Frozen

I want to write but my mind is frozen.

This is partly because it is negative eleventy degrees today in Salt Lake City. And, I know. Some of you live in Michigan or Wisconsin or Siberia or wherever and I shouldn't complain about our winters because you're doing it uphill both ways in a mini skirt up to here and a candy bar is a nickel but minimum wage is 10 cents and the only good jobs are at the mine.

I got lost back there somewhere.

The point is, my mind is frozen.

This is partly because I just took Duncan for a walk in the cold and dark and he demanded that I throw the ball in the snow for him eleventy hundred times. Duncan is immune to the cold, I believe. It has no effect on him. He could sleep in the freezer, and probably would if I put peanut butter in there. Skylar is mad at Duncan because Duncan "bit" him on the nose last week. Duncan didn't actually bite him on the nose. But Skylar was kissing Duncan on the face for 3 straight minutes while Duncan was trying to take a nap and he suddenly got startled and nipped at Skylar's face. Duncan walked away from that exchange more freaked out than Skylar. But Skylar is the only one who has held onto the emotion from it.

Where was I.

I was telling you that my mind is frozen.

This is partly because the 10th Circuit issued its opinion this morning on the civil rights case I argued in November of last year and I spent the majority of my day obsessing over what it said. Some of what it said was infuriating to me, by the way. And it was infuriating to Rebecca, too, whom I called as soon as I finished reading the long opinion because she attended the argument and I knew she would be interested. She yelled into the phone about injustice and government conspiracies and "get me out of Mississippi" and then she just started talking about her new baby and how unfair it is that all of the crappy parts of bringing a human into this world go to the women. 

Some of the court opinion was good, so I tried just being happy about that.

Judge Gorsuch was on that panel that heard the argument last November but he was appointed to the Supreme Court just a few months later so the opinion in this case was issued by only two judges instead of the typical three. I think that hurt me, based on how the oral argument seemed to go. But I'll never really know for sure.

Now I'm just rambling.

You can see that my mind is frozen.

This is partly because child abuse feels especially exhausting to me this time of year. I don't really know why that is. It's usually not too difficult for me to negotiate these matters somewhat clinically and try to keep myself from becoming invested to the point that I'm not being helpful. Or healthy. I'm not saying that I do it without caring, by the way. I care. I think child abuse is one of the great blights on humanity. And I am disgusted by how much it happens and how much people let it happen by ignoring or excusing or downplaying it. 

But I have to try not to get emotional about the sometimes-dozens of child abuse matters that come to my attention every day. I've noticed every year right around November this starts getting harder to do. 

It's probably partly because my mind is a little frozen. 

~It Just Gets Stranger