BrianCavner.com

I'm Bad At Size

2010-08-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

From my: Vignette a Day Project.

I decided to show these two pictures from today (Day 35) and a few days ago (Day 31) to show the relative sizes of the dogs, but I realize now it doesn't really work when the dogs I want to compare are in different pictures taken at different distances. But I'm leaving the pictures anyway because I want to. And I can. So, there they are.

I realize I'm bad at size because I'm used to seeing dogs the size of the ones on the right. Those are the ones I live with. I mean... that live with me. So when I see one the size of the one on the left, it feels like it's an unusually huge dog. And she's not even that big of a dog either; I just somehow forget that dogs come in sizes bigger than a honey badger.

Guinness Book of Records listed honey badgers as the most fearless animal in the world, by the way.

Anyway, so in addition to dogs I also forget that people come in different sizes. I don't have any kids, I live too far away from my family to see the (scant few) kids that are in my family, and none of my friends really have kids. This means I generally only encounter people adult-size and bigger. I imagine it's normal to be kind of afraid of something you're not used to seeing (e.g. clowns), so as a result I've become kind of pedophobic.

That's kind of a weird word.

Anyway, so in addition to dogs and people I also forget that ice cream gets smaller when you get it home from the store. Really. In the store it looks big and full and delicious, but then you get it home and eat it all and it seems like it was so little.

Size. I'm bad at it.

A Tale of Two Dogs

2010-08-16T16:22:00.000-07:00

Can you tell which one I like more?

From my: Vignette a Day Project.

These Boots Are Made for Mr. Phoenix

2010-07-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

I've always wanted to work as a costume designer in Hollywood on one of Joaquin Phoenix's movies. Not because I'm particularly talented in costume design--in fact, I'd postulate that it's an area in which I'm particularly untalented--but because there's a joke I've been dying to make: It is my hope that I would craft a delightful piece of footwear for the star, whose coworker would mistakenly stumble across my creation and, assuming the shoes were for him, begin to take them. I would then admonish him, and state plainly, "these boots are made for Joaquin!"

The joke's not funny per se (or perhaps at all), and almost certainly not original. I mean, I've never heard anyone else make it, but come on... these boots are made for Joaquin? Really?

I mention this only because I have the Oregon state bar exam tomorrow, and so a fitting title for this post may have been "Dead Man Walking," which led me quite naturally to "Dead Man Joaquin," which doesn't make any sense. So here I am explaining this boot joke I've had chambered since puberty because I was genuinely concerned that people would think Dead Man Joaquin was a stupid title. Good thing I avoided that.

Anyway, as mentioned, I have the Oregon state bar exam tomorrow. As such, it seemed entirely appropriate to embark on a new creative adventure. I've seen various Photo-a-Day projects around the interwebz over the past few years, and have finally decided to do one myself with the aid of an application I'm sure is much maligned amongst real photographers. It's called Vignette, and its big sell to me was the ability to apply random effects to your image after exposure. Most are cheesy, but that's the charm to me. I want this "Vignette-a-Day" project to capture not just the random encounters I have, but to further randomize them. This way, not only will the daily experience be a fun surprise, but so will the photograph that captures it. In celebration of the bar, here is my Day 1 shot:

It's my exam preparedness kit, containing: One apple, one Focus flavor Vitamin Water, one mint Clif bar, two apple raspberry Just Fruit Bars, five citrus Vitamin C Halls, a package of tissues, and a handfull of cashews. Not quite the previsions necessary to cross the Appalachians, but they also don't allow pack mules in the testing center.

As I post a new photo every day for 365 days, the newest ones will be posted here in my Picasa account. The more interesting ones deserving of special commentary (that may or not be sometimes tangentially related to the picture itself maybe) will get a blog post.

So... night before the bar: exam food kit constructed, new photography project started, and back to blogging. Keen.

25 Random Facts About Me

2009-01-31T18:47:00.000-08:00

It's a big craze on Facebook right now to post 25 things about yourself. I decided to share my list because I think it's way more gooder than other people's lists. It is probably of very limited interest to anyone but close friends and family, so if you don't fit those parameters, you are excused.

Some people quote movies. Some (smart) people quote books. I quote the Internet. Regularly. I become surprised if you don't know what I mean when I say "yo dawg, I put a swimming pool in your swimming pool...".

I was an honors student in high school. I was a student leader in undergrad and earned a B.S. with a heavy research requirement. I'm currently enrolled in a doctoral-level program at a decently well-respected law school. But most of my knowledge comes from random Wikipedia perusals. I find it fun to know things about things.

I get a little bit of anxiety when I pee for the first time in the morning because I always think about "what if I'm still asleep and peeing in bed?" I have to do a couple of tests to ensure I'm awake before I can feel comfortable.

If I'm alone in the car, I'm singing. Even if I don't know the words to the song. I just make 'em up. I get incredibly embarrassed if anyone sees me doing it, though. If I'm stopped at a light, I try not to be directly next to anyone so they can't see me. If I see that I've been spotted while on the highway, I pull out my phone and hold it just below my face so that it looks like I was talking to someone on speaker phone.

I use an electric toothbrush, so it makes noises when I brush, and I find it fun to mouth words while brushing to make it sound like I'm saying those words. Only "mom" and "wow" really come out clearly, but I still try whole sentences.

Everyone says that they're bad with names, but I've taken it to the goldfish level. I cannot remember names to save my life. I've mastered ways to converse without ever having to say anyone's name because of it. Friends I've had for years comment that it's weird to hear me say their name because I do it so irregularly.

I hate being asked what my favorite color is. I feel like the answer (for some reason) has very dire consequences if I commit and make the wrong choice. I could be stuck with blue for the rest of my life and be unhappy and never fully understand why. This is the only type of question I feel this way about, though.

I would put a snake in my pants before I would consent to having a spider in the same room as me. I'd rather eat a cockroach than see a spider. I'd wrestle a cougar before knowing there's a spider in the same forest as me. I seriously have nightmares about accidentally walking into a spiderweb.

Though, oddly, I can't kill spiders. I'm afraid the deed will be witnessed by another spider and they will hold a little spider tribunal and sentence me to death and then one night a troop of spiders will march upon me for my war crimes. Don't laugh, bees actually do this (sort of (seriously, look it up)).

I've never had a nickname that stuck (including the nasty, mean nicknames kids give each other), though this is the first time in my life I'm more regularly called "Brian" than "Cavner".

I never used to be able to cuddle because I would get hot and antsy and uncomfortable. In fact, sleeping with someone else in the same bed (or room for that matter) always made me feel awkward because I like to move around a lot and feel guilty if I think I'm keeping someone else up. Though I'm in a relationship that I actually enjoy cuddling for the first time. I think that's a good sign.

The most valuable lesson I ever learned my mother taught me. I used to panic about things (like, oh my goodness a school project I forgot about is due tomorrow!!) and my mother would just calmly say "well, let's do it now, then. It will get done and it will be fine." I have to say that to myself every once in a while to keep from feeling overwhelmed. Whatever happens happens, and everything will be okay.

I have difficulty sleeping facing a wall due to one of those "awake dreams" I had when I was a kid where, while I was laying in bed, a ghost touched my back.

I'm sort of afraid of the dark, but only because I'm afraid of what I can't see (also why the ocean scares me). So to combat this fear, I'll sometimes announce out loud "I know you're there". If the monster thinks I'm aware of it, it can't hurt me.

I find the little scar that people get in their eyebrows if they have a piercing that is rejected incredibly attractive. I do not, however, find the piercings themselves particularly attractive.

One of the things I miss most from San Diego is regularly going tanning in a salon. Don't knock it. A 15-minute nap at your lunch break in a warm cocoon is heavenly. It also gives you that lingering sensation of warmth that sticks with you for a few hours, like after a nice hot shower or a dip in the spa.

I feel reasonably sane. I think what helps with that is that when I feel stressed or overwhelmed, I listen to sad songs and let myself cry until I slobber. The feeling of catharsis is amazing.

The job I miss most is being a campus tour guide. Getting paid to have people follow me around and listen to me talk? AWESOME! My dream job, I think, is to be a minister. But not of any specific religion. I just want people to pay me to yammer about stuff.

I have never (that I can remember) worn a bought Halloween costume. I feel like costumes are an intensely personal manifestation of your own inner creativity and feelings of self-worth. Piecemeal, homemade costumes are the best.

I love bottles. I think I was an alchemist in a past life. I think it would be fun to fill a cabinet with little hand-blown glass bottles filled with all sorts of fun concoctions and tinctures. My favorite ever was a bottle my mother had when I was really young that someone had made her. I think it was supposed to be for perfume, but it was always empty and on display. I want it.

I've never been in a physical fight. Though I did once kick a kid in the head during nap time in preschool when he was laying on his little sleep mat. I think the reason I gave at the time was that he was looking at me funny. I guess I was a bully. I also bit a girl on the arm on a Dumbo-esque ride at an amusement part.

I sometimes fantasize that I will randomly run into the boy I kicked or the girl I bit and we become friends without ever knowing that we had previous encountered each other. And then, a few years down the line, the other one starts telling me the story about the kid who kicked his head or the boy who bit her and I can exclaim "that was me!"

I love teaching. Not just in a professional capacity, but just sharing with someone how to do something I know. I love when people ask me questions about standardized tests because it lets me teach. I'll sometimes relay random tips for tests on unwilling audiences. Hey! Did you know that you can remember the square roots of 2 and 3 with Valentines day and St. Patrick's Day? The square root of 2 is 1.4 (February 14th) and the square root of 3 is 1.7 (March 17th).

Some people enjoy finishing books, but I hate it. I also hate finishing a television series or a movie. I usually get really sucked in to the plot and feel a closeness with the characters. Finishing their story feels like losing contact with a friend.

Trigger Happy Police Kill Another Innocent

2009-01-24T12:27:00.000-08:00
I have twice been critical of police officers' use of the Taser. I previously suggested that the weapon should be "used as a substitute for lethal force in a situation where the revolver would be appropriate". While both of my previous musings were critical for using the Taser when the revolver would have been inappropriate, I now focus on using the revolver when the revolver is inappropriate.

I speak of 80-year-old Florida man Isaac Singletary who brandished a firearm at a group of drug dealers who had congregated in his front yard and was promptly shot four times and killed by the dealers who were, in fact, undercover police officers. Note that Florida laws permit property owners to shoot someone who is on your property if you feel that your life is endangered, whether or not your life actually is endangered. So what we have, then, is a group of police officers illegally trespassing on a private citizen's property who then shot that citizen when he legally used his firearm in an attempt to scare them away. Rather than identifying themselves as officers and diffusing the situation, they shot him. Rather than using a Taser when it would finally actually have been appropriate, they shot him.

To quell the invariable counter-argument, this situation is not the same as SWAT shooting someone while executing what is (or what they reasonably believe to be) a legally valid search warrant on a property where it is believed that the occupant is armed and dangerous. In that situation, the police are legally on the property (i.e. not trespassing) and have reason to believe that the occupants may shoot them. Here, however, the police are not legally on the property (i.e. are trespassing) and have no reason to believe that an innocent citizen will shoot them if they properly identify themselves. While police officers should be entitled more leeway than a civilian when they are in situations that warrant heightened concern (e.g. the SWAT example), this is not such a situation.

Let me also calm police-apologists and state that this is not an issue of whether or not officers should be able to defend themselves or "they do a dangerous job and need protection". This is simply a look at the legality of their actions. Self-defense requires what amounts to a "clean hands" requirement; you cannot be the cause of the situation that threatens your life. For instance, I could not threaten someone with a knife and then stab him if he pulls out a gun and say "self defense, he had a gun". Similarly, I could not enter your property and shoot you in self-defense for fear of the gun you're legally threatening me with. There's no question that had the police officers been civilians, they would have committed indefensible murder.

Let me make the point that I believe Mr. Singletary's actions were disproportionate and had he shot first under a theory of self-defense or defense of property, I would just as quickly condemn him as I now do the officers. However, Florida law disagrees with me and says that he would have been justified in doing so. Tangentially, despite that law, what do you think would have happened if Mr. Singletary had shot first given that the "victims" of the shooting would have been police officers? I'm willing to bet his otherwise justifiable actions would magically become unjustifiable.

So what we have is this: In Florida, property owners can legally shoot and kill a trespasser. Similarly, a trespasser has no claim of self-defense if he shoots the property owner because he lacks "clean hands"; he put himself at bodily risk by trespassing. However, if the trespasser is a police officer, the roles are reversed. A property owner cannot legally shoot and kill a trespassing officer, but the trespassing officer can shoot the property owner.

Isaac Singletary was murdered by police officers who were not even required to stand trial for a fact-finding jury of their peers to determine guilt or innocence. Your opinion may differ from mine as to the officers' justification and 'rightness' or 'wrongness', but you must agree that such a determination should not be made by you or by me or by a police chief or by a judge; but rather by a jury.

On the Cyclicality of Studenteering -OR- The Chalkboard Effect

2009-01-09T17:23:00.000-08:00
It strikes me, as I enter yet another semester of schooling, that perhaps our rinse-and-renew approach to education sets an unrealistic understanding of the Real World^TM. In scholastic pursuits, each semester presents a clean chalkboard of achievement. A C-average student has the same opportunity to earn an A in any given class as the A-average, B-average, and D-average students do. Like a coin flip, the future outcome is completely unaffected by the past outcomes. Certainly there is a progressive tracking of progress that prevents past accomplishments (or non-accomplishments) from being completely wiped out and started anew -- e.g. the GPA -- but the blank slate approach still keeps each semester from influencing the next.

The effect compounds if we begin to discuss the chalkboard effect as a student advances schools. I can think of no high school accomplishment that would in any way be relevant to my current or future goals. Nary a single person would ask -- or more importantly care -- what my high school GPA was or what my SAT score was. I submit that I cannot even ballpark either at this point. My undergraduate experience is only moderately different. The subject of my degree is sometimes germane and other times not, my GPA is again largely irrelevant, and my work experience and awards serve to pad an otherwise stark resume, but again provide details no one would likely care to know. Four years of study for a given GPA and months of work for a respectable LSAT score were almost entirely wiped away after my first law school admissions letter arrived. I have a degree to hang on my wall, sure, and I naturally value the knowledge I gained from the experience, but as my memory of early 17th century Humanities fades, so too does its importance in any modern practical application.

The value of last semester's classes is now shorn down to how many GPA points I gain or lose as a result of my performance on a final problem I do not even really remember. That number, then, will serve me in earning my first job, at which time it will go the way of my high school GPA, my undergraduate GPA, and the dodo.

The system makes sense, of course. I can more accurately be valued as a lawyer by my law school GPA than by my high school GPA -- though, admittedly, that's debatable -- and I could later be even more accurately valued by my performance as a lawyer. But does adulthood bring with it the same chalkboard effect that studenthood does? Are my accomplishments at 30 largely irrelevant by the time I'm 40? Diminished relevance I would expect, but would a 10-year-old work history be as inconsequential as a 10-year-old GPA?

If the answer is no, why, then, is this the scholastic approach? Could not we just as easily learn in a coherent stream of knowledge accumulation rather than in discrete bunches? And why would we continuously reinforce the notion that a degree is more valuable as a piece of paper than the knowledge it represents if we truly wish the purpose of education to be education rather than diploma-earning?

I recall a comment from a 3L in one of my classes at the end of the semester. He indicated that he did not intend to study with any great vigor as his GPA was likely already set where it was. A single 'A' or 'C' would have very little numerical impact on his overall performance record, and any last-minute cramming of information would do little for his long-term recollection of the subject, so indeed, why study hard? The purpose of the class was clear: the law school requires units, the class gives units, QED.

I have met plenty of dumb Ph.Ds and smart non-degree holders. Perhaps its time we de-emphasize the numbers and the lamb skins, and reemphasize the totality of an individual.

"Text messages are a rip off!", "cellular companies make too much money!", and other misinformed outbursts

2008-12-29T12:50:00.000-08:00
I've been seeing a lot of hysteria recently over reports that text messages, despite costing users $.20 each, costs cellular providers nothing. Users allege that this is "unfair", "price gouging", "offensive", and any other array of colorful indignation. Economists apparently disagree on the issue. Thankfully, I have no economics background and can speak simply from layman common sense.

The price of a good be it a chair, a text message, or legal advice does not -- and should not (more on this later) -- relate to the good's cost to the supplier. Rather, the price relates to the perceived value to the purchaser. A painting's price is not the aggregate of the costs of paints, canvas, brushes, and time, but rather the value of hanging the work in your living room. If price exceeds value, the purchaser will simply not purchase the good. Quite simply, the cost to produce the good is an irrelevant consideration. A chair made from $100 wood is no more valuable to me than one made from $10 wood provided I can sit comfortably on both.

A text message is slightly different in that the good is intangible. Whereas I can only produce as many chairs as I have material for, I could manage a (theoretically) unlimited number of text messages following my initial investment in the infrastructure. However, this does not change the basic fundamental that price relates to value and not to cost. Of the variables of cost and price, neither are dependent on the other. If this were false, a company that successfully lowers its costs would be obligated to pass the entirety of these savings onto its consumers.

This is where thinking diverges. If your belief is that a company is in fact legally obligated to do such a thing and that the government may enforce such a requirement, your position is indefensibly incorrect. There is no such public inquiry into the relationship between the cost and price of a good -- unreasonably excessive profits notwithstanding -- (see the divergence in price between an Apple and a Dell despite substantially similar costs). However, reasonable minds may differ on the subject of whether or not there should be such a relationship.

To return to the titular subject, our current economic scheme permits cellular companies to charge whatever the market will bear for a text message. In the curve between a $0 price and 0 customers, a provider may set itself wherever it desires. Its goal, of course, is to optimize its revenue on the curve (recall the lemonade stand game; you seek to find the 'right' price that attracts the 'right' number of customers to achieve the highest profits). The question then becomes should they be required to charge "reasonable" rates given their costs? Or more simply, is $.20 reasonable given an incremental cost of $0?

I will put aside for a moment the economics argument that initial cost (i.e. the cost of creating a cellular infrastructure) is relevant in determining price, and rather argue from a more metaphysical perspective.

Let us presume that our economy has shifted and there exists a cap on a good's price relative to its cost to produce. If I spend $5000 to develop a new widget, I can include that cost in the price of my goods. But once that $5000 is invested, what motivation do I have to continue new developments? In the end, it does me equally well to sell the same good at lower prices than to sell a better good at a higher one (recalling, of course, that a 'better' good requires a costlier initial development). If my price is always proportionate to cost, I don't stand to make any material revenue gain from increasing my product's value.

Similarly and conversely, if I as an attorney charge $200/hour for my legal advice, and can conduct my personal maximum of 40 hours of work per week, what benefit do I derive from lowering my overhead costs? The public certainly receives a benefit (they can now acquire the same legal advice for only $150/hour), but my revenue remains the same. Why would I, then, expend effort into lowering my costs when I realize no benefit from doing so?

Leaving price as a variable dependent on consumers' perceived value encourages suppliers to increase value and to decrease cost. Shifting price to depend solely on costs removes this encouragement. It is therefore reasonable to establish an economy like ours in which a price is reflective of users' perceived value (i.e. what they are willing to pay).

