Limericks, poor quality of

I was flipping through the index of my Glannon's civ pro guide, and came across the above quote. He starts each chapter with an original, legal limerick, and in the introduction he apologized for their poor quality. It's nice that the guy has a sense of humor - it made going through the guide a lot easier. Civil Procedure is the only class I "stooped" to using commercial outlines for - but man was it helpful! I feel pretty good about that final, actually. I've felt good about all the finals, but I think I may have managed an A in Civ Pro, because it seems like many many people had a really hard time with that one, so the curve should help me out.

And now I'm just procrastinating from any further studying by writing in my blog and watching Anna and the King. But I suppose I'm going to have to study before too much longer . . .

If it's a musical shouldn't people be able to sing?

So Con law went okay, and it's on to studying for Torts. But for my study break tonight, I decided to rent Grease 2. Yes, Grease 2. It's in the "cult classics" section of Collegetown videos, and is one of the few VHS tapes they have left (they got rid of most of them and just have DVDs). It's one of those movies that proves you should never trust my judgment on movies, because I like good and bad movies equally. ;-) But while I always knew it was a bad movie, I don't think I appreciated just how bad until tonight. For some reason the numerous previous times I watched it, it escaped me that half the characters *can't sing*!! Yikes! Why would you hire a chick to play a Pink Lady in Grease when she couldn't sing?? But nevertheless I still enjoyed it. Granted, I was laughing at a few points where I was supposed to be crying, or at least feeling sympathetic. But hey, that's what I'm looking for in a study break, right? A few good laughs.

I know the original Grease backwards and forwards . . . almost anyway. I was in my high school's musicals every year, and one year, to keep the cast occupied while we weren't onstage, they had Grease playing back in the classroom just off backstage. We played it every night - so much so in fact that we knew when it was time to head to the wings based on what part of Grease we were at. I'm not sure when I saw Grease 2 for the first time, but it definitely doesn't live up to the original in terms of actually quality.

Grease 2 is the reverse story - instead of the bad boy-good girl story of Grease, it's the bad girl good-boy story . . . and strangely, I kind of like it better than Grease, story wise anyway . . . I suppose that's not surprising. Besides, it has motorcylces. In fact motorcycles are a very important part of it.

But let's face it - the real reason why I like this movie so much is that the leading guy is SO DAMN HOT. I mean, we're talking my ideal guy here! He's hot, he's got a cool accent, he's hot, he's smart and really one of the nice guys, but to impress the chic he dresses up in leather and does cool motorcylce stunts. oooh, my dream man! He made my motorcycle page, in fact:

http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/cs234/motorcycles.html
And look, there's even a fan site . . .
http://www.grease2.net/

The picture in the top of this blog is really the best of Michael Carrington, unfortunately I couldn't make it bigger. He didn't age well though I'm afraid. I looked up the actor one time (carrington is the charater's names - I don't care much about actors mostly just their characters) and saw a recent picture of him. No Sean Connery. But damn, he's fine in that movie. Okay and a final shot . . . pardon Michelle Pfeifer's slutty look . . . credit to the above site.

I walked in the door to my apartment tonight and gave a big contented sigh of "ah, I'm home." And then I thought - wow, that's the first time in awhile I've felt at home again, anywhere, really. I lived in 6 different places in the past 2 years . . . even my parent's house doesn't feel like "home" in the current sense anymore. So it was a bit of a thrill to realize I finally feel like I have a place to be home, again.

It probably helps that Rob and I put up my Christmas tree this weekend. It's a six foot fake tree, and a little worse for the wear of being stuffed in boxes and trucked all over and reassembled - this is the third year I've had it up. But when the rest of the lights are out and it's just the tree it's beautiful - I have only shiny balls on the tree and the most beautiful glass birds on the tree, and they gleam in reflection of the lights on the tree. And I really really like my tree topper - a beautiful angel in a full cranberry red dress. There aren't many ornaments - other than purple and gold ball and the glass hummingbirds, I have one golden glittery star Rob bought me from Mystic Seaport. But it's a beautiful tree.

I bought an advent wreath this year too, which is a nice touch to the season, I think. I'm planning on being in this apartment for at least two years, so I've been a bit more willing to actually buy things for the place, like some fluffy comfy pillows for the futon. The apartment came w/ most of the furniture I need, but there are a few odds and ends I'd like to add, although figuring out where to put them my be hard: a coat rack, and some glass display shelves for the Norman Rockwell plates my sister Kate gave me several Christmas's ago that I have never yet been able to display.

It's so great to have my own place - it's decorated very "me". I finally pulled out the colored wax shadow puppet I bought in China and found a way to display it - AC Moore had frames that are basically two clear pieces of plastic with a black frame around it, "floating frames" I think they call them, so I can put a light behind the puppet when I want to show it off. My tapestries are on the wall, as well as one really aweome picture I took at the Forbidden City and an embrodered painting I bought in a flea market that's really classy, surprisingly. The book shelves are full of my old books from my poli sci classes, and also with all my fiction books from home (the ones I felt like keeping that is), which I finally moved out of my parents house. And I have pictures up on the table and the TV and the shelves. And a magnetic dart board. :-) As usual, my living space is an outward expression of me.

Interestingly enough, my bedroom is pretty sparse. I used to spend so much time decorating my bedroom - but really I spend very little time back there, and I host people in the living room, and I do my work in the living room - basically I live in the living room and sleep in the bedroom. The way it's supposed to be! And the kitchen is set up for me - all the important stuff at Cecelia-accessible heights. :-)

Rob even likes the place, which is saying quite a lot. We had a really good weekend this weekend - went to Hai Hong for dinner, went dancing, had bubble tea w/ Darrick and El, had some "us" time, put up the tree . . . really it almost couldn't be improved. It was the second time we've gone out w/ Darrick and El; the first time was bowling and Rob had a headache and so he barely spoke three sentences the whole night, but Saturday he was feeling fine and was quite sociable; he really liked Darrick and enjoyed the night, which made me really happy. It's one of those things - two girls may be close friends, but when they can go out as couples, it's so much better . . . as El said once, when you're in a relationship it's not always about who you get along w/ one on one but what couple works well with your couple. I'm enjoying playing the hostess at my apartment a lot; I think I may invite them over next weekend too, if they're free.

But I've rambled on about how much I love apartment quite enough. I really would love to host out of towners, although I'll have to find some extra padding for the futon because unfortunately it's a pretty wussy pad. My butt hurts from sitting here typing this. ;-) But I will say, it's a good thing that I told Jason he couldn't come down this weekend as we'd been planning, since he has a date for a Christmas dance that he couldn't have said yes to otherwise. :-)

Everything works out the way it's supposed to, right? I'm feeling very optimistic.

A Scully-wannabe

So this past spring as I was in the process of committing myself to law school I was simultaneously trying to figure out how I could not be a lawyer. I know, pretty bad reasoning. But there it is. I was looking through some info on "alternative legal careers" and it turns out that the FBI hires a lot of J.D.'s. In fact, a lot of special agents are lawyers. In fact, J. Edgar Hooever used to *require* that every special agent be either a lawyer or an accountant. So I look at the FBI website - they have a summer honors intern program.

Fast forward to this fall. I realize in September I should do something about this, and then in the last half of October get myself in gear to meet the Nov. 1 application deadline. Application goes in, I forget all about it.

Tuesday I got a call from the Albany field office. Wednesday I call them back. Today I interviewed with them.

I'm not actually sure how it went, though. it just kind of felt perfunctary, like it didn't matter what answers I gave. They read off the sheet, and they didn't ask any follow up questions to any of my answers. Which would normally be a bad thing - but I didn't get bad vibes, either. And afterwards, after the whole 15 minutes of questions or whatever brief amount of time it was, they said "do you have questions". And since it was 3 women interviewing me, and I felt pretty comfortable, i bit the bullet and asked if the FBI was really an old boys club, and then we just talked about things for awhile - not really that but just opportunities at the FBI, and the special agent telling me how she got to be a special agent, and saying how I was obviously very qualified and my essay was wonderful and a really good piece of writing, and if I didn't do the honors internship I should apply to be a special agent after graduation, and Rob could get a job there too. So that seemed kind of positive to me. And they said Chinese and Arabic were the two languages they needed the most.

In the end, however, it's up to headquarters, not the field office, who gets picked to fill the internship. And even though I have nothing to hide in my background, it weirds me out a little, the idea of having my entire life's history checked up on a scrutinized and put in an FBI file. As Rob pointed out, they could do that anyway, but the point is by trying to work for them I'm putting myself on their radar screen. It's kind of weird.

And in any case, there's another really exciting summer opportunity tantalizing me. Cornell Law just decided to offer a 3 week summer program in China. 3 weeks is extremely short, but on the other hand, it's late in the summer so that we can 6-8 weeks to do something else before going to China, like work for a non-profit or whatever. The program sounds really interesting, and I'd love to get back to China - it's in Suzhou, about an hour from Shanghai, and so in a part of the country I didn't see the last time. And I desperately want to brush up on my Chinese skills. I miss speaking Chinese, and I really would love to get fluent. That's never going to happen unless I spend more time there. Now granted, 3 weeks isn't going to help much on that front, but it is perhaps better than nothing.

So we'll see.

Shop Talk

One thing that strikes me is how much of the civil procedure is set out to try to avoid the technicalities and the falling down because of bad counsel or the more agile performer. The popular perception is that the person w/ the best lawyer wins, or, following from there, the person with the most money wins.

