penny for your thoughts

Should I be so lucky to find a penny today, it would be the fourth Wednesday in a row that I came across spare change lying on the ground. The first two times it was a dime, the second time, a nickel and a penny. At first I thought it was odd, finding spare change specifically on a Wednesday, but I think the more I find change, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if I think about finding change, I tend to look for it more, and the more I look for it, the more I actually find. When I told one of my friends about the dimes, he said "Wow, I'll have to hang out with you more." Yeah. And maybe in two and a half months we'll have enough change to go out for smoothies.

Anyway, along the lines of deep thoughts, there's a booth that is set up on our campus every week with a 'question of the week' that students can answer just for fun such as 'who is your hero?' Yesterday the booth was handing out freeze pops and asking 'why do people take themselves so seriously?' (Due to a recent cold snap, I think they'd get more traffic if they handed out hot cider, but that's beside the point.)

I didn't stop at the booth, but it got me thinking. I think people take themselves so seriously because they realize that they have a finite amount of time on the earth, and they feel like they have to accomplish something while they're here. I read some survey this summer that said people's biggest fears weren't heights or public speaking or spiders or anything like that. The biggest fear was dying without having left a mark on the earth, and having no one to remember them. I think that would be enough to make people take themselves too seriously.

In lighter news, it's getting to be my favorite time of the year: fall! There's a million reasons to love it, such as the ones I blogged about last year. But this fall is even more interesting because I got to try my hand at pumpkin carving for the first time. We got pumpkins at a local produce market and carved them in my friend's room. My humble attempts at a jack-o-lantern are documented below.