Grrr...

My new computer was supposed to arrive via FedEx ground this morning. Despite the fact that I've been at home and awake since before 8:30 am this morning, nobody has come by to drop off my computer. I just checked the tracking online, and it said that someone came to drop off the computer at 10:50 am, the FedEx website says that my address could not be located.

Could not be located? I live in a gigantic apartment complex with 7 buildings and roughly 75 units per building. How hard is it to find the right number of apartment? I mean, it isn't like the numbers are messed up on the apartment doors. Like most every apartment complex, the numbers start at 1 and go up until they run out of apartments. And does FedEx really give up on delivery when they can't find your apartment number, rather than ask the people at the front desk?

So now, I have to wait to see what they do with my package. According to the website, though, if they retry delivery, it won't be until Monday.

Whew!

Well, it’s over. I held my first ever dinner party, and aside from a little bit of last-minute panicking over the salad (the first batch of noodles burned when I was frying them in the butter), it went fairly smoothly. Somehow, without too many problems, I managed to make up twelve pork chops (with a marinade that I am vaguely proud of - mostly for the sugar which caramelized over the meat giving it a slightly sweet taste), an Asian noodle salad with a homemade dressing, a vegetable stir-fry, and rice.

...And now I have leftovers. I’m going to be eating pork chops for the next 4 or five days, I think.

All in all, though, a rousing success.

Good News

I know that my postings tend to incorporate bad news far more often than good news, so this is my one attempt to ensure that (at least) on my birthday, the news will be good.

A listing of good things that happened today (which I will add to as the day goes on):

1. Despite an obscenely early wake-up time for my 8:00 class, I managed to get out of bed after only hitting the snooze alarm once (a dramatic improvement from my normal 5 or 6 times).
2. On my way to school, I sang "Oh, what a beautiful morning" from the musical "Oklahoma" and actually nailed it (my voice is usually pretty fuzzy in the morning).
3. I was actually semi-prepared when my Evidence professor called on me this morning, which is good since I'm usually unprepared in most of my classes every day.
4. Two of my dear friends gave me a birthday card, which was both hilariously entertaining (I'll have to show people the card) and touching. It was the first birthday card I've received so far this year, and, for being so sweet, I now owe the two of them more than I ever have before.
5. I was covered in little red glitter bits and got to use the phrase "Glitter emergency."
6. The word 'fair' was used 3 times in Evidence class this morning, even if none of them actually involved a discussion about fairness. I counted them as amounting to 1 full mention, though, because they got close.
7. My wardrobe of old clothes I could no longer wear got smaller today: I could wear 2 pairs of pants today (not at once, of course) that I couldn't wear a week ago.
8. All of my dirty laundry is now clean and in my dresser where it belongs.
9. Despite its recent highly extensive and invasive plant-surgery, one of my houseplants is recovering nicely with no apparent signs of infection (alway a worry when removing parts of the plant, leaving open wounds).
10. I got an 'A' in Constitutional Law II, which makes this last semester about on par with all of my previous ones, grade-wise.
11. I came home to find out that the apartment maintenance people had finally swept the loose paint flakes from in front of my door (previously in the week, someone had gone through and scraped all the peeling paint off of the ceiling in the corridor outside my door, but left all the flakes on the floor).
12. I wasn't called on in tax to answer any questions, even though I am fairly sure that Kansasgirl and I were one of the only ones in class who knew what was going on. Any class where I am not required to answer on cue is a good class.
13. My dining room looks fabulous with the lights on.
14. The can of mixed vegetables I had for lunch and the can of green beans I had for dinner, along with the leftover bits of a bag of carrots put me in excess of the number of recommended servings of vegetables per day I should have (as per the old food guide pyramid; I don't trust the new one) for the first time since I began living on my own.
15. My brother called me from Seattle this evening to wish me a happy birthday, even if my parents haven't made the call yet from 8.5 miles away. I like hearing from him, so that cheered up the evening.

Petition to elevate my mother to sainthood

(In another 7 hours hours, I will be 25. I don't plan on being awake at my birth-time, so I'll post this now instead...)

January 26, 2006. Twenty-five years ago, at 4:17 am, I was born.

