Summer Time, Living... you get it.

In my last post I told you all what I was going to be up to this summer, now its you all get to tell me, and everyone else, what you are going to be up to this summer. Remember nothing is too dull to post.

Summer Time... Living Easy

So I got the same summer job that I had last year again this year... not too bad I guess, pay is not horrible and I can stay on campus (much to my fiancés dismay) for free. I guess this year res life has dumped some of its loyalty to those that have worked for them in the past... looking over the list of employees I see some people who deserve to be on there, and some who don’t, as well as many missing names. Over all I am glad I am done with res life after this year, I had fun while I was here, but I am ready to go my own way; however I do want to have a meeting with Cari (assistant director of res life) at the end of the summer to give her a piece of my mind, respectfully of course.

It is going to be a long summer, with work, going home as often as I can to see Emily and work on wedding plans. Not to mention having to deal with finding a second part time job... Should be good times, and at the end of the summer is the wedding, so at least there is something bright at the end of the road to look forward to. Anyway that’s my update.

Back to Back to Back

Sorry for the delay... I have been less then focused on my blog over the last week, but now that I am back at work I have some time to post again.

So I think I have some idea of where I am going to go from this point, at least with my education. Well the plan before was education with an emphasis in political science and at this point I am going to keep going on that route. For the entire next year I need to take poli sci anyway so I am going to keep plugging away on that and during fall semester I am going to try this teaching program that Josh (Emily's brother-in-law) recommended to me to try and figure out for sure if teaching is what I want to do. If after the program I decide for sure that teaching is out I will just finish up the poli sci and change it from an emphasis to a major. If I follow that route I will be out a semester and a half early too.

So with this plan I am going to be in a lot of poli sci classes over the next year and if I plan to major in it then it does not leave me much time to try and get some internships or volunteer experience, but I am hoping with elections coming around again that I will be ok in that respect.

Although I will admit that I am not all that happy about having three classes on Tuesday/Thursday that are back to back to back (it is the only way I could take the 3 that I need next semester). For a splash of flavor I also get to add Spanish into the mix at some time... which I have not taken since high school.

So yeah, that’s next year, and school. Feel free to let me know what you think.

The reluctant teacher.

So I have had this problem for a while now; what the heck do I want to do with the rest of my life?

Right now as most of you know I am on the Secondary Education/Social Studies path. I have almost 3 years down and still 2 to go. Once or twice I have mused about whether or not I want to be a teacher, at first the question was should I be a history teacher? Which sparked a blog post quite a while back and after it was said and done I decided maybe I would be an economics teacher, then it changed to what it is at right now, political science. The problem however is that I am still having these questions about my future which makes me think maybe it is not what I am going to teach that I have a problem with, but rather teaching itself. This leaves me with a big problem with registration for next semester only 2 weeks away; what do I do with the rest of my life?

The problem is not helped by my not having any idea what I want to do, I look around and so many people have passion for one thing or another (biology, chemistry, theology, engineering) and I just... don't. So yeah that is my problem and with time ticking away I do not really have a solution.

On a side not I am an now a kinda-uncle; congrats to Gina and Josh on their little boy!

New Post! Big Government!

So I have not written a blog in a long time and I did rather like the short debate that took place on my old post between Ryan and Matt, but I guess since they both did agree on me making a new post I will do just that.

Please bear with me as this train of thought has not fully been run through yet on my part, and I am writing this mostly as a way of getting my thoughts out there and working though them.

So I have been reading UST's paper, The Aquin, for quite some time now and most of the time its interesting to read about what is going on and all the "controversies" that may be arising at any given time; but I have never considered them a "liberal" news source. Well yesterday I found a paper on my dorm room doorstep, this paper proclaimed itself to be the "conservative" UST paper, which made me wonder if my Aquin was indeed liberal. I digress though, the point is that I was looking over this "conservative" student newspaper and reading some article about big government not being the goal of the constitution when it was written. More or less it just talked about the big government versus small government stuff that most of us have heard several times before and this got me thinking about government "size".

Today in my poli sci class the topic was political economies, nothing really to do with big government or little government, and port control was mentioned which harkened my memory back to the whole government size issue, and it seems that the Republican Party has found themselves in a kind of contradiction when government size is concerned.

So try and follow me here as I attempt to stumble through this; the Republican Party (hereafter RP) criticizes the Democratic Party (hereafter DP) for their attempted involvement in everything, claiming that it is not the role of government to be that involved in what people should be able to handle themselves. So the RP is for smaller less involved government, and along with that lower tax, due to a lack or required funding. Knowing this basic premises it seems odd to me that the RP of this current administration is taking on such a high number of DP big government ideas; that is not to say the RP is for social programs and increased taxes, but rather for "safety" and increased prices.

One good example that is a current issue has to do with the Dubai Port Company and their buy out of a British company who was in charge of many of our large container ports. So with a large amount of our shipping ports being controlled by and Arab country, never mind that they are one of our most friendly Arab countries in that whole region, our president and the RP want to say that they (Dubai) can not have that type of foothold in our country. The proposed solution is to make large container shipping ports directly under government control in the interest of "safety". The same solution has been proposed, and is still being proposed by many RP members, for airport security.

I am not entirely sure I have given you enough to see what I am thinking, but in short the anti big government RP is attempting to increase the governments relative size dramatically by taking control of something that has been a private industry for the last 250 years. Would the RP increase taxes to cover these new costs? Probably not, that money would just go into our national debt (kind of ironic if you really think about what that debt is) but at the same time the US Government is not equipped to deal with the shipping industry and would not be able to manage our ports at the same low costs as the current outside companies can; what does that mean for you and me? The handbag that came from China that cost $15 jumps up in price to $20 to cover the increased port fees. So no we are not being taxed more but we sure as heck are paying more.

I guess my overall point is that the RP for all of their small government aims, for their mantra of "is it really the governments job to handle that?" has taken some pretty big steps in increasing the size of government under the ruse of "safety".