A long overdue stammer of thanks

I’ve been reading some of my posts recently, and I’ve come to a few realizations about myself. I’m incredibly boring sometimes. No, don’t contradict me on that. I know that I may on occasion have intelligent things to say or make insightful points, but (at least) every now and again, I have to stop and spout off some bit of esoteric and arcane mumbo-jumbo that has been running through my head. The most recent example has been my diatribe over the abortion issue.

I read that post (talk about long... man, sometimes I just cannot get to the point!) and realized that I don’t think I function on the same level as other people generally do. I don’t know how to introduce myself to a pretty woman without stammering and mumbling. I can’t walk confidently through a business social gathering. I get bored watching a football game on television... But ask me about how democracy suffers from a utility preference transitivity problem, and watch my face light up!

Most of my life seems to be spent in a permanent state of grey. Issues flit through my head and I have full-blown arguments with myself over bizarre hypothetical scenarios and what most people might consider absurd propositions. But when entering the mind of a by-nature philosopher, one thing gets left at the door:

Emotion.

A rational man thinks, but cannot afford to feel. A conclusion laced with passions can be a dangerous thing, because while you can throw away a conclusion based on reason when better reasons come along, a conclusion based on emotion is much harder to let go.

Most of my past-times seem to be centered around making me emote. Some people get drunk. Other people get high. My personal form of intoxication is the revelry of euphoria, the misery of genuine despair, the pounding vision of righteous fury, and the thrumming of the heart in breathless anticipation.

While I typically turn to movies or literature for my drama fix, occasionally real life provides all the emotion I can handle. These moments, when the force of my emotion has left me bereft of reason... These moments, when I simply do not have the capacity to think, are as rare as they are meaningful to my life.

Perhaps you might not know what I am talking about, so let me give you an example.

In most every generation there is some moment that defines a lifetime of people. For my parents, it was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. People who were alive then can usually tell you where they were when they heard the news, what they were wearing, and any number of other details about the day.

For my generation, that defining day is likely September 11, 2001. I have little doubt that in 40 years when the specter of 9-11 has been passed, children will ask their parents about "how it was back in the day." Their parents, all of us, will be able to tell their children about where we were, what we were wearing, and how it had affected us.

I was in the basement of my scholarship hall on the campus of the University of Kansas. Because I lived in the Scholarship Halls, I had to do work around the hall as part of my reduced rent. My job that morning was to do the breakfast dishes. While I did the dishes, I usually turned on the television to CNN (the best news program that we got... I always wished we would have gotten the BBC news instead). I was there, watching, as the news cut away to an emerging story. I was there, watching, as the plane hit. I was there, watching, as people died.

I was there, and I was thinking.

I wondered about how this would affect foreign policy. I wondered about how domestic policy would be altered. I wondered if this would be the start of a war. As usual, though, because I was thinking, I was not feeling.

After I finished the breakfast dishes, I continued to watch and think until it was time to go to my class. I continued thinking about policy as I went to my mid-morning political theory discussion section under Phara Charmchi. We wouldn’t be talking about class-material that morning, I knew. I mentally prepared a list of questions I had and insights I thought I should share.

As the class began, though, something happened. A pretty blond woman, who I think sat in the second row, began to cry.

I can’t recall what I was wearing. I don’t remember whether I had breakfast that morning. I haven’t the foggiest idea what other classes I had that day if any. I do remember this class, though, and I do remember her. She was wearing a blue jacket, and she was weeping. She was so overcome by the power of her emotion that she got up to leave the class partway through.

As she broke down, and as she left, she flipped a switch in my head. Thoughts left. Emotion flooded in.

