"So you're quoting Cornel West in your blog now?" Spare me father!

The classes I'm taking have proven to be moderately hard, yet manageable. German 101 is almost easier than predicting how my parents will react to whatever silliness my sister is currently getting into. "She just needs to figure it out for herself." As opposed to: WRAAATH OF THE TITANSSSSS. *Katherine's soothing voice* followed by a reasonable second try.

I came back to Portland this past weekend to celebrate my first anniversary with my girlfriend as well as her birthday. It went incredibly well, to say the least. Cashmere always knocks it out of the park. It was nice to see my family and my good friend who was down from UW. My only gripe about the whole situation--and this goes back to what I was saying earlier--is that I came home to all of the same problems that I left two and a half weeks prior.
I'm not saying by any means that I because I have been reading J.S. Mill that I am now an all-knowing truth-searching wise man, but it has shed a new light onto some things. It's unreasonable to hold people to the standard that they should address, adapt, and move-on after dealing with a problem for the first time because people aren't that smart. Volatile emotions will almost always take over reason when people start arguing--no matter how often that reason is made clear afterwards. Rather than addressing their own faults, people rely on others to change.
Don't make the assumption that just because you HAVE a set of principles, that they are always the right ones.
I love my family. I also love the skills that I have developed as a mediator because of them. Luckily, people don't have to change actively because time will do it passively.

My PS 260 class is frustrating right now. I feel like I'm sitting through an hour of dumbed down review. The massive stain on America's History that was the Jim Crow era, followed by the equally impressive failure that was desegregating our educational systems after Brown v. Board is an incredibly interesting and moving topic. I would love to talk with my professor about it in a private setting (Thank the lord for office hours. I literally thank the lord.) because so many people in that class say things that make me want to stab my face with a knife. Repeatedly.
I guess I'm spoiled; Con Team was such a rich experience.

Sometimes I ask myself why I even write this stuff for everyone in the world to see and judge. Why would anyone ever care to read this stuff... THAT is why I'm going to college and getting a degree and some useful knowledge. "Oh yeah, Philosophy and History... what are you going to do with that?" Well it's better than a Business or Poly-Sci. I hear those are perfect prerequisites for being a barista. All I want to do is share my knowledge and research (once I have some good knowledge and If I ever do some research) with other people who want to learn and become inspired. Maybe I'll write esoteric dissertations that only a handful of other Historian scholars or philosophers might read. BUT I would get to read their stuff and that is so cool! The whole idea that someone could posit Math, Reading and Writing, and the Sciences as the most important areas of schooling is absurd to me. Earl Warren knew what he was talking about in Brown when he stressed the "importance of education to our democratic society...the primary role of public education lies in fostering 'cultural values' and 'good citizenship' among children." He said nothing about reading, writing, or arithmetic.

...I just read this whole post and it is all over the place. THAT'S HOW I DO IT. I figure, what is a blog if not some place to pile up your rampant ideas. It almost spells "glob" backwards. My idea glob. I looked up glob in the apple dictionary and the example they used for how it would be placed in a sentence was: thick globs of melted mozzarella cheese. That made me laugh for some reason.