You be the Captain, and I’ll be no one

I keep doing this thing where I’ll stay up outrageously late, and then go to my terrible Fed Cts class by 9, and then stagger out of class and go sleep for like hours. And then, of course, be all awake and so forth super late.

I think I could not really have done a good job preparing for exams without having so much significant help from Adam’s old outlines. There’s at least one class that I truly and profoundly did not understand until I was reading and revising his outline. I think this makes me even more self-conscious about my general lack of initiative, and maybe lack of suitability, for law school work.

In happier news, I found this hipsteriffic section of town like, right by my place, which is sort of unnerving and weird because I was relatively unaware that there was this whole interesting little “center” within walking distance, which makes it feel like some kind of urban mirage, maybe induced by all the daytime sleeping. There’s a mediocre (but close!) coffee place, and a really-super-great Mexican food place with no discernible traces of onion in either salsa or food, and a boba tea place which was so full of fifteen year olds in leggings that I had to duck out immediately without buying anything because I got all terrified.

Mostly, though, I was at my happiest today when I decided it was time for me to go to the undergrad library. In contrast to the law library, which is all Serious Fucking Business with shiny tables and shiny racks of horrible casebooks, the undergrad library has a bizarre 7 floor setup, with some disjointed connections between floors (some elevators don’t go to all the floors; it’s not like UVA exactly but the pattern is more unpredictable). I love it so so much. The light is terrible and there’s no wireless and the study carrels don’t follow any real pattern but I can find places that are nigh-inaccessible and I really enjoy dingy, inaccessible buildings where I can hide completely. Today I just poked through the books, and it was kind of awesome.

I read this super schmaltzy book by oldtime crime thriller writer called E. Phillips Oppenheim. It was so great because it wasn’t clear at first that the “twist” was going to be profoundly lame, but as the book went on it became clear that implausibility was mounting at an astounding rate. The book is about a man and a woman who are involved in what’s ostensibly a drug-running scheme, and much of the action focuses on how the cops find threads of the action. The people repeatedly claimed they were addicted to adventure as well as liking money (who doesn’t?!) and so there were all the expected scenes:

You know what I mean by expected scenes: There’s one where person A is all “but darling, shouldn’t we get out of the business? we’ve made so much money” and person B is all “oh darling but I love money, and we can make more if we do just this last haul, and then we can get married maybe and settle down, but I need this last thrill” and person A is all “I love when you talk all scoundrel-y, let’s make out!” And of course the other scene was where the guy’s little brother is all “I AM ADDICTED TO THE VERY DRUGS THAT THE READER WILL NOTE ARE BEING RUN BY YOU, ELDER BRO!” and the elder brother is all “NOOO! We will kick this terrible addiction–mum will be heartbroken and you no longer will be able to play cricket if you keep this up!” and little bro is all “Compelling, very, BUT I’M ADDICTED, OLD CHAP!”

In between this, the girl dresses up as a hooer who, like, “dances provocatively” at dockside taverns where the dude in charge of her drug-running ship drinks and tries to rape her (cloaked in horrific euphemisms like “I must and will spend a half hour with you!” since it’s the 30s). There’s no explanation for why Lady Judith feels she must be “Judy of the Docks” at key plot moments; also, she gets out of being raped like four times through highly implausible means.

All this I would enjoy, as you can imagine. It comes with 30s crime novel territory and is arguably THE reason to read 30s novels. But then, Sir Gregory gets arrested because the cops get the ev from some kind of nark who, spurned by Lady Judith (both as herself and as Dockside Judy), went and talked to the police in revenge. So Sir Gregory goes to trial and is all debonair about his arrest, like, “Pshaw, darling, I shall be back in a trice and we shall be married on Saturday!” I was even willing to spot them this implausible timeline of trials. But here is where it all fell apart: And it’s almost as bad as the “they were twins!” plot device, though not as bad as “Harry Potter couldn’t really die because his wand ate Lord Voldemort’s magic and bizarrely recognized him even though he was using Draco’s wand” (or whatever the fuck was going on with the resurrection):

