Tomorrow

So I've been watching Skins, a British reality TV show, and I've realised one thing - most humans are more terrified than anything that tomorrow won't come, that for whatever reason, their last breath will occur the moment they slide into sleep.

My grandma once told me that a person who's lived a full life isn't afraid of dying. I disagree. I would still be scared of dying. More than that, I'm afraid someone close to me will die - just like Josh did. I see Libby fighting her way through a myriad of facades every single day just so she doesn't drag the people she loves into her misery as well.

[I miss those days
And I miss those ways
The days I got lost in fantasy
In a cartoon world of mysteries
In a place you don't grow old
In a place you don't grow cold]

When I look ahead in life, I just see this huge, huge slab of concrete bricks, because there are so many paths to take they all overlap so much you can barely see the spaces in between. Maybe I'm in a space between right now. Maybe all school-age kids are, because they haven't realised that the real world is one of pain.

It's also one of beauty and hard work.

If you think about it, humanity is about preserving the past to enrich the present. We work so hard just to find out about things a lot of people find menial - like when did the dinosaurs go extinct, or how were the Egyptian pyramids constructed, or why exactly did Hitler turn out the way he is, and why was JFK assassinated, and where did legends and myths stem from?

Typically, we all spend our lives in much the same pattern - school, home, school, home, uni, home, uni, home, work, home, work, home... but then there's always that one person in a million who dares to step outside the pattern and go against what everyone else thinks.

[You call my name
I come to you in pieces
So you can make me whole]

We owe everything humanity is to those people, people like John Dee and Katherine Mansfield and Mary Shelley for pointing out the ugly truth, and the beautiful truth. Humanity is capable of creating beauty. Beauty is capable of creating pain.

And we owe people like my literature teacher, Dunbar, who aren't afraid to teach us outside the box, to tell us things that nobody else remembers or maybe never even knew, who aren't afraid to break the rules if it means it gives us just that slight advantage.

I wonder a lot about whether anybody thinks the way I do, and most of the time, it makes me feel alienated, like I'm not a part of whatever bigger picture there is, that I'm a puzzle piece that's been packed into the wrong box and I just don't fit anywhere. And then, sometimes, very rarely, it makes me feel like I can take on the world, like I really do have an advantage 'cause I'm lucky enough to have met all these amazing people who have taught me so many amazing and astounding things.

[So much is happening to me
So much that I can't even see
So many words of wisdom that I am trying to be
Catch me if I should fall
And even more so while I'm standing tall]

I'm grateful I watched "Signs" which demonstrated the power of coincidence, and "War of the Worlds" that showed me even the simplest things make a difference. I'm glad I saw the Little Mermaid and witnessed a human's capacity to love, and I'm glad I watched Valkyrie, how Tom Cruise portrayed the human spirit as something utterly unbreakable.

Most of the time, I'm just glad I'm alive.

[You don't understand what I'm going through
Just to find a way to find a way to climb
It'll be in my own time]

I'm incredibly happy every time I go to school, just because I see so many different people, and it doesn't matter if I don't like them or not, it's just observing them and how they act that's totally amazing. I'm grateful I took psychology and know the contributing factors to a human personality, and I find it hard to believe now that a human is just a machine. How could something so complex be a machine?

Machine implies we're all copies of one another.

"When I was a kid, my mother told me that I was a little piece of blue sky, that came into this world because she and my father loved me so much. Most babies are coincidences. I mean, up in space you've got these souls flying around, looking for bodies to live in. Then, down here on earth, two people have sex or whatever, and bam. Coincidence. I on the other hand, am not a coincidence. I was engineered. Born for a particular reason. A doctor hooked up my mother's eggs and my father's sperm to make a specific combination of genes. He did it to save my sister's life. Sometimes, I wonder, what would have happened if Kate had been healthy? I'd probably still be up in heaven or wherever, waiting to be attached to a body down here on earth. But coincidence or not... I'm here." - Anna Fitzgerald, My Sister's Keeper

the sensational crusader. (: