Because you are reading

I just need to write right now, and this is one of those posts that will just have a bunch of thoughts written down sporadically. It'll be very similar to this post, and will have a reflective, melancholic mood to it, much like my three end-of-a-Stonehill-year blog posts (here's my most recent one).

This morning, I took a test that I had studied a total of two hours for. Two. And at that, that's probably two more hours than I would have liked to have studied for it. But because of the huge inertia that has been with us for our 17 years of being students, we feel this immense guilt if we don't study for a test. So after doing some math and realizing that I watched approximately 26 hours of college basketball between Thursday at noon and Sunday night, I studied for one hour before bed, and one hour at breakfast this morning. I think I did well on the test, which is a scary thought, because I'm now wondering if I could have always done relatively well in school with a lighter study regimen. Imagine all the time I'd have on my hands.

I almost just wrote "Actually, we have no time on our hands," but I'll rephrase this. We have plenty of time on hour hands, but we don't know when it's going to end. If we all live a life as long as we're supposed to, then we have plenty, plenty, plenty of time. But life doesn't happen like it's supposed to. Sometimes planes get lost at the bottom of the ocean, sometimes the driver of a car isn't paying attention...sometimes it just happens. We don't know when, and that's scary. I talked about appreciating everything that's ever happened to you. Appreciate everything that will happen to you, too. Again, not in some predeterministic, "everything happens for a reason" sort of thing. Maybe appreciate life because "everything happens" or something pithy like that.

Hearing about MH370 having no survivors is terribly sad, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me think about music. One of EITS' songs is about a Russian ship that was at the bottom of the ocean for six days. So I immediately thought of that. I turned on some news channel and they showed a map of where the plane might be, somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Some 1,200 miles from Perth, Australia, the source of another important song to me.

Speaking of Explosions in the Sky...I learned today that The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place (you know, the album that is literally a part of my soul) has an answer to the question of why the Earth is not a cold, dead place. On the vinyl, you will find the words "because you are listening, because you are breathing." After what happened at the Boston Marathon last year, I was pretty quick to believe that, well, the Earth was a cold, dead place. Two days later I changed my mind, but I'm really glad that I ran into this message. We're here. You're reading this, some amount of time after I was typing it, listening to music, staring out my window.

I'm glad that I'm here, and I'm hopeful that I will continue to be here for a very long time. I'm also glad that I've continued to blog for over three years, now, and if you haven't figured it out by now, there's one reason (among a few others) that I've continued to blog. So thank you.