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[May. 15th, 2006|07:27 pm] |
Grades just got posted for this semester. I'm back on the 4.0 honor roll. Which makes me particularly happy considering that I had a class with only three grades in which I scored a 70 on the midterm. Pulling that into an A is something I'm pretty damn proud of!
I've been on a reading kick ever since I collected on my aforementioned prize winnings. I bought 18 books on Friday. Saturday I started my intiative of reading at least 300 pages a day in order to discipline myself for grad school. So I'm now on book five. (okay, so I've been surpassing 300 pages/day, but that was a minimum, not a limit!) Hands down the best I've read so far was the biography of George Washington that I just finished. I love well written biographies, and have an abiding interest in revolutionary era American history, but even without those interests, this book would have stood out. A fascinating protrait that managed to avoid the Oedipal trend of cutting down our founding fathers without glossing over his weakness and failures. Highly reccomended.
I started my "new" job today. Given that Dr. Meernik had to pick up his daughter and thus wasn't availalable to discuss my particular responsibilities, other than answering the phone I pretty much read all afternoon.
I'm so sick of hearing people talk about "Saving Fry Street" already. I'm glad I'm leaving soon. |
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[May. 10th, 2006|02:18 pm] |
So I just won a $400 gift certificate to the UNT bookstore in an essay contest. Rereading my entry today, I have to say I rather like it, so I thought I'd share.
( After the cut... ) |
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[May. 7th, 2006|02:34 pm] |
Totally stolen from bluestarliz and rottingstrip:
1. Open a music player
2. Add all your music
3. Hit shuffle/repeat/randomize.
4. Find photos of the first 15 artists/bands that come up (no repeats and no cheating).
5. Have people guess who the artists/bands are.
6. Paste this in your journal and do it too, so I can have fun guessing as well.
( You know you want to play ) |
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[Mar. 29th, 2006|02:01 pm] |
So between standard sort of senioritis and having a short week, I've been apathetic this week. Of course, my apathy takes the form of only putting in 10 or 11 hours days at school...so my performance isn't exactly suffering I suppose. But there has been alot more goofing off.
I'm going to Columbus tomorrow. I'm excited. I need to find my disposable camera so that I can get some pictures, particularly of Capital Square. (Yes, I'm that big of a dork)
( Meme stolen from bluestarliz ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 27th, 2006|09:13 am] |
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Last night the glamorous, exciting world of high fashion came to my building! It was so amazing! How could my research, or the research of the other political science, history and economics students working at Wooten last night possibly compete with the wall-shaking music, the preening teenagers prancing up and down every hall, or the unwavering self-devotion that accompanies professional narcisism. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 25th, 2006|12:10 pm] |
If you haven't already read it, you should check out Justin Watt's response to threats from Exodus International, which serves as a nice reminder that our country is still salvageable once we kick the hick out of office.
Speaking of good news, the Supreme Court handed down an opinion in Georgia v. Randolph this week upholding the Georgia Supreme Court decision. For those of you unfamiliar with the case, Police arrived at the Randolph home and asked Mr. Randolph if they could search his home. He denied them permission and put them on the phone with his parents (the home's owners) who also denied permission. The police then asked his wife if they could search, to which she agreed. They proceeded to search, find evidence of cocaine use and arrest Scott Randolph.
The Georgia Supreme Court held that in a multi-occupant home, for the 4th Amendment to have any meaning, any occupant of the house had to be able to deny permission for a search. Police can not go "permission-mining" asking around until they find someone who will authorize their search.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed. If anyone who lives in a residence denies permission, a warrant is required.
The decision was 5-3 with Alito not participating. Which lends credence to the belief that Anthony Kennedy may be the most powerful man in America right now. While oddball cases produce strange bedfellows, as a general rule Souter (the author of the Randolph opinion), Breyer, Ginsburg, and Stevens vote as a bloc on the liberal side. All evidence suggests that Chief Justice Roberts has also taken over Rehnquist's position in the Chief Justice-Scalia-Thomas bloc. While we don't have enough votes from Alito to really peg him yet, a review of his lower court opinions makes it difficult to believe that he's going to stray far from the Roberts-Scalia-Thomas axis.
Which means we have a solid 4-person liberal voting bloc and an equally solid 4-person consevative bloc. Which leaves only Anthony Kennedy, who can not reliably be placed with either group. He was appointed by Reagan, but he has repeatedly angered conservatives for being far more moderate than expected.
So the bottom line is that whatever position Kennedy takes in controversial cases will generally become the law of the land. The hopes of conservatives and liberals alike rest on his opinions.
So where does he stand?
Famously, he stands against the death penalty. He's responsible for the recent opinions outlawing the death penalty for minors and the mentally handicapped.
