It's been a long time since I posted, huh? I think that's more a consequence of the weather than anything else, to be honest. I find myself thinking, "Well, I could stick around and blog and watch tv, or I could get home before it gets cold and rainy." I usually choose dry and warm. But today the forecast is free of precipitation, and it's already cold, so there's nothing to lose by staying.
Where to start? I guess it's been more than a week? So on Wednesday nothing really happened. I pulled an all-nighter to finish my paper for legal writing. So not much to say there. Thursday I got to play Andy! I lost the first game 21-7, but I made some adjustments and got 17 in the second game. I'm curious if he was trying his hardest, because if he was, I think I could fit in pretty well with the top players if I surrounded myself with them and really devoted myself to getting better. That was encouraging. Events which have transpired since then have been a bit less so, but we'll get to that.
Friday? I don't really remember Friday. I know I met with my group to work on our project, but the rest was pretty mundane. Saturday I had to decide between biking and not body pumping or getting a ride and doing another round of the class. So I went with the ride. It was much better when I didn't use way too much weight on the bicep segment. I played for a while, and since there are only four courts at Midway, I got a lot of doubles practice in. It was good, since I feel like that's definitely a weak area for me, and I'm playing open doubles in Milwaukee soon. I will need more experience playing with my partner (we both prefer the front court), but I'm looking forward to some fast-paced action.
Sunday I didn't do anything. Apparently what I should have been doing was outlining for my classes, writing papers before they were due, and getting a jump on studying. Instead, I napped, wrote a bit of bad poetry, and watched a bunch of Magic: the Gathering on my phone. Luckily, with all the napping, I woke up really early Monday and got all my reading done before class. Then I did a brilliant thing that may have been for the first time: I checked the weather! It turned out there was a storm-ish looking thing headed my way, so I went to class forty-five minutes early and kept reading. By the time I left, the rain had passed. Planning and foresight! Who knew!? Monday was a good day for food also. My section had a meet-up with our orientation advisers for a check in before the last push toward finals. For the fourth time, I was told that I should really be started doing all the things I haven't been doing. Everyone is emphasizing doing all these advanced study things, but I am as yet unpersuaded. I still feel like I have an adequate grasp on the material from studying it the first time, and the tests are open-note! I don't know. I just really hate stressing out about stuff like this. And every time I start to feel comfortable, a professor or previous student jumps up and says things are awful and I need to do a bunch of stuff. But the point is, they had free quiznos. And because our section had a way higher RSVP rate than others (we have a pretty unique rapport with each other, it feels like), they ordered pizza. So I ate quiznos and pizza, then found more pizza waiting outside leftover from other sections. Then I went to the cafe and waited until they put out the leftovers. I don't know why more people don't hang out there. I mean, there's always a few, but every time my group meets and they put out free food, we all make remarks about how we should go there every day. I guess I'm the only one who's serious about it? I guess I shouldn't complain; more for me, right?
Tuesday I played league again! We won, and I won, and I played terribly. It was actually very frustrating. Not more frustrating than losing, of course, but I felt like I wasn't playing good handball. Just in general. My left hand has reverted back to its submissive role after showing decent improvement while my shoulder was hurt. My serve is underwhelming, and my footwork is lazy. Then, when I left, it was snowing heavily. I was ready to brave the elements, and I called my mom to aid in distracting me from the misery of my wet, cold, slippery bike ride. Only, it turned out I left the YMCA going the wrong way. I had done this before, and I had committed certain landmarks to memory to avoid doing it again. Unfortunately, I misremembered that I was supposed to bike past the Arby's while leaving rather than arriving. Also, there is a weird divide because a train goes down the middle of the street, so to get across one has to turn around a couple times. These are all silly excuses I'm putting forward to illustrate why I biked two or three miles in the wrong direction. Eventually I realized I hadn't gone under an underpass like I should have, made an about-face, and biked the now-six or -seven miles back to my apartment. I owe a great debt to my mother for staying on the line while baking her cookies and talking with me through my misery. At one point I hit a patch of snow-covered leaves and slid out, but luckily I was traveling so slow due to the conditions and lack of fenders that I was able to stick my foot out and sort of push along in a skateboard-like maneuver and stay upright. I was pretty proud of myself.
The roads were pretty much clear by Wednesday morning. So I was biking to class, and while I was going over a bridge I looked back to change lanes when my back tire slid out. I went down. I was not very proud of myself. So it turns out the warnings that bridges freeze before roads is entirely accurate. I wish I had found a more appropriate way to perform this research. So after bouncing off my butt for a while, I made it to class and took stock of my injuries. My knee has a slight hole in it, my butt has a huge bout of road rash, and my elbow is bruised and a bit skinned, along with miscellaneous bits of shin and ankle that were caught in the crossfire. Luckily I got more pizza at lunch. I had to learn to get this pizza though. The lecture was about terrorism and how the government has been expanding its capability of prosecuting suspects. It's now acceptable for the government to put you away for more than 20 years for aiding terrorists. They put a guy away just for offering to provide medical services in the future to the Taliban. So he hadn't actually done anything, but his mere offer was enough for them to find him guilty. One of the cases being tried by the attorney visiting concerned her clients helping terrorists use email. Nothing crazy, just how to save a draft so you could read it later (or someone else with your information could read it later without having to hit send). She wondered out loud about humanitarian efforts in conflict countries. At some point it approaches a certainty that those people will have provided aid to a terrorist. It may even be that their aid gives people enough freedom that they can leave their day to day existence behind and actually join a terrorist organization! I grabbed a muffin and a bear claw as I left from the bakery. Another day I didn't need to provide my own food.
Also Wednesday, instead of going to civil procedure, we attended a live motion for summary judgment argument hosted here at the law school. It was pretty interesting in that we got to see explicitly the exact things we've been studying being argued in real life. Civil Procedure came into play in that it was a motion for summary judgment, they talked about jurisdiction, and they had particular burdens they had to meet. Also, courtroom manner, and other things were probably important. Torts came into play because the plaintiff was arguing about negligence. Whether the seller of an item has a duty to provide safety information to everyone who will use it, or whether they just had to provide that info to the purchaser and they then incurred the duty to inform. Whether the injury that occurred was foreseeable to the manufacturer, and whether the plaintiff assumed the risk when he exercised his decision-making process incredibly poorly. Contracts came into play through the concept of implied warrant of merchantability. So all of my classes were represented. And I knew exactly what these people were talking about! Encouraging indeed. I felt like I could totally do this stuff. And I don't event think I want to stand up and argue in front of people. But it didn't look hard! That's the important part.
Thursday is today. So I'm nearly caught up with the mundanities. My leg had finally scabbed over part way through today, so I didn't have to keep adjusting in my seat to get my shorts to stop sticking to it. My elbow being sore was really annoying because when I take notes I rest it on the table in a way that is no longer tolerable. I grabbed a blueberry crumble pastry and a donut after school from the cafe for free. I ate poor quality pizza while listening to a man talk about the jurisdictional complications of indian reservations. And a good time was had by all. I think I'll write my civil procedure paper on this topic actually, so you might want to brace yourself for more talk about this soon. I'll leave it alone for now though.
I was watching How I Met Your Mother while typing part of this. Near the end a character says that finding the right person is like finding the person who hits the reset switch on all of life, so that doing things again is special just because you're doing it with them. I'm not sure if I've ever felt exactly that way, but I do know that I loved my subsequent trips out west with girlfriends precisely because I loved watching them react to the things I already knew I loved. So it wasn't like I was enjoying the scenery for the scenery. Rather, I was enjoying it for the reaction it produced in the person I cared about. It was like I had something to offer myself, in that I was responsible for their happiness, even though I obviously wasn't responsible for the sights or anything. So it wasn't like the world had been reset, because I wasn't experiencing it for the first time. I was experiencing it through another person, which may have been even better in that those people were even more outwardly enthusiastic than I was.
I don't react that much to things, especially outwardly. I've been exploring this a bit in some writing I'm doing on my own, but the point is that I think I need to be taken by surprise to really genuinely smile these days. I can appreciate something as beautiful or smart, or clever, but unless I'm startled, it doesn't usually produce a physical reaction. So when a six year old grabs my hand and drags me into the handball court, that's awesome and unexpected. When he hugs me and calls me his friend later, I smile, because I am surprised at how easily that term comes at that age. I forget that things can occur in a smaller worldview than an entire lifetime, and to be really caught in a moment is so rare these days that when it happens, it's awesome. But it doesn't happen much, and every day it feels like there's less that can really take me by surprise enough to make that happen. I'm not sure if this sounds weird, but being around people who aren't very smart (or who I don't consider looking to as a source of wit) is perfect in that when they do say something clever, it catches me off guard and I feel a genuine appreciation. Sure, it's a pedantic appreciation, or something not quite perfect, but it's nice. Like when a person makes a joke that is funny by itself, but also funny because it references a conversation from a half hour ago, or from earlier that day. And I was sure they didn't remember that particular detail from earlier, or something.
When my mom mentioned she said something to my dad along the lines of being a bit taken aback that the time he smiled at her the most genuinely was when she made an unlikely putt at disc golf, it brought this to mind. There's a constant appreciation I have for smart things, for practicality, for intelligence, but there's always going to be something genuinely fantastic about the surprising. So when Kristina, Ted, Jessica, Alex, or any other person I don't play seriously at handball hits an amazing shot, I smile. And I smile more about that than I did about being in love. But that doesn't mean the former is anything similar to the same scale as the latter. It's just a different reaction. So I hope my mom doesn't think my dad requires her to be sinking sixty-foot putts to be happy. Because if she started doing it regularly, it would become one of those constant appreciations anyway. A smile would be accorded, sure, and a nod of acknowledgment, but that elusive grin would come later, say if she bounced it in off an obstacle.
I think this also has to do with why relationships are so fantastic when they are starting out. There's just more to be surprised by. This doesn't have to be significant-other style relationships, either. Tera has been playing handball for about a month now. She is ridiculous. She flops around the court, dances in the middle of points, jumps for joy if she hits it to the front wall, and her happiness is infectious precisely because I don't have any idea what's going to prompt the next silly thing. Mention one thing to her and she is ready to try it. And she'll jump in oblivious to what other people are thinking, just because that's what she wants to do at that moment. She tackles her boyfriend without any notice, but also jumps into his lap and kisses him while he is equally unaware. It's all too spontaneous for me to understand, and I find myself smiling around her way more than other people I've gotten a bit more used to. But that's just her personality and how different it is from mine. It will continue to surprise me for longer than the other people I find easier to understand. Her recklessness is refreshing.
My sister is going to Worlds! That is amazing. I'm not even jealous for once. I'm actually just genuinely thrilled she has this opportunity and gets to share it with Kurt. I can't even come up with more appropriate words than amazing. So amazing will just have to do. Have an amazing time, Sarah!
And speaking of Sarahs it's Sarah Schreitmueller's birthday today! Happy birthday, even if it's only for another twenty minutes. And that's your time! You're special day has been over for a while where I am, but hey, take advantage of the last bit.
I actually have a lot more to talk about, but this post has been pretty long already. So I'll try and continue tomorrow. Things to look forward to: I made a friend who accidentally formed a delegation to the Chinese government and then turned that into a nonprofit lobbying group. Also, is it legal to contract to have another person's baby? All this and more here next time. Thanks for reading!
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