I found that I couldn’t recall any of the points that I had wanted to make or any of the questions I had prepared in advance. All I could do was be carried along by the swift current of emotion coursing through me. I was struck by the overwhelming tragedy of so much wasted life. I realized that the estimated dead were not numbers to be tallied on a chart, but were people’s mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and children, too. I was confused and terrified, but there was more. Even though I am not generally a violent person, my mind would not listen to reason that day. I wanted vengeance, but I didn’t want to punish the people who had killed the victims in New York because they had killed the innocent people in New York. I wanted to exact terrible retribution on whomever had hurt the girl from my political theory class so badly.

Sometimes, I forget that living means more than having an iron-clad set of beliefs which can withstand serious intellectual assault on the force of their reasons. Being encased in an armor of rigorous thought is a good way to have a good argument, but it is not a good way to live.

To that woman from my political theory class, wherever she may be tonight, I want to say thank-you. You reminded me then, as you remind me now, that life must be lived with passion, and not absent it. Although you may not have realized it, you were the cause of a meaningful moment in my life, and I’ve been remiss for not saying so in the four years intervening that day and this, even if this time I’m throwing my heart-felt appreciation into the wind.

Why my future wife will demand to plan the wedding on her own...

A bit of news arrived last week (I think it was last week, anyway... my sense of time is a bit off) and I thought I might cast it into the ether. When I couldn’t find any volatile, highly flammable liquid in the form of C2H5OC2H5, I thought I’d post it on my blog instead. Ha! Science jokes always get the ball off to a good start...

What’s that? You don’t like science jokes? That’s the trouble with you all - not nerdy enough. That’s alright, though, because I think I’ve got the solution. And remember folks, if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate. Ba-dum bum ching!

Seriously, though, my brother, whom I have mentioned several times, is getting married and he and the future bride have finally set themselves a date and time for the wedding. I haven’t always liked all of my brother’s girlfriends. He used to date the older sister of one of my best friends in high school, but she ended up being a bit callous. While she was gone over a summer break, she met another guy, started dating him, and ended up dumping my brother. My brother used to date another woman when I was in college, and even got engaged to her, but she ended up being about as bitchy as they come.

I’ve been dumped my fair share of times... And they all really take the wind out of your sails. I’ve been dumped in person. I’ve been dumped via IM. Once, I was even dumped by letter even though the girl lived next door to me (the real kick in the pants on that one was that she ended the letter: "Thank you for your time and consideration..." as if it were a business letter).

My brother’s old girlfriend (the one with whom he was previously engaged to be married), dumped him (called off the wedding and everything) on a holiday... When she had made plans to fly out to see him... When he’d bought the non-refundable plane tickets... And she did it over the phone... From half a country away.

Ouch.

Before, I’ve never liked his girlfriends (even before they did the awful things to him), but this one is different. I like her. She’s an amazing person who seems as sweet, intelligent, artistic, beautiful, and compassionate a woman as I would hope for my brother (and that says a lot about her). On one of my trips out to visit my brother in Seattle she even took me on a day trip to an out-of-the-way zoo to see penguins while my brother was at work. Anyone who can find a way to bring me closer to penguins gets an extra gold star in my book.

The wedding should be great. While anyone can get married in a church, rent a space in a park, or go down to the courthouse for a good ol’ fashioned government wedding, my brother and his future wife wanted their wedding to be unique. So they chartered a boat and will get married while sailing the high seas (those are commonly found in Washington state, me mateys... Arr). What’s even more spiffy is that they are getting a sea captain to officiate.

It’s hard to beat that in terms of uniqueness. My idea is to take it a step further though. If we’re going for unique, why not take the next logical step? Pirates. Yes, pirates. A pirate themed wedding would be sure to get things off to a good start, right? Who doesn’t like pirates, anyway?

Make anyone who suggests ‘the chicken dance’ for the reception walk the plank, roll around in a pile of gold dubloons, and get married all in the same day while wearing an eyepatch. How could a day get better?

I just hope we can find enough grog.

Why are people so awful?

A few days ago, I was reading the news on one of the few pseudo news-sites I visit regularly (CNN.com) and came across an article that broke a streak of what was otherwise a few good days in a row without bad news.