I had an unusual birth. Well, that’s not so true, I suppose. My birth was much like any other, except that it involved me, and since I’m the best thing to happen to planet Earth since the surface cooled, that’s enough to elevate my mother to sainthood. My egoistic self-indulgences aside, though, my mother deserves special kudos for an inhuman patience with cluelessness. My mother deserves special praise for not back-handing my father into a new time zone.

My mother and father lived in Smith Center, Kansas, while she was pregnant. Now, for those of you who have never met my father, he is sometimes a bit... um... well, let’s just say unreasonable from time to time. He gets in moods every once in a while where he recruits everyone in the house to do housework (or some big project he’s dreamed up) and makes you all feel guilty or punishes you if you refuse to help. I remember getting grounded from watching cartoons on Saturday morning for a month once when I was little because I hadn’t been cheerful when we’d had to clean the garage on a Saturday morning at what had to have been, like, 7:00 am.

The bad part about this is that he’ll make you help him and your excuses be damned. He sets some arbitrary deadline (usually unrealistically short) and then mandates that the task be done by then. I can still remember a night when I was about 8, and I remember being hauled out of bed at 11:00 pm on a school-night because my father realized that the house was a mess and that my brother and I needed to clean the bathroom NOW. No, tomorrow wasn’t just as good, and the fact that we were supposed to be up early the next morning to go to off to elementary school wasn’t a problem for him. If he could be awake, then so could we.

Well, apparently my father had one of his weird cleaning moods on January 26, 1981. With his wife 8 months pregnant, he decided that he wanted to rearrange the furniture in the house. He grudgingly did all the work by himself until it came time to move a refrigerator up the basement steps into the kitchen. Well, he ‘recruited’ my mother into helping him by faking that he pulled a muscle in his back when he was halfway up the basement stairs with the thing.

Now, I may have training in biology, but my background isn’t really in human biology. Nevertheless, I’m fairly sure that having an 8-month pregnant woman help you move a refrigerator up a flight of stairs isn’t on the doctor’s list of things you should do while pregnant. In fact, I’m fairly sure that it is on the list of things you ought to avoid.

Well, the strain of the exertion sent my mother into labor. My father, recalling his training for the situation and his experience with my brother 2 years earlier, knew that a rapid flight to the hospital wasn’t necessary at this stage and that they didn’t need to leave until the contractions got to be to some certain frequency and severity. So he told my mother that he was going to go into the bedroom and take a nap for an hour, and that when he got up they would leave. He set a timer, and told her to relax.

My mother waited on the living-room sofa while my father took a nap (ignore for now the gall of asking your wife who is in labor to sit on the sofa while you take a nap). She waited. And waited. And waited. She thought to herself that ‘this is the longest hour I’ve ever endured!’ Finally, she went into the bedroom and found out that he’d been resetting the timer back another 10 minutes to prolong his nap, and had done so for about an extra hour.

When she finally got him to get in the car and leave, they drove to the nearest hospital. Naturally, of course, there was no hospital in Smith Center, so they drove to the next town over: Phillipsburg. They arrived at 11:45 pm. (The time is important).

My father rushed into the hospital and told the doctors that his wife was out in the car in labor, and that she needed to be admitted to the hospital. When he found out that admitting her at 11:50 pm would entail that he be charged for an additional day of in-hospital stay for my mother, he did the unthinkable.

He had her wait in the car for another 15 minutes so that she would be admitted after midnight.

Despite all the fuss and my father’s typical miser-esque attitude about spending money, I was born - all 4 pounds, 3 ounces of sleepy, tiny me. I was rushed off to the NICU to the incubator (I was a full month early, so I guess that was the standard protocol) and stayed there for a few weeks. They gave me a 1 in 100 shot of living, and I guess I was using lucky dice that day or something (not that should be a consolation to the other 99 babies similarly situated who lost the medical lottery, I suppose).

My mother, having had a relatively uncomplicated birth (I understand that some babies are significantly larger), went home from the hospital. When they called my parents and told them that it was alright for them to come and get me, my mother sent my father to go pick me up from the hospital.

