Friday, August 31, 2001
bad blogger!
I am not a good blogger. I do not link to many pages, I don't even link to my friends when I make references to them (sorry Tehshik). On here, I am primarily introspective.
But I am not a good web-diarist either. I do not chronicle the minutiae of my daily events, because I believe that analysis takes precedent over happenings. And much of my analysis doesn't get put up here.
When I really think about it, I feel like a dinosaur. It's true that I recently started this blog, as a way of dealing with the fact that I won't have stable internet access for awhile. But I'm still, at heart, an old school webber. A homepager, if you will. With the unfolding layers of categories, and the topical essays spread on separate pages, and the picoed or emacsed html.
Anyways. When I get stable internet access again, I will take all the longer entries, and separate them all back into individual pages again. Then all will be well in blueblanketworld.
Thursday, August 30, 2001
the path dependence of relationships
Just a reminder to write something about this, though not as a blog entry.
from the new republic
A quote, from an article on the customizability of online music:
"There should be much more to community, after all, than identical interests."
Because the net is the only place I've really found much feeling of musical, uh, "cultural belonging," I don't entirely agree with the article's thesis, that "[n]ow, thanks largely to the Net, that underground is disintegrating, creating a thousand tiny subcultures, most of which are too small or diffuse to provide a real sense of solidarity." Though it's basically the music version of Sunstein's thesis in republic.com, which did resonate with me more.
Nevertheless, the quote and the article is a good reminder for me, a person who all too often focuses on interests.
a terrible source for inspiration
From a Slate article covering Russell Weston Jr., the 1998 U.S. Capitol gunner:
"What juror wouldn't be more sympathetic to Weston if they heard him expound on his theory of 'time washing'? About how the ripening of corn causes time to flow backward?"
A terrible source for inspiration, I know, but wow, I would like to hear about his theory of time washing.
Wednesday, August 29, 2001
characteristics i like
I used to call these my litmus tests, except that ended up weeding about everyone out. Now I'm calling them "what I want in someone I'm dating," or even just "characteristics I like." Here's a list, with my frequencies of encountering them (in anyone, not just dating interests). There's no real order, because it's always shifting.
* having a general desire to do good: moderately rare
* having similar beliefs about what "good" is: infrequent, though not entirely rare
* being smart: not all that infrequent
* being multitalented: rare
* having one of those talents be writing or music: even rarer
* being a bibliophile: not frequent, but not rare
* liking the same kinds of books that i do: a lot less frequent
* being multidisciplinary: rare
* having one of those disciplines be grounded in quantitative methods: [rarer
* being a person like me, with all the ensuing random energy and stuff: rare
* disliking cars: incredibly rare, though not as rare in certain geographical areas
* liking architecture, urban planning, and other human-factored designey stuff like that: relatively frequent, compared to the other things
* disliking beaches: annoyingly infrequent
* being able to do group projects together: i can count on one hand the number of times i've hit group project harmony
* having a big nose (i know, weird little thing of mine): not all that rare, though the really really striking ones are rarer
* (and this one I realize is selfish, in an extra-girly kind of way) knowing me well enough and caring about me enough to do special personalized things for me: almost never
There's more, I'll keep adding.
more news from the alma mater
"The Pentagon And the Professor," from the Washington Post.
cleaning out the emailbox
So it's my last week of work, and I'm cleaning out my emailbox. Like many people, I rarely bother to delete my email. But now I have to, just to delete all the irrelevant stuff so that my correspondence will all fit on a disk or two. This year, I am not saving everything, as I have always done in the past. I am just saving the things I need to save. So I need to go through everything.
In doing so, I'm getting a weird retrospective of the year. The hallos when I first arrived. A history of my random exchanges with people like Tehshik, Gina, Andy, Dan, Justin, and Ed. All the crazy commentary about events like the election saga and the Cincinnati riots and Jeffords. Goofy project ideas. The ending of certain friendships. The dating dramas of my friends and coworkers. Stuff like that.
It's a reminder that, uneventful as this year might've seemed, while going through it, it was nevertheless full. Of thoughts, of ideas, of happenings, of stuff like that. Reminders are good that way.
my favorite types of dreams
My favorite types of dreams are geographical dreams. Dreams in which I am living in a familiar city, but a familiar city in which new things have cropped up, new things that feel, um, old. The other night, for instance, I dreamt I was in Somerville, Massachusetts again, only I knew of more restaurants than I know of now. Like this foofy sushi place with a circular bar in the middle. Or this divey diner up near Powderhouse Square. In my dream, I don't even have to visit these imaginary places. I just know they're there.
