Dear Mr. Horowitz

-You are not a very engaging speaker. This was evidenced by the girl sitting in the row in front of me who played the new-fangled version of tetris on her blackberry, during your ENTIRE speech.

-I'm glad you clarified yourself so much throughout the first hour of your speech: "4/5, so that's 80%;" "People from the state of Palestine, so Palestinians..." etc. I would have been completely lost without these clarifications.

-I wish you would have given us less of a history lesson during your initial hour and spent more time on how you justify hosting Islamofascism week, TODAY: Monday, October 22nd, 2007

-You pronounce the word "Nazi" awkwardly. I have always been under the impression that "Nazi" rhymes with "Yahtzee."

-In the future you should be more sneaky about calling people stupid, saying things like: "Clearly, you've hit your intellectual ceiling;" "Well, you're obviously not seeing that 2 and 2 makes 4;" and "Maybe you just can't read;" generally just makes you look like a a jerk, whether or not these quotes are taken in or out of context.

-Next time if someone quotes you from your book, and you say that you have never written those words, and then the person comes back to the microphone and says: yes in fact you did, it's from "The Professors," come up with a better cover story then: "Well I wrote at least 200,000 words last year and I don't remember every one of them." Maybe you thought we'd be so astounded by the quantity of your writing that we'd never question the quality or importance of it: because if it was as monumental as you say it was, you should remember that you wrote it, it was only last year.
(Kid at the mic: when David Horowitz asks you if you have read "The Professors" in it's entirety, next time lie and say: "Yes.")

-For the first hour that I heard you speak I had trouble believing that you had actually said all of the crazy quotes that were used to hype a response to Islamofascism week...then I realized that the way you speak is totally conducive to crazy quote making, or at least the way you speak during question and answer sessions. A lot of things you said tonight will get added to the list of ridiculousness, and they will seem like they were taken out of context, but the truth is if you put them back in context, it still won't offer a whole lot of insight into the situation.

-Finally something we agree on.
Adam Lichtenheld is in fact, a huge jerk (hehe, just kidding Adam!).

P.S.
-Props to the kid who said "bling" on the microphone while talking to Mr. Horowitz.

-Anti-props to the man who was obviously BFF with Horowitz and videotaping on the right side of the auditorium. Every time someone would yell something in outrage and get up to leave, this crafty cinematographer would cut to said person and follow them out as he put his hand into the frame waving bye. He was smiling the entire time, extremely satisfied with himself, and I'm sure thinking he was thinking: "Nifty camera work, nifty camera work."

GO ABROAD

A movie I filmed and edited for the Go Abroad session I faci'd for ROKS. Sweet Madison AIESECers talk about why people should go abroad.

life, liberty, and happiness?

"The Dream is in there somewhere. Sometimes it takes some digging. Maybe digging is The Dream. I never figured it out. But I held onto my shovel."

Oh Mr. Williams, sometimes you are so wise, you've gotten props twice in my blog this week. You should be impressed with yourself.

However, this statement makes me think of the phrase: "The pursuit of happiness."

A few weeks ago I was walking through Library Mall at night, and they were playing a movie (which I have no idea what it was), but I passed through just at the moment to hear the segment: "Maybe they wrote it as 'the pursuit of happiness,' because they already knew that's all it could ever be, a pursuit." I find that statement a little dismal, but perhaps somewhat true, I mean the constitution says: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (I still have that memorized from 5th grade, and as a child I was no more of a time manager than I am now, so I learned that the night before it was tested...whoever said cramming wasn't effective?)

Why didn't it just say that we are entitled to life, liberty, and happiness?

graduation destination

I've recently started thinking more about how long I am going to spend in college, 4 years? 5 years?

But yesterday Kaitlin said: "Someone once told me that you can never take too long to graduate."

And 15 minutes ago I read Williams post which says we should stop the "in and out as fast as possible" mentality, and take time to have personal growth experiences, etc.

When I think about the time I'm going to spend in college, I'm less worried about my personal growth (because fingers crossed that will happen mainly on it's own--although I do agree with Williams that people who graduate later often come out as more well developed people) but mainly because as a college GRADUATE you suddenly have this new set of societal standards thrust upon you. Sure, you can go travel, but it better be for a reason (I mean I don't actually think that, but I think a lot of people do) When really, I still want to have a period in my life (like we're talking 6 monthes) where I strap a backpack on my back, put some shoes on my feet, and just walk around Latin America. And if I have a lot of extra time, like a year, then maybe I will just go on a walk around the world. I'm not too worried that "walking around the world" won't even fit anywhere on a resume, because when I graduate and have a "real" job, whatever that may entail, I don't think that 3 weeks vacation time a year will be enough to get it all in. I have a lot of things I want to get in.

And the glory of it all is: you know when you return from wherever you are (and you are 24 like Kaitlin), there will still be a Newbie Social (like there was last night), and it will be filled with people much younger than you (like 18 years old), who will most definitely want to grind on you because you just look so damn wise.