What Do You Mean; To Be Human

     It all starts with babies and mothers. One force of will produces by the result of action, effort, or work another separate individual who will have a different force of will by some point. In the beginning, there's a lot of cooperation, as much of what happens during pregnancy happens with almost no conscious effort, on both parts. After birth, Wills part slightly, just a little, and what each individual wants shifts just slightly away from each other, but still mostly coincides with one another. Babies want to be happy and feel good, and to experience and grow. Mothers want their babies to grow and learn, and to be happy and healthy. Success in the task of life is what we all generally aim towards.      As we grow up, we start to develop our own ideas of what we want, and about what the world is like versus what we want the world to be. As we grow stronger and smarter, we start experimenting with what we can get away with, how much we can influence ...

     Living with low level, high-functioning autism, asperger's, is kind of an interesting experience to consider. It's such a mild condition in my case that it's usually mostly negligible. I do have some days when i feel especially 'aspy,' when socializing takes an especially high level of patience and effort at cognition and comprehension just doesn't come easily. My experience of life reverts to a focus on my physical experience and anything beyond whatever i'm doing by myself is just... extra difficult. It's not easy to explain, especially considering the degree of the human experience that lies beyond language itself.      My mom had four kids before she had me, and now all my siblings are having kids (waaaayyy) before i will, so it goes. Watching those kids grow up is so fascinating and exciting to me, and i view my self  as being fairly childish. As a 21 year-old, i feel like my childhood is so close behind me that i sometimes still forget that...

     With your feet flat on the ground and your head more or less centered atop your shoulders, it's very apparent and obvious which way is up, and which way is down. Put on a space suit and launch yourself out of the atmosphere, and suddenly those concepts become a little more vague, especially the farther you get from the planet you orient yourself from. Up and down become farther and closer, left and right become even more subjective than they are from the surface of the planet from which your distance grows.       Imagine a world where everyone ages in the same progression of Benjamin Button, starting out wrinkled, weathered, and grouchy, and becoming smoother and more energetic as their life passes. In this world, "youth" takes on an entirely different meaning. In a world where those who appear "young" to us are in fact approaching death sooner than their apparent "elders," the appearance of youth would develop connotations of the onset of deat...