Another Alan post. Still waiting for his list of things he hates about China, but already the differences between his posts and Graham's amuse me:

Graham:
What does America have to offer that China doesn't? Why would someone want to move to one of the most pathological cultures on earth?

Alan:
We tried to keep it as polite as possible but she had believed China to be as democratic as the US and there was no polite way to express the degree of my dissention.

Maybe it was how I spent the Fourth, up North at a cabin with my relatives and their macrobrewed beers and fast boats and dangerous fireworks, but though I'm alternately embarrassed and bored by certain aspects of red American culture, and frustrated by prettymuch all of the major Supreme Court decisions this term, I think we've got a great country here. Good to see a bluish fellow like Alan standing up for it.

I shouldn't do that to Alan. I'm sick of people implying I'm ignorant (or, what amounts to the same thing for many: Republican) when I disagree with them, and I'm somewhat glad that, with college done, I'm partially free of Lawrence's lopsided but unavoidable dichotomy.

As colors go, I lived in Smurf village for the past four years and met a lot of partisans there who were not knowledgeable so much as "informed," but I distrust gut-feelings on right just as much as knee-jerk reactions on the left, possibly more so. I'd say I'm dark purple, but everyone ("these days") wants to claim he's near the center, or better yet, that the center used to be where he was until everything went downhill.

I do love classifying people. Our Bold Hero brings order to the universe.

Enough navel-gazing. I'm going home tomorrow, but I'm expecting to have the Internet there as well. Finally. So that's exciting. I've also got this vague desire to improve myself, which really all goes back to a muttered comment I overheard in a hobbyshop and the fact that I'm unemployed and likely to stay that way. I could... I dunno, learn a craft. Sell things... out of yarn. It's all very vague.

It feels like things are snowballing, we'll see.