the ocean

The Latest In Medical Devices

So somehow I managed to jack my left wrist up yesterday at the gym, resulting in perhaps my most embarrassing fitness class ever, including the one where I discovered I had my gym shorts on backwards. (Although probably not as embarrassing as the one where the Asian girl threw up was for that Asian girl.) I kept having to stop doing the exercises halfway through because I thought my wrist was going to snap. This involved flopping down onto my stomach on more than one occasion. And today I have actually been having trouble typing as a result -- I wrote a whole section of an appellate brief one handed. I actually think I'm going to go to Walgreen's and buy a brace. Not because I think it's actually going to do anything for my wrist; I just think it will make me feel better.

I do realize this is just a few short steps away from a truss and a colostomy bag, but I'm ready to embrace it. I lived too hard when I was young (read: pixie stix) for middle age to be kind to me.

Treasures from the Quincy Archive

My parents literally never throw anything away, so their house is always full of amazing things. (In addition to catalogues of violin supplies from 1992 and remnants of my sister's dance costumes from the mid '80s.) Here is just a small selection:


The perfect gift for the child who sees Woodlawn Cemetery and thinks, hey, I'd love to color that. Which is all children, isn't it?


Yes, we have a Labyrinth poster. It came free with the VHS copy, as I recall. As though they needed to sweeten that deal. Still Jennifer Connolly's best work, by the way.


I went through a latchhooking phase in middle school. I swear that all of the kids were doing it. We weren't cool enough to get into drugs.


Irrefutable evidence that I am a mathelete. I think this was first place in Geometry, though it may have been Advanced Algebra. Apologies to Jonathan March if I got our triumphs reversed.

Mr. Saturday Night

It's 10:12 on a Saturday night and I'm sitting with my parents in the living room watching a rerun of Monk on the ion network. It's like I've entered another dimension, one in which Tony Salhoub is a credible dramatic actor. Not that I'd be doing anything particularly exciting if I were in Chicago, but at least the TV would be several sizes larger and not trying to sell me adult diapers. They really do look like underwear though, I've got to tell you.

There is not much to report about this day, either. It rained a lot, which prevented my mother from giving me another tour of her new plants, but also meant that there was a lot of working on jigsaw puzzles that went on. We went to the gym at my parents' college, which is always a strange bizarro world where everybody loves them and people speedwalk on a rubberized track. I went to Wal-Mart and bought five dollars worth of dental floss. I'm gonna do some crazy gum care tonight.

Traveling Man

Tomorrow night I'm taking the train to Quincy to visit my parents for the long weekend. It will give me an excellent opportunity to practice looking unfriendly and acting like I'm really into whatever I'm reading, as it is bound to be a packed train. I've also got a strategy whereby I allow my laptop bag to slip ever so slightly into the aisle seat's legroom, just enough to make the seat look undesirable without being enough to attract the ire of the conductors. Amtrak conductors fall into that category of people who do not have much power but still somehow have too much power; I have more than once heard them dress passengers down for seemingly minor infractions like putting feet on the seat and not being fast enough to display their tickets. I'm guessing you did not know that riding the train had a moral dimension.

Anyway, I'm guessing that I will actually feel more like posting that usual this weekend, given that my alternatives will likely be walking dogs and putting together puzzles with my parents. But if you don't hear from me, I am not dead -- I've just been kidnapped by elderly people and forced to watch Mythbusters.

Amazing Travel Photos

I'm pretty sure Springfield is every bit as photogenic as Vienna, but I wasn't there for as long of a time, so you'll have to cut me some slack.


This is the capitol building. It's where they have government and stuff. I don't know why it looks so short and fat in this photo -- it must be some problem with the upload because it looks downright lanky on my phone. But I'm never one to judge based on body proportions, so I'm letting it go.


This is the Illinois Supreme Court building, where I had my oral argument. Yes, they have metered parking right out front. It's called access to justice, bitches.

By the way, security guards really love it when you start taking pictures of government buildings. It's tough love, sure, but I'm pretty sure there's love in there somewhere.

Excused Absences

I haven't posted in almost a week, but it's totally okay, because I am busy and important. I had an argument before the Illinois Supreme Court this week! It was amazing, and not just because I got to drive a Mazda 2 with no cruise control down to Springfield. They're like the nicest court in the world and they asked good questions and really seemed to listen to the answers. Also their courtroom is, like, super pretty. Oh, and I stayed at the Hilton, where I got a free cookie at check in. Chocolate chip. That's going to be pretty hard to top.

In bright scheduling ideas, I had to go to a three-hour Shakespeare play immediately upon my return to Chicago. Henry VIII. I enjoyed it pretty well, although I think I was probably so tired that I was hallucinating through parts of it. Henry VIII doesn't actually ride on a dinosaur, does he?

Thursday was our support staff appreciation lunch. Which is a little weird in a government job where the support staff is unionized and makes as much as or more than the attorneys. But I am all about appreciation, not to mention that I am generally expected to bring the small talk. Topics covered included the weather, everyone's children, and travel plans past and future.

And then I also did some drinking. It has been my experience that beautiful weather invariably leads to the ingestion of tallboys on the roof. It's just science; I see no reason to fight it.

How Did We Celebrate Mother's Day?

-- Guilt, recrimination.
-- Placing panicked calls to florists.
-- Listening to commentary on the neighbors' landscaping habits.
-- Playing Words With Friends with the phone on speaker.
-- Receiving visual reminders of a childhood's worth of awkward haircuts.
-- Being compared unfavorably to other people's children.
-- Answering pointed questions about our footwear.
-- Pretending to be interested in NCIS: Los Angeles.
-- Realizing we're too old for handmade gifts to be considered cute.
-- Eating dinner at 4 PM.
-- Recognizing that we are becoming our mothers.

