Phase Two, Day 25: Apologies and a Little Talk of the Afterlife

Apologies for sucking at blogging, I mean. Goodness. I was doing so well at the beginning of the semester, and now look at this. It's partly a matter of working on other projects, and partly a matter of having fewer plans left than I imagined I would to tell you here. I don't like doing filler entries.

There was this one time when a classmate was quizzing me about the afterlife. I'd been taking a class on aging, and was annoyed because the teacher seemed to expect me to be much more afraid of death than I am, and actually got a little snotty with me when I said, "No, I have given it thought, and know how I want to be buried, and while I don't want it to happen anytime soon, I'm not convinced I'm immortal, and I don't see it as something that scary."

Anyway. So this guy was like, "Why not?" And I said Heaven seems pretty awesome, so I think things will turn out okay. And he said, "What if there's no Heaven?" and I said in that case I don't have a consciousness anymore, so it seems pointless to worry about it. He narrowed it down to me being conscious as a ghost, but for whatever reason ghosts can't see or hear or otherwise sense each other, so I couldn't spend my time tracking down family members or Shakespeare or Jesus to talk about what in the world is going on. He said, "What if it's just you, wandering the earth, unable to interact with anyone, forever?" It was clear he thought he had me. And then I had one of those moments that reminds me why my friends tell me I'm a little odd sometimes, because without hesitation, I said, "I would ride leopards."

He needed a little explanation there, but the more I explained the more confident I became. If it was me all by my lonely ghost self, what could be better than to drift to the rainforest, find a leopard, swing my ghostly legs up over it when it woke up in the morning, and drift along following it through its day? I have not yet found the upper limit to how long I can contentedly watch leopards pacing in a zoo, so riding one all day in the wild is about as close to Heaven as I could get at that point. It would be peaceful, it would be exciting. I could do that every morning for a hundred years before I'd need a weekend off.

"And then," I continued, as a new thought struck me, "I could go down to the ocean and find one of those glowy Finding Nemo fish!" I made snaggly shapes with my fingers in front of my mouth so he would know what fish I meant.

"Lantern fish?" he said.

"Sure." I still don't know for sure what they are called. "Glowy Finding Nemo fish" tends to get the right picture in people's heads.

"You realize there's about one of those every square mile in pitch darkness, right? The chances of you finding one are astronomically small."

"I'm dead," I said. "I've got time." Besides, how amazing would it be, after a month of darkness, to see that little light? These are the moments religions are made from.

I have since thought of other ways to pass sections of eternity: if I'm one of those chilly-ectoplasm ghosts, I can squat in poor people's refrigerators when they lose power, so their food will not go bad. (I would have to be careful riding leopards, though, so I don't give them hypothermia). I could read over people's shoulders in a library. I can go inside a pregnant elephant's belly and check out that elephant baby. I could see what people look like to the campfire. I could ride an emu, since that is as close to riding a velociraptor as we've had since back in the day. I'm not too worried about filling my time. (And I do realize this is only filling time until the heat death of the sun, but I'm pretty sure I'll find fun things to do at that point, as well.)

So -- sorry for lack of posts, and for this post not being about taking over the world. I hope this is satisfactory in the meantime!