Diary of a Disturbing Influence

This week has been utterly exhausting. Scratch that; this entire semester has been exhausting. In high school you’re told to work your ass off, get into the good college. No one tells you that if you do get into the good college you will most likely suffer a complete mental breakdown before the age of 21. The stress doesn’t just come from academics. It comes from a bizarre diet of caffeine, pizza and chocolate. It comes from the gastritis caused by said bizarre diet. It comes from your love life (or lack of one, in my case). It comes from a thwarted desire to get the fuck off campus (I don’t have a car). It comes from the mental list of all the things you have yet to do (laundry, vaccuuming, school, sleep, school, school, feed Betta, more school, repeat until graduation day). I always wanted to go to college. I had no idea that doing so would destroy the lining of my stomach as well as what emotional stability I have left from high school.

 In more interesting news, I got to talk to Tim Goeglin, Special Aide to the President of the United States. He spoke in chapel (why, I don’t know) and held a question and answer session afterwards. He had some decent things to say, especially in regard to having a woman president. He’s very much in favor of a diverse White House. However, he also claimed that America ‘was the greatest nation in the history of mankind.’ I asked him to defend that assertion without resorting to the defense that America is a Christian nation. His answer avoided that exact terminology, but in classic political fashion he merely couched it in different words. I lost track of how many times he used the phrase “Judeo-Christian values.’ I also found it interesting that when asked about the war in Iraq (I believe the exact question was, “What do you have to say to those who say the war in Iraq is a mistake?”) he began by listing each recent attack against American assets. He gave an exact number of the American dead in each situation. Allegedly, he did this to show the cost of war. However I couldn’t help but wonder why he didn’t mention the innocent Iraqis and Afghans killed in the war that responded to those attacks. It seems to me that if one wishes to calculate the true cost of war, one should pay attention to everyone that died.

Goeglin also claimed that Bush is ‘a great man’ and asserted that history would most likely regard him as one of the greatest president America has known. I found that to be amusing. I also found it amusing that he claimed that Constantine built the Hagia Sophia. He was attempting to prove the greatness of the Christian religion (by talking about a big church?), but his argument would have been much more affective if he’d gotten his facts right. Justinian and Theodora built the Hagia Sophia. The very name of the church is Greek. Constantine was a Roman. Yes, I’m an anal-retentive history nerd, but these things matter to me. I wonder if he realizes that the Hagia Sophia was eventually turned into a mosque.

 Probably not.