Stay of Execution

MS

A post by David Weinberger mentions how long it took the committee charged with giving each state a two-letter abbreviation to do the job. Apparently the states beginning with M were problematic and non-intuitive.

That reminds me of something that's always puzzled me about boat registrations. Most boats have to be registered, just like a car, in the municipality they belong in, and doing that results in numbers that you affix to your bow. (This picture shows the registration numbers reasonably clearly.) The numbers are preceded by a two letter code, so a boat's bow will read "ME 7134AN" or something like that and everyone knows that the boat is registered in Maine. But the odd thing is that boats from Massachusetts have the two-letter registration abbreviation "MS" instead of "MA". I've always wondered why this is so. And what they do in Mississippi.

Volume Color

Housemate has started up again at art school, and one of her classes this semester is called "Form and