I'm Not Alone

My friend Kirsten got halfway through our first class this morning before realizing that she was wearing two very different shoes. It was such a relief for me to find out that I'm not the only person here who is slowly going crazy.

~It Just Gets Stranger

What Matters Is Love

By way of update: Last night I was scouted out by another person who is looking for a roommate online. So far Miss Rita is 2nd only to Georg and his boyfriend who want me to come and live with them in the southern part of the city.

Here's her email . . .

Hello, I am miss rita,I came across your profile today and became much intrested in you i will like to have you as my companion, from here lets see if our dream towards each other will became a reality i will also send you my pictures after i have recieved your mail direct to my box (rita.koroma@yahoo.com) I will be glad to recieve ur mail remember age, colour, or distance doesnt mater but what maters is love,
thanks from my heart
miss rita

Happy trails!

~It Just Gets Stranger

Homeless

I was told originally that I could work through the legal counsel I'll be with in Moscow to find housing for the month and a half I'll be there; so naturally I didn't worry much about it . . . until now.

I will be leaving for Moscow in a month and a half. I've got my Russian visa application in. I've got my plane ticket. I'm studying my Russian. But I am currently on the verge of being homeless in a giant unfamiliar and likely unfriendly city. I started panicking about this a week or two ago when I emailed the general legal counsel I'll be working with to ask if he had any place for me to stay. His response was basically, "I'll check around but here's a website you can use to find a place if nothing pans out." On Sunday I emailed him again to see if he knew anything and I've yet to get a response.

My "panic" from Sunday night was "anxiety attack" by Monday, "violent heart attacks and vomiting" by Tuesday, "incoherent screaming and babbling while banging my head against concrete" by Wednesday, and "time to put on the ol' Depends, b'cause you have a lot of living to do!" by this afternoon.

I started looking through the website the attorney had sent me thinking, "I'm 63 years old. I'm sure I can find an apartment by myself if needs be." Well, the site didn't actually have any apartments but rather gave some advice about what not to do when looking for an apartment. The first bit of advice was "DO NOT find an apartment online. Wait until you get to Moscow to start looking." Additionally, the site told me that as Moscow is the priciest city in the world to live I can expect to get a downright crappy apartment for two months for no less than $1,500. However, as a trade off for lowering my standards enough to settle on an apartment this "cheap", I would have to live in a neighborhood where you are more likely to be stabbed and killed by the jagged edges of a broken vodka bottle than (insert something very likely here).

I was then led to a part of the site that allows you to search through profiles to find "flatmates" who need help to split the rent. Initially I said I would rather be homeless than travel to the other side of the world to live with an absolute stranger, unverified by anyone I know, who is more likely to mug and gang-rape me in my sleep than (insert something very likely here).

One panic attack and several Diet Cokes later, I was scouting out the online profiles. As the site has thousands of profiles, it allows you to put in your expectations of your potential roommate so it can filter out those who don't meet your standards. My initial search turned up nothing. So I had to keep going back to the questions they had asked me originally to change answers and essentially lower my standards. I found myself at first saying things like, "well I guess I don't mind if they drink a little," and "it's not that big of a deal if they have more than 10 cats." When my lowered standards in those categories still turned up no matches, I found myself finally resorting to "well I don't care if he's a convicted felon," and "who doesn't have a long medical history of deranged self-perpetuating psychosis-themed disorders?" I thought this felt a lot like dating and marriage: you start out with high standards for a companion and when you realize that there aren't any who meet those standards in your price range, you lower them again and again until you finally get a match. Then you have to decide whether you would rather settle with what you've got or live a lonely lonely life. Eventually I had lowered my standards enough to get one match. Meet Zoro:

Zoro is a heavy drinker and smoker. Zoro is 28 years old. Zoro prefers to live with "gays and lasbians pleeeaase!" Zoro's only listed interest is "sex." Zoro is also "looking for someone who good time and fun personality so party so much!" I won't even go into Zoro's profile picture.

