Barbarossa

Nichtlustig

2008-05-23T08:01:00.001-07:00

On the board: names for our new product
Honey 8
Bee-slobber 1

Man: Clearly, no one values honesty here!

Really Finished!

2008-05-19T21:55:00.000-07:00

So I actually finished all the first year law work! The paper I wrote ended up being a bit like this:

If you don't know the number it is about a con man tricking a town into buying band instruments by convincing them that the opening of a pool hall will turn all their kids into hoodlums (i.e. quick get your kids into a band and off the streets1). I basically tried to do the same thing , i.e. try and sell my paper by telling everyone the federal agency involved was the devil.

I am proud of my work and feel my transformation into a used car salesman is complete (i.e. first year is done and all my pesky moral qualms are gone too).

So Close and Yet So Far!

2008-05-17T22:11:00.000-07:00

As mentioned below I am done with exams, but the academic year for first year law students is not quite over. Yes, first we all get to scramble to write what amounts to about a sixteen page paper in two days. Oh, and it is based on a 58 page packet of cases we get on that day. Did I mention none of this is technically for fun? Yes, based on these papers the editorial board for the law journals will be chosen, an honor we have all been brainwashed into thinking we secretly want since day one.

Now, I always have a bit more trouble sorting through cases with no human parties and just a lot of regulations that seem to have borrowed the devil's Dewey Decimal system to come up with their names. Yes, I do best when parties are human (ok I am holding out for mythical beasts, but none of those yet) and when there is a comprehensible story or at least some human elements involved for better or worse. So image the joyed I was filled with after receiving my question packet from an overly chipper helper and discovered that our question was on banking regulations. Awesome! Nothing like 50 plus pages of banking regulations you have to read and then come up with new and exciting views on them. Now, I may be as pigmentless as the monopoly man one day, but that does not mean federal banking regulation will ever occupy a warm place in my heart.

So just as I though I was out the door the icy hand of the law grabbed my ankle and pulled me back in. Accordingly, the monsoon weather we had on my free day was traded for fun in the sun weather when I had to lock myself inside and attempt to do handstand as an attempt to better understand what I was reading.

Did I mention that the reward for this is getting to argue for a year about other peoples citations? Seriously, I would accept a handful of beans. It would be a better offer. Then I would climb up mine bean stalk to the the land of the giants where all would hopefully live in a land of blessed anarchy and anyone who mentioned the law would be given in intimate role in the provision of bread for the entire giant community. And on that blissful not I shall drift off into sweet, sweet sleep.

Praise Be!

2008-05-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

First year of law school is done!

I seriously cannot believe it

Maybe in a few days time I will have some insight

you know,

other than law school,

don't do it.

Oh, I don't dislike Hillary THAT much

2008-05-11T18:21:00.000-07:00

Remember when I used to have words on this here blog? Or things about me? Maybe those will return once I finish exams tomorrow and have life again/words to spare.

Um, Yeah

2008-05-10T23:16:00.000-07:00

If you ever wanted a ghetto summary of the Die Hard movies in Russian and set to music and then marketed as a hip hop hit...

And yes, this is one of Ukraine's most popular groups

Clearly I am studying civil procedure.

Dragons vs. Robots

2008-05-09T23:49:00.000-07:00

Vs.

II

(WTF?)

In Other Presidential News...

2008-05-08T22:45:00.000-07:00

And Just because...

"Senator Barack Obama has caught the imagination of the British public across the board. He is both known and seen as fresh and exciting. Nearly a half of all voters (48 per cent), and the same proportion of men and women, and of Labour and Tory voters, prefer Senator Obama."

"This meanwhile is a disadvantage for Barack Obama. All those Americans who care deeply what the Brits think will be voting for him anyway and the enthusiasm of foreigners - even British foreigners - will only add to suspicions that he is not the heartland candidate."

We are a bit touchy about that whole Revolutionary War thing. Maybe if they had burned down the White House under a less popular president?

New Guy in Town

2008-05-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

Dmitry Medvedev was sworn in as the President of Russia today. The role of religion in the ceremony seems to be much more than prominent than it has been in the past (but I could just be looking for it more intently this time after reading this article). Still they managed to find a group of people who knew the non-Soviet lyrics of the national anthem so that was impressive.

The video above, among other things, shows Medvedev being sworn in (does it say anything that he is not given the book by anyone and it is not being held by anyone? Seems a bit like Napoleon crowning himself). A big part of the oath that they show was up holding human rights. This cartoon parodies that:

Medvedev: the most important values are human rights and freedom
Putin: [thinking] what was that now?

Now for fun, compare and contrast the video with the video below of the (re)inaugeration of the President of Kazakhstan:

I can sing that anthem!

Hilarity

2008-05-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

This one is all Edward and is brilliant:

And a Kids in the Hall sketch I cannot rationally explain liking so much:

Under the Sea

2008-05-06T10:05:00.000-07:00

Oh man, I really could not believe this. So apparently because subway service in New York is too regular New York is willing to give away older subway cars. This has inspired a number of odder projects. Delaware decided to use its subway cars to make an artificial coral reef:

I guess this is why you really want to make sure you get off when it is the last stop

Studying for Property

2008-05-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

Preparing for my property exam involves going back over a lot of very funny situations. Oh sure, we have plenty cases where there are just angry neighbors in a cookie-cutter suburb, but oh there is so much more.

Here's a list of some of the better ones:

1. Angry neighbors...who live next to a racetrack
2. Developers who build a dung heap (sexy right?)
3. It is WWII, in the middle of an air raid in London an expensive broach falls from somewhere in a house, a soldier finds it, but it is not from the house, who keeps it? Apparently that division of German fighters got confused and was dropping priceless heirlooms.
4. Whaling and the Provincetown mafia.
5. Rivers fickley changing and stealing part of states territory.
6. It's my body, I own it, so why won't you let me sell bits of it?
7. I have this lovely home how can the government even think of taking it away? So cruel, and to think I would lose my view of the HUGE sewage plant.
8. I know lets build a huge skyscraper on top of Grand Central, fortunately this is the 70s so a t least it will be pretty.
9. I don't like you, you nouveau rich bastard, having a fox hunt are you? Oh, did I just kill your fox mid hunt? What?

Nichtlustig

2008-05-06T00:27:00.000-07:00

TV: penguins mate only once and then stay together for lifetime...

Ha!

2008-05-06T00:05:00.000-07:00

I was brushing up on my English slang the other day mainly using wikipedia. I was listening to a lot of slangy British music and though I remembered most of it from my time in Brighton it was fun to get dry dictionary definitions for the stuff.

One of the words was Chav, which in Brighton we usually called townies. Wikipedia had this illustration:

Personally I like this one:

Anyway, a bit of research led me to a certain Welsh rap group and this amazing music video:

Nichtlustig

2008-05-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

* I REALLY like this one

Goings On

2008-05-05T23:41:00.001-07:00

Not too long ago I applied for a job with Human Rights Watch in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. If I get it I will take it.

I would really love to go for a number of reasons. For one, it has been really tough for me being separated from my passion (the former Soviet Union). Granted it is not as if I haven't done anything related to it: I have been taking Russian classes, reading quite a bit in branching into legal topics, going to Brighton Beach, and unwittingly going to multiple Russian Speaking Uzbek Jewish barbers. None the less, for something at the center of my academic interests and that I want to be at the center of my professional life. What kind of professional life? I have no idea, but I am looking for something to push me and force me to use the skills I have and to push me.

Of course, there is also the fact that I miss being abroad in general, and Central Asia in particular. I have to admit I would be very excited to be using my Russian on a daily basis again and to learn Uzbek. After law school I also have to admit that the idea of working a 9-5 is also extremely appealing. I could start to sing again and learn Uzbek songs! In addition to just generally being a bit more chill (though I think I have done pretty well as law students go). It will also come as a surprise to no one that I also find the history of Russia-dominated Uzbekistan fascinating.

So we'll see. What I am really looking for is a galvanizing experience. Uzbekistan is a country where human rights violations are quite prevalent and the position involves keeping track of the many political prisoners in addition to taking notes and trials. I have to admit that I do not think it would be an easy experience, but I think that is exactly what I need. If I continue with law school I really want to have a focus and to really know what I want to do and to have relevant work experience. Also I mean this would have to like tipple my street cred right? (Shh, no comments about multiples of zero)

Why I Support Barack Obama

2008-03-26T22:05:00.001-07:00

The long and short of this is that I want a president I can respect.

I respect Obama. First of all, I respect Obama intellecually. The intellectual respect is two-fold. On the one hand, I deeply respect Obama's personal struggle for identity. Like many Americans, Obama came from a background that kept him from being able to adopt a pre-packaged identity. Obama is black, but had little contact with his Kenyan father, was raised by his white family predominantly on Hawaii, a place with a very different race dynamic from the rest of the United States. When Obama's mother moved from Hawaii to Indonesia, Obama chose to stay in the United States and later to root himself in and marry into Chicago's African American community. Obama had a long struggle for identity and eventually chose to connect with the African American community, and focused much of his early professional life serving that community. I respect him for seriously struggling with his identity and putting down strong roots.

The section aspect of intellectual respect is academic. As a graduate of Columbia College and Harvard Law, Obama attended some of countries finest academic institutions. He shows intellectual curiosity, a skill and comfortability with complexity, and a preparedness to struggle with questions (such as race) which need to be addressed but for which no answer can be claimed to exist. Obama has a top class mind and has spent the time and energy to refine it.

I also respect Obama for being a self-made man. Though he did not grow up in poverty, no one can claim that Obama belonged to the American elite. He has has not had family connections to fall back on for political success, but rather has had to rely on his own successes and merits. I have to admit I am none to eager to have the Clinton dynasty simply alternate with the Bush dynsaty, and the prospect of someone like Obama who has built his own name and doesn't simply rely on Napolean III - type fame excites me.

Finally, I respect Obama because all of the politicians I have heard speak he is the one I find most truthful. I have no allusions, politicians are not in the business of honesty and transparency, but a personal voice matters to me. With Hillary I usually think to myself that she has excellent staff and speech writers and then wonder what she really believes. Obama's willingness to make impromptu statements and express opinions (contrary to general American political style) impresses me.

Those are the reasons I respect Obama as a person.

For me, Obama also represents the type of America I want to live in. Obama has an internationalist perspective and a willingness to address and try and include all ethnic groups in American political life. I want a more inclusive America. I want an America where a black man can be president and people realize that is no better or worse if a white man were president, but that it depends on the person. Particularly following the Bush administration that seemed to represent an old white America plagued by corruption and nepotism, I want a young president who comes from a diverse background and want to improve the country, rather than the position of a select few in that country.

Mini Wall of Shame

2008-03-24T21:02:00.001-07:00

Bad, bad boys.

Places in time II

2008-03-20T21:46:00.000-07:00

New York

New York is a special place for me. It where I was born, but not raised, and it is home. In many ways New York is the only place I make any sense.

Ethnically I am a weird white mix: Catholic Northern Irish, Western Ukrainian, Swiss Italian, and Italian (Sicilian/Genoan/Roman). As it break down with me, I look and come off most Irish to people, I feel the most Italian (very much raised in the (non-guido) Italian-American subculture, and I am probably most fascinated by my Ukrainian roots.

The only things all those groups have in common is that they all came to New York at the turn of the last century. The Irish, Italians, and Ukrainians continue to have strong communities in New York. I feel at home with all of them, but particularly with the mixture.

Besides going to college in New York, I grew up with stories, stories about the ethnic neighborhoods. My grandfather's story about how Lucky Luciano attended his uncle's funeral, stories about the neighborhoods that used to be Irish and where they all moved once they got money from the GI Bill, how my parents and grandparent were always told to never take anything from mafia types, and how almost all of the Swiss Italians left New York almost immediately upon arriving for the warmer climate of Southern California. There were also the many, many stories about the great depression (prohibition was funnier) because of which I think my parents essentially consider themselves depression children.

Anyway, New York has never been just a city for me. It has been a story intimately tied to my family. I went to the same college my grandfather did, I live not far from where my grandparents did when they were first setting up, and most of the trendier parts of lower Manhattan are where we used to have a number of relatives. Obviously the city has changed so much I certainly don't feel like I am just rehashing the past, but as I walk around I do feel a real connection, not always sentimental, but a sense of belonging. I feel very at home in the Irish, Italian, and Ukrainian areas. Italian-American food is American food for me. Talkative Irish men all remind me of my grandfather and myself. The Ukrainians instantly remind me of my grandmother and the pictures of her family and church (the food also hits a tender note of home).

Now of course I am also and assimilated New Yorker. I can be quite pushy, I complain, and I am not much of one for beating around the bush. But with my friends here and New York being the center of most of the stories of my childhood, New York is my past and present. It is also a place where almost never feel out of place. But again it is very much the mix of it all that makes me feel at home. Here the table are turned. In New York the born Americans are more often than not the foreigners as are the people only emerging from one culture, as opposed to those who emerged from the tangled web of differing, tangled, and sometimes frictional cultures.

Nichtlustig

2008-03-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

First sign: Careful! I bite! (German equivalent of "beware of dog")
Second sign: and apparently I can write.
Third sign: Hey, I can write!
Fourth sign: Then I can read too.

Tired

2008-03-20T15:31:00.000-07:00

I can't really seem to get over my exhaustion. I was feeling extremely burnt out going into spring break, and despite some really fun relaxing moments with friends I have yet to feel refreshed (all the work I have had to do over break hasn't helped either). I have found myself staying in a couple of nights to literally do nothing (really out of character) and I have even been too tired to exercise, which is really frustrating (the type where even if I could drag myself to the gym my body still wouldn't be able to do much).

I have a good amount of work ahead of me so this worries me. More likely than not at least part of it is psychological. Classes have become monotonous and the only thing to look forward to are the exams, which really isn't much to look forward to at all.

I suppose it is probably part of something larger (I have been feeling a quite profound wanderlust lately as well). Hopefully I will be doing something profoundly exciting and different over the summer, but at the moment with the often gray days and seemingly endless stream of cases and work it is a bit hard to work through.

I do try and figure out what this stuff says about me sometimes. I know for work I will need something challenging, but I also like things that come in cycles: really intense and calm again. I can't really take the long intense burn. I am the type that has always run up mountains rather than walked, or sprinted if I was going to jog. If I am going to get tired I'd rather it happen quickly and get it done.

Nichtlustig

2008-03-17T22:03:00.001-07:00

Mailman: It would have hurt less if he had just bitten me.
Dog: Your mother never really loved you!

Growing

2008-03-17T20:54:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated for a little while now so this is going to be another catch all post.

I am learning an awful lot these days. Admittedly, that is a very new agey sort of thing to say, but all I can promise you that my inner child has been left well alone and my crystal collection remains, well, nonexistent.

I suppose what I mean is that I am learning what is important to me (versus what I think is important for me). Some things remain constant: languages continue to really capture my intellectual interest, doing improv continues to be when I feel most alive, and I continue to be driven by a desire to connect with my different roots (had a really great moment with Alexia over the weekend in a tiny cafeteria in the east village serving mainly church-going Ukrainians; the pirogies were much better than what I have had in restaurants here and I was very happy to use the Ukrainian I knew). I have reaffirmed some newer things as well, such as the fact that while I value hard work and do always work as hard as I can, I am not a workaholic and do not desire to be one. I just don't think it is healthy, and seeing more and more workaholic lawyers and law students preparing for themselves for that those positions, I can only say I do not think it is healthy and takes its toll on your personal life and breadth as a person. So I continue to try and balance law school and normalcy.

