The Final Post

So this is it.

The end of this blogging journey
Photo courtesy of myself

I am extremely doubtful that I will ever write another blog post after this one, an awareness that's accompanied with a sense of both relief and sorrow. We are nearing the end of this school year, my blog's expiration date.

Where was I when I started my blogging journey? I was admittedly very confused, unsure how I could possibly manage everything that was bound to be thrown at me. I've grown slightly, although I don't feel like much has changed.

I've learned a lot from blogging, as stupid and vaguely cliché as that sounds. Being given an outlet is an amazing feeling. I was able to release stress by writing ridiculous theories about the universe, I was able to distract myself from other things I was worried about, and I was able invest a piece of my mind in one of the first school assignments that has ever truly been fun.

I honestly don't think much has changed since the fall, when I began contributing to this blog. Other than creating some sort of digital journal for my future self, nothing extremely life-changing has come out of this assignment. However, I still feel like it was worth it. I learned from this experience.

Mostly, I learned that it's impossible to escape some things, like the extensive workload you're bound to be given and the bad things you're going to feel. You can manage, though. As people, we forget how tough we are. It's not like the video games, because in reality you only get one life and most people still live an average of 78 years. There are moments when things feel really bad and that's okay. I know that's okay.

I'm not going to tell you that you can do anything or some bullshit like that because I'm not a motivational speaker. It's just that, this year, I've found out that hard things are possible. Maybe I'm bound to fail the AP test this upcoming Friday and, yeah, I've bombed lots of assignments this year. But all these terribly stressful difficulties are things that I've accomplished. I survived my first year in high school! Look at me go.

So where am I today? Still confused, that's for sure. I still have no clue what I'm doing and maybe I never will know, but I've decided that nobody really does. It's okay to feel lost because we are living in a world full of people who feel the exact same way. We're all stumbling around blindly, searching for places where we feel okay. I think people are like puzzles – yes, in the way that we're all looking for ways to put each other together, but in a different way, too. I think we hand out puzzle-pieces of ourselves like flyers on the sidewalk corner. Me? I've given a piece of myself to my friends, to my family. To dance, art, writing, photography, reading, music, movies…things I love. Things I can't lose.

Now, the human mind is a complicated thing. I'm never going to know all the secrets of the universe, but I know this: everyone's trying to find something to root themselves in. Perhaps a religion, a band, someone to love. People want to feel safe. And everyone needs somewhere where they can be whoever they want to be, free of fear or discomfort. Maybe a group of friends, a church, a social media site.

Or maybe a blog.

A/N: Thank you to anyone who has actually been reading my blog (my friends, mostly). People who have left compliments – especially the few that stopped me in the hall to tell me they loved my writing when I didn't even realize they knew about it. This was a cool journey. Thanks for sharing it with me.
Also, I'm allowed to be sappy and superficial and fake-deep because this was an entire school-year of my life and I feel bizarrely attached to it. Thank you. This is the end.

A Realization

I was sitting casually in my bedroom, thinking about this blog that I've sort grown tired of writing for, when I realized something: Nothing on this blog matters at all.

The "description" under the header of my blog has always said "This is my blog, I talk about things that matter" but today I have come to realize that this is a massive lie. As a person who talks constantly about existentialism and the inevitability of oblivion, it's fairly obvious that nothing I've written on this blog is actually "important." I feel like my description should instead read, "This is my blog, I talk about things that don't matter."

If you know me at all, it's obvious that I believe humanity is insignificant to the universe. Yes, all people contribute to shaping the world in some way and yes, everything that you do has led you up to reading this sentence. But this blog, in all honesty, is very negligible. The world would still turn and people would still go about their daily lives if I had never created it. The only thing that would change, really, is the amount of homework I'd have to complete.

