Well, today sucked...

Got my shit pushed in in front of a jury today. For some reason my client thought he knew what he was doing better than me, and blew off a two misdemeanor offer so that he could plead guilty to a felony and two misdemeanors after having his best friend call him a violent alcoholic who threatens people and drinks before 11 am, and was probably looking to hurt someone on the day in question. I would have taken the plea, or at least gone to the jury without any additional evidence after the motion to strike, personally. Now he MAY be 2 points over Schedule B, or 1 point under, depending on when he got served and whether he was on bond for other charges yet.

I haven't won a case in 14 months. In fact, I don't think anyone stationed in my jurisdiction has. I'm pretty good at what I do, but our public defender clients just suck, and in a jurisdiction where they'll indict a ham sandwich, that doesn't work out too well. It doesn't help that we're outnumbered 3-1 by prosecutors getting paid 2x as much, and everyone leaves our office for theirs, and they have 4 times as much staff, and offices in the courthouse... It's pretty demoralizing, and I'm ready to move on. My problem is I'd like a new job before I quit or get myself fired, but my patience is wearing out. More there soon, methinks.

Been dicking around lately looking for new blogs to haunt.

This one is some fucked up shit... All I could say was "wow" and give some advice.
She's kept me mildly entertained. She needs to learn some things about hockey though...
wtf?

I recently found posts suggesting 26 new episodes of Futurama (the cartoon). My life is complete. I can go die now...

Blog insanity

I'm having seeeeerious insomnia. Too many things on my mind.

So, because I ain't sleeping, I've just been surfing the blogosphere. There are some cool sites, and some absolute shit out there. There's also some freaky-ass scary crap. This much I have noticed: everyone is trying to increase his or her traffic. There are all kinds of spams to people's sites saying some permutation of "great site, come see mine..."

There're also some fairly serious breeches of ettiqutte. Serious bad spelling, grammar, blogs just to sell things.

This is odd.
wtf?

This was amusing for a minute or so...

I personally prefer seeing the senators "bitch-slapped."
Brodeur is the greatest goalie ever, and this guy needs to respect his Authori-tie.
You just need to know this exists

For a while there I was running across only "unrequited lovesites." All I can say is "wow" and:
This lady needs help.
This one a little less so.

A lot of brand brand new blogs, like, started this month... or today even.

This week I re-discovered a lot of bands I stopped listening to a long time ago, in part as a result of my bizarre weekend last week. Still trying to sort that one out.
Listening to the Descendents really brings me back, though they put out a new album during law school and I saw them on tour then. The sone Jean is Dead is probably one of the most powerful punk songs I've ever heard.

I think Citizen fish will be next for rediscovery.

Full metal alchemist is pretty bizarre. So is stand alone complex.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a damn traffic report/camera?

I was asked to help find a person a way out of some monstrous traffic, but I can't seem to find a traffic report/camera to figure out where the problem is so I can fucking get them around it. How the fuck, in 2006, can we not yet have a nationwide, comprehensive, traffic webcam/reporting system? What a load of shit. How much time do truckers/commuters/travelers/-I- (yes, me fucking personally) have to waste looking for one of these things? Much less how much time do we waste in that there AREN'T ANY FUCKING CAMERAS OUT THERE!!??!?!?!?!??!

I need to go break something...

Mysteries of near arrest uncovered...

[EDITED:
I have always been of the opinion that a person should bear the costs of his or her speech. It has been pointed out to me that this particular rant imposed some costs on two, perhaps three, and maybe even 5 or 6 other people that outweigh the benefits of the speaking to me. Because of that, and for only that reason, I redact this post.]

Doing dumb shit

So, several years ago, I withdrew from some community college classes to go to law school. They failed to mention that Ws become Fs after two semesters. A few years ago I applied to engineering school, and found out about the Fs. Ever since I've intended to fix the problem. Here's the problem. They're classes I have no need for. It will cost about $1k, books and all. I got into engineering school anyway, though I will need to reapply 'cause I didn't go. Do I go ahead and take the classes? I really feel like I need to do it for me. On the other hand, it's sort of a waste of $1k, which I can't easily spare. I can take these classes through distance learning in a matter of weeks, with almost a guaranteed A. They also might serve as a sort of back to school training wheels, just in case the law ship doesn't get righted and I have to abandon it.

This is really a debate about a larger issue: I used to just sort of do what I wanted to do, and things worked out. For the last several years I stopped doing that. I'm not sure which came first, but now I have things to lose, and if I do dumb shit, then I may lose them. However, I'm also miserable. So what if I lose my house, my car, my career, if I can be other than miserable, right? The problem is, I can't tell when I'm doing dumb shit that is the good shit that got me here, or just doing dumb shit to try to do the good dumb shit.

To my friends and "re: anonymity"

To my friends: the point of the blog is that people can read and comment. Emailing me directly fails to serve that purpose (my friends, who know who they are, email me directly rather than commenting). How am I supposed to inflate my ego if no one comments on my musings? And yes, it is easy to open an account.

Re: anonymity: I deliberately use an alias. I have used this same alias for so long, in so many places, that many people either know who I am, or know me by the alias. Please preserve the alias. That's both for my protection, so I can sandblast people and things without fear of losing a job or something over it, and for your protection, because you don't want people out there to know who you are any more than I want them to know who I am. The world is a bad place, with bad people in it. Use your fucking heads, people.