I'm not denying that completely - but it's worth noting that it used to be WORSE. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were adopted in the 1930s to replace what was by all accounts a very messy and complicated, common law system. Common law still exists - torts for example seems to draw heavily on common law - but its' *procedures* have been replaced with uniform ones. And many of the modern procedures are more lenient than the old common law ones, providing that a case is more likely to be judged on its merits than on technicalities - at least more likely than it was under common law. So the ability to amend your pleadings for instance insures that relevant issues which come up late in the trial aren't excluded from consideration simply because they weren't in the original pleadings, as would have been the case under old common law procedures.

There's also changes that seem basically aimed at providing safeguards for the client in regards to the skills of their attorney.

For instance, a major break in the FRCP from the common law is the extensive discovery stage that takes place pre-trial. This sets up procedures whereby opposing parties have to share certain information with each other and get a chance to question each other. This allows you to get a good idea what the other side is going to throw at you and prepare for it. Under the old common law system where no such discovery stage existed it was very possible that you might get a "surprise witness" thrown at you (which btw makes me think that the whole melodramatic surprise witness coming in and cyncying the case that you see on TV is bogus because normally you have to provide an exclusive list of witness beforehand . . if you want to add one you have to notify the opposing counsel. But maybe there's some provision we haven't encountered yet that allows for the surprise witness.) Anyway the point is under common law it was far more likely that you might get a surprise witness thrown at you, or some piece of evidence you weren't prepared to deal with, and consequently you'd lose your case not because you *couldn't* have defended against it, given time, but because you simply didn't have the resources at hand to contest it or you weren't thinking right because you were off-guard. In other words, theoretically under the current FRCP system, assuming some minimal level of ability to adequately present your case orally to the judge,being a good researcher is more of an advantage than being a fantastic speaker. And all in all I think that's a better situation. Because after all I'd rather have a case decided by really digging into the merits of the facts and the application of the law then because somebody happened to be really good at tripping up their opponent.

Now that's not to say being a persuasive speaker and quick thinker aren't valued under the current system. They are. But I'm just pointing out that in modern years they've tried to introduce some safeguards into the system to prevent it from being as bad as it was.

In the Car??

So I really enjoyed the Fall ball, but Rob hated it. I can't blame him too much; he hates loud music, he didn't know anybody, it was hard to get to know anybody when the music was so loud, and besides we were there for close to an hour and a half before most of my friends showed up. However, I often feel like I have to leave dances and events sooner than I would otherwise, because Rob wants to leave, and so I just decided that night I was going to stay. I gave him the keys, told him to go home, and that I would get a ride home myself from one of the other students or on the buses that the lawschool was running between the hotel (out on Triphammer) and the law school. I thought that seemed like a reasonable compromise - he could go home and sleep, which is what he wanted to do, and I could stay at the party, which is what I wanted to do, and so we'd both be happier.

I suppose that might sound weird to some people, but after all, it's not like past years where we had to treasure every second together because we only saw each other on the weekends. We're close enough we see each other pretty often, and if anything Rob is more likely than me to say how it's not such a big deal if we don't "make the most of every second" together because we do see each other at least 4 days out of the week. So I didn't think it was so ridiculous or callous to suggest that he go home and I stay at the dance.

Rob insisted however that he come back to pick me up rather than me get a ride from someone else. So when 1am rolls around and Rob comes to get me, I find out that he spent an the time - over an hour - sitting outside in the car instead of going home!! He said that since it took him 20 minutes to get back to my apartment and then 20 minutes to get back to the dance he'd only be home for 20 minutes, so he just decided it wasn't worth it.

I think actually he was underestimating the amount of time - I think it was closer to 11:30 when he left, not midnight, so that he had closer to an hour and a half of lapse time rather than just an hour. But no one can be sure. I'm also not convinced it would be 20 minutes back to my apartment on State street from Triphammer. At that time of night, although there's a lot of people out and about, most of them aren't in cars cuz they're drinking. I think it would have been more like 10-15 minutes to get home. But I could be wrong.

But all that aside, needless to say he was pretty grumpy and feeling pretty neglected by that point. I felt bad for him but I wasn't at all inclined to feel guilty because I thought his decision to sit in the car was dumb- and I would never have stayed at the dance if he had told me that is what he was going to do. He claimed that he wasn't grumpy because of the sitting in the car, but that while at the dance he felt unimportant, because I should have been making more of an effort to include him in conversation. I replied that the fact that I was introducing him to every single person from my section I ran into "Hey this is my boyfriend Rob!" Would indicate that he was important, although he felt like I was showing off. I also said that he left just as things were getting started, really - I had a number of conversations w/ people afterward which if he'd been around I think he could have joined in, but he wasn't there. You know how it is at parties - takes a little time for people to mill around and get settled before they want to start actually visiting at all. Nobody wants to be cornered the first second they walk in and tied down to a conversation.

But given that we were at the dance for so long before the rest of my section showed, up, his desire to leave when he did wasn't so out there. The dance supposedly started at 9pm; we showed up at 9:45 or a little before. People from my section didn't start arriving until 10:30 or 11pm. So when Rob left at around 11:45pm, he'd already been there a good couple hours.

But, I repeat, after he left, and before I found out he was just sitting in the car, I had a blast. Just lots and lots of dancing - not the swing kind, of course. But it was great to cut loose a little, and hang out with my section friends in another context.

[and yes I'm back dating this post.]

Tonight was a good night. It started out a bit slow; weeks ago I had planned to go see Whoopi Goldberg with some friends from my section, but I thought Rob and I were going to be doing some swing dancing tonight, so I gave up my ticket early on. But that never panned out - the Fall Ball, or the lawschool semi-formal, is tomorrow; and Rob had a really hectic week at work, and I had a really hectic week academcially. What between the usual class load, and finishing up an internship application, and trying to fix my cd Drive which has started malfunctioning since I installed the Securexam on it that I had to install to take my tests on my laptop, and taking the practice exam, it's been a long week. So Rob and I decided we'd each take a night to recuperate.

For Rob of course that means something low key. I was a bit on the edge though - I kind of felt like I should take the opportunity to catch up w/ Ellan / Janine / Patti / Renee whom I haven't seen or talked with pretty much at all the past couple weeks since I took my fall break road trip. I've just been so busy. But I couldn't get ahold of any of them. Finally I remember that there was supposed to be a free swing dance at WSH tonight; it's a Lindy workshop weekend so there are some good dancers in town, too. So I headed up there.

I'm really growing by leaps and bounds as a dancer this semester, I think. It helps to be back in a place where there are so many opportunities, and it helps to go to these dances sans-Rob so that I'm forced to dance w/ a lot of different leaders. I still have a long way to go - although I've improved drastically I have a nagging feeling I'm still too heavy a follower (referring to the amount of pressure in the connection not body weight) and I don't always get my feet in the right place when the leaders try to do some of the trickier things. Still, I'm finding that I've really mastered a certain skill level, and it's time to kick it up a notch. The best way to do that is to dance with the really good guys - and most of the leaders at the weekly swing dances don't qualify. So tonight was a nice change of pace. I was even asked to dance by Peter Strom, the guest teacher and national champion they brought in this weekend. To be fair, it was a small dance (there was a competing ballroom event tonight and the workshops don't start until tomorrow), and he seemed to be making an effort to be fairly social - some of the teachers they bring in are a bit of dance elitists and only dance with the one or two girls who are at their level. Still, he didn't dance with every girl or even all that many dances, percentage wise, so it's nice to know that I've passed over that bar under which you're not even worth noticing. It's a step. :-) And at the end of the dance he said "That was awesome!" although I wouldn't read too much into that . . . maybe that's what he says when he means "I'm never going to dance with you again!"

However there was one guy in particular that I just felt really well matched with. He was a bit of a heavy set young man but extremely into the music and an extremely easy to follow leader. A lot of the moves and the styles that you see in swing (especially six count) depend on the hands for the connection in swing - I mean all points of connection are important but simply because of the nature of the moves the hands and arm to arm connection are the biggest leads. Lindy Hop theoretically should be led much more through the back but somehow even your better leaders often end up leading mostly through the arms and hands simply because of the moves they are doing. It's less common to find someone who leads through the back the way this guy did - i.e. the main point of connection is his hand on my back.

In other words, he did a lot of Charleston variations. That can often turn out very poorly, partly because I suck at some of the more complicated variations (I cannot for the life of me do a walk-around) but also because Charleston is an even more limited universe than just say Lindy Hop. But once in awhile you get somebody like this who really knows how to dance Charleston as a dance rather than as a single move with slight variations. How do I describe this? Most people reading this are familiar w/Charleston as this eight count kick move. But from there, via the face to face Charleston (or other methods), you can sort of move off into this realm of gliding . . . It's almost like a two count move, you're just stepping around the dance floor, with abrupt stops to emphasize certain points of the music, and then just a lot of improve foot / leg work - which actually is one of my strengths. At that point you're not really doing any specific footwork or any specific move, although at any point you can seamlessly flow back into a more structured moves. But it's a type of free movement that's recognizably swing or jazz, and that stays w/in the Lindy structure. Doesn't sound very graceful when I describe it like that, but trust me, when it's done right it manages to be both graceful and sassy, while really playing off the music.

Anyway I'm babbling about dancing again. The point is I enjoyed the dance a lot, and I can really tell that I'm improving. And boy did I get a workout! Oiye, I was so out of breath and sweaty and tired at the end!

As I left WSH the clocktower was lit up orange with a pumpkin face on it, as it has been all week. It felt nice outside after the heat of the dance room, so I walked on the Arts quad a little, feeling nostalgic and yet alive at the same time. And I stood at the top of Libe Slope and looked over the valley for a bit. And for the first time in a long time, I felt perfectly content.

And now I'm enjoying my Zima, getting ready to watch Beetlejuice, before finally going off to sleep about oh two am. I bought a six pack of Zima three weeks ago, went through two in two nights, and then haven't been able to drink one since then because I'm soo busy all day and through the evening that I can't just chill and drink one. But tonight I can even though It means I'm going to be up really late.

