"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his."
~General George Patton

"I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it."
~Groucho Marx

I love Groucho! And Patton, too. I don't even know what he looked like in real life; whenever I think of him I automatically think of George C. Scott...and then that makes me think of Dr. Strangelove. "Patton" had a sad ending though; I don't like how some of the best generals didn't seem to meet the best ends of their careers--not only Patton, but McArthur...and maybe you could count Rommel, if you ignored the fact that he was a Nazi. I mean, he turned against Hitler eventually, that had to count for something right?
I also found it interesting that as practical a military man as he was, and a devoted Catholic, he still believed in reincarnation, and believed he had fought and died in Africa thousands of years before he actually set foot there in WWII. Sort of shows you that it's not just drugged-out hippies and tedious New-Agers who believe in that sort of thing.
And where is Meghan? I want to talk to her and she is not online. Sigh.

We won the championships last night! Our basketball team is number one, for the fifth time!! There truly is no other spectator sport such as basketball; no other sport that is so fast-paced, can't-look-away-for-a-split-second, hair-raising, expletive-shouting, blood-pumping incredible. Even the Series doesn't get people as riled up!
It would have been better if all my friends were there, but some just didn't go and some couldn't; but I gather that they enjoyd themselves, no matter what they were doing. That's the important thing.
I have thought up an idea for a film script for next year! I think it would be told with a lot of flashback; the plot will center around a young woman who travels to a foreign (and possibly war-torn) country as a photojournalist, or some other such profession. She is fleeing an undesirable husband back in the States. While there, she catches a glimpse of someone in a crowd who looks strangely familiar to her--the scene flashes back to his face, years before. She doesn't get a chance to pursue him and figure out who it was, so, a little puzzled, she continues on to whatever is her destination. To make a hopefully long story short, she meets this stranger again, and realizes, to her incredible surprise, that it is someone whom she met in that very country many years before. Insert flashback--our heroine, as a teenager, travels to Europe and meets a handsome young man. Although they do not speak the same language and can barely communicate, there is a strong attraction between them. They have one night together; the next day he leaves the city. As a joke, she gives him a cheap plastic ring she got out of a vending machine at the airport. She returns to America believing that she will never see him again, but treasuring the short amount of time they had together.
Returning to the present, there is a problem standing in the way of the resumption of their romance. The heroine's husband arrives in search of his wife; he has reformed himself, and wants to heal things between them. The woman truly loves her husband, yet she feels a powerful connection to someone who seems to be just as drawn to her. Her long-lost lover believes that fate meant for them to be together; he believed that from the moment he laid eyes on her, so many years before. He has never married because he has always believed in his heart that they would find each other again someday. Obviously a decision must be made; the down-to-earth love of her husband, or the passion of the man who just might be her soul mate? The choice, unfortunately, turns out not to be hers to make. She is pregnant with her husband's child; she knew that when she took the assignment abroad. Ultimately she cannot bring herself to abandon the man whom she has sworn to love, and whose child she carries; she chooses to leave her former lover behind forever. At their last meeting, he presents her with a gift--the cheap blue ring which she gave him, and which he has saved all these years. He tells her that he hoped to use it to propose to her one day; since that will never be, he will give it to her to remember him by. The film ends on the plane; snuggled next to her sleeping husband, she fingers the plastic ring, and gazes, expresionless, out the window.

That's my idea! Now I hope I can actually develop it into a story, script, or other item.

Nobody updates these things except me! :-( Where am I supposed to get ideas from, my self?
I've been thinking I should definitely go make myself a personal one o' these. I continually have to stop myself from mentioning friends by name lest they find this someday. And yes, talking about my friends--or bitching or whining and such--is something I periodically require, lest I take it out on them personally. Since I'm usually not into confrontation, I'll avoid that.

I've always wanted to try one of those two-person blogs; it's easier than constantly checking your friend's site to see if she's said anything recently *glares at meghan*

Life is complex, and often difficult.

This is really time that could be spent editing the script for film club, or reading one of the four books I have piled in the study, or rereading my physics notes, or doing anything productive besides typing at the computer. But my fingers are all warmed up and they're just flying across the keys, so I might as well use it while I've got it.
I just read a friend's webjournal, and one of her entries was talking about how you should be a friend without expectations. People may disappoint and not stand up for you, and you shouldn't expect them not to because they are imperfect, like everyone else. But what do you do when they have expectations of you, expectations that you so often fail to uphold, either unconsciously or consciously?

