for God and party

I've been having a cheap philosophical thought lately. Some people complain about everything that's wrong in the world, and say that God cannot be both omnipotent and loving if he allows such pain and suffering to exist. Now, I personally can't see God either as a bearded guy sitting somewhere above us, or as a formless entity in basically the same situation, separate from creation. In my personal abstraction of the unknowable truth, creator and creation are the same thing, and we're all part of the divine. (This evolved for me from believing in souls but not in God, to believing that other people had a god but I didn't, to believing that we're all just seeing the same thing differently. It's possible that I'm being stubborn because I know it upset my mom that I didn't believe in God, despite how much she'd always encouraged Justin and I to find our own beliefs.) Obviously by ourselves we're not all knowing and all powerful, but we might be tiny parts of something bigger. A (poor, probably) metaphor of this is that we're all neurons in the brain of God. If free will does exist, then we all have the choice to be loving or hateful, to follow our hearts or not, to work with each other or against each other. So out of our own choices we're either creating a loving God who really does have a plan for everything, or a God who is psychotic and hurtful. We might not see how our actions and our energy affect the world as a whole, but I think they do.

The party last night was a lot of fun, although I eventually left because it became too loud for me to function there. I had fun with the school-girl getup (hmm, must remove the electric blue nail polish tomorrow), and learned that the star-shaped hairclips that I loved so much late in high school are now dorky enough that people laugh out loud when they see them X-) Three different people asked me about my boyfriend/ex-boyfriend, which was interesting because no one seemed to care to hear too much about him before.

I'm starting to think that I've got some real friends out here, not just people who are letting me hang out with them on a trial basis :D It's so weird not being an automatic outsider any more, and not having to really search to find my niche of friends. I meet people, and we get along. Am I blending with the normal people, or is it that no one pursuing a Ph.D. is normal?

Did get stuff done today, must get much more done tomorrow... I want to try to find some rocks in a natural environment so I can better understand the ones I encounter in the city, but it looks like tomorrow will be rainy. Maybe I can squeeze it in somehow before I go home. Must do rotation presentation, exam, Draconic secret santa, and many other little things first. And now I'm getting emails with stuff assigned to me for my classes for next quarter, gah. I already have a presentation date assigned in a course that I was planning on dropping. I'm starting to think that I'll keep it- A) I have to take it anyway, and may as well take it while I don't know what electives I'll want to take, and B) my workload is light enough right now (since I finished the NSF app a month ago) that I'm having trouble taking it completely seriously, so being a little busier next quarter could help give me that kick into feeling like a real grad student.

And just so you know, because I work in a high-tech bioinformatics lab, I get an automatic pencil sharpener (click to zoom in and read it for yourself):