I have also learned that I can't be in a relationship if I don't think it is for the long term. Though I have always been adverse to relationships when I am not in a place for very long, I mainly mean it in the sense that I am unable to stay in a relationship that is comfy when I realize I am not getting the fulfillment I need in the long run. I am a big picture person and for better worse if I know there is hard work to be done I would rather get started on it today. In terms of relationships that means I'd rather get back to searching rather than stay with what I have, but ultimately am unsatisfied by.

Other than that not sure there is much else to tell. Continue to struggle a bit with being dyslexic in a field that is extremely detail oriented and finicky. My own fault really and I don't regret it though it poses frustrating challenges at times.

Generally, I have felt rather burnt out as of later. Been thinking about running away to New Caledonia. If you consider the pile of dirty laundry in the corner a suitcase you could say I have a suitcase packed and I am ready to go at any moment.

Notes:
- The subway continues to be the best free show in the entire city with Crazy people saying 'hi' and flipping out remain remarkably similar. I am thinking of a scene in Queens when a woman on the platform saw a guy she knew in a subway car. As the doors were closing she dove through blocking them. She didn't get in the train (she just stayed stuck between the doors), but proceeded to have a weird discussion with the guy she knew on the subway in which both tried to pass the buck of calling the other. It ended with the woman yelling "I'm gonna find you, I'm gonna find you!" See, she wasn't really crazy but seemed like she could break you that's what made it scary.
- I am on an ethnic neighborhoods/locals kick which I am quite enjoying. In addition to my further adventures in Little Ukraine, it has involved the Czech beer garden in Astoria (amazing kielbasa!), a great Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights, and a number of rather authentic Belgian and German beer gardens. Next on the list: Little Poland, Irish part of Queens, and the Central Asian part of Queens.
- Cranes. I am supposed to be watching for them now according to my mother.
- Can China please be nice to Tibet? Okay, maybe this is a hippie post. Look it took me a long time to overcome my dislike of Richard Gear and get behind Tibet, but I did, and well I like the Dali Lama and am none too fond of China's attacks on Tibetan language and culture.
- I continue to be impressed by cute female friends ability to smile and get free stuff. Six foot tall (randomly bearded) men can be cute too right? Right? No, it's okay I know people would only give me free stuff if they thought I was about to rob them.
- I really want to see Candide at City Opera next month. Interested?
-Question: guys in your early 20s, do you get called 'sir' a lot? I do. Is it my fake-Britishness or just the scariness factor?
-The computer monitors in the L train almost make me think I am in a European metro/U-Bahn. Almost.
-Oh, Spitzer, I nearly forgot. Wow, right? These are the kinds of people who perfect scores on the LSAT. . .

Out and About

2008-03-02T20:39:00.001-08:00

I am officially post-brief (well I have been for a little while now, but after all that writing the last thing I wanted to do was, well, write). The great things was that the brief was due on a Monday so after conned out of a weekend I then had a full week of normal law school. Still the weekend came around and fist full of pirogies (though for me good ones will forever be "pedeha") and a few German and Belgian beers later my semblance of humanity has returned.

*Note: it does amused me that I basically get to responses to these sort of whiny law school posts. From my fellow las students something along the lines of yeah it sucks, I had forgotten normal people don't do that stuff. Then from my normal friends (Hu-Man-Z) it generally just solicits exclamations of "thank God I am not in law school" and "wow that sucks." I mainly still think law school is funny, a funny repository of neurotic and anal youth and age.

Not much else to tell at the moment really. Tomorrow I am waiting to hear back about a summer internship I would quite like (international law and abroad). Could very well not get it, which is fine since it isn't actually late to not know it is just the time when people start to freak out about that stuff so if not I will enter into my last round of applications.

Also I am pretty much giving up on trying to stay close with a lot of people from college. Coming back from Austria I foolishly thought I could reconnect with my whole college group and after many facebook invites that never received rsvps and other attempts I am done. I am quite happy with the people I see on a regular basis and will be happy to see other friends on the more haphazard basis that they pop up on.

And now some randomness:

1. I saw Nathan Lane on the street last Monday near Time Square. He looked very tired and though no one was paying any attention to him he ran to a taxi so as to avoid human contact as quickly as possible. The cabby seemed to recognize him and be pleased. I can't stand Nathan Lane.

2. So many Russian in New York and really everywhere. One very small example was me not going to a barber where Russian speakers from Central Asia work and ending up at another barber where Russian speakers from Central Asia work.

3. The L train is very spiffy with its computer screen and counters. Most other trains, still pretty ghetto.

4. The Jersey/Long Island overflow into the city is irksome and the cultural and fashion difference is impressively strong.

5. Kosovo, at some point I would like to do a post on this. I really think it has every right to be independent. There is a lot of talk about it being a dangerous precedent in international law for regions breaking away and becoming their own countries, but if the precedent is that if you government tries to ethnically cleanse the majority in your region you get a shot at being a government opposed to ethnic cleansing, I don't think it is that bad. Either way, NATO has been administering Kosovo for some time with a governor whose power and style was compared with the British Raj's. Time a democratically elected government took up the reigns.

6. Russia had its Presidential election. I'd like to do a post on that. It is all too clear who won and there was never any question of that.

7. Lily Allen is really impressing me with her musical talent as of late.

Entering Paper Land

2008-02-14T21:21:00.001-08:00

Going to be working on a large and rather important law school paper for the next week or so. Life is likely to start resembling the Dali painting above. Should be fun. Hopefully I should make it out the other side. See you then.

Oh Mao, Such a Kidder!

2008-02-13T15:13:00.000-08:00

So transcripts were recently released from a 1973 meeting between Henry Kissinger and Mao. As you can see from the picture above the two clearly enjoyed themselves. Apparently Mao was quite the jokester.

Specifically, he complained about there being so little trade between the US and China and said something along the lines of "I know! We have loads of women! Why don't you take 10,000 of them?" He later increased the offer to ten million, complaining that they have too many children. Later, he added they would flood the US with disaster. Closing with the observation that if the Soviet Union invaded China it would probably win since not enough Chinese women knew how to fight (something made evident by his surviving so long making these sort of comments).

To make things all the more wonderful, the interpreter passing on all this crazily sexist dictator humor and translating Kissinger's foghorn-like chuckle into Chinese was a woman. In the end, Kissinger, afraid of making Mao lose face, was able to to talk him down to 500 Chinese women, who as a result of new state gift policies were taken off and stored in a Raider's of the Lost Ark-like warehouse under the old executive building.

Chinese women, however, continue to haunt Mao to this day, specifically questioning his choice of the moo-moo as life-long fashion choice.

Places in Time I

2008-02-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

So this a new experimental series I am trying to start on places of significance to me. Not sure how interesting it will be or how long it will run, but here goes.

Between graduating high school and starting college I spent a year at an English boarding school in Brighton conveniently titled Brighton College. Oddly, my going was entirely self inflicted and did not involve any action on my part that horribly embarrassed my family and required me being shipped far away to learn some discipline before I could be trusted enough to go to college. No, instead I chose myself to apply to the English Speaking Union's secondary school exchange program and ended up being selected which provided me with a free year's worth of study and room and board at an English public school (the public schools in England having been the first and oldest and hence the term reffering to elitish private schools rather than schools that are actually open to everyone as it does in the US). Anyway, this was all very funny for the English because when they take a gap year, they tend to go to warm places with plenty of beach and do things that pass as community service, where I had chosen to go somewhere damp and of limited beaches to sit their exams.

On the whole I am not sure the year was a good one. It was one of a lot of growth and I wouldn't undo it for the world, but it was certainly a challenging one and I must admit that by in large I do find people from the south-east of England a bit hard to get on with if only for all of their indirectness. During that year however, I did have a fantastic opportunity to dive in German and theater to an extend I had never been able to before and it was then that I began to travel for the first time as well (quick list of countries visited: Ireland, Switzerland, Germany, France, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Norway, Latvia, and Estonia). It was also during that year that I had my first exposure to the EU and European politics, and ironically, because of my interests and love of continental Europe I was considered a European by or at least as some sort of expert by some of my classmates.

Perhaps the hardest barrier I experienced when in England though was the drinking culture. I am not much of a drinker and never have been. Coming straight out of a Christian school that openly preached the evils of any sort of alcohol and then going to England, however, was still more than a bit of a culture shock. Still there were elements I liked, English pubs are lovely and there is certainly always something to be said of buying a good friend a pint. Binge drinking is something, however, I am none to fond of and that was a feeling augmented at the few parties I went to when intoxicated people would come up to me and tell me what exactly they thought the problems were with America's foreign policy and how I was personally responsible (bit of a theme in my travels actually).

But back to the place. Brighton is lovely. One of the warmest places in England (i.e. not that warm and still a bit chilly and windy most of the time) and an old bathing town with some beautiful architecture and some hideous projects from the 60s and 70s mixed in. The beach is mainly for show as the water as both too cold and too rough for swimming. There is a great theater scene, loads of young artsy types, lots of cool shops (good comic book shop as well), and a giant clubbing scene I never took or wanted to take advantage of (partially because I had a 10 0'clocl curfew, we actually had role in the morning and evening, I remember there being a large bingo hall next door that was all jazzed up and which I thought was a movie theater, but was not). Brighton was my first city, not a big one (about 170,000 is memory serves), but is was the first one I had lived in and the first one I was really comfortable in. I grew a tremendous amount in Brighton, it was my first real slice of independence (my parents never even having been to the UK at that point) and taught me to balance things I didn't like (being forced to take more exams and in less time than other students because for some reason they though I would bring the school average up) with things I did (traveling, theater, public speaking [I made it to a semi-final!]).

I don't have many English friends from that time, though the few I do have mean an awful lot to me, on the whole my better friends were the other international students, in particular, and I know this will come as a huge surprise, the Eastern European students. To this day, I feel a particularly strong bond of loyalty to the other boys who were in my house (yes we had Harry Potter like houses) and with a school and host parents in the England whenever I go back it does have certain element of going home whenever I go to visit. And that is why Brighton is a place with a little extra bit of significance for me.

In the News

2008-02-06T22:52:00.001-08:00

Well, not in ours...

Pince Andrew made some remarks critical of Bush ten days before he is supposed to leave on a trade mission to the US. They have caused quite stir in the UK. Here are a couple of them:

"[There have been] occasions when people in the UK would wish that those in responsible positions in the US might listen and learn from our experiences."

"why didn't anyone listen to what was said and the advice that was given?" [in reference to Bush's (non-existent) post-war Iraq strategy]

Seriously though, this stuff caused a fuss? First of all, those are comments most Americans would agree with let alone Britons, a majority of whom never supported the war to begin with. The whole business is so painfully English. No one really disagrees with what he said, but is the principle of it so there has to be some sort of half-hearted uproar.

What is even better is how the government emphasized the impropriety of his actions:

"The remarks are not just unhelpful but the timing could not be much worse as the Super Tuesday primaries unfold."

That bit just seems to be pompously English to me. Now, I read British papers. They are quite well written and have a more international slant to them than American ones do. That being said, even if Andrew had said Hillary Clinton was a witch and he had seen her luring children into her candy house and gobble them up, I don not think it would have had the slightest effect on Super Tuesday. That is A.) because people who like Hillary know that about her already and think that is the sort of strong leadership America needs right now (if you don't already know my political leanings now would be a fun time to guess) and B.) because nobody in America cares what people outside the country think/say about our leaders or are even internationally oriented enough to notice something like this.

America's lack of real interest in the abroad does concern me, but those particular comments from the government source amused me because they make it sounds like the opinion of a minor British royal could have had a determinative effect on Super Duper Fat Tuesday and/or plunged the US into a civil war. Yes I know, figureheads are supposed to be neutral and the like, but really Andrew has a long ways to go if he is ever going to live up to his father's ability by just opening his mouth to blow diplomacy out of the water like an a-bomb going off in a kiddie pool (yes, I will miss him).

In recent memory, the only time I can remember people in the UK having an impact on a US election was the last presidential one when the Daily Mail was having readers write to undecided voters in Ohio to try and get them not to vote for Bush. The problem with that is that the list they had was not of undecided voters, but of people who hadn't voted recently. Now if there is one thing Americans like it is being told by their former colonial masters (sorry, but the revolution is still a big part if our national mythology) it is how to vote. Shockingly, a great many of the people who received the letters went to go and vote for Bush just because of the letters.

This concludes my observational rant.

Nichtlustig

2008-02-06T09:14:00.001-08:00

A
AAAAA
AAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAA
AAAAAHH!
My head!
what kind of
doctor
are you?

Pulling It Together

2008-02-05T09:11:00.001-08:00

I really need to get my shit together. Not in any crazy way, just there is a lot of stuff I need to be doing and I will only be able to do it all the way I need to if I throw myself into it full force. The problem is that I am just enjoying life so very much at the moment and I do not want to sacrifice that.

There is the basic stuff life law school reading, which I do enough of. But the thing is whenever I don't quite grasp something rather than leaving it for later I need to jump into it full force now not leaving it for later. so much of a law school exams is creating a store of knowledge that lets you share a vast amount of pertinent knowledge on the subject of the class. It is much easier to build up that store over time than to try and cram it full at the very end.

There are the more complicated and short term things. For example, the brief I have to write for my international legal writing class. The thing will be a monster. I have to defend a countries bombing of another under international law. I love the topic and feel pretty comfortable with international law, but I need to dive into the material and start writing. This is an important paper, but it is also what I will have to do oral arguments based on and what my Moot Court try out will be based on (Moot Court is a bit like a law school debate club, except it is very prestigious and something employers look for). It is likely I will never been in the very top of my class, by Moot Court is something I could do very well and I need to take advantage of that opportunity. I want to know the stuff in and out, I just need to make time for all the work.

Summer internship pressure has continued. As I am sick the fact that I have so far only received rejections hits a bit hard. Granted, that is not abnormal and I am applying for very particular stuff without a whole lot of specialization in my professional background. I will get something good, but for now it is something else tugging on my time strings as I wonder whether I should be using my time applying for more stuff.

For now some things have to go on the back burner. My improv class is wrapping up and as much as it pains me, I am going to have to take an improv hiatus for a while. French too after jumping back in the boat is going to have to go back on hiatus as I reallocate time. What is frustrating is yes, I could create and extremely detail and rigid schedule for myself that would allow me to do more or work more efficiently, but I don't work well with those. First, they do stress me the hell out, and second my body revolts against them. So I suppose I will continue working in my slap dash fashion where guilt continues to be a powerful motivator (i.e. groan, I can't believe I still haven't done that) while attempting to preserve some sort of a social life. Again, having one that I consider so rather pleasant makes it so very difficult to haphazardly chuck it overboard.

