if god told you to jump off a bridge...
2001-08-03 - 7:49 p.m.

Hey, here�s the meaning of life, abridged version. You ready? I am. You are. We. Did you catch that? I must apologize, because it losses something in translation. *giggles malevolently*

When I was in elementary school, I followed one of our house cats. Out the door, into the tall grass, into the hugemungous rosebush, down the road, up on the neighbor�s porch, lying in the sun on the back of the couch. For nearly a whole day, I followed that old orange cat around, looking not unlike a lost kitten, trying to learn from the best of mousers. When the cat took a nap, I took a nap...when the cat meowed, I made poor attempts to do the same. That cat died soon after this little adventure, curled up inside the bigger-than-tree-stump-rosebush...but he had left me with the refreshing feeling that he had passed on to me that endless knowledge that all simple felines seem to posses.

Today, I was surprised, at least 50%, by a human-thing. And my parental units, no less. They said that I was right. To my memory, they have never said this to me...granted, they don�t usually talk directly to me. So there was this tent that Sarah and Dad are taking out to South Dakota to drop her off for school today. There�s a truckload of dead things and fungus spores infected in the tent, and it�s been sitting in the cat-piss smell of the basement for the last two years. (As a test, I put it out on the lawn, and Sarah could smell it from the porch, at least twenty meters away.) But regardless of the medical problems that such a tent mught induce on an innocent camper over the course of two weeks, Step-mother insisted that they take this tent with them and save money by staying at campgrounds. There�s another tent, in the garage. A perfectly healthy tent with four separate �rooms� that was used less than a month ago. So I throw away the old, half-green-from-who-knows-what tent, and tell them they should use the other tent. After several verbal attacks and fully illogical arguments from Step-mother, they finally agree that I was right in what I did, and Father mentioned this rightness to me while I was pouring him a coke. Dude. I was right. And they admitted it. Oh yea, and Sarah�s leaving today for college...chances are slim that I�ll see my favoritest sister/friend (seastar) in the two years to come.

I always take a quick cold shower at the end of a boiling one. Other than the basic reason for liking how it feels (jumping into cold water like a polar bear escaping form a warm day at the North Pole) I do this for two reasons. First, because if I change the water to freezing, and there�s someone in there with me, her nipples are gonna harden up like jawbreakers. And second, because thinking about the first reason makes me wanna take a cold shower, ya know?

It really annoys me when I�ve gone onto an hour-long tangent in my head, from association to association, and just as the aircraft reaches cruising altitude, someone comes in and asks me want I want from a selection of home-cooked microwave diners, causing me to forget the whole string. You can�t get back on track after an interruption like that...even if you could remember the caboose thought, the following thoughts wouldn�t be influenced by the thoughts that had originally preceded the caboose; the aircraft has to start again, at the airport, laoding on passengers. Sometimes I just wanna shave my head and live on a mountain.

I mailed my grandmother. For most people, this wouldn�t seem very odd...but seriously, it was a first for me. She�s mailed me about once every few months since I switched high schools two years ago. And I just never replied...and if you asked me tomorrow, I wouldn�t be able to tell you why I responded to this one. You see, I�m not at all very connected to my family, let alone my non-nuculars. Mum�s brothers act like she doesn�t exist, and Father�s siblings have chosen to distance each other strategically so that they can only get together once a year or less. Both of my Step-families are rather ill-appealing and never come in contact with me (with the exception of uncle Jeff, Step-father Greg, and Step-mother). I don�t even remember what I wrote in the letter, but I think I�ll prubly write her another one. She�s a really nice woman, after all...I just wish (not Wish) that my parental units weren�t making me pay for my own stamps.

