Do we really need more snow? I mean, I had plans for the day. Instead, I found myself cooking — cooking food I didn't feel like eating. What's that all about?

Sometimes, when I'm not busy thinking about work, or the future, or how my life isn't exactly what I hoped it would be (for starters, I always hoped I'd be cooler than I turned out to be), or what's wrong with my brownie recipe (still... too... dry), I come back to the question do the ends justify the means?

Usually I count myself in the no camp, but that answer is usually accompanied by the nagging question what if they're right?. What if the people in the "yes" camp are right? What if the ends really do justify the means? What if acts I'd consider inexcusable must in fact be excusable, if they're done in the name of a greater good? What if they're not just excusable, but necessary? And what if I'm just too naive to understand that?

Put another way, if you were taken back in time, and pointed at a child, no, a baby, and told that that child would grow up to destroy, no, murder, millions, no, hundreds of millions of people, could you then kill that child? I posed that question to a friend recently, and he asked me how I'd respond. I had to say "no", I couldn't. But, in the end, it's the most objective good for humanity, he argued. And all I could come up with was that we have to be more than a random factor, more than the sum of a bunch of neurons firing and making haphazard decisions, randomly feeding into the sea of history. There's got to be more to us than that. And I can't back that up with anything more than a feeling. Which in a way, is one definition for Faith. And it's surprising to me at least, to find, that after all that I've learned and seen and heard and experienced, that I have still some at all.