Zoro originally didn't seem like a good match so I started over. For reasons I still can't explain, when I answered the questions the second time I had several matches, most of which looked slightly more promising than Zoro. I immediately sent out about 9 emails. I've only received 3 in return so far. One was a no go. One simply said, "Ok." Really. That was the whole email response. "Ok." I've yet to discover what got okayed. And my personal favorite was from someone who found me on the site and her email said:

hello dear,
i am miss Katurah looking for a loving, caring and trust woethy man so i will like yoy to send an email to my box furctygirl@yahoo.com for more explanatio,s with my picture. waiting for your reply.
with love from miss Katurah.
I don't want to make any rash judgements, but miss Katurah seems like Zoro's type. Except I don't know how "trust woethy" he comes across, whatever that means.
So here we are.
I guess life is sort of just made up of one challenge or problem after another. Some of them really aren't a huge deal (sort of like this one) and some of them really are. But regardless of the level of the challenge, the only relevant thing is that they are real for each of us as we go through them and that's enough to make them a big deal in their own right.
Ultimately, I'm learning at least one incredible lesson from the experience and that's that while the world sometimes seems full of the Zoro's and miss Katarah's which are great for entertainment purposes, it's also full of a lot of pretty amazing people. Throughout this week I've casually mentioned my problem to several people, busy people even, and throughout this week I've seen person after person offer their help and support when I didn't ask for it. I met one person at school today who, I found out, knows many people in Moscow; 30 minutes after I told him that I was having a hard time finding a place to live he found me to let me know he had typed up a one page letter in Russian and emailed it to about 20 different people to see who could help me. Yesterday I heard a girl that I don't know at all get on her phone to ask a friend about a possible housing connection she may have had in Moscow after this girl overheard me discussing the issue with a friend of mine. I randomly received an email from a woman in Moscow who was contacted by a customer at the bank who asked her to write me to see if I needed any help. The list goes on and on.
Ultimately I think that that's what is really important; and I likely won't remember much about this process for the rest of my life but I'll always somehow be affected by the kind of support and care people have shown me. And in a world that seems to focus on finger pointing and who-hurt-who's, it's nice to have these rays of sunshine here and there.
~It Just Gets Stranger

Trial Ad Photos

Here are a few pictures from the trial advocacy competition of a couple weeks ago. These were taken just after the completion of finals. In the group picture you can see my partner Jeff and I on one side of Judge Sam and his two assistants (who also helped judge the competition) and on the other side is Allison and Adam. The only thing keeping us standing by this point was the right combination of Diet Coke and adrenaline. It was only 15 minutes after this picture was taken that we all started our 3-day, non-stop, sleepless pursuits to write our 20 page briefs. Man I love law school.

Oh, and One More Thing

Was anyone else functioning under the impression that our brainiac highly paid NASA rocket scientists were prepared to give us some kind of a warning that an asteroid is almost close enough to feel it? I know outer-space is kind of big but come on! You have one job! I was just going to give some kind of comparison to my job as a banker but I can't think of a proper analogy to warning the world that a 200 foot rock has traveled millions of miles to cause as much destruction as a nuclear bomb.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,503164,00.html

~It Just Gets Stranger

7 Days and 5 Hours of Sleep Later

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Last week was the craziest week of my life! And this is coming from someone who had an appendectomy in a 3rd world country. On second thought--this last week was the 2nd craziest week of my life!

About 2 months ago my good friend Jeff from school asked me if I was interested in participating in this mock trial competition with him as he needed a partner. I hadn't originally planned to participate at all but I then found out that it was sort of a big deal, most of my class was doing it, and this was the only way to try out for the trial advocacy team at the school which is pretty prestigious and something that I think I would be interested in. So I told him I would do it, mostly excited that it would give me an opportunity to wear my really shnazzy 3 piece navy blue pin-stripe suit.

For the competition, the school gave us a packet of information regarding a fake law suit and half the teams were assigned to represent one side and the other half were assigned the other side. We had a few weeks to prepare (find people to play the part of the witnesses we were allowed to have, build our case, prepare opening statements and closing arguments . . .). It, of course, ended up being a lot more work than we expected by the time we got to the first round. But the first round came and it was an absolute blast (and I don't use that word freely). The mock trials go for about an hour or an hour and a half and then afterwards the judges give feedback and send you out the door. If you advance to the next round you get to go again; otherwise, you can get back to the regular school work which is already more than enough to keep you busy. While the competition is run in teams, the scoring is individual so if you advance to the next round but your partner doesn't, you'll get a new partner for the new round and you may even have to switch sides if there is an odd number.

