ghosts + cartoons + technology = amazing

Today I did something I've been wanting to do for at least the last 5 years. I watched the disney halloween special. do you remember it? it was the one hosted by the magic mirror on the wall. i watched these cartoons every year until I was around 13 i think. and i've been trying to catch them on the disney channel each october for a long time, but now the disney channel just plays all this lindsey lohan junk (with all those outfits...), so i haven't had any luck. but today i realized that technology is amazing and that there is something called youtube . so i finally got to watch my halloween cartoons. and i am happy. it was weird though, because i think my personality was in a big way shaped by the cartoons i watched when i was younger. luckily these were some good cartoons. actually, i really was impressed with them. i didn't realize this until today of course, but they had an animated witch quoting Macbeth and a magic mirror talking about old testament stories. pretty cool. man, it was fun to be 5 for a little bit today.

the problem with studying

is that it shows you how much more studying you need to do. at least you need to do it if you don't want to fail your classes. there is so much material, and i can see no meaningful way to organize it in my mind or in my notes. there's so much studying to do that i don't know where to start.

on a happier note, i found a great place to do all this studying. i've never been able to focus at home, so i'm used to going out to get work done. here there is a bakery called nussbaum & wu that i go to now. the food isn't actually that good, but there's something about walking into a noisy building, handing someone three dollars and sitting down in a straight backed wooden chair that makes me work a little harder.

how to nurture your marriage

I got a call today from someone in the elders quorum presidency asking me to teach the priesthood lesson this sunday. the topic: how to nurture your marriage. I don't remember ever being married and don't have a lot of experience with this topic. Also, this is an odd topic for a group of single guys to talk about, but i do understand that it's important to think about now as preparation for later on. but still, i have no personal stories or insights about this, unless i want to talk about how to get phone numbers or plan a date, which would probably be best left to talk about after church (and with somebody who is better than me at those things). So, married people, what should I talk about? Single people, help me make something up, ok? Any ideas or insights would be appreciated.

law related post

i don't think people are very interested in posts about things related to law school. and i'm surprised that i'm willing to write about them considering how overexposed i am. but here's a kinda gruesome example of what keeps me doing my reading every day. It starts off with a kinda dry explanation of a principle and then gets a little gross, so if my niece and/or nephews are reading (that would be amazing!), please skip this post.

In my torts class the other day we were talking about suing to recover damages for non-physical harms. it's a lot easier to get money if someone does physical harm to you or your property than if they assault you in some other way. if someone punches you in the face, its no problem to get money from them to pay for your stiches. but say someone yells a bunch of obscenities at you or says something really mean, maybe you can get them cited for harassment or whatever, but it will be very hard to convince a judge to give you any cash award to compensate you for the psychological damage. and probably for good reason. but we looked at one case where the court did allow recovery for a purely psychological damage. The story starts with an old man who dies in the hospital. His son then goes to make some arrangements with the hospital and to pick up his father's things. The hospital person hands him a bag of his father's "personal effects", and when the guy opens it he finds... a bloody severed leg. The guy assumes that it's his dad's and freaks out. The hospital clears everything up, and no they didn't cut off his dad's leg or anything, but the guy has nightmares about it for a long time and when his marriage later deteriorates he blames it on the psychological damage resulting form this experience. mark twain said something like "fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. truth isn't". anyway, that guy was allowed to recover. and that is the sort of stuff that you read about in law school.

food

"shabu-shabu"

roughly translated that means "swish-swish". it's the name of a dish that i had with some friends at a japanese restaurant this weekend. on every table there's a burner and the server brings out this big pot of water to boil on it. then you get a big platter of raw meat and vegetables and some chopsticks and you kinda make a soup with all the vegetables. you hold the meat under water and kinda swish it around for 5 or 10 seconds to cook it, which was really unsettling to me because it never really looked like it was cooked right. anyway, just so you know, this food doesn't really taste very good. and it is really expensive. according to wikipedia, it originated in the 13th century as a way for Genghis Khan to feed all his soldiers. i can't imagine that being very efficient. they must have had some special technique.

