A usage lesson: My laziness impels me to procrastinate, but my teacher compels me to turn in my work.

Such is the story of my Qur'an paper, which I spent about three or four hours today working on. It's eight pages long with five monstrous paragraphs, and since I've been wondering about paragraphs lately I'm going to turn it in as is. Once I started writing, these wonderfully bloated paragraphs took on a life of their own.

Nothing really went on today, besides the paper writing. Of course, that's never stopped me from blogging before.

It was my birthday today, actually, and tomorrow I'm having an early dinner with Beth to celebrate. Likewise, on Sunday my family will no-doubt take me to the Bonanza Family Steakhouse and embarrass me, an experience I'll idealize or regret later, depending on the outcome. For those unaquainted with Bonanza, I'm going home this weekend for reading period, as it's the last time I'll see home, or my friends at Hamline (who I plan to visit), before May at the earliest.

I have yet to see a moral system that can cope with the issue of lying in human societies.

Back when I was in 6th grade, our church had little pamphlets on white lies, gray ones with puffy white stick figures, unless this was a dream I had. In any case, I read over one of these pamphlets, and it was all about how white lies lead to worse lies and worse things. Which can of course be true, as any sitcom could readily prove.

But it can't be wrong to use white lies all the time, because the people I've met who were totally honest were so vocal about their negative opinions that they came off as jerks. Is it possible to be completely truthful without being pretentious and offensive? I'm just sick of white lies, but then again I think society couldn't handle complete truthfulness without denegrating into name-calling. It just bugs me when I have to use white lies in conversation, really bugs me, but I can't see another way. I wish there was a moral system that could tell me in advance when its going to be ok to use a white lie, and when that white lie will slap me in the face.

I suppose I'm obligated to stick something here about how my birthday was never a big deal. Firstly, I was glad that I escaped any public embarrassment today (last year with my family I was less fortunate and very angry). I guess basically it means something to me, and I don't expect anyone else to care; it's no different, even more me, from any other day of the year. If I was less self-centered, it'd be more important, but since so many of my days revolve around Dan anyways, I hardly need to set one aside.

Still, I'm older, now, numerically-speaking, and its nice to have a milestone that I can celebrate every year without the pomp and circumstance (and in some cases "Pomp and Circumstance") that accompanies the Hallmark holidays. It's a good little day, quite aware of how little it matters in the grand scheme, but observed nonetheless.

I'm completely unprepared for my quiz tomorrow in Math, but I don't care. Still, I need sleep. Later.