Like Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, perhaps I am only a figment of my own imagination and the interactions I have are the result of the time I have spent creating and interpreting my own thoughts, designed to keep me from killing my self out of boredom. But designed my whom? By me? If I am thinking my whole life up, then why couldn’t I have come up with a better one? And then I suppose the phase, “everything is what you make of it” actually applies in a literal sense.

At the end of every class I leave with an intense desire to alter my own consciousness. Then as this high wears thin and disappears, I become terrified of making that leap into the unknown. Yesterday, I realized, however, that every adventure is terrifying. That’s what makes it an adventure. But are these adventures, to me, only amazing if I can recount them later in my own self glory? Would I take those risks if I knew I could never share them with anyone else? I am not so sure. And if that is the case, what does it mean, both the experiences themselves and my reactions to them later?

“I know you believe you understood what you thought I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

- Anonymous

One conclusion I came to at the end of the last class is: anything is everything and nothing, and always relative. I was stuck in this spiral where any definitive statement someone made looped back to this conclusion. I know that is it oversimplified, but, like I said, I got stuck. Does this statement mean anything?

My view of my own intelligence seems an illusion. What is not an illusion? I tripped over the statement “observing children in the real world” when Donald used it in his essay. What is the real world? I graduated college a semester after most of my friends, and I still get very aggravated when they say, “wait til you get into the real world, it sucks.” What world had I been living in all this time if not the real one? A fake world? I wasn’t on drugs my whole life! This idea of the real world bothers me. “We are all members of the real world,” I wanted to say, “So, just get over yourselves!”