Thursday energy

Siphoning itself into the night, my energy departs from me, including the energy I need left to figure out what will get myself into bed without my stomach complaining at me like it has the past few nights. I need a food to fill it up but that won't be too easy or too hard to digest. Maybe I don't need to eat anything. Maybe I need to refrain from eating! Whatever, this conflict having happened before I don't know why it's come back, but it has. The worst problem, though, is the fact that I recently have not gone to bed before sunrise. No incentive strong enough to prevent that. The irony is that the incentive will probably come immediately after my summer class ends. But anyway, I'd like a food that has very little sugar but that still has a lot of content, that is, that's sufficiently large to give my stomach enough to be satisfied yet won't have enough energy in it to keep me awake much longer. As in, virtually anything in the fresh pastry section of any Japanese convenience store. What the hell, America? Apparently we give Japan 80% of its soybeans nowadays, so what's preventing us from using some of that stuff ourselves? THAT'S how you solve the problem with our food being a) bad and b) completely unhealthy. Use more soybeans. Hell, if we don't grow red beans, we should be. But if we are, we have no excuse for not making an pan (アンパン) all the time. The problem with eating that stuff, though, is that the shock of having that much red bean in my body (I'm very slightly allergic to soybeans) takes my stomach about a day to get used to. So I need to be eating that stuff fairly regularly in order to enjoy it without any displeasure afterwards. Meaning that if I go into Porter Square for an pan, I should get like six of them and put them in my refrigerator and hope they'll last.

And yet that, as it'd be for any perfectionist who can't find anything he knows he's made perfect recently, is not the only thing keeping me up. What can put me to bed more easily? Well, probably having a topic for my Japanese history research paper due whenever is one. I noticed about four people stay later today because they wanted to get their topics approved the class before the original due date (which is this upcoming Tuesday). Oops. I should've been working on that before, but you know me. Or maybe you don't. Well, I put things off as much as possible. よくこんなことを後回しにするね。(I just learned that phrase today from a Japanese song; I'm proud of myself for that.) And there's yet another one.

But I also put too much on my plate. And I've picked up the mentality (from certain people, well, a certain person, and it's not his fault) that I have to eat everything on it. So I try to do that, and I end up having a lot to shit out later. (You knew I would choose this image, not the ones that are all for the squeamish.) That's the story of things, and the story of America. Well, Americans can have bad metabolisms too, and that's another problem. This country...

At least that's the current story of America. Way back when (in the 70s) it was different. Now people are probably gonna look at us badly for having an overweight surgeon-general. What's the surgeon-general's job anyway, though? I don't know. If it's to suggest regulations on doctors, then I've got an easy solution for you, which is to follow the Constitution and take away that power, but nobody wants to hear that one. If that's not the surgeon-general's purpose then there's no easy solution.

It's hard to support positions that differ from what most people see or from the status-quo when you're just as ignorant as everyone else. Then again, I do believe we're all just as ignorant as everyone else in that we can only know a finite amount of information, no matter how infinite our power to memorize can seem. Still you've gotta fight to know.

And hopefully, that's still the story of America, or if not, it can become the story again. Fighting to know rather than to kill, or to continue past mistakes just to cover our collective ass whose size has been insulted. (And in terms of our influence abroad, rightly so.)

I don't want to end this freewrite on a foreign policy note. I do want to end it on something relating to myself. That's how it started and that's how it should end. But I don't know what to write, and that's cool too. So I guess I'll just leave a period here, and I'll make it open in the middle。