nothing is something

random thoughts seem to be making a habit of passing by as i'm drying my hair nowadays. by huge leaps in logic that can be described more as a flight of ideas rather than brainstorming, a question was posed. what happens to blogs and webpages when the author/webmaster dies? in particular, what'll happen to my blog and my domain when i pass away?

besides the obvious answer of having no further updates, i couldn't really tell. it's much more clear-cut if one's talking about company websites. the layout may change and so may the links, but ultimately.. so long as the company or organization exists, there will be someone who's job is to manage their website. it only gets tricky when i started wondering about the fates of personal blogs and homepages. does one leave the story of their life on some server located in some part of the world only until the service provider decides to allocate this space to someone else after a certain time period, maybe a paying customer? is one able to dictate in one's will: keep renewing domain registration indefinitely? will the site eventually get hacked, as selfish greedy kick-seeking thieves are wont to do when they see potential areas of security vulnerability? will one truly be left with nothing as one departs from this world? would you ensure that your legacy lives on or would you just let things be - so be it if the page dissapates into thin air? *poof* what does one doooooooo?

speaking of leaving with nothing.. i used to agree when people comment that all of us arrive with nothing as we enter this world and that all of us leave with nothing as we depart. now i disagree. in days of yore, i would have agreed if you had squeezed the word "tangible" in there so it reads that we arrive/leave with nothing tangible but now, i don't even agree with that technicality. after all, we do arrive with functional body parts. for those less fortunate, they still arrive with body parts albeit a tad dysfunctional. doesn't that count as something? in terms of the intangible, we arrive with the capacity to learn, to love, to play, to see, blahblahblah... you get the picture. we also arrive, already owning/belonging to a family irrespective of what that family structure may be. my family, one may call it. my suggests ownership, no? and leaving...! so many many things we leave with! peace, pain, hope, dreams, experiences, regrets.... you name it, someone's prolly taken it with them as they passed away. and of course, don't be silly. of course you can take it all with you!

and with the execution of another leap of ideas that would put any ballerina to shame...

i teleport back to the days at sierra canyon. we would've been in 6th grade when californian schools still had 6th grades in elementary schools. (man, i feel ancient.) the class was playing some form of tag with a name that evades me ~ the one where one person is "it" and runs around tagging people as you do when you play tag. when "it" manages to touch a 2nd person, that person needs to join hands with "it" as he/she becomes part of "it" and they go around chasing for a 3rd person to join them. it's only game over when everyone playing has become "it" and joined the huge line of people. anyway, i was one of the few remaining people left. i got cornered with maybe half a foot of space between "it"'s fingertips and a fence. i sucked in my tummy, got on tippy toes and spent the next 10 secs inching across, hence earning my unfortunate nickname of "fat-free amy lee" from mr. garrity for the rest of the year. he was inspired by my health poster on which i had cut out the words "fat free" from some ad and had stuck it at the bottom right corner of the poster, right before where i had signed my name. i digress...

it was after this game, some good half hour later when all of us had become "it" and disbanded, that piper and i were sitting there by the fence "philosophizing" about nothingness. i loved conversations like that and i still do. one of us started the conversation up with:

is nothing nothing or is nothing something?
nothing is nothing because there's nothing!
but nothing is something because it is nothing
yeah, but there's nothing there for you to call something so it's nothing
but if you close your eyes and think of nothing, isn't that something that you're thinking of, even if it's nothing?
well yeah. so i guess nothing is something, but how can nothing be something and still be nothing?
nothing is nothingness and nothi.....

and so it went until we felt our brains twinge with cramp-like jolts of pain.

=)