Music and Scientific Progress

I’ve discovered that I prefer take-at-school finals to take home finals. I’d rather have the compressed stress of a few hours of testing with a definite start and end time than the elongated discomfort of an all day (or three day) take-home exam.

I had my first regularly scheduled final exam this week. After a Monday of studying Business Associations, I spent four hours on Tuesday morning writing as much about partnership law, fiduciary duties, and corporate law as I could come up with. I don’t think the end result was very good; I just hope it was enough. While I enjoyed the class and felt like I understood the legal reasoning, I don’t think I did very well on applying the law to the facts given in the final.

But at least it only lasted four hours.

Tuesday night was much more enjoyable. I was invited to join a friend for some respite from school and studying at a Tallis Scholars concert in Newport News. The Tallis Scholars sing Renaissance choral music – no instruments or microphones, just ten people singing on stage and absolutely filling the concert hall with pitch perfect music. It was beautiful.

Though I feel such music should, as a general rule, be heard in a concert hall or a church, YouTube works in a pinch. Click here to listen to Vigilate, by William Byrd.

I spent the rest of the week researching for my supervising professor. He asked me to research organ (as in kidneys and hearts, not musical instruments) donation  and alternative reproduction technologies (such as in vitro fertilization). This led me on a nice tangent into 3D printing, which has expanded to the realm of printing human tissue. One of the major companies working on organic 3D printing uses “Bioink”, an substance made out of living cells and support material (if I remember correctly). That term made me smile; to paraphrase a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, “Scientific progress goes Bioink.”

On Saturday I was treated to another concert, this time at the Williamsburg Community Chapel . Their Christmas concert was performed with a lot of heart and enthusiasm. It struck me as halfway between the Lawrence Welk show and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Not something I’d go to every year, but a nice evening out after a week of staring at my computer.

The week ended on another musical note: the ward choir Christmas program. Our performance made me realize how quickly this semester has gone by. We started practicing Christmas songs in August; now all of a sudden the program is done and the semester is nearly over.

In fact, there are three school days left: one for six more hours of research, one for studying Trusts & Estates, and one for taking my last exam – which will happily only last three hours.

On the Impossibility of Finding a Familiar Face in a Dark and Crowded Street

Fireworks framing the roof of the magazine.

This post might also be titled “On the Ease of Watching Fireworks After the Leaves Have Fallen Off the Trees.”

Or, as I originally intended, “On the Evolution of Panic.”

I’m speaking here of academic panic – the experience of having a big paper or project to work on all semester and procrastinating until the mounting pressure and shrinking time impel you to get it done.

The grade for my Public International Law class is based on a 30 page “major academic paper” (my professor’s description). In law school, that means lots of research and citations to authoritative (or at least trustworthy) sources. I made some progress on my paper through the semester – mostly because we had due dates for our topic, outline, and rough draft –but I still had a lot to finish this week before it came due at 5 pm on Friday.

As I slogged through it, I traced the evolution of my emotional reactions to working on it:

• For most of the semester, my attitude was best exemplified by a James C. Christensen painting titled “Lawrence Pretended Not to Notice that a Bear Had Become Attached to his Coattail.”
• On Monday, that feeling changed to the sort of feeling Harry Potter had in The Goblet of Fire when he was desperately trying to find a way to breathe under water for an hour.
• On Tuesday, I thought seriously for the first time about the possibility of failing the class. But, I decided I preferred grinding out a mediocre paper to outright failure, which was some comfort. This stage also felt a bit like Harry Potter, specifically when he decides he’d rather face a dragon than give up and hide in the Muggle world (also in The Goblet of Fire).
• On Wednesday, I was a bit numb. About 1:30 am I paused to decide how long to stay up. At that point I wasn’t quite halfway done. I worked for two more hours before I ran out of steam.
• On Thursday I felt calmer; I’d gotten far enough that I felt reasonably certain I would not fail the class. About 4:30 am I decided to get a few hours of sleep before finishing.
• On Friday, I reached the “Never again!” stage. After an achingly long time cleaning up my citations and footnotes, I uploaded my paper to the school website, printed a copy, and drove to school to slip the copy under an office door.

At that point I was wound too tightly to feel relieved. And I discovered it is very hard to go to bed at midnight after a week of staying up until 2:30 or 4:30 am, even with only 4 hours of sleep the night before.

But my paper was done.

My weekend was much more enjoyable. I went to help with the stake’s monthly Bishop’s Storehouse delivery, I watched It’s a Wonderful Life, and I went to the Grand Illumination – Colonial Williamsburg’s official Christmas season kickoff.

The Grand Illumination is what prompted the title of this post. I knew some members of my ward were congregating in the same general area to watch the events, but I never managed to find anyone I know. As I wandered around the crowd, I met only dark (albeit friendly) shadows also milling about, watching the Fife & Drum Band, huddling around the fire baskets on five-foot poles, or waiting for the fireworks to start.

