Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in M's LiveJournal:

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Monday, October 15th, 2007
10:16 pm	The Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Culpable I've never felt so popular. Ever since I got pulled over for speeding in Coral Gables last month, I have been the daily recipient of numerous correspondences from fine local attorneys offering to represent me for a fee "starting at only $69*" (the asterisk indicates that it will almost surely cost me far greater than that, but who ever pays attention to asterisks?). Most of these attorneys don't even need to meet me in person; they'll handle my case based on a mere phone call. And many of them will refund their fee if points are assessed against my license! What a great system! I even got mail from opposing counsel in one of my cases. Nevermind the fact that I couldn't get him on the phone if my life depended on it, and have been trying to schedule depositions with his office for months. But now that I have been promoted from "opposing counsel" to "potential client," the mail comes tumbling in. I think I will dictate a response: Dear Mr. Smith: Thank you very much for your recent correspondence. It was quite a pleasant surprise that you chose to write on glossy yellow paper emblazened with a map to your office. However, I was dismayed to realize that you did not address the Johnson case and the depositions we have been trying to schedule for a number of months. Or, you may have printed that portion in yellow ink, which does not stand out well on your choice of card stock. In either case, in lieu of contacting me at my home address, please feel free to contact my assistant, Jane, in order to schedule the necessary depositions for a mutually convenient time. Thank you again for your kind offer to protect my legal rights against the tyranny of the local traffic court; I shall certainly keep you in mind in the future. Very truly yours, Michael Current Mood: amused Current Music: The Get Up Kids - Overdue (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
2:05 pm	The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. - Anatole France (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 20th, 2007
10:46 am	Bad Day First I went to the wrong courthouse. Then I lost my train of thought in front of the Judge. At least I still won the motion. This day may yet be salvageable... Current Music: The playlist on Stranz' Myspace page (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007
8:07 pm	On Statutory Construction Judges are those who take the often incomprehensible draftings of the legislature, carefully guide them through the law's precision filters of logic, and render them even more incomprehensible than they were before. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
7:22 am	I just had a dream that I was deposing the Blob. It wasn't being very responsive. It was just sitting there being smugly gelatinous. Current Mood: tired Current Music: My Bloody Valentine - Loveless (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 18th, 2006
3:40 pm	Good News! So I have some good news! After what might add up to 15 or more years of trying, I have finally beaten Super Macho Man in Mike Tyson's Punchout for the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. Actually, I've probably only been able to get to him for the last three-or-so years, so maybe I was exaggerating with my figure of 15 years. In any case, I could never time his Super Spin Punch and would ALWAYS bite the dust on it. But a few days ago, I tried a new methodology. I paused for just a millisecond longer between each sidestep of a punch, and was able to dodge eight spins in a row! He was TKOd in the first round. I still can't last more than a minute in the ring with Tyson himself, but that is a challenge for another day. In the interim, I consider myself victorious. Oh, and I passed the Florida Bar too. Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: Cursive - Dorothy at Forty (29 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006
11:41 am	This morning I think someone at Dunkin Donuts slipped me decaf this morning. They also forgot to toast my bagel, but I can deal with that. But decaf is just completely and utterly pointless. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Cursive - Dorothy at Forty (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 4th, 2006
