March 26, 2003 | 12:50 PM

God bless this week�s issue of the Onion-- especially This article.

This is thought provoking and very well written and you should read it �cause I said so.

Spring in Boston. The smell. Brings back all the other Springtimes here. So does the feel of sandals on my feet after not having stepped into them for months. Suddenly I can remember a moment, be transported right into the thick of it. Swimming in the current of personal history.

Why should it be that just because something stops meaning anything to someone else, it should stop meaning anything to you? Why does it hurt to know that which hurt you so horribly didn�t hurt someone else 1/10th as much? As though you wanted them to hurt like you hurt? Why do you equate hurt with meaningfulness? As though in order to prove your own humanity you need the evidence of deeply cut palms. Why do you insist on suffering so much? Why have you split in half like oil on water�all giddy shameless joy on the top and churning suffering sadness on the bottom? You need a thicker tougher skin. To defend yourself, you create distractions but you have no real armor at all. Fuck armor�you don�t even have boundaries. People float in and out and through you like ghosts and on their way they mix up the molecules and you become them.

And by you I of course mean me. I talk to myself that way all the time in my head. Constant dialogue.

My brother is so super smart it�s scary. (He's only 18 years old.) This is an email he sent me today.

You should read The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Shore. Howard Shore is probably one of the most well-read authors I've read; he wrote the entire Contemporary Literary Criticism collection. The reason I suggest you read it, is because it'll give you a good idea on the current trend of the nation; mostly in terms of economics, but domestically and internationally too. It definitely changed my opinion of the nation, and right now we are not at all number 1. We are largest importing nation, we no longer have the highest standard of living, and our medical institution is failing. Moreover, we are beginning to lose our technological grip-many innovators and inventors are going elsewhere because our investors are not as sharp-eyed anymore in picking out potentially profitable consumer goods from new technologies. Our education system is in shambles, and the way social security is currently set up, its going to destroy my generation.

Haha, I suggest moving...both parties are failing to institute new ideas in the Information Age. The democratic and republican parties are still stuck in Industrial/New Deal America. Also, that brief decade of economic boom in America during the 1990s was actually not a good sign. Corporate mergers were on the rise, which temporarily helped our economy, but look at 1850s Britain, and you'll see a similiar trend. 1850s Britain was obviously considered the superpower at the time, but the only superpower status they had about them was their military. The rise of conservatism, militarism, egoism of its citizens, and the ignorance of domestic problems like education destroyed Britain, even before it lost much of its colonies after the world wars. Also, Britain in the 1850s had MANY corporate mergers, very similiar to the 1990s America. And Britain isn't the only parallel this book makes; there are countless others. It simply is no longer America's time to be on top.

Unless we get a VERY progressively-minded administration next time around, the United States will fall, probably even out of the top 10. The only thing we've got going for us now is our military.

God I love that fucking kid. He�s coming to visit with my whole family in three weeks. I am psyched!