A Lawyer or a Lance - Your Choice

I read an opinion piece today that had a good point, so I wanted to share it, in defense of my chosen profession. :-)

[The article begins by remarking on the dread a lawyer might feel at a party when someone asks that unavoidable question, "So what do you do."] In case you couldn't guess, lawyers, along with anoyone else who introduces themselves as a murderer, devil-worshipper or terrorist, are often on the receiving end of the negative label described above. . . . Can lawyers really be this bad? I maintain that lawyers are really no worse than other vocation.

[ The article then reminds us that businessmen and accountants are responsible for major corporate scandals, plenty of doctors make money by pedaling to people's vanity, computer engineers and scientists have created "a world of less human interaction and easier access to porn" and priests are the face of child molestation today. It then goes on to speculate why then lawyers are the ones w/ the really bad rep.]

"The core reason could be that whenever an atrocity is committed, the public sees the lawyer front and center answering questions in place of the accused. Even though we might not ourselves commit the appalling act, we are seen as somehow justifying it, as though carrying out our duty to represent our client to the best of our abilities makes us co-conspirators. . . . Until we as a society can come up with a better means to settle our disputes, or possibly regain the medieval affinity for jousting, utilizing attorneys will remain the most effective method to do the job.

Which reminds me, incidentally, of the 1L whose food was stolen out of the communal fridge a few weeks ago. He sent out an email over the student list serve, demanding satisfaction either by returning the food or by pistols at dawn - and cited the entire ancient English code for how such duals should be conducted. Just in case the thief didn't have the code memorized off hand, you know.

And yes, I know a few of you are going to tell me that you'd prefer the lance.

Motorcycles are for going on picnics.

Activity was exactly what I needed to escape despondency - at least for a little while. Dread and uncertainty are never buried too deep, but as long as I can keep active I can stave off despair.

So Pattie, El, some of El's ballroom friends and I all went bowling last night. It was really a lot of fun, despite the fact that I scored my worst three games in months: 99, 100, and 82. HNH was actually pretty crowded; I guess since everything else is shut down on campus for fall break the bowling alley became the default place to be. El and I played our individual bowling alley staples: Glory Days, I Can't Dance for me, and Uptown Girl and The Champions for El. I was kind of hungry, but it wasn't until about 10pm that it occurred to me that I hadn't eaten dinner. I had had a pretty late lunch. So Patti El and I went up to East Hill and got some wings and drinks to take back to my place, and Janine came over. It's the first time the four of us have hung out since before classes started, so we did a little catching up, and yes a little talking about boys, and a little gossiping. El was telling us about her multi-talented new boyfriend Darren, (incidentally, can I just give myself a little pat on the back for introducing them? ;-) ) who wants to get a motorcycle. We were kind of laughing at the image of El being a biker chic, and then we were talking about how dangerous motorcycles are. And El pipes up "But you use them to go on picnics." The rest of us were just craking up, like WTF? Imagine this big biker dude on his Hawg, all dressed in leather - with a picnic basket?! El said "That's what Darren said. I was noticing the satchels and he said yes, just big enough to put a picnic lunch and a bottle of champagne and you. And we'll go have a picnic." LOL

We hung out for a couple hours and then called it a night. I managed to just barely get 8 hours of sleep and still wake up in time to make the 10am Mass. Afterward I popped over to the lawschool and settled in to work on my Torts outline. The whole time I was in the library there was exactly one other person there. It was kind of nice to feel like the whole place was deserted, actually. I get a lot more work done in the library than at home, and even more so when I'm the only one in the place. I put in about 4 hours on the Torts outline, really making good progress on it. The review is immensely helpful, too, in getting a grasp on the material. Once I finish outlining the first segment of Torts, I need to do some hypos on it. (Hypotheticals - word problems like those that show up on exams.)

And I even got to the gym today, although for only 40 minutes. So I've kept myself pleasantly busy - I even enjoyed working on the Torts outline, because I wasn't doing it under a deadline and so had the pleasure of feeling like I was being a good little student and getting ahead, and because I actually felt like it was a really useful exercising and it's nice when you feel like you're understanding something.

It is fall break though, so I have a movie rented (Crash) and I'm going to break out another bottle of Zima, and watch a LOST episode, and maybe organize my state quarter collection and do a little embroidery while I veg in front of the TV. Well I guess that's not vegging, huh if I'm doing other stuff while watching?

Well the point is it's going to be a relaxing evening. Rob stopped by for a little while on the way up from the lake, but he's headed home and the rest of the evening is mine.

And yes, I realize that I just admitted I have a state quarter collection.

Break out the sparkly purple bowling ball and the Riesling

So all the first year law students left town like bats out of hell yesterday, along with the rest of the campus. Cornell is starting fall break, and the law school actually gives us a whole week off. But I'm going to be hanging out in Ithaca for awhile; later in the week I'll be road tripping down to Philly and Baltimore to see Tom, Katie, and Jason, but last night Rob and I celebrated our third anniversary. (It was actually Tuesday but this was when we were free.) We ate at the Aurora Inn - a very classy place, with some excellent live jazz music. When we returned home we discovered to our great amusement that we had gotten each other the exact same gift - a massage session! We even went about it the exact same way: tried out the Fingerlakes School of Massage, and not finding any info on their website, tried "massage" on yp.yahoo.com, and then scrolled down to the one place that had a website, checked it out, and decided that was the place! We finished the night off by going to see Wallace and Gromit. It was really funny. The tomatomaster even rated it 100% - which is amazing, since most movies fall into the "rotten" category. So all in all, I laughed more last night than I have in quite awhile.

All in all though it wasn't the anniversary celebration that I'd been hoping for, since I'd managed to get my hopes up that he'd finally pop the big question. Since I'm utterly incapable of hiding what I'm feeling, at least from the people I really care about, I brought the subject up with him this morning. *sigh* And after that discussion, I'm feeling miserable and hopeless, because it seems like we're not closer to getting engaged now than we were a year ago. It seems that every time we pass one hurdle he comes up with some other reason why he's not ready yet. Some people don't care about the marraige thing . . . and it's not that I want to be married in general. I am hopeless, desperately in love with him, and I can't even describe how desperately I want us to make that commitment to each other. And he says he feels essentially the same way about me, can't imagine life without me and he loves me so much and knows he wants to marry me eventually and so on and so on - but he's not ready to get married. And I'm prolonging my own misery by pushing him on the issue . . . but it's incredibly hard to keep waiting and waiting when I don't understand why I'm waiting, don't know what he's thinking or feeling. It's like my life is on hold - and has been on hold for two years already, and it's killing me inside. And now I can't stand still anymore. In another month or so I'm going to be starting the search for a job next summer. It's time that I start making plans and actually implementing them . . . start getting on with living my life. But those decisions about what I'm doing in the next stage of my life necessarily are affected by him, and yet he's got us in this holding pattern. So my emotions are hoavering in some twilight zone between desperation and despair.

But that's not healthy, there's no doubt about that. So I called up the girls tonight and we're going bowling, and then we're going to come back and crack open a bottle of my favorite Riesling, and I'm not going to talk about him - despite the fact that Janine and Patti and El are exactly the people I would talk about relationship stuff with. because I can't handle it. Somehow I have to pretend for tonight at least that he doesn't exist, and re-establish myself. I'm giving up on him, just a little bit. Oh I'm not breaking up with him. I'm desperately hopelessly in love with him. But this weekend, something broke inside. I haven't been desperate before. But after that talk, when it seemed like we're as far away as ever from taking the next step, I'm desperate. And the only way I know how to deal with this pain is to bury myself in my work, my friends, anything and everything except him. Pretend he doesn't exist, just a little bit. I have to reclaim my life, a life where he doesn't exist and doesn't matter, because that's the only way I know how to stop feeling so miserable.

I warned him that I couldn't wait forever. I can't do it. It's not in my nature to stand still.

So I'm going bowling. Break out the sparkly purple bowling ball. Watch a movie with the girls - not a chick flick, because I've had my fill of romance for the weekend. Drink some Dr. Frank. Bury myself in tort review tomorrow. Watch the rest of my LOST dvd's. Go the gym. Take a roadtrip. Anything but feel like this.

Who says Americans don't take their food seriously? At least New Englanders do . . .

and what does it say about me that reading this case made me laugh out loud and want to share with others?

Webster v Blue Ship Tea Room
MA Supreme 1964
[summary in my own words]

A native New England woman ate fish chowder in a "quaint" Boston restaurant. She got a fishbone stuck in her through and suffered "not insubstantial" injury. She sued, saying that the Uniform Commercial Codes provisions on implied warranty meant that there were not supposed to be fishbones in her chowder.

The defendant's lawyers asked the court to dismiss the case, saying "In so ruling the court will not only uphold its repuation for legal knowledge and acumen, but will, as loyal sons of Massachusetts, save our world renowned fish chowder from degenerating into an insipd broth containing the mere essence of its former stature as a culinary masterpiece."

The court responded, "Not withstanding these passionate entreaties we are bound to examine with detachment the nature of fish chowder and what might happen to it under varying interpretations of the UCC." All the same, the court seems to have taken their words to heart, describing the ancient roots of chowder (both the word itself and the food) in Brittany, Newfoundland, and New England. It then recited various recipes, starting back in 19th century cookbooks, and progressing to modern cookbooks, including "the all embracing Fannie Farmer" who explicitly indicates that bones should be put into the chowder. The court summarizes,

"Thus, we consider a dish which for many long years, if well made, has been made generally as outlined above. It is not too much to say that a person sitting down in a New England to consume a good New England fish chosder embarks on a gustatory adventure which may entail the removal of some fish bones from his bowl as he proceeds. We are not inclined to tamper with age old recipes by any amendment reflecting the plaintiff's view of the effect of the Unifrom Commercial Code upon them. . . . We should be prepared to cope with the hazards of fish bones, the occasional presence of which in chowders is, it seems to us, to be anticipated, and which in the light of a hallowed tradition do not impair their fitness or merchantability."
(emphasis added.)

