Item!

Specifically, Items! Of things I forgot to mention in my last post :)

Item: I got my French test and my Grammar quiz back yesterday. I got a B plus on the French and an 86 on the Grammar. A lot better than I thought I was going to do, yet, I am not very pleased. I do not want to turn into your average "B" student after doing so uncharacteristically well last year. Gotta work harder, I guess.

Item: In Grammar class yesterday we had a speaker from Forbes magazine. He was a nice guy, but he was extremely professional, and as I think I've said before, I am not a top-of-the-line type girl and these really suave put-together people frighten me about my choice of career and whether I'm going to be able to compete with them. The whole "looking for a job" thing scares me, actually. It's good I get to put it off for a couple more years ...

Item: Last night at seven o'clock I and one of my friends from Grammar went to see Leonard Pitts, Jr. speak at Morton Hall. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Miami Herald. He loathes Bush and seems very liberal on some issues (gay rights, etc) but conservative on issues such as Affirmative Action. The theme of his lecture was that the country is not as polarized as the media makes it out to be, and that we are all really one mostly-in-agreement family that Cable TV and other media are trying to force into different, extremist warring groups with different labels. He used Gallop poll statistics for issues such as abortion, gay marriage, etc. to make his point. Of course, there are a lot of other polls that don't show such monolithic agreement on these topics.

It was a pretty good speech and I agreed with a lot of what he said about extremism and the media. Unfortunately when we began to discuss the upcoming election, he asserted that he had never seen the country as fiercely divided as it was over Bush vs. Kerry. He made special note of the level of "anger" prevalent in the campaign. I agree with this, but doesn't it completely undercut the earlier portion of his program? That we are really united? Isn't the presidential campaign a legitimate "issue" to be divided about? Augh. Too much. Maybe he made some subtle distinctions that I missed.