I love these dreams because I am fascinated with spaces. Not vast spaces, like mountains and forests and rivers (though I do like those too). But people-sized spaces, like houses and streets and train stations and things. In encountering these spaces, I encounter not only physical stuff like design and architecture and urban planning, but people stuff like sociology and history and politics. And by encountering these spaces in my dreams, it just makes the places I love seem all the more detailed and layered.
Tuesday, August 28, 2001
news about my alma mater
"Suicides Prompt MIT to Ponder New Health Services".
Monday, August 27, 2001
a dream, all too real
This girl I think is cute, I am talking to her. She is cute in that energetic but mean way that I (unfortunately) often find cute, and she is purely a product of my dream -- I do not actually know her in real life. But in my dream, I am talking to her and thinking wow, I can't believe I'm talking to her. She, on the other hand, thinks I'm crazy and obsessive. She mocks me, in ways that are far too accurate.
This was, needless to say, not a pleasant dream.
Sunday, August 26, 2001
a reminder to myself
This article in The New Republic touches upon stuff I'd been working into my story, but gives far more philosophical detail than I ever will. Oh well. Can't have it all.
Saturday, August 25, 2001
more spiro watch
The blueberry thing, that might've been a bad idea. Now he snuffles through all his food, looking for blueberries and nosing everything else out of the bowl. It's cute (no other fruit or vegetable has affected him so strongly before), but rather messy. Plus we're running out of blueberries.
Friday, August 24, 2001
the cd on perpetual repeat now
Okay, wow, I'm all over The Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse. For awhile I had flipped to The Moon and Antarctica, but now I'm back to The Lonesome Crowded West again. Tracks I'm particularly fond of: Convenient Parking, Lounge, Trailer Trash, Out of Gas, and Polar Opposites.
spiro watch
Spiro the iguana really really really likes blueberries, once he'd figured them out. He's only so-so about grapes. Mango peels he's also so-so about, but apple peels he loves.
from the good ol' chronicle
An article on how anticlimactic defending your dissertation is. So true. At least the author went off to teach after he was done. Me, I went off to more schooling. Which is what I love, but was even less climactic, because my status as student hadn't changed.
some words on words
So here it is. I am a word fetishist. I love words, I love the sound of them, and, oh even more, I love the way they look on a page. I love crisp clean text, I love scribbled words, I love words that I can't even read. Oh, do I love words.
I love them even more when they are barely familiar, but intriguing. It is like the first stage of falling in love. I get this perspective, most often, by reading texts in disciplines I know little to nothing about -- geomatics, for instance, or forensic linguistics. There the words are, undiscovered, riveting, seductive.
There is a problem in this approach to words, the same problem that occurs when one approaches falling in love this way. The fascination recedes when familiarity seeps in. That is not a good thing.
It is the problem of those of us who prefer finding out over knowing, the kind of problem that we have to deal with, not only when it comes to long term relationships, but also when it comes to really delving into something. This tendency to lose interest, once we know.
I fear that now, even before I begin practicing. I mean, I can't see it coming, not really, but I fear it, because that is my tendency with many things. To become distracted once the new and unknowable comes into view. My hope is that I've chosen a profession that changes enough that I won't start to feel the disciplinary wanderlust that I often feel, that the words, while familiar, will always be accompanied by different words, new words, unknown words.
some words on sex
Now we are all very smart people here, very smart indeed. And we think about tons of things and write about tons of things and worry about tons of things, yet sex always manages to stick its unthinking, unwriting, unworrying head in our lives.
And we find it weird, don't we? We find it weird that it has the power to stop the verbiage that continually drones on in our head. Oh yes we do find it weird.
Except when we don't. It's hard to think about how weird it's busy making life complicated, or fucked up, or mindblowingly happy. When it changes everything, or when it surprises us by changing nothing.
I had to avoid that for awhile, except for the time when it surprised me by changing nothing. (A good surprise, that was. I think.) I had to avoid the complications and the fucked upedness and the mindblowing happiness.
But hey, that time is now over, almost. Yay.
Thursday, August 23, 2001
me, government cheerleader
See here.
Wednesday, August 22, 2001
in the early days
In the early days, when I first started this page, I could say anything. Everything. It was either 1995 or 1996, I forget, and I had a twiddle in my address. I babbled, knowing that almost no one was reading. And the people who were reading, I knew who they were. I could scrutinize my life in detail, and I did not have a job with any requirements of confidentiality.