In order to answer the question of whether or not $.20/message is reasonable, one must ask the obvious question: do people pay this amount? My linked article claims 2.5 trillion text messages are sent worldwide every year. Clearly, the answer is yes. If people pay the price, then the price is roughly equivalent to their perceived value. And as per my reasoning above, if the price is roughly equivalent to perceived value, the price is reasonable.

Cost per text message to cellular providers is a red herring. The only relevant factor is a text message's value to a user. Our market indicates that users vote 2.5 trillion times per year that $.20 is the value of a text message, and thus $.20 is absolutely a reasonable price.

The Catharsis of Patience

2008-11-23T12:08:00.000-08:00
I had a somewhat inappropriate love affair with Subway as an undergrad. University tours finished at 12:30 in the food court, so it was only natural that I, a tired tour guide, would partake in the riches therein. Something about being active in the sun makes greasy fast food feel intolerable, but there was always that delicious allure of Subway that pulled me in. A cold cut combo with that Chipotle sauce was a welcome reward. Oddly, its cost roughly equaled my pay for that day's tour...

It came as no surprise to me, then, when my love was rekindled when someone pointed out a Portland-area Subway on my school route. It strikes me suddenly that I tend to enjoy this delicacy following teaching. To think, some neurons in my brain are devoted to the task of equating Subway with post-work relaxation. But I digress.

The purpose of this post is to recount my adventures with the slowest ever person to grace Subway's hallowed halls. As Jackson so elegantly described, "if I were to intentionally go that slow to annoy someone, I would annoy myself." When we entered, there were only two other customers, and both had half-prepared sandwiches. I'm a bad estimator at time, but I do know that the radio station playing in the Subway went through two songs (both 80s soft rock that I gloriously sung along to), a commercial break (I want to kill those 'Dick says Yes!' people), and another song (I want to say MMMBop) before our sandwiches were even started.

...how many people have uttered the phrase "I want to say MMMBop"?

This guy moved in slow motion. I think the took the idea of "sandwich artist" to heart as he carefully laid out -- and I swear I am not exaggerating here -- each speck of lettuce piece by piece. Each tomato slice was painstakingly placed equidistant from its neighbors. Even the olives had to be meticulously placed in a row. All of this contributed not only to a ridiculously lengthy procedure, but an inferior sandwich (who wants to be able to count the resultant sprigs of lettuce on a single hand?) 20 minutes we were in there, my dashboard clock told me. 20! With no line!

And then I think about how I normally spend 20 minutes in a day. It's 12:20pm right now and I woke up at 9. That's 3 and a third hours, or precisely ten 20-minute intervals, if you will. In those ten 20-minutes, I've accomplished... well... I've caught up on my blogs and refreshed the front page of Reddit a bunch. I got stuck in a Wikipedia loop that leaves me intimately more knowledgeable about the literary roots of the Illithid and probably none the better for it. Oh, and I put the glue stick I used last week away. So... that's something.

And I did all of that in my ten 20-minute intervals I have had so far this morning. But still, that slow Subway guy wasted one of 'em. What is it about patience that makes me so... impatient?

For all the time we waste in our daily lives, you'd think we could overlook the extra minute we have to wait at a red light because we just missed it, or the 10 seconds we're slowed because someone merged into us, or the 15 minutes I lost waiting for another human being to prepare my food for me (I account for 5 of those minutes being well spent). Maybe I can make it up by refreshing Reddit one fewer time. Or maybe I should just learn to forgive someone for "wasting" 1/1972307th of my life. And what does it really mean to "waste" my time anyway? I breathe, eat, and poop. That's what an organism does. What makes me so special that I demand I respire in my own home rather than respiring in Subway?

Maybe that's what patience is. Not measuring our lives in time "wasted", but rather considering the sum of our lives as every moment we have. Having the perspective to realize that one two-millionth of my life, which lasts for one three-hundred-millionth of the duration of the Universe so far (for a grand total of 1/500,000,000,000,000th of history) isn't really anything to get worked up over.

I feel small. And hungry.

I am not the Lewis and Clark pedophile you're looking for

2008-11-13T10:58:00.000-08:00
It's been a few weeks, but I am still getting a lot of hits from people searching for information about the Lewis and Clark student arrested for possession of child pornography, likely due to (a) my affiliation with the same school, and (b) my occasional posting about sex offenders. Just to clear up any possible misconceptions, I am not the one who was arrested, I do not know the guy who was arrested, and I have no comment about the story. You can find news reports here: http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_110108_news_salem_counselor_child_porn.168a1e56a.html

That having been said, I'd like to blog about something related, but I feel that a typical "pro-sex offender" post might be inappropriate, so I have thought of another fitting -- though only tangentially related -- theme that is especially topical given the recent passages of anti-gay marriage amendments in California, Arizona, and Florida, and yesterday's first same-sex marriage in Connecticut. Specifically, I'd like to address the so-dubbed "slippery slope" concern in which 'marriage protectors' opine that allowing same-sex marriage will open the flood gates for people to marry children. This applies as well to incestual, bestial, and polygamous relationships. In short, these "arguments" are ridiculous and baseless distractions from the real issue.

Let me first put to rest the especially moronic concerns. We cannot marry animals because animals are not competent to enter into a legal contract. We cannot marry children because children are not competent to enter into a legal contract. To marry either of these two groups would not only require a change to marriage, but a change to our fundamental understandings of animal sentience and basic contract law. Any "concern" in this area is an outgrowth of the homophobic conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia and bestiality. Pedophiles don't even want the right to marry children because (shockingly) children grow up. Once they do, the sexual attraction fades. Why marry something that nature will force to be different in just a few short years?

The second two concerns, incest and polygamy, are a bit -- though only a bit -- more valid because they directly engage the argument of the pro-gay marriage side that two consenting adults should be free to do as they please. Unfortunately, I can provide no better answer than to point out the obvious: marrying someone of the same sex and marrying your sister are different things. Those on my side are often challenged with the question "if you're for same-sex marriage, you must also be for incest and polygamy. How can you offer one without the others?" While I, personally, am of the belief two (or three, or six) adults may do as they please, there are reasons that we outlaw incest and polygamy that do not apply to same-sex couples.

First, incest is "risky" because of the potential genetic defects that may be passed on to offspring. Most genetic diseases are as a result of the presence of two recessive genes. These diseases are rare because they can only be passed on if both parents are carriers of the recessive allele, and then only 25% of the time (instances of one parent actually having the disease notwithstanding). It is substantially more likely that two siblings will be carriers of a recessive allele than for two strangers to share it. This all having been said, a prohibition on marriage is overinclusive for siblings wishing to marry but remain childless, and ineffective because siblings wishing to have sex will do so regardless of their ability to marry. Further, what of two brothers or two sisters that wish to marry and have no risk of genetic problems in offspring due to inability to produce offspring? The issue is murky, but I return again to my original point: incest is different than homosexuality. We can allow one without the other. If siblings would like to petition the courts or the legislatures for marriage certificates after same-sex marriage is legalized, they may certainly do so and we will debate that issue when and if we ever come to it. Further, there is no "flood gate" to be opened here. Siblings can already petition for marriage with or without same-sex marriage. One is not prerequisite to the other.

Second, polygamy is "risky" because it promotes social anarchy. Though a woman with multiple husbands would be equally permissible as a man with multiple wives, anthropology tells us that the latter would be the more likely of the two to occur. The taking of many wives makes wives a social commodity; one that must be hoarded quickly for fear missing out. Naturally, as with incest, this argument has its flaws. Specifically, there are a great many people for whom polygamy, even if legalized, would not be an attractive option. The rarity of polygamous relationships would inherently prevent my doom-and-gloom prediction from coming about. After all, my neighbor's relationships do little to affect mine (hear that, "marriage defenders"?). The only defense I could give reminds the same: same-sex marriage is different than polygamy. You can allow one without the other, and polygamous are equally as free to make their arguments now as they would be after same-sex marriage legalization.

I suppose my ultimate thesis here is that I have no problem with your personal beliefs on whether same-sex marriage should or should not continue to be legalized. The only thing I have a problem with is bad argumentation. And invoking "slippery slope" is per se bad argumentation, especially when your fear is that an apple will slip down the slope into an orange grove. Same-sex marriage is not bestiality or pedophilia, and it is not incest or polygamy. Interracial marriage was similarly none of those things. Let's move on to genuine worries for once.

Boldly going where bigots go time and time again

2008-10-14T13:15:00.000-07:00
It's a fallacy amongst the ignorant to demonize anything by calling it a word that they agree means "bad". See also: liberal. The latest word du jour (or perhaps, more accurately, word des sept années) is "terrorist". Don't agree with something? Call it a terrorist. Don't like software piracy? Pirates are terrorists. Don't like drug use? Using drugs strengthens the terrorists. Wary of Homeland Security and TSA measures? Well, you must be supporting the terrorists. And what about Obama? Clearly he too is a terrorist.

The latest victim of bigoted name-calling? None other than The Little Mommy Cuddle 'n Coo doll made by terrorist extremist Fisher-Price.

The doll, according to outraged parents, utters such evil messages as "Satan is the king" and "Islam is the light". One such outraged parent proves the point in the video below:

Did you hear it? If so, welcome to the wonderful world of confirmation bias. For other such similar instances of pareidolia, listen to one (of almost any) song played backward to discover all the "hidden Satanic messages" or, if you're more of a visual learner, try to spot Jesus in your tortilla.

One thing I will grant is that the doll's random babbling does sort of sound like "Islam is the light" if you squint your ears and tilt your head to the left. And if you refuse to buy the doll on this basis, you are well within your rights to do so. But a ban? I am sure there are plenty of families in America who would want (horror of horrors) a doll that promotes Islam. Yes, they walk amongst you and no, they don't all blow up buildings. A ban is unnecessary because rationally minded individuals already have economic means to deal with such a "problem": don't buy the doll. Could we similarly ban black Barbies because a while family complains?

"But that's different," the above parent would decry. "These are evil dolls!" (listen again; he says that)

Bigots: A doll is not a terrorist simply because you think it refers to "Islam" and "Satan". In fact, I'm pretty sure Islamic terrorists are also anti-Satan (Islam is an Abrahamic religion after all). Just because it's different than what you believe does not make it evil.

I Heart Sex Offenders

2008-10-10T11:51:00.000-07:00
I have previously, with tongue in cheek, revealed my pro-sex offender stance. I do so again today.

An individual in Ohio was arrested last Friday for distributing child pornography. The photographs were taken on a cell phone camera and featured a nude teenage girl. The distributor of the photographs, incidentally, is 15-years-old. And the pictures she distributed were of herself. [AP]

I should also mention that this 15-year-old "child pornographer" will likely also have to register as a sex offender.

Let us put aside for a moment the absurdity of charging children with distribution and/or possession of child pornography (15-year-old children are, of course, unashamedly attracted to other 15-year-olds). Let us also put aside my -- perhaps tangental -- belief that a life-long sex offender registry is unconstitutional. And finally, let us put aside the fact that the girl attends and distributed her portraits in a high school called Licking Valley. Some jokes are just too easy, after all.

But even with all that aside, we are left with the core issue: any legislation that sets mandatory sentences on non-discretionary crimes is inherently inequitable for statistical outliers. Ohio legislators did not and could not envision such a scenario when they drafted 2907.323(A)(3), the statute calling possession of photographs depicting minors in states of undress a fifth-degree felony. State representative Jay Hottinger agrees, saying, "clearly it was an unacceptable act, and there needs to be consequences from that, but we need to make sure the punishment is a reasonable punishment."

While I disagree with Rep. Hottinger that the girl's act was "clearly unacceptable,"¹ he does highlight the inherent absurdity of mandatory sentencing: in some instances, the measure of punishment will be unreasonable given the particularities of the crime. And when a statute -- one designed with the express purpose to protect minors from exploitation -- begins paradoxically targeting minors, something is plainly awry. If we are to believe that children are incapable of validly consenting to anything related to sex, how may we simultaneously punish another minor for her decisions related to sex? Where is the equity in a law that makes a perpetrator out of a victim?

¹Speaking not as a legal professional but as a psychology professional², a minor's expression of his or her own sexuality to another similarly aged, consenting minor is nothing if not healthy, normal, and expected. To demonize such behavior reeks of puritanical insanity. The story, admittedly, would be far different if the recipients of the girl's photos were unconsenting, but then the crime should be sexual harassment, not any "distribution of child pornography" nonsense.

²Of which, incidentally, I am neither.

Zen in the Art of Sushi Train Dining

2008-10-03T17:44:00.000-07:00
I like sushi. Lots. I've never ridden a train and so have no real feelings toward them, but I presume that my love of sushi trains transcends boundaries. That's me: a boundary transcender.

Background for those who are unaware: a sushi train is a conveyer belt filled with plates of delicious sushi that circles an entire restaurant. Patrons are free to select from the 'train' the dishes they would like. You then -- and here's the fun part -- eat the sushi. Your final bill is based on the types of plates you selected. Simple? Yes.

I love these establishments. You get in, you sit down, and you're eating within seconds. SECONDS! Imagine, in less time that it takes to... I don't know... let's say wash a dog, you could be eating sushi. It's wondrous. I have some difficulty in these restaurants, though. I am what some people from the 90's would call 'crazy'. Now I'm sure there's some newfangled term ("quirky"?), but for lack of a more specific word, I really am quite literally insane. I am insane because I have an awkward relationship with inanimate objects. It's part of the reason I'm a pack rat. For instance, I've never once thrown away a computer. Or sold one. They just all exist in a closet or garage somewhere, probably in the possession of my equally packrat-y mother. After all, each was such a good friend to me, how could I just throw it away as if it were useless? I imagine it sobbing, lonely in the trash can and I can't bear to do it. Though oddly I don't bring in stray animals...

...Anyway.

So that brings me back to the sushi. As I mentioned, this conveyer belt goes around and around the restaurant. As people take dishes, the chefs replace the gaps with other dishes. Naturally, it's almost impossible to tell just how long a specific plate has been going 'round. A common favorite like tuna or salmon is likely to be snatched up within a circle or two, but what about those sad pieces of, say, pickled kelp? They take their cyclical journey over and over, watching their neighbors of shrimp and spicy tuna and albacore and eel get chosen over and over until, like the last kid to be picked for dodgeball, someone finally takes pity on the wilting mess. But its hours-long journey has made its quality suffer, and after one bite, the patron grimaces and pushes it aside, much, again, like the last kid to be picked for dodgeball. Or... wait. Yeah, something like that.

So I always feel an odd tinge of guilt for these plates. Inanimate and feelingless as they may be, how would you feel if you had to go through life watching the salmons and the tunas always get picked while your pickled kelp self just took up space? And when you came by, people groaned and complained, "bring on the real fish". Poor things. It's tragic.

They say people always root for the underdog. Me, I root for the pickled kelp. I think life would be a lot better if everyone had some empathy for the pickled kelp. I never get it myself, of course, because... hey you know I feel bad for it, but let's not go too far now.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere. But like a great work of art or a dreadful poem your high school English teacher makes you read, its subject to your own interpretation. Or I'm just copping out on having to come up with an explanation. But think about it: what have you done for pickled kelp lately?

Reliving the Past: How a Year Comes Full Circle

2008-08-06T01:05:00.000-07:00
A little over a year ago -- just before I moved to Portland -- I wrote my first entry on this blog. I said the following:

I keep looking at the calendar to see how many days I still have left in San Diego. I've spent so much time saying, "I'm not leaving for another two months", and "I'm not leaving for another month", that I got used to the idea that it was so far off. Now I find myself saying, "I'm not leaving for another... wow, it's a week, huh?"

My how history repeats itself. Our program -- the academic side of it anyway -- concluded yesterday. It is a bittersweet reminder that it's almost time to leave.

There are two reasons I write entries on this blog. The first is to entertain. I enjoy writing. I enjoy telling stories. Most of all I enjoy finding the craziness in the inane. I think that's why most of my stories deviate away from "oh my goodness, The Hague is such an amazing place full of history!" and toward "and so the bathroom was unisex and I almost killed myself on the paper towel dispenser!" Anyone can write that The Hague was amazing. You can write that without having ever been there. To say that it's marvelous is meaningless. But to remember the bathroom in the Peace Palace puts me back there again, with all the same emotions and feelings. Because that's a real memory.

And that brings me to the second reason I write: to remember. There's a lot of subtext in my prose that I put there just for me. Just to remember. Just for those feelings. Sometimes if there's something really important I want to remember, I'm more overt about it. This is one of those times.

When I was in High School, I had a blog like this one. I'd like to think that I'm a better, more interesting writer and person now (in fact, from reading my old journal entries I'm most assuredly a more interesting person now (right? Please?)), but I'm going to borrow something that I did in those years because I think that it was effective and that it will be effective again.

What I did was I put a dot: •. Just like that. And I said that when I looked at the dot, I would remember. And I did that because I knew that no matter how well I described what I was feeling, going back and reading it later would not quite express everything the way I wanted to. So I made a dot. A dot that would transcend words.

And now I make an Amsterdam dot. •. There it is. It's pink.

That one is just for me.

Whew... WHEW I say!

2008-07-20T02:37:00.000-07:00
I can tell my classroom stamina is down; one two-hour class a day is killin' me! I'm not sure how I'm going to be ready for Fall...

The classes here have actually been really interesting, and the two that Jackson and I are taking this 'semester' are wrapping up next week. I have a paper I get to write on the legal duty of parents to their in-vitro fertilized embryos with regards to selection for or against disease/disability (I'm actually really excited for it). Next week also marks the beginning of three new classes, a trip to the Anne Frank House on Monday, and a trip to The Hague on Thursday. I'm also planning to order a Holland Pass which grants me access to five museums of my choice of which I'm considering the Jewish Museum (it's supposed to be very haunting and moving), Rijksmuseum (a museum of Amsterdam art and history), and Van Gogh Museum, among others.

In less scholarly but far more important news, it turns out that we have a washer and dryer in our building after all, so no more of that drying-on-crutches nonsense.

In movie-related news, we're also planning a trip to see the latest Batman movie on an IMAX screen here. There's something inherently cool about doing Americanish things here if only because it will spur condescending conversation when back in the States ("hey, did you see Batman?" "oh... yeah. I saw it whilst in Europe. On an IMAX screen. In a theatre that serves cocktails. While being massaged. It was good.").

And now back to an irregularly scheduled anecdote:

So I've spoken briefly about my fear of driving in Amsterdam. More accurately, I have a fear of any sort of transportation here; walking, too, is mildly dangerous (what with the constant dodging of bicyclists). But I'd like to expand on this driving phobia.

So people here love to honk. A lot. A lot a lot. As in cars will honk at pedestrians on the sidewalk should they so much as sidestep toward the street. As in cars will honk at other cars quite literally the second a light turns green. As in cars honk when there's no conceivable reason to do so and when no obstacle -- mobile or otherwise -- impedes their path. I don't fully get it. Combined with either a law that allows driving on either side of the street or a willful disregard of laws prohibiting it, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm sort of surprised to still be alive.

This is especially surprising when "crossing the street" involves crossing no less than 4-5 individual mini-streets and pausing on scattered islands. Near as I've determined, buses have their own streets, each direction of car traffic their own, each direction of bike traffic their own, and then one or two on top of those included wholly to confuse me.

And then the kicker: most streets are so narrow that they cannot even accommodate a single car (this is especially the case in the canals around the school). I've seen vehicles going in both directions down the streets lining the canals and have had to squeeze against buildings to avoid them, so I'm not entirely sure what happens when two cars meet face-to-face. I'm told, though, that approximately one car per week ends up in one of the canals, so I suppose that's a potential solution.

But as terrifying (for me -- imagine what the drivers are thinking) as the canal streets are, the main streets are no better. My primary form of transportation on this adventure has been bus.

Side note: I procured a stamkaard, which, like the strippenkaarten I have blogged about previously, allows one onto all forms of public transportation. But unlike the strippenkart, allows unlimited usage and comes with my photograph. I get to flash a badge to get on buses now. The coolness is going to my head.

Anyway... so the buses. On main streets, the avenues are wide enough to accommodate two vehicles at once, and sometimes more. Though I will note that there's no clear delineation between lanes, leaving me to wonder, as I previously mentioned, how much of the driving I see is consistent with law and/or standard practice, and how much is attributed to road rage and impatience or, as the Dutch say, roaden ragen... I think...

So, then, on these narrow, unmarked streets shared by personal vehicles, buses, and trams, all going every which way and crisscrossing on bizarre, fun house 19-way intersections, I get mildly terrified. We pass so so so close to each other that side view mirror-related carnage should be a much more common occurrence than it is. Standing on a bus and facing the window, I'm close enough to another bus-rider doing the same in a passing bus to reach out and touch his shoulder.

With my own.

Without moving.

And buses have this curious habit of -- instead of honking when lights turn green as cars do -- not-honking, but accelerating anyway. This happens, of course, only in the buses that do not brakes mere centimeters (...when in Europe...) behind the vehicle in front. Some public transportation adventures have been Mr. Toad's Wild Rides complete with oncoming train that may or may not send you to hell afterward.

God that was a scary attraction. And for kids, Disney?

In related "they must not have strict liability for torts" news, the Dutch sure love their death-defying staircases here. Those leading up to a (unbelievably delicious) pancake house were so narrow that only about the front half of my foot made contact. Plus the ceiling was so low that I -- all 5-foot-7 of me -- had to bow. Even more fun, at the bottom of the stairs was a concrete street. Miss a step and you smash your face and get driven over by bikes. The same goes for the stairs that led into the underground bondage dungeon. Except no bikes. Though trust me, you still don't want to fall face first.

So I guess the moral of the story is that I'm still alive despite daily attempts to undo that. And crepes are delicious.

A wee bit o' rappin'

2008-07-13T01:54:00.001-07:00
There are a few other points I wanted to make that aren't conducive to entire blog posts. In lieu of that, here is a quick flash selection of this past week in review:

Amsterdam bikers are scary

No pick-pockets yet, of whom I was wary

I have way too much stuff that I need to carry

Australian Justice Michael Kirby was magnificently airy¹

Netherlands cheese comes from delicious dairy

So much walking has tired me, very

Amsterdam drivers are excessively harried²

I still haven't ridden on a canal ferry...

...but I have seen plenty a Dutch fairy

I have a ton of reading I'd like to bury

Everywhere the architecture does beautifully vary

I have yet to be bored, oh to the contrary

But most importantly:
This week has been exceedingly merry!

I promise never to do that again.

¹In a good way.
²Seriously, they honk at everything!

In case you've forgotten that I'm here for classes too...

2008-07-12T05:01:00.000-07:00
Yeah, academics are great. Learning lots. More on that later. Now, time for the Angry Old Dutch Man anecdote I promised!

So this was on the same journey as my last misadventure shopping tale. It had been sort of a long day, and Jackson and I were tired, so we wanted to rush through the Albert Heijn as quickly as possible. I left him in the main line to check out while I went to another smaller desk (where they keep the cigarettes and stuff) to buy a Strippenkaart (or strip card -- it's a slip of paper with 15 'strips' on it that a bus driver stamps when you board the bus).

The weird thing, first off, is that I have found in almost all Dutch stores that there is no way to exit without walking through the line in front of the check-out register. All entrances are equipped with a one-way only barrier, and the exit is easy to get to if you're planning to buy something, but requires a bunch of finagling in an unfamiliar language to get out if you're not.

Such was the case here. The lines were extraordinarily long, and I couldn't squeeze by to get to the side desk I needed to get to. When I saw an elderly man slip through, though, I decided to follow in his freshly people-cleared wake. He was attempting to buy his entire armful of groceries at the side desk (apparently seeking to avoid the much longer, yet more appropriate main line), which strikes me as a no-no. The same feeling was apparently shared by the growing line of hungry cigarette and Strippenkaart purchasers behind me.

Now the Dutch and the Americans, for all our differences, have many things in common. For instance, we both have slow old men.

Said slow old men unload their products one-by-one onto belts, verify the price of each item before offering the next for purchase, and insist on unusual things (like paying only in coupons, bartering over the price of a peach, or attempting to buy only three eggs from the dozen carton). There was a lengthy conversation between check-out attendant and Dutch Old Man, which I can only assume outlined either the complex political decisions surrounding attendance at the Olympics in China despite human rights violations, or that he was in the wrong line.

I'm guessing the latter.

As he (presumably) debated with her, patrons behind me began to grow restless and starting making comments of their own. One man kept tapping me and gesturing to the man and saying things in Dutch (things that did not include, I'm guessing, "that is one fine tweed blazer he's wearing; where do you suppose he procured it?") I just responded back with as many generic, international onomatopoeias as could come to mind, accompanied by vague, slight shrugs (in hopes that whatever he kept saying to me would be correctly answered with onomatopoeias and shrugs).

One thing I've noticed is that the Dutch seem far more confrontational than us Yanks. Not in a bad way, though. In the States, we might grumble silently about this situation, but the Dutch freely and openly express their disapproval. It never really seems, like, angry or violent, it's just more Type A than we're perhaps comfortable expressing.

Anyway.

In the panic, I forgot what language they speak here, and requested "das strippenkart" and left with a "danke", but apparently I pulled it off reasonably well as the attendant spoke to me in Dutch as opposed to the typical English they immediately switch to when they see my foreigner self coming down the street.

Angry Old Man and Scary Pawn Shop Lady are now two of the characters appearing in my autobiographical tell-all one-act play entitled: Maybe if I Just Keep Smiling They Won't Smell the Confusion and Fear.

Further (mis-) adventures in shopping

2008-07-10T22:46:00.000-07:00
I was discussing recently how much we take American standards for granted. For instance: the light-switch. If you enter a dark room and need a light, you know precisely what to look for (a small, flickable protrusion from the wall) and, typically, exactly where to find it. Here in The Netherlands, however, light-switches are square plates that, incidentally, operate opposite ours (i.e. up is off, down is on). The effect seems minor, but when you become accustomed for 23 years to the American standard of light operation, one quickly finds themselves disoriented when lights don't work as expected.

Tangentially, one of our light plates also includes a dial with three settings: 1, 2, and 3 (note: no 0 or "off" setting). I haven't been able to figure out what this dial does yet.

In any case, one of the other standards we become used to is much more pervasive: English. While granted approximately 100% of the Dutch I've come across so far speak fluent or near-fluent English, most signs, cafe menus, and products are only in Dutch. Further, the products do not even necessarily look like ours (for instance, the mustard we purchased comes in what looks identical to an aluminum paint tube). Our latest misadventure, however, occurs when attempting to purchase laundry detergent.

It should first be noted that we spent several minutes perusing dish soap before a label featuring a sparking glass tipped us off that we were in the wrong isle.

While it seems that laundry detergent selection would be a simple chore, think for a moment about the plethora of items designed for laundry care. Not only is there the distinction between detergent and fabric softener, but also between detergents designed for whites (i.e. containing bleach) and those for colors. Mistaking the two would be a horrific laundry-related error. Then you have all sorts of special blends including those for cold washes, those for hand washing, concentrates, those for delicate garments... the list seems endless. And distinguishing among the varieties ends in a game of "what English word does wasmiddel most look like?"

Another side note that this experience much resembled our attempt to purchase shampoo in which there is, again, a stunning variety. I think we may have ended up with shampoo designed for color-treated hair. But I digress...

This same trip also ended in a confusing myriad of Dutch objections to what an elderly Dutch man was doing (I think...) but I'll save that story for next time.

The purchase of detergent was prompted by a sudden need of both Jackson and me to do laundry. As in need. Packing light means packing without many clothes, and here on our seventh day in The Netherlands (wow how time flies), we both faced a potentially embarrassing Friday of nudity unless we could do some washing. Unfortunately, ours is the only building which does not have laundry facilities inside, so we relied on the aid of a friend in the neighboring building for assistance.

Let me first explain that if purchasing Dutch detergent is hard, operating a Dutch washing machine is nigh impossible. Instead of choosing length of wash based on a factor of dirtiness as we do in the States, these machines were turned on by selecting a temperature. But it's still not so easy. First, you must open the machine, then turn the dial to reset, then close the machine, then select your temperature. Miss a step and the machine glares at you for your obviously stupid-foreigner mistake.

(I like to humanize my washing machines)

Note also that there were a grand total of three washing machines and two dryers for what is, I assume, a very well-populated building. This results in numerous piles of laundry about the laundry room. Those familiar with college campuses will recall that this is a laundry room standard sight. As fellow washers become annoyed with other patrons' inability to unload their laundry after use, they "kindly" unload it for them.

The amount of people attempting to use the machines that evening worried both me and Jackson, and these worries materialized quite quickly as another fellow dorm-dweller (who, I am almost positive, was wearing an extra-long T-shirt but no pants) moved Jackson's still-spinning laundry to one of the dryers after only about 20 minutes. In case you've never experienced such a phenominon, I will remind you that the washing machine does a great deal of drying through an ending spin (called centrifugen here) cycle. Circumvent this final step and you have sopping laundry in your dryer.

We had sopping laundry in the dryer.

Fearing further laundry-related foreign-touching, and also the impending ominous warning of "washing machines lock at 10:00pm" (it was 9:55), I decided to let my centrifugen finish and take home my damp laundry to hang to dry. Jackson then took my machine and did the same. I now sit in a living room with, I kid you not, six stacked chairs of various heights and two crutches stretched between them holding our still partially damp laundry from last night.

I think we'll be hand washing from now on with our may-or-may-not-be-bleach Albert Heijn brand washmiddel voor de fijne was.

In Which I Become Clockophobic

2008-07-08T09:25:00.000-07:00
I had the opportunity to meet a bunch of my fellow students in the program yesterday. There is a bar in our housing complex that we met up at as we shared, compared, and contrasted our lovely experiences regarding Whittier's non-organization (oh they lost your letter of good standing? Me too!)

Everyone seems friendly and I'm looking forward to meeting everyone else. Oddly, no one in attendance that evening was a Whittier student. Hopefully I'll meet one of their elusive brood tomorrow.

Today, though, Jackson and I went foraging for another power adapter. We bought one -- along with a converter -- before we left, figuring we'd be able to find another one or two out here for cheaper. So far, no luck. We're planning to ask at a local hotel tomorrow when we have the chance, so hopefully they will either have some to sell to us or will know where to find them. In today's hunt, I ran across what I thought was an electronics store.

I'll preface this story with with one other: On the first day we arrived and were trying to find our dorm, we wandered into a coffee house. The place was empty save one full table of what I now assume to be the owners and/or operators of the place. We were greeted with "there's no smoking here anymore." When we said that was fine, she added, "you have to smoke outside." We again said it was fine and sat to rest for a moment. Getting tap water proved a chore, and in our attempts to not overstay our welcome, we attempted to order a small bit of food. We were never offered the ability to request it. A short time later, an older man entered and sat at a table and the same woman who greeted us brought him a coffee without request. We started feeling increasingly awkward and out-of-place, and politely excused ourselves, Jackson leaving two 50 cent coins on the table. I later became convinced that we had simply walked into someone's house and sat at their kitchen table.

Now back to the 'electronics store'. The shops in this area don't resemble a typical commercial zone we may be used to in the states. Often, you have to enter through a door that seems very much like a standard residential door. This shop was no different. The displays on the outside showed electric outlets and alarm clocks (the former was close enough to a power adapter, and the latter I needed, so I figured it was a safe bet that something I needed would be inside). When I entered, it looked like a cluttered living room with random items all over the place. A delightful elderly woman greeted me and I stuttered through a, "sorry, spreken Engels?" and explained I was looking for an alarm clock. I really wanted the power adapter, but this was not the kind of place that had packages hanging on hooks in displays, so I doubted my luck.

I followed her through a tunnel of items to a shelf, where she pulled out a bag that contained a packaged alarm clock. The price was 15.95€ -- outside of my range -- but I felt rude interrupting her enthusiasm for the clock, so I listened to her pitch. She warned me -- and repeated a few times -- that the clock would not play music.

As a tangental note, I find that the Dutch are keen on sternly telling you what things are not. Not a smoking establishment, not a musical alarm clock... it almost makes me feel guilty as if I had originally demanded such things. Maybe they presume that we Americans are demanding bunch? Anyway...

She lauded all of the features of the clock (though really, it was a standard, buzzing, analog clock, so there were not many features to speak of), and seemed genuinely proud of it. One particular point of praise was that it was "brand new" and that she had just got it in. This led me to believe that it was some type of pawn shop or other alternative garage sale style store (are these common in Europe?)

She offered to take it out of the package for me to prove it worked, but I declined. I tried to imply that the price was too much for me, but she insisted that it was a quality clock. I felt trapped amidst a pile of random wares and Dutch sales pitches. I expected some fantastic, puppetmaster-esque abomination to leap from some hidden space amongst the shelves to capture me, toy-ify me, and add me to the Dutch woman's wares if I loitered much longer, so I tried to back myself out of the shop while oddly over-complimenting the clock. (She had some difficulty with English, but one word she kept using was "good", so I, too, started describing many things as good, even those which I ordinarily would not give such a descriptor. "Oh it comes with a battery? Good! Light-up face? Good! Set the alarm by sliding up that lever? Good, good!")

It's a well-known fact that you appease angry puppets by flattering their master's goods.

Then some impulse drove me to lie and claim that I had no money, but would return in a few moments for the clock. Good? Good. And then I left.

So for today's tally: Power adapter obtained, no. Groceries obtained, yes. Alarm clock procured, no. Puppetmaster angered, yes. All in all, I'd call it a wash.

It rains here (shocking!)

2008-07-06T10:39:00.001-07:00
It was pretty rainy all day yesterday, so Jackson and I mostly stayed in and made our own Mystery Science 3000 marathon. Rockin'.

Today was more fun, though. Another friend from school arrived at about the same time we did, and we met up with him for lunch. There's a cafe in our complex right on the waterfront. One thing I've noticed about Amsterdam food is that the bread is really chewy. I'm not really able to describe it unless you've eaten it, it's just... chewier -- denser, perhaps. It's more like what I imagine real bread to be like as opposed to the processed bread we get used to in the States.

We then toured our immediate vicinity and I found some amazing places. There's a park literally right across the street from us. The ponds there are filled with swans and some other duck-like bird I don't recognize. I've scoured the web for a picture, but apparently it's not classified as a "duck". Just picture a duck with yellow legs and feet instead of orange, all black feathers, and a short, more pointed, white beak which includes a bridge up the duck's face. I wanted to steal it, but there were signs near the pond that were in Dutch but I'm pretty sure said, "American tourists: please don't steal our odd ducks".

Perhaps the most enjoyable sight was this four-person outdoor stand-up urinal. I certainly understand the Amsterdam residents are far less reserved and shy than we are (see also: legal public sex in parks), but I'm still not sure how comfortable I'd be peeing in front of other people. Perhaps if I were at a crowded venue and these things were packed with other people, I'd feel more comfortable. But by myself right in the middle of a plaza? Pass.

The architecture was absolutely gorgeous, and the top picture is from the Museum Hey Schip, which features three monumental Amsterdam public housing blocks. The picture above is not just a particularly interesting section, but rather an example of how the entire area looks. The buildings are so widely varied in design as well that I was simply in awe during the entire walk. The museum itself was open when we went to it, but was closing so soon that we opted to come back another day to see the inside.

Classes start on Wednesday, so we're trying to soak up as much culture as possible until then. Somewhat difficult given ik spreek geen Nederlands, but (most) of the locals here seem eager to help.

Good Morning from Amsterdam!

2008-07-04T23:35:00.000-07:00
In an effort to beat jet lag, Jackson (my traveling partner) and I got the idea to stay up all night the night before our plane ride so that we would be tired enough to sleep on the plane from Philadelphia to Amsterdam (which would occur during Amsterdam's night time) and then during our first night here. The plan (thankfully!) worked, but I think it may have been the only thing that did.

Jackson's cut foot kept him on crutches during the plane rides and our first day here. I enjoyed it (we got to board first, had carts waiting for us everywhere, and basically got to cut in line wherever we went), but I'm sure he was miserable having to hobble around. It was especially trying after we left the airport in Amsterdam and had to walk all over the city with fully loaded backpacks. I was tired and hurting, so I can only imagine how he felt.

Things seemed smooth after we landed, though. A woman met us at the terminal to drive Jackson and I through all of the customs procedures and took us right to a train that would take us to Amsterdam Central Station. Once there, we figured out which bus we needed to take to get to our housing complex, Gevleweg, and hopped aboard.

The public transit system here is really great. You buy a strippenkaart which has 15 'strips' on it. Then, when you board a bus, you "pay" one strip per zone plus one more. Everywhere we have to go, it seems, is within the same zone, so we always stamp two strips and then sit.

At Gevleweg, we discovered that we were supposed to check-in at the main office that was in the opposite direction of Central Station. This, among plenty of other things Whittier failed to let us know (where do our classes meet? Do we need books?), equaled a lot of tiredness and confusion. Fortunately, the route to the main office used the same bus we had taken to get to Gevleweg, so it was fairly easy to figure out how to get back. Thankfully, we found an unsecured wireless network to jump on in order to figure this all out, otherwise we might still be wandering the Amsterdam streets.

After finally getting our keys and making our way back to our dorm, it was already about 3:00pm. We landed at 8:30am and originally came to our dorm at 10:00am. After approximately 22 hours of flying, training, bussing, and walking with massive backpacks, we were completely exhausted, but at least finally home.

Our apartment is decent. It's much, much larger than expected, but definitely a dorm. Thankfully, we're stocked with utensils, plates, bowls, cups, and cookware. No food, though, so we went on an expedition to the local grocery store to pick up a few staples. The shower is definitely unique, and the water closet is so small that I feel claustrophobic in it. Our bedding is also unique (all of it from Ikea, incidentally), and is in the theme of packing material. That's not a joke; the sheets are actually printed to look like packing material. Cute.

I made some spaghetti for dinner which really hit the spot. As we were eating, Jackson and I realized that perhaps the main reason we were so miserable is that we hadn't eaten since the previous dinner. On the plane. 12 hours prior. We were so focused on trying to get into a home that eating completely slipped our minds. With dinner in stomach, though, I definitely felt a lot better. Tired, but at least somewhat nourished.

As soon as we finished eating, Jackson opted to take a shower to wash the day-long travels away, and I got the bright idea to lay down "just to rest my eyes". I couldn't force myself to get up after that, though, and just slept through the entire night, still fully clothed.

