Thanks to Tristen Tristan for the photo.

This photo appeared in the UCLA yearbook.  (And underneath, they misspelled my name.)  Some of these people are not coming back next year!  Aww.

On Friday June 5th, we had the last meeting of the year.  There was pizza!  Pie!  Chips and soda!  You may get the impression from my minutes that we’re all debate, discussion, and gossip, all the time.  Not so.  A lot of the time we just spend hanging out.  And if someone wants to talk about something which is inordinately nerdy or philosophical, we’ll do that too.

Andrew came up to give an impromptu presentation on Alan Watts Buddhism.  Alan Watts used to be a Christian, but he became interested in eastern religions.  Andrew says he’s very entertaining to listen to.  So we started discussing the question: what is a life?  What makes you you, despite your constantly changing nature?  If you died and got resurrected, would you really be the same person?  If you got teleported, as in Star Trek, would you be the same person?  Or did the original you get destroyed?  What happens if the original is not destroyed, and you just create a copy?  It seems that we can’t answer this, because life and identity is an illusion of sorts.  Our genes want us to care about our future “selves”.

Unfortunately, at this point, I had to leave the meeting early.  But I still have an idea what happened through rumors and other supernatural postcognitive powers.  So you know my account is completely true.

Afterwards, Joe gave a presentation on why we should argue with crazy people.  He then proceeded to argue with the rest of the group, with a generous application of his new Loveline/Zelda soundboard.  Then Spencer confessed his deep, entirely heterosexual love for Christopher Hitchens.  After a very clever segue from Joe, Roy performed an interpretive dance inspired by the bacteria living in his bathroom.  He had apparently prepared this for weeks, repeatedly bleaching his bathroom for inspiration, rather than getting us t-shirts–and it was worth it!  Robin discussed Star Trek and North Korea, showing a collection of youtube videos to demonstrate a point he may or may not have had.  Matthew told us all about dating methods for dinosaurs, and how we can use them in our own lives.  Shaun and Deja presented a sock puppet show about Neo-Nazis.  A collection of people headed by Paul, Leilani and Steven performed a full production of Fiddler on the Roof.  Then we all crashed a Healing Touch Therapy lecture and… no wait, that never happened.  The rest is all true though.