The court concluded by saying that not only did courts in California, another coastal state, hold the same, but that even an Ohio case held that someone eating oysters should be expected to look out for pieces of oyster shells. "Thus, while we sympathize with the plaintiff who has suffered a peculiarly New England injury, the order must be exceptions sustained."
(In other words, defendant's appeal upheld.)

I decided this needed it's own special section.


And speaking of things I can't stomach (Alias discussion coming up so i fyou haven't watched the premiere and want to be surprised read no further) WHAT THE HELL were they thinking, killing off Vaughn?????? WTF? There's some discussion on the fan boards that perhaps he's not really dead - Matt in fact was trying to make the same argument to me, and Matt doesn't even like the character - but I think that's just wishful thinking on a lot of fans parts. I think he's dead and gone. I'll be happy to be proved wrong, of course.

But this leads to another gripe - why is it that the strong females in a series never get their men? Dark Angel, for instance . . . sure they were sort of together in the end, but considering they still couldn't have any physical contact w/ each other due to the deadly virus thing, that barely counts. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: after a slew of guys that never worked out, the only guy that might have possibly kind of worked out kills himself for her, and yes, again, she's left w/o her love. (and yes, this means I've finally been moved over into the Spike camp, after a long hold out for Angel . . . but just barely.) Alias: they freaking killed her fiance in the series premiere. They killed her old flame in season 2. They put Will into witness protection never to be contacted again. They freaking KILLED VAUGHN.

I mean, I get the whole "These are strong women, they don't need men" argument, but come on. I flatly reject the argument that being a strong woman can't go hand in hand w/ having a man. Sure, there are some guys (read a lot of guys) that get turned off by strong female personalities. especially in the younger years. Once people grow up I think men go for it a little more. But in highschool? Hell no. But puh-lease, after all the crap they put these gals through just so they can have them show off their hot figures while ass-kicking, you'd think they'd let them have this happiness in their lives!

*sigh* yes yes, I know they're just TV shows. But it's late at night and you know how I get when I start ranting. ;-)

I am bored out of my mind.

I mean, the classes are interesting enough. And I certainly spend my weekends being social. Nevertheless, I am BORED OUT OF MY MIND.

I realized this laying in bed last night. It's probably because all I do is go to class, go to the library, come home cook / clean (which is actually a welcome break from all the reading) and watch some TV when I decide I just really need some break. Or more specifically, movies and shows I have on DVD, because I don't have cable. This Sunday was a rainy Sunday, and Rob and I were just curled up on the couch, and it would have been really nice to turn on some football. We watched Alias instead, which is fine. But football would at least be connection to the outside world.

AHHHHH.

And the thing is it's not like I don't have any free time. Rob seems to think I have more free time than in undergrad. That's definitely not true. However in fairness, I have managed to not be drowning in work.

But all the same I am soooooooo freaking bored . . . . . this provides a strong incentive to go *somewhere* and do *something* on Fall break.

Arrogant ASS

So my mom has had a bad summer: gall bladders surgery, severly pulled hamstring resulting in limp, arm so broken it required surgery, 50% crop failure, and most recently a car crash totalling the van. My uncle Greg, the vehement hot head liberal who daily sends out emails to the entire family discussing why Bush and religious fanatics are ruining the country, sent this response to the family:

"Therese
It seems that God has decided that you and all the folks on the Alabama,
Mississippi, Louyisiana, and Texas Gulf coast should personally pay the
price for the conservative supreme court that this summer has brought to
the land. I suppose that one should consider it quite an honor to be
chosen to bear such a burden for such a cause. Of course it could also
be a gentle reminder from on high that we have neglected the problems of
poverty, engergy, and the environment for far too long.
Let us hope the price is well and truly paid and the message taken to
heart.
Love Greg"

I'm pretty protective of my family, and really I just wanted to cuss him out, but instead I sent this reply.

"Your "joke" was in extremely poor taste Greg. Everybody has their political views but you're completely across the line of decency when you start using other people's personal suffering as an opportunity for cheap shots on political issues.
And I can't emphasize enough the word "extremely.' "

Anybody who knows me knows that was a pretty damn reserved response on my part! What I really wanted to do was cuss him out. He replied with this:

"You take yourself much too seriously. I was not making fun of anyone's beliefs. Who are you to say your mother is not paying a price to save us all? Lighten up. Otherwise you'll age prematurely. "

Which of course only pisses me off farther. What a condescending ASS!!!! Tom suggested first responding something along the lines of "you are a worthless human being", which he then expanded to the following:


---Knight: There. Not bad for a one-and-a-half Control Crises effort.
(22:22:09) ---Knight: "I cannot believe what an ignorant fool you really are. Frankly, I've long hoped that you weren't this much of an idiot, because it embarrasses me to think that my own grandparents might have managed to produce you. The next time I'm in Moberly, I'm going to the town hall in the desperate hope of finding evidence that you're adopted."
(22:22:16) ---Knight: "The most regrettable part of this is your complete and total lack of vision. Setting aside the fact that there are voters of all stripes in every part of the country, your cheerful willingness to see those who don't share your beliefs sacrificed makes you no better than the "conservatives" you claim to despise. It's painfully obvious to anyone looking that what you really are is an angry, frightened child who is afraid of the wind and thunder, and is glad that it's hitting someone else."
(22:22:23) ---Knight: "Don't worry, Uncle _____, the adults are going to keep you safe. You could contribute though, by giving every ounce of food you eat, every drop of liquid you drink, and every molecule of air you breathe. Better people than you could use it."


Of course, sending out that response only means that this uncle will continue to pick on me to no end at family reunions, and while I'm certainly capable of defending myself I hardly want to have to spend all my time playing verbal war games w/ this asshole uncle.

So the actual response was far more tame and less satisfying - but probably a better strategic move:

"Do you honestly think that somebody in the position my parents are in - or the people whose lives were destroyed in the hurricane - would find your joke funny? If you were trying to cheer Mom up, there are far more appropriate ways to go about it. You know, maybe a word of comfort, or a reminder that hey at least you've got this good thing going for you, or a tasteful, non-political joke.
I didn't say you were making fun of anyone's beliefs. I'm merely suggesting that if you focused on what would make the primary recepient feel better, instead of focusing on your personal agenda, you would have responded differently.
Aren't liberals supposed to be the truly compassionate ones?"

But I just had to vent by declaring to the whole world what an ASS this uncle is.

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

I went to the "last chance" Mass tonight - the 9:30pm mass, so called because it's your last chance to fulfill your Sunday obligation to attend Mass. They hold it in Sage Chapel. I was told it's the most popular Mass, and I can see why. Not only is it the last chance, but the late evening format works well for a lot of students who don't want to get up early enough for the morning mass or don't want to cut up their study day (which really doesn't start until noon, probably) by going to the 5:15 Mass. Plus Sage is a wonderful place to celebrate it - you feel like you're in a real church, as opposed to Anabel taylor auditorium. And because there's so much more room in Sage, I actually saw quite a lot of students hanging around after mass chatting, (building community) as opposed to just sort of shuffling out of AT Auditorium so you aren't blocking the path of those behind you.

So it was nice just for those reason. The homily tonight was on forgiveness. Part of what he was talking about was how pyschology points out that the act of forgiveness is a liberating act. This is by no means "news to me", certainly this aspect of forgiveness popped up in some of those gradeschool Religion classes, but it somehow crystalized something for me that I've been becoming aware of for a little while now.

When I was young it was easy to love unselfishly and unconditionally, to forgive the foibles and weakenesses of those around me, and to feel forgiven in turn for my own foibles and weaknesses. That's just sort of the way children are - and I think to a large extent I managed to hold onto that for quite a long time. But in the past 6-8 years I think it's disappeared. The longer you live the more crap happens - not even major, Oprah Winfrey worthy crap, but just the every day stuff that builds and builds . . . and then add to that the relationships that sour (both the friendships and the romantic ones) . . . and the disappointment when the people around you fail you in some way, or simply fail to live up to expectations . . . and the struggle to figure out if the problem is you or other people or circumstances. And if you're lucky you manage to let go a little bit, to not remember every little incident where someone hurt you, or you did something wrong - because holding on that tightly drives you bonkers, suicidal, or homicedal. But even if you manage to mostly let go of things, it builds up not just a hard outer shell, but a cynical strain of self-interest that makes it incredibly difficult to love unselfishly and unconditionally.

And of course when I say "you" I mean "I."

So when Fr. Bob was talking about the liberating nature of forgiveness tonight I was thinking how that doesn't just mean forgiving particular acts where you felt somebody wronged you, but also letting go of that cynicism and hurt and selfishness that's built up over the years. In a way I suppose it's fear that makes us hold so tightly to those things - we think our cynicism and self-interest is what protects us from getting hurt again.

And yet in the end, I think all it does is cause a different kind of pain, one we inflict on ourselves when we close ourselves off to the possibilities of joy, love, and happiness around us.

Because those possibilities are there, no matter how dark the time seems. One thing that I've never lost in all these years of ups and downs is my rock-solid belief that our lives are what we make of them. It's a given that there are factors we can't control - but what makes the difference is what you do about the factors you can control, and the attitude you bring to the matter at hand. Letting go of that hard shell that's built up over the years, liberating yourself from the fear that's keeping you closed off, means you can be open to finding the unexpected and unplanned.

