The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Halloween in Boston was great this year. Fallen leaves were all crunchy on the street, yet the weather was fabulous: clear and warm.

I was invited to a party at the home of a fellow law student so I had an excuse to get dressed up. I had been hemming and hawing about what to be, with neither the bandwidth nor budget to build or buy any sort of elaborate costume. Then I saw this Tom Tomorrow cartoon and decided that dressing up as a Diebold touch screen voting system was the scariest thing I could possibly be.

Front reads: (on hat) DIEBOLD - TOUCH SCREEN VOTING - NO PAPER TRAIL - TECHNICAL GLITCHES

Back reads: (on hat) Cease and desist all criticism - NO SECURITY - THE FUTURE OF OUR DEMOCRACY... SCARED YET? - MANUFACTURERS ARDENT POLITICAL PARTISANS

It wasn't a particularly well-made costume, but then again, neither are the voting systems...

Edit 11/3: Pictures posted. And the story (about Diebold, not my Halloween costume) was picked up in the New York Times.

Edit 11/4: I'm famous! Tom Tomorrow linked to me from his site.

To make my Halloween costume I stopped off at the drug store and bought a shower curtain liner for $3.49. Pretty simple curtain, pretty simple packaging. Or was it?

I happened to flip over the package and noticed it included a few messages: care instructions, a bar code, a logo and the name of the manufacturer, a "made in China" reference, and, naturally, a copyright notice (exactly as typed below, though without the quotes):

"This Package and Package
Design are Fully Protected by
Copyright. Infringements will
be Prosecuted."

I am chagrined that I had not previously realized the devastating effect rampant piracy was having on the shower curtain industry. It's just a matter of time before Orrin Hatch proposes that shower curtain companies who suspect that people are using infringing bathroom products be allowed to barge into their bathrooms and flush the toilets while they are showering.

Yet another election-related entry, but this one's a little different.

My dad is running for town council, and I've decided to do my daughterly duty and show my support for his campaign.

I don't live in his town so I can't speak much to some of the issues. But on a meta-level, I think his campaign is a good thing. The town I grew up in did not have partisan elections. Candidates were evaluated on their specific positions. In my dad's town (not where I grew up) they do have partisan elections, but for years and years only one party was ever represented. Even with the best of intentions such a situation is, if not dangerous, certainly not in the best interests of the town. One party pretty much decides everything internally, from who the candidates will be (and therefore who the mayor and councilmembers will be) to how all the issues will be decided. Civic involvement stagnates as everyone resigns themselves to accepting that the status quo is just how things are. My dad is part of a slate of candidates from the other major party, represented in an election in his town for the first time in years.

But it isn't about the partisan politics, and in fact, how the two slates' positions map doesn't necessarily follow strict delineations of the Democratic and Republican platforms. It's about having a choice, or even more than that, waking people up to even thinking about having a choice. Even if my dad or his fellow candidates don't win, by having been part of the political process and encouraging their neighbors to have gotten involved they've already made a positive difference in their town.

Of course, I hope he wins. Not just because he's my dad and I want good things for my dad, but because this means in a few years I can move to his town, inherit my political legacy and claim my rightful position as town councilmember. Because isn't that the way politics works in America?

In the days where naming rights to every civic structure are routinely sold to the highest bidder, it's nice to see things get named after a deserving and appropriate person.

California just completed a new suspension bridge (in the Bay Area, crossing the Carquinez strait carrying eastbound I-80 traffic) and named it the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge. According to CNN:

It is named for an ironworker who fell from the Golden Gate Bridge during its construction in 1936 and survived to help build six more bridges in the Bay Area.

Zampa died in 2000 at 95, weeks after turning the first shovel of dirt for the bridge.

He sounds like a worthy recipient of the honor of naming a bridge after. Much more worthy than others who've had civil engineering projects named after them, say, like Ronald Reagan. Someone wrote on the Internet somewhere (I forget where) that it was tremendously ironic to name an airport after the man who fired all the air traffic controllers.