Lord Gregory is a Scientist, and he made coke and opium that were, like, chemically altered, so, there was nothing harmful about the drug but it still made addicts happy. This was so terrible that I think I groaned out loud. I get that methadone supposedly is like that, but people get addicted to methadone and also, methdone was invented was 70 years later, and furthermore I’m pretty sure addicts can tell the difference between methdone and heroin. I was so unimpressed. I hope you are too. I hate when wicked people are all like “Just Kidding!”

something is not right

Today I am tired.

but I want you now: you will always be my

Everything starts getting really black every semester around finals. Maybe it’s only when I’m trying to pull together the material for the course, outlining and such, that I find it more difficult to escape the thought that I have truly and profoundly fucked it up, in an increasingly irrevocable way, and that no matter how well things appear to be lining up here, I am unhappy with what I chose. What’s usually mere bearable tedium from which I can distract myself becomes a darker symbol of chains and binding, irreversable error. Or maybe it is just a defense mechanism, born out of fear of failure: If I tell myself enough times that I hate this, then it doesn’t matter any more if I do badly.

On days like this, though, law school angst spills over into a larger question of where did my life go all wrong, so wrong, so that I’m occasionally aware that I’m only just kind of trying to make the best of things even now. I like to think that there is one hour, maybe two, that if I had done over, done better, then things would be different somehow, be better. But if I think harder about it I know that causation’s not that simple, normally, but it feels more true today; and the self I would have been in that counterfactual world recedes, leaving me with my tired sarcastic lazy now-self.

So, you know, I’m going to fix some gentleman jack and light up some cloves and set up a playlist of cat power and t&s and start in on trying to figure out what the fuck “complex litigation” entails.

Is there a song title that goes “I just want to get laid”?

I was trying to figure out at what point I became so thoroughly entrenched in the desire for invisibility–the feeling of overall transience so intense that I can barely summon up the willpower to imagine that next Thursday matters or that I will exist in it.  I’ve been reading Elizabeth Bowen, mostly without understanding, and I read a particularly confusing book which nonetheless seemed to have something intriguing going on if I could just figure it out (my mind is deteriorated, as is well known).  I read commentary on Heat of the Day and one commenter talked about Bowen’s emphasis on rootedness–like the importance of having an actual physical home, as a way to ground the individual in the community which, I suppose, helps to anchor love of another person in a context which is somewhat outside the lover’s mind.  The book is set in London after all the bombings and so forth and contains a lot of emphasis on the ways in which the feelings of homelessness (or actual homelessness) of characters contributes to their inability to love fully. 

I’ve got little to say about the academic value of the writer or the theory; I read only to think about my own life, now.  I think in many ways my feeling of homelessness might strongly implicate the reasons why I have such a difficult time seeing my relationship (any relationship) as real and true instead of something merely in my head.  Maybe it’s true that people, fascinated as we are with the intersections between the mental and the world into which we are thrown, need desperately to have a stable physical context in order to form identity (to borrow heavily from House of Leaves, isn’t that why stories in which houses change abrubtly are so existentially terrifying? besides the fact that a house which eats people is scary).  And maybe a lack of this feeling of external rootedness leads to a general doubt of one’s reality and, by extension, a doubt of one’s ability to be loved or, more specifically, a doubt that one exists in the perceptions of others.

I fought the law and the law won

Normally I’m pretty selfish and enjoy contemplating all the lovely things I’m going to buy when I’m a rich corporate lawyer.  However, this shit makes me get all outraged and cause-y, especially coming as it does in a chapter of the textbook which is about all the procedural hurdles to habeus corpus review that Congress has enacted and the Court has allowed.

From Blackmun’s dissent in McFarland v. Scott (1994):

Jesus Romero’s attorney failed to present any evidence at the penalty phase and delivered a closing argument totalling 29 words.  Although the attorney later was suspended on unrelated grounds, Romero’s ineffective assistance [of counsel] claim was rejected by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit . . . . Romero was executed in 1992.  Larry Heath was represented on direct appeal by counsel who filed a 6 page brief before the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals.  The attorney failed to appear for oral argument before the Alabama Supreme Court and filed a brief in that court containing a 1-page argument and citing a single case . . . . Heath was executed in Alabama in 1992.