Now look at me. I have no idea who reads this now, where the hits come from. I can't publicly overscrutinize my life anymore because I don't know what acquaintances of mine might surf accidentally here. I've realized that I can't record my temporary gripes about friends and coworkers, because I am all mushy and don't want to hurt people's feelings. (Tehshik, you can relate to this, I'm sure.) Temporariness gets lost in the seeming permanence of text.
I can't overanalyze certain things anymore, wondering if so-and-so likes so-and-so, because so-and-so might be reading. I have to fudge what I say about work. And I have awful parts of my history that I don't want to tell just anyone.
In the early days, I was more free. But I go on, in these changed circumstances, because writing like this gives me solace somehow. Because the ability to reflect, and the way this page forces me to do so in a semi-coherent manner, is something I can't give up.
choices
A few weeks ago, my coclerks got into some discussion about who they'd like to stay with in the long run -- a partner or a companion. They seemed to agree that a partner was better.
I thought they were lucky they felt like they could choose. Me, I'm happy when I meet people I can stand.
It's not like I hate everyone, though sometimes it feels that way. It's that people, even friends who I like tons, find some way or another to annoy me when I have to deal with them in large doses (the doses of, well, datey-type people). I'm picky, I know, but this year I've come to accept my pickiness. I've come to accept that I'd rather date someone regardless of where they stand on the companionship/partnership meter, than have to deal with annoyance.
ten things not cool about me
* Being a lawyer is so not cool.
* Being a government lawyer is probably even uncooler.
* Living at home with my parents -- unbelievably uncool.
* Not knowing tons about music, but, instead, listening to the same CDs over and over, is not really so cool, and is made even uncooler when you consider that the CDs do not come from any particular name-able subculture with musical roots, but instead comes from random eclectic "indie" stuff, a term so overused that it is terribly uncool.
* Being temporarily purposefully celibate, and not even a pure monkish celibate, but a wussy almost-celibate, is so not cool.
* Preferring to spend at least part of my vacation in law libraries is really really not cool.
* Preferring to spend the other part of my vacation taking a Japanese language class might be cool, but probably isn't all that cool, and the fact that I could think it might be cool just makes it definitely not cool.
* Being addicted to Fox's Murder in Small Town X -- incredibly not cool.
* Getting over what I am getting over, and being so goddamningly whiny yet obfuscating about it, pretty durned uncool.
* Getting off on really old books is so uncool that it turns cool for about five minutes, but then, unfortunately, reverts back to totally uncool again.
Tuesday, August 21, 2001
links
Unlike real blogs, I barely link to anyone. My web presence is fairly solipsistic, you see. Which is weird, because in real life, I will do almost everything I can to avoid talking about myself, unless we are friends.
some thoughts, on watching dateline
The weird thing about being a lawyer, and, in particular, being a lawyer working for a judge, is that it skews your perspective. Or it skews mine, at least.
But not in the way that you might expect. I'm not like my brother, the medical resident, who looks around a mall and thinks, "Wow, healthy people." I don't look around and think about the lawsuits that aren't, or even the lawsuits that could be. God no.
No, the deal is almost the opposite. Looking at the narrow legal issues presented before us, it's just all too easy to forget the stories that go along with them. Why did this bank robbery occur? Or what are the interactions that led to this particular lawsuit? Why didn't they negotiate some type of settlement, as so often they do? Why did the jury find conspirator X guilty, but not conspirator Y? Often, we in the courts don't know. We just get the information that the lawyers give us.
I was thinking about all of this as I watched Dateline, cheesily enough. There was a show on, about a class-action racial discrimination suit against Georgia Power. And I thought, you know, we see a lot of discrimination suits. And my mind immediately went to the technical stuff, like McDonnell-Douglas burden-shifting, and theories of disparate impact.
I had to pull myself back to the program, which, of course, was not about that at all. Because most people don't care about that, they don't care about what it takes to certify a class or what it takes to overcome summary judgment or what it takes to make a jury verdict stick. They care about the story behind all of this, what the plaintiffs have to say and what the company has to say.
And we in the courts should care, too, and we do, in our own way. But often, when these stories reach us, they're molded and shaped to fit these technical standards, and both lawyers and judges lose the storied forest for the technical trees.
