I'm proud of the way our capitalist society deals with holidays. I mean, we really have taken the Jesus right out of everything. Its so great how we manage to use non-religion related characters to celebrate our religious beliefs. Easter is great because its pretty much the biggest bullshit character ever. A rabbit, that for some reason lays magical colorful eggs that are sometimes plastic and have candy inside. What a holiday? The candy companies, the card companies, the plastics industry, the bakers, the quakers, the candle-stick makers...we've all jumped on the holiday money train. We've decided that the church isn't the only organization that can make money off of the death/ressurection of Jesus. Now, for just a $1.99 we can buy a whole bag full of chocolatey goodness in honor of our God. Its great. All of the money that we spend in celebration of our old religion funds our new ones-our corporations. We worship our Hershey's, our Cadbury's, our Hallmarks, our Starbucks, our Microsofts, with tithes more than we have ever given to any other diety. Today our salvation comes from the almighty dollar instead of the so-called Almighty him/herself. What a country? Who am I to say that this is a bad thing? At least now we put our trust in something that is our own, instead of focusing all of our energy on coming up with new gods and new ways to sacrifice to those gods. We now have put our focus on something we can actually see, something we can actually physically use in the world today instead of someone whose existence is questionable, at best. There is much more to life than money. That much most people can agree with. I can't say that I do not desire money. I would use it to do the things I want to do. It would be a tool of my life and not the object of which all of my desire is focused. That is what I believe when it comes to money. We should use it to live a full life, not spend a full life in search of it. If I could be happy and poor, which I am hoping I will be, I would. However, if I could find happiness while rich, I would do that too. Now, here is where I throw out something that some people will not agree with. There is more to life than religion. If we busy ourselves too much in preparation for the next world, we tend to forget the world we live in now. We need to do the best we can while we are here, whether we believe in the afterlife or not. We need to help ourselves be happy here too. If you are happy in your blind faith, then do it. Do what you can, while you can to make yourself feel good. I'm not saying in any way or form to fuck up other people's lives just because it makes you feel good. We should help eachother to be happy whenever possible as well. And now, I take it a little bit further. There is more to life than happiness. We need to experience the whole plethora of human emotion to have the full human experience. We need to be sad and not know why. We need to be pissed off over the smallest things. We need to laugh at the things that we shouldn't laugh at. We need to be afraid of things which we shouldn't fear. We need to laugh. We need to cry. We need to feel before we die. Now I sound like a bad poet. We NEED to feel. If we are simply happy all of the time, we won't know what it is to be happy. I think it is said best in Vanilla Sky when it is put, "The sweet just ain't as sweet without the bitter." That is my main trouble with the concept of heaven. It is supposed to be that we are happy all of the time and our happiness just increases with every passing moment. I know we aren't supposed to understand it, but I just can't imagine that. I think our happiness is defined by the times we are unhappy. Without the bad, how can there be good? Its too difficult a concept to grasp without experiencing it. Much as love is, much as hate is. Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps happiness is not knowing that we are in fact unhappy. Perhaps, if we unaware of our feelings, we are happy by default. If we do not know that we are unsatisfied, are we not satisfied? Perhaps happiness is the ignorance of any other emotion. I don't have the answers, but I will never stop searching for them. That is all that I have. All I know is that I do not know. All I have is my search to have something worth searching for. Maybe theres nothing. Bah. I never finish talking about what I started talking about. Oh well, I'm done anyhow. "Meaningless like when two fireflies flouresce Just like everything I guess it was utterly meaningless Even less a little glimpse of nothingness sucking meaning from the rest of this mess"