whatever man

I take it back, crim pro can kiss my ass.

That’s really not important here. What I want to tell you about is a dream I had the other night. Worst dream of my life. And too bad for yall that this terrible year has leeched any ability I once had to glean even a modicum of insight into my ridiculous thoughts, conscious, sub or otherwise. Leeched it like the motherfucking parasite it is (you know what, fuck you if leeches aren’t parasites) so I’m just going to give it to you straight. I went to bed after about, I kid you not 13 straight hours of trying to figure out what the fuck procedure applies to criminals in the state and motherfucking federal systems, and had a goddamn panic attack about not understanding any of it. And various other things we don’t need to discuss. You know what, if you are a neurotic person, just don’t have kids. Because you know what, they’re going to be neurotic too and do you really want that hanging over your conscious you neurotic fucking ass?

You know, once upon a time, I could deal with my shit because I made dealing with my shit a priority. I prioritized that shit! The goddamn depths I have fallen to.

Anyways, I went to sleep thinking about how I thought I had this subject on lock and really was not so sure about that anymore, and slept terribly, and had this lucid crazy dream about being a serial killer. And that is not the kind of dream you want to have lucidly. I guess it wasn’t really lucid in the way that I felt like I could control what was happening, but shit, it felt like it was me in there. And I was in this dream, experience this incredible cognitive dissonance of presenting myself as a very likeable, innocent, good person, presenting it so emphatically that even though I knew I was doing these terrible things (i.e., killing many people), I couldn’t give up this image. And it was fucked up. Right? Because who am I really.

You know what. I might be intoxicated at the moment so I’m not going to do this dream justice. Not to mention that my brain lacks the ability to analyze anything other than motherfucking legal doctrine. And even then. It’s not so goddamn hot. Who the hell gets drunk off ONE miller light? I do. Jesus Christ. At least that’s good news for my liver, if for nothing else.

Fuck you law school!

no EZ meals.

there are also no easy meals. and if you think there are, you’ll find out halfway into eating your soggy spinach and old green beans and gross eggs that you want to puke, and you will THINK AGAIN.

it’s a lot harder to keep writing here when you’re actually trying to keep up with reading. dammit. the man got me again! but relax folks, just because im keeping up on my academic game this quarter does not mean i have forsaken you. look at this tasty little something:

who knew how attractive the lead singer of the band was?
who knew what a farce it would be to google “who is the lead singer of the band”?. it was almost like having a clown jump out from the search box being like “GGGHHWWWAAAAAT BAND AYUCK AYUCK AYUCK”

these are the problems i encounter everyday of my life. every goddamn day.
and just a note for those of you who thought international law was going to be interesting/compelling/useful/engaging. you were incorrect.

No EZ Answers, Pt. 2

Im sure you’ve all been waitin with baited breath.

a brief recap: as you’ll recall, there are no easy answers (“truth like a lonely man”, infra.). we adhere to this conclusion and expound upon it here.

its super jarring to get back to school after a week of break and then start all new classes. property? principles? policies? where art thou?? i miss you. but now its the second week of school and crim pro with rw is bomb man, so bomb. i missed that adorable guy. INAAMS (i now abbreviate all my sentences). IMLWE (it makes life way easier).

goin home, like breaking up, is hard to do, especially when you only have a few days to see everybody and youre as popular as i am. (whats that you say? haters gon hate huh. i see you, and i hate you too.) and then you come back to school and you’re like, ok i can do this, i’m in a whole new mind frame; last quarter was my spiritual enlightenment game and this quarters gonna be my crim procedure game what what.

what you should remember is that to be an enlightened scholar, you must be able to move between the realms of reality with ease, like i do.

ok. comin back is even harder when you thought you had your shit all worked out and then you went home and you realized you dont even know what shit is, let alone how to work it out. you dont even know if shit is an actual concept or just a concept in your own head. you saw black swan and you were like ok natalie, ok mila, i see you, that’s deep stuff. and then you saw a trailer for no strings attached and you were like, ok natalie, i guess. and then you saw a trailer for friends with benefits and you were like wtf? mila?

im sorry, im getting a little emotional because i thought i knew shit and now im just not so sure. i thought i had a piece of that truth pie and now i’m like i don’t even know what dark matter is man, how can i know what reality is?? how can i believe in truth and meaning if i dont even know particle physics (neil gaimon says this is smaller than atoms which is what we is made of. i get all of my information about the natural world from the graveyard book. you should too.) i even put on some MGMT to try to get back in that “yeah i got this” mood and it left me only feeling as though “yeah no i most certainly do not got this”. so then i put on some sade. you give me the sweeeeeeetest tabbooooooo.

if you were expecting something more than mere ramblings today, all i can say is that i hope you have been disabused of that notion by now. i certainly have been.

