I was thinking today. Maybe it's all the sugar. I've had at least ten candy canes, two cups of vanilla coffee, and some skittles. Wooo! Anyway, I've been playing with these two bouncy balls for the last two hours, and thinking about life. I told my boyfriend about all the things I think about at the same time, and he looked at me like, "Okay" but I thought some of the ones I thought were interesting.

Actually, the whole thing started when I was going to go downstairs and get a light bulb so I could read in my room without having the overhead light on. But I forgot about that for a long time. My mind just wandered all over the place. Have you ever had that? Where you think about one thing, but then whish bang, it's just gone again?

Yeah. That happens to me a lot. It's a good reason why I am always asking myself at college, is there something I was supposed to do? And I'm always doing my homework a week early. I think my roommate thinks I'm weird. That might also be because I always go to bed at midnight, and she wouldn't go to bed before two if she was sick unto death.

Anyway, back to the part where I started playing with the bouncing balls. I'm in beginning physics in college, and we're doing some experiments now with different kinds of motion. For a lot of our labs we use balls to see the effects of acceleration and such. Very trivial stuff.

So, I was bouncing my ball down the stairs and thinking about how it was affected by gravity and all the other little forces on it. I confused myself a couple times, because when you drop a ball down the stairs the bounce increases, unlike when you just drop it normally. I'm not sure why it does that. I think it might be because of the increased velocity caused by a greater change in position. Don't know.

Then I was thinking about how the ball goes a lot further and faster if it hits the side of the stair instead of the top of the stair. I wasn't exactly sure why it did that either. Then I thought maybe it was because when it was pushing on the top of the stair, it was fighting gravity, so the motion in the upwards direction was less than when it was pushed to the side, where it didn't have to fight to move. I'm still not sure about that.

I noticed, though, that my stairs were not a good environment for study, because the middle parts, where it hit on the top, were hollow, so they absorbed a lot of the energy, while the sides were thicker, where they were nailed to the other board, so less energy was absorbed. So, that might have been part of the reason why it bounced so much further that way. Again, I don't know.

So, while I was sitting doing this, I suddenly realized that I was doing physics. I hadn't really thought about that before. So then I sat on the stairs for a while and thought about some of the other physics problems that I am always thinking about.

Now, I don't know a lot about physics, so I usually think about the things that I have read. Like, in this book about superstrings(which I don't actually know anything about, I didn't get that far in the book) it talked about how they were trying to figure out if light was a particle or a wave(before they decided it was both kind of I guess, I don't really know) and the whole experiment with the slits. Then it talked about how even if you shot a photon of light at the screen it would still make waves if there were two slits, and not if there was only one.

So I was wondering, how do you get a photon of light? How do you know when you have only one particle? And I didn't think that light traveled in just little particles. I always thought of light as sort of a big mass spreading outward. Like, the energy from the lightbulb is a lot of light, and then it goes on and becomes less light, and less, until there is mostly darkness because the light has gotten so small you can't see it.

And light isn't solid, so I always kind of thought of it as being pulled into the universe by, I don't know, osmosis like. Osmosis for light. The places where there isn't any light pull the light like water is pulled by the lack of water. Although, somebody told me once that light moves because of interactions between the two waves, the electric and the magnetic. I don't know anything about that. I still don't know how you can get just one particle of light though when it's not a solid thing.

So then I was thinking about how I don't know very much about physics at all. This always makes me worry, because I'm majoring in physics, and it seems to me that all the people who were really good at it knew all about it by the time they were my age. I worry a lot that I'm not learning it right, and that I won't be able to do all the things I want to do because I don't really understand it properly.

And I thought about if I was doing the right thing with my life. I wanted to be a teacher for a long time. Mostly because I love learning.

In school, everyone always hated going to classes, and I never understood that. I thought it was great. You get all these questions, looking at things, and then you can go into school and they teach you all the answers! It's great. It's like having God right there to tell you why everything works. Of course, the teacher's didn't know everything but I figured some stuff out on my own, and it was fun to think about all the stuff that nobody knew the answers to, even if I didn't always understand them.

My favorite thing which made me think I wanted to be a teacher was always when I was with my sister. She asked me so many questions when I was little, and I always made up the answers, because I liked that she thought I was smart. Of course, this got her into a little trouble in school, when the teachers taught her that I was wrong a lot.

Recently though, I started to actually know the answers. When I was in high school, she always asked me to help her with her homework. It's so fun to sit there, and watch when people start to understand the things you know! And very, very frustrating when they don't understand, and you have to sit there, and know they feel dumb, and not be able to do anything. But even with that, I liked teaching my sister.

One time, I wasn't even trying to teach her. We were just sitting on my bed and talking. My sister and I do that a lot, because we are very good friends. And she was asking me the hard questions, like, why are we here, and how did everything begin? So, I was telling her all about the ideas of protobionts and life coming from a big chemical soup, and how they made proteins form by using electricity. I love that kind of stuff, and if I didn't hate all the memorization, I might have become a biology or a chemistry major because of that.

And the best part of that conversation was when she looked at me and said, "It's weird. They teach us that stuff in school, but when you talk about it, it actually sounds interesting!". And then I was happy! Because maybe she saw just a little what I saw when I went to school.

But I stopped wanting to become a teacher because so many of my teachers were unhappy. They told me that they didn't get paid enough, and that they didn't get proper health insurance, and they were always changing the curriculum. All of them seemed to hate the Board of Education for one reason or another, and told us stories about how funding got dropped for different programs, and how hard it was to get any new ideas to work. So I was discouraged.

Then I thought maybe I would become a college professor, because maybe there wouldn't be so much trouble then. College professors make a lot of money, and they can make a lot more happen, because they work at colleges. Now I don't know about that either.

Too much college professors seem to be people who couldn't get enough funding for their ideas to do real jobs, or who had gotten a lot of education but had absolutely no use for it. I didn't want people to think that I became a teacher just because I couldn't do anything else.

How do people decide what they want to do with their lives? I worry about that every day. When I was in high school, I thought everyone knew what they were doing, because they all seemed to know what they were going to major in, and what college they were going to, and had their entire life planned out. I only decided to be a physics major out of a weird twist of fate, and my college... Random for the most part, hoping to be lucky. I was lucky too. I love my college, even if the weather is horrible and we are surrounded by incredible large masses of brick.

What happens to people who don't know what they want to do with their lives? I've been lucky so far. Everyone seems to think I'll do well. But what will I do later, once I've gone down the pretty path and run out of room? When I finally have to jump into the absolute unknown and hope that there is something there to catch me? I worry about that a lot.

Then after that I got scared by my sister because she opened the door to the stairway. She didn't know I was sitting there thinking. That was funny. And then we played on the computer, and I thought about that, until I was bored.

After that I decided to write this, because I thought maybe other people would be interested in some of the things I was thinking about. I wondered if other people thought about the same things. And because I was in the middle of a sugar rush, I actually got on my computer and wrote this, even though I'm usually very self-conscious about telling people what I think about.

Good old glucose. It does a body good.