James Messer, a mentally impaired capital defendant, was represented by an attorney who at the trial’s guilt phase presented no defense, made no objections, and emphasized the horror of the capital crime in his closing statement.  At the penalty phase, the attoreny presented no evidence of mental impairment, failed to introduce other substantial mitigating evidence, and again repeatedly suggested in closing that death was the appropriate punishment.  The Eleventh Circuit refused to grant relief  . . .  and this Court denied certiorari . . . . Messer was executed in 1988.

I’m going to quit these rambling ways, one of these days soon

I kind of want something and I don’t know what it is.  A change, maybe?  I can’t tell if it’s something fixable by, like, changing my hair, or whether I’m restless in my skin and need the promise of some huge overhaul, some dramatic experience after which my restless irritability will be silenced.  I very rarely take any thought to the future (in the broad, Think of Your Future sense), which is probably pretty bad, but for some reason I’m taking even less thought than usual, feeling total lack of interest in things like, you know, schoolwork and outlining and my Note. 

(Said Note is the most boring piece of writing I have ever produced including even that time I wrote about Terri Schiavo for a Bioethics class that I cared about just as much as you would imagine.  This was boring because I could not refer to Kenny Dies.  The Note is also even more boring than that time I wrote 12 pages, no cites, about Hello Dolly [from memory, bitches] for a Musical Theater class in which, not being a theater person, my requirement was simply to produce 12 pages.  In related news, if anyone wants to know the impact of the WTO’s recent 22.6 Arbitration Report on the issue of damages owed Antigua in the wake of the US refusal to life narky laws against internet gambling, I’m your woman.)

I want to walk off for a really long time leaving it an open question where I’m going and if I’ll be back.  But without getting too sweaty or being accosted by homeless people.  I never carry CHANGE.  If I lived in a place with moors I totally would go all British Gothic/Romantic and stride on them, fiercely.  This desire to go walking with indefinite goals is in some sort of tension with my secret, competing desire, which is to own one truly sublime skirt that made me happy in my heart every time I wore it. 

But.  There are compensations for being anchored in my tedious world.  I’m rocking Harrisonburg tomorrow, indifferent debaters in tow, and I get to see the darling of my heart, Hulga.

The Abomination, or: Liveblogging the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice

Opening shot: Keira reading a book. Ohmygod, do you think they are trying to establish that she is Intelligent? She quickly closes it; I think it burns her skin to be in close contact with printed pages.

There’s tinkley music of indeterminate origin and no discernible tune. Clearly this man has watched a lot of Merchant & Ivory movies.

Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are already disappointing me. Mrs. Bennet, who should be shrill and obnoxious, is more sad and fluttery, while Mr. Bennet sounds in the grip of both Alzheimer’s and a bad case of laryngitis. Or possibly they just administered a strong soporific to both actors in order to capture the aforementioned B-list M&I ambience.

The sisters twitter. Quietly. I turn the volume up, to no avail. The camera closes on Keira, not twittering. They’ve let her eyebrows grow out all bushy. I’ve always thought Hulga was unusually Intelligent; now I know why.

Like one minute after the opening credits everyone is doing period dances, flourishing their costumes. Keira can’t help sounding vaguely hysterical and breathless when she laughs. Not Intelligent.

 The whole room stops when Darcy/Bennet first enter. Probably because the director doesn’t trust us to pick them out among all the whirling extras otherwise. This movie is almost as unsubtle as Keira’s breathless giggle into the silence (to be fair, it might have been Lydia; it sounded lots like Keira though).

Inexplicably, Keira is under some sort of bench when The Line is delivered (“Elizabeth Bennet is not hawt enough to tempt me”). I’m not the biggest Natalie Portman fan ever, but I think she looks identical to KK AND could have seemed more like the sort of person to get under a bench for no reason.

Mrs. Bennet suddenly anounces that “Lizzie is so plain.” No, she really isn’t, dude; and saying it one hundred times won’t mollify me to the casting choice of KK. They did give her sort of stringy bangs, though. Keira also insists “I shall be an old maid.” Not in the book! I sort of think I should make a running tally of all the lines which were clearly put in after the fact to justify the casting.

