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Today we had an interesting discussion about abortion in my Honors Colloquium. Every time I hear these debates, I just become more Pro-choice.

Let me first say, that I would never tell a woman to get an abortion. That would just be wrong to tell her what she should do since I have no medical training. On the flip side… I would never tell a woman to NOT have an abortion. That would be wrong because I am not in her shoes (neither physically nor metaphorically) and I have no medical training. This is an individual choice the woman has to make. And since the government has no medical training and they do not know every case personally… they can not make a blanket law completely banning the procedure. It’s as simple as that.

Another thing that came up in this discussion was Obama’s stance on late-term abortion. Most people cite how gruesome the procedure is. Why does that change anything? I’d be willing to be the average person would consider ANY surgical procedure gruesome, but since they don’t know the details of digging around inside a human body, they remain ignorant to those details. Sometimes it is medical relevant to have a late term abortion. Sometimes it is a choice between saving the mother or the baby. And to mandat that the baby gets all priority in these decisions is so wrong. If the mother chooses to die for her baby to live, then ok. If she decides that she does not want to trade her life for a baby, then ok. There should be zero judgment on her choice because it is to be a personal choice. And individuals with a medical training (aka the doctors involved) are the ones that can make the best recommendation on the situation… NOT the government.

This is why laws against abortion are fundamentally wrong. Sure, people have opinions… but these opinions are just that. The fact is that you do not know all situations, therefore you can not just say one way or the other.

One thing that seriously annoys me, more than someone that is so hardcore about their religion that they feel everyone has to hear the word of [deity], are people that thank [deity] for their accomplishments. Or on the other side of the spectrum… people that blame [deity] for their lack of accomplishment (and either become to hate [deity] or just brush it off as some master plan).

Do people have no value in themselves or the work that they did to reach a set goal? Do they honestly think that they couldn’t have done it without a character from a book?

It annoys me because it is, in a way, taking any credit you take for an accomplishment (such as winning an Oscar) and making an attempt to shift it to someone else– no mater who that someone else is. It’s analogous to giving credit to your parents every time you make it to class on time, even if there has been no contact with them for several days. I do not go around thanking the sun every time I make it to class on time, nor do I blame the laws of physics when I get a poor grade on a writing assignment. I take full responsibility for my accomplishments or lack there of. I would feel like a jerk if I said “Oh, it wasn’t my doing… it was [deity]’s plan that let me do this.” But when people do thank [deity] for what they do… that is really what I hear. And then I can’t help but think that maybe we should skip the middle man and just go strait to [deity] with any credit we were going to give this person. If don’t feel that it was anything that you did to achieve some recognition for an accomplishment… then you don’t deserve the recognition.

Keep thy religion to thyself. You go and personally thank [deity] on your own time. Thanks.

George Carlin suffered a heart attack last night. This truly saddens me. George Carlin in my opinion is the best comedian of all time, or at the very least he is definitely up there. He changed the face of comedy with one of his famous stand ups – “7 words you can’t say on television.”

On a more personal side, George Carlin honestly changed my life. I have seen most, if not all, of his HBO specials and I can recite several of his speeches off the top of my head. He views on the world greatly changed mine to a much more laid back view. He also assisted in changing my view on religion– to which I personally want to thank him for. One of my favorite speeches is his “Religion is Bullshit” speech. Before seeing that for the first time, I was highly spectacle of religion but was completely foreign to the idea of not believing it, but seeing that speech, I started to really think and figure out exactly what I believe… which changed my life not only in the religion department, but just my own free thought on everything.

That said, I will truly miss George Carlin. I was always looking forward to actually go and see him live and every time I say I will do it next year. Each year I feared there wouldn’t be a next year because if you’ve seen him recently… he looked pretty old. I guess my chance to see him live is now gone.

R.I.P. George Carlin: May 12, 1937 ~ June 22, 2008
The world will never forget you.

…if people you thought were actually good friends even give a shit. The lack of returned calls for weeks at a time and the complete lack of contact– those things make you wonder.

What better time than college to discover those people? It’s OK. I’ll move on.

I have noticed the weirdest thing happening to me lately. I have started to realize that I have my best ideas in the middle of the night… in the time between when I say I need to get to bed and the time when I actually get to bed.

So, right now I’m in that period of time. I told myself it’s time to get to bed around 1:30am, which was about an hour ago. At that point, I start putting things away and preparing to go to bed. Often times in that process, I will get distracted by something, often times something that I have told myself I’ll worry about some other time. Then I’ll go from there until I feel satisfied with the result.

What the hell am I saying? Ok… I think the best way is to just tell what I did tonight. I told myself it’s time for bed and started heading that way. Then, I suddenly saw my calculus homework that I didn’t feel like doing earlier because I had no idea what I was doing. I picked it up telling myself that I’ll just write down the problems and worry about it tomorrow (I had intended to actually copy it from someone else, actually). But as I was copying down the problems, I found myself curious about the solutions. And before I knew it, I was working through it and figuring it out. I was making obvious mistakes along the way and instead of saying “screw it,” I kept going. Before I knew it, I was done with it and I’m fairly confident I ended up with the correct answers– confident enough to bet money on it.

This is not a unique occurrence. This has happened to me many times before. I made a blog post last semester about a similar situation in which it was the middle of the night when I finally felt like working on a paper. That is really odd because papers are not minor things… and I did end up staying up very late that night working on the paper. I finally told myself I NEED to stop… but I did get really far on it.

Another example is just the other night, too. Sometimes it isn’t just homework or something I haven’t felt like doing. Sometimes it’s just thinking about stuff, and talking to myself (you may not know that about me, but I do talk to myself… a lot actually). There was a computer problem that I had been trying to figure out for several weeks now. I’m not going to bore you with the details, but just last night, I was thinking about it very systematically, when I suddenly came up with the ultimate solution to the problem. Once I get some parts, I will be implementing the solution… and it will work, I know it.

So… I guess you could say my brain is most active in the middle of the night… which definitely explains why I have a hard time getting to be before 3 or 4 am every night.

And then I found $20.

I have created a new page, currently title “My Stuff” for lack of a better name. This page will run through several of my computers. It is for those people that are curious what I run, and whatever. It is open to questions and comment. Feel free to take a look and ask any questions you have; I would enjoy answering them.

The page is not complete, but I got it started with my desktop computer. More will come, and I’ve started a list of more things to add to it. You can also suggest things for me to add to it.

(It is probably obvious my life is focused around computers and technology, so… now you know will be able more details about what that means)