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We’re all heading home now. In my body, there is buried some strange memory of learning to fly. It will lead me to the origin of me: prehistory. –Monarch by Matt Alber
I recently read that some classified documents would be unsealed in 50 years. I excitedly shared this news with an older friend. He replied, disinterested, “I won’t be around.”
Within the next two years, I will reach the age where, statistically, I won’t be around in 50 years. In some ways, I feel that I still haven’t accepted not being a college student. College was a period that I anticipated and fantasized about for a decade prior to experiencing it. It’s done. over. almost three years now. I dealt with a “quarter life crisis” shortly after graduating, but now I’m working on accepting that there is something to be excited about at 25 and 30 and 50 and beyond, which our culture doesn’t beat into us.
A few weeks ago, Arthur and I went to see Matt Albert in concert. He briefly talked about Monarch butterflies and how their migration takes several generations to complete. As one generation dies off, the next continues the journey.
I’m posting today because it would have been my mother’s 47th birthday had she not died of cancer at age 34. Knowing how much she has missed and not been able to look forward to at the ages that I’m creeping closer to is oddly assuring that there is so much to anticipate. I hope to live enough to pack two lifetimes in the years to come in her honor.
Written over a bowl of Kix. Kid tested. Mother approved.
I wonder what the first man thought right before his own death. Unless one of his offspring had died prematurely, he had never known of his own kind’s finitude.
I wonder what the first funeral service was like. Did the survivors keep him around for a few days hoping he’d wake up? Did they delude themselves that it wasn’t really goodbye?
Do you think that Adam understood what returning to dust meant when god handed down his death sentence? I’m fairly certain that when Jesus spoke about eternal life, he wasn’t referring to eternal consciousness, but, rather, legacy, which is far from eternal… unless you’re Jesus Christ, ironically.
My first exposure to death was the family cat, Lucy, shortly before my sister’s best friend’s mother to cancer, my piano teacher to cancer, my mother to cancer, a highschool friend, a cousin, a best friend’s mother to cancer, a professor, a great aunt, a great grandmother, and another cousin.
I’ve had to deal with lots of legacies on my path to adulthood. I’d take all of their smiles today over my memories of them smiling.
Title reference: Elijah by Rich Mullins
I often need to read and format the updated node in an Atom formatted XML feed for display. PHP oddly lacks the ability to make a date object from RFC 3339 formatted dates, so here’s how to do it in PHP:
< ?php
$atomFormattedDate = '1984-01-24T12:00:00.000Z';
$phpTimestamp = strtotime(substr($atomFormattedDate, 0, 10).' '.substr($atomFormattedDate, 11, 8));
echo date('m d, y', $phpTimestamp);
?>
Welcome to my “rebirthed” blog! I barely made it. Check out the other participants’ sites.
After years of not knowing what to name my blog, which usually changed with each redesign, I’ve settled on onThought. This is just the start of my blog redesign. I’ve been working on some posts that I hope you’ll enjoy in the near future.
Alas, it’s late and I need to put Arthur to bed.
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