Auntie Jillian, Judge Alex, and How Plans Change

This post was originally about something entirely different than its eventual topic. I'll tackle the other topic soon, as the introduction was already written. Instead of telling you about Stephanie March - a talented actress who portrayed (and still portrays, I think although I rarely have time to watch) an ADA and/or bureau chief  on Law and Order SVU, I'll instead write about what my brother says is my absolute favorite topic on which to write or to speak: ME! Anytime I seem to him to be too full of myself, my brother announces, "Let's all sing another round of the "Alexis Theme Song" (sung to the tune of Barney's opening theme: "I love MEEEE! You love MEEE! Everyone loves  MEEE,  MEEE, MEEE!" etc. You get the point. My brother thinks my ego is excessively large, and i am perhaps abit self-obsessed.

As a very young child, I had a bit of an obsession with the guy who played Steve on Blue's clues. I didn't even know if his real name was Steve or not. That's how young I was. Judge Alex Ferrer was probably my closest thing to an obsession after Steve. At first I wanted to be adopted by Judge Alex and his wife and to be rescued from what I perceived as the abusive home situation in which I was entrenched. Then, as I began to see reality a bit more clearly, I just wanted to become Judge Alex, or at least the female equivalent of him. Television fame - or even fame in any form -- was not my aim. Rather, my goal was simply a matter of wanting to fight for truth, justice, and the American way. I lamented that fact that I was not of Cuban descent. I wanted to go to a really good law school. From there, I wanted to be an assistant district attorney, which is something Judge Ferrer never did, but still I thought it was the best way for me to reach my ultimate objective, and it had worked well enough for The Judge  Honorable Marilyn Milian (also of Cuban extraction), so it seemed like a viable plan.

Incidentally, I now no longer totally idolize Judge Ferrer, I don't worship him as I did as a young teen. Instead, I see him as a real person with normal strengths and weaknesses - far more strengths than weaknesses, if it matters - who is a truly good, kind, and moral person. He is a good husband and father, which, in today's crazy world, is one of the most honorable characteristics a man can possess. He married a good woman when he was young and was smart enough to stick with her through the inevitable tough times of any marriage. He raised children of whom he and his wife can be proud. One of them just graduated from law school today. He never forgot his humble roots, having immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba as an infant, with his family having left behind a comfortable lifestyle and virtually everything they owned, and speaks often of his experience as a young immigrant assimilating into a new and very different culture. He's the sole survivor of his parents'  three sons, and as such has assumed the responsibility of assisting his aging parents. Judge Ferrer has raised awareness of the issue of bullying in our schools and elsewhere, and is also taking on corporations who commit unethical practices that harm all of us, in many cases without our knowledge of the nefarious corporate practices.  Judge Ferrer is someone I admire  immensely, and once the craziness of medical school, internship, and residency are history, I will strive to someday accomplish a fraction of the good in the world that he is doing..

Judge Ferrer is someone I also consider a friend -- one on whom I can call for advice or even just a kind word of encouragement when I'm in need of it. He doesn't have to be so nice to a complete nobody such as myself. He just does. It's certainly not because of my looks. If such were the case, he'd be asking me for the phone numbers of my friends, some of whom are bona fide knockouts. I'm not the only average citizen to whom he extends such kindness, He's a great man who gives freely of himself. If half of the world's celebrities, or even of the world's average citizens, were as giving of themselves as is Judge Ferrer, the world would be a much better planet on which to live.

Back to my law career that never happened . . .From the ADA's side of the courtroom,  I had hoped to impress enough politicians that I might eventually be appointed to a position on the bench in some capacity. I could, obviously, have run for election, but I'm not sure it would have been a great route to a judgeship for me. Something about being a tiny blonde girl  with a high-pitched voice who doesn't look her age and probably won't until she's fifty wouldn't seem to inspire confidence in the masses when it came time to cast one's vote for a judge, and my preference wouldn't be to wait until the age of fifty before attaining the rank of judge. (Once I had the position and had done a decent job, relection wasn't quite such a daunting prospect to me.) Neither Alex Ferrer nor Marilyn Milian waited so long. Impressing a few politicians seemed like a surer bet.  Meanwhile, I could put away hordes of heinous.criminals. I would have to look over my shoulder constantly because of the friends and relatives of the gang members and other bad guys I'd convicted, but that would be just part of the excitement of the lifestyle.

