allmostrelevant

You ever done the same thing so many times that you can’t remember doing it anymore? You just zone out and the clock moves? People say it’s a form of hypnosis, like driving the same stretch of road everyday that you zone out and just ‘appear’ at your destination. “woah–how’d I get here?” Some people say it freaks them out and it’s really weird, but I think I just invented teleportation.

I work fast. I eat hard. I can run a book faster than I can read a mile. I eat dumbbells for breakfast. Sneezes come in one’s. I can baby sit an entire elementary school for a week—in just one day. Cars look both ways for me. I can wash the dishes while I give a massage. I remind the reminders what they’re supposed to remind me of. I can sleep for an hour in 5 minutes. I dream for other people, and they tell me it was awesome. I’ve grown old a thousand times and can still wrestle a hippo. My teeth make my toothbrush cleaner. I high-fived a bald eagle mid-swoop. I can draw the line and then cross it, and draw another line. I am the answer to your next exam question. I can fill in the blank. I am the blank.

It’s funny how on the first sunny day in a long time you will see students out enjoying the sun, playing frisbee, tanning, reading outside, playing music. And then on the second sunny day hardly anyone is outside because they’re all catching up on the work they skipped the day before.

Time is a funny thing. It’s very constant, as constant as things can get, but it seems to act in such a relative way it baffles the mind.

“They grow up so fast, don’t they?” I don’t know who to trust when I hear that statement. When I grew up it took me a long time, an extremely long time. A school year was an eternity, and if I had to wait an hour until dinner I might as well forget about eating. Time passes so slowly when you are young, but now an hour flies by in the blink of an eye, and I completed four years of college like it was nothing.

In the most unscientific explanation possible, I feel like this is because of two things, both having to do with the relativity of things; their ‘context.’

The shorter you have lived, the longer a second is relative to how long you’ve been alive, and conversely the longer you’ve lived, the shorter a second seems.

Routine and memories. If you fall into a routine where you start and end and execute your days in the same manner day in and day out, each day will be the same and they will all blur into one memory, and thus time will seem faster. When you are young there is not much routine and everything is new, so you are constantly making new memories and time seems much slower.

Today we are going to talk about setting appropriate expectations.

Continue reading →

That’s the interesting thing about expensive video cameras; we never get to see the poor people having fun.

I like writing in short, simple sentences. People always seem to be amazed by how simple kids speak; like how they are so innocent and see the world in a way we’ve forgotten. I’m pretty sure I can understand the wisdom of a child. I pretty much am a kid. I can talk like a kid; I can write like a kid. I’m writing like a kid right now—why aren’t you listening to me when I talk like a kid!

Looking up I could barely spot a group of about 6 little white butterflies dancing above a 100 foot evergreen tree. They swirled around in relatively the same spot until taking off in the direction of mount ranier. When they flutter their wings, it looks like the sky is shimmering with glitter, like mother nature’s confetti or something. When the butter flies get too distant and I can no longer parse the shimmer from the clear blue back drop, I started to see little white spots in the sky. After starting at the uniform blue sky and seeing the sparkle of a tiny white wing after a few second of nothing, my mind started to insert white spots into the blue sky without my permission. My eyes darted across the sky, seeing butterflies that weren’t there, and some that were—maybe—I didn’t know. All I knew is that it was a cool trick. The breeze picked up slightly and a tall tree next to the one where the butterflies were dancing released a whole new batch of butterflies into the sky. They shimmered with equal brilliance of the first few, but were hundreds in numbers, all drifting in the same relative direction. I thought about how much the wind affects the flight of a butterfly, but then as some of them started to fall I realized that they were just leaves that had blown off the tree, dreaming of being a butterfly, and living the dream until they either fluttered out of sight, or hit the ground. I couldn’t help up think of skydiving.

Have you ever noticed dogs seem to have a set level of energy, like a quota or something? Big dog’s are really chill because all of their energy is spread out over their whole body, and they just lope around and lick your hand and stuff. But little dogs, all their energy is compacted into this tiny little body, so their eyes are always wide open and they skitter around yapping “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WOAH EVERYTHING IS MOVING SO FAST AND BRIGHT AND I NEED TO KNOW YOUR NAME I’M HUNGRY YOU’RE SCARING ME STAY AWAY STAY AWAY COME BACK I HATE YOU YOU’RE THE BEST I LOVE YOU OH MY GOD!”

At 3:44am, when it’s still pitch dark, a bird started chirping. I wonder if birds ever have nightmares and can’t go back to sleep. Around 4:15 I took video of the glowing orange sky over the familiar hill in the near distance, and of the moon which shone brightly still. The cute little birds that you wouldn’t mind feeding start chirping around 4:00. I primarily wanted to catch audio of the birds chirping for any future audio/visual needs. The sunrise is gorgeous and floods straight in through the front windows. The day fills up so quickly with light, but the the big ugly birds wake up with the sun, and ruin the soundtrack. I stare at that hill every day, and now I’ll never look at it the same, having watched it be formed out of darkness under the softness of the sunrise, and flourish in the vibrance of the full, living morning.