Lost My Voice

2008-02-04T20:40:00.001-08:00

Thanks to a sore throat followed by lots of yelling Friday (I'm sorry it was a bar and when I can't hear myself I start talking louder without even realizing it) I have all but lost my voice. Oh sure, I can still talk, but only for short bursts and in a rather muppet like fashion. Seriously though, when I hear myself talking I wonder when I have been smoking those four packs a day all of these years.

This has been going on three days now and it is quite frustrating. I like to talk. I like to think I like to share meaningful insight unlike a rambling valley girl unable to stop the deluge of her own voice once it gets going, but I also know I just tend to talk a lot. Very frustrating knowing that any loud background noise will wash out your ability to communicate, having a brilliant point in lecture (or thinking you do) and having to let it go because you just won't be able to communicate it, and having people leaning into you to hear what you are saying like you where their octogenarian grandmother.

I would say the whole experience has taught me know understanding and compassion for the mute, but I am pretty sure they are used to not talking, where I keep getting ready to say something and then remember "oh wait, I can't talk."

I really hope it does not take too long for my voice to come back, but this probably all some sort of ironic punishment for something I did or thought. Possibly being a little sad that this float got pulled from the Rio Carnival festivities.

Yes, it is a holocaust float that was supposed to feature at least one dancing/sambaing Hitler that the Viradouro school had hoped to enter. Offensive? Incredibly. Poor taste? I did mention that it was a DANCING Hitler on top of a float of holocaust victims right? Does that sort of float have any place in any sort of a tasteful or pc Carnival celebration? Of course not.

And that is just it. Carnival is not tasteful. Come on, people used to mock the bubonic plague by dressing up as corpses and undertakers and piling on corpse wagons in the middle of the worst days of the black death. Look at a Bruegel painting, they are insane. I do realize this post will probably bar me from any sort of public office of working with people. Ever. But, that being said I still completely agree that the Viradouro school has no taste as can be seen by their replacement float/dance idea which seems to be a samba homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger's tour de force as Mr. Freeze:

(for reference):

That has to be intentional right? Sick, sick Brazilians.

And just to prove that I have some notion of political correctness after all, here is the pic I chose not to lead this post with:

Remember, it is Carnival so offensive is festive!

Nichtlustig

2008-01-30T10:40:00.000-08:00

We meet again Sandman!

We both knew this night would come drool-on-pillow-man!

British Council

2008-01-21T22:32:00.000-08:00

This is getting closed down

because this guy

killed this guy
and this is how Russians feel about it

Explanation:

British Councils is an organization sponsored by the British government that promotes English-language learning through courses and access to books in its libraries. It has branches abroad (would be funny if there was one in the US) and much like the Goethe Institute which is subsidized by the German government and the Alliance Francaise which is subsidized by the French government, the British Council is subsidized by the British government.

The Russian government is forcing the all British Councils offices outside of Moscow to shutdown. Russian authorities have been giving various reasons for this, the most amusing and simultaneously most ridiculous is that they are centers for British spies in Russia. That is a laugh, something the British papers are quick to point out. I have seen these places. They have some books and really just try and help people to learn a but of English at a subsidized rate. To be sure there are British spies in Russian, and rightly so, but they sure as hell aren't wasting their time in the British Council branches, just as I am sure the Russian spies in the UK don't go to too many Russian cultural events.

Basically, what is going on is part of an ongoing British-Russian feud centered around Litvinenko poisoning (pictured in his hospital gown above). To make a very long story short, Litvinenko was a former KGB agent who was poisoned with radioactive polonium. He died in the UK and had been living there before being poisoned. The Brits sent a team over to Moscow to investigate and came up with the fellow they believed to be responsible, Andrei Lugovoi (blond guy above). The Russian refused to extradite him and he was later voted into the Russian parliament , giving him immunity from prosecution.

In a tit-for-tat response, some more minor Russian diplomats were expelled from the UK last summer and things have been simmering since then. The latest element of that was the forced closure of the British Council offices outside of Moscow (most likely so the foreign ministers kids can keep going to language class), on preposterous grounds. The British government has been quite resilient, lambasting the Russian authorities and so far refusing to shut those offices claiming the claims against them are baseless and any attempt by the Russian to close those offices would violate international law (not so sure about that one, but sounds good).

Anyway, essentially banning the British Council puts Russia in the fine company of Burma and Iran, the only other two countries to do so. Hence the ironic kidney punch of the Russian political cartoon above.

Nichtlustig

2008-01-16T12:39:00.000-08:00

Cashier: There are fifty in the box. Either you buy all of them or none of them.
Polly: Polly wants a cracker
Cashier: I'm calling the manager

* yes Oliver, I am well aware you will not find this one funny. But at least there was a glimmer of hope for a little while.

What Lies Beneath

2008-01-15T22:45:00.000-08:00

One of my new classes this term is property. I have to admit I was not looking forward to that one. I just pictured it being a lot of old crotchedy people trying to sue their upstart neighbors for building a fence that accidentally extends a millimeter on to their property (that's the sort of thing that happens in my home town).

There is that, but so far it has been much cooler. I mean it is funny because there are a lot of very British cases (whether we are actually talking their side of the Atlantice or ours), and the personalities are amazing! The duck catcher who is mad at his neighbor for building his new duck net too close to his, so he unloads round after round in the guys yard to scare them away. Then there was a the grumpy old man who didn't like the young nouveau riche upstart who would go on crazy fox hunts, so just as he was about to close in on the fox Mr. Crotchedy jumps out and kills the fox first. Oh and we talked about the whale mafia of Cape Cod.

I think the prof though the whale mafia was a weird idea for most people so he was explaining how rough the lobster crowd up in Maine is. There the coast is technically open to anyone so anyone can leave their lobster traps, but if you step into one of the lobster gangs turf they will cut the rope connecting your trap and your buoy. For me that was funny, they do the same in Long Island. I could relate, oh Long Island, so full of surprises.

We also had a cool case where man was suing an airline for flying over his house. This was a while ago so it didn't have to do with federal aviation regulations, but with him trying to claim all the air above his land belonged to him. And it is funny because it doesn't. We are more eager to give people what is under their land, but even then underground rivers don't belong to the people whose land they run through, but oil does (well, in this country if not in glorious Canada).

The resource stuff I found really interesting and certainly is relevant with all the underground minerals and energy sources countries and firms are fighting for -cough-Russia-cough. Anyway I thought it was really cool and will now definitely apply to the Total (the French oil/gas giant) legal internship in Paris I found. So many disputes over underground stuff! All the gas in the Caspian Sea, the legal disputes over the north sea not so far back, and over the North Pole: the new frontier! Also, Russia tends not to play nicely with others, which could work in my favor with that career wise. Though I suppose I do run the risk of become a huge douche/evil oil lawyer. I'll deal with that one as it present itself.

Oh, and I know I steal a lot of images off the internet, but I was amused to find this one:

Kamini

2008-01-13T13:46:00.000-08:00

I love Kamini. I think it is because in our hear of hearts we are both suburban/rural white boys. Granted, he is Congolese (grew up in France) and I am about as a white as they come (though I like to think I could pass as Russian mafia at times, ok I'd need to wear more black, gold, and pointed shoes), but he just mocks everythings so well. He takes the piss out of the the snobby French, American rap stars, and pretty much everyone else and with a smile.

Anyway, I finally managed to get his album and I am loving it. It is pretty fun as every time I listen to it I get a bit more. Anyway, here are some of his best videos (I know I posted the first one before). Perhaps it is my own stylized one-dance-fits-all approach to dancing, but I love his dances. I am sure you cannot tell at all that I really do not want to do law school work today.

And They're Off!

2008-01-10T19:35:00.001-08:00

So after a glorious one day delay for me, the second semester of law school got off to a roaring start. The classes are earlier, there are more of them, but I have a much better idea of what I need to do on my end so it really isn't too worrying. Grades are starting to come out so most people are in a situation akin to a demonic version of slots where the stakes are high and it takes forever to get the results. I really do wish everyone the best.

I'll look when they are all in. I am willing to be frustrated, depressed, elated once over all of this and that's it.

I had a really good talk today with a woman in my new international legal writing class. I was explaining my philosophy about law school, the jist of which I am neither living for law school nor willing to stop living for it. If I were a coked up rocker type that might be a problem, but for me it seems to work. Still, the woman had really good insight as an older student with a husband and some experience under her belt. Her meaning: I like my life, gonna keep it, I just want a career and I am doing this for me. Couldn't agree more.

I have a lot of young professors this term which is a big change from last year. One had what seemed to be a Russian last name and a very funky accent. Turns out he is Australian, though after consultation with my Russians we think he is probably Croatian (which would make sense considering a huge chunk of the Australian world cup team is/was Croatian). So yes, an Australian accent with Croatian overtones.

I think that is pretty much it. I am trying not to over commit myself as I am always tempted to do at the start of the semester. I seem a bit ahead of the game when it comes to applying for summer internships which is nice, especially since even if I don't get my first choice I will be doing something cool this summer. Pretty much just more of the boring same. Pretty happy and feel relatively on top of things. I'll ride that wave for as long as it lasts.

Nichtlustig

2008-01-08T00:15:00.000-08:00

Joy

2008-01-08T00:00:00.001-08:00

According to some artist, this is what joy looks like. Her joy sort of scares the crap out of me, but really who am I to judge?

I am really doing smashingly for some reason. I had an absolutely great break. I was able to do a lot fo fun things and just felt like I was able to make the most of living in New York.

I just feel really in control of my life for some reason. Not that I don't think there will be any surprises or that nothing bad will happen, just that I am pretty content with my lot and life and happy to play even the weaker hands life sometimes deals me.

I am reading some great books. I started up with French again tonight, discovering I could still speak it, and it looks like I will be able to continue with Russian as well.

I am applying for loads of stuff for the summer. Trying to do about an application a day. I don;t expect to get the vast majority of the stuff, but it seems likely that I will be able to get something I think is pretty cool and abroad which would make for a great summer.

So the semester is staring up again, but I am feeling pretty good about it. I feel like I have a plan and with good friends, fun, and intellectual stimulation I am feeling pretty contented.

Pretty good start for the new year.

War and Peace

2008-01-04T18:06:00.000-08:00

Went to see War and Peace at the Met with Alexia last night. We got rush orchestra tickets, which are a good deal except you have to wait in line for about six hours to get them. I was the first one there and two crotchedy old people cut me (I know I should respect my elders, but I really really don't like them). That bothered me more than it should have. Still, it was a wait of epic proportions, and though we were inside it was really cold and there was major construction going on one room away. Still, we played Risk which was quite appropriate and made a few very bored people jealous.

Anyway, on to the opera. First half was really boring. To be fair, that isn't really the opera's fault. The first half of the book is also rather dull. It is a lot of noble people loafing about the capital being melancholic (very Pride and Prejudice like, I hate Pride and Prejudice). Yes it all looks very pretty, but it is dull. But let's be honest, war is a lot more interesting than peace. So yes it all looked very pretty, bu there wasn't much meat to grab on to.

The second half was really good. The sets and props were amazing. They had over a hundred soldiers marching in different scenes and Napoleon rode in on a massive white horse in a few scenes. Moscow burning was spectacularly done (especially a phoenix from the ashed effect they did). There was some very good commentary on war, particularly when Napoleon's manservant is trying to entreat him to eat a rather luxurious breakfast while a dead body is being carried in front of them. there is also a great bit where they use the hydrolic stage to raise Napoleon and show him to be standing on the corpses of hundreds of soldiers.

I liked an opera quite a bit. I am a sucker for romantic nationalism. The music isn't especially memorable, lacking the same dissonance of Prokofiev's more memorable pieces from Romeo and Juliette. Still, what amazed me the most was that this opera was put on in the Stalinist Soviet Union in the middle of World War II.

Throughout the opera there is a lot of talk about God, the tsar, and faith. None of those things were encouraged at the time, in fact they were pretty harshly punished. Also, though the critique of Napoleon would apply to Hitler, it easily works well as a critique of Stalin as well, who led alone and with no care for the lives he sacrificed, which is how Napoleon is characterized. There are some very Soviet things opera: the peasants are depicted as the heroes and there is a lot of talk about their strength being the greatest and of their "revolting." Without a proletariat to work with, the peasantry was used as a substitute (even though the Soviet leadership wasn't too fond of them). The use of the peasant chorus reminded me a lot of how Brecht uses Choruses in his plays (i.e. to present a collective willing to sacrifice the interests and lives of individuals to achieve a "common good").

Still, despite all of that I found it very hard to believe the opera was produced when it was. It really doesn't conform with the censorship of the time. I wondered about that until I looked at the Wikipedia discovered that the opera was never allowed to have an opening and was only allowed one very small performance equivalent to a theatrical reading. Suddenly it made a lot more sense to me. Produced in the Soviet Union, but not shown.

In closing, the opera is very interesting both because of the strength or the original text, the modern style of the music, and viewing how the whole opera was put together to at least try and conform with Soviet censors.

Balancing Act

2008-01-01T18:56:00.001-08:00

Had an absolutely wonderful New Year's party at my place last night. It was so good that I am still happy from it all. Just reminded me how important the people around you are. I was not drink, but still ha what was quite possibly the best night of the year. Good god I love having creative passionate friends! I would describe it all, but others seems to have documented most of it in video and pictures more than adequately.

So yes, the New Year has rung and it is time for me to reminisce about the past a bit and look to the future (that is a New Year's blog obligation right?).

This time last year I was (where): not entirely sure. I was probably still in Vienna with my family or on the train with them to Prague. New Year's in Vienna was quite spectacular (the whole city was taken over by Italian tourists) and there were concerts and fireworks everywhere (well the center of town seemed a bit like a war zone with all the people setting off illegal fireworks and fire crackers).

I was worried about: Admittedly I don't entirely remember, but most likely law school, I had applied to my first choice school and been deferred and had a quite a few more applications to get together. Well I have to say compared to last year this certainly is an improvement. I mean, I am in law school now. I was also having a tough time finding my scene in Vienna. I am not sure I ever did, though in the end I liked the people who I met through fringe theater and the Slavic languages department.

This year I feel very excellently socially adjusted (does a world of good for my view on life). I have law school friends, Austria friends, college friends, and high school friends. For me though it really isn't the quality it is the caliber. That is where my friends come through for me. People who are pursuing their passions, struggling with what life gives them instead of ignoring it or just accepting it, and with an energy for life. Passion is passed like light from a candle.

I was excited about: Travel mainly. Both the short term trip to Prague and hoping to get to Ukraine and Moscow. I did a lot of travel last year (quick list: Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Italy, Turkey, Ukraine {3 times}, Luxembourg, France, Russia, and Belarus). Huh, that really is a lot. It was great especially making it to Kazan when I was in Russia. I do like traveling, but for me I am most excited when I am going to make use of a specific skill, usually a language. It is sort of like the testing phase when you go and try and apply it all. Quite exhilarating.

At the moment I don't really feel the need to travel. Oh sure, I'd like to go to Morocco, but I am really very happy to be in New York and with everything that has been coming my way. I do very much hope I make it to Ukraine or somewhere Russian speaking for the summer though. It is nice to use my languages on a more regular basis now and again and feel less like a a parlor magician with them (i.e. pulling them out to do cheap tricks at parties.

