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| The Talented Mr. Czolya (short title)Or, Because the Mysterious Yearning Secretive Sad Lonely Troubled Confused Loving Photographically Gifted Intelligent Beautiful Tender Sensitive Haunted Passionate Talented Mr. Czolya is too long to fit in the title line.
My life's been playing out like one of those indie flicks wherein the (anti) hero muddles around about life, no friends, no excitement, everything's droll, and he realizes that he's a cog in a machine that he might be able to escape but he's too apathetic to do so and instead sits around spouting random but poignant lines of Proust and Foucault all day and no one ever understanding him, even that young beautiful girl who tries, unlike anyone else, to understand him but is fated to be aloof to his meanderings as insular as they are external.
Not that my life has become that barren or is going to adapted to the silver screen and in the running for a Palme d'Or at Cannes next Spring (and thus relieve me much earlier of the burden of carrying this law school loan debt earlier than I would like). Nor are there any lines from Proust, Foucault, or even Sartre coming from my lips. It's all black-letter law. People can pretend to care about panopticism. People find Being and Nothingness sexy. NO ONE gives a damn about strict scrutiny tests for fundamental rights. And fate would have it that the Bar examiners don't really give a damn about human rights law, treaty law, or intellectual property. Sure, there's a bit of overlap. Think Venn diagrams. A. B. C is what I took in law school. C is just a teeny little slice between A and B on the Bar Exam. International Business Transactions did more to prepare me for the Bar exam (Contracts) than International Humanitarian Law (treaties are the supreme law of the land, which is a question or two in the Constitutional law section), but the latter I believe probably did more to prepare me for being a lawyer. And I'm not the one writing the exam (sorry for the confusion this brings any of my Canadian readers, I hope you didn’t leave your Canuck - Yank translators at home).
Then again, no pretty, lonely, equally misunderstood girl is following me around the halls of the law school, where I've been spending most of this surreal experience. We're all in the same boat together. I look like hell. We all look like hell. No one certainly has anything approaching Scarlett Johannsen in Lost in Translation. You have me and all the people studying for the NY Bar in one lecture hall. Just across the rotunda from us are the IL Bar people. And there's a smattering of some OH Bar folks who wander in and out of the school now and again. They're looking much more chipper than us in the NY Bar classroom. So do the IL Bar folk.
The central reason I bring up movies is that the one strange side effect of studying for the Bar are the increased vividness and lucidity of my dreams; to the point where I wake up feeling as if I sat through a film festival that went on in my head. At first I appreciated my subconscious trying to keep me entertained but one feature film-esque dream is enough per night when I'm trying to remember the intricacies of contracts, torts, constitutional law, wills, etc. I don't want to have to deal with myriad characters engaging in epic battles utilizing zeppelins, spaceships, flying carpets, and giant beanstalks (all at once, mind you). I found the dream dealing with architects remodeling Big Ben and transforming its beautiful four analog clock faces as they appear now into rectangular digital screens a bit confusing though not out of the realm of possibility given the proclivity of some architects to transform what has been established as beautiful into something no one finds beautiful to try to push the boundaries of what we find as such. Leave those meditations to the Tao Te Ching, at least for the next month. After the second week of Bar prep, I started dreaming like mad. I've started dreaming even before I fall completely asleep. Maybe I'm just that fatigued. However, I wake up remembering, at least in the first few minutes, four or five dreams. Too much. Too tiring. I want to sleep and get rest and not remember anything except that the intentional tort of battery at common law involves four elements: (i) the intentional (ii) offensive contact by the defendant (iii) of the plaintiff's body that (iv) causes harm. I don't need to bother myself about flying on a spaceship to the planet Zephyron where there are no Bar exams but where everybody settles disputes by stepping into a boxing ring. Naturally, I worry about what sort of dilemmas this system creates when the 90-year old decrepit grandma accuses the 18-year old thug built like a bulwark of snatching her purse. But each society, having survived long enough, has its own reasons for dealing with its problems in its own way.
Right now, I'm dealing with my own. Both in the very real realm of Bar prep and the oneirosphere. 26 more days to game day.
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| D'oh! PandemicWhile all of you in the Xangaverse whittled away your precious hours blogging, e-propping and commenting one another about why Xanga's doing everything wrong, the upsurge in haters and trolls, trading tips on how to lose those extra 5 ounces so you can look like Lindsay Lohan with the drug problems to boot, I was out buying a proper face mask and bottled water (and, of course, loads of beer because one might as well make some merriment out of potential impending doom).
Today, the World Health Organization declared that the world has ushered in its latest pandemic. The swine flu that barely made a blip on the pop-culture radar over the past two months is back on the radar. Even though the infections number less than 30,000 and deaths are around 125, pandemic is back.
The best way to stay alive during this time is know what to do. These are my personal suggestions. I'm not a medical doctor and I have no connection to the medical community so this is just my opinion - certainly based off of my reading up on how to NOT contract swine flu. Be sure to read up on your own. My advice is not sufficient but I'm sharing with others what I'm doing.
1. Wash your hands. This should be a given but by watching a very recent news report, one must understand that there are massive swaths of the population which choose to forgo basic hygiene methods that have been proven, over the past few CENTURIES, to help cut down the transmission of germs and viruses. Wash your hands. Don't be that guy/girl who kills off your family 'cause you couldn't soap up for thirty seconds (remember: sing the Happy Birthday song - preferably in your head so you don't freak people out and run them out of the bathroom before they, too, get to scrub down - when washing your hands WITH SOAP and LATHER LATHER LATHER. If you say to yourself you can't sing it because you don't know anyone who has a b'day on that particular day, please don't have children). Water alone does not suffice. Water is great. We need it everyday. The Tao Te Ching makes several references to the power of water. Believe me, the water coming out of whatever faucet you happen to be using is not magical. It could have been derived from six springs each blessed by numerous holy men and endorsed by every new age nut job in Sedona and everywhere west thereof, but it won't make the bad swine flu virus go away. SOAP SOAP SOAP. Or else, stay HOME HOME HOME.