1:07 am	I Just Wanted to Buy a Book I didn't walk into Barnes & Noble expecting to see a scene unfold. My goal was to enter, buy a book, and leave before my meter ran out. I hadn't even had my coffee yet. On the second floor, I began browsing a bookshelf. Everything was normal. Suddenly my subconscious told me to pay attention. Huh? "Sir," somebody whispered, "Excuse me, sir." I pondered this a moment. I am a male. Sometimes males are referred to as "sir." Maybe I was being referred to as "sir." I whirled around. A plain, average, normal-looking man was sitting at a table behind me, reading a magazine. "Some people are so rude," he said. My mind raced again. What had I done? I know I had been blocking his view of the bookshelf, but who the hell was he to expect to get an unobstructed view of it while seated at a nearby table? He nodded back over his left shoulder, and I sighed in that way you do when you realize that you haven't actually been the rude one after all. I followed his gaze. It rested upon the corner of the store, where a woman with a few shopping bags was seated at a small table. She had her feet propped up on the table, and the back of her head was facing me. She was motionless. I squinted. What was going on here? And then it dawned on me that this noise that I had normalized as background music was actually not that at all. There were voices booming loudly as if over a walkie-talkie. Was there construction work in the bookstore? The noise was emanating from the woman in the corner. But she had no walkie-talkie. She had a cell phone. And it was on speaker. I looked back at the man. He was smiling. "How rude" he said. So this woman conversing loudly on her phone was disrupting all these people trying to sit and read peacefully. Well it didn't bother me; I had a meter to catch, and all the better if some extraneous force should make me want to leave the store early. "Why don't you go mention it to her" I asked? "Well, if she wasn't a woman I would" he replied. I began to nod my head in a naively chivalrous way. He continued "but when you approach women, they get scared that you're gonna' try and rape them, ya know?" I had been nodding but now stopped. It had never occurred to me that a woman might think I was trying to rape her if I approached her in a crowded bookstore. He continued. "I wish I had my phone with me, because I'd turn it on really loud and go sit by her and scream into it and see how she likes that. But I left it in the car." I didn't know what to say. I pretended to offer him my cell phone, and then withdrew it. Better not. I might never see it again. The woman's voice had risen. I could now hear not only the violent crackle of the speaker-phone, but also her distinct Spanish responses to it. She sounded quite agitated by what the voice on the phone was telling her. She cried out. People looked up. Stared. Nobody knew what to do. Did she have any clue how inapropos her behavior was? A Barnes & Noble employee came to the rescue. She put her hand softly on the loud woman's shoulder, as if hesitant to make any sudden moves. The loud woman stopped talking. The voice on the other end kept going. After a moment, it stopped as well. "Hola?...hello?.." The employee whispered something like "you will have to leave our store now" to the woman who had previously been loud but was now silent. She looked a bit confused. Why was she being asked to leave the store? What had she done wrong? I could see her gears spinning. Finally, hanging her head defeatedly, she grabbed her bags and began to walk away from the table in the corner. Expulsion had hit her hard. I looked around again to take in the scene. The man at the other table looked somewhat contented. The other readers seemed appeased as well. I had a meter that was ticking away, and I had wasted my time to watch...what? I didn't know how to categorize this incident. Was this just a rude woman? Or was she just extremely upset? Mentally imbalanced? Tourette syndrome? Who knows? I returned to browsing the bookshelf. How long had that taken? A few minutes at most. Which means maybe a dime on the meter. A dime that had already been spent anyway, whether I needed the time or not. I'll just have to conclude that watching a woman ejected from Barnes & Noble was worth, at the very least, a dime already spent. Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: The Clash - The Story of the Clash (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 1st, 2006