A man in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, caught a mouse in his home and wanted to get rid of the mouse. Now, at my parents’ home North of the river, I’ve caught a few mice before, and I’ve always done what I thought was the proper action. After catching the mouse in a non-lethal trap, I take the trap up to the lake, find a culvert with some tall grass, and release the mouse with the hopes that it will start a new life in its new location.

This fellow in New Mexico, however, wasn’t quite as considerate. Instead of doing something as humane, he thought to himself, "Well, heck. I’ve got a pile of leaves outside I’m going to go burn, and I’ve got a mouse to get rid of... Why don’t I just put the mouse on top of the leaves and burn them both together?"

I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in. Without any apparent trouble from his conscience, this man took a living being - a being scientists have discovered has memories, emotions, fears, plans for the future (albeit short term future), and quite importantly, feels pain - and he decided to burn it alive.

Maybe I’m more sensitive about the issue of burnings than other people are, but I sincerely hope that I am not alone in my horror at what this man decided was appropriate. Being burned alive must be an absolutely horrible way to die, and this man without a second thought took a being capable of feeling the entirety of the experience in the same way as would a human infant, and condemned that living thing to excruciating pain, terror, and confusion. And don’t gloss over how awful that would be. Hair would burn, skin would char, and blood would boil away before the mouse was burned to death.

In what seems to me to be not quite a fitting enough (but close) punishment, something intervened. Fate, nature, chance, the hand of God... Call it what you will, but the story did not end with the mouse in the flames.

After the mouse caught on fire, it leapt out of the pile of leaves and ran, still on fire, back into the man’s house, and tried to hide underneath a window. The still-burning mouse, as it died (most likely), caught the man’s house on fire and burned it to the ground. The house and everything inside was completely destroyed.

A mouse doesn’t have a lot of weapons to fight against wanton cruelty. It cannot gnash its terrible teeth or roar its terrible roar (brownie points to anyone who can identify where that came from...). This mouse fought back in the only way it could, and if there is a heaven, I hope this mouse made it there.

It may not be a victory of self-defense, but if you can’t take your attacker with you, do as much damage to him as you can.

In memory of the poor mouse, R.I.P.

Another boring philosophy lesson: Abortion

Right now, I am in the middle of furnishing my apartment. I always knew that there would be lots of little things I took for granted living either at my parents’ house or in campus-run housing, and now that I am without their aid, I see that I was right. It’s amazing how many small things I am finding that I am lacking that I never before had to worry about. In fact, I’m going shopping now more frequently than I ever have before in my life.

While I was out shopping today (I was looking for some scented candles to match the accent colors in the living room), I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt commemorating Operation Rescue in Wichita, Kansas, in 1993. For those of you who might not know, Operation Rescue was a massive protest in the form of civil-disobedience against Wichita’s abortion clinics. Protesters blocked clinic doors, kept patients and doctors from entering the facilities, blew up a few trash dumpsters, and laid down in the middle of busy highways bringing traffic to a halt all over Wichita. Generally, the protesters made pests of themselves, as I understand from people who lived in Wichita at the time.

What struck me is that by and large, people who are quite passionate about the issue of abortion are almost, to the last person, completely unsophisticated about their views, do not understand the conceptual weaknesses of their positions, and find themselves unable to do more than repeat particular talking points that they’ve gotten off a pamphlet another unsophisticated person prepared.

In case one didn’t know it, there is a voluminous literature in philosophical journals on Ethics over the morality of abortion. One of the most (in)famous philosophers on the issue of abortion actually teaches at the University of Kansas (Professor Donald Marquis). And virtually every single philosopher has outright dismissed the standard two positions concerning abortion for the same reason: they are quite untenable in any sort of principled fashion.

The two classic positions can be characterized something like this:

1) Person A says that abortion is wrong because it is murder. They point out that the fetus is a human being and that all human beings deserve a right to life. Abortion is therefore no different, morally, than killing a fully grown human being.