After the dance Lizzie and Jane spend like a full minute giggling without dialogue in bed. Now, I am quite the bed giggler, myself, but this scene nonetheless annoys me.

I’ve decided I could be reconciled to KK if they had made Jane much prettier even than Keira Knightley; then we could assume maybe that everyone declares KK is plain b/c she looks ugly next to Jane (there’s textual support for this, even). Scarlett Johansson has been rocking the period pieces; she would have been a great Jane, with that air of indolence, and I think she’s probly hotter than Keira. Alas, the actress they picked is completely nondescript with this strange shingled hair thing going on. I refuse to look up her name because she’s basically a prop.

I’ll grant there was a purely gorgeous landscape shot. Tragically it only lasted for a second, and then was replaced with an annoying sequence in which Keira is stared at, woodenly, by Darcy, while Miss Bingley chatters on. She’s so clearly designed to be annoying that I, paradoxically, begin to take her side. They didn’t even use the Austen lines, which have some slight subtlety, but instead she says “did you see her hair? How medieval!” Zoom in on Darcy looking like someone stepped on his toe. It’s love! Actually, I used to really believe in the romance novel myth that a sudden falling down of one’s usually pinned back hair would instantly strike gentlemen callers with lust.

Darcy has a mullet! For real. There’s clear party in the back going on. That’s the only party going on though, since this actor is stiff and awful.

Historically inaccurate joke! My intensive knowlege of romance novels, both trashy and slightly-less-trashy, tells me that only the oldest girl got to be “Miss Bennet” and everyone else went by their names, like ”Miss Lydia Bennet.” The footman just announced “Miss Bennet, Miss Bennet, Miss Bennet, and Miss Bennet have come to call” and I was all over that mess like the stickler I am.

Mr. Collins kind of has bulgey eyes, but is otherwise quite legit, with a nice low voice, and no discernable mullet. Remember how we are supposed to assume that Keira is ugly because it gets repeated a lot by the cast? Well, similarly, Mr. Collins is supposed to be ridiculous because everyone is rolling their eyes when he talks (and Keira has some “charmingly insolent” moments) but he really doesn’t deserve the hate.

Wickham has a ponytail to challenge Fabio’s. But I’ll say for Keira that she’s giving him the lustful eye in quite a convincing manner. It’s the most convincing thing she’s done thus far; one gets the sense that she is on much more solid ground when she doesn’t have to handle complex witty barbs and books in her hands.

I seem to recall (from my treasure trove of trashiness) that young ladies were not allowed to spend long stretches of time out alone with those wicked boys. In reckless disregard of the conventions, Keira lounges seductively under a tree, probably getting her ass all muddy, all all alone with Wickham.

Obligatory corset lacing scene, with obligatory corset-lacing lines “breathe in more! I can’t! you’re hurting me!” Obligatory incredible expanse of boob, displayed fetchingly in corset (Jane has a nondescript face but a truly awesome rack.)

The camera does several of those round and round shots around Keira. Maybe by this point in the shooting the director got enough disgruntled fan letters that he no longer even bothered to pretend that Keira looked right for the part, and just decided to celebrate her unquenchable hottness.

Breaking news: Mr. Collins is a dwarf. Now it doesn’t matter how un-mulletted his hair, how deep his voice, or how normal his conversation. He must always be a buffoon.

Keira is all “did I just agree to dance with Mr. Darcy?!” I have never understood this convention in romcoms. I do lots of stupid things, and I second guess WHY I did them, but never the FACT of their happening.

They have a dramatic scene on the floor in which they stop dancing and face off. Keira does that thing with her jaw to express stubborn hatred (“that thing” sounds too much like acting; what I mean is, she pushes her jaw forward rather alarmingly). Apparently there’s a whole blog devoted to the adventures of her jaw.

Mrs. Bennet was attacked by a succubus or something because she is delivering the mostly-intact lines without any liveliness at all. I’m super-depressed by this: she’s totally my favorite character. Lots of people get all excited about the BBC 12-disk P&P because of Colin Firth but I love it because it’s like the best Mrs. Bennet ever.