I think that it would be advisable to make a rule (codified, or simply a hegemonically and tacitly socially agreed upon tradition) not to name things after people until 50 years after their death. This would give us a chance to really reflect on their contribution to society and decide if, on retrospect, we still feel highly enough about them to justify the honor. Also, particularly in the case of political figures, it eliminates the partisan quality to naming structures that everyone shares, even people who don't favor the political contributions of the naming honoree.

Granted Zampa died only a few years ago, but it's not like he was a political figure whose supporters called in the favors to have the structure named after him. And his story seems to make naming a bridge after him seem very appropriate. Maybe if it was a baseball stadium I would feel differently. Then again, if it would prevent another recurrence of an Enron Field...

Edit 3/9/04: There's an interesting and related comment pertaining to this post here.

Today a friend of mine at school looked up over the lid of his laptop and announced, "Do you know that there are only six federal cases that use both the terms 'explosions' and 'ninjas'?" thereby causing my other friend to exclaim, "Are you googlewhacking in Lexis-Nexis??!!"

My googlewhacking friend was also the one who went to our criminal law professor's office hours to discuss with him whether the villagers in American Werewolf in London would be subject to any criminal liability for knowingly allowing (or at least not stopping) a person who turned into a violent werewolf on a regular basis from going to London to wreak his havoc. Apparently the answer is no, because in neither criminal law nor in tort is there any duty to rescue. In other words, the villagers had no duty to keep a dangerous person from exposing his dangerousness to others. They might have had some accomplice liability had they purchased the train ticket to help send him off to London, but apparently they didn't do that. Not that I ever saw the movie; I'm pretty much taking my friend's word for this.

I also didn't see 28 Days which raised another criminal liability question. Apparently some activists break into a lab and free some monkeys who happen to be carrying a deadly virus. Consequently the liberated monkeys end up exposing all of England to the illness, from which the entire population inevitably dies. The activists could have potentially faced 10 million (or so) counts of felony murder for the deaths having occurred as a direct result of their burglary (of the monkeys) were it not for the fact that they all die too. Or so my friend tells me.

Both hypotheticals involve superimposing American jurisprudence onto crimes in England. Normally I'd doubt that such an imposition would be kosher, but then again, in the movies anything's possible. I mean, if you can imagine something as farfetched as having a werewolf running around eating people why not also imagine something as equally farfetched as America violating another country's sovereignity.

Wait a minute...

Suddenly worried about werewolves...

Recently I've gotten together with some classmates to begin reviewing our notes in preparation for finals in a few weeks. We've so far reviewed half of what we learned in Contracts and about 2/3 of what we've covered so far in Criminal Law.

At the study session yesterday our conversation briefly turned to what we've learned in Civil Procedure. We'd just studied two cases regarding summary judgment: Adickes v. S.H. Kress & Co. and Celotex Corp. v. Catrett. The decisions are seemingly quixotic: under Adickes the U.S. Supreme Court seems willing to be charitable towards the plaintiff in weighing her evidence before ruling on the defendant's motion for summary judgment. In Celotex the Court seems to hold the plaintiff to a stricter evidence standard.

In class our professor asked us to speculate on what could justify the distinction. Language in the subsequent Celotex decision made it clear that the latter merely finessed the rule from Adickes rather than overruled it, so we needed to understand the distinction in order to understand how the summary judgment rule may have been reshaped. One of my classmates, who was also in the study group, thought the distinction had to do with the type of claim being raised in each case. Adickes was a civil rights claim whereas Celotex concerned a tort claim for death due to asbestos exposure. I, on the other hand, suggested that a better comparison could be drawn if one compared the aggregate evidence in each case. In other words, rather than focusing on the moving party's evidence separately from the non-moving party's, look to see how the entire pile of evidence matched up against the pile from the other case. Arguably, in Adickes there was a larger aggregate pile, even though it wasn't entirely generated by the non-moving party.