2) Person B says that abortion is permissible because it is a woman’s right to choose. A woman, this person says, should have the right to decide whether to have children, when to have them, and how many to have. The woman’s right to decide what to do with her body is the kind of freedom we all need to live in society, so abortion cannot be restricted.

Neither position is tenable in any rational way.

The classic pro-life person makes several mistakes. First, most usually, they draw their moral principles on killing from the Bible. While this is not a fatal mistake for a theory on the wrongness of killing, it suffers from two separate critiques. The first critique is that the Bible may have some good nuggets of wisdom in it, but by and large, it is not a very good guide for morality. If you doubt my words, let me remind you that the Bible contains exact rules on whom you may rightfully enslave, how to go about selling human beings as property, that handicapped people may not enter heaven, vivid descriptions of deity-mandated genocide, and recommends stoning for children who talk back to their parents or for people who work on Sunday.

The second critique is the problem of trying to get out of the bible the moral principle that killing a fetus is wrong. While it is true that God issues one of his ten (well, one of the second set of 10 commandments... The first set involves not boiling goats in the milk of the she-goat which bore the one you eat) commandments as a prohibition on killing, this does not have the forceful significance one might hope. God commands others to kill repeatedly, and kills many individuals himself in terrible ways.

One might not even be able to say that God treasures infant life more than other forms. Even the innocent babies are not spared. God makes it clear in his orders to the Israelites during their genocides to wipe out the elderly and the suckling babe alike and to spare none (except for the virgin women, of course, which become property of the invading Israelites). God curses all infants in Genesis, dooming them to toil or pain of childbirth. God drowns millions of infants in the flood in Genesis. In the Old Testament (I’m too lazy to look it up right now), God even kills an infant baby as punishment for the adultery of the father King David with the wife of one of his generals.

A second main problem with the standard pro-life argument, leaving aside the biblical origin for most adherents of the position, is that the term ‘human’ is nebulous and uncertain. On the one hand, ‘human’ can be said to be as the Supreme Court defined pornography: "I know it when I see it." But what we mean by ‘human’ will depend on whether we include fetuses or not in the moral community, and the pro-lifer rarely stops to analyze the difficulty with their assumed definition.

One can define human in three ways. First, one can define ‘human’ in a spiritual way, identifying humans as things that have souls. Of course, this poses unique problems. It was not a century ago when ‘the woman’ question was vigorously argued in the most progressive of universities, and seminars were held to discuss whether women had souls. For the longest time, black people were not believed to have souls, either. Clearly, identifying which things in the world have souls is not something which we can clearly work through. Furthermore, identifying ensouled beings seems to be a circular. Those whom we wish to be ensouled are used as the definition of what it means to have a soul.

Humanity can be defined psychologically. Being human is identified with a particular set of mental characteristics which make one human. Some theorists will lay out sets of mental characteristics, but I will not do that here. The classic hypothetical which is used to demonstrate the identification of a person with their mind is the brain-swap. You have two people, say George W. Bush and John Kerry, and they undergo an operation to have their brains transplanted with each other. When the operation is finished, where is George W. Bush? Is George W. still in his body or is he now in John Kerry’s body? The person who identifies a person with their mind, will agree that human followed his brain, and did not remain with his (old) body.

Finally, humanity can be identified biologically. A human is a particular set of DNA, something that looks like a human, something that has ‘human’ parts, or (to get a bit more technical), a physical contiguity of something which was human at one point.

Depending on which version of humanity you hold to, you will come down differently on particular issues. The recent controversy over the death of Terri Schiavo in Florida illustrates this concept. When someone is fully brain-dead (as all her doctors asserted), what you have left is a body with autonomic nerve function. Before they pulled the feeding tube, was Terri alive? If you are a biological humanist, then yes, Terri was still alive. Her heart was beating, she was breathing, and she digested food. If you are a psychological humanist, then no. Terri died when she went brain-dead.