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the opinion which upheld Roe v. Wade, Kennedy was with the majority in all sections of the opinion. What does that mean? It means he favored 1) abortion remaining legal 2) requiring parental notification for minors 3) requiring a 24-hour waiting period and opposed spousal notification for abortion.
Gay rights? He wrote the majority opinion in Romer v. Evans. The facts of the case are little too technical to spend a lot of time on, but suffice it to say that the holding said that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment prevented discrimination against homosexuals. Now that didn't change the scrutiny levels (reply to this post if you want to know what I mean), but its still the most protectionist stance towards gay rights the Court has ever taken.
What about the war on terror? In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld he was part of the plurality that said that the Bush administration could indefinitely detain American citizens as enemy combatants without a trial, so long as they were given access to counsel and allowed to plead their case before a "neutral decision-maker." (This case is a great example of what I meant above about strange bedfellows. A dissent was filed stating the opinion that all American citizens are entitled to a full trial in federal courts, regardless of their role in terrorism or the war efforts. The opinion was signed by Scalia and Stevens, the most conservative and liberal members of the Corut, respectively.)
So the bottom line seems to be that we have a fairly precarious safety on the bench right now. I say precarious, however, because both Stevens and Ginsburg are old enough that we can expect their deaths or retirements within the next 5-10 years. Given the relatively young age of everyone else on the Court, if either (much less both) of those two go, it will be game over for at least 2-3 decades, unless a Democrat is in office.
So if you're the praying sort, I urge to pray every night for the wisdom of Kennedy and the continued health of Stevens and Ginsburg. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 23rd, 2006|05:03 pm] |
So this year I'm going to achieve something special. Something extraordinary, really.
I'm going to beat daylight savings time.
Yes, you read that right. On April 1st, the day that we're all supposed to "spring forward" like dutiful sheep (I'll leave consideration of whether sheep can truly spring to another time), I will be traveling from Eastern Standard Time to Central Standard Time. So I will not be resetting my watch on that godforsaken day.
This year, daylight savings time, April Fools Day is on you! |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 22nd, 2006|11:02 am] |
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I don't understand watching a movie in a college class. If the movie is really that worthwhile (as opposed to assigning reading on the same subject) we should be assigned to watch it on our own time. Hardly seems a good use of class time when you're not a teenager anymore. |
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| skill by proximity |
[Mar. 21st, 2006|01:18 pm] |
You know its one thing that people consider me to be McKinzie's keeper. She's my office-mate, so its semi-reasonable, if annoying, to assume I might have any idea where she is or when she will be back.
But why would you think that because I have an office across the hall from Prof. Meaders, the undergrad polisci adviser, I know where is, or when he'll be back, or even stranger, that I would be able to do his job when he's not around (e.g. get you into a class, change your major for you, tell you what to take)?
When ever someone asks me if I know when he'll be back, I make a point to get up from my desk, walk across the hall and read aloud from his posted office hours. "It seems he'll back at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow. Can I read anything else for you?" |
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[Mar. 12th, 2006|07:48 pm] |
Just got back from vacation. And *what* a vacation! Most of the time when I've taken roadtrips and whatnot, I come back so exhausted that I feel like I need a couple of days to recover before I go back to work. This trip, however, was maybe the most relaxing weekend I've ever had. The area was absolutely gorgeous. I spent the entire weekend sitting out on a deck chair, feet propped up, out on the dock watching the lake. Smoke some cigarettes, drink some beer. Read a book. Watched birds hunt for fish; watched beavers play; closed my eyes so my ears could truly enjoy the utter lack of mechanical sound.
From our back porch it was about 40 feet to the dock. Could go out there first thing in the morning in my pajamas and hang my legs over the side and stare at the sky while I had my morning cigarette. At night we'd go to the one restaurant in town and have alligator or catfish or snapper, all caught in the lake.
Trees grow up out of the lake, thick and conical at the base, wiry and thin at top, with spanish moss draped across the brances. As night fell it seemed like the entire world was brushed with the same palate; the sky, tree, and lake all seemed to reflect each other.
Wonderful! |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 6th, 2006|08:20 pm] |
Although I have nothing major to report, I realize its been a while, so I thought I'd post.
This weekend we finished collecting data for my big project this semester. (Although technically speaking I should say I, not we. We decided we could circumvent the whole issue of intercoder reliability if we just had one coder. Yay!) (Also, if we're going to be technical...I seriously doubt that my data collection is completely finished. Rather, let us say that phase I is finished and that we all hope phase I is the only phase of any significant length)
All of which means that we got to run our model this morning. Not the final thing, certainly. Not the one whos results we'll report. But one that can give us an idea of what we had. This was a moment I was kinda dreading. Because it would ultimately amount to typing one sentence into stata and getting back a page of results which would either say "Hey, you've got a really interesting paper to write" or "You're paper is going to consist of telling everyone how you were wrong" (and yes the second was a legitimate possibility)
But no, our model is significant! and seriously so. I felt like running off from school to go grab a glass of champagne! It is, in my adviser's words, "a thing of beauty."