My ambition to practice law was all the more heightened by my Aunt Jillian's choice of law as a profession. Aunt Jillian is only seven years older than I, and has always been my real-life role model. I suspect if she had become either a nun or a prostitute I would have seriously considered doing the same even though I haven't the slightest inclination toward a vocation of either sort. She attended J. Ruben Clark School of Law in Provo, Utah (affiliated with Brigham Young University) because she had done her undergraduate work there and because her husband was attending the University of Utah School of Medicine thirty or so miles up the freeway. Aunt Jillian did well in her law studies, just as she has done well at virtually everything she has ever attempted to do. She had considered medical school, but because of issues with her health, she ultimately decided that law school would be a more reasonable course of study or her.

I don't know if she has regrets about her decision to forego medicine in favor of law -- I certainly hope she doesn't --  but her early legal career showed considerable promise. She moved from the public defender's office to a position as an assistant district attorney to private practice to doing the one thing that really mattered to her most, which was to raise children. She is in her final trimester with her second and final child. (Having children puts more stress on her body than it does on the body of the average expectant mother, and she's doing very well to be able to produce two healthy children, and signs point to her being able to do just that, though we're all still keeping our fingers crossed and keeping her and the baby in our prayers.) .Jillian's older child - a little boy named Andrew, who just reached six months of age, is my Godchild and is the absolute light of my life. I don't think anyone in the world loves him more than I do except, perhaps, his parents.Andrew's little sister will be born at around thirty-five or thirty-six weeks of gestation, which is as long as she can carry a baby before going back onto her regular medication for cystic fibrosis. This will make Andrew between eight and nine months old when his baby sister is born. My mom says non-twin siblings born less than a year apart are known as Irish twins. The babies are half Cuban, with the remaining half being a mixture of Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, so there's not a drop of Irish in the mixture, but they're about as close in age as non-twin siblings can be. I gave up a teaching job this summer (I had an offer to teach calculus for summer school) in large part so that I could spend as much time with the babies as possible. There are lots of people to help, so it's not as though the family is in great need of my assistance, but it's what I want to do with my summer. Jillian and my Uncle Scott will probably get so sick of me that they'll kick me out of their house, but until then, I'm staking my claim and hanging out there.

Aunt Jillian still does paperwork for the legal firm in which she is a partner (it was a new firm, and they really needed capital, which she could offer, so she became an instant partner). When her children are in school, she says she'll try a few cases a year. Meanwhile, she'll handle paperwork and draft opening  statements and closing arguments for other attorneys in the firm when she has time.

I've worked with Aunt Jillian as a paralegal (no certification is required in order to be a paralegal here; if the attorney paying you is satisfied with the job one is doing and the "paralegal" does nothing to offend the judge, he or she has the job). I can shuffle papers with the best of them and am a relatively quick study with a bit of clairvoyance in terms of anticipating what document Aunt Jillian needs before she asks for it, plus I'm a meticulous note-taker. She says anytime I want to take a break from my career as a med school student or doctor, I can work for her if she's working. Right now she's having too much fun with her baby to even think about stepping into a courtroom.

Working with Aunt Jillian gave me an up-close-and-personal look at the practice of law in the courtroom. It's neither as glamorous nor as exciting as what one typically sees in any of the Law & Order genres. Even in the most efficiently-run courtroom, a tremendous amount or time is spent on technicalities. Jurors are late for trials. Motions are made and must be ruled upon, however ridiculous they may appear. Witnesses become emotional or ill, and everything stops while they compose themselves or finish hurling. Questioning involving s mindless and inconsequential matter can go on for what seems like forever. A good judge can minimize the repetition, but the accused must have a fair trial, and if that sometimes involves the belaboring of a point ad nauseum, that's the way it has to be.

