Head Cold

I'm home sick today. It's amazing how twelve hours of sleep makes me feel so much better. Or, rather, it's not amazing at all. If only that were a scheduling possibility.

Yesterday morning the old woman upstairs was dragging and bumping stuff around at about 5:30, as she is wont to do. At 5:50 there was a big bang noise and I lay there with my eyes open wondering if she had fallen over. Eventually I heard her moving around again and I went back to sleep.

Last night, she was listening to some cheesy drama and then to news reports about Barack Obama. When she does this, I put on my headphones and listen to music, because I'd rather be kept up by my own noise. Falling asleep wasn't really going to happen so instead I lay there and tried to decide whether or not I believed in god and what my ideas were on the afterlife, if any.

I guess it's only pretty recent that ruminating on these concepts has become something we can do in our spare time, as opposed to a necessary aspect of our cultural and social identity. That's kind of nice, I guess, individuals getting to decide by themselves what they do and do not believe in or want to get up early for on Sunday (or any other) morning. It does, however, lead to the situation where you don't really have to think about it if you don't want to and you have the option of sleeping in instead of spending time contemplating where you are headed, in terms of right and wrong.

I think that for the most part, the role that religion would have played in my life if I had been brought up to be religious was replaced by novels. I'm hard-pressed to think of a better way of gaining an understanding of the necessity of being a humanist in this world.

Needless to say, this line of thinking last night lead to some strange and wonderful dreams.