Clearly the best thing ever.

Maybe this is what God wants to do with people at church sometimes. Presumably God would be more skilled at it.

Exams Exams Exams Exams... til December 14th...

I've got love for you....

if you were born in the 80's, the eeiightiees! I've got exams now too. Last law-school ruined holidays!

Peace and Love.

Feeling a little guilty...

So I was scanning the radio stations today, and I stopped on the Christian one to hear the rest of Nichole Nordeman's "Seasons" song, which I have always loved. Immediately after the song ended, another started with the words "Britney I'm sorry." Turns out that Bebo Norman has written a song to Spears-- one of my favorite people to hate on. And listening to this song, I realized, it's our society that lifted her up and let her fall. I like this guy's cover of the song-- it doesn't have the annoying Britney footage of the other fan made video. Anyways, the song made me reflect on that judgmental and critical part in me, and on how desperately we need empathy and forgiveness. Hope you enjoy it too.

Take a little break to restore your faith in humanity.

Fifty People, One Question: Restored from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

Giving a shout out to Ben and Sarah- and what I think is a great video!

Coming up: Three Years After Katrina- 8/29/08

Three years after the storm, many obstacles to recovery and other problems still remain for the Gulf Coast. More than ever, while campaigns are going full blown, it's important that we keep what happened in memory. Here are five easy things you can do to commemorate 8/29/05.

1) Get Informed. There are several great websites you can visits to learn the facts about Katrina, what went wrong, and the recovery efforts. Two of my favorites is are Nola.com's page and America's Wetland.
Of course there's also google.

2) Write/call/email your congressmen. This is so easy and it actually does make a difference. You can either write your own letter about how you want better levees, funding for coastal restoration, a plan for Fema, etc. Or you go to websites like the Gulf Restoration Network for prewritten text. Also, dropping a line to McCain or Obama won't hurt!

Contact your house members.

Contact your senators (including Mac and Oby).

3) Talk to your friends about Katrina. Easy. You can even start a heated debate, but the point is that we don't want people to forget. Especially now that campaigns are in full swing!

4) Attend or host an event commemorating the third anniversary of Katrina.

Finally
5) Volunteer your time or donate your bucks to help spread awareness/ aid restoration efforts.

Check out
The Gulf Restoration Network

Levees.org This group is concerned with levees all over the nation- you'd be surprised how many are inadequate.

The New Orleans Musician Relief Fund

or

Make it Right This is the one with Brad Pitt.

just to name a few.

Thanks for standing with the Gulf Coast!!

Back to school

So I'm back. Back from Costa Rica (with better Spanish). Back in Baton Rouge. Back to school. This is my last year of school, so I'm going to make the best of it. I'm. Going. To. Study.

Hard.

Short Update

So I guess I'll get into a writing mood again soon, but for now I'm just blazing through life. I love my summer job at a small firm, which makes me so happy because I've been afraid I would dislike practicing law. I haven't been thrilled with law school, but this work is so invigorating and real that it's great.
Also I won second place and a nice chunk of change in the LA Bar Association Environmental Law Essay Contest. This is great news as well--- professionally speaking, I'm flying high.
Friends are doing great, whether they're getting married or just going to the gym with me. Which I'm doing, by the way. For like three weeks now.
Anyways, I'm super busy now, so enjoy the Beatles videos if you stumble across here.

The Beatles - I Am The Walrus

goo goo ga joob.

Again!

Your Mother Should Know.

Oh How I Love Them Beatles

After all these years, too!

Wow-- movie adaptation

So Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was a movie featuring Uma Thurman as Sissy. Uma!! Later to be Tarantino's heroine! NO coincidence.

Read With Me Now

Next to be read and reviewed:

Light in August by William Faulkner.

Book Review: Even Cowgirls get the Blues

This is my first book review. Please insult it if you think it's lacking. I'm starting out with a Tom Robbins book, almost three years since I read the book that was my book for months: Skinny Legs and All.

Before I review this book, let me just make a disclaimer. I read books like I read the Bible growing up in Lutheran school-- I assume that the author knows where he's going and that the words are purposeful. If there seems to be a problem, I tend to blame my small mind rather than the author. And in every scene I read a theme.

Another disclaimer: how much I enjoy books has very much to do with their aesthetic. The prose I like has a very precise amount of thickness- it's enjoyable and can be picked at for a while, but it doesn't give me an aneurysm. So if the writing is yummy, I will generally read more awesomeness into the book that is there in the first place.

Ok, so Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Like I said before, I have only read two of Robbins' books: this one and Skinny Legs and All. And man, these are great plots just for their strangeness.

Although Cowgirls doesn't have the epic quality of Skinny Legs, you do get to visit stuffy New York apartments, secluded Native American cave people, a crazy "wise man," rowdy cowgirls of all sorts, a neurotic, self-absorbed psychiatrist named after the author, the Clockworks, and the backseats of many, many cars.

That's because the main character, Miss Sissy Hankshaw, has enormous, repulsive/beautiful thumbs that have made her stick out like-- I won't say it-- in her small southern tabaccoland town. Those gigantic thumbs of her prevent her from ever having the chance to just be in the background or fit in at all. But instead of despairing, she decides to worship them. And she follows her thumbs where they lead her-- hitchhiking across the nation before finally brushing with normalcy and confronting her nature. There are, of course, many other surprising confrontations, and Robbins' hallmark moments with animated otherwise-inanimate objects.

