the ending of this chapter

since most of you have chosen to endure my endless complaints about law school, and have shown a tremendous amount of support through my days of misdirection and self-defeat, i feel it's only fair and right to let you know that the bar results are in.

i didn't pass.

and before you feel sad for me, or worry, you should know that i'm okay.  really.  i'm okay.  in fact, friday was overall a really great day for me.  my sister flew into town, i got off of work early, i went to see new moon, then went up to tahoe for the weekend.  it wasn't until about halfway between home and tahoe (at about 9:30pm) that i remembered the results were released.  i googled it on my crackberry, and lo and behold, i didn't pass.

it hasn't been, and sometimes still isn't, easy to articulate to people the reasons why not passing didn't wreck me last week.  my only explanation is that i had already dealt with it all.  personally, i think i was in a good place with whatever i was going to see when i clicked onto that pass list. 

shortly after the results went public, M., one of my closest law school friends, sent me an incredibly sweet email.  my response to her, copied below, may flesh out my reaction a bit more.

...Yes, it was incredibly difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that this path I chose was perhaps the wrong one for me, or at least it wasn't the right one, and admitting that to you all and to my family was worse.  But the only reason I could do it, and the only reason I got through it and am on my way to finding out what it is I really want to do is because I knew I'd get support.  I knew that you, B. and L. (not to mention N. and my family) would understand and support me, even when it was hard for me to understand and support myself.

Honestly, I'm actually surprised at my reaction to the Bar results.  I really did think I'd take it a lot harder than I did.  And don't get me wrong, I was disappointed.  But I was disappointed in the "I bet it would have been cool to be able to say I passed the California Bar Exam" way.  In the end though, I'd already come to terms with not passing, and with the fact that I essentially chose not to pass, hard as that was.  And, if I'm honest with myself, I think the largest part of the disappointment at not passing comes from my bruised ego; I didn't want to have you all know that I didn't pass (because maybe you'd think I wasn't as smart?).

But once I got past all of that, I realized that, for me, not passing is okay.

Because I still have the best friends ever.  Like you.  And you guys understand.

so this chapter of my life seems to be, for now at least, officially over.  i can't tell you how much i'm looking forward to the next one, whatever it may be.

on the eve of battle

you know those moments when your hair looks perfect, you don't feel overweight, you've got a great outfit on, you're about to be promoted at work, the love of your life has just proposed to you, you found the world's most comfortable pair of shoes on sale, and life is just generally one big tub of happy?

this is most definitely not one of those times.

actually, this is almost the exact opposite. because tomorrow morning i will start the three day nightmare that is the california bar exam. and if you just scroll down and read a few of my other posts you'll quickly realize that, for me, this exam is simply an exercise in humility. i don't want to be a lawyer. so why am i taking it? because this is just the type of person i am. i was too afraid to leave law school when i realized that i didn't want to practice (and i honestly enjoyed parts of it too much to stop). i was too invested and had gone through too much to give up when i could see the finish line right ahead of me. i was too wrapped up in what i thought was the only version of My Life Plan that i would ever have to pause before taking out a hefty bar loan and applying to for the test. and now i'm just...in too deep.

so i'll sit for the bar tomorrow and let whatever happens happen. because i'm not prepared, and i don't care that i'm not prepared. at least, not for me. does that make sense? what i mean is that, in regards to how i feel about most likely failing the bar, i'm okay. i've come to terms with it. i'm already looking to plan out the next stage of my life (because, let's face it, i'm a planner), find a job (side bar: it was quite an eye-opener when i realized yesterday that none of the jobs i envisioned myself having in the future required bar certification), live my life.

but i've been flip-flopping on my emotional stability lately because, while i'm okay with my own failure (in this case), i can't stand to have to tell my parents. i'm the type of person, as sad as it may seem (and believe me, it's sad), whose self-worth has almost always been wrapped up in my academic/professional achievement. it's crazy and completely unfounded, but a part of me feels that if i don't become this wealthy, successful lawyer, then i've failed my parents. they wanted me to be something, you know? and if i'm not this, then what am i?