My most troublesome dilemma concerning my friends is two-fold, I guess. One part of it deals with the compatability of all my very different friends, all of whom are special in their own way. The other part concerns demands on my time; basically, I don't have enough of it to lavish it on everyone all the time.
Over the three years I've been at Northwest, I've been lucky enough to make an inordinate amount of friends. Some of these relationships have disintegrated, some have changed until they're barely recognizable, some have flourished, and some have recently appeared; but they're all different. And, true to the clique organization of high school, not all of them run in the same circles. That entails delicate balancing when I know I have two friends who don't get along, or who don't care to associate.
This is where this half ties into the time half of things. I have a small circle of close friends. Up to last year, it was pretty much composed of three other girls, with whom I spent the majority of my time. Things have changed, we all have changed, and I've met other friends; not friends who replace them but friends in addition to them. However, some of the 'old school' pals don't like the idea of admitting others into the 'inner circle'; they feel it was always us four, and it should stay us four. Unfortunately, it's nowhere close to being like that anymore. In addition to this, I've always had a bunch of other really good friends who were never exactly bosom buddies, but I still enjoy being around. But when you have a great number of people expecting their share of your attention, it gets difficult, especially when you're drawn to spending time with the ones who understand you best and you have the best time with.
Then there are misunderstandings, and hostilities, and people getting upset with other people, and me not knowing what to do. I know it's best to follow what you feel inside--and what I feel inside is that I need to be around "light". Mario said to "surround yourself with light, so the darkness will have no opportunity to enter". I naturally gravitate in any situation towards the person who I connect best with, the one who makes me feel the happiest without all the uncomfortable situations that some friends come attached with.
That's what I want inside, but apparently that's not what's expected of me. I'm supposed to be the same kind of friend to everyone, be attached to everyone the same, and spend the same amount of time with everyone. But not everyone is my friend to the same level of mutual understanding as everyone else! My friends constantly say that this new friend is replacing that old friend, or that it seems that this person is more important to me than another person. Of course some people are going to be closer to me than others, there's no way around that, human nature to assign levels to things. There's no way one friend can really replaceanother because they're all different. But it's true that some have become closer to me than others used to be. I refuse to apologize for that. I wouldn't trade the friendships I've gained even this year for anything, because they've opened me up and shown me new things that I had not thought about or known about or felt anything about before.

In conclusion, I am a babbler. I guess there's no real way to solve my problem except to take it one day at a time, but sometimes I wish everyone could be friends without expectations. I wish people weren't overly dependent on other people. Things would be much happier that way.

These are just some thoughts I scribbled down in religion class about that whole truth/knowledge/God thing. Well that sort of encompasses all of life right there, doesn't it? This wasn't meant to be a total proof, or totally coherent, so there are gaps in the reasoning.

1.) The universe exists as a collection of truths, which are understood as knowledge.

2.) We recgonize that there is truth beyond the conception of human understanding and knowledge.Other truths exist than those that we are capable of knowing, ergo the truth of existence.

3.) We say "discovered" and not "invented" when referring to new knowledge, implying prior existence.

4.) Knowledge should not exist where there is not the capacity to know. For it to be, would there not have to be a knower?

5.) There had to exist the very knowledge of DNA before it was discovered; it did not create itself out of thin air for us. Would there have to be a being which previously held this truth?

6.) Knowledge of all truths must be held by a being higher than we.We perceive it rarely and indistinctly.
6.) The possessor of this knowledge is a godhead.
7.) Additionally, what we perceive to be knowledge and truth must be by human nature imperfect. If there is no God, and our knowledge is the only and supreme knowledge, is flawed knowledge what we must settle for?
8.) Back to the same conclusion--Supreme and Perfect Forms of Knowledge and Truth exist, and are held by God.

I just read something in a friend's blog which actually made me gasp out loud. Needless to say, I am not the kind of person who usually gasps when reading things. It was (Meghan's blog everyone) about her beliefs in God, and how her faith was utterly destroyed by her knowledge of cellular biology. I gasped because what for her disproved the existence of a God, was the exact same thing that proved God's existence for me! Amazing how the facts can work both ways in a debate!

