"Airports are depressing, don't you think?"
"yeah. i have a picture of jesse, heather and i lying in the middle of the phoenix airport. we've got this mexican blanket heather bought the day before, we're covered up and we have this pillow that we're sharing; we're taking a nap or something. i had my new indiana jones hat pulled over my eyes and we all have sunglasses on. all three of us have this hollow expression on our faces; like a mixture of exhaustion and peace. it was right next to the ticket counter, everyone was standing around using up the last of their film, trying not to think about going home; we just laid there on the carpet after we checked our bags because we had nothing to do."
"Do i know jesse and heather?"
"no. you know aaron though, remember him. well anyway he was there. i have a picture of he and i later that morning hugging these stupid, abstract egg-shaped sculptures in the terminal. these giant white things with blue dots."
"I remember aaron, he moved right?"
"yeah."
"Do you still talk to the other two in the picture?"
"no."
"I couldn't imagine working in an airport, you know, like being a ticket-taker or something. everyone there seems so vulnerable and out of place. people try to act like flying doesn't bother them, but they're always apprehensive about going somewhere new or having to say goodbye to all the new people they just met. there is something so temporary, so ephemeral about an airport, it's like a small city where nobody lives but everyone visits for an hour."
"i like to guess which people are leaving and which are going home just by looking at them. sitting in the terminal looking at all these people and giving them homes and lives, guessing which ones are waiting for the same flight as i am, hoping i get to sit next to the girl across from me, until her boyfriend or husband comes over and i pretend to start reading my book again. but maybe he's her brother, probably not though. and when we land some place strange it's home to some of the passengers and some are just catching another flight, or just visiting, but you can't tell. it's weird because you almost expect to see them on your flight home but you never see them again. nobody knows you don't live there, and then you go home and people think might think you're a visitor."
"Whenever i'm at the airport, even if i'm just picking someone up or something, all i can think about are goodbyes. like those movie cliches where someone is left crying in the terminal."
"we tried to have one of those dramatic scenes at an airport once. it was that same day, when we landed jacob and i decided to fake one of those meetings and so he got off the plane first while i waited, i was probably the last one to get off the plane and i ran out of the gate just as jake yelled my name. we ran towards each other and i jumped into his arms like we hadn't seen each other in a year."
"Nice. was everyone staring at you guys?"
"no, not really. there was this asian guy staring at us i remember. it was pretty crowded."
16 comments:
Reflective on good times,perhaps and bitter that they are over?
Everything ends when everything begins. stupid reality.
brooke was looking at old pictures in brian's office tuesday nite, and today was one of those bad-diary-days, which changes the tone of my week from listless to cumbersome, so it's another painful irony. absurd reality.
I have to secretly confess I love airports and I love flying. I've done a lot in the last four years. I love people watching and talking to the person next to me on the plane and I could make up stuff if I wanted and be really impressive. But I always get teary eyed when I leave(usually my dad)and go past security and go back home. This I hate.
I have bad-diary days every day.
Ty... question... how would you define God? how would you define God in comparison to our lives? I've just had phylosophy convo.
that's a loaded question. broadly speaking you can define god as that which you worship or have venerated, but useually god refers to the underlying reality of the world; the reason why there is something rather than nothing. how you distinguish yourself from god depends on whether you believe he is a seperste entity who is beyond and distinc from the world. but there have been christians who have tried to make their faith more mystical or pantheistic and said that god permeates all areas of life, or god is the only reality and everything is an extension of god. or you could be a deist and say that god created the world but no longer concerns himself with it. there are as many ideas as there are people, why, what were you thinking?
well. I was asked the same questions last night. I said: God is infinte. and then a girl asked how can you even begin to wrap your mind around infity... I said I can't because society puts us in time: I.E life expectency... generally speaking it's hard to wrap my mind around a god that big. There is Jesus. Then she said I'm not even talking about bringing those two individuals... or bringing those two idea into this. I said: well i have to because that's how I begin to understand and it is based off of faith for me.