So my semester is already starting to ease up a bit. My classwork was really a tiny portion of what I had on my plate this semester...the big things were the foreign policy project (what I've been talking about), my certification project (which I'm basically done with -- I just need to see if I can find more information on caseload levels for state courts prior to 1994), and the 92 bis paper (which I'll write over spring break) -- once those things are out of the way, I'll feel like the semester is really over, even though I'll have a few weeks of class left.
Tomorrow my mom gets to town, yay! I don't know how much I'll get to see her (if for no other reason than the fact that "in town" means Fort Worth, not Denton) - but I will a little anyway. Jordan too. Unfortunately David and Allex couldn't come.
Friday I go to Uncertain with Megan. I just hope she's improved by then. She's so stressed about school that I can barely tolerate being around here right now. I mean, I'm stressed too -- we've both got a lot on our plates. But her stress takes the form of pessimism and depression, which are things I can ill-afford to entertain right now.
In non-school topics, I just want to say that Dr. Who rocks ass. It made the hours of coding cases this weekend far more tolerable (see I just can't get away from talking about school.) |
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[Feb. 9th, 2006|09:24 am] |
So that whole moving far away and getting my Ph.D. thing just got a little more real.
I got my first "yes" this morning. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 6th, 2006|02:58 pm] |
Blah! I'm at work, and I have plenty I should be doing, but I feel like doing none of it. So I'm sitting here drinking my Aruba Jam Sprite and tooling around the web.
I really want either a personal robot or a jetpack soon -- its six years into the 21st century, for Christ's sake! |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 22nd, 2006|07:34 am] |
Last year I went to the American Collegiate Moot Court Association national tournament and was ranked as the third best speaker in the nation. I was really proud, but I had only been doing moot court for about a month, so it kinda seemed like a fluke. For the last year I've waiting for nationals to come around again so that I could prove that it was not a fluke.
It wasn't.
As of Friday, I am now ranked as the *best* undergraduate moot court speaker in the nation.
Suck it, self doubt! |
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[Jan. 18th, 2006|10:55 am] |
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Doctor has cleared me to go back to my routine, although I'm supposed to still take it fairly easy. I'm on a new round of antibiotics that are seeming to be pretty effective. Overall feeling pretty good today. Godawful cough when I woke up, but its getting better. |
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[Jan. 17th, 2006|12:54 am] |
Ok, well despite, Dylan's good-natured mothering, I overdid on the being out today...(for the record, all I did was have lunch then go to the office for a while, go home for three hours to rest, and then go to moot court practice -- but that was apparently way too much)
So pardon me while I get a little whiny:
FUCK THIS SHIT! This illness is fast approaching "worst experience of my life" status. If I do *anything* besides lie on the couch like a vegetable, my nose and throat fill up with so much fluid that I have to fight to breathe and feel like I'm drowning. The medicine helps, but it also gives me panic attacks, mood swings, intense insomnia, exaggerated claustrophobia, and the complete inability to hold rational thoughts in my head or put sentences together -- I AM NOT FUCKING EXAGGERATING...in any of this...no fucking hyperbole... |
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[Jan. 16th, 2006|01:07 pm] |
Goddamn, I have *NEVER* been so happy to be out of my house before.
Still not well, but a billion times better...
...course now the prednisone is kicking in, so I'm getting stupider...yay! |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 13th, 2006|09:21 pm] |
So the last several days, I thought I had the worst cold that I've ever had. I wandered around sniffling, groaning, coughing and moaning "blah, I think I'm dying." In other words, pretty whiny.
My professor convinced me (ordered me, really) to go to the doctor. Turns out, I don't have a cold.
It seems what I have is some kind of severe lung infection related to pneumonia (and which may turn into pneumonia at any moment) My doctor has instructed me that the situation could very easily take a turn for the *serious* this weekend if the medicine I've been prescribed proves ineffective. I've been ordered to not leave my house at all until Tuesday, to spend the majority of time in bed, to faithfully follow my prescribed regimen of antibiotics, steroids, expectorants, and albuterol.
So I can barely breathe, I'm running a triple digit fever that leaves me feeling constantly confused and disoriented, and now I'm doomed to a weekend of unimaginable boredom (and anxiety)
But at least I don't feel whiny anymore! (grin)
So, I'm not contagious...so people are encouraged to bring me media, drugs, food, or the pleasure of your company to keep me from going stark raving mad.. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 12th, 2006|05:22 pm] |
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I'm updating from the bar. That gives me a neat little thrill. It's a shame I have nothing exciting to report. I'm sick as a dog, but that's offset by the technojoy my sexy new laptop gives me. |
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