An exhausting day

Today has been an excellent laid-back day, celebrating my Mom's birthday with a nice lunch, Harry Potter movie, and excellent dinner. This Harry Potter was pretty good--my favorite of the books, although the dialogue in the movie bugged me. Right now I am very happy and sleepy.

BUT this post was originally supposed to be about yesterday (Thursday), which was an extremely stimulating day for me, mentally and physically. I biked to my friend Clare's house and we rode down to the beach for swimming, talking, and lunch, then biked back. Later that day I walked with Cheolseung to his house and talked more, so all in all some interesting topics were breached.

Clare and I talked a bit about good and evil (a branch from a discussion about spirits and the dead that we had after playing with an ouija board). Lately on iTunes U I have been listening to a lot of really good talks on genocide and non-violence (with a missionary who ran orphanages in Rwanda and one of Ghandi's grandsons), which prove to be excellent reference points. The Rwanda missionary talked a lot about grey areas: a woman soldier who had served the military at the start but switched sides devoted herself to saving people, to the point of dying in the effort. Clare and I talked about the idea of "bad" versus "evil", with the difference being (as close as we could figure) that "bad" referred to action, "evil" to intent. We played a bit with a philosophic scenario I'd heard from somewhere with the idea that the highest "good" was "the greatest good for the greatest number." In this scenario, a train is on a track at full speed, and in front of it are three people, tied to the track. You cannot stop the train, but you can throw a switch so it will change tracks to one that has only one person tied to it. Is it better to be indirectly responsible for the deaths of three or directly responsible for the death of one? What if that one was your mother? Where do friendship and loyalty fit in? Is it "right" to value people we know over those we do not? This applied to genocide and related subjects as well--should we be concerned with people on the other side of the earth? To what extent?

I talked about quite a few things with Cheolseung, from the idea that Western philosophy *struggles* or *fights* for an answer, while Eastern philosophy accepts or *surrenders* to one. The most interesting little nugget was talking about the value of "thank you," or gratitude in general. Being too grateful is as bad as not being grateful enough, which seems odd.

That's a strange place to end this post, so I'll end it with this instead: Happy Birthday Mom!