Well we made it through the first round and we were excited because it was a big cut. They started with about 60 teams and chopped it down to 16. The 2nd round was held the very next night so we didn't have a lot of time to prepare and incorporate the comments the judges had made but it went pretty well and both Jeff and I advanced into the 3rd round where they cut it down to 8.

The 3rd round was held on Tuesday of this week and was markedly more difficult as the opposing team was extremely prepared. I also very awkwardly dropped my 10,000 sheets of unorganized pieces of paper all over the room during a cross examination of one witness. The most embarrassing thing was when I was essentially told to shut up by the judge (an attorney from Salt Lake) when I tried to ask him a question at the beginning. Nonetheless, he really liked both of us and sent us into the quarterfinals.

With 4 teams remaining in the competition, Jeff and I were the only original team left (everyone else had been assigned a new partner along the way as their original teammates were eliminated). So we were feeling pretty good except that we were going up against two really talented people: one girl who we went up against in the 2nd round and one guy who we had heard rumors about (that's how good he was---we heard rumors about him). That round was held on Wednesday night and was so long and exhausting that I thought I was going to pass out by the end. We didn't leave school until after midnight but we didn't go to bed until after 2:00 AM because we had to wait up for the email to let us know if we were going to be finalists as the final round was going to be the next day at 1:00pm.

So we got the email and we made it to finals! I, of course, ran around the house screaming for about 30 minutes (using my whisper scream as it was really late). I then started calling everyone in my phone starting with the A's until a slur of obscenities were thrown at me somewhere in the D's for calling in the middle of the night.

Thursday came; I, by this time, had completely given up on trying to get caught up in my classes which were all now a good 2 weeks behind. A federal judge from Salt Lake (Judge Sam) came down to judge the even and it was held in the court room with the whole school invited to attend. The two people we had gone up against in the 4th round made it to finals as well so it was essentially a rematch from the night before.

The final round was far and away my favorite. All four of us were on our best game and it made me more than ever want to do trial work every day for the rest of my life. It was also great to have so much support from classmates who came to cheer us on. After the trial, the judge and his two clerks left the room for about 30 minutes to tally up the scores. I was so thrilled to be a finalist by that time that I surprisingly wasn't really nervous to hear the results. And I suppose it was a good thing anyway because the other team won. I was first runner up and Jeff was second runner up. Neither of us felt like we could possibly have been disappointed--that round was our best performance and we ended up as finalists in a competitive competition that started out with 110-120 of the smartest people I've ever met. I would say it was a pretty good week.

Of course, that day I had to start facing reality as I had a 20 page brief I had to turn in by Saturday night at 11:00 and due to the competition I had done little work on it. This brief makes up my entire grade in one class and, because this is law school, everyone is graded based on how well everyone else did; so I couldn't really afford to do a weak job on it. So on Thursday I worked on it from 4:00PM-4:30AM. Then I took a nap for an hour and a half and went at it again on Friday from 6:00am-Saturday 3:00am. Then I woke up Saturday morning and worked on it from 6:00am-8:00am at which point I ran into work for a few hours. Then back to school from 2:00pm-11:00pm where I turned the paper in just in time. The whole time I could hear David (a friend of mine who is a 2nd year at another law school) telling me to calm down and go home already.

So I essentially lived at my desk in the library for a few days. In the picture you can only see 2 of the 50 or so Diet Cokes I drank during that period. You'll also notice the small pile of clothes in my top left drawer. Currently I have enough pants, shirts, sweaters, socks and shoes at the school to clothe a small country.

I really started to lose it by Friday. Sometime that afternoon I lost my shoes at school and I had to walk around for a while looking for them. I couldn't even remember when I had them last. I eventually found another pair of shoes that were mine but they weren't the ones I was wearing earlier that day. I actually still don't really know how the shoes I found got to school in the first place. Several hours later I found the shoes I had been looking for in my computer bag. I'm going crazy.

~It Just Gets Stranger

1930 Called; Wants Its Phone Back

I feel pretty confident in most day-to-day situations; this is probably a result of becoming desensitized through a life full of embarrassing and uncomfortable experiences. One glaring exception to my maintaining confidence, I've come to find recently, is whenever I'm put in a situation where I have to discuss cell phones with people at cell phone stores.

