Midnight rant

00:59. Almost 1. I am torn between going to bed and finding something amusing online to keep me from going to bed. I have no reason to stay awake at this hour. It's the holidays and there are no assignments to deal with. As a matter of fact, I am feeling a little on the drowsy side. I should just go plop down onto my cozy bed and drift into blissful sleep. But I know I won't. Why??

1:05. Perhaps it's a bad habit I've developed. If I think about my situation, the best decision would definitely be to abandon the computer and hit the sack. Not only do I not waste my time wasting time online, but I get to be up fresh and early the next morning. It's always a good feeling waking up early, feeling fresh and knowing you've a long, beautiful day ahead of you.

1:08. Or perhaps it's something I can't control, something inherent that craves impulsively for amusement. It's not about what tomorrow might hold for me, but about what all I can wring out of today. While it does sound like a noble thought, the idea does not hold when it comes to actual work. For work, it's about how long it can be put off until the concern that the deadline might not be met overwhelms the compulsive craving in the brain.

1:14. It's been 15 minutes since I began this article. Am I a slow writer? What's the pace of normal writing? Not for a classic or polished article, but for a blog post like this. Mine's probably average, depending on how much thought needs to be put into the article. If I'm recounting something without worrying about phraseology, I could probably speed it up. But a ponderous article can take long. This one's a tricky one, I'm thoughtful at points, but just breezing through others as I simply transcribe my thought process.

1:19. This is stupid. But I am a little more awake than I was when I first began this article. Is that good or bad? I'm not sure. Probably bad. I want to feel so drowsy that I drift away the moment I hit the pillow. Hmm. I dunno. Sometimes I use the time before falling asleep to dwell on interesting thoughts, or just on wild daydreams as I let my mind loose. My easily-distracted mind can keep me busy for hours. I do get bored on long train rides though. Or maybe I don't. I think it's when my chain of thought or my daydream is broken and I look at my watch and realize how much longer there is still to go, boredom sets in. And I'm lost in my mind again. But the combination of all those little punctuations of boredom create the feeling of a long boring ride. Maybe I am just making a case for my mind to make it seem more amusing than it might really be, I don't know.

1:26. Don't want to keep this up much longer. I've some tasks I need done by noon tomorrow. It would have been done today, if it were not for the fact that it's Easter Monday. "was". I didn't know it was a holiday until I got out on my bike to find all the shops closed! If it were not for the little shopping I did Saturday, I'd be starving now.

1:31 I took too long to write that last paragraph. I just didn't know what exactly to mention and kept debating things in my head. Thoughts are complicated things. When I'm not consciously thinking about what I'm thinking, I wonder if we even think in a language. The mind just knows to figure things out at lightening speed without the translation into language slowing it down. But as I write, my mind is thinking in sentences. Or perhaps it's being fed by invisible ideas from all around the sentences that form the main thought. I'm totally lost now. It's like one of those physics problems that you really need to think over before you can comprehend it.

1:35 So yea, ok. The vastness of the universe. It's vast, everyone knows that. But can we truly comprehend its vastness? I think we cannot, you can't multitask when thinking about these things. Just focus and try to fathom how minuscule and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things. Then snap back and put our lives in perspective. Where do we stand? If there was a god who could observe the whole universe at the same instant, earth would still be so insignificant, he probably couldn't care less about it.

1:41. But some might say that life on earth is what interests god. If we are all this whole creation is about, what's the purpose of more than 99.999999999999% of the universe. Why would god create all the extra crap?

1:43. Talking about god is not very interesting. Anyway, I might have said how insignificant we are in the big picture, but it's amazing how something so insignificant has been able to scientifically comprehend the size of the universe. From this tiny corner of our galaxy among billions, we have managed to use the collective intelligence of several generations of our best thinkers to come up with a way to figure out what's out there, to graze the very edge of the universe, to dare to fathom it's history and its probable end in the future. As individuals, we bear little significance, but as humans we are definitely capable of leaving a mark. Our combined intelligence spans all four dimensions to their limits. That's not to say, a single stray meteor couldn't wipe planet Earth and all humanity off the universe in an instant! It would be a tiny poof that would hardly be noticed in the broad scale of the universe.

1:57. I have gone into a ramble now, I hardly even know what I'm talking about anymore. Oh and if Earth was destroyed, we'd still have that tiny group of humans in the International Space Station. The ISS would probably go shooting off into space. I wonder if the group inside would find a way to survive, reproduce, and keep the human race going!

2:00. The topics heading into sci-fi now! Goodness, it's been exactly a minute over an hour since I started this post. I need to end this incoherent rant now!

2:01 Goodnight!!!

[Added later: I was thinking about our inability to comprehend the size of the universe, and I truly believe we cannot, yet. The idea of the size of the world is different to a world-traveler than to someone who has never left his little village, even if the same number crunches of the dimensions of the earth are given to them. Numbers give you an idea, something to compare to. But when you run into the realms of light years, our mind cannot make realistic comparisons because nothing compares to the sheer numbers dealt with in astronomy. The nearest galaxy, Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away! Our longest flight is probably around 20 hours, and fastest jet travel is ~0.85 mach, which is less than the speed of light by several orders of magnitude. How then are we to grasp how far even our closest galaxy is, much less the vastness of the universe!!]

PS. If you're wondering, I know midnight isn't 1 am! But midnight can leniently be interpreted to mean middle of the night. So yea, my title isn't too far off! :)