My Hippie Van is a poem I found on deviantart.com, it was written by Winterfang.

“[...] When I wake up,
I’ll grab a thick marker
climb up on the roof
and scrawl my heart and brain out
for the sun and the moon and the stars
to read.
Just in case they get bored up there.

She’ll…she’ll do crazy things
to the sides of this van.
This hippie van of ours.
There will be visages and designs
and things no one
can put name to.
And it shall be awe-inspiring.
I told you before,
she’s awesome like that. [...]“

It is interesting listening to my grandmother’s visitors. It’s her birthday, I don’t like little old ladies and men who come every year asking about my school and boyfriends and such things, so I go to my room. Their conversations are much more diverse if I’m out of the room. I can still hear them clearly as they are only a door away… They go from talking about the old and new political system to the amount of trash we produce each day and global warming. These are the people who would, a century or so ago, be the driving force of national awareness. The good kind of national awareness, perserving the culture, not destroying all others and thinking theirs is superior. Educated people, old school, the kind that still has manners and integrity. A dying voice…

Most conversations, in my own age group, that I overhear these days, are dominated by Britney Spears shaving off her hair and “Oh my god! What is she wearing!” What a way to kill the mind…

I have another question.

My sister and I were watching a cartoon today, the Prince of Egypt. It tells the story of Moses and there is a scene in it, where he transforms the Nile into a river of blood.

Now here’s the question… What was the blood type?

All I can think about lately is nonsense. =/

Edit: After a long consideration and many opinions I believe I have found my own. It must have been 0.

If we persume that at first the river contained all the blood types then the antigens would destroy all but 0, which has no antigens.

Unless someone can come up with God’s blood type and say that is it?

After questioning pretty much everone on my MSN list, I finally got an answer. 2048. You might ask yourself what the question is!

Yesterday I was talking with Migs, and he mentioned some chocolate, of course I wanted to know if I can have some. He was very kind and promised to e-mail it to me. Out of purely economical reasons I instructed him to use my gmail.com account, because you can fit 2gb of chocolate in there. The next completely natural question that asks itself, is the very one to which no one could give me an anwser. How much is 2GB of chocolate in kg?

Well, ladies and gentlemen! Thanks to Gil, I have an anwser! 2048.

I am a rather silly person. I frequently get on the wrong bus out of absent-mindedness, or forget to get off at my stop. I’ve gotten used to walking home for 30 minutes by now (don’t think it’s really a 30 min walk, it’s just 30 min MY walk…). Usually it’s not a problem, it just gives me more time to think about things, but yesterday… Yesterday was quite a shock.

What got me so lost in my thoughts was a line from the Dead Poets Society by Mr. Keating… He said that language was invented to woo women. I was busy thinking up all the ways that could lead to so many different languages, but each geographically centered in one area.

One version was that different langauges corespond to different women that were wooed… Which is a little unfair cause by that logic the entire male population of China was wooing one woman.

The other version is that different languages corespond to different temperaments of women in the area… Dialects should offer enough diversity. Any other thoughts?

Today was gorgeous though. Snow in March, if only it could be winter all year long…

A few days ago our English teacher asked us where we see ourselves in 10 years. I said I didn’t know, that I never thought about it. She was surprised and asked about short term plans, I said I want to finish the year… “Nothing else?” I said things never turn out how I want them to, so I don’t make plans… But that’s not the truth, I just didn’t want to watch her and my class turn my wishes into something weird and odd, something to be scorned for and laughed at.

Where do you want to be in 10 years? Everybody said they want a family, kids. The girls all want husbands, the guys all want wives, they all want children, some want a dog on top.

I don’t want a husband or a wife, I don’t want children. I want to live alone in an appartment or a house with a lot of books. I want a writing job, a cat and a dog. I want a nifty caffee nearby, where I could go for coffee with my friends every once in a while. I want a tree. I want to travel a lot, sometimes with friends, but mostly alone.

All wishes to be frowned upon. Joyful, joyful… So I lie.

For the past few days I’ve been constantly encouraged to read Orwell’s 1984. I am very forgetful and have only gotten my hands on it yesterday. Within the first 5 minutes of reading it I had to stop. “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY” staring right at me, amongst other things. Freedom is slavery? I got lost in grasping that concept for quite some time before going on with the book, but it keeps on bugging me. Things like that bug me in the same way as it is frustrating to have the names of three ninja turtles but lacking the fourth. It is something I could have, something I could know, something I could understand if I only tried hard enough, only reached a little farther in depth and questioning… Alas, it keeps slipping away from me.

I should start at the first thing that gives me any hope of getting to the bottom of it, the beginning.

What is “freedom”? By definition, or one of them anyway, freedom is the power to act, speak or think without externally imposed restraints. An expression of the individual’s will. Hegel says freedom is “[...] when my existence depends upon myself [...]“. (The Philosophy of History, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) In todays world, putting that definition into practice is virtually impossible. There have been attempts, of course, such as living in isolated communities, but in the strictest definition, freedom doesn’t exist. There is always a restraint, either put onto you by something outside yourself, or inside yourself, it doesn’t matter.

To me, absolute freedom would be detachment from everything. Detachment from culture, moral standards, emotions, literature, material possessions, expectations, socialization, visual stimulants, audible stimulants, touch, smell, body… everything. Freedom, in the strictest sense, the way I imagine it is one endless white emptiness with no gravity, one big nothing, except for the soul, freed of it’s fleshly body, forgetting everything it once knew, thought or experienced. A blank piece of paper, to me, that is freedom.

What is “slavery”? My Oxford Dictionary says it is “the condition of a slave”. If I look up “slave” I find it is: “a person who is in the legal property of another and is bound to absolute obedience; a helpless victim of some dominating influence”. A helpless victim of some dominating influence… Society, as such, is one dominating influence, family, the media, your own mind…

So where do the absence of restraints and presence of them meet? Is there common ground? If there is, I couldn’t find it. All I found were different points of view that might explain it. Being free in your mind, a fantasy world, but bound to laws and responsibilities in the physical world. Perhaps not even that, having the chance to free yourself from the surroundings, but as in The Event in the Town of Gogi, being a slave to your own disabilities, your own imaginary cage, chained to stagnation.

Any other thoughts?