long journal on everything

merry christmas everyone, it just occurred to me that this journal is going to be read by very few people, but... i guess that's ok, because what is a journal in the end? it is something for myself. and now that i think about it it's probably going to be quite long because there are a few things on my mind.

the boring part comes first.

this past semester was the most difficult few months of my academic career. it was the first time where i've seriously thought that i wasn't going to pass a class. not just one class, but three were up in the air. the most serious of which, was posted to ssl this morning and... thankfully i somehow recovered from my record breaking lowest score on the first midterm of 16/100 ( i was EXTREMELY tired) to get by, but as of Christmas another two loom like spectres waiting to say, Stephen, you tried hard but... you just weren't good enough. Let's hope that doesn't happen. Suzie was crying on the side of lerner a few days ago, she 'failed' her japanese final, 'failing' meaning... she could possibly get a B. it impresses me a lot that people can still pull of straight A's. it was pretty easy in highschool, at least i thought so, I made 2 B's in highschool, one was a class I took over the summer that I didn't want to argue about and the other was taking Spanish 3 my first year of highschool. Now... SEAS has shed new light, I wish i had the leasure of getting mad at getting a B, now I hope to at least get a B, i've seen quite a few C's the last 3 years and they aren't going to stop coming. i think i'm a-ok though.

what's next...
finals finished on tuesday for me. we went out everynight until thursday. to tell you all the truth i've never been happier. i don't want to say that i like the friends i've made in college better than the ones from home, my dad says that the HS ones are the ones that will be there forever, but the truth is, they are the ones that are the most foreign to me now. For the first time in 5 semesters of Columbia, I think i've found friends that I can call good friends, friends that I can actually picture being there 10-15+ years down the road. Friends that will be standing there in dresses and tuxes if I ever walk down the aisle with big smiles on their faces, they are the best men and bridesmaids. but wouldn't you know it, matt is leaving for Madrid next semester, and as depressing as it is to see him go, i know it's going to be absolutely fucking amazing for him. I envy the cc kids that can take 12 credits abroad and just take in the sights and sounds of a completely different culture and worldview.

i'm glad the distance of dormitories didn't crush things this year, you know who is sticking with you when you don't recess into just being another facebook friend as soon as the year is over, you go home, you live somewhere new, and they discover a whole new group of people that they think are way cooler than you ever were.

but anyways, the weekend was amazing. i may have seen almost every girl i've ever been interested in at CU/barnard (well not all of them) and i just let them all... go. i knew they were there though, even if the semester of working my ass off did basically crush and spirit and energy i could put forth toward anything with the women. the semester parting of the matt, tim, and stephen squad was capped off, in what more bizarre finish than a mecca. a mecca that only in its absence of Neal patrick harris and other way more weird things, could have been the multiracial adventure known as harold and kumar goto white castle. we stumbled into a cab at 4 in the morning to white castle, dragging matt and tejal and then we feasted. as matt and tejal argued with the employees over the validity of not serving them english muffin egg sandwiches until 6am, tim and i began our quest, the Crave case.

within the hour, tim and i destroyed 30 hamburgers. this was after our earlier dinner of Deluxe's hamburgers with our crew + tim's brother and his accompanying hot girlfriend. may god strike me down, she was 16, nevermind, i'm shameless, she was hot.

more substantive:
i'd like to do some research over break and retype this part, because i think it is without a doubt worth looking into. michael moore and al franken find it absolutely ludicrous that people peg the mainstream media is having a incredibly blatant liberal bias.

to me, the gut reaction is, liberal bias? the only liberal bias that exists in the media is the fact that there are lots of letters and words on pages of newspapers and print ads.

i love wired magazine, i respect the readers who send letters to the editor, this one stood out when i was reading it today,

the September issue is an insult. I get plenty of left-wing propaganda free from the major media; I won't pay [you] to deliver more into my household. When resubscription time arrives, don't bother sending the bill- I won't be renewing. - Milton Woodham, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

If al franken, michael moore, and myself ALL think that the comment that the media is liberally biased is without a second thought, without a doubt completely and unquestionably stupid, then why is the statement so prevalent. sure we could make the case that GOP leaders force feed those talking points into people so much that people repeat it like a parrot. i am inclined to disagree, there must be something more to this. Why would so many people take offense to things in the major media and label it as liberally biased if it really was not so? that just seems to prevalent and common to be some kind of right-wing conspiracy. it has occurred to me recently that perhaps what i consider liberal is left from my conception of what the center to me is, the center being far left of normal americans. if this is so, then I think that there is a problem with America, at least in what or ideals as citizens of this nation are, the things we hold most important to us, the drive that keeps us going from day to day, there must be a cog in the gears.

I'm going to at this momment do a quick survey of the major headlines from some prominent internet websites.

msnbc.com
• Christmas in Iraq: Soldiers, celebrities help spread cheer among U.S. troops
• WP: U.S. lacked postwar plan, strategist says
• Tanker blast in Baghdad wounds 12 Iraqis
• Lawyer: Aziz won't testify against Saddam
• Bush calls service members to thank them
• Ukraine braces for presidential runoff | Video
• Saturn moon probe descends toward Titan

cnn.com
• Space probe on way to Saturn moon
• Tanker truck suicide bomb hits Baghdad | premium content Video
• Russian military tests top-of-the-line missile
• Aziz won't testify against Saddam | The face of Iraq
• Five killed by Vietnam War shell
• Abducted children returned to mother
• Fast-food worker rescues drive-thru customer
• Airman saves woman, son from river

nytimes.com
• Bitter Divisions Rife in Ukraine as Voting Nears
• Remembering the Dead and the Horror of Mosul
• Program Coaxes Hospitals to See Treatments Under Their Noses
• Spitzer, in a Shift, Will Yield Inquiries to U.S. Regulators

since it's christmas, i think we should look at the headlines on a different day since they will probably try to be cheery right now. i believe right now that the cause for accusation of left wing bias and the disbelief is created because Americans do not reside in the center. there are people like me who are very liberal, and there are many very conservatives folks out there, I think their conceptions of a mutual center is still too far to the right and vice versa.

in my eyes, conservative america has pinned the stories and themes that make newspapers sell, that bring large tv audiences as liberal bias. newspapers reach out to stories like the poor family that can't eat and can't have christmas gifts because of poverty, of AIDS victims that are suffering, this is not the newspaper presenting liberal bias, it's writing news that sells. i don't know where i'm going with this, but America has put too much faith in the validity of what institutions and people present them with as true. we live in an age where we are truly the fast food age, we want our information and we want it fast. we don't goto the library to read books written by experts of the age, we double click a firefox icon, a stylized blue 'e' and instantly we get a filtered version of exactly what someone wanted to give us, and guess what, we accept it. we don't want to look at the second search result, we want what's at the top of the page, and in our rush and haste, what's at the top is the only thing that counts, everything else is lost as a excess heap of 1's and 0's.

the end.