And that's just the courtroom side of the law -- the exciting part. Most of a lawyer's hours are not spent in court. Most of it is buried in paperwork, negotiations, consultations (often for which the pay is often a big fat nothing), drafting of pre-trial motions or responding to such, conferencing with clients either by telephone or in person, trying to reason with people who are not all that reasonable, and attempting to console clients or families when things don't go the way they had hoped. But mostly it's paperwork, paperwork, and even more paperwork. And that's if you're working in criminal law. In civil law, God only knows how much worse it might be. For the most part, there's  not quite so much looking over your shoulder at someone who wishes in the worst way to off you as an act of revenge, but it's still not beyond possibility. Family law in particular can be ugly in that regard.  Where huge sums of money are involved, too, emotions run high, and people who might otherwise behave more rationally can lose sensibility. No profession is 100% safe, and the legal profession is probably less safe than most.

The safety factor is minor in the grand scheme of whether or not to ultimately choose to go into the legal profession. one must have a passion for it in order to be either successful or happy. It is going to be tedious more often than not. An attorney had best be a person who doesn't mind reading even when the reading material is something that could put a person to sleep who hasn't slept for days, and one must read with extreme attention to detail and with level 20.0 comprehension at the very lowest. (That's as in beginning first grade being 1.0, mid-second grade being 2.6, etc.). Unwieldy stacks of written material will appear on an attorney's desk on a regular basis. Unless an attorney has a paralegal he can trust beyond question [and it typically takes years to develop such trust in an employee] the reading needs to be done by the attorney himself or herself. The buck stops with the attorney. One simple conjunction -- an and versus an or-- can drastically alter the bottom line of a settlement. It's all in the details.

And  one must write with the same level of precision that is expected in one's reading. A good legal secretary or paralegal can catch the obvious errors, but the more subtle nuances may only be understood by the attorney. As an attorney develops a working relationship with a paralegal, he or she may find that the paralegal is roughly as competent at such things as is the paralegal, but in such cases, if the paralegal is really sharp, he or she will complete law school and cease to work for a paralegal's wages. And in spite of any paralegal's qualifications, the ultimate responsibility will always fall upon the attorney. He or she will be sued if a client is screwed over by a misplaced comma or other seemingly inconsequential misuse of the English language that might have earned a single  mark of a red pen in a university English course but could cost thousands or tens of thousands if an attorney botches a legal settlement on behalf of a client. (These sorts of things are usually read multiple times by more than one reader with expertise in  going over such material; such a grievous error  isn't an everyday occurrence, but they do happen.)

Though it sometimes doesn't seem to be the case with my haphazard typing, usually after I've put ointment into my overly dry eyes, I am able to write with precision when I take the time to do so. I read carefully as well. I have the ability to pay attention to detail, to think quickly, and to draft responses on the spur of the moment. What I do not have, and may not have at any time in the foreseeable future, is a commanding presence and a powerful voice. I'm a skinny, pale little girl whose voice sounds even younger than I look. (I only sound authoritative if I have a cold.) Were I to pursue law as a career, I would surely need to have speech therapy in effort to add depth and resonance my voice, and chances are that the world's most talented speech pathologist would have only marginal success in improving my voice. In terms of vocal chords, you basically get what you're born with. You can damage them but you probably cannot make them much better.. Relaxation techniques can remove some of the strident sound my voice possesses, but there's a limit to how relaxed I can or should be on the job. I can't down a pint of bourbon before work every day.

What I do have working in my favor, though, is that I've always had a knack for math and science. My dad mostly kept his mouth shut throughout the time it was assumed I would study law because he knew that I was likely to do the opposite of whatever he suggested, although he did recommend several math and science courses as electives under the guise that it would supposedly give me an advantage in certain specialty branches of law. I listened to his advice and took the courses. Then, midway through my undergrad studies, Dad finally came right out and said that it was a waste of mathematical and scientific strength for me to go to law school. I don't know if he honestly believed the part about it being a supposed waste of ability; I think he just believe I would totally suck as a trial lawyer. Regardless, at least I had that strength on which to fall since it didn't appear that law school would be the best of options. I would have gotten into at least some  law school (my GPA and LSAT scores were strong), and I would have done reasonably well in law school, but I would have totally stunk up the joint as a trial lawyer, and chances are that any attention I got from any politician would have been because of my high and squeaky voice and little-girl-dressed in-her-mom's clothing appearance, and not because of my Solomon-like rulings and any presumed laser-like precision with which I ran the prosecution of my cases,

