Quick post

I'm rewarding myself for actually being productive by letting myself post a bit here before leaving and actually sleeping (a rather strange concept for a Wednesday night).

I played a few games of handball on Monday, then played another three or so hours on Tuesday, so this week (since Sunday) I already have about ten hours of court time in. I have a tournament this weekend too, so from Sunday to Sunday I might get the equivalent of a part-time job's hours of handball in! Turns out I probably could have gotten a job to put myself through law school. But this is way more fun, so hey, I'll just try and appreciate it.

I made biscuits yet again on Tuesday morning, and it turns out one disadvantage to them being perfectly well-done and not sticking to the pan is that sometimes when you tilt the pan to get it out of you oven racks (which for some reason have a lip on the front which prevents you from simply sliding them out), the biscuits wind up on the oven rack instead of the pan. And because they are delightfully crumbly, you panic and burn your arm trying to extract them before they fall apart and ruin everything. Then, of course, is the ideal time to realize you can just slide the pan back in on the bottom shelf to catch the pieces while extracting what you can without undue hurry. I went out with my "teammates" after handball as promised, and it was about the most anti-climactic thing ever. It was trivia night at a bar/pizza place, and it consisted of sitting around while only talking to the person directly across from me and directly to my right while they asked me silly questions. Luckily, I've gotten pretty used to bantering with these people, so at least it wasn't just question, answer, awkward silence. But it also didn't strike me as a particularly stellar use of my time. I showed an inordinate amount of enthusiasm at all their interests, and luckily I know enough about a variety of topics I can feign interest in just about anything. Zombie apocalypse? Check. Starcraft? Check. Decent books? Check. Pre-requisites for science degrees and AP credits? Check. Obscure fantasy authors and video games? You bet. Antique furniture? Well, that was pushing it a bit, but I think I covered adequately.

About the only thing I like about question-sessions is that I make sure I answer everything honestly and directly. I didn't always do that, but in college it was one thing I really admired about a particular frisbee teammate I had, and I've tried to adopt it for myself. Not to mention it's fun to see people taken aback slightly when you actually just give them a direct statement during what might otherwise be an awkward topic of conversation. I figure I have relatively few regrets (see whatever post it was where I talked about my decision-making process), and rather than treat myself as a mystery, I might as well just let them make up their minds about me based on whatever information they deem relevant by asking me for.

The handball group was bigger than usual (I gather) because a person I've never even met is moving to Texas and it was his last day in town. We had like four tables pushed together, so it wasn't like I could even talk to everyone there. Not that that was a huge loss, but that, combined with the place being virtually empty except for our one, big group, made the experience pretty atypical. It was certainly better than the last time I went to a bar, though, in that it didn't seem like anyone's goal was to get drunk. Sure, one guy had enough to start being a bit rowdy, but it wasn't like they were on a mission of intoxication like the frisbee people when I accompanied them. And people actually showed an interest in me, which was pretty refreshing. The frisbee people either felt awkward because I don't drink or just didn't really care I was there, but these folks at least took an interest. I had someone talking to me almost the whole time, while in Ames I resorted to looking blankly at my phone so people wouldn't think I wasn't so pathetic that I didn't have anything at all to do. Maybe it's just that people who play handball respect me because I'm good at that, while the frisbee folks had their group independent of me and didn't find a reason I should fit in. I'm just spit-balling. Either way, it wasn't a good enough use of my time to do it every week or anything, but at least it's reassuring to know that they'll make an effort and I won't be that weird guy not drinking, just watching and hoping the person I came with wants me to be there at some point.

As far as interesting cases go, in Torts we are talking about causation, a topic I have a real problem with philosophically. So I have to restrain myself from taking things out of a legal context when the courts are talking about what caused an injury. They adopt a "but for" definition of causation, which means that someone didn't cause an injury unless that injury wouldn't have happened "but for" the action of the person. So if someone got hit by a brick, then I'm responsible only if the brick would have otherwise not hit them had I not acted. Luckily, the courts still look at things given the totality of the circumstances, so even when they adopt what seems like a hard rule, they can rule however they want in the end. Causation seems to be disputed a lot when it comes to cancer, since two of the three or four cases we've talked about have had to do with that. I guess it's just that people still aren't sure about what does cause cancer, so those cases are necessarily hard enough to make interesting cases. In one case a person got injured by a window falling on him, which was certainly the fault of a hotel. Then he got cancer in the exact spot of the injury, and tried to recoup damages. The theory was that because healing flesh is more prone to be affected by radiation, the hotel's negligence led to the cancer. Now, in a "but-for" scenario, this actually makes a decent amount of sense, because if the hotel hadn't caused the injury it is likely he wouldn't have gotten cancer. But there's also the fact that if he would have protected his healing wound from radiation (we assume the cancer was caused by sun exposure or something), then he also wouldn't have gotten cancer. So it's probably more his fault than the hotel's. But in the case of a fire that wiped out a construction yard, even though the yard was going to be destroyed by a different oncoming forest fire, the people responsible for the fire were held responsible. In that case, the construction yard would have been wiped out anyway, so I'm not sure I agree that the people should have been found causally responsible. I don't disagree they should be punished for their negligent behavior, though, so I guess the court's interest in justice (preventing bad behavior in the future) trumps almost everything else.

I really do have to get going. This was a bit more time than I wanted to spend typing. I'm going to try and be more poetic after my quiz on Friday, but if it goes poorly brace yourself for some emotional poetry! Also, I'll be heading straight from class to my tournament, so that might not get up very promptly. And then I have a group project (though I am currently group-less (surprise!)), so we'll see. And another paper for legal writing due next week I haven't really done much for. One thing at a time! Thanks for reading!

My weekend, complete with complaints (self-reflection free of charge)!

So... I'm really bad at studying. I picked up the review materials, and all I could think was "I already know these things." Of course the difference between "knowing" and "having memorized" is the difference between getting a decent grade and a terrible grade, so that's obviously not good enough. I thought the days of rote memorization were over! (Insert more complaining here.)

What's that? More self-observations that obviously can't hold water because my perspective can't be separated sufficiently to provide any semblance of objectivity? You bet!

So, as most of these sections seem to start, I was talking with someone who doesn't like to see their name in my blog when somehow the subject of my annoying characteristics came up. After exhausting the standards (too removed and calculating, ultra-defensive, etc.), something a bit surprising came up. Apparently I am frustrating when I am nice, especially to my significant others. I didn't know what to say. I mean, I had noticed that trend, but I assumed it was just odd reactions on their part. How could they get mad at me for trying to do things for them? This theory was put forward, and it makes some sense, but I obviously can't say anything conclusive as I am far too close to the situation to be unbiased: I am a self-reliant, stoic-seeming sort of person. People in a relationship with me know this, and (according to my source) this makes them think I expect that of them. So when I do things for them (and they think I expect them to do things for themselves), that means I am saying they can't do something for themselves. So it becomes a sort of condescension. A "I am self-reliant, so you must be self-reliant, but here, let me do that for you since you obviously need help" sort of thing. I have been rebuked a fair number of times when trying to do little things like that, and it always puzzled me. The story about giving unwanted bicycling cautions springs to mind yet again, but so does a time in Toronto where I offered to throw away some trash and was harshly cut off with "I can do that myself!" Years and years ago the same thing happened with my first girlfriend, when I went out of my way to buy her a smoothie when I knew she had a bad day. She refused it, and got even more upset that I was trying to cheer her up. When I planned an elaborate valentines day it only got worse, and things ended soon after. It's nice to have a theory to work from at the very least, whether it's 100% accurate or not.

I had some time to think about this (I always seem to have time to think about these sorts of things. Sleep is overrated.) and I tried to figure out why I do things for other people at all. I mean, it's not like I think chivalry is even a good thing in and of itself! I don't think there's any inherent reason men should open doors for women, any reason we should pay for things, or whatever the stereotypical gentleman does (carry boomboxes back to dorm rooms, etc.). But when I was first starting a relationship, I was clueless. I didn't know what my role was, and I knew it made her smile when I did little things like that. So from then on, whenever an opportunity presented itself, I did the following little thought exercise: I asked myself if whatever it was would really be difficult for me to do. If the answer was no, then I just did it. So I open doors for people, even though I don't really think there's any reason to do so. Next, if it was something slightly inconvenient, I briefly weighed whatever it was against the probability of making the person happy while factoring in how much I cared about the person. (So if there was a moderate chance of making a person happy that I cared about, I would do something more inconvenient for myself than if there was a sure chance of making someone happy I cared less about.) So I bought things for people. I paid for things when I could, because I liked knowing they would appreciate it, and thought it far outweighed the inconvenience, even though I still didn't think it was my job or even something a person has to do even if they were trying to be a good person. I think being a good person goes way beyond things like that, and chivalry is uncalled for. But I did it anyway because it didn't really cost me anything I cared about relative to the effect I anticipated it having.

