You Are 91% Tortured Genius

You totally fit the profile of a tortured genius. You’re uniquely brilliant - and completely misunderstood. Not like you really want anyone to understand you anyway. You’re pretty happy being an island.

HT: CyberChocolate

This story pissed me off.

A 16-year-old girl who caught a cold during a school trip to New York was kicked off her flight home because she was coughing.

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It was a very hard decision to make, but with the last day to withdraw from the semester without a grade penalty approaching at the end of next week, I feel it was the right one to make. I’m behind on all of my bills, and rapidly maxxing out my credit cards. Since September, I’ve felt like I’ve been living on a financial house of cards, but the last couple of months have been incredible rickety. I need to get myself on some sturdy financial ground.

I’ll be able to return next semester to finish my degree. I’m not happy about the situation, but I really don’t feel like I have any choice.

On Thursday, Jules at Originality is SO Overrated wrote a post about one of those jingoistic chain-e-mails. You know the one, or you know one similar to it. It starts by talking all nice about how great it would be if every American, regardless of political ideology, could join in supporting a message with a very narrow political focus.

Like Jules, I hate shit like this. First, they lower your defenses by talking about unity and putting aside political differences. And then they go into this crazy bizzare isolationist rant that can be summed up as “might makes right/if you don’t agree with us fucking hit the road/wooohooo!”

The great thing about America is that everyone is entitled to their opinion. However, opinions are like annoying neighbors — everyone’s got one, but just because you have one, it doesn’t mean (unless you’re me) that your opinion is the same thing as ‘truth.’ But in my opinion, America’s greatness comes in doing what is right not because there is some profit motivation in the action, but because doing right is right. I was reading Right Thinking From The Left Coast, and a quote from David Iglasias caught my eye:

It makes me think of what Bobby Kennedy argued during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the military wanted to do a preemptive strike on Cuba. He goes, “You mean, you want us to do a Pearl Harbor, except we’re the Japanese. We don’t do that. Americans don’t do that.”

Do you think the author of that e-mail would agree with Bobby Kennedy? I doubt it. But holding ourselves to a higher moral code (easier as a country before this current presidential administration) is what America is — or was, or should be — about. But WTF do I know.