Since my previous entry, I've started three blogs that I couldn't finish. Mostly out of anger, or despondency, or perhaps both. I'm a bad person, yes, I know. So here's a story about my precocious daughter, because while it may not be incisive political commentary or helpful law school advice, right this moment I could use the psychological boost that comes with actually finishing something I've started. d^_^b

So apparently my daughter is a budding philosopher. I tend to encourage this kind of antisocial behavior. Once, while we were riding Utah's TRAX, she asked me why people couldn't come on the train if they didn't have shirts or shoes. I told her it was to keep poor people off the train so that the city could maintain its wholesome, prosperous image. This was perhaps unnecessarily cynical, to say nothing of the psychic damage it doubtless caused my child's developing brain. But it was entertaining to watch people's reactions, and it gave my daughter something to think about.

Anyhow, the other day she asked me what would happen if there were no colors. The following conversation ensued:

"If there were no colors, everything would be black."

She grins, mischievously. She thinks she's caught me. "But black is a color!"

"You are a clever girl, but in fact black is the absence of color. Black means no color." This was perhaps unfair of me, but I didn't think she'd appreciate a conversation about oculo-neurological interpretations of electromagnetic radiation. Maybe next time.

"Oh. What if there was nothing, forever?"

"Then it would be black, forever."

"Is outer space made of nothing?" She remembers this tidbit from a previous conversation.

"Outer space is the nothing between somethings, like other stars and other planets."

"Are aliens real on other planets?"

"Probably."

"Can we go to other planets?"

"Maybe someday. We can go to the moon. But we don't have the technology to travel to other solar systems because they are very, very far away."

"How can we make spaceships to go to see the aliens?"

"Well, if we study a lot of math and science, maybe someday we'll figure out how to make spaceships to go to other planets where aliens live."

"Oh." This gives her pause. She makes a decision: "Then I will put stickers on the spaceships."

So, all you astrophysicists, get cracking! My daughter wants to slap die-cut vinyl decals on your interstellar gene-pods.

Okay, so that conversation took a surreal turn at the end. But I was very impressed with my five-year-old's thought experiment on the complete absence of color. Her philosophical predilections will doubtless prove less amusing when, some distance into adolescence, she inevitably adopts the solipsism of youth, but... one bridge at a time. d^_^b