Wednesday Letters on a Thursday

Boo!

As good as any other start since it’s October.

People have been complaining – and I do mean people and not just my mother – that I haven’t been writing.  You probably all assumed I got too busy to write.  Wrong.  Well, I am busy, but not too busy to write.  That wasn’t it.  Anyway…

There are some books that just pull me in completely, make me part of the world; the characters are people I know in another life.  And then, there’s most of the books I read.  Sadly.  Maybe I’m just too hard to please.

Last night, I finished one of these ‘usual’ books.  It was called The Wednesday Letters.  It wasn’t a bad book (thank goodness!) but it wasn’t stellar either.  It started out with this neat idea – old couple dies in bed together, kids find special letters their father wrote to their mother every week of the marriage.  Neat, sweet.  After the first chapter I thought I’d send the book home to my daddy.  Seemed like the sort of sappy love stuff that would make him hug Mommy a little tighter.

Then, I kept reading.  Pretty soon, crazy stuff started happening and the book wasn’t about the Wednesday letters.  It was about eight different storylines crammed soap-opera style into 150 pages.  I’m sorry, but unless your book is a large, thick tome, it shouldn’t have more plot lines than Les Miserables (which, please note is a large, thick tome).    And resolving them all at once just comes off as unbelievable.  I hate being reminded I’m reading a book.

Maybe I’m just spoiled by my love of Pride and Prejudice and it’s beautiful handling of only three plot lines, all of which end at different points and are realistically intertwined throughout the book.  Or maybe I’m just bitter because the last novel I read, A Blue and Gray Christmas, had the same ridiculous amount of plot lines crammed into an itty-bitty space like Genie in his lamp.

The current book I’m reading is 600+ pages.  At least I won’t have to worry about jumbled plots.

 

P.S. Even though I wasn’t a huge fan of these novels, I still think it’s really neat that the authors sat down to write them, turned their ideas into reality and got their books published.  So kudos for that.

Testing Knowledge of Wisconsin Law, or Knowledge of Wisconsin?

Next week, across the nation, thousands of fresh law grads will be pouring into large conference centers, pouring all the information they’ve spent the last two months memorizing onto an answer sheet and watching the sweat pour down their faces.  With them will be a smaller, and theoretically less nervous, group of veterans.  Attorneys who have done this before; glutens for punishment that have found a reason to take another bar exam.

I’m one of them. Next week, I’ll be in the happiest place on earth, sitting for my second bar exam.  Wisconsin, here I come!

 

In preparation for this upcoming exam, I’ve been doing a bunch of essays from previous Wisconsin bar exams.  The hardest part is not going to be remembering the law, applying the law or finishing on time.  The hardest part is going to be remembering how to be a Wisconsonite.

The questions are full of language, incidents, names and the occasional joke, that will only make sense if you know Wisconsin.  Essentially, the questions are written in Wisconsin-eese (not to be confused with Wisconsin cheese).

 

Here are some examples of things that would have a non-Wisconsite surely perplexed:

Last Names, like Lomanski and Bielski, Backhausen and Mentzel.  More ski's than Tahoe, more sch’s than Cindy Brady.   String a bunch of those together and it’s enough to make most people skip over half the page.  But not in Wisconsin.  Not only can we read those, we can pronounce them, too!  Heck, we probably have a bunch of friends with those names.

 Geographical locations “Whiskey River,” “Nonesuch County” and “Waukesha.”  That first one would stop most people dead in their tracks out of pure shock.  The second would leave them scratching their head and the third, although it’s a real place, would leave them tongue-tied.  (Trust me, I’ve heard enough out-of-staters try to pronounce it.)

Whiskey River falls into another category of things, the things I call the “wait, is that acceptable?” category.  Sample answers that begin, “My prayers and thoughts are with you” in a tax advice letter to a terminally ill client.  Prayers?! in what you’re supposed to write?!  Why that’s enough to make a Californian turn blue and pass out from shock. 

My favorite though was the answer that pointed out the police officer’s stop was probably a pretense for profiling, but then goes on to explain why that’s ok under the law.  I had started to write that in my answer and then thought, ‘no, wait, I shouldn’t include that, it’s not time to get on a soap box.’  Should’ve stuck with my gut, my Wisconsin gut.

Seemingly-crazy situations which really aren’t that crazy: a family with six children, each of whom has four to eight children of their own;  a foot of snow falling during the work day and a guy losing control of his car on I-94 driving home through the storm; an acre of quarry in the middle of a farm; or a person signing a check over to another person.  -  I once asked Mr. Trizzle to sign a check over.  He and the Legend looked at me like I was nuts, called me nuts, told me it wasn’t possible.  Hah! – These aren’t parts of the issues in the question’s fact patterns, just supplemental details, but they’d certainly trip up a non-Wisconsinite into going down a very wrong path.  (probably into Whiskey River).

