(no subject)

Mostly cloudy, 22C (20C)

I had a dream that I was living in the math building at Tulane (with my mother), and it burned down because my best friend was smoking a cigarette and didn't put it out completely, and I lost -everything-.

Why not live forever...

Mostly cloudy, 22C (21C)

Someone I met IRL from online, here, is trying to convince me that it would be a good thing if he could help develop some kind of drug regimen to perpetually keep people in their 20s for their whole lives--extending youth and also life. I'm trying to explain how that is not only Not The Best Idea, but that before he start trying to do it, he ought to give a little consideration to what will be done with his technology and how to prevent the most heinous of obvious abuses. He's sure it'll become like vaccinations--"that everybody gets basically for free." He's better traveled than I am and doesn't seem to "get" that vaccinations are not given equally. I mention Central and Eastern Africa and he brushes it off, "they'll get it eventually"... Social justice aside, there are a zillion other moral-ethical, socio-political and practical reasons why he should never experience success in this little enterprise. But he's like a crazed scientist and refuses to comprehend...

Ugh.

But this brought up another realization for me--why don't I want to live forever? Other than how being poor sucks and how nothing seems to work the way I want it to (hell, I don't even know how I can go on for another year most of the time, much less another decade...), living forever has just never been something I've wanted to do. Even the appeal of becoming a vampire, which kept me reading and re-reading vampire fiction to this day, is not about living forever but about observing history. I want to know what my place in the grand scheme is--I want to either know that my life is utterly pointless, or that it has a lasting effect on the world. And you can't know that while you're in the world. Vampires leave the world--they become observers and with the same consciousness with which they lived, they come to understand the full richness of the context of their lifetimes. That's what I want. You don't know the context until it's over. Living forever, living in youth forever, means you'll never know what your place is or was--you'll just keep filling it, until perhaps long after your time to have vacated it passes.