The next morning, I showered, shaved, ate breakfast, and generally feel a lot better. I'm pretty sore all over, but fortunately we built a few days of recuperation into our schedule before classes start, so we'll likely take the next few days to rest and continue to stock our fridge.

Sorry that this first entry is largely biographical. "How the plane ride" went doesn't really make for interesting discussion, but you know that I'm still alive, so rejoice.

Three Years of Bitterness

2008-06-05T20:51:00.001-07:00
Three years ago, I designed three different looks for the Day of Silence T-shirts at my university. All three were rejected within roughly 15 seconds. I discovered, just now, that I am apparently still bitter. I think they're good. I'd wear them. Wouldn't you?

The Apprentice: An Exercise in Flash Fiction

2008-05-12T13:45:00.001-07:00
One of my summer projects is to get back into writing. Today, I sat down to try to pen a short story that's been in my head for a while. But try as I might, I couldn't get it down. So instead, I took to the elements of flash fiction and tried to tell the story in exactly 100 words. Here is the result:

The Apprentice
“But how will they know what to do if we do not guide them?”

“The essence of life is in the ability to choose.” And with the Wizard’s breath, the wooden figures became animate and explored their world.

The Apprentice looked with admiration at his master’s work. “They should know of you and what you’ve done.”

“Leave them be.”

And when the Wizard left, the Apprentice penned a single, wooden tome of divine instructions. It told how to live wooden lives and find wooden happiness -- a gift for the wooden people.

It was the book that unmade their wooden world.

What is it that I do... do?

2008-05-04T13:59:00.000-07:00
Summer is rapidly approaching, and with it comes an increasing number of inquiries into my plans. Just as wedding patrons must endure "when are you two getting married?"s, students must navigate through a barrage of break-planning probes, looking hopelessly for reasonable excuses to justify why the answer does not include any combination of saving the world, saving starving children, or saving a bunch of money on your car insurance.

In law school, my answer is supposed to be different; I'm supposed to give the name of the firm for which I am interning. That's what "what are you doing this summer?" means. I'm not interning. So I tell them I'm studying abroad in Amsterdam. They always seem excited by that answer and then ask what I'm going to do "before" then. There's a whole 'nother month of summer, after all! How are you going to spend your 40-hours-5-days-a-week?

Photography, I offer. Exploring. Doing things I haven't done yet. I've been in Portland for 8 months and all I've really seen is the stretch of highway between school and my apartment. I haven't snapped a single picture outside of my apartment. I've gone on two dates. There's gotta be more to do here, right? Outside of the law books?

"Oh, so you're not working?"

Well, I mean... I guess not for a firm, no. I want to keep working on that college admissions website I've been developing. And I want to start up a non-profit after I graduate, so I'll be researching into that stuff. But mostly, you know, focusing on my -- what? Why are you looking at me like that? So judgmentally? I'm not planning to lounge around all day living a lavish life on the generous 400 bucks a month the federal government gave me. Personal development is every bit as important as professional development, you know. And hey, I'm doing both. Just differently then you. That doesn't make it wrong.

"Just taking it easy, then? I hear ya. I hear ya."

No, I -- look can we not talk about this now? I have my own goals and plans and I have my own idea of how I'd like to get there. At least I think I do. Maybe it's nontraditional, but hey, life'd be boring if we all followed the straight and narrow, huh? I mean that is right, right?

You know, whatever. I don't need your approval. Maybe I'll make my mistakes and maybe I won't. Who knows? But hey, there's more than one way to build a light-bulb and if I fail a few times before making it, at least by the end I'll have my very own light-bulb. Or... something. I mean, I'm trying really hard here not to sound like I'm quoting song lyrics and all, but I really do just want to do it my way. Failing with my own hand is more rewarding, I think, than succeeding with someone else's. At least I'll always know who to blame and who to pat on the back.

I mean really, how can we really measure 'success' or 'failure'? If I'm doing something I love, isn't that enough? I mean I certainly think it's great when someone can actually make a leaving -- meager or otherwise -- by selling some unique brand of something only they can sell. If people are willing to buy me, doesn't that mean I'm inherently successful? Maybe not I-invented-the-wheel successful, but successful in that I don't think I'm ever going to look back and say, "oh, shoot... I really wish I would have followed my dreams less."

That sounds really naively idealistic maybe. And I guess I've sort of gotten off track. So anyway, yeah. That's what I'm doing this summer.

"Cool. I'm glad we had this talk."

Me too, self. Me too. I just really wish you trusted me more sometimes.

...So did two out of the eight ballerinas

2008-04-10T21:36:00.000-07:00
A wonderfully fascinating discussion about Title IX is taking place over at Fannie's Room. In it, participants analyze the push/pull effect that Title IX has on girls vs. boys sports. Truly, as Fannie mentions, equality doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, but all too often it feels as if our equality is trumped by someone who is made to be 'more equal'. As I point out in the comments section: "for every girl (or boy) helped by Title IX, there's another boy (or girl) potentially hurt by it."

Now naturally there's no perfect way to solve inequity (though I certainly can think of a way not to), but the discussion spawned a link to a Kurt Vonnegut short story I felt the need to share. In Harrison Bergeron, Vonnegut shares a dystopian future where everyone is equal. While I would argue that there is a chasm between 'equality' and 'sameness', the story certainly parodies our politically correct tendencies.

Deep Thoughts In re: Addition

2008-03-26T21:05:00.000-07:00
You ever notice that there's no mistake more humiliating than failure to correctly add two numbers together?

7+5=12. 12, Brian. 12.

Good thing lawyers don't need math.

Can you be accountable to a cat?

2008-03-23T12:48:00.000-07:00
They say the best way to stick to something is to have someone who will hold you accountable. "When starting an exercise program," they say, "have a partner who will hold you accountable." "If you're trying to diet," they say, "tell people about your plans, so that they'll hold you accountable." "If you're trying to finish a legal assignment," they say, "have a housemate constantly nag you about it so that the only reason to do it is to shut them up because my God, they're lazy too so why are they getting so uppity with me?"

And for that matter, why do they say anything? Who are they to tell me what to do, eh? They're not so smart. If they were, they'd have gotten a better job than standing around all day saying things. But I digress.

I'm not on a diet, and I'm sticking to an exercise regimen despite not having a workout buddy, but there are still things I feel I'm lax about. This is my first time living alone, and it's coming as a shock how easy it is to put things off, or to avoid doing them entirely. When I lived with people, you were constantly surrounded by those who you fear might criticize you if you fall behind Living alone, though, means I'm faced every morning with the temptation of, "eh, I don't really have to go to school today," and the ever-present urge to put off reading, writing, shopping, and showering, and to just get drunk instead. I don't have a problem with, thought. I mean, I don't think...

But this comes up today because it's Easter. I was content a moment ago in thinking of today as just another Sunday. After all, holidays are just arbitrary days we choose to celebrate, anyway. It's not as if I'll be any more or less fulfilled if I eat spiral cut ham tonight. But then I spoke to family back home in San Diego who asked about my plans, and in response to my "nothing" asked, "are you sad?" Some bizarre psychological response suddenly occurred inside of me as I thought: I don't know. I wasn't sad. Should I be sad? I guess I should be. Okay, I'll be sad. I'm sad. But I'm not. Not really. I mean, I could eat spiral cut ham on Tuesday if I really wanted to.

And then I started to think that I might feel different if I had someone or something that would hold me accountable. By myself, saying 'eh' to the holidays is easy. But if there were other people around, they could criticize my lack of spirit and force a ham upon me.

So that leads me to my titular question: can you be accountable to a cat? If I had a feline housemate, would she make me feel guilty if I skipped class? Would she comment on my bulging waistline and ask about the last time I've been to the gym? Would she suggest that I didn't need another glass of wine and that five was enough? And when I said, "you're right about the wine" would she take a shot of whiskey with me to make me feel better? And then would she assert that a great chaser for whiskey is a locally brewed porter?

I guess what I need to do is to find a judgmental cat. Preferably an alcoholic one. I... I really don't have a problem.

Another Police Officer Abuses a Potentially Lethal Weapon

2008-03-15T20:30:00.001-07:00
News of a Missourian man shot twice with a taser while at his child's Middle School has reinvigorated my distaste for police officers' use of the weapon. As I have blogged previously, "[t]he training procedures must be changed."

The parent, described as "angry", was suspected of trespassing and disturbing the peace. When a deputy asked him to leave, he refused. The officer then attempted to arrest the man, and then subsequently shot him twice with his taser. There is no suggestion that the man was acting aggressively or violently.

On its face, this appears to be a clear-cut case of excessive force used to subdue a non-violent man merely suspected of crime. However, even more shocking (no pun intended) is Cole County Sheriff Greg White's statement attempting to justify the deputy's actions: "[i]f they don't [comply], additional force is going to be used. Taser is an available option and if they don't comply at that point, then the trigger can be pulled again, and that's what happened." White's nonchalant and abusively dismissive response is especially appalling when viewed in tandem with TASER International CEO Rick Smith's explanation for the purpose of the taser:
You can use it before you would have to use the revolver. If you have someone who has a knife, who is threatening other people but isn't quite at the level where you'd use lethal force, you'd pre-empt with the TASER, get them safely under control before it escalates.

I.e.: Used as a substitute for lethal force in a situation where the revolver would be appropriate.

Sheriff White's attitude and the presumed attitudes of the deputy involved and of officers across the nation is one of police thuggery. Not only does it run contrary to the spirit of the taser as a weapon, but is also unreasonable as a matter of law. Remember, police are permitted to use no more force than what is proportionate to the circumstances. Firing a potentially lethal weapon to completely incapacitate an unarmed, nonviolent victim rises to the level of excessive force.

How many lawsuits like this one -- in which a Utah man won a $40,000 settlement after being tased for speeding -- must we see before the police react more harshly to officers who excuse with a badge their arrogant misuse of a dangerous weapon?

One More Step to Amsterdam Complete

2008-03-14T20:10:00.000-07:00
This summer, I have the amazing opportunity to participate in a Sexual Orientation and the Law program put on by Whittier Law School and taking place in Amsterdam. While I still have to sort out all of the financial aid considerations, I completed one step in the trip's process today by applying for my passport.

4 weeks is the average processing time now. Four. Wasn't it sixteen just a month ago? I'd be praising federal efficiency if it weren't for the fact that the State Department's online application form is so woefully Mac-incompatible. If personal blogs with 10 readers can be cross-platform, why can't major governmental agencies be? My taxes pay for something, right?

(Though this year, my 100% refund means my taxes didn't pay for anything but a new video camera for me, but I digress...)

In unrelated news, how do you feel about male eggs and female sperm? The technology is on the horizon, but is the law ready to accept it? You should visit my legal blog for my thoughts.

Status Report

2008-03-12T17:53:00.000-07:00
I'm still alive. That's the good news.

The better news is that I've been busy out there on the web. I'm returning to this blog and will begin to update it more frequently again. I created two other blogs while I was gone, one that I started yesterday and another that I've been working on for about two months. The latter is a website called Accepted to College and is designed to help students and their families in the college admissions process.

My new project, though, is a legal blog I call Koala Law, which is focused on the area of LGBT and other civil rights issues viewed from a legal perspective. It is under my main portal site, BrianCavner.com, which I have just relaunched.

This blog, then, will shift to more of a personal focus and be home to other types of legal commentary that don't fit within the scope of Koala Law.

And that's pretty much it on the front of web-based status updates. Expect much more from me in the future.

A New Semester: Cool Runnings

2008-01-16T10:37:00.000-08:00
I recognize the dearth of posts due equally to winter vacation, the start of a new semester, and the complete lack of any interesting non-election news on which to comment. I have a legal post to make, but I am going to let that one stew for a while so that I can make a personal one.

My second semester has started. As any law school student or grad could tell you, the 1L year is marked by nothing if not nationwide consistency. Part of every curriculum are the basics: Civil Procedure, Contracts, Property, Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure, and Torts. The order varies slightly from school to school. For me, the first two are full-year courses, the second two are first semester courses, and the latter two are second semester courses.

I share with you this thrilling information to provide my perspective on the theory behind the structure of the first year. Naturally, most law students come into school with only a meager understanding of the law. Indeed, most schools actually frown upon undergraduate legal education prior to enrollment. As such, most of us come in as relatively blank slates -- a veritable tabula rasa, if you will. It follows, then, that there is a great deal of power in shaping legal understanding simply from how these classes are ordered.

Take an example regarding a dear friend of mine at another law school. Her first semester was the same as mine except for an exchange between Constitutional Law and Criminal Procedure. Such a minor substitution results in very different interpretations of legal problems, even if just for the first four months of law school. While we looked almost exclusively at the civil side of law, her curriculum balanced the civil and criminal aspects of it. The difference is clear from even only a cursory look at the way we speak, still commonly misstating a party as the "plaintiff" rather than as the "prosecution" simply because this is what we are accustomed to.

Naturally, this minor mistake would not be responsible for the shaping of a legal education, but consider this: by having Constitutional Law before Criminal Procedure, our brains function in such a way as to want to approach criminal matters from a Constitutional point of view. I am not asserting that this is 'bad', 'wrong', or 'better' in any way, but merely that it is 'different'. Such changes affect the way in which students of different schools elect to approach novel legal problems.

Whether or not this effect will be long-term, I do not know. Perhaps I will quickly forget my Constitutional reasoning come second week. But it remains that the difference between a completely novice student's approach to criminal proceedings and that of a 4-month-old student's is vast enough to warrant consideration. There is some method to the madness of course organization, I am sure, and it will be interesting to find out what it is.

Balancing the First Amendment with Property Rights

2007-12-31T10:55:00.000-08:00
Disturbing legal news again from my home state of California, this time even closer to home at the Fashion Valley Mall in San Diego. In 1998, the mall booted boycotting demonstrators from their premises. Nine years later on December 24th, in a 4-3 decision, the California Supreme Court held that doing so violated California's free speech laws. [1]

The First Amendment is a beacon to which Americans cling very dearly; it is the very basis, many say, of what makes our country great. Indeed, joyous times are had when a small movement succeeds in overturning a conglomerate -- or even the government -- thanks to the power of the great equalizer: freedom of speech. It seems odd, then, that I would be bothered by California's highest court's decision that upholds private citizens' right to assemble and protest.

But herein lies the problem: while we do hold an inalienable right to use public space to assemble, one must consider the clash of rights when this freedom extends to private space. Shopping malls, like other privately owned yet open-to-the-public locales, have always existed in a nebulous state, simultaneously suffering and enjoying the pangs and boons of both private and public property. In almost all rulings, however, the court leans toward defining shopping malls as private (see e.g. the right of exclusion re: photography).

This ruling, however, stands in stark contract to the aforementioned precedent. While I am a staunch champion of free speech, I draw the line when such speech infringes on the private rights of others. In this case, the Supreme Court seems to say that the First Amendment trumps the property rights of the shopping mall's owners, a harsh reversal of the traditional notion exclusion. I must assert my position amongst the dissent, who wrote, "[p]rivate property should be treated as private property, not as a public free speech zone."

Hear hear.

It is said that one can only cement judicial decisions as law after they are applied in future decisions. My hope, then, is that such future decisions will segment rights appropriately. Using private property after being asked to leave is trespass, First Amendment defense or not.

The Twelve Days of Finals

2007-12-21T19:41:00.001-08:00
On the twelfth day of Finals my Professor gave to me: reasonability.

Law school finals were, expectedly, far different than undergraduate finals. It was quite jarring to have the entire pace of my life change with exam season. For two weeks I became a legal hermit crab, huddling in front of my heater and taking two days to become a master of a single subject, before emerging into the harsh (non-)sun to regurgitate it all as best I can, and then finally returning to the comforts of my shell for two days of mastery for the next subject. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseum (or, perhaps, just ad quater). For two weeks this went on, and I can feel the physical effects of such a rapid, harsh routine change. By the end, my brain resembled the embedded photo (turns out drugs and casebooks have similar effects on developing minds).

It is rather distressing to stare at the results of a three-hour writing sprint and realize that those words stand as the sole avatar of the hard work and determination of the entire semester. Omitting information is akin to admitting that you never knew or understood it even if you did, and you seek madly for the single blessing of insight unique enough to help your answer to stand out, but not so unique as to make your answer stand out.

As far as my personal final product, I have no regrets. I performed to the best of my ability and identified every issue for every question that I believed was pertinent. Whether or not the professor will agree will be revealed in mid-January I suppose, but I can spend a restful Holiday break without fearing academic dismissal when I return. At least... I think I can. At the very least, two weeks in San Diego's 73° weather will be a welcome revivification after months of Portland's 37°.

I told everyone on the week before finals that I was looking forward to them somewhat; that I looked with eagerness toward being able to show just how much I had learned after weeks of assimilating new information from a brand new language into my head. It has been only a few months, I know -- and only one-sixth of my entire legal education -- but I feel that the major building blocks have been lain, and sturdily at that. And as the blacksmith of my legal career, my best hope at this point is that the kingdom will not be lost but for a missing horseshoe nail.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished by a $5 Starbucks Gift Card

2007-12-18T21:04:00.000-08:00
The Blogosphere is lighting up like the lights atop a police cruiser over the news that officers in a Sacramento suburb are being instructed to pull over law-abiding motorists to reward them for their good driving with a $5 Starbucks Gift Card [1]. On one hand, the gesture is sweet, but on the other hand...

When I drive, it is almost always with the sole intention of transporting myself from one place to another. Typically, I, like most drivers, would like to do this in the smallest reasonable amount of time possible. In only a small minority of trips would a single cup of coffee be an acceptable exchange for my delay. Further, I know the aggregate effect a stop has on traffic; other drivers will slow either out of fear of being pulled over themselves, or simply to gawk. And with police spokesman Sgt. Tim Curran commenting that the volume of donations received affords the ability to, "be pulling over a lot of people," it becomes clear that the effect on travel time will be measurable.

Petty grievances aside, I believe the much larger issue is the potential Fourth Amendment violation this policy evokes. This amendment protects us as citizens from police detention without just cause. Traffic stops are legally defined as detentions, and just cause is limited exclusively to situations of reasonable suspicion or traffic violations; this clearly does not include Starbucks. Further, imagine the following entirely plausible hypotheticals:

Because we have the right not to be detained without probable cause, what would happen to a man who refused to pull over to receive his gift card? Would there be a pursuit? If so, would there be a charge filed given that the stop was technically illegal in the first place?

As a corollary, what if an officer attempted to pull over another man for speeding who assumed (incorrectly) that he was being stopped to be given a gift card and opted not to pull over? Would this be a valid defense for refusing to stop?

If an officer noticed something illegal in the car during the stop, would the evidence be admissible given that it was obtained during an unlawful detention?

In non-legal concerns, might there be a rise in police shootings when someone pulled over for good driving but in a stolen vehicle panics and grabs his gun? And further, will the stress associated with frequent traffic stops really, "enhance goodwill between the traffic unit and the motoring public," as Curran suggests? While I applaud the police department for their good intentions, I must also warn that the road to hell is paved with them.

Non-Lethal Force in Police Capacity: The Use of the Taser

2007-12-17T16:15:00.000-08:00
As a followup to my last post regarding a civilian's use of lethal force, I would like to address the issue of police officers' use of non-lethal force. Specifically, I would like to discuss a current non-lethal favorite: the taser. But first, the theory behind so-called less-than-deadly alternatives.