It's a family thing that we all try to obtain degrees in music even though we don't necessarily intend to pursue careers in the field. Both of my parents have music performance undergrad degrees in addition to their REAL degrees. Matthew didn't have time to get one because he played Division I baseball and finished school in three years. As critical as i can be of Matthew, even I will admit that it's asking a lot of someone to complete a double major under such circumstances. I was already on track to complete my piano performance major, but because I had switched majors from English to biochemistry and didn't have quite as many broad science  courses as would have been ideal for a medical school applicant, my counselor decided it would be a wonderful idea for me to tack on a violin performance  major to my already heavy load, (The word on the street is that nearly all science majors with high GPAs and MCAT scores who are also violin performance majors are usually accepted into the medical schools of their first-choice.) Since I was slated to finish in three years  (I had taken tons of AP courses in high school. I would have finished high school in three years except that A) my parents didn't want me leaving for college at 15 and B) I took enough AP course to equal more than a year of university credits) this added a level of intensity to a final year of university that should have been spent lying on the beach while opening an occasional textbook. C'est la vie.

The violin performance add-on major might seem on the surface to have been a really good idea except for one minor glitch:  I'm not all that terrific a violinist. What I play sounds good, but my technique up to that point hadn't been something on which I devoted a great amount of time. Piano was my instrument. my mom played violin, and we always had one around, so I dabbled with it. My mom noticed that  I got a better-than-average sound out of it when I played, so she taught me the basics, but I never had formal lessons. I didn't even own my own violin until the Christmas before I graduated from high school. I played it because I enjoyed it, but there was a considerable level of technical mastery that I lacked. When the counselor came up with his brilliant idea, the workload nearly killed me, but I did it. I passed my juries easily, and the recital went without a hitch. (It's easy to perform when you're playing the pieces you choose.) I'll never know if the violin major made a difference, but I was asked to play violin at two medical school interviews including the one at the school I attend.

That's how I ended up in medical school despite starting out as an English major with pre-law aspirations. Relatively few people end up doing what they thought they would do when when they began university studies. The points to this, if there are any points to it, are  that ANY degree is better than no degree at all, to take courses early that will be useful regardless of one's major ends up being, to listen to the right people, as some  people give better adudy vice than others,  to make changes in university if one feels the strong desire to do so , as it's easier to shift courses of study while still in school than it is to do so after one has completed his or her education, and to try to maintain some sort of a balance between what you do well  and what you love to do.

My New Not-Best Friend: Sorry, Dr. *****

my arch-nemesis




 

a great man who took martyrdom to seldom-before-seen levels

Some things are best left unsaid, or at  the very least, best left not discussed in polite conversation. Colitis and sigmoidoscopies fall under those categories.  Even here among those of us who are basically friends, I'll try hard to be discreet in the discussion. I've  had both, PLUS a colonoscopy in recent months. 

Note to Judge Alex Ferrer in the event that  this ever crosses his eyes: I've had an endoscopy, too, but I was not so naive/macho/outrightly sub-moronic as to allow anyone to attempt the procedure on me without benefit of sedation simply because I didn't want any of my relatives to have to transport me there and back. WHAT THE HELL ARE RELATIVES FOR? It's a reciprocity sort of thing: you go to your mom's house and tell her that her cell phone is not, in fact, her TV remote control, and she drives you to and from an occasional medical procedure (unless your mom drives the way my grandmother does, in which case you're safer taking your chances in hitching a ride with just about any drunk who crawls out the door of a pub than you are in riding with her at the wheel) for the benefit that you do not convince everyone in the outpatient clinic in which you are to undergo the procedure that you are a maximum of three IQ points above the clinical status of imbecile.

