Everyone, my sincerest apologies for a long and unexplained moratorium from my site, but I had a last few busy days before leaving for Italy last Friday.  Right now I am in Italy "studying abroad," a phrase which seems to me like a complicated way of saying you are dating a girl.  When someone would ask me, "Oh, are you going there to study abroad?" I would always think of the phrase as "study a broad" which I would sarcastically answer in my head, "Why yes, and her name is Sarah." 

It feels like bizzaro world being in a place where everything is just slightly different.  The signs for things all look like English, except with vowels on the end, and the people all look American, just with tans and slightly different clothing.  All in all, I feel like I have invaded a different reality, where I am "under the radar," as it were, an invisible agent in a world of Italians. 

By the way, the rumors are true; Italy is every bit as beautiful as everyone says it is.  In central Lecce the streets are all very narrow, paved with smooth stones and next to two story buildings which all have balconies.  (Being here provides a much more profound understanding to the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.)  There are caffes around every street corner, and gelaterias around every other one.  Everyone here drives very small cars, and a good percentage of people drive vespas, or small motorcycles (we even saw a small child riding one with training wheels in a piazza.)   

Coming from the consumer-oriented culture of America, it is at first unfathomable that almost all Italians close their stores and go home to sleep for four to five hours every afternoon, and then come back in the evening and re-open them.  But once one walks around all morning, practically offering themselves as a "burnt offering" to the blistering Italian sun, and then upon arriving home around 1 P.M. in a deep lethargic stupor, immediately collapses on their beds and falls asleep, they attain something I would deem "siesta enlighthenment."  Though one comes to Italy not understanding the cultural phenomenon of siesta, one soon cherishes the idea with heartfelt gratitude.  Just think--an entire culture which understands and embraces the idea of "chilling." 

On the flight over I sat next to a girl my age who was also going to Italy to study.  Since I don't own one, I had forgotten to bring a camera, and while we were talking I mentioned this to her.  Now, I understand that taking pictures is intrinsically part of the meaning of life to females.  Everyone should know this; the evidence is well documented on a site known as "facebook."  Thus, expectedly, she gasped profoundly and stared in disbelief at me, apparently wondering what planet I had come from, or perhaps if I had come via time travel from the past and did not fully understand the importance of pictures.  Pictures do have some worth, I admit, but I find it odd that some people seem to think that the primary purpose of being at a place is to document that they were there, rather than to do whatever there is to do at that place.  

My time here is very limited, and I probably will not be able to check up on this for awhile, so I hope you are all having wonderful summers.  Arrivederci! 

A Mural of Thoughts

It is better to pray for someone than to tell them you will do so.

Some days are "holidays" and thus on that day people think about the significance of that day.  But since everyday is automatically Reality Day, people ought to always be thinking about the meaning of the place they are living in.

A pet peeve is something that annoys you, and therefore everyone's biggest pet peeve ought to be pet peeves. 

People in general reason for the view they want to believe. 

A person who has discovered how to fix the world need not convince others that it is the right way to fix the world.  If they have found how to fix the world then what they should do is fix it. 

Everything first exists without a name, but then we will add a word onto it.  This is a dangerous enterprise, for people then tend to continue using the word while the meaning originally behind it slowly vanishes.

Some think of their life as the main event, and think about God as if he were a character in it.  But the true format is that the universe is God's story, and we are the characters in it.  It is a problem of priority. 

Of all the matter in the universe, only a select few capsules of skin on planet earth have been granted the privilege of thinking, but once in this position man cries out, "I don't want to think about it!" 

Through the eyes of a child

I thought that a battery exploded if you dropped it.

I used to think that the "conscience" was a actually a thing in a person's head.

I was very intimidated by girls who could write in bubble letters, and I was always frustrated that when I tried it didn't look as good.

When being driven somewhere, it always seemed to me that headlights were like the eyes of a car.  Thus whenever looking out at the busy intersections I always saw cars as the main agents, like they were the ones driving and deciding where to go.