Classic pro-lifers are biological humanists, hence the popular phrase "Abortion stops a beating heart." The fetus has human DNA, therefore, it is a human being. The fetus has human features, therefore it is a human being. The fetus is potentially a human, therefore it is a human being. Unfortunately, there are several really terrible problems (I believe fatal problems) for biological humanism. First, there is the mind-swap problem discussed above. In this modern age, it seems clear that your brain is identical with your mind. A biological humanist, to maintain that the human doesn’t follow his brain, must maintain that the brain and mind are separable. This seems unlikely. Also, there are two separate problems that I want to flesh out to demonstrate the fallacy of biological humanism:

First problem: Suppose I have cancer. I go to the oncologist and have the oncologist remove a cancer cell culture from my body. As usually done with such cultures, the doctor places it in a Petri dish and adds nutrient agar. By watching the growth of the cells in the culture dish, he can tell whether the cancer is malignant or benign. But now, having found that the cell-culture is benign, what should he do with the cancer cell culture in the dish? It decidedly has human DNA. It is surely a physical continuation of something which was human. It ought to have a right to life, then. But we feel no guilt when we throw it into the bin marked for incineration.

Second problem: Suppose I am out in my backyard having a barbecue. An alien saucer lands by the pool and a little green fellow gets out. After flipping on his translation device, he tells me of his planet. He tells me about his form of government, the scientific advances they have made, and shows me pictures of the new house he just had built, and pictures of his wife and children too. Can I permissibly kill the alien? Surely not. The alien is not human by any means. The alien does not have any human DNA. In fact, the alien may not even use DNA as a method of heredity.

By assuming the position of biological humanism, classic pro-lifers have opened themselves up for some serious conceptual flaws. Finally, classic pro-lifers suffer from one additional problem. This problem was illustrated by Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article on abortion, where she likened pregnancy to a peculiar scenario.

Dr. Thomson’s argument goes like this: You are jogging in the park one afternoon, when some masked people jump out of the bushes and press a camphor-soaked rag to your face. When you wake up, you find yourself lying in a hospital bed attached to a bizarre machine. Lying in a bed just across the room from you (also connected to the machine) is another person. A nurse comes in and tells you that you were kidnapped by members of the Society of Music Lovers, and brought here to this hospital. The person lying across the room from you is a famous violinist who has a rare blood disease. The machine hooked up to the two of you will allow your liver to filter out toxins from his blood, and will ensure that he lives for the nine months it will take to cure him of his disease. He is a person and has a right to life. Even though you did not ask for this situation, the nurse is sorry, but she cannot unhook you, because to do so would kill the violinist (a violation of his right to life). Thomson would allow you to unhook yourself from the machine, even knowing that this would cause the death of the violinist.

Thomson’s point is that the mere fact that we give something a right to life does not entail that it is always wrong to kill that being. Thomson argues that other considerations should be weighed against the right to life to discover what to do.

Pro-lifers of the classic variety will not have any considerations like those just mentioned in mind. They will almost universally parrot the same tired lines about "It is always wrong to take a human life" despite the fact that such sayings cannot be supported with principles that stand up to scrutiny.

Unfortunately, classic pro-choicers are almost as bad.

Pro-choicers will typically be found repeating something along the lines of "A woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body is what matters." While such a sentiment sounds good on its face, it suffers from the same flaw as the pro-life argument - namely, that it assumes the moral status of the fetus without arguing for the position.

My rights to my body are not absolute by any means. People do not have an absolute property right in their own bodies. Our society certainly does not hold such a view currently and one might be hard pressed to defend such an absolute right to property in one’s person.
My rights to my person are effective only within the bounds of law, and only to the extent that they do not interfere with other moral agents. As one undergraduate professor of mine once noted, "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."