I don't know if this makes a lot of sense. If it does, perhaps it goes even more to explaining why people in a relationship with me start to resent me doing things for them, because if they know I'm just doing it because I expect them to appreciate it, it puts pressure back on them to acknowledge it or feel like they are slighting me in some way. Now, obviously I would say that is unnecessary, that as long as it makes them happier, it doesn't matter that they explicitly thank me, but I do recall many times where I used little things I did as examples for how I was putting effort into the relationship, when the whole premise was that I did those things because it didn't cost me hardly anything compared to the positive outcome that resulted. But when doing things stops even leading to positive outcomes, starts annoying the person I'm doing them for, then I am in for trouble. Not to say that's why my last relationship ended. I still don't have that figured out to my satisfaction. But it sure is interesting how other perspectives can spark crazy paradigm-altering realizations. Not that there's anything I can really do now. I'm not even sure if I would want to change. But that's a thing that would have to be discussed, I suppose, with whoever I had reason to discuss it with. For now, it's just another observation/fact/whatchamacallit to store away and reference if it becomes relevant.

This post picks up Friday, when I was planning on grocery shopping but missed my opportunity when the store closed earlier than I thought. So I was faced with the options of either biking a few more miles out of my way in the cold and rain, going home and eating nothing, or going home and eating peanut butter, or breaking my diet. So I went home and ate a bunch of cheese-stuffed pasta. It was delicious. Unfortunately, it was also the start of a slippery slope. I woke up early and went to the store so I could make breakfast. I had been looking for a good time to break a hundred dollar bill, but every time I go it feels like I'm in line with people who are using food stamps and stuff, not to mention the fact that there are always interesting-looking characters loitering outside. So I figured if I went early in the morning maybe there wouldn't be a crowd. This was sort of accurate, but the other side-effect of going early in the morning is that there isn't enough change in the drawer for a hundred, so the lady had to call her manager from the back to make change, which then made a line form behind me, which then meant all sorts of people were watching as she handed me a bunch of cash. I know I'm paranoid, and that there probably wasn't anything to be worried about in the first place, but it was still a bit of a relief to hear her do the exact same thing for the person two places behind me in line. It's sort of like when I'm biking on a busy road and I'm not sure the cars are going to be looking out for bicycles. I always feel better after I pass someone, because my brain goes "well, at least if they're going to hit a biker, it will probably be him before me, and if they see him, they'll at least be aware there's a possibility of seeing me later." So obviously nothing happened and I biked back to my apartment with my food where I made more egg and cheese biscuits. Those things are addictive, but I always make sure I have honey and strawberry preserves on the last biscuit. Who needs dessert when you can put that combination in your mouth? I killed time, because I was supposed to go to Midway where I'll be playing league at 11:30. Then a guy texted me at 10:30 saying there wasn't anyone to play and asked if I could make it. I said I was on my way, and then immediately went the wrong way. See, the location of the YMCA was a mystery, but I knew it was across the river on University, so I set out the way I normally go to class. That was somehow the opposite way I was supposed to go, so my route wound up being very circuitous. As a bonus, I now know where a few more of the major bike paths go. The network is pretty fantastic. If I want to take the most direct route between my place and Midway I can just bike down the major street (bike lane for most of it) near my house, and then turn onto University after I cross the river. But if I want to take bike paths I have that option too. Or if I start off the wrong way and have to double back there is a really nice one, where I found some skiers:

This is one aspect of my phone that I think is pretty awesome. You can access the camera at any time, and to take a picture you can just point the phone at the target and click the volume control on the headphones! So you don't have to worry about stabilizing the camera while also pressing the screen of the camera. You can just point and take pictures as fast as possible and hope one turns out! I did the same thing with some rowers I saw while I was biking over Mississippi river bridge in heavy traffic. I couldn't point the camera and also use my other hand to hit the camera button while directing its lens over my shoulder, but I sure could point it in the general direction with one hand and spam the volume control shutter button and cross my fingers. Of course, the rowers were still pretty far away, but if you know what you're looking for, you can pick them out:

I made it to handball only about five minutes later than I should have if I had gone the right way. I proceeded to play from 11:00 until 3:30. If all it takes to get better is spending a lot of time on the court, then I will be great at this sport in no time! Unfortunately, for the last hour I sure didn't feel like I was getting better. I just felt lazy, like my footwork was off and because I knew I could win without fixing it, I didn't bother. I really hope that doesn't become a bad habit... But anyway, there wasn't really anyone there close to my skill level, which I half-expected, but it was probably good to establish myself as a person who actually exists before just starting to play for them. So I played two games of cutthroat, two games of doubles, another game of cutthroat, and then sat out when old people wanted to play doubles (they offered, but I declined, not wanting to warp the game into something crazy where the objective is just not to hit it to me). Then I played doubles with those same old guys when no better option presented itself. While I was sitting out a lawyer (one of many) came up to me and opened with "I heard you're going to law school; what do I need to do to talk you out of that?" I was surprised, and then realized: "Oh, don't worry, I'm on scholarship, so I'm not stupid." He seemed relieved. I got the feeling he had a whole speech prepared about how I didn't really need a law degree to do the things I wanted to do. But it turns out I'm incredibly lucky, so it's all good.

Most people had left the building at that point, but there was still a father-son duo looking for doubles, so I stuck around and played with whoever else didn't mind. That lasted three more games with two more partners, and that was the part where I stopped really caring and just hit whatever from whatever position. Sloppy. Then I biked home, and since I had biked the wrong way there, I was surprised to realize my route took me right past some amazing restaurants. And it's not even like I know what good restaurants around here are. I've been to like three total, but the best pizza I've had was at a place on this route, and I came incredibly close to stopping. I told myself I didn't need to spend money on that when I had just bought groceries, but in reality I should have just stopped. I was starving, it sounded amazing, and I don't really eat pizza because it's usually after 5:00 by the time I would want it, or it looks really greasy. I'm stopping next time, and that's that.

I went home intent on studying. Or rather, I went home resigned to studying. As mentioned above, that didn't work out. Instead, I alternated between falling asleep out of boredom and looking over notes wondering why I needed to memorize things I felt I already knew conceptually. Then I told myself I would just do a good job the next day.

The next day, as surprising as this may seem, was not any more appealing than the previous. Plus, it was raining and cold out. This would have been a great reason to stay inside and study, but there was frisbee to be played, so I departed on bike and arrived already damp. It stayed decently tolerable for the first half and a bit of the second, and then it actually started raining and things got even sloppier than my handball. Plus, my arm was quite tired from handball the day before, and while I know throwing is almost all wrist, I just couldn't get it to go more than fifty yards without turning over and blading down into my receiver. We won 16 or 17-3. Also, one guy on my team decided he could just throw it to me whenever he wanted and I would catch it, which was pretty freaking awesome. I would be covered and he'd just put it up anyway, and because I was playing against people who didn't quite know what was going on, I got some pretty sweet highlight reel catches. There's nothing to build a short guy's self-esteem like skying taller players at frisbee, no matter how bad they are.

I returned home drenched and ambivalent about studying. Also, while I knew to be cautious about the fruit at Aldi, it hit home again recently when I bought pears. They were on the green side, I admit. I figured they'd ripen eventually and it would be fine. I had bananas too, so I'd eat those first and by the time they were gone the pears would be ready. Nope! The pears started turning fuzzy WHILE STILL GREEN. Stupid pears. So I am eating crunchy pears. Crunchy, moldy pears. Delightful.

When I write or study I like to listen to classical music. It keeps me focused, blocks out distractions, and doesn't distract me like music with lyrics does. Interestingly, though I know almost nothing about classical music, I do know what I don't like. I don't like violin concertos. Do you know how many violin concertos there are? Too many. Way too many. As far as I can tell, it's violin concertos all the way down. (Turtles got nothin' on violin concertos (extra points for recognizing the reference).) But I do have a couple of composers I like. It's even gotten to the point where I can recognize them most of the time! The guy I made a pandora station of a while ago is Edouard Lalo. Unfortunately, you know what else he composed other than sweet orchestral arrangements that get me pumped up and ready to write? You guessed it. Stupid violin solos/concertos/garbage.

That's all for tonight. I have to eat and read some, and maybe even study for that quiz. Thanks for reading!

PS: I also passed this guy:

I'm not trying to knock him. I think he's awesome. Just wanted to share because it made me grin. Later!

Oh crap, I forgot some stuff!