Photo: My mom and most of her cousin’s on her mom’s side of the family (more were born later).  She’s one of 6, her mother was one of 9.

Oh, and then I musn’t forget, the questions that aren’t asked.  The Wisconsin problems tend to ask one, fairly specific question, when what’s really wanted is the answers to four questions.  This is different than the questions on other bar exams, for example the California exam, where there might be on big question that requires answering a bunch of small questions in the process. 

No, this is more like asking “did you go to the store” when you really want to know if the person bought pickles, if the new store next to the grocery, which is implied by “store” in your question, is open and if the cute cashier was working that night. 

It’s the sort of thing I do to Mr. Trizzle all the time.  And it’s taken him a long time to break me of the habit of answering all the unasked questions when he asks me a question.  He’s not from Wisconsin; he’s actually only asking me one question.

“Did you make it to work on time?” 

“Well, the original bus didn’t come, but I did get on BART, which then broke down, but it was ok because I left half an hour early because I had a good night’s sleep last night and had no trouble picking out an outfit this morning.”

The your-doing-it-again look shot in my direction…

“Yes. I made it to work on time.”

At least they throw in some nice midwesterner funnies, too.  How about a potentially unconstitutional diversity policy at Great Lakes State University?  Or a company in IL called “Flatland”?  The only way that could have been better was if it was Flatland International Bank, FIB.

 

Hopefully, my few extra days in Wisconsin before the Bar Exam will get me wholly back in the Wisconsin mind-frame needed for this exam.  Mommy, I think I better get some Leon’s and cheese curds when I arrive.  You know, to help me remember Wisconsin, hey?

The Perfect Present

I think it is ok to use the proper word as Mommy would likely not find it vampire-worthy, in this instance: The Gates of Hell. To Dante, a reason to abandon all hope. To that poor armless, legless boy in the ICP song, something he never saw coming. To art fans, it is magnificence and beauty. And to me, to me it is a great story.

The Search

“I called Tokyo and Paris, neither of them have one.”

“Darn, and I called Philadelphia, and they didn’t have one either.”

“You, know it’s possible there just isn’t one made.”

My friend, Ant, was attempting to help me find the perfect birthday present for another friend, Mr. Maintenance Man.  I knew exactly what I wanted to get him, but it was starting to seem that the perfect present literally didn’t exist.  A poster.  It seemed simple enough.  A poster of his favorite piece of artwork, Rodin’s Gates of Hell.

The birthday boy and my goat, which I named after him (for reason).

Ant and I had started by searching online stores.  Though not as ubiquitous eight years ago as they are today, there was still a pretty decent selection of stores.  But try as we might, we couldn’t find anything.  So we started calling the Rodin museums around the world and inquiring about their gift shops.  Nothing.

The Plan

Then. An idea.  It was 2am, or some other ridiculous time of night when only drunks and college students are awake.  The Rodin museum in Philadelphia, the only one on this side of the planet, has a Gates of Hell, outside, in front of the building.  A road trip!  Yes, that’s it, a road trip!  I’ll just go there and take a picture myself and get it turned into a poster.

But work, shoot, I have work, and I can’t miss that.  A weekend!  I can go on a weekend.  Where is Philadelphia?  Ouch, that far?!  I can’t drive there and back, and get to the museum while it’s open in a weekend….  I know, an airplane!  I’ll fly there and back in a weekend.  How much are flights?  Oh, that sucks.  Hmmm……

And then, the most brilliant idea ever: Greyhound.

Oh, and I’ll need company.

It just so happened that my very good, and practically life-long, friend, The Great Ecclestone was on AIM.

Hey, wanna go to Philly?  On a Greyhound?  To take a picture of a statue?

What?  Ok.

Alright, so the conversation was a little longer and convincing him might have taken a bit more work, but soon we were set.

The Trip

Early on Saturday morning ,we stood at the Milwaukee bus station.  I had never been in a bus station before and had no idea what to expect.   People and luggage were everywhere.  Buses rolled in an out, trails of fumes behind them.  The Great Ecclestone and I looked at the stack of tickets in our hands.  One ticket for every bus we would board on our 24-hour trip eastward.  The strip of tickets reached almost to the floor.

The Great Ecclestone and our Greyhound tickets.

Many filthy bus terminals and bathrooms fit for a lead-in to CSI later, we arrived at our destination.   Backs sore, feet and legs cramping, groggy and damp with sweat, we disembarked from our last bus into the hot Philadelphia summer sun.  Sunday morning, welcome.