so this is where my head has been at lately.

and then yesterday happened. getting back to those perfect moments i mentioned earlier, let me just say that, while my moment was definitely not perfect perfect, it was pretty incredible. there i was, sitting in the car with N. listening to NPR, thinking about failure and about "how can it be failure when it's not even something i want?" or "what am i going to do if/when i'm not a lawyer? how am i going to make a living?" and about disappointment and how my parents want so much for me and i worry that it's not what i want for me, or that my j.d. doesn't seem like much anymore (i think i actually thought having only a mere j.d. was a failure as well, so deep was i into my self-deprecating snowball) etc. etc. etc. just generally having a silent nervous breakdown there on the 580. and then i hear it.

it'll sound ridiculous when i say it, but i don't care. at that exact moment when the bar was indeed getting the better of me, NPR began to play j.k. rowling's harvard commencement address, entitled, "the fringe benefits of failure, and the importance of imagination."

while the entire speech is fantastic (which is why i'm posting the video in its entirety), it was the section on failure that forced me out of my whirlwind of insanity and gently requested that i stop, take a deep breath, and think. and while i'm still sitting to take a bar i don't want or need to pass tomorrow, the panic has receded, the breakdowns have come fewer and far in between, and i'm in a place where i can say: whatever happens...let it just happen quickly.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Text as delivered follows.
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

me v. the burnout

so, apparently, i've hit The Wall. my own personal, great big barbri wall i like to affectionately call, "kahea doesn't want to do s**t." it's like i know i should be studying day and night, night and day, but God help me i have the motivation of a small bag of rocks. none.

for the passed two weeks, i've barely spent any time outside of class studying for the upcoming bar (which, hahaha, is now less than a month away!). i go to class for 3-4 hours each day, then come home, stare at my outlines, and retain absolutely nothing.

and i know i should be worried. i should actually be freaking the eff out. any sane person would be. but i'm not. i think i've figured out why:

1. before barbri even began, i promised myself that i wouldn't let it beat me. this course, this exam, these 2 months of hell would not get the better of me. it would be over my dead body that law school would get one more nervous breakdown out of me. so here i am, doing whatever i think is healthiest for me. even if it's blowing off the california bar exam. i'll still try my hardest when push comes to shove, but i won't let it kill me in the mean time. i'll study when i study, and when the day draws nearer i know i'll buckle down because a part of me just hates to fail at academia, but i can't let myself get lost in this again. i whole-heartedly stand up and refuse.
2. but i'm also not freaking out because a part of me, and i don't know how big a part of me yet, just doesn't care all that much right now. i mean, the fact of the matter is that, comparatively, i almost have it easy. i don't need to pass the bar. unlike so many of my friends and fellow barbri students, i don't want to practice law, so any job i may get in the future isn't contingent on my passing. my driving force at this point is that i don't want to face the, well, embarrassment of not passing (particularly since, fyi, anyone and their mama can go online in the fall and find out who passed and who failed the bar exam). i don't do failure well, so the humiliation will be a hard pill to swallow should i not pull myself together soon.

but i have to admit that there are moments when the exam tries (and nearly manages) to get the better of me. i'm talking about those times when i hear the way others are coping with it. when i hear the guy behind me in class saying that he's going to be doing 1 essay and 1 hour of mbe's a day, along with reviewing and shortening his outlines, it makes me either want to kick myself or throw my book at him. when i hear friends freaking out because the answer they wrote for their practice essay wasn't exactly like the model answer, i want to put my head down, close my eyes, and scream. and when i see the exam getting the better of others, it makes me feel like i should let it get the better of me too, because maybe that's what it'll take to succeed.

but this happens less and less frequently now since i've learned to just pop my earphones in and blast music from the likes of paramore to van morrison to muse to jack's mannequin. that's how i'm coping with the burnout from three years of law school which felt like 10 years in prison. music, and shutting everything else out.