What disturbed me about my classmate's theory was that it was impossible to look at the decisions and derive any sort of guidance about what kind of standard future cases should be held to. First of all, there was no language in either decision to suggest that the type of claim directly influenced the interpretation of Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (which controls the applicability summary judgment motions). Nor is there any language in the Rules themselves suggesting that different standards should be applied to different types of cases. In rare instances the Rules do make differentiations with regard to the topic of a case. An example would be Rule 9 which in general requires pleadings to maintain a mimimum notice standard except, as subpart (b) proscribes, in instances alleging fraud or misrepresentation.* These exceptions seem minimal, and with good reason. The Rules set standards to allow for efficient jurisprudence across all types of civil cases. If nuanced exceptions were allowed, judicial efficiency would be compromised. No fan of the school of thought on law and economics could want such a setup because it would add a level of complexity to an already complex and nuanced process. Not only would every trial have to contend with the usual batch of motions but it would also need to endure separate arguments on which category of rules each other motion would be considered under.

In talking later during the study group, my classmate reiterated her belief that the Court allowed for differentiations due to type of case and made it clear that she thought such a move would be a good use of the Court's discretion. For her it seems to boil down to a desire to permit and encourage judicial activism. I understand where she's coming from, to an extent. When I think back to some of the most pivotal socially progressive dictates from the Government in the last century, many of them have come from the U.S. Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, etc. An individual who has welcomed the enhanced definition and protection of civil liberties that cases like these have afforded can come to regard the Court as a social savior. My classmate seems to see the Court that way, but my views have become tempered.

In one way they've become tempered because the Court does not seem to be protecting ideals of civil liberties with anything near the voraciousness that they have in decades past. Sometimes I think the Court does very little to uphold them at all, and even tends to undermine them. One of the problems of bestowing a lot of power on the Court (or courts in general) to set social policy is that you have to be ok with the result if it exercises that power in a way you don't like. The same social institution that decided Brown v. Board of Education also decided Dredd Scott, for instance. A hero-like worship of the U.S. Supreme Court as Supreme Protector of Liberty is bound to bring about grave disappointment.

And my views have also become tempered in listening to the complaints of people whose preferences for public policy are different than mine. Sometimes the differences in preference are substantive, in that the policies they advocate for would, I believe, undermine other people's liberties. In those instances I hope for any governmental institution to use whatever leverage it has to stave off these incursions. But sometimes it's harder to tell which position involves the greater incursion. And sometimes the problem is not in agreeing about what the overall policy should be but on how it should be arrived at. People who hope that the government will do what's right can substantiate that hope only when they can have faith in that process. Such a worthy process would need to be clear, articulated, and equally applied. If we encourage the Court to become an active proponent of certain interests it can exercise discretion in such an arbitrary way that it will be difficult for anyone to have faith in the results, even people who might otherwise welcome them.

In a pinch I don't think it's inappropriate for the Court to exercise discretion. The Court is an important component of the system of checks and balances and I don't think it need humble itself to the legislative and executive branch. When those branches abdicate their responsibility in promoting liberty-protecting social policy the Court can and must step in. But getting back to the example at hand, that scenario is not what we are contending with. Redefining the Rules for Civil Procedure to coddle certain types of claims seems far beyond the realm of any believably necessary use of judicial power. Especially since the legislative branch can choose to handicap or favor certain types of claims when it establishes the remedial rights entitling aggrieved parties to sue. Only if the other two branches are capricious or clearly unjust in such delineations would it be acceptable for the Court to compensate accordingly.

* IBM recently filed a motion to strike three of SCO's defenses as defective.

"Under Rule 12(f), the Court 'may order stricken from any pleading any insufficient defense'. Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(f). Rule 9(b), in turn, requires that, '[i]n all averments of fraud or mistake, the circumstances constituting fraud or mistake shall be stated with particularity.'

"As detailed in IBM's Memorandum in Support of Motion to Strike Affirmative Defenses, SCO's Fifth, Fifteenth and Nineteenth affirmative defenses -- which allege fraud and inequitable conduct -- are improperly pleaded under Rule 9(b) and thus should be stricken. Specifically, SCO fails to allege any facts concerning the fraud that IBM is alleged to have committed. Under any interpretation of Rule 9(b)'s requirements, therefore, SCO's affirmative defenses are defective."