Basically what Meg said was that when she learned about the complexity of cells, and the laws of physics, and what makes things spin around, she could not believe that some entity sat down and figured this stuff out. Now when I was in my Does God Exist Period (which returns intermittently), I could not help but see nature as the ultimate proof. The Sophists could have asked for no better! In my opinion, there is no way a God did not create all things. How could a mere accident produce such intricacies of life? How could the Big Bang, with gadzillions of atoms richocheting off all corners of the universe, possibly formulate itself into something so distinctly organized? What are the infinitely incalcuable chances that these random combinations could form the mathetmatical and scientific laws that we have? Did utter probability make a circle always 360 degrees? How could a chance encounter of conditions ensure that for all time, under optimal conditions, in all corners of space, PV will equal nRT? (For those non physics people, this says pressure times volume equals number of moles of gas times constant R times temperature) I can't believe that chance brought about the truth of laws of motion, that the position x of any body will equal its initial position, plus its initial velocity times time, plus one half acceleration times time squared? What are the odds?
Yes, it does seem completely unthinkable that some being could have mapped out such delicately balanced and perfectly perfect plans for creation, but that is the unfathomable knowledge and capacity of a being greater than we. If we could comprehend it, it would not be a godhead. This was always my answer to people who could not believe in God--could an accident have begotten all the orchestrations of life, down to the paths of every whizzing atom in every molecule of our bodies? I can't believe that to be the case.
As for my actual thoughts on the origin of the universe, I've always had a hundred different theories, none of which can be substantiated or disproved, really, so they remain to clutter up my mind. One, which I thought of when I was a kid, was that maybe we were created as a science project; he threw all the ingredients in, stirred it up, set it out, and left it to develop as it might, checking in periodically to see how we're doing. We really can't know if our God is just one of a community of other creatures like him, to whom our omnipotence is their normal abilities. We may be their lab rats.

I agree with Meghan that people always seem to view past cultures as mythology, while present religion as paths to truth. I had an argument with my sister about this; she refuses to beleive that the creation story is false. I told her that it's been proved that it was *made up* during the Babylonian captivity because the Babylonians had a flashier one than the Hebrews! It was a pissing contest!

"Well, my god's more powerful than your god."
"No, my god could kick your god's ass!"
"Yeah, well, we've got fig leaves!"
"Uh....Your Mom!"

And so on and so forth. But no, she persists in belief that things really did occur like that, in some way; she also takes offense to my reference to it as mythology. My sister and I have great differences of belief; I always tell my mom I don't know what she did wrong. Nice solid, Catholic upbringing--(although my dad was sort of a lapsed Syrian Orthodox--not really converted Roman Catholic hybrid), Catholic schools, church every sunday...hmm maybe that did the trick. Anyway I usually tell her that God will damn her for allowing one daughter to become an infidel and one to become a 999 Unaffiliated on the SATs.

My few religious discussions with my mom have usually gone like this:
Mom: "You're not an atheist, are you?"
Me: No.
Mom: "Then what are you?"
Me: "Undecided."
Mom: "Are you agnostic?"
Me: "Um, no."
Mom: "Then what ARE YOU?"
Me: "Undecided, Mom."
Mom: "Arrrgh!"

Then I usually finish by threatening her that I'll shave my head and become a Tibetan Buddhist. Actually it's really not so bad, I guess as long as I believe in a god of some sort, and don't dance naked around a bonfire with strange symbols on my body more than a few times a year, she's ok.

Hmm almost beddy bye time!

We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art today. For the five hours of terrible traffic time, the half hour we actually had to wait since our tour guide chose this morning to play hooky, and the hour we were required to stare at nasty American artists such as Winslow Homer, we got about one glorious hour of seeing not what I really wanted to see, the Renaissance masters, but some impressionism, Monet and Van Gogh, as well as a few Egyptian artifacts and the Egyptian temple down below. The beautiful pieces of art I did see I only managed to because I strayed from the tour at certain points. I hate when tour guides park you in front of the nastiest masterpieces, such as this one French artist who decided to "break all the rules" by painting a huge domestic scene of his ugly sisters giving money to a ragamuffin tending creepy cows. We were forced to stare at this monstrosity, while across the not-so-large room was an absolutely gorgeous painting by Winterhalter, of the Spanish legend of Florinda. Basically, it was about ten beautiful girls sitting around doing each other's hair, and a guy staring from the woods at the most beautiful of them all, Florinda, whom he wants to make his bride. The tour guide labeled this "the establishment", and ignored it! It was lovely!
It happened again later when she made us discuss this Manet painting of the crossdressing bullfighter, while there were Van Goghs and Monets and other awesome paintings that she didn't mention. Just the confused looking woman in drag.