Here's the view from where I slept last night.

They're building/rebuilding that ship. Craziness...

I took a bunch of pictures as I came across the bridge and then realized that 1) snapping photos while driving is a bad idea, 2) snapping pictures from infrastructure is a bad idea these days, 3) snapping pictures of ports/naval equipment is a bad idea these days, 4) EZ mode on my camera is pretty cool, and 5) nobody wants pictures of a guard rail.

You might be a sociopath if...

I spent the last 36 hours off and on thinking: "What carnage would be wrought if that were to fall and kill a dozen lawyers?. Eh, they're all defense attorneys... no one would notice."

More of the world from my reclusive compound in the woods...

New camera fun. Learning the buttons on this damn thing...

This is me trying to take a picture of Orion from my front yard. I need a tripod, but I faked it by leaning the camera on my boot. Had to kill all the lights first, and I nearly killed myself tripping over one of those solar powered, staked in lights I had next to the walk. I have 7 more, but that particular one is going to need to be replaced...

My neighbors have alpacas...

I'm trying to figure out if this works...

YAY!!!

My neighbors have alpacas. They're sort of dopey looking...

My other neighbors have horses...

I live in the middle of the woods...

Life altering weekend

Well, this was an interesting weekend... [EDITED: see above and below] I did something very un-galactichero-like: I called someone I haven't heard from in a long time and apologised for something horrible.

Backstory: Several years ago just after college there was this girl I was actually stupid over. This is rare in and of itself, because I'm usually a machine and nothing makes me stupid, but I was actually stupid over her. We never really got off the ground, much to what I expect was the frustration of both of us. Finally, she said something innocuous that I took really badly. I remember stewing over it, but then I must have said something horrible, and we haven't spoken in 5 years. To give you an idea of how horrible it must have been, I remember almost every conversation I've had since I was 8 years old, at least generally, and this is a woman I made a habit of driving all over the Country to see. I can't even remember the conversation. I don't even know why we didn't talk for 5 years. I am actually ashamed of something I can't even remember, and I am almost never ashamed, and nearly never have difficulty remembering something.

Aaaaaanyway, partly because I wanted to, partly because the movie Hi Fidelity made me think about it, and partly because of a conversation I had with someone last week, I was looking up some people from my past (as an interesting aside, every single one of them ended up doing EXACTLY what they set out to do, from teaching, to marine biology, to forensics). The last one I got to was this particular girl (last probably not because it finished my list, but because it took almost three hours and appears to have altered my life), and I couldn't find out to my satisfaction what happened to her... BUT, I found a phone number. After some contemplation, and blocking my cell number, I called. I can't pin down why it was important, but it was really, really, really important to me by that point. Bam. 5 years just went away. I don't know if I'm stupid over her anymore, but I can tell you we talked for more than TWO HOURS. She's doing exactly what she planned after a few setbacks (some of which I was there for). She's moved across the country and is doing well. She's searching for Mr. Right (after experimenting with being a lesbian, apparently), and I think I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that that's not me. She has contracted an incurable but not imminently life-threatening disease, which concerns me a bit, but is doing ok with it. We talked about everything. Work, family, plans, friends, where we're living, why, politics, school, eeeeeverything.

Maybe I was calling to make myself feel better by finding out that she's a mess -- she isn't and I'm pretty happy about that. Maybe I was calling to rekindle, or actually kindle for the first time, something -- but I didn't, and I'm pretty happy about that. Maybe it was simple curiosity. I am most bothered by the fact that I can't remember why we didn't talk for five years. I got the distinct feeling that she DOES remember, but that she didn't want to insult or embarrass me by reminding me. I think that whatever I said was soooo bad that I don't WANT to remember, and that for five years I've been ashamed, and talking to her and finding out that she doesn't want me dead fixed the problem, at least a bit.

It's been pretty liberating. I've been motivated to do a lot of completely unrelated things that I had trouble motivating myself to do before. I've been in a frighteningly good mood, and far less antisocial than usual. The really crazy thing will be if that effect lasts into next week.

So, now the point. Every major self-help program has a step where you do this thing: call people you've hurt and apologise, whether they accept or not, or you want to or not. Who would have thought that such hokey bullshit works?

This post is really embarassing to me. Anonymity is a good thing.

Adsense

What's this adsense thing? People are making money off their blogs? I saw that it's got like a search counter and stuff, but it seems very not punk rock to get pay per click on your blog. Someone explain it to me, so I can decide if it's worth compromising my ideals to get a search counter, or if I would actually be compromising my ideals. Thanks.

Roaring back

Well, I've been gone for almost half a year from this space. Been haunting tres-chicas.blogspot.com after haunting the now defunct zoemitchell.com (she finally went to law school), and postsecret.blogspot.com. It feels a little arrogant for me to do my own blog, which is why I generally haunt those of others instead. Every once in a while I may have something interesting to say, so I came back.

[EDITED:
I have always been of the opinion that a person should bear the costs of his or her speech. It has been pointed out to me that this particular rant imposed some costs on two, perhaps three, and maybe even 5 or 6 other people that outweigh the benefits of the speaking to me. Because of that, and for only that reason, I redact this post.]

Everyone, here is my advice: just buy porn. Hell, you don't even have to BUY it... Just stay out of trouble.