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blueblanketblog

my not-so-temporary blog, i guess

saturday, august 25

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.

.: 10:09 AM .:

friday, august 24

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.

.: 5:42 PM .:

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.

.: 10:25 AM .:

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.

.: 10:20 AM .:

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.

.: 9:43 AM .:

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.

.: 1:24 AM .:

thursday, august 23

me, government cheerleader

See here.

.: 6:17 PM .:

grumble

Don't you hate it when, because of various goings on, you've built up tons of material for a giant angry cathartic rant, a rant that keeps getting bigger and bigger, and the only person you can really spill it to is out of the country? I am all twitchy now, just trying to contain myself.

.: 11:05 AM .:

wednesday, august 22

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.

.: 10:50 PM .:

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.

.: 7:10 PM .:

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.

.: 12:17 AM .:

tuesday, august 21

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.

.: 11:51 PM .:

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.

.: 11:02 PM .:

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.

.: 10:48 PM .:

monday, august 20

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.

.: 6:17 PM .:

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?

.: 2:17 PM .: