The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

If you've ever wondered, how wet could one really get in a 20 minute bike ride in the rain, you might be surprised...

On Saturday I packed up my things and headed down to the school (in the rain) to board the busses for the annual student trip to Malente. The second year students every year organize a retreat to a hostel in the countryside. They rent out the whole hostel complex and most first years and some second years go up to meet, mingle, introduce the new students to the extracurricular activities, and then have a really big party. Everything's taken care of (food, transport, etc.) and it was really impressive how well-run the whole operation was. We left Hamburg around 10:30 and arrived at the hostel around lunchtime, where the hostel staff had prepared a meal of standard German fare. We sat at long tables in a large room while dishes filled with cabbage, beef stew, potato dumplings, and noodles were passed around. (It felt a little like summer camp, except the people were less obnoxious...) Shortly after lunch student group and activity leaders set up stations in various rooms around the hostel, and over the next few hours new students walked around to find out more about them. Dinner then was a barbeque – German style, of course. No hotdogs and burgers, but rather little steaks and sausages. The meat was then accompanied by tub-fulls of macaroni salad, potato salad, cucumber salad, and sauerkraut. Also, by then the beer had been broken out -- amazingly vast quantities of beer that they sold for 1 euro each (with a 1 euro bottle deposit) throughout the rest of the day and night. And not the crappy little Astra beers we usually drink but whole bottles of Beck's. Then when dinner was done they cleared out the room and turned it into a dance floor, complete with strobe lights. The party ran until almost dawn, and then at 7 or 8 on Sunday morning those who had been sleeping got up and swarms of students cleaned up the place before eating a really big breakfast (with coldcuts, waffles, bread and jam, cereal, etc.) and heading back to Hamburg.

The international students were completely welcome to come too, and except for our beers it didn't cost us anything. However, because it came during a string of 5 days off from classes, many students instead opted to travel to farther-flung places. Despite Americans being about 2/3 of the international program, there were relatively few at Malente. In fact, I think I was the only American woman who went. But not only were we welcome to come, but we were also invited to find out more about the student groups and partake in them during our remaining months here. I mostly found out about the sports teams, some of whom I'd already played with in the past weeks.

In fact, that's how I knew there was going to be a soccer game up at Malente, from having played last week in an outdoor scrimmage on Friday and an indoor game last Sunday. So I planned ahead and packed my shorts, socks, shin guards and cleats. And it was a good thing I did – especially the cleats. Because remember the rain? The field we played on was essentially just a giant mud puddle fringed by slick grass. There was a definite advantage held by the players who were wearing cleats and had some measure of traction. It was a fairly unstructured game, but a lot of fun, sloshing through the mud and puddles. (A definite advantage was also held by the people not afraid to play through the deep ones. Like me!)

Overall, especially Saturday, I had a great time. Even at the party. I don't think I'd ever done a retreat like this ever before, and I also don't think I'd ever been inclined to. A weekend of drinking? I don't think so... But I enjoyed it in spite of myself, at least well until the night. Even in the waning hours people were drunk, but not disgustingly drunk. And people were nice. I was wearing a ThinkGeek t-shirt, the one that says, "There's only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't," and nearly everyone stopped by to admire my shirt... (And most of them got the joke! Do all German kids learn binary in school?) I was also paid some lovely compliments about my soccer playing, which really made my day.

Still, there were some poignancies. The generation gap amazingly does not matter in many, many instances. We are all law students – smart people, with a common esoteric interest that we can talk about among ourselves, even transnationally – but rarely to the other people that we know. But I'm 31. And the German law students are for the most part a good 10 years younger than that. Even the second year students, several of whom I'm friends with. Which sometimes doesn't matter, and sometimes sort of does. Never mind my own existential doubts about what I think I'm supposed to be doing with my life right now – that part's not the problem. And in a sense it's kind of cool that I get to do the "kid" things again – or in my case, perhaps for the first time. (It took a lot of maturing before I could lighten up to the point where I could learn to let go in situations like these and even begin to enjoy myself.) But it does seem to be a barrier to making certain substantive social connections with my German peers. (And to some extent the other foreign students, who are also generally younger. However, the Americans, because they've already completed their undergraduate education, are usually at least a few years other. And there are several who are 29, and a few who run 26-28, and I think technically there may be at least one student on the program who's older than me.)

But I don't think it's age that's behind my aches and pains. I think I'm actually in pretty good shape for my age. Or at least I was, before this weekend. The soccer game aggravated some horrible blisters that I picked up from the indoor soccer game that have yet to heal. (And when I say "blisters," I really mean the complete absence of the exterior layer of skin on the backs of my ankles, which has not been able to heal properly, what with needing to walk around every day while wearing shoes. And playing more soccer...) I also got some sort of itchy hives and/or rash on my knees from running into the brush to get the ball when it went out of bounds. And then there's the dislocated jaw... Well, not completely, but I did get nailed in the jaw by an elbow early in the game. It was good to know that I do not have a "glass jaw," however, and not only didn't I get knocked out (or cry), but I stayed in the game and kept playing for another hour. Unfortunately it was a solid shot that made my jaw move sideways suddenly, and it hasn't quite gotten over that trauma yet.

And then on top of all that, there's the foosball injury I somehow sustained on my finger. It's the first time I've ever had to stop playing out of concern for bleeding on the handles, but I guess there's a first time for everything. But all that's ok, and despite drinking vastly more alcohol than I have in ages, or perhaps ever, I'm not really any worse the wear for it. Although the lack of sleep did make me cranky, and I fear I was a little pissy with some friends when we got back to school. I've been wrestling with some pedestrian issues in the back of my mind that the trip brought to the fore, and I was in no condition to deal with them. I guess that's what makes the age gap so pointless to worry about, because even 31 year olds can act 13 from time to time...

Backdated to when it was written. Posted on 10/3.

I was too rushed in August to do a very good job packing, but I did manage to pack my soccer gear. I knew I wanted to play when I got here, and just needed to find an opportunity to.

The first came about a week ago when I played indoor with the men. I was welcome to play, but at first the German men tended to back off and give me a lot of space to handle the ball. It was only when the American men who were also playing started attacking me that then the German ones followed suit. I don't think it was a referendum on how the German men thought I actually played – I think it was just that they didn't know what to expect from a woman player and they just wanted to be polite (non-aggressive). The American men seemed more used to women players, however, and so were more comfortable putting the requisite pressure on me. And then, especially after I started attacking them, the German men started attacking me and all was well.

The game I played on Friday was nominally coed: it was technically a scrimmage between the women's team and alumni men, but only one other woman showed up. Again, the men watched to see how I was going to play and then reacted accordingly. Particularly in that instance, I think they would have tolerated poor playing because I don't think they necessarily expected more. Fortunately they didn't really need to. Until I was slowed by the blisters I got from the indoor game I played solidly, scoring and saving goals. (I had to buy sneakers with non-marking soles to play in the gym, and they require some breaking in, apparently.)

But at Malente... Malente was something else, a tremendous validation after many years of frustration. Of all the people there, probably 200 or so, I was the only woman who played in the soccer game there. I don't really understand why that was, although I have some theories. I would have expected, in a country where soccer is so popular, that everyone would play, men and women. But it seems to be very much a man's sport, and perhaps not as accessible for women as it is for men. In the US, I think it is particularly accessible for women, maybe even more so than for men, in part because the men get sucked up by football and baseball. Whereas in the fall, if a girl does a team sport, it's likely to be soccer. As a result, in the US there are now a lot of adult women who play, and I've even played in adult leagues with some of them.

But before I sing the praises of US girls' youth sports opportunities, it should be pointed out how often they (and indeed all youth sports) so often squander talent and enthusiasm of so many kids. Because here's the thing: when I was a kid, I loved to play always went out for the teams. But in games, I sat on the bench a disproportionate amount of time. Now, I will admit that I'm not the fastest, strongest, or most coordinated of athletes. But I love to play. And I know how to use the talents I do have to contribute to the success of team play. So why didn't they let me play?

(Perhaps it should also be mentioned that I was not the most popular kid either, and some coaches were more likely to play their daughters and their daughters' friends than the other girls they were stuck with having on the team. Granted, this was more often my experience with softball than soccer. But this kind of favoritism happened with soccer too, and was particularly appalling on my freshman high school soccer team.)

So let's look at what happened after we all grew up: some kids who played then surely still play now, and just as surely some kids that got to play then got bored and stopped. And some kids who were really gifted were pressured to play too much, blew out their knees, and now they can't play at all.

Meanwhile, *I,* the kid who wasn't good enough to get playing time, is apparently good enough as an adult to join a game fielded entirely by men, men of a country where soccer is massively popular, and not only not play badly but play well enough that people made a point to come up afterwards and tell me how well I played. Not only were they completely impressed that a woman wanted to play and could play, but they were objectively impressed with how I played. Which is not to say that I'm the greatest soccer player ever. But I ran hard, I played aggressively, I got open, I passed well, and I even scored. I knew how to use the talents I had to the betterment of my team. The World Cup we weren't ready for, but we could be competitive enough that the whole experience was thoroughly enjoyable for all. And, really, with sports that's all that really matters.

The thing that really makes me seethe, however, is that were it not for my sheer obstinate refusal to let go of sports despite coach after coach, team after team, trying to rip all the joy of playing from me, I would not have been able to do what I just did yesterday: play well and have fun. Only because I insisted on having this be part of my life is it still today. And that's a shame, particularly for all the other kids – the perpetual benchwarmers – who are deprived of having sports in their adulthoods because it was denied to them when they were young. More than a shame, it's a tragic waste.