Rick Smith, CEO of TASER International, says of the use of his weapon, "[i]f you have someone who has a knife, who is threatening other people but isn't quite at the level where you'd use lethal force, you'd pre-empt with the TASER, get them safely under control before it escalates." [1]. This is, of course, a good thing. To disarm a potential threat before he or she has the ability to seriously injure someone is certainly pursuant to the goal of public safety. Further, relying on a taser to stop a suspect who is reaching threateningly into his pocket is clearly preferable over shooting him dead, especially if one were to later discover that he was merely reaching for a stick of gum or some other innocuous possession. Thus, the premise of the taser and other non-lethal alternatives is logically sound; it is better to stun an individual rather than to kill him. However, in practice, the use of the taser is commonly less responsible.

Rather than rely on the weapon as an alternative to their traditional firearm, police officers are increasingly using the taser to make their job more 'convenient'. Especially in recent months, but also over the last five years, there have been repeated reports of situations where an officer's use of his or her taser was questionable. Consider one instance in which a man was shocked with a taser twice by an overzealous officer who spotted him accidentally bringing a court file outside of a courthouse [2]. Or perhaps the incident in August when a father holding his newborn daughter was shot with a taser by an off-duty officer -- the girl was, of course, injured by the resulting fall [3]. Multiple students nationwide have been shot by tasers, including this one of three recent incidents at UC Los Angeles [4]. A dog has been shot and killed with a taser [5], a Canadian man was killed recently [6], and even a patient suffering from a brain tumor and having a seizure was shot and killed by a taser [7]. In fact, between 2001 and 2006, approximately 200 individuals in the United States alone have been killed by a taser [8]. Clearly, police officers are not, as Smith claims, only using the weapon when suspects are, "threatening other people," but instead whenever they believe the taser's use will simplify their job.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the taser itself at fault, nor do I wish to imply that all police officers are using the taser irresponsibly or that the dangerous nature of the job does not warrant additional protection, but instead positing that there is insufficient training bundled with taser use to instruct officers of the proper and improper times to make use of the device. Quite simply, if the instructions were akin to requiring that a taser only be used in situations in which a firearm would also be appropriate, I believe there would be far fewer YouTube-documented incidents of improper use. Certainly no reasonable person would believe it just to shoot and kill a student for failing to leave a library fast enough, so why are some police officers comfortable with gambling on the non-lethality of an obviously dangerous weapon? Less-than-deadly alternatives are supposed to decrease the incidence of police-related deaths, not increase the incidence of excessive force and police brutality. The training procedures must be changed.

Killing in Self-Defense: Disparate Treatment of Justifiable Lethal Force

2007-12-15T19:52:00.000-08:00
I am a month behind on this news, but on November 15th, 2007 in Texas, a 70-year-old man used a shotgun to shoot and kill two burglars who were escaping from his neighbor's house. At the time of the shooting, the man was on the phone with a 911 dispatcher and said, "I'm getting my gun and going to stop them," and the dispatcher responded by instructing him to remain indoors. He did not. No one was in danger and the burglary was a property crime only. [1]

In general, common law has established that lethal force may be used only in situations presenting an immediate and otherwise unavoidable threat of death or substantial injury to oneself or to another person whom an individual has a legal right to protect. There are three elements used to determine if a defender is justified in using deadly force: 1) the attacker must have the ability to kill or cripple the defender either through the use of a deadly weapon or by commanding a uneven level of force, such as a very tall man attacking an elderly woman; 2) the attacker must have the opportunity to kill or cripple the defender (e.g. be in reasonable range to stab the defender with a knife or be in the process of readying a firearm); and 3) the attacker must be acting in such a way that a reasonable person would conclude that the attacker is intending to kill or cripple. A cursory analysis of these elements shows quite clearly that the old man was very much not justified in shooting the burglars. According to the report, the two men were unarmed and were running away; they possessed neither the ability nor the opportunity to harm the man. Further, no reasonable person would believe their life to be endangered by two fleeing men. But then why would a Texas prosecutor say that the shooting, "clearly is going to stretch the limits of the self-defense law," when it seems through a preponderance of evidence that the old man is guilty of murder?

Herein lies the disparity. While the above three elements are the typical standards of common law self-defense, Texas's penal code allows individuals to make use of deadly force to stop, "an arson, burglary, robbery, theft or criminal mischief at night, or to prevent someone committing such a crime at night from escaping with the property." (emphasis added). Read: you may shoot and kill a fleeing suspect who poses no physical danger to you or to anyone else if he has stolen something from your property. Further, Texas expands this right by allowing individuals to protect the property of others if they believe they have a reasonable duty to do so.

Property law establishes that we discourage self-help when remedies at law exist. The reason is to prevent situations exactly like this. I submit that there are very few 70-year-old men most would trust with the judgement and the aim to fire a shotgun anywhere near their home. In this case, it was fortunate that no innocent bystander was struck with stray shot, or that the burglars were not, in fact, the neighbor's relatives. But even within the confines of these facts, are we as a society comfortable with allowing immediate judgement and execution of two men for the crime of burglary in an empty house? Further, also within the confines of these facts, can we allow an individual to make such a decision even when instructed not to by law enforcement personnel?

I must assert that Texas's penal code with regards to justifiable lethal force promotes vigilante justice with no return in the way of increased health, safety, or welfare. I further suggest that it goes beyond any rights or privileges bundled with firearm ownership and may violate the very spirit of property law within our system. As such, it should neither apply as a defense in this case, nor be allowed to remain on the books as written. Finally, I offer this bonus follow-up question: is it justifiably within a state's police power to allocate the enforcement of laws to its private citizens as Texas seems to have done here?

The Ages of Man: Stone to Bronze to Iron to... Silicon?

2007-12-12T17:31:00.000-08:00
As I study for finals (one down, three to go!), I am amazed by the revolution in methods for studying. I am in my eighteenth straight year of education now, and the changes I have seen since the beginning and the current point on my academic timeline are astonishing.

I remember in my earliest Elementary School days that when I would prepare a report, the first thing I would consult was a black, hard-covered volume from the Encyclopedia Britannica. My mother bought the set for me when I was very young, and the collection became the default go-to whenever I needed to research for my next report. Of the various things I remember looking up, the information on the Egyptian Pyramids are perhaps the most vivid. I can still remember the pictures I found. There was one that showed the tunnels that led into the biggest of the pyramids, and I copied it by hand, with my mother's help, onto a piece of white paper to include in my report. Under another heading was a picture of the human body with various different clear film sheets which represented different parts -- one sheet for organs, one sheet for muscles, and so on -- and you could peel each sheet away and progressively get deeper and deeper into the body. I never had to do a report for which this helped, but I remember periodically flipping to that page (the film sheets always made it easy to find) and simply exploring for my own amusement.

Then, I remember when my mom bought a CD with Grolier on it. I used the older hard-copy encyclopedias less and now relied primarily on the interactive, multimedia encyclopedia. I remember using the software to conceive a report I wrote on the state of Illinois, though I cannot remember specifically any media I used. The memories are a bit less vivid.

Then we got the Internet. It was not right away that the revolution happened, but some time between then and now, Google was born, and Wikipedia was created, and a multitude of study aid sites popped up. Now if I need to research something, I craft a few clever search queries to plug into Google and crawl through dozens of different sites, slowly compiling more information and more understanding about my topic. No longer do I have to rely on a single pyramid diagram, but can instead scan around the net, and in minutes find precisely what I need.

Each revolution gradually made research faster, more powerful, and more robust, and yet I feel like something is missing. There was some magic in cracking open a volume taken from the huge shelf of the Encyclopedia Britannicas; it was intangibly exciting to transcribe pictures and to physically feel my way through the layers of the human body. Even Grolier had some magic about it, and I remember always being entranced by the simple multimedia file that played on launch (it opened with Kennedy saying, "ask not what your country can do for you" and quickly transitioned into "the Eagle has landed" and then into various other famous quotes and identifiable sounds). The entire experience is incredibly vivid for me despite happening many years ago. And yet, I cannot even remember the exact path I took for the law research project I completed two weeks ago. The marvel and wonder in exploration is gone and replaced with a more base goal: find as much information in as little time as possible.

It could just be that I have grown up and a necessary artifact of that is that there is less curiosity. But I prefer to think that there was, in fact, something magical about the tactile experience with Britannica. I could never go back to it, of course; the modern method is simply too efficient to leave unused. But I do long for the days of simplicity when a colored pencil sketch of Giza was more than enough to earn high marks. Academics seemed much more special then.

One Nation, Under God?

2007-12-09T19:57:00.000-08:00
A very wise person once told me that there are two topics you are never supposed to discuss while at the dinner table: religion and politics. As such, I must request that you not read this post if you are eating.

Mitt Romney's December 6th "Kennedy Speech" has become famous -- or infamous -- for a number of unsurprisingly controversial statements he has made. Among them, he asserted that, "[f]reedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." He further said, while referring to people engaged in promoting active separation of church and State that, "[i]t is as if they're intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They're wrong." To support this accusation of 'wrongness', Romney takes a historical approach and claims that, "[t]he founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God.'" Romney apparently did not recall that we were not "a nation Under God" until 1954, long after "the founders" had anything to do with the course of the modern United States.

But this post is not designed to criticize Romney, but rather to analyze the role of religion in our modern political system. Romney's campaign strategists clearly believed it was wise to craft a speech based around the theme of, "yeah, I'm Mormon, but at least I'm not atheist," in hopes of unifying both his own and the Evangelical base against what is perceived to be a common enemy. This belief is neither new nor unique. Bush while campaigning in '87 said, "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." Then, twenty years later, candidate Ron Paul wrote, "[t]hroughout our nation’s history, churches have done what no government can ever do, namely teach morality and civility." The steps may have changed slightly, but the dance remains the same.

Could it be that the candidates truly believe that the religious are morally, civically, and inherently superior to those who are not religious? Or perhaps they are just pandering to a base that believes it? Truly, there is no statement more indicative of the latter than when Douglas Kmiec wrote: "[Mitt Romney's faith] defines him as a person of integrity in interpersonal dealings, of service to the nation and community, and of fidelity to his family."

There exists no other group that can insist with a straight face at the same time that they are both a superior majority and an oppressed victim (see e.g. 'The War on Christmas', 'The War on Marriage', 'The War on Religion'). I do not mean to browbeat faith, but I do take issue with anyone who can simultaneously high-five their 'morally superior majority' brethren, while also rallying the troops against the evil, Leftist secularists supposedly in power. I admit that it has been a long time since Civics class, but does not Democracy essentially make such a scenario implausible? As I understand it, casting yourself as an "oppressed majority" is the ultimate political non-sequitur.

And through the same teeth through which such lies flow comes the same line: it is only the supremely religious who like freedom, are patriots, act with morality and civility, and possess integrity and fidelity. Meanwhile, everyone else, they say, is a danger.

Unfortunately, I do not see any real way to combat this plague of misdirection. A candidate's job is to win an election. "I'm religious just like you, vote for me" wins elections. I certainly cannot fault candidates for using a winning strategy. It is also unlikely that I would ever succeed in convincing the Nation to stop voting for politicians on purely religious grounds. I do, however, believe it prudent to demand that our candidates talk about the political issues rather than hiding behind the veil of their faith.

Inequitable Motive Afoot in Proposed Arson Registry?

2007-12-08T18:20:00.000-08:00
Disturbing developments in my home state of California as Representatives Adam Schiff and Mary Bono sponsor a national registry to track convicted arsonists [1].

I have previously blogged about my aversion to sex offender registries, and so I believe it goes without saying that I oppose this move as well. The grounds for my distaste are different, however. To recap, my primary issue of contention with sex offender registries is that non-dangerous offenders -- e.g. football streakers and teenage debauchers -- are treated with the same level of scrutiny and stigma as so-called 'dangerous' offenders. Further, its purpose is dubious at best, serving only to warn (read: frighten) people of their 'dangerous' neighbors. The arson registry, in contrast, does not seem to suffer from the same problems. Indeed, accidental firestarters and other 'non-dangerous' individuals will, apparently, not be targeted by this plan. Further, the registry would be available only to police departments and not to the general public. Presumably, police departments would consult the registry for a convenient list of suspects after any suspicious local fire.

On its face, everything seems to be in order. After all, according to Rep. Schiff, the registry "lets the convicted arsonists know they can't hide from law enforcement for the purpose of committing another act of arson." But why stop here, Rep. Schiff? Should we not compile a list of convicted shoplifters to let them know that they can't hide for the purpose of shoplifting again? Where should we draw the line? Shouldn't every criminal be sent the message that we do not want them to repeat their offense again?

Or are we perhaps operating on the theory that arsonists are somehow fundamentally a different kind of criminal, the same way, incidentally, sex offenders are? Tell me then, Rep. Schiff, which criminals are and aren't the 'different' kind? Which ones should receive their constitutional expectation of privacy and which should not?

As we add more and more to the list of former convicts who must appear on registries, we move further and further away from our original spirit of criminal justice. Out with forgiving youthful indiscretions after ones debt to society has been paid, and in with lifelong stigma and constant scrutiny from local law enforcement. Though we find prior criminal histories to be inadmissible in front of a jury for fear of bias, we are allowing law enforcement officials to succumb to that same fallacy. Committing arson once does not make you a serial arsonist, nor should it subject to questioning forty years later when a fire is set fifteen miles from your new home. Shame on you Reps. Schiff and Bono for contributing to the breakdown of due process.

I worry that this legislation comes only because of California's recent wildfires. Truly the damage and loss of life was horrific, but it does not justify the stigmatization of yet another brand of criminal. Stiffer penalties? Maybe. A life-long registry? That is going too far.

Boston: At the Nexus of NASCAR and Police Power

2007-12-06T17:15:00.000-08:00
Boston, Massachusetts -- or, more accurately, a small town north of Boston called Melrose -- is currently floating a proposal to sell advertising space on their police cruisers in order to help raise money [1]. I will start by asking the obvious questions, and then move on to what I feel is the larger concern here.

Do we really want those who have the duty to protect and serve driving billboards down the highways? Would these cars become the subject of ridicule and scorn, substantially decreasing the legitimacy of the force? Can anyone ever really feel compelled to pull over whilst being pursued by a cruiser donning the Golden Arches on its hood? (Tangentially, only one such person exists, and the Hamburgler lives in McDonaldland, not in Massachusetts). In fairness, the cars are not going to become NASCAR clones, but rather have 'tasteful' ads confined to the "rear fenders and back bumper" no larger than approximately "twice the size of a normal bumper sticker". But the spirit of the move, despite assurances to the contrary, still reeks of a gradual corporate takeover of the public arena. As a Rutgers professor mused, "[d]o we want the Statue of Liberty to become the Starbucks Statue of Liberty?"

Here is where I think the trouble comes in, and it comes ironically in the form of a "don't worry" from the plan's proponents: in order to maintain a professional image, only certain types of ads will be allowed. This means no doughnut companies (too much of a cliché) and no liquor stores or funeral homes (certainly sending the wrong message). But can the police department, a public entity, engage in content-based discrimination? This issue has been raised before. In Washington, advertisers were denied in their request to post billboards related to marijuana legalization due to a federal statutory prohibition. The court struck down the statute, saying, "[t]he government [...] violates the First Amendment where it 'denies access to a speaker solely to suppress the point of view [the speaker] espouses on an otherwise includible subject.'" ACLU v. Mineta, 319 F.Supp.2d 69, 78 (D.D.C. 2004) (quoting Cornelius v. NAACP, 473 U.S. 788, 806 (1985)). A doughnut store is undoubtedly an "includible subject", so may there be First Amendment concerns if the police station were to turn this willing advertiser away? Certainly, the local Doughnut Shoppe understands the potential to capitalize on the public's association of police officers with pastry, so what better medium of advertisement?

It is easy to propose what appears to be a simple solution and to shoot down the nay-sayers with constant assurances that any negatives will be avoided, but what happens when those assurances are constitutionally challenged and the department ends up tied in litigation? It is far simpler to keep private interests away from public services. Better to keep what's private, private; what's public, public; and what's Caesar's, Caesar's, I say.

Law School Resolutions Redux

2007-12-02T18:29:00.000-08:00
Over three months ago, right before law school started, I made a list of resolutions I intended to keep. Now, with (almost) a full semester under my belt, I want to revisit these resolutions and gauge my progress.

1) "I promise to keep up with reading." Mostly fulfilled. There is certainly something to say about the art of knowing when to cut corners and when not to -- and, as Kenny Rogers would agree, knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em -- and I think I did commendably well in this regard. Despite the doomsayers' warnings of the Socratic Method and its penchant for ruining the will of even the most hearty of law students, I would say I have survived my first semester with nary a scratch. I have had my fair share of wrong answers, but such is the nature of being a student.

2) "I promise to treat law school like a job." That lasted roughly one day. My classes start every day at 10:00am. I arrive promptly at 9:55am. My classes end at roughly 4:00pm. Save for any distracting conversation outside of the classroom or a 'Bar Review' trip to a local brewery -- a pun hilarious to students of law and of substantially less humor to anyone else -- I tend to leave at around 4:05pm. My two-hour lunch breaks are also substantially less productive than I might have wished before school started. I do not, however, file this as a resolution failed, but as a resolution unnecessary to follow.

3) " I promise to keep perspective." The 'I will not become obsessed with inserting legal issues into every day situations' aspect of this resolution was an absolute failure. But I am okay with that. As I have previously asserted, learning law is a lot like being dropped into a foreign country and having to learn the language through immersion. There is no better way to practice than to spar with your peers and shadowbox with fast food receipts ("And what contract have you made now, Brian?")

4) "I promise to let myself have fun." I have explored less of Portland than I had hoped, but I have certainly had a great deal of fun here so far. It's been five months since I first moved here and I have to say that I am happy beyond what I would have guessed. Aside from the cold. And the rain. And the cold.

5) "I promise to stay within budget." Certainly patting myself on the back for this one. I have been at least $200 under my budget every month, allowing me to keep enough money saved away for a rainy day. Did I mention it rains here every day? And it's cold.

All in all, I am happy with my first semester. I say that a week before finals start and without having any idea what my grades are going to look like -- though perhaps that allows me to be happy -- but I do not anticipate any sort of plummet in my resolve any time soon. Sure, there have been frustrating nights, toiling over a memo and weeping into my Civ Pro textbook, but the happy times far outnumber the sad. My final resolution, 'no regrets', is perhaps the most poignant, and I am proud to say that I have none yet.

Guns Don't Kill People; Bears with Guns Kill People

2007-10-06T13:32:00.000-07:00
It is exceptionally difficult in this day and age to enjoy a quality Fred Meyer bagel-hunting experience without being accosted by scary ladies. This fact I learned the hard way.

While attempting to fetch a cart, I was stopped by a woman in an awkward red blazer who handed me a clipboard and told me to, "control guns!" Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to communicate with people on a more complex level than two-word commandments. After sensing my confusion -- and letting me stew in it for quite a few moments -- she told me that she was collecting signatures for a petition to ban guns in Oregon. On a personal note, I hate being asked to sign petitions. There's absolutely no easy way to tell someone 'no'. They're only slightly less bad than their ilk who solicit donations by asking, "would you like to save a child today?" forcing you to be the ass who says, "nope, no child-saving for me today, ma'am. I'm going to go ahead and do my shopping while a village of infants starve. 'Ta."