Some things I have learned: Most people aren't that bright or intellectually engaged. In college it was quite normal for my friends to have intense academic passions along with extracurricular ones (i.e. improv, arts, building mode airplanes for competitions, photography, and who knows what). There were plenty of pretentious asses, but once you found a good person they had something going on upstairs.

Generally not the case in the world.

I like making fun of pop culture, I like a good party, but if that is all you are interested in and are living for then I am out. Most people's goals are to find a better apartment, get a better job, have a hot(ter) boyfriend or girlfriend. That isn't enough for me either concerning my own goals or the people I am going to spend my time with.

I first realized this last year when I was studying in Vienna. I thought it was an American/European thing, but apparently it is really just a people thing. Generally just makes me realize how important it is I keep reading non-law text on my own and continue to seek out interesting people.

Some goals: I'd like to be a bit more secure in myself in general, and specifically in myself as a lawyer. I have made a lot strides with all of that and just want to keep on that path. The law element is new and I am quite inexperienced with it all, but I suppose the goal I am trying to verbalize (textualize?) is to have carved out a bit of a legal specialty by this time next year. To have a bit more direction with my legal studies.

Things to have done by this time next year:

1.) Started to learn Ukrainian
2.) have gone to the French conversation group and be actively improving my French in some way
3.) Pretty much the same with Russian.
4.) Have expanded my circle of friends by actively having sought out new and interesting people (sounds a bit like Star Trek that one doesn't it).
5.) Have a regular occurring artistic outlet (probably improv, but I'm open).

That's all folks.

Around the World

2007-12-29T11:26:00.001-08:00

Now that I have a bit of down time I am applying for summer law internships. As a first year law student with no previous legal experience they tell you to pretty much forget paid work. The name of the game is work experience, you are trying to get experience that will help you get a paid job next summer and hopefully then a job with that firm or organization.

Since I am going to have to shell out for whatever I do this summer I am trying to do something I would really enjoy. There are a few things I am applying for in the US or have already applied for, like the UN, State Department, and a couple of federal agencies dealing with space law and law of the sea, but most of the stuff I am looking at is abroad.

Clearly, that is entirely intentional I like Europe. I have no interest in going to Ireland or the UK because if I do that then I can't use or improve a foreign language (ok, my British is rusty but functional and rarely requested). So I am applying for positions in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan (ok, Kazakhstan isn't in Europe). Basically they all have at least one thing in common: I speak the local language. In any of those places I have a certain level of comfortability that just makes things so much easier.

Still, the whole business is rather disconcerting. Should I try and hone my French and get some legal terminology? Work on my business Russian vocabulary? Start going to second semester Ukrainian? I don't know. That isn't too big of a problem, really I plan on doing at least a little bit of all of that anyway, but not knowing keeps me from being able to dedicate myself 110% to one thing (perhaps a good thing).

The funny thing is that even though I do really like Western/Central Europe, my heart keeps tugging me east. I would love to spend some time in Lyons or in one of the many beautiful Belgian cities, but for some reason the thought of spending the summer in sort of crappy nouveau riche Kiev excited me so much more. I love the former Soviet Union, I suppose because there is just so much energy, you never know what is going to happen from one day to the next in politics or business and then compared to Western Europe the population is quite young and there is an very active youth culture (something I found very lacking in Vienna). So I suppose if the opportunity comes through I will very happily spend my summer there.

Still it has become almost a constant in my life for the past three years or so that I have no idea where I will be six months from now. It is exciting if daunting, and again it is something I do to myself because I do love to be between things, experiencing new things, challenging my understanding, though it has drawbacks as well. Sometimes I worry that I don't really put down roots because of it. Certainly it can be hard because with my diversity of interests it means I have to leave things for a while.

One example of that is improv. I love improv. I have taken a lot of classes, directed a good number of shows, and performed more. I know a good number of people on the better teams at the New York improv teams. But I am not on a team. Now, had I stayed in New York and kept pushing improv I still might not be on one. I am a good improver and I've had great moments. Improv has influenced me tremendously both in terms of how I tell stories and how I think about people (much like in a scene, many people don't bring much to a conversation).

At the moment I am rusty as all hell which is a bit tough for someone who is randomly a perfectionist with certain things. I haven't had the time over the past five months to do anything performance related, and the few times I've had it has been more about expression and getting some frustration out than good clear cut funny improv. I need to work on that.

The funny thing is that although I periodically wish I was better areas that perhaps suffer a bit because I do so much, I wouldn't change it. I really thrive on diversity of interests and passions and different people. I am happiest when I am on the verge of having too much to do (a dangerous place to be) love the stimulation and cross pollination of doing many different things.

This Will Not Be Linear

2007-12-26T21:30:00.000-08:00

So I have been home on Long Island for the holidays. It has all been very pleasant. Lots of eating good food, play board games, and seeing old friends. Already seems like ages since exams, which is exactly what I needed.

I got some very nice Christmas presents (gave some good ones too). Since I do not read non-legal texts for law school I am trying to become a more avid reader, both in English and Russian (I can read for pleasure now and not just torture!). For the moment I am working on rereading Faust II, reading the Whispers by Orlando Figes (personal stories about the Stalinist repression from my favorite academic writer), and Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (he's my kind of cynical sceptical American).

Also I am trying to catch up on my movies. Seriously. I feel like I haven't seen anything since I went to Vienna last years. So far I manages to see Super Bad (a great stupid movie) and the Simpsons Movie (good, but I need to rewatch it). Still on the list: Stranger than Fiction, the Departed, Hairspray (the original was descent), and Knocked Up (which I keep calling "a little bit pregnant" since that is what it was titled in Russian).

I managed to see Sweeney Todd before heading home. I liked it a lot. It is sort of amazing how it manages to be a cross between a slasher and a musical, though I suppose that is what it always was. Still, it is much more than opera than in musical with no dance numbers and tremendous intensity. The lyrics are wonderfully cynical.

On Friday I am hoping to make it to see War and Peace at the Met. I don't know the opera, but Prokofiev composed the score and it is War and Piece so it has to be a healthy serving of Russian Nationalism. For whatever reason, I tend to go for the grander more Wagnerian operas (not that I can take Wagner on any sort of regular basis), which so far has kept my mother and I from being able to see an opera together (she likes the lighter Italian ones).

Well, that is it for now. Before New Year's I'll be back with some sort of year in review entry. I'll have to come up with some observation by then.

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-24T22:30:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas from all of us at Barbarossa!

i.e. just me

Hell yes!

2007-12-19T14:00:00.000-08:00

Okay this is a horrible graphic for this post, but it was the closest thing I could find to the way I feel right now (think: fuck yes!).

I think I found a way to go to Kiev this summer, do a law internship, receive one on one Ukrainian language instruction, stay with a host family, and not have to pay anything.

It would be amazing if I could do that. Being in Kiev would mean I would get to use both Russian and Ukrainian, living with a host family would solve my housing problem and introduce me to more people, and I would get work experience for the field I want to go into.

I'll go more into the details later (need to get back to studying), but I am so excited this is even a possibility! It would make for an absolutely amazing summer.

Brilliance

2007-12-18T11:16:00.001-08:00

I'm too lazy to explain why right now, but this is a really brilliant cartoon (by Бандура) about the announcement that Medvedev would be president and Putin would be his PM. It's brilliant. No really. Eh, at least enjoy the bunny.

Actually this one is too brilliant for me not to include:

"What's not European about us?"

Remember Medvedev means bear. The style of the script is great too because it is in old peasant/fairytale style.

The Greatest Show on Earth

2007-12-14T17:21:00.000-08:00

Amazing video on P.T. Barnum's New York (yes the circus guy) and all the crazy stuff he did in it. Wow. Sounds more exciting than today's New York. Things seemed to burn down a lot though. Guess the mafia was still gainfully employed.

Passing

2007-12-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

I have wanted to write about this for a while now.

A few weeks back Ian Smith (voting above) died. He was a huge racist. Smith was the prime minister of Rhodesia from 1964-1979 (when Rhodesia ceased to exist in and Zimbabwe took its place). Smith spearheaded Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, which was done in order to keep Britain from establishing a government including the other non-white 95% of the population. Pretty much from there on out Rhodesia struggled with the resistance movement and once Mozambique became independent and supported the resistance the jig was up. Ironically, even the Afrikaners couldn't stand the Rhodesians, they reminded them too much of Rhodes himself (for the Afrikaners Rhodes' coup attempt in the Transvaal, best/most horrible example Rhodes choice of burial spot for himself on a sacred mountain in Zimbabwe in an attempt to develop a religious following for himself; who wants a Rhodes Scholarship now?)

For a really description of life in Rhodesia for a man who has experienced both Smith and Mugabe click here.

What really interests me about Smith's life though is what he did after he lost power. For one he stayed in Zimbabwe, but he received remarkably good treatment from the man he had fought to keep white rule in Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe. I say this because unlike South Africa, Zimbabwe did not follow the line of forgive and forget as much. They don't teach 20th century history in school in Zimbabwe because it would be to damaging to the current regeme, the press is strictly controlled, and pretty much all of the white farmers were driven out over the past decade or so. Criticism of president Mugabe is certainly not permitted.

And yet until he left the country, Smith was allowed to keeping living on his farm and call Mugabe "mentally deranged." At one point when Smith was in South Africa for medical treatment, Mugabe threatened to have him arrested and prosecuted for genocide if he returned to Zimbabwe. He did, and was greeted warmly by immigration officers. I don't think Mugabe really meant it, he just wanted to make some noise.

What fascinates me is that Mugabe seemed to respect Smith. They had nothing in common, and though Smith was once an important political figure for Zimbabwe's white community there isn't much of one left and they certainly weren't a threat to Mugabe's power. Instead, Mugabe seemed to respect Smith as another dictator, perhaps treating him as he would want to be treated (would Mugabe really want to set a precedent for a undemocratic Zimbabwean leader to be held liable for all the death he caused? I don't think so). The dictator to dictator bond seems almost literary.

The New Guy

2007-12-12T23:29:00.000-08:00

And law school exams continue to take up most of my time and sanity, but in other news....

Putin named who he will back to be Russia's next president: Dmitry Medvedev (guy on the left).

The picture is old, but I like it because it captures some of the dynamic.

The whole situation is a bit odd. Firs there is the fact that considering democracy's recent passing (she was suffering, it was her time) people the world over (who care about Russia) have realized that it really isn't the election campaign that matters, it is everything before. So in that light, Putin's backing of Medvedev has been treated as the election of the next Russian president. Okay, fair enough, nothing more wrong with that than with anything else that has been going on. So you would think with Russia's recent side stepping towards authoritarianism, they would try and set Medvedev up as a serious intimidating leader right? Not so much.

At least to me the whole thing had been a bit more like Putin introducing his long time girlfriend to mother Russia. In most of the press conferences Medvedev has sat there next to Putin nodding along, as Putin basically said "oh you are going to like him so much, he's such a nice boy."
The most significant quote I have seen from Medvedev was that he would appoint Putin prime minister, which just seemed a bit like "oh, I don't have opinions, I'll just do whatever he tells me to."
But who knows what will happen. My Russian politics teacher from last year in Austria thinks it is all a red haring so Putin can deal with all the wannabe presidents and people pressuring him to stay in office now so he can pull a switcheroo later with another guy. He hasn't stated his reasons yet though. I don't know, sounds crazy enough for Russian politics.

Apparently in the Russian blogosphere they have been making fun of Medvedev a lot. Ironically, for the same sort of petty thing I would: his last name means bear. The word for bear in Russian is pretty to begin with as it is a combination of the words med (honey) and ved (an old verb for to know), i.e. the creature that knows where the honey is (if you were wondering 'ev' is just a standard ending for surnames). Anywho, Mr. Bear being the president of Russian is a amusing tantalizing notion...even for Russians apparently.

Santacon

2007-12-09T00:20:00.000-08:00

Life sucks at the moment as law school kicks into high gear and I lose the ability to relate to humanity, but lets focus on more positive things like:

Santacon!

If only I had know earlier! Apparently Santacon is a global phenomenon involving people dressed up as santa doing a day long pub crawl. The one New York was this past Saturday and involved hundreds of santas moving from bar to bar and going to a park to play reindeer games (drunken relays and such, such as in other activities they are all drunken). I am sorry, but I really don't have words to explain how awesome find this. Oh, there are also reindeer, elves, and various attempts at iconic Hanukkah figures (the link about has a great Hanukkah chicken).

I had really never heard of this before, and even though the timing will probably be equally bad for me next year, but I really want to do this. Anyone else want to be Santa with with me next year?

Life Imitating Art

2007-12-07T09:57:00.000-08:00

Piece by anonymous English grafiti artist Bansky. Banksy, besides just being brilliant, is known for his graffiti both parodying society and pop culture, and more specifically criticizing authority (he has done a fantastic seriois on the barrier being built between the West Bank and Israel). Here, besides, just being inredibly funny, I would say it is also a commentary on authority's love of power.

Moving on to this earlier piece of graffiti on the Berlin wall . Soviet leader Brezhnev is shown passionately kissing East German leader (and bastard) Erick Honecker. The caption is both German and Russian reads: God! Help me survive this deadly love! A commentary on the close political relationship between the Soviet Union and East Germany (i.e. we say jump and you say how high or we send the tanks in...again) which made any sort of reform or change impossible. Brezhnev is certainly the driving party (the dominant Soviet partner), but Honecker isn't doing too badly himself.
Fast forward to this year when this piece by a Russian photographer, called "the Era of Mercy" was pulled by the Russian government from an exhibition in Paris ahead of the recent parliamentary election. I really like the piece. Here you have two symbols of post-Soviet Russian authority passionately embracing each other in a birch forest: the symbol of Russian peasant culture and Romantic nationalism. So where is the mercy? It seems to be telling the story of power's love of power. it definitely alludes to the two pieces above, but while making the two figures less distinguishable and without the power relationship so integral to the Berlin wall piece. These aren't high ranking officials, but ordinary young police officers passionately embracing each other. Police in Russia are not known for the mercy or diligence, here though we see mercy: mercy towards itself and others with power.

And now fast forward to this week with a celebratory event for the successful election campaign of a member of Putin's majority in parliament. Little similar, no? Good thing that picture was banned.

Election

2007-12-06T15:07:00.001-08:00

I suppose I should say something about the Russian election though I have said most of what I had to say already. It happened, there was intimidation, voting inconsistencies, and a wholly biased media. Putin's party won, the communist party was the only other party to make it into parliament.

Germany said there is no democracy in Russia.

I tend to agree. Once more, this time around Russia's leaders really didn't care what anyone else had to say about that. The propaganda is all about the West having taken advantage of Russia and Russia's need to stand strong on its own (Russians ability to view themselves as victims while continuing to ignore all the people they have victimized continues to amaze me).

Democracy dies and the crowd just cheers louder. Somehow I am glad I am not in Russia without any resonance for my own disquietude while simultaneously having any dissent in the Russian people being blamed on me and the US.

The picture about is from Nashi's post-presidential victory rally. I want to call them a post-Soviet Russian version of the Hitler youth. I say this because of their tendency towards violence, intimidation, dogmatism, while claiming to fight fascism (ah the Soviet bogeyman, so nice he is still around). There is a short but informative video about them here.

