you can't have christmas without

Yesterday I went to bestbuy to check out if i could find home alone 2 on dvd because I know we have home alone 2 somewhere in my house but i can't find it anywhere, and there is no christmas without watching it. So i got there, and was looking around and found Home Alone 1, and it was on sale, along with Jingle All The Way. 2 for 30 bucks. So i thought to myself..."I do have home alone at home, sitting in its case, but it is a VHS and there is one part where the screen, well it kinda flickers and rolls, so i'm probably justified in making this purchase. And as for Jingle All The Way, well i'll probably end up renting it every year at christmas time so I may as well just buy it now, save money in the end and even get the 2/$30 deal right now." So i grabbed those two DVDs, but still did not accomplish my purpose for coming to bestbuy. So i searched some more for Home Alone 2 (home alone and home alone 2 weren't even in the same sections...kinda weird). I got this nice girl at the front to help me find it, and after a few minutes we finally found it in the family dvd section. So I picked it up and then went over how much money i was gonna be spending here. Even with the 2 for $30 deal, it would turn out to be like 55 bucks! I wasn't sure if that was worth it, but i REALLY wanted to have these movies. So, I ran out of the store with the DVDs in hand. There was only the girl in the doorway so i easily shoved her out of the way and sprinted to my car which, by the way, i left running. I got in my car, peeled out of my parking spot while being chased by a host of bestbuy employees who knew they couldn't catch me but wanted to be heros. I made sure that i drove through their crowd to scare them and made them dive out of the way. They were all in a frenzy. It was an inspiring moment. I then pulled out of the parking lot and safely drove home.

Then i realized that bestbuy probably had an army of cameras zooming in on my face that whole entire time. And most likely one of the employees was at that precise moment showing somebody how to use a digital camera and took a photo of my face while I body checked that girl. I guess it was a good thing i was wearing that balaclava the whole time. People gave me weird looks, but i just fingered them.

prophets foretold him

"absolute" would be ultimate reality; God, life-force or "One", nirvana, etc. If one of them is true, meaning to our lives can only be found through whichever one it is.

i'd discount the life-force or "One" option, because usually this is another word for nature which a person can become "one" with or else he or she will reincarnate... but nature is not absolute; it has a beginning (in the big bang) and thus its existence depended upon something else.

in terms of nirvana, i can't say i know lots about it but when Buddha reached this state he was still persuaded by other people to change things in his philosophy for the better (such as his father persuading him to make an age restriction before a son can leave his household to pursue enlightenment), yet Buddha had perfect knowledge in this state and shouldn't have had to be pursuaded in anything. Futhermore, he recalled an infinite number of past lives of his, yet this was his final life because he had reached nirvana. 1) infinity cannot end, because infinity is forever in the past and forever in the future. 2) there cannot be an infinite regress of events (such as lives) because one would never reach a "present" moment. 3) space & time began with the big bang billions of years ago, out of nothing, therefore there is no infinite amount of lives to be lived.

if there's a God...which one? the God of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism? I guess this is where the not "copping out" part comes in. What's more important in life than finding truth and meaning? Why wouldn't people search and search for this, rather than let themselves fall into a sleepwalk of daily meaningless motions? Get out of the cave people.

joyful o joyful

i havent really been in the mood for anything serious lately, but today i was thinking about life and was wondering if i even know whether or not there is a meaning or purpose to life or not. it seems like we do things simply as a means for occupying our attention and time, to distract ourselves from boredom, lonliness, meaninglessness, and so forth. we set goals so that we can justify the way we spend our time, and once we reach those goals we make more goals and start a cycle. for example, as it now stands university is just a way for me to know what i'm doing for the next 4 years; to have something to achieve, to have somewhere to go, to create a habit of doing something which i can identify myself with for a period of time. once i'm done university, other things will take up my time and attention, such as a career, a mortgage payment, etc. And with these aspirations which are known to us, we can focus on our goals and not let the meaninglessness of it all infiltrate our minds. It seems like the only time we ever reflect on life is during the down times; the times we have nothing to do, nothing to focus on. That is why when we are bored, when no TV shows will be able to capture the attention of our restless minds, when no book will firmly clasp our mind away from its insistent wandering, we just think. And soon we are quickly dissapointed with the lack of answers to our questions and so we search for stuff to do in order to pass this empty time until we reach a "must" in our schedule, such as a shift at work or a class at school. And so our days are a series of a "must do" action followed by a small period of "empty-passtime" which is then followed by a "must do" and our cycle repeats until the ultimate end, sleep. And perhaps this is what life looks like in the whole spectrum of years. 13 years of pre-college schooling, 4 years of college, then the insurmountable years of work and house payments and family raising and relationship building, all mixed with "waiting" periods in which we wait for our next promotion, our next child, our next job, our next car/house payment, our next grandchild, until the ultimate end that we are waiting for arrives, death.

People try to avoid this outlook on life by saying that certain things give them meaning. its poetry, or its music, or its friendships, or etc. but we can't give meaning to our own lives. its useless; those "meanings" are just distractions from the meaninglessness. If we want meaning we have to search for an absolute, and stop copping out about it.