A Stream of Thoughts that would make Faulkner Jealous

Today seems a good day to ramble about nothing in particular, so I'm going to do that. To start out, I'd like to note that the spacebar on this keyboard is really noisy. Pressing it gives me a feeling analogous to putting my hand on the old rope swing in my backyard--lots of annoying tingles. I think I might endeavor to utilize unnecessarily elongated words, to minimize the sensation. That being said, that rope swing in my yard has lots of positive memories associated with it--it wasn't always such a nasty, spiny thing. I remember when it was brand new, when I looked out the window and realized that my backyard had been taken over by a gigantic playset. My excitement was such that I went outside and spent the whole day swinging. The rope swing was unique in that it could go in any direction, not just back and forth. I see that as a metaphor for thinking; you can think in straight lines or you can think all over the place. Unfortunately, I would like to think in all directions, but the text on the screen can only go one way at a time. I'm trapped by the format. The only solution, from what I can see, is to make my writing as disjointed as possible, in order to escape from linearity. Cats are cool. My dad brought home a catnip mouse for my cat Gandalf yesterday, and he (the cat, not my dad) spent all evening ripping it to pieces. Such devotion, and for no apparent reason. Chemicals, I suppose. But it was really entertaining to watch, and was probably the most fun my cat has had in a while. Sometimes it's fun to just put all your effort into something, illogically and for no reason. It can be a great learning experience. When I got a Lord of the Rings computer game and discovered that one of its features was too demanding and crashed my computer, I set out to fix the problem. I fiddled with every graphics setting my computer possessed, messing with shortcut properties and virtual memory, until finally I reduced my graphics low enough to play the game. It took several hours, and after that evening I never really put much use into the feature I'd enabled, but it gave me a much better sense of how that computer of mine actually works. Computers in general are fun to learn about and understand, but sometimes it seems as if they do completely illogical things just to mess with you. My brothers are like that too. Probably more so, except with a computer you expect it to do just what you tell it to. My brothers, meanwhile, are human beings, and they make human decisions that you can't predict. This is debatable by science--I was reading something about determinism last night, and it's quite thought-provoking. The idea is that, although quantum mechanics only allows you to find the probability that something happens, the probabilities evolve over time according to a precise formula, so you can still extrapolate events as far into the future as you want. No, I don't get it either, but it's fun to read about. Know what else I don't get? Squirrels. For the last five years or so, my dad has been implementing every hare-brained scheme he can think of to try and keep the squirrels off our front-yard birdfeeder. But the little critters thwart him every time and eat all the birdseed. They seem like geniuses. Maybe we could use quantum-mechanical wave functions to predict whether my dad will ever stop the squirrels. Or we could not, and say we did. Actually, those squirrels seem so smart that they could probably figure out quantum mechanics themselves. And if this is the case, then we probably have no hope of keeping them off the birdfeeder, and we're better off putting our energy into something more important. Like configuring computer graphics options, for example. I think it really doesn't matter what random activities you put your time into, as long as they're enjoyable. That should really be the point of life in general. If our fate is to be conquered by scientifically elite squirrels, then we might as well have fun until it happens. Yahoo.