Thought Machine

I've been very ill the last week - ran a temperature of 103.5ºF, had a massive coughing fit and slept for 16 hours. I’m not in love with the experience of popping pills every six hours, sleeping with your face, neck and chest smothered with Vicks. Ugh!

Anyway, after all that I’m finally getting better. So yay!

Things have been sailing along pretty nicely, what with my cousin and niece staying over for a week. It’s been super fun! Cuz and I’ve caught up on a lot of “stuff”. Déjà vu!

Long conversations remind me of my yahoo chats with sagaro. Someone reading them would go mad. I’m sure. While at one level, they seem deep and thought provoking, on another plane, they just seem silly and ridiculous. I don’t understand why. Cuz and I spent 5 hours talking about this. Sheesh. But all the same, I always enjoy these conversations. Because they always make me think and I can convince myself that “deep” thinking is productive use of my time.

I often think about why the young people were so pissed off. They aren't satisfied with anything anymore. A bike a sixteen, a car at eighteen, a degree at twenty-one, a job after that: somehow that was a matter of course. And if you had to do without you were strange. Inferior. I mean, what's a life without these right? I say what's a life without fantasy. Without spontaneity. Working your fingers to the bone for something you don't even want that much isn't done. These are the ideals of the generation gone by. For many, these are the minimum expectations of life. But then there must be something else too. That thing, precisely, which makes life meaningful. Memorable. And that is nowhere in sight. But a few are still seeking out that which is meaningful in life. For a young person, it is better to have false ideals than no ideals at all.

I’ve also been learning Italian for awhile now, from my mum. I’d also attended a couple of classes with her. And then her teacher says that I can do the Level 1 exam and go to Level 2 directly. Awesome no?! :D Molto bene!! :D

And then Nanowrimo. I scrapped my initial, pathetic attempt at a novel. I suck at fiction. Big time. I spent two weeks writing 13K odd words of fiction. Now in two days, I’ve written 14K of non-fiction. Pretty darn amazing what memory can do. And it’s so much easier to put down things like they happened, to talk about real people in your life. Real.

But then someone said, Some memories are like butterflies. If you pin them down to a page, it takes the life out of them. Hmmm. Something to think about. Or not.