Have keyboard, will post

Man, money is difficult. I have a bunch of things going wrong right now, and it's really frustrating trying to get them all straightened out. The first thing is that my credit card was charged fraudulently a while ago. This happened before an autopayment I scheduled, so I payed for the payment and then I filed the claim. Sure enough, a credit appeared on my account. That was all well and good, but I hadn't bought anything for the credit to be applied to, so I used the card to buy textbooks. I bought a book from the bookstore, which was twice as expensive as the one online, and then bought the one online as well, planning to return the book from the store. I did that, and was happy with the hundred dollars I saved. But now I looked at the credit card report and the credit still hasn't been applied to my account. To make matters worse, the credit for returning the book also isn't appearing. So I'm currently out over $200, which is really frustrating. I also need to go talk to the financial office here about where to send my scholarship money and to make sure that money will be okay to be received by me. I hate dealing with all this money stuff. Very annoying in general.

I should have taken the advice people have been giving me to just keep doing things to forget about being broken up with, but I didn't really do that today. Instead, I returned to my salvation in the computer lab, but even three episodes of Breaking Bad and live streaming Magic coverage from Atlanta wasn't enough to keep me occupied, and I've been feeling a bit sad. This won't be the post where I go into things in depth, but be forewarned, the storm is imminent. In the meantime, I made note of a few things worth talking about, so I'll hit those up.

The first topic is this video Sarah sent me from her beloved NPR:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/09/05/219266779/our-cultural-addiction-to-phones-in-one-disconcerting-video?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=20130908&utm_source=mostemailed

If you didn't watch it, it's basically just making the point that cell phones are ruining EVERYTHING!

I waffle back and forth on this topic. On the one hand, I hate to see three people with their phones out not talking to each other, but on the other hand, I've totally been the guy up at night on his phone. I've also been part of the group of three people, and as long as nobody in that group was hoping for eye contact, that isn't necessarily as bad as the video makes it out to be. The only time it gets bad is if someone without a phone expects reciprocation (like the girl in the video is obviously hoping for). I guess it might also be a little different for me because I don't have that many friends, so if I'm in a group, it's not usually because I actually want to be spending time with each one of those people. So when I'm talking to the friend I do want to be there with, I don't look at my phone, and when that person is talking to other people, my phone provides me with an out so I don't have to talk to the other people there I don't really care about. I'm rarely even doing anything on my phone. I just have it out and look at a game I've already moved in, and it solves my awkwardness problem.

Phones are also really handy to have when you're in a conversation. Or maybe just when you're in a conversation with me, because I tend to spark controversies that need settling, and phones provide a great way to do that. When a person runs out of something to talk about, a phone provides endless topics. The only time phones really get in the way is when a person is trying to social network (which I assume is what's going on in the video). Then they are showing a preference to people other than the one right in front of them, which does seem a bit silly. I also get irritated by people constantly taking pictures to send to people who aren't there, or for later, when nothing that cool is actually happening. Remind me to tell you about the only time I've been to "the bars" sometime...

The thing about having the phone in the bedroom might be a bit different from my perspective also. See, I don't sleep well/at all/easily, and I usually stay up until I feel certain that if I go to bed I will fall asleep quickly.  Otherwise, my mind starts wandering and I really hate where it goes. Before my phone, this meant I would either have the light on, have a computer on, or be in a different room entirely, none of which were as good as having my phone. It disturbs whoever you're with to have those distractions, and not being in the room just makes both people lonely. But having my phone (or iPad), means the lights can be off and not distracting while I can be distracted, a critical element unless I want to start feeling depressed. The iPad lets me read with the light off, the iPhone lets me stream something, etc. while allowing me to roll over and sneak a cuddle or hug or other sign of companionship. I'm not saying everyone should have their phones out all the time; I'm just trying to provide my point of view and preemptively defend myself against people wanting personal contact.

