Most of the rest of stuff

I have no idea how to organize this stuff. Luckily, this blog has never been that organized.

So it turns out I've been walking into this place called Mondale Hall every day clueless as to this guy's actual story. I knew from orientation he was instrumental in the Gideon v. Wainwright decision, which was pretty cool. But it turns out he was also vice president of the United States?! And subsequently a candidate for president? He was the first vice president to have an office in the White House, and he really expanded the role the VP played. Of course, as far as I'm concerned that means he multiplied zero by a number, since I have yet to hear of a VP doing anything of consequence. But still, presidential candidate! There's probably a lot more that I have no clue about too, but I'll leave those for another time. You'll learn as I do, and I'm not interested enough to look anything up. It will be a fun, gradual process!

I know nobody reading this will care about this, but I watched a really cool youtube documentary on the game Super Smash Brothers, so I wanted to include a link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tgWH-qXpv8&list=FLbkYrBZ7Ymm4y63jhEIAjFA&index=4

It's an interesting probe into the social atmosphere of another sort of obscure scene. It's the same as anything, really. Handball, frisbee, magic, juggling, starcraft, etc. There are people out there who take things incredibly seriously, and their quest to be the best in their niche is inspiring to me. Walk up to anyone and try and talk about this stuff and your first ten minutes are spend dispelling stereotypes (that usually exist for a decent reason) before you can actually get to anything interesting. But those "in the know" automatically have a connection that allows them to talk for hours at a time! I love that these facets of our culture exist. It really makes you think that there's a spot in society for anyone who takes the time to carve one out.

Tomorrow I have a thing my professor calls Contracts-Fest. It's technically optional, but it starts at 8:00 am, goes until the last person is satisfied with their knowledge, and includes food. And she said she'd be talking about areas to focus on for the final. So it's optional in the same way its optional to not jump off a bridge. I'm okay with the idea, actually; it's just odd that this sort of thing happens at all. But I was thinking taking a tiny break from the sheer amount of handball I've been playing might be nice before the tournament next weekend anyway. Maybe I'm just getting a bit burnt out and taking things for granted on the court. So I'll spend tomorrow sequestered with my section learning about contracts!

Speaking of contracts, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts jumped in and grabbed jurisdiction over a case recently that I found interesting. A woman couldn't have kids with her husband, so they contracted with another woman to have her artificially inseminated with his genetic material. The contract provided for three payments totaling $10,000. If at any point she backed out, she would have to give the money back. Sure enough, a few days before she delivered she decided she wanted to keep the kid, despite being chosen on the grounds that she had already had a family, expressed no interest in having any more kids for herself, and was in need of the money. Perhaps predictably, the court ruled that she had every right to rule the contract void. But what I find thought-provoking is that the court paralleled this contract to an adoption contract wherever it could. In those practices, a mom has four days after giving birth to changer her mind about putting a child up for adoption. They also made a big deal about the fact that she was technically the biological mother in that her DNA was used in the creation of the child. So it leaves the door open for cases where a fertilized egg is implanted, for instance. The court seemed really wary about endorsing what amounted to the sale of a child, but I am tempted to say that this amounts to more of a service than a sale of a person. It deprives two parents of a kid they were counting on, had made appropriate arrangements for, and all because this woman is making this decision at what is probably the most-influenced time of the process.

Another thing I said I'd talk about in my conclusion yesterday is this guy I met through my group project. We work together really well when it comes to outlining cases and thinking through issues, so when I needed a place to store my backpack while we went into a courtroom setting (where such items aren't allowed), I turned to him for use of his locker. On our way there, I asked him about a book he said he published. He casually said he used his lobbying groups resources to get it printed. I had some follow-up questions. Here's a list of what I learned:

He emailed the Chinese government while still in high school with some suggestions for expanding religious freedom.
China responded by asking when his delegation would be able to visit.
He got together a group and went to China, meeting with the head of the religious department.
His group turned into a non-profit lobbying group.
At some point he wrote two books, one of which was a political thriller.
He published it using his connections, and at some point the lobbying stopped happening.
His senior year of college, a professor left and he was asked to fill in.
He re-wrote the curriculum, including his political thriller as a textbook.
Now he's in law school.

