chance.

Obviously I'm having some trouble keeping this blog up. As I do with papers, and work in general, I decided to put my iTunes on shuffle and wait for inspiration to strike. I like to think that a song will come up randomly, and a line from it will start to make me think. But as the first song came to an end and the next started, I hit "Next," therefore keeping the random chance of it all from even happening.

I'm not sure why I skipped the next song. I guess it was a mixture of things: I had just listened to the song earlier, I wanted a different genre, I wanted a more "artsy" or "indie" song to be the song that inspired me. But reflecting on this moment now, I realize that I kept the uncertainty-which was the purpose of the Shuffle function-at bay. I orchestrated what I had intended to be random. And then I realized that I do this a lot. I imagine situations in my mind; I picture what I would do or say in a given situation, and I control other people and things as well. I'm sure other people do this too, fantasizing about something interesting or lucky or rare happening to them. But by incorporating the sense of randomness into the situations I imagine, I ironically take the sense of chance out of it. Because if the thing I imagine were ever to happen, I'd already have thought about it; perhaps I'd even made it happen.

On the other side of this topic, anything that happens that actually is random is just "something that happened." I don't think that if a certain type of car passes me, it's a chance occurrence. In my mind, it doesn't register as a random act. It's just, "Oh that car passed me."

So it seems to me that I have a very backwards idea of chance. Chance isn't the things that, in the moment, we think of as "so random!" Chance is the things we don't think of and random. Or, more accurately, the things we don't think of at all. Or maybe it's both, but we just forget about the latter.

I don't know if this even makes sense. But hey, it's 2:30 AM, so what are the chances of anything making sense at this time?