Journal

two days after full
october 12, 2003 ~ 12:20 p.m.

I've made a new layout for my site. I succumbed to frames, finally. I've always been wary of frames, since they can be annoying, but I decided to use them because it'll be faster to download that way, and I realize that not everyone has a T1 connection like me. When I'm at home using my pathetic 56k modem, I appreciate fast-loading sites.

Why is it called ephemeral? Well, the reason I thought of it was that the other day in Microeconomics, the professor was talking about the ephemeral nature of unstable markets. He paused and said, "Y'all know what ephemeral means, right?" and the girl behind me muttered, "I don't think any of us know what it means." And so I sat there, thinking, god, you're stupid. Not because she didn't know what it means; it's a relatively obscure word, at least for a college student. She's stupid because she assumed no one else knew, just because she didn't. I know what that word means, and it's one of my favorite words.

So I started thinking about the word, and about the ephemeral nature of everything. Nothing's permanent, after all. It's autumn right now, and that's the season of decline and change. Fall is analogous to the setting sun, the third quarter moon, the old age of a human. It's the time before death.

Everything is ephemeral. Our lives seem so long, but it's a blink of an eye from the universe's perspective. Even the seemingly endless cycles of life -- the moon's phases, the sun rising and setting every day, the turn of the seasons -- it will all end some day. The moon will fly from its orbit into space, the sun will explode, the life on Earth will wither and die. And it will all start up again somewhere else. More stars will be born, more planets will give rise to life. And eventually, they'll disappear too.

~~~

Today is the fifth anniversary of Matthew Shepard's death. Do you think it's any coincidence that Bush has declared today the start of "Marriage Protection Week"? That's really fucking sick. That's a fucking blatant slap in the face. It's worse than Fred Phelps counting the number of days Matthew's been in hell, because we can just say Phelps is a run-of-the-mill crazy. But Bush isn't just a right-wing nut, he's also the president -- and he's doing this to show us just how little regard he really has for the value of a human life.

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