We do not allow people to take their own lives, or to sell their kidneys for money. We do not allow people to take dangerous chemical substances (well, many dangerous chemical substances, anyway). If a mother with a small child wants to simply get up one morning and move to another State, she cannot simply leave the baby at her old house when she leaves (such an act would likely be criminal).

The only way that the ‘woman’s right to choose’ argument can function is if we accept from the start that the fetus is not a moral agent. This is denied vehemently by the biological humanists, of course, since the fetus is biologically a human being. Pro-choicers are usually psychological humanists though. Killing the fetus is not a moral wrong because the fetus is not yet a human (i.e., does not yet have mental characteristics sufficient to grant it personhood).

Such a view seems plausible to me for other reasons, but suffers from a few conceptual flaws, just as does its pro-life cousin. Demanding a particular set of mental characteristics to create a moral agent has some unforseen consequences.

While it is true that a fetus does not have the mental characteristics to make it a human (it cannot, after all, have them since its mind has not yet even developed), such characteristics are also not likely to be found in a newborn infant. Holding that the fetus may be aborted because it is not yet human also demands that infanticide be acceptable until some developmental threshold is passed. Such a conclusion is shocking to the minds of most people.

As well, what of sleeping people? Particularly during non-dream sleep, while I sleep, my mind may be functioning, but certainly not on any level sufficient to make me a moral agent. I am, for all intents and purposes, unconscious. That word might be glossed over, so read it again... ‘Unconscious’ ...not even cognizant of my own existence. Such a mental state is surely the most base mental state one could imagine and still purport for there to be a ‘mental realm’ to a creature exhibiting it. What of the senile elderly? What of the mentally handicapped?

Defining the proper set of mental characteristics is difficult and may be clouded by circularity problems. A theorist must come up with the appropriate set of characteristics without thinking through the consequences of his set, otherwise he might alter his proposed set of mental faculties to allow in those he wishes or keep out those he does not want in the ‘human’ group.

Finally, if we are willing to accept some set of psychological principles which will allow most infants to remain on the ‘human’ side of the line (meaning we can’t kill them), then by what principle can we possibly exclude the millions and millions of non-human animals who have mental faculties well in excess of newborn human infants? Gorillas have been found to have intelligence levels of young humans and chimpanzees are in the same range. Dogs and cats have mental abilities, ranging from memory to planning to rudimentary mathematical abilities, which far outstrip our own young. Even ravens have been found to possess mental acuity greater than kindergarten students.

There are more sophisticated positions available to people, should they care to think about the matters carefully. While I have yet to come across an account of the wrongness of killing which did not suffer from some critique or another, it strikes me as a sign of intellectual weakness on the part of American education that the two MOST flawed theories are also the most popular.

Eye of the beholder? This had better involve a gaze-attack instead of science...

My Environmental Law class today discussed varying approaches to environmental issues in response to an article we read detailing a simple hypothetical. The hypo’s details are unimportant (as are the facts of all cases), but the values which are being weighed are clear in the scenario. We were asked to choose between illimitable benefits to humankind and environmental degradation on the one hand, and a slightly harsher reality where the environment was spared on the other.

In the course of discussing one of the possible ways of judging how to deal with such a simplified issue (Cost-Benefit analysis), one factor kept coming up with students in class. Several students eschewed the reliance on science to determine the probable dangers and benefits of the various proposed actions because "good science is in the eye of the beholder."

Such a sentiment is shocking to say the least and portrays the total lack of success that scientists have had in educating the lay public about the shared endeavor of all children of the enlightenment. Science, as a discipline, is NOT in the eye of the beholder. In fact, the objectiveness of science is one of the factors which distinguishes is most clearly from disciplines like philosophy, religion, and literature.