The Rodin museum was only about a mile or so from the bus station and would be opening in a short while.  Time for some breakfast, and a change of clothes.

My SLR camera and about a dozen rolls of film jostled in my bag as we approached the large iron gate at the foot of the museum’s walkway.  No tripod, not allowed in the museum.  And there it was, shining brightly in the sun, towering far above me, immense yet exquisite in detail.  The Gates of Hell.  I began to take my pictures.

All day I stayed at that museum.  All day, taking pictures of The Gates of Hell and of the art work inside.  The Great Ecclestone accompanied me through the small museum and then headed off to the large art museum down the street.  Perhaps he even ran up the steps like Rocky.  I don’t know, I had a job to do and shadows to beat as the sun came over the roof of the museum  and illuminated bits and pieces of the giant brass sculpture.

Rodin sculptures: The Shade.

When I had finally finished my pictures, and my film, I met up with The Great Ecclestone again and we went to see the Liberty Bell.  We had to.   I mean, you can’t go all the way to Philadelphia for the first time in your life and not see the Liberty Bell!  It’s a bell.  With a crack.

Dusk began to settle over the city.  We grabbed some Chinese food for dinner and headed back to the bus station for our long ride back.  Our day in Philly was over.

The Liberty Bell.

Getting Back

After the ordeal of getting out to Philadelphia, we thought we had a pretty good idea of what to expect on our twenty-four hour ride back.  Boy we were wrong.  24 hours later, when we were supposed to be back in Milwaukee, when I was supposed to be on my way to work, where were we?  Stuck in a bus station, in Gary, Indiana.

Never been to Gary, Indiana?  Good.  Keep it that way.  Let me give you some perspective, some places where it might be worse to be stuck.  ….  Places where it might be better to be stuck.  A bus station in Chicago, a bus station in Lusaka, a bus station in Oakland, a luggage locker in a bus station in Oakland.  You get the idea.

Five hours.  Five hours until the next bus.  Our bus to Gary had gotten stuck in construction traffic on the highway and we had missed our connecting bus from Gary to Chicago.  Five hours.  Needless to say, I had to call into work stranded-in-Gary.

We did eventually make it home.  And the present, the present turned out spectacular.  He loved it, and the Philadelphia Chinatown fortune cookie.

The photo that became the poster: Rodin’s Gates of Hell.

*Note: the white edge is from a crooked scan and was not on the poster.

A Monochromatic Life

A few weeks ago I wrote about my little sister and her anti-obsession with pink.  It’s not fair to just pick on my pretty little munchkinhead though; I too have had my obsession with color.  But mine was a little different.

Pink, blue, green, yellow.  It didn’t matter, as long as everything matched.  And I mean everything.

Getting Dressed

Every morning I went to my color organized closet (ok, I still do) and picked out my outfit for the day.  Usually, one of my classic dresses, a princess seamed, knee-length dress, generally made out of a light weight cotton.  The first of these was light blue gingham check with little blue flowers on it, made for me by Mommy my freshman year of high school.  I wore that dress in my senior pictures.  I wore that dress to high school graduation.  I wore that dress to law school graduation.  I love that dress.  By the time I was a freshman in college, I had the same dress in every color of the rainbow.

Little ruffled socks, the color of the dress, and matching shoes and I was basically dressed.  Light blue socks with dark blue denim shoes, white socks with pink flowers on the ruffle with light pink canvas shoes.  Orange dress, orange barbie slides (no socks).  Same for red.  Every color, a pair of shoes.  But that’s hardly remarkable.  The really remarkable part is that most of those shoes were flat!

Accessorizing

  Once decked out in my dress, I went to the large mirror to accessorize and put on my makeup.  A small plastic drawer set, the kind used for sorting nails and screws, sat on my counter.  Each little drawer held a different color, in rainbow order, barrettes, hair rubber bands, and earrings together. (Ok, they still do.)  If my dress was blue, I opened the blue drawer and put on blue earrings and clipped my hair back with blue barrettes.  If my dress was yellow, so were my earrings and barrettes.  My toilette was finished with eye shadow of a matching color.

A Meal

Breakfast time!  Pink dress?  Pink bowl, pink napkin, maybe even a pink plastic spoon.  Strawberry oatmeal for pink days.  Blueberry on blue days.  Yellow? Cheerios.  At dinner, I’d reset my spot so my cup and plate could match my outfit.

Final Touches

After breakfast, it would be time to head out of the house.  No jacket needed in summer, but a visor was always a must.  Pink Adidas, Blue Adidas, Yellow Adidas, White Adidas,  Orange Wisconsin Dells.  (singing: One of these things is not like the other…)  And then, the most important piece: my purse!

