From a gal whose brain cells work faster than her fingers. (Sometimes.)
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There was a cool, sweet smell in the air. Maybe the trees all knew the holidays are coming and put on their best show for winter. It felt more like an autumn day than deep into December. In my mind I was walking around park, taking in the lake, the birds, the air, and the sunshine.
But I'm about to go into something not very beautiful.
This may be the semester where I flunk law school. I swear, I've never felt so unprepared in my life. In the past, after exams, even though I knew I didn't do spectacular, at least I had optimistic feelings. Not this time. I freeze up, I get nervous, I can't understand what the question means...
You know what's bad? Having a song stuck in your head (just wrote "having your head stuck in a song" - might as well be) while you're trying to concentrate on an exam. It's like a little gnat that bugs and bugs and won't go away. I don't remember which awful song I had stuck in my head for the previous exams, but I do remember telling myself I'm gonna replace it with "Tempted" by Squeeze. Bad idea, because that got annoying as well. I switched to chanting the professors' names in my head, but that type of praying/technique obviously didn't work, either.
Maybe I'm going insane.
Maybe I'm just not competitive enough for law school. Maybe law school is too competitive for me. I know what I signed up for, but honestly, I can't spend every waking moment thinking about the law or studying. I'd simply go insane. Yet, there are people so driven to do it. They can take all the big firm jobs, that's ok. Damn grades, too. I do wish the point of education is simply for the point of being educated and not for trying to earn a living. There's no "joy" in learning when you're forced to compete like that.
Switching yet another gear. (This is what happens when I'm forced to hold it all in for some time.)
Now that I have heat in my place, I should be happy, but instead, I've been afflicted with something. It might be dry skin - at least, that's what I think it is. I've woken myself up in the middle of the night, scratching. (I'm sure everyone needed to know that.) Thing is, I've been getting insect-bite-like bumps. It can't be bugs since I'm in pants and long sleeves all the time now. Also haven't changed my laundry detergent. So I went and got myself an expensive bottle of lotion that's medicated/mentholated and promises to calm the itch. Crossing my fingers.
4 more exams in this coming week, and I ain't talking about grade school exams. It'll be a total of 12 hours of trying to churn out words on the laptop. I feel like keeling over. It's so hard to keep going like a wound-up toy after days and days of typing, studying, outlining, sitting here and feeling my butt grow ever more vast.
Exercise? What's that? Oh, right, getting up from my chair to go to the bathroom, which is about 5 feet away, or getting up to grab food from the kitchen, which is about twice that distance. Maybe going downstairs to get the mail. Wait, showering counts too. My fingers sure are slimming from the typing though. But I think my eyesight is even more shot than it already is.
I'll be surprised if my brain isn't fried to a crisp before I get to go home next week. Need all the good vibes I can get.
A SHRIMP, A DUCK, A DEATH
Wrongful-Death Case Survives Summary Judgment Request
BY CHARLES DELAFUENTE (for the ABA Journal eReport)
Proximate cause—from a flying shrimp.
That’s the crucial element in a wrongful-death case starting to wend its way through New York state’s judicial system. And there is enough of it, so far, for the plaintiff to successfully resist a motion for partial summary judgment.
The facts in the case, Colaitis v. Benihana Inc., are nothing if not unusual. The plaintiff is dead, and the issue is whether he died as a result of what happened at the defendant’s hibachi dining room. Benihana restaurants serve Japanese-style food, and the chefs cook tableside and often put on a show by tossing food and twirling cooking implements as they prepare the meal.
Rest of the story here.
It's hard to comment on this case. On the one hand, someone did die following the incident, which was unfortunate. On the other hand, the chain of events leading to his death seems rather protracted to show proximate cause. I'm sure his family wants to blame someone, and honestly, thank goodness we even have a working legal system that allows us address our concerns.
But, as my dad says in Taiwanese (kinda like that Chinese proverb sort of thing), if you're destined to die, you'll die even sitting at home and minding your own business. (Not in the heart attack kinda way but the external, freak accident kinda way, i.e. meteor rock falling out of the sky, landing on your roof, which collapses on you kinda way.)
Maybe Mr. Colaitis was just unlucky.
This picture makes me happy. Makes me forget about craptastic days or annoying neighbors.
Having a tidbit of trouble trying to post some pictures on the entries. For some reason the formatting gets all screwed up. Hence the posting and deleting... It's gotta be something simple that I'm not seeing.
Around 80 degrees yesterday and about 75 today. The heat built up and I finally relented to turning on the A/C about half an hour ago.
Summer weather in December. Unreal. As much as I love warm weather, these wacky temperature changes are surely signs of global warming and who-knows-what environmental damage, all of which worries me.
I think about Star Trek a lot. The premise behind it is that we, as a human race, has united as one, so there is no more warfare, racism, harmful environmental policies, etc. It presumes that at some point we come to our senses, drastically change all of our policies, and somehow don't obliterate ourselves or Earth. With each day I fear that vision of the future will never come.
That's it. I've finally had it and left a note for my downstairs neighbor asking him to please be quiet at night. Don't know who he thinks he is, but his constant yelling on the phone (and he's on the phone ALL the time), late night laughters and pillow talks with his boyfriend, and just his generally high-pitched voice all come through my floor. This is all especially grating when I'm trying to sleep at a decent hour, like midnight or even 1 a.m. As R well knows, stomping on the floor doesn't do anything. They're totally clueless.
I thought I could escape people's voices and people walking above me by living on the top floor. I did NOT move here so I can live with rude neighbors again. If he doesn't stop, I may leave another note. After that, I'm calling the landlord.
I should not be policing people's behavior as if I were their mothers. People should be policing themselves out of respect for other people who are forced to share spaces with them.
2:32 a.m. Time for bed finally. I need more time.
Simon & Garfunkel's "Hazy Shade of Winter" runs through my head.
Winter? Check.
Time, time, time, what has become of me?
Manischewitz cello soup mixes are awesome. My mom used to buy them, cook them, and add our own ingredients. I just added some corn, peas, carrots, string beans, and lima beans to the minestrone mix.
What comforting food for a cold winter day...
Had to turn in my paper this morning, so I tried to print it out on campus, and what happens? I had a weird feeling my laptop was going to fritz out at me just before I left, and sure enough, it did. ('Cuz we know Murphy's Law is a proven scientific principle.) Of all times I run it without battery, this was the time when it had to have a mental break down. I couldn't connect to the wireless server to print. When I tried to email the paper to myself, the mail program freaks out and freezes everything on my laptop, depriving me of my icons. Had to figure out how to shut down/restart without my icons, and when I tried to log on to a lab computer, that damn thing takes its sweet time to start up. In the meantime, of course, had to get my laptop restarted so I could get the copy of the paper off of it to mail it to myself.
All this time, tick, tock. Soon enough I was 10 minutes late for class. But other people were there, too, and some other girl was there until the end with me as she struggled to print her own paper from one of the lab computers. The printer was also spazzing and printing a huge job out from last night.
We both rushed downstairs, only to bump right into our professor talking with his secretary. Soon it became clear that she was concerned because some papers were "missing," and we immediately proffered ours to her. At least because there were two of us both coming from the same place, that there were major printing problems was a more believable story than if only one person told it. Even if it was true. The prof. then told us we could've told him there were printing problems...but who would've thought about going downstairs just to tell him that while we were struggling with computers?
If it weren't for the fact I don't have a laser printer and wanted my paper to look "nice," I wouldn't have bothered with the lab. Those computers and printers are pieces of crap, and so is our network/server.
%$#*(@(! Not having a good morning.