what i’m trying to say is that you are the lover’s rock, the rock that i cling to. in the storm. just kidding, sade, i know all about copyright infringement. and in any case, you aren’t the lover’s rock so whatever. what im tryin to say is that (A) there is a limited amount of time that we can devote to figurin out “meaning” unless we want to devote our lives to it, and even then, no guarantees for sure. (2) our brains are wired to find meaning in shit (i know this because of an epiphany i had while watching the itunes visualizer), so how do we know if we’re seeing meaning meaning or our brains are just creatin meaning? (D) does it even matter? (4) what should we be lookin for? meaning? productivity? happiness? money? (G) life is short as hell, and sometimes we get stuck lookin for the right way to live rather than just any way to live at all. i know i do. my brain gets so full of shit i just cant answer and cant figure out. and im not sayin live your life just figurin out how to make it awesome for you. try to make it awesome for everyone. but also for you, you know. weve got one little life – meaning-seeking brains and all.

i dunno what im tryin to say here, but i feel ive successfully procrastinated, and thats not nothing.

these are the (firstworld) questions.

Maybe the answer lies in reframing the way we think about truth and meaning. maybe its got nothing to do with what can be proved, or our brains, or knowledge or anything. maybe its got nothing to do with death or us or particle physics at all. maybe its just – - . beyond us? maybe its just the feeling of meaning rid of all doubt and thats what it is. thats what truth is. an absence of doubt. and the point is that we’re able to feel it, and it gives our lives meanin when we do feel it.

truth like a lonely man at 3 in the mornin EST

heres the thing. you can never know if what youre doin at any one time is gonna remain the right thing to have done once you get to the point at which youve already done it. linear theories of time bein those generally accepted at the moment, knowin that what you’re doin in the present is going to be a cause for some kind of effect in the future (reading ei powell –> immediate enlightenment) but not knowin what that effect is going to be, or whether its going to be the effect either present you OR future you wants is enough to set any mind spinning. well, its enough to set this mind spinning. whether i set the mind-spinning bar too high or low is not the point to be discussed, amongst myself or amongst any of you.

you are correct. i am reading a brief history of time. it was thinner than anna karenina and also on hand at just the right intersection of new book craving/free time availability. but it might be more than my closet neurotic mind can handle? what? whos neurotic? not me.

the main conclusion ive come to is that you sir are shit out of luck.

please apply this conclusion to any major or minor premise you choose. for instance: there are no easy answers.* thus, you, search-for-easy-answer-er, are shit out of luck. once you start expecting easy answers the hard ones come and moosh you in the face. and nothin is as infuriatin as a well deserved moosh to the face.

blamo. words of wisdom from yours truly, powell. and a good night to you all.

*there are some easy answers:
Is tina fey better than jesus? yes.
Can Kristin Stewart act? no.
What’s the square root of sixty-nine? I’ve been tryna work it out — Drake.

Is “I don’t know” an answer? an EASY answer at that? I don’t know. BRAINTEASER!

only when i whine

i don’t know what there is to say today besides that it’s sunday again (EW) and i have a powerful urge to watch clueless. but sometimes we have to resist our urges or we end up turning in briefs that we are ashamed of.

i was talking to this lady about temperaments the other day and she was all…but your temperament craves stability, so you can’t just be a starving artist. and i was like YEAH WELL MY TEMPERAMENT IS ALSO CONTRARY SO JUST SINCE YOU SAID THAT IMA DROP OUT. bitch.

sometimes when i can drag myself away from watching an entire season of 30 rock on netflix in one day, i watch new movies. last night i watched that movie up there, only when i dance. its a documentary that follows two teenagers from the favelas in rio who are tryin to be dancers. irlan is the quintessential ballerina. tall, strong, lean, quiet. there’s this scene where mariza, the director of the centro de danca in rio, is talkin about how when irlan gets nervous and anxious he doesn’t eat. and she seems really pleased about it, like he’s passed her test for how good ballerinas should be.

then there’s isabela. she’s black (bad news for ballerinas in brazil), and a bit “heavier” than everyone else. and not as talented of a classical dancer as irlan. and so much of the doc focuses on commentary about her black skin and her wrong body type. and mariza keeps telling her that she needs to want it, to really prove that she has the right body to be a ballerina. and you can tell that mariza has this idea for how ballerinas are supposed to be. and isabella doesn’t quite fit. so much latent racism and body-ism (is that a word) that mariza is sort of tryin to fight, but she’s fightin it with her own weird fetishisms about black skin and skinny ballerinas.

look, i realize the past few posts have been subpar lately. i’m sorry :c

anyways. watch the doc. it’s so beautiful.