To give some background, I decided a few months ago that it was probably time to trade in my old phone for one that works. My friends all around me have had the phones for a while that also function as 12 other electronics and common house-hold appliances. I swear I saw one friend ride his phone to work one day. Mine on the other hand, at least when I first bought it back in 1919, did what phones are supposed to do: it made and received phone calls with 30% accuracy. So while Suzy Q down the street was using her phone to make a latte, and Jackie P up the street was using hers to scan the Earth for volcanic activity, I was climbing to the top of the highest building in order to get reception that would allow me to call my parents to try to find out if they still love me even though I'm in nearing 60 and I'm not married with 12 kids yet.

Getting a new phone was not a jealousy issue as I'm quite uncomfortable with the fact that phones now could very well have the ability to take over the world if the Earth tilts just right. I just wanted one that would stop dropping people out of my phone or randomly switching names and phone numbers which resulted in one slightly embarrassing text message last week which was sent to the wrong person. Actually it was a whole text conversation which I later found out was very confusing to the person on the receiving end. This was much less tragic than an extremely embarrassing text I sent a few weeks ago to an entirely wrong person; that one wasn't the fault of the phone however, but was human error. And I would be lying if I said that an obscenity didn't escape my tongue within one second of sending the text.

So a couple of months ago I broke down and went to the cell phone store with every intention of buying a new one. It was high time anyway as the Panguitch Historical Society of Utah has been begging me to donate my old phone to their 1920's collection at their local museum. I brought my two older sisters with me and explained very CLEARLY that I needed their help because I didn't know what I was doing. Sure enough, as only sisters can do, as soon as the salesperson started asking me questions they got lost in some conversation with each other (probably about hair products) and then the next thing I knew, I was completely on my own. I heard the girl say things like "data plan" and "microconfigeration of the cepticide" and "makes the best lattes" and all I could do was smile and say "I'm going to think about this for a while and come back" while slowly taking steps backward toward the door. It took all the way until we got back to the car for my sisters to notice we had left the store empty-handed.

So on Monday I took Krishelle with me again (I figured this would be easier if I only brought one sister) and coached her very well before we left, explaining that I needed her undivided attention the entire time in the store. She came through and pretty much handled the transaction like she was my mom. I was ok with it though; she somehow got me a discount.

Now I have a problem. I have this great phone which looks really nice but I don't know how to use it. I've missed several calls because I either can't figure out that someone is calling or I don't know how to answer it. Also, it has this out-of-control feature where you tell it what to do and it just does it ("call home," "walk the dog," "blow up Mongolia," etc.). Two nights ago I rolled over on the phone at about 2:00AM and heard the robot woman voice say, "calling Diana." I started screaming at the phone "NO! STAY! STOP! DON'T CALL ANYONE! TURN OFF! SELF-DESTRUCT!" When none of those commands worked I started pushing buttons until it stopped calling; somehow in the process I sent a text to my friend Jason that said, "Tr!,'-d." He never did respond.

Over the course of the next few days my pocket called 4 people and left messages on their voice mails.

On a side note, we stopped at Bath and Body Works on Monday before leaving the mall where I experimented with about 12 different "try me" cans of lotions and I think I may have found a combination of over-priced name-brand products that could permanently cure my foot disease. A huge sigh of relief for everyone. Fingers crossed!

~It Just Gets Stranger

Remember When I Said Law School is Like High School?

Now you have proof. This is an actual poster hanging up in the law building. And yes, it does say "Who will be Prom King & Queen" at the bottom. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

It Just Gets Stranger~

So I Had A Hallucination

Hallucinations: Does anyone know much about these?

I'm pretty sure I had a severe hallucination yesterday; my first in fact. My friends will argue that this was at least my second ever since I saw a little boy disappear out of thin air at an Arby's 2 summers ago and then reappear in the parking lot just seconds later. But that one, I'm sure, was not a hallucination but rather a realistic manifestation of evil in human form. I know what I saw and one day I'll be getting a lot of apologies. We'll talk about that one another time.

