1 Have Sex and Make Babies...

"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." 

- Friedrich Nietzsche

 A few years ago, I decided that life is meaningless. Well, less decided and more realized. This did not go over well with few-years-ago Sydney. It's hard to realize that everything you've done, everything you will do, has no rhyme or reason. Everything was hopeless and miserable.

That is, until I also realized something else. Yes, life has no meaning. There's no set assigned meaning. Our purpose in life isn't to have sex and make babies anymore. Life is a blank slate.

But that's the point. It's a blank slate. It means that the world is full of possibilities. Life has no meaning, thus you can assign any meaning to it.  Life is meaningless so we can assign meaning to our life.

For me, education, communication, literature, and people hold meaning.

Education is the most important though. Without education we have nothing. I guess the meaning in education  comes from my constant exposure to educators. Both of my parents have worked for CPS for many years. So have some of my aunts. I've always been around teachers and I see what happens when people are well educated and what happens when they aren't. I've seen how much school can help and how much teachers love and will do for their students.

And I've seen what it's done for me. I've seen how I'm a lot better off than other people of my background. I attribute that to my parents' emphasis on education which they passed on to me.

A lot of people have something against schools and I can understand why. The  basic set up for a school is very linear. Every day feels like it's filled with busywork and it can be mind-numbing. I get it. But I feel like that's the system's fault, not education itself. Education is wonderful. Without education, we wouldn't be able to know. We need basic knowledge. We learn from the subjects in ways you wouldn't expect. You just have to assign meaning to it, find what you're actually getting from it. From presentations in class you learn public speaking, working in group, and how to communicate ideas effectively to others. From math class, you learn to approach problems in your life from different ways. From history you learn from others' mistakes. And it goes on. You won't remember a lot of it later in life. You won't remember names and dates, the specifics. But you'll remember the lessons from it. You'll remember the true meaning, even if you don't realize you remember. After all, after a certain point we don't even known how we know what we know.

My point is, education is majorly important, not just for succeeding in life but for making it through. There are things we learn from the education system that we need to function for the rest of our lives, even if the presentation of the information is crap at the moment. You need to know how to live under a routine. You need to learn how to deal with authority. you need to learn how to deal with deadlines and commitments and how to balance your life. Education is more than just plugging and chugging with equations. Education is everywhere in life. It's lessons you learn from biographies and it's tolerance you get when you sit next to that really annoying kid in 5th period. Education is how we prepare for the future and it's incredibly important. You can tell the people who never learned certain skills and you can tell how it hurt them. You know the only children who never learned to share. You know the people who never had to present or deal with being forced with others. They stick out with like a sore thumb because they struggle with things in which they were not educated in.

Education has meaning to me. It's how I'm preparing for the future. Sometimes, I'm really sure that I'm not going to make it. I'm sure that my days are numbered and I don't have the most time left. Education is how I'm more confident that I'm not just going to fail come adult life. And that's important to me. Really important.  And thus education is.

0 A Weird Version Of Mean Girls...

"Fear follows crime and is its punishment."
- Voltaire

Okay, so lets say that I kill someone. Let's say his name was Aidan and he was Irish or something along those lines. Now lets suspend reality even more and say that I got caught. The evidence is airtight and noncircumstantial. And there's no hope for my lawyer for getting me off (and me shouting that he deserved it, that he was asking for it, that I won and that's all that matters didn't really help either) and this is his only defense: that I am insane. And they'd diagnose me and say it was true and lock me up in the big white room with the fluffy everywhere. And why? Because I'm insane and cannot help myself. The punishment isn't really fair

The same goes for Candide.

This is not to say that he's insane. Not at all. Our boy is many things: naive, a bit stupid, a bit rash, etc. But he is not insane. It's the naivety and the stupidity as a result of his naivety. And you can't punish someone for being stupid. It's not his fault or something that he can help. He just doesn't understand. He grew up behind castle walls thinking they were the best of all possible worlds. He doesn't know how the real world works. He doesn't know better. He doesn't know that walking away from the army may seem deserting or how evil recruiters look. Most if not all of his punishments were results of him not getting it.

One time he was punished because of Pangloss. This may be taken as a result of his nativity. If he was more worldly, he may have known that hanging with Pangloss would only lead to trouble. But he's not the one to day the words. Those may or may not have been his beliefs. But he is punished for who he associates with. And that's never right.

But it happens.

1 In A Game Of Chicken, Cars Always Win...

"The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing."
- Socrates

Okay, think about something you know. Something you're super sure that you know and you have little to no doubt about. Something that is undeniably true. Not something like your name or your address or the best school in Chicago. Something else.

Got it? Got that undeniable fact that you absolutely know? Okay?

How do you know it?

How do you know what you know? Can you trace where you learned it? And, most importantly, how do you know that it is true?

For most things, it's easy enough to trace back to how you know what you know. Your parents may have told you why you look both ways before you cross the street and your third grade teacher may have told you how the water isn't actually blue and why the sky is. The crossing the street thing is simple enough. You look both ways because in a game of chicken between pedestrians and cars, the cars always win. The sky is blue thing is a bit harder but to call it into question you end up questioning the whole of science and that's a giant enough headache to completely forget about.

But take Shakespeare, for instance. Shakespeare is basically this amazing literature dude who died a long time ago and left us with all of these plays and sonnets and whatnot for english and lit teachers to assign to you today. (Well no but let's go with it for the time being, shall we?) Let's say you think, like a lot of others, that Shakespeare was the greatest playwright of his time and still outrank everyone else who has come after him. Let's say you think that he's moving and brilliant. How do you know that?

One might say that you know that because your teachers have been telling you so since the seventh grade. One might say it's because of all of these elements that you can find and point out in his writing. But how you know about the elements and how they apply to him? From your teachers, right? And how do you know that your teachers are correct? How do you know that you're just making mountains out of molehills in order to fill up a fifty minute period of time?

I say that I don't know anything for sure. Knowing consists of inalienable facts. And everything can have doubt and everything can be wrong. I don't know if what I know is true. I'm just guessing at life. I don't know it because I'm not sure it's true.