Martin just SMSed that someone just committed suicide by throwing himself onto the train tracks. The train going in the opposite direction hit him, not M's train, but he was still freaked out and who can blame him? That happens more often than you'd think; M has seen it before; he told me once that "you don't even have a person anymore" if they choose a sneltrein or Intercity (fast trains, 150 km/hr, which don't stop at every station). Ugh. And not just the train, either - Linde was in Amsterdam back in October and she was standing at a station and saw someone throw himself in front of a bus.

Everyone asks, "What could bring you to the point of not wanting to exist anymore?" They say, "Things always get better." And I'm probably one of the least suicidal people I know, but still, if you think about it, it's understandable. Why are we here, anyway? We're really just animals, highly evolved apes. Sure, we have higher brain function and consciousness of our own existence, but we're all going to die anyway. And what is the point of our lives? [More on this in a second.] You work your whole life trying to earn money and have a good house and a good job and all those things, but then after eighty years, longer if you're lucky, you die anyway. So why not just skip the whole rest of your life, if it holds no joy and no one and nothing you care about? You could sort of look at death as the 'next phase' of the life cycle - nobody knows what comes next, but we all get there eventually, every single one of us, so if this world holds nothing for you anymore, why not just move on? I can definitely see how some people could start to think that way, and along the same lines, I also understand why intelligent people have a far higher suicide rate than those of average or low intelligence.

Just to clarify: these are not my own personal thoughts. I love life far too much to ever do something like that. But to truly think about and understand how someone could get to the point of suicide, I think you have to see it from a point of view where it all starts to make a weird kind of sense.

However, my theory on the meaning/point of life: all beings are born with an innate desire to stay alive (probably so we'll procreate and carry on the genetic line) which manifests itself in the form of a fear of death; almost all of us are at least a little afraid to die. And you never see rabbits or dogs or fish committing suicide, or hanging out with predators. But we have a higher consciousness than any other animal has ever had, so we have the ability to question that built-in stay-alive mechanism - something that was never meant to be questioned. Nature is shooting itself in the foot.

That's my philosophy for the day.

Moving away from the cheerful stuff ;) ...I just went and met Pauline and Anna at Broers (café in the centrum where a lot of students go) and we sat there for a couple of hours and talked and ate (Greek salad and spekkoek with banana ice cream, LEKKER!!!) and caught up. Pauline was my first Dutch teacher (I mean besides you, Linde, haha) and Anna is another Dutch student who studied in Florida at the same time as P. I hadn't seen either of them since December and had really missed them, especially P. That whole philosophical view on suicide that I just wrote is probably a direct product of hanging out with her; she's another of those scary-smart people. I know I go to university and that my friends aren't exactly stupid, far from it, but once in a while I miss the Stanton IB community, where all of us were capable of that kind of thinking. It makes such a difference. I can see it in my sister, and I miss it. Pauline is one of the few people who challenges me to think, even when she's not being a teacher, so it's doubly nice to hang out with her.

Oh, and she has a friend, a gay guy, who's also going to Tenerife (with his boyfriend) on Friday on a very early plane. What are the odds? I'm sure it's the same one. They were both short names beginning with H... I'll keep my ears open.

Only 29 hours left to go!