The pinwheel.
Huzzah!

They Grand Illumination program includes music and other events, but I just went to watch the fireworks finale. And I have never seen fireworks like these – they weren’t imposing and impressive like the typical 4th of July fare, they were just fun and showy and sparkly and celebratory. They were the firework equivalent of a 5-year-old’s Christmas Eve excitement.

I watched the show from in front of the magazine, which was a great place to be. A ways off on my left I could hear more fireworks going off at the Colonial Capital. A ways off to my right I could hear even more fireworks going off at the Governor’s Palace. The show right in front of me was so close it was almost on top of us. The crowd was perfectly responsive:

*first explosion* = “Gasp!” (with a communal jump of surprise)

*BANG!* = “Ooh!”  . . . *BOOM!* = “Ah!” . . . *BANG* = "Ooh!" . . . *BOOM* = "Ah!"

*long sequence of brilliant flashes and showers of light* . . . “HUZZAH!”

(Ok, I didn’t actually hear a “huzzah,” but that was the general spirit of the reaction.)

The fireworks went off right around the magazine, allowing some of the sparks to tumble cheerfully down the guardhouse roof. Some of the fireworks looked like the classic Christmas Star of folklore, a bright shining light with a long tail. The pinwheel was a bit hit. The evening ended with the Fife & Drum Band’s customary march down DOG Street.

It was great.

Maybe next year I’ll bring hot cocoa.

That little white speck in the background
is the full moon.

Fire baskets on poles: not as warm
as fire barrels, but much more
colonial and festive.

The only time traffic backs up in
Williamsburg is after a big event at the Colony.

Quick Status Report

It finally got cold enough at the end of this week that I turned the heater on. My reaction to the nearly 80 degree weather at the beginning of the week was, “Oh yeah, I live in the South.”

I also did something this weekend that was not homework: I went to a movie. A friend invited me to go see Big Hero 6 (which is good). It was so nice to do something from normal life for a change. (Law school rarely feels like normal life.)

I’ve reached that point of the semester when my brain starts to feel full. It’s getting hard to focus on new concepts. I think that’s what makes school so mentally exhausting; my brain is always grappling with something new and never has a chance to go into autopilot.

And maybe that’s why today’s long afternoon nap felt so good. No thinking required.

* * *

Trusts & Estates professor quotation of the week: “It probably wasn’t really meant to mean anything.”

Business Associations professor quotation of the week: “This case is in here because it’s a freak.”

Counting

I recently started keeping track of the hours I spend on law during the week, mostly as an external enforcement mechanism for getting more done. I generally set a 2 (or 3, or 4, or 5) hour timer and pause it every time I need a break. And I seem to need a lot of breaks. Mental breaks, food breaks, go-for-a-run breaks . . .

It usually takes me much longer to run out the timer than the actual time counted.

I was pondering on that a while ago. Why is it so hard to sit and plow through the research and reading and writing I have to do? After all, that’s what I used to do in college.

I could probably come up with multiple reasons: a different level of mental challenge, the availability of distractions, the numbing effects of reading legal analysis . . . But whatever the case, it’s hard. I seem to run out of day so much faster than I run out of work to do.

That said, the countdown is on: four more weeks of class, three finals, two papers, and one law student who’s almost halfway through school.

Paint-Brushed Beauty

Autumn is in full swing here in Williamsburg. The trees are different colors every time I drive down Hwy 199. The range of colors runs from a few purples and a wide variety of greens to oranges, dark yellows, browns, and occasional smatterings of bright red and shining gold. The change in colors happens so calmly; it’s like watching a candle melt or a log burn. What Virginia lacks in the fireworks of an intense all-at-once fall, it makes up in quiet, plodding, almost paint-brushed beauty.

That said, autumn is a dangerous time to be under the trees in Virginia. Every time I go outside I hear twigs and acorns tumble through the branches to the ground. I’ve heard a few thunks on my car as I’ve pulled out of the driveway, but I think I’ve only been hit on the head once.

My week was very busy. I’m taking a mini class on European Union law. It’s interesting, but somewhat dense. The EU has to balance the interests and needs (and ideologies) of 28 different countries, which results in a complicated system of institutions and powers and competences. And which involves an absolute alphabet soup of acronyms. Acronyms are useful when there are only one or two, or when they are relatively familiar. They’re not quite as useful in large numbers, especially when they are composed of the same letters in different configurations. I’ve gotten lost a few times because the only acronym I could translate into a meaningful title was “EU”.

Happily, we have a good professor. He’s from Spain and is skilled at pointing out the principles that are very European (and not American).  This is especially helpful because the EU is based on civil law while the US (and every state except Louisiana) is based on common law.* It’s a little bit of a mental workout to think about law from the civil law perspective.