What happened yesterday, I'm sure, was a COMPLETE hallucination and I'm sure this has never happened to me before. I'm not a great sleeper; I never have been. It usually takes me an hour or two to fall asleep each night and I need absolute silence in order to do so. I have one friend who lives in Toronto who used to tell me in a thick old man Toronto accent that that was a sign of a guilty conscience. Maybe. But lately it's been worse and I've been suffering the results of being sleep-deprived in my classes each day where every time I hear someone say "hello" I think they're saying "pillow." So yesterday I decided to come home in the afternoon for a bit and attempt a nap.

Napping is a pretty foreign concept for me. I can hardly sleep at night; why would I try to sleep during the day? But I heard a while ago that every hour of sleep you lose and fail to make up takes off a decade of your life and makes you 30% more likely to contract leprosy and while my skin is already halfway there during the winter, I would really like to avoid that one.

So I napped. And it sort of worked. Until the hallucination happened: I woke up after about 30 minutes and looked toward the door in my room. As vividly as I've ever seen anything, I saw it coming toward me. It was a GIANT black spider with looooooooong spindly legs all moving up and down. It was gliding about a foot below the ceiling toward the bed. Now you're thinking, "well that's not so crazy. Maybe it wasn't a hallucination." The spider was about the size of a giant beach ball. Still smiling?

So I FLEW out of bed, put my hands over my head and ran to the door screaming, bent over the whole way. I flipped the light on and looked in the direction the alleged spider was heading, my heart pounding faster than I think it's ever pounded before. I've really never been afraid of spiders before but what I had just seen was making me reconsider the whole thing. I looked around for about 2 minutes before I finally started to reason through the situation. I then had the following conversation with myself, aloud:

Eli: Where did it go?
Eli: You know it probably wasn't real. I don't think spiders can be that big.
Eli: I know what I saw. I didn't make that up!
Eli: I'm kind of hungry right now. Do I have any string cheese?
Eli: Don't change the subject. Where did that spider go?
Eli: Oh, it was probably just a hallucination.
Eli: No, don't say that. Then that means I might be going crazy.
Eli: Well I am talking to myself.
Eli: Good point.
Eli: Thanks
Eli: Oh and I don't have string cheese, just a block of something.
Eli: What's the difference between block cheese and string cheese?
Eli: One is stringy.
Eli: Thanks, I know that. But why is it stringy?
Eli: I don't know. I've never thought about it before.
Eli: Do you think you can die from eating too much cheese?
Eli: You can die from eating too much of anything.
Eli: That's true. I bet I'll die from eating too much popcorn.
Eli: Yeah or something stupid like candy corn.
Eli: True. Because when there's a big bowl full of it I can never stop eating it.
Eli: I would like to die from eating too much cheesecake.
Eli: Yeah, then on my tombstone they could write "Rest in Pieces."
Eli: Hahahahaha. I get it! Like pieces of pie.
Eli: Yeah; then below that they could say "sorry for the 'cheesy' comment above."
Eli: hmmm. . .ok.
Eli: OK, I think I'm going to finish my nap and then go find some cheese.
Eli: What about the spider?!
Eli: Didn't we establish there isn't one.
Eli: Oh. Right.

I'm not sure if I should be more concerned about the hallucination or the full-blown conversation I had with myself about the hallucination in which I took sides and argued vehemently for both ways. Or maybe I should be concerned that in my moment of great alarm I couldn't even carry on a conversation with myself about a giant spider that posed a serious and imminent threat without getting side-tracked and start talking about cheese. Either way, It Just Gets Stranger~

Thanks For Not Being Forward

It's time we talk about email forwards. My relationship with any of you who may have sent me any of the following forwards will likely be awkward for a little while. Nothing we can't overcome I'm sure.

Over the past 40 years or so of my life (give or take about 15), I have received email forwards of many kinds which have intrigued, manipulated, and irritated me to no end. Here I present the various types and what to look out for:


MANIPULATIVE RELIGIOUS FORWARDS

These, I think, start somewhere in the south. They are usually created by the same people that walked across the Bible belt throughout 2008 chanting some cute slogan using words that rhyme with "Huckabee." They come in two main types. The first (and possibly the most annoying) are an almost endless string of sayings in size 200 font separated by the cheesiest computer graphics you've seen since computers began. So that you'll recognize these emails quickly, one of the first quotes is usually either "every time a leaf falls, an angel is hugging the Earth" or "a sunset is just God's way of sayin' 'so long'!" Because of the length of these emails, it takes several minutes for them to load all the way.

