Let me preface this–let me preface the hell out of this–by saying that I wouldn’t have wanted to go to my commencement ceremony tomorrow anyway. To me they’re drawn-out, highly-generalized celebrations of impersonality guised as something meaningful. But the speaker MSU has chosen for this year’s ceremony has resealed the deal that has already been sealed. Regardless of personal opinion, dragging out a figurehead of the Bush administration during a highly-polarized period in foreign affairs is tacky and tactless, and should induce the gag reflex in just about anyone. A person’s commencement should not be a forum for political discussion.

Condoleezza Rice may well be an inspiring orator, a great person, and a good lay for all I know, but we’re talking about her as a political symbol. It’s inescapable right now. She’s a prominent assistant for Bush on national security affairs, making her selection understandable when you consider MSU President McPherson’s work in Iraq. McPherson’s job was to rebuild Iraq’s economic structure, which he apparently forgot to do, and now he’s offering MSU students a piece of some of that Bush administration action. In a dramatic coincidence, there’s also an election in six months. I don’t think Condoleezza Rice cares whether or not I’ve graduated anymore than the next commencement speaker, but sullying the ceremony with current affairs politics makes the entire process all the more insincere. Obviously Condoleezza Rice won’t actually discuss foreign affairs–dear God, I hope not–but again, this is about her image as a political symbol. Because without that image, nobody would know who she was, and she sure as hell wouldn’t be speaking at commencement.

I don’t like politics, and I’m sure nobody reading this wants to hear me talk about them, but I really, really like arguing, so here we go: I’m not voting for Bush. It’s not because he’s stupid, which he probably isn’t, it’s because the actions he takes on social issues–which is every issue–are overwhelmingly informed by a particular structure of morality. Not necessarily an incorrect structure, but a specific one. That’s problematic. All politicians have their morals, obviously, which is fine and dandy, but some politicians impose them onto their constituents more often than others. That’s divisive. It’s controlling. In politics it leads to decisions based on prejudiced gut-instinct. Our President should not attempt to be our moral leader. But the language of Bush favors such moral-sounding words as good, bad, right, wrong, justice, and evil, as in the “axis of evil,” which would be a good name for a band but is a horrible thing to ever come out of a President’s mouth.

Like, what the fuck is evil? Seriously, on what chromosome is the gene for fucking evil? Is it a recessive trait, or dominant or what? I mean, I took biological psychology, but I don’t remember–oh dear fuck. I don’t want political decisions to be made by these ideological hallucinations, by a President capable of convincingly summarizing complex foreign affairs issues into a game of cops and robbers, a rationality which volatizes globalization and precludes healthy relations between the US and the outside world.

I could argue about this for awhile, I truly could, and sometimes, late at night, with my teddy bear, I sometimes do. The only point I really have is, I don’t want a commencement speaker who inspires me to discuss such nonsense on this website, even if her name is really neat.

Every day there are a bunch of bees twirling around outside our side door, and it’s really aggravating. I refuse to believe it’s just a coincidence that there always happens to be about seventy to eighty bees just hanging out at that same spot, so I think they’ve built a nest or a hive or a honeycomb, or whatever bees live in, right outside our side door. I can only thank God that there is no such thing as indoor bees.

This beehive, our house’s enigmatic fifth roommate, has prevented me from using the side door. The problem is, outside our front door, there is also a bunch of broken glass laying around, presumably from a broken ashtray. So basically, there’s no way to leave this house. My plan is to sweep up all the glass shards and then whip them at the bees.

I live in the student ghetto of Michigan State, and the favorite activity of everybody who lives here is to sit on their porch and yell at passersby in a very confrontational way. For example, if you are so bold as to ride your bicycle to class, you will hear people shout such ringers as “Yeah, bicycle!” or “Look at that bike!” or simply “Bicycle!” They do not say these things in an uplifting way–they seem genuinely angry, as if they’ve recently lost a loved one who enjoyed riding a bike. They are also critical of the following things:

* Wearing a backpack after 10pm on weeknights or 8pm on weekends.

* Wearing a jacket when it is hypothetically warm enough to not wear a jacket.

* Wearing a hat.

* Failure to wear a hat.

* Girls who are walking anywhere at anytime by themselves.

* Walking around at night on the weekends, either in a group or alone, in any gender combination, going in any direction.

When they are not critical, people are incoherent. Last night I overheard the following exchange between somebody driving by in a car and somebody climbing a tree in their front yard (I swear to Christ I’m not making this up):

Man in car: “Sorry, he’s Asian!” [nobody in the vicinity was Asian]

Man climbing tree: “I’m in a tree!”

I used to carefully orchestrate my choice of transportation and the company I walked with based on the potential of those stimuli provoking somebody to yell at me, but recently I’ve decided to give that all up. Last week I openly scootered to class, and it absolutely blew peoples’ fucking minds. Next week I’m going to scooter to class wearing a University of Michigan t-shirt and a pair of suspenders, because I can’t stand the pressure of people in this neighborhood, so screw them.