Imbecile, incidentally, used to be an in-use clinical diagnosis, by the way. (It was, in the relative cognitive ranking, considered above an idiot but beneath a moron.)Then imbecile was supplanted by the term "moderately mentally retarded."  School children across the U.S. and probably other English-speaking nations soon adopted "retarded" as an insult at which to hurl at adversaries on schoolyards. This, courtesy of the advocates of a particular cognitively challenged individual named Rosa, caused the Powers That Be to change the name of the category of cognitive deficit to 
"moderately intellectually disabled." Someday school children will insult each other using that term, too, as an epithet, or perhaps they'll just call each other "Rosa" until some new advocate of an individual with intellectual challenges enacts legislation for a new and even less offensive moniker. (I nominate "Matthew.") I'm not sure what it will take for special education advocates  everywhere to get it through their rather thick skulls (my uncle Ralph once told me about special education students that they're best taught, administrated, and advocated for by their own kind) just what a losing battle it is they're fighting, and that the very best they can ever hope to accomplish is to remain one-half step or less ahead of the children of the world, linguistically speaking. I'm confident the same thing happens in nations where other languages are spoken, though I haven't a clue as to how their respective Powers That Be respond to the conundrum.  

I digress, however. The point here is that Judge Ferrer had numerous options for undergoing the procedure and being transported home safely (including but not limited to asking his wife for a ride to the surgical or outpatient center, as he's probably transported her to the occasional E.R. visit or doctor's appointment [driving one's wife to the hospital to give birth does not count, as a husband can  be presumed to have been at least 50% responsible for the condition that necessitated the hospital trip]) none of which had to be the choice  of allowing a sadistic man in a white coat with the quasi-prestigious initials of MD behind his name to shove a tube down his throat sans any form of sedation whatsoever while morbidly laughing at the patient totally at his mercy.

Back to the procedures of which we do not like to speak in polite company . . . Not one of them is a walk through a field of daisies.  Nonetheless, if God comes down and pays you a personal visit to tell you that you are going to have one of the three aforementioned indignitites inflicted upon your body, and you may either name your poison or let God roll the dice for you, DO NOT choose the sigmoidoscopy.  The doctor and his flunkies tell you you're being sedated, but in all seriousness, the amount of sedation that runs through the IV that's been stuck into your arm (the IV is there for the primary purpose of having instant access to your blood supply just in case you clinically die on the procedure table, which has happened more than once; read the fine print on those disclaimers they make you sign) is not sufficient to dull the pain of a mid-sized cockroach undergoing a leg amputation. The cockroach would be thrashing around on its little gurney just about as much as I was during my procedure described so euphemistically as a sigmoidoscopy.

So now the gastroenterologist, who is a friend of a friend of my dad, and I are not on nearly such friendly terms as we were before the procedure. Lest he show up here and attempt to tell  his side of the story, I shall beat him to the punch. I did NOT  use any expletives. He says I did, but I have nurses and God as my witnesses that such was not the case. I did scream at him at the top of my lungs, and I did  accuse him of trying to kill me.

I do not believe that anyone on the face of the Earth would attempt a sigmoidoscopy on an unanesthetized Barack Obama (not because Mr. Prez himself is so formidable but because the Secret Service would be obligated to take the doctor out of commission), Mike Tyson,  or that guy who bit an opponent in a recent soccer match, without first putting on major protective gear.

Note to Jaci: I seriously considered using a display of tampons as my Twitter pic, but there are limits to which even I cannot stoop, plus I didn't want to embarrass the judge if he saw the pic before I took it down.

Twitter Photos, the Noticeablity Factor, et al

 

 

 

 

Note: My mom asked me to remove the extra pictures for security reasons. She said the twitter pic was fine, but that all the pictures revealed more about my identity than I should reveal. I don't absolutely HAVE to do what she says, but I can see the wisdom in her words. If I wish to continue to be open at all here, I can't leave too many  clues about my identity about my identity.