I do find it interesting, also, that I play better today than I did back then. And I think it has something to do with the ridiculous pressure placed on me when I played on youth teams. Because I was always a perennial benchwarmer, every shred of playing time that I managed to get was laden with an unbearable weight of needing to prove myself in THAT particular moment for fear of being yanked out of the game and not getting another chance. I never felt like a good player, and I was essentially told as much during every game when I only got a fraction of the playing time my teammates did. Whereas when I started playing as an adult, I never introduced myself as a bad player. And because no one expected me to be, I wasn't. I was able to perform not only tolerably, but at a higher level than I ever had as a kid.

So I will enjoy my time in Germany, and play as much soccer as my schedule will allow. I've been learning the words and phrases you are supposed to shout out to your teammates, like "hintermann!" (sp?) when there's a player coming up to attack the ball, or "ecke" when it's a corner kick. But that's not really the important thing. There is nothing else quite like the thrill of competition, of getting out there on the grass (or the gym) on a fall day to run around and challenge yourself to play as well as you can. It is one of the things I want to have in my life, so I will.

Written 10/2, posted 10/3.

Over on Lawrence Lessig's blog he posted an entry in praise of the TSA staff. Several commenters took issue, because there's something very insidious about the protocol and the agency itself, particularly with "no-fly" lists and the demand to identify yourself before being permitted to travel. These are grave problems that require addressing.

But it is still possible to appreciate people, I think, and I posted a comment generally in support of Lessig's take. With the necessary caveats, however:

"I have concerns with the whole institution, but surprisingly few concerns about the individuals themselves. I’ve had a couple of negative moments travelling (FYI - I travel about 25-35k miles every year) but most were due to to the first line of hired guns (not TSA) hired by either the airports or airlines to check people’s travel documents before they get into the security lines, and whose sense of self-importance led them to feed me bullsh*t lines about how I couldn’t take my backpack through.

But for the TSAs, I think the sense of purpose has helped instill a greater level of pride in the individuals doing this than the previous private "security guards" that we used to have before (I once saw one leave her post to chase after Danny Glover...) And at the same time, I’ve seen them (the TSA people) be extremely reasonable, yet professional, despite some really dumb traveller behavior (eg, accidentally packing a pocket knife in carry-on luggage. Not that *I’ve* ever done that, mind you... um, yeah...)

But I fully grant you that I’ve been lucky. And I do still get stressed in anticipation of travelling, that on the next occasion my luck just might run out. So I feel ok about saying nice things about the professionalism I’ve seen, but at the same time it’s really hard to get too excited about a police force..."

Sadly, other people posted how their experiences had been just the opposite, encountering frustrating lacks of critical thinking skills, but I guess it's hard to get improvement unless you also appreciate when things are done right.

On the other hand, I have this sense that I'm conceding something important by allowing any sort of praise for any of the operation. There's something so defective about the whole thing, it's purpose and function and execution, and I certainly don't mean to give the civil liberty infringing aspects a free pass. I just wish to acknowledge the courtesy I've been treated with. I wonder if that's ok?

In posting about my experience where I accidentally packed a pocketknife in my carry-on luggage, it reminded me of my trip to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi two years ago, when the knife-packing error occurred. It had inadvertently been caught in my backpack, and I hadn't noticed it was there until the X-Ray found it. From the check-in counter I was able to acquire a tiny box, placed it in the box, sealed it, and then checked it as luggage. Coming home, however, I decided to mail it on ahead and so went to the post office in Bay St. Louis to do it.

Bay St. Louis, like most of the Mississippi Gulf Coast was incredibly hard-hit by Katrina. I can remember, in my mind's eye, the quaintness of the town. And I can't begin to imagine the devastation, how everything I saw there has suddenly been undone.

Last week the New York Times ran a portrait of the victims. I think it's good that the New York Times does things like that, because it gives victims of tragedies back their humanity that summation in the news otherwise strips from them. Reading the news it always seems like it's strangers that bad things happen to, but in reality it's people just like those you know.

I was also thinking recently, as a result of something posted on the Conglomerate, about the Gulf Coast casinos. I'm not really a fan of building casinos all over the place. I think they can do more harm than good so easily. Some are far cries from the economic panaceas they are touted to be, and some put more strain on the local communities than cash into the coffers.

Mississippi apparently had a rule that casinos could be built, but only if they floated. I guess that was to keep them from really being "connected" to Mississippi, but it seems like a distinction without much difference. Their impacts on the communities were the same as if they'd had an actual foundation, and without it they were much more vulnerable to Katrina's destruction.

So I was thinking about whether the casinos should be rebuilt, and if so, how. Again floating, or attached to land? And I was thinking about all the problems incumbent with casinos, and then I started to wonder how much that mattered. The fact of the matter is that a casino is what brought me to Mississippi. I had never been there before and had little impetus to go, had it not been for the Huey Lewis and the News concert, which was at a casino. Now, one traveler, especially one like me, hardly justifies building casinos. But maybe there are lots of travellers like me. My friend whom I met on the way back, for instance, had also just spent some time on the Gulf at its casinos, and I doubt he's the only one who had ever travelled there to do so.

I guess the question is whether on balance they are truly an asset to the area, or only a burden. And if it's a close call, how much of an asset or how much of a burden. Mississippi, for better or for worse, gets to start over. It seems unlikely that the casino companies, even if they want to come back, would want to rebuild as floating establishments (unless it was vastly cheaper to do so). If they are to come back, they may insist on building on solid ground. Assuming so, to what extent should Mississippi encourage them to?

These is a question I can't answer, but I hope somebody does.

Edited 10/4.

I've sent off my note to be considered for publication. However, perhaps I should rethink this - it seems apparently they can come back to haunt you later on...

On the other hand, speaking of judicial opportunities, despite massive efforts of cutting, pasting, and collating, nothing seems to have come from my federal clerkship applications. Which is as frustrating as disappointing. The whole effort seemed to be very imprecise, overly demanding, and not an efficient use of energies. I had indeed contemplated postponing the whole thing, but couldn't bring myself to resist the 3L application tide. Part of me wishes that I had, since I sensed I didn't have the right resources to throw at it right now. But part of me was afraid if I don't get on the clerkship horse right after I graduate, I might never get on it. And it is something I would like to do.

So I may see about state opportunities, and apply if it's feasable to do from over here. Otherwise, though it's something I really would like to have done, I will need to recognize the limitations I faced and stop kicking myself for whatever imagined inadequacies might have affected my candidacy. I can only be who I am, and I can only do what I have the time and energy resources to do. Beating myself up won't change that reality, and even if I want to chastize myself for not making it a higher priority, the fact of the matter is that even if I had, something else important would have been dropped and I'd instead now be punishing myself for that.

There are two things that should perhaps be noted: one, though I applied to clerkships in three distinctive metropolitan areas, I only applied to those metropolitan areas. And they are popular metropolitan areas. However, they are areas that I am connected to and would be willing to live in again. At this stage of my life I am not willing to go see what living in another city would be like. I'm already doing that now, but my patience for packing up my life AGAIN and figure out yet another community is waning precipitously. Perhaps that self-imposed restriction reduced my opportunities too much, but that's how it is.

Also, apparently (though I haven't seen this in person to judge whether it wasn't really a mass-mailed letter) one of my rejection letters was a very complimentary missive from a judge who only hires career clerks, but said that I have a very impressive resume that she would keep on file.

See? I don't completely suck after all...

Edited 10/4.

I'm really enjoying my time here in Germany. I'm learning a lot of interesting law, meeting lots of really nice people, learning the language... I'm really glad I came, and as an American student I'm being made to feel very welcome at the school, in the city, and in the country.

But I'm not just an American. I'm also Jewish, and it's hard to think about being Jewish in Germany without stumbling upon the elephant in the room: what happened 60-70 years ago. It's the history we've all inherited - but to what end? I know relatives and acquaintances who refuse to set foot in Germany, not out of any sense of personal fear (although there probably is some distrust that the virulent anti-Semitism is truly a thing of the past) but more out of a lingering anger for those horrible crimes perpetuated against so many people, and particularly against people like us.

I can't dismiss their feelings: they are a reasonable reaction to an incomprehensibly horrible tragedy that I would not want to minimize, nor encourage others to minimize. But at the same time, it's completely unintuitive to me to dig my heels in and continue to punish a nation of strangers. On the contrary, it seems that the complete opposite is called for. Hatred festers in the distrust unfamiliarity breeds. The thing to do, it has always seemed to me, is to take affirmative steps to not be strangers anymore.

In this vein I had an interesting conversation with a German woman a week or so ago. Her parents were war refugees themselves, having fled what is now Poland in advance of the Russian army. Growing up, her parents - directly scarred by the trauma - harbored and often articulated ill feelings towards the Russians as a result. But she, not being as directly affected, resisted absorbing those attitudes. Instead she chose to study Russian, and come to know the people that she otherwise might have regarded with fear and suspicion. I understood exactly why she felt it was so important to do that, because when I was younger, as a child of the Cold War, it was what motivated me to study Russian as well. It was also what prompted me, when I was 13, to want to study German too.

Of course, learning the language is just the first part of the equation. The next step is to learn people's stories. In talking to this woman she admitted to me that when she meets someone who says they're Jewish, immediately the wheels start turning and she wants to know how their families' stories personally intertwined with history. And when she said that, I immediately blurted out, "You know, I've always been curious the same way about the Germans that I've met."

The conversation greatly validated what both of us, independently, had come to believe - that it was necessary to climb down from our respective, distant turrets history had built for us and make a point to lay a shared, positive foundation for a mutual history that's yet to be written. (And that both of us from such different - perhaps oppositional - pasts could reach the same conclusion is itself an important lesson, too, I think.) For my part, I'm here - learning German, "being" German, and making an effort to see the world through the eyes of my German friends and neighbors. And for their part, the Germans I've met are making a tremendous effort themselves. My woman friend, for instance, learned Yiddish and wrote her dissertation on a community of Russian Jews. As another striking example, a few nights ago I was out at dinner with a group of German students from school, and was amazed to find that, in this random group of four people, three of them - completely separately - had visited Israel. (Two had gone on student exchanges, and one worked at Yad Vashem.)