Now, this isn't a blog post just to talk about how unimportant we all are (I've written one of those before). I just thought I would mention it because I suddenly realized that I sound very arrogant. I do not talk about things that matter, because different things matter to different people. Claiming that I am one of the only people who writes about these things (that probably don't matter) makes me feel sort of ridiculous.

Anyway, now that I've started this blog post, I should probably make a point.

I don't know about you, but a part of me feels like my life is unimportant. Maybe it's because I'm not Beyoncé, or maybe it's because I'm so small in comparison to the massive universe. This is sort of irrelevant to what I was just talking about but think about it: There are, what, 7.12 billion people on this planet? You're 0.000000000014035% of the planet's population – I looked it up. While maybe that's something that makes you feel small, it's also sort of amazing. In a world full of frustrating, vaguely annoying people, you were given this little life in which you go to school and eat fruits and vegetables. It feels nice, almost, to be so unimportant.

If you think about it, it would sort of suck to be famous. You've seen the movies: a pop star with her life planned out by someone else, stuck in a cycle of paparazzi and crazed fans. That's not what I'm talking about, though. Your life is an extremely personal thing. To be given your own hands and a mind that no one else could ever understand…it's sort of extraordinary.

It's like that Bill Nye quote: "Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't." Everything that is currently shoved into your brain, everything that matters to you, and all the knowledge you've ever been given is all yours. No one will ever understand things like you do. You have a mind of your own with opinions unlike others'. You're a singular, individual personality. You're a separate person, detached from the realm of this troublesome world, and you exist.

This is absolutely the stupidest picture I've ever put on a blog post but.
Look! We're all different colored fish :)
Image Credit Here

A/N: I sort of went off on a tangent (10 points to Gryffindor for the use of the Vital Vocab word), so I apologize. To summarize: my blog does not matter at all, but it's alright because being small and distinctive is a good thing in a world full of different people who will never know you at all.

The Curse Of The Tuesday

A/N: The amount that I wanted to swear in this post was sort of unbelievable. But I refrained myself, so don't worry.

I think everyone should know that Tuesdays are the absolute worst day of the week.

There are ignorant, social-norm-conforming people who would argue that Mondays are much worse, but these people are very incorrect. You see, Tuesdays suck. At least on Monday it's the first day of the week, so you can have a little bit of the mindset, "Woo hoo! A fresh new week!" On Tuesday, you're stuck in the terrible in-between that's much too far from the weekend and not early enough to be inspiring.

At the beginning of this school year, someone cursed my Tuesdays. This sounds ridiculous (frankly it is ridiculous) but it happened. I can't reveal too much information in fear of exposing this person, so I'm not going to tell the story. But know this: it was not a good day. It was humiliating and awful and ended with mutual hatred toward this person. The conflict lasted a week, and by the end my Tuesdays had been officially cursed.

Everything about Tuesdays is bad now. Let me give you an example:

Yesterday (a Tuesday), I went to open my lunch box for food, right? And my yogurt had exploded everywhere, leaving a pool of strawberry gunk at the bottom of my lunch box. Now, normally I would start laughing hideously and probably make a gigantic joke about it. This is not what happened. I guess I wasn't really having a good day or something so when I unzipped my lunch box, I burst into tears.

I sat there crying for a solid ten minutes as my friends watched me, most likely stifling laughter. Aside from a small yogurt-soaked ziplock of popcorn I'd managed to fish out from the top of my bag, the rest of my lunch was ruined. It wasn't a big deal but I cried about it, for some reason. I have no shame in admitting it, either.

Anyway, it has been an ongoing joke between me and my friends: The Curse Of The Tuesday.

The Space Shuttle Challenger before it exploded,
killing 7 crew members (on a Tuesday)
Image Credit Here

I did some research, and I'm not entirely sure that this is a curse on me specifically. I decided that all Tuesdays are just bad. Possibly for everyone, these are simply awful days.