(You may want to read yesterday's post first.)

We have read three cases regarding summary judgment. Below is the analogy I've drawn to distinguish the different results. (Work in progress. May be edited subsequent to posting.)

In any trial, at least one party submits a sample of dough. The party with the burden of proof at trial needs to make sure that there are enough nuts and raisins in the dough somewhere to lead to a ruling in its favor.

When one party submits a motion for summary judgment, the dough of the non-moving party is rolled out. Under a simple reading of Rule 56, the moving party asserts the claim that the non-moving party could not possibly have enough nuts and raisins in its dough to justify a verdict in its favor. The court will look at the dough and maybe pat it a bit. It will not tear into the dough to look for the nuts and raisins, nor will it try to count them, but if the dough appears a bit lumpy the court may presume that a jury could find sufficient nuts and raisins. If the jury could find them, the jury could then count them and determine if there are enough to justify a verdict in favor of the non-moving party.

In Adickes v. S.H. Kress & Co. [398 U.S. 144], the Adickes dough sample was thick and gooey, making it difficult to ascertain the population of nuts and raisins. While it was likely that there wouldn't be enough nuts and raisins, it was hard to be sure at that stage of trial. But because the moving party, the defense, couldn't foreclose the possibility that a jury would find enough nuts and raisins to decide in favor of the plaintiff, it was left to the jury to poke around the dough to find and count them.

With the Celotex Corp. v. Catrett case [477 U.S. 317], the Supreme Court applied a more complicated analysis to the nuts and raisins question. The Court first said that the moving party, the defendant Celotex, could try to point out that the dough clearly contained no nuts and raisins, leaving it to the plaintiff Catrett to note that there were in fact nut-like lumps in the dough. The Court then remanded to the Appeals Court to determine if the lumps were suggestive of sufficient nuts and raisins for a jury to find and evaluate, or if the plaintiff's claim was still essentially a nut-less doughy pleading only.

Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, Inc. [477 U.S. 242] posed a different problem. Whereas in most claims a mere preponderance of the evidence is required, in certain types of claims such as libel there needs to be a clear and convincing determination of proof. The plaintiff rolled out its dough, and indeed there were suggestive lumps throughout. But the Anderson Court took the language of the law providing the remedial right and superimposed a cookie cutter on the dough sample. While there may have been evidentiary lumps throughout the sample, the jury could only find and count the lumps that were contained within the boundary of the cookie cutter. After applying the cookie cutter the Court patted down the sample, ignoring the outlying lumps, and determined that there weren't enough lumps within the cutter's focus that could lead the jury to find in the plaintiff's favor.

Technically this was posted 11/18, so pretend this was posted 11/17 as intended.

Edit 12/3 - some tweaks throughout, and Celotex section rewritten.

I knew a guy at college who'd always been a bit flaky but not in any way to prompt any alarm. Until a conversation several months after not hearing from him for a while when he informed me that he was about to corner the hemp market.

"Now I know how Bill Gates felt, right before things got really big and he knew he was going to own the whole industry."

Um, ok....

I worried that my acquaintance's shaky grip on reality may have been due to him consuming his own inventory.

I have a harder time explaining the latest surprisingly similar delusions of SCO executives Darl McBride and Chris Sontag. Based on one of the comments McBride made, it appears they've been trying to toke a Linux CD. I imagine the toxic smoke of the smoldering plastic might cause hallucinations, but to this extent?

I hate my roommate with the white hot passion of a thousand suns.

She is one of the most myopic people I've ever met. Completely unaware (at best) or uncaring (very likely) about the impact she has on other people.

We discussed, all the roommates, that you can't leave food in the sink because there's no garbage disposal and it clogs the drain. Guess who keeps leaving plates with food on them in the sink. I provided for the apartment a pristine, practically new microwave and asked people to clean up their splatters before they caked on. No one did, so a few days ago I cleaned it. Guess whose bacon grease is now all over it again.

