Facts

1. Paul Gowder is simply delightful.

2. My chicken soup is awesome.

3. My bittersweet chocolate pudding is even better.

4. Stanford's political science department places its graduates better than God.

5. One's musical education should always be continuous, and I am very open to learning and being challenged, and am at least aware of the good stuff and in favor of it. That I do not possess the good stuff (or any stuff, really), is due to my life-long limited budget for the arts, and my different priorities of spending more for books and food than music. I should not be blamed for this, but perhaps I could be pitied and thus looked upon charitably and treated with charity. At the end of the day, I am redeemable.

6. That said, I am also unapologetic and unwavering in my love for things that other people hate, namely country music and other "maudlin" stuff about love. In the immortal words of Tom Petty, no, I won't back down. I will not be changed. So there.

7. At some point, all friends reach an impasse, a sort of friendly detente, which I call the punk/God split. You can have a conversation where statements 1, 2, and 3 are all in perfect agreement, filled with comity and bon homie: 1. Kids these days don't know what real punk is. 2. "Real" punk is great! What passes as punk these days is crap! 3. The Clash were awesome! Now, they are great punk! Statements 1, 2, and 3 generate nothing but unanimous assent, and not only do you have a mutual love, but also a mutual hate: kids these days, "not-real" punk, etc. But then you get to statement 4., in which one of you identifies a band you consider to be "real" punk that the other does not, and then one of you just keeps quiet, and changes the conversation. And that is what real friendship is: holding one's tongue, and keeping the friendship, because being friends is more important than being right. Even though you are right, of course.

One can have the exact same conversation about any other topic upon which one would vehemently disagree: belief in God, rigorousness and value of social science, value of literary theory, etc. etc.

This also extends to lovers, although I can't figure out if one compromises more or less for a lover than a friend. On the one hand, friends are for life, and more valuable than any passing boy/girlfriend. On the other, so are partners. On the other other, you have to spend more time with partners than you do friends. On the other other other, love is a more powerful emotion than bon homie. Suffice it to say, I have always had to tolerate something I've hated, e.g., bad punk or reggae, but I do so willingly, because that is what you do when you are a sucker.

8. The problem with imposing one's taste on others is that one should share, but not demand. One should not force or coerce another to bend towards one's "subjective universal" truth/whim.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove,
O no! It is an ever fixed mark
That looks upon tempests and is never shaken
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

9. Studying for a statistics midterm SUCKS.

10. Not seeing the reggae-loving, country-hating TD for a few days for the above reason sucks even more.