a milestone

It seems I am going to vote for the first time through the postal service, no not the band, indie kid, but the actual postal service. i received my mail-in ballot today. And it would seem to me that the people designing the ballots would try and come up with the most practical and easy-to-understand layout for these ballots - instead, all of the names are scrunched to one side in tiny font with little boxes that are kind of not exactly congruent with the candidates' names.

and then, I realised I need to provide my own postage. i'm not sure how to feel about this. For some reason I don't think that it should cost me to vote, even if it's 37 cents, I think there's something very fishy about this. kickbacks from Big Postage Stamp Conglomerates or something.

bleh.

Also, I read this by Hemingway:

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."

As depressing and negative as that statement is, I can't help but agree. Happiness is quite the useless and selfish emotion. But who's to say whether being selfish is an eternal sin or not. I'm not sure, I'm still figuring that one out. All i know is that the intelligent people Hemingway is talking about are those who have realised that the world is what it is. perhaps once you peer into it even more you find out that there's no rhyme or reason - that things we take for granted don't actually exist, and that our lives here are as random as the stars in the sky or the freckles across a girl's face. the deeper you go, the more you realise that nothing is set, nothing was planned, and that is the human dilemma. the belief in a world that is completely hypothetical. Is it possible to know the world and be happy?

I hope to always chase an answer. I went to a vigil for the victims of the Darfur genocide last night, and the thought came to me, as residue from a conversation i had with a certain scotland Fox the other evening - there almost no piece of information we cannot obtain in less than thirty seconds. anything. and yet it is human nature to leave thing behind their veils and use that as the excuse for not acting. the shoah, for instance, was not widely known about during the war. however, our generation has access to nearly everything that is going on in every shadowy crevice of our planet. this, of course, means that we have no excuse for acting upon something we know to both exist and be a human problem.

it is our nature to not react, to simmer in our own lives. but do we not have a moral obligation to affect the world to the extent that we know about it? that sphere has become without end, and yet even I, the biggest proponent for an un-lazy existence, have to fight against my inner sloth. I believe that is our generation's biggest challenge - to revolt against our inclinations, grasp within our minds the power we own by having access to pure information, and use it to its fullest power.

this is the struggle. fight on.

this entry is ordained 'a milestone'. it is, indeed, my 100th entry.

here's to 100 more.