To quote myself: Holy crap!

While browsing my site stats, I discovered that when you Google 'reasons to hate america' (sans quotes), this blog is the fifth hit. (And thank you to whoever the nice person from Abingdon in Oxfordshire is, because your referral page is what brought this to my attention.)

I'm uncertain if I should feel proud or a little bit guilty about that. This is the entry that comes up as the Google result, if you're interested, and I suppose if I give my entries titles such as 'reasons to hate America' I have to expect to get hits from people searching for reasons to hate America.

I am, in fact, planning on travelling to Ireland and then the UK (probably England, but possibly Wales, haven't figured that one out yet) for a number of months this spring. Now I get to imagine all sorts of horrible scenarios involving angry US passport-control folk in New York when I return, brandishing printouts of my blog at me. "You terrorist!" they'll screech. "You hate America! You said so yourself!"

"I do not hate America," I will calmly say, "though I may sometimes say I do out of anger. America is far to broad of a nation to hate entirely, and it is founded on concepts far to noble to inflict my wrath. I merely strongly object to the rampant idiocy so commonly accepted and embraced within the American public."

And by then, they'll have lost interest and will have waved me through, and I'll be one of those people who walks through the airport talking to themselves, only they're actually using their hands-free device, only I actually will be talking to myself.

I can't wait.