I had a purse in each color, and each purse had its own color-coordinated collection.  A comb, a pen, some kleenex, if it came in that color, chapstick, a lighter and keys.  Yes, keys.  I had a set of keys for each purse, each with plastic key covers the color of the purse. It helped that I worked at a hardware store and could all the key copies myself. 

I didn’t smoke, but I liked that the lighters came in a rainbow of colors.  One time, I even found colored cigarettes, so I bought them just to have the matching ones in each purse.

All Good Things

And then one day, it all came to an end.  I was wearing blue.  I could only find my green and pink keys.  I was running around the house trying to find the blue ones.  Looking everywhere.  I was running late for work.  I couldn’t leave.  I couldn’t drive my car without keys.  I had two sets of keys in my hand.  Two sets of keys that would drive the car.  But I wouldn’t leave because they weren’t the right color.  There was green in my dress, on the little leaves, the green keys would have matched.  It wasn’t good enough.  I had to have those blue keys!

Then all of a sudden, I realized the absurdity of the situation.  I was about to be late for work and risk getting in trouble because my car keys weren’t the same color as my dress.  It was so silly, it made me laugh.  And it scared me.  A little further over the edge, and I might have a full fledged mental disease.  That was it.  No more absolute one-color matching.  (Ok, once in awhile there still was.)

Now, I just coordinate.

An Injustice for an Injustice?

Some of you may remember a video and a post from shortly after New Year’s 2009.  The murder of Oscar Grant.

Except technically, I’m wrong for calling it ‘murder’.  The jury on the trial of that officer in the video that you see shooting Oscar Grant in the back while Oscar Grant is lying face down on the platform and then, after Oscar Grant is bleeding to death, puting handcuffs on the dying man – the jury in that officer’s trial came back with a verdict yesterday.  A verdict of involuntary manslaughter. 

Those twelve people decided that not only was this not murder, the officer did not intend to hurt Oscar Grant.  Somebody, please watch that video and tell me if you believe the officer didn’t intend to hurt Oscar Grant.   But then a video didn’t matter in the Rodney King trial either. 

Anyway, I could go on about how ridiculous I find that verdict, and why, but I won’t.  I’m not the only one that was angered by this.  Lots of people were, and they took to the streets in Oakland last night to protest.  There’s a beautiful set of pictures of the event on Thomas Hawk’s Flickr Stream. 

It paints a fitting portrait of the police in light of what happened to Oscar Grant.  The police from all over the area converge on downtown Oakland for the “Oakland Riots.”  The Oakland Riots, considered riots because they were named such by the media before the trial even ended, named in expectation.

You can see the clearly angry and upset, but restrained, crowds with their signs, making their speeches, demanding the justice they didn’t get.  You can also see the police, in full riot gear, looking like something out of a 1960s picture of the South, utterly stupid in their mis-match of armor.  Assault rifles in hand, assault rifles against cardboard protest signs.

And then, there’s these guys:

who decided that the injustice of the verdict was a permission slip to steal sneakers.  And this is what really pisses me off.  (There are several other pictures of the Foot Locker looting on the Flickr Stream.)

One, how does a bad jury verdict in a murder trial justify stealing shoes?  Ok, maybe in the OJ trial if you were stealing some OJ shoes or something so he didn’t get the royalties.  But stealing shoes because a BART officer got off easy?  They’re not BART shoes; there’s no little  logo on the side; they don’t get you on the train for free.  How about just jumping the toll gate at BART instead?

Two, why are you busting stuff in your own neighborhood?  It’s your neighborhood!  You’re mad?  Justice wasn’t done?  You wanna break something?  At least go break the officer’s windows so your angry, aggressive, illegal behavior makes some bit of sense!

The protesters were of all ages and races, all styles of dress, from suits and ties to hippie gear.  The looters, at least in the pictures, almost completely 20-30 year old black men in ghetto-styled clothes.  This is not a good look for the black community!  (and I’m not talking about the clothes; those look fine.)  I’m not going to begin to discuss the amount of stereotypes this perpetuates; I get to sad.

This looting of the Foot Locker, this alone almost* justifies the presence of the full-riot gear police in Oakland.  And to some people, as sad as this is, it may even help justify what that officer did to Oscar Grant.  The black community deserves better than that.  Oakland deserves better than that.  Oscar Grant deserves better than that.

 

 

 

[All photos, except the BART logo, by Thomas Hawk, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license and available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/sets/72157624455565162/detail/]

 

*Thomas Hawk gives a good 1st person account of the event, which includes descriptions of when the crowds did turn violent later in the evening and broke windows on other area businesses.  Although I still don’t think assault rifles are ever appropriate against unarmed people, Hawk’s account does show that some riot protection and the heavy police presence were eventually necessary.