seriously MPD post
MPD stands for “multiple personality disorder”, because calling it a schizophrenic post would be inaccurate. What I mean by that is in the last week or so I’ve been starting new posts every time I have something new to say, and then not posting them because they’re too slight. So here’s a hodgepodge of all the collected non-relevant stuff I’ve had to say for a week or so.
1. Pure Bitching(tm)
The community college has a woman in the registrar’s office who is either blind or incompetent, or something. I got a letter last week telling me I was scheduled to get my certificate just fine in May, as long as I sent an official transcript from my alma mater before March 20th. I submitted an official transcript when I applied to the college, one I paid $4.00 to my alma mater for, and I know this because I kept the copy (I have it in my desk drawer right next to me, right now) and hence must have sent them the original. The woman at the registrar’s office told me on Monday that she had an unofficial transcript, not an official one. I told her that I was 100% sure that I sent the official one to them when I applied, and she said no, we don’t have it. So I sent a request and another $4.00 to the registrar at my alma mater. It’s a little thing, but it pisses me off that I am positive I am right about this and still have to pay for another one.
2. Amusing Excerpts from Legal Cases
When I opened this post I thought I’d wind up with more than two examples, but I haven’t found any more, so I guess there are only these two for now.
All the teachers I’ve had at the community college have expressed their sympathy to their classes for making us read cases. There’s no other way to learn the law, they say, but I understand that it’s not very interesting and I’m sorry.
Aside from cases that are more than 50 years old, or breach of contract cases, I have never found this to be true. I love reading cases. They are almost always interesting, the way that they put together a legal issue and then take it apart. Sometimes there are details of the case circumstances that are amusing or that reveal human nature, sometimes the court phrases things in interesting ways for the sake of clarity. So I present a couple of those to you.
From 56 Md.App. 125 (1983):
EL: The problem is I committed murder in self-defense. I wasn’t going to be beaten again.
911: OK. Is the person that beat you there now?
EL: I would imagine so. He’s up lying in bed dead.
From 235 Md. 556 (1964):
Wife’s paramour was convicted of murdering husband. The Circuit Court…[found] paramour guilty of second degree murder, and paramour appealed.
3. Send Me a Reader (ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh)
Yesterday I spent nearly four hours looking over the draft of what I like to think of as a very short novel, instead of a very long novella, in between short bursts of work when it was asked of me. It’s something that’s been kicking around in different forms since 2003, and in 2007 I managed to take it from an overly dramatic piece of juvenilia to a twice-its-size almost-novel that might actually be saleable. It’s a ghost story, overall, but it’s also about isolation, love and loss, and furniture.
The problem I’m having with it is that I find it very engaging, and I can see a few points where I think it might need work, but I’ve been too close to it for too long. What I really need is a reader. Someone who will not only read the book, but talk it over with me, tell me what parts need work and what parts had unanswered questions and where the hell I can slot in the other 15,000 words’ worth of short stories that are tangential to this book and which I need to fill out the length but which right now seem to have no place whatsoever in the manuscript. And other such details.
Granted, I could use a reader for just about every project on my slate, but especially with this one, because I believe it’s fairly close to completion. The more projects I have that are completed, the more query letters I can send out.
This is yet another problem with social anxiety, by the way. Writers’ groups are the lifeblood of writers’ growth, and trying to make your way without a group of fellow writers to support you, read your drafts and talk to you about them (and of course you return the favor!), and bounce ideas off of, you’re kind of swimming the Atlantic without an emergency boat following behind you. But the model hasn’t worked for me. I took a fiction writing class at a community college (a different one than where I am for the paralegal cert) two years ago, but I was the only person other than the instructor who had lengthy comments and lots of suggestions for the other writers, so…it wasn’t much help for me. Something of the same thing happened at the conference I went to in the summer of that year. I could get out there and try to find local writers’ groups that meet in bookstores and the like – there are tons of them out there, trust me – but I don’t know if I’ll get anything out of it, and I don’t really want to meet all those new people and make myself and my work vulnerable in that way. There are much more snotty reasons why I don’t want to do this, but I’ll just save those for another time.
