Death haunts me

ooh I feel a late-hour-type blog post coming on.....

...and here it is.

One of my friends is incredulous that I'm not afraid of death.  And lately I've been wanting to talk to him and tell him that that's not strictly true.  I mean, I'm not afriad of dying.  It's an eventual end we all have to face at some point and I've made my peace with it years ago.  What I am afraid of is other people dying.

And, well, let's just say that in the past week other people's mortality has gotten me thinking a lot.  Things like "but where do they go when they die?" which I'm sure is a religious question and to which I have always replied "they don't".  Lay in the ground, rot, back to the earth, that's it.  No floating spirits, no heaven, and certainly no hell.

But the thought of someone I know, the person I wrote about in my last post, in fact, lying cold and inanimate... it makes me wonder.  But where did he go?  How did that animation all of a sudden disappear?  And I take a step back and I think, gosh, living and dying are such *weird* things.  Can you imagine something animated, until all of a sudden something stops the animation, just stops?  How curious.

Am I being morbid?  Let's change tracks.

If there was so-called life after death, I've always thought of heaven not as a place, but as being able to go back in time, to the happiest parts of your life, and re-living them over again, or just living in that time and place, without any major changes.  Like I could be 13 or 22.5 forever.

And the thing I fear most about death (even though I know I said I don't actually fear dying... but if I were more prone to believing in souls) is that there is a soul.  And it keeps on going forever.  But it gets trapped in your body and doesn't fly away when you die.  So you're just stuck in a dead body, unable to open your eyes, unable to say "hey, I'm not dead!", just lying there thinking to yourself until... I don't know.  But then that's all rot because what is a body?  Won't it all just degenerate eventually and would your soul still just get stuck with your bones?  See, all rot.  So don't even think of fearing about that last paragraph being true.

So let's go back to the 6th sentence of this post.  I fear other people dying.  Like, all the time.  I don't know whether it's common and it's just something people don't talk about, of if it's just me, because I've watched too much TV and read too many books as a kid.  But people just seem so... mortal.  And I fear people I love might die and leave me forever and hey, that's totally not cool.  So I'm really glad that facebook is around to let me know that people I love are still alive, even though they are many many miles away and I might not have spoken to them for several months.  And for the people who I love who aren't on facebook... well that's practically just my parents, who I can ring up, so that's cool.

So tell me, is this natural?  Or is this part of the big abandonment issue that I have recently dug up again.  I like to dig it up to keep it fresh, see if it's still there or if it's started to leave me alone.  Well that's for another post, perhaps, but why not now.  This whole abandonment thing... no doubt it's because I'm a TCK.  But goddamn, some people who call themselves TCKs really have things lucky.  I spoke to a friend from a European School last week, and he said *their* turnover rate was something like 1 per class per year.  I was incredulous.  Flabbergasted.  Relieved that I finally had a reason to not connect as well to EU school kids as I did with International school kids.

So am I distracting myself from what I was going to say?  Well, yes, but I thought that was rather really interesting and really a good indicator as to why I just didn't seem to click as much with those EU school kids, some of which are really good friends, but I never got along with them like I got along with the international school kids.  I figure it probably has something to do with developed versus developing countries as well.

Ah yes, distracted myself again.  So this whole abandonment thing.  I don't think it's going away, *but* I just seem to care less about it.  I mean, logically, I'm much more to grips with it, and I can explain things to myself.  It's good.  But, looking at this fear of other people's death thing, it's not really going away, is it.  It's just much more primal, sitting at my subconcious level laughing at me since I refused to acknowledge it at the conscious level.  Pathetic.

Anyway, must go to bed now.  I've got to go to Kent tomorrow to raid a library.  Actually can't wait.  I hope there's loads of sunshine for my train journey.

Trade-offs

I got a text message about half an hour ago telling me that the person who send the text message just got a text message from a friend of ours about the death of someone we all knew from karate.  When I read the name at the bottom of the message, I was selfishly thankful, that it wasn't someone from our own team, and someone I cared about a lot more.

It's unfair for me to think so, but I'm still glad, and I feel guilty, because of course he was just as loved, and a great great loss to the karate world, but just not to me.

All the same, I'm sorry you're gone.  R.I.P.

Economist? Me?

I met up with a friend on Saturday night and his friend who, it turns out, works as an economist.  We had good conversations about stuff and people in economics, while my other friends talked about computers.

So now I feel like... I'm an economist!  I mean I've been able to hold conversations about computers for years now... this is the first time I've managed to hold one about economics.  And it's kinda weird.  Like I know I've been studying all this stuff, but never thought it actually made any impact.  Like someone's been building this secret 'economics' building in my head in the darkness for the past few months, and then all of a sudden they've turned on the light!  Surprise!  You're an economist!