12:37 am	A Call to Arms Shampoo is nice. You put it in, lather, massage your scalp, and then rinse. A nice in and out procedure. Conditioner is different. You put it in, and then spend the best part of the next ten minutes trying to get it off your hands, and wherever else you might have wiped it in an attempt to get it off your hands. And you can never get it out of your hair. When people do the exact same thing, we refer to them as "house-guests who overstay their welcome." Things are fine at first, but after a few days, you're pretty much sick of their continued presence. You are reduced to dropping subtle hints (i.e. "I think I'll be driving past the railroad station later today, is there anything you need?"). But in the end, HGWOTWs can be easily convinced to leave by a mere phone call to the local police. This technique fails dismally when applied to hair care. The last time I called 911 to complain about conditioner, the dispatcher kept asking to talk to the adult in the house. I gave up. I understand that experts in the field of hair maintenance will tell me that the persistence of the product is merely it doing its job, not unlike the burn that results from the application of alcohol to a wound. But I think this is something chemists need to be working on: a substance that makes your hair smooth and velvety without rendering you convinced that you still have product residue in it. It will allow people to step out of the shower feeling clean as the day they were born (absent all the blood and membrane and that damn annoying umbilical cord), which is what a shower is, at a fundamental level, supposed to be about. Now it is possible, that at 1:29 A.M., having studied Evidence for most of the past nine hours, I am not looking at this conditioner problem clearly. Some may say my senses have been clouded by excessive exposure to yellow highlighter fumes. Others may argue that there are other more important things to complain about, such as world poverty, excessive militarization, and global warming. But you gotta' start somewhere. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll be able to move on to the problem known to most as "handsoap-that-leaves-dried-scum-in-the-soapdish." But such grandiose aspirations will have to wait for a later day. I urge you to visit https://rn.ftc.gov/pls/dod/wsolcq$.startup?Z_ORG_CODE= if you wish to lodge a complaint against the conditioner industry. Only through concerted action can we prevail on this issue of universal magnitude. Current Mood: lucid Current Music: The Specials: Today's Specials (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
10:12 am	The Most Amazing Thing It was as though God had, in a single act, decided that I was the Chosen One. I poured a bowl of Corn Pops this morning for breakfast. But as I was replacing the box, it inadvertently bumped a can of Chef Boyardee that had been precariously placed too close to the door. The can of pasta dropped directly into the bowl of dry Corn Pops. And it didn't even happen in slow motion like they usually say it does, or the way people usually describe these things. One second it was on the shelf, and the next it was in the bowl. Now Archimedes is usually credited for having exclaimed "Eureka" upon discovering the same principle that I just did. But I have a feeling that when he dropped the King's crown in a bath, it did not displace nearly as many Corn Pops as I just did. They are still being located, minutes after the initial event, and miles from ground zero. I just got a call from a humble Vietnamese farmer who wanted to return a Pop that I had luckily tagged prior to pouring it into the bowl. I'm waiting for the military to start shooting them out of the air; after all, we all know the highly-touted accuracy of those Patriot missiles. In the end, one principle is clear. I should have been more careful two years ago in Spain when I let my digital camera get stolen. Had I been more vigilant, you would all be able to see the beautiful Corn Pop-laden disaster zone that my apartment has become. Current Mood: amused Current Music: the distinct patter of Corn Pops ricocheting off my windows (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
6:14 pm	A Moment of Existential Reflection I was studying in the student lounge. My friend Amanda walked in and we chatted a bit. A fly started buzzing around her head, but I didn't pay much attention. Suddenly there was no fly. Where did it go? Had it spontaneously combusted? Been erased from existence by some ethereal demon? Followed a wormhole to some distant and immortal coil? No, actually she had swallowed it. I hope it was filling. Now back to your regularly scheduled journal-surfing... Current Mood: quietly amused Current Music: Sunny Day Real Estate - How It Feels to be Something On (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
11:58 am	10 whole months I haven't posted in 10 months. This is partly due to the fact that the first year of law school kicked my ass timewise, and partly because I've mostly been using Myspace now instead of Livejournal. http://profiles.myspace.com/users/1789255 Well the last 10 months has been a hell of a time. I'm now a second-year at UM. I spent the summer in the Mediterranean...taking comparitive law classes and visiting a ton of countries. Now I'm back in Miami taking all kinds of classes that I'm actually excited about - Copyright, Patents, Business Associations, Freedom of Speech in the Americas, and Intellectual Property Research Techniques. Anyway, I'll hopefully make an update soon, it's just impossible to update for a period of 10 months with the kind of specificity I enjoy. In any case, hope you all are well. Let me know what's up... -Mike Current Mood: content Current Music: The Pixies - Surfer Rosa (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 16th, 2003
