Wandering Wheels - 19 January 1991

Sucking all the marrow out of life. Carpe Diem. These are sayings and terms that I've truly come to appreciate on this trip, maybe because I'm trying to live by them every day. Today brought a lot of things together. The first thing we did today (after I woke up feeling sick and almost puked and then ate a delicious Belgian waffles breakfast) was go to the Institute for Creation Research, a facility dedicated to evidence (scientific) for creation. I really wish I could have spent hours in there talking and learning about what they believe. I noticed some faulty logic in their thinking (such as belief in creation is the foundation for everything) but a lot of what they said made a lot of sense.

The most interesting thing about it, though, didn't occur at the center. It occurred at our next stop, the San Diego Zoo. The experience fit so well into the morning's session and really helped to illustrate a lot of different points (Break: before the zoo we stopped for lunch and Team Bias, minus Ed and Randy, went to Little Ceasar's and had a hilarious time badgering the waitress and being called Marines and being told you need a local driver's license to use travelers checks!). The Zoo was kind of a disappointment; again, it was because of bad expectations on my part. But the interesting thing was seeing all the different species of animals and discovering how neither evolution nor creationism adequately (in my opinion, limited though it may be) explain them all.

Probably the best parts of the zoo were petting the elephant and walking through the Rainforest Aviary. Looking for all the different birds and having them sit three feet from you was incredible. It, like most of this trip, made me painfully aware of the environment and what we are doing to it. And that experience of the aviary in the zoo led right into the final experience of the day. After a delicious Godfather's Pizza dinner, I went to see Awakenings starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. Talk about a powerful movie. But it was very subtle in its power, something you really didn't notice until about five minutes after the movie was over. Its message fit right into the rest of the trip: take the time to appreciate the little things in life and don't take anything for granted, for one day you could not have those things. Like I wanted to do on this whole trip, we need to absorb everything and I intend to keep on doing that, 'cause someday this trip will be over and I want to have experienced all I can. Lord, make me a sponge! Æ

Tunes: U2 - don't take your guns to town