Then we got into existentialism, desteny, and gravity. Gravity because if the earth rotates around the sun based on gravity and the moon around the sun isn't it destined to always go the same route. Then someone drew Nietzsche on my wall in red crayon and wrote "In heaven, all intresting people are missing" I think for this person the more appropriate quote should have been "God is dead"
well, infinity has little to do with time, it is usually ill-concieved of as time without beginning or end, but time assumes that you can distinguish between earlier and later, before and after, whereas infinity is an always-being. infinite time is inconcievable because a past that has no begining, a chain of causes with no first cause is logically impossible, in time, everything has a begining and an end. time itself is only a property of relativity, if there was no multiplicty there would be no time, because time is only the measurement of two or more objects against each other-like hands and a clock, or planets and a sun. that's why evolutionists say that there was no such thing as time before the big bang, since there was only one undefinable mass with nothing to measure it against. most easter religions see god as an all consuming oneness, they are pantheists; god being eternal in the sense that he is the all encompassing reality, and matter is only an illusion. so i'd say that eternity is quite concievable as long as you don't assosciate time with it in any way. just think of it as completion or unity. so god then, would be the underlying reality to a finite world that neccesitates an answer as to why something exists rather than nothing, there might not be a reason, but there needs to be a cause.
through a series of metaphors, this individual came to the conclusion that 'a god that big can not even bother with someone like me because i am to small. Ant is to me as I am to God.' I wasn't sure how to handle that... we switched topics and went to predestination vs. freewill...
where my conclusion was: it's not black or white, free will and predestination are very grey issues i think.
sounds like your friend has more of a personal problem than an ideological one, people have ant farms, but any analogy will be weak, which is ironic since she is only assuming how she would feel if she was god. however, if god is so big, so different than us, who are we to presume to know what he does and does not care about. he did create this world so he appears to care that at least something exists. as long as what you believe makes sense she can disagree with you for whatever reason she wants to.
she admitted that she hadnt put much thought into god, because she's not religious... but i think that was just a cop out. my other friend had an odd conclusion that god does not speak he does not invest in linguistics. Words muddy things, he is everything around us that is how he speaks. I asked what about the bible? and she said I have a lot of problems with the bible... which lead into a circlular conversation on weather or not the bible is truth or just some white man's sexist, rascist opinions. i dont recall the entire conversation.
the bible, no matter what it might be, was written by dark men, not white. there is some credit to inability of language to communicate truths of a transcendant being; if god is beyond space and time then that could be a problem if he wants to reveal himself in temporary instances, but that has to do with mythical thinking. but it doesn't make much to say that language is 'muddy' and inadequate in one breath, and then tell you what it really means in the next breath. if it's unclear then there's no reason to believe any other interpretation she has either.
yes i did clearify that the writers of the bible aren't how people back then are portrayed in Da Vinci's Last Supper... well so what your saying is god speaks through other means rather than language? Personally, i think god uses people and situations to get his point across, which is sort of the same thing my friend Maren was saying... except she thinks he uses no words at all only things around us. so yes there are inconstancies to her argument but it's not totally off. i give up.
the idea that god uses people and/or natural events to communicate is something catholics like to perpetuate, a priest named teilhard de chardin wrote a lot about, annie dillard kinda talks about it and so does flanery o'conner, emerson and thoreau do too, but with less of a christian twist. i find it interesting to read, but for myself, i can never tell what would actually be from god and what i was projecting god onto, same with prayer, we can say that god did this or showed me that but, there's no way to prove it, just because one thing correlates with another doesn't mean it caused it.
somethings yes but others no... I watched a movie once and the narrator poked fun at someone who had said "they were in a parking lot and the spot closest to the building opened up and they said that is was as sign from god" in my own life for instance: I didnt get into whitworth and i was horrified. then someone almost hit me in the face with the door and said 'doors open all the time they are nothing to be afraid of' and a week later i got into mills. so they could be a quote unquote sign or just some old lady justifying her almosy hitting a teenager in the face with a door. but now i find that mills is exactly where i should be, whitworth would have been way too comfortable. so yes it is my belief in a sense god does use things slash people, i think that is also layed out in revelation when prophecy about the end times is being talked about and god will use natural disasters and also 144,000 etc... then again that's just prophecy.
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