But then through the clouds struck a ray of light. I hung out during this trip with Meghan, and we had previously spotted two of our other friends asking a guard about paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec--both of them Moulin Rouge aficionados--and I had commented on the original version of the movie, which dealt with the painter's life. Later, Meghan and I were strolling by this guard when he stopped us to ask if I was a painter, since I had watched that movie. I said no, that I had only watched because I was curious. We kept talking.
This man's name was Mario--though I didn't find that out until after we had walked away, from the business card he had given me--and, in addition to being a guard, he was an artist. This too, we didn't discover until a little ways into our conversation, but I recall thinking, and Meghan thought this as well, that he had to be an artist, because he had the soul of one. He saw the world in a different way, and he was so ready to share it with us.
Incidentally, we made the mistake of telling one of the chaperones about this encounter, and she immediately suspected he was some kind of sexual predator trying to lure us in. I know it's perfectly possible, but he did not seek us out, he didn't ask us personal information, not even our names, and he didn't invite us to contact him, only to return to the museum. So don't get the idea of a creepy stalker man; I had a feeling of total ease in this man's presence, especially since it was immediately obvious that there was something different about him. Meghan described this as almost innocence, but it certainly wasn't naivete--he mentioned sex, and how women should be careful never to let themselves be used like cheap blowup dolls, tossing off such words as easily as if he was speaking of coffee.
As for what we spoke of, would it be cliched to say that I don't really even remember because I was so caught up in the euphoria of meeting a person, an adult, with a viewpoint that was so removed from my own, yet so relative, and so willing to just share what he knew and felt! I know we intially spoke of movies, Dr. Zhivago being one, and a French version of the Beauty and the Beast being another; I guess this led to love and women, because he recommended to us a book he had read in order to understand women better, Quotable Women: Five Thousand Years. He mentioned this because it made him realize how similar people are, from age to age--emotions and dilemmas and petty squabbles only change in superficialities. Stepping closer to me, he said "I have been with twenty men in my life, and yet this is not what a woman needs". This was said by a tenth century Chinese woman. He quoted Anne Frank about her relationship to her mother, that her mother should be conducting herself in a way that her daughter could emulate, since that's how girls feel connected to their moms. Again, parallelism in today's world. He mentioned something about how both an 19th century woman and Marlene Dietrich both commented that "a strong woman can make a strong man stronger, but she cannot help a weak man. He will only make her weaker."
Laughing, this man said that these were definitely things that should be understood early in life, before one "jumped into the pot". He quoted another famous saying, that "if you educate a man, you educate an individual; but if you educate a woman, you educate an entire family". Now you may wonder at this time if this man was gay; I honestly don't know. I also know, incidentally, that I was wondering at about this time if Meghan were weirded out by the conversation--or should I say lecture, since we just let him speak because he had so much to say--and wanted to leave; on the contrary, not only was she equally intrigued, she was also worrying that I wanted to leave!

I don't know how long we spoke to this man, but it feels as though so much was crammed into a small space in time. I remember that he told us, in a sort of warning fashion, not to let time or ennui steal the fire of life from us; he said to "keep passion alive in your heart". Without it, he said, you will never contemplate a rose as absolute perfection; you will never be able to see an eighty-year-old woman as at all beautiful; you will never be able to look at an elderly man wearing the garb of another era and appreciate that he's kept his old style.
He also said something that stuck out in my mind as well as Meghan's: he said when you find something you really love, of art or knowledge or whatever, you just want to "eat it up", to absorb it, to take it into you raw and whole so that you don't miss a drop of it. That, according to this man, was the wonder of art, that it could give you this feeling. Long after everyone else is bored with a kind of art and wants to find something novel, you will have that one painting or sculpture that really resounds with you, that truly means something. I don't know as whether I've found such a work of art yet.