N. and i also just adopted a dog, which helps me slack off, but more on that later. :)

a girl can dream

i've found myself thinking of dream jobs lately, mostly because i've just graduated and am on the verge of having to find a job myself. barbri (which is a course you take in preparation for the bar exam) started just last week and i'm already wondering exactly what i was thinking when i signed on. why am i taking the california bar? no, let me rephrase: why am i taking the most difficult bar exam in the country when i'm not even sure if i want to be a lawyer?

because i'm scared i don't have any other options?

because i'm too stubborn to stray from the path i've already laid out for myself?

because i don't know what else i'd do?

how about a strange, mish-mash of all of the above.

i'm terrified that i don't have the skills to do any other job. this is lunacy, i realize that. i'm a lawyer for crying out loud. i've completed one of the most rigorous studies out there, and have work experience in both the public interest and private sector. my research and writing skills are pretty decent, and i can get great recommendations if and when i need them. all of this i know, but still i worry. am i too specialized? prior to law school, i was an administrative assistant for five years. other than being a lawyer and a receptionist, what can i do?

i also recognize that i may just be too stubborn to admit defeat. i mean, i decided to become a lawyer. i've made it through - maybe not so gracefully, but successfully at the least - the three years of hazing i often feel like law school is, have worked really hard and learned a lot, have incurred an obscene amount of debt, and am forcing myself through to the bar. my family has supported me, my friends have put up with me, and N. hasn't yet decided to drop me for greener pastures. so after all of that, there's a part of me that just wants to scream, "suck it UP already!" i'm almost at the finish line, you know? it's the deep breath, and i'm taking it. so why back down now? and yes, if i'm perfectly honest, there is a part of me that just doesn't want to disappoint my family, my colleagues, those who have put their time and energy into training me, and myself.

and finally there's the question of what else i'd even do were i not to become a lawyer. i can't think of a single rational, responsible thing to do with myself. i mean, yes, okay, i do have a dream job that you all probably already know about. in my ideal world, i'd be a writer. i'd spend my days working from my home office (which i now have! - will post about later), or on my mac laptop (which i will one day have again) in some cafe researching and writing. i'd be published, i'd be able to pay the bills, and i'd love every second of it. eventually, i'd use the money i earned to open a bookstore/cafe. i even have a name picked out, so much like an expectant mother, but i'll refrain myself from gushing. it just isn't reality, you know? how many people out there want to be published writers? millions. how many actually are? not millions.

i am a not million. i am a not million at my dream job.

but it won't always be that way.

so what about you? what's your dream job? are you doing it now? if yes, how's it going? is it everything you hoped it would be? if you're not working at your dream job right now, are you working towards it? or have you, like myself and so many others, almost resigned yourself to the fact that maybe the dream job was always supposed to be just that - a dream?

ranting

what could very well have been the worst semester of my entire academic career is now officially over.

i've finished my ethics presentation, my trial, my ethics paper, my fed indian law exam, my writing requirement/article, and work. and i get to go home tomorrow.

life couldn't get much better this second.

so the way this writing requirement/article thing works out is that i originally wrote this paper for comparative law final last spring. because i want to go into indian law, the topic i chose was violence against women. amnesty had just done this huge project on sexual violence against women that really inspired me to do my own research from a more legal perspective, and so my paper was born. once that paper was done, i decided to continue to pursue it as my upper division writing requirement, meaning it would have to be longer and better than the original. at the same time, a law journal at school decided to publish it in their upcoming april/may volume. so i spent nearly every minute over the weekend revising it and adding sections, taking sections out, cite checking, all for my writing requirement. and over the course of the next several months, i'll be working with editors at the journal to bring it up to publication standards.

i should probably be more excited, because i'm finally getting published. but i'm more stressed actually. it's really scary when your thoughts and theories are going to be out there for people to read and quite possibly attack. i'll guess we'll see what happens.

