For the love of penguins

Dear Earth,

What is happening to you? Are you sick? Is it that whole ozone depletion thing that’s throwing all of your systems out of whack? Earthquakes in Haiti, Chili, Mexico, and China; volcano explosions in Iceland. I’m starting to wonder if it’s a mental breakdown you’re having, or a temper tantrum.

Let’s see…natural disaster in North America? Check. South America? Definite check. Europe? Check. Sounds like Africa and Australia are next. Or maybe Antarctica -- watch out, penguins!

So, Earth, what do I need to do to make you all happy again? Recycle more? Stop using aerosol hairspray? (*sigh* Yes, I know that makes the ozone layer mad at me, but my hair has never been happier. You’re saying I have to choose?)

I’ll do what I can to be nice to you. I do appreciate you, I promise. I much prefer living here over, say, living on the moon. Or Mercury; that whole hot/cold thing would wreak havoc on my Earth-based carbon life form.

Happy birthday Earth! I didn’t get you a present, so I hope you accept this letter as a somewhat decent substitute.

Sincerely,
Amanda

PS: Penguins really are cute. Please don’t earthquake Antarctica.

You picked what you picked, and you can't go back and change now, so shut up and live with it

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, 1915

The ones who create civilization

The romantic hero is invariably one who is going through the adolescent phase of human life. The child phase…is the time of complete dependence on others to create our identity and our worldview. Little children gladly accept even the strangest stories that others tell them, because they lack either the context or the confidence to doubt. They go along because they don’t know how to be alone, either physically or intellectually.

Gradually, however, this dependency breaks down—and children catch the first glimmers of a world that is different from the one they thought they lived in, they break away the last vestiges of adult control themselves, much as a baby bird breaks free of the last fragments of the egg. The romantic hero is unconnected. He belongs to no community; he is wandering from place to place, doing good (as he sees it), but then moving on. This is the life of the adolescent, full of passion, intensity, magic, and infinite possibilities; but lacking responsibility, rarely expecting to have to stay and bear the consequences of error. Everything is played at twice the speed and twice the volume in the adolescent—the romantic—life….Who but the adolescent is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger?...

Only when loneliness becomes unbearable do adolescents root themselves, or try to root themselves. It may or may not be in the community of their childhood, and it may or may not be their childhood identity and connections that they resume upon entering adulthood. And, in fact, many fail at adulthood and constantly reach backward for the freedom and passion of adolescence. But those who achieve it are the ones who create civilization.

Orson Scott Card
Greensboro, North Carolina
29 March 1991
Introduction, Speaker for the Dead (excerpt)