That was quite a list!

On November 15 the Make-A-Wish foundation is turning San Francisco into Gotham City for a day so a 5-year-old can be batman for a day. I wish I could go. It sounds like a blast, and knowing it's for a good cause adds that extra element of appeal.

This article was all over facebook for a day or two around last weekend. And by "all over facebook" I mean that I saw it twice, and considering my low number of friends, I assume that means everyone saw it at some point: http://sethadamsmith.com/2013/11/02/marriage-isnt-for-you/

Now, I found myself taking both sides of the issue, so I figured it was worth writing about. In case you didn't read it, it is basically all summed up by this quote: "You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy. More than that, your marriage isn’t for yourself, you’re marrying for a family...for your future children... Marriage isn’t for you. It’s not about you. Marriage is about the person you married."

Now, on the surface there are two immediate reactions. Of course, my immediate reaction was "that's ridiculous. Of course you have to think about yourself when you decide who you want to spend the rest of your life with. If you're only thinking about making them happy, then you're doing yourself a disservice. You have a responsibility to yourself to be happy also." Of course, anyone who knows me is completely unsurprised by this reaction. Knowing how prolific this article was getting, I wanted to know what the comments said. After all, if it were being spread and then people were disagreeing with it, I wanted to know. Right now the comments have been hijacked into a discussion about the origins of the concept of marriage and whether or not it's a religious thing, but I took some pictures using my phone so I could write at my leisure later. Here's a quote:

"Wow... After reading just a handful of responses this article received, I now truly see how much the devil has corrupted society's view on marriage, love, and lust! The reason the divorce rate is so high is not because of out-dated ideals on what marriage is...but rather the new idea of what marriage is. Of what love is. Marriage used to be something people went into knowing it was a lifetime commitment. Now, people go into it with the philosophy that if it doesn't work - oh well.Just split up and try again. Maybe two or three times will be the charm. That they will magically find their "perfect" match if they just keep trying. There is not "perfect" match. No one and only soulmate. Relationships take work that people just aren't willing to put in anymore. Or they are only willing to work at it a little, and if that doesn't work - well, it must not have been "meant to be." So wrong...!!! The other part is that because people no longer know what love is. Love is UNselfish. Love is NOT lust. You do not "fall in love" the first time you see someone. You don't even fall in love during the first month. True love is something that happens over time. My husband and I have been together for 19 years, married 13...and we didn't truly begin to understand how to love each other until about 5 years into the marriage. Love is not the butterflies in your stomach, can't stop thinking about him/her, want to spend every minute together feeling you get in the beginning of a relationship. That is simply lust...Love is so much more than that."

Oddly, I found myself relating to this idea as well. Then I realized that none of that concerned the thing I originally had a problem with. So the two views aren't really inconsistent. You can be in a relationship not just for the other person and still be committed to an "older version."

I'm posting this unfinished so I can talk to Sarah S. I'll get back to it probably. But if not, there you go.

Thanks for reading!

Judge Joe Brown Visits the University of Minnesota Law School

An amazing thing happened today. Judge Joe Brown visited my school. Now, I am not one easily swayed by celebrity, but this guy was awe inspiring. Unfortunately, this was not for good reasons. The guy who introduced the Judge really focused on his experience as a minority lawyer and his ability to provide insight into the somewhat recent phenomenon of small claims courts. Judge Joe Brown, on the other hand decided to focus on other aspects of the law. And soon enough, other aspects of anything at all. Allow me to illustrate:

The judge started off by really emphasizing that the law was entirely a matter of appealing to a jury. He said that the jury was the standard we had to keep in mind at every step of litigation, and that a major factor that would make or break our careers would be our ability to relate to a jury. He practiced in the South, so his stories on this topic mostly concerned emphasizing church. One case in particular concerned a murder and the prosecution's key witness was, and I quote "a lady of the night, or as I call her, a ho." His key witness was a young man whose story was not very good. Four of the five people tried in the matter were found guilty, and his client was the only one to go free. You know what he did? He had his witness's father show up in court every day in a nice suit, and near the end of the testimony asked him if he could identify that man in the back of the court room, to which his witness responded "of course, that's my dad, pastor 'such-and-such.'" The whole jury was moved right there. In his closing, Brown said he sat in the witness chair and told the jury "This judge is going to give you instructions, and he's going to tell you to think about the witness's demeanor and reliability into account. So who ya gonna believe? The pastor's boy or the ho?" And he won his case.

Another story involved him grabbing all the evidence and walking over to the jury and saying "I'm going to cast this all up into the heavens, and let God keep whatever he wants." Sure enough, it all came back down to earth, and one woman jumped up with an "Amen!" and ended up hanging the jury, getting him his retrial.

What this had to do with being a minority or judge of small claims court, I'm not quite sure, but that's where the vague association with the courtroom ended. What followed was a solid forty-five minutes of rambling rants about the government. His segues were mind-boggling. My notes pick up about ten minutes after his courtroom stories with a series of question marks. It was at this point I realized we weren't getting back to the topic of lawyering any time soon. Under the ruse of issue-spotting, he changed the topic to the Middle East. Something about how as lawyers we would have to learn how to get at what was actually important. He said that England had gone bankrupt paying gold for sugar it wanted for its tea. For some reason, this included an affected British accent. Let me just say, until you've heard Judge Joe Brown's southern black voice give way to a British impersonation, you haven't experienced all life has to offer. Then he went from that to the fact that England's way of recouping economically in its search for tea was to get people addicted to opium, plant opium in Afghanistan, and ensure their subsequent power over the Afghan government by keeping it destabilized.

Naturally, the topic was then transitioned into a discussion of our involvement in Kuwait and Bush's interest in oil. He asked for questions soon after. We were all speechless. I certainly had no idea what I had just witnessed. Not wanting to let a minute go by without hearing himself talk, Judge Brown supplied his own question in the form of "Let me give you first year students some advice. I can do twenty times the research you guys can do in half the time it takes you to do it." He then launched into a description of photocopying certain key pages I didn't bother remembering because, you know, I have this thing called the internet. He concluded this segment with "this gives you more time to be relaxing. You have to be careful who you have an affair with, though." His second solicitation for questions was met with more stunned silence. One of the representatives for the organization that was hosting him raised her hand.

"Can you tell us a bit about the role of the small claims courts and your experience there?" You know, that thing we thought we were paying you to come do in the first place? He started almost on topic by giving us the story of how the small claims court came to exist in the United States. After filling us in about that, he said "lots of idiots file stupid claims in small claims. It was my job to beat them down." He then ranted about the quality of the education system. The reason we have so many idiots filling up his court is because of these stupid standardized tests that teachers have to teach to. I don't necessarily disagree, but oh boy was that ever not what the question was asking! After emphasizing his role as the man in charge of the courtroom, he told a story about how Hollywood wanted to take over, but because he was a judge he retained control of the program. They apparently invited a high-ranking judicial figure to try and intimidate him, but that lady was a girl he recruited to attend his alma mater and subsequently dated, so they just kissed on the mouth in greeting and Hollywood's plan failed. At this point there were multiple people just laughing uncontrollably, while the rest of us just looked around with various degrees of skepticism and confusion on our faces. And then his time was up and we left. What a weird experience.

Thanks for reading! I realized this was long enough to be a post of its own, so I'll get on with the rest of my life stuff immediately.

A bunch of boring stuff, unless you think my daily activity is interesting

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!