As the blazer-donning woman explained her stance and I idly perused her petition, I realized that I didn't agree with her premise. I handed the clipboard back and, as politely as I could manage, let her know that I could not sign it. She then asked me, "oh, so you advocate school shootings?"

Yes; yes, you caught me. I'm the guy in favor of school shootings. Why, there's not enough of them I say. That's why I'm also collecting donations for my new charity SAFSAC: Semi-Automatics for School-Aged Children.

Are you kidding me, woman? Do you also make the, "oh, so you hate our troops?" argument when people tell you they disagree with the war? Or, "so you support terrorism?" when someone suggests they're voting Democrat? Now look, I'm as against school shootings as the next guy, I just don't think banning guns is the solution. Nothing irks me more than when people argue that something like the Virginia Tech massacre wouldn't have happened if guns were banned. First of all, banning guns doesn't mean that people can't still get ahold of them, and secondly, suggesting that he would have used 'knives' or something less deadly if he couldn't get a gun is simply ridiculous. If you're that nuts and want to slaughter a mass of people, falling back on an inefficient killing technology is not where a psycho's mind is going to go. If he can't get access to a gun, then maybe 30 seconds on Google will give him the directions he needs to build a bomb or something even scarier.

My point is that we as humans can come up with some pretty creative ways to kill each other. It's in our nature; we are cruel beasts. Banning guns won't stop school violence any more than banning flag burning will stop the insurgency. If you really want to stop shootings, let's go to the source of the problem: the shooters. Preventing kids from becoming maniacs is a far better solution than taking away their toys.

On the way out of the store, another woman tried to hit me up for the petition. The beblazered woman stopped her and said, "no, he hates children". At least she got that part right.

In Which I Reveal My Pro-Sex Offender Stance

2007-10-05T16:45:00.000-07:00
Maryland is planning to require that registered sex offenders post signs at their homes during Halloween that say "no candy at this residence" in order to dissuade children from approaching and block contact between the trick-or-treaters and the sex offenders. It will also be 'advised' that they stay home from 6pm until the next morning, leave their lights off, and refuse to answer the door. [AP]

As odd as it may be to say, I believe this country is too hard on its sex offenders. Are we really suggesting that certain people are irredeemable social outcasts to be forever avoided? Is this the lesson we want to give our children? "Never pass judgement -- except on certain people like Mr. Jones down the street who made a mistake 15 years ago and whose door hides a secret so vile that approaching it for treats even when accompanied by adult chaperones is far too risky to even consider"? This strikes me as blatantly violating the spirit of our justice system in which we consider the crime forgiven once the debt to society is repaid. Further, the very nature of this country is to reward those who recover from their former indiscretions. To paint people with an unsheddable scarlet letter is a markedly cruel and unusual punishment.

It may be convenient to imagine all sex offenders as evil predators with a vast history of child sexual abuse, but remember that there are more than a few names on the offender registry that belong to young boys barely past trick-or-treating age themselves who drunkenly got carried away with their girlfriends one night. They, too, are expected to confirm to mandatory house arrest every year on Halloween, sitting in darkness and hearing the eggs pelt their doors because they aren't allowed to give out candy. I can't be the only one whose sense of justice is being ravaged by this policy.

Slanderous Insult: "You're Boring" Claims Small Child

2007-10-04T18:05:00.000-07:00
I left school at 3:30, blowing off my "study after class every day" promise because there was a book at home I needed. It's now 6:00 and I am, for the first time, sitting down. This, it turns out, is why I am boring.

As of this morning, a grocery shopping trip was an absolute necessity. I enjoy sandwiches for lunch. I was out of bread. Case closed. So on the way home, I stopped to shop. "While I'm here," I rationalized, "I may as well pick up other things". About an hour and fifteen minutes later, my shopping cart squealed under the weight of food. (Why is it, by the way, that it is quite literally physically impossible to leave a Fred Meyer in under 45 minutes? It's like a different world in there, or something. A world in which your earthly problems vanish and your notion of time is replaced with the unquenchable urge to buy reasonably priced bulk products). Before I left, I decided that sandwich bags were in my immediate future and charted a course for the appropriate aisle. It was here I learned of my vapid existence.

Yes yes, it was a truth I had, at times, suspected, but never fully realized. "It's just a phase," I thought. "Everyone experiments with being boring". But alas, a small child pushing a shopping cart and clearly weary of the entire adventure commented broadly to his mother, "grown-ups are so boring". He looked at me and scoffed, clearly intending to make clear that I was lumped into the group of banal idlers for whom he clearly held contempt. Or pity. I felt an immediate need to justify myself to this stripling. "I'm not boring! And I'm not a grown-up. I meet neither of your criteria. Look away from me, child." But as his mother's eyes met mine and she smiled an isn't-my-kid-perceptive grin, I resigned defeat.

I spent an hour and $100 buying groceries. As far as this kid was concerned, dinner is something that magically appears on the table and whose sole purpose is to deprive him of his evening play. For me, it is a nightly chore with only sometimes enjoyable results. My how I miss those days of innocence. And as he walked away, I realized that he took with him some element of my youth. And I mourned its loss momentarily before returning to the problems of sandwich bag brand and quantity. Just another boring, grown-up decision in my boring, grown-up life.

This is why I think it should be legal to harvest the organs of children.

Bad News for People with Brains

2007-10-01T17:41:00.000-07:00
As if things weren't bad enough, we now have deadly, brain-eating amoeba to worry about. Six people so far this year have have been killed by this water-dwelling, nose-invating, single-celled bastard. And it seems it only affects males. Why, that's a joke that just writes itself. In related news, six people have recently risen from the dead with no explanation.

Because I'm without an appropriate forwarding address, I'd like now to pen an open letter to God. Everyone else can skip to the next paragraph. Okay, so God... really? Really? Zombie amoeba? Are you kidding me? What are we doing wrong now? I mean seriously, just tell us what we're missing. We really are trying down here. Well, some of us anyway. I mean, I can understand the floods and the fire and brimstone and all that... cleanse the Earth, purge the evildoers, yadda yadda... but this? This is just downright diabolical, pardon the term. We've got mad cow and bird flu and SARS and west nile, do we really need the brain-eating amoeba too? Are You just getting bored with creative ways to kill us? Seriously, God, let me know what we can do to get ourselves out of this whole mess and I'll pass on the word. Promise. Your pal, Brian.

Word of the cranium-chomper spread fast, and in the landmark case of Scarecrow v. Wizard of Oz, the Emerald City district court ruled that the plaintiff could not, in fact, give his brain back. Summary judgement was granted in favor of the defendant as a binding contract had been formed upon Scarecrow's acceptance which was indicated clearly using the objective test when he said, "Oh joy! Rapture! I got a brain! How can I ever thank you enough?" The court also invoked the no-givesies-backsies rule and broadened its scope to include brains in addition to the commodity for which the standard more commonly applies: cooties. In dictum, the court made reference to the Colevito standard, claiming, in essence, that even if it were found that a contract had not been formed, Scarecrow had only quasi-property rights to his brain and could not have it removed or destroyed.

Looks like he's out of luck too.

Senior Lawyers Eat Babies? Oh Bother!

2007-09-30T19:07:00.000-07:00
I, personally, am tired of being inundated with doomsday warnings about how difficult, unrewarding, and unforgiving life after law school is. Not once has anyone told me, "it's an intellectually rewarding experience". Instead, it seems as if everyone loves to play the, "you made the wrong choice, idiot, your life is now debt-filled hell!" game. People who are normally Poohs and Piglets turn into Eeyores the moment they spot the ability to quash dreams. The law profession seems to be one in which pros happily eat their young.

I try to counter the pessimism by insisting that I did my research before making the plunge, and that I came to law school for the academic experience and do not feel the need to become rich or follow the 'traditional' lawyer path. This is typically met with either the ever-patronizing, "you'll understand someday" or the far more foreboding, "the law is a profession not open to change; you follow the traditional path or you follow no path at all". I read one observer's musings that it seemed as if many JDs have started taking the route of MBA grads. Indeed, I have partially decided that if a professorship does not end up working out -- as I mentioned, it is the academic side of law that interests me -- that I would start my own non-legal business and perhaps operate a small solo practice part-time. It seems that many of my peers share similar motivations.

The thing that is most scary, though, is that it seems any career path other than being self-employed expects you to be coming from one of two tracts: BigLaw or judicial clerkship. And once you chose a tract, you are locked in. Even worse, if you chose neither, you are locked out.

Are there no legal optimists left?

American Culture's Biggest Threat: Activistism

2007-09-29T16:13:00.000-07:00
I was very politically minded while in high school and for most of my undergrad life, but I find that my threshold for outrage is increasing as of late. Rather than speak out against injustices, I find myself more often then not shrugging and changing the subject.

Case in point: The Jena 6 controversy for which it seems everyone has a strong opinion. Me? Not so much. Why? Dunno. I would assume that I fall into the same fallacy that many fall into. The notion that 'it doesn't really affect me' rings loudly -- it's the south and I live on the west coast; or, it's a "black issue", and I'm white. All are bad reasons, I know, but are still reasons nonetheless. And even more nagging is the ever-fallacious bystander effect first noted when, in a rape and murder lasting half an hour and witnessed by thirty-eight people, no one aided the victim or called the police until after she was dead. The theory here is that everyone assumes that, "someone else will take care of it". I don't need to think about the Jena 6 because someone else will take care of them. I need not fret over the Senate's borderline unconstitutional censure of MoveOn.org because someone else in power will do something. I shouldn't take up arms in favor of GENDA because that's someone else's fight and someone else will fight it. Is this what it feels like to be older? Apathetic about things until they actually affect you?

Conscious as I may be of my terrible reasons to avoid the issues, I still have neither the time nor the energy for activism. But then again, maybe it'd do this country good to have fewer activists.

The Answer to the Ultimate Question (Hint: It's not 42)

2007-09-25T18:19:00.000-07:00
I figured out the answer to the ultimate question of, "why?" And no, not the trite "why are we here?" (I already know the answer to that one), but instead the much more complex 'why am I in law school?' It finally clicked today.

The study of law is kind of like riding an invisible bike. Stay with me here. Legal theory is complex and amorphous and obscure and indiscernible; it doesn't make sense and yet it does at the same time. It has a defined shape (like a bike), but is neither particularly obvious nor clearly established (like an invisible bike). It's perceptible if you know where to look, but entirely indefinite if you don't (again, like an invisible bike). It'll get you to where you need to go, but first you gotta know where to find it and also how to ride it (you getting this metaphor yet?)

My point is that it all finally makes sense to me. I'm not studying to learn the ends, but rather the means to get to the ends. In other words, it's not the laws that I need to know, but the process by which I can apply the laws and procedures of legal reasoning. By accepting this, it's much easier for me to approach the hypotheticals that my professors pose from a stance of, "hmm, this is an interesting legal puzzle with many justifiable outcomes" rather than my initial "oh God what's the right answer? I don't know! Don't call on me, don't call on me, don't call on me!" that carried over from undergrad. My contracts professor today spoke at length about a hypo in the case book for which each of us offered one of two opposing conclusions (a contract was formed versus a contract was not formed), but all had completely different reasoning. I kept expecting the Right Answer(tm) to be given, but the professor just nodded and told us that we did a good job and to do what we just did on the exam. Enter a-ha moment stage left. I've always kind of understood on a superficial level that it's more about justifying your answer than what your answer is, but now that notion has sunk in.

So that, then, is why I'm in law school. Anyone can read and memorize statutes, but I'm learning how to reason through these complex legal problems for which statutory understanding is insufficient. I'm learning, as it were, how to ride the invisible bike.

How to be Successful in One Easy Step

2007-09-23T18:16:00.000-07:00
Step 1: be successful.

I've been writing this post about goal-setting and my recent feelings of failure for the past hour and a half and, for some reason, cannot condense it down to exactly what I want it to be. Instead, I'll let this Albert Einstein quote do the work for me: “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else”

I've been worried that I've been making too many mistakes and missing too many opportunities lately. I have to come to terms with the fact that I'm still learning the rules of the game, as it were. Law school is like getting dumped in a foreign country and trying to pick up language by total immersion; the complexity of legal thinking is unlike anything I've ever tackled before and its many nuances are unfamiliar to my tongue. It's challenging and thrilling to be sure, but it is a new language. It would be foolish and arrogant of me to think myself capable of being fluent in only the four weeks I've been here.

But I am content with having learned so much already. I know that initial missteps are all part of learning how to play the game. The world, after all, is more than happy to give a few mulligans to the newbies. I'm confident that I will eventually be playing with the best of them, sinking aces, and all variety of other golf metaphor. It just takes time. And patience. And beer. Yes, lots and lots of beer.

"Don't taze me, bro!"

2007-09-18T18:02:00.000-07:00
Today's post is brought to you by random thoughts. Random thoughts, available now at your local Fred Meyer.

People here HATE Californians. I mean absolutely cannot stand us. This is not my imagination; this is locals looking nervous when I say where I'm from and people constantly saying, "oh, you better not tell anyone else that". That last line, about keeping where I'm from secret, was not one of those 'heard once or twice' kind of things. I'm talking easily two dozen people in the past month and a half giving me such a warning. Just today while I was innocently buying bagels, the checkout woman commented with denigration, "oh... a Californian, eh?" when she saw my ID. Even in law school classes, the supposed bastion of liberal-minded thinkers, professors are quick to quip about almost any decision a Californian court hands down. Someone even commented to me, in all seriousness, "oh, California, where all the hippies are from." Okay, thanks Oregonian, but I think you top me and my eighth largest city in the country on that scale. The fact that Lewis and Clark doesn't have an barefoot, hemp-wearing albino playing the guitar in the middle of our quad and singing about 'establishment' surprises me almost daily. Don't throw love beads if you live in eco-friendly glass houses, guy.

Then again, I'm starting to hate Californians too. Well, one in particular. I swear, if you don't stop saying "like", "dude", and "bro" twelve times every class, my book will sail into the back of your head.

Random thought #2 - An open letter to that one guy in the locker room: I don't know if you noticed or not, but there is a restroom immediately adjacent to the locker room. And in restrooms are mirrors. And through the magic of specular reflection, I can see you. Full-frontal nudity is fun every once in a while, but at 8 o'clock in the morning, and especially from you, Sir Wookie, it is not a welcome surprise. Let's try putting on some pants before you wander around, 'kay?

#3: Nothing is quite so classy as having a box of wine in your refrigerator. Get off me, the dollar:buzz ratio is fantastic.

#4: If your dog gets away from you and starts jumping on a total stranger, and then the total stranger calms and delivers the dog back to you, you should, at the very least, make eye contact. And no, lecturing your dog in front of me about why he shouldn't run away does not count as an apology or as an expression of thanks. If he could understand your lecture, he probably would have also understood the first fifteen times you said, "come back here, boy" as he mauled my Triskets. I, however, do speak your language. Focus on your fellow biped next time.

This has been random thoughts. Random thoughts, on sale now.

Justice Logan to Mother: "But I Want to be a Poet!"

2007-09-14T22:03:00.000-07:00
Never let it be said that court justices are without poetic flare.

Edwards v. Sims is a 1929 property case involving ownership of a cave below ones land. Yadda yadda yadda, what's important is that the dissenting justice in this case, Justice Logan of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky, missed his calling. I would contend that the biggest loss to the literary world occurred when a young Logan decided to go to law school instead of pursuing his dreams in creative writing. I quote for you an actual excerpt from his dissenting opinion in Edwards v. Sims in which his undeniably vivid writing shines:
Men fought their way through the eternal darkness, into the mysterious and abysmal depths of the bowels of a groaning world to discover the theretofore unseen splendors of unknown natural scenic wonders. They were conquerors of fear, although now and then one of them [...] paid with his life, for his hardihood in adventuring into the regions where Charon with his boat had never before seen any but the spirits of the departed. They let themselves down by flimsy ropes into pits that seemed bottomless; they clung to scanty handholds as they skirted the brinks of precipices while the flickering flare of their flaming flambeaux disclosed no bottom to the yawning gulf beneath them; [...] they found chambers, star-studded and filled with scintillating light reflected by a phantasmagoria revealing fancied phantoms, and tapestry woven by the toiling gods in the dominion of Erebus. [...] They created an underground kingdom where Gulliver's people may have lived or where Ayesha may have found the revolving column of fire in which to bathe meant eternal youth.

I don't know about you, but I want to drop out of school and go caving. If anyone ever tries to tell you that legal reading is boring or dense, they lie.

A Battle of Proportions Describable Only as 'Epic'

2007-09-13T16:33:00.001-07:00
I have teased you and now your patient curiosity will be rewarded with the stunning and, some may say, terrifying account of the events so described by my title. Epic may well be an understatement, and I assert with great voracity that if Homer were alive today, rest his bardic soul, his quill would immediately be to work.

In my tease, I told a tale of seeping water. What goes along with seeping water -- and this I did not know -- are centipedes. I'll say that again for full effect. Centipedes. Actually, I don't want to invite more bad luck, so I'll say instead centipede, no 's'. Now I'm a southern California boy. We have mosquitos... sometimes. There are those little tiny black ants. The big goliath ants are nowhere to be seen and red ants are an incredibly rare occurrence as well. Bees and wasps exist, but I never really see any. Snakes are there, but are innocuous and keep to themselves. Spider population is low and the deadliest thing we have to contend with is the black widow and I have encountered only two of them in twenty-two years. I see cockroaches sometimes, but only in messy, food-y areas. Rodents may as well be considered nonexistent. My point is, we don't have pests. I say this not to gloat, but to paint a picture for you about my experience with dealing with vermin. Insofar as I don't have any experience dealing with vermin.

Flash forward to present. We have goliath ants in Portland. Spiders are more abundant. But I can deal. There had been nothing really crazy I've seen. Yet. But then on my freshly mopped kitchen floor one morning was my mortal enemy for the day: a centipede. I knew what it was only because I watch National Geographic and play old-school arcade games. I've never seen one of these in real life. I took a moment to freak out and then reminded myself that because I lived alone, the responsibility of dealing with the intruder fell solely to me. Deep breath.

In general, I like to capture and release wandering critters. It's not their fault they came inside. Maybe they're cold, I don't know. But having never dealt with centipedes, I didn't know what to expect. I don't know how fast they run (apparently, from my research, the answer is fast), I don't know if they're poisonous, heck, I don't even know if they can jump. Don't laugh. I just didn't want to take any risks. I then decided that catching the creature wasn't an option and leaving it alone certainly wouldn't do (on my top ten list of things I don't want on my face in the middle of the night, I'd say centipede ranks only slightly behind a firmly held pillow). So my only option was to kill the creature. Squashing certainly wouldn't do as a gutty mess on the floor was unacceptable. No reason we both had to suffer, right? A laser shot by a tiny spaceship, though empirical evidence would suggest otherwise, was also not a valid option. I considered poison, but I don't own any bug spray and instead tried to improvise. Oven cleaner? Nope, I didn't have any of that. Hairspray! No, also not owned. Cologne? No, that's silly. I have dish detergent, but I don't think a green apple scented centipede is really what I should be aiming for. Okay, so poison was out. I fell back on the only thing I could think of that I had at my disposal.