This is not to say that law consists of just irrelevant technical details. I like the law, I like having a legal system that can be applied, and I think that our legal system can, at its best, provide us with a means to achieve justice. This is just to say that law is more powerful, more persuasive, when it isn't just detail. When it's connected to the story behind the legal case.
And this is also to say that the briefs I read, the really good briefs I read, they contain both. They have the law, the standards and cases to back up what they're saying. But the good briefs, they don't lose the overarching story, either. Be it a particular interpretation of an environmental statute, or an appeal of a disability discrimination verdict, the really good briefs make us understand why the result is important, why it matters to someone.
It's all too easy to do that, I have to remind myself, it's all too easy to become a technician of the law. Especially for someone like me, who is admittedly much better with detail and depth than with the big picture. It's all too easy for lawyers in legal public interest organizations to forget about the battle of public opinion, instead focusing entirely on the legal battles. It's all too easy for us to forget that what other people do matters a lot too, often more than what we do. And it's all too easy for people who should be working together -- different types of environmental activists, for instance, or civil rights advocates -- to forget to do so.
strange
It has been a very long time since I've been in love. But in the meantime, I've rediscovered what it's like to be in like, and, while it's fairly different, it's also pretty nice. I'd prefer to have both, I guess.
Monday, August 20, 2001
wuss
For some reason, I am a wuss about making big travel plans. So while I am anal about everything else, I procrastinate in that one particular area. But no more! As of this afternoon, all travel plans are made. Off I go, September 8, on my month-and-a-half-long moochathon.
missing
The feeling of absence is actually a really odd one, especially when it hits you by surprise. You start to question yourself. You start to think, gee, why didn't I notice that all along?
Saturday, August 18, 2001
a small citation to remember
United States v. National City Lines, 186 F.2d 562 (1951) (a case involving National City Lines, a subsidiary of General Motors).
Friday, August 17, 2001
titling, blogs, and more
On the topic of web writings, Tehshik argues that titles make everything better by encouraging people to write with a point in mind. He suggests that the mundanity and boringness of most weblogs may stem from their lack of titled entries.
In general, I agree with him. There does seem to be a lot of awfulness out there, a lot of pages that don't really generate a sense of anything.
But sometimes, just sometimes, something comes across as nice, despite its pointlessness and meanderingness. It's a different nice, a nice in that gentle boring sense of nice that the sound of waves is. But it's a type of nice at which blogs can excel.
It's not like this hasn't been done in titled works. Take Wittgenstein's Mistress, for instance, that book by David Markson. Honestly, it sounds like a blog, in how its entries are page after page of one-lined, semi-connected thoughts. But I found it enjoyable and soothing.
Lots of people, though, didn't, and I presume those are the same people who wouldn't enjoy blogs either. But maybe they would, if they approached Markson, and blogs even, differently. As ambient text rather than as discrete literary works. And if so, perhaps different standards would develop as to what constitutes a "good" blog and a "bad" blog, just as there are different standards, really, for each genre of music. Coherent standards, that is, as compared to the unknown that's out there. Nothing formal, of course, just a better idea of how to approach a different form of expression.
And blogs, in turn, would adapt to those standards, and all would be well and good in the world again.
Just a suggestion.
Thursday, August 16, 2001
the periodic whythis entry
This web page thing, to some extent it's because I'm lazy. I mean, the impulse that's driving me is the impulse to communicate, only oftentimes actually talking to people feels like it takes too much effort. Not that it requires tons of effort. Just more than sometimes I feel like putting in. See, I'm just lazy that way.
The people I talk to lots (these days, Gina and Andy), they're in that weird group of people who somehow make it feel like talking to them isn't full of effort. Usually I write to people (you know who you are), though sometimes that takes effort too. Sometimes I feel so antisocial that this page is all that I can deal with.
Everytime I say this to Dan, he sounds all surprised, as if I don't come across in person as all that antisocial. I smile a lot, you see, and that probably takes the edge off. Plus it's not like I find it difficult to interact with people, I just don't feel like expending the energy to do so lots of the time. Fine, and plus I'm probably relatively more extroverted than Dan.
Anyways.
this blogger thing
This blogger thing makes it all too easy to document my failure to concentrate. As I work on this one case I'm working on, I'm thinking about
* how similar I am to spiro the iguana (all skin-sheddy and angry and glarey and prickly, but occasionally peaceful-looking, when I'm asleep)
* how weird it is that cass sunstein got on a jury
* how that pizza made me way too full
restart
I'm still working out the kinks in this thing, but I think it's getting there. Anyways.
start
dare I say it? test.
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