Travels

2007-12-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

Quick post-studying, pre-bed fantasy break.

I really want to travel. This is nothing new, but certain places attract me more at certain times that others. So anyway here is a list:

1. Antwerp - I really like Belgium. Amazing chocolate beer, chocolate, mussels (yes I know have gone off about this before). I also really want to work on my French and learn Dutch/Flemish. I have been to Brussels and a few other beautiful places in Belgium, but never to Antwerp and that is the allure. Could visit for a weekend sometime could apply for a scholarship to study there through the embassy.

2. Willemstad, Dutch Antilles - I am a city person. I travel places for the cities. I like the concentration of people, history, and culture. Anyway, rare for North America and the Caribbean in particular, Willemstad has a UNESCO recognized colonial center, which is beatiful. Amazing sounding city, potpourris of languages, amazing weather, and beautiful water. What is not to love?

3. Morocco - Almost all of it. Fes, Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakech, they all excite me and have amazing and different architecture. Beautiful mosques.

4. Mariupol - Historic Greek cityin Ukraine that still has a fairly large Greek-speaking minority, just sounds cool.

5. Genoa - Part of my family is from there. Ideally I'd like to do some sort of greater Genoa tour: Genoa-Monaco-Nice-St. Tropez.

6. Algiers - Sounds pretty amazing and I am fascinated by the hisotry of the city.

7. Tiblissi - Post-Soviet and the potential to live up to my orientalist expectations, what's not to love?

Quick Russia

2007-11-29T21:24:00.000-08:00

Parliamentary elections are coming up this weekend this Sunday in Russia. It is widely predicted to essentially be the death of the Russian opposition with only Putin party and the Communists making it into parliament (it is hard to really call the communists an opposition party, not because they are so supportive of Putin, but because they are so far from an alternative being a mainly populist party supported by a dwindling population of pensioners). I will get to that in a second, but first...

Why it's time for the annual millionaire faire in Moscow. Need a new private jet? How about a diamond studded cellphone? No? Well maybe you you'd be more interested in a new luxury sedan with ostrich leather tires to make your thirty car garage a little more interesting?

Yes, Russian had 53 billionaires worth a total of $282 billion and 103,000 millionaires who are worth $670 billion. Th evast majority of which live in Moscow. Yes, the oil and gas businesses are booming and times are good...for sum. Any sort of ridiculous luxury items make me angry (makes watching tv or anything about Sourthern California difficult), but these sorts of showing of wealth when so much of Russia's population lives in poverty. It is sad not only because so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few, but because the extreme concentration of wealth in once city detracts from the development of infrastructure in other cities. Moscow is quite pleasant, and yet with few exceptions the difference between the infrastructure in Moscow and any other Russian city is shocking (as the saying goes, Moscow isn't Russia, yet oh so many Westerners take it to be).*

As mentioned above Sunday is the parliamentary election day in Russia. Though Putin isn't up for re-election the campaign is being run as if he was. To be fair, even Russians know that the Duma is little more than a rubber stamp, so in that sense I suppose it is natural that Putin takes central stage, since people know he is pulling the strings anyway. The slogans have been things like "Putin's plan - Russia's victory" (Putin's never mentioned having a plan), [place the name of you city here] is voting for Putin, and "I believe in Russia, I believe in myself."

Ironically the election ads have been very similar to the opening sequence a Russian remake of Little Britain, contrasting text of Russia's greatness with images of quite the opposite. The election rhetoric, however, places a strong emphasis on fate, Russia's re-emerging greatness, and the importance on unity above all else. Sadly, it is all very Soviet rhetoric and whether intentionally or not says quite about Russia and many Russians insecurity, and Russian culture's intolerance towards any sort of difference (intellectual, political, ethnic).

I'm including this picture because Putin looks like a pimp

Also, remember when I said Georgia was acting like Russia by trying to blame someone else for all its problems? Well perhaps concerned that Georgia was going to take away it title of "most likely to blame whoever they are mad at for whatever is pissing them off" (my favorite is still by far Russia saying Georgia fired the missile into a Gerogia village, not Russia), Putin blamed the US for discrediting the upcoming Russian election by discouraging election monitors to go to Russia...though Russia denied the OSCE's election observers visas.

So who is the Russian opposition? There are a number of parties. The more experienced opposition politicians have by and large grown jaded and are not making as big as push as in the past. Key figures from the Soviet past have reemerged to fight what they see as Russia's sliding back into its old Soviet ways. One of those is Garry Kasparov, a famous Soviet chess player, who says he will campaign for the presidency and has been arrested multiple times trying opposing the government's refusal to allow his peaceful protests (sadly, in Russia neo-nazis are oftne allowed to march where democratic paty's demanding more freedom having their protests violently broken up). Gorbachev too has returned to politics albeit with less outward conflict with Putin.

The figure who interests me the most is, partially because I have been reading his work, is Vladimir Bukovsky. One of the most famous Soviet dissident, Bukovsky (pictured above) spent decades in prison, Siberian exile, and solitary confinement for his activism in demanding multi-party democracy and greater individual freedom. A remarkable individual from a society that tended to produce few of them and tried to break those it did. Bukovksy returned to Russia seeing in current events the restoration of much of the Soviet Union's political culture. He will also be running for the president.

Bukovsky is an impressive figure, but in today Russia he is all but irrelevant. No one care's about the past. The sad thing is that it wasn't people like Bukovsky who led Russia right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. You had that in Czech Republic with Václav Havel. These were people who wanted a different Russia and believed democracy did not just mean more than one lkind of sausage in the supermarket. Instead, since the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia has been led by people not only by individuals who were deeply ingrained in the Soviet system ( Yeltsin), but who saw little fault in it (Putin). Is it any wonder then that there has been a turn back to unity coercing culture of the Soviet Union? Is it even surprising the party the will win an absolute majority on Sunday is called "United" Russia?

* On a slightly tangential note it is interesting to compare with New York. Modern Russia is often compared with the Robber Baron days of the US. In those days too you had an obscene juxtaposition of wealth of poverty, on the head the super rich came from across the country to build their supper mansions (it's a bit later but think about the Midwestern millionaires in the Great Gatsby), and on the other you had the slums of recently arrived immigrant with absolutelyu nothing.

Plan B

2007-11-28T15:46:00.001-08:00

The Reckoning is Upon Us.

Not really, but law school exams are on the horizon, which are the stress equivalent of the horn of plenty. I had a good exchange with another law student about how these first year courses are probably the most important despite being classes you are the least interested in. I did some legal reading a few weeks ago on topic that really interested me (the stuff my international law post was based on) and was amazed how much easier and enjoyable it was to read (i.e. I had forgotten it can actually be fun doing work when it interests you.

Anyway, it is times like these that I like to have a plan B. I stumbled upon my current one over the weekend. As you may or may not know/care about a masters in Eastern European/Russian Studies is something I would very much like to acquire at some point. It isn't a degree terribly helpful to employment unless you already have a relevant work experience or a more career oriented degree. It's a factor making the taking on the $80,000 worth of debt a little hard to swallow.

Well the Free University of Berlin has an Eastern European Studies Masters program. With the former Russian presence in Berlin the Russian course offering are quite good, in addition to courses on law in various Eastern European countries, Russian political history and cultural history, and Georgian language classes! Perhaps the best elements are that I could write the masters thesis in English (fine with the classes being in German and doing classwork in German, but if I need to try and say something new in a long-ass thesis I have a better chance of doing it English), and it would only cost 260 euro a year!

I am not saying I am going to do it, but it nice to have a fallback plan you really like. I liked Berlin, it is pretty comfortable for me and I have studied at the university before /know a lot of the faculty. It isn't the same quality of an American program, but I wouldn't have to stack up any debt. Huzzah for alternatives!

Subway Gymnastics

2007-11-27T17:24:00.001-08:00

I had a bit of a bizarre subway moment today. I was heading back to Brooklyn from my Russian class in the Bronx (second to last stop on the 4!) doing my constitutional law reading when to street performers got on.

They had their stuff way too together to be beggars: they pried the subway doors back open for a woman (pretty much guaranteeing she would give them money) and had their own boom box.

Then one of them starts doing some break dance moves on the subway floor.

This is where is started to become a bit like a Felini dream sequence as I was running on fourish hours of sleep.

The two of them took terms doing front handsprings down the length of the subway car, dodging polls and people's belongings. They then formed a human ring and rolled back across the the subway car. It was by far the most amazing subway act I have seen.

Then they collected money and sat down and one of them talked about what he was taking for his back pain.

On Coming Home

2007-11-23T15:27:00.001-08:00

Oz was probably more fun

Home for Thanksgiving for the first time in three year. It is a bit of an odd time as I have to study like crazy for law school exams and randomly clear out of the house for showings (parents selling the house so probably the last Thanksgiving here as well).

Coming home is always rather strange, a big part of it are the elements of stepping back into the past. That can both be figurative, living under the same roof and my parents and bother, and more literal: staying in my room with the posters that haven't changed since 1998 (when is the next No Doubt album is coming out?) and wearning sweaters and t-shirts dating back to high school, but were never popular enough to become worn and be thrown out.

It's like a personal time warp.

Russian Ramblings

2007-11-21T20:08:00.000-08:00

Pictured above is the Solovetsky monastery in Russia. The monastery is a UNESCO world heritage site and is located on its own island in northern Russia (think very isolate and extremely cool). Perfect place for a gulag right? Yes, yes it was. Once of the most famous and terrible as well.

Above is Lubyanka Square on October 30th, the memorial day for victims of the gulag. The building in the background is the KGB headquarters and the monument for the victims is a stone brought from the Solovetsky monastery.

Same day. Outside of Moscow in Butovo. Thousands were taken there and short during the purges. Putin taking part of the memorial service. He looks bored doesn't he?

I was sort of amazed Putin even attended considering how he glorifies the Soviet Union. It is one of the great oddities Russian politics that the Russian president can be mourning the brutally murdered victims of the Soviet machine, and presiding over soldiers dresses in Soviet uniforms the next.

Perhaps it is naive to think either one genuine. Still it amazes me that even with so many reminders even the most brutal figures of the Soviet period. About half of Russians think Stalin did more good than harm (in the words of my Russian teaches this past summer "he kept order and life was good") and the figure has been growing over the past decade. The really peculiar element is that almost all Russian families were touched by the purges (another teacher bragged about her father having died in a famous prison and then later about her own party membership).

Still it seems to me that the treatment of the past seems an important indication of a country's future. The Kremlin recently released an approved history text glorifying the Soviet Union and playing down its short comings. I am hesitant to get on the bad wagon that Russia is turning back into what it was as I think it is a dangerous over simplification. Still, I think there is dangerous trend of playing down the importance of the individual whether it was the sacrifice of the individual in the gulag for the supposed common good, or further stigmatization of political opposition and any distinguishing elements of the individual (ethniciy, religion sexuality).

Anyway, if you are still interested this video is quite enlightening especially if you are American.

Stupid Post

2007-11-20T21:17:00.001-08:00

Emperor tamarin (above). The BBC taught me it was named after German Emperor Wilhelm II (below).

It's because they both wear suits.

On International Law

2007-11-20T09:11:00.001-08:00

I am exhausted, but finally finished my memo and finally have time to bring up what I wanted to yesterday.

In constitutional law we had probably the most stimulating class of the semester, which was too bad because I think most people were so busy with their memos they never go to do the reading.

For whatever reason con law starts to put most people to sleep about half through. Probably because I am a big picture kind of guy I stay pretty engaged the whole time (not true for all of my classes admittedly).

This time were talking about the legal battles involving the detainees at Guantanamo bay and the relevant legal precedent from the Civil War and World War II. Very relevant stuff.

One of the cases cited the Geneva Conventions. This really interested me as the direct application of international law in US courts is something I have been wondering about for a long time. I had asked professors about it before, but they always became very uncomfortable and didn't really want to talk about it.

In one of the cases plaintiff directly cited a breech in US obligations under the Geneva conventions as grounds for releasing an "enemy combatant." It was quick to reinforce it with US legislation, but the point is the same. On appeal, the Supreme Court avoided the question of whether US citizens could sue the US government for violations of the Geneva Conventions like it was the plague (just like my professors had). The lower court said a citizen could not, but the Supreme Court refused to deal with the issue.

All of this made me realize two things: 1. The really doesn't like to US international law in it s courts, if it uses it at all it uses elements worked into later US legislation 2. Most of my professors feel very out of their element when it comes to international law. Just made me realize why I am not always on the same page with my profs.

Personally, I think international law the US has owned up to should be grounds for suit in US court. I don't see things like the Geneva Conventions being much more than symbolic otherwise. If the US signs a treaty giving individual rights they should be able to sue if they think those rights are being violated.

Also, I liked this cartoon:

Going Slightly Mad

2007-11-17T22:41:00.000-08:00

To this tune.

I am writing a memo, and it is sort of like hell. For every previous memo I have had nearly as many comments on my memo as text and now it should at least theoretically be done properly. It won't be. It just means I spend loads of time worrying I haven't been thorough enough in one section and haven't realized the complexity of another. It should be sharp analysis, but it is also legal writing so despite some interesting material so it is fairly dull.

I would like to say I have big hopes for this one, but I don't. Don't get me wrong, I am trying to do the best I can and I am sure I will get it all at some point, but for now I know I don't have the knack for it and though I have some specific things to work on, I sadly know I cannot trust myself. Sadly no one else has stepped up to take over. So it will be a long cumbersome process with little reward expected (yeah?). Still almost everyone from my class was int he library so that was comforting.

Aside from that it was a lovely weekend. Thursday night bad the Kilmer bad poetry competition up a Columbia and I got to go and read one of Edward's poems, which went over quite well, and see people I haven't seen in over a year. It was like going back to all the good parts of college.

Then on Friday I got to see my host parents from England. Very pleasant conversation, though it was strange to think my time in England was almost six years ago. Also the people at Columbia looked really young which was another bout of old-fellingness.

Doesn't bother me much though.

Just a bit of Art

2007-11-12T21:38:00.000-08:00

Really can't put any thought into words today, so let's try something with a bit of art.

Above is Potsdamer Platz by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Not sure if I remember all of the details, but I am going to tell them the way I remember them since that is how I like them best.

It's an expressionist painting. Love expressionism, always felt like impressionism was trying to develop a new technique for depicting reality to break away from the stiltedness of realism. Expressionism, was trying to come up with a way to depict emotions, both what was going on within people and the way places felt. Much more interesting I think.

Potsdamer Platz is a square in Berlin. A big center of commotion and nightlife before WWII it was bombed into oblivion and left a field until the late 90s when it was made into Berlin's equivalent of Time Square (granted on a smaller scale, but hey, it is Europe!).

In the early 1900s prostitutes gathered there wearing war widow's black veils to identify themselves. And that is what is going on here, with the would-be patrons encircling them. Still captures a lot of the night time feel the now prostitute-less Potsdamer Plotz today actually.

I suppose what I like about it is that it is trying to depict the moment without being bound by reality. Streets, limbs, and buildings are bent to provide all the desired angles. Really none of the characters seems to be sympathetic. The women seem to not even with their rigid stances, and the men look like emerging wolves.

I have a large print of it, but it didn't seem quit right for the kitchen.

