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.