Yesterday I had a chat with none other than the esteemed Judge Alex Ferrer  when the topic of Twitter pictures came up. Judge Ferrer commented that he reads all tweets but doesn't always know who authored them because the pictures are small and he doesn't always take the time to check out the names. He mentioned a couple of tweeters whose tweets he could identify because their pictures stood out in some way-- usually because of color. I made the decision that my Twitter photo must be changed so that Judge Ferrer or anyone else would stand a better chance of recognizing that a tweed had come from me. I'm still not sure how much difference it makes in the long run, but still, it is my choice to wither away in anonymity to no greater degree than I must.

i'm handicapped to a degree in that I avoid cameras whenever possible. if i see someone with a camera at an event, I do my best Harry Houdini imitation.

Last night I posted a twitter picture  and asked those I knew who have Twitter accounts to give me feedback.  Tomorrow I'll take it down and post a different trial picture. The present picture is probably the prettiest picture of me that I'll post.   In all honesty, while I'm not the wicked witch of the east, west, or any other direction, neither am I exactly Natalie Portman.  In all honesty, I know I'm not butt-ugly, and that there are girls in the world who would trade appearances with me. The problem for me is that I grew up as a rather homely child. My dad said that I was so homely that I was cute. My mom said I looked just like  her, so who was she to criticize my looks? I was excrutiatingly thin with wild hair. I had an uncle by marriage who was fond of calling me (never within earshot of my parents) "the ugly duckling who never turned into a swan.". The man was and still is  not exactly Brad Pitt himself, so I'm not sure what he thought gave him the status to be so critical of any child's appearance.

I enjoy pictures that flatter me as much as does the next person, but the object is for the picture to stand out. I could,of course, wear a clown suit, but while I'm not overly vain in terms of my [non-existent]  resemblance to Natalie Portman,  neither do I wish to go so far into the portmanteau of visible and salient color that I'm willing to literally appear as a clown.

I will post here  a few of the the pictures that I will post on my Twitter account. It won't be a perfect parallel because the size won't be exact. I'll also leave the Twitter link so that if you have the time or the inclination, you can check out the photos at the actual site.

Keep in  mind that, other than my size, standing out visually is not one of my strengths.  If  it is determined that I don't actually catch attention in any of these photos, I'll just go for the one where I look the best.  "Sort of pretty" invisible   trumps "ugly" invisible every time.

Link to the Twitter site:  https://twitter.com/TheAngelAlexis







         
                             



                                                                            8


I obviously look better in #1 than in the rest, but I'm trying  to balance looking OK with being noticeable.  If I  cannot be noticeable, I'll go for as un-ugly as possible.

Thank you for your time and for your input.
               

I Will Always Like You (imagine Whitney Houston warbling it): Chapter 16 in my on-again/off-again relationship with Judge Alex

There ain't [sic] no good guy. There ain't [sic] no bad guy. There's [sic] only you and me, and we just disagree. 

My cyber-relationship  of  almost five years with Judge Alex Ferrer has always been of a somewhat tenuous nature. For starters, anyone who is not certifiably insane -- and, despite what a few relatives and divas for whom I've provided piano accompaniment may say about me, I have both of my feet planted relatively firmly on solid ground -- knows that a relationship that consists of exchanging brief communications via social media does not constitute a bona fide relationship.  Cyber friends can in some situations turn into real friends, and have done so in at least a couple of cases in my life*, but largely, a mentally healthy person builds his or her actual life around those into whose physical presence he or she comes. 

Still, communicating with Judge Alex via the Twitter has on occasion helped me through rough spots in life . I assume I would have made it through most of those rough spots with or without the the occasional metaphorical pat on the head from the judge, especially since the most traumatic aspects of my life were things I did not share with the judge or with anyone else on Twitter. Still, Judge Ferrer was kind enough to offer words of encouragement or humor from time to time, and those words did on occasion give me the strength and courage to go out into the world and brave one more day of that often ugly period in one's life known as adolescence. For that I am most grateful.

Psychologist and behaviorist B. F. Skinner, building upon the earlier work of physiologist  Ivan Pavlov, categorized forms of reward, which we all remember from Psychology 101. In short, reinforcement systems as described by Skinner could be categorized as fixed ratio ( the provision of  reinforcement after a specific number of responses), fixed interval (the provision of  reinforcement after a specified amount of time), variable ratio (the provision of  reinforcement after an indeterminate or even random number of responses), or variable interval (the provision of reinforcement after an indeterminate or random period of time). 