Deep Down, We all Just Want a Man Like Putin

2007-11-11T09:53:00.000-08:00

This morning I was watching a video on the New York Times about the Baltic Republic. The people interviewed were saying that the Wes needs to fear Russia more. It reminded me of a song I wanted to find a while ago. It is called "I want a man like Putin," it is an actual Russian pop song from a few years ago. Enjoy!

I know I tend to be pissy to begin with, but...

2007-11-10T22:44:00.001-08:00

I am picky about my languages. I don't like it when I am abroad and people who have just discovered I am American then say I have a strong American accent. I don't I have a strong American accent. No one would think I am English (though I could pass for a while after my year in Brighton), and I have an American accent, but it is not a strong one and it is not a regional one (neither Midwestern, New York or Long Guyland).

Since studying in Austria I have had a few Germans try and convince me I have an Austrian accent. This requires some back story. When I was in Austria my classmates would laugh at me for pronouncing Austrian colloquialisms in too German a fashion. My Austrian German teacher told me I was in Austria and needed to speak more like an Austrian. Austrians thought I was German. Germans thought I was German. No one thought I was Austrian and as Austrians are none too fond of Germans, I often got the cold shoulder because of this. Fine, whatever. Really don't care. Fast forward to recent events when Germans have been trying to convince me I have an Austrian accent (granted one person only said it after I mentioned I had lived in Vienna, but other people have really meant it). Basically these events make me understand why the Austrians hate the Germans so much(besides World War II). Austrians find Germans to be pretentious.

When I was in Moscow a German said to a good Austrian friend of mine "wow, you speak pretty good German." This is along the lines of an English person telling an American "wow, you speak pretty good English." Anyway, my Austrian friend did not take to kindly to it especially as the implication was that the German did not expect Austrians to speak anything but hick German. Germans can also found Austrian German to be cute, which is why a few people have told me I should keep my "Austrian accent." But I am not cute. I do not do cute.

I should close with some parallel for French or Russian, but I don't really have one. After having an African French teacher and listening to a lot of Congolese rap I thought I might have picked up a bit of an African accent, but I am pretty sure my existing American accent was strong enough to overpower that.In terms of Russian, I had teachers who tried to blame mistakes I made on the Russian they speak in Central Asia, which was mainly just racist. Though in Kazakh my accent was apparently perfect which is probably a reason why I don't want to continue with it (so I can just go on thinking I could always speak my few Kazakh phrases without an accent).

All of this is pretty much a moot point though as my language are going to shit. I don't speak any of them long enough these days to get back into the linguistic rhythm.

Georgia, what the hell man?

2007-11-08T15:41:00.001-08:00

Okay, so I that that suffices as an introduction. Pictured are events from the the past two days in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.

About four years ago the peaceful Rose Revolution kicked out the party in power that had been cooking the votes to stay there. Those protests were on these streets. Mikheil Saakashvili, a Columbia Law educated politician, led on the protesters as they occupied state building. The then president agreed to leave office and Saakashvili was then elected president.

I found it all pretty moving, all the more so because there was the unity of political will afterwards to enact real change; not the case in Ukraine. Fast forward to today. There are popular protests against the president, about 50,000 people on the streets. They are not really a unified front, but represent frustration with the current government from across the political spectrum (yes there are a good number of crazies). What does Saakashvili do? After talking about how Georgia is a democracy now and how there is the right to protest, he says the protests are all Russia's doing, and after declaring a state of emergency has water cannons turned on the protesters and has tear gas fired into the crowds. He also has government special forces raid the state run television network, taking it off the air, holding guns to journalists heads, and smashing their phones. Saakashvili basically used the force that was not used on him. I don't know that I am so hopeful for Georgia anymore.

Happy October Revolution!

2007-11-07T17:09:00.000-08:00

So today marks the anniversary of the October Revolution, and where do they still celebrate it you ask? Why in Belarus of course. Somehow it seems appropriate that there is that much snow in Minsk already.

I don't really have much to say about the October Revolution, on the whole not such a big fan, but then again as much as I like the architecture I am not sure how much of a fan I would have been in living in Imperial Russia either.

Still it is definitely this sort of stuff that make people think of Belarus as a living museum of the Soviet Union.

But then again they were marching for it in Moscow too:

Russia is so very strange. It is odd for me that the same soldiers can be marching in Imperial Russian uniforms (based on the Prussian ones) one day and then in Bolshevik uniforms the next. The coats look warm though (this is the sort of perceptive analysis you would expect from Eastern European Regional Studies Major after all).

Back to Basics

2007-11-06T17:48:00.001-08:00

I am having a down day. I am sick and I don't know how sick (i.e. how far behind schedule I will end up being). I also had one minor incident that suddenly made me look at a lot of problems that I had been fine with with less positive light. Isn't it annoying when that happens?

Anywho, I am starting improv again! My new class starts this Saturday and I am really looking forward to it. Improv is my main form of artistic expression and the discipline has shaped a lot of the way I tell stories and look at any sort of performance (films, stories, theater, and so on).

It will be the first time in a long time in a while I have done improv. In Vienna I went to a place that did pick-up improv classes. It was on Monday nights so the timing wasn't too good. I liked it, it was fun to do improv in German again, but it wasn't geared towards any sort of a performance and it was usually just a succession of exercises that weren't really building on one another (having led rehearsal I am critical about this stuff). That sort of thing can be fine, usually when the people are cool/good enough that it does not matter, but the performers weren't too hot, and there were different people each time so it was hard to get to know people.

So now I am back in New York, my Mecca of improv. I have seen a lot of good improv being back, but without the performing something has still been missing.

I don't know. I am sure I will be rusty, but I am just ready to perform again. I really love the creativity, the group effort, and the sharpness of it all.

I will let you know how it goes.

Update: I suppose this will teach me to count my chickens before they are hatched, my improv class has been delayed till December (boo!). This happened with the last class I tried to sign up for too, which ended being canceled. Grrr. Despite, this my mood is quite good today.

New Caldeonia

2007-11-05T12:30:00.000-08:00

So since Alexia is going off about some of her obsessions with obscure areas, I thought I would go off about one of mine as well.

Pictured above is Nouméa, New Caledonia. New Caledonia is a former French penal colony off the coast of Australia (The English started using Australia as a penal colony and France literally said "well two can play at this game" and stared their own). New Caledonia is a still a part of France, though it had its own money, quasi-citizenship, and is not part of the E.U. The native Kanaks are the largest ethnic group, though they are not a majority, followed by Europeans and other ethnic groups from all over Asian.

Also, New Caledonia is beautiful! As evidence I offer this website.

I really wanted to, and still sort of do, go and spend a year in New Caledonia teaching English, hanging out on the beach and working on my French (the program is for Aussies and Kiwis, but i was told they might make an exception).

It is remote and the population is quite small (about 200,000 people in total), but it seems like a really fascinating place.

Small Things in Life

2007-11-04T16:56:00.001-08:00

I am a little bit obsessed with Belgium. First of all it is beautiful. Second of all their French makes more sense than French French (even if the Belgian joke is the equivalent of the Polish joke here), and I want to learn Flemish. Also I love their mussels and, this is actually probably the most important part, they make my favorite beer and chocolate. I kind've really want to live in Belgium at some point.

Anyway, today is a boring day as I have a lot of work and have been writing a memo in the library. Then along came an e-mail from the International Law Society about a summer internship in Brussels. This was right after I had had the first Belgian chocolate I had had in a long time.

I have done nothing towards applying, and may very well not get it, but it really perked me up. It would be a really good thing to do and I am pretty sure I would even get paid. Recently I have been doing a lot of random searches for summer work, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of things I have found that genuinely interest me (some element of internationalism and/or cool location). It is just nice.

So Cool!

2007-11-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

Stealing this picture from the New York times. So that there in the picture is a real convertible and pop corn machine? What is it you ask? -cricket- Um....what is it I asked when I was looking at the pciture? It is a drive in consisting of one vintage care on the lower east side. The car seats up to six people and you book if for a film. They are moving through them chronologically (though simultaneously thematically, which is pretty cool) and it is done in a store they completely reinvents itself every few months (not a section of the store, but then entire think, the only linking element is that it is the store that changes every few months).

I know this is sort of an example of urbanites engaging suburban/rural -entalism, but dammit, I didn't grow up in a city and never got to a drive through. I really want to go. It is really dorky, but also amazing! If anyone who reads this want to go let me know because I am trying to put a group together.

Man, this is really the stuff about New York I love: the sort of crazy randomness (also exemplified by the now annual giant pillow fight, which I will go to now that I am back by golly).

Also, it was nice to be back in a place where Halloween is celebrated properly. Yes I know other places have holidays like Halloween and our Halloween is only for their clubs, but I love walking around New York with people in costume, especially when so many of them are clever or funny. And on that note I suppose I will end with a list of Halloween costume observations:

Fuzzy Tiger suits were in for guys this year (a little creepy when the have beards)
A guy was dressed as white trash, mainly wearing a white trash bad, it was awesome
Geisha was in, though mainly men seemed to be doing it
Lots of pirates, many Johnny Depps (both pirates and Fear and Loathing)
And girls continue to dress and slutily as possible and wear fuzzy ears and call is a "costume"

What was also funny is how many different people thought I was (and asked me if I was unsolicited) in my Mozart costume from last year, which was never really a Mozart costume, but seemed appropriate when I was in Austria:

George Washington - I got a lot of these, mainly from hobos that were really eager to hang out with me for some reason (and I had been worried about being mistaken as a slave owner)

Thomas Jefferson - Same reasoning I supposed, slightly more esoteric personality

Beethoven - sure, why not?

Mozart- I got this one when another Mozart was around actually

Hitler - just kidding

Liberachi - Got that one from a group of subway workers, I think it is my favorite.

Stranger than Fiction

2007-10-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

The readings for Criminal Law are always the most fun, and by that I mean most horrifying.

Well, after reading a number of cases about children being beaten to death, I got one a about an Arabian guru, who came to New York after spending some time in China.

Anyway the guru basically has a cult. They believe in mind over matter. The guru says he has the ability to stop his followers blood flow and the like allowing him to stab them multiple times with no injury. Apparently he has done this before and there was a witness.

Well this time it didn't go too well and and after the guru stabbed one of his followers in the heart and a few other places he died. Oh, he dies. Anyway the gurus defense is pretty much "well it worked last time."

Something I need to do more research on

2007-10-29T17:29:00.000-07:00

Stolen from the BBC site:

This is a 750 year old church in Germany being rolled from its old village to another. Fine, people still like stories about buildings being moved because a house on wheels is just a funny [exorbitantly expensive] idea. Fair enough. Excepts this is the only building relocated in the entire village, the rest of it is getting flattened. For a good cause perhaps? At least for an important highway? (Germans love cars right?) Try because they want to mine the brown coal under the village and it would get in the way. I find this really horrible because the people lost a legal village to keep their village (government of Saxony wanted it and you know imminent domain), as in they wanted to keep living there, and this is for brown coal. From what I remember about Brown coal, it is a horrible power source (pollutes more than normal coal) that was used extensively in East Germany because there was a lot of it was locally and that was a big emphasis of their economic development. That had terrible repercussions for East Germany's air quality. No just no. Don't knock down the historic village because you want to get at a power source you should not be doing. This is environmentally conscious Germany? Granted it is Saxony, but really?

Surnames of Jews in New York

2007-10-29T12:06:00.000-07:00

I don't really do very much with my German on a day to day basis these days. It does not really both me having more or less just come back after a year in a German speaking country and planning to back to another one in the nearish future (it will be part of what I end up doing with my life so it is fine). What is interesting is that German I do experience crops up in the last names of my Jewish professors and and classmates. Granted they are probably of Yiddish origin, but they are common to both languages and only knowing one of them they register as German for me. It is funny, I subconsciously pronounce them all the German way (replacing 'W's with 'V's and the like). It is a bit odd as most of these people have no connection to Germany or German and many are probably justifiable less than enamored with Germany considering WWII, but that is how German pops up in my day to day life.

Architecture

2007-10-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

New York is surprising. I would not say New York is a beautiful city, but it is a city with a lot of beauty in it. New York is gritty and serious in a way that a city where things get done has to be I find Milan, London, and Moscow similar in that respect).

New York, however, will surprise you. Because New York is a vertical city, you can really turn a corner and be amazed by the 19th century street you've fallen into, or the beaux-arts building you "discovered." Many of New York's most impressive buildings are obscured by the construction of the last thirty years or so and as a result you can't see what in the past were considered monumental buildings (City Hall for example, which when it was built was mean to be grand and imposing and is now so dwarfed by the building around it that it seems quaint, and it is).

I have a great respect for the hodgepodge of architecture that is New York City, which cannot blame or accredit the diversity of it architecture to fire or war, but to greed and vision of its own citizens.

I recently discovered that many of my favorite New York City buildings were designed by the same man: Cass Gilbert (pictured above). You can see some of his building here. My personal favorites are the United States Court House, Hamilton Custom House, and the Municipal Building, which Stalin like and copied in Moscow many times. Cass was a very European inspired architect who very much wanted to work in England, but who life brought back to the states. He did, however, design on an American scale and did amazing works (like the Woolworth building, which is essentially a Gothic skyscraper). He also did the Supreme Court build, which is perhaps what he is most famous for.

Work

2007-10-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

I am trying to work more. I need to, but I also like how I feel when I have done a lot. Unfortunately, I don't like the feeling when I am just starting. Oh my mighty dilemma.

also,

Went to China Town today for lunch with friends. Despite the rain, it was extremely pleasant. I have not been to China Town in a very long time (I used to have a grudge against China Town having grown up in an Italian-American family the bemoaned China Town's swallowing of little Italy, which got smaller every time we went with my grandfather to his favorite restaurant), but I really enjoyed it today. There are a lot cool little shops, and though people stop and ask you if you want a rolex or a handbag, it doesn't feel too much like a third world country (horrible thing to say? Maybe).

Anyway, good times. I am genuinely very happy to be back in New York. Life isn't always easy, but I like the people I meet and I feel very much at home. It is the right place for me to be right now.

Good Times

2007-10-26T15:14:00.000-07:00

One of the more eccentric teachers here forgot to turn on his microphone this morning. It took fifteen minutes of the people in the back of the class coughing and trying to get his attention, which did not work because he lectured for the first ten minutes with his eyes closed, before one of the people is the back yelled that his mike was not on. He responded that he had not put his mike on because there was a sickness being transmitted among the professors by the mikes that they all had to share. He then admitted that was a lie and put his mike on.

That goes up there with his mimed reenactment of one of the murders we read about as my favorite class moment.

Another professor told us about how he had defended a client who had previously been convicted of having sex with a dead bird. Apparently in the unrelated case his working in the judges were very curious and asked about the type and size of the bird among other questions.

See, law school is fun, if deranged.

?

