I wish it was that easy.

An entertaining, propaganda film about intelligent design:

http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=da0f2f41925019c81011

Come to your own conclusion.

If you want to remind yourself to be good and kind, there’s always an episode about Donna Martin, the quiet and polite virgin.
If you want to see someone get hurt to remember that life could always be worse, seek out an episode about Kelly, who almost developed an eating disorder, almost got shot, was almost raped, almost died in a fire, and then did get raped, did kill the man who raped her, and did call off her wedding at the last moment.
If you’re feeling sorry for yourself about not having enough money to pay for a new dress, recall Andrea, who lies about her address in order to attend a better-funded public school on the West side of town.
If the only people who seem to take romantic interest in you are major creeps, remember Brandon, who was involved with Emily Valentine (who slipped U4EA in his drink at an underground club and committed arson), Nikki (an obsessive younger girl), and a married woman (a professor at the university he attends).

It probably still seems silly, but I’m sure 90210 can change lives.

Okay…that was mostly just a dumb post.

At 2:54 AM, a car backfired in the alley. Several young men had been working on it for the last three days, and still, whenever they turned the key in the ignition, the whole neighborhood was shocked by the noise, which was always followed quickly by a chorus of expletives. Tom had been living in the house for seven months, on the top floor of the left side of a twin owned by his high school friends, Russell and Amy. They had an eight-month-old son, Fionn, and although the boy’s paternity had been called into question, they had rushed to marry before Amy’s second trimester of pregnancy. Tom’s space on the top floor was directly above the nursery, so it was not unusual for him to be stirred from sleep in the middle of the night, and in fact he had taken to stumbling down the spiral stairs to rock Fionn until his familiar brown eyes closed.
Tonight had been the best sleep he’d had in seven weeks, since the evening Fionn had begun his new tradition of waking before 5:00, but Tom knew that the sleep would not have lasted much longer, anyway, and so he took the time to consider his position within the house.
Tom understood that their arrangement was peculiar. It had only taken him a week of rocking the boy back to sleep before he understood Amy’s motive for inviting him to live rent-free, and Amy couldn’t have believed that Tom wouldn’t figure it out, eventually. It had come down only to counting back through weeks and breaking into clouded memories. And then there was the matter of the eyes—Fionn’s, just like Tom’s, were black-brown with green flecks. However, Tom knew he wasn’t supposed to acknowledge Fionn as any more than an unofficial nephew, as Russell accepted Fionn without much obvious struggle.
“I know he’s my son,” he’d say, and point to the child’s indistinct temples and brow line. “His face is the same shape as mine.”
The thought that Russell was protecting himself from doubt had crossed Tom’s mind, since, he figured, it would be hard to miss the fact that his son’s eyes were so dark while his and Amy’s were light green, but Russell had always been willing to go on faith. He had believed Amy in high school when she told him that she didn’t sleep with the quarterback after prom, and he had believed her when she claimed that the other possible father had been an anonymous one-night stand. Tom knew that neither story was completely true, but it didn’t seem to matter to Russell. His acceptance of Amy’s flaws worked for him, affording him a happier-than-average life, and Tom didn’t want to disturb the arrangement.
It was growing more difficult to treat Fionn as though he was only his friends’ child, someone with whom he had no innate connection. Fionn had begun to make distinctly conversational noises, making Tom aware that the boy was a true human, pure and small, who, Tom thought, should perhaps not be corrupted by such cruelty as a lie so early in his life.
Tom’s growing guilt had instilled new fears of the night in his gut, created new compulsions in addition to his longtime obsession with syllable-counting. After half an hour of rocking Fionn to sleep and carefully returning him to what must have felt like a zoo cage, Tom would frantically check and recheck the locks on the doors and windows, arrange the seven stuffed elephant toys as a bumper around the walls of the crib, and monitor Fionn’s breathing for irregularities. He would return to the third floor, sitting cold in the corner of the front half of the room. He was afraid to sever the connection between his eyes and the darkness outside of the window.
Although it was located in the city, trees, including the second-largest Sycamore in the region, surrounded the house and its yard. Collectively, the trees blocked the house from vision in the back and along the side, creating a division from the quick world outside of the stone building. The yard would be the ideal hiding place for an escaped prisoner and, although there were no jails in the area, this was a great source of worry for Tom, as was the face that the only person who could see into the yard was John, who had a roof deck and a guitar, which combined to form loud parties in the spring and summer and on unseasonably warm evenings. Even this was less than half of the days in the year, and would do little good if someone were to inconveniently decide to murder all four members of the household and the cat on a cold evening in October. The isolation must have been a familiar comfort to Amy and Russell, who had spent two years in the mountains after high school, but for Tom its omnipresence was strange, putting him on edge. It hadn’t bothered him before he’d discovered that Fionn was his son, but he had decided, the night that the realization hit him, that if he could not protect Fionn from his mother’s lies he would protect the child from the world.
By 7:00 AM, after two trips to hush Fionn into silence, Tom had fallen back asleep, with the bottom half of his body on the cold, hardwood floor, and his head rested on his thin, lumpy futon. Amy found him this way, asking, as though it was a real joke, “Is this an ancient method of sleep therapy that you picked up during your time in Sri Lanka?”
“I don’t know how I ended up like this,” Tom replied. He’d never been to Sri Lanka. Even if the joke had been funny, he wouldn’t have understood it, but Amy’s jokes were better than what he could expect, were she to know the two-pronged truth. He couldn’t admit that he knew about Fionn, for fear it might spark a series of conversations explaining the merits of lying to the child. At the same time, Tom couldn’t imagine why she would want him to be in the home if she didn’t want Fionn to know about him, if she didn’t have a subconscious wish to expose the whole charade. Amy had a history of self-sabotage, especially in her relationship with Russell, but Tom couldn’t remember anything so stupid, anything that would ruin three lives and confuse a fourth.
Tom sat up and looked as Amy as she turned to walk away. She always hesitated at the top of the stairs, just as she reached the plastic tube railing, as if she had something stuck on her mind, like she wanted to ask him whether he knew.
“Amy.”
“Yeah?” She turned and looked into the mirror by the staircase.
“Fionn is perfect. You and Russell are lucky to have him. I hope you know that.”
“I do, Tom. Thank you.” Amy walked down seven steps before Tom heard her pause, then take five steps much more quickly and slam the door to the bathroom. Five more steps before she reached the sink and turned the faucet.
Tom felt pleased, and closed his eyes.