So I foreshadowed my dietary difficulties earlier in the post and then forgot to mention the fact that I went to a lunch meeting today where they served unlimited pasta with chicken and pesto and/or tomato sauce with sausage. I had three helpings, which by itself is more than I should have had, and then they offered dessert. I haven't had trouble declining dessert recently, but this time they said it came with the opportunity to score more points (redeemable for amazon gift cards), so I needed at least the sticker on the packaging. So I got some cookies and then I realized the points they were offering were just the same as the points offered via promotional emails, but by then it was too late. I ate the cookies, and boy how I've missed sugar! Usually I fall asleep in torts (or close to it), but I felt awake for the whole thing. Maybe that's where the dessert idea came from. There's that inevitable post-meal crash, but the temporary sugar jolt gets you over the hump just long enough so that the only crash you get is the one coming down off the sugar (perhaps less?) I don't know. All I know is that I got paid around $15 in amazon gift cards to eat pasta for 45 minutes today. My plan was then to go home and nap, but Brian texted me to play handball, so I did that on a too-full stomach instead. Tomorrow is another lunch meeting, and then handball again, and then I promised the handball people I'd go out with them... So I guess there's that. And now I have homework. So I guess there's that too. Thanks again!

Some stuff and some pictures

Desperation breeds creativity.

I am almost never desperate. I think I've gotten to the point where I don't stress that much over things (yes, this statement is too general and there are plenty of exceptions; let's keep it in context), and this has led to this problem where I don't feel like I'm brimming with creativity. I usually just assume things will work out. I also think it contributes to my procrastination. That feeling of desperation, that knowledge that I have to think on the fly and be correct the first time is quite appealing. This weekend will be a test for me, I think, because I have resolved to read sections of the USC until my eyes bleed. I have my second quiz on Friday for Civil Procedure, and now that I know it's all memorization and not based on theory or case law, I will prepare accordingly. It's annoying that I am still being tested on things in this manner, but I suppose when it comes to procedural guidelines, there might not be a much better way. It doesn't really matter why the guidelines exist so much as it matters that you know all the applicable laws and the ways they interact. There are so many ways to get a case thrown out of court! It's crazy.

So after I play handball on Saturday, that's my plan. I'm going to curl up with a nice book (a really bad book) and a nice glass of cocoa (orange juice) and wile away the day (try as hard as possible to not use my phone every five minutes to distract myself). I've actually been doing that a bit recently, though. On my way back from Fargo I only had my civil procedure book, my phone, and my iPad for entertainment, and my phone was low on batteries. Then I remembered that when I was in Toronto I had a lot of time on my hands without internet. Fascinatingly enough, there are these things called "fiction books" that people have been using for entertainment for quite some time, and I still had the next book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series that I hadn't finished on my iPad. So I read. And you know what, it was great. It's almost like I used to do that all the time of my own volition for a reason.

The only interesting thing that has happened in Civil Procedure recently is that one of the defendants in a case was... Valley West Mall! From West Des Moines, Iowa. In the 70's. Unfortunately the case itself was really boring again, but at least I'll remember it. Don't worry, I'll tell you all about it so you can be as bored as I am! So the mall told a jewelry store they wouldn't allow any more than three jewelry stores in the mall. Then they were about to let a fourth jewelry store in the mall. Then the original jewelry store sued Valley West. Valley West tried to use a rule 19 defense, saying that the first jewelry store had to also sue the last jewelry store because of a technicality. Then the court said that that technicality didn't apply, because it would be stupid for them to also have to sue that last jewelry store (which would have gotten the case thrown out on jurisdictional grounds). The rule basically says that you have to sue everyone involved in a particular matter at the same time. Because Valley West losing this case would have direct consequences on their contract with the last jewelry store, they tried to claim that party was essential to the case. The court told them that it was none of the court's business that they had been irresponsible in entering into two stupid contracts at once. So Valley West Mall relied on a technicality as their sole means of defense and lost when that didn't work. Silly Iowans...

I'm watching Day[9] play a video game called Mirror's Edge while I write this. It's a game where you play a parkour runner and you die really easily (which means realistically (which makes it very distinct from most video games)). It looks fun, but it's also sort of distracting when he's falling off buildings all the time.

I made biscuits for breakfast on Wednesday!




They were delicious. The box said to leave them in the oven for 10-12 minutes, and I just opened the oven and they were perfectly done. And came off the pan perfectly! No spatula or anything required! They crumble really easily, but I managed to cut some in half and make egg and cheese sandwiches (last picture). (I took that picture before desecrating it with sriracha.) So I had two and a half biscuits with eggs and cheese, half of one with butter, and one with strawberry preserves and honey. Then I packed two with butter for lunch, and ate the last when I got back from school. An entire (almost) day's worth of food! They are so versatile too! They go with any dish, and about any topping. It's cool to be able to put rich food on them or sweet stuff, or just whatever. For instance, this morning I made them again due to lack of other options, and I put maple syrup on them. I figured it was still just pancake mix in a different form, and sure enough: delicious.

While we're on the subject of food, I guess I'll mention that I am completely out of it. All that's left is pasta and biscuit/pancake mix. Yesterday I ate the last of my tuna and, well, basically everything else. And peanut butter. Just plain peanut butter. Which I was eating with a fork, obviously.



Yesterday at handball there was a new guy. He was pretty athletic-looking and asked for a game. Everyone was getting ready to leave to watch hockey, so I said I'd stick around (a good excuse not to go out? don't mind if I do!) and give him a game. He said it was his last day of working out before the twin cities marathon this weekend. I tried not to win too easily, and found myself down 10-2 or something after not paying much attention. I served five or six aces in a row to put myself back in it and wound up winning 21-17 after trading points most of the rest of the time. He got out of the court and immediately laid down and made a show of catching his breath. I had been there for five hours at this point (granted, there are a lot of breaks between matches when people are feeling lazy (they are generally feeling lazy)). I asked why he didn't come more often and he cited his participation in break dance club, parkour, some sort of martial art, and the marathon, as well as night class. Quite a list. He's like 6'3" or taller, so I know one person I don't want to ever fight ever. He reminds me of this time a freshman showed up to our frisbee practice and was obviously just completely ripped. He was terrible at frisbee, but he was a shoe-in for if frisbee ever spontaneously morphed into a gladiator competition. This prompted a debate about our best seven players if we ever had to throw a gladiator line on the field. Frisbee was fun. Anyway, this new handball guy basically just is our gladiator line for handball. Luckily, handball players in general are a collection of people who would make terrible gladiators.

While I'm still thinking about handball, I figured I'd mention a nice little side effect of being good at something: I can wear whatever I want without people making fun of me! Nobody picks on the guy who just beat the other guy 21-2, 21-4 or whatever, even if his clothes don't fit. So with that in mind, this is what I wore to Fargo:

A women's large Great Britain frisbee jersey and Japanese shorts. I felt so foreign! And you can't see, but my shoes are also blue, and my socks are white and red. Just for good measure. I even brought along two pullovers, my grey one and my colorbiotics longsleeve warmup. The cycling warmup is actually awesome for handball because I can listen to music without having something flopping around in my pocket against my legs (because the pockets are in the back of cycling gear (for those who think I talk too much about sports and can't follow along (Sarah))). And that is white and red. So I was either a baller, or a huge jock-looking jerk...

I got to talk to Sarah for a decent chunk of time today finally, which was fantastic. And while I was doing that (since I can't really focus on typing and talking at the same time), I uploaded the pictures here. Then I got bored and got on facebook and unfriended a bunch of people I never talk to anymore. I dropped from 130-ish friends back down into double digits. It's weird which people you don't actually keep in contact with. And also weird which ones I still consider close enough that I might have to contact them again at some point. And which ones post interesting things to facebook enough that I don't want to unfriend them even though we obviously aren't friends anymore (or never were). Those were my basic criteria. It basically fell into the obvious groups of frisbee, handball, and magic, with a very few remnants of high school (and even fewer when you realize that most of those are also subsumed into the other categories). I remember that a lot of these people I added a while ago because I wanted to post a blog entry on my facebook and I wanted to get some more people to read it, and those were some people that were suggested by facebook that I actually didn't mind talking to, but now that this is basically just my journal, there's not really a reason to push for readership. I guess I could post my poetry blog up there every once in a while if I think I've written anything good...

Well, I have to post this and go grocery shopping, because unless I want a dinner of only peanut butter, I am in desperate need of food. Then tomorrow morning I will get my first look at the club I'm playing league for later this month! I'll try and get another something posted here about the weekend (and another poem), but hopefully I'm forcing myself to learn civil procedure for some non-negligible amount of time. Thanks for reading!

