A personal note on the speed of light...

Ok, so it turns out that light travels really, really fast. I mean, so fast that you can talk on the phone with someone halfway across the world and not miss a beat. Or play them in an online video game.

Yes, thanks to the speed of light, and how really, really fast it is, I will never amount to much of anything. Instead of winning the nobel prize in literature or the fields medal in mathematics, I will have a 1,011-456 record in Madden Football on Playstation2 to show for my life.

See, when I'm by myself, video games don't hold my attention span for very long. But when I'm playing against someone else, then the obssessive, competitive nature comes out. And I become like an addict who needs a fix, who needs more than anything to never stop. So I don't.

I just got this modem for my playstation that lets you play online through the cable internet on Sunday. Do you know how many hours I've already played? Let's just say a lot. Like 'Bush sitting quietly in a mini-chair among a bunch of elementary school kids instead of actually getting up and making some sort of decision about the fact that two planes just flew into the world trade centers'- kind of time. Slow motion time. The rest of the world seems to warp around me at my playstation.

Needless to say I blame all this on the speed of light. I mean, I'm in Happy Valley for goodness sakes. How many people would I be able to play video games with without this whole internet thingy? And the internet and it's ability to globalize is a direct result of the fact that light (or more properly electro-magnetism) moves really, really fast.

Welcome to the future. Or what's left of it.