2. Carry hand sanitizer with you and, um, USE IT! Purell it up. Lather that stuff on every time you touch a public computer keyboard, phone, shake hands, etc. Even after you go to the bathroom. ESPECIALLY IF YOU DON'T MAKE A HABIT OF SCRUBBING WITH SOAP (re: last sentence of Point #1).
3. Face masks! No, not a la Friday 13th. But not skimpy masks, either. Just because it has Pikachu print on it doesn't mean it's going to save your ass. Moral here: when selecting proper mask type, go with maximum guaranteed protection and not with the crowd unless that crowd is wearing N95, which probably means that they're all sold out. Don't give in and go with something flimsy with a cute imprint. You may be making, arguably, one hell of a fashion statement because you wearing a Jonas Brothers imprinted face mask but people don't really look to rotting corpses for advice on prevailing fashion trends. N95 masks offer a great deal of protection. You can probably find them at the hardware store if the pharmacies are sold out. The N95's keep almost everything out. That's what you want. Now, it may be too soon to start worrying about face masks but it's good to have them on hand before the shit hits the fan. Just a suggestion. Having to acquire, by ILLEGAL means, such a mask necessarily involves a whole other bunch of skill sets and you probably don't have them and I don't endorse that.
4. Bottled water. It's good for you when the company doesn't lie about impurities. If you can't get bottled water, then boil it at home and bottle it there somehow.
5. Stay healthy or stay home. If you're feeling a bit sick it's something you can commiserate with your colleagues and BFFs about from home via text message - luckily the flu virus doesn't spread that way even though someone has already asked that (what if the swine and a computer virus mutate together and form a new strain? - we're screwed but that hasn't happened yet so we're not addressing it BUT what we should address is how you managed to graduate from college). Believe me, we love you, we just don't want to die because of you.
These are just a few suggestions. Something more than to just keep in mind but to implement. Read up, educate yourself and stay healthy. In the final analysis, this is just for you to do your part so you don't inadvertently kill me. No one wants to inadvertently kill anyone else. So don't be that guy or girl. | | |
| Bar Review Beat #2: Old NewsA rare pleasure these days, given all the time committed to studying, is following up on what's going on in the world, reading what's most important and influential. One of the top headlines today is that Adam Lambert is gay. Who the hell is Adam Lambert and why should I care if he's gay, straight, or just a figment of my imagination? Seems he's some contestant from American Idol. I think he might have been the winner or runner up. I'm in the dark on this one because I was too busy to pay any attention to that competition this year. From what I've gathered in a few minutes time, the great speculation has been whether he's gay or not.
In other news, if you care, two American journalists were sentenced to 12 years hard labor in North Korea for "grave crimes" and the Brazilians and French have been fishing wreckage and bodies out of the Atlantic. Hopefully, the most recent of the tail section of Air France Flight 447 will key investigators into the actual nature of the tragedy. But that's all really small time compared to America's Adam Lambert, who in casting off his sexual ambiguity that had been menacing the general public, has arrived as our imminent emo star.
Way to keep it real America. Way to keep it real. | | |
| Bar Review Beat #1I've posted a couple of blogs lately but by the time I finished them up they didn't entertain me and that's the litmus for posting them. They'll remain private.
I'm absolutely exhausted today. I spent eight hours each the last two days studying for the NY Bar. That doesn't include the nearly four-hour long lecture on Friday we had to watch. I have about four hours of work remaining before I head into Week 3. I've been told that as long as I treat studying for the NY Bar as a job (eight - ten hours a day), I'll likely pass. Now, that doesn't include the lectures. That brings the timeframe to 11 - 14 hours per day. Barely any time to rest. On weekends, I'm expected to spend 10 - 12 hours over both days. Thus, the four hours left for today.
Today, I woke up and spent most of it completely mindless. It didn't help that I managed only five hours of broken sleep and wasn't able to force a few more hours. I don't think that would have made any difference. This has to have been one of the loneliest weekends on record. While I spent many weekends hard at work during law school, there was always the silver lining that the next weekend or even in a few days' time I would be doing something with a group of friends or just spending time with J. Everything has ground to a complete halt.
Studying for the Bar also requires extreme focus. It doesn't help that it's summer. Like I told someone else who's now going through the same process: I missed the first two summers in Cleveland because I was overseas for internships and now I'm going to miss summer a third time in a row.
Now I have to go get some work done. Maybe I'll be back in a week or so. Until then... | | |
| Summertime at the MoviesI got a hold of J on chat late last night. I told her that I took in two new films on Friday: Star Trek and Terminator Salvation. When she asked me if I enjoyed them, I said that I did but I think they did more for the big budget action flick franchise than each did for their respective franchise.
My own personal jury is still out on how I feel about these two films.
I went to see Angels & Demons the week before. At first, I was concerned that I would be seeing the same movie as The DaVinci Code. However, I was pleasantly surprised although the film wasn't that great.
I told J that it seemed like this summer was going to be a good one for films. A lot of action, a lot mystery, a lot of everything. Then I remembered that I hadn't been Stateside for the entire summer since Summer 2004. Now I remember why the Summer rocks for movies.
Still, I have the Bar exam to study for and the prep class begins this Wednesday so that was probably the end of my moviegoing for a few months. | | |
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