7. What are your religious beliefs? Have they changed, or have they always stayed the same?

Yeah let's see if posting this picture works this time.

Anyway religion- that isn't a touchy subject at all. Anyway I sort of hate religion because it purports to bring people together and unify them but really I feel like it causes just an awful lot of problems. Especially because you can't prove anything about religion. Like, inherently, that's what religion is- belief. Or, rather, with the mythologies attached to most dogmas, more like suspension of disbelief.

I was raised Roman Catholic, which anyone will tell you pretty much guarantees eventual atheism. It's not surprising- as they say in Dogma, we don't celebrate our religion, we mourn it. When I was in grade school we always livened masses up with fun songs and more kid-friendly sermons, but either way, it's an hour of your life that I always felt would be better spent reading- even if it was just the bible or something. After all, the bible has some pretty good stories. There's lots of fire and brimstone and general kickassery, if you read the right parts. The rest is mostly paragraphs tracing very long genealogies or a bunch of outdated rules and regulations that were, for various reasons, crucial at the time to enforce but which are mostly moot now. (There is evidence for this on both a scientfic and sociological level, I've read about it some)

Don't get me wrong, in general, religions fascinate me. Religion is basically a giant origin story- and everyone knows that's the best part of a superhero franchise. (Well, except The Dark Knight, but Batman doesn't adhere to society's silly rules.) The problem is those psycho people who take these stories for literal truth. I mean stand back a second. They're absurd.

I was once having this conversation with my friend who is Hindu, although I'm pretty sure her family doesn't really practice it. I'm sure her parents do (they are from India) but I know her and her sister just kind of stick with the "don't eat meat" thing and that's about it. But she was sort of making fun of Christianity, pointing out that we basically believe in a zombie god (which, btw, is another example of an awesome story. Zombies. Zombies!). Since I don't actually believe in that, I didn't take too much offence, but when I pointed out to her that she apparently believes in lots of gods with lots of limbs and that when we die we get put into an animal's body (or a different caste- whatever) and she seemed to take mild offence.

The point I'm trying to make is, I don't believe that you can can prove that there is a God/gods/Allah/Yahweh/Zeus/Buddah/Force/Flying Spaghetti monster. But, to be fair, you also can't prove that there's not. So I guess I feel like it's safest not to bank on anything. As a scientist, I know that the world and life is a pretty fantastic thing, and you don't need religion to understand that it is inherently divine. I guess the closest thing I have to a set of beliefs is math. I'm terrible at math, and so are a lot of people, but it has the power to unlock the mysteries of the universe and to divine answers from the chaos. And in the end, that's what religion really is, trying to fix the entropy of the universe, to give order to madness, and to resolve the chaos that lies threatening every part of our world.

The picture, by the way, is of Arcade Fire when I saw them in concert on Easter. Really I can't think of a better religious experience.

Bonus: Motherfucking Jellyfish

This is what jellyfish look like with a fuchsia background ^
This is what a different kind of jellyfish look like with a blue background^ Bonus: the flower-shaped things are their gametes!

And that was your education for the day. I was really determined to post these pictures. I'm still not positive what went wrong.

6. If you could change one thing ...

Full prompt: "6. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be, and what would you do if later on you changed your mind?"

I don't particularly like this prompt because it sounds an awful lot like the one I did just before it, about my bad habits. I understand that the site I got the prompts from is supposed to be a journal writing thing, so I suppose they're trying to make me be very introspective, but I don't think that's what people care to read about on an internet blog. Not that anyone is really reading this, but still. Should it somehow become massively popular, or should, god forbid, channers or some other cesspool of the internet get ahold of it, I don't want to give anyone too much fodder on my self-deprecation.

The bonus of this post is I went to Shedd Aquarium today and took a bunch of awesome pictures of fish. The jellyfish turned out the best on my phone, so that's what pictures you see. lolz nevermind blogger's being an asshole.

