Yoda the Survivor

I'm watching The Empire Strikes Back and noticing some odd things about Yoda. As every fan learned in the prequels, Yoda and Kenobi are the only two surviving Jedi after Palpatine enacts a sort of genocide against them. These two manage to survive and then go into hiding. Kenobi settles on a sparsely populated desert planet with little to do. He also happens to live near one of the children he's hiding from the government. It's definitely a step down from living on Coruscant where he served on a sort of special forces for the government, but it could be worse.

Yoda lives in a swamp. On a swamp planet, actually. He is completely isolated from intelligent life and modern civilization. If you look closely during the movie, you can see that he's actually filthy. It makes sense since his robes are apparently his only clothes, and he has no known means of washing those or himself, other than use inhabited swamp water. We are also led to believe that he has no way of leaving this planet as there isn't a ship in sight besides Luke's sinking X-Wing. Why would he do this to himself?

One might argue that he prefers a life of solitude but he seems to enjoy himself enough with Luke around. We even gain the sense that he genuinely enjoys having him there as company rather than just a student. Sure the freaky cave for testing training Jedi is there but that doesn't mean he has to live there. In case no one noticed, spacecraft is plentiful and available in the Star Wars universe.

All I can think is that Dagobah is actually Yoda's home planet and he feels comfortable there. The obvious question then arises of where others of his species are. My conspiracy theory is that some event wiped his people out, and this is why we never see another creature of his type in the films. This would mean Yoda has survived two genocides against his kind; his species and then his beliefs.

Yoda is freaking awesome.

Exams Are Stressful

As midterms roll around, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with some fellow students about the horrible feelings of stress that come with big, important exams. As we sat around a table in a frozen yogurt shop during finals week, the conversation turned to how stressful that time of the semester can be. I'm pretty open with my friends, so I went out on a limb and asked them if they stressed out the same way I did.

I forget my exact wording, but I talked about how at a certain point, an urge occurs to inflict bodily harm upon oneself just to get out of the semester. I'd never acted on these thoughts, but as finals and procrastination pile up, I admitted that these easy ways out start looking a little better than the alternative. I wasn't surprised that they understood; that's kinda what friends do.

I was surprised that they agreed wholeheartedly, resulting in a talk about all the different things one might do to get out of the responsibility of a semester at school. Included were:
- get hit by a vehicle or in some other way suffer a serious injury
- develop a drug addiction / spend semester in rehab
- get pregnant (probably give baby away)
- contract a temporarily debilitating disease (ex. mono)
- break a limb
- get sent to an asylum
- enlist
- go hobo
- go into an illegal business (drugs, etc.)

Of course, we would never actually do these things just to get out of finals, but the thoughts do occur. If you have any other examples of things you've thought of to get out of your responsibilities for a while, please post them in the comments.