First, why we’re screwed:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7416120.stm
Second,
If I catch any one of you riding you bicycle without a helmet I will be angry. And not the pretend kind of angry that makes D laugh. Actually angry, because you’re smarter than that. Everyone falls. Everyone.
For those not directly inside whitebread’s skull:
The last post is a reminder to myself that the current friends I have should be better appreciated because they won’t be with me forever either.
Apologies for any confusion.
-management
Sometimes I’m amazed at just how much I miss Carleton.
But would you really want to go back there, even if you could?
Time-machine style, with all my friends? Absolutely.
Now whitebread, you’re not remembering all the hard times and just cherrypicking…
No! Don’t you see? I’ve matured enough that if I could go back, any petty discontentment wouldn’t matter.
I’d appreciate all those friends for who they are, while I still had them, because I’d know those times wouldn’t last.
If I could just do it over again…
I realized this morning that the move will give me the opportunity to put my life in order, and that I should view it as such, instead of dreading it as was my original plan.
I attacked the box that has been in my closet for a year, harboring such stowaways as old batteries, sandpaper, various small tools, a broken calculator, screws, a needle, a penny…you get the idea.
Maybe this time I’ll actually manage to eliminate everything I don’t need. Well, everything except the cable bags. (Yes I have more than one now)
Americans are “hardly the first people to believe themselves favored by Providence, but they are the only ones in modern history who are convinced that by bringing their political and economic system to others, they are doing God’s work.
This view is driven by a profound conviction that the American form of government, based on capitalism and individual political choice, is, as President Bush asserted, ‘right and true for every person in every society.’ It rests on the belief that all will embrace it once the United States removes artificial barriers imposed by regimes based on other principles. By implication, it denies that culture and tradition shape the human psyche, that national consciousness changes only slowly, and that even great powers cannot impose their beliefs on others by force.
Early leaders of the United States did not hold this view. George Washington wrote that for nations, as for people, self-interest is always ‘the governing principle’ and that no country, specifically including the United States, should be ‘trusted further than it is bound by interest’.”
From page 315 of Overthrow, by Stephen Kinzer