you can't play god, son

i have a feeling no one is reading this blog. but that's not surprising, since this is summer and only less than a third of the people who were always online during school year actually go online and check out other people's blog simply because they don't want to study. there's nothing to study anyway.

that, and people don't update their shit as well. i need something to read. or something to comment on. reading something more than ranting or just simple daily life story that begins with "today i..." is what i need. that's what i usually do to fill up the free time in my school days.

now i've got nothing to do. at least until then end of june when my online classes start. so i occupy my time doing crap that i haven't had a chance to do during school year. like washing my car, playing badminton, sleep for 12 hours, and sit in front of my computer watching a movie.

so i finished one that jim recommended me. the butterfly effect. i was going to watch the city of god but it turns out i downloaded the one without subtitle. actually, i don't know. maybe it's supposed to be a foreign movie and those who don't understand jamaican can't enjoy it?

you can't play god, son.

yes, you can't. see, nothing can be made perfect, evan. this world is all about balance. too much light is not good, you need some darkness. too much love is not good, you need some hate. too much sleep is not good, you need to be awake. too much beauty is not good, you need some atrocity. too much of one side is not good, you need to be in the middle. changing the past to make a perfect future just doesn't work out. an event in the past is something that has occured, and if you sacrificed one out of four things when that event occured, you will still have to sacrifice one thing when you go back to the past to change it. can be a different one, but something has to be sacrificed. you cannot have all four, evan.

it's like the idea of conservation of mass. if you want to create a particle with a mass of 300 MeV, you will have to accelerate 2 electrons up to a certain velocity so they gain a total kinetic energy of 300 MeV. you cannot create something out of nothing. so if your present that you dislike is made up by, say, five events, three of which were good and two bad, you cannot go back to the past and relive the bad two in order to make them good. if you successfully made them good, there will be a chain reaction that creates another two bad events. it just never ends, evan.

you cannot change what has happened in the past.

BUT

you can change the present. that's why they're called the present, the gift. it's a gift, because you can change it, unlike the past. if you really can go back to the past and relive those days, then fine, evan. go ahead and pick the past you want. try every single options and see which one fits you best, then move on with your life. do not try to change it so that your present is perfect. your present is perfect the way it is; you just have to learn to accept it. if you're unsatisfied with what you have in the present, why don't you try to LOOK FORWARD, evan? why try to change the present? try to change the future. the future. the future.

i read some parts of chapter X of augustine's confessions and it got me thinking. he claims that the past is memories, simply that. it's just something that the images in our mind form and our brain perceives it as having happened some time ago. it's not real. the past is not real. if you erase those memories, then you don't have a past. if you can somehow erase memory about the bombing in hiroshima and nagasaki from everyone's mind, then that event has never happened. if you can somehow write in everyone's mind that einstein was a journalist and not a physicist, then einstein was a journalist. the past is what your mind believes it to be. you want to go back and change the past? try this formula, then tell me if it actually works.

** this will only work for events that YOU ALONE experience. if there's someone else at that event, basically everyone who participated in the event will have to do this.
1. relax, take deep breath, this is going to take a while, it will not happen in an instant.
2. sit inside a room with nothing in it. walls, ceiling, and floor excluded, of course, or otherwise it won't be a room.
3. wear something that you wore in the time you want to go to. say you want to go back to that night of your 5th birthday, wear something that you wore that day.
4. leave present items. if those items do not exist in the past, DO NOT CARRY IT WITH YOU, or it will ruin your concentration and return you to the present.
5. tell yourself over and over again that the past your mind think as the past do not exist. do over and over until you yourself believe that it does not exist.
6. now create a past. a custom one. the one that you've always wanted.
7. tell yourself over and over again that the custom past is your past until you come to believe that it was what happened in the past.
8. voila. you've just got a new past.

yes, basically the idea is like hypnotizing yourself. i remember this one movie i watched in one of my class in highschool, what class or what movie, i don't recall. but here's the idea of what's going on in the movie. there was a guy who was watching a concert, then an old lady stopped by him, gave him a necklace, and walked away. then the next day the old lady passed away. the guy was confused because he did not even know the old lady, so he paid a visit to the lady's house. there he met her daughter but the daughter also could not give any explanation about the necklace except that it was something her mother really treasured. she also clarified the fact the old lady DID know him, and she's not just some kook giving necklaces to random people. he ended up leaving the necklace to the daughter, but was still curious about how this old lady managed to know him. so this guy went to see a professor at a university, a psychology professor who was working on time traveling. this guy got so curious he became interested in the time traveling method the professor proposed. the method was simply what i had described above. so this guy dressed up in 1920's style and lied on the bed with his eyes closed for days. he had a recording of his own voice that said "the year is nineteen twenty" repeated over and over again. after couple of days, he woke up to find that the recording had disappeared and that he had traveled to the past. so he looked for the younger version of the old lady, simply to ask about how she got to know him. he could not find her, but he met a beautiful lady and fell in love with her. this guy had completely forgotten his present and was willing to live in the past to be together with this lady he really loved. so they got married and he gave this lady a necklace, not knowing it was the same necklace that he got from the old lady in the present. during the honeymoon, she found the suit that he was wearing when he traveled to the past. she was cleaning it up and discovered a coin, a token from the present. she brought it to the guy who was surprised to see the coin. a memento of the present brought back the memories about the present, thus he was sent back to the present and never got to see his wife again. he then tried the same method over and over again, but never managed to succeed. so he gave up and live his present life alone.

then came the day when the old lady came to give him a necklace, which was the same necklace that he gave his wife in the past.

and then he realized: that old lady is his wife after all, and that necklace was the present from him. apparently she waited all her lifetime for him to return because apparently during honeymoon he just vanished without a trace.
and the daughter of the lady, is of course his daughter.

way to live your life, bro. =)

i've been talking too much. 2.38 am, time to sleep now.