mahiwaga

The Republic is coming apart at the seams and still, I will try to write about little things.

I don’t know, between the war and the hospital¹, I don’t have much else to say. Everything else seems worthless, though I know it’s not true.

the (future) evil resident
original URL: http://fatoprofugus.net/evilresident

I’ve always believed that the kind of person you are shows in the little things you do. The so-called insignificant things that Gandhi and Mother Teresa tell us we need to do. Right or wrong, people read deeply into these things because that is all they get to see. It may be unfair that people judge you this way, but I think that true character always shines out.

But it doesn’t matter, though. As many have pointed out, you shouldn’t require a reward for doing things right. I just have faith that if you do the right thing, people will know. But you can’t please everybody.

My mind is all over the place. The events of the world today seem to reach out throughout all time and history, throughout all my small store of memories, and I find myself pondering the past and I find it bizarre how the past always seems to jump up and bite you in the ass no matter how many decades, centuries, millenia pass.

Ah. Whatever. Time to get my head out of my ass.

My sister discovered the true gender of her cat on Monday, when she (the cat, not my sister) gave birth to five kittens. For some reason, my sister has this affinity with stray animals, much to the consternation of my parents. Two dogs live at my parents’ house because of my sister, and this cat was likewise a stray. Because it’s spring break and because no one is staying at her apartment over the break, my sister tried to bring the cat and her kittens to my parents’ house, resulting in much mayhem. In the end, my brother was forced to drive the cat and her kittens back to San Diego to leave them to fend for themselves, as my sister had promised to accompany her roommate to Central California.

Ah the fragility of life.

My sister commented on how this was the first time she had ever seen anything actually born before, and immediately my mind strayed to the two births I witnessed that one night on neonatal call: one C-section, the other NSVD (normal spontaneous vaginal delivery), and how, before then, I had never seen anything being born before either.

But despite my general cynicism about how horrible the world is, there is something about birth that forces you to want to be optimistic. Something about that bawling, wet bundle that can’t even open his or her eyes, who needs to be held and fed. And yet I’ve found out that most babies are quite robust, undergoing remarkable physical trauma during birth, and I can’t help but reflect that as horrible as this life is, as much pain and suffering we are forced to endure, it is instinctual to want to live, and I think it is instinctual to let life thrive.

Then again, maybe it’s just me.

Random, I know. Instead of going out this Saturday night, I am just writing utter nonsense.

But yesterday I was listening to “All This Time” by Sting, and it took me back to that semester break my freshman year in high school, in the midst of the Gulf War. (I don’t know if it’s just me having grown up, or has network TV and radio just become more incredibly asinine and juvenile? I used to be able to tell the difference between CNN and MTV back then, and I was only 14.)

As we rained terror on Baghdad (the CNN broadcasts made me think a lot of that Atari game Missile Command), I stayed at home and played Romance of the Three Kingdoms on the Nintendo (the old 8-bit version where you had to blow on the cartridge in order to get it to work) and I listened to the radio. “Ten Summoner’s Tales” had just been released so Sting was getting a lot of air time. (Just for some levity, the other songs I remember being played were “Wicked Games” by Chris Isaac and “I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls.) But a passage from the lyrics resonate in a way that I can’t articulate very well. All empires fail with time, and to admit that the U.S. is in fact an empire is to admit that someday the U.S. too will fall.

The teachers told us, the Romans built this place
They built a wall and a temple, an edge of the empire
Garrison town,
They lived and they died, they prayed to their gods
But the stone gods did not make a sound
And their empire crumbled, ‘til all that was left
Were the stones the workmen found