All that said, I still find some things about being in Germany difficult or poignant, especially around this time of year. And there is one concrete thing that I felt very uncomfortable about in particular. While I suppose there are many things about Germany that don't make sense to me, or that I think should be different, it's not my country and therefore not my place to criticize. Except in this one instance, and I say what I do with all due respect for my host country and the complete cognizance that I am a guest here: it felt extremely wrong to me that when I filled out the city registration application, I had to report my religion. Purportedly this was for tax purposes, and had something to do with the city needing to know how many people the churches served. But it made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. I don't want to tell the German government that I'm Jewish, and I don't think it's good if it knows where all its Jewish residents live. Things went horribly wrong the last time it knew.

But beyond that, the Jewish high holidays are here. Even not-particularly-observant Jews tend to use the occasion as a time to reflect on their Jewishness, and given where I am right now, I felt it was important that I did as well. I didn't want to let the occasion go unmarked. I didn't really care if I marked it formally by going to services; indeed, I found the prospect intimidating. I'm not so well versed in my own religion that I can resist feeling a bit like an outcast amidst other Jews who are strangers to me. I tend to feel very inept, and consequently critically question my own identity. This wasn't the time for that though - to be able to be Jewish in Germany is an important thing, and I needed to find a way I was comfortable being so.

So I took the day off on Tuesday for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. I didn't go to school that day, passing on the matriculation ceremony for new students we were graciously invited to. I felt my obligations to myself were the most important ones for me to attend to and focused only on those. I did go to a German class for a bit in the afternoon - after all, learning the language is one of the obligations I owe to myself - but that was the only regular appointment that I kept.

Instead I threw a party. One of the traditions of Rosh Hashanah is to eat sweet things in hope of having a sweet new year. I thought it might be nice then to have a dessert party. But poor planning morphed it into something else - something nicer, even: some of my German friends came over and joined me (and my roommate) for dinner. One made some delicious sweet pancakes, and we ate them with applesauce, carrots with peanut butter, and, of course, the traditional apples with honey. It was one of those lovely occasions where you can sit back and marvel, "Wow, I'm a grown-up!" as we enjoyed the company of good friends and good food, all of which we arranged ourselves. It was such a nice evening my roommate and I were still high-fiving each other an hour later about it. Then, the kitchen and our rooms all straightened up, we were ready to face the new year.

It was one of the nicest evenings I've ever had, spending it in the company of people I really like. German people, even. Call it an irony of history if you want, although I would prefer to see it as an inevitability. Being willing to cross the barriers that sorrowful history has placed before you seems well worth its rewards. If I hadn't come here to Germany, I wouldn't have known these people, and they wouldn't have shared my holiday with me. I don't mean to suggest, though, that I shouldn't look at the elephant, or pretend that the elephant isn't there. We all need to look at that elephant, long and hard, so that we can make sure it doesn't happen again. My nice evening does not make me glib about that. But what I have come to realize, with increasing clarity over recent days, is that running away from the elephant isn't the right thing to do either. If I had refused to come to Germany, or refused to know my friends, or refused to let them share in my personal celebration of such an important day, what would it have accomplished? What sense would it have made to punish my friends for something they themselves didn't do? I would only have been punishing myself.

One of the reasons my party ended up the quiet affair it did was that some of the invitees were unable to attend. I don't just mean that they had other obligations. I mean they couldn't attend because they couldn't find the place.

I had emailed everyone with the directions, but they were walking directions from the U-Bahn. Two of my friends have cars, and they were not car-centered directions. In fact, I would have no idea how to give driving directions because I have no idea what the streets are called. At least if you are walking you can use landmarks, but the drivers seemed to need to know where to turn off to find the building to park with a bit more precision (particularly when consulting their maps).

It also didn't help that my building is behind a small frontage road that is obscured from the main street by piles of construction equipment, or that the little side street next to it is an unmarked left turn completely invisible at night.

I do find, however some vindication in that even native Hamburgers, as my car-endowed friends both are, got lost (too). It says quite a bit about this city, and also why so many people seem to always need to ask me for directions. Or at least if it doesn't say anything about my directional expertise it does say something about their desperation...

(For those of you keeping score at home, it should be noted that it happened again. Last week, even though I was dazed and confused myself - my rear bike lamp suddenly broke off, and I was still reeling from the annoyed trauma - yet more people approached me to get directions to a place I couldn't find. I'm sure they regretted asking me once I started babbling ineffectually, but since they hadn't been deterred by my general aura of cluelessness, I guess it served them right.)

The other day some German students were discussing how Bucerius really needs to build a "napping room," perhaps with an LCD screen that should easily show new nappers which beds were available. In case of high demand, they could also be put on a timing mechanism, kind of like the showers in train stations. (I used one once in Copenhagen: you get 30 minutes for your shower, and when the time's up, the door is going to open whether you're ready or not...)

One student then suggested that perhaps Clifford Chance could sponsor the "napping room." After all, other rooms in the school had been sponsored by leading law firms, like Linklaters and White and Case. But Clifford Chance does not (yet) have a room of its own, and the students thought this might provide the perfect sponsorship opportunity.

"Do you have napping rooms at your schools in the US?" the students asked me.

"Yeah, but we call them libraries."

Quite an exciting night for sports last night. Two of the international students, one from Texas and one from OU, decided to watch the game over the Internet in the student lounge. Unfortunately it was for some reason blocked out, so they were unable to watch it live (for that they paid 20 bucks?). Instead they killed time by watching some previous baseball playoff games until 11pm or so when they'd be able to watch the completed game archived.

Meanwhile, the German students were gathered in a lecture room to watch Germany play Turkey in soccer. I decided to join them. It was more exciting than Americans might suspect – at least in a room full of people.* Germany however didn't, in my estimation (and as represented by the final score), play particularly well. But people had fun. Everyone brought beer – even me. But that was totally fine, because the head of the school was also there watching with us and didn't object. There was also a pool to guess the final score, and despite it being 1-0 Turkey for most of the game, a flurry of goals in the last 5 minutes turned it to a 2-1 Turkish victory. And the head of the school won the pool...

I then contemplated staying at school all night to watch the Cal-UCLA football match-up, but it was difficult to tell if I'd be able to watch it televised over the Internet so instead I went home. The game wouldn't even start until 1:30am, and it didn't seem worth staying up if there was a strong possibility I wouldn't get to see it.

* There was also some additional, um, excitement... At some point a Turkish player sustained an injury. I suppose it was a groin injury, because as the cameras showed the trainers treating him, it also showed them taking off his shorts in full view of the cameras! In my opinion the European football "wardrobe malfunctions" are much more interesting than the American ones...

Edit: Oh, and Friday had its own athletics excitement, when the school organized an American (touch) football game. Of course, a 20-on-20 match, comprised of many people who had never even seen a football before, went about as well as you might expect...

I really hate exams. Not just taking them, but having my friends take them. And most of my German friends here are in the thick of studying for the exams they need to retake in the next week or two, which makes them no fun at all... (OK, they are still fun to hang out with, but they are much less available to do so, at least without us all feeling very guilty about it.)

Tonight I did get to help one of them study though. He's really well-versed in the subject matter, but he's been having issues figuring out how to write a good exam. Welcome to my world... Intellectually I know how to do it, but in practice I think I may come up short sometimes.

But my friend was really spending a lot of time trying to get his head around this IRAC structure. Not so much what it was – that part's pretty clear – but how to actually employ it effectively in an exam. So we took a problem from a Torts review book and worked through it. Actually, it wasn't really "torts," because in Germany there's no such discrete subject. Tort liabilities exist, but they are scattered throughout the general civil code. I'm not sure that his test is really on "tort law" any more than it's a test on criminal law as well, and in fact the problem we worked on had to do with whether the subject of the fact pattern would be guilty of theft, which in the US would not be a tort per se.

In one sense it was really interesting for me, because my friend could articulate some of the legal nuances about how theft was codified in the law. Whether something is a crime in Germany depends on both objective and subjective elements. In our practice problem we only got as far as the objective elements, but, then again, if you don't satisfy those the subjective ones won't matter. In this case we were considering whether the object of the potential theft was a "foreign moveable object" and whether it had been "taken away" from its previous owner. Of course, these are rough translations of the actual German terms, which themselves have their own legal definitions. There is law explaining what "foreign" means in this sense, and whether something has been "taken away" requires a multi-layered analysis of its own.

(In this hypo a person had gone to a store wanting to buy two bottles of alcohol. He discovers that he doesn't have enough money for both, so he only puts one in his cart. However, he puts another inside his jacket, an act which was observed by a store detective. But before he gets to the cash register, he had a change of heart and puts the one in his jacket back on the shelf. The question: is he guilty of anything? Interestingly, in Germany the act may very well have met the definition of theft, or at least its objective elements, due to the way Germany considers possession and property, which seems to be different than it is in the US.)

I obviously couldn't critique my friend's understanding of the law in this area, but he seemed to be on top of its particularities. We spent some time instead working out how best to express it in an exam essay. Though German law is different than US law in terms of its doctrinal technicalities and lack of import judicial decisions have on shaping the law, German law students still write their exams much like American students do, laying out the issue (I) in contention, the rule (R) that would determine the issue's resolution, the analysis (A) tying the facts to the rule, and then a conclusion (C). So the exercise was helpful for both of us – him particularly immediately, and me for any future law school exams I may take.