Well, my father thought to himself, "Hmmm... I can’t very well hold a baby while I’m driving. It wouldn’t be safe..." So he engineered himself up a solution using what he had on hand. He had just bought some shoes, so took the shoe-box and lined it with socks from his sock drawer. Yes, I was carried home in a shoe-box. My mother’s shock when he pulled into the driveway and removed the shoe-box from the TRUNK of the car was not assuaged when he defensively noted that he’d put air-holes in the box’s lid with a screwdriver.

At least I know I come by my cluelessness through heredity and not by choice.

A woman with less patience would have snapped before then. My mother didn’t, though. I’m fairly positive that thoughts concerning knives and sensitive male organs might have been involved in her reaction, but - much to my mother’s credit - this paragon of patience simply took the shoebox inside and introduced me to my first home.

So, Mom, thanks for bearing and birthing me. And an extra helping of thanks for not killing the man I call Dad.

Environmental Law: Clean Water Act

Today, in class, the professor (who looks like a slightly agitated elf) had us work through the text of the Clean Water Act by designing it ourselves. Now, we didn’t actually design it ourselves. Basically, we proposed ideas and he shot down everything that wasn’t aligned with the actual clean water act as being ‘absurd,’ ‘complicated,’ or ‘unrealistic.’ Then, by default, whatever was left was the Clean Water Act. It was a little condescending that he suggested that we had designed the Clean Water Act ourselves when most of our suggestions flew wide of Congress’ actual methods enshrined in the statute.

I made a few suggestions, but I’m getting used to my ideas not being taken seriously in that class. Without discussion or argument, most of my ideas seem to be shot down as being ‘absurd.’ I disagree with the way that the Clean Water Act is handled and so I thought it might be fun to engage in the project that the frustrated elf wanted us to engage in. I’m going to design the Clean Water Act the way I think it should be designed. If I were a Congressperson, this would be my proposal:

My CWA:

Goal - No pollution in the water. Is it unreachable? Probably in practical terms, yes. We shouldn’t tolerate some level though as the goal for the same reason that we don’t tolerate the police having a goal of some allowable level of crime. Ideally, we would want the police to eliminate all crime, but we recognize it isn’t (broadly speaking) feasible. Instead, what aim for is a lot like a curve I used to see in Calculus class. It starts high and drops quickly, but the slope of the curve gets gentler and gentler until (as we approach infinity) it becomes almost parallel to zero.

How implemented - Create a series of ratchet-like goals. Environmental experts (i.e., the EPA) would decide actual dates and figures but this would be an example:

By 2010, plants may emit 100 megatons of green radioactive goo.
By 2015, plants may emit 90 megatons of green radioactive goo.
By 2020, plants may emit 80 megatons of green radioactive goo, and so on.

How violations are discovered - government monitoring. Right now, the CWA seems to have a strong emphasis on self-reporting (in the same way as is our income tax system). But can we really trust people to self-report accurately? It seems unlikely, particularly when a lie would help them out monetarily. My analogy would be a person self-reporting the proceeds of his burglary on his income tax form. It isn’t likely to happen through self-reporting.

How enforced - Punitive sanctions. People in class kept talking about providing incentives to help companies raise their technology rates, and providing tax credits to companies that meet the required standards. Forgive my language here, but that’s about as close to corporate coddling as my bullshit meter can go. We don’t pay people to follow the law. We expect them to do it, punish them for noncompliance, and reward them for going above and beyond the call of duty. Can you imagine a system where the police didn’t lock you away for murder, but instead paid you not to kill people? Such a notion ought to be a little on the bizarre side for most people. Incentives should be part of a good system, but not for meeting the requirements of law. Incentives should be distributed for people doing more than what is required. For instance, if a company can lower its emission of green radioactive goo to 80 megatons in the first year of the program, it ought to be encouraged to do so, since it isn’t required to do so until 2020 CE.