"If you and Tom ever have to argue against each other in court, let me know. I want to bring popcorn." ~Matt D

So in my excitement babbling about swing dancing, I forgot to mention a rather important event: my first being-grilled-Socratically experience. In Summers class no less . . . so much for wishing I could avoid it! At least Holden-Smith makes an effort to get students to the right answer by asking them a series of leading questions, when they don't get it right off the bat. Summers on the other hand, attempts to make you second guess yourself even if you do have the right answer, and cuts you off, and can be rather difficult to understand the words he's saying much less the meaning. But all in all it wasn't too horrible - not too great either, since I think at least 1/2 the answers I gave him were in some way wrong or lacking. It's weird too - I really understood the case coming into class, but I understood more in a synthesizing it, general sense, (we learned this principle from this case, and the case shows it in this way . . . ) and he was asking questions with very specific answers.

I managed however to at least speak clearly and audibly and with some amount of confidence most of the time - the last question he asked, I didn't really have time to think about (because he wants immediate answers not considered ones), and since it was yes or no I said, "No, because - " and was cut off by "Anyone disagree with her?" I think I actually could have defended the "no" answer, but it doesn't bother me too much that I can't because the exams are blind-graded anyway. My only point in relating that part was in saying that I just decided to pick an answer and go at it confidently, rather than trying to figure out what I actually thought. And while that didn't produce the answer he wanted, it did at least make me not seem like a fool to the rest of the class, I guess.

I definitely wished I had performed better, but I wasn't really too shaken up by the whole thing either. It kind of was inevitable, so although I definitely had an increased heart rate when suddenly I heard the bark "Ms. Sander!" that meant "you're on, sucker" I felt like I came out of it fairly unscathed. Despite the numerous incorrect answers I apparently gave, a number of people told me afterward "You did a really good job" which just goes to show, I suppose, that it doesn't matter so much what you say as how you say it.

[btw, cuz someone asked, this is the Socratic method is one in which means the professor conducts the class not as a lecture but as a series of questions, and in strict Socratic form often doesn't tell you if an answer is right or wrong, and usually cold-calls various people off their list and then proceeds to ask questions only of that person for either the whole class period, if they're really mean, or for a part of a class period in which you are discussing one particular subject - and they'll move on to a new victim for the next subject.]

"You do mostly Lindy, right?"

I totally blew off Constitutional Law homework tonight to go to the Big Red Barn swing dance. It's going to be a weekly affair on Tuesdays, so I didn't really have to go tonight, but it's the first one, and the swing club is one activity I really want to make sure I have time for this year. Besides, Tuesdays are horrible nights for me anyway, tonight is better than most Tuesdays will be because one of my classes for tomorrow was canceled, so I figured I'd take the opportunity. Plus, while Rob is going to try to get up here as often as possible on Tuesdays to go to these, tonight he was a bit under the weather and stayed home. Normally this is a sad thing for me, but tonight it worked out well. We tend to only dance with each other, which is horrible for our skills in general, although we often look very good together.

But especially as a follower, you only learn to be a truly good dancer by dancing with a lot of different leaders with a lot of different styles. Being a new kid in town (naturally there's been quite a turnover since I was involved in the club two years ago) I decided the best move would be to take the initiative and ask a lot of different guys to dance. I had some really good leaders that I really enjoyed dancing with . . . and a few bad leaders . . . and a few fairly good dancers where I just crashed and burned trying to dance with them.

That was kind of frustrating / humbling actually, because the worst dances were the ones where the guy was like "Do you know Lindy?" And I said "Yeah!" *sigh* I don't know what it was . . . maybe it's just that it's easier to fake it when you're doing six count East Coast, so I got along better in those dances, but the 8 count Lindy dance, which theoretically the MAIN type of swing I do, I really was sucking at tonight. I'm not used to dancing it w/ anyone but Rob, and these guys had very different styles. The sad thing is it's not like my East Coast was 100% on either - twice I had guys say, as they noticed the styling and footwork I was doing with their six count dance, "Oh, you do mostly Lindy, huh?" Which is another bad thing because it means that I wasn't switching between the two dances smoothly. When the second guy said it though I made a mental note to really pay attention to my footwork, and after that he and I had what I thought was a great dance. I think our skill levels were somewhat on par.

On the other hand Kurt, the slightly sketchy PE instructer that first taught Rob and I how to dance and who heads the rival swing dance club at Cornell (The Hot Tin Roofers or something, I can't remember - it's the jump swing club, which is a really fast form of jitterbug / East coast), seemed fairly pleased with my dancing and said "you know, I have some guys that would really love to have you in my second level swing class. We have about four more guys."

Anyway all this writing is mostly intended as sort of a self-evaluation tool for me, kind of a way to go over the high and low points. Even back in undergrad I never went swing dancing on a regular basis; it was often a once a month thing. And the two years I was living in New England, I really only went dancing a few times a year - maybe four or five times maybe. That's pitiful - but the sad thing was Rob and I often caught people's attention, and sometimes even got compliments. Of course that's probably also because we were doing Lindy in a West-Coast swing world, and we adopted a little bit of the Andy Reid style (almost out of control so that people are amazed you don't fly into walls - but actually being totally in control). Of course, I think sometimes people were probably a little annoyed at how much space we took up, if people gave it to us. Almost-out-of-control Lindy is a very space consuming dance. ;-)

But the really good people around here are the ones who do this swing dancing every week. The reason the BRB dances are on Tuesday is because Wownet used to be on Tuesday - free dances at the internet cafe down on the Commons. The cafe part was just an excuse to have a really good dance floor - the owners built it specifically to have a spot for free weekly dances. Unfortunately, since the cafe's menu consisted largely of variations on Peanut butter and jelly, they eventually folded. But people go used to having a weekly, free DJ'd dance on Tuesdays. So thus the Tuesday BRB deal.

Personally I think it's a great way to revive the club, which has been struggling a little. In order to really create a vibrant, sustainable lindy scene you need to make it a regular part of people's lives, not just on a monthly basis (in the "old days" BRB dances were the last Friday of every month only) but on a weekly basis. And having it on the campus ensures more people will come - getting down to the commons for the various events that ISDN (the Ithaca group) was kind of a hassle plus it was out of the comfort zone for a lot of Cornellians.

The Cornell group however traditionally has been the stalwart champion of the Lindy scene - with some serious competition from the jumpswingers (who actually showed up in force tonight and constituted more than half the crowd, I'd say.) ISDN is more West Coast focused. Lindy and jitterbug / jumpswing / East coast can all exist in perfect harmony, because you use the same music for both (although the ultimate jumpswing tempo requires VERY FAST LINDY, which many people won't even bother attempting . . . thus the Andy Reid out of control style.^_~ ) West Coast on the other hand generally uses oldies rock, which is a hell of a lot harder to do East Coast (and variations jitterbug jumpswing) to, and all but impossible to Lindy to. So keeping the Cornell club alive and kicking ensures that there will be a place for those of us who enjoy Lindy / East Coast over West Coast.

Although really, all of us should probably learn all the styles . . . I've come to the conlusion that I really ought to take some West Coast classes one of these days.

But every live band swing dance has at least one "Really Sweaty Guy", and they always insist on doing West Coast with you, which is far more sultry, far more bodily contact . . . and EW!

Okay nobody really has read this far anyway, since the whole discussion of swing techniques and various dances will bore anybody not into swing and be obvious to anyone who is, so since I'm just talking to myself here I'll stop.

Oh I lied. I have to say on another note, I told El about the dance tonight, and she actually came - albeit to try to find guys she could recruit for the ballroom team. I object on the idea that I want the good leaders to stay in the swing scene - but there's certainly room to do both since the swing scene is far less demanding than ballroom (at least ballroom team). So I actually randomly found a new Masters student here, an excellent excellent leader, whose style seemed like he might be able to be transformed into a ballroom dancer, and I introduced her. His comment was that she was amazing to dance with, and she was also impressed with his leading skills. And I talked him (and tentatively El) into coming to the live band swing dance on Saturday.

I wish I had danced better tonight especially because I really wanted El to be able to see some quality swing dancing . . . and I wanted to show off. ;-) Unfortunately there was not quality swing dancing coming from me tonight. Nor were there any of the truly top notch, unbelievable to watch dancers there like Sky, Sarah, Andy, and Lucy of the old days. They've all moved on to cities with bigger scenes where they can make a lot of more money probably teaching lessons. *sniff sniff* my first teachers, all gone! (Kurt doesn't count.)

Ah well. but now I must sleep, because despite what I said I'm not going to blow of Con Law completely. I just have to get up early to do it and deal with the lack of sleep.

*sigh*

Well all in all, I'm in a much more upbeat mood than I was last Wednesday.

I dodged my first cold call by volunteering instead. In lawyering Friday I had a number of questions and thoughts on the hypothetical we were discussing at the start of class, so I was quite active in the class discussion. When we got around to the actual case at the end of class, Dole said "Cecelia - well you're off the hook. I had you down for this case, but you've been raising your hand all class, so we'll go on to someone else" and he called on my friend Joanne instead.

*sigh* now if I could just get out of being cold called in Summers class . . . I actually think the old guy is pretty funny, but that's probably just because I haven't been subjected to his questioning yet. It will probably be a hell of a lot less funny when he's making jabs at *me*! Somehow though it doesn't come across as mean-spirited to me though; more like he's just fiesty.

Yeah. Anyway. So classes are continuing, and I'm managing to have a life, too. El, her mom and I went to an opening at the Johnson on Thursday, which was not surprisingly crowded with people wanting the free food. Then Janine, Joanne and I went out for pizza and beers; we'd all had a pretty rough week, but Janine especially, who is majorly sleep-deprived trying to keep up with the demands of being both a TA and a research assistant, as well as handling classes *and* her research for her masters thesis. Yikes!!! Janine and Joanne seemed to hit it off pretty well though; they both have a strong attachement to NYC, for one thing.

