This is a perfect day to my way of thinking. It’s fairly cool (in the 60′s), and what began as a totally grey day is now blue with scattered cloud-puffs blowing across it. Humidity is fairly low, at least for Indiana in the spring. And best of all, it’s windy! That above all denotes perfection in the matter of weather. As long as I have wind, I’m a happy woman.
Archive for May, 2003
In My Element
Monday, May 12th, 2003Time Traveller’s Perspective
Thursday, May 8th, 2003Dorothea and Li both talk about the merits of unionization for TAs. I have little enough to add to what they say, except to note that where there is no union conditions do not change. I was a TA at the same university as Li something over a decade before she was. There was, at the time, a fledgling attempt to organize a TA union for just the reasons Li gives. Obviously it had not yet taken root 10 years later, and the problems were exactly the same as when I was there.
Do I believe in the necessity for unions? You better believe I do.
Biting Another Shark
Thursday, May 8th, 2003I was supposed to be in trial this morning. I was ready for a fight I couldn’t win, arguments and legislative intent spinning in my head.
It didn’t happen, and while that is by my own actions, my brain has kind of jumped off its gear wheel for a while. Wick and I refer to the phenomenon as “litigation interruptus” – ready to go and full of adreneline, and nothing to do with it. Settling down to quieter thinking and work usually takes a half a day or so.
I got genuinely angry at opposing counsel yesterday. I’d been annoyed by him, but yesterday I found out he hadn’t relayed my settlement suggestions to his client because “they weren’t acceptable.” That isn’t his decision, and is decidedly unethical. Why did he do it? Because he wants a judgment on an uncomplicated case that he’s sure will be appealed, so he can get an appellate decision binding in Indiana. Fine. Go for it. But not with my client. Not with a man who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a Jewish Refusnik, who still carries the fear of courts and KGB in his guts. Not with someone to whom I had to explain that being unable to pay a student loan was not a deportable offense. He’s wouldn’t let me file an appeal if I wanted to! I think the thing that upset me most in that was that the attorney understood what I was telling him, and did not care. That sort of coldness is what gives attorneys in general a name for ruthlessness.
So I took that damned thing out of his hands, and those of the county judge. I moved it into federal court. It’s an interstate suit with debtor/ creditor issues being pursued under federal statute. My client’s credit is already shot down in flames. Bankruptcy couldn’t hurt it, so away to bankruptcy court we went. At worst he’ll get a more liveable repayment plan. Let the jackass (excuse me, my learned colleague) argue federal statute in a federal court! I’m only sorry I didn’t do it sooner.
Update: My husband just called, asking if my mind had switched back to my regular job. I told him no; it keeps coming up with nasty things I’d like to do to opposing counsel. His response: “Just remember that divination with entrails is ineffective.”
An exercise in values
Monday, May 5th, 2003I heard an NPR story this morning that I found profoundly disturbing. They were discussing a move by the current administration to place a value on the cost of medical care provided to a younger person as opposed to an older one. It indicated that when asked to choose, most people would say that a 40 year old had more years left, and that the money should therefore be spent on them. The countervailing viewpoint was that if the administration devalued the health of older people, they could then devalue environmental protection, because by the time the cumulative effects of environmental degredation caught up with people, they were older anyway.
The underlying assumption on both sides is that the only measure is years — trips around the sun remaining to a person. What about experience? Does the accumulated wisdom attained the hard way count for nothing at all? The answer, of course, is that in this society it does not. That is not merely a pity, or our loss as a society. It is a shame.
Percussive maintenance
Thursday, May 1st, 2003It seems our primary computer at home, which contains the cable modem, all the saved Grand Ellipse e-mails and all the random miscellaneous bookmarks and general stuff that makes it easy to use has decided to emulate bread and become toast. It froze up a few times, and now refuses to boot about 90% of the time. When we get it up and running, it goes for at most 15 minutes before hanging up yet again. So in those brief intervals, we’ve been trying to copy anything and everything we can think of and get to onto CD-Rom. Arrrrgh. You don’t realize how much you’re keeping on there until you can’t get to it.
And no weekend blogging or Ellipsing either, since I can’t get on line with anything resembling grace. Sigh. Not that I don’t have enough else to do, with a garden I need to clean out before I can plant for this year and fence to put up to prevent the ducks (and rabbits) from again feasting upon my produce but it would have been nice to have the option. I’m telling you, percussive maintenance is a real temptation