oh man, this jive has me in a trance
One of my posts showed up on Technorati the other day, apparently. I don’t actually know what that site does – is it one of those aggregate sites, where content editors troll the web looking for stuff to post that’s interesting? I don’t know. I’m not really in on Web 2.0. (I am not actually looking for any kind of explanation, o helpful readers. Unless you want to explain how one of my posts got there.) In the same vein, I am close to 1,000 comments! I will congratulate whoever hits #1,000 with…notification that they were the 1,000th commenter. And a hearty “Good for you!”
So I built up my courage and I talked to Paul before class, telling him that I thought his alignment practices were not working for my body. He found the phrase “aggressive alignment” interesting, and told me that he was so glad to hear from me about excess pain that his instructions were causing so he could, you know, stop instructing me like that. He said he would be thinking about what I’d said for a couple of weeks, and generally it worked out well instead of badly. It may even strengthened the student/teacher relationship – I got more strongly that vibe of “I’m enjoying working with you” from Paul. I was petrified before class, and thought about a) just not going to class with him ever again and not explaining, b) not saying anything and suffering through another alignment-focused class, or c) failing to do any of the stuff he asked me to do that caused me pain, without comment. Not one of these options sounded at all good to me so I bit the bullet. Yet again, the right thing to do was the wise thing to do and it turned out fine. When am I going to learn this for good?
Class itself was terrific. We did ashtanga-style sun salutations, three each of A and B, and then a bunch of work on shoulder opening, eka pada rajakapotasana, and natarajasana, which I was seriously kicking some ass in. I think the heavy warmup of the sun salutations gave me some good grounding, and I had one of those balance days where I felt like I could just stay in it forever. There was even time for savasana! (Paul usually runs out of time for savasana.) It was hot in the studio yesterday afternoon, so I was sweating through all this and feeling great. Really nice practice.
Then I went to the community college. The teacher in CivPro decided to show us a movie about the legal process in the last couple of classes, and he said it was called The Staircase. I’d never heard of it, but hey, I like movies, right? No problem. Well, it’s not a movie, it’s a six-hour miniseries, a documentary, and I have no idea why he thought that showing six hours of documentary was at all a good idea for this class. He split it up, three hours last night and three hours next week, but STILL, that’s insane.
The case is quite interesting. It’s a murder from 2001 in Durham, NC, and partway through the second 1-hour segment last night I looked it up on my laptop – oh, how I love the internet – and was surprised to find that the guy was convicted. The documentary is strongly slanted towards the defendant and his innocence, but even with my cynical view it still seemed to me like one of those cases where reasonable doubt would kick in for an acquittal. Both theories of the woman’s death, murder and accident, have major puzzlements in them.
The defendant was a local columnist, and had written critically about the problematic racial divides in Durham. He was explaining his point of view somewhat cryptically at one point, and Cop Lady, next to me (the one who deliberately brought up her ancestors’ slavery in a previous class), kept saying “What’s your point?” and “What are you getting at?”. (We were all talking back to the screen after a few minutes of watching, so it wasn’t weird in itself.) It was extremely defensive, and I wanted to turn to her and say “Let it go, already, he’s on your side. Most of us are.”
I left at 8:45, when the third hour was just starting, because I wanted to go home and eat dinner before I had to go to bed. BF had made a recipe that we watched Ingrid make on “Simply Delicioso” over the weekend, full of dairy and vegetables, and I was looking forward to trying it. It was tasty, but not as good as the show made it look, and BF said it wasn’t at all worth the amount of time and effort he had to put into it.
He also called an AC guy, who is hopefully at our house at this very moment looking at our AC. I think last night I’d gotten used to it, because I slept well, but it will obviously be better to get it fixed.
A case that has been dogging the firm for a couple of years with its uncertainty and its incredibly depressing client settled yesterday. I am a happy, happy person because of this. Despite the exceptionally intelligent men with leaf-blowers who sprayed all the pollen in the parking lot straight into the air just as I was arriving at work this morning, I feel good about being at work today.
Famous last words, I’m sure. Eh, I’ll tempt fate anyway.
April 28, 2009 at 11:46 am
As you know, stories of trials (or really anything) can easily be to told to slant in either direction. I have a hard time watching any serious story without looking at who produced it and what their angle might be. It bothers me that I look at things that way, but I guess it is just a sign of the times and the people in control of the flow of information.
April 28, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I have a bunch to say about that. This case had a whole lot of evidence going for the prosecution, because to all appearances she did NOT just fall down the stairs, but all the surrounding circumstances indicate that there’s no reason whatsoever that he would have killed her, unless it was a completely random rage. My guess is that the documentary was skewed towards the defendant because that was the harder side to prove (and because it was a lot easier to get access to the defense than it was to the prosecution), but I would have liked to see all the evidence in detail. It really was an interesting case.
Also, I think that looking at the source of a story is absolutely imperative if you’re going to believe it. I don’t think you’re cynical at all. As for “sign of the times”…hell, yellow journalism dates from the turn of the century, and I’m positive that people have been telling stories in one specific way or another for a heck of a lot longer than that.
April 28, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I’m tempted to spam some comments just to win the coveted 1000Th.
Congratulations on talking to Paul. I always like to hear about small acts of courage. And I too wonder how many times I will continue to ask myself when I will finally learn that lesson for good.
Not only is six hours a bit much, but I also wonder what a murder trial has to do with Civil procedure?
Nothing. At all. He said he wants us to understand what the course of a trial is like, and while that makes sense to me, there’s another course at the community college called Criminal Evidence and Procedure. I think he failed to realize this, or is just a bad teacher.
I have a hard time complaining about that part of it because I find criminal law a lot more interesting than torts, on the whole, but I sure can complain about the six hours.
Finally, the story of Socrates trial and death would probably be much different if it had been written by someone other than one of his disciples.
April 28, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Technorati basically finds sites that are linked to other sites. In other words, you could go there and look for everything that points back to your blog. I’ve done it from time to time, and the results rarely surprise me…but the surprises have been interesting. Once that’s how I caught someone lifting, in its entirety, several posts from Vix’s blog, including my answers to her “Application for Sexual Discourse.” Kinda like someone finding a letter you wrote to someone else and passing it off as having it written to them. Grr.
A lot of people seem to find my blog by Googling “analysis of ___”, and one of the movies or books I’ve discussed is in the blank. If they can live with plagiarizing from a blog, I’m not sure I care, but it creeps me out to think of my analyses being passed off in classrooms as the work of students.
Hope both the AC and the change in yoga practice work out for ya!