The September 11 attacks, for example, occurred on a Tuesday. There were nearly 3,000 casualties. Or, in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart a minute after takeoff, and this happened on a Tuesday. The stock market crash of 1929 was given the name "Black Tuesday." Elvis Presley died on a Tuesday, which most likely sucked for all the people who liked Elvis Presley. The Columbine shootings in Colorado also occurred on a Tuesday, where two high schoolers killed thirteen people.

I think The Curse Of The Tuesday is a universal thing. Nobody likes Tuesdays. And if you're one of the few people who wake up full of joy on the second day of the week then good for you, you little optimist. But I hope this knowledge has somewhat informed you.

Next time Tuesday roles around, consider this. And, hopefully, Tuesdays aren't as awful for you as they are for the rest of us.

I Lied To You!!

Please Note: This is a very nerdy post and if you're not into science or space or whatever then read with caution. Also credits go to my father for the balloon analogy thing.

Alright, let's talk about the size of the universe.

I know I've written about this before, considering that space is really really cool and I basically center most of my blog posts around the topic of the galaxy. But I think I lied to you.

The universe is not infinite. This is something that I've stated many times before which makes me feel slightly stupid and uneducated, but hey. I never really know what I'm talking about, anyway.

So how big is the universe actually? It's a difficult question to answer, as I've discovered. Here's what I know:

Although the universe is 13.8 billion years old and nothing travels faster than the speed of light, the universe is actually bigger than 13.8 billion light years. (A light year, by the way, is the distance light travels in one year). This is because space is actually STRETCHING.

Imagine two dots on a balloon that's blowing up. Even if the two dots try to stay still, they will move apart from each other as the balloon expands. That's just how it will happen, because the balloon is getting larger so the dots are spreading apart along with it.

Two ants walking away from each other on a balloon
Courtesy of my amazing photoshop skills
Also this balloon these ants

Now imagine two ants on the balloon walking away from each other at 5 miles per hour. The ants' relative speed will be 5 miles per hour plus the speed of the expanding balloon, which overall will be faster than 5 miles per hour. Basically their walking speed is added to the balloon-expanding speed.

In this same way, the universe has grown faster than the speed of light to be about 91 billion light years in diameter.

In other words, the universe is not actually infinite, nor is it's size simple to calculate, because space is ever-expanding like a giant balloon. I think this knowledge is ridiculously annoying but also extremely interesting. It's sort of relevant to the idea that the Earth is always moving around the sun and rotation around it's axis simultaneously. We're all moving. We're all spinning in circles, we're all tracing repetitive yearly rings around a giant ball of fire, and we're all inflating with the universe.

The universe isn't actually infinite. Sorry about that.

Time Doesn't Exist

I feel like this should be common knowledge, so if this blows your mind a little bit then sorry about that.

Time is a concept that humans invented to organize themselves. Every day, our planet is moving. The Earth is spinning while simultaneously rotating magically around the sun. Now, I did some research on this, and there is no specific person who ever invented time. I suppose, long long ago, someone with a hairy face and clothes made out of animal skin pointed at a stick and said, "George, once this stick's shadow touches this rock, I want you to come over to my cave." Eventually everyone just subconsciously created "time" as a way to understand the universe's cycle of events.

There's a bunch of movies about people who can "stop time," which is super ridiculous when you think about it. If someone were to pause time, as if it's a physical thing, nothing would happen. The Earth would still move and the wind would still blow and everyone would carry on as if nothing is different. Nothing would be different.

If people stopped measuring time, however, we'd have a huge issue. Clocks would disappear from walls and watches and phones. Everyone would do everything with leisure. No deadlines, no stress, no organization. The Earth would spin and spin and spin and no one would care. People would probably celebrate Christmas on different days, if it even existed. There would be no way to log significant events in your life. Everything would just blend together.

There's also this haunting feeling that "time" did exist. Like, maybe up until 2012 (the end of the world) there was a giant clock in outer space somewhere that was counting something down. Maybe on the 21st of December, we all got stuck in time. Maybe it's still technically December of 2012 and we've all just continued along our lives ignorantly.