The other thing I was going to talk about is how much weight I've lost! Of course, this means broaching the Rebecca topic again, but whatever; that seems unavoidable. The story is basically that Rebecca had said she wasn't feeling attracted to me anymore, and I said, naturally, that I would do whatever I could to make that change. I asked if it was because I weighed more than when she met me (I'd put on ten pounds or so since my sophomore year of college). She said that might be it, and I put myself on a diet. I didn't really know how to go about that, so I just thought of all the things I've heard of people doing and combined them. So the restrictions I currently operate under are:
1) No carbs after 5:00 and no food after dinner. This was motivated partly by the Atkins people and the people who say eating late at night is bad for you. Just thinking about it made it seem likely that carbs (that take longer to break down, I think?) shouldn't be cut entirely, but I'd heard that while sleeping the body converts a higher percentage of food into fat than while awake, so I wanted to limit the amount of work it was doing then.
2) Portion control. This was a lot more important to me when I just started trying to lose weight. I took careful precaution not to eat more than a handful of food at a time. I would only eat when I felt like I needed to, and if I still felt hungry fifteen minutes later I might have a bit more.
3) I started eating healthy. This was more challenging when I was in Ames (and in a relationship), because I don't buy unhealthy food here. One of the more frustrating things was Rebecca offering me ice cream, cookies, candy, etc. while she knew I was trying to lose weight. I guess she just didn't remember or thought I would be making exceptions for things she was also eating, but as has been discussed earlier, when I commit to something, I don't do it halfway.

The results have been pretty great. I lost ten pounds in the first few weeks. Since moving here I haven't been nearly as good about not eating late or right before bed. Also, I've been making bigger portions for myself, since I'm not really doing this for anyone anymore, and only because it seems healthier. I started this mission at 167 pounds, and I even saw my weight over 170 on a couple of occasions (when I came back from a magic tournament having eaten as much as possible without moving for instance). I now weigh about what I did in high school. I took this picture yesterday:

153!

I haven't noticed a huge change in my energy level or what I look like, but I put on some shorts I bought before I left, and this was the result:

I can't figure out how to rotate this!

There's a lot of extra space in that waistband, which is both awesome and frustrating, since I didn't bring a belt. And I probably wouldn't wear a belt anyway.

So I don't know which of these things to credit the most for losing weight, but I do know what seems to work for me. To be honest, it's probably mostly the fact that I just really wanted to lose weight, and I was willing to feel hungry to make that happen. Now I am less thrilled by that idea, and I seem to have stabilized somewhat around 155. But I'm also not working out as much as when I was in Ames, when I was playing frisbee twice a week and handball twice a week. But I'm starting intramural frisbee tomorrow, so maybe...

yeah, that's not going to be the same at all.

It should be fun though. I haven't thrown a disc since I've been here. I was considering playing left-handed if this situation cropped up, but I want to make my captain want to play with me, so I will be trying pretty hard for the first time and I'll see where we are after that. I should really start running again, but I don't really like my neighborhood, and I just haven't been thrilled about being in public now that I'm in a city. I restrict my time outside my room to being on campus and biking as fast as I can between the two locations. And I walk to Aldi once a week. That's it. And I wonder why I'm lonely...

Well, that's all I had noted for topics to say. I'll just edit a few more poems, I think. And if I feel like depression is about to overwhelm me, maybe I'll start complaining again. Thanks for reading!

Wheeeeeeeee!

Hello there!

I finally made my way to the computer lab in the library, and I must say, it's odd to type on a real keyboard for a change. My fingers aren't used to the work involved, and each key press makes my wrists wonder how long this is going to go on. And I'm not sure I am typing any faster what with all the times I have to hit the backspace key. I don't use that function on my iPad because its autocorrect feature is so good. I just hit the space button and usually the word I was supposed to be typing appears.

I'm writing to announce a few changes/updates to the whole blog situation. This will still be my hub of operations, but I've started yet another blog for my poetry (peschpoems.blogspot.com). So I'm gradually taking the stuff from the entries here and hopefully other places and I will put it all on there in separate posts. And I'm editing them as I do it, so they're going up a few at a time. My plan is to continue to write everything here raw, so if you like to read all about me, this is still the place to be, but in case someone stumbles across my blogs and doesn't like to read about my emotional problems, this gives them another way to access my stuff. I've added a little gadget-y thing to all my blogs (hopefully), so you can just click them on the right side of the screen over there -->

That being said, this will probably be updated pretty frequently, but I can't guarantee it will be creative-oriented as much any more. I have a bit more free time and fewer people I want to talk to, so I figured I'd just cut to the chase and tell anyone who wants to listen. So I'll write anything here, but I'll start new blogs as I feel they are warranted. I'm thinking I might start one just about law school, for example, so people searching for cases can see what I thought about them, or people interested in the experience can get an idea of what I'm doing as I go through it. But maybe that's what this is already? So I'm not sure. I just know that when I want to say something, I'll come here first and divide later accordingly. So you're not missing anything by continuing to read here.