Law school has the potential to be a very lonely endeveaor; people are friendly in class but have mostly been disappearing to the library every spare second they have this first week rather than hanging around chatting. I was thinking how different it was from undergrad, when everyone was eagerly on the look out for friends and romantic entanglements. A lot of people have significant others already though when they come to law school, which means there's less of this whole "everyone scoping out everyone else" thing going on. Kind of nice - it mostly erases the whole "trying to impress the opposite sex" pressure and lets you relate to people just as people. Still, all in all, while social relationships are forming, it seems like they are being cultivated more carefully since nobody has time to waste on people they really don't like. But I've had 5 or 6 days of small section classes - with the same small section of people every day - and I still barely know 1/3 of their names. (And I'm usually decent w/ remembering names.)

Thursday was all around a good social day though. I sat out in the courtyard on Thursday and another 1L acquaintance of mine came up to chat. She's one of the OWLS (older and wiser law students) and was commenting on how anti-social everyone was . . . she pointed out how everyone in the courtyard picked a spot where no one else was. It was true, too. So we sort of broke the norm. As we chatted another girl from our section sat a little ways away from us; I caught her eye and motioned her to join us, and then later another acquaintance of mine from another section sat a little ways away, and on my invitation he came over and joined as well, so that we had a whole lunch party going for the "people who bring their lunch" crowd.

Yeah, yeah, it's not shocking anybody reading this blog that I'm being Miss Social organizer, I know! It's nice to know I've still got the skills though, after my two year exile in hostile territory! ;-) Low key, under the radar social connections . . . that's my specialty. The closest I'm going to get to throwing a party is my girls night IN which will hopefully become a semi-weekly occurrence . . . margaritas perhaps next time? Or maybe the Ithaca Apricot Wheat beer . . . I discovered it at the Nines, and Janine, Joanne and I all really liked it.

So yeah, despite the horror that is Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I'm still managing to have a life.

And yes, I am keeping up with my class work, thank you very much. And even getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night! I'd say that's pretty good for the first week of law school!

"This is inconsistant with the way people sit in chairs."


Okay now for an explanation of why the offensive contact thing is a big deal - and why it isn't, supposedly. (I'm referencing the blog entry just before this one.)

Far from quibbling over a mere redundancy, I think it's pretty obvious to see why the inclusion of the phrase "unconsenting contact" would be concerning - in its broadest sense people could be suing for ANY normal day to day incidental contact. Now in practice the law has limitations to prevent people from abusing this phrase - for instance there is the theory of implied consent. The example the professor gave was, if you get on the NYC subway, even if you are wearing a T-shirt that says "Don't touch me!" and get on a bullhorn and say "I do not consent to be touched", the act of getting on the subway - an institution which you *know* by its nature is one where people are squashed together like sardines - you are giving your implied consent to be touched . . . at least in so far as is unavoidable on the subway. IN addition to implied consent there's this notion about it has to be in ways "outside those of accepted social usages." So you can't sue if someone taps you on the shoulder to get your attention because that's accepted social usage.

Despite these provisions built in to supposedly protect against abuse of the statute however, this guy sued three surgeons for battery and WON. What did the surgeons do? They performed a sucessful surgery on his mother. The guy had given his consent to the first two doctors to do the surgery, and then the third guy actually performed the surgery, so the guy got all three of them. What an asshole!!! I mean it was a freaking successful surgery, that he had consented to! His argument was that the third surgeon was "too insensitive" and that he wouldn't have consented. So it was an unconsenting touch. Man that ticked me off! Well okay not actually ticked me off, but that's like one of those causes I wanted to take up in class. It's just so wrong!

This is part of why I can't decide if I like my Torts class. The professor is a younger prof who's extremely amusing in the hypotheticals he uses in class (Jackie Chan figured into an assault example yesterday), and the subject matter is fairly straightforward, unlike freaking Constitutional law. But you have to read these cases where it seems like people are suing for really dumb things, or outrageous things, or what not - as the prof says you're really seeing people at their worst. But the rules are actually fairly straightforward to apply, if you can get past the fact the inclination to judge something based on your gut instinct of what *should* be right and wrong and instead of look at what the law says it's not too hard. Just annoying when you have to say "okay by the definitions we know hold of battery the surgeon did perform a battery for successfully fixing this problem for this old lady.

But a professor who regularly makes the whole class burst into laughter is worth it, I think, given the high stress nature of first semester first year of law school. I guess you have to have a sense of humor if you're going to practice torts!

As for the quote at the top, that was one of his one liners that had the whole class laughing - it was hilarious in context. The first case we studied in torts was this woman suing this 5 year old boy for pulling the chair out from under her while she was sitting. The boy tried to give some really complicated defense explaining how he hadn't actually been trying to make her fall down. The professor was good-naturedly poking fun at this really unbelievable story (because c'mon, who hasn't tried to pull a chair out from someone when they were 5 or 6 or 7?) and that line came up.

(The woman had fractured her hip from the fall, so there were damages, and eventually the court was forced to find against the boy and award damages, but the parents are generally not held liable in intentional tort cases like battery, so all the woman could do, as Prof. Wendel said, was garnish the kid's allowance. It was, he said, a really pointless suit to bring.)

I'm the "unconsenting touch" chick who lost her power cord.

So I have apparently ensured that at least 50% of the first year class knows me by name and face. Yesterday in Torts I drew attention to myself by pestering the professor about why the phrase "or unconsenting touch" was necessary to the definition of battery, since it seemed to me to be subsumed within the other key phrase, "offensive contact." (For a discussion of why I was making an issue of this,see below.) The pestering alone would only have gotten me face recognition. But it was right at the end of class, and after leaving the class I discovered I couldn't find my power cord to the laptop. When an extensive search failed to produce the power cord I shot off an email to the student list serve (thus sending out my name) - which reaches all the law students - saying basically "I lost my power cord - I was that girl pestering the prof about unconsenting touch in Torts - anybody accidentally pick mine up?" (Very possible since a lot of people have Dells that use that power cord. And btw the list serve gets used all the time for stuff like that so it's not a big deal.)

So this morning everyone was asking me "did you find your power cord?" And in fact when I went to the student activity fair this afternoon, this third year who happened to have given my group our tour of the lawschool doing orientation was like "oh did you find your power cord?" I was trying to figure out how she had managed to put my name with my face. Of course I do have my orientation nametag stuck to my bookbag, mostly to cover up the Dell sticker, but I don't think she was in a position to have seen that before she said that to me!

But yeah, so I'm the "unconsenting touch" chick who lost her power cord.

"Learning law by the yard is hard, but by the inch it's a cinch."
*yes it's a groaner - but at least Summers is taking a stab at a sense of humor!

The whole presentment of materials in law school I find kind of frustrating. it seems to me that the whole thing would be easier if they would deal in a straightforward manner with telling us first what is clearly dileneated, and then later introducing us to all the complexities that happen in the gray or contested areas of law.

But no. Instead their explicit policy is to give us the borderline cases first, the ones where the application of the rule is murky and can be reasonably argued in completely opposing ways. The whole reasoning behind it is that they want us to think about all the issues lawyers and judges have to think about in these murky cases, they want us to argue with each other and the profs, struggle with it, and somehow in the process we'll develop the analytical skills, the types of reasoning processes that are specific to the legal realm.

The problem with this is that we don't even really know what the law is - we're expected to work it out from the case. That's also supposed to be part of the reasoning process. But how are you supposed to work out what the law is from a case that's admittedly pushing at the fringes of where the law is? If the law was stated to us clearly, and then they gave us a murky case, it might be possible to use our analytical skills to argue away at the murky case. Or, if the case was a clear illustration of an undoubtedly correct application of the law, then w/o being told what the law was we would stand a chance of working it out for ourselves from the cases.

But instead they throw us into this realm where we don't get anything, we have to make it all up as we go and hope it comes out the way they want. At the very least I can say that the profs don't expect us to necessarily come to the right conclusion . . . this is why we have no graded assignments but simply a final at the end of the semester. Asking us to try to come up with "right answers" right now would be ludicrous. We're supposed to trust that it will all make sense by the end of the semester.

And I believe it will, because after all they train lots of competent lawyers. But all the same, in my tired exhausted state, the structure kind of pisses me off. Granted, I'm at the end of a very bad haul . . . Tuesday and Wednesday my section has all four of our core classes, which amounts to 8-16 hours of prep for Tuesday and 8-16 hours of prep for Wednesday, plus full days of classes both those days. Tuesday especially sucks because I both have to be in class all day *and* have to do the maximum load of work . . . which means Wednesdays also suck, with only having the slightest mitigating factor of being able to say "well at least I've finished Tuesday!"

And this is repeated, week after week. And I'm in week one. So I feel like being grumpy. And don't even try to tell me "well what did you expect from law school". Yeah I signed on for this, I know - but that doesn't mean I signed a contract not to complain about it!! :-P

!@#$:@L#K:LK:@L#K$:@L#$K

That's about as introspective as I get right now. Boy did I waste a lot of time today - and now I'm feeling slightly paniced because despite spending the better part of 8 hours on what boiled down to about 10 pages of substantive stuff out of a whole whopping 30 pages (sense the sarcasm) of reading assigned for tomorrow's 3 classes, I'm still wishing I had two more hours of time tonight - about another 30 - 45 minutes to make sure my Civil Procedure stuff is down pat, and the rest to finish up Constitutional law, which I didn't finish to my satisfaction this morning.