A food torch.

And before you balk and cry and protest, let me say this: it's a very hot, very concentrated flame. Death by rapid incineration is quick and (hopefully) relatively pain-free. I didn't set it on fire and watch it burn or anything sadistic. I tried to make the experience as humane as reasonably possible. And no it didn't smoke and no there was no smell or anything gross like that, it simply charred and crisped in much the same way an earthworm who crawled out into the sun after a rainstorm would. I wrapped it in a paper towel and then returned it to the earth from whence it came. It left an elegant-looking corpse which is really what anyone could hope for. My choice was far more humane than many of the other things I could have done. I'm sure you'd agree that poison would have been far worse.

And thus ended my epic battle with the first centipede I had ever encountered. The jitters will wear off eventually I'm sure, but I'll be shaking out any article of clothing I put on and watching my feet when I walk for a bit of time. I feel bad for assaulting the poor insect*, but if there's one thing I've learned in law school it is that if I don't assert my right to exclude, I risk abandoning my vested property rights. And that's not good for anybody.

*I know that a centipede is not really an insect. In reality, it's a legume.

When I was Sixteen...

2007-09-11T16:52:00.000-07:00
On February 14th, the day I turned sixteen, I didn't get a car. I didn't have my license or permit, so there was no reason. On June 7th of the year I was sixteen, summer vacation started. I don't remember what I did during my time off. School started again on August 17th. I was a Junior. Then, on September 11th of the year I was sixteen, I watched the news in my physics class. Buildings were falling down.

I'm not writing this to be yet another "Remembering 9/11" post that we have all seen over and over again for the past six years. I also don't intend to tell my "Where were you when..." story. Instead, I want to look back not-so-fondly on some of the highlights since 9/11/01 and then see if I can extract a silver lining from it all.

We, as a country, went crazy. I'm talking absolutely nuts. The time immediately after the attacks was different, though. It was surreal. I want to describe it as almost calming without sounding callous for saying it. What I mean is that in the days following -- and especially on the day of -- we, as people, started to see the big picture. That our triple shot grande macchiato had heavy foam instead of light foam like we had asked didn't seem to matter anymore. We started to see the guy that cut us off in traffic not as the all sorts of colorful terms we used to call him, but as a fellow member of this great big world and with probably a perfectly decent reason for doing what he did. We told our family, "I love you" more often. For a moment, we were thankful for what we had and forgot about the minor things we didn't. There was no drumbeat of war, but rather a moment for global mourning and sadness where we all, for just that moment, were at peace with one another.

And then somewhere along the way, something changed. I suppose we worked our way to the next stage of grief. People started buying T-shirts declaring "Yo' momma, Osama" and bumper stickers with the now tired phrase, "These colors don't run" while simultaneously chastising Starbucks for 'abhorrently' capitalizing on tragedy for personal gain (see graphic). We listened to the radio to country stars singing to terrorists and telling them that we were going to put a "boot up yer ass" and "light up your world like the fourth of July". M-16s filled out airports and grannies were dumped out of wheelchairs for weapons inspections. We completely lost our grip on reality. When frozen tazo beverages getting "dive-bombed" by a dragonfly strikes us as insensitively mocking imagery, that's it, folks. Game over. We've lost to our own fears.

And its not as if we can yet look back on the madness and say, "yeah, those were crazy times". We're still at war. And I don't just mean our war in Iraq, but also the intangible 'War on Terror' we've committed ourselves to. And its going just as well as our equally intangible War on Drugs. We still have a color-coded system telling us how scared we should be on that particular day. It fell to joking quickly as evident by my last two titles, of course, but you can't tell me that you don't get a little bit anxious when CNN announces that we're at "terror alert orange". Unattended 'suspicious' packages are supposed to be reported to authorities. We're advised not to open letters without a return address, with excessive postage, or with poorly written English. Car bombs used to be undeniably the work of the mob, now Al Qaeda must be behind every one. Hell, we'll even dive behind a gun-toting gang banger for protection when we see a Middle Easterner walk toward us on the sidewalk.

I want us to go back to that time of peace. We united momentarily with our enemies because we finally had something in common: tragedy. We seem to have forgotten that we still have things in common. Six years ago we hugged total strangers and let them cry on our shoulders. Now, the most pressing social matter is stopping those gays from getting married. What happened to that love we used to share? Did we forget how to do it? The compassion is still in us and I know that it's still in us. I know it because it came out of everyone six years ago. It's just dormant in us now as it was six years and a day ago. So why don't we have it anymore?

One day every year I think that we should commit ourselves to one goal. The one day doesn't have to be on the anniversary of 9/11; it can be at any time. But the goal is this: think about the big picture again. Weigh the things you're thankful for -- your friends, your family, your children, your spouse, and their love -- with those minor day-to-day things that trouble you. Complain less about the line at the supermarket and appreciate more the fact that all the food you could ever possibly want is only a short ways down the road. Don't grumble about the parking ticket, but rather be thankful that you even have something that a parking ticket can be put on. It's amazing how much stress you can get rid of when you start thinking about the good things you have in life rather than constantly focusing on the bad. That's what I learned when I was sixteen on September 11th. And six years later, I remind myself of this fact. Sure, it sucks that I have to read 20 pages of Civil Procedure tonight, but there mere fact that I can is something for which I should be eternally grateful.

The world is crazy and life is hard sometimes, but I find comfort in the fact that at least I have a world to be in and at least I have a life to live. In the grand scheme of things, saying 'thank you' every once in a while isn't so hard. Extending compassion isn't terribly taxing. Love is free to give and rich to receive, so let us endeavor to pass it around. The world is what we make of it after all.

The Terror Alert has been Downgraded to 'Brown'

2007-09-11T16:28:00.000-07:00
Consider this post an ominous teaser.

This owl -- I'll call him Jeff -- and I have a lot in common. Jeff doesn't like surprises. I kind of like surprises, but can understand Jeff's point: sometimes surprises can be bad things. For instance, when I have returned home some evenings, I've noticed that an amount of dried grass has been blasted underneath my door. I had assumed it was propelled under there by some weed-whacking device. Today, however, the grass was not dry. Today, the grass was wet. And muddy. And plastered to my front door. And floating in dirty, murky water that had creeped in from under my door and laid absolute waste to my entryway. On my door in addition to the slop was a fat, brown, presumably displaced spider. It looked as if someone dropped a water grenade into the nearby flower bed. It was carnage, I tell you. Absolute carnage.

I'm now starting to believe that this is why there is dry grass inside sometimes. I postulate that it was not dry when it came in. This also may explain why spiders have an uncanny fascination with living around my front door. They, like Jeff, don't like surprises. You get blasted out of a flower bed once, you figure you may as well just live wherever it is you land instead of trekking back to the minefield.

I further believe this water malfunction may also explain this morning's troubling encounter. Dun dun dun. Consider yourself teased.

The Terror Alert of my Front Door is 'Bright Red'

2007-09-09T14:21:00.000-07:00
My mother is a real estate agent. My parents own various homes that they rent. I'm taking a class in property law (commandment: love thy neighbor's money). From all three, I've learned one thing: tenants are terrible, horrible, evil ~~clowns~~ people.

This is a fact I first picked up on when I flew to Portland to try to find an apartment. Driving around yielded no favorable results in spite of every person saying that this was the holy land of apartment hunting (it's not) with rentals spilling like purified water into the streets (they don't). So my mother and I retired to our hotel where I, making use of the free wireless, and she, making use of the free business center, set out to use the Power of the Internet(tm) to find a place. I utilized tenant reviews to help me in this search. Now I know that online reviews in general need to be taken with a grain of salt and are comprised only of people who lavishly praise the item or bitterly condemn it (mostly the latter), but I was mostly looking for patterns in reviews and certain key phrases like "perpetual roach infestation" and the like. After wading into the reviewers' bile, though, I began to learn that nearly 100% of the complaints were based on some fantasy land facilitated by amphetamines. The complex I eventually moved into was blasted by reviewers who claimed that construction workers, "woke us up at 5:00AM every Saturday morning!!" and that cars, "were stolen and broken into every night!!" After a month of living here, it worries me that these reviews almost kept me from checking the place out. What swayed me, though, is when my mother told me that tenants were pains in the ass and would generally complain about every possible thing they could.

"I'll never be a tenant like that," I vowed. "I know management isn't responsible for changing my light bulbs". This was a vow clearly not shared by those in the neighboring units.

Some loud woman crying "*scoff* they've been painting here for a week. What the hell is wrong with them?" floated through my window as I was cleaning my kitchen. She's the same woman whose balcony is still cluttered with an array of nonsense nine days after getting the notice to please clear them off so as not to get paint on our belongings. I'll bet she complained about that too. Now granted the painters have made some laughable errors in their job, though I'm assuming (hoping?) that they're not done yet. My front door, for example, was painted while closed which means that while most if it is the new maroon color, there's a delightful tomato-red ring around the edges . They also painted over my peephole, but that required only a few wipes from a wet rag to correct. But you'd swear from the complaints I hear that the construction teams were breaking into apartments and bloodying people's noses while they slept. Sure, my unit looked ugly for a day while the siding was being replaced, but now I have new siding and fresh paint. And to those that have complained that this project is just "another excuse for them to raise rents" I can only shake my head. You mean we have to pay to live in a clean, upgraded community?! What?!

Tenants ~~are scary clowns~~ suck.

Glasses for the Brain

2007-09-05T21:26:00.001-07:00
Today's post was boring. But the graphic was cool, so we'll go with that:

It is an out-of-focus Pepsi-drinking Native American. Such an iconic symbol which I'm sure requires no explanation. And I need glasses for my brain. Preferably those stylish black-rimmed ones. Ooh, or do they make brain contacts? Maybe some of those blue-tined ones? I'd so wear those.

A Treatise on the Height of Georgia Pines

2007-09-02T17:36:00.000-07:00
I open with a limerick:

Land contracts are serious stuff,
So Lucy's attorney got tough.
"We don't know the truth.
Was it due to vermouth?"
Well, the court quickly called Zehmer's bluff.

If you don't get it, I envy you.

Lucy v Zehmer is perhaps the most classic example of what happens when two good ol' boys get drunk and make contracts. While reading the case, I couldn't help but envision a classic (made-up) I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy accidentally sells a 471.6-acre farm to the Mertzes for $50,000. "But Ricky," cries Lucy, "I had so much to drink in the bar that I was high as a Georgia pine and accidentally wrote on the back of a restaurant check that I would sell all our land and now they're taking us to court and they have an attorney and you won't let me be in the show and waaaaaaaaaaaah".

"Lucy, you've got some 'splaining to do, hah hah hah hah hah, babaluuuu!"

But thankfully as a result of this case, any time I get drunk -- nay, any time I imbibe even a drop of alcohol -- I'm going to refer to myself as being "high as a Georgia pine". Note that I'm only joking and that this does not qualify as a contract under any objective standard.

It's amazing how much I can get done when I'm supposed to be studying.

This Secret will Change your Life!

2007-09-02T13:54:00.000-07:00
I must open this post with a small confession: what I am about to talk about is neither a secret nor will it change your life. But it is really cool.

I'm sure you've heard from everywhere that you should always keep your important files backed up. I prefer to live on the edge, knowing that each day could be the last day I ever see my precious documents. This lifestyle is not by choice, mind you. I'm both lazy and cheap, a combination of things not particularly conducive to a regular backup regimen. But then I found the coolest free (good) and automatic (good) backup service EVER.

It's called Mozy and it's both a web service and an application that you download that lets you pick the exact types of files and specific folders that you want to keep saved. Then, whenever the program notices a change in these files, it'll automatically upload them to your online backup hard drive. So, for example, my documents folder is set as one of the folders I want to keep backed up. Whenever I edit a document or create a new one, Mozy notices and uploads it the next time my computer is idle. You get 2 gigabytes for free, which is probably not enough if you want to save your entire music library, but was plenty for all of my documents, e-mail messages, and anything else I deemed important. And it works with both PC and Mac/OSX (hurray!)

If you decide to sign up (you really should), please use my referral code P7WJML because if you do, we both get an extra quarter of a gigabyte of storage space. Here's a direct link: https://mozy.com/?code=P7WJML.

(And if you're wondering, that graphic is the album cover of Reba McEntire's You Lie. It's because I lied about the life-changing secret thing. But I did not lie that this service is awesome. Sign up.)

The End and Beginning of an Era

2007-08-31T17:24:00.000-07:00
Today marks two important milestones: I have survived my first week of law school, and I have survived my first month of living in Portland. Both have happened, interestingly, on the same day.

It may not seem like much, but these two thresholds carry a lot of symbolic weight. No longer is it, "oh, my first week of law school". Now I'm a law student. No longer have I, "oh, just moved here". Now I live in Portland. Two of my classes asked that we write personal statements so that our professors can get to know us. In both, I said that I expected a lot of anxiety over living in a new state for the first time in my life (I've never lived outside of San Diego). Yet instead, I think I've transplanted fairly well and very quickly. I feel comfortable in my Portland apartment now, having had the time to decorate it and make it feel like ‘home’. I already find myself happily saying that I’m going “home” at the end of each day. I may be a long way from San Diego, but I feel like Lewis and Clark is just 10 minutes away from home.

I have done a lot of thinking about whether I will stay here after I graduate. I am no where near a place where I can reasonably answer that question. But I am moving forward. Tomorrow morning marks the day that I will have been here for one month; four weeks; 31 days. Tonight marks the moment I have a drink with my new peers and celebrate our victory over our first week in law school. This is the first weekend (of many, no doubt), that I lock myself in my apartment and read and study. And clean. God, that's overdue.

But this moment feels somewhat monumental. It's a change in the way I think about things. This isn't a vacation anymore, but a new life that I've started. And as for what the future holds, I don't know. I can only wait and see, staying flexible and optimistic. There are many doors of opportunity, for sure. And as a welcome relief, its not as drafty as expected with them all left open.

Dear Faculty and Staff (and Brian): Parking may Cause Cancer

2007-08-31T16:08:00.000-07:00
On Tuesday, I received an e-mail warning that undergraduate new student orientation starts Wednesday and will last throughout the week. It specifies that parking will be "tight" and that we should plan to arrive early or look into alternate transportation.

I've avoided commenting on the parking situation thus far as my experiences have been largely positive. And yet, what I have heard from other senior students is largely negative. Despite the e-mail warning, I found a spot without a problem on Wednesday (though I did arrive early), on Thursday (again, early), and Friday (not so early). When I say "without a problem", I mean that I selected one open spot of a dozen immediately visible ones. But still there's this nagging panic in me every morning. When we, as new students, ask older students, professors, or staff what parking is like, the vast majority have laughed and said, "good luck!" This is what we in the biz call a 'bad sign'. Could my experiences thus far really differ so drastically from what the future will be?

I come from an undergraduate school of 20,000 undergraduates, 6,000 graduates, 14,000 staff and faculty, and about 60 parking spaces. I kissed my 732-dollar parking permit if I had to walk only half a mile to get to my first class. You want to fight with me over who has experienced difficult parking situations, I'll knock your glass-jawed self out, buster. But what is apparently "good luck"-level parking here has been working out quite grand so far. The spots seem copious and the walk is 100 meters maybe. 150 if I have to park far. And I'm only out $165. No problem!

My guess is that this may be influenced by the fact that the undergraduate part of the school hasn't started yet. But with orientation already in swing for several days, shouldn't I already be seeing a volume of cars equal to what the rest of the year will be? And I've been parking in the law student only lot, so I can't imagine the undergrads will affect me anyway. Right now I'm in a state of cautioned optimism. I'll also be sure to link to this post in a month when I write another one laced with profanity and a declaration that I'm selling my car and buying a Vespa.

Ha. Right. I enjoy breathing my carbon too much, thank you.

Seeking Draino for Clogged Hourglass

2007-08-29T23:51:00.000-07:00
How can it be that I've already been in law school for forty-six days and yet it's only Wednesday of the first week? Maybe time is moving slower than the provisions of physics allow.

Today I was having a conversation with a new friend who said she felt the same way I did about slow moving time. "Well," I said, "at least after this week is done, we only have nine more left." She asked what I meant and I clarified, "you know, until the end of the semester. We have nine more weeks." But semesters are 16 weeks, she told me. As an undergrad, I did three 10-week quarters. Courses were over practically as soon as they started. But back now on the semester system that I'm no longer accustomed to, the proposition of fifteen more weeks is disheartening. Not that nine weeks is really a short amount of time or anything, but there's something inspirational about having only a single digit before you. Fifteen is such a unfriendly looking number.

I'm nearing burn out already. And before you think of me as weak-willed, consider that I have had mono for two weeks. In fact, from Tuesday two weeks ago to Tuesday last week, I never left my bed. I only left on Tuesday to go to the hospital. Then, more bed on Wednesday. Thursday and Friday were orientation, and then back in bed with earache and throat pain death on Saturday and Sunday. Following that, three days of my first week of law school. Essentially, every day for the past two weeks I've either been involved in day-long law school commitments, or day-long bed confinement. My apartment is in desperate need of cleaning and lacks an occupant with time or opportunity to do it. I haven't even shopped for groceries and I'm getting dangerously close to running out of meal options.

On the whole, though, I'm fine. Really. My mental state is healthy. I'm just tired. Nothing a bit of relaxation and recreation won't cure (that bath last night was actually a wonderful start). This weekend'll do a body good for sure. Which reminds me... I need milk.

In Which my Previous Brilliance is Challenged

2007-08-28T20:06:00.000-07:00
There has been a gradual increase in the class load and work load from day to day. On Monday, I had only one class. On Tuesday, I had two. Tomorrow, Wednesday, I have three. While the class time itself is largely irrelevant when it comes to the amount of work I need to do, the number of classes for which I have to prepare ends up being somewhat of a daunting endeavor when the value climbs to three. Preparing readings, briefs, and other written assignments for tomorrow's sessions was indeed taxing, and only now at 8:00 PM have I finished. Not as bad as it could be, I freely admit, and likely not as bad as it's gonna get. Rejoice.

The notion I asserted yesterday of age being much less of a factor at law school as compared to during undergraduate school was flipped a bit today. It started on my walk to my first class when an older student asked me, "second day of law school?" Apparently there is, in fact, some vibe I send out that indicates my 1Lmanship. Maybe it was my doe-eyed expression, or maybe it was the peanut butter and jelly sandwich peering from my bag in its tupperware container, but I now know that I'm identifiably a legal newbie. And then, later, another younger student addressed me with, "excuse me, sir". Thus the justification for today's graphic (I'm an old baby, get it?) Though in my defense, she did hesitate on the word 'sir', clearly indicating her understanding that such an address was largely inappropriate but lacking any other working identifier on such short notice. Despite that, though, it still made me feel old at the age of 22 in a student body whose average incoming age is 28.

I have also noticed another peculiar dissimilarity between law school and undergrad. For the past four years, I observed immediate movement and evacuation of the classroom the moment the professor even indicated that his or her lecture was about to close. Now, however, not only do students sit patiently still for the final word, there is also a decided pause between the end of the lecture and the initial student movement. I attribute it primarily to the extra time it takes to gather our rather copious belongings that have been strewn across our desks, as well as the the increased number of laptops which, I presume, add to the post-class packing ritual. Though instead, I'd prefer to assume that there is a greater respect for the institution of learning as a law student than as an undergrad. It's much more noble that way.

