I'm writing this post instead of reading for Con Law, but oh well. I went to the New York Times a few minutes ago, and saw that President Obama signed an order today to end secret interrogation techniques and the secret detention system of the CIA, and to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center within a year. He also is establishing diplomatic efforts to figure out where to place released detainees. (I originally typed "renewing diplomatic efforts", but you can't renew something that never exactly existed.)
As happy as I've been around Obama's inauguration, and W's departure, it finally hit me with this article: I never really thought about how it would feel to again be a citizen of a nation that acts with some basic integrity towards the larger world. The violations of human rights that we have been perpetrating have been egregious and untenable. If another country systematically did to U.S. citizens what we've been doing to others, we would go to war at the drop of a hat. As crazy as it sounds, it didn't actually sink in that it would end, or how it would feel for it to end.
I'm speechless at the feeling inside me right now. There is relief. There is amazement. There is happy shock. There is, for the first time in a long time, pride. I love my country, and I hate to see it do horrible things. I have always had true admiration and support for the men and women serving our country; for the first time in a long time, I now have some faith in their civilian leaders. I truly understand the hope now - I thought I did before, but the difference between dreaming of hope and actually having it is amazing.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Why We Use Privacy on the Intertubes
True story, not from me (I promise) but from an acquaintance who will remain nameless, in keeping with the theme of this post.
Said acquaintance (hereafter referred to as "AQ") posted a YouTube video, related to gender. (What? I have friends who talk about gender? Shocking.) AQ got a private message reply, asking what AQ's gender was. AQ took this as a teaching moment, and rather than answering, told the person (hereafter refered to as C, for CREEPER) that they might learn more about the whole subject of gender if they examined their reason for being so curious - was it because they couldn't deal with wondering? Did they want to be able to fit AQ into a neat boxy category? Would it bother C if AQ never answered and they never found out?
Well, C mistook the "would it bother you if I never answered" bit in a slightly different light, and began talking about how no, it wouldn't bother them, because it's not like there was any emotional commitment...and then began expounding upon love. Yeah, actually using the "L" word. In the course of part of a day, C sent AQ three messages on YouTube, each one getting progressively more creepy, and the last one clearly being impatient at the lack of a response (all three were sent while AQ was nowhere near the computer). Not quite sure how to respond, AQ didn't.
The next day, AQ got a final message from C, proclaiming that since it had been a full two days that C had not heard from AQ (but could see that AQ had logged on in the meantime), that the best thing C could do was to "move on". The search for that special person in C's life would have to continue, although they had hoped that AQ could be that person.
Creepy. Cree. Py. Creepy.
And this, boys and girls, is why I use initials (even though most of the readers here know full well who is who...except in this post, quite intentionally), and why when you have accounts on places like YouTube, Flikr, Facebook, WhoreSpace, etc., you should REEEEALLLY pay attention to your privacy settings.
Said acquaintance (hereafter referred to as "AQ") posted a YouTube video, related to gender. (What? I have friends who talk about gender? Shocking.) AQ got a private message reply, asking what AQ's gender was. AQ took this as a teaching moment, and rather than answering, told the person (hereafter refered to as C, for CREEPER) that they might learn more about the whole subject of gender if they examined their reason for being so curious - was it because they couldn't deal with wondering? Did they want to be able to fit AQ into a neat boxy category? Would it bother C if AQ never answered and they never found out?
Well, C mistook the "would it bother you if I never answered" bit in a slightly different light, and began talking about how no, it wouldn't bother them, because it's not like there was any emotional commitment...and then began expounding upon love. Yeah, actually using the "L" word. In the course of part of a day, C sent AQ three messages on YouTube, each one getting progressively more creepy, and the last one clearly being impatient at the lack of a response (all three were sent while AQ was nowhere near the computer). Not quite sure how to respond, AQ didn't.
The next day, AQ got a final message from C, proclaiming that since it had been a full two days that C had not heard from AQ (but could see that AQ had logged on in the meantime), that the best thing C could do was to "move on". The search for that special person in C's life would have to continue, although they had hoped that AQ could be that person.
Creepy. Cree. Py. Creepy.
And this, boys and girls, is why I use initials (even though most of the readers here know full well who is who...except in this post, quite intentionally), and why when you have accounts on places like YouTube, Flikr, Facebook, WhoreSpace, etc., you should REEEEALLLY pay attention to your privacy settings.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Gift Horses and Mouths*
The grades from the first semester have been returning. I've gotten the grades for the courses that had final grades--Torts, Criminal Law and Civil Procedure--and later this afternoon will be getting back last semester's paper from Lawyering Skills.
