06/02/2002 - 8:21 p.m.

And that's my new philosophy!

First up, a little message to any of you planning on killing yourselves any time soon: if you're popular, please, please, please, for the sake of those of us who don't know you, don't do it! We had a guy commit suicide on Monday night, so we spent all day yesterday with counsellors hired out from various crisis centres checking in to our classes to see "how we were doing" and what the "collective student pulse was like" (I swear, those are the words she used). I still have no idea who this kid is, but apparently half the school did. The ironic thing? Last year an ROTC kid did exactly the same thing, but nobody knew him, so there wasn't any of this.

I can't deal with all this there's-collective-misery-so-we-don't-have-to-teach-you shit. Why is the world expected to stop for everybody else's problem? No one wants to let me not do my work when I'm having a particularly shitty day. This week, I'm slightly sick, and it's just too much for me to deal with everybody else's whinging. I don't want to be at school either because I feel like my personal gravity has increased 40% and I ought to be laying on the ground curled up in a little ball as my head sinks into the floor from its massive massive weight, but I keep going to school and doing stuff, it's absolute bibbly shit, but yeah. I'm there because that's what I'm supposed to do.

I also resent the implication that I'm expected to know this kid. They keep up with the "all our lives have been touched", well, you know, touched, screwed up, maybe that's the same thing. Maybe if everybody wants to come to school and cry they'll let the rest of us stay home? Or vice versa, pick one.

Yeah, OK, I realise, suicide = tragedy for some people, fine, why can't they go have their issues without involving me? I came to a conclusion in December about death.

The thing that makes people alive is that they have a spirit, a soul, a ghost, whatever you want to call it. I call it a ghost, because that's the one with the least religious connotation. So, we all have this thing that makes us alive, and it's kept in our body. Well, people have out of body experiences, right? (They do.) So, what would that be, working from my prior statements? How about an escape of the ghost while the person is still alive? We know that the ghost can be seen without the body after death (this is the other reason I use the word ghost- the Halloween term is much more readily accepted), it's escaped from the body. Death, then, is simply the escape of the ghost from the physical shell. Death is a lack of physical presence.

This is not something to get all upset about, at least, I don't see it that way. If the only thing you can miss about a person is their physicalness, you've been missing out on a lot of things. However, people are afraid of that which they cannot see, and so ghosts have been pushed off to places which also cannot be seen: Heaven and Hell, whatever you want to call it.

I believe it's just the body that's gone, and without the body, the ghost is sort of lost. Ghosts are known to revisit people, these people often feel them, hear them, see them. There's nothing to say that they have dissapeared. They're just not around in an accepted form anymore. There are instances of people whom ghosts work through. I read about a woman who would write down the songs she claimed were dictated to her by Mozart and Betthoven, songs that could only have been written by those composers because the woman certainly didn't have the training. Can't ghosts use the living the way Milton used his wife? If they do that, they're not really gone are they?

We know that the universe is expanding, it will probably not end. We cannot yet, however, look back into our past and see the beginning of the universe. We cannot remember the time before our birth, but maybe, like the universe, we are wrong about the definiteness of our death.