And now my reward for the day is a nice dinner, a glass of wine, and then another glass of wine in a warm bubble bath that smells like green apples. I may even light candles and play soothing music. Sometimes I impress even myself with my elegance.

I'm Probably the Smartest Person Ever

2007-08-27T19:48:00.000-07:00
My first official day of law school is now complete. And while I didn't get called on like another equally brilliant new 1L, I did brief my first case correctly and did understand everything discussed! I'm amazing.

I did notice something rather unique and nice about law school on my first day: whereas brand new undergraduates stand out like a pubescent thumb (they quite literally look like babies), I didn't feel like an out-of-place, infantile transplant subject to the oo's, aw's, and jeers of the upperclassmen. It could be because the age spread of law school is so much wider than that of undergrad, or it could simply be that we do not look as different between 22 and 24 as we do between 18 and 21. Whatever the reason, despite a general feeling of newness still plaguing me, I felt comfortable since I had just orientated myself with the petite campus a decifortnight* prior. I picked up my refund check (yay!), bought my parking permit (yow!), ate an apple (yum!), and settled into the library for a bit of pre-class studying (yiz!**). After class, I finished my readings for the next day and headed home.

All in all, I'm feeling rather mentally prepared. I feel organized, I feel directed, and I feel ready. I'm going to try to get myself into the habit of preparing briefs on readings 1-2 days in advance during daily downtime in the library, and then retyping and reorganizing my notes on my laptop after each lecture at home. How long this'll last remains to be seen, but I'm optimistic. Right now I have a fun new note-taking program to play with, so while the novelty lasts, the habit will be easy to keep up. Hopefully down the road, I'll be so used to the routine that I'll just keep doing it.

So that's it, then. Day 1 officially done and day 2 officially already prepared for. If all goes according to plan, tomorrow when day 2 is done, day 3 will be prepared for and so on and so on until I'm a law school graduate in three years. What a daunting idea. One step at a time, baby. One step at a time.

*Decifortnight is an actual term (believe it or not) meaning 1.4 days. I figure it's close enough to 2 days to warrant its use given its awesomeness as a word.

**Yiz, on the other hand, doesn't actually exist. But my three-letter y-exclamatories needed to continue, so deal with it.

Recovery is a Slow Process Facilitated by Chips Ahoy

2007-08-26T23:15:00.000-07:00
I feel like a 95-year-old woman when people ask me how I'm feeling. "I have my good days and my bad," I'll tell them, "and the dementia's starting to set in. Why doesn't my son visit me anymore?" I don't say the last part, of course, but I think it and it makes me laugh and that's all that matters.

I have a lot of reading that I'm supposed to be doing, but I can't force myself to focus. I keep thinking that I'm Healed, and then the next day, I stumble again. Yesterday, my throat hurt so badly that swallowing proved to be a torturous endeavor. And when doctor's orders involve lots of fluids, I'm left looking for other ways to get water into me (turns out no IV bags at Fred Meyer). Today the sandpapery feeling has subsided, but fatigue set in a bit more. If Mono were a sports team, it'd have a head coach way too into substitutions.

Yeah? Yeah? Sports metaphor? That's right. And they said there were no worthwhile teams in Portland (there aren't).

In other news, I have my first official law school lecture tomorrow. My brief for the case we're going to discuss is all done and I'm ready for a rousing hour-and-a-half examination of subject matter jurisdiction. In related good news, I also get my loan refund check tomorrow (spending spree!) And in related bad news, I also get to buy a parking permit (spending conservatism!) And in entirely unrelated news, if you haven't yet played Bloons, you should really be off playing Bloons.

And 'lo, the Trumpets did Sound and the Printer did Print

2007-08-23T22:18:00.000-07:00
Exactly one week prior to this moment, I had visions of sugarplum fairies murdering me. Now, after my first official law school assignment has been completed, I'm prepared to admit that I'm brilliant again.

The assignment was simple enough. I needed only brief a case about children who died swimming in a poisonous pool (uplifting). I certainly did go through the moment of, "I don't even know what the verdict is, I can't read this, I'm an idiot!" (I'm waiting, incidentally, for Obfuscation 101, an apparently requisite course for opinion writers). Once I started understanding the facts of the case, though, it all just kind of came together. And thus ends my first brief of my first law school case ever. I'm sure I'll find out tomorrow how stupid I am because I forgot this and this and this, but I'd say for my first try, I did a pretty decent job. I think I've divined all the main parts of the case, I'm just unsure whether I put the right parts in the right places.

The major work, though, starts this weekend when I get cracking on multiple different cases and reading assignments that I have to be prepared to discuss for next week. I bought all of my case books today for these assignments, which was fun. I swear, you have to abandon all knowledge of the pricing logic of the outside world when you enter a college bookstore. Who, really, would pay 150 bucks for cardboard, paper, and words that were written 50, 100, or 200 years ago? Are we to expect some sort of new 'directors cut' ending that wasn't in the seven previous iterations of the same book? I won't even pay 15 for a new release and here I am sitting on a stack of 8 books equal to the cost of my rent.

Thankfully I had my Amazon.com Visa rewards card on hand to sweeten the deal ever so slightly.

Because Starting Law School Healthy is Too Easy

2007-08-21T23:44:00.000-07:00
Remember that whole thing I said about being fine now? Ha! Joke's on you.

So here's what happened, I'm assuming: God... and, let's say, Hephaestus... were having a conversation, and God says, "hey, Hephy," -- that's what God calls him -- He says, "hey, Hephy, I wonder what Brian's up to down on Earth."

And then Hephaestus says, "I hear he's going to law school soon."

And God says, "oh, really?" even though He already knows because he's God and all, but He's just making conversation. "You know what I hear about law school? I hear it's really hard, especially for the incoming 1Ls"

"But God," Hephaestus replies, "Brian's really, really smart. I don't think he'll have a hard time at all!"

"Yes, you're right, Lame God of Fire and Blacksmith to Olympians. Brian is one of the finest of My great creations. He'll think law school is a piece of cake."

"But law school is a rite of passage. It's like getting hazed for a fraternity. You have to do something." Hephaestus is kind of a dick like that.

"Yes, son of Zeus and Hera or by some cases Hera alone, I must" And boom!

Mono.

The worst part is that I have no idea how I'm going to get great connections if I can't go to professors' office hours and make out with them. Though I do have Vicodin, so that's fun. Party at my place. God thinks I'm smart, you know. Too bad His dialogue is written so poorly.

A Lack of Interest in Interest (though Amortization is Cool)

2007-08-19T18:05:00.000-07:00
Today's post is brought to you by the letter F, the symbol $, and the number 140,000:

I lost three days of my life to debilitating disease. I'm fine now, though, thanks. On today, the fourth day, I decided to be productive and created a fancy personal finance spreadsheet. By fancy I of course mean one with tiny, tiny numbers. Thankfully Ramen is 7/$1 at Fred Meyer.

For fun (it was a riot!) I made a graphical breakdown of my monthly expenses represented by this delightful pie chart. The paunchy purple Pac-Man you see there eating all who dare oppose it is my tuition expense. The tiny sliver up at the top, shining yellow like a beacon of hope amidst a sea of travesty, is my allotment for happiness. Joy.

I also let myself have the honor of calculating exactly what I'm getting myself into loan-wise. Fun fact: If, after I graduate, I commit to paying off my loan in 10 years, I will be facing a monthly payment of $1,489. This includes the 57-thousand dollars (!!) I will be paying in interest. Financial experts generally recommend that student loan payments not exceed 8 percent of ones monthly income. So, all I need to do is ensure that my first job after graduation starts me at 220k/yr. No problem.

I hope to mitigate that staggering amount a bit with a clerkship and some additional scholarship money. After all, one must consider that, with interest, a scholarship is worth a lot more than what the check says (one of my scholarships worth $15,000 over the next three years, for example, will save me not only that amount, but also an additional $7,700 in interest payments). Anything I can do to lower that principal ends up paying off big in the long run.

I've contemplated deleting the file on my desktop charged with monitoring my money and replacing it with a text document that reads, "you're poor, deal with it". Tears are free.

Exactly One Week from this Moment, I'll Be Dead...

2007-08-16T22:50:00.000-07:00
...figuratively.

So law school orientation is one week from today. I'm told we receive our first homework assignment on day one of orientation that is due on day two of orientation. Talk about being tossed in the river and either sinking or swimming, eh? I'm already having black premonitions that I'll be slumped bruised and beaten over my coffee table, struggling with terms I don't understand like cadit quaestio, pacta sunt servanda, sui iuris, and others that I had to Google to even make that list. Then, mercifully, sleep overtakes me and I wake up the next morning, assignment incomplete and with the assumption that if I didn't finish it, then by golly no one must have been able to. Except I get there and everyone else did. And one girl sitting next to me says, "and it only took me 15 minutes!" And then she stabs me.

I'm not sure why she does that.

I know (hope?) it won't actually be that bad. But I'm bored and feverish, a combination particularly well-suited for gruesomely vivid imagination. Today I also spoke at length with a kitten on a poster in my kitchen. Could it be? Could it be that I'm still a week away and already going crazy? Scott Turow was right!

And now, your moment of female prepubescence:

Mood:

Law Student Seeks Dog Seeking Home -- I Have Kibble

2007-08-15T23:56:00.000-07:00
My law school is better than your law school. Or, in the absence of a law school of yours for mine to be better than, my life is better than your life.

I attended another event with my fabulous fellow incoming classmates of L&C -- or at least the dozen or so of us that are apparently the only sociable ones. As it turns out, roughly 99% of these people have dogs. The 1% is me. So now I've decided in much the same way that a younger brother lusts for his sister's Polly Pockets (the non-poisonous ones), I want a dog of my own. My plan was ultimately to bring a pet into my home, but I was intending to start small with, like, a fish or a plant or a rock. It's not that I don't think I can care for it, I just fear I'm not going to have the time to devote it its happiness what with the whole imminent death by library coming up. But at the same time, you can't walk a rock or play with a fish. You can't bring a cat to dog parks (do they make cat parks?) No, only a pup can bring true happiness. Then again, maybe I'm too codependent.

If I were to get a dog, though, it'd be this one:

It's totally mine and you can't have it.

Law School Resolutions

2007-08-12T13:55:00.000-07:00
As the beginning of school draws nearer, I have decided to compile my own thoughts with the chatterings from other 1Ls and more experienced 2Ls and 3Ls (and some professors to boot) to create my law school resolutions:

1) I promise to keep up with reading. Of all the pieces of advise I've received, this seems to be the most poignant. Don't let yourself fall behind. Don't take a day off just because you feel like it. Set a goal for the amount of pages that need to be read that day and stick to it. I'm told that I'll thank myself later when I have that much less reading to catch up on.

2) I promise to treat law school like a job. A corollary to the first resolution, I intend to, as much as possible, approach law school with the same ferocity that I would approach a new career. Arrive on time in the morning, and leave on time in the evening. This means a day starting a 8AM and ending at 5PM every weekday. If classes don't start that early or end that late, make a trip to the library and earn my pay.

3) I promise to keep perspective. Law school may teach me how to think like a lawyer, but I will not lose touch with how to think like a normal human being. I will not become obsessed with inserting legal issues into every day situations and will remember that sometimes a solution is not so clearly black and white as the law demands it to be. I will see and will appreciate shades of grey.

4) I promise to let myself have fun. Studying may take up a lot of time -- a LOT of time -- but I will let myself take breaks and have fun once in a while. I will explore Portland and the surrounding areas. I will make friends and spend time with them. I will enjoy the next three years of my life. But...

5) I promise to stay within budget. Not having a real job with be a somewhat novel experience for me after a while of holding various positions. And thus, lacking income will be a fun thing to deal with. I will keep a close eye on my finances, and though I do promise to have fun once in a while, I also promise to not bankrupt myself when I do. Collecting cans, while lucrative, is not dignified.

And finally: No excuses, no apologies, no regrets.

In Which I Stop Numbering Days

2007-08-10T14:35:00.000-07:00
Things are feeling more routine now. I still haven't bought plants (putting it off). I still haven't bought a wireless transmitter (doing that today). I still haven't bought my first bottle of alcohol (stores close early here).

But I did make some fantastic chili dogs for lunch. A trip to the gym later and some chicken 'n eggs for dinner tonight (maybe a bowl of that vanilla/orange sherbet ice cream I picked up) and I'd say the day'll be rounded off nicely. Routine indeed. It feels great to do nothing. Shame this feeling will last for only a few more weeks.

Law school picnic tomorrow. Hope they have chili dogs...

Day 9: The World at my Fingertips (Again)

2007-08-09T13:49:00.001-07:00
Horray for the ability to access the Internet again. And to watch TV. And all that.

I have a couch, a coffee table, a lamp... it's almost like I actually live here now, or something. I was thinking the other day that I dreaded the thought of coming to the moment that everything in the apartment was put together. There are two reasons for that. 1) I figure once everything is done, it gives me nothing else to do for the next two weeks, and 2) if I finish moving everything in, it means I officially live here now and not in San Diego anymore. The first one makes sense because boredom may kill me, but the second one?

When Mary was here, I talked to her on the phone and I said that I had a moment where I cried and missed everyone, but that it was all over now. And she asked me, "is it really?" I have only been here for a week after all. Is it too soon to feel like I've moved on? I've done a good job keeping myself busy, but honestly, I still do miss San Diego and everything there. I'm not homesick or anything, but I'm not sure if that's because I've already come to the point that I've moved on and can accept that I live in a different state, or because I haven't yet been here long enough for it to all feel real.

Fortunately I still have to buy plants.

Day 7: Cut off from the World

2007-08-07T20:23:00.000-07:00
Finishing off the seventh day without cable. Without Internet. I'm living like an animal.

Power's in my name now. I'll get monthly bills addressed to 'Mr. Brian Cavner'. (As a side note, I'm so looking forward to 'Mr. Brian Cavner Esq.'). I feel so grown up. I'm living by myself for the first time in my life. Though, granted, three years ago (God has it been that long already?) as an RA I was technically living on my own. It feels different now, though. I have bills to pay, an education that's about to come out of my own pocket, a bunch of things around me that belong to me and me only. No living things in my sole care yet, but hopefully I'll add a plant or two to the apartment in the coming days.

It's still somewhat surreal that I'm in a different city and a different state on my own going to law school. I think back to all the things I did to get myself here and it all seems so recent. I knew I was taking the LSAT to go to law school, but who would have known right at that moment that I finished and headed home to the rest of the day to play Super Mario Bros. drunk with my roommates that what I had just done would eventually land me here, in Portland, Oregon with law school starting in two weeks. It's surreal. That's the only word for it.

Reality hasn't hit quite yet. That'll change when the first smattering of law books grace my yet-to-be-purchased coffee table.

Day 6: Update One

2007-08-06T11:07:00.000-07:00
Enter day six.

That number was quite honestly bigger than I expected it to be. I thought I had been here for three days, maybe four. But six already?

The first day was hard. Really hard. I was already physically and emotionally drained from the 18-hour drive. I had slept little and had a variety of nervous breakdowns on the entire trip. My body is just now starting to shed the physical evidence of the stress. As I was unpacking things from my car, I felt lost. I was in a strange place where nobody knew my name and I knew no one else's. The best I could do was point roughly in the direction of the grocery store I had visited during my first trip here. There was a Quiznos too, but that reminder did little to calm me.

As I got down to the last two trips between my car and my new apartment, I could feel my eyes start to water. By the last box, I closed the door and let myself cry. I felt so utterly alone. I wanted so desperately to call someone just to have a friendly voice at the other end, but I reminded myself that the sooner I was able to move on, the sooner I would be able to start regarding this place as home.

Oddly, I think I'm to that point now. And it's only day six.

The apartment is more or less put together. I still don't have a couch or coffee table, two purchases I had planned to make yesterday, but will probably (hopefully) do today. As an experiment, try living a day in your home where you're not allowed to sit on any of your furniture and have no table to put anything on. My meals consist of standing in the kitchen eating off my countertops.

But the moment I knew I felt comfortable here was when I started falling back into my old routines. I get the urge to check my e-mail now when I wake up. I want to turn on the tv when I sit to have dinner. Both of which, by the way, are impossible as I still don't have cable or Internet set up. That will come on Thursday. But the routines are all gradually coming back. I'm proud to say, too, that I've only twice had a meal outside my apartment. Once was the very first evening I was here when I stopped at McDonalds for chicken nuggets simply due to the lack of any other type of food in my apartment. The second was day-before-yesterday when I went berry picking with my fellow new law students. An activity that I predicted, correctly, would be met with confusion when I shared the incident with friends and family from San Diego. "They'll think it's some crazy euphemism," I said. They did.

But I have made some friends. Sort of. I mean, their numbers aren't in my phone or anything yet, but I know them by name and face. We're all in a stage, I can tell, where we're violently clinging to whomever we can get near.

I've driven to and back from the law school twice. Once by freeway, the other by the back road that leads directly there and that I finally know the name of. I've been passively meaning to drive the route more often during the mornings and evenings that I would actually be going to the school just to see what traffic is like. One of these days I have to head down there to get my id picture taken and to register my laptop, but I'm not too worried about all that just yet. I do, after all, still have a full two weeks and most of a third before orientation. It seems like a lot of time now (too much, maybe), but once school actually starts, I'm sure I'll be thankful for the downtime. I knew that I would need plenty of time to start feeling comfortable here, even if I am doing nothing but laying on the floor reading books and whatever other random things I could get my hands on.

I suppose all of that serves as an introduction to my story here. Now that things are more in order, I can get used to making an update a day. We'll see how long into law school that lasts. I'm reading One L now (it's a turbulent true story of a first year at Harvard Law School, the cover tells me), which makes me feel like I won't even have enough free time to shower never mind blog about not having enough time to shower, but the stories I've heard so far about L&CLS (not as poignant an acronym as 'HLS' the book uses, but it's passable) make it seem far more tame. Though still prestigious, the school seems to draw those more like me: interested in learning the theory and practice of law, but also in touch with our own interests. Those I've met so far at the two events I've attended seem to have that in common. But, again, we'll see if that changes as school starts.

One Week...

2007-07-23T08:34:00.000-07:00
I keep looking at the calendar to see how many days I still have left in San Diego. I've spent so much time saying, "I'm not leaving for another two months", and "I'm not leaving for another month", that I got used to the idea that it was so far off. Now I find myself saying, "I'm not leaving for another... wow, it's a week, huh?"

I haven't started packing. I haven't started thinking about packing. I'm still not sure everything I have will fit into my car. I'm less nervous than I was now that I have an actual home waiting for me and all, but I still don't like the feeling of finality that's building up. Every time I do something, I think about how it might be the 'last time I'm doing xxx'. And even though time is winding down, I still refuse to start packing. I know that once I do, it will be admitting that my time here is over. I'm not ready to admit that yet.

I'm writing this now so that I can get closure. I need something to push me into the feeling that it's time and that I'm ready. I told myself that I would relax and enjoy the weekend, and then this week start packing. Or, at least start thinking about packing enough so that I recognize any potential troubles I might run into. I still don't know what I'm doing about furniture.