Next!

Sometimes I think Seattle is one of the most beautiful cities in the country- when it's sunny. Like it was yesterday! I spent all day yesterday at the ginormous Barnes & Noble in University Village finishing Snow Crash. There is a hilariously awkward sex scene in it between Y.T. and Raven. I mean, I don't think it was intended to be either hilarious or awkward, but damn, it was like reading about the conception of Hagrid the half-giant in Harry Potter.

Today, I will be embarking on my next reading adventure, Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. It's a fitting way to start off my 24th year. My twenties has been a time of self-discovery, and for a "long" time, I thought happiness was the ultimate aim of life. You know, life is short, do what makes you (and not some abstract dude called God) happy, as long as you don't hurt anyone. But now I'm beginning to think that purpose is just as important, if not more, than happiness. Happiness is short-lived. Moments of pleasure survive in your memories, but those memories quickly become like someone else's dreams. Did that really happen to me? I often find myself asking. And was it really only a few months ago? It seems like ages ago, another lifetime. After basking in your memories, you shake your head, waking yourself up to the present, and wonder what's next? Who's left? It's the fate of humankind to have brains built to comprehend time linearly, so no matter how amazing the present moment is, we're constantly asking ourselves, "so what's next?" only days later. Conversely, no matter how shitty the present moment is, we can look on into the future and hope for better times. Overall, it's a blessing to be able to have things over with, because that's what makes our lives dynamic and exciting. We can be filled with anticipation (or dread) precisely because of our inability to view time all at once like a typical dimension of space. But, it is interesting to think that there are other ways to view time, like the block universe theory. Many physicists are convinced that finding the theory of everything will only be possible with a better understanding of time. Trying to understand the true nature of time with the limitations of the human brain is sort of like Helen Keller learning to read and write in Chinese. When you think about it, Helen Keller was quite a lucky girl to be born blind and deaf into an English-speaking society. Imagine trying to learn 10,000 complicated Chinese characters and getting all the tones down, when you don't understand sound or sight.