I really like that poem I wrote a while ago called "Trouble with Chess." I just put in on my other blog, and I was going to revise it, but then all I did was change capitalization and punctuation. It even gets better when you read it twice, because the chess metaphor applies to the military so well. The soldiers are the pawns on the board obeying commands and standing there defending the people while occasionally being sacrificed. People think that progress is good, meaning that we get involved in everything, when it might just be better to sit at home and defend ourselves rather than interpreting everything that happens as a reason to move.

"Skepticism," on the other hand, is incredibly underwhelming. I added a bit to it, but I can't decide whether the correct move is to add to it or take away from it. It might be better as a shorter poem, but it might need even more in order to get to the point I wanted to make (on top of the whole I can't see God deal). I might revisit it again later.

I edited the "Church" poem to smooth it up, but I didn't actually change it to be actually satisfied with it.

I really want to write a short story, as I feel that was a cool part of my life, but I can't think of anything suitable at the moment, and I'm not even sure how I went about doing that. I guess it started differently every time, but this time I feel so lawed-out that I can't really think of anything other than court cases, and I'm not sure how much fun it would be to read about a lawyer or something filing for a jurisdictional dismissal of a case.

I've also been slowly bottling up little things I've been sad about recently, so there's probably another depressing "I'm lonely and I don't understand why my girlfriend left me etc." post coming soon. Don't worry, I'll let you know in the title if you should brace yourself. For now, I'm just staying busy trying to track down poems. I think there are a bunch on the computer I have in pieces at my parents' house, but there are also some that I emailed to myself for classes, and I'm sure I can find some saved somewhere... I just can't quite put my finger on it. Did I back them up somewhere? Anyway, I have a lot of them to keep me busy just from this blog in the meantime.

Nothing really exciting is going on as far as law school is concerned, which is probably fantastic news, since it seems some of my classmates are starting to feel overwhelmed already. Unless something changes drastically about the experience soon, I'm afraid "they" will have been incorrect again. Every single time I change educational "levels" I'm told I won't have as easy a time of it this time, I'm going to have to actually apply myself, I'm not going to have the free time I used to have, I will have to work carefully to balance life and schoolwork. The list goes on. And yet again, I'm feeling fine about everything, haven't put in any more work than I want to, finish my readings on time, have the relevant material in my notes, and have plenty of free time. I play handball for four hours a day two times a week for Elliot's sake. (I really need to meet a Pete, so I can say it for his sake. In this case, Elliot gets the honors as he's probably the nicest, smartest guy in our classes. He's already passed the bar in California!) And I obviously have even more free time on my hands than I know what to do with, as evidenced by the length of this post, if nothing else.

I've pulled two all-nighters already I guess. One because I don't respond to rejection well, and one because I took a nap in the afternoon, and I was just getting tired around 2:00 am when I got a phone call that a fellow classmate was in the library and couldn't figure out how to access his assignment materials. I wasn't quite done with mine, so I went and made sure he got everything figured out, then worked on mine even more. This turned out to be fortuitous for him, since he went to the bathroom and locked himself out of the library! So I was there to let him in, and just stuck around from 3:00 to 8:00 when class started. I'll admit, that day was a pretty bad day as far as information assimilation was concerned. So if my classmates are doing that sort of sleep-deprivation regularly, it's no wonder they are feeling overwhelmed. If you aren't operating with a fresh mind the text turns to gibberish and the professors might as well be asking you to translate enigma code. So maybe I'm just abnormally good at reading the material and getting the necessary stuff out of it, or maybe they are all drinking instead of putting even the (what I consider to be) minimal amount of time into the reading.

