2015-06-29 - 10:30 p.m.

Tonight I was rewatching bits of one of Paloma's favorites, the PBS miniseries 'Becoming Human.' The two most interesting facts: 1) We probably evolved our intelligence in response to the continually changing climate in Africa over a few hundred thousand years. 2) We all descended from a group of about 600 individuals who barely eked out an existence on some coastline of southern Africa, living off the sea.

It comforts me to think of all those people, or proto-people, who lived and died millions of years ago, most returned to the earth, a random few, by sheer luck, whose half-smashed skulls were embedded in rock, covered in sand or ash, only to be kicked up by someone in a totally different world, their entire way of life one that can only be speculated on. That immense timeline, as incredible to imagine as the distance from us to the stars, making us realize what a tiny speck of time and space we stand on. I want what so many people want, I guess, to feel like a part of something greater, to be a part of a narrative that means something.

I wonder if, one day, the bones of one of us will be uncovered, and people will piece together what our lives were like. What will survive a million years from our civilization of today? Will the pyramids still stand, or bits of New York City's subways linger on? Maybe what is preserved will be an accident of history, the town that is buried in ash or the body that is buried in land that goes deeper underground rather than being exposed to the wind. And who will those people be who dig us up?

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