So I’m back from my college visit trip down to California. It was good times, though driving 2000 miles in 3 days was pretty brutal. Here’s the brief summary:Stanford You can’t help but notice that Stanford has a freakin’ huge campus. 9 square miles huge. It’s a massive piece of land. The college is nice weather and nice facilites and all that whosit and whatsit, but I thought a lot of the people working there were sorta jerks. I called a week ago to try and get a quick interview with someone in the Econ department to talk about what type of management preparation they have at Stanford. I was never called back. So I decided to stop in at the Undergraduate Admissions office in the Econ department, and God forbid, I stopped in during lunch. There was a lady in there who finally came to the door when she saw me looking in, but she seemed awfully perturbed that I’d come during her lunch hour. She was wicked unhelpful, anyway. Ah well. The students there seemed nice, though.
Pomona This is a *really* nice piece of college. There are only 1500 kids at Pomona, but there are 5000 in this group of 5 colleges that are all next to each other, so it seems bigger. And because one of the colleges is women’s only, there a really nice guy-to-girl ratio on the campus ^_^. The facilities were all top-flight, the professors I talked to were all really helpful. Pretty much no complaints here. Oh, here’s one: No merit scholarships. College is wicked expensive.
USC Funny story that happened on the way to USC. USC is in the middle of South Central LA, right? So we’re driving on the freeway thru the city, going under some underpasses, when we see a mural painted on the wall. It was a 10-foot tall, really intimidating police officer that looked like one of the bad guys from Terminator pointing at your car with “BUCKLE UP!” written in huge white letters. I can see why people sorta resent the LAPD, heh. The university was less intimidating, though. It had a really good newspaper, and the new Business building was wicked futuristic. The college is *really* big, though, and the dorms are as mediocre as they come. They do have 100 full-tuition scholarships every year, though, so I’m gonna apply and try to score one of those, which would rock immensely.
This company, LamboShop, is cool. They have the single worst website I’ve ever seen, but what I gather is that they take pretty average cars and make them look like Deloreans or Lamborghinis or whatever. With the doors that go up and everything, but for only like 30 grand. That rocks.
I was thinking about worrying the other day, and my conclusion is that there’s no point to it. Worrying about something isn’t going to change your situation. That’s not to say you shouldn’t think about how to improve yourself or think about the solution to the problem, but thinking about the consequences of something isn’t going to improve your position at all.
Tolerance was also something I was thinking about. Linguistics is an interesting subject. One concentration of it deals with how words are interpreted differently according to the environment someone was raised in. For instance, tolerance means something different to every person. In my opinion, being tolerant means not hassling someone because of their personal beliefs. Tolerance doesn’t mean that you need to believe what other people believe, or even think that what they believe is moral. It just means accepting that everyone believes what they believe as fervently as you believe what you believe. There’s a big trend among people of my generation which has basically never been seen before that I don’t really agree with. It’s called “moral relativism”, and it basically says that you shouldn’t judge people on their morals because morality is a relative concept and there is no such thing as an absolute moral truth. With moral relativism, it leaves people to be not only tolerant of ignorance, but respectful of it. Ignorance is not something to be proud of. Being tolerant means not castigating someone becuase of their ignorance on subjects. But it doesn’t mean, in my opinion, respecting their beliefs.
The concept of morals and ethics are a really interesting branch of philosophy. Like, for instance, what should law be used for? Should punishment be determined by revenge or retribution for a crime? Or should it be used to keep someone from harming others? Hmmmm.
Since we’re on the subject of tolerance, diversity is another word that gets tossed around a lot. Diversity, in some circles, has meant leftist beliefs among a large portion of a group. That’s not diversity. Diversity means a variety of backgrounds and experiences among a group of people. A group that is 90% white or 90% black or whatever isn’t diverse and never will be diverse. A group of 90% democrats is not diverse. A place does not have diversity because everyone there believes in being completely tolerant of every belief. You need to have the “every belief” in the place first.
Speaking about non-tolerance, though, we drove thru Medford on the way home from California and passed a well-known billboard in the town. It says, in giant letters, “The POPE is the ANTI-CHRIST!”, with www.anti-christ666.com written at the bottom. Beside being intolerant, I don’t get protestants who think Catholicism is not Christianity. They completely ignore the history of Christianity. Y’know, that part about Catholicism being the *only* Christianity (other than Eastern Orthodox) for the first 1500 years of the religion. Or the part about Paul being the first Pope.
I did a Relay for Life with the South People and some buds from our NHS group last week. It’s a 24-hour thing for Cancer Research. I raised $141 for cancer. I should get an award or something, eh?
MP3 Prime Cut: Daddy DJ (Chico & Tonio Radio Edit) by Daddy DJ
Wicked cool Eurobeat track. “Daddy DJ, please take me to the party…”
MP3 Prime Cut Extra: I Do by Toya
R&B track with a cool garage backbeat. Some other good new R&B-ish tracks: “Fallin” by Alicia Keys and “Get Ur Freak On” by Missy Elliott w/ Nelly Furtado
