well, they say never go to bed angry, or annoyed, or anything like that, because it's just a bad idea, so here i am, several hours after i had intended to hit the sack. i got into an argument with tommy on the phone about--get this--Disneyland. yes, disneyland. as some of you may know, i have never been nor do i have any intention to visit disneyland, for several reasons, one of which is that i consider it one of the most blatant examples of conspicuous consumerism on the part of the US. that's not the main or the only reason, really. the main reason is that i plain don't want to go there. i have no interest in it. the very idea of it doesn't appeal to me. i also don't like crowds and have no interest in the rides. i would rather not pay the exorbitant entrance fees. i'd rather save my money and go somewhere really amazing, like another country. tommy described it as a place where people have no stress, where everyone is mellow and just has fun all the time. it's a fantasy world where americans go to briefly forget their woes, for a considerable price. i don't consider that an awesome vacation.

the main thing that pissed me off was that tommy called me close minded and said i had no right debating this because i had never been there. he later went on to say that unless i had direct experience at the topic at hand, my arguments weren't good enough. that's not true. first off, i wasn't being close-minded, i had an opinion, i stuck with it, and i defended it. i didn't just repeat "i hate disney" over and over. it also annoyed me that he said that anyone else would have just been like, oh, disney? i've never been, what's it like, oh that sounds nice, blah blah blah, but i had to turn it into a debate. well, i'm sorry i'm not everyone else, sweetheart, but i thought you knew that when you started dating me.

and yes, i'm stubborn. i won't give up unless someone convinces me that their position is a better one, or unless i just plain run out of arguments. he said that i didn't take anything away from the discussion, so i was close minded. well, he didn't exactly say anything that i hadn't heard before. he said it was fun. it was relaxing. it made you feel like a kid again. people are happy there. there's so much to do there. why do you have to focus on something like it being commercialized. yeah, those are not exactly mind-expanding arguments right there. usually, i don't focus on what's highly commercialized in our culture. i notice it, a lot more these days after a lot we learned in high school, but i grew up in this culture and i'm pretty used to it. some things, however, stick out at me as examples of what's stupid about our culture and our modern age. reality tv is one of them, and i refuse to watch it. things that promote gross commercialism, like disneyland and the mall of america, are another. i would prefer not to patronize them. as the world progressively falls to pieces around them, americans seek bigger and more fantastic distractions from reality. wonderful. it's not for me, thanks.

it's not even the argument itself that upset me. it was the way tommy acted, like i was this annoying person who can only ever see one side of an argument. that's not true. if you asked me to come up with some reasons why disneyland is great, i could come up with them, even though i wouldn't agree with them. for instance, it creates thousands of jobs for americans. another is that people spending money is exactly what the depressed economy needs. another is that they probably do a lot of giving back to the community, most rich corporations do. another is that they attract tourism to florida and to american in general, which is again helpful in the depressed economy. yeah, maybe i would have taken something away from the discussion if he'd mentioned any of the above, which i just sat here and thought of in the past five minutes. but he didn't, and i didn't find his points to be at all enlightening, and so i didn't give in. at the end, i was just mostly offended by the way he was talking about me and the attitude he was taking, as though this is some cross he has to bear with me turning things into debates. i can count on one hand the number of debates we've actually had that haven't ended in like five minutes with him saying "well, fuck you", which apparently translates to "i don't feel like getting into this". i don't purposely try to make things into an argument, but if i have a strong opinion on something it's going to take a hell of a lot more than "it's a lot of fun" to convince me that my position is incorrect.

he also asked me if i ever "stop being on debate team". if this were actually debate team, we would have argued it back and forth for twenty-five minutes or so and then let the judge decide and then left it at that. but in debate they don't accuse you of being close-minded because they're failing to win you over, and in debate they don't tell you that you can't debate anything you haven't experienced yourself--because, you know, most of what people discuss, in general, they haven't experienced themselves. politics, the war in iraq, the abuse of iraqi POWs, whether slobodan milosevic should get the death penalty, whether human stem cells should be harvested from cloned organisms--no one our age has ANY experience with that. yet we can discuss it, usually in an intelligent fashion, working with what we know and our own personal convictions. that's how opinions are shared and debated. it's a plus if you have direct experience because you'll know things the other person won't. if i were a hawk, i could debate someone who had returned from Iraq being completely against the war. he'd have been out there in danger of getting his ass killed and i would have been safely in the united states, BUT if i truly believed, on the basis of what i knew and believed about the role of the US in the world, about the specific nature of the war in Iraq, and about the competence of the administration, than i could still debate him on it. that's if i were for the war and i'm not. but guess what--there were guys who came back from vietnam believing the US had every right to go in, and there were guys who came back believing it was a huge fuck-up. they both had direct experience and they didn't agree, and someone who hadn't gone could still debate them on principle of whether or not such military action on the part of the US was warranted.

here's another example: i've never been to the running of the bulls in pamplona. i have no desire to see it, even though i love spanish culture and that's one of the most famous aspects. why? because i think it's kind of stupid to watch some really brave/foolish guys in red sashes run like hell from a bunch of pissed-off bulls who have been penned up in a tiny space to get them agitated. yeah i don't have to have been to that to think it's kind of silly, even if it's supposed to be exhilarting, man versus beast. i can form an opinion on that based on what i know.

i know tommy has a completely different opinion of disneyland than i do, and i can respect that. i wouldn't deny anyone the chance to visit disney if they so choose because hey, it's their dollar and their choice. but i didn't feel like he respected my opinion at all, i felt like he just considered it to be idiotic and baseless because i've never visited it, and that hurt.

now that i've released my pent-up frustration in a civilized manner, i'm going to bed.