On Foreign Things

So I am going to study in Paris next year. Hooray! I'm excited.

I smoked a cigar last night to celebrate. Cigars make you classy, no matter what. Even if you're a woman, you are automatically more classy if you smoke a cigar. Only super classy people smoked cigars, like William Churchill and Fidel Castro and Groucho Marx and Tony Soprano, so you can be just like them if you smoke cigars. Cigarettes can also make you cool, but only if you're a beatnik or a musician or Miles Davis or some kind of artsy person who can pull of smoking cigarettes. Unlike cigars, cigarettes smell bad, which lowers their classy quotient. Both are improved by smoking them while holding a cup of an appropriately classy beverage, such a cup of port or a forty in a paper bag.

Anyway, smoking and drinking are bad habits. They are bad for your health and you will die sooner than is natural if you do either one in excess. So don't smoke and don't drink. You will be a better person, unless you're just naturally a unhealthy and bad person, in which case smoking and drinking won't do anything.

So if you'll bear with me for a moment, I'd like to talk about our perceptions of reality. I think that reality is entirely subjective. How should you know what is real when your perception of life can be so easily altered by your situation or foreign substances such as alcohol? I know I said that I dislike "What if..." situations before, but what if what we perceive as our normal lives is not what life is actually like? It's kind of bizarre and conspiracy theorist, but it's an interesting idea.

I've been feeling kind of philosophical recently. There're lots of "What if..." situations that I'd like to have answers to, but I know that there is no answer for most of them because the world doesn't work that way, and even if I had an answer I would have no way to know if it was actually correct because they're hypothetical situations that never played out. They're questions about my life that could only be answered by understanding the nature of the universe. It's pretty intense, I know.

So here's my idea of the universe. Time had a starting point. I know it's hard to imagine that time actually started some time, but I think that there probably was some time when it actually started. Anyway, from that starting point, there were many possible events that could have happened, depending on the some preexisting conditions. There're actually an infinite number of universes in a big tree kind of shape that resulted from all of these universes. It doesn't really make that much sense when I'm writing it down but it made sense when I was thinking about it.

Poop is a funny word. It's also a palindrome.