She doesn't clean the bathroom, ever, or at least not in a way that doesn't require someone else to come in and finish the job and even PUT THE SPONGE AWAY. Worse, if someone else cleans it, two days later the sink will be covered with dried globs of toothpaste and her hair. We discussed, all the roommates together, just a few days ago how we needed to "all" remember to clean up after ourselves so we wouldn't have to clean so much, and one of them (not her) did a good job deep cleaning. But, like clockwork, the hair and toothpaste came back two days later. So I went in and cleaned again. Guess what's back in the sink...

I have lost count of the number of nights when she has single-handedly destroyed any semblance of restful sleep. She has an alarm clock that crows. At 5 AM. Incessantly. Because she sleeps through it, so then if I want to avoid being driven utterly mad by its high-pitched shrieking, I have to get out of bed, march around the apartment to her door, and yell at her loudly and repeatedly (thereby waking the other roommates who somehow manage not to hear the crowing.) By which point I'm completely awake and unable to go back to sleep.

Of course, then there were the occasions where she decided to start HAMMERING at four o'clock in the morning. And the time that she called at five o'clock because she lost the keys so I had to let her in...

And this isn't even the worst of it, because the worst of it is that she smokes in the apartment. Despite having represented to me and the other roommates before I'd moved in that she doesn't smoke. Her room is pooly ventilated and the stench creeps in to the common areas of the apartment. And then creeps into my room. I can't get away, or at best I have to barricade myself in my room. It's disgusting, and she refuses to stop. She claims to make accomodations to be better ventilated, but the stench last night makes me think she's not even trying. She also says that she only smokes when she's writing papers, but tonight she was watching tv and talking on the phone and yet here I am breathing her second hand smoke in my bedroom. Clearly she lies too.

And so what if when she's stressed writing her papers she needs to smoke. Why should I have to endure it?

Finals are coming up and I have a lot to do. And a lot to deal with since it's time to start thinking about summer jobs and various other things that require attention. I can do it, I can handle the stress, but sometimes I need to be able to go home and relax. And I can't, because MY HOME is the single biggest source of stress for me. I can't count on a restful night's sleep and feeling fresh the next morning. I can't count on being able to even BREATHE in my own home. I go out to school every day and I love being there, but I never, ever get to come home to recharge and I desperately need to. I can feel my batteries running down and I'm plagued with panic because I have no idea if I will ever be able to get any relief. I'm running a marathon without any mileage markers or aid stations. And I'm scared because she may destroy my semester.

A few days ago we "talked" about it. And I tried to be flexible. She agreed to change alarm clocks, so now I get woken up by a different one. She apologized for being such a sound sleeper, but you know, I still have to deal with it. I'm *welcome* to come wake her up, but somehow this has become my job??? And it's my job to let her smoke out all her stress because, hey, she's so over-extended with her schooling and jobs... I mean, it's not like I've got anything important going on in my life.

My other two roommates are fine to deal with on their own but they are completely conflict-averse and refuse to do anything about the insipid roommate even though they are put out by some of her behavior. They tell me I have to deal with her directly. I don't know what to do. Talking doesn't help. None of her alleged "accomodations" help. She pays lip service to caring but her actions say otherwise. Not only do I have to deal with her impositions but the daily slap in the face from the disrespect they entail. I can't live like this, dealing with these things and in the brief moments of bliss when she's not around, walking around on pins and needles waiting for her to destroy the erstwhile calm.

Something has to give before it's my sanity.

Help.

Apparently my grandma reads my blog, and when I don't post in a while she calls up my mom to ask why. So it's ok, Grandma, I've just been busy!

Let's see: what have I done? And where have I done it? Suffice it to say, I'm extremely well-traveled. Two Friday's ago, after class, I hopped on the T, took it to the airport, and got on a plane to California so that the next day I could go to Big Game. Big Game is the annual football match-up between Cal (UC Berkeley) and Stanford.