*Civil law is statute-based and civil law judges can only interpret the law. Common law is not statute based and judges can both interpret and create law. For a more detailed description than that, I recommend Wikipedia.

With all the reading and research of this past week, I’m very grateful for whoever scheduled this class. It was a stroke of genius to put it in the two weeks surrounding the end of Daylight Savings Time. I needed that extra hour of sleep last night.

Scholarship is not Philosophy

In Trusts & Estates, we’ve moved on to revocation of wills. Things can get complicated very quickly when someone doesn’t dispose of an old will after making a new one. Hence the following question from my textbook: “Did the revocation of the revoking document . . . revoke the revocation (of the revoked document)?” (Thomas P. Gallanis, Family Property Law, 5th Ed., 226 (2011).)

This topic also yields itself to distractions regarding spelling. As I take notes (by hand – that is, without spell check) I find myself wondering, “Does that word have a ‘c’ or a ‘k’?”

Revocation can take place in many ways. A Virginian’s will, for example, is void if he or she “cuts, tears, burns, obliterates, cancels, or destroys” it. (VA Code § 64.2-410.) I’m guessing that the author of that statute had fun writing it.

In Business Associations we spend a lot of time talking about policy. That prompted the following question from my professor when he was trying to make a point: “Let me rephrase this question: Why are lawyers bloodsucking parasites?”

I’ve spent a lot of time researching this week. Mostly that involves the somewhat mind-numbing activity of skimming law review citations and articles. The first few aren’t too bad, but when I get to the third or fourth hour of browsing similar articles looking for a specific facet of a topic about which dozens of people have written, I start to get a little stir-crazy.

This has led me to the idea that I’m much less of a scholar than a philosopher. By that I mean I don’t care for researching and study just for the sake of research and study, but I do like thinking about and discussing ideas just for the sake of thinking about and discussing ideas.

Database of thousands of law review articles on every imaginable facet of the legal world? No thanks. Panel discussion of the very same topics where people are expressing the same ideas and asking the same questions? Bring it on. Maybe that’s why I generally prefer class time to homework.

Except, of course, when I get to read sentences full of verbal gymnastics like that one from my T&E textbook.

October in Virginia: flowers . . .

. . . and falling leaves.

On Wills

“Where there’s a will there’s relations.”

– Jill Paton Walsh & Dorothy L. Sayers, A Presumption of Death 285 (2002).

In Trust & Estates, we’ve finished discussing intestacy and moved on to wills. The main thing to keep in mind with a will is making sure it’s done correctly; courts can be exceedingly (and ridiculously) inflexible about meeting the requirements. (Some courts have loosened up a bit, but better safe than sorry.)

One of those requirements is, of course, a signature. This led to potential problems for Theodore W. Dwight, the founder of Columbia Law School. Prof. Dwight neglected to make his will until he was on his deathbed. (This was, according to my professor, despite having taught Trusts and Estates Law. My professor also claims that Prof. Dwight resigned from Columbia in a huff when the school switched from a W&M style curriculum to a Harvard style curriculum.) After finally having his will written, he began to sign it and got as far as “Theodore W. Dwi­–…” and then suddenly died.

Bad timing.

(I don’t know whether the will was ultimately considered valid.)

There are, of course, reasons to declare even a correctly executed will invalid. One example is insane delusion. It’s not simply being delusional that invalidates a will, though; the delusion has to actually affect how you make your will. For example, your will can still be valid if you believe you are Napoleon, but not if you try to leave everything you own to the Empress Josephine.

Another case we read was regarding a woman who got involved in a cult and made a will to leave everything to the cult’s leader. She later changed her mind, but was prevented from changing her will by physical duress (they wouldn’t let her sign it), fraud, and possibly murder. The court (wisely) struck down the will that designated the cult leader as beneficiary of her estate (good job, New York Court of Appeals). That’s one of the more extreme cases we’ve read in T&E.

Meanwhile in the world outside of law school, the avian population at the lake has ballooned. I ran through a large group of geese the other day to an absolute cacophony of honks. I’m not sure if they were mad at me for disrupting their party, warning each other to get out of the way, cheering me on, or protesting being caught between the cars on the street and me on the trail.

Also, the trees are no longer a uniform shade of green. Most of the change is the summer’s solid green fading into a variety of green hues, but there are also smatterings of brown, yellow, orange, and occasionally red. I prefer the range of colors more than the continuous green wall of summer.

And today we had our first day of autumn-like temperatures. Yay for the impending sweater season.

I stopped mid-run by the lake one day. The ducks
immediately and excitedly rushed over. I think they
were expecting food.

Little did the ducks know, I stopped
mainly so I could take a picture of the
heron. I did feel bad, though, so I
walked down the next day to feed the
ducks (and a lot of geese) some Chex.