A reflection........

Blogging weekly for nearly all of this year has taught me two things about myself. First of all, I have learned that I tend to point out flaws and things I do not like in the books I read. These flaws usually become the subjects of my blog posts. Second, I have learned that I much prefer writing in a notebook to blogging. Notebooks, to me, seem more personal. I enjoy writing in notebooks more, I can write in them whenever I like, and I can write down whatever I want without worrying about what people will think. Speaking of worrying about what people think, I think many people on the internet don't, but should. Many people take advantage of the amount of freedom they have on the internet. These people are not only teenagers, but are adults as well. I've always thought that adults are just as immature as children, they just hide it better. As to whether or not people are themselves on the internet, people that take advantage of their internet freedom perhaps are a bit too much of themselves. Then again, there are all kinds of people who use the internet. Some show everything about themselves, some show a middle quantity, and some people just hide behind layers of webpages.

I'm probably going to delete my blog. I may start it over again, with a different purpose and a fresh start, but I am not sure yet.

The rules have been spurned.

I have begun to read "Mostly Harmless", by Douglas Adams. This is a fantastic book in a series of equally fantastic books about fantastic occurrences on fantastic planets. These books do not really follow a plot, so to speak, but have a seemingly never-ending series of unusual and humorous events that, at unexpected points in the book, converge towards a central occurrence. Therefore I cannot explain the "plot" of this book to you fully, but I will tell you what you need to know in order to understand this blog post.

Previously in this series of books, the earth was blown up to make way for a new hyperspace express bypass. There were only two human survivors of this explosion: Arthur Dent and Tricia McMillan. Arthur went on to devote his life to the fine art of sandwich-making. Tricia went on to becoming a sort of space-time traveling news reporter. She constantly travels through time and space, and each time her future is not altered. Douglas Adams' writing can get very confusing, so it is necessary to stop and think every once in a while while reading his books. So, as I was contemplating his writings on space-time travel, I realized he had broken all of the rules.

What I mean by this is that whenever a form of writing includes someone traveling through space-time, there are always consequences. Let's say I travel back in time and alter something, which then alters something else, which then alters something else, and by the time I get back to my home in my time, my world is completely different.

Another example is the whole "I went back in time and met my past self" scenario, popular with the movie series "Back to the Future". Going back in time and meeting your past self would just alter your past self and your past self's decisions, which would also, in time, (ha ha), alter your future. Your life would still be altered, albeit through a different way.

As a side note, there's also the fact that if I go back in time, then go back to my own time, then do the same entire thing again, I have left three of my past selves behind. There's my original past self, then there's my present self that went to the past the first time, then there's my present self that went back in time the second time. Basically, you count your original past self and the number of times you dipped into the past and you have the number of past selves you're left behind. This just goes to show how traveling into the past can influence your future in a major way.

Douglas Adams didn't think of any of these aforesaid rules. He just wrote. I suppose that was somewhat of a liberating experience, saved him a lot of time, and allowed him to write about occurrences that wouldn't normally be able to happen. It also made for a damn good book.

But I still feel like it was chicanery. At least a little bit.


Postscriptum -

Another thought is that every time you dip into the future, you're dipping into the past of that time's future. 

Just a thought.

Leather Interior.

I have finished reading The House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer. This book follows the life of a boy named Matt who discovers he is the clone of a wealthy drug lord. In Matt's world, clones are generally regarded as the scum of the earth.

In part of the book, the wealthy drug lord who Matt is a clone of (who is very, very old), is in an extremely critical medical condition. He needs Matt's heart to be transplanted into him in order to survive. Matt is about to be butchered against his will to save this man, but then Matt's caretaker speaks up. It turns out that she has been secretly giving him doses of arsenic and foxglove (which are poisons) in his meals in order to make his organs unstable and therefore unable to be used for transplants. However, Matt's caretaker did not feed him enough poison to harm him permanently.

This got me thinking as to how much or how little our immoral actions "harden" our conscience. The wealthy drug lord is a mean old crow of a character, and built his entire drug empire on killing, brainwashing, and enslaving others. Was the drug lord's decision to preserve his own life and to end Matt's life partly influenced by his extensive immoral criminal activities? I think that all of his killing, brainwashing, enslaving, murdering, stealing, butchering, pillaging, slaughtering activities were just callusing his conscience more and more until he really didn't feel any remorse in unethical deeds. This makes me wonder how much everything around me has influenced my future decisions as well. I never liked the video game and movie rating system, since my mother still doesn't let me watch R movies or play M video games, but now I'm starting to wonder if they are crucial to keeping us sensitized to immoral acts and violence.