I don't really have anything to say

I was going to go home because I didn't really have anything to say. Then it turned out I forgot my keys in the computer, so now I'm here anyway, so I feel like I might as well post. But I still don't really have anything to say...

There are light switches on the end of every book shelf in our library.

My commute is one constitutional conversation long.

The characters on Bones keep saying VIN number. This is incredibly frustrating. It's a vehicle identification number number! Like ATM machines, HIV virus, PIN numbers, and other examples of RAS syndrome (redundant acronym syndrome syndrome).

In contracts we are talking more about enforcing promises, and in torts we are establishing the fact that being a doctor is the worst idea ever. We must have talked about at least five malpractice cases recently, and doctors just don't have it easy where the law is concerned. For example, doctors are sued for mistakes all the time, but what makes them liable in a tort is their failure to meet a standard established by others in their profession behaving reasonably. This seems reasonable, right? But in this case where a young-ish lady had glaucoma, her doctors didn't perform the necessary test to figure that out because in their profession that test wasn't required for people less than 40 years old. So they didn't do it, and then she sued them. The court found they were still guilty because the test is painless, so doing it incurs no risk to the patient. So even though they were operating at the standard that was nationally accepted, they were still found guilty because the court decided to increase that standard (seemingly arbitrarily).

This is also a problem for me because it's not as though there is no reason at all to refrain from performing the test. I'm sure the test costs something to perform, and the incidence rate of glaucoma in young people is minuscule, so unless every other young person agrees they want to have this test performed and to pay for it, I'm not sure asserting these doctors did anything wrong. If the court said they should have realized the necessity for the test from symptoms presented or something along those lines, I could see how that would point to negligent behavior, but what they said in their ruling was they "had a choice between finding for an innocent victim of glaucoma or specialized doctors," and they couldn't bring themselves to rule against a victim they knew was innocent, so they went the other direction.

There is an interesting note in my book with which I am sympathetic as well. It basically questions how we justifiably blame doctors. Firstly, the fact that you can't even find them guilty except for negligence is telling. It is just assumed that you can't sue a doctor for intentionally harming patients. By the very nature of their profession they are trying to help, so negligence is the only way to go about taking them to court. Taking this one step further, is it perhaps incorrect to hold them negligent in most situations? In order for negligence to be viable, you must prove a person had a duty, they breached that duty, and that there is a causal relationship between the breach of duty and the harm that resulted. But the book points out that this causation can be questioned, because is it really the doctor that is causing the harm, or is it the disease (or whatever their problem is), which is certainly not the fault of the doctor. The patient wouldn't be in the situation, obviously, if there wasn't something already wrong with them, and we are already willing to stipulate that doctors only want to help. Maybe court cases are actually good at sorting this out, generally, but, like my professor said, "we don't deal with the easy cases." So I suppose my perception could be warped by the stuff to which I'm exposed.

Another topic we are dealing with is what standard to apply when talking about a reasonable expert in a profession. Obviously we want to compare doctors to doctors, but what about cases where doctors just don't have the same access to technology, resources, or other necessary equipment? Do we hold the hospitals liable for not having enough funds, because a person could die for lack of a machine for sure. Originally the courts applied a standard of care that looked at people in similar positions, so a rural doctor would only be judged by his performance relative to other rural doctors. However, this presented major problems in that rural doctors could then get away with anything by just all deciding not to do a particular thing. Or by not testifying against each other if something went wrong. So now we use a national standard, which seems appropriate, but again, if we hold Hicksburg Community Hospital to the same level as Mayo Clinic, we are probably doing something wrong. It's a tough line to draw. Luckily, the court is supposed to look at the totality of the circumstances, and these "rules" can be explained by judges in ways that are supposed to uphold fairness, but that's not a perfect system by any means.

Well, I've watched all the new TV shows, and I am hungry. And I need to read a bit more stuff. And while I could perhaps do that here, for some reason it goes faster when I'm not in front of a computer. Until I get out my phone, of course.

I'm surprised at how little I miss a TV. I only really miss watching football (and probably other sporting events in other seasons), but it's really not a huge loss. I guess you just adapt to whatever you have. I am glad I found this computer lab though.

I played handball tonight, though it was mostly just for fun, since I was never really challenged. I can't wait for league to start later this month so I can be guaranteed a solid match at least once a week. It's pretty cool that I'm incredibly confident playing any of the people at the University though, since when I got here I readily acknowledged they were better than my previous competition, and now I'm beating them with scores similar to what I was winning with in Ames. I beat David 21-3 today, for example, and he's not a bad player by any means. I think I also adapt well to my opponent once I play them a few times, though, so it doesn't really help when you go into a match blind. Hopefully I can just get enough experience among different players here that I'll always have an analogous style to draw upon when I'm thinking about what will work against a brand new opponent.

Music Interrupted

I was expecting your call
while the rapper in my ear
rhymed seamless rhythm
quick and smooth
then halted.

And so did my breath
catch
my pulse
pause
as I snatched, possessive
and began to answer
already forming words
trembling
tongue-tipped
teetering.

I was ready to gush
ready to pour out
exuberance
over the slightest hint
overflowing the bowl
as your pittance
your single cornflake
doused in milk
dissolved
and dipped
over the edge
drained down the sink
as my words fell fruitless
filled excuseless
and meant all the less for it.

And then the rapper
resumed
his hitch a glitch
and I thanked the shoddy
spotty internet
for showing me my sham.

A long time ago in a galaxy as close as possible to this one (And by a long time ago I mean last week, which is a long time ago if you're a short-lived insect or something. Probably. Unless that's not how time is perceived. Because there's nothing to say that just because a thing lives less time that it perceives it as passing at a different rate. Although it certainly feels as though life passes more quickly as we get older (seasons seem to go by instead of individual months these days)), I fell asleep at 7:00 or 8:00. I had set my alarm for four hours in the future, because I wanted to be awake for Sarah's call from California to hear about her big tests, and I needed to do my laundry before my tournament. I woke up about ten hours later. I'm blaming iOS 7, the new download that made my phone ugly and is obviously conspiring against my alarm. I really need to start looking into these downloads! At least there are good features on this one, like a one-touch access to my flashlight, clock, calculator, volume, wireless, bluetooth, orientation lock, etc. But the display is sort of gross. Anyway, I made a pancake (with a moderate degree of success, still multiple pieces after flipping, but done to the point of deliciousness, and only two or three pieces instead of a million), and got my laundry done. It turned out that the washing machines were much smaller than I'm used to (I wonder if they're trying to make money off of that idea), so I did two loads simultaneously. Then I pulled out all of my stuff that dries quickly on its own and threw the rest in the drier. Then there was a lot of space in the drier. So I threw the rest in too! What a good deal. Two loads of laundry for the price of one drying cycle. Then it came out and it was all a bit damp. So I hauled it all back to my room, turned my fan on, and laid it out all over my bed, drawer handles, baskets, boxes, refrigerator, cupboards, sink, etc. I was particularly proud of one mechanism I devised whereby I looped the drawstring for my shorts through the handle of the refrigerator so it would hang at a different height than the stuff already on there, then stuck a fork through the drawstring to hold it in place, then stuck a pair of underwear on the fork. MacGyver's got nothing on me.

Then I did homework for a couple of hours (briefing cases for constitutional law and wishing I were dead rather than reading civil procedure). Because I was up for so long before class I actually didn't have any trouble staying awake. It was pretty cool. And then when I got back I ate a bunch and slept in the car on the way to the tournament. Oh, and I guess I haven't mentioned that I also played handball on Thursday. I lost a game to Brian, then beat him 21-0. It was pretty epic. He didn't even bother playing a tiebreaker. Then I played with the rest of the players (nobody else was very good, but I played for fun and made sure not to injure myself before my tournament) and called it a night a bit earlier than usual. Then the weekend happened, which I've already talked about. Then today happened, which was pretty typical except I had to decide between staying here and going to a lecture, staying here and not going to a lecture, going home and coming back, going home and studying, or some other options that probably existed. I opted to go home, but then realized I needed to mail my entry for next weekend in, so I wound up leaving so I could get that in the mail before 5:00. I got to eat dinner though, so I arrived set and ready to blog for hours. Then House of Cards got distracting (a guy actually died as the result of politics (and murder, I suppose (probably mostly died of murder))), and it took me a long time to write that last post. And now I'm just cleaning out the notes I've made in my phone since I last posted. With that in mind, here's a machine-gun style account of a few of them:

I bought pork chops the other day. I don't usually buy pork because for some reason the idea of eating pigs is less appealing than the idea of eating cows and chickens. Then it turned out I don't like pork chops. It also turns out they are amazing with asian plum sauce. Go figure. So pork exists only insofar as there is plum sauce in my book. (Hot dogs aren't pork, for the record. They are a category all their own, and they are alternatingly delicious and repulsive. But when I'm in the mood for one, it's fantastic.)