2007-10-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

I don't know how to network. Really. I mean, I have always known this is an important thing, but before I had no skills and my only prospect so my prospect of employment looked out upon the exciting world of janitorial work, and really do janitors need to network? I certainly did not think so. Well apparently the greater world of law is networkapalooza, where you try and ride high on the nepotism beast instead of clinging to its moldy underbelly (really I feel like we should revolt and kill the nepotism beast so we can all live on top, but I guess nobody likes a dead nepotism beast). This all mainly coming out of the international law career panel I wen to today at the New York Star Bar (wow, the have a beautiful building). All the panelist emphasized networking as the most important thing you can do. I generally felt their description was lacking a step, observe: 1. Always talk to everyone, network down, up, horizontally (there may have been other directions), give people your card, send out holiday updates to your entire network 2. -not mentioned- 3. Networking gets you a great job that no one else has ever heard of. Yeah networking! I think the one thing they convinced me is that I should get business cards, as they made me picture one of the panelists giving me his card and me giving him a shred of paper sloppily bearing that would certainly not disintegrate in his wallet.

Coincidence?

2007-10-25T16:49:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or have there been way more disasters natural and otherwise under Bush than under any other president in at least the past fifty years? Is he like a magnet for trouble?

Familiarity

2007-10-24T11:11:00.000-07:00

So you know sometimes you know a genre of something so well that you can predict what happens next? Like how in bad teen movies if you see a girl with glasses and her hair up who is supposabley nerdy you know at some point someone will giver her a makeover that consisted of letting down her hair and taking off her glasses and everyone will be shocked and she will end up with the football star/class president/most popular guy in school. Or how in action movies (excluding James Bond) if someone speak with a very British accent British accent they will be the villain. Well, in our criminal law book, at least in the cases on murder, there is an equivalent: when in doubt, someone will be stabbed multiple times in the throat. Yes, Hollywood like you to believe the torso, but no, apparently the throat. So you will be reading a story about a guy trying to make up with his ex and you will be thinking "Oh, she's going to get stabbed in the throat isn't she." And then the guy puts aside the presents, and pulls out a steak knife and does the deed. And then despite it being horrible, you think" not very creative saw that coming, we've had at least three other throat stabbing cases this week." This is how law school ruins your soul, or makes you into a creative murder.

Pictures Stolen

2007-10-22T18:14:00.000-07:00

Pictures from various newspapers websites that entertain me:

Three-year-old British boy's birthday. He was running around the playground and decided to plop this traffic cone his head and play "Harry Potter." Then he went to show his parents. They couldn't get it off. They called the fire department. It took them half and hour to get it off. His mother, relishing the future black mail potential of the picture, said "He looks quite sorry for himself in the photo and he's not going to thank me when he sees that in the future."

I know she is in the Middle East promoting Breast Cancer awareness, but this picture really freaks me out. Not sure if it is the pink/black contrast or the tilt of her head.

Alumni reunion on College walk! Oh no, Serbian veterins. Sorry.

Algiers. Do you recognize the fancy outfit the little boy wearing? I do. I saw them being sold in Istanbul. They look like little prince costumes, but they are to celebrate circumcision! That little boy looks pretty happy now, but something tells me he won't be in a minute!

KKK

2007-10-15T23:39:00.000-07:00

So I am supposes to blog about how they taught us about the the Klu Klux Klan in middle school. I don't actually find this story all that remarkable, but Alexia said it was worth blogging about (versus most of my stuff and my perma-whine about law school, don't worry that will come at the end of this entry anyway).

So when I was in middle school we learned about the Klu Klux Klan. Not in a way even romtely suggesting they were okay, but we learned about their beliefs. At one point during class when when one teacher was lecturing another teacher entered wearing a Klan robe and hood. This was probably only even remotely okay because there were no black kids in the class. Anywho, he was trying to scare us (basically impress upon us that the Klan existed in New York too and we could not just write it off as a southern thing). Someone had found the robe when they bought a new house and donated it to the school. The teacher wearing it actually looked pretty funny as he was tall and the robe was made for a smaller man, so it was about a foot too short.

We also learned about the Klan's plan to divide the country up into sections and have a white part, a black part an Asian part, and probably a latino part as well. I don't remember which was which.

Such was middle school (it was a public school by the way).

Writing a Russian composition at the moment and it will be a while yet before I finish. This week is sort of hell. I was up most of last night writing a memo, writing my Russian comp tonight, and for Monday I have a large and important memo that I have no idea how I will finish in time and do decently.

Did I mention I don't look law school too much?

I always wonder why I am here until I read about US-Russian missile treaties, territorial disputes, or a legal systems of Ukraine and Russia and then I remember that that is the stuff I really want to get to. It will just take a while.

Entrapment

2007-10-11T22:18:00.000-07:00

So law school continues. We had a very nice meeting of International Law Society tonight, which I really enjoyed. The people are really interesting, many are multilingual, and well, share many of my interests. Most are more into human rights, which isn't really what I want to go into, but it just a good group of people (they are also organizing language conversation groups for twelve different language, which is pretty cool).

Many of the people there were older than I am. Many of them had spent years abroad. It kind of made me wonder if I should have spent more time abroad before law school perfect my Russian and French (granted French had farther to go) and picking up either Ukrainian or Georgian. I do really like spending time abroad. Still, I know that last year when I was abroad I felt an internal pressure to acquire skills and get on with my life, so it does seem like there will always been an element of "the grass is greener."

My original plan after Vienna had actually been to spend a year in France. By the time that came around though I was no longer so enamored with French, and was also discouraged that in the places the teaching program would send me I would not be able to continue with Russian (bane and joy of my existence). So that was tricky and then it ended up not working with differing.

Still, with a very structured schedule at the moment the appeal of just hanging out in a country that I would like to learn more about is great. For some reason Georgian and Ukraine are really calling me. Don't know if it is because I wrote my big research paper on the two countries political situations last year. I was really happy that when I was in Ukraine this summer I picked up some Ukrainian (my Ukrainian grandmother was pleased). I would really like to learn Ukrainian properly one day. I may have to make it back to Columbia at some point to take their Georgian and Ukrainian language courses.

New! (may be a lie)

2007-10-07T22:06:00.001-07:00

This post is a bit older, but when I was ready to post it the internet decide to flip out on me.

Well it looks like posts are going to be a bit more sporadic these days than they were last year.

School is keeping me pretty busy and I am trying to find away to run with that while keeping a life (by extent my sanity) and a sense of fun.

Nothing too crazy is going just that we 1Ls don't speak the same language as the professors. We are not specific enough and are more careless with our words. Still they are the ones stuck with first years for eternity, we presumably only have to be 1Ls once.

A number of things are going well. It has been nice to be closer to my family again. I have had some great moments of catching up with College friends (it is really wonderful to have friends that understand you better than you understand yourself).

I am also pretty happy about the elections in Ukraine. The Orange parties squeaked out a majority in the new parliament. Observers, Ukrainians included, are pretty cynical about the whole business, but the Orange parties seem to be the only ones committed to greater transparency. Tymoshenko despite being a former oligarch herself is likely to give the oligarchs a run for their money and keep them on their toes, which suits me just fine. Still seems like a positive development to me compared to the farce that is Russian politics (specifically Putin not only saying he might run for the presidency again four years after his current term, but that he might take over the position of Prime Minister in the meantime. Basically he'll just do whatever he wants.

Me

2007-09-30T21:56:00.001-07:00

Doing law school readings makes me really sleepy and sadly sleeping doesn't get the reading done. I really do often feel like the book is leaching life energy from me, thought that thought probably doesn't help me much in getting the work done (unless the books suck all the life out of me and I become some sort of cool zombie lawyer immune to the books effects, which would be cool, but I digress). So far, I think the most dangerous aspect of law school is just the guilt. The guilt that whatever it is you are doing you should be doing work for law school instead. There is always something you could be doing. It is like being constantly nagged. What is really tricky is even though you think the person doing the nagging is crazy, they could be right so you still have to listen and try and spend as much time with the books and deciphering their arcane meaning.

What is irritating is that grades are really the measure of all things in law school. Basically firm only look at the top 10% of students from non-top ten schools (and if you want to transfer they are looking for people in the top 10%). The problem is no one tells you how to get these "grades." The professors can't because becoming a professor is also based on how you do in law school so pretty much by their very nature law professors never had trouble getting good grades. So at this point I am working on not failing.

Also, my mom, the source of encouragement that she is, sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal that prominently featured a graduate of Columbia who had gone on to Brooklyn Law only to graduate with pretty bad job prospects and paying 60% of his income for his student loans alone. Don't think that will be me, but still not encouraging.

Anyway, I have to go tomorrow and have my first memo ripped to shreds. The year so far is just a bit like being told again and again that you know nothing about the law, I tend to agree with them which they don't like toj much, but so far I have nothing to put in the blank space of the response they really want: No, I do...[some brilliant insight about the law].

Hang Man

2007-09-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

My sleep schedule is very messed up. For a couple days this week I have slept about three hours the entire day, and on other days I haven't been unable to sleep for more than an hour at night, but am ready to pass out by my last class. I am sure there is any easy way to fix this, like making myself stay up until it is a normal time to go to sleep, but sometimes that involves staying awake for another twenty hours when I am already ready to pass out so it is a bit tricky.

So law school, yes. Pretty much everyone here will freely acknowledge that they know nothing. We are well aware that we pale in comparison to the professors' knowledge, yet as a result of the fabled Socratic method we are the ones that have to answer questions when we go into class. Most of my professors don't lecture, they mainly just ask questions about the readings expressing dissatisfaction with the many attempts at answers frightened 1Ls attempt to offer them as sacrifices of appeasement. To be honest, I don't really mind that the professors don't like our answers, mainly because well, we don't know what we are talking about. What I mind is that they never answer the questions, so all we have at the end are the various shards of answers that failed to please.

It is perhaps the most frustrating in my civil law class where the professor usually tells us she is looking for one specific word and proceeds to call on people for the next ten minutes or so to get words that are completely different. These are moments when I think a game of hang man would be much more efficient. We would guess letters and even if they were wrong we would have the spectrum narrowed by multiple possibilities. Eventually we would figure out the word and with each guess we would be a little bit closer. At some point though in the real world we give up, which does not really matter though since guessing does not have to be voluntary. Then the guesses become really interesting. The fun thing is by then we are all pretty much convinced that the word must be pretty advanced legalese or at least in latin, and then it ends up being something like "status." By guessing, we have actually become dumber apparently. Sometimes though we never get the actual word and after being told there is one the professor lowers his or her standards and accepts a rambling paragraph which if anything is comparatively less wrong as opposed to right. Fun.

Here are some picture from this morning when I couldn't sleep and decided to go for a walk:

Who cares about Iran?

2007-09-27T00:32:00.000-07:00

Iranian President Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia this week. This week is the world leaders forum, when Columbia tries to net visiting dignitaries while they were in New York. They tried to get Ahmadinejad last year, but he confirmed too late and they couldn't set up the security. Well they got him this year. The whole event was a huge controversy as Ahmadinejad is fond of making comment, no international conferences dedicated to, thing like the holocaust not having happened (oh sorry, "needing more research"). Loads of protests (from both sides of the political spectrum). Anyway, after weeks of defending inviting Ahmadinejad and his right to free speech, Columbia's president introduced him as a "petty and cruel dictator." Ahmadinejad didn't quite agree and went on to make some choice remarks about their being no homosexuals in Iran (hint: there are).

The whole event got a lot of media coverage and Bollinger was mentioned on the cover of every paper I saw the next day. The whole event has also greatly boosted Bollinger's popularity, who to my knowledge has never been popular among either students or faculty. Eh. Not quite sure how I feel about the whole event. It certainly was not particularly nice to invite Ahmadinejad and then insult him before speaking. I think more than anything I don't really see the point. Ahmadinejad has some fairly cracked out views about Jews, homosexuals, women, well most topics really (my favorite involves his days as Mayor of Tehran when he had billboards of David Beckham shaving banned and encouraged/required people to grow beards), but there are also a lot of people in Iran that agree with his crazy positions. Perhaps it is worth challenging him on those positions, but it won't change his stances, it only makes the Americans who probably would not like any Iranian president feel like he got what he deserved. Also, and I am no expert on Iranian politics, it seems to me that the President of Iran does not have anywhere near as much power as we give him credit for. There is a whole conservative layer of government above the president (let us not forget the ayatollah). Still the more sensationalist American newspapers had a field day with the whole thing playing on some populist issues, which is rather ironic as Ahmadinejad has always been a pretty populist politician...in Iran.

Also the new president of Turkmenistan came to visit. Nobody asked him about what he will do with golden statues of Turkmenistan's last dictator or with all of things he renamed after family members an inanimate objects he was fond of (including his autobiography which I am pretty sure has its own month, but at the very least is what the test for university admission is based on).

Also he can't smile.

Birthday Party

2007-09-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

After a week all of my birthday hijinx have come and gone after celebrating on Saturday night with friends. It is sort on annoying that after 21 there isn't really anything special you get to do when you get older (except for rent a car in some places, but that really isn't too exciting). it was really nice to see people and I was in full traditional Ukrainian attire. The host thing is a bit weird as you don't really have much time to spend with any one group of people. Fewer people showed up than last year, but I suppose that is to be expected with me having been abroad the past year and me inadvertently competing with the Jewish holidays. Still it was very nice with some people from High School, College, Austria, and Law School so I also felt like most of the key parts of my life were represented.

Other than that I am still figuring law school out. It is a wee bit frustrating that you know you know next to something and really hope the professor will teach you something and most classes turn into giant guessing sessions (honestly I think most of the professors after shooting about twenty students' responses to their questions down lower their standards and will accepts pretty much any old answer). Still I am hoping to make it to Russian arctic law and nuclear law one day.

* The image above is a t-shirt I am going to buy and wear to my Constitutional law final. If you are a little slow like me you not have gotten it at first, which makes it all the more wonderful later: the second amendment is the right to "bear arms." I rather like this interpretation of that right.

Birthday

2007-09-17T23:04:00.001-07:00

Another birthday has come and gone. It wasn't even one of the fun ones where you get to legally do things you have long had the opportunity to do if you wanted to anyways. Still for me my birthday stretches pretty much a week from when I celebrated it with my parents a couple of days ago till a week later when I finally have my party with my friends (where the creepy guy told me if I bring enough people I drink for free, huzzah!).

Really not so eventful so far. My parents felt like sharing the story this year about how my mom's water broke when she was pregnant with me and they had to go look for diapers (my mom pointing out that they could just use the other ones for me later anyway). Ah, family bonding.

Not much more to say really than the cake in the picture above is made of foam. Doesn't it still look sort of tasty though?

Back in New York

2007-09-12T20:30:00.001-07:00

So I have been back in New York for a few weeks now. It has been really great to see some familiar faces and spend some time with my family, but at the same time there has been so much new stuff going on that it doesn't quite feel like a homecoming. Where after my other stints abroad I always had Columbia to come back to, I am now in a different part of the city, living with different people, and studying something new. A lot of those things are really positive and being closer to down town Manhattan is great, but at the same time it adds to a general feeling of insecurity as I try and figure out where I sit with things. As much as I feel more at home in New York than anywhere else, I have realized over the past several weeks that this is more of a new beginning than a continuation from where I left off last. I still have all of my college friends and am extremely thankful for that, but at the same time I am spending most of my time with an entirely new group of people and don't really run into people from college unless we make plans (though I do run into lots of people from jr. High School apparently). It is sort of the same with my studies, I do have some experience with studying law having taken a number of courses on European and international law while in Vienna, but I have no experience with American law, which is what I will be spending all of this year doing.

