stuff you don't read
"stuff you won't bother reading"
...unless i'm wrong, because there were actually some comments for the last nonsensical post. more than anything else, silence is irritating. even if someone says "i don't care", or "you suck", or anything else that's negative, at least they're acknowledging something. silence makes me think of the suffering of people that have missing children... never knowing if those kids are alive or dead is worse than finding their dead body in a shallow grave in the middle of nowhere. never receiving any kind of feedback is much like never existing at all.
to which you can react in any number of ways, including 'pulling a naruto' and declaring that you'll make yourself leader of your country so that you'll force people to see you. a move i highly do not recommend nor endorse, of which i actually detest, which is precisely why i cannot stand naruto as a character. but that's besides the point.
it's funny how obstinate people are. observing people argue over trivial, or unresolvable differences, is mind numbling and so blatantly pointless, yet it happens. listening to my sister argue about christianity with my father, for instance, is a completely unneccesary exercise of uselessness. it makes me wonder how debate is even possible. how can you possibly find ways of convincing people of anything when it's so hard to move them with any amount of logic you display? and yet it's possible to persuade people of some things. commercials evidently serve their purpose to an extent, otherwise companies would be smart enough to realize they're "wasting" their time and energy if it didn't attract some costumers. and yet, when i talk about observing other ppl caught in the act of a useless debate (where neither person refuses to budge or at least LISTEN to the logic and reason at hand), and speak of it in a manner as if i was above it all, i find myself occasionally caught in the act as well. and then i guess i understand why people do it, why they try at all--perhaps the point is not to win the argument, but just the fleeting hope that the other side would just make an effort to LISTEN--and yet even that is too much to hope for sometimes. how the heck does a policeman stop the jumper from going over the bridge? do you not think that if the policeman fails and the jumper jumps, the policeman will feel guilty about not being able to stop the person? and if that is indeed what happens, IN RETROSPECT, should the policeman not have tried to talk the jumper out of it in the first place? i would disagree, yet i feel not everyone agrees with me. and maybe i understand better why (in just one example) christans may feel so fervent about trying to get non-christians to agree with them. perhaps they feel the need to save people just as badly as the policeman. to them the bridge may just be as clear as day. who knows?
if you play a game such as blackjack many times, you are bound to lose many times, but also bound to win a few times. if you play blackjack with the mindset that you ARE GOING TO LOSE EVERY GAME beforehand, you will still end up winning a few times in the process. if you have the mindset that you will LOSE MONEY OVERALL, you're probably right. but if you approach the game with the reverse mindset, that you will WIN MONEY OVERALL, will it actually make any difference in your results?
consider it differently. suppose you are playing a game of monopoly(C) with your friends. let's say that you've played the game with the same friends many times and you always end up losing first, except for just once when you won with a lot of luck. does this justify giving up before starting the game?
and yet, neither example illustrates the point. i say this because "losing" implies that someone else will be "winning". so let's say that you're on the wheel of fortune and you're about to take a spin. you might roll a low value, you may get lucky and roll a high value, and you may just unfortunately hit the "bank-rupt". if you're CONVINCED you'll roll the bank-rupt before you begin, does that justify refusing to roll at all and running off the stage?
let's say a baby was born, and there's a famous fortune teller who will predict the child's fortune. interestingly enough, the fortune teller has nearly always been correct. s/he predicts the child will live an unhappy life full of depression and sadness. does this justify killing the child to spare it the misery? or make the situation more extravagant, and say the the child will bring about the destruction of the world (a somewhat common story idea). does this justify killing the child? and why is it that nearly every story with that idea ends up the child being spared? and would it make a difference if the fortune teller had far less credibility?
are self-fulfilling prophecies REALLY self-fulfilling? does a person who does absolutely no studying and who walks into an exam expecting to fail really fail ALL the time? there is a chinese fable about a man who had a tree stump in his backyard. one day a rabbit ran into the stump and died. the man had a good rabbit stew that night; the next day he chopped down all his trees and then on sat around in his house hoping he'd get more rabbits that way. ...we don't need to be genuises to realize how stupid that sounds. if it's obvious that a farmer who doesn't plant crops doesn't get any harvest (other than weeds), if it's obvious that money doesn't grow on trees, that "something doesn't come from nothing" (a generalization of the first law of thermodynamics), then how and why do people think something good will happen by just waiting around? patience being a "virtue" doesn't apply to that situation... "garbage in, garbage out" (as quoted by my 11th grade math teacher regarding incorrect input into a calculator).
and now, after all that babble, my incoherent attempt to patch things together. i was just thinking about things, looking at pictures, and just felt slightly sad. i looked at how much my parents aged over the years, how much the rest of my family has grown up over the course of nearly 20 years, and so much seems to have happened during that time. i'm not the person who my parents wanted me to be, and it makes me somewhat sad. i'm not really the person i wished i was either, but i don't know if that's true. afterall, i don't know WHAT i want to be, or exactly who i wish i could be either. but you know, it's not like something will just swoop out of the sky and tell you what to do, who are you, or anything like that. and even if there was something out there, i doubt it would cut me any slack and just TELL me what to do. sadly, people can only give advice along different way points, and ppl will take these bits and pieces to assemble a larger picture, or make some sort of decision. or maybe i'm mistaken in thinking so, and "perhaps we all need some overall 'father figure' who tells us exactly what to wear each day, what we should be doing every second of our lives, giving some kind of 'purpose' and guidance so we never have to think anymore for ourselves and just listen and follow things like good sheep under the darn shepherd."
if that were true (italicized above) maybe there WOULD be justification in ending it all. >_<