I had a choice between pickle varieties a while ago. There were the classic "Kosher Dills," which I habitually grabbed and put in the receptacle. Then, I saw them. For the exact same PPO (price per ounce, for the less obsessively frugal (and less obsessively acronymistic)), I could purchase Polish Dills. I could not resist. I simply had to know what mystery these pickles held inside their bumpy, yet crispy exteriors. What were the Jewish people afraid of? Or were they simply impolite? My interest was piqued. (Spoiler alert: there is absolutely no difference.)

I was talking to Greg about our backgrounds coming into law. He's from the hard sciences (biomedical engineering), and I'm from the opposite. He said it was annoying how vague things seemed with the law, how there wasn't a right answer, and that frustrated him somewhat. I, on the other hand, find it a relief. The clarity is a fantastic change of pace from philosophy. The judges writing the opinions actively want you to know what they are saying! In philosophy it was a guessing game half the time to even get at the point, much less the conclusion (if there was one). And in philosophy you don't even need to be making "a point." You can simply be making an observation about something in a different way than is conventional, showing a new viewpoint but not drawing conclusions for it/from it yet. In law, they have to give a verdict. There is a reason they use to support their verdict, and they need to be sure they set a clear precedent. So while each side may have a compelling argument, at least there is an outcome! I think that's why I'm finding this so easy (except for civil procedure, which is nothing like philosophy). I walk past my section-mates at least once a day on my way to the library computer lab. They have their own table staked out in the library and there's always at least five of them (though which five varies (except for Elliot)) if not ten studying. Some of them wave, and I come in here for hours, but I haven't cracked a book really. I do almost all my reading either right before class or between classes.Then again, I did bomb that quiz... It's one of those things where you wonder if you should be reevaluating.

In Fargo there was an entire, huge warehouse building that looked sort of weird. Then we drove alongside it and in huge letters it said "CURLING CLUB." There is an entire club for that. In Fargo. I can't decide whether or not to be surprised.

Also in Fargo, there was a Roosevelt Elementary made of old brick walls. It was actually a bit nostalgia-invoking, especially considering the last time I was by my old elementary the play structure had been torn down and the fence had been moved and it didn't look like a place kids should ever want to go.

South Wind

My inhalations deepen
the addictive, fulsome smell
cannot be teased, experienced halfway
after crossing the highway
trading the exhaust of a too-close car
for the mellow yeastiness
of new-brown bread
delivered from the oven
with the care of an obstetrician
cradling its crackled crust
and overwhelmed by its freshness.

I can taste its sweetness
the southern breeze,
which when strong enough,
wings wondrous smells
fresh from the ovens,
released from swinging entrances
one succoring, wheaty, exhalation at a time.
Persistent, refreshing, yet insecure,
at the whim of the wind.

Which can switch back from bread
to bearing the stench of downtown's honking
hideousness
like the bread itself
laced with the smell of honey
departed downtown-bound
in big white trucks
yet whose syrupy reminder molds
on my microwave
uneaten, now inedible.

Some explanation for you and so when I go back and edit I can remember what I was going for:

First stanza:

New-brown bread = new born child
fresh from the mother = oven, easy analogy

second stanza:
focuses on sounds, assonance to mimic wind
experience of being intrigued by the new discovery, fickleness of attraction = direction of wind

Third stanza:
reality check, wind does change, bread shipped elsewhere

I bike back from school every day, and when the wind is out of the south, the bakery smells absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, this amazing smell is also identical to the smell of the bread Rebecca used to make, so it's this crazy association game my nose gets to play every time the wind blows a particular direction. So I wrote the poem as a rough analogy for a few things. It's funny, because bread does go bad in my possession because I don't actually eat it for any of my meals. Breakfast is cold cereal, oatmeal, pancakes, or eggs, lunch is pasta or salad or sometimes a sandwich, but most often skipped, and dinner has no carbs (usually meat and fruit/veggies). So I eat a couple of slices of bread a week. So the bread is both a person and the relationship in the poem. The newly-spawned intrigue of getting to know someone, the insecurity of not knowing what's coming, but the deliciousness of anticipation, and the eventual death as it rots away in my possession. Needs work, but hey, it's one less note in my phone. Thanks for reading!

The disappointing weekend that still turned out okay

So I went to Fargo on Friday, got out of the car, warmed up for ten minutes, and proceeded to lose in embarrassing fashion to the second seed of the tournament. I need to learn my lesson. Games were to 17, I wasn't familiar with the courts, my opponent cheated, and I'm sure there are more excuses I could come up with, but the truth is, as usual in the case of individual sports, I lost because I didn't play as well as I should have. I made error after error, and it sucked a lot. That was one thing, but the worst thing was the fact that my opponent told me I was playing well, and lots of people were impressed with my shoddy performance. It was almost unbearable. Mat and I played doubles later that night (scheduled for 10:30, but we started a bit before that), and I was able to take out my frustration pretty successfully on our opponents. In the first game we played pretty strictly on our sides (him on the left, me on the right), and we won 17-11 or so. The in the second game I took over and basically hit every shot. We went up 5-0 right away, then 14-0 on my next time serving, and won 17-1 in rather spectacular fashion. My strategy was to park myself at the front and hit everything I could get to. It turns out I can get to a lot. It was like they thought I was getting lucky, because they just kept driving it at me, and I kept reflex-volleying it into the corners. "Surely he won't hit this one." Well I did. And don't call that person Shirley. In one of the last points Mat hit a pass shot down the wall I was on, so I jumped over the ball, then the guy right behind me killed it in the opposite corner, but I had started diving as soon as I hit the ground and got there. The guy just shook his head and glanced back at where I was (last he knew), a bit skeptical.

So that was fun, but mostly just a venting of frustration. Nothing came close to making up for my poor play off the bat though, so I was still fighting a bit of underlying unhappiness while distracting myself fairly successfully by bantering with my carmates. That is, until I learned that Rebecca would be sharing a car for her ten hour trip back for Thanksgiving with the guy she cheated on me with (twice). I'm not supposed to care about that probably. But I do, obviously. So that's a thing. I watched some magic videos on my phone after the girls turned out the lights and eventually fell asleep to the lulling sounds of obese people cursing their misfortune.

The next morning the four of us went to breakfast, which I skipped in favor of the free food at the tournament site. They had yogurt! So I had a couple bananas and a couple yogurts. I won my singles match 17-0, 17-2. Very few highlights. A mercy killing, basically. Then the tournament had a rarity happen. The matches got ahead of schedule, and we were all left with some free time on our hands, so I challenged the one seed to a game. Neither of us were giving 100% probably, since we were about to play doubles. I lost 19-21, but I felt pretty confident I had figured some stuff out I could use if we ever played for real. It reinforced in my head the fact that we should be the two duking it out in the finals. Mat and I lost our doubles match, but I feel confident in saying it wasn't my fault. The game we won was because Mat finally got back a good number of serves and I took over the front court, but we lost the tiebreak when they managed to get the ball at him more consistently.

At some point Kristina decided she was angry at Mat, which made things awkward for the rest of the trip. Apparently her mood changes about things daily if not more frequently. For instance, when I mentioned I wasn't going out with the group a few weeks ago, she said she didn't drink, and I countered with I didn't eat carbs after 5:00, and she re-raised with the fact she was on a diet like that too. Well, needless to say it has been more than a day since those claims were raised.

We went to a banquet after the matches on Saturday, and it started off pretty cool. There was a tab at the bar, but the fact I wasn't drinking seemed to slow down my tablemates. They got chocolate shakes instead of alcohol, which was actually much more tempting and distracting than alcohol would have been, since while I've never had alcohol, you can bet I've had more than my fair share of chocolate binges. We waited for quite a while for the restaurant to clear out of normal patrons so our banquet thing could get underway. In that time, two guys made their way to our table and started not-so-subtly hitting on the girls. One of them was still under 21, but loved to talk about how much he could drink. Of course, his ideas of interesting topics of conversation were incredibly age-appropriate (which of course means immature), and he was being secretly mocked. Well, not so much secretly as obliviously. Also, the girls kept texting each other about him, a few of which Jessica showed me. Another application of the ubiquity of cellphones, I suppose. Amusing until you wonder what they are saying about you.