I sort of wish I'd had this discussion two years ago...

Written 10/9, posted 10/10.

I'm taking a "juridique" course, and just had the first session today. Actually, the course began last week but I was slow on the uptake and didn't decide I wanted to do it until after it began. C'est un dommage, mais ce n'est pas grave...

It's a mind-expanding endeavor on two levels: one, it's French practice, and two, it's an explanation of French legal structure. It is kind of interesting to take it with German students. In a sense, we're all equal because we're all fumbling around in a second language for a change. On the other hand, they still have some advantages: the class is all in French, but the provided vocabulary lists give German translations. Also, when we consider hypos, they all share the same Germanic sense of jurisprudence, whereas I'm the only weirdo who thinks about American.

Today, for instance, when we were discussing the types of errors that could result in a contract being void, I was the only one who started talking about cows. Why cows? Because in the back of my mind I remembered a case we studied in 1L contracts on mistake involving people buying the wrong cow.

Of course, now all the Germans probably think all of American jurisprudence has to do with cows. Which obviously isn't the case - for instance, there have been some very important cases involving chickens.

Keeping the holiday around here is challenging. My days are particularly packed, with more classes than usual as two of them wrap up this week. Yesterday began with Conflict of Laws, followed by Comparative Torts. Then almost immediately thereafter many of us boarded a bus for a field trip to the Neuengamme Concentration Camp.

It was one of those gorgeous fall days the holiday often falls on, sunny and pleasant. But we spent it in an environment whose modern serenity belied its past. Although this camp wasn't dedicated to the extermination of Jews, per se, many did perish there (along with many, many others). On an occasion of contemplation, it was quite the place to spend the afternoon.

We got back to school at about sunset. I tried to pretend that sunset hadn't quite happened yet and had one more meal in preparation for today's fast. I have 4 classes today so missing school really wasn't a viable option, but I wanted to do something to not glibly ignore the day.

Yesterday also I discovered that Eric Muller, law prof at UNC, had linked to my post about the Elephant in the Room (reconciling the Holocaust with my current participation in modern German life). I read his comments in the morning, and was particularly pensive throughout the rest of the day and camp tour. I imagine I'll have more to say on the subject as I digest everything, but I can't currently claim any sort of clarity.

Of course, how can there be any clarity? At the camp we faced the abject horrors inflicted by Germans. And back at school, I faced my 19 year old German friend who kindly stayed behind, even though he'd long since finished, to keep me company while I finished my meal.

Still, later in the evening some of us gathered to watch a soccer game – the German national team versus China. And one of my friends leaned over and asked, "Which one are you rooting for?"

Somewhat surprised at the question – I suppose I tacitly rooted for Germany, in support of my friends – I cryptically responded, "You know, it's a bad day to ask me that question. I'm finding it hard right now to say, 'Rah rah, go Germany.'"

The thing is, Germans themselves don't say that so much themselves anymore. In fact, those who do are immediately regarded as extremists. Even at political rallies there was vastly less pageantry than there would be at similar American events, where everything would be draped with red white and blue, with brass bands belting out Irving Berlin songs. Here, the only color motifs were those of the party, and only on the stage and some literature. There would be tremendous discomfort, my friends have explained, with having it any other way.

The concentration camp at Neuengamme is just a few kilometers outside of Hamburg. In fact, it was established in 1939 as a result of a partnership between the city and the Nazis. Back then the city was in the middle of a building boom and needed lots and lots of bricks for the construction. The Nazis, meanwhile, wanted to find a place to put all the people it deemed incompatible with society. So the city gave the Nazis the land it owned outside the city, land rich with clay deposits, and the Nazis used it to build its Neuengamme camp. In exchange it then gave back to the city all the bricks the camp's prisoners produced.

The Neuengamme camp was one of the many such camps built across Germany. Like Dachau, which began in the early 1930s, it served as a place for Hitler to isolate his political adversaries. But whereas most of the Dachau prisoners initially were German, Neuengamme contained people pulled from societies all over Europe. It also housed POWs from the Soviet front. Unlike Auschwitz it wasn't designed to summarily execute its prisoners, but they were often summarily worked to death anyway.

(There was also at least one instance when Soviet POWs were locked in a building and gassed with Xyclon B. Survivors from Neuengamme who were there at the time remember this occasion vividly. They'd all been assembled in the adjacent main square for roll call and could hear the screams of the dying soldiers.)

As a work camp, Neuengamme contained two main production facilities: a small munitions factory, and a brick manufacturing plant. One of the better jobs prisoners could have was in the munitions factory because the work was indoors and could be done while seated. However, if prisoners were even slightly suspected of slow or bad work, or sabotage, the omnipresent SS guards would kill them.

Meanwhile the production of bricks involved digging up the clay and hauling it to the factory, where it would be pressed into moulds, cut, and baked, and then loaded onto barges for shipment to Hamburg. Again, one of the better jobs at the camp was one on the inside of the brick factory, although the people who had to remove the bricks from the ovens had to do so without any protective gear. The outside jobs were the hardest: exposed and physically grueling. With poor clothing, meager rations, and forced effort at gunpoint, prisoners rapidly wasted away. In the summer they might last 2-3 months; in the winter, 2-3 weeks. The barracks were also overcrowded and unhygienic, and provided prisoners little ability to wash. Disease therefore also claimed many lives, either directly or as a result of Nazi euthanasia of unproductive prisoners.

The camp itself was also a product of prisoners' labors, and its brick factory and canal can still be seen today. Hamburg sits on the Elbe, a river whose natural flow runs about 600 meters away from the camp. The Nazis decided it would be great to float the bricks to Hamburg, so they made the prisoners dig a canal connecting the factory to the river. A huge undertaking, requiring the manual digging through clay, it claimed many more lives than the SS's propagandist photos would suggest. Most of the pictures from the camp at that time show able-bodied men working without any coercion, but this depiction was far from accurate.

On the other hand, while the Nazis tried to keep the local citizenry in the dark about what was going on at Dachau, obscuring it with a large wall, they were not similarly surreptitious about Neuengamme, which was merely bordered by a fence. Although the area is fairly rural, people could easily see what was going on inside it. Or at least smell the stench from the crematorium eventually built. Or see the prisoners who were lead out on urban details, like ordinance recovery after the bombs started falling on the city. The prisoners would be made to dig through the rubble and disarm any unexploded bombs. One advantage to the job was that prisoners could sometimes scavenge food, but at the same time it was also extremely dangerous. The thing is, though, everyone in the city could see these haggard people pass through their midst, sometimes even riding the streetcars. Though today people who lived through that time maintain they didn't know what was going on, it's a specious claim.

After the camp was liberated by the British they used it temporarily as a facility to house displaced persons. In 1948 the then-mayor of Hamburg razed the wooden barracks and build a "conventional" prison where they'd stood. In retrospect doing so looks like an incredibly insensitive act, although at the time it may have seemed more reasonable. The mayor himself, a Social Democrat, had fled the Nazi state. His thinking behind razing the camp seemed to be based on the impulse to remove reminders of this dark period in order to be able to move on.

However the survivors couldn't forget and didn't want others to either. And so began a decades-long process to try to preserve what remained of it and its dark memories. Which was a hard task. The Cold War had set in, and Germany was preoccupied and divided by that. Meanwhile, in the 1970s another prison was built on the grounds, this time over the clay pits. But finally in 2003 the camp became a monument. The staff tore down the 1948 prison -- which itself had been made by bricks earlier produced in the camp -- and turned some of the remaining original brick buildings into museums. They also excavated the foundation of the building were the Soviet POWs had been killed. The staff decided not to rebuild the wood barracks, fearing that whatever they built would be far too sterile, and instead outlined the foundations where they once stood with the bricks from the dismantled prison. The staff also decided not to restore the camp leader's house.

In this quaint wooden house adjacent to the grounds, Max Pauli, the prison commander, lived with his wife and 5 children (or at least 4 of them -- the wife died delivering the 5th, at which point her sister moved in). After the war he was tried and executed. The children went to live in other parts of Germany, changed their names, and have no contact with the museum staff. The house, however, had since been occupied by whomever was heading the post-war prison. (One of these people had a questionable sense of "humor," however, and had a new front gate installed at the end of his driveway. One side of the gate includes an icon of a ladder, referring to "leader." The other contained the silhouette of the main buildings at concentration camps like Auschwitz. So his gate could be read as "camp leader," just as Max Pauli's front gate had decades earlier.) The museum staff has chosen not to show the comfortable life Pauli had lived out of concern that it would further encourage the neo-Nazis, who already like to come there and celebrate this dark history, by making the Holocaust seem like a good, cushy situation they should try to recreate.

These neo-Nazis may be the exception -- although the tour guide fears they are a growing exception -- to modern German attitudes towards the Holocaust. But even in the mainstream there is resistance to effective Holocaust memorialization. The museum is well-done and excellent, yet surprisingly new. And due to limited funding, only open limited hours. Also, the second prison is still there and still operational. With its light gray concrete walls it looms there in eerie silence. Though still occupied, hardly a sound escapes from behind its walls. In 1990 the Hamburg major acknowledge that it had probably been a mistake to have built any prisons at all there, but it is a slow process to have it decommissioned.

It's hard to feel though, with a prison still there, that the trouble from the past has yet taken its proper place in history. The camp was built to isolate people from society, and that's what the prison continues to do. It does so more humanely, of course, and with due process protections unavailable during the Nazi reign. In fact, many German legal codifications and instruments exist as they do today in response to what had happened before, in order to guarantee that it never be repeated. However, to look at a modern incarnation of a prison on the site of an earlier, horrific one, does not give one much hope that as much was learned from the past as there ought to have been.