Typical Supper Conversations, ver 1.0
Step-mother: *interrupting the silence* �that�s from my garden, and that�s from my garden, and that�s��
Step-sister: Okay, you�re scaring me...
Step-mother: *in a hushed sort of exclamation* �Well, I thinks it�s so amazing!�
Me: *poking at prepackaged lasagna* �would someone pass the Tao of Pooh, please?�

The following is hypothetical: On a regular basis, one of my sisters has sex with her boyfriend. I have no problem with this. Also on a regular basis, her boyfriend has sex with his ex-girlfriend. And lastly, this girl frequently has sex with one of the local drug dealers. This chain of sex basically links half of this town (keep in mind, it�s a small town), together in a viral sense. This means, of course, that unsaid sister probably has some sort of STD if not a list of them. I have no problem with this either. I respect her decisions as a human being and respect that she knows what she�s getting into. If she were to go suicidal, I would tell her that it�s stupid, but otherwise would no restrain her from finding out for herself why it�s stupid. Such is the price of true freedom.

Green-tinted skin today. I must�ve spent a smidge too long in the sun. This got me thinking about cancer. Plants do not get cancer. They don�t have weird aberrations of mutated tissue hanging off their leaves, and yet, plants get buckets more sunshine than most people do. So what�s the secret? I doubt it�s the chlorophyll, or an advantage of square cells over squamous. Mayhaps a side effect of the calcium deposits required for photosynthesis? It�d be sorta funny if the human race was dropping like flies because they refused to drink whole milk because they thought it was fattening...in a twisted sort of way.

Sidenote: A pinch of luciferin combined with your normal oxygen in a sample of luciferase...fun for the whole family. And you can even put in a jar and watch it fly around in the dark; flying fire.

In the beginning, there were four. Four Buddhist brothers in China by the names of Be De Aye, and Bal. And in a time of liberating pilgrimage, they decided to jump the border into Tibet. After drawing mental straws from the realm-of-the-beyond-reality-but-not-quite-nirvana, it was decided that the two youngest brothers, Ei and Bal, should go first to Tibet and then send word when it was safe for the other two to cross. So Ei and Bal began their preparations to steal across the border; taking two lamas with them. They also packed two donkeys, and two parakeets, and two panda bears, and two of every other sort of reincarnatable being they could find, in case the new land was vacant of their ancestor�s spirits. Of course, the animals (especially the pandas) made a fuss while en-route to Tibet, and the local Chinese-side authorities noticed them. Aye started to run back toward China, but Bal was determined to get across the border. In a last-ditch effort, they jumped and rolled into the last ditch on the right, and released their ancestor�s spirits from their backpacks. The border patrol had such a time, getting spat on by lamas, and cuddled by the panda bears, that they were unable to apprehend Aye and Bal. When it was clear that the authorities were under control, Aye, who who had taken a semi-vow of silence and could only utter the sound of his own name, said �aye� in agreement, and the brothers ran like hell to the next House of Siddhartha Gautama*. They stayed in Tibet for seven days, practicing the lessons of the Theravada, before they had learned the eating habits of the border patrols. At this time, Aye communicated with the other two brothers via the-plane-of-higher-existence (even though the reception was quite fuzzy, because the Himalayas got in the way) to tell tham when to cross �the river of political limits�. The next day, around lunchtime, Be and De jumped the border into Tibet, carrying with them all sorts of fuzzy, flying, scaly, and exoskeletoned animals for their new life in Tibet (which they promptly let free, because no animal deserves the punishment of prison). The brothers remained in Tibet for seven years in nirvanic peace, which was silly, because they could have meditated anywhere, and there wasn�t much of a reason to go to Tibet in the first place. At the end of the seven years, authorities began to check the border-towns specifically for border-jumping Buddhists, and discovered the brothers. Bal was the first to be captured, and was interrogated severely. The Tibetan Mafia burned his hands with coals to get him to tell them where his brothers had hidden, but he refused to tell them. Eventually, he made the brave statement that he would rather die than be so selfish as to expose his brethren. To this day, when someone says that you �have Bal�s�, they are referencing the astounding bravery that Bal the Buddhist displayed in Tibet. And then there were three.

it's a different game every time you play!