entitlement and misery

I was reading a bit of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters last night and came across something that really struck me. He wrote, "Men are not angered by mere misfortunes but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied." This is so true. I think that we all have a remarkable ability to survive hardship when it comes down to it. We can get through pretty much anything, and the only time when it gets bad is when we allow ourselves to feel a sense of entitlement and think that we're not getting what we're supposed to get. It's so easy to think that you deserve something better than you receive, and to blaim other people when your life doesn't meet your own expectations. Sometimes things just happen and that's ok and you'll always get through it. For a better explanation, look at the first chapter of Job (especially verses 21 and 22). That should be required weekly reading if you ask me (or at least i should read it every week, because i tend to forget it)

album of the week

the beach boys "Endless Summer"

it's an epic compilation of a bunch of their older stuff, which is the good stuff- love songs, break up songs, surfing songs, driving songs... it's basically the sum of the human experience with a surf guitar background and cool harmonies. also, my old roommate joey used to have it on all the time back at our old apartment (he was a san diegan), and it reminds me of home, which i like.

it's raining in new york, in case you're wondering.

political junkie

so, normally I hate talking about politics, mainly becuase it tends to lead to arguements. but i can't help but be excited about the possibility of Mitt Romney getting the GOP nomination for 2008. I am a junkie. I check evangelicalsformitt.org and http://blog.electromneyin2008.com several times a day for the latest news. It seems like he's building good momentum. Most conservatives can't stand McCain or Rudy, and there aren't too many other viable options in the republican party right now. The other "other" canidate was supposed to be George Allen, but it turns out he says too many racist things in the news and is too wrapped up in scandal to get the nomination now. And then there's Mitt's awesome record as governor and before that a succesful venture capitalist and CEO of one of the most prestigious consulting firms around. harvard MBA and JD, BYU undergrad. anyway, I'm all for him. and it looks like more and more people are thinking that way these days. just my 2 cents and perhaps the only politcal commentary you will get out of me all year.

good reading

the last few days or so i've kept on coming back to the same little section of scripture. 2 Nephi 4 16-35. you can read it here. i think the approach here is really interesting in a couple of ways. i'll leave that discussion for another forum though, and just say for now that its a link worth clicking.

rock'n'roll

I have a guitar now. my friend let me take one of his home with me last weekend. if any of you want to hear me play The Who's Pinball Wizard over and over again, just give me a call and i'll put the phone on my desk so you can listen. seriously, i'm so glad about this.

kindness

I spent most of the weekend driving around Utah in a gigantic, old, gray truck. It was really great. But I don't think it got very good gas mileage. In fact, I think I pretty certainly overestimated the gas mileage I was getting. I think this because late Monday afternoon, after not driving particularly far after putting gas into it, the car sputtered to a stop on the highway. I wasn't really in the mood for this, especially considering that the weather was starting to get a little wet. I think that it was karma though, because I have a tendancy to drive around on empty for inordinate amounts of time, and I haven't run out of gas in about 10 months, so it was probably just my time again. Anyway, I started walking along the freeway and watching the cars go by, and I didn't even have time to consider being upset or annoyed at my situation, becuase within 2 minutes a nice old guy pulled over and offered me a ride. He took me to the gas station, waited for me while I filled up a gas can, and then drove me all the way back to the truck and waited to make sure I got out of there allright. He probably didn't know how grateful I was, but I was so glad to have someone helping me. It wasn't really about the trouble of walking a couple of miles, but much more about knowing that someone was there when I needed it. I'm not sure if the help came so quickly because I was in utah, or because I looked particularly needy (due to the old, broken looking truck i'm sure), or what, but whatever the case, sometimes a person's kindness just means a lot and deserves at least a blog post.