The second type of MRFs have a looooooooooooooong story about some child who watered a plant every day because the Bible said we should respect all living creatures; then at the end the plant inevitably saves his life and as one friend tells the boy how lucky he was, the boy says back "yeah . . . luck" as he swears he sees a cloud in the heavens wink at him.

The reason MRF's are manipulative has to do with the way they end; they usually say something like "funny how most of you will forward funny emails but you'll think twice before sending one about God!" The really blunt ones might actually tell you the heavens weep when you delete their emails (as if heaven doesn't have better computer graphics than presented in the MRF's). To the untrained mind, these statements may be enough to get you to send the emails on, fully believing that this is the ultimate test of faith, and pressing that delete button will be counted against you at the judgment day. I on the other hand am ashamed to forward these on; but it has nothing to do with my belief in God.

MANIPULATIVE PATRIOTIC FORWARDS

MPF's are similar to MRF's. Every once in a while these are somewhat pleasant. Often they seem completely fabricated. And their hidden purpose is usually to show why one political party hates soldiers. Either way, I steer clear of people who make their political choices and major life decisions off of what they've read in these emails.

The manipulation section is similar to the one found in the MRF's except it will say something like, "the soldiers have the courage to fight for you every day and some of you won't even have the courage to send this to your friends." And so some of us will forward it even though much of it seems packed with lies and one-sided rhetoric in some vein hope that this will somehow be the equivalent to serving in the military for a couple of years.

INAPPROPRIATE HUMOROUS FORWARDS

These always come from the friends that would never tell me an inappropriate joke in person; so I end up reading far into the email sometimes before I realize that it is, in fact, an IHF. I usually just delete these and then spend the rest of the day wondering if that friend sent me the forward on accident.

OUTRAGEOUS PETITION FORWARDS

These are often touted as my favorites. They usually have some completely fabricated story about a time when justice wasn't served followed by a plea to email-sign a petition. I say "email-sign" because instead of actually signing something, you are asked to type your name at the end of a long list and then send it out to every Cindy Lou and Mary Beth you know so they may do the same. I've often wondered how they would go about collecting these in the end. In brief, it may look like this:

Mur Derousthief was caught in 1992 murdering an entire town of 3,000 in Iowa after plotting the entire thing for over a decade in his basement. He killed everyone in the whole town so now, after only a few short years in prison, the judge decided to set him free because there is noone left from the town to prosecute him and the judge ordered [a city near you] to give him a $300k home and a large stipend each month unless 10,000 people sign this email petition. Before you delete this email, you should know that one person managed to get some of the killings on tape . . . and he was laughing the whole time! And now he's in charge of Disneyland!!!

Then you have to scroll down the page for about 12 minutes to get to the bottom to find out if the friend who sent it to you actually email-signed the thing before sending it on. I'm always amused when the friend hasn't signed; it's as though they see that the entire thing is completely implausible, but they want to send it out to others just in case.

The other OPF's can be grouped with the MRF's because they're all about churches' freedom of religion. These will usually have some story about how a certain senator is moments from getting some piece of legislation passed that will forbid anyone from believing in God unless we can get x number of signatures on this petition. And this seems perfectly reasonable because we've seen thousands of bills that we've never heard of, but undoubtedly would completely turn the country upside down, stopped in their tracks when some techie in Washington rushed into congress with a thousand pages he printed off from the petition email he just received. Right? Wrong:(

TACKY GRUSOME FORWARDS

Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase stop sending me these! If you love sending me forwards that's fine but I can't do the TGF's anymore! I never know they are TGF's until it's too late because the subject usually just says something like "interesting pictures" or "must see" and for all I know I'm about to stumble across some neat shots of deep sea creatures having a picnic together. Instead I'm unexpectedly bombarded with the most horrific pictures of some bear attack in Wyoming that tore an entire family reunion apart, cheesy matching t-shirts and all. I usually spend the rest of the day curled up in the corner crying (as if I needed anything else to be terrified of) after exposure to the TGF's.

I'm hoping we all have a better idea of what to look out for. The Internet is a scary world; and one day those that started the forwards will have to answer for their actions. They'll probably do it in an email.

It Just Gets Stranger~