Where was I?
Oh, yeah...
So I was at church on Saturday, for a memorial service for one of our recently-passed members. My mind has been so elsewhere lately that I literally did not realize how I had dressed for the occasion. Jeans, a gaudy print t-shirt, and my black baseball cap. Everyone else dressed up nicely, as would be expected, but here I show up in my round-the-house grubbies. It was embarrassing. I basically hid upstairs as much as possible, since I had to video-tape the event in the first place. But I felt like a tool. I meant no disrespect.
Sorry, Pat.
I feel the urge to update this blog less and less as the weeks go by. Perhaps it is because my 40th birthday is rapidly approaching, and I feel so lost. Perhaps it's because I'm out of things to say. Perhaps it's just summer doldrums. Perhaps I'm as sick of me as y'all are, I'm sure.
Nope, not out of things to say just yet...
I was contemplating again today how amazingly unlikely it is (mathematically) that any of us actually made it to birth. I mean, what are the odds that out of all the people on earth, your parents met each other and decided to marry? What are the odds that the egg that became you was the one that dropped on the right month, and got fertilized? I don't know enough about reproduction to know this, but if every sperm in the "batch" that made you would have resulted in the same person, that's crazy enough, but if each individual sperm would have combined with the egg to make a different person, then that puts the odds way up past impossible. The exact sperm and egg, the right month, to make you and me. That alone staggers my imagination, but think also of all those that didn't make it! All those eggs and sperm that failed... untold millions of potential people!
What about the kids that would have resulted had your folks married someone else... they'll never exist now. They stepped aside (in a sense) so you could be born! Do you feel special yet?
Of course, if God had "you" in the pipeline to be born, and your parents just happened to be the happy couple trying to get pregnant, and God let them have you, that's a whole other issue. Then there really aren't untold millions of people that never got a chance to live. It's either a huge biological crapshoot, or every person that was meant to be born was/will be born, and the math is meaningless.
One week ends, another begins. I've been working off and on (mostly on), editing the camp video. All the photos (about 300) have been cropped, sized, cleaned and labeled. All of the video footage has been captured, imported and edited down to about 40 minutes of footage I want to keep. It's been grouped by event and placed on the timeline. Next is to incorporate the pictures in the appropriate places on the timeline, add Burns effects to each of them, make sure the run time is under an hour, and then find music. It's a long, tedious, ultimately rewarding process... especially difficult this year, with so much on my mind.
But it needs to be done, so done it shall be.
I'm going to my sister's marketing seminar in Las Vegas this coming up Thursday. So I'll be out of town from the 5th through the 8th. Will you miss me? Wifey and I are taking Eldest Daughter, and we'll be documenting the event with video camera and photos. We're getting a new HD video camera - I trust it will arrive before we leave, otherwise we're screwed! Our job is to document it and then edit together some informational products from the content. Squish me luck.
Dave the Cynic, signing off...
4 comments:
Ah, the beauty of the Random/Chaos theory ...
It's true that the chances of you being exactly the person you are almost zero, with so many random factors influencing your character variable, both before and after conception.
But, this variable eventually had to take a value, so here you are. Even if you had turned into a different person, you'd be pondering the same thing again.
There sure are more possible Dave versions that we can count (almost infinite), but since they never took form, it's absurd to talk about people that gave way so that each one of us could be what he/she is today.
Some believe in Destiny; a convenient approach, "it was meant to be this way, so accept it already".
Some believe in Randomness; more complex to comprehend, "it could be different, but it didn't, so it never was, so accept it already".
In my opinion, we're not special or anything; we just turned out this way. For better or for worse, we shall never know ...
Chaos. Oh Discordia! We're born, and our being here is constant and there's nothing to be done about it. We take what we've been given and run with it. No sense in pondering why, really; no sense in examining the incalculable odds that led to our birth; no sense in wondering the infinite number of variances that could change everything. Verily, everything is vanity!
That outlook is too depressing for me. I'm too much an optimist. Not to the point of being naive, but what's the harm in having a positive outlook on life? We're born, life happens, deal with it or get crushed by it, but in all give glory to God, because it could always be worse. Always.
I hope you don't disappear from the blog-world like Marky did. I rather enjoy reading your random thoughts.
I wouldn't feel too bad about not dressing formal. I figured there would be both those formally and informally dressed there and went in jeans as well.
At my funeral you can wear whatever you want, in case you were wondering.
Glad you posted! I miss reading them daily.
Have a great trip to Las Vegas. :)
Great feedback, Dry! I should try to wax philosophical more often...
Logan, thanks for the encouragement. I doubt I'll follow Marky's footsteps, at least any time soon... I have too many funny pictures in my archive I have yet to post!
Rebekah, I can pretty much guarantee I'll be wearing a white, wispy sort of robe thing to your funeral... since I'm sure I'll be long gone well before then!
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