Posted 10/18, written 10/13. Edited 10/28/08.

I'd forgotten how nice night trains can be. I used to take them quite a bit, particularly on my marathon post-graduation 6-week trip through Europe in 1996. I think I took about 14 night trains within a month. (Actually, it was probably more like 15 if we include the Rome fiasco, plus a night boat was also taken between Helsinki and Stockholm.) My thinking always was, you have to sleep and you have to travel – why not do both at the same time? Plus the couchettes cost no more than a hostel bed, and it saved me the trouble of having to find one. In any case, this is why I opted to take a night train to Poland.

Shortly before 9 this morning the train pulled into the Central station in Warsaw. Immediately it reminded me of the Prague train station when I was there in 1995. Cavernous, with straight, rigid geometry and smooth, faux-marble concrete surfaces everywhere. Tucked in between columns and staircases were lots of kiosks, the kind that proliferated in communist environments. Only while 20 years ago they were probably minimally stocked, today they are stuffed with all sorts of modern consumables.

Two levels upstairs from where the trains arrive is the huge main hall, which itself showed signs of both Warsaw's past and present. For instance, there were several ATMS, but the one I used squeaked... There was also a new, modern "Relay" news shop, where I bought a Wired magazine (for too much money) so I could break my large bills from the ATM. The woman at the tourist information booth said my tram would cost 2.40, and I'd read somewhere that they don't take large bills.

I only had three hours to spend in Warsaw before catching my next train. I figured I'd do a nice loop, walking to the Jewish cemetery, then to the old town, then on to my train. What I hadn't realized was just how huge Warsaw is. The map that made it look like a compact place must have been on a far smaller scale than I'd thought. Tiny streets on the map turned out to be 4-lane affairs. In fact, it took me a half hour alone to figure out how to cross them... Clearly I was going to have to curtail my plans, so instead I decided to first do a dry run to find the hotel I'd need the next night when I returned. And good thing I did too, as it completely blended in to the neighborhood. No sign, and the door was set off from the street and behind another building. Still, it wasn't far from the station, and not too hard to find again since it's the only one with a three-story tall statute of Wallace and Grommit in front of it.

But before I got that far, after I emerged from the station I was stopped by the view. Modern Warsaw is enormous, and what's in it is on an enormous scale. Including the abominable Stalinist building looming across from the train station. Among the many criticisms of Stalin one needs to include architectural taste. This is a behemoth of a building in some perverted art deco style, like the Empire State Building but shorter, more sprawling (it has wings like tentacles), and with more gargoyles. I remember seeing a similar building in 1992 at the University of Moscow and thinking it was the ugliest building I'd ever seen. Unfortunately, my travels in the former communist-bloc countries have led me to see several more just like it.

Once out on the street, however, the architecture was a mix. Even in the center of the city, where there has been the most recent investment, there was a strange amalgamation of modern Europe and Moscow. The urban planning, with its relentlessly rectangular buildings, pedestrian setbacks, and ubiquitous kiosks was straight out of the 1960s and 70s. But then there were also the skyscrapers under construction, the newly-paved and well-marked roads, legible and omnipresent street signs, and a KFC and Pizza Hut right behind the H&M and C&A stores and next door to the doner kebab shops.

After I got my bearings I walked around a little. I walked just a bit past the Stalin monstrosity, behind a church, and to the only synagogue in Warsaw to survive the war. It was surrounded by a few other Jewish establishments, including a theater, restaurant, cultural center, and Kosher store in the basement of the temple. The synagogue itself wasn't open (note: it was the day after Yom Kippur) so I walked back towards the station. On my way I bought groceries for the trip. The stores are fully stocked with the same things you can find in Germany, except with far fewer (in fact, objectively, too few) shopping carts and cashiers.

Once laden with my snacks, I found the tram. What I didn't find, however, was how to pay for the ride. I was really embarrassed when I discovered that the driver didn't take money, yet I had no ticket to validate. The woman at the tourist office, when she told me what tram to take and how much it cost, couldn't have also told me how to pay for it? Apparently not... So it seems I was a fare cheat, though completely unintentionally.

Fortunately it was a short trip and no fare inspectors boarded. (I got nervous when I saw the guy shilling for the Polish Red Cross, but then I realized that he wasn't a real authority figure, and paying him was entirely optional...) Meanwhile a young man sat down next to me at some point and saw me looking at my map. I showed him where I was going (the eastern train station), fully expecting the tram to take me all the way there. But before we reached it he told me to follow him off the train and he'd walk me to it through the side streets. Despite the fact that there was no common vocabulary between us, this all got communicated smoothly. And I'm glad it did, because I'm not sure I would have found the train station otherwise.

My train came along, on time, and I boarded. It was really crowded, but I squished in to a compartment with seven other people. (Edit 10/17: it turns out it was crowded because most people got on at the Central station. Apparently I didn't need to go to this other one after all.) The two young men spoke English, but they mostly stood in the hall so we didn't talk much. One other older man seemed eager to make contact though, so we conversed a little. The best common language, it turned out, was not English or German, but Russian. I'm really glad I learned it – it's come in handy so many times. If only I could actually remember it though... In our conversation it did become clear that I come from Boston but used to live in New Jersey, and that he has relatives in Edmonton, Canada. I'm not entirely sure exactly what was said to get this across, but does it really matter?

Posted 10/18, written 10/14.

I did it again – I picked a spot on the map, and then went to go see what it was like.

The point I went to see was Suwalki, a town in the very northeast of Poland. In fact, it's so northeastern that it hasn't always been part of Poland. Within the past two centuries it's also been claimed by Russia and Lithuania.

It's a bit off the beaten trail. My Lonely Planet Eastern Europe book didn't even list it, and it takes at least 5 hours to get to by train. (However, that says more about the speed of the train than the distance... It goes pretty fast to Bialystok, which is about two-thirds the way there, then turns into a local train and goes much slower the rest of the way. Plus they have to change the engine at some point because the tracks are no longer electrified.) I came up yesterday afternoon and reached town just after sunset. Fortunately, a college student going home for the weekend had entered my compartment (everyone else had disembarked by then) and helped me sort out a taxi. (He recommended against taking the public bus after dark.)

Before we arrived in Suwalki though we talked off and on for about an hour, to the extent his English would permit. At one point the conversation stalled when I asked him if Poland had changed a lot since joining the EU last year. Actually, the conversation stalled often, but this time it stalled because he didn't know the word "change." Most of the time if he didn't know a word I would abandon the topic, but this I felt was an important word and looked up something in my travel phrasebook that would give him some idea what it meant. I thought I must have succeeded, because soon he gave the unforgettable exclamation, "I know what change is." Studied philosophers themselves have been less certain... But either he still didn't understand, or there has been no change in the last year, because he just kind of shrugged. Probably it was some combination of both, I think, because later in the conversation when I asked him about the economy directly he said it was bad. "It was a lot better under socialism," he added. He was mostly making reference to employment, though, and I can imagine that it would have been true, that once the government stopped being the economy and everyone had to play the capitalist game it was difficult for everyone to compete. On the other hand, I suspect that with the EU connection there are more EU-funded enterprises and projects now, and it may in fact be easier for local businesses to compete in Europe now than it was without the EU membership.

The taxi then took me to my hotel. It was a perfectly fine hotel for my purposes: clean, cheap, comfortable. It even had a TV, and for the first time since I've been in Europe I watched a little. Mostly a BBC World Report on guinea worms in Africa (grotesque human parasites that can be at least 10 cm long that painfully bore themselves out of people's legs) and a French program where it tracked a Chinese au pair as she settled in with – and apparently immediately fell out with, though for reasons unexplained – the family she worked for.

I didn't watch any German TV, but I did get some practice speaking it that evening. When I was checking in earlier I realized the men behind me were not speaking Polish but German. "Are you German?" I asked them, in German. They were. They were also very nice, and later that evening joined me at my table for dinner.

Dinner and breakfast were both included in the $33 room price, and they were both very good (especially the dinner). The waitress brought me a menu, which was all in Polish. I looked at it and blurted out that I couldn't read it. So instead we agreed she would decide. She chose pretty well: a cauliflower-potato soup, and for the main course some sort of beef-rolled pate with a sweet and sour sauce. There was also a plate with three salads (red cabbage, carrot, and some sort of dill salad). Breakfast was also nice – a scrambled egg, bread with butter and something that looked like cream cheese, coffee and tea, some crudités, cheese, and cold cuts. However I was a little concerned that it might have been prepared and left out unrefrigerated for a while. I got this impression from the tables in the other dining room, which had been laid out the night before. Not just with table settings, but the first course...

I was nearly done when the men came in but I stayed while they joined me at my table. While they ate we talked, about 80% in German. It's amazing what struggling in Polish does to my confidence in German. I keep thinking to myself, "You know, I could say what I needed in German..." The men were there because there is a narrow-gauge train in the area, and they are train buffs. (Or "trainspotters," as I guess the British term would be.) The hotel gets a lot of visitors, Polish and European, who come to enjoy the region's many lakes and forests.

I wasn't there for that though. The reason I was there is because a part of my family came from Suwalki. The Gellis side, in fact, including the great-grandmother for whom I was named. The story goes that when she was a young teenager some Russian soldiers made a pass at her, which led to her being expeditiously married off to my great-grandfather. They then had many children, several of them there and the rest (including my grandfather) after emigrating to New York.

All day as I was wandering around I found myself looking at the town and wondering what of what I was looking at the first Chaya Gellis had also seen. Certainly not all of what I saw: not the brand-new service station or freshly-laid brick sidewalks. Nor the communist-built hopelessly rectangular apartment blocks. And perhaps not even the train station, which wasn't built until 1899. (Edit 10/23: Actually she did see that. I've since found out that she left in 1905.) But Suwalki doesn't appear to have been greatly touched by war, and though a lot has changed because things were added, not so much seems to have been lost. The original architecture along the main street, for instance, is probably the same that she might have passed. As are many of the low, wooden houses along the town's periphery.