When I took the exams for the three doctrinal courses, I felt incredibly uncertain about Crim, really good about Torts, and pretty decent about Civil Procedure. I've told a lot of people how poorly I thought I did in Crim, and am currently preparing to be made fun of. I want to stress that thinking I did poorly was not the prototypical drama of the attention-hogging smart person who always claims they did poorly but always does well. It's pretty rare in my life that I've left a test thinking I did poorly, and the times I've thought that, I was right. With the Crim exam, it was a pretty objective feeling, knowing there was a lot of stuff I didn't include that needed to be included. In being short on time to prepare, I hadn't taken any practice exams for that class, and in the course of taking the exam I mismanaged my time horribly, spending an inordinate amount of time on one area and leaving myself very shortchanged for the rest of the exam. As a result, time ended before I was able to include a whole slew of things that needed to be included.
I'm kind of torn about the whole thing, because on the one hand I really want to know how on earth my exam merited an A grade. On the other, I'm afraid that if I ask, a mistake will be uncovered either in the professor's grading or in the school's grade entry, and I will really have gotten a C. (It wouldn't be the first time a clerical entry has worked out to my favor; just ask the Rutgers scholarship committee.) Exposing such a mistake would of course be a very ethical thing to do, but...well... Yeah. And from still another point of view, I'm almost afraid to learn that the grade was legitimate, which would mean that this whole thing really is a crap shoot, which is of course what everyone has tried to tell me, but deep down inside I really don't want to believe! Either that, or the future of Criminal Law is very bleak indeed, if so many people really did worse on that exam than I did.
Perhaps in the end it's a matter of some sort karmic gift, for my being willing to jeapordize my performance for the sake of working on Prop 8 over the semester. Yeah, that's it.
* Updated around 4:15 - Having gotten our papers back, we here at UCLA Law have learned that it's much better to get the grade without the raw score (as we do for exams) than it is to get the raw score without the grade (as did for our papers). They've since posted the distribution so we can get a feel for our placement relative to others, but there were many anxious people looking at their scores without any means of getting a bearing.
When I took the exams for the three doctrinal courses, I felt incredibly uncertain about Crim, really good about Torts, and pretty decent about Civil Procedure. I've told a lot of people how poorly I thought I did in Crim, and am currently preparing to be made fun of. I want to stress that thinking I did poorly was not the prototypical drama of the attention-hogging smart person who always claims they did poorly but always does well. It's pretty rare in my life that I've left a test thinking I did poorly, and the times I've thought that, I was right. With the Crim exam, it was a pretty objective feeling, knowing there was a lot of stuff I didn't include that needed to be included. In being short on time to prepare, I hadn't taken any practice exams for that class, and in the course of taking the exam I mismanaged my time horribly, spending an inordinate amount of time on one area and leaving myself very shortchanged for the rest of the exam. As a result, time ended before I was able to include a whole slew of things that needed to be included.
I'm kind of torn about the whole thing, because on the one hand I really want to know how on earth my exam merited an A grade. On the other, I'm afraid that if I ask, a mistake will be uncovered either in the professor's grading or in the school's grade entry, and I will really have gotten a C. (It wouldn't be the first time a clerical entry has worked out to my favor; just ask the Rutgers scholarship committee.) Exposing such a mistake would of course be a very ethical thing to do, but...well... Yeah. And from still another point of view, I'm almost afraid to learn that the grade was legitimate, which would mean that this whole thing really is a crap shoot, which is of course what everyone has tried to tell me, but deep down inside I really don't want to believe! Either that, or the future of Criminal Law is very bleak indeed, if so many people really did worse on that exam than I did.
Perhaps in the end it's a matter of some sort karmic gift, for my being willing to jeapordize my performance for the sake of working on Prop 8 over the semester. Yeah, that's it.
* Updated around 4:15 - Having gotten our papers back, we here at UCLA Law have learned that it's much better to get the grade without the raw score (as we do for exams) than it is to get the raw score without the grade (as did for our papers). They've since posted the distribution so we can get a feel for our placement relative to others, but there were many anxious people looking at their scores without any means of getting a bearing.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Buon' Nuov' Anno!
See, I was nice and I spared all of you the obligatory sappy tranquil holiday posts. Peace, happiness, blah blah blah, same old same old, boring boring boring.
Nah, actually I kinda dig all that stuff. But I have to admit, I totally missed out on the holidays this year. Not because I had flights on both Xmas and New Years (although I did) but because there was neither the time nor the weather. My last final was on the 19th, after which I took a couple days of brain-dead respite, then had to hurriedly catch up on things I fell behind on during the semester, and start looking at the summer job hunt and scholarship applications for next year. Somewhere in there I found what I think were some really fun presents, but I must admit my shopping and present-pondering was much more crammed in than it normally is. And there was not the typical leisurely evening of lovingly wrapping and decorating each present amidst breaks to gaze at the Xmas tree. Nope. I think they all got wrapped in a 15-minute span at around 2 am Xmas morning, so they could be crammed into my luggage and flown east.
