Lunacy and lunarcy

It is often a practice of mine to do things that I have absolutely no intention of revisiting, even though they're incredibly funny or poignant at the time that I do them. A very recent example of this -- now invalidated by my talking about it on my blog -- is the night of Arabian Nights rehearsal during which I spread water on my butt while I was offstage because my character ran into the scene complaining about diarrhea. It was a stroke of genius brought on by my visit to the water fountain and my incredibly random nature.

Sitting in work-study today, I watched a few episodes of Scrubs, listened to a podcast from IGN Wii-k in Review (while I sat in reverie at the games coming out this and next year. We are looking at another shot at the gaming Golden Age right now), and tried many times to get my iPod to connect to the internet. Being that I'm sitting at the front desk's workstation right now, it's safe to say that my attempts failed.

The failure did, however, allow one of my iPod's more interesting features to shine through. The feature, you ask? My calendar.

While wholly spectacular inventions in and of themselves, calendars have been mostly overlooked by the general populous as simple chotchkies to be hung on the kitchen wall and ignored until you need to know what day or year it is for the check that you're writing. But the idea of extensible calendars, which allow for much more information than can fit in a 1 1/2 square-inch box, is bringing the practicality and -- let's face it -- fun back into having places to be at certain times of the day.

Perhaps one of the most interesting calendars of the non-extensible form, however, is the giant stone one located in Latin America, cradled in a Mayan ruin. The calendar gives proof that the Mayans were at least dilligent timekeepers, as it has on it the dates of lunar eclipses and other celestial happenings. But unfortunately for anybody visiting the Mayan ruins and wondering what the stars will be doing in 2011, the Mayan calendar only keeps up on such information until December 12, 2010: the day which the Mayans playfully describe as "the end of the world."

Having heard of this back in my junior or senior year of high school from a member of Bellevue East's forensics team, and having been exposed to stories of the calendar before then, I made, in a stroke of random whimsy, a schedule of events for December 12, 2010. I bring this up now, because the very same schedule somehow migrated from Google Calendar, where I first wrote it out, to my iPod's calendar, for me to stumble upon this afternoon. Here's what I've got myself doing:

12 AM - Panic
2:30 AM - Panic some more
6 AM - Spongebob Squarepants
9 AM - Eat breakfast at McDonalds
10 AM - Panic
1 PM - Late lunch
2 PM - Prayer
3 PM - Prayer
4 PM - Prayer
5 PM - The Simpsons
6 PM - Prayer
7 PM - Prayer
8 PM - Work on forensics piece
9 PM - Buy a hammer
10 PM - Build sculpture of Campbell (my forensics coach)
10:30 PM - Destroy sculpture of Campbell
11 PM - Panic and pray

In my exceptional genius, I planned out this schedule and excluded an hour for eating dinner. I'm sure I had a reason at the time for why I don't eat any kind of final meal, maybe in reverence to all of the foods that I should have tried by this point but hadn't, maybe in a kind of observance to God that I'm not full unless I have Him dwelling inside me, or maybe it was just because I knew that I probably wouldn't be hungry that night. In any case, why would it take me an hour to find and buy a hammer?

Drowsy musings

I was with my friend Andrew in the campus coffee shop earlier today, looking at the various options I had for cold drinks. I was thirsty, you see, and delicious as coffee is, I just didn't feel like downing a hot one on a warm fall day (in spite of the fact that it's over 80 degrees outside, I want my readers to acknowledge that it has, in fact, been fall since September 22).

So I saw the Aquafina and the water and the smoothie list, and noticed that Aquafina costs $1.25 where water costs $1.00. Thinking that I had missed the day where Aquafina stopped being water, I looked at the drink case and saw that the Aquafina was all of the flavor splash variety. Well, that explained it, I thought, but Andrew told me that he sees Aquafina as pure evil.

And somehow this brought us to the topic of parallel universes. I believe the train of thought went something like this: why the hate toward Aquafina, did Aquafina kill his dad, maybe in a parallel universe.

Yes. That's it.

And so my wonderings were fixed on parallel universes. It's incredible, that when we say to ourselves "anything's possible," we don't really mean it, because we believe that there's a certain amount of rationality to anything in the universe, even those things that seem completely irrational. In a parallel universe, I am equivalent to this universe's Indiana Jones. And I'm probably fighting the evil corporation of Aquafina for killing Andrew's dad.

Or maybe I'm actually the operative from Aquafina that killed Andrew's dad. My conscience is unphased by this act, which the me that's typing this is completely against, and I'm setting traps for the unassuming Andrew to fall into. Or we could look at a different universe where Andrew knows that I'm laying traps for him, and he eventually makes it to where I am and kills me. Gosh, that'd suck.

I'm sure there are plenty of parallel universes where I'm a homeless guy, too. Maybe there are a handful where I dance and sing for food on some corner in New York because I couldn't make it as a line dancer and that was my lifelong dream. In that other universe.

On the same token, there have to be plenty of universes (much like this one) where I'm just this normal guy who isn't Indiana Jones, or an incredibly powerful businessman, or a hobo. And I'm just trying to find my way in life. Maybe I'm happier. Maybe I'm not happier. One of the bitter ironies, of course, would be that in some other universe, I might have everything that I want in this universe, and still not be happy. Or it would actually be making me unhappy.

The really tricky thing about thinking in terms of infinite universes is that just because there are infinite opportunities for something to happen... doesn't necessarily mean that it actually ever does. Are there some factors of existence that are true in absolutely every reality? By that same token, are there some things in all of existence that have absolute no chance of happening?

Are there some things, some people, some places, some events, that are completely unique, only seen just one single time, in one universe, in one instance, for one little blip of eternity?

The more important question is... how do we react when we experience those things that will never be seen by anybody else, ever, in this or any other existence?