I was studying for my Chinese history test today at the library (avoidtion of neighbors--yes, I stole the word avoidtion from The Simpsons)

I stopped at Bone (our student center) on the way back to have a little pizza for dinner. In the room I ate, there's a little ticker, that has ISU news, and other news sometimes. Slowly, painfully, this message was unraveled onto the ticker: "Bush warns nation that Osama Bin Laden's terrorist organization might now be in possesion of nuclear weapons"

I about choked on my pizza. This is just lovely, confirming my stupid paranoia of earlier. I'm still pretty down.

I was thinking about random inane things related to it as I walked home. Like, "I wonder if the post apocolyptic Sci-fi that was so popular during the cold war will start up again" etc.

Then, I know this was corny, but I looked up, and saw the birds flocking as they always do in the fall, on their way south. Black birds, as always, but they would've been black anyway, the dusk held just enough light to form elegant silhouettes of them against the pale blue sky. And I thought, "How beautiful." And I wondered how come there's so much beauty and so much horror both in the same world, as no doubt a million jillion bazillion people have thought before I ever came up with it, but I thought of it anyway. And then I thought of something my dad says, whenever he sees the countless numbers of birds wheeling randomly through the sky, "I wonder how they manage not to hit each other, even though there are so many of them and the flock is so chaotic." And I wished that humans could get along as well as those "lesser" creatures, up there in the sky.

And the flock thinned out, as some of them landed on the now leafless trees, also silhoutted against the sky, but some of them followed me all the way home.

And I wished I was a bird. Birds don't worry about nuclear war, or the apocolypse, or where their souls are going to go. They just fly.