So it is a new beginning. Did I mention I don't like beginnings? I like knowing where I stand with people, what I am good at, what I can expect. With languages I always hated the elementary classes. Preschool, however, I remember fondly. Anyway, that's about it so far. Mainly a lot of confusion and bright lights.

Favorite Kiev Pictures

2007-08-03T05:15:00.000-07:00

So I am in Moscow and it is a very rainy day. This weekend the whole program is off to St. Petersburg, which should be fun if the weather improves a bit (even if I'll be spending two of the next three night on the train). Anyway now is sort of a time of reflection and with a bit of an Internet connection I wanted to post my favorite pictures from Kiev. What was really great when I was in Kiev was that I got to meet a lot of young Ukrainians. In Kiev I lived in a working class neighborhood in an apartment with Ukrainians more or less my age. For Ukrainians, Kiev is the land of opportunity (better jobs, but also cleaner air than in the east and less corruption). I lived in a working-class neighborhood with some Ukrainians more or less my age. Really nice people, but not simple lives. It was interesting to meet people pretty much my age who already had families and who had more to look forward to in an evening drink than the future.

Anyway, here are my favorite pictures from Kiev:

Ukrainian

2007-07-14T09:31:00.001-07:00

So things are pretty good here in Kiev. I have met some other interesting young people and feel like I have gotten a good sense for the city.

What has impressed me the most here is how much Ukrainian has taken the place of Russian. When I was in Odessa (a very much Russian speaking part of Ukraine) I had asked about Ukrainian being taught as a foreign language to the Russian-speaking inhabitants of Odessa. My teacher made a really big deal out of emphasizing that Ukrainian was not a foreign language in Odessa and at the time I didn't really understand why. The fact of the matter is that in Ukraine all of the signage is in Ukrainian and only Ukrainian. This extends to most shop signs (with the exception of Crimea) as well. Also there are few Russian-language schools in Ukraine and pretty much everyone regardless of what part of the country they are from or what language they speak goes to Ukrainian- language school. Even if many of the older teachers end up teaching in a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, the fact of the matter is that if you grow up in Ukraine today you are surrounded by Ukrainian (it dominates tv too). In that sense you can't talk about Ukraine being a 'foreign language' even if you are living in the Russian speaking East.

This all impresses me even more because this was very much not the case in Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, like in Ukraine, you had a native language that suffered as a result of direct or indirect Soviet promotion of Russian. After the collapse of communism in both countries you had attempts to promote the 'native language.' Efforts in Kazakhstan have been far less successful. First of all in Kazakhstan you have the problem that in comparisons to Ukrainians in Ukraine, Kazakhs make up a much smaller percentage of the population. Then there is the issue where as an educated speaker of Russian can probably understand about 60% of Ukrainian with no exposure to it before (both being Eastern Slavic language), Kazakh apart from a few loan words shares very little in common with Russian and is much harder for Russian speakers to pick up just by watching tv. In Kazakhstan, however, there is the added complication that given the choice between Kazakh- and Russian-language school even Kazakh speaking ethnic Kazakhs will often choose Russian school (the better textbook are in Russian).

In any case, the official rhetoric when it comes to language is very similar Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the results, however, have been very different. I suppose I am just impressed by the success of ukrainianization in Ukraine, especially considering the failure of a previous attempt in the 20s.

Anyway, over the past couple of days I have been spending time with young Ukrainian bankers. I had answered some ads in a Kiev English language paper from people willing to trade Russian for English (I done most stuff here on my own) and ended up meeting with two of them. Both were more or less my age and were trying to work on their English for career purposes. Both were really nice and were native Russian speakers so it was interesting to get their take on things (as products of the post-Soviet period both were also fluent in Ukrainian and had no real concerns about the expanded use of Ukrainian), and one of them had taken part in protests here in Kiev during the Orange Revolution so that was interesting. Though I was glad for the company, I have to admit that both in terms of the breadth of their interests were a little dull so I will be looking forward to shaking things up a bit when I head to Minsk.

I had wanted to come to Ukraine because especially after the Orange Revolution because I really felt like there was hope here. Hope in the sense that there was an up and coming generation that was talented and energetic and unhampered by media censorship or a completely rigged electoral system (the latter not being the case in Russia or Kazakhstan). Change is possible in Ukraine. After having spent in total of about a month in Ukraine this year I can say there is hope in Ukraine, the media is truly free, elections are free, but the sheer number of problems the country faces makes that hope difficult to realize if there aren't politicians capable enough to tackle them even if they are popular. Ukraine has tremendous class divides, housing is crushingly expensive (even for the poorest quality), villages are dieing out, alcoholism is a way of dealing with everyday life, life expectancy is low, cronyism and graft are prevalent, and women face huge discrimination and little help is raising the children they often have to provide for on their own on salaries that aren't sufficient for one person to live off of. All of this makes the hope that exists in Ukraine bittersweet. Yes in Ukraine there is a better chance of addressing these problems and the problems of those without connections in general, but even if they are better than in Russian or Kazakhstan the probability of addressing all of these problems effectively is slim. None of which is helped by the fact that politicians are more focused on fighting each other than helping people.

2007-07-09T10:58:00.000-07:00

So Kiev is interesting. Not surprisingly it was quite different from my expectations. Admittedly my main interest in Kiev is historical, going to old churches and museums and trying to take in the vibe. I had a great time doing all of that when I was in St. Petersburg and I would be lieing if I said I wasn't trying to recapture some of that. As the ancient capital of the Eastern Slavs Kiev does have a lot of history, but as the Soviet mined the center of town on their way out the center is not where Kiev's rich history is to be found (though if you are looking for cheap-looking Stalinist-Gothic architecture surround by a giant mall and McDonald's that you could find). Kiev does, however, have moments of mind numbing beauty particularly it monasteries and churches.

In general it is a bit of weird mixture for me because in its baroque churches and bright colors it reminds me a lot of St. Petersburg, though with its Soviet architecture it reminds me of Almaty. The fact that I hear more Russian here than anything else, but everything is written in Ukrainian also throws me for a loop.

Swan Song

2007-07-02T04:38:00.000-07:00

So as of Wednesday my time in Vienna has drawn to a close. It has not been the easiest year, but I have gotten a lot out of it. As I have mentioned before, the European education system is not for me. The Diplomatic Academy is not typical for Austria, but in most of the classes there was still far too much emphasis on regurgitation and summary than on analysis and coming up with new ideas. Still, I was able to spend a year in Europe on scholarship doing German, French, and Russian simultaneously. I also got an introduction to international law. There were a lot of fun moments and it was great to travel, but I have always been a person looking ahead and who wanted to get going with the next thing so I am happy to be off.

On Wednesday I leave for Kiev where I will be hanging out and doing some Russian language stuff for two weeks (very excited!). After that I will be in Minsk for four days visiting some friends from the academy. Then I am off to Moscow for a month long exchange with the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Hopefully while there I will manage a weekend trip to Kazan aw well. In any case, it is a former-Soviet Union themed summer, but that is how I like them and I am at a point with my Russian where I am genuinely excited about using it and less intimidated than I used to be.

From here on out the posts will be much less frequent until I make it back to the states in August (I definitely won’t be fulfilling my 20 posts a month quota, which is self-imposed of course). Still I hope to squeeze a few in from interesting places and things develop.

Cafe Alt Wien

2007-06-30T17:05:00.000-07:00

Here in Vienna my hang out of choice has been Cafe Alt Wien. It is pretty central, but manages to be off the beaten tourist path while still having a strong student following. It is probably the place where I have felt most comfortable here in Vienna. Anyway here are a few pictures.

Me and Özlem

I drink.

Özlem drinks.

I explain my (somewhat intoxicated) treatise on the nature of man.

Özlem clearly thinks I am not spouting BS.

Reiko arrives and studious work begins.

Özlem and Reiko don't agree.

And this picture clearly explains the end of our story. Clearly. It's like a choose your own adventure except the page you chose is blank. That or we killed Özlem and bow in honor of a job well done.

Done

2007-06-29T04:57:00.000-07:00

As of Wednesday I have been completely done with school work. It was not easy (on Wednesday alone I had three exams), but it is finally over as is my year here in Vienna. I'd like to say I did well on everything, but I didn't so at this point I mainly celebrating the completion(also important). In previous entries I have listed my complaints about the Euoprean education system (little room for creativity, all emphasis on memorization and little to none on analysis), and in many ways this year has been how the two of us just don't really get along. Nonetheless, I was really touched in my Russian composition class when the professor told me how impressed she was with my style and how with every sentence she could tell I was trying to say something. To me, it seemed like validation of the priorities of the educational system I come from.

Now we are on to the end of the year parties. There is a trip to an Austrian wine pub tonight (heuriger) and tomorrow there is the big end of the year party where students, faculty, and alumni will mix. It all promises to be pretty nice. For me, though, it amusing how there is much more of an emphasis on networking here. They sent out an e-mail of all the alumni who are coming and their jobs specifically for the graduating students to be able to make connections with those people. I know it is nice, but for me it is still weird. Maybe it is because I don't have much in the way of concrete career goals, but I just wouldn't walk about a random person who had a job might want to have one explicitly for the purpose of making connections. I might do it if it were something I was really interested in and wanted to know if the person liked the job, but me that is different. Oh well, let the networking begin.

Snow Globe

2007-06-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

My friend Hannah and I went to the Vienna Snow Globe Museum. They claim to have made the first snow globe in 1900, and after being alerted to the places existence it seemed worth checking out. The snow globes were very nice (there is also a 'museum,' but we weren't too interested). Their snow globes were just sort of different, they were well made, but not too expensive. Mind you there were a lot of really corny ones (like Hoki Poki, the advent sorceror, above), but a lot of them were cool because they showed different scenes from Austrian life and bits of the country we had seen. Oh yeah, and the place seemed to be run by recovering drug addicts. Not trying to be mean, just how they seemed.

Interestingly, though this place claims to be the first one to make a snow globe, the wikipedia entry for 'snow globe' makes no mention of it. The entry marks France as the birth place of the snow globe, though not mentioning a specific person or place. The German entry does mention does mention the shop we went to, but as the first place to get a patent for a snow globe, not as the first place to make one. Oh snow globe politics [insert metaphor about their fighting somehow being like when you shake up a snow globe and all the snow goes crazy]. Yes.

Governors Island

2007-06-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

Governors Island has pretty much always amazed me. First there is the name, which I think is great, and which refers to the time when it was the exclusive property of the British governor of New York. Then there is just the fact that you have this 172 acre plot of land so close to one of the the most space cramped part of the Unites States and next to nothing has been done with it (they uses it as a dump for a while). The place just clearly has a lot of potential, the view alone says that.

Over the years the island has changed hands quite a bit being given by the army to New York State, from New York State to the Department of the Interior, and from the Department of the Interior to the National Park Service. The fact that is belonged to the military saved it from the clutches of Robert Moses and now they are getting ready to develop the property (as a park and leaving the historical buildings on the north face of the island in tact). Anyway here are my favorite and least favorite plans for Governors Island (there are five proposals in total and you can see them all here):

"The Mollusk" - Involves flooding big chunks of the island with more chunks being flooded at high tide. It is supposed "evoke the mollusks that once encrusted the island's shores." Yes so they don't say flooding, they say 'tidal pools,' but either way I think it is stupid. First I don't think anyone will get/care that they are trying to make the island look like a mollusk and I don't think most people are too interested in the island's mollusk past. Also, it just seems a waste to flood good land, not to mention the tidal pools would be big mosquito breeding grounds in summer (not fun). They did want to put in thermal pools though (for people) a la Iceland facing the Statue of Liberty, though, that was pretty cool.

"The Island" - This plan involves creating a big meadow, a working farm, a beach, and a ravine within the island that you can kayak around in (with fantastic views). This one just works for me better, it seems to make better use of space while differentiating the areas and providing a lot of variety of nature in one of the most urban areas of the world. This endorsement may be the kiss of death for the proposal.

Anyway, look at the link for the full plans, the images are pretty cool (would have posted them there, but sadly they are not swipeable).

Prince Philip, My Hero

2007-06-26T09:36:00.001-07:00

Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, has a habit of saying offensive things at public events (usually about the ethnic group/nationality the event is for). Eddie Izzard said that he has habit saying things like [insert stodgy British accent] "you are all a bunch of bastard." An itemized list stolen from wikipedia is actually quite a bit of (offensive) fun:

Speaking to a driving instructor in Scotland, he asked: "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?"
When visiting China in 1986, he told a group of British students, "If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed".
After accepting a gift from a Kenyan citizen he replied, "You are a woman, aren't you?"
"If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." (1986)
In 1966 he remarked that "British women can't cook."
To a British student in Papua New Guinea: "You managed not to get eaten then?"
Angering local residents in Lockerbie when on a visit to the town in 1993, the Prince said to a man who lived in a road where eleven people had been killed by wreckage from the Pan Am jumbo jet: "People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle."
On a visit to the new National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff, he told a group of deaf children standing next to a Jamaican steel drum band, "Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf."
He asked an Indigenous Australian, "Still throwing spears?" (2002)
Said to a Briton in Budapest, Hungary, "You can't have been here that long – you haven't got a pot belly." (1993)
Seeing a shoddily installed fuse box in a high-tech Edinburgh factory, HRH remarked that it looked "like it was put in by an Indian".
During a Royal visit to China in 1986 he described Beijing as "ghastly".
"Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" (in 1994, to an islander in the Cayman Islands)
At the height of the recession in 1981 he said: "Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed."
Upon presenting a Duke of Edinburgh Award to a student, when informed that the young man was going to help out in Romania for six months, he asked if the student was going to help the Romanian orphans; upon being informed he was not, it was claimed the 85-year-old duke added: "Ah good, there's so many over there you feel they breed them just to put in orphanages."

At the University of Salford, he told a 13-year-old aspiring astronaut: "You could do with losing a bit of weight."
In 1997, the Duke of Edinburgh, participating in an already controversial British visit to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (Amritsar Massacre) Monument, provoked outrage in India and in the UK with an offhand comment. Having observed a plaque claiming 2,000 casualties, Prince Philip observed, "That's not right. The number is less."
During a Royal visit to a Tamil Hindu temple in London , he asked a Hindu priest if he was related to the terrorist Tamil Tigers.
He once attributed a badly finished carpentry job to one having been done by an Indian.
In 1988 he said that "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."
In 1996 he drew sharp criticism when he said a gun was no more dangerous than a cricket bat in the hands of a madman. The comment came in the wake of the massacre of 16 children and their teacher by a gun-toting psychopath in Dunblane, Scotland.

At this point I think he must be trying, planing his next offensive remark. Oh yes, but to top it all of, he is worshipped as a god in the South Pacific.

Dunce

2007-06-25T13:07:00.000-07:00

Feeling a bit duncish today.

Mr and Mrs

2007-06-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

So in my post-war European history class the professor talks about 'Mrs. T' a lot, I being an educated individual first think of the wife of Mr. T. You know similar sass, maybe similar hair, somewhat more female. He means Margaret Thatcher. I rather like the though of them being married. They are both forceful in their own way, and just think of the children.