Intransitive

today was long and arduous and produced this. and a paper. the paper came out well, but we'll see how i did from the teacher's perspective. poring over court cases is no fun, but i made the best of it and i think i picked good ones. good 'ole american education system: totally interesting to read but totally irrelevant for my career choice. i understand that most people going through my major will be into the stuff in this class, but it's really not teaching me anything that i'm going to need to know in the future for myself. america really is a quite self-centered country.

and that reminds me of a brief but interesting conversation i had with my friend mike kaess earlier tonight about the pledge of allegiance. he asked me if it was bad or strange that he thought it was a disgusting practice and something he couldn't rightly participate in, and i told him 'no.' most of the time when i do it, it's just out of politeness. i don't really mean the words coming out of my mouth, like a jack mormon in sunday service, because i'm not a nationalist. that doesn't mean that i'm not a patriot, because i certainly am, but it means that i don't believe that america is the greatest country in the world simply because i was born here or live here.

there are plenty of great countries, and america is one of them. there are plenty of crappy ones, and america is one of those too. it's not all black and white when it comes to countries and the way we feel about them, so it makes little to no sense to me for me to blindly accept that we are the best because we are 'we' and call it good. does not compute. anyway, yeah. this is going up super late because i've been wrestling with the video i linked earlier after writing that paper. the render of the video, which i previewed after i had uploaded it, was bad. so i had to re-do it and change a few things, which took an hour. so it's late. sleepytime.