11:06 pm	Finally the Weekend Well the weekend is here finally. The weekend starts Thursday morning at 11:55, when Elements of Law ends. Later in the afternoon is Contracts, but I'm all over that class, and on Friday all I have is Civil Procedure, and you don't have to talk in that class unless you want to. In any case I usually manage to bring up at least one somewhat relevant issue anyway. My girlfriend and I are on some kind of pseudo-permanent hiatus, which translates to we broke up. Neither of us really had the time or energy to give each other the type of attention that people in a relationship need. We still hang out when we have time, and are really good friends, but we are officially single. Now I'm actually getting all my work done with a bit of time to spare each week, rather than falling farther and farther behind. It feels good. I've actually begun watching a movie. In the past two months, I watched one new movie, which was "Sunset Boulevard" and was amazing. Bernice said I had to see it, and I agreed. But I never had time to watch movies at home until now. Over the last few days, I have gotten almost halfway through "Boogie Nights." In the old days, I would have watched the entire movie plus the bonus features disc in one day. I also recently saw Eddie Izzard's newest DVD, which is called "Circle" I think (and doesn't count as a movie). You should all get your hands on an Eddie Izzard DVD as soon as you can. The man is mostly responsible for keeping me sane. I think I'm going to order some new music. So far I know I need the newest Cursive album, but I forget what it's called. Also, I've been told Mates of State is up my alley, anyone know their best album? This weekend Bernice and I are celebrating my birthday by going to see Neil Goldberg's Cirque, which is like a low-budget version of Cirque du Soleil. It is playing right on campus, and I made sure we got the highest price tickets, so that we'll be ensured a good view of the spectacle. I don't remember if I posted about this before, but the battery acid spill is still in my car. I plan to clean it this weekend. This time I mean it. No really. The battery acid cleanup kit has been here for weeks. It is sitting on my floor looking tempting. Once I get to this, I'll have full use of my car again. I'm also looking forward to cleaning out the various items of debris that have fallen into the battery acid and become mangled and twisted beyond belief. Namely, a pen and an independent magazine, but a water bottle managed to fall pretty close too and I didn't want to take any chances by continuing to hoist it to my lips. I've been trying to figure out my finances. I figure I require about $20,000 a year to live on, including rent, food, and other necessities, but not including tuition or books. This is kind of alot. I better be in the realm of employable three years from now, or I'll be tearing my hair out. When I have some time I'm going to make an expense table for myself and see just what the figures are. Oh and for all you New Jersey people, a word of advice. You are actually not in the area with the highest auto insurance rates. I can assure you Miami is worse. Much worse. The rest of Florida is not bad, but Dade County is ridiculous. I just got a birthday gift from my parents in the mail. It is a framed First-Day-of-Issue cover of the September 11th postage stamp. I really like it. It makes me feel not so far from New York City. I really miss the City. The Marlins made it to the World Series yesterday, and the streets were loud all night. Getting to sleep was tough. I'd never felt such antipathy toward sports fans. But people were driving down the street with horns blaring, whistles blowing, walking out on porches to scream for extended periods of time, etc. - you get the idea. I don't even have TV, so I know jack about what goes on. All I know is right now the Yankees and Red Sox are or were playing for the pennant, and there was some issue with a fan in Chicago who may now have to relocate to Florida. These are all things I have overheard. For all I know, they could be completely made up, although I doubt it. I went to an early Marlins playoff game a few weeks ago...it was fun but still nothing like seeing the Yankees, at least for me. However, what WAS highly entertaining was watching my friend Sam proceed to get wasted and yell in the ear of the lady in front of him. He has nice sustain. And he can really belt out "The Love Boat" theme like a champ. Ok, I should get going, I want to read two more cases before I go to bed. 'Night. Current Mood: content Current Music: New Order - Get Ready (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 24th, 2003