to give a brief summary, native american women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped and/or sexually assaulted than any other woman in the united states. 86% of the time, the perpetrators are non-Native men. unfortunately, tribes have no jurisdiction over non-Indians. that jurisdiction, in most cases, lies with the federal government. the federal government, however, rarely prosecutes perpetrators (we see this in rape/sexual assault cases against non-Native women as well), mainly because of a lack of resources, the distance and time it takes to get to a lot of these remote areas in Indian country (think: reservations for Sioux nation, Alaska Native villages, etc.), and the fact that even the federal government is confused about it's authority to prosecute these perpetrators. compounded with this is the fact that the severity of the crime also matters. one U.S. attorney from michigan can be quoted as saying that in order for this sort of case in Indian country to see any sort of action, "there needs to be stitches, practically a dead body."

so tribes don't prosecute because they can't. the federal government doesn't prosecute because of a lack of resources, a lack of effort, and general overall confusion.

and then you have the states. so in some states, the federal government has decided to chuck it's jurisdictional responsibility off of itself and on to state governments. so in those states, when a Native woman is raped by a non-Native man, the state is the one with exclusive jurisdiction to prosecute. BUT, when the federal government decided to give states this responsibility, they neglected to also give them extra funding, and tribes, as we all know, don't pay state taxes since they live on the res and are quasi-sovereign entities. states now have a much larger jurisdictional area, much more responsibility for a much larger population, and they have to police this increased area with the same small budget. added to that, there's already hostility between tribes and states when it comes to jurisdictional issues, so states rarely choose to prosecute crimes committed by non-Indians against tribal members.

where does this leave Native women? without remedy for crimes against them. and this is not to say that tribes wouldn't prosecute if they had the authority to do so; many tribes have tribal codes which cover these sorts of crimes. but tribes are also limited in the sentences they can impose under the Indian Civil Rights Act. so, for example, if a Native man rapes a Native woman, the tribe can prosecute, but they can only give the perpetrator either one year in jail, a $5000 fine, or both. and a lot of tribes feel that this isn't enough, so they'd prefer to leave even this sort of prosecution up to the federal government (especially because the government can vacate the sentences if they feel it doesn't measure up to federal standards).

and again, Native women get no remedy.

there's a lot more to it, obviously, since i write 50 pages on it, but this is just a really rough and tumble sort of summary.

it's okay if you don't understand it. i had to literally draw myself graphs and pictures until i really got it. like i said, fed. indian law is ridiculously complicated.


OFF TOPIC:
so not to be 13, but i'm one of those who think the twilight movie people should keep the dude who plays jacob instead of recasting him. i'm not saying he's the best actor, or that he can necessarily handle a leading man role, but come on, you let rp have a leading man role... it's kinda shady (not that that isn't the movie biz as a whole...).

AND, maybe you should have thought of all this before casting him in the first place, no? even if there was only the possibility of a sequel. it's called planning ahead, hollywood studio. little jake fans (of which i, for the record, am not) all over the place are attached to him now. first you change directors, now this? ever thought of changing the screenwriter instead?!

oh, and the dude from oth circa-season 2 as jacob is a no-go, imho.

haters.



reminders to myself for future blogs:

• new camera!
• home!
• decision to take the bar
• writing
• book reviews
• new layout?
  

can there be justice without a God?

so i'm sitting on BART this morning heading in to work and all of a sudden i see this ad that says simply, "can there be justice without a God?"

and so of course, i start having this full-fledged internal battle over that question. i guess i just wanted to put that stumper out there to see if anyone had any thoughts, or even to just make you wonder about it for yourself. it's a good question. especially for someone like me who has decided to make the law, and through that justice, my career.

oh, the ad was for this program that i guess BART is putting on that actually fosters discussions on topics involving God, etc. and encourages community service and stuff. it can be found at godrides.org.

I believe you, but my tommy gun don't

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Could the founding fathers have been any more vague?

Me, nutshelled: The only thing you're going to catch in the middle of the inner city with a 9mm is people. Deer don't live there.