I was crying on the bus today, feeling sorry for myself. The mood stuck around all day until I heard this trivia question on the radio:
"What is the life expectancy of the sun?"
For those of you counting down at home, the answer is 80 billion years. My goodness. And then what will we do when the sun gives it up? I learned it in science class, and I bet you did too: no sun, no life. You know, I think about the sun as though it exists for my own personal warmth. How dare it go and die?
How ridiculous I am. We all are. War and health clubs and Prozac and wine snobs and what color your eye shadow ought to be today. It's all a really great distraction, but it's dumb. We don't matter.
Just think of it. Think of humans--all things, really, but we're just the weirdest products of random evolution--as the accidental products of a single catastrophic event and zillions of years of happy accidents. Makes my little troubles seem stupid, really. Not just "small, meaningless," like the vast-universe cliche, but pathetic. All of this is an accident.
Maybe if we all just owned up to the fact that we're just the mold on the cheese, we'd lose our sense of self-aggrandizing entitlement to joy, peace, or comfort. The cheese owes us nothing.
Maybe my reading choices have been a little too cranky of late.
Posted by care at February 22, 2003 01:07 PM | TrackBackWe're meaningless, yes, but what should we do with our meaningless time? The hours, we still have to deal with the hours. ;-)
p.s.: How did you make your blog cooler than mine in just one day?
p.p.s.: Yes, both X's song and my life.
Posted by: ambimb at February 22, 2003 05:49 PMWhat do we do with the hours?
Spend as little of it being whiny and self-pitying and jerky as possible.
At least, that's me.
At least the universe extends forever. (So they say.)
We seem so tiny compared to what is out there. And yet still we create things that are even much much tinier, so incredibly invisible even. Just changes of current somewhere on some spinning discs somewhere in dark rooms at the end of long, long wires. And yet there is so much beauty in it all, is there not? (Among other things.)
What a beautiful little site. Is it really just a few days old? Here we go, this is proof, it is all worth it.
Please keep writing. We will return and you will shine, okay?
(As much as you like, for as long as you like.)