Who enforces - Department of Justice Criminal Prosecutors. I wouldn’t treat this as a civil matter, the way it is commonly treated. I would make noncompliance a criminal offense. Here is my reasoning: 1) Congress is within its delegated power to pass a statute like this, 2) Congress, using its power, did pass a statute like this, 3) By passing such a statute and publishing it in the appropriate places, all citizens were given notice that releasing 105 megatons of green radioactive goo in 2010 was illegal, 4) Company X knew releasing 105 megatons of green radioactive goo was illegal and went ahead and did it anyway, and 5) the interests Congress meant to protect by making the emission of green radioactive goo were harmed. We shouldn’t be punishing companies with slap on the wrist fines. We should be prosecuting executives, confiscating assets to clean up the damage the company caused, and throwing offenders into the federal penitentiary system. Let me assure you that having a corporate executive arrested by federal marshals (preferably while at work), handcuffed and dragged to the station, convicted and thrown into the general penitentiary with murderers and druglords would be good for the corporate culture of America. Who knows? It might encourage a few executives to have some moral rectitude installed into their business-oriented minds.

That’s my Clean Water Act, and I for one find it vastly superior to the one we ‘designed’ in class today.

Thoughts on fairness: In defense of a friend

I’ve come to believe that a large part of morality (and I’m talking about morality from a philosophical point of view rather than a colloquial one) is known or intuited by young children, but that as we grow older, society corrupts our confidence in some certain valuable moral principles. One of the principles that I find most relevant here is the idea of fairness. Fairness is usually captured by the idea that if a person is good, they deserve good things. If a person is bad, they deserve bad things. And to the extent to which a person falls somewhere in between the two extremes, they deserve the good and bad things in life to the degree to which they are good and bad.

Young children are renowned for their constant bleatings of "It’s not FAIR!" If a school teacher hears talking in class and holds the whole class in for recess, you can put Vegas odds on the fact that some kids will protest on grounds of fairness. Nothing seems more obvious to a young child as when something is unfair, particularly if it is unfair to their detriment. Evolutionary psychologists now believe that an emphasis on fairness is a mental module which has been selected for through natural selection and that it forms the basis of most all of our moral intuitions.

But most adults (including people my age, I suppose) don’t think about fairness all that often. What is more shocking is the lack of emphasis on fairness in the legal profession. To be a good lawyer or judge, legal professionals need to step back and take stock of their historical function. Judges are the King Solomons of the modern age. People bring disputes before them and the judge’s sole job is to resolve the dispute in the fairest way possible. A lawyer is simply a helper to the judge, giving the judge the best arguments he can as to why the judge should use his wisdom to come to a particular conclusion.

But when is the last time someone in a law class discussed fairness? After the first week of school during my first semester, I was shocked by the absence of terms like fairness and justice in our discussions in class. I started keeping a running tally of the number of times that the terms were used - a tally I’m still keeping, by the way - in their appropriate forms (i.e., I don’t count ‘justice’ when someone refers to the ‘justice system,’ and I don’t count ‘fundamental fairness’ when it is simply used as legal jargon without cognitive content). For those who care to keep track with me, fairness = 2, justice = 8.

In almost 2 full years of law school, to have the core concepts of our discipline mentioned so infrequently tells me one of two things. Either legal professionals have forgotten our role in society (probably true), or legal professionals as persons have forgotten the role of fairness in their everyday lives. Being committed to representing a client is fine, but we need to remember that our responsibilities do not lie with our clients. Our responsibility is to society to solve disputes in the most fair way possible. We are not playing a game to win or lose for our client, and making the biggest gains for our side is not the best thing for society, for ourselves, or for the legal profession.

This became more apparent to me yesterday. A good friend of mine came into class frustrated, hurt, and upset by the callous way in which the editors of the law journal had treated her. They had treated the journal as their client, abused their power over the system, and tried to win the largest gains for their side without considering what the fairest course of action would be for all parties involved.

Traditionally, we respect the people on the law journal for having the technical skills to write and edit truly boring documents that virtually nobody reads or cares about (and when I say that, you know it means something). Yesterday, I got a lesson about why the people on law journal who abused my dear friend are unworthy of my respect.

Good people deserve good things. When a good person is treated in a shabby manner, the people who abdicated their roles as the societal repositories of fairness in favor of temporary gains for ‘their side’ lose my respect. They lose my respect; they lose my admiration; and they lose out on experiencing the honored position and tradition that law once held in civilization.