Lemons

"When life gives you lemons" you can't really make lemonade since life didn't give you a knife, cutting board, purified water, sugar, or cups of any kind. So really all you're left with are lemons. Sucks to be you.

Price

How much is a human life worth?

Is it worth the entire world? Can you put a price on it? Maybe the net worth of the person? I don't know, but certainly a human life isn't that important. Take, for example, those who have died in wars. Yes, we all learn in school how many casualties there were, and we can even record the approximate number of those who died due to disease rather than in battle. But can you name all of them? I can't. So how are they important? What did they give their lives for? So a bunch of awkward middle-schoolers can hopelessly fail to memorize how many died in some past war? They, as an individual, are now only considered statistics, one of possibly thousands who just died... maybe by some bullet, maybe by their own men, maybe by excrement in the river. But no one in ten years would ever remember. Isn't a human life worth the entire world? No.

You can put a price on a human life. Slaves. Thomas Jefferson bought slaves, the very man who wrote the American Constitution. He read the price tags on their flesh. He paid for them. There were people who would sell themselves into slavery just so they wouldn't starve. Prostitutes, their bodies had a price tag as well. How much are you worth?

Is a person's worth measured by how much they made in life? Maybe. Who's the richest man in the world right now? Carlos Slim Helu. Is his life the most precious? Is his life the most valuable? Maybe. Then why isn't he at the top of the world? Why isn't he King? Why don't people remember him for his childhood? Why don't people remember him for his other talents? His other passions and life? Maybe they do. I sure don't. Maybe a person's worth is measured by how much money they make in life. Then what about Jesus Christ? He's our Savior, he is the son of God. He has forgiven us for all of our sins. He wasn't the richest man in the world, but he is revered by a great majority in the United States and in the world. Is Carlos Slim Helu revered by a great majority in the United States? Is he being worshipped? No? Then does that mean his life is worth less than that of Jesus? Then does that mean a person's worth isn't measured by their net worth?

All in all, a person's life is worth something. But that's only for a single person. You. Only you are worth something. Only you are worth the world. Because only you know what the world looks like. Only you know what the world feels like. Only you know what the world sounds like. Only you know what the world smells like. Only you know what the world tastes like. If you weren't born, the world would cease to be. There would be nothing. Everyone else doesn't matter. Everyone is selfish. Everyone is worth the world, but only they see it that way.

Scanning

"... Oh nuts the sun exploded"
I can finally scan images into the computer now, thanks to a friend named Ray (a.k.a. X-ray a.k.a. Ray Xublahaha). So I scanned this thing. The speech bubble can be hard to read, so i put in a caption.
~C.

The Mountain

Society is like a mountain. People will always try and struggle to reach the top, where life is good and you can see and experience so many things; where you can view everything, rather than at the bottom, where you can only see so little and have nothing. In the middle, people will struggle and climb to the top, but naturally there will not be enough room there, so once it gets crowded, the climbers fight each other and push one another down, competing for the desired spot.
The questions, now, is what the conditions are for going 'up', and what exactly the 'top' and 'bottom' are. In this contemporary age, it seems that the conditions in order to climb the ladder, or 'mountain', of society is rooted in monetary and financial aspects. The richer you are, the more power you have, and the more power you have, the more things you can experience, such as vacations, which is an obvious example, but also businesses, having to deal with more people, and the more things you can purchase or own. Political power can also be a condition, but I think you are more weighed down and burdened by political power rather than monetary value, since there are more problems to be dealt with, many more enemies, in my opinion, and more criticism all around. Spiritual values is also debatable as a condition, some people belonging to Hinduism, for example, might compare the 'mountain' to the caste system, in which Brahmans are at the top and the untouchables, or animals (Sorry, I am not an expert in the field of Hinduism.), are at the bottom, and you must do good deeds in order to move up the caste system once you die and become reincarnated. Though the caste system is a bit more inflexible than my own thoughts about the 'mountain', and I think it really only pertains to Hindus in India (The caste system is gone now, I think, like I said, I'm not an expert at this stuff.). The conditions are still a bit vague, and can be argued.
The 'top' of the mountain is the most desired place, for most. But what exactly is it? If the condition for climbing the 'mountain' is monetary, then the 'top' should be the richest person in the world. If the condition for climbing is political, then the 'top' should be Dictator of the World, president of the United States of America (or leader of any of the big countries), or maybe a monarch in the old times. If the condition for climbing is spiritual, then the 'top' should be either "God(s)" or perhaps "enlightenment" (The quotation marks depict broad, general terms in a universal sense). Some examples of people who have attempted to get to the 'top', or might have reached it, are Hitler, Napoleon, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helu, etc. The 'top' may be way out of the reach of humans or it might be something that is attained by few people through luck, talent, and hard work.
~C.

whut?

