born in the usa

I'm too exhausted to blog effectively, but I'll give it the old college try. I left Denver around 9:15am MDT, after a quick shower and a lovely breakfast of oatmeal and a latte served up by Katie and James. I was sad to leave them to their own devices, but I had to drive approximately 720 miles today, and so I needed to get out of there. The drive was completely and utterly uneventful, as is to be expected when driving across the vast wastes of Nebraska. I was only in serious 'drowsiness is red alert' mode once, and a Starbucks appeared as if by a miracle just off the interstate, so I spent twenty minutes in one of their even-comfier-than-usual chairs catching up on the online world and waking myself up again. After that, I was basically okay, and I made it home at 9:45pm CDT - 11.5hrs is a pretty good time for 720mi, particularly considering my Starbucks hiatus.

I walked in the door just as the news interrupted my parents' viewing of "CSI: Miami" to say that Obama was calling a press conference. So, I sat around with them, eating a loose meat sandwich and waiting for the speech to start. As it turns out, I found out everything I needed to know about bin Laden's death from Twitter well before the speech actually happened, but I thought the speech itself was a good one. Then, I sat around some more, came downstairs, finished some romance-related tasks, did some digging on wikipedia and other news outlets, and am now calling it a night.

But in closing, I will just say that for one thing, it's quite amusing to me that 9/11 happened on my birthday and that bin Laden's death happened on John's birthday (happy birthday, John!). And for another thing, it's quite interesting to me to see such a public display of partying and rejoicing over some dude's death. Don't get me wrong - I'm pretty bloodthirsty and support it all the way, particularly remembering 9/11, etc. And, I hope that the country comes together like it did in those moments after 9/11, although I suspect the parties will have already found ways to attack each other over this by this time tomorrow. But still, for a country that values due process and the rule of law, it's fascinating that we're so jubilant over what's essentially a black ops assassination carried out on foreign soil. We certainly live in interesting times.

But interesting times call for sleep, so it's time for bed!