Of course it doesn't take that long just to read the stuff. Mostly I'm spending a lot of time writing the case brief as I go, which means for the moment outlining the issues at question, the holdings on those issues, and the rules of law. See, all this would be nice and straightforward if they said "here are the issues, here are the applicable rules of law, now see how this case demonstrates them and see if you understand why the court made the holding it did." Oh no. No that would be far too easy - or more to the point, that wouldn't allow us to develop the mental skills of reasoning they want us to develop. It's true that I probably understand all this more by having to work all this stuff out the hard way - it's actually acknowledged that the professors omit from the casebooks the parts of the decisions that explicitly summarize this stuff.

I'm hearing a big fat "I told you so" from Heather and Tom in my head. ;-)

But this afternoon I just managed to be non-productive in multiple ways, including being distracted by the Color Guard performing with the Big Red band in front of the campus store, and walking to the wrong copy store, and IMing people for a whopping 15 minutes. And tonight I allowed myself a full hour for dinner at the welcome BBQ - I had intended to only be there 15 minutes but I sat at a table with a couple former merchant marines and took the opportunity to ask them what the heck merchant marines were - a question I have honestly wondered for a long time. That resulted in a 45 minute conversation on the topic. It actually was both interesting and entertaining; the wife (the non-law student) was very animated in telling stories about crazy mariners.

But my self-preservation unit, i.e. GUILTY FEELINGS, has finally hit peak and I have to go back to work from my little break before I relax myself into a heart attack.

"She thought it was just a phase, and then I got the scales of justice tatooed on my body."

Wow! You see what I mean about the zealotry of some of these people? That was a girl I met at the pizza event (at which I received no pizza having arrived 1/2 hour late) talking about how she'd wanted to be a lawyer since she was 10, and how her mother used to think she'd grow out of it. Yikes!

Then of course, there was the second-best quote of the night. I met this guy Yosef earlier in the day, and was struck by how much he reminded me of (Westbourne) Matt. At the end of the pizza event I ran into him again, and he and this guy Andy and I stood around talking. It became pretty clear once their jokes dipped into dillithium and warp speed references what kind of guys I was dealing with here - although I was already suspecting. ;-) I said, "you know there's a sci-fi club here I bet you guys would enjoy." and Andy replied "Actually, I would like to find some gamers." And being the helpful person that I am, I confessed that I did indeed know where he could find the gamers on campus. (Friday nights in Goldwin Smith.) To which Yosef said, "You know, when I first met you - and forgive me if this is sexist - but I thought you gave off an aura of a gaming groupie."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What have you done to me you crazy boys!!????!!! A gaming groupie!?

Okay, it's hilarious, I admit it. I definetly saw the humor in it. But all the same I had this real urge to go out and drink lots of beer to wipe off this apparent aura I have.

It's because I'm not wearing make-up, isn't it?? I knew I shouldn't have. But I accidentally left the make-up case in Rob's car (I think) and therefore didn't have it tonight.

But I'm getting up extra early to go to CVS in the morning before orientation stuff starts and get some. In fairness, they're taking pictures for the law school directory so I'd like to be done up a little, but also, I think I need to tweak my image a bit. ;-)

I think trying to keep my living room straightened up is going to be my full-time job. Maybe it will be easier when I'm running around less, but as every day it seems like I bring something else into the house - today, BOOKS. Yeah . . . I'm beginng to suspect that $800 / year figure was complete bullshit. On the other hand, Some of these books may be books that I'll use next semester too; a couple of the courses are essentially full year, I believe.

But man are they HEAVY!!!! On the other hand I have some impressive leather bound (textbooks!) on my shelves with names like "Constitutional Law" and "Civil Procedure", so I can feel all cool. But even having bought the books, I'm not sure it's sunk in yet that I'm really going to be studying these subjects. I'm feeling incredibly blase about this whole law school thing. It reminds me of when I went to take the LSAT. Everyone was waiting on the lawn to be let into the testing building, and I remember overhearing snippets of very excited / tense / worked up conversations, and people bragging about how long they had studied, and I had studied for exactly one week. Not even hard core. Just a couple hours a day, you know? And I didn't care that much what score I got because I wasn't even sure I wanted to go to law school. And I scored in the 98th percentile.

I'm not suggesting that I'm going to be in the top of my law school class w/o working - or even the top WITH working. Certainly not - the LSAT tested general reasoning skills, whereas I have to know specific stuff for lawschool classes. Nor am I totally relaxed and all "cool dude, whatever". But law school is like anything and everything else I've ever done. It's a task, a challenge to be overcome, a step on the road. I am actually looking forward to the intellectual challenge, so please don't think I'm being negative here. And I don't think it's over-confidence, either. I can easily crash and burn, just like anyone else.

Maybe it's preparedness. Which is weird, because when I talk to other students I feel unprepared because I haven't memorized our course schedule for the first year or read up on the pros / cons of all the different supplements or studied the faculty yearbook to know my professors on sight. (Okay nobody has told me they did that - yet.) But I'm prepared to be challenged, tested, stretched, and stressed. (And I'm sure I'll be quite stretched and stressed.) It's happened before, it will probably happen again, and this is what I do: I meet challenges.

"Okay, I'm definitely not living in Kansas."

Hmm, how typical, I've been in my apartment less than a week and already hosted my first social gathering. I invited three gals over to my place for sangrias and girls night, and it really was a blast! I know all three from different routes - old friend from undergrad, girlfriend of another friend, and the old highschool friend of one of my college housemates. But it turns out that all of them are in the same department in the Hum Ec school! They're all sort of doing different things; El is getting her masters in Fiber Science, Janine her masters in Apparel and Fashion Design, and Patti is working full time with one of the profs in the biomaterials lab. So although they had met each other they didn't really know each other.

I invited everyone over at 7, and expected that people would leave between 9 and 10 depending on how things went. Instead the party didn't break up until a quarter of midnight!! I had a new audience for expounding on cultural differences between the midwest and the northeast. :-D Janine is a Utica NY girl, so there was lots to fill her in on. ;-) I mean I didn't do it intentionally, but you know me, the conversation often goes there when I have the chance! And Patti, being from western Kansas, has far more extreme stories to tell than I do! She had us laughing pretty hard with her stories of rattlesnake bites (that sounds like a scary topic but actually it was funny) and mountain lions and coyotes and tarantulas and bull constrictors. After which Janine was like "Mountain lions? Okay, you just sealed the deal. Absolutely no way am I ever going to Kansas."

Of course in the beginning Patti and I managed to get on a joint soapbox about the Cornell ag professor who wrote that ethanol paper, and what a load of bunk it was. I eventually had to pull us back, because we were definitely feeding off each other. It's kind of fun to have another midwest farm gal around though! And Janine and El, both having a fashion history background, had their little time later in the evening when they really got going about the Met and it's fashion exhibits like Dangerous Liasons and the Chanel exhibit.

All in all it was a fun night - and actually it didn't really take that much cleaning up after!

It's a little early to tell, but I think the group may actually fit my sustainable quartet theory. See, it seems that in my life there have been a number of times when I've been part of a quartet of friends. The quartets form unintentionally, simply because a certain group of people have a mix of traits that taken in pairs don't necessarily form as strong of a bond, but which in the group of four really melds well. For instance, the quartet I'm thinking of in highschool: 3/4 of us were in band, 3/4 of us in choir, 3/4 of us religious, 3/4 of us super interested in dating, 3/4 of us in the top 10% of the class, and so on. The end result is a group who is close as a group out of common interests or persuasions, with subdivisions sometimes on personalities (we had two outgoing and debative and two noncombative, also two more worldy and two less worldy). And usually it seems like there are two people who maybe wouldn't be friends on their own, but who are sort of brought together by the other two and consequently become friends.

Well I'm back in Ithaca!!! My boxes are all unloaded into my apartment. For those whom I haven't told, I have a one bedroom apartment conveniently located near a bus stop that can get me to campus quickly. And in addition, thanks to the protesters who objected to Cornell cutting down the redbud trees to make a parking lot, I get a free bus pass! Wheee!!! I was going to buy one anyway because I don't want to deal with driving to campus. It will take too long, as I found out this morning. I mean the undergrads don't even arrive for four more days, and already it's hard to find a non-pay parking spot in CT. The meters are of course open, but who wants to pay for the meters? Unfortunately I won't get the bus pass until the end of the week, so for now I have to deal w/ the traffic. Steal it's a nice change to be able to run up to the mall and so forth w/o having to deal with the buses.
It was quite a nice day yesterday. Rob got a hand truck at Lowe's (Ithaca now has Lowe's, Walmart, Chili's and Bed Bath and Beyond down on 13 - or rather Lansing does, WHEE!) which made getting the boxes into my apartment much easier. Because of the location of the apartment, our choices were either park on a VERY busy street to unload or park almost a block away. Rob took all the heavy boxes like a model boyfriend. :-D With the handtruck, of course.
Then we went out to dinner with Patti, and after the two of them left I went over and saw El's new house. El and I went to get bubble tea and walked all around campus for a couple hours talking. It was nice to reconnect, and a relaxing end to the evening. It wasn't actually the end though; I got home and went back to unpacking. About midnight I started trying to go to bed, but I kept thinking of one more thing that would be easy to put away so why don't I go ahead and do it, and consequently didn't get to bed until 1am.
And now I'm feeling guilty because I've spent this whole morning in CTB surfing the web for pleasure stuff, instead of reading the novel I'm supposed to finish by next Tuesday. So I better get down to business - like getting to the Verizon store and straightening out this whole "my headset jack doesn't work" thing, because I'm in NY now and I can't drive and hold the phone to talk. And in any case, in this part of the country I wouldn't want to try. Even driving a manual, I did okay in Missouri where it's fairly flat, broad, and straight. I could let go of the wheel in order to shift when necessary. That soooo does not work in Ithaca! But anyway, yeah, I need to go be useful.

Sometimes I think life on this farm is a bad joke.