While Judge Ferrer obviously did not create an application on his iphone designed specifically to track my tweets and his replies, it became apparent that his replies to my tweets were based very casually upon a reinforcement schedule falling somewhere between fixed ratio and fixed interval.  After noticing X number of tweets from me, or after realizing that he hadn't acknowledged anything I had tweeted him in a given period of time, he would eventually tweet a response. Other factors, including just how busy he was in his real life at a given time,  just how busy his overall tweeting life was at a given moment in time, or just how pertinent a particular tweet or set of tweets might or might not have been, also figured into the formula. 

I tweeted a brief version of this to my cyber-friend Jaci. I looked for the tweets because I wished to reference something here that was cited there,  but I could not find them though it was probably less than two hours ago that they were sent. Twitter is a fickle media in that regard. Perhaps Jaci deleted the original tweet to which my tweets were mere responses. that may have caused them to disappear.  Then again, perhaps the Twitter fairy removed them, or perhaps they merely disappeared into the ether.  Regardless, I refuse  to lose sleep over the situation.

Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky, according to Kerry Livgren of 70's rock band Kansas, and scientists will tell you, for that matter, that odds are against even  the Earth and sky lasting forever. Still, it's a sad time when anything that brought you happiness comes to an end. I hope this dissolution, termination, or whatever one might call it with Judge Ferrer, is merely a hiatus and not the actual end.


*I would never have met Becca without our respective connections to Judge Alex, and for that, I extend my gratitude to him.

"Judge Alex" : Today's Episode

I watched today's "Judge Alex" case with the other crazy people residing in this facility with me. I had been warned by someone from the east coast who had already watched today's case that there was at least one litigant in the "not quite sane enough to run loose" category. That, fellow citizens, was an understatement. The plaintif, a self-proclaimed "Warrior for God," epitomized the degree to which the Venn diagram circles of religious zealots and bona fide insane people overlap. I'd map it out for you were it not for the fact that I'm not allowed to have any illustrations in my blog.

The plaintiff had a church in her home. I've known of people who held church services in their homes. To be perfectly honest, I've always thought the concept itself was bizarre, and have considered the people I know who engaged in such practices to be more than a smidgen odd, religious worship style and location notwithstanding. This lady, however, didn't just hold worship services in her home. she set up an actual church, complete with pews, an altar, and other requisite trappings. She brought photos of her home church along with her to court. Even though the church in the plaintiff's home had absolutely nothing to do with the case at hand, morbid curiosity must have gotten the better of Judge Ferrer. He agreed to look at the photos when the plaintiff offered them. Judge Ferrer asked the plaintif how many members her church had. t/he grand total is [drum roll] /././././././././././././././ FIVE! I've never heard of a church with jusy five members. Even the Branch Davidians in their prime outnumbered this group. The lady never gave the name of her church. It probably had one of those "Lamb's Blood Bride of Christ the Redeemer and Holy Ghost Covenant Pentecostal Epiphany Harvest Worship Center" sorts of names.

Judge Alex couldn't spend much time on the church because he had to address the actual case, which was about a thirteen-year-old washing machine and drier. The plaintiff paid seventy-five dollars for these appliances but was unable to pick them up by the time the defendants moved out. The defendants sold the items a second time. Why they felt justified in doing so is another great mystery. It's bestm in general, not to try to get inside the minds of judge Alex's litigants. Most of them have minds that do not work in the ways your mind or mind does, and trying to understand the nonexistent logic is an exercise in futility.

The plaintiff prevailed, but not for the one-thousand-plus dollars or so for which she was suing. God only knows, if God even knows, just why the plaintiff thought she was entitled to a thousand dollars when she had paid just seventy-five dollars for the appliance combo. She explained that it had something to do with extracting revenge on behalf of her congregation of five, but the exact reasoning was about as coherent as one of Brian David Mitchell's rants.