The food was terrible. Refried black beans, dry-looking rice, deep-fried doughy pseudo-mexican things, and salad. Nothing I really wanted to eat, but I ate anyway because I wasn't about to go spend money when I had already paid for this stuff with my entry fee. Then there was the raffle. Again, my poverty convinced me I shouldn't partake in what looked like the more fun option. Tickets were pretty cheap and they had a TON of stuff to give away. With every item that went out to the crowd, a brief flurry of bartering took place. Jerseys, t-shirts, towels, and other clothing items were thrown around like confetti, and the obvious trend was that if a person was in college, they were looking to trade anything they got that wasn't alcohol for something that was alcoholic. There were only six or seven things I would have wanted anyway, so it's probably best I didn't buy any tickets, but if I would have gotten a jersey from worlds in Ireland (of which there were two), or this really cool jersey that was a combination of the Irish flag and an american flag/eagle I would have been thrilled. It was pretty awesome looking, and I have no idea where it came from or how to get one. I do take some solace in the fact that I will have an Irish jersey from frisbee worlds at some point in the future. A couple of guys with too much money had bought a ton of tickets and distributed them to those without, so between the three people whose company I was in, there were a total of eight bottles of wine by the end of the night. I even walked away with a new pair of gloves and some R48 handballs (a different brand I've been wanting to try), so I guess it wasn't a bad night. We got back to the hotel and didn't have a corkscrew, which was obviously fine with me. Yet again, my not drinking resulted in a sober night. We still managed to stay up too late, though.

There's a saying in Buddhism that if you meet the Buddha on the road you should kill it/him. This has been taken to mean that if you think you know yourself or that you have achieved enlightenment, you must immediately discard those assumptions and start from scratch. I'm pretty bad at that. I feel like I've been building a huge network of beliefs my entire life, and to admit I don't know anything (though it seems more and more likely that is the case) is a step I'll probably never be able to take, as nice as the theory sounds. This goes back to the thing I said the other day about not really thinking about people as entities of their own. There is a difference between knowing a thing and acting upon it. We all know abstractly that the sun is huge and we are moving around it, but it doesn't stop us from saying the sun comes up in the morning. I doubt we really think about what's actually the case. If we thought about how things actually work rather than how they appear to work or how they function in our lives, then we would be so bogged down (and overwhelmed at the same time) we wouldn't be able to do what we want with our lives. How are we supposed to worry about which pens to buy when just a few thousand miles away an endless vacuum waits to consume us into it's entropic demise? It's like this video If we thought about how insignificant we are, even compared with the scale of humanity, much less the scale of the universe, how could we be expected to keep it all in our heads? I struggle with things like that a lot. Objectively, I know it's pointless, but I can't really stop. So I fall asleep with my phone in my hand and a video playing.

So when it comes to people, I already know on some level I can't understand myself or the simple facts of the world around me, much less the motives driving the person next to me. Again, using objectivity, I know perfectly well they are as complex as I am. They have as many motives (well-reasoned or not, conflicting or not, subconscious or not) as I do, but if I can't even fully comprehend all of my reasons, can't figure out why I can hold two conflicting beliefs and not explode, how can I think of anyone the way they "deserve?" Can anyone? I actually don't think so. I think the best we can do is admit that we can't know. We can predict. I "know" what my friends will do. I "know" how they will react. I know these things based on our shared history, how they have behaved in the past, the things they've told me that motivate them, but "knowing" someone and truly thinking about them in their entirety as a person seem too disparate to put on the same scale. I can act "knowing" it will bring a smile, and be happy I made them happy, but I can't say I did it while treating them as an individual. I did it because I had good reason to think it would elicit a particular response and that would lead to future pleasantness for me in that we would both express pleasantness.

This is getting a bit twisted and repetitive. I think about stuff like this at the oddest times, so there are notes all over my phone about it. I have notes about groceries with little things at the bottom about how I still don't comprehend what I'm doing with my food, how it's still results-based and biased because for all I know I want it to work and am really losing weight due to portion control. I have notes of unfinished (and unstarted) poems that slide headlong into tangents of how the universe responds to us trying to figure it out. How we are chasing the wonder out of the world gradually under the guise of science, and yet it still persists in the oddest ways, with the silly equations not quite balancing, or the discovery that gravity may not be as constant as we thought. And then there are the simpler poems, the notes that are designed to prompt silly little anecdotes. Those will be in the next post.

For now, let me tell you how my weekend still turned out okay (because I wrote the title before the entry this time, and have been full-bore out of control for a while now): I won my consolation match 21-2, 21-9, making some of the best gets and shots I've ever made. I played better than I needed to by far, actually. It turned out that the guy's left hand was actually pretty bad if you got the ball above his waist, but I was too busy killing and re-killing it to figure that out until the end of the match when my shoulder felt like it was coming apart. I had a point where he passed me on my left, I ran back and dug it off the back wall between my legs and immediately started sprinting for the front, where he killed it only to have me dive past him and keep it in play, at which point he missed due entirely to shock. Multiple times I got just my fingertips on the ball and rolled it out. I felt good. And I won a handball for my troubles, which is approximately one handball more than consolation winners usually get. On the drive back I even got a sandwich and a cup of soup. Total spent on the weekend: $10.00. Oh, and $10.00 for gas. Worth it. Mankato tournament in two weeks. No excuses next time. All focus, and I'm going to play a game for real as warm-up. Except they only have four courts. But I'm going to try!

Thanks for reading!

Another night without sleep

I just finished my first real legal writing piece! And, on a related note, I also just finished the first eight episodes of House of Cards. I'm pretty happy with both. Well worth the sleep lost. If you feel like reading what I wrote, just skip past the break. It's pretty dry, and I'll admit I did it mostly just to get it done, but I'm eager to see what sort of criticisms it receives.

Also, I can't figure out how to put text after the link to the rest of the post, so here's my "thanks for reading!" in advance. And also my PS: I saw a Delorean on the street yesterday. And in a confusing contradiction, it had the letters TARDIS written on the back window. Two cult classic forms of time travel referenced in the fleeting span of a couple seconds!

Random stuff

I don't have much to say other than my normal daily activity updates. You already know about Saturday morning, and it turns out the rest of that day was mostly just me sleeping. It turns out that when I don't have anything better to do and I wind up horizontal, terrible things ensue. I must have woken up three times and thought to myself I have had plenty of sleep, I should start doing things. And then I didn't. I think I lost a bit too much motivation when I knew I did that poorly on my quiz. But eventually I made it to frisbee on Sunday, with very little happening in the intervening time. Unfortunately, nothing really awesome happened at frisbee. I did have one pretty ridiculous sky, but it loses something in the retelling because I know the person I skied probably wasn't very good anyway. It was sort of cool though, because I went up for it pretty early, and then it got caught a bit by the wind and hovered a little longer. In what the press is calling a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, I had jumped even higher than I needed and barely got a hold of the disc before beginning my descent. Or maybe I got high enough that the guy underneath me supported my weight briefly. Either way, it felt awesome. (I'm going to gloss over the part where I threw really, really poorly (blaming it on my sore shoulder from handball) because it turned out that almost every time I turned it over, I wound up getting the D back. It was actually really funny, because I know I'm not good at D, but my intramural teammates have no clue. Yay for low standards!)

Yesterday I got my quiz back, and it turned out I did even worse than I thought, so that was pretty awful. It's even more frustrating, because I sit in class and shake my head and facepalm when my classmates just can't get to the conclusion the teacher is fishing for, but I also know the person saying wrong thing after wrong thing probably got a better score than I did on the quiz. I know it's hard to believe, me being level-headed and totally noncompetitive, but it actually does get under my skin a bit. I didn't really do much else yesterday. Which explains why I didn't post here, I suppose. I did have a nice talk with Sarah S, which was especially awesome because she hadn't talked to me on the weekend and I was sure she would be too busy studying for her huge tests she said she had this week, but she made time for it and I was very grateful. (I know she's reading, so I just wanted to emphasize.) I'm probably pretty obviously hard up for company, so an apology in advance to all the people I'm bound to annoy while avoiding getting to know people here.

One thing Sarah said was that she was surprised about how much I had written and how hard I seemed to take the break-up. I forget exactly how she put it, but the gist of it was that I didn't seem invested/committed/in it for the long haul, at least to her. I said I was also surprised how hard it hit me. I had been bracing for it for a while, since it was obvious things weren't going well and I couldn't think of what to do. But maybe that was also part of the problem. When I said that I didn't think it mattered at that point since Rebecca hadn't felt attracted to me for quite some time, Sarah mentioned that she knew she didn't feel attracted to someone unless they were also obviously invested in the relationship. So there's yet another perspective to add to the collection of viewpoints I'm amassing regarding where things went wrong.