My mother has been having quite a bad week of it. For starters, my parents rarely take time off during the summer to just go have fun, unless it's some sort of family trip. My uncle though brings his boat up to Thomas Hill Lake, just 15 miles north of Moberly, just about every weekend. So he convinced us to join them for the afternoon Saturday. We had a really fun two hours; I taught mom and dad how to play monkey in the middle with the football, and we took turns jetting around on the two wave runners. My dad was being playful, and they both were having a really good time. Two hours into it, my uncle says he'll take us out waterskiing. So Mom takes the first go at it, and on her second try manages to get up on the skis. But then we started turning, and she was outside the wake, and she had a rather nasty mishap and pulled her left leg so bad that she can't bend the leg w/o severe pain. The docs tell us it's just a strained muscle, so hopefully it will heal up in a few days to where she can function more normally, but it just bites that when they finally take some time to have fun, she gets hurt
Mom's accident meant I was playing hostess for the family gathering that last Sunday. It went off not too badly. Luckily Thad and my dad took over the cooking of the steaks. I had tried to get somebody to help me w/ them but nobody had, so in the end I just put them on the grill saying "okay they said it should be about 12 minutes so I think I should have the rest of dinner ready in 15 or less, so let's just get them started." Only I had the fire up too high so they were cooking too fast, but the guys saved them before they burned. I was kind of crabby though until dinner was all on the table.
Anyway, that was just an aside in the story of my mother's woes. So all through the week she was slowly getting better, and by Thursday limping but still getting around enough to feel up to helping Dad with the spray boom. They were trying to make some adjustments on it. (This would be the spray boom used to spray the soybeans for previously mentioned spider mites.) The short version of the story is a jack slipped and the arm of the spray boom came crashing down on her forearm, breaking both bones. The top bone was basically a clean snap, but the bottom bone was splintered, and one piece had slid under the other. So they had to perform surgery on her to set the bone, and she's going to be in a cast for a couple months.
And on top of all this, Mom's been wearing her glasses instead of contacts all summer because she's getting LASIK done in September. The RGP lenses (hard lenses) my family all wears actually reshape our eyeballs / hold the shape, so that when you take them out for even a couple days, our eyes begin to shift back to a different weakness. This makes it nearly impossible to keep an up-date to glasses prescription. We wear our contacts almost from the time we get up until the time we go to bed. But to do the LASIK they need to see her eyes at their natural shape, so she's been out of contacts the whole time I was home.

Woe-be-gone Days

I've enjoyed my stay at home, but in some ways it's going to be a relief to leave. Actually just in one way. It's very hard to be here and see my parents so worried. Probably a lot of you haven't noticed, but it's a pretty bad drought year out here. Actually, the worst part is that I don't think it's as bad in Iowa and Illinois, because the rain's sort of been on this northeastern pushing pattern that clips the corner of Missouri but misses most of us. So it's not even like prices are likely to be all the great for our crops. But Missouri is scorching. Jefferson City, for instance, got a grand total of about 3/10 of an inch the ENTIRE month of July. All the car washes have been closed down completely, lawn watering banned, and so on. The farther north you go the better it gets (Jeff is ~70 miles south of us.) but nobody's gotten as much rain as they need. Here at the home farm we've gotten ~ 1 inch for the month of July - and no rain at all so far in August. And it's been hot, hot,hot, with the weather regularly over 90, and there was a 12 day stretch when it was well over 100 degrees every day.
The crop scout (a guy who goes and does spot testing to check up on the health of the plants) told Dad today that the spider mites he found last week have gotten 400% worse, and the soybeans will all be dead by next week if he doesn't spray them. That's a big expense; the kicker is that unless we get some rain the soybeans will be dead in two weeks anyway. We don't really have any choice though but to spray the beans and hope that we get some rain PDQ. The soybeans are the cash crop; normally we would have been harvesting wheat in July (winter wheat, planted in November) but they didn't get it planted last fall because of the weather.
There is some corn; at last check Dad said we still had managed about 2/3 of a crop of corn. That's good news, because we grind some of the corn into feed for our hogs, and the hogs are where the real money of the farm is. And a lot of the corn this year will go up to the ethanol plant that my parents have ownership stake in. The ethanol plant pays 7cents/bushel higher than market price on the corn that it's members bring in to fulfill their membership commitment. In addition my parents are getting a pretty sizable dividend check from the plant's profits for the year.
Which reminds me, I've actually been meaning to write a blog about ethanol; I went to the annual membership meeting with my parents for NEMO grain, the ethanol plant I just mentioned above. I found out a lot of interesting info about the industry. And then just a few days after that, my dad was ranting about a Cornell ag prof's report bashing ethanol. I read the report and tried to find some rebuttals, and I have some thoughts I want to share, but I have to have time to get it all typed out. So look for it coming up - hopefully before classes start!!

"I don't wanna be Jessica Simpson, I wanna be Jessica Biel."

(If you want just the basic summary of my opinion of the movie Stealth, skip the detailed analysis following and go to the purple at the bottom. )

A friend and I went to the movies last night. We briefly considered Dukes of Hazzard, but opted out since it's only redeeming quality was Jessica Simpson. Obviously she's eye candy for Bruce, and he essentially said I might enjoy imagining myself as Jessica Simpson. So instead we went and saw Stealth, which I enjoyed very much. The initial reaction of a couple people who hadn't seen it was "oh I thought that was supposed to be really bad," but I don't know where that came from. If you're like movies like Top Gun - i.e. fighter plane action movies - then this is definitely a movie for you. It also had a cohesive plot that drew you into the story. I'm always a little reluctant to give my opinion on whether it was good / bad acting, but I will say that the interactions between the characters struck me as very real - specifically Jessica Beil and Josh Lucas. Granted I think Josh Lucas is hot hot hot so I have a bit of bias toward him, ;-) especially when he's playing a guy in uniform. >big grin<

But I didn't know anything at all about Jessica Beil before watching the movie, and I was impressed with her character. That's partly a tribute to the way they wrote the dialogue and partly to her acting. The movie wasn't exactly overly-original - basically all of the plot themes were familiar Hollwood lines, but they were played with just enough differences and put together in an interesting enough story that I found it entertaining. You've got the AI weapon that starts going off and threatening to create world war - only in this movie it's not simply that it goes haywire, it's that it evolves, and takes a lesson from Josh Lucas's character that he never intended for it to take. You've got the guy and girl that want to be together but have some major obstacles. Only they handled it a bit differently I think than normal, and really believably for a woman who's in the top ranks of the Navy's fighter pilots.

For instance, there's a scene where the three fighter pilots - Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, and Josh Lucas - are in a dance club. They're obviously close platonic friends, and the two guys are hooking up with girls, and Josh is getting ready to leave to go have sex w/ his date. And he kind of looks across the room at Biel (it's already been somewhat hinted that there's some chemistry between them) and she mouths "Go. Have Fun." and gives him a little smile. The typical Hollwood reaction for her should have been something more insulted, like pretending not to see and the two of them missing the other looking at the other or something. But that typical Hollywood reaction wouldn't have struck me as very believable for a woman who's climbed in the elite ranks of the military. She wouldn't get to that point by kicking and screaming against the boys' club and being all girly; she'd get to that point accepting it as part of life and just continuing to do her own thing. The job these three pilots were doing obviously required them to really have strong relationships of trust with each other; you don't get that kind of chemistry when somebody is being all judgemental about the others. It's the reasons why the guys basketball team always seemed to be more cohesive than the girls' basketball team I played on - girls are just catty an awful lot of the time!

Anyway, I could go on and give more examples, but basically I just thought all the interactions between Beil and Lucas's characters were really believable and well done, and slightly out of the usual Hollywood mold. If nothing else, it's nice to see a strong female character who's power and feminism is more subtle. As much as I like my girls-kicking-butt, there's always an in your face quality to them that was not there in the character of Caroline Wade.

And on top of that, she delivered a great last line of the movie. At the end Josh Lucas gave this brief little speech that really was kind of corny, and then there was this pause, and then Jessica Biel just let out this zinger that basically was like "that was corny" but still resolved the whole issue of how they felt about each other.

So yeah, I thought Stealth was a very good movie - except for the lack of a kiss. But like the ending to Cowboy Beboy, as much as I wanted the ending to be slightly different, it totally was the right ending in the context they had set up. Still, for those of you who need happy endings, don't be afraid to go watch Stealth.

And something else I forgot to say, caught up as I was in the romance thread of the movie - Stealth was also a bit thought provoking. The romance thread was actually secondary to an exploration of the role of human morality in the context of war. (played against the AI which at least initially is amoral.) Again this was a theme that was done with some subtlety; although it was very apparent, it wasn't preachy at all. And it was easy to get caught up in the action of the movie and ignore the underlying ethical questions. In a way I think that's a more significant accomplishment - the movie works on two levels. You can enjoy it purely as an action film w/o feeling like you're being preached at, but if you're so inclined to give more thought to the ethical questions raised, there's certainly meat for discussion in the movie, since many of the conversations are part of this context. (Lucas and his CO discussing human vs. AI and consequences not being divorced from the action - which is exemplified on the next mission the Talons take; Beil making the point that the AI is neutral - it is moral in the hands of moral people - which is exemplified by the way the CO, who is not a moral guy, puts it to use. At the same time they don't completely villify the CO . . . another example of the deftness with which they handled the subject.)

So yeah, in summary, the action in Stealth was awesome fighter plane action, but the human interactions were handled with a subtlety that's pretty impressive for something that's aiming for the genre of typical Hollwood blockbuster rather than more intellectual / artsy. It also manages to provoke thought about what role human morality has in the context of war w/o being preachy. It also managed to effectively infuse humor into an otherwise pretty intense movie, making it a great balance. I definitely recommend seeing it.