So today, as my sister told me about The Last Song movie, talking about how some girl's dad was dying....

I realized...

We are all dying.

Every second we live is a second closer to our death.

You may think this is a bad thing...but how could it be bad?

This view means that each second you live wasting time or doing something you don't want to be doing is a second you'll never get back. A part of your lifespan disappears, floats off into oblivion meaninglessly.

So do what you want to do. Do everything as if you're dying, because you are. Live with no regrets!

Appendix.

Today, while reading my biology textbook for homework, I had an epiphany.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist, proposed to the world in 1809 that changes in an environment caused an organism's behavior to change, leading to greater use or disuse of a structure or organ. The structure would become larger or smaller as a result, and that these changes would be passed on to an organism's offspring.

Observations by Charles Darwin on his voyages to the Galapagos Island revealed that though the islands were very similar in climate and geology, the animals that inhabited each island were completely and totally different. Darwin concluded that this must because animals migrated there from South Africa, separately, to each island, and slowly, started adapting, and evolving to meet the needs of survival on their particular island.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would like to propose a new idea. A radical idea, one that would change the way we think about the world.

You know that small thing we have inside ourselves, the appendix?

Truthfully, it serves little purpose to us.

It has been suggested that the appendix is a lymphatic organ, rich in lymphoid tissue, necessary to create lymphoid cells that fight off viruses and invaders to the body.

However, it can be removed, and no one is exactly sure of what it does now.

But this is NOW.

What about THEN?

What if the mammals, near the time of the age of dinosaurs, had the ability. to breathe. fire.

It was no meteor that killed the dinosaurs. It was no ice age.

IT WAS THE MONKEYS THAT RAN AROUND BREATHING FIRE.

After the monkeys had completed their genocide of the dinosaurs that had terrorized the world for eras, most of the monkey population settled in peace around the world, and stopped using their fire-breath-inducing appendix. Eventually, their appendix shrunk and lost it's function as the monkeys evolved, and became an organ aiding the immune system as we became humans.

The rest of the monkeys that did NOT want to stop breathing fire would begin to shed their fur and live in tropical climates, developing a cold-blooded body and scales, and later becoming what we believe to be dragons. Later, the dragons migrated to the Europe and East Asia from the equator zone, the locations of many dragon myths.

While dragon-monkeys evolved, one group of monkeys, smarter than the rest of the peace-monkeys, decided to make the harsh pilgrimmage to what would be known as the Mayan civilization, in order to get away from the stupid ones.

Their journey was harsh, climbing mountains, fighting off dragon-monkeys, traveling without food for days at a time. They eventually had to adapt to their environment, they had to evolve, just as Lamarck and Darwin demanded it.

So they developed ESP. They developed the power to SEE INTO THE FUTURE (near future, mind you). This ability greatly ensured their survival as they traveled.

Finally, when they reached the coast of Texas, where the land and food was plentiful, some of them realized that they had actually gone off their original course. Others just didn't care about going to Maya anymore and just wanted to stay in Texas, where they would be ensured a lifetime of happiness rather than make another harsh and desperate trip to Southern Mexico.

And so, the group split up again, half of them traveling southward, the rest staying for luxury. The journey was completed much faster due to less supplies needed to be consumed by less monkeys. By this time, the monkeys were almost human, and they had reproduced to make several generations, and their ESP was growing stronger with each new generation.

By the time they reached their destination, their ESP had become so powerful that they had foreseen the horrible death that would come to all of life on Earth by December 21, 2012, as well as having developed a revolutionary planetary-based calendar system.

And so, they planned ahead, creating their calendar and purposefully stopping at 2012, to give humanity a warning of what was to come.

Then most of the Mayans, now almost completely human, died because of overworking on developing the calendar, and the rest died because they had ended up in-breeding within families too much, and they became susceptible to a deadly disease, what was to become known as HIV.

While this was happening, the monkeys in Texas lost their ESP slowly while becoming humans. However, most Texans still retain their ninja-like reflexes and ability to see within the near future.

There are firebreathers out there, humans with mutated appendixes that still allow them to breathe fire. The genetic code has not been completely lost.

And that is the story of why our appendixes are small.

~BKH

Gravities

War. What is war? War is conflict, wrought about by clashing needs, competition, and wrapped up in ideals. So what causes conflict? Regional differences which cause certain settlements to have either a surplus or a shortage of needed resources. Then what causes regional differences? The earth's spherical shape which causes sunlight to rain down upon the populations unevenly. And what causes earth's spherical shape? Gravity, which brought about the formation of earth from nebular dust and formed it into a spherical mass. What causes gravity? I sure don't know, but from this logical standpoint, gravity is the most indirect, and yet most important, cause of war on earth. If world peace is to be attained, then gravity must go.
~C.