Today, school was boring. I made a pancake for breakfast, which was delicious, and then to top it off, my morning instructor brought in breakfast for the whole class! Now, I wasn't that hungry, and I knew I didn't need to eat a delicious bagel, but I'm reverting back into college mode, where you don't think twice about free food. So I grabbed a bagel with some sort of fruit pieces sticking out of it and started spreading the nearest cream cheese on it. I was marveling at the awesome coincidence that I had, by pure chance, grabbed a cream cheese that also had fruit in it when I realized... I was putting garden vegetable cream cheese on my fruity bagel! I went with it, because I do not admit making mistakes. And you know what? It wasn't that bad. It wasn't fantastic, but the zest sort of complimented the fruitiness. Or so I shall continue to tell myself until the end of time.

Class happened, which is all I can really say about that. We are talking about some interesting cases, but the fact we keep dragging things on overshadows the thought-provoking things that could potentially be happening. We're discussing negligence in Torts, which from what I can tell is basically the basis for every single lawsuit brought ever. We've had cases where kids die from being hit in the head by a backswing of a baseball pitch, cases where people get hit by cars while pushing buggies full of junkyard debris, cases where horse and buggies get hit by cars, cases where garbage trucks run over children playing under gigantic sheets of paper, cases where people are liable for untying boats, cases where people are liable for tying boats, cases where people let barges drift free and sink. The whole gamut of things, really. And it turns out every single one boils down to whether or not a reasonable person could have been expected to act differently. What changes are the things we take into account when deciding how a person should have acted. So all sorts of "excuses" come into play, like age, handicaps, even the weather. The boat examples, for instance, were both predicated on the weather conditions, but one was exculpated because it was in protection of human life, whereas the other was found liable because they prioritized their own property over the dock to which they anchored their boat. The garbage truck was found liable, not because he was irresponsible in running over a kid, but because he tried to avoid it (thinking there might be glass or something else bad for his tires) and his failure to do so pointed toward negligence (not taking proper precautions) in a transferable way.

In contracts we are talking about the concept of consideration, which is a necessary component of every contract. Basically it's the collateral that holds the contract together. In a court's eyes, if the parties aren't giving something up as a way to make sure the promise is kept, they aren't serious enough to be bound by the contract. The weird thing is, a court can basically find consideration anywhere when it suits them, and fail to find it when they don't think the contract should hold. In one case a business gave away some treated ash to a construction company whose project wound up going poorly and who then had to pay to dispose of the ash. Now, if the ash was a gift, there wouldn't be a contract and the construction company couldn't recover the cost of disposal they incurred by taking the ash, but the court found consideration in the fact that the original ash people (I think we should just start calling them that. It's easier to type, and pretty hilarious) were looking to dispose of the ash, and thus benefited from the resulting "contract" to take it away. Because they advertised for people to take it, they induced the company to do so, and the court somehow found that to be enough to find in favor of the construction company. So basically the court makes up its mind about what they think happened and who should have to pay, and then justify it however they can. Law is weird.

Anyway, school happened, then I played handball at a new place. It's called St. Anthony's, and it's handball/racquetball specific! It's sort of a hole in the wall (as much as a place with huge racquetball courts can be), and consists of three courts, a locker room, and a hangout/bar/lounge area. It's sort of like a huge man cave for handball players. It's pretty great. It's nice to not have to walk to some unused area of a rec facility, passed all the people using exercise equipment to play a sport nobody really understands. Everyone at this place is interested in what's going on. I liked the atmosphere a lot. Also, the back walls are opaque, and boy have I missed that. I got to make some pretty incredibly, floor-scraping gets back there because I didn't have to worry about losing the ball in the glass. Brian was even more frustrated than usual, at one time even saying "You're going to miss something some day..." Then we played doubles, and I got to play on the left because I was playing with another right-handed guy. And I was killing it! (Handball joke! I'm hilarious...) I'm just way more comfortable on the left side. Shots off the right wall are setups, shots that come around the corner are more setups, and shots down the middle are to my dominant hand, making it easier to cut more things off. Then I paired up with the guy I'm playing with this weekend and things just felt incredibly awkward the whole time. I missed pass shots, I didn't know what to expect because his style is a bit different than mine, and I wound up having to leave shots to him that he couldn't put away, but that I couldn't take without putting us both way out of position.

So it was a mixed night. I destroyed all my singles opponents and felt amazing on the left side, but I'm apprehensive for this weekend. I think my plan will just be to focus on singles and play doubles by ear. It should be fun no matter what.

Well, I hate to say it, but I have homework to do, so I'll have to cut this short before any poetry manifests. However, I would like to say that my professor wore a suit jacket thing with a zipper instead of buttons. It was very distracting. She made a valiant effort, but I don't think anyone could pull it off. It's weird how a small variation (what fastens a jacket) can look so weird.

Oh! And I was passed by another bicyclist for the very first time yesterday. And in the classic way these things always seem to go, he pulled away for about ten meters and then slowed down significantly. See, it was pretty windy while we went over the bridge (slight change in elevation), and I guess he's competitive in the same meaningless way I am. So, naturally, I burned him. And I passed him riding no hands just to rub it in because I'm a jerk. Satisfaction in the silliest places, I suppose. And with that, I'm off. Thanks for reading!

My morning!

I won my handball tournament!

Of course, there wasn't any real competition there, but it was worth it just to get to know a bunch more people. I met Marc, a tri guy who looked about my age, Dean, an older guy who is hilarious, Eddie, the guy I played in the finals, Jessica, who it turns out will be going to Fargo with us next week, and exchanged contact information with Steve and Phil, two really helpful and nice guys. But I suppose I'll start at the beginning.

I set my alarm for 6:15. That may seem early, but what you might not know is that I didn't even know where this place was until last night at 10:00 or so, at which point I texted the only people I knew to ask if they were going. None were. So I resigned myself to biking the 12 miles there before it started at 9:00. I also wanted breakfast, and I'd been meaning to make pancakes for a while, so I gave myself a bit of time to do that. Speaking of, this is what happens when I try to make pancakes:

The problem, of course, is that I have no patience, so I just fill the frying pan and hope for the best. It doesn't always fail though:

I was pretty careful to spread the batter out evenly on this one, and I was rewarded with a passable pancake. I ate the many pieces of the first one, then immediately realized I should have eaten the whole one, since I didn't have a way to store an entire pancake at once anyway. So this is how that pancake is in my refrigerator now:

Google said that it would take me an hour and six minutes to bike the twelve miles to Lifetime Fitness in Bloomington. I decided to give it an hour for sure, just in case I got lost or something weird happened. I set out at just after 7:20, and this is what I road for more than half of the time:

I made pretty good time, and even passed a guy on a road bike. Twice even, since he ran a red light and I had to catch up again. Having my own entire lane was amazing, but it gave way to a bit of heavy traffic for the last couple of miles, which was less enjoyable, but still no real problem. I arrived just after 8:00, beating Google's time by about twenty minutes. Not bad for a mountain bike and a backpack!

The structure of the one-day tournament was as such: people were split into groups to play round robin. This would determine the divisions we got put in for the playoffs for the little plaque/prize things. I won my round robin games (one game to 21) 21-4, 21-4, 21-4, 21-8. I meant to hold the last guy to four points, but some stupid hand errors combined with some pretty good spin serves thwarted my perfect run. I was put as the one seed for Division 1. I was playing Marc first, and he made some good shots, but I won 15-1, 15-8. He seemed like he was generally in good position, but he just didn't quite end the point when he got the setups he wanted. That's a common theme when people play against me though. In fact, I was asked multiple times how I got to the balls I got to. I didn't really have a good answer, so I replied that I thought it had something to do with my wrist action. I don't have to be in a good position to hit a good shot because I can put pace and accuracy on the ball from just about wherever.

I played Eddie (I think that was his name) in the finals, and he hit some good serves to start. It was pretty obvious he was just going for broke, and it was paying off! He was up 10-8 for a while as we traded being on serve, but I eventually wend on a streak and took it 15-10, 15-1. So I was the champion, I guess. After one point where I dove for a shot up front got up and made a between the legs get off the back wall, and then retrieved a pass down the right side, Eddie said, half under his breath, "That's the best I can do. I can't hit it any better than that." I just smiled to myself. So the tournament was over, but it was only just after noon, so I asked if anyone wanted to keep playing. Everyone looked at me like I was a little crazy, but I wheedled, "come on, at least we can play doubles, less running!" They bit, and the four people from the semifinals paired up and had at it. I played with Steve, a tall guy who readily took the right side and let me take all the shots I wanted. It was awesome. I think I single-handedly demoralized the other two guys (Marc and Eddie, obviously) when at one point it was just me at the front court and they just kept hitting kill shots and I just kept getting them back, only to have them lob me. I ran it down and killed it behind my back. Eddie shook his head, Steve gave a bit of a cheer, and Marc just looked a bit sick.

