Like a puddle with no reflection of the sky or the trees

Nothing says non-productivity quite like panda bear pajama pants.

Andrew Jackson may be my least favorite person in history. At least when Hitler and Stalin decided to champion the cause of ethnic cleansing and genocide, they got an eternity's worth of villainizing and sucky reputation for it. Jackson, directly responsible for the deaths of 4,000 Cherokees and the shoving around of another 45,000 American Indians, gets his face on the $20 bill and hundreds of laudatory statues scattered around the southeast U.S. I'm not sure that balancing the national debt is an impressive enough presidential achievement to justify the Indian Removal Act.

In fact, in Jackson's own time, he was criticized enough that while he was running for president, his opponents (mature founding fathers that they were) started collectively referring to him as "Jackass." Jackson decided to embrace the name, even using it as the symbol for his campaign. In time, this evolved into being the symbol for the Democratic party as a whole. That's right: the Dem symbol is a donkey because Andrew Jackson was a douchebag.

Just... seriously.

The fact that recently a truly astonishing number of people I know have gotten married (which I only know about through the stalk-tastic nature of the Facebook news feed) has made me wonder how long it's going to be before a majority of my friends have spouses. For no particular reason, I assume that whenever that time comes, my life will suddenly involve more dinner parties. (Isn't that what married couples do? Host dinner parties?)

This was quickly followed by the realization that I really don't have much of an idea of what young married coupledom is supposed to look like. Romantic comedies, after all, always end on the wedding day, and sitcoms don't pick up until after 20 years of marriage. I don't know how to envision a life stage that hasn't been unrealistically, repeatedly, and monotonously represented in the media.