And there is was; just randomly occurring in an episode of my life, an encounter with what Anne of Green Gables would call "a kindred spirit". I wonder if he was not some creature not of this world, someone sent to be there, in that gallery on this day, when Meghan and I would appear, to impart some fantastic knowledge of life and of the world. Would you call this life changing? I really don't know yet, but this mysterious character interposed himself at a time when I really could appreciate such a touchstone the broad canvas of life.

Meghan and I agreed afterwards that it was an incredible experience; yet we had trouble relating the euphoria of contact with such an individual to anyone else; and even here in this blog I could not have possibly done justice to the connection that was there. I have no idea if I will ever meet this man, Mario, again, but perhaps I will meet someone like him, someone who is also willing to share what it is they have gained in knowledge of existence. In the meantime, I merely hope that one day I will see the sunrise from a point of view such as his.

We had a visiting speaker in the writer's group that I'm in today. She was a pretty good poet, but the most interesting thing about her appearance was the discussion that her poem--a seven page affair--caused amongst the assembled. While we talked of religion and death and art and voices telling us the theories of quantum physics as we dreamt of lilies opening, she related an interesting story. Her father, it seemed, a lifelong atheist who believed in no loving God, on the last day of his life appeared to be seeing something wondrous, something that he kept saying was not what he expected. He died happily. This led our teacher to relate a similar story from her own life; how her dying father, who had slept with the radio on in the eleven years since his wife's death, at the end of his life said that he no longer needed it because the wife came to him every night and slept with him. Later in the hospital, he had a dream that all of his deceased relatives were with him, and celebrating. My teacher said, with a tear in her eye, that she believed this was helping him to pass to the next world.
My question is, why did these people deserve this? Why did they get "crossing assistance", and assurance of a life after death? An atheist, for crying out loud! What made them more deserving of such a comfort, especially after having lived long and happy lives? Forgive me if I sound bitter, but while they told their stories all I thought of was my father, and how he was taken from his life with no warning, no consolation, no chance for a goodbye. I don't know what he believed, but I know he believed in a God and in a heaven because he always told me my grandmother was waiting for us there. So why didn't she come to help her only son across that threshold? I'm past the point where I wonder and rage about why he was taken when I was so young, why I have to grow without a father--but why couldn't God have given him some consolation! God knows he needed it, and even more, he deserved it.
I guess it comes down to my lack of assurance, as well. I've never had a vision of my family meeting together in heaven. I have a predeceased father of unknown beliefs, an off-an-on Catholic mother, a Muslim sister, and an undecided me that really likes the idea of reincarnation but can't always reconcile it with everything else. Sure, I like the karmic cycle idea because it makes sense--but it also means I will not see my father again until we've both completed that cycle; and even then we won't be Joe and Michelle, we'll just be two "spirits". Screw spirituality--I want to see him again as ME, as his daughter. I want to hear him say my name again, and be able to say "I love you, Dad", the million times that I didn't say it when he was alive. It's for this reason that I could never not believe in some sort of afterlife. The thought of never seeing him ever again, the heavy horror of it, would crush me. I made it through everything because I believe, I need to believe, that he's waiting for me somewhere, that I'll be able to make up all the time I lost with him on some other plane. I can't conceive of the idea that he no longer exists! He has to! I can't go on in life if I'm not headed towards him; what's the point of loving someone if you'll just lose them forever?
This is the only proof I need of the soul. There was something in him that loved me, and my mother and my sister, more than anything else in the world; something that I know would never abandon me to eternity alone. I know this, I know I know I know and I can say it a thousand times, but as I've said, my knowledge is not true Knowledge! What I really want is some heraldic vision to promise me that my years of toil on this earth will be rewarded. I would need no other reason to be a good person than the eventual goal of being reunited with someone that I love so very much. someone that I need more than I usually care to admit.
It will be his two month anniversary in little more than a month. Two years, and I have not yet found the way to broadcast my message across space and time to wherever and whatever he is know, to tell him that I loved him, and that I miss the best father I could have had.