5:48 pm	Dishwashing Washing dishes was so therapeutic. I thought I'd never hear myself say that. But I'be been staring at books for so many of my waking hours that anything physical is both fun and relaxing... Current Mood: relaxed Current Music: The Lawnchairs - Moth and Other Tales (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 20th, 2003
8:32 pm	Living in Miami I'm hungry and haven't done dishes in days. The result of this is that I'm eating a yogurt with a measuring spoon. The surface is highly concave, and I have to suck my lower lip into it with each bite to get the remaining yogurt. Other than this, I'm pretty content. I've been a resident of Miami, Florida for almost a month now. I have a driver's license and everything. I like my apartment. It's relatively big, and easily fits all my stuff (I'm actually on the prowl for new stuff once again). It has a decent kitchen, bathroom, bedroom with walk-in closet, and living room. It's got gated parking so nobody will steal my 8-year old, 160,000 mile car. There's a tiny gym and business center downstairs. I'm about ten minutes from UM...a bit longer if it's rush hour. I'm liking law school so far. At first I was so lost, but now I'm slightly beginning to get the hang of it. (continued a week later) I don't study enough - I know this - but it takes time to get adjusted. The one thing I love doing is reading the cases. I suppose I always liked that aspect of law - determining what's at issue and what the court will likely do about it. The hardest part for me is the writing - I've always been a strong writer, but I can't break the desire to just go off on a tear and turn my case brief into a rewrite of the surrealist manifesto. Even when I stay disciplined (or so I think), the briefs are still too long, too wordy, and often miss the point. Well, I'm workin on it. I have a new girlfriend. It was kinda cool - we met at orientation, and were dating within a week. Her name's Bernice, and she rocks. She studied psychology, but is pretty much an artist at heart, studying to be a lawyer. Anyway, so this is where my time has gone. I'm either at school (8-12 hours most days), or hanging out with Bernice. I'm hardly ever at my apartment anymore, so it is falling a bit into disrepair. I have so many things to clean, and errands to run. I need to get car insurance so I can register my car in Florida, before my NJ registration runs out in 10 days. I need renter's insurance. I have to submit health insurance claims. The rug needs vacuuming. The kitchen and bathroom need to be mopped. I still need a couch and a coffee table, for starters. My printer is broken and thus I have fallen behind on printing out bills and receipts, as well as class syllabi. On the first day of law school, I got up for my 8AM class only to find my car battery dead. I ran to the Metrorail, took that to campus, and took the campus shuttle to class, only to be late anyway. The whole week I went through this, and on the Friday I was able to get someone to recharge my battery. Then I went to Sear's and bought a new one, but didn't have time to install it, so I put it on the floor of my car. A week or so later I found it overturned with battery acid spilled all over the place. It ate through the fuzzes in the floormats, but didn't destroy the rug base or anything else. But it's still sitting there, being a problem, and I haven't had time to call in a HazMat truck yet. Earlier today, I ordered a battery acid clean-up kit on Yahoo. By next week it'll have arrived, and I'll clean up this mess, and have complete use of my car once again. I also promised a law group that I'd take photographs of local abandoned lots in bad neighborhoods for them to use in their appeal to the government to do something about the situation. I think tomorrow morning I'll go to the flea market, and maybe find some furniture. Then I'll make my way to the bad neighborhood (hopefully not as bad on a Sunday morning), and take pictures. I may stay in my car the entire time. or bring a large friend. Actually, I recently made a friend who's 6'3" and could be a bouncer, but I suppose the real question involves what he could do with brute strength while facing the barrel of an assault weapon or something. Maybe I'll bring Bernice. She's 4'11", but packs a mighty punch. The best way of describing my girlfriend in this sense is to compare her to Shannon (for those of you who don't know Shannon, she's a small punky girl who is crazy with energy). So Bernice might be able to protect me. I need to get back to work. This entry is an amalgamation of random shit, that I've just kind of packed in so that it could suffice as an update. Here and there I may tell short stories in the future, but I probably won't have time to truly update anymore, at least not until finals end (December 17). Take care until then. Current Mood: busy Current Music: Fugazi - Red Medicine (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2003
