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(9:43:08 PM) Adrian Sud: if it were my life or ten people you didn’t know, and you had to choose
(9:43:16 PM) Adrian Sud: i’d fully expect you to let me die so they’d live
(9:43:30 PM) Adrian Sud: if it were my choice i’d do the same
(9:43:51 PM) Adrian Sud: their moral standpoints don’t matter, either

I said that to Mikah. Now I’m wondering how true it is. See, when I wrote this I meant if it were my choice–My life, or ten stranger’s lives–my path is obvious, and I would take it, with little hesitation. If it were Mikah’s choice, my life or ten strangers, I would expect her to do so as well.

But what if it was her life, versus ten strangers, and I had to make the choice? What about someone else? Would I really be able to make that choice? Would the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one then? Well, logically, yes. But how difficult would it be for me to make that choice?

I would look for a way out, i’d need to cheat the question, anything but answer one way or the other, there has to be a third option. If there is none? How can there be none? But in any real world situation there is one who is closer, one that is definate, I can save her, and then she becomes the choice, whether it’s right or wrong, not for her, but because she’s one, at least one.

Schindler’s dillemma was that a hundred people, two hundred people, was just a drop in the water compared to the millions slaughtered; but those two hundred people were alive and standing because of him, because of what he had done, and that meant something. It wasn’t who he saved, it was that he had saved them at all.

So it’s a matter of instinct. What can I do, right now, right here, to help someone, anyone. And just pray and hope that when I come back, there’s more that I can do. It’s not an intellectual choice. It’s not a moral quandary at all. It is the action that matters, not always the consequence.
Whew.

I was in our pool. There was a little black boat made of wood that I was playing with. It was kinda neat, until I noticed a small green scorpion inside of it (yes, small. It was a scorpion, but smaller than they can get). I tossed the boat out of the pool, then climbed out to excise the scorpion with a stick. Once I had, one of my brothers came, and tossed the little boat back into the pool.

I was on a big black ship made of wood. We were in the hold, myself, a family friend named Ro, and my brother. There were really nice windows that let in a lot of light at one end, and the floorboards had a bit of bounce to them, and were just a bit creaky. I was looking around at things, telling Ro that her friend who had built the ship had done an excellent job. There was a ladder that would lead onto the deck.

I was in a battle. A youth (twelve or thirteen) tried to climb the ladder, but I pulled him off and said, “Let the old ones risk their lives.” And then I began to climb it.  I drew my sword. I reached the top of the ladder and pushed open the hatch to the main deck and was instantly attacked, someone standing in front of the hatch, preventing anyone in the hold from leaving. I knocked his sword aside with my own, lunged up three steps on the ladder, and swept so he had to jump back. Then I made it up the rest of the way and began to fight to protect the ladder, so more could get free to join the fray.

I moved to the right of the hatch and looked back. In my immediate vicinity, there were three men, each with a sword, and one advancing on me. He knocked me down, and pushed the swordpoint into my shoulder. It hurt.

It hurt a lot.

I tried to fight him off. I tried hitting his sword away with mine, but I couldn’t get it to budge. I tried throwing my sword at his face, a good idea, but it sailed right through without harming him. It still hurt. I yelled.

“You can’t kill me!”

It didn’t help. He wouldn’t release me.

“Loki!– no–Morpheus! You can’t kill me in a dream!”

My eyes were suddenly awake to the room, there was something there, a dark cape and helm in front of the window, voice booming: “You dare call me?”

I was awake. I could barely see, but i realized that the “dark cape” and “helm” were just the drapes on the windows–even though the drapes are gold. I stumbled out of bed, careful about the pillows I left by the bedside, groggily trying to gain some purchase, and using my hands to steady me somewhat. I looked at the dresser at the foot of my bed. There was something on it. I screamed.
It was a small, black boat.

Only then did my alarm clock go off; only then did I wake up in my bed.

I have a theory: There exists a scale, whether you know it or not, on which your blog and everyone else’s, exists. This is not a normal scale, wherein it is better to land on one side than the other. This is a scale on which the ideal spot is directly in it’s center.

This is a scale that combines two qualities: Intelligence, and gender role.

By gender role, I do not mean sex; Livejournal, and blogging in general when it is for personal reasons, is a fairly effeminate thing to begin with. I am male and have held a blog for over two years, and a livejournal for almost four. It is the gender (and possibly age) that one might assume you are upon reading one of your posts.

On one end of the scale, there is unintelligent feminine. Most people are fairly familiar with posts like this. A sentence from this end of the scale might look like the following:

“OMG, i wuz talking to sally and she said sumthing about the mall and i really want to go can any1 give me a ride?!”

Usually these are characterized by excessive exuberance (exclamation points after every sentence), a minute-by-minute description of as much that happened in the day as possible, and often a reliance on internet slang, or intentional misspellings. These usually attempt to convey a large amount of emotion.

At the other end is the uninteligent masculine. This is less frequent, but a common sentence from a post on this end might be:

“man, i am so frunk rgiht now.”

Commonly, these can be characterized by a lack of any information whatsoever. They will often be either detatched posts which say little, if anything, about the person’s feelings, or they will simply be things the person posted because they thought it amusing.

Now, I hypothesize that as one approaches the center these lines blur, eventually leading to a point at which intelligence makes the post androgynous.

There it is. That’s my hypothesis, as offensive as it may be.