This book focuses on Sissy and her "preaxial digits." Although many themes flow from the story, the most striking one to me is oddness in society. Whether or not people are born strange or chose to be that way is often a matter of debate-- but it's not in Sissy case. Those thumbs of her ensure that she will have to make big decisions about how she will characterize herself and her relationship to the world. Being different without being apologetic about it comes at a big price, and I think this book is very much about the cost of being different.

Being different and being free are almost the same thing for the purposes of this book, and Robbin's demonstrates in a million ways how civilization interferes with these qualities. This idea is brought to life in the image of the giant whooping cranes, dwindling in numbers, that descend occasionally near the Rubber Rose Ranch that the cowgirls inhabit. No more plot spoilers here.

In the end, there's no satisfying "moral of the story" in Cowgirls. The author explicitly points out the flaws in the logic of all of the characters, so in the end you're not sure who to believe. With so many other themes to digest, and none clearly resolving in the end, there are more than a handful of approaches a reader could take in characterizing Sissy's experience. But to me, the nice thing is that the story is honest to life, in the sense that every choice Sissy makes-- to embrace the individuality-made-flesh that is her thumbs or to find the love and security that she craves-- is made at the expense of something else. And maybe there's a happy ending.

So, this book is fun, fast and smooth to read. It was written in '76 but it feels up-to-the-minute. It can get cheezy at moments and preachy at others, but the tone is tongue in cheek overall. In any case, Sissy is hard to forget. Worth the read.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues receives
4 out of 5 cookies for yummy prose
3 out of 5 moons for symbolism
4 out of 5 owls for intellectual stimulation
5 out of 5 bras for women's themes
3 out of 5 bibles for teaching me lessons

over all: 3.5 out of 4 clover leaves.

Awesome, awesome, awesome

Thank you, Google and You Tube.

Google and You Tube team up to bring presidential forum to N.O. - Breaking News from New Orleans - Times-Picayune - NOLA.com

I've discovered Imogen Heap.

I think I'm gonna be obsessed now for a little while. Poor Raul, lol.

Imogen Heap - Just For Now (live at Studio 11 103.1FM)

I'm pretty much blown away.

WALK IT OUT FOSSE!!

This is my all-time favorite internet video!
Doesn't it just make you smile?

Let me just tell you

how extremely content I am with life right now. It doesn't even matter that now is time for me to buckle down and study- I'm happy about it. I only wish my budget somehow included these.

Well, I'm going to go hit the books for the next three weeks. Realistically, I'll be back here to procrastinate and share my review of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins (and then promptly return it Joanna after like a year). But while I'm away studying, enjoy the music that I'm listening to now.

A little love for the law

So I have recently had a couple of experiences that make feel optimistic about my future.

1) The other day a friend called with a legal problem. In the end, there were no concrete steps I could take, but just being able to research and possibly help someone with a problem was absolutely invigorating. I think I'm just getting weary of the academic grind and the theoretical stuff that I memorize for the exams. Maybe I just need the sense of purpose that only a problem to be solved can bring.

2) I attended Family Court yesterday, as a part of the Family Law class requirement. I watched the judge deal with ex-couples looking to set child support. It was great because I got to see her apply the law in a human way. She went by the book, but also made a clear effort to show both parties that their concerns mattered. For example, although support could have been set (legally speaking) without the father's presence in one case, she told the attorney for the state that if at all possible, he should get the father in court instead of just sending him a piece of paper in the end. In another example, she told a couple that the situation "was no longer about them" and was about the child. She considered the other factors in peoples' lives but was firm. She was truly a force for good. I was impressed.

Yay! Now, back to the books. Ha.

In the meantime, I'm pretty excited about Raul's recital in the Ridge this Saturday. And about finishing off the second year of law school.

Pick an Analogy

law school is to middle school
as

ultimate fighting is to professional wrestling
body builders are to spinners
tiramisu is to chocolate pudding
major depression is to dysthimia

Yoshilicious

Me, these days

I want to write so badly, but I'm busy. I'm desperately trying to write a paper for class/possible publication. I think I found a good job for the summer. I'm having a nephew! I'm engaged to be married!!!

But this week needs to end before you'll hear from me again.

Mineral Rights Rambling

Royalty. Override. Read the lease. You're bound by the terms of the lease. But your honor... No, read the damn lease. This is not right-- But you're about to get your lease terminated. All you can do is turn to Humble for equity reasons. That's all you can do.

This is a lesson to all of us just to read the documents.

Or maybe a lesson to forget it and watch more documentaries.

Let's stay home and watch Planet Earth all day. Let's have an Earth Day or better yet return to undergrad when the Communists made you feel super-conservative.

Where you spent all night analyzing a character and enjoying it, but also feeling like it's just a fun game. Then you started thinking about professional schools like the law one, and how when you get out of those places you could do real things. But then you're in Mineral Rights, two years later, thinking it's all just a not-as-fun game that clever people play with money.

'Sblood.

Changed?

Do I think I've changed in the past two years since I've written in this blog?
Maybe.
What I'm certain of is that I know myself much better now. I'm much more aware of my desires, strengths and shortcomings. I'm more averse to competition and sensitive than I thought I was. Law school doesn't fit neatly into who I am as a person, but I don't think anything would. I think where I am is as good a place as any for me to learn skills that will help me to be a productive member of society.
But the creative, expressive side of me is calling me back to this site. So here I am.

Clover Lover

Over under, soft soft green,

Toes blanketed, head curled downward.

Blind earthen ancients burrow out of sight.

Above, fluff or clear or Zeus with bolts--

I don't know.

And around me, no one cares

for different reasons.

Ovular soft soft green, delicate white lines

form triangles

and occasionally delicious

curvaceous squares.