When Jed died I shut down completely and I could barely move. I stopped doing everything and I felt sorry for myself for a very long time, and sometimes it still fucks me up to think about it–she’d been at my side for my entire life, and there were only few more days then digits on my hands and feet that I had spent away from her in seventeen years, and then I knew that every day for the rest of my life would be without the cat who was my best friend.
It sounds sort of awful, but this doesn’t impact me as much. This is a person, and a person I love, and it’s not as hard.

I am still enjoying all of the writing in short stories. It is a bit draining, but I have yet to come to the point at which I can no longer think or function with a pencil in my hand.

“I welcome the sun, the clouds and rain,
The wind that sweeps the sky clean
and lets the sun shine again.
This is the most magnificent life has ever been,
here is heaven and earth and the brilliant sky in between.”
-Brett Dennen, “Blessed”

(I find it funny that the song after that on shuffle was: “He will then be reborn from 1970s porn, wearing tube socks with style and such an innocent smile.”-Rufus Wainwright, “Gay Messiah”)

I wonder if anyone reads this. If you do, leave a comment, even if I don’t know you in real life.

Listening to:
“Puttin’ on the Ritz” by Rufus Wainwright, from Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall

I believe in living until I die. I believe that this is my only life and that when I am gone I am gone. Forever. The end. No going back, or doing it over, or begging and bribing Peter to let me through the Pearly Gates. No divine forgiveness, or final judgment, or what-ifs and wish-I-hads. I believe in doing what feels right, and in deciding, every day, to improve myself by doing little things that don’t really seem to matter in the moment.

I cannot pinpoint the moment at which this belief became a part of me. I have never believed in God, or in heaven, or in hell, and so I suppose that I have always felt that it is my right to enjoy my one life, that it is my duty as a human being, not as the subject of an omniscient being, to do everything that I can to experience my life for as long as I can.

But Sylvia Plath was right, there is a limit, there is no way that I will be able to do everything. I will probably never jump out of a plane, and I will definitely never star in a major motion picture, but even if I cannot experience something on my own, I might live it through the words of someone who could—I must allow myself to be taught. And in return, I feel that I am obligated to put my experiences into words for those who can never experience those things that I can and will. I will never read all of the books or write all of the words that live inside of me, but I will try until I die.

I have every intention to travel far distances, to meet people with whom I have no common ground, to learn to understand their beliefs, and to eat many strange, vegetarian meals. I believe that I will find endless opportunities, take as many as possible, and die knowing that I did all that I could within a lifetime.

I believe that I will always work to figure it all out, but that we can never truly know anything at all, and that the best we can do is try to understand. There is a possibility, though it seems fantastically small to me, that I am completely wrong. There is a chance that there is a God, and that there is a hell, and that I am doomed for an eternal state of misery after death, but it seems so minuscule that I am not capable of believing it. I guess you could say I’m optimistic. So, no, I don’t believe in God, or in heaven, or in hell, but I do believe in human possibility, the magnificence of living life to the fullest, the magic inside of every book, the importance of constant human interaction, and learning something new every day of my life.