oh shit

im sitting here just trying to study up so i dont look a (total) fool tomorrow and i realize it’s happened. over this past week, a bunch of papers due and all that, and i just fell out. the weekend was hard, the week’s been harder, the real shit feels real far away suddenly.

how do you get back on track livin purposefully when all you’ve got is deadlines deadlines deadlines? and you’re worried you’re not givin anything your all? and worried about what people are going to think and what you’re going to regret the next day? and wondering if you’re enough of a person to keep yourself grounded all by yourself.

is it possible for one powell to do it on its own??

all semester i’ve been scared of getting into my school work because big fucking surprise, i like schoolwork. i like it but i dunno if it makes me happy. it makes me competitive, ambition-seeking and attention-seeking. i start to really dig the way professors respond to being smart, i start to really enjoy the feelin of being immersed in something, in getting a prof to like me. i start wanting to brag, wanting to hold onto accomplishments to prove that i mean something, that i’ve done something. so what’s the prob? i dunno. i can’t really articulate it but i know i dont really feel good when it starts. i dont feel that deep feeling of satisfaction. i start feelin like im being a jerk to other people. like im livin on the surface.

i know that’s not a prob with school though, that’s a prob with how i relate to school. i dunno how to change it though. ill keep you posted.

its a low night. jobs and homework and office hours and life and all. sheeeeeet.

the sunday blues

the tricky thing about them is that it doesn’t matter what day of the week it is, as long as youve been kicking back having a blast forgetting all of your responsibilities until the last moment and then BLAMO

it is sunday (or whatever) night and you have to get up the next morning and reeeaaaaaddddddd and go to property.

and if you dont happen to have property tomorrow it doesnt even make it any better.

and all you want to do is curl up with a kitten and watch 30 rock or wallace & grommit or even the proposal, because even though you at first thought it sucked because you found it totally unbelievable that they fell in love after all that, and EVEN THOUGH ryan reynolds is so unattractive, not even attractive in that jerk way, just an ugh god youre so gross bro, and EVEN THOUGH they could have done so much more with the premise and sandra bullock is usually soo cute, you at the last moment, right before calling it in as a bad job, remembered that david and susan hate each other throughout bringing up baby, until the end when susan climbs up the brontasaurus and david suddenly realizes he’s in love with her, and you’re socks were still charmed right off even though there was really no romantic buildup at all. and you remember that critics and audiences alike hated bringing up baby when it came out, only to be so sadly proven wrong when the world realized it for the comedic masterpiece it was, and you dont want to be on the wrong side of the proposal train do you? i thought not.

anyways, sometimes curling up with a kitten and watching other people’s netflix instant view just isnt an option, and not only because you dont happen to have a kitten (a puppy would be even better). so what do we do to make our sunday blues go away? there are several options, all of which i’ve tried at some point or another today.

- eat a some granola (but only if you have a self-restraint that i lack, because this will inevitably become eating a lot of granola, and then you have the sunday blues + the post sugar blues and that might be the worst combination known to man)
- take a nap (but only if you didnt sleep enough last night, not if its because you just ate 3 bowls of granola and soy milk and are post hyperglycemic fit)
- watch wallace & grommit
- watch 30 rock, any season
- print out your reading so you feel like you’ve been productive
- drink a lot of glasses of water
- drink some orange juice (maybe your potassium’s low)
- cook a real dinner, with protein and a lot of vegetables, to counteract the box of granola you ate
- read a few pages of Inside of a Dog, for a fresh perspective
- get a puppy!
- make some rooibos or other non-caffeinated beverage, so that you won’t have trouble falling asleep tonight, no honey
- google images for tattoos
- exercise, preferably aerobically
- clean your room, including vaccuum or sweeping
- read part of your reading, even if its only a page or two, to ease you into the swing of things, so that when you return full blast, you’ll be presently surprised to see you’ve already accomplished some of it (even if its only a page or two)
- write in your blog, even if it is just a list
- write down a list of things you are supposed to do (make sure you include things like “make a list”, and “eat dinner” so that you’ll be sure to have at least some items checked off by the end of the day)
- email some people you were supposed to email
- AVOID FACEBOOK (this is impossible)
- do your reading with friends
- take a shower and put on some makeup, even if you are about to go climbing or exercising
- do a 30 minute intensive conditioning to your hair
- do laundry (good idea, brb)
- decide you’re going to get up really early tomorrow morning
- listen to your favorite more energizing album (I suggest MGMT, but elton john, jorge ben, and even joni mitchell can also be nice, as long as you are listening to a full album. no playlists or shuffle)
- make your bed
- make a schedule for your week
- talk on skype with someone, but maybe not someone you miss a lot. that might make sunday blues even worse
- wash the dishes
- make your work space neat
- meditate
- look at adoptable dogs on petfinder.com
- dont stay up too late
- plan out your breakfast and outfit for the next day
- look on craigslist for apartments for next year

or, you can stop trying to avoid the inevitable, and simply wallow. turn off your lights, or keep them on, relish in the messiness of your room that you told yourself you would have allll three days of the weekend to clean, frown, wear your most baggy and comfy clothes, refuse to comb or condition your hair, nestle in your unmade bed, and simply think about how bad everything is and how much the week should always begin the day after tomorrow.