However, something important has been lost since then.

The first stop I made after leaving the hotel and walking around the small lake behind it was at the Jewish cemetery. The cemetery is still there, but the grave stones are mostly gone. Wave after wave of anti-Semitic attack has left most of the markers toppled, broken, or completely missing. Some effort has been made to rehabilitate the cemetery: some of the broken grave stones have been restored and formed into a large monument in the middle. There is also a smaller monument near the entrance dedicated to Holocaust victims. But other than a few clusters of graves here and there, the cemetery was but an empty field and a far cry from the immaculate adjacent Catholic cemetery, or even the smaller Orthodox one. It's unclear whether anyone really cares for this cemetery at all, though it's not too overgrown. But it is clear that the waves of attacks desecrating the cemetery have not abated, judging by the piles of broken glass from smashed beer bottles near the monuments. It was everywhere, not just in one small spot. A shard even got caught in my shoe, and I could hear it clicking on the sidewalk as I walked away.

And when we talk about what is missing from Suwalki we should realize that before the war there were 5400 Jews in Suwalki, yet today I could find not one surviving synagogue.

(When I had asked the hotel clerk about what to see when I walked around the town, and whether the cemetery had any Jewish people in it, she said to me in another unforgettable sentence, "What are Jewish people?" Oy vey... I suspect she just didn't know the word, and if I could have thought of the Polish one she would have given me a better answer. But still, if there actually WERE any Jewish people she might have had reason to learn the word. In the cemetery there were a few graves from the 1960s, and one from 1986, but nothing more recent that I could find.)

Continuing on with my day I walked to the town center and main street, taking pictures of anything I thought might show my great-grandmother's world to other relatives. I walked to the top of the street, turned right, went a few more blocks, and then ate lunch it what appears to be a brand new McDonalds. I don't think my great-grandmother saw that... but mostly, I didn't take a picture because it looks like every other suburban McDonalds. It did appear, however, to be across the street from a prison.

After lunch I stopped by an Internet café to check my email, bought a few more postcards (my thinking with postcards is, "Why should *I* have to take all the pictures? Why not get a professional to do it?") and then went back to the hotel.

Actually, I didn't go back right away. I walked a little past it to see what was beyond. But I was tired and didn't go far. As I turned to go back the wind must have blown a glass bottle into the street, and a car immediately ran over it and broke it. Concerned that cars were going to get flats, I thought about finding a broom to clean it up. But that thought made me angry. If I was going to sweep up any glass, it would have been at the cemetery. Still, I made some effort to help and tried moving it out of the way with my shoe. But an oncoming car in the same lane, who could see me from a long way away (the street was straight, and I was uphill) refused to yield. So I had to, and as he passed he seemed to curse at me. The thought that immediately popped into my head was, "Fine! You people like broken glass so much? I hope you like it in your tires!" I couldn't help but find the crunch of his tires as he rode over the glass somewhat satisfying.

But as I said, I was tired by then. I'd walked a lot, and most of the people I met there were perfectly nice. Still, it was time to call it a trip, and I went back to the hotel where they called me a taxi to go back to the train.

Posted 10/18, written 10/15.

Edit 11/12: Pictures are posted here.

It was nice, when I got off the train in Warsaw, to be able to walk around like I knew where I was going. And actually know where I was going... I stopped off first at the KFC for dinner (I was curious) and then found Wallace and Grommit – I mean, my hotel. (I also discovered that it did have a sign after all, but one that was only visible at night when it was lit up.)

The hotel was interesting. I'd stay there again (location, location, location) but the interiors of the rooms had some questionable aesthetics. Lots of brown... I felt like I'd stepped into someone's den sometime in the 1970s...

The room included breakfast, which was an elaborate buffet: cold cuts, all sorts of cheeses, hard boiled eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs, cereals, fruit, coffee cake, breads with butter and jams, sausage and some other hot meats, juice, tea, coffee... Sadly I only had about 20 minutes to enjoy it.

The room also had a TV, which I stayed up too late watching. There was a great musical cabaret show in a Polish channel, which featured a string quartet that performed Canadian Brass-style (classical musical training, expressed with a sense of humor). Then I watched a bit of Mad About You dubbed in German. Sorry to say, there's a vast difference between Paul Reiser saying in his sarcastic New York accent, "Excuse me?" and a dubbed Germanic voice instead saying, "Entschuldigung?" Still, this was better than the German sitcom that seemed to be one long stupid joke about the husband failing to have an erection. Meanwhile, on BBC World, the sky was still falling. OK, I know there are bad things in the world and it's good that someone tells us about them, but, still, the BBC was a bit much. The happiest segment I saw them show during the whole two days I watched was on advances in artificial limbs, which is only a happy subject if you don't stop to consider why people actually need artificial limbs.

Then another Polish channel had a movie that was mostly in Polish but subtitled in English. It wasn't very good. It was one of those morose European flicks full of melodramatic silences and a darkened city full of no one but the movie's sinister people. (I wonder, though, if this is not because European filmmakers can't afford the extras needed to make a place look populated?) I've seen French films like this too, though they usually include some gloomy dialog where the protagonist waif explains how her parents had both killed themselves and that's why she's throwing herself into the clutches of an emotionally-scarred man three times her age. Or at least the one I saw in Suwalki was like this...

Anyway, in the Polish movie at one point one bad guy suddenly starts speaking to the other bad guy in English. I'm not sure why; they seemed to both be Polish. Maybe they thought it sounded tougher? They thought wrong. The older one, his accent was ok, but his pacing was off. Perhaps he couldn't really speak English and he learned his lines phonetically, which would explain the erratic diction. I wouldn't make fun of someone's language limitations, but I think it's perfectly legitimate to criticize the filmmaker who wrote his dreadful dialog and directed the performance. The "sit your ass down!" demand was delivered so out of sync from the way any English-speaking heavy would have said it that I was surprised the other bad guy didn't start giggling. (I did.) Then he punctuated his threat with, "Dig it?" I get the sense that the filmmaker perhaps once stayed in my hotel and got confused about what decade it was... "Capiche?" would have been much more contextually appropriate, but I guess then he wouldn't really be speaking English. And then how could the other bad guy take him seriously?

Posted 10/18, written 10/16.

The train I was running late for at breakfast was from Warsaw to Krakow. Once in Krakow, I then needed to change to some form of transport to take me to Auschwitz. However, I had no good information on how to do this. Even my Lonely Planet Eastern Europe book let me down. (The Polish chapter generally needs a lot of updating, if they haven't already done so.) It was hard to tell how close to the camp the train would get me, or how I would bridge the distance in any case. The book suggested taking a bus instead, but I couldn't find the bus stop in the confusion of Krakow Glowny and instead opted to take the train.

Which naturally turned out fine. When I got off the train in the town, I and all the other tourists converged on the train information guy. (There were no other signs or sources of information.) He couldn't speak English, and this wasn't his purview, but he knew all our questions and what the answers should be. (How to get there, and how to get back.) I ended up splitting a taxi with three other English-speaking people since it seemed easier than taking a bus. The cabbie charged us 15 zloty instead of the usual 10 ("It's a holiday," he said) and so we arrived at the camp by taxi.

It turns out that it had been a good choice to take the taxi because I got there just in time for an English tour. It started with a 15 minute film, and then the guide walked us through several buildings. We then took the shuttle to Birkenau, 3 kilometers away, which is the place everyone really thinks about when they say, "Auschwitz."

Unfortunately my trip was rushed, and I was preoccupied with worrying about how I would get back to Krakow in time for my night train. In the end, when the tour ended in Birkenau, I took another cab (again 15 zloty!) back to the train station. The train was an easy 40 minute trip to Trzebenia, but the train we transferred to for the rest of the journey was packed. I boarded it like I would a crowded B-line train in Boston...

Arriving in Krakow I had about an hour and a half to spare. My initial impression of Krakow in the morning had not been good. The area around the train platforms was decidedly uncharming, and disconnected from any sort of central station area. I'm not sure I even believed then that any existed, and in the morning I had no time to explore. But at night I did, and I was curious. So I followed the path away from the platforms, and found at the end of the Victorian-style covered pathway a nice old restored station building. The overall aesthetic reminded me a lot of Disneyland, actually...

By then I was hungry so I wandered down a road to find some food. What I found was a lot of gorgeous, old, lit-up buildings. My initial impression of Krakow now seemed entirely wrong. It seemed like a quaint, medieval-feeling European city worth another visit (although perhaps maybe not for another year or so, to give them time to finish up some of the infrastructure construction they are working on).

In fact, Auschwitz should probably be visited again sometime when I have more time. The trip to Suwalki really sucked up most of my weekend – although that's fine, I'm really glad I went. But then I had to rush to get to Auschwitz (and, really, who wants to rush to go there???) and I couldn't really connect to the place because I was so distracted about the logistics of leaving.

At one point I worried that I'd perhaps somehow ruined the Auschwitz experience by doing the trip like I had. Then I mentally slapped myself, because how to you "ruin" Auschwitz? I perhaps failed to fully absorb the dramatic depths of its horrors, but not entirely. My memories of Birkenau in particular come to me in flashes. These camps need to be seen in person to really understand their scale. In some ways it's a scale more vast than you can imagine (for instance, it took 10 minutes at a rapid pace to walk from the end of the train tracks by the gas chambers back to the gate house), and in some ways it's also smaller (though the gas chambers/crematoria were crumbled ruins, they were smaller than I imagined). Having been there at least it will give better context to other Holocaust history I learn.

