I just find myself saying, \"No, there\'s not a place for everyone in the world. You can\'t expect to find a fit. You can\'t just follow some lark because you\'re not satisfied with where you are now. Why should the world be so ideal?\"

Is this a mismatch in opportunities? Clearly my company can find another programmer, a happy code-monkey (sorry Derek, Scott, et al, etc) who\'s interested in bizarre little tidbits of applying code to things (but how? how can you be interested in that?), but can I really find someone who is interested in someone who ... WHAT? WHAT IS IT THAT I DO??

I\'ll tell you what I do. This. I do this. Which is why I keep coming back with the answer, \"No, it\'s not possible. Tough luck. Find a job that people don\'t care about you being interested in. Or at least some good-natured half-scam where people throw money at you willingly but for no particularly good reason.\"

So, I guess I\'ll write another book then. It will be called, So, I Guess.

I have to say that I agree that parents shouldn\'t be allowed to let their children die because of religious beliefs, especially when the child is too young to break away from those beliefs. But it also makes me very uncomfortable to think that we would force upon someone a cure which is more painful than the disease. I think they\'re doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Which means that they\'re not going to change their minds when you ask them not to do it for the right reason (See: Canada). Can we really say that the United States of America doesn\'t torture?

I find modern society to be unnaturally obsessed with living. It\'s a strange thing to say, but I think it\'s entirely valid. Why can\'t we accept death? I\'m not asking anyone to accept their own death, I\'m asking them to accept other people\'s deaths, when those people are willing to die. It seems like when push comes to shove people know when they want to die, but it\'s those around them that can\'t handle it. We coerce, bully, or in some cases, physically force people to remain alive, even when the alternative is worse than death. It actually sickens me.

I admit that the question is more difficult when someone doesn\'t get to make an informed decision because religion is clouding their judgment. But I\'m also struck by the fact that in this country, religion is often given the privilege of allowing you to opt out of things. It\'s ridiculous that you can avoid doing certain things because of a nonsense reason like religion, but you can\'t avoid it because you actually learned something that made you think twice.

In some cases, children have been forced into taking vaccines, some of which are just as likely to kill you as the nearly extinct diseases that they are vaccinating you against. Death in either case is very unlikely, but if it is, then why are we so obsessed with doing it one way instead of the other? (It\'s not because the disease will become common again, modern health care prevents this, not to mention the fact that \"immunizations\" stop pretty far from granting you immunity, with effectiveness sometimes 50% or below.) Never mind the other possible effects, because we arrogantly decree that if a medication hasn\'t been proven to harm you, it must not be harmful. Why should a medication be innocent until proven guilty?

But the main point is this; you can pick and choose your vaccinations only if you claim that they interfere with your religion. So, it\'s certainly conceivable for someone to claim religious exemption as a last resort, if not in some case we know about, then maybe in some others that we don\'t. How can we have freedom of religion if you have to claim to be religious in order to be more free? What does freedom of religion ever do nowadays other than allow people to break the law - again, for the wrong reason, when those who have a better reason aren\'t allowed?

Might as well connect you to the place where I\'m actually logging updates: http://twitter.com/toddcesere.

Crap, I need to fix the bug with the slashes, those are kind of annoying.

There was no calling card left behind. Then again, there were no experts to consult, and no news to watch, which were usually the two things (most likely combined) which would tip you off as to why a bunch of buildings had fallen down and a lot things like bridges and furniture had been tipped sideways.

All I could tell was that some disaster had happened, and it didn\'t look like any I\'d seen or heard of before. Earthquakes usually tipped things over, but I don\'t recall them scattering large electric signs and trucks and cars around miles from where they had been before. If it were a large bomb, it should have had a ground zero. A hurricane maybe? Do hurricanes blow over large brick buildings and leave the trees largely untouched? No, but tornadoes do, don\'t they? But do tornadoes happen everywhere at once?

As I walked down the neighborhood street in a daze, towards the main road, as though in a dream, I began to mull over choices that made less and less sense. Flooding...but there\'s no water anywhere. Hail and blizzards leave behind hail and snow. Nuclear bombs destroy everything much more thoroughly.

Perhaps, I reasoned as I saw something three stories tall slide into view and then out of view faster than I could identify it, somebody invented a new kind of bomb, or some other new kind of weapon? I made my way around a barely damaged upside-down car, and looked back at my house. I knew I\'d walked out the attic window, but I don\'t recall being in the attic just before things went wrong, and I don\'t remember scrambling through upside-down stairways to get into my attic. I can\'t remember anything from the previous day at all. I can remember plenty of things in recent weeks, but I can\'t identify any memories as being the last ones before this.

In front of me there was a flower garden. All of the flowers were laid out on the road, roughly in the same patches they\'d been in when they were still rooted in the ground. I avoided stepping on them for good measure.

As I approached the intersection, a widening curtain opened up chaos to me. My first reaction was that I was in a very large pinball game which had tilted. Almost everything seemed intact, but there were debris from many things that clearly weren\'t intact, but it wasn\'t clear exactly where they had come from. I noticed that one of the intact things was actually a three story building which was now facing backwards. I couldn\'t make out any breaking point where the building had separated from its foundation - perhaps the foundation had also rotated?

There were people entering and leaving a building that used to be a theater. Thinking that they should be able to give me some information on what sort of thing might have gone on the night before, or maybe even what kind of thing was going on right now, I decided to follow them in.

What I entered was the side door, I couldn\'t figure out where the front might have been. When I entered, I was taken aback by the sheer number of people. They were everywhere, standing or climbing up and down a staircase, going this way and that across the ground floor, seemingly engaged in a giant crime where the victim was hidden away in the crowd.

They didn\'t seem to know there was anything wrong, but were never-the-less raiding some store of food in the same way that you would if something had gone wrong and destroyed all your food. It seemed as though they\'d been doing this for ages, and indeed, as I awkwardly engaged a few of them in conversation, it seemed that they believed they had. They would only talk fleetingly about any disaster, and the consensus seemed to be alien invasion. If I\'d found an alien mixed in somewhere, perhaps they would have been able to help me come to a better understanding.

I was prepared to believe that everyone was insane, because this made more sense than alien invasion. I also concluded that their insanity was likely the cause of the destruction. They must have gotten together with a bunch of trucks and cranes and power tools and simply torn everything apart. I decided I\'d at least follow suit in one respect, which was to make away with some of my own stolen food. Except I wasn\'t sure where to take it.

When I emerged from the building again, I noticed that everything that wasn\'t bolted to the ground was sliding down the street towards me. I re-entered the building, and decided to reconsider the alien hypothesis. I didn\'t know of any earthly disaster where large objects like buses retained momentum for several hours afterwards without wind, water, or fire to propel them. Maybe it was a gigantic magnetic field.

I talked a bit more, and I began to understand part of the problem. There were no working televisions or radios. No cars were working, so no one was driving around in and out of town. There was no communication with anyone who had come further than walking distance. There was no consensus on how long ago something had happened, so you couldn\'t determine how far walking distance actually was. Half of the people couldn\'t remember how they got where they were, and even less of them could tell you what things looked like when they left where they were before. It was impossible to know, at least for me, whether this disaster covered a two mile radius, or the entire world, and it was nearly impossible to find anyone who thought they knew, and at the same time seemed sane. Maybe knowledge of the situation actually caused insanity.

I couldn\'t see anyone I knew anywhere, although this was just down the street from my house. As I was thinking this over, it occurred to me that my house or my street might not be where it was when I went to bed last night...or last week, or last year?