4. And Now the News
I know it seems like I haven’t been doing much in the way of work at work lately, but it’s just a really slow period right now. I feel extremely, ridiculously guilty about not doing work at work, but if there isn’t any work to do…?
I got a 96 on my first major assignment for Legal Research & Writing, and a 10/10 on the first grade we got back in Civil Procedure. Hopefully this will be another slide-through semester, and thank goodness it’s the last one. The cop-ish lady (5th paragraph) in CivPro is proving herself to be interesting yet again; on Monday night she made some comments to me in a way that made it seem like she thought the teacher was incompetent. He is, but she was pretty impolite about it. Also, she jumped in to a discussion that the teacher and a student were having about their Greek heritage to say “My people came over here a long time ago too.” The teacher asked from where, and she laughed and said “On slave ships.”
Awk. Ward.
I love taking nice long lazy showers, but I really dislike taking a quick shower when I’m half-asleep and then being freezing cold when I get out. Which makes most mornings unpleasant for me. Lately I’ve been alternating my morning shower with a day where I’ll dunk my head under the tub faucet and shampoo my hair, and then give a quick swipe under my arms with a washcloth and call it clean. I don’t freeze to death when I get out, I’m presentable, and I don’t smell. Is this unhygenic? I don’t seem to be scraping patches of crud off my body when I shower on the alternate day.
And now I’m off to…not work. Likely for most of the day. Why don’t you guys blog more often for my amusement? Sheesh.
February 25, 2009 at 9:54 am
“I would imagine so. He’s up lying in bed dead.” Hahaha! I loved that.
There’s nothing wrong with how you’ve improvised the winter shower; I’ve always called that a bird bath and employ it a lot in the cold months. Mostly I just switch my showers to night instead of morning though; our bathroom is the coldest room in the house and there’s no way I’m dealing with that first thing in the morning.
My hair magically grows grease by the end of the workday if I shower at night. Blech.
I took a fiction writing course here at the university a few years back and found it to be both annoying and also really cool. It’s amazing to be able to get immediate feedback on your stuff, yet a lot of people out there think they’re the next Stephen King or whatnot and they are NOT. So I don’t know if you want to go that route again or not, but either way if you ever need a volunteer to read something here, I’d be happy to! I love reading people’s stuff and was born to be an editor if I do say so myself. Anytime you want feedback, just say the word and I’m yours.
See, here I was thinking you secretly hated me, because I emailed you a week or so ago asking you if you’d read some of my work and you never responded. I guess my email was another casualty of Yahoo’s spam filter. I’ll try again soon.
February 25, 2009 at 2:23 pm
1) Consider that your $4 bail for NOT smacking her.
2) Case files rule!!
3) I can certainly read for ya, but I’m not all that good at literary criticism. Nonfiction yes, fiction not so much.
4) I suck it up and shower. I just reach out, grab the towel, and close the shower door again so I can mostly dry off in the steam-heated shower. Then I go hop back into bed with Dys for a few minutes and warm myself up at her expense before I get dressed. I’ve always been a little bit self-conscious about that sort of thing so if I’m at all sweaty I usually shower twice a day. But I need to shave my head every day, and it’s easiest to do it in the shower.
“Literary criticism” is not really what I’m looking for. You might be able to tell me if something hangs together, if I’ve characterized someone properly, etc., and that’s all I need. I’m thinking about sending you something, but I’m balking because you already have enough to do (and read) for the next couple of years.
I’ve been sucking it up for years now, and I know this sounds really spoiled, because who doesn’t take a shower every morning and suck it up?, but I’m tired of it. And we don’t have a door to our shower, just an open bathroom that won’t keep heat unless your shower is 20 minutes long and you don’t save any hot water for BF.
February 25, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Not saving any hot water = point taken. Dys not working a regular day job means I can take as long a shower as I need to – she showers later in the day (and she also often doesn’t do it every day during the winter). It’s been so long that we both had to get ready at the same time in the morning that I’d forgotten about stuff like that.
Or there’s the opposite problem, if BF takes his shower first. Cold shower = cranky Crisitunity.