I think it's important that people understand this abstraction: time does not exist. Clocks exist, yes, but clocks are a human invention. The world is moving, but time is not.

Another unnecessary picture I've added simply because it's required
Image Credit

What's Wrong With Technology?

How many times have you been scolded for being on your phone? Personally, I'm been reprimanded constantly from my mother, as I'm sure most teenagers have been. I've discovered that often the people criticizing the use of technology are the same people who are incapable of utilizing it.

I don't understand why so many adults are convinced technology has a negative influence on our lives. Like all things, of course, there are adverse traits, but the amount of technological advances we've experienced over the years is incredible. 

There are cars being sold now that run without gasoline. People can search for cancer with only a simple blood test. Printers exist that can develop 3D objects – scientists are even trying to print live organs for donation. The technology in our world today is absolutely amazing.

I understand that most adults aren't complaining about this. Majority of the people who whine about technology are directing their issue toward teenagers, a group of kids who are known for being completely obsessed with their screens. But why is this so bad? Sure, it's not easy for most of us to go a day without utilizing technology, but that is the world we live in. We are the generation that is going to grow up and invent the flying cars and mechanical surgeons that save lives. We are the generation that is going to use our knowledge and our technically-savvy minds to fix holes in our planet. Technology is not a bad thing, so stop treating it like it is.

Look how many positive things come from technology!!!!
Image Credit

And if you're the type of person that scolds others for being on their phones in public, shame on you. You don't know what they're looking at. Maybe they're reading a letter from their Grandma who just passed away, studying for a geography test or looking at pictures of their old friends that don't live near them anymore. Maybe they had a shit day and all they want to do is sit peacefully on the bus and play a cat game. Good for them.

If you think that a teenager (or any person, really) should look up from their cellphones and absorb the world around them, please shut up. Technology is not ruining our lives, and seeing a person on their phone in public is not "sad." It's common. It's useful. It's necessary. We live in a world surrounded by technology, so if you're against that then I'm pretty sure it's your own fault. 

A/N: This is kind of harsh. It started out as a rant toward my mother concerning her constant lectures for being on my phone… I got a bit carried away.

Nothing Special

When I was younger, for whatever reason, I created a very stupid game. To play, you're supposed to try to formulate the strangest sentence possible. As a child, the sentences were often senseless and completely confusing, like "Chickens bounce small from skinny weasels and evaporate onto the gum balls." The object of the game was to say something that no one has EVER said before.

Obviously, there is no distinct way to determine whether or not a sentence has already been said in all of human history. That was sort of the point, really – your sentence had to be such nonsense that nobody could've possibly uttered it.

Now that I'm older, the concept is a bit more meaningful.

Have you ever wondered if all your words have been said? Maybe every sentence you've ever spoken has already come out of someone else's mouth. Perhaps there's even one specific person who has said everything you've ever said, just in a different order.

Furthermore, maybe everything you've ever done has collectively been done by other people. Maybe you've never performed an act that hasn't already been performed. They say that no two snowflakes are the same, but how are they supposed to know if the same snowflake that fell outside my bedroom window today fell 1,000 years ago in Portugal?

I've lived in three houses before the one I'm currently sitting in. What if tomorrow a new family moves into my first house – the one I lived in until I was 6? What if that family has a daughter just like me? What if the family then goes on to live in my second house? Then my third one? By the time I go off to college and get an apartment of my own, what if that little girl lives here? What if she ends up sitting where I sit to do my homework after school? I would never know. I could be following someone right now and I wouldn't know it; there could be someone ten years older than me who has lived my exact life. I wouldn't have a clue.

Image Credit

A/N: I'm not really sure why I wrote this. I was standing around a pool table with one of my friends a few months ago, listening to loud music through the ceiling-speakers. It was past midnight, and for some reason we were talking about this. I thought it was interesting.

Read more of my theories here.