Wherever you will it to be.

Listening to: Quadrophenia (The Who)

This is the first and last time I use Alicia's opener.

When I was younger and lived downstairs in the blue room with my sister, we had two clocks on the wall: a green plastic Ikea clock, shaped like a green plastic Ikea plate with a bee on a stick for a second-hand (secondhand!), and a Sylvester-and-Tweety clock that my grandparents gave me and that I've had for ages (unfortunately, it's a little broken now). They both ran off single AA batteries, and these batteries tend to run down after awhile. A little over two years ago, both of them stopped within a few weeks of one another. This was unexpected, but not unusual. What was truly staggeringly unbelievable was that both of them stopped at exactly the same time, to the second. They stopped at 7:51 and forty-five seconds.

How?

A few months ago, I took the metro from Tyndale to Vendome, where my father had volunteered to pick me up. I stepped onto the train at the Georges-Vanier station, wrapping an arm around a silver pole at one end of the car. Then, looking to the other end, I noticed the hair. Not one hair, but two hairs -- one short and black, one unmistakably distinctive...I had walked into Ariel and Kelsey's metro car.

How?

Over and over, we dismiss such apparent "coincidences". We do not understand why such things happen, and therefore we pretend that they do not happen. Much is based on perception, yet no matter what our carefully established opinions, something always happens to shock us, to make us lose faith in our preconceived ideas.

The unpredictability of life is difficult to capture in literature or in analysis. No matter how carefully you evaluate all the potential outcomes of even the smallest event, what winds up happening will surprise you. There ought to be a scientific law...nothing that is expected will happen, or will happen in the way it is expected to do so. I have never been able to say, with complete certainty, what will happen in the future.

Because the few times that I have known, with complete certainty, I did not conciously realize that I knew until I looked back on the event. Had I realized it, the outcome would, I am sure, have been different. This is why premonitions, from what I gather, are impossible to prove.

I am no Cassandra, but I think that everyone makes a few surprising predictions in their lifetime. And in a lifetime, much more than we would like to believe is inexplicable.

We like to have explanations handy, but knowledge is not always the same as understanding. Think back to Grade Nine biology. Think about everything you learned about the cell. Think about DNA. You learned what the basic substances in DNA were; you learned that DNA transmits genes, that it coils up during mitosis, that bits and pieces of it are interchanged, somehow, with other cells. But did your teacher even once attempt to explain to you how a strange shape composed of protein can contain all the traits of the cell? How can a code composed of only four "letters" transmit information, and how can a cell, an organism without conscious thought, adopt that code and become as the code specifies? I have absolutely no idea. Of course, I won't even mention that question so taboo in the world of science -- the why.

That is why I find so much of school so frustrating. Book learning deals very much with what, very rarely with how, and almost never with why. (And, no, I don't like ME.)

I believe that all things are interconnected. I don't subscribe to the notion that art and science and religion and athletics are four concepts in direct opposition with one another. Rather, I feel that all four are complementary. Indeed, I have never come across two areas of human interest that were mutually exclusive. I am fortunate enough to have never been required to confine myself to one field, and therefore I have become very interested in learning to perceive more of the whole. I can never see the trees for the forest.

I dislike being asked what I want to do when I'm older, what I want to "go into", because I don't want to "go into" any one thing. I want to understand things, and I want to help others to understand things, and I know I would not be able to do so if I chose to specialize.

This two-part rant has been brought to you by the creator of such anti-classics as Being Born in the Wrong Decade Runs in the Family and Somewhere, Anywhere. Life is thus shining.

(Yeah, I've been looking through my archives again).

Let's all battle our own demons.