I feel stupid sometimes. Not in the basic sense of stupidity, the kind where you don't know that 1+1=2, but a more universal sense of naivete and ignorance. It's usually with me a lot, especially in places of culture, like museums, galleries, libraries, bookstores. These places speak to me when I enter; they overawe me with their towering stacks of pure human thought, emotion, and conception, whispering in my ear that never in a hundred lifetimes will I come close to absorbing the amount of raw knowledge of which they are guardians. They laugh at me when I feverishly attempt to learn as much as I can, about as many things as I can, as quickly as I can, in hopes of reducing the sheer volume of what lies in front of me; but one might as well ask oneself to count every grain of sand on every seashore in the world. Not in a hundred years could you do that; neither can I assimilate all the knowledge that calls out to me in the time that I have.
When I look at what I have done, it seems so paltry and weak! I've read more than a few hundred books in my lifetime, yet there are ever so many more. When you finish one classic, twenty more get mentioned in some oblique reference that yet sound interesting. After you've toiled through one philosopher's blurry logic, someone informs you that they've been disproved. You listen to one classical piece of music and realize there is an entire genre that you've barely sampled; you see one of Goya's paintings and your eyes open to your own ignorance.
If I spent every day of my life in pursuit of learning, if I read constantly and studied the art and architecture of all the civilizations, if I learned all the languages I've always wanted to and familiarized myself with all kinds of music, if I traveled to every historical place I have ever dreamed to visit, if I engaged my mind in unraveling on my own every philosophical conundrum that presented itself, I might live to be as old as Methuselah and still not have gained a fraction of what I desire.
Yet I don't desire omniscience; I often wonder that God isn't bored if he knows all. God can't even read a good book or watch a good movie--he knows the ending already! Of course, being also omnipotent, he could make himself forget the ending; but is God capable of forgetting something? Obviously we view forgetfulness as a weakness, a frailty of our human abilities, but if God cannot forget that would disprove God's omnipotence. Maybe I just shouldn't think in this vein anymore, lest I increase my headache.

I suppose it would proper, so early in a new blog, to provide you, my gentle reader, with some valuable personal information about yours truly. However, since a.) if you're reading this there is a possibility that you know me already, and b.) I have no desire to be stalked, I will restrain my impulse to tell you every last detail about myself, right down to the fact that I had Progresso pea soup for dinner a few hours ago and am now wearing mismatched socks I had to borrow from a friend.

I have long wondered what people wrote about in their public blog. After all, if you're going to give the address to your close personal friends, who will give it to their close personal friends, who will in turn give it to their close personal friends, and so on and so forth until the entire school knows about your eating habits and sock problems (not to mention a strange penchant for run-on sentences which are, amazingly, still grammatically correct), you probably shouldn't post things like "Oh my gawd, Kent is the hottest guy EVER!" or "I'm having an affair with my English teacher."

Also, in the interests of both personal and national security, it might be viewed, in some cultures, as unwise to post things about all the people who might theoretically possibly be reading this right now. Unfortunately that presents a bit of a physical impossibility, seeing as how anyone, including an icebound Siberian who lost his fingers to frostbite and an angry dog and is now forced to type with his tongue, could theoretically gain access to this page, I would be restricting myself from commenting about all of the six billion people who, regrettably, share this wonderful earth with me. This would leave me quite bored; therefore, I will merely prohibit myself from mentioning by name any persons who share a distinct physical possibility--including access to a computer and possession of all fingers-- of being able to see this page, referring to them instead by means of acronyms and clever sobriquets.

This brings me to an important question. Would an icebound Siberian, bravely licking away at his keyboard in order to surf the great wide net, truly be entertained by the paltry offerings to be contributed in this blog? The answer, sadly, is a resounding no.

Sucks to be Siberian.

Welcome to my new Blog! I say new because I've never actually had one out in the open before, where prying eyes might gaze upon my innermost secrets.
And that's still not going to happen, because I highly doubt any of my innermost secrets are going to spill themselves upon my keyboard. Especially not a keyboard with a K that sticks like mine. That last sentence was hard, it had three Ks! I practically have to pound on it to make it go.
So anyway, bienvenido a mi blog; no quiero decir que me llamo-- tu puedes me llamar Michelle. Is that proper syntax or whatever? I really don't know, but I do not appear to care.