Update

I am presently in the process of preparing to leave Vermont.  Mostly, this means I sit around and relax.  The weather is pretty nice, when it's not thunderstorms, which are initially cool, but can be kind of a pain in the ass when they go on for a week.  I might go on a walk after I get done writing this before such activities become dangerous.  In any case, much of Vermont is being flooded.  My slice is not.

Spent last weekend in San Francisco for my brother's college graduation.  Was a great time; San Francisco is an amazing city, and I heartily encourage anyone who hasn't be there to visit.  Congrats to him.  Congrats to me, too, as I officially got my master of arts that same weekend.  I picked up the diploma from the registrar the other day and damn, is it huge.  Way bigger than my puny undergrad diploma.  If I got a PhD, it'd have to be poster-sized to keep up the trend.

Still don't have a job lined up.  It will hopefully be much easier to find one once I get to Washington.  At the very least, there are some temp agencies that want me.

Romantic/sexual misadventures continue.  I'm not going to publicly share the details of this one, but it essentially boils down to me being totally about to hook up with a chick and being defeated by the demon liquor (her fault, not mine).  Were I to pick one word to describe my Vermont experience, it might have to be "celibate."  At least I got to do some shameless drunk flirting with my friend's sister and feel kinda sexy when she was responsive.

(Yes, I tried to hook up with one of my friend's sisters.  That's how I do.)

I'm starting to get really excited about leaving Vermont and returning to the Best Coast.  San Francisco reminded me of how much I love the Pacific states and how inferior I find New England.  Plus, I can't wait to live in an actual city, with actual city things.  So while a shitful of packing lies between me and June 16... bring that shit on.

And finally, I have a cold, no doubt contracted during my recent travels.  This perhaps explains the general dourness of this blog post.

That is all.

To California!

Going to California for my brother's graduation.  Should be good times.  San Francisco is an awesome city under any circumstances.

Done

As of Thursday, 12 May 2011, I am done with grad school.

Here's something strange/awesome to help me celebrate.

Thoughts on bin Laden's Death

So unless you've been living under a rock, you've become aware that American troops killed Osama bin Laden yesterday.  This event has stirred a lot of different reactions in the US.  Most disturbing are the belligerent celebrations of the death of a human being.  Relief is one thing; I think both of the wars are immoral and unnecessary, but I can't say I'm not relieved that bin Laden is no longer with us.  But jubilation over the death of a human--any human--is too much.  Have more respect for life.  I can't believe I have to tell a nation of ostensibly Christian people this--remember how your god said all that shit about loving thy neighbor as thyself and turning the other cheek and not being happy about people getting killed?!  Try practicing what you preach before telling my atheist, human-life-respecting ass that I'm going to hell.

I have, however, been relieved that the voices saying basically what I did (just less bitterly) have been considerably more numerous than I expected.  It turns out the people of this country aren't as universally stupid, ignorant and brutally self-centered as I tend to characterize them.  Who knew that someone who speaks almost entirely in hyperbole could be wrong.  (See?  That last sentence was hyperbole, too!  Shit, I'm on a roll!)

Listening to the radio today (yeah, I'm an NPR-listening leftist), I heard several callers on various programs express their disappointment that bin Laden had not been apprehended alive to face trial for his crimes.  Quite frankly, given the sad state of what passes for justice for suspected terrorists in US custody nowadays, I'm glad he's just fucking dead.  It's ironic that, in reportedly giving him a burial at see in accordance with Muslim tradition, we treated him in death with far more respect than we've afforded his alleged co-belligerents illegally imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay and other secret prisons throughout the world.  The more I think about that, the more fucked up the whole situation seems to me.

There's one thing that's I've found to be missing from the conversation on bin Laden: perspective.  I don't mean that this is a largely symbolic victory--that's been covered.  I mean that, as we mourn the approximately three thousand victims of 9/11, and make speeches that discuss the ten-year search for bin Laden and the justice that has finally been visited upon him, there seems to be no awareness that in the process of that ten-year hunt, we've killed a shitful of innocent people.  Even ignoring the ones we didn't directly kill, but who would almost certainly be alive today if it weren't for the wars we started, we have the blood of untold thousands of civilians on our hands, collateral damage of what is being depicted in the media as a righteous crusade in response to one man's evil deeds.  Perhaps bin Laden and 9/11 justified what we subsequently unleashed on the world.  (I don't think it did; even by extremely conservative estimations, we have killed many times the number of people that died in 9/11, and justice is in no small part about proportional response.  But that is a topic for another day.)  But the reality of the matter is that this war/these wars were wars, no matter what you think about their morality, and that we destroyed huge numbers of people who had offered us no offense, and whose only crime was living in a crappy country.

I don't really have a point to all this, other than the blood on our own hands is something we ought to be considering as well.  No one comes out of any war squeaky clean.  Maybe if we remembered that a little better, we wouldn't start so fucking many of them.