I hung out and ate as much as possible of the lunch they had before I left. I had paid 28 dollars to play in this thing, and there were way more sandwiches/wraps than there were people, so I made myself a bit sick (for a good cause). Also, they were delicious. They were from the cafe at the fitness center I think, because there were employees in charge of bringing the food down to the courts and keeping the gatorade refilled, so they were healthy and pretty good. The healthy muffins from the morning though... it turns out those need some sugar. I grabbed what I think was supposed to be a blueberry muffin, but it just tasted like bran or wheat or something with hints of mushiness. Luckily after I choked that down, there was plenty of fresh fruit (pineapple, cantaloupe, and strawberry) to make up for it. With the sandwiches was a salad with bleu cheese, nuts, and raisins, another salad with garbanzo beans, spinach, and sun-dried tomatoes, and even more fruit (same kind as before). The sandwiches had some delicious sort of mustard/mayo/avocado spread, along with meat, lettuce, and cheese. Delicious all around. Between the food, the handball, the award, and the contacts, it was probably worth the money (I ate three sandwiches).

I biked back, and saw this:


 

Kites! Very distracting to someone trying to bike by, but it was also really cool to see! Because I biked through at least two suburbs, I saw plenty of other fields full of people. One had bouncy houses and balloons, one had peewee football, one had soccer fields with a wide variety of ages enthusiastically pursuing balls at all sorts of crazy angles. There were other parks with tennis courts, lakes, and people jogging. That is, until I missed my turn. See, I had gone to the fitness center on a one-way street that turned into a two-way street after a couple miles. So naturally I took the same street back, but when it turned back into a one-way, I just turned right blindly and figured I'd hit another one-way street going the direction I wanted (I knew there was one, by the way). I somehow missed that street and it wound up that the next street I recognized was the one that went right in front of the law building (Cedar), so instead of going back to my apartment, I wound up here. Cedar is not nearly as bike-friendly, though, and the last couple miles were a bit hard on the nerves. I was riding in a parking lane, but whenever there was actually a car there, it meant I had to look back and gauge whether or not the car behind me looked like one that would care about running me over. A couple times I jumped on the sidewalk rather than go out into the road, but that's not really any safer. I obviously made it back fine, but I will certainly be avoiding that road in the future. Trust Google's green bikeways is the moral for the day.

So here's what I have to show for it all:

I feel a bit out of it. I guess combining a full day of handball with biking got me a bit sleepy. So I'm going to nap, and then maybe I'll edit some poems on my iPad. Thanks for reading! Oh! and I decided on a league. I'm going to play for the midway YMCA team near campus. They have what is generally considered one of the weaker teams, so I'll be able to jump in as their number one singles player, giving me the opportunity to play the best players on the other teams. I'm in this for my own improvement, after all, not for whatever the league championship is. It should be fun!

Third post today? Yeah, no life, I get it...

There's probably such a thing as too much to say about one's self. There's also probably such a thing as too much free time, too sad an existence to come up with something interesting to do, and a plethora of other excesses to which I will no doubt go. But as long as I'm at a computer and have something to say, I might as well write it down.

Also, I took some pictures of my ankle because people kept asking if it were bruised or swollen, and I didn't really know how to answer because it doesn't look that different to me:

 

I included smaller versions of my left foot because I always compare the two sides to each other when I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for. I guess there's minor discoloration and a bit of swelling, but it doesn't feel any worse than any other time I've done it, so I'm definitely playing handball on it tomorrow. I'll think about taking it easy at frisbee on Sunday though (yeah, who am I kidding?).

One other thing that's been on my mind recently is that Sarah can't stand my blog! It's weird. She says it doesn't sound like me writing. She also said it sounded like I didn't respect Rebecca enough as an individual person, which I was a bit surprised to hear, but makes sense. I think I always defined her in terms of our relationship together, and I probably didn't ever give her enough credit as a person of her own. I think I do that with most people I've been around a long time, and I'd be surprised if other people didn't, to be honest. I know kids almost universally, think of their parents as "means to an end," whether that end is a new toy, their favorite food, or staying up later. Rarely do they think "I wonder what my mom would like in her life as a person of her own," or "I wonder what it means to my dad for me to take this action." I guess I saw Rebecca as a "means to avoid loneliness" or a "means to a great girlfriend" rather than as an entire separate entity. Or maybe I'm grasping at straws and just saying things that sound right even though I probably wouldn't have said them unless I was put into that frame of mind. I know I see Brian currently as a "means to a challenging handball game." I know he has a fiance, and that he's probably busy and stuff, but it's not like I'm going to actually think about these people outside the contexts with which I'm familiar. I'm not going to sit here theorizing about what people's lives mean outside of me unless it's relevant. It's too much work, to be honest. I'll keep track of the facts. I'll know what they are doing, and I'll know some things about them, but I can't keep track of people as their own entities. It's just not possible to think of very many people that way, if any. We can say we want the best for people, but half the time what it sounds like we mean is "I would be unhappy to see you unhappy, so please be happy so I don't have to be unhappy." Is that the same thing as actually contemplating them as another person? I doubt it. So I doubt I think of other people as people very often. It's possible my readers do and that I'm alienating my audience, but deep down inside I'm not sure that's how people work. And I know I've tried with all of my close friends to know them as entities at one point or another, but because they just aren't me, I always came up short. So I guess that's my excuse? I don't know where I was going with this. I genuinely don't think I was only using Rebecca, but as many perspectives as I can get are helpful. Each one adds a bit to the overall perspective I'm trying to develop.

Sarah said she liked reading my blog when I biked across the country, though. I guess maybe it's because I had more events to talk about, which lends itself to more humorous anecdotes than my typical introspection and recounting of my day-to-day life. She says the only times she sees the "me" she knows is in the parenthetical asides in this blog. I think that's interesting. Because the parentheses are where I provide "color commentary." But that's just one side of me, and to think she doesn't even recognize the analytic side of me is a bit disconcerting. And if she didn't like my blog before I put her in it this prominently, I can only imagine her reaction to this post, but as I've said, this isn't really for anyone but me at this point. I'm happy if people want to read it, and I hope it's not incredibly boring, but it can't be more interesting than my life.

I revised a few poems for my other blog. I still like the poem "Obstacle" too much to change, though I did switch one word.

Here's one that's been in the works for a while. I just pulled it off my phone and completed it, so it needs some work before it makes its way to the other blog, but I figured I'd get it out anyway. Otherwise it will just sit there staring at me accusingly every time I scroll past is on my way to jot another note down to blog about later.

When they clone us, and our perfect versions run the world
we will tell ourselves from them by our blemishes
our scars heralding the blunders
turned either epic
or tragic.
The stitched arm somehow still attached
after being dragged out the broken window
of the upside-down van
skating the half-pipe of the ditch,
one axel perpendicular to the other
and a shoe worming its way up under dashboard
a place seldom explored by footwear
except when culverts flip things on their heads,
and hurl laptops, still playing "Lost"
into the snow, its screen glowing, uncracked
out of the thing layer of icy particles
a halo left behind in the wake of an epic story.

His clone would never have that scar,
the stitches holding together the arm
that flung blood further than the damning beer
into the woods, so when the cops showed up
all they cared about was the Centrum for Men.
The blemishes on our hips from every diving catch
(and only noticed after every diving drop),
those won't be there when you leave this world behind.
Your soul won't have that mark
though it might bear the one I left
when you left.

It's an imperfect analogy, the perfect clone
to the all-to-human soul.
They walk around blameless
and our souls, too, can have no evidence against.
No fingerprints to tie them to the scene
where they fell asleep and swerved
into the semi,
but the scars left behind
on faces, foreheads, hips
mean something more than "I did this thing."
They mean you lived this thing
this life that gives you badges
for every bad decision.
Their strengthened ankles only mean
they never sprinted, heedless of terrain
never stopped too suddenly, never changed
directions without knowing the consequences.
But even when we're careful, we can misstep
so better to run than walk, better to not look back
at the clones we leave behind
as we rush toward our next injury
our next soul-sculptor
and leave them to their perfection.

That whole poem started from this line in my phone: When (not if) they clone me i will tell myself apart from him by the scars, pockmarks, imperfections. And it somehow became about the car accidents I've known people in, the difference between the body and who we actually are, the difference between our experiences and ourselves, and I don't know what to do with it, which direction to take it. That's the problem with my style of writing. I just go line by line and put one thing after another. Making it tie together can get tricky. So I'll just put this up here and wait a while to see if some time crystallizes anything for me. In the meantime, I'm hungry, and I have some fish in my freezer a mile away calling my name. Thanks for reading!