Segue part 2

I just spent a half hour or so reading old blog posts on my phone while editing a couple of them on my iPad. Then I looked up at something a person near me in the room I'm in said and realized my eyes couldn't focus at all! It was disconcerting to say the least. Then again, it did provide yet another occasion to appreciate having LASIK done. I've been taking that for granted the past couple of years, but occasional bouts of blurriness are exactly the remedy required. Not having to put in contacts every morning is still a huge deal to me when I remember to think about it.

So anyway, I found the sections of the document I had already posted, which didn't actually leave as much original material as I thought. Most of it is unfinished poetry abandoned because I wrote myself into a bit of a corner that I knew I could get out of but didn't have the willpower to think about at the time. I am decidedly less poetic these days than I was when I was blogging regularly before, and I'm not sure whether to blame it all on law school or not. I think it's mostly because I just don't read much poetry these days. The more I read of anything the more I assimilate the style. This is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to writing for my legal writing class on Thursday, but on the other hand, it's sort of depressing reading my old poems and thinking, "Wow! That's actually pretty good; I wrote that?"

Further depression can be found in the subject of the poems (Rebecca in many cases, obviously, but also just being excited or thoughtful about things I no longer find intriguing). Like it or not, I have to admit I'm slowing down and settling in to who I am, which seems to be limiting my range on things I'm really willing to get excited about. Or maybe it's just my removal from philosophy, that field of thought that encourages taking the slightest idea to its extremes just for the sake of mental excercise. Right now the only things I'm really devoting that sort of thought to are finding loopholes and thinking about all the ramifications of particular legal procedure. Which is all well and good for my first few weeks at law school, but I can easily see this profession eating up my natural tendency to explore new areas of though. That's not quite accurate. Rather, my tendency to explore will by redirected solely to law, which is a big enough field that you can explore its particulars for your entire life and be quite content and stimulated mentally. But to anyone who isn't a lawyer you look single-minded, one-dimensional, and probably pretty boring. Plus, I'm not sure I'm willing to devote that much of myself to this yet, so I'm just a bit apprehensive.

With all that said, I'm hoping this will be my last purely autobiographical post for a while. I plan on rewriting a few of these poem scraps from my recovered documents, and I want to make at least a token effort to maintain some diversity in my writing style. My autobiographical stuff has always bordered on the technical and properly-phrased anyway, and being in law school will only serve as a reinforcement. If I don't try and do something creative soon, the self-perpetuating cycle of legal writing and autobiography will have taken their hold to an inextricable level.

That said, I have a story from class yesterday! I even forgot to tell my mom while I talked to her, so it's new for everyone. In my torts class we were talking about the difference between negligence and intentionally disobeying the law. The case involved a man whose horses escaped and one was killed as he was leading them all back home on the side of the road. The one struck by the car wasn't bridled, as he couldn't catch them all initially and two had simply fallen into line after he started leading the ones he had caught home. There is a specific statute governing the case that says a man can be held liable for damage in this scenario only if he placed the stock on the highway intentionally. The case includes indemnifying dialogue where the man admits being familiar with the tendency of horses to spook at cars, and he even says he has had horses killed in this manner before. Because intent is defined under a summary of law as having a "reasonable certainty" something will happen and taking the action in light of that knowledge, it wound up being a pretty open and shut case. When prompted for a way of defending the case, one of my classmates said the first thing he would have told his client was not to mention anything tht could be construed as intent. Frame the case only as "I took the horses I had secured back to my ranch, and I had no control or obligation regarding the ones that followed of their own volition. Therefore, I never intentionally placed the horse responsible for the damages on the road." This is actually a pretty reasonable line to pursue. However, when confronted with the dialogue, my classmate said, "Well, I would have told him not to spew any of that stuff about his certainty." This prompted the professor to say, "Now, I know you guys haven't had ethics yet, but I'm just going to caution you against advising your clients against 'spewing the truth' all over a courtroom." Laughter ensued.

Oooohhhhh noooooo! Curse my blind faith in updates being better than their predecessors! I updated an applications I use to watch people stream live games and now there are ads all the time over my videos. This is almost as bad as when I did THE EXACT SAME THING with YouTube. One day: ad-free, delightful viewing to my heart's content. The next: 30 wasted seconds on every video watched on my phone. I have an ad blocker on my computer, but my phone does not have that technology. As a person who could watch up to thirty or forty videos a day, this represented fifteen or twenty minutes of my life down the drain (on top of all those videos!). So I stopped watching. I didn't miss it much, but I was proud of having seen every single episode of sourcefed and a few other channels I followed closely. This is not nearly as bad as the YouTube update, as I watch these videos for a longer amount of time, so I'm losing less time as a percentage, but if I had only known...