In a former life of mine, before I found that I was ill-suited for a life in a white lab coat, I studied microbiology. I still miss using my platinum loop to plate bacteria onto the agar. I still wish that I had those tools just so that I could enjoy the pleasure of growing little critters on a plate and looking at them under a microscope. One thing is certain, however, about the work that I did. When I write that a certain mutation will occur when Serratia marcescens is exposed to some level of radiation, my results are either true or false.

Their truth or falsity (whether they match to the objective world or not) is not a matter of philosophy. It is not a matter of politics. It is not a matter of ideology or personal interpretation. A model I might make of how nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections spread and a way to combat them is not a matter of politics. It is a matter of empirical research. Whether to implement my ideas might be a matter of politics, but the truth or falsity of my ideas is not.

Bad science does exist. Scientists are human, and all humans make mistakes from time to time. Some scientists have fabricated their results. Some have engaged in unethical scientific research. Some have mis-interpreted their data or made errors in calculations. Still others have had the proper numbers in front of them but reached the wrong conclusions from those numbers.

But this fact alone does not indicate that science is a subjective discipline. In every case where such fabrications, falsifications, or miscalculations have taken place, science has stepped in and discovered and corrected the errors.

Drs. Pons and Fleishmann (I may have misspelt the names) thought that they had created a functioning cold fusion reactor during my lifetime, and their scientific discovery was widely touted throughout the media as the dawn of a new age of energy for mankind. But their results were quickly found not to be repeatable and their methods highly dubious.

Ideology is static. A classical liberal (using liberal in the technical sense, not the political sense) feminist will believe that males and females are born the same inside and that purely social forces shape our gender identities. No scientific evidence to the contrary (and there is quite a lot of it) will dissuade him from his belief. A person who clings to the idea that mankind was created in its present form just over 6,000 years ago will not be convinced by the overwhelming evidence that such is not the case.

Science is not of the nature of ideology, though. Science, because of its reliance on methodology to reach conclusions (instead of assuming the conclusions in advance), is self-correcting. Bad science and Good science are not matters for the beholder to decide. Science sorts itself out fairly rapidly, and the bad science is thrown on the dust-heaps of the past, just like cold fusion, Lamarckian evolution, and the witchcraft theory of disease.

The first day of classes

Today was the first day of classes for my second semester of being a 2L. As usual, I have a sneaking suspicion that somehow I got the shaft. In my schedule, I have a day where I have one class, a day with four classes, a day with three classes, a day with two classes, and finally a day with three classes (In that order, M-F). Naturally, school starts on the day in which I have the largest number of classes.

I started off with Evidence. I can already tell that I am not going to enjoy taking this class. I know that it is required so I must take the class anyway, but the fact that the course is at 8:00 in the morning is a big drawback. I am decidedly not a morning person. I can stay up until 4:00 in the morning without a problem, but asking me to wake up before 10:00 is usually not a fast way to get in my good graces. And the course is being taught by "Jimmy C," which is a bad thing for me. I like him as a man, and I an easily tell that he is one of the most intelligent men I will ever have the privilege to know in my lifetime, but all that said, I can’t stand the way he teaches class.

For those not in law school, there are usually three varieties of professors that call on students in law school. For people like me who are, by nature, a bit on the shy side, the prospect of being called to answer in front of the class can be a terrifying thought. Some professors are relaxed and call on students to participate but simply allow students to raise their hands to join in a discussion. To me, these are the best. Strangely, if not forced to come up with an answer, I will typically find one and have decent arguments to back up my answer (however unconventional the answer may be). Other professors do the "lightning strike" method, where the professor will call on you, but with no clearly defined order, and once you’ve been called on you have a week or more of easy breathing because you won’t come back up in the queue for a while. "Jimmy C." follows the last option, though. "Jimmy C." is of the "rolling boulder" type. He’ll simply start at the end of a row and call on people one after another until he reaches the other side of the room. For me, this is pure hell. I don’t learn well under that kind of stress. In fact, I tend to spend about fifteen minutes of the class simply stressing over how many more people he has to go through before he gets to me, what he is likely to ask me about, and attempting to frame a coherent answer beforehand despite my terror. Unfortunately, when I know my ‘turn’ is coming, I spend so much time playing through scenarios in my head that I fail to listen to what is going on in class around me, even though other students are surely making valuable contributions to the class discussions.

