Because Sometimes I Am a Good Political Science Major and Talk About My Field.

Wednesday 17 April

I have about two percent motivation left after a physics/ethics binge, and just yeah. I can't find any more and that is disconcerting.

I woke up in a panic because I thought it was Thursday and that meant I had an 8AM that started about five minutes from when I woke up, but then I figured out what the hell was going on, so no worries, guys. I got this. I'm a functioning human sometimes.

So yeah. I got ready and all that jazz and I was running pretty late. So I was like, "Well fuck this," and decided to ride my bike to physics. I defrosted my stupid bike and then hopped on, where it was covered in ice and snow and literally wouldn't pedal because the chain was frozen solid. Then THAT defrosted but my brakes worked even less than usual. It's a goddamn miracle people didn't die.

Anyway. Physics was decent; I tend to underthink it, which is REAL bad and I should probably figure that shit out before tomorrow. Then I went to Western Political Thought and totally zoned out because Mewes gave us the same lecture at the beginning of the semester. I made the mistake of scrolling through old posts on the wonderful group Shit Graham Says, and ended up almost peeing my pants from suppressed laughter, so that's where I'm at.

Then I didn't have chemistry, so I went to the library and ACTUALLY STARTED MY JEFFERSON PROJECT FOR ETHICS. WHAT'S UP. I also registered for NSCS and got my info for AP and even Facebooked a decent amount, so that was fun.

Then I went to Farrand for QUESADILLA WEDNESDAY HELL YEAH and scarfed that down before Crissie and my WEDNESDAY STARBUCKS YEAH! I got a cold drink today, which Crissie judged me for and I thought was perfectly valid or whatever.

Then we stopped in Kitt to get my Jefferson book, and went back to Hallett to work for a solid THREE HOURS on ethics and then on physics. Then I grabbed a Farrand pizza (because Crissie didn't want to eat but I'm, as always, ravenous) and we watched New Girl.

After that my productivity derailed and I mostly just helped Binder with physics, made Crissie's desk into the Batcave (because I'm five), and then sent her hundreds of Snapchats. Then we watched YouTube and got ice cream and then ended up here singing along to Train after Nole told me that he wanted to be best friends with my boobs. Yay (or something—yay college).

So it's been a snowy day of busy nothings. Basically how my life is gonna be forever. How it's always been. And I don't honestly know if I'm okay with that.

And instead of talking about my existential awkwardness as usual, I'm going to talk about how I am pretty sad that representative government is FAILING US MISERABLY, especially since like 90% of the US population favors stricter background checks and the Senate JUST defeated a bill that would tighten that up. And quite frankly, I don't think that's right.

Yeah, I get that politicians lead the people instead of following them, because that's a rookie mistake, and I get that Madison's brainchild works heaps better than anything else we could ever design, but I'm just mad sometimes. I feel like part of it's the lack of moderate politics, but then again, American politics are about as moderate as it gets and the ideological differences we see here are pansy shit compared to the rest of the world. I really think a viable third party would shake things up. Maybe break up the stifling dichotomy we find ourselves in. Or something.

I am a political science major, and I hate politics. This is the culture I have been born into.

Personally, I think background checks help, but the solution is to ban the sale of automatic weapons in the immediate. There's no reason to have them. My brother and I could debate this for hours, so I'm sorry for this liberal outburst, my right wing friends. I have no idea why the hell you NEED a gun. Yeah, it's a constitutional right, but when they wrote that, there were like bears and shit at their front porch, slavery was still legal and straight up from Africa, and they thought phrenology was a viable science. A lot of shit didn't make sense back then. If you're hunting, you obviously can't hit a deer in 40 shots if you can't get the job done with two bullets, and if you're afraid the government is going to descend into tyranny, it's been stable for literally almost three and a half centuries with a crap ton of checks and balances and a very unique separation of powers that PROHIBITS THAT. Read the Federalist Papers and you'll know what I mean.

I feel like this is an issue people latch onto and have very superfluous reasons either way—yeah, I get that taking away guns will not fix everything, but it'll help.

But then, maybe that's the fundamental problem with politics in general—Whitman says in "Song of Myself" that he imagines the ship's captain so well that he becomes the ship's captain, and the wounded man, and whatever else. He can become other people. But I think that's too idealistic. I'm a Whitmanian, and I can't even fathom how he does that. We have an extremely hard time understanding that other people are as real as us, and we have a very hard time seeing other peoples' viewpoints. I can't see the opposing side of an issue sometimes because I'm very entrenched on mine. As John Green says, "The only wounded man I can ever be is me." I can't do it. Science, in this case, helps a lot in this field—you can gather empirical data and evaluate your position that way. But at some point it comes down to truly human experiences, and I don't know if I'm capable of reversing it because there is no way to measure the value of human experience.

I don't know about a lot. But I'm going to keep learning and keep observing until I figure it out. And then I will try my damnedest to fix it. You can be sure of that.

So yeah. That's me. I'm going to bed and I'm probably going to be sad in the morning because of goddamn physics. Yay.

Thanks for reading :)