So I guess the obvious thing I'd change about myself is I'd make myself pretty. All the other things that are wrong with me are personality-based things. While I don't necessarily find myself a worthy human being, my personality, for all its flaws, is what makes me unique, so I'd be afraid to tinker it too much. Plus I'm sure if I cured any of my particular neuroses, different ones would pop up or something.

Anyway so yeah I guess I'd just make myself pretty. I have gotten a high volume of comparisons to Zooey Deschanel recently, however I feel that is unfair to Zooey. Although, should someone offer me a Joseph Gordon-Levitt a la 500 Days of Summer, I would solemnly swear to treat him a lot nicer than she did because he is just too adorable. And hell, he was fucking sexy in Inception. Oh, but stop getting distracted. (I'm listening to a playlist I created called "Music I Should Be Ashamed Of" and I just had Katy Perry's Hot N' Cold and I couldn't...stop...dancing...) Okay yeah so make myself attractive, particularly to the opposite sex, which I'm pretty sure doesn't view me as attractive at all. At least I'm not hideously deformed or anything, I'm just, you know, a 4 on the 1 to 10. Not so ugly people recoil at me, but not even average enough to snag someone mildly functional. I guess my wish would be to be at least a 7. I have no desire to be a 10, I don't need to be a model. I would just like someone besides the creepy old men on the L to leer at me once in a while.

I guess if I (for whatever reason) decided to undo my wish, I would do it in a very dramatic way. Maybe I'd save someone from a burning building and get horrible scars. Then I'd be ugly, but there'd be a good story and it would give me character.

Nelly's "Pimp Juice" is on now. So clutch.

Now I'm going to talk about the aquarium because it was awesome. We were there from about 1:30-6, and it was amazing 100% of the time. I love fish, and Shedd is huge. Although, we had an unfortunate run-in with this awful weather. Clair, Leo and I (Oxford comma?) met at Roosevelt and were waiting for the 130. It had ABSOLUTELY pour on my six minute walk to my stop. I had to take off my coat on the train because it was so absurdly wet. My legs weren't fairing too well, either, though the rest of my upper body had more or less survived. However, the rain had totally abated by the time we were at the bus stop. ("Standing in the Rain"-perfect for this story) We got on the bus, were riding over LSD, and... RAIN. EVERYWHERE.

This also happened about seven years ago when I came to Chicago with my mom and we went to Adler. It downpoured only while we were trying to get from the bus to the planetarium that time. This time I felt like there was more irony associated with travelling to an aquarium in a torrential downpour, but it was still unappreciated. We got off the bus and the water was coming down in buckets. I think it could easily have qualified as a category 3 hurricane, though I guess it lacked the "wind" part.

So Clair and Leo and I did sort of a half-run towards the building- which, unfortunately, the bus drops you off on the side of. And we ran around the wrong side at first, heading toward some tent set up for a non-existent event. Leo yelled at us about it being the wrong way (No shit, Leo) and we realised we now had to run back down this ramp and then circumnavigate a quarter of the building. Did I mention Shedd is huge? So of course halfway around the rain came down harder. As if that was somehow even possible. My umbrella was already broken from the rain on Thursday (fortunately it was 65F instead of 35F today) and the wind that hadn't existed before suddenly upped the hurricane level to category 5. I almost died running up the steps, which had water coming down them so fast they looked like fountains. I could barely see up the stairs. by the time we got inside, I looked as though I had jumped into a river with all my clothes on. I was soaked all the way to my underwear (which, btw, was still damp when we left nearly five hours later).

At least Clair had a membership so they ushered us in. All the saps coming just for the day had to wait OUTSIDE in this ridiculous line. Which was funny, because they weren't letting people out of the building for a while because of the wind/rain- apparently, if you've already paid, you're worth saving, but everyone else can be whipped out to Lake Michigan for all they care.

In the end, what I'm trying to say is, anyone who came to Chicago for a nice Memorial Day vacation got Punk'd.