Life Worth Living

Tears almost came to my eyes as I sat and listened to Barack Obama’s inauguration speech today. I watched the eyes of the onlookers, those who stood with their hearts in their mouths and their trust in the president. I thought back to two hundred years of bloodshed, of fighting with swords, guns, and words, of hope lost and hope found again, of believing when all belief seems lost, and of persevering and of succeeding, and I hoped that my fellow students in the classroom and my fellow Americans across the continent cared, because I do. Because in the end, whoever I may have voted for, whatever wrongs this nation may have committed against others and its own citizens, whatever may be down the road for us, I really am proud to be an American.

Corny as the title is…I’ve been following the Olympics almost nonstop for the past two or three days now, checking medal counts the last thing before I go to bed, hopping downstairs every morning right after my shower, so tense and anxious at times that I want to hold my breath. Sometimes I want to close my eyes because I’m afraid to see, until I realise that if the result is disaster, I would be pinching myself to know what happened and, well, if the result is victory, how could I let myself miss it?

I haven’t been just watching mindlessly, though. Certain thoughts have been going through my mind, almost always the same ones. I’ve been wondering when the right time is to blog about them, but more and more it seems that I’m not quite ready to get them out of my mind yet. The thoughts are jumbled, unorganized, confused. I need them to settle. Or maybe I’m just not ready yet. I say I’ll write it all down eventually, but I’ve learned that I don’t always keep my word. Suffice to say, the one thing I am certain about is that I want that Team USA victory over China. And with that, I’ve learned that I can be quite patriotic when I want to be.