Confused

I feel like I'm different somehow than I was at the beginning of the summer. I've become quieter and, I fear, less stoic than I was before. Things are happening to me and for me, big things. Some great, some not so great, but their momentous natures have me feeling a bit like a life raft in the middle of a hurricane. I'm just hanging on for dear life to see if I'll get out alive, and what shape I'll be in.

Law school is picking up again, I've got interviews coming up with law firms, even though my grades aren't the best. Somehow I've got to wow them by sheer force of personality (if you're not in law school, you can't possibly understand how nerve-wracking that is). I'm feeling less-than-confident about my interviewing abilities at this point.

I'm getting married in five months. Nerve-wracking. Exciting. Scary. It's a completely new and unique mixture of feelings for me. But it's wonderful. Still, though, it's emotionally draining. Proposing to Marisa was ten times harder and scarier than I feel like it should have been. And it still hasn't hit me that I'm going to be a married man. I really can't put into words how great it is and how awesome Marisa has been to me. I'm madly in love with her. Other than that, I'm just wonderfully mixed up on that front.

I spent ten weeks in a public defender's office this summer, dealing with lowlife scum and the lowlife crimes they commit. Also spent time dealing with authority figures who abuse their power and discretion at the expense of harmless, well-meaning citizens because they happened to be the wrong color or were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's a hard pill to swallow, looking at our society from such an all-around disheartening angle.

And now I'm alone. The only person I've had any extended contact with in the last week or so has been my fiancee. Most of my friends are out of town and I've been working in my room for the past 7 days on a freelance project to get some extra cash. And, as much as I love my fiancee, and even though she's my best friend, for a guy who thrives on the company of others to be deprived of it for so long, it has a funny effect on you. Numbing, really.

So, consider this a disclaimer to all of you who might at some point in the near future find yourself thinking "Todd's acting weird/preoccupied/strange, something's up with him." I promise, it's not you, and I'm not trying to be offputting or weird. I'm in a mental and spiritual spot I've never been in, and probably won't be ever again. Just taking some time to sort it all out.

A Conondrum

I was so happy with it, I really was. It makes so much sense after all.

I take pride in my moderate viewpoints. I like to think that I separate myself from the narrow-minded tautologies of the major political parties. Pro-choice vs. pro-life? How about abortion under a few outlined circumstances? Guns for all, or none at all? How about a concealed weapons permit that's just harder to obtain? State sovereignty or consolidated nationalism? Depends on the situation. Some would say I just can't make up my mind. I say I think for myself and take the bits and pieces of common sense that eek out of both parties occasionally and streamline them into a workable solution that nobody would ever vote for, of course, because it doesn't toe a particular party line. It's an odd thing to see a government that's more concerned with party theology and pissing off the other side than common sense solutions that will make everybody happy.

I was particularly pleased with my personal views on the energy crisis. We need to get off foreign oil, we can all agree on that. Face it, we suck the stuff down like we were college students at a kegger. So, it would seem logical that if we can get the same stuff on our own land, that's a cheaper solution. There are massive oil reserves in Alaska, Montana, Texas, and copious amounts of natural gas along the gulf. It would make total sense to mine the stuff. Of course, the liberal environmentalist types will inevitably whine about raping the land and destroying the habitat of some spotted owl or something. Fine, I'll grant you that we don't want to do that...but does it make a lot of sense, even from an environmental viewpoint, to pay another country more money to rape their land and sell us the fruits? So, it's not ok to destroy the environment in America, but it's ok to turn the Persian Gulf into a cratered wasteland? I don't buy that. Bottom line, as green as the collective consciousness is these days, I have a hard time believing we couldn't come up with a more environmentally friendly means of getting the stuff out of the ground ourselves than we could, say, 10 years ago. There has to be a way to do it while keeping our precious spotted owls alive.

But hold on, you say! Even if we keep using so much of our own oil, we're still choking the environment with our massive SUVs and evil, polluting private jets! And besides, how long will our reserves last us? Two good points. Pollution levels are still rising and contributing to global warming (though not to the extent the alarmists would have you believe, if you ask me). And the reserves, say, in the Gulf of Mexico would last us maybe 30-35 years tops. Clearly this isn't the whole solution. The answer, my friends, seems to lie in alternative energy. Wind, solar, electric, even nuclear. Ideas like the Pickens Plan (which Texas just implemented, putting legions of wind turbines on its oh-so-barren plains) make good sense because they promote clean, renewable energy sources. The knock on them is that they cost a pretty penny, especially when talking about hybrid cars and such. How is an average, middle class family supposed to afford a $60k Mazda fuel cell car, to say nothing of repairs that will be inevitable, because first-generation products always have kinks to work out.

So why not use both ideas? Drill for oil here in America and offshore, reducing our dependence on foreign oil, funneling the savings to alternative energy R&D, and providing tax and other incentives to hybrid car producers, vendors, and consumers. That way we get the short-term relief of offshore drilling ("short-term" being relative, I know) and the long-term benefits of renewable energy research.

I was so happy with this. Then I saw Paris Hilton respond to John McCain's use of her celebrity in an anti-Obama ad. You can see the response here.

The unthinkable has happened. Paris Hilton agrees with me, or rather, I agree with Paris Hilton, of all people. I am now at a personal impasse.

Paris Hilton is a moron. A grade "A" bimbo from the word go. She represents everything that is wrong with society, Hollywood, and pop culture. When I think of reasons for expatriation or lighting myself on fire (like everyone else does, right?), "Paris Hilton's celebrity" is always in the top 10. That said, Can I allow myself, on principle, to agree with anything she says? Do I have to now renounce my beliefs and form new ones? Why, Paris? Why must you do this to me? Why did you have to go and be all sensible like that? Jerk.

Of course, there's always the possibility that she was just reading a script written by someone else. Maybe she doesn't understand, much less give a crap about, all this energy stuff. There's a good chance that as long as she can jet around in a pink Ferrari with that stupid dog and bottle of Bacardi, she couldn't care less about $4/gallon gas.

Yeah, that's it, she's just doing that to be funny. That must be it. She doesn't really believe it, or understand what it even means, does she? I can safely keep my beliefs without being ashamed, right?

Right?