seriously

The review session went fine, was actually sort of fun.

I'm now on the Union patio, writing this, about to walk home. Then I think I'm going to run a few miles, eat some dinner, and then head out to finish up my conference paper. Quite. A. Night.

Have you ever had this experience: you look back on some of your past actions and see them in an entirely different light? It's as if now you see why you really did those things, though you wouldn't have thought that at the time?

Some people walk around with this vapid look--they're smiling, their eyes are even sort of bright, they've got a bounce to their step--but there's something dead about them, too. Like there's no intelligence animating their being. Like you just feel that they couldn't possibly take things that seriously, or even know what about life one would even begin to take seriously.

I'm being too hard on these people, and I'm sort of joking.

It does raise a question for me, though, of how seriously people should take life. I've always thought it's important to have a sense of humor (something I got from my dad), but I do think it's important to take the world seriously, too--to recognize that there are real problems in the world that keep people from living fulfilling lives or even from just surviving at some kind of minimal level. I sense that many (many) people don't take the world seriously in this way, at least not seriously enough to want to do anything about it.

But then again, while I want to do something about it in an abstract, academic, educational sort of way, what service have I done lately?

Right.