Florida

If my frail memories of AP US history allow me to recall anything, it is that Georgia was once a penal colony, and that once Florida was taken from Spain it was sort of an extension of the penal colony.
That may not be true. But it's an interesting thought.

Today we went to this African safari thing. I saw lots of elephants and Rhinos (which were literally right outside the car), lions etc., and I got to feed a giraffe. Every time the giraffe went to eat the food, it would encase my hand with its freakishly long blue tongue. It felt like a human tongue. It was weird, and very slobbery.

I have, true to form, not been truly vacationing, as I have homework, and I am reading Descartes. I really think that of all of the philosophers, Descartes was my soul brother. I read this in Discourse on Method and the Meditations and it rang really close to home:

That is why I shal take great care not to accept into my belief anything false.... But this undertaking is arduous, and a certian indolence leads me back imperceptibly into the ordinary course of life. And just as a slave who was enjoying in his sleep an imaginary freedom, fears to be awakened when he begins to suspect that his liberty is only a dream, and conspires with those pleasent illusions to be deceived by them longer, so I fall back of my own accord into my former opinions, and fear to awake from this slumber lest the laborious wakeful hours which would follow tihs peaceful rest, instead of bringing me any light of day into the knowledge of truth, would not be sufficient to disperse the shadows caused by the difficulties which have just been raised.

As modest as Descartes tried to be, he would probably not accept easily that a 17-year-old girl 360-something years later really understood how he felt when he wrote that. But I do. I've faced the abyss that philosophy creates; I faced the posibility of a life of enlightenment being way worse than the life of ignorance.
Shea told me, though, that once you start peeling away at assumption, you can never go back. And she was right. And the life I have found- partially of enlightenment, partially of comfortable old, even if false, assumptions- is manageable. It's lovable. It's surely worth living.

But all of my panic this summer is enclosed in the quote... I stood on the cliff of everything I knew, and I prepared to jump to something I believed more authentic, but I really didn't know if it was there.

There is one aspect I don't agree with Descartes on however. He believes that existence and enlightenment are only guarenteed when one is ratinalizing and thinking. I believe the only times I was truly alive this past summer were the times I stopped thinking, if only for an instant, and lived in the moment.