Swings
May 29th 1998
I love going on swings because if you go really high and point your feet up, it feels like you can reach the sky with the tips of your toes.
Another thing that I love is that when you're going high, if you close your eyes and hold your hands out, it feels as if you're flying. Of course, if you're not careful, you could fall off and end up really flying on the way to the ground...
Ouch.
Smiles
February 2nd 1999
Aren't smiles the nicest things? No matter who you are, where you come from, what you look like...a smile can make you beautiful.
Smiles don't need to change, wherever you go. In any place, anywhere in the world, a smile is one of the few things that will be understood as a sign of happiness, friendliness, and good will.
Smiles have been around since the dawn of time...of course, around the 60's, they became more frequently used. No one can feel anything but joy when they are smiling. Try it...smile...can you feel that smile in your heart, not just on your lips?
:)
*note: I can't remember if, at the time, I was serious about smiles becoming "more frequently used" in the 60s...that made me laugh right out loud when I read it again...
Deep Stuff
September 28th, 2001
I think my grandpa's going to die soon.
He's in the hospital and he's really weak...i heard something about his liver going and he can't take care of himself anymore, so if he actually does make it out of the hospital he's going to have to live in a nursing home.
I want to go visit him, because I don't know if I'll have another chance to see him. If I do go it will probably be this weekend, and so i'd have to cancel my not-quite-confirmed plans with my friends for my birthday. I don't want to but I also know I'd regret it forever if I gave up my last chance to see my grandpa to go to the movies instead.
What I'm thinking is, what if one of my friends were to die this weekend, and I missed my last time to go out with them? It's less likely that it would happen to them, but...what if?
That's the irony of it...we go to see someone because we know they're dying and we assume that we won't get to spend much more time with them, but every single moment that we're alivem we're taking a chance. Something could happen to anyone we love at any second and then what would we do?
Like, mom's downstairs right now, but what if she has a heart attack while I'm writing this and dies? I would have spent my last moments to be with her up here in my room, writing about it...huh.
October 1st, 2000
This is a note I wrote to the DPS today...thought I'd copy it out:
"Happy birthday to me...it's 3:21 p.m. and my grandpa just passed away. My aunt phoned from the hospital to tell me. I'm home alone right now...my parents have gone to Guelph with my sister and I can't get hold of them right now, but I had to tell someone so I'm writing to you guys.
"It's so strange to think that he's gone...I'm not especially sad, but i don't mean for that to sound insensitive. What I mean is, I was never too close to my grandparents, and I know he's in a better place right now...he's happy where he is.
"But I still can't quite grasp that he's...gone. He's the closest person to me that I've ever lost...I only ever rememebr crying about a death when my budgie died when I was four. But apart from that, I've been lucky in the sense that no one I'm especially close to has ever passed away.
"Still, what just happened has made me realize how fleeting life can be...at around 2:30 this afternoon, my grandpa breathed his last breath, thought his last thought, his heart beat one final time, and then just like that, 79 years of living were over. When I thought about that it made me realize that...well, it's hard to put into words but one second, you're alive and thinking and breathing and dreaming, and the next...you're not."
There was a bit of other stuff too but not as important. But that note said a lot of what I'm feeling right now.
Contemplating Fruit Flies
August 6th 2001
Isn't it amazing how something as small and seemingly insignificant as a fruit fly can have a life within it, just the same as any other creature on this earth? It has the teensiest little brain telling it what to do, and eyes with which to see the world, and legs to move around and get places...and as easy as it is to simply shoo them away and disregard them as pesky little annoyances, they hav their place in the circle of life...one that is every bit as important as we humans. As weird as it may sound, I watched one die today and it occurred to me that that thing had a mother and a father and a whole helluva a lot of brothers and sisters, and maybe even lots of kids of its own. Physically, they may be different but when you dig right down to the basics, aren't we all really the same?
Miscellaneous Meats
March 7th, 2002
I'm not much of a meat-eater...I think I love animals too much to enjoy something like deer or duck, or even cow (beef). Poor things, I feel sorry for them...I'm not going to try to justify eating chicken or fish, but I don't really think they have the capacity to understand what's happening to them so maybe they don't suffer so much as, say, a goat who cries when he realizes he's about to be slaughtered.
So I can't for the life of me understand how people can eat the parts of an animal classified as "miscellaneous" or "other"...
When you eat the eyes, are you eating all the things, beautiful and horrible, that the animal ever saw during its lifetime?
When you eat the brains, can you feel every thought that animal ever had?
When you eat the tongue, does it taste like everything the animal ever tasted?
When you eat the heart, do you - even for a moment - feel the force with which it used to beat?
When you eat the testicles...(I'll leave that one up to your imagination...)