There’s a commercial for  Tyler Perry movie called Meet The Browns. What’s the prospective over/under on the amount of times there will be some racial joke about how their last name is Brown and their skin is brown? Hilarity shall ensue, no doubt.

The Midget proposes. AND they do the rudest thing they could possibly do: The Keira-Vision view of the top of his head. God, if I were this actor, I’d be pissed. She’s like ten feet tall! He probably isn’t even really a midget.

The actor playing Mr. Bennet mumbles all the good jokes. I hate this monstrosity. How could anyone fuck up “your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do”??

The next few scenes are full of boring. Jane’s rack is not on display, and she’s tedious otherwise, and there’s some quick treatment of her jilted self, and I don’t care.

Keira’s on some damn swing in the farmyard. I don’t think swings were invented then. Hulga refuses to read my liveblog so I am stomping off from this liveblog, in a temper. I shall leave Keira where she is, twirling weirdly and un-fetchingly.

curled on the floor hiding out from it all

foreclosing options is really, really difficult; even imaginary options.

hooray

I found the perfume. It’s called Unicorn Spell. Ohmygodohmygod it’s so icy and violet and cold dank earth with little green bits poking out and, dude, I totally think it smells like a unicorn maybe just walked by, and maybe will walk by again.

AND. Midweek hippity-dippity (best euphemism since “doing the squelchy”!), with an undiscussed anniversary lurking in the air which, instead of making us weird, contributed this little added frisson of playful comfort. I’m going to go ahead and classify this as a kickass day.

for the bible tells me so

Yesterday I saw that someone had opened the storage closet outside my apartment, an area which I used to store some overflow of books judged not meritorious enough for my bookshelf, as well as some boxes which seemed like they could be super useful (like the blender box with that styrofoam business that I can never bring myself to throw away, but feel stupid for keeping in the house). All the boxes were scattered in front of the open closet. I, being a person of almost unimaginable laziness, did nothing except speculate (while sitting in my underwear on my couch) whether a vagrant had opened it searching for things of worth, or if I had unwittingly barged into a space which another tenant perceived as their own (which would be bullshit because all the other closety-things were full).

 Today the whole space was completely cleaned out. I went and checked the dumpster and there was nothing. I don’t really care about the other stuff, but it occured to me as I was coming home from school that I maybe don’t have my Bible any more.

 I kind of don’t know how to feel about this, if it’s true. I bought a Scofield Bible, replete with references to the Rapture and the Gap theory, words of Christ in red, blue leather covered, for $45 (three sessions of babysitting for a church family) when I was almost 13. I used to write verses that “meant a lot” to me inside the first few pages, so the pages document my various experiments with handwriting (including the time I read about a “backslanted” left-hander’s writing in some Agatha Christie book and promptly started tilting my right-hander writing for the sake of cultivating an air of intrigue, and also the time I read about “a perfect copperplate hand” and started forming letters in approximately the style of lovely 1890s handwriting, and possibly even the time I became obsessed with dark slashing strokes on the page, gave up cursive altogether, and printed in an abstract a way as possible). I embroidered this horrific bouquet of flowers onto a bookmark which I used to mark Psalm 27. When I was in my first year and a half of college, I had tons of bits of programs and so forth stuck into it.

More importantly, I think that by losing it, and losing it in such a passive way — literally letting it drift from me –I have severed (or, allowed to be severed) the last link binding me to that person (barely) who honestly scrutinized the Bible for ways to live life, who felt guilty repeatedly for the abandonment of daily study, felt exaltation (highly akin to smugness) each time I sucessfuly executed a daily devotion, and who really thought (at 13) that I had a Bible I would always keep with me as an evolving physical testament of my evolving inner life.

I don’t even write my name the same way that it’s written in the flyleaf, but I nevertheless feel kind of disoriented not to have even so small piece of my history as the writing I wrote (with excitement as of one consummating ownership, and with a calligraphy pen that I got for Christmas) on the first day I bought the Bible.

I cherish no illusions about my lack of religion, so it’s not that I’m sad because I think I will need the Bible in future; also, I don’t think that the loss symbolizes a unique break with faith itself. It’s nothing so dramatic. But it’s difficult in a different way because I feel fully delinked from the person I was when I believed.