Still, if the experience seemed anticlimactic, I think there are several reasons. On my end, in addition to my distraction, I'd also seen another concentration camp that week. There was probably a saturation problem. But I've also heard others criticize the presentation of Auschwitz. It's hard to put my finger on it, but there's something about it that's disengaging. I liked my guide, so that wasn't really the problem. I think it may have something to do with the logistics. It should feel very dramatic to enter those gates. But it's such a confusing hassle to get there and figure out what's going on that it's hard to be emotionally wired to take it in properly. Also, you sort of stumble into these places. Whereas in Neuengamme and Dachau the entrances were themselves more dramatic. And maybe, too, the area could be better curated as a museum. The 15 minute film about the camp's liberation, though necessarily awful in its content, I thought was one of the blandest Holocaust films I've ever seen. Furthermore, ever since the Neuengamme guide pointed out that pictures of camp life were actually SS propaganda, I've not been able to take them as seriously as realistic representations of the horrors of the camp. However bad they may look, the reality was worse.

But as I said, the guide was good, and her tour was peppered with anecdotes explaining the psychological torture inflicted by the SS as much as the physical. It was also good to get her personal insight on some of these matters. In Suwalki I had noticed that the WWII memorials never referred to Nazis or Germans. They always used some form of the word, "Hitlerowcowy." I asked her what it meant and why they seemed to always use it. Apparently it means, "Hitler's People," and she thinks it's more accurate than saying either Germans or Nazis. With the latter, she pointed out, who were they? They were a political party. But that's like saying "communists." It's a party too, and it isn't even clear of which country. As far as using the term "Germans," it tars too many people. The atrocities themselves were only carried out by Hitler's People. On the other hand, she said she has started using the term "Germans" to make it clear that she does not mean Poles. She said she gets offended when people ask her how many Poles served in the camp. First of all, she noted, a Pole couldn't be in the SS even if they wanted to be – it was reserved only for Aryans, and Poles are Slavic. Secondly, they were victims too. The country was divided and fought over by Hitler and Stalin, the government was in exile, and Poles themselves were deported and imprisoned. Around the camp 5000 people were displaced as punishment for helping an early Auschwitz escapee. They were sent away, and their houses dismantled (the SS then used the bricks to build Birkenau).

Still, I suspect the history of Poles and Jews from that period is more complex than any one representation might capture.

Written for the most part 10/17, posted 10/18.

In Krakow I decided to have Chinese food for dinner. Or at least the Polish approximation of Chinese food... After dinner I went back to the train station to catch my night train back to Germany. And that's when things got annoying. The trip up until that point had worked out really well: trains were caught, hotels found, destinations visited, weather fine (true it rained a bit in Auschwitz, but the gloom was sort of fitting).

But now, at my train, the conductor seemed to be saying that my ticket was not good. Well, not that it was no good, but that it didn't cover the part of the journey from Krakow to the German border. Um, yes it does, I fruitlessly argued. I showed him the itinerary that the Deutsche Bahn agent in Hamburg had printed out for me, where we discussed that I needed a train from Hamburg to Warsaw (having transferred in Hannover), Warsaw to Suwalki, Suwalki to Warsaw, Warsaw to Krakow, and Krakow to Hamburg with a change in Berlin. I could demonstrate that it was the intent of both parties – me to purchase, and her to sell me, a ticket valid for that itinerary. But no dice. I asked him to infer that it would have made no sense at all for me to have a ticket with a huge hole in it – why would I have bought a ticket that covered almost the entire loop but not all of it? Especially since there was no need to buy the Suwalki parts in Germany – it was the international parts that were most important to purchase earlier. But no dice there either, and in fact he said I was lucky they let me travel from Warsaw to Krakow because he didn't think the ticket was good for that part either.

European train tickets are a bit opaque. The way it generally works is that you buy a ticket that covers traveling the distance, but not a specific seat. For a specific seat you make a reservation. For a seated train it's usually a nominal cost, and has the advantage of meaning you get a seat no matter how crowded the train. For some trains though reservations are optional, for others mandatory, and for others they aren't possible at all. For a night train they are mandatory, at least if you want a bed, because you have to pay extra for that. So I had my couchette all reserved and paid for, that part was no problem. Yet still he was telling me that, though the agent had sold me a couchette, she had not remembered to sell me a ticket?

The complication was twofold: that it had been a complicated itinerary, and that it had been significantly discounted based on German rail promotions. The problem with the former is that the conductor couldn't figure out from what was written on the ticket that it covered this particular train. He said it didn't, and compared it to another ticket which had different markings on it. I can't account for the different markings, but I still insist my ticket was valid. But he further didn't believe it was because the ticket was cheaper than he thought it should be. I tried explaining the promotions involved, but no luck there either. In the end, the only way I was going to get to take the train was to buy another ticket from him. I scrounged 15 euros and 7 zloty and got on with my journey.

You may be asking yourself, I can tell, what language did this conversation take place in? The answer is Polish, a language I don't speak. Fortunately, a girl had come upon me and offered to translate. She was very nice and very insistent in making my arguments to the conductor. The whole thing stretched about an hour (we continued once the train was moving) and she was very persistent, but in the end the argument was lost.

Upon arriving in Berlin I had two hours to spend, so I tried complaining to Deutsche Bahn. But they told me to wait until Hamburg since I still needed the ticket for the last part of the trip. Instead I went to Alexanderplatz, a place I recognized being in about 9 years ago. It looks different now, with all the construction they've done. If it weren't for the TV tower I might not have recognized it.

Meanwhile, back at Berlin Ostbahnhof, I made what I thought was an incredible discovery: Dunkin Donuts. And not just Dunkin Donuts, but chocolate creme filled, which I can't even reliably find in the US, not even in Boston where there's a Dunkin Donuts every 50 feet...

The rest of the journey back was uneventful, and back at the station in Hamburg where I'd bought my ticket I went in to complain about the problem. The woman said the ticket should have been valid, and couldn't explain why the conductor didn't accept it. We filled out a form and it will go to Berlin, where perhaps they will decide to refund my 17 euros. I'll believe it when I see it, but that's not really the operative detail here. What is important is that I EXPLAINED THE WHOLE THING IN GERMAN!!!! And she understood!

I had been worried, before my trip, that going somewhere with a different language was just going to confuse me. But it seems instead to have loosened up the inner-workings of my brain and made the German possible. Being in Poland and only knowing about seven words of Polish (all of which I learned while there) contrasted mightily with being in Germany where I am vastly more literate, and can speak entire sentences. So I think my trip was a good thing for my German language skills and didn't confuse me at all.

Attending my French course immediately upon arrival, however...

I went away this weekend and just got back yesterday. I blogged regularly during that time, however. Except not online, but in a notebook. I came back with about 30 handwritten pages that I just typed up for posting. I have adjusted the dates for when they were written.

For the best effect, start reading here and work forward.

Because of the way the term works at Bucerius, this week most of the international students had final exams. I had one for intellectual property on Wednesday and one on torts today.

They were not quite what I expected. Potentially easier, vastly easier, which in their own way made them harder. I mean, on a hard test I should have been able to have kicked ass on intellectual property. With the exception of trademarks, which is new for me, I knew all the patent and copyright stuff - including actual statutes, policy goals, and normative arguments pros and cons. I was even holding review sessions before the exam, and there wasn't a single question I couldn't give a good answer to. And yet I still might get a B on the damn thing, just because one of the few bits of information the test asked for wasn't in my notes (I seem to have been missing a trademark slide, which I gather contained the specific answer to the question), and perhaps also because I knew too much. It was hard to parse through all the law in my head and only write down the bits that had been gone over in this class. I kept bringing in more knowledge, and it left me confused because it didn't play so well with the superficiality of the new stuff.

I'm less worried about today's tort exam, but that's because I feel very satisfied with my essays. I don't know if the professor's gonna like them, but he should... In fact, I think they would have made suitable blog posts (and if I ever get them back I may very well post them). It was funny, even, because when I was studying for the test I had been thinking about writing a blog essay on the very subject I got asked. So that was convenient... But the whole thing was still weird: both essays I wrote were normative, and none of the questions (even the ones I didn't need to answer) actually asked about the nuance of the various tort systems we learned about. Perhaps at some point I'll blog about them, just so that knowledge doesn't go to waste...

Anyway, it's stupid things like this that remind me that law school grades are the stupidest basis to judge a person. How can people keep believing that they are in any way precise measures of anything about a person worth measuring?

This coming week most of the international students will be gone. Many are going on the school-arranged trip to Berlin. Others have gone to other places. I'm staying here, somewhat purposefully and somewhat because I failed to plan any excursions in advance. Part of me is pleased with this turn of events because with any luck I'll be able to get a leg up on all sorts of neglected projects. And part of me is feeling left out because, well, I left myself out. So it's pretty much a grass-is-greener kind of thing, that no matter what I do this week, I'll want to be doing something else.

And I am feeling pretty blah already. I'm in the kind of mood where all I want to do is take a bubble bath and watch TV. (Unfortunately, I have neither a bathtub nor a TV, which pretty much ruins that plan.) Yesterday there was a Halloween party, but despite my best efforts, my incredibly clever costume idea went highly unappreciated. (It's so clever that I'm not going to blog about it, just in case I ever get the occasion to try it again.) Also, against my best intentions and/or better judgment, I've been sucked into the high school aspect of law school social life and that's going to make the near future annoying and unpleasant. And then on top of all that, I was supposed to play soccer today but the league I was to play in (with the school's men's soccer team) won't let women play. So the week off's begun with an auspicious start.

Things can only get better from here, right?

Written at home on Saturday, posted at school on Sunday.

