analogy for a human brain

think think think whisper NO NO NO not that just breathe in out in out not so fast shhhhh don't think of that obey me obey obey turn lift life stop stop stop it!!! sigh heartbeat heartbeat beatbeatbeatbeat beat...beat...beat... panic blood racing whew slide move operate pulse throb work work work!!! death.

it is not about you.

it is about the things that you do. in a hundred years, people will not remember that you liked hot chocolate, or that you failed a test in the third grade. they will not remember your favorite song or your thoughts, your lovers or your clothes. most likely, they will not even remember your name. people do not especially care about other people-they care about events. and that is the way to make yourself remembered, through your actions. i forget her name, but there was a woman who spent her entire life as a washerwoman and a miser, living extremely cheaply, and then at thee end of her life she donated tens of thousands of dollars to charity. think about this logically: your personal comfort is mathematically less important than your good deeds, because it affects only you.

generosity and willingness to make sacrifices is not a "saintly" or "special" thing, but a necessity. it is the reason we are alive. well, not exactly. there is no reason we are alive. actually, the human race is a flaw in nature. only a single, middle-of-the-chain mammal, we ignore the ecosystem and decide that we are above everything else. but i digress-the only way to make up for our...sins, i suppose you could call them, is to improve the world, to strive to become the "paragon of animals". most creatures do not either help or hurt the earth, but simply exist in it. this is all very well for them, but humanity cannot exist this way. we insist that we are here for a greater purpose, a greater cause. we move forward. we cannot help it, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. to deny our struggles would be lying. what we must do instead is make sure that we are indeed moving toward something good, and not simply choosing what is convenient at the moment. that would be pointless and harmful. be careful.

you're right, mom. its kind of sick.

thats what my little brother said to my mother-he wanted to get one of those handheld thingamagigs with buttons and jumping dinosaurs and stars, and my mother said to him,
"look at that boy over there. does he even know that it's a nice day? does he even know that he's in the playground?"
"you're right, mom." he said. "its kind of sick."

i have figured out the thing that keeps people staring transfixed, looking at screens for hours on end (rather like you and i are doing right now.) we have made this marvelous invention-The Moving Thing. you see, if something before our eyes moves, and our eyes follow it, we don't have to go anywhere to feel as though we're doing something. the first example of a Moving Thing is a book. we can sit looking at a book and not moving for hours, because things are happening inside our heads. it is like dreaming. Moving Things are a sure sign of a Civilized Society (not an expression i use negatively or positively; only a state of being.), but they can look scary to someone not involved. if we, not seeing the screen or the page or hearing the music, see a person with their eyes open doing nothing, we are frightened. if seems like they are blank, dead. they are not. they are doing more than we are, with their minds. in creepy sci fi books and movies, the society is always converted entirely to Mind Motion-that is, doing things inside your head rather than outside. this frightens the reader/viewer because it feels like the society is full of dead, motionless people. on a certain level, this is true. The Moving Thing is a concept which had the potential to do great harm, but also the potential to do great good. we must find the balance between intellectual movement, physical movement, and emotional movement. only then, will we be truly alive.

pieces of you

so i was in a thrift shop, and since the people i was with were still trying on a bunch of things and i had picked out everything already, i started looking at the CDs. one particular CD struck my eye, and i wrote down its name. it's called *pieces of you*, by jewel. i'm not a big jewel fan myself, nor do i plan to listen to the album. but i just loved the cover. here it is:

penny for your thoughts.

i dont really have any grand theories to present right now, but there are a few mosquitos buzzing around my brain. here they are:
-i am in the process of tie-dyeing 83 pieces of recycled tshirt fabric to sew into a dress based off of the enterprise uniform, so right now our bathtub is full of yellow and purple dye. my brother asked my mother why he couldn't have a bath? and my mother said "because your sister is an artist." this made me very happy and proud.
-that last post was not fictional. i really am clowning.
-on the way home from school, i heard divine smooth jazz music coming from somewhere. at first i thought it was coming straight from heaven itself, but then i realized that it was floating up through the subway grates. i stood to listen for ten solid minutes, then went into the station just to pay the man. he wasn't at all like i pictured; white and slightly chubby, with a hipster goatee. on the way home, i sang joni mitchell's *for free*.
-people say that you can never be too careful, but you can. you really can.
-the idea of advice makes no sense. the only person's advice you should follow is your own, and this should be based on your experience, and in order to have that experience, you must not follow advice.
-this saturday, i went to a magical place in a great big wood. i live in a hustleconcretesteelwreckingball city of secrets and cloudy thursdays, and right in the middle, there is a forrest. not a park, not manmade at all, but an honest-to-goodness forrest made by nature herself. i hiked through it at night, and found the wizard in glasses. he was an astronomer with a huge telescope and people around him, and he showed me saturn and the twins and the moon. the moon looked just like a piece of soft clay that had been rained on. when i left, we all sang folk/campfire songs on the way back, and i remembered the original purpose of music.


none of this is metaphorical. its all true.