9:40 pm	Bienvenidos Miami So here I am in Miami, hanging out and not knowing a soul. It is pretty decent because I've been busy the last few days finding apartments. I've narrowed it down to a few, and tomorrow I'll decide and sign the lease, and fly back to NJ on Friday. Likely I'll be moving down here at the beginning of August, so I may have up to a month of free time coming up. I'm gonna try and see all my friends in NY/NJ before I go, as well as finish off the 50-or-so books I've been meaning to read "when I have the free time," which I've always said figuring I'd never have the free time and thus be off the hook. I'm at the Holiday Inn - University of Miami, and the conditions are great. They let me have the student discount, which amounted to 33% off the room. I've been eating dinner at the hotel restaurant, and the nice Honduran waitress lets me sit by the pool and read Tolkien, and she delivers my food out there. I stare at the palm trees and the little banana-like thingies growing from them, and sip pineapple juice (no alcohol because that would amount to drinking alone), and swat away the occasional mosquito. Panic Room was on HBO last night...big disappointment by one of my favorite directors. Some of the shots were great, but the subject matter just seemed completely different from what Fincher is good at. Yeah, I know, I bet he's defended it by saying it's an homage to Poe or Hawthorne or something, but in the end it seemed to be lacking a basic essence that Se7en and Fight Club had, namely some substance beyond the mere visuals. This Holiday Inn is interesting because they have this computer tucked away in a room behind the front desk that has been alloted for "use by visitors." But I doubt many visitors know it exists, because you have to knock on this locked door near the elevators and someone then lets you in "if nobody's using it." Last night I considered using it all night but figured that other guests might want in. Maybe tonight I'll just waste away the evening at this screen. Yeah, I know, what a waste of a beautiful tropical city. But I'm alone, and I don't feel like going to a club, or the beach, or even driving around without someone else. Anyway, I'll be moving here in a month or less, so I'll save the excitement for then. One of my students unleashed the devil in me by introducing me to Runescape. Runescape is this massively-multiplayer online game. Basically you collect weapons and fight monsters and do all those other things that I did from the ages of 7 to 14, only this time you are playing against real human beings from across the globe. I've known about these online versions for a year or two now, but resisted because I knew I would become addicted. But of course on the last day of school a few students were in my room playing this thing, because, hey, what's better than being able to level-up your character, vanquish a few foes, and accomplish a day of school at the same time? Being bored a few days ago, when my parents were not home, I experimented and found out that I liked it. Or maybe it was just that I liked myself more when I was on it. But ya know, nothing really matters to a junkie strung out on a Runescape binge. Night becomes day becomes night and all this sad loser can consider is whether or not a level-42 Flame Dragon can be destroyed with the Mithril Sword. Or something like that, I can...ahem...only imagine must occur to...ahem...said person. Oh and by tomorrow I should have a cell phone...I'll hook you all up with the number so that I'll finally be able to be that annoying jackass that I've always wanted to be whose cell phone rings in the middle of the movie, and instead of sheepishly turning it off, he actually attempts to converse in a muted shout. I hope I didn't get charged twice for this trip. The travel agent gave me my total and I gave her my card number, but upon my arrival here, I found out the only thing that was pre-paid was the airline ticket. It turns out that all the car rental companies have names that evoke a sensibility of cheapness. You have your "Thifty"s, your "Budget", etc., but the best of all is a company called "Payless." Forget the fact for a moment that they stole their name from a women's shoe vending company. Suffice it to say that while ten other car rental companies managed to splurge for little cramped information booths near the baggage claim at Miami International Airport, "Payless" made the ingenious decision to spare that expense. And while ten other companies said "Hey, we're