Ramblings: Major-Minor, Real-ity

so i wrote this a couple of weeks ago around 2:30 AM while taking a break from homework. i pretty much just took all the thoughts swirling around my head and wrote them down. i haven't changed anything since then, so my ideas are constantly interrupted by others, only for me to get back to my other points. but a lot of points that i start making sort of just fall to the wayside when i think of something else. kind of like my stories, eh? (note: although it says this was posted on October 10, 2008, that was actually when i wrote all of this. this was actually posted on monday, october 20th)


do you ever have those moments where you just know that the results of your actions are going to cause ripples in every area of your life? and it's not even a big thing, just something small like waving to someone or helping a friend. But you know that by doing this, somehow other things will be altered. You have some ambiguous idea of how, but you're not quite sure, so you just go along for the ride. This could be a post about self-awareness and how consciously ironic it is (postmodern ftw!), but it isn't. I'm not sure what this post is about. Everyday I wake up, and I take the same long shower, and go to the same room and put on essentially the same clothing and then go to the same school and the same classes where teachers teach the same thing they have taught year after year. After that is lunch, which is usually the same; finish up homework, go to a club meeting, walk around aimlessly waiting for something miraculous to happen, on good days go off campus... to eat at the same few fast food places around the high school. Then it's home, to the same tv to watch an episode of the daily show, then the colbert report, then eat a snack and up to check facebook, espn, engadget, cnn, popsci, and e-mail. Then onto homework, which usually ends in bitter frustration as I wonder when we ever learned this in class. Then perhaps a chat with someone on AIM, and then off to bed around 12:30 or 1. Every day, basically the same schedule. Only a few variables change, and is that what makes your life worth living? The hope that perhaps this day will be different than the next, maybe something good will happen; maybe you'll catch up with an old friend or get a good grade on a test (still waiting for that) or you'll get an extra dollar back in change for lunch, and suddenly you don't know what to do with all the excess cash. Why is it that such unimportant things are valued so highly by everyone? Why do we put so much effort and time into things if these unimportant things are what make life worth living?

When I was a sophomore, we watched a series of films called "The Great War" or something like that in World History. It was an 8-hour long documentary on World War I, and episodes 3-7 or so all detailed the deadliest battles. Seven-digit casualties would be thrown out by the narrator like the time of day. The battles that were skimmed over by the videos were the ones with less than 100,000 deaths. 100,000? How can this be? How many people have died in Iraq? In Vietnam? I'm not saying that it's ok for 4,000+ soldiers to be killed, indeed it's a great tragedy, but imagine that many dying every day. After those videos, especially the ones recounting battles with casualties of a million or more, I would walk out of the class in a daze, wondering how I can exist in the same world that this war was in. Why don't more people talk about this? It was as if my reality had come crashing down. Here I was, worrying about how I was going to do on my next quiz or trying to find time to spend time with my friends or rushing home to see a new episode of The Office, and not even 100 years before this there were battles that would wipe out the population of San Jose in a matter of weeks. Has society really changed this much? Was reality now different now than it was then? Was it OK for so many people to die because it was seen that by dying now they are saving more from dying later? Reality never changes, just your perception of it. I know I'm taking that saying out of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, but it strikes me as something that bears repeating. reality does not change. History is not subjective, things happened, and the only subjective thing about it is how you perceive the information. Gravity was there before we knew about it. You cannot change reality, but so many factors (everything in your life) affect how your perceive the piece of reality given to you. That is the fundamental difference between your reality and actual reality. I guess you could say yours is virtual reality. Reality is a concrete, definite thing, with a finite size. Only that size is too large to fathom, so I guess it's infinite. But there is a definite reality. So what? Definite reality does not make anything, it only says if you're right or wrong. And right and wrong matter less than almost anything else. What if I were to tell you that there was no such thing as gravity, that there is no God, that calculators really have little pepole inside them working them? You probably would think I'm crazy and go on with your day. But what if everything I said is complete truth? It still wouldn't matter to you, because you don't believe it. Your life is not based on reality, it is based on your perception of reality. If you believe that gravity exists, then gravity might as well exist. It doesn't matter if it does or not, the fact is you believe it exists and in your reality it does. And no one's reality matters except yours. Have you ever been driving in your car and seen everyone on the highway and realized that every single one of them has as complex a life as you? And that everyone is going somewhere to do something, and have initiative and have an idea of what the world should be like. I've never understood that; if billions of people are always going around with a purpose of doing something in the hopes of bettering their lives, then why does the standard of living take so long to go up? You wouldn't ever do anything unless it bettered the life of you or your family or your friends or someone you don't know. Why would someone ever do anything that is purposefully backwards? The incentive is not there. Or is this just a game of give and take, where "life points" are only transferred? Then it would stand to reason that the best way to better life would be to add to the cumulative life point pool. This can be done by adding life points to places where there is none. Everyone started out with zero life points, and America has been the first to one thousand. At least that is what it is like in my perception of reality. Why do we even need concrete reality? By believing something, it becomes reality. Reality is really a wikipedia sort of operation. It is decided by the agreement of most people. This is how language is created, a certain sound is taken to mean a certain thing and it then becomes a part of every person's life. Reality has nothing to do with language, but laguage was made into reality by it's creation. And history actually is subjective, because people's reality influenced their behaviors, and their behaviors created the history. Which means that all of reality can be considered subjective, because its creation was dependent on the creator's reality. But then what really is reality? Dicitonary.com defines it as "something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive." But nothing exists independently of everything else. Except for the very beginning, before there were people to perceive what reality really means and shape it into their own meaning. Which means that absolute reality is only created when no one is around to influence and shape it. So reality is the inverse of trees falling. Does this mean that true reality can no longer be created and it will always be corrupted by perception? If this is so, then it would appear that reality is much smaller than we thought. Reality would be everything that the big bang did, or everything that God made. But what if God and the big bang were just created to explain what happened around us? By that standard, nothing is reality. Everything is just the perception of what we see. But then what is that which we see? The reality of it (no pun intended) is that we will never know.