If I was ever in a room with a lot of people and the door was closed, I was always afraid that we would breathe up all the air and start suffocating.  Since we inhaled the good kind of air, and breathed out carbon dioxide, how would more of the good kind of air get in the room once we used it all up?

The mind of a child is a place of quiet wonder, and while adults busy themselves about grownup things and conversations, many ideas stir within it.  What a curious and wondrous environment is the world to those who still view it as strangers because they have just begun their visit. 

A Meditation on History

The present moment has the illusion of being more present than moments have been in the past.  When thinking of history, it seems like time flew by through all the kings, wars, and noteworthy individuals, but now time is here.  And here it will stay.  It seems the past, summarized in our minds in quick concepts, was fast forwarded to the present moment for our existence to take place; it is as though reality in the past never seemed to people like it does to us in the present, as a slowly progressing reality with a blank canvas of a future.  It does not seem like the past happened at the same rate as the present is happening, but rather much faster.  But this is simply time and the mind playing devilish tricks on us. 

The past happened at the exact same speed as the present, the only difference is that the past is finished and your life is not.  But slowly and ever so surely, the past sucks you into its abyss of nonbeing, slowly drawing in your existence like a whirpool down a drain.  Like gossamer, our physical being slowly unravels into the wind off our backs.  And the absorption of your existence into the muffled and immobile past is inevitable; indeed, history is a long record of it having happened to every person. 

When you read the name of a historical figure on the pages of a book, you are witnessing him in his paralyzed state;  his name written there is simply his place on the victim's list, gagged and motionless like the rest of history's prisoners.  Some people say they love history because 'it is alive'; how confused they are, for history is a communal grave, where all persons who were once animated and talkative beings have now been eternally frozen. 

Despite its ubiquity and surety, civilization remains casual and oblivious in the midst of this unending bloodbath at the hands of time.  Do they expect it to stop one day?  Such would be foolishness to hope that the very villain at work will soon negate his own project. 

The present moment is merely the edge of the tidal wave of time which is consuming all of mankind as it surges into the future, pulling humans into the enormous ocean of blood which is the past.  Yet though this monster lurks right behind them, people continue facing forward, unaware that they will be gagged and bound for eternity in only a moment as well.

It is amazing and profoundly peculiar that people should have clocks in their houses, on their mantles, right in the open where everyone can see; it is a murderer on display, indeed, showing the murder take place!  People should be outraged and offended when they see a clock, grabbing it furiously and asking, "Why do you continue?  Why are you killing us all every second?  Are you laughing at your cruel joke?  Is this your idea of a joke?  Stop.  I said stop.  Stop, I say, stop, stop, stop!  Commonplace trinket!  Wretched murderer!"  The man smashes the clock on the ground and walks away quickly.  He looks at his hands, feels his abdomen.  "Is it happening now?  I seem fine.  But no.  I am dying.  We are all dying."  And all around him the man watches as the crowds enjoy exploring and living in their gas chamber of a home.  "Life is a death march," the man thinks, "and no one even knows."

After raindrops form, they have a short fall but then disappear instantly upon hitting the ground.  Humans are the same; their life is a short fall before they land at death and likewise disappear into the ground, as though they were never even there.  Also like raindrops, humans are very small and fall quickly and in great numbers.  But sometimes a person will go to sleep, and when he has awoken a storm has happened in the night, though he slept right through it.  Because history quickly unravels, and afterwards it seems it has always been done with, humanity is like a storm that happens during the slumber of the universe.

If a person's day does not go so bad, then they will perhaps have hardly noticed the time, but when they arrive home they find that a friend had an excrutiatingly long day because of the suffering they experienced during it.  But to the person who had a fine day, the slow and miserable time that the other person endured seems to have never happened.  Now that they are together, the person's suffering is over, and thus to the first person it seems the suffering must not have seemed long, for it happened during the same time as the day which seemed to fly so quickly.  So it will be with the universe at the end of our lives; to the universe, as though nothing happened, though we suffered through every second.

Life does not take time.  Time takes life.