cheap, but at least we want our names and brand logo to appear on the sign above where our shuttle buses pick customers up", "Payless" spared that expense as well. In fact, the only way to be sure that the word "Payless" emblazoned on your itinerary is an actual company, and that it rents cars, and that it operates out of this airport, is to catch a sight of the endangered species known only as the "Payless-shuttle-bus-that-comes-once-every-half-hour-while-all-the-other-shuttle-buses-come-every-one-to-two-minutes." And by the time you rub your eyes and realize that you have seen one of these elusive buggers, they are usually pulling out the other end of the airport, and while you do have confirmation now that their existence is more than myth, you are also forced to wait another half-hour until the next spotting. Before I sign off I would just like to state for the record that I believe the manager and assistant manager in the next room are having a farting contest. While typing this entry, I heard what sounded like a "Poot" followed by ten minutes of on-and-off laughter. When I finally stuck my head in the room, I noticed that the commotion had attracted a janitor and the Honduran waitress to the scene as well. I don't think any of them had any idea I was in here. Everyone speaks espanol down here. I'm working on recovering my dos anos de la lengue en la escuela . Hasta la vista y buenos noches, -Miguel P.S. - http://www.runescape.com Current Mood: whimsical Current Music: Echo and the Bunnymen - Songs to Learn & Sing (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 12th, 2003
9:33 pm	There was only one catch and that was Catch-22 Lately, whenever something's going really, really badly, I console myself with the fact that, hey, at least it'll make an interesting story for my LiveJournal. That de-stresses me. Because I am not stressing it anymore, the situation usually resolves itself. Thus, I have no good LJ stories. What a Catch 22... Current Mood: existential Current Music: New Order - Get Ready (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 6th, 2003
11:01 am	Updates 1.) Finally, after almost 4 years of wearing around a shirt with a Russian slogan that I can't read on it, I have gotten it interpreted. Both of my gymnastics coaches (Vladimir and Damir) at the new gym speak Russian and were more than happy to translate. The red letters spell out: REVOLUTION 2.) I successfully pleaded my speeding ticket before the Bernards Township Municipal Court, and it was dropped from $78 and 3 points to $155 and no points. A bunch of students of mine were in court too for various matters. They all looked at me as if I was supposed to be a role model or something yet here I was in court, just a common criminal, just another lowlife thug. They were all dealing with traffic tickets too, and I was sure to be pretty explicit that mine was as well, so rumors wouldn't start that I was in court for possession of, say, heroin and paraphernalia with intent to sell, or anything. 3.) I was called today and told that I was chosen as the new high school video production teacher in my district. I start next Monday, and will be on my own with the class beginning February 1, when the current teacher leaves to take a position in a new district. I've kind of always wanted to be a full-time high school teacher, and now I have the opportunity, and my mind is a blur of ideas for the curriculum. I also have to brush up on a lot of material, including television and advertising, which are currently being taught in the class, although the district art director told me that I can ignore the previously-written syllabus if I so desire. We'll see. Now that I will be a full-time teacher, I'm considering making this journal friends-only, although I really don't know. I left it open as a substitute, so is there any reason to change now? I'll decide eventually, but of course my mind is racing now, so lucid thought is rather impossible. Current Mood: overloaded Current Music: Rancid - And Out Come the Wolves (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 31st, 2002
5:42 pm	Scrooge McDuck's Pool (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 30th, 2002
12:09 am	My Parents Are Becoming Fantasy Geeks I just watched The Fellowship of the Ring with my parents. My dad said he would make a good hobbit, because he likes the simple pleasures in life such as gardening, fishing, lounging around, etc. (although I'm not sure about the brewing and the smoking of the halflings' weed). My mom expressed interest in buying a hobbit house, like Bag End. I think she'd enjoy retiring there rather than living the last of her days in a geriatric facility. Somebody call a realtor. Current Mood: content Current Music: Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream (Comment on this)