but always brush your teeth, no matter how much youve committed to wallowing.

you must listen to this song: I guess that's why they call it the blues

sandwiches are bad

think about it. do you really want that slice of processed flour and that slice of processed meat and that slice of processed cheese? no wonder you’re not satisfied. not all sandwiches are made equal (darwin’s), but most are made badly (your average turkey&cheese).

i used to eat sandwiches for lunch and wonder why i was always still super hungry afterwards. and then i realized that it was because sandwiches are bad. now, everytime i see someone eating a prefab sandwich, i just want to shake them, and tell them there is so much more out there for them. but i guess we all have to come to things at our own time.

The House always wins

I’m having a lot of thoughts about staying in law school or quitting this shit like a bad habit, so my reading focus hasnt been up to par (and thats saying a lot about how poor its been, since on my good days i read at roughly a demented snails pace). i’ve also been making a lot of bad jokes lately, maybe because my minds trying to figure out why the hell i went from sleeping 10 hrs/night and being around art and film and love and all things good to reading Property: Principles and Policies (i dunno who gets to decide the words that come after the colon on all these books. maybe its a random lottery. maybe ill get to pick next time), so its a little bit stressed, a little haywire at the moment. anyways, i was reading the always fascinating Property: principles and policies and i came across this line in guido calabresi & douglas melamed’s property rules, liabiltiy rules and inalienability,

“Whenever a state is presented with the conflicting interests of two or more people, or two or more groups of people, it must decide which side to favor. Absent such a decision, access to goods, services, and life itself will be decided on the basis of ‘might makes right’ – whoever is stronger or shrewder will win.”

and you know what? i may not have fully or carefully read the rest of the article (sorry prof), but i did have a lot of thoughts about these lines. first of all, guido, with a name like that what were you thinking going into law (AND economics, its like the two worst subjects)? what a wasted opportunity. secondly, though i appreciated the elaboration on what exactly “might makes right” means, i think we all could have done without it, and you know, every millisecond of reading time saved is another penny in the “lets stay in law school” pot. so guido, youve contributed to the get the fuck out pot in a small but not meaningless way. i hope you feel good about yourself.

thirdly, really? because the state isnt just one big MIGHT? this is just a system for making the state’s might right. instead of someone else’s might. i mean come on. the shrewder lawyer all wins.

fourthly, and i say this only because, like i said, ive been feeling a little punchy lately and it seems like a great idea: the house always wins. i was struck by the brilliance of this idea at around 11am this morning in the library about to fall asleep but apparently no one in the law school library falls asleep and while i may drop out ill be damned if ill fall asleep in public amongst this heathenous crowd, so i was actually doing my reading.

the state does not “decide which side to favor” – the state favors its own goddamn self.

you may know that we have what is called an adversarial system of law (i may not know exactly what this is, but being in law school, i feel i have the right to make up what i think it is), where one person sues another person, or the state charges a criminal (or the fed whatever). so you look at this and you might think, oh ok, t’s my guy against that guy. it’s my right to have a piss-free garden against his right to piss on the god given ground. so you look at this, and you see people arguing, and then the verdict comes down adn it’s for your guy and you think, ok, my guy won. you think this! but it’s not true. your guy did not win. the house won.

the moral of the story is: if youre suing someone, or the state’s charging someone on your behalf, dont kid yourself. you aint win shit bright eyes. i mean ok, you maybe won a ton of money but whatever. just like in vegas, you might take home a pot of cash, but you’re really just givin life blood to the beast that never sleeps. in the bigger “we are all selling our lives to the man” sense, the house won. it cashed you in for some legal capital and the right to restrict your freedom and tell you what’s important and what’s right and what’s wrong. im not saying i have a better system. im not even saying this is true. im just saying that it’s true right now, right here.

look, i already told you im really tired, so i dont want to hear it about this not making any sense. save it!

wtf

actually that thing about just picking a system and running with it, that goes for the entire legal system. a goddamn system of social control. corrections! just think about it. 1 out of every 31 people are being “corrected” on any given day in the united states. and 1 out of every 100 people is in actual prison.* thats a lot of warm blood in cold cells. if that many people cant follow the rules, maybe that means something about the rules homie.

*yeah i did just go to my first sentencing class and am dropping some knowledge like its mine to drop