I've decided that I want to be one of the ancient Old Blues (Cal alums) who can claim to have attended 80+ years of consecutive Big Games. So far, with this year's, I'm at 12. It's a respectable number but my streak almost got broken a few years ago when my ex-boyfriend insisted that I forgo what was immensely important to me to instead attend his best friend's wedding. Fortunately, it turned out that the wedding was ACROSS THE STREET from the Big Game so I was able to do a wedding-football game double-header. Given that my ex now refuses to speak to me and I've had no contact with the betrothed friend since, I'm REALLY REALLY glad that my record didn't get compromised for nothing...

It might sound like a silly priority to try to attend a football game, but it isn't. It's not really about the football at all, although I do enjoy watching Cal play it. (And given Cal's until recently recent predilection for mediocrity, it's clearly not about the winning either.)

It's about being attached to the community. I've noted elsewhere how annoyingly hard it is to be a Yankee fan somewhere where it's completely incongruous to be a Yankee fan. Caring for a team makes more sense when you are in the community that the team plays for. With Cal, though, the community aspect transcends geography. I've been in far-flung places (e.g., a line in an American Express office in St. Petersburg, Russia) where I've run into Cal alumni. We greet each other with a hearty "Go Bears!" and are suddenly no longer strangers. The Big Game just gives us the occasion to all converge on the same place and reconvene with all of our friends.

It’s not that I’d want to relive my undergrad years: they were full of stress and angst as I learned a lot of (sometimes hard) lessons, academically and otherwise. But I still couldn't imagine a better place to have learned them. The gorgeousness of the campus, the vibrance of the town, the ambient desire for knowledge and discovery that hung in the air like the heavy smell of eucalyptus... these are just some of the things that I appreciate about my time there. Cal was absolutely the best place for me to have gone to school, and as I go out into the world I want there to remain a little tangible tether to keep me tied to her.

"To the University of California, then, cheer for her, it will do your lungs good. Love her, it will do your hearts and lives good."
- Benjamin Ide Wheeler, former University of California President, 1899

The trip to California was very quick. Landed Friday, and took the red-eye back on Saturday after the game. But it was good; I saw many of my Cal friends who I now don't see so often, and on top of that, Cal won! One disappointment is that the Stanford fans seem a bit dispassionate about our rivalry. Spoilsports! It's no fun having a rivalry if one side doesn't care. It IS possible, though, that because Cal has been such a doormat for many of the last several years that Stanford was getting bored with us. But things might be turning around: we've got a new(ish) coach, and in his first year last year he won us back the Axe (the trophy the winning team gets to keep) for the first time in years. And he won us the right to keep it for this year, so maybe Stanford will start to sit up and take notice if we keep getting in the way of their post-season goals by beating them.

It was good that the trip was quick, though, because I have other things to be worried about than Cal sports. The semester is winding down and finals are now visible on the horizon. Stress stress stress. Earlier last week I did several study sessions and went to class, but then the holiday break came up. My sister and I carpooled down to New Jersey, waking up before dawn on Thanksgiving to beat the traffic. On the way we argued about various public policy questions. At one point I commented that when we used to ride in cars together we'd complain to our parents from our car seats, "She's looking out my window!" But we've grown up a bit, and so now my protests are more like, "She's disagreeing with my worldview!"

We spent the holiday dinner with our dad, who unfortunately did not win the election. At least not in the sense that winning describes the person with the most votes. It seems that there are other things he did win, in a matter of speaking. He did very respectably, with around 1300 votes to the victor's 1600. These are 1300 people who didn't even know my dad in the slightest before the election, who nonetheless chose HIM to represent them. He says he gets fan mail(!) all the time from people thanking him for having run (while I was visiting he even got a letter from the governor), and for simply having attempted this people regard him with much more respect. I likened it to a village from a fairy tale, with a menacing dragon living nearby. People want to be rid of the dragon but no one can make themselves be the one to do it. My dad took it on, and even though he didn't slay the dragon, for even having tried to he demonstrated a worthiness that most people only idly aspire to.