And don't even get me started about seeing Xmas tree lots spring up while I'm still wearing shorts, and how much that helped my holiday spirit.
At any rate, it was a good two-week break between semesters. I had a good trip back east, seeing a lot of my well-missed friends and family. It was very strange, being back in Pittsburgh. It's odd how a place can seem so much the same but so different after just under five months. The first thing that struck me was how small it felt. Even the streets felt narrower than I remember. The other thing that struck me, which made me kind of sad, was that I definitely have lost that sense of ownership and intimate belonging that I felt such a short time ago. It was great to see so much that I love, and so many people that I love, but the feeling I had towards the city was very much that of a loving visitor, not of a resident or someone with an existing stake in the place. I guess that's just how it goes when you've naturally fallen out of touch with the daily goings-on of a community, the changes, the ebb and flow of events. It definitely confirmed to me that yes, I have moved away.
On the other hand, though, the feelings I had were also still definitely that of a close connection, love, and appreciation. It wasn't quite like slipping on a glove and having it fit perfectly, but more like pulling on an old hoodie or t-shirt that feels a little weird because it's different from most of your newer clothes, but has a comforting familiarity to it. So, at the same time that it confirmed that I have left the 'Burgh, it also confirmed that I will always love it dearly.
And I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't mention the PEOPLE! It was great to see so many people. I missed one or two that I really wanted to see, but also got to see some who I thought I would miss, a very pleasant surprise. I even got that greatest of time-passers, a quick road trip with MT! Complete with Headstones! I couldn't ask for much more....except perhaps more time with everyone. It's a very new thing for me to think, "A few months ago we used to talk almost every day. Now I have about three hours to sit with you for a meal, and that's all I'll see you for half a year." I'm not quite used to visiting places where I have a number of friends to see--something I'll have to adapt to!
At any rate, it was a good break and a good visit, and I feel like I'm entering the new semester refreshed and rejuvenated. We'll see if I still feel that way in a week or so, when first semester grades are in.
Nah, actually I kinda dig all that stuff. But I have to admit, I totally missed out on the holidays this year. Not because I had flights on both Xmas and New Years (although I did) but because there was neither the time nor the weather. My last final was on the 19th, after which I took a couple days of brain-dead respite, then had to hurriedly catch up on things I fell behind on during the semester, and start looking at the summer job hunt and scholarship applications for next year. Somewhere in there I found what I think were some really fun presents, but I must admit my shopping and present-pondering was much more crammed in than it normally is. And there was not the typical leisurely evening of lovingly wrapping and decorating each present amidst breaks to gaze at the Xmas tree. Nope. I think they all got wrapped in a 15-minute span at around 2 am Xmas morning, so they could be crammed into my luggage and flown east.
And don't even get me started about seeing Xmas tree lots spring up while I'm still wearing shorts, and how much that helped my holiday spirit.
At any rate, it was a good two-week break between semesters. I had a good trip back east, seeing a lot of my well-missed friends and family. It was very strange, being back in Pittsburgh. It's odd how a place can seem so much the same but so different after just under five months. The first thing that struck me was how small it felt. Even the streets felt narrower than I remember. The other thing that struck me, which made me kind of sad, was that I definitely have lost that sense of ownership and intimate belonging that I felt such a short time ago. It was great to see so much that I love, and so many people that I love, but the feeling I had towards the city was very much that of a loving visitor, not of a resident or someone with an existing stake in the place. I guess that's just how it goes when you've naturally fallen out of touch with the daily goings-on of a community, the changes, the ebb and flow of events. It definitely confirmed to me that yes, I have moved away.
On the other hand, though, the feelings I had were also still definitely that of a close connection, love, and appreciation. It wasn't quite like slipping on a glove and having it fit perfectly, but more like pulling on an old hoodie or t-shirt that feels a little weird because it's different from most of your newer clothes, but has a comforting familiarity to it. So, at the same time that it confirmed that I have left the 'Burgh, it also confirmed that I will always love it dearly.
And I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't mention the PEOPLE! It was great to see so many people. I missed one or two that I really wanted to see, but also got to see some who I thought I would miss, a very pleasant surprise. I even got that greatest of time-passers, a quick road trip with MT! Complete with Headstones! I couldn't ask for much more....except perhaps more time with everyone. It's a very new thing for me to think, "A few months ago we used to talk almost every day. Now I have about three hours to sit with you for a meal, and that's all I'll see you for half a year." I'm not quite used to visiting places where I have a number of friends to see--something I'll have to adapt to!
At any rate, it was a good break and a good visit, and I feel like I'm entering the new semester refreshed and rejuvenated. We'll see if I still feel that way in a week or so, when first semester grades are in.
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