At both Neuengamme and Auschwitz last week it was pointed out that the Soviet prisoners of war were treated just like the other prisoners in the camps. In other words, inhumanely, subject to deplorable conditions and executions. Whereas POWs from other countries were housed in regular POW prison camps. Which is not to say that they were spectacular, but they at least nominally were in compliance with the Geneva Convention, which the other countries had signed.

But not, apparently, the Soviet Union, which seems to be why the Nazis took such liberties with the incarcerations of the Soviet POWs it captured.

In a modern context it raises the concern any soldier should have if fighting for a country that doesn't abide by the convention's terms. Whether because it didn't ratify it outright, or because it gets a reputation for not obeying it.

Edited 10/24.

I almost titled my "Crummy Week(end)" post as "Crappiness begets crappiness?" fearing a "when it rains it pours" future in store for me.

Alas, my instincts may have been correct, as this is turning out to be the type of week where I'm wondering if I've been teleported to another planet, one that looks exactly like Earth except that the local beings are all really weird. And by weird I mean "judgmental," "hostile," and "inclined to hold me to unrealistic expectations of perfection." Because I've already had several strange encounters that have left me agog, and I fear I'm not yet out of the woods...

On the other hand, it's been more of a polarized week so far than a uniformly bad week. In addition to the unpleasant strangeness, there's also been a few particularly good things. For instance, I had a nice time last night with a friend of mine watching Huey Lewis and the News videos for 5 hours. Never underestimate the therapeutic value of HLN music... Plus it was nice to spend time with a friend who is old enough to actually remember the 1980s - and all of them... My friends at school here are very nice, and mature in their own way, but with most of them being 21-22, hanging out with them I'm constantly having flashbacks to the inherent adolescence of my undergraduate years. Much as I loved my school and overall had a good education and nice four years, it's not a period that I particularly care to relive. And yet here I am...

Edit: And could people PLEASE stop hitting me in the head!!! I know I'm a foot shorter than everyone else, but that's no excuse to wave your elbows around wildly. I only finally just got my jaw realigned from the last time I got whacked...

Apparently, despite an avalanche of negative feedback with respect to security and privacy concerns, the Bush administration has decided to insist that all US passports issued as of 2006 be implanted with RFID chips.

RFID chips are little radio transmitters that can be detected without the passport being placed in direct contact with a detecting device. Other people, including other nefarious people, can detect the transmissions. Your transmissions. From one of your most important citizenship documents.

Supposedly the passports will provide some mitigation to the dangers of being intercepted. But I am not comforted - I am inclined to think these measures will be insufficient, and that in general this is a path down which we should not be travelling. I'm all for making passports unforgeable, but that's not what this is about. This is about tracking people, and, like most such efforts, is so enthusiastic about being able to track people in new and exciting ways that it turns a blind eye to any of the problems such tracking happens to cause.

In the meantime, to avoid having a RFID-"enabled" passport, I think you can renew your current passport now, even if it hasn't expired. (I'd renewed last time when I still had a year left since it was a year I wasn't travelling abroad and didn't need it for a while. It's getting harder and harder for me to find an occasion when this is true...) Also, if you're running out of space in your passport, you can have pages added. The easiest way to do this, in my experience, is to go to a US consulate abroad and they can do it for you while you wait.

Interestingly, getting pages added is a remarkably straightforward and paper-based endeavor. They have a little booklet that they tape into the center, and then they use an engraver to emboss an official seal on it indicating that it is a valid extension to the passport of this particular number. No silicon chips, no power cords, just paper, tape, ink, and an engraver that pinches paper into a design.

Edit 10/27: In case you are saying to yourself, well, I don't travel abroad and don't need a passport, bear in mind your driver's license will have one of these things by 2008. Read more about it, and be very alarmed.

Perhaps part of my distemper resulted from my not having ridden my bike in a while. It, being the piece of crap that it is, was broken yet again.

One of its larger problems is that it lacks a kickstand, and as a result it tips over a lot. And every time it does, something breaks. This last time it was the rear lamp. But the other problem, the more serious one as far as I was concerned, is that the little pulley that put tension in the cable running from the gear shifter to the derailleur had popped off, and consequently the bike was now stuck in the hardest gear. Having now experienced the joys of riding a bike in something other than the hardest gear, I found this change most unwelcome and thus avoided riding the bike.

Finally, though, I got around to fixing it today. I went back to the university bike shop, now with enough German to be able to ask my questions with some competence, and got a new pulley. Someone helped me put it on and made it so the gears all now work. Or so it would seem so far... The bike is currently in second gear, which is generally usable around the fairly flat city, but in any case I'm planning to make do with it. It was the last time, when I greedily tried to ride in first gear up the hill to my apartment, that my troubles began and the pulley popped off. So rather than tempt fate, I think I'll content myself with second gear for the duration.

I also got a new rear lamp, although I decided against getting a kickstand. I had seriously considered getting a kickstand: normally it's not worth the extra weight (the bike already weighs 1.8 tons) but it might keep things from breaking further if it could keep the bike from falling over. On the other hand, I'm tired of putting money into a bike that I'll only use for another month and a half. I could put a lot of money in and it would not cease to be a piece of crap, so I think I'll save myself the grief.

But on the upside, today is a gorgeous day and it was nice to get to ride around for a change. Back at school I am now sitting outside in the fresh air as I write this, which is very nice except that lots of bugs for some reason seem to be inclined to land on my computer. And the last thing I want at this point is a buggy computer...

What with it being Thursday, last night there was a party...

It was the school Halloween party. Held at the St. Pauli clubhouse, like the last one was, it was well-decorated with the orange and black spooky motif. I was impressed, since Halloween is not nearly as entrenched in Europe as it is in the US. But people largely got into it and most showed up in costume. For my part, I bought some white first-aid adhesive tape and taped "bones" onto a black shirt and pants. Then I got some bandages, stained them with red nailpolish, and tied them around my neck and wrists, since those parts were obviously not flayed.

On the other hand, it's a little weird seeing Halloween and all its ghoulishness become popular around here. In the US its ambience is sort of a form of fictional escapism. The horrors that we imagine and decorate ourselves and our houses with have rarely been seen on America's shores. But in Europe, with its plentiful history of torture, war, and disease, it all seems a bit too real to celebrate.

I'm working on three major projects for my journal, and I've gotten myself involved with the Bucerius Vis Moot Court team. Free cycles? Not in the forseeable future...

Which of course means that I'll be blogging incessantly...

(Actually, it does help keep the wheels lubricated. Particularly when I need to write a lot it helps me get warmed up. Less clear is if it also helps when I just have a lot of reading to do, but I certainly can pretend it does...)

But despite the intellectual onslaught, it's all good. The moot court thing is interesting, in particular because it epitomizes a true international law student exchange as I bring my American sense of jurisprudence to my teammates and their German/Continental one. It will make our joint efforts particularly enlightening for all involved. It also means I'll end up knowing a lot more about the Vienna Convention for the International Sale of Goods and conflict of laws doctrine than I ever have before...

The journal projects will also keep me hopping as well. Among them I'm still working on pulling together the colloquium, and I'm an article editor now with an actual article to edit.

So the next few(?) weeks will be really intense. (New classes start next week too.) But that's ok - all of this is what I came to law school for.

I stayed late in the law school library last night. It's unusual for me, since I'm not really a study-at-the-library person. But with the aforementioned truckloads of work to do, and no Internet connectivity at home, it seemed like a good plan.

Although it was really weird, because people kept strolling through the library all evening. Like at 10:50pm, there would be these grown-ups with small children just meandering on through. I suppose there was a reason for that, but I wasn't informed... Although interesting how in Hamburg, the Bucerius library is apparently THE place to be on a Saturday night.

Then last night I finally got my wish, to live on a planet with more hours in its day. Because with the clocks getting pushed back last night, that's what happened. I didn't even need to move to Mars to do it, although with it's particular proximity last night it would have been easier to do than normal. I walked out of school just a bit past 11 and was immediately struck by the large, red spot in the sky. I waved to the Martians (I'm sure they could see me...)

But sadly, my extra hour seems to have gone to waste. Here I am in the library, yet Lexis Nexis, which I really need RIGHT NOW for BOTH things I need to do today, is down. Um, people? Your timing is NOT convenient... Westlaw is alive, apparently, but I stopped using it last year when I kept getting kicked off of it, and now they've changed their interface and I can't find what I need. Argh...

Edit: Lexis lives. Perhaps they thought the wee-hours of Sunday morning would be a good time for system maintenance? Bastards. Did they not think about all those law students in Europe who would be up at that hour, desperate to do some legal research???

Also on edit: This entire post may be a complete waste of... um... paper? Bits? Electrons? I think I just wrote it because I really wanted to use the phrase "blinded by Mars." You must understand, my life these days is currently one of such distinction where being able to allude to celestial incapacitation is quite the high point.

This picture provides an interesting snapshot into my personality.

My sister and I were given pumpkins to decorate with markers (PERMANENT markers, even! None of the washable Crayola ones for this job!). So I divided my pumpkin up into a lot of slices so that I could draw a lot of different faces, and not have to pick just one.

How little has changed in 26 years... My life is a lot like that pumpkin, sliced up into a bunch of pieces so I can experience everything and not have to pick just one thing to focus on.

I do remember though that some of the slices were a bit cramped. It was hard to properly draw the desired expression in the space I'd allotted myself. And fast-forward to today, I wonder if sometimes I haven't over-extended myself, so that my quest to taste everything doesn't undermine my ability to fully enjoy any of the things I experience.

But this is just a matter of balance. It is an essential truth about me that I am always like that pumpkin-decorator. And the life I decorate now is just like my pumpkin from kindergarten: well-rounded, and multi-faceted...