Sometimes it seems like you are always someplace else.  Whatever activity is before you, you are thinking about some other activity you have to get to.  It eventually winds up the focus of your mind and your physical surroundings never happen to coincide.

It feels rather intimidating to be one human in a world of seven billion others.  Yet, for some reason, if you have merely one other person to stand by your side, you feel ready to take them all on.

When you read the sentences of a book all in order, it produces one grand meaning at the end of it all.  In the same way, the thoughts you experience all in order will produce one grand meaning at the end of your life.  That is why it is so interesting to be alive; where will the plot go next?

And for all of our plots to intertwine is what it means to be in the world.  It is seven billions stories, but it is one story; though others seem to be characters in our lives, we are really co-characters along side them in the story which is much bigger than us.

In the paper I will see a statistic about many millions of people, which is interesting for it shows how easy it is to group humans together in our minds.  People can be reduced to their mere quantity if we so desire; that is a mental ability we possess. 

Indeed, we can reduce them to anything we want to.  We can reduce people to their jobs or genders, their skins or sins, their looks or likes, their moods or money.

And this is how simplistic and silly our minds are; we think we can notice clues which instantaneously explain a person’s entire life.  But just as humans can never fit into a statistic, one clue is never good enough to figure someone out.  We need lots of clues.  And the only place we get lots of clues are in friendships.

So we live a life of meaning inside our heads, pursuing the plot everyday; we become friends with other plots, and try to figure out their clues, but the answer is always hidden from us. And everything we see is a clue about the story of the whole world.

And after thinking about all this we finally realize that we were born into a universe thick with mystery.

There is only one name which it is not alright for people to call me, and that is Paul. That is the name of my little brother, and thus my parents are always calling me Paul.  They claim it is because they both start with the same letter, which baffles me because they of course nonetheless have different sounds.  It also makes it somewhat tempting to start spelling my name with an F. 

Anyways, an interesting thing happened yesteday in light of this.  My friend Saul and I went to Noodles & Company, and after I had ordered the cashier handed me a number.  After Saul had ordered, I asked the cashier why Noodles & Company had become so impersonal.  Are we lowly customers now to be relegated to the land of cold and unfriendly numerical anonymity?  The girl who was the cashier responded, “What, do you really want me to be walking around with your food yelling ‘Paul! Paul! Paul!’?”

Apparently knowing me and my little brother are not preconditions for confusing me with him. 

It’s also quite interesting because Saul should be Paul, since that was what Saul began to be called once he came to know Jesus.  Thus, the cashier randomly chose the exact name which I should not be called, and the exact name which Saul should be called. 

Hmmm. 

We individuate things as we look at the world around us.  We see people, which we break down into certain types of people, and then certain names of people, and eventually everything ends up analyzed like this.  The mind finds it much easier to think about the world if we break everything down into categories.

It is for this reason that we get lost in trains of thought about all sorts of particular things; I may see a bowl and think about washing it, and then I think of laziness since I don’t want to wash it, and then I wind up lost in a mental montage of a sluggardly life.

And we spend all day like this in our heads, in a world of specific thoughts caused by things we see.  When you see a person, you have really no idea where they are.  The sign they just saw could have sent them to Nepal or three girlfriends ago or Barney.  The traffic is much more chaotic in our heads than on the street.

But every now and then, I will wake up.  At one point I may think to myself, I have spent the last six months of my life thinking about all these little things, lost in my head, really as a madman rushing down the streets without the bearings to know why he left the house in the morning. 

Usually waking up will come when I am outside, and it is at night in a big field, and I can see the stars.  Everything will be quiet, the cicadas and insects will be humming, the sounds of creation.  The soft and silent chill of the night will find me, and once again it is an amazing thing to be alive. 

But then it is back to the city of people, where we build a matching city of thoughts in our heads.  And we dance and tango in the conversation and rhythm of life with all the other humans, and it will be six more months, maybe a year, before we remember that at the floor of our existence, we are shocked that we are here at all. 

For however stupid I am, I feel pretty good. You see, the world is a very big, physical place. As such, the *first* thing anyone should think about it is: don’t run into things. It’s that simple. Everything is made of matter. Don’t hit it with your body.

And I’m pretty good at that. See, I have a bad memory. As such, I misplace *invisible* things. So that’s something of an excuse. A person who misplaces invisible things will always have an infinitely better excuse than someone who misplaces visible things, i.e. their whole body.

We had better hope there’s not some law of the universe that we don’t know about that blows everything up. Oh my.

Just think, what if there is some law in the universe such that a specific course of human history would then incinerate the earth after that that history happens?

I’m scared. What if my next movement could trigger that event? Wow. Someone help me.  I . . . don’t know if I should move my arm slightly to the right or not.

But still, I am so stupid. Yesterday I found out a huge bill I tried to pay in June never made it because I sent it to my own address.  Last Thursday I was waiting for my mom to get home from work when I found out she had been out of the country for four days.  She had told me she was going to leave, and yes, I live in the same house as her.

But I don’t run into things. And that is my consolation.