It's My Life, It's My Choice

I like to complain. Anybody that knows me knows I like to complain. The kicker is, the things I complain about the most are the things I choose to do. The things I completely volunteer for, no one makes me do them, no one holds a gun to my head. It is all me. And I take resposibility that it is all me, but it does not stop me from complaining.

I do complain, but I do take responsibility for my decisions. For example, Law Review, the thorn in my side. My comment is due in two weeks, and due to my genius planning, I will be out of town for five of those 14 days. Now, I chose to go on this trip, and I stand by my choice. But that choice is making my life suck right now. And I am complaining about it. I will have four nights of library time. Probably staying until 10pm each night of them. Which is a feat because on three of those days all I will be doing is library time. I am talking 12 hour days in the library (that is right, my day does not begin until 10AM--listen to me complain).

Another example is Marshall-Brennan, which is my teaching fellowship. Now, don't get me wrong, I love teaching, but the program annoys me and sometimes the students annoy me. Like the one student who cites Chappelle's Show as valid legal authority. Now this would be funny under normal circumstances, and you should be laughing now, but the thing was, the student did not mean it as a joke. He was dead serious. He even said "they would not put it on TV if it wasn't true." Now most probably think that this is a sad commentary on American society and is nothing for me to be annoyed at. Especially annoyed at the student, but this particular student is smart, he just makes stuff up. And I can handle making some stuff up. But every class he comes up with a new theory or a new idea that he claims he read or saw somewhere but can never remember seeing. Like Catholics aren't allowed to vote. Or women in 1790 were MUCH (and I am talking leaps and bounds here) better off than they were in 1690. I try with him, I really do, and I have started to get him to think about what he says before he says it and he is articulating himself much better. But he still says things about the way girls dress and how that shows what type of person they are.


Anyway, in completely unrelated, uncomplaining events, I was solicited by one of the oddest looking women ever. Not odd in a bad way, but just odd. And when I say solicited, I am not talking propositioned or anything like that. I was waiting for the shuttle bus and almost immediately noticed this woman because she looked odd and was pacing on the sidewalk on the other side of the street like she was looking for something. She was short, had big round glasses on, was wearing a HUGE sweater that came to her knees, black pants that covered her feet, and she was carrying three bags. One was a backpack that was three times as wide as she was front to back. It was like she was carrying another person. Another bag was an old leather briefcase that was so full she couldn't zip it, she carried that by the carrying handles. The last bag was a messenger bag that again was too full to close properly. I do not know how she was carrying all those bags. Her face was also beet red. I think that was from the cold wind. Anyway, I am just standing there, minding my own business, bopping up and down to The Houses of the Holy, when she crosses the street and comes to me and starts talking.

Now I come from a place where if someone is wearing headphones, they clearly do not want to be bothered. Anyway, she told me there was a town hall that John Kerry was going to be at tonight, and I should come. Then she went to tell me the address, but she forgot the address, so she had to search in her bags to find the right location. It happens to be on I Street. And after I thanked her for the information, she promptly took off, not sharing this information with anyone else on the street. Or at least no one that I had an eyeline to. What makes this encounter interesting to me foremost is how odd she looked bustling around in that HUGE sweater with all of those bages. The second interesting fact was her singling me out. I don't think I looked like some bleeding heart liberal in my name brand child-labor threads, but maybe I do. Anyway, no real point to that story, and I am not even complaining about it, I just wanted to share.