La Playa...and stuff

I just got back from spending a couple days with my family in Orange Beach, Alabama. It was fun. I'll post pictures when I get the energy to. My life feels very mundane right now. I want to save a life. I want to uncover corporate fraud. I want to have a family of my own. I want to go whitewater rafting. I want to have a near life experience. I want to go train hopping across the U.S. I want to experience epiphany. I want to love God more than my own life.

That's one of the problems of human existence. Never being satisfied with the present. For now, I should be totally content waiting tables for one summer...just one summer. But then again, how can one be content with "the present"? What is "the present"? As soon as I finished typing "the present," the present had already passed. By the time you think of what is present, you've already moved on into a new present, and the old present has passed. The present must be some sort of intersection of the past and the future, where the two coincide. Think about it. How short a length of time is the present? Is it one second? A millisecond? A nanosecond? 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds? It's bananas! Ridiculous! The present and the past, however, can be measured. I've known the meaning of romance for 6.5 months now. I will turn 20 years old in a little over a month. We always dwell in the past and wish for the future, because these are the only quantities of time we can measure. That suggests to me that, yes, we have a "free will" endowed to us. But that free will is exercised in the present, which is apparently such a small quantity of time we cannot ascribe a unit of measurement to it. And the present and the past are infinite compared to the present. The past and the present are out of our control. Tying all that together, the past and the present form the majority of our existence, and they are outside our control, so the majority of our existence is outside our control. That is to say, that we do have free will, but compared to this other operation of Providence, our control over our lives is miniscule. It's only a concept, really. To quote Mel Gibson in Signs, "So the question is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind of person who sees signs, sees miracles, or do you believe that people just get lucky?" Do you believe you are all alone, there's no God watching over the affairs of men? If so, I pity you, for you must feel very very alone and frightened. Or I don't know, maybe you think you're All That and can handle life solo. Fare well.

Anyway enough psychobabble, I'm going to eat some biscuits and watch Maria Full of Grace. I hear it's a real smash-up, maybe i'll post about it some time.....in the future.