I'm having serious flood day flashbacks, and it's a little traumatic, because I was in a place of Sheer Confusion and Existential Suspension back in those days. Yay rain.
I'll just note that Wednesday posts are probably going to be late because Orchestra. Woot.
Today wasn't bad. I stayed awake for all of my organic lecture, which was nice. We're doing something about enols and enolates and they're important because their starting materials determine their acidity versus the conjugate base? I'm learning stuff? Ish? I've also got House Tully's Sigil with their House Words as "Fish are Friends!" so yay things-that-aren't-ochem.
I then went to my Constitutional Law lecture and we had a GUEST LECTURE today which was kinda nice because my brain is in no state whatsoever to handle Real School. Dr. Brad Birzer from Hillsdale College in Michigan is up for election to CU Boulder's Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought, a position currently held by my Law prof Dr. Steven Hayward.
As a liberal in the People's Republic of Boulder, it's been an awesome experience to have someone that doesn't share my political beliefs that's actually intelligent and doesn't tell me I'm just a stupid girl that doesn't know her shit (Arvada was a tough place to grow up knowing you identified with the left from about the age of nine). The discourses I've heard have been fascinating, and this why our two-party system blows—we try too fucking hard to pigeonhole ourselves into two narrow sets of ideologies.
Anyway. That's a rant for another blog. I'll finish Brad's lecture at the end of this blog.
Then I took my twice-daily walk home from Clare Small to Bear Creek, which was nice. Today was the Absolute Perfect Temperature and if it's like this forever I'm totally down.
I got home and ate some pizza rolls and decided, instead of doing a mostly-optional assignment for my writing class, to read A Dance With Dragons, because I have Priorities (and by Priorities I mean Seven stupid fucking Kingdoms that are super fucked either way because everyone I love is going to die a horrific and painful death. Fuck this fucking book series).
I mustered some strength in this daze of lethargy to get to said Writing Class, where I am the Anointed Sovereign of Sighs and Groans because NO ONE GETS SHAKESPEARE OR HAS HEARD OF THE GLOBE THEATER OR QUEEN ELIZABETH I. KILL ME PLEASE. I also resisted the urge to say that Coriolanus is the most YOLO character in all of Shakespeare's works—really, he doesn't deliberate like Hamlet or Macbeth, and he is utterly unashamed of the person he is, unlike Othello and Richard III, and I think he's basically fucking awesome and doesn't deserve the end he had. Anyway.
Then, instead of reading Hunger (which, to quote a classmate, "I don't know what I expected") for class, I read ADWD and JON SNOW STOP YOU STILL KNOW NOTHING. Anyway.
Orchestra came next, where I ended up in the third chair seat which CAN'T HAPPEN BECAUSE I STILL CAN'T CONSISTENTLY PLAY MY BASS OR READ MUSIC EVEN AFTER TEN (!) FUCKING YEARS OF IT, but it was fabulous anyway. Then again, I don't give up three hours of my Wednesday to have FUCKING RESTS for FIFTY MEASURES IN A ROW. Best section ever. Welcome to my life.
I swore profusely on finding the rain-snow mix outside, drove Katniss-the-car home after having a minor panic attack in the parking garage because she wouldn't start for a moment (thank god she did). Then I parked Across the Narrow Sea (read: the soccer fields because I'm Cheap) and started on homework until I remembered it was April and this had to happen.
Anyway. Brad Birzer gave us a lecture on the American Founding and he said something that really resonated with me regarding the character of a republican (Read: not the GOP) nation, which was that you had to ask yourself what it means to be a human with your liberal education in order to further the common good, which is a question we forget to answer in the endless maze of tropes and policy holdups and filibusters and whatnot these days. Furthermore, it's "not the accidents of your birth, but the character of your soul" that makes you a good politician or a bad one, and that was fucking awesome to hear for a lower-middle-class female that wants to compete in that world.
I LOVE talking about the founding—more than almost anything in politics (other favorite topics are constitutional law and revolutions and also elections because just eeeeeeee). Thomas Jefferson is my favorite person and the tooth-and-nail politics of Revolutionary America was a fucking bloodbath, which is always the best. The founders played dirty come election season and kicked ass in office, had actual real life toga parties where you had to recite shit in classical Greek and Latin, and by whatever is Good and Holy, they mastered the art of oration.
Basically when I fell off the few moral pedestals I had when I came into college (because Freshman Year Yaaay), I was forced to reevaluate my ideals and what I stood for. And the liberal ideals of the founding—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, justice as the end to the means of government, representation, equality of opportunity, and the simple acknowledgement that you have a voice in the vast nothingness of the universe—were what I was left with when I threw everything else out with the bathwater. Yeah. I have some issues with their racism and their misogyny and their hypocritical actions, and OH MY GOD THEIR FOREIGN POLICY IN THE FORMATIVE YEARS MAKE MY OCHEM ATTEMPTS LOOK SPECTACULAR (I'm looking at you, Quasi-War, Jay Treaty, and Embargo of 1807) but for the most part, I believe in their ideals more than I do any sort of deity. Maybe it's foolish and maybe, as Woodrow Wilson suggested, it's completely nonexistent. But I got into politics and I'm staying here because I would do anything to further these ideals, and I think they make the world a better place.
Yay manifestos!
Anyway. I'm going to go read
Thanks for reading :)
Disclaimer: I'm going to talk politics. A LOT. I'M SORRY YOU KNEW WHAT YOU WERE GETTING INTO LET'S BE REAL ;)
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