My sister studies public policy, and she wrote about my dad's election on a mailing list for classmates:

"[N]ot only do our nation's leaders often get their start on the local level, but the issues in these elections often represent the very essence of our democracy. In my dad's election, he and his runningmates are campaigning for the very basics of transparency in government, increased and improved communication between government and citizens, and an end to one-party rule. I know many ... students who have worked on democratization projects worldwide with these same objectives, and I find it interesting we often overlook how simple it is to support these goals in our native neighborhoods..."

The last post that lingered for a while was a complaint about my roommate. There are some who have told me that it's impolitic to refer to someone in a public forum with the words, "I hate..." and that's true. It's also not a very well-written post, but I'm hesitant to edit it heavily or remove it because I'm trying to document the process of law school and she's become a not-so-negligible part of the experience. If the aforementioned tantrum compromised style, in exchange it may have captured the sense of panic I felt at that moment (and at many, many moments before) from losing my home as a place of refuge, terrified about what the implications of that loss would be on my semester and future legal career.

I'm not sure what to do about the situation. Some of my friends have suggested various modes of revenge. Revenge is not my style though because I hate to descend away from my standards of civilized behavior. Much as I WANTED to throw her alarm clock out the window, I didn't. And I wouldn't. I also wouldn't harm her in any way, which I want to say equally publicly in case she should happen to suffer some horrible accident lest people think I'm somehow responsible. I would prefer to seethe, or find some catharsis in a more verbal way. Say, by posting on my blog or writing a song. If my friends want to contemplate machiavellian counter-attacks, though, that's ok too. One friend of mine consulted her sister, who suggested putting raisinettes in the shower. It's hard to immediately ascertain what they are, and it's very easy to presume they are something extremely disgusting. Unfortunately, Miss Myopia wouldn't notice and it would just antagonize the roommates I like.

One of these roommates actually cleans, and may be responsible for the fact that I'm not completely a melted-down puddle of stressed-out goo over this yet. Apparently she's cleaned up quite a bit of mess in the bathroom that I wasn't even aware of, including sprays of vomit. This, and a few other incidents, has led us to speculate that the problem roommate might be bulimic. She also may be an alcoholic, which we suspect given the large quantities of beer she consumes regularly. These things, if true, are lamentable, not detestable. In a sense, these realizations make me feel worse. I'd rather be able to hate her outright, not feel guilty that I'm taking issues with her vulnerabilities. On the other hand:

a) I'm not her nursemaid. She doesn't pay me to take care of her. I have no problem helping her or my other roommates out from time to time (I've helped her fix her computer and another one with her homework) but being friendly and helpful is not the same as bearing the full-on burden of her illnesses. I'm not qualified skill-wise to take these things on, nor am I compensated for it in any way that could mitigate the imposition it has on my already overstuffed schedule; and

b) Just because she may be at the mercy of these problems does not mean she's not also a jerk. When she says "OK, I won't smoke," and does it anyway, when she refuses to clean up the kitchen/bathroom/microwave after herself... these are aggressively antagonistic actions. They may stem from a troubled psyche, but she's clearly capable of conscious thought and choices and if she refuses to make respecting her roommates one of her choices then I think it's reasonable to resent her. I don't wish her any ill will, I don't want anything bad to happen to her and I'd hope that she get help for whatever may ail her. I just want her to stop messing up my home.

This weekend hasn't been too much of a problem, so far. I came back up from Thanksgiving yesterday and so far no one's home but me. I was also home last Wednesday. I'd had some errands to run in the morning and when I opened the door to go out there was a package in the hall. For me! This was confusing: I never heard it get delivered, and I hadn't ordered anything. It turned out it was a care package from the friend mentioned above. (A care package! Wow! Even my own parents didn't send me care packages during all those summers when I languished at sleepaway camp...) Turns out she sent me a gigantic container of chocolate covered raisins. But these are for dining purposes only – she wanted to make sure I was getting enough vegetables in my diet. “Remember, 5 a day!"