I would have titled this post "London Bridge is Falling Down", but that bridge is still fine, as far as I know. (I prefer the Tower Bridge in London to the London Bridge anyways. I personally consider the Tower Bridge to be prettier.)

The bridge I'm referring to is the Internet. What other thing connects people from all over the world better than this does, in our modern age? But lately I've been having trouble with it, because certain sites that I frequent have been misbehaving.

The first of the sites to go down was Tumblr. One day I decided I wanted to do some posting and reblogging, but Tumblr apparently had other ideas. I kept getting errors, and sometimes pages wouldn't even load. Eventually I became frustrated with it and gave up. There was also a time when it was down for maintenance, which was also quite annoying. I know it really can't be helped, but all the same, I want to blog while I still can. (Summer vacation is nearly over, and who knows how much free time I'll have when the school year gets under way.)

DeviantArt was next to go down with errors. And I made some mistakes of my own on the site. There's a badge that you can give people called a Llama badge. It started out at the beginning of April. There are now a lot of people who give and receive llamas, myself included. The problem is, I have a tendency to act before I think, so sometimes I give a llama before reading a person's journal. I've already messed up by giving llamas to two people who didn't want to receive llamas. I wonder why I didn't learn from my mistakes the first time. I would think that after messing up many times I would learn to be careful, but it never seems to happen.

Well, anyhow, the third site that had problems was Beauty in Everything, a website with many beautiful photos (the photos come from Flickr users). I was trying to access it so I could perhaps look for some nice pictures. However, the site would not load, even when I came back to try again later on. It seems to be back up today, though, and I'm glad. I guess I've gotten attached to things all over again, even though I've been trying not to. But maybe it's something a person can't help doing.

Imagine, though, if the Internet really broke down, if all the sites crashed and no one could get on the web anymore. I figure it would really cause panic all over the place. People have become so reliant on the Internet, and it's become a part of life...I wonder if people would ever be able to adjust to not having Internet, like in the days before it was invented. (Then again, there are also many people who don't use the Internet, which can be bad in some ways, although at the same time I figure if I had never gotten onto the Internet, I wouldn't have wasted so much of my youth.)

Labels: adjust, attached, badge, beauty in everything, bridge, deviantart, error, internet, learning, llama, meltdown, mistakes, photography, problem, tumblr, waste, website, what if

Sometimes I feel like that, and other times I feel like quite the opposite. There are times that I have the feeling of being on top of the world, like I can overcome anything, and that life is easy. But there are times as well where I feel as if there is so much out there and I am just one person, too insignificant to matter.

I mentioned in a previous post (unfortunately, I can't remember which one it was, so unless you're really bored, don't bother searching for it) that I live in a place where many people are fairly affluent. One time, my language arts teacher (who says she is poor, but I suppose it can't be so bad she must live off of freebies) asked how many of us think about the price of things when we buy them. I didn't mind when I was younger, but over time I started to care about it, and nowadays I don't really buy much for myself (except for a Galileo thermometer, but that's a different story). A lot of people said they just asked their parents to buy something and didn't really worry about how much it cost. I had heard that my town prides itself on having an average income that is quite high, or something along those lines. (Note: That doesn't mean everyone owns a private jet or a beach house in a foreign country, though)

I started to wonder, "Would us kids be able to survive out in the real world?" Well, my parents' friend's son was a student at both UC Berkeley and Harvard, and he said, "The experience you get at the schools is different. At UC Berkeley you're more left to your own devices, but at Harvard you'll be helped along." Basically, even the different colleges may encourage a different level of independence. I have been wondering whether people living a sheltered, privileged life will really be okay when they get out there into the rest of the world. (Well, unless they always live in the same place, or move to a similar place) I mean, there are 6.8 billion people in the world and counting, so there will definitely be a lot of competition - for example, people will fight for jobs, as jobs are not created fast enough to make up for the growing population and the bad economy.

And really, the world is filled with hardships. I don't think everyone can be so lucky to never experience them. Some of my troubles are physical, like when I catch a cold, or sprain my ankle, but most of them are mental. I've always wondered what it would be like if I had a different life. Like if I had siblings...Being an only child, I don't really learn to share or to take care of someone else. In fact, I don't really do chores besides putting my clothes away when they have been washed.

Today, I visited a bridge in my town. It's not a bridge over water, it's simply a bridge over a highway. I think it looks very nice at nighttime, though I didn't visit it at night. I walked there with my dad in the afternoon. There were several people on the bridge. No cars are allowed on it - only people on foot and people on bicycles. The bridge is practically on the border of my town and a neighboring town, so if you cross the bridge, you'll be in a different city. But you'll be in the same school district. There is a high school right next to the other end of the bridge. I would like to be able to go that high school. (The high school I will probably be going to is a very highly ranked one in academic terms, though, and the high school next to the bridge is...not so much) It would be so charming, living next to the bridge and walking across it to go to school. Quite picturesque. Some people would be bothered by the highway noise, but I don't think it would be too much of a problem for me (as long as there aren't too many police chases and ambulances at nighttime).

I wonder what I ought to do. Should I accept my fate, because destiny cannot be altered? Or should I fight against it, fight to change it, and make a life for myself? Is it better to be the blade of grass, which bends but doesn't break, or like bamboo, which prefers to break than bend? Is it better to go with the flow or to make ripples in the water? I wonder about that.

Oh, before I end this post, I would like to explain why I was thinking of fish in the beginning of the post. It was because of something I saw in the December edition of Reader's Digest. There was a complaint someone made to a travel agent. The person said, "No one told us there were fish in the ocean. The children were startled." Wow. I guess there are many different people.

Labels: bamboo, berkeley, bridge, change, college, competition, destiny, feelings, fish, grass, harvard, high school, money, only child, readers digest, spending, survival

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