Committee Thinking

So I serve on a professional committee that shall remain nameless. (But the use of the word "professional" pretty much rules out the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, thank you very much.) It's something that I got roped into doing before I left the big firm, since I think I successfully said "no" a total of four times in the almost seven years I worked there, and two of those time I'm pretty sure involved turning down pie. Nowadays I don't know that I'd even be invited, because being someone they think they can get money out of seems to be part of the deal. But I'm on the committee, and I seem to be just minimally competent enough that I'm not going to get thrown off any time soon.

Anyway, by and large the committee is not much work and I don't mind it much, but sometimes the meetings just drive me batty. They're seriously just two hours of people sharing their many deep thoughts about the law and complaining about how the teleconference equipment doesn't work the way they think it should. There's a lot of people talking over other people while I just kind of sit there and try to look like I'm paying attention. Generally this involves putting my phone somewhere where it's not totally obvious that I'm playing with it. And I'm the youngest person in the room by about ten years, so I don't even have anyone to sit back and be sarcastic with. I write a lot of bitter tweets in my head.

I'm sure this is all good for my resume somehow, right?

Light Reading

Today I received the following package in the mail from Restoration Hardware:


To be clear, it is five volumes of catalogues: Interiors, Outdoor & Garden, Objects of Curiosity, Tableware, and Small Spaces. I added my own volume, Vomit.

It contains things like "an important 1949 French library globe" ($179) and "a grand 19th century realist carved horse head" ($395). It features rugs that cost more than my car. Just holding it makes me feel like a worse person.

It filled up my entire mailbox. It was ominously labeled "Spring 2013." What am I to expect the Christmas edition will look like? Will it require a forklift?

I did not request it, let us be clear. I guess if you buy one bed from these folks you're on their list forever. I'm scared of these people. After these comments, I might end up finding a grand 19th century realist carved horse head in my bed.

Just by way of comparison, though:


I've heard rumors that Joyce was actually looking to branch out into catalogues.

Required Reading

In case you didn't know from the giant pictures of Tobey Maguire transforming bus stops everywhere into chambers of horrors, there's a new film adaptation of The Great Gatsby coming out. I don't have especially high hopes for it, given that it comes from the man who made an Australia movie that made audiences long for the subtleties of Crocodile Dundee, but that's actually not my point right now. The other night we saw a commercial for the movie and one of my friends confessed that she had never actually read it. And not because she faked it with the Sparknotes like I did for the second half of Great Expectations, but jut because it was never assigned to her. I, meanwhile, had to read it three times, once in high school and twice in college. Not that I minded; I would rather read it ten times than The Faerie Queen once. But anyway, this led to an interesting discussion of what was required reading and what wasn't at our various schools. Gatsby was pretty popular all over, though perhaps not as hot as The Scarlet Letter. There was a lot of Shakespeare, particularly Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. I was surprised that The Red Badge of Courage didn't do that well, though, and neither did your major Faulkner novels. ("A Rose For Emily" seems safe among short stories, though, along with "The Lottery" and "The Most Dangerous Game.") And a lot of people were forced to read The Lord of the Flies, which I was not, and to date have really only sort of perused. I feel like I kind of get the point on that one, I guess.

Anyway, one of my friends kept referencing "this one where this guy's on a jury, and he has a briefcase." She couldn't remember the name. I offered Twelve Angry Men, of course, but was declined. I tried To Kill a Mockingbird, because I knew there was at least a jury in that one, but that was rejected as well. I offered Inherit The Wind and, becoming a bit more desperate, a bunch of John Grisham titles. No dice. A lot of googling followed, but "book jury briefcase" surprisingly yielded few results. So as a desperation play, I started to just kind of describe the plot of Twelve Angry Men.

"Oh yeah," she said. "I think that's it. I guess I just didn't know what Twelve Angry Men was."

Anyway, the night ended with me pulling out my Norton Anthology, which in any sensible person's book is the very definition of a wild evening.

Here's the Pitch...

So I saw Pitch Perfect last night. It was all right. Given all of the hyperventilation surrounding it (I'm looking at you, Entertainment Weekly), I sort of expected it to be the greatest cinematic achievement since the advent of the talkies, but it was just mildly pleasant and likable. I have to admit that I was hampered somewhat by the fact that I have a general aversion to a cappella groups, stemming partially from their tendency towards the cutesy (look, I'm making percussion noises with my mouth!) and the pun-filled. Also from the fact that some a cappella singers I have encountered place the importance of what they do right up there with performing brain surgery and exposing human trafficking, but who's counting? Anyway, the movie did succeed by and large in making a cappella singers seem funny and entertaining as opposed to annoying and frightening, which was good. And some of the jams were actually pretty sick. I'm somewhat troubled by Anna Kendrick, specifically her mouth size and placement, and Brittany Snow to me has no particular reason for being, but I did enjoy Rebel Wilson, although not as much as she seems to have enjoyed herself. The guys were sort of nondescript, as evidenced by the fact that I am not particularly able to describe them. And there were lots of things that the script sort of threw out there and then didn't particularly know what to do with, such as daddy issues and homoerotic subtext. But generally it was entertaining, so I'm not complaining. My other Netflix disc right now is Inherit the Wind, by way of comparison. Expect a report on that one in approximately two years.