Following Evidence, I went to a class on the Federal Court system. I can tell already that I am going to love this class. The subject matter is interesting to me, which is always a bonus. According to the professor, this will be a class about ideas and substance rather than dull, dry procedure, which suits me just fine. I’m at home in the world of ideas and can argue for hours over the proper role of judges in law, what it means to be part of the judiciary, and the proper relationship between the judiciary and the other branches of government. On an even bigger plus, the professor (a new professor hoping to be hired on permanently) is an amazing guy. I’ve found three professors in law school so far whose personal presence commands the room, one simply by the force of his charisma and will, and two of them simply because they seem less regimented and are willing to crack jokes in class. This new professor is one of the latter. Any professor who can make jokes about his own name, have hypos where it involves a cop "kicking your ass because he doesn’t like candy canes" (his words), or people living in the sewer is alright in my book.

After lunch, I had Environmental Law. I wouldn’t even have taken the class, actually, if I had been attending law school alone. I am avidly interested in environmental issues, particularly ones relating to animal rights, but the legal side of that sentiment is generally too dull and dusty for my taste. Slogging through the Clean Air Act is not my idea of a good time, and we seem unlikely to discuss my pet issues. On my own, I would have rather been in the course on Law and Religion, which explores various religious approaches to law and how the law deals with religious groups.

However, I am not in law school alone. I have a small cadre of friends at law school, and I enjoy the company of every single one of them, from the guy who understands philosophy like I do and who can discuss issues of substance with me, to the guy who shares my love of gaming and science, to the woman who shares my love of politics (and agrees with me on a lot of substantive policy issues), to the woman who shares my love of politics (and disagrees vehemently), and to the woman to whom I am indebted for numerous reasons and to whom I owe my continued time at the law school (without whose effort to befriend me I would not have stayed in law school past the first semester). Alongside all of these, one woman, though, seems to me to share a bit more of my personality and mind-set, and she asked me to take the class with her.

I can do things I consider to be fun on my own for the rest of my life. I am more than willing to do things I consider to be less fun if I get to do them with people whom I value. I’ve spent more of my life doing things alone than I care to. Even when I lived with my parents, I spent my time largely alone. During my first semester at law school, once I just stopped talking to see how long it would be before anyone initiated any kind of social contact with me, even if it just meant saying ‘hello’ as they passed me in the hallway. I made it for four days without talking to another person before a professor called on me in class. Having lived this way for the better part of my life, I can tell you firsthand that if you pass up the opportunity to share experiences with people you value, you are passing up life.

Finally, I went to my tax class. This will be one of the most grueling courses I have ever taken, I’m sure, and that means something from someone who took an entire semester of Oil and Gas Law. Apparently, the professor believes that none of us can read a statute (despite the fact that we are all 2L’s and 3L’s. We spent the hour and a quarter agonizing over the tiniest phrases of the code provisions which we looked at, despite their readily apparent meaning. When a provision says something like "As used in this subtitle, Gross Income means..." is pretty clear. This section will define Gross Income, and anywhere we see the phrase "Gross Income" used in this subtitle, we should refer back to this section to find out what it means if we don’t recall. What I just said in one sentence we spent about 15 minutes going over in class. I really hope that we start to go a bit more quickly as the semester progresses.

I still have two more classes yet to go to this week for the first time. Immigration Law and a Legislative Workshop. I’ll have to see what they will be like before making a final assessment of the semester, but for now, I’ll issue a temporary opinion on the semester. A few good classes, a few bad classes, and a few classes in between... In other words, just like most every semester that I’ve been in higher education, only this time with friends.