This post has gone on for a long time. I've been in the computer lab since just after 3:00. I was about to leave when I remembered I forgot to print off a thing due at 4:00. I also remembered I hadn't ever learned how to use the printers. So I reentered with a bit of trepidation, only to find this computer lab in the back of the library. It's delightful. I took the computer in the back corner, and I think I might never leave. I have my headphones in streaming commercial-free internet music, I have my Google Chrome account synced to my phone and iPad so I can pick up wherever I left off on any device, and I am loving it. And being able to type faster is exhilarating. Having an apostrophe key is only something you appreciate after you've been without one for years. And just in the course of this blog post I've stopped making the stupid typos that were requiring the backspace key, so that's not an issue anymore. If I was faster at thinking creatively, I'd be tempted to write things of substantial length, but even when I feel like I'm in "the zone," I think about each word I write, so typing isn't the limiting factor. For this though, I just think about a topic and the rest comes out.

I will undoubtedly write more soon. Probably as soon as my depression outweighs my new-found enthusiasm for typing. But I'm going to take advantage of this and put the photos in I couldn't with my iPad, and update my profiles places. Be back soon!

Thanks for reading!

Segue part 3

In yet another autobiographical foray into law school...

Oh wait, just kidding. I'm finally creative!

Church

The church is the biggest thing in town
Huge, hewn stone, hauled hundreds of miles
A testament to Christianity,
A monument in itself, to the rightness
Of righteous belief
For who could haul and hew
If they knew
Their questions would go unanswered
Their inquisitions, begged on bended knee
Fly out of flying buttresses,
Bounce off the belltower,
And bring nothing but silence
But belief needs no concrete
The tons of stone are enough
Their mere presence a testimony
To the belief of the builders

The unbending, balustraded nave
Brooks no bouts of doubt
It's physicality manifests harsh juxtaposition
To my infirmity
For my beliefs have have never sparked
Such superior structure
Such skyward-seeking symbology
Such arduous adoration
Never allowed me assurance to commit
Wholly,
To assert my authority over attention

You can't help but look up to it
Neck craned and cricked in stricture
You can't help but hear it
The ringing adulation of the bells
Extolling virtues in idyllic scripture
So who am I to doubt
The devout
As I wander,
Ghostly,
Unseen and un-momentous below?


I'm not sure how I feel about this one. The first stanza was written in my iPad as a note from when I was living in my car in Missouri. I remember when I was writing it I wanted to make an ironic transition from the devoutness and righteousness the people felt while they were building the church and their certainty in their religious and compare it to the pyramids. The pyramids were built by slaves, of course (and there are probably plenty of parallels I could draw to the mindless way people seem to follow religion today), but the sheer size of the task overshadows the churches completely. I was going to say something to the extent of "if the people who built this church did so as an exhibition of their belief and their authority in that belief, imagine how much more devotion and authority the Egyptians had. But then I wrote some other stuff that doesn't quite go with the first stanza. There are a couple of interpretations I am thinking of for how I wrote it, but I'll keep those to myself in case I want to revise it to more completely adhere to one of them.

I also found this in my notes from Missouri:

Last night was the first night it was actually cold, and my feet hurt for a while before I eventually got back to sleep. It wasn't until around 9:00 or 10:00 this morning that I realized they were numb when I tried to walk and felt unbalanced due to my lack of toes. All was well soon after, though, as the blood started moving and feeling came back. I believe I will break out the sleeping bag tonight, just in case. By the time I thought about it last night, it was too cold outside of the blanket to warrant trying to remedy the situation. I figured all that was really cold were my feet, and it wasn't worth the risk, so I'd just cut my losses. Yet another reason not to leave decisions to my tired brain. This comic pretty much sums it up:  http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2402

I'll write more soon. Just wanted to post before I'm off to my next class.

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...

One small step for me. One giant segue for this blog!

We only got through one case in my contracts class today. People just couldn't stop asking the most repetitive questions, which is frustrating because during orientation we were specifically told multiple times that anything we didn't get through in class would still be on the final, and that we'd just have to read hundreds of pages the week before we took the test if we didn't keep class moving along. Which brings me quite seamlessly (if I hadn't thrown this seem in, of course) to my next grievance: what was the point of orientation if we didn't learn anything useful and even the stupid little tips we did get are going discarded? I got an email recently asking me to fill out a survey about the usefulness of orientation. I really hope I win the random drawing for the gift card after putting "extremely unhelpful" or "no opinion" for every single response. Don't worry, I explained the reason I didn't have an opinion about so many things was because after realizing how useless everything was, I skipped as much of the procedures as possible. The short response section was challenging because I was asked to reflect upon something they did well. All I could think of was free pizza, but even that was sort of greasy. I doubt they're going to take my advice for how to improve it, since scrapping it will deprive the person who's ONLY JOB is to make sure this event is worthwhile and enjoyable.

So nothing interesting happened in contracts, and I have an hour to kill before my torts class. I already did some reading/briefing during my break and don't really feel like being lawyerly at the moment, so I figured I'd write a bit. But I don't have that much to write about. I guess you'll have to bear with me as I take a bit of stream of consciousness approach.

It used to be that I couldn't write very well with music on in the background. I had a couple of classical stations ready at hand for occasions such as this, but I've been listening to this station by featuring a rapper called Childish Gambino for so long at this point tht I don't even find it distracting any more. He has to be the cleverest writer I've come across, even if he's a bit too explicit for me to recommend to strangers. I never know what the rule is on explicitives these days. On the one hand, I hear elementary school kids throwing around the whole gamut of what were considered extreme when I was their age. High schoolers even swear around their parents on occasion, and frisbee tournaments are a whole conflagration of weird situations. On one side of the YCC fields the heckling and profanity rage wildly, while on the other the parents are trying to find tactful compliments that they cross their fingers and hope are relevant. So maybe there aren't inappropriate lyrics anymore, but the thought of adults (I'm obviously still not an adult) appreciating and laughing at lines playing on the concepts of ejaculation, chauvinism, "hood rivalry" and felatio still makes me grimace. But they are so clever! The artist's name is Donald Glover, and he starred on the tv show Community while also writing comedy for at least one other show. He had a brief part on the show Girls, and probably some other stuff if I bothered to look him upon IMDB. He also does live standup! It's weird, because he's a different person in each of these capacities, and yet another person in the interviews he gives.

We are starting to get into the definition of intent as it relates to tort law, and while it's not ll that different than I was expecting, some of the specific cases are a little interesting. The first we looked at was the one that was responsible for changing the definition from intending the harm to intending to commit an action that was "reasonably certain" to result in harm. This is a much broader definition. So if you intend to harm someone you are liable even if you don't succeed, and if you don't intend to harm someone, but you commit an action intentionally that you reasonably know will have that effect, you are equally liable. In case the second definition needs clarification, I found one case particularly illuminating:

A seven year old was playing in a car lot with two friends. One of the friends was on a ledge, and the little girl forced her off, after which she sustained serious injury. The little girl was certainly not thinking at the time "I want to hurt her;" she just wanted to take her turn on the ledge. But she knew that her actions could (or probably would) result in the girl being hurt. So even though we don't hold children responsible for the intent behind their actions (the reason we have an extreme aversion to assigning the death penalty), the girl was liable for the consequence of her action.

I started writing some poetry just now, but it wasn't coming out right, so I switched to classical. Then I gave up temporarily and moved it into my notes section. Then I realized I have many, many unfinished things in my notes section. Then I realized I have a bunch of stuff that reminds me of Rebecca in my notes section. Then I deliberated over what to do with all that stuff before moving it to the back of my notes section because I don't have any idea what I actually want to do with it. Then I compiled all the unfinished stuff into one big document. Then I remembered I might have actually posted some of it, but also that I have some drafts of posts on my blog site still in the editing phase. So my new mission is to put those into the same big document as well, figure out which things I've posted, delete those, and then put the whole thing into production. But for now, due to having wasted half an hour deliberating and collating, I need to go. So no creative fun stuff today, but steps are being taken, never you fear!

Speaking of steps, by the way, I got a reply to an email I sent about getting access to my scholarships from Magic six or eight years ago. One step closer! (included mostly for mother's benefit-one less thing to nag about)