"So you take a picture of something you see..."

Coldplay always puts me in a really sentimental mood, especially the song "The Scientist." It came on shuffle earlier today, and of course, I could hear the rain/wind outside my window, and I was eating ice cream... it became one of those nights.

Those nights you think about your future, think back to this moment and remember how scared you were that nothing was going to work out, and how scared you were about losing yourself. Sometimes I wonder about my future for hours on end, thinking about all the places I want to go and all the people I want to meet. I think about all the people that have gone before me, all the lives that have directly or indirectly impacted my own.

Sometimes I think about life ten years ago. I think about how simple everything was: wake up, go to school, go to daycare, come home, watch TV, go play. I miss the innocence; I miss how easy it was.

I guess it's time to accept that I'm growing up. I'm in this awkward limbo position between childhood and adulthood right now - I think some people call it adolescence or early adulthood, but I like to call it the awkward limbo phase. Nothing really makes sense, and everything is sort of uncertain. You don't really know where you're going or why, but you just sort of carry on because that's what you're told to do.

Sometimes I wonder about college. It's four years. It's supposed to be the best four years of your life... but four years is a pretty short while. What about after that? Do we peak at college and then start a slow and steady decline into middle age, and then into the elderly phase?

I always wanted to study quantum physics: the science of time. It's one of those things you need to think about when in another state of mind, because thinking about time whilst sober will literally give you a headache. One life time is only about 100 years, if that. 100 years in the scheme of things is such an insignificant amount of time, but we savor it like none other. I guess this brings up the whole, "What is the point of life?" discussion, but I won't go into that tonight. It's just weird to think about how 100 years goes and comes so quickly in terms of time, but for us, it's our forever.

But then there are others, whose legacies live forever. Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Adolf Hitler, Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy... the names that will live on for years to come - or will they? Are there people before them who we have forgotten about? Who got left out of the newer editions of textbooks? Will they get forgotten about sometime soon too? In what year will I stop being remembered; when will my latest successors stop talking about me and just refer to me as "great-great grandmother"?

And then there are the next four years of your life. And then there's the rest of this night (to do homework or not?). There's tomorrow, and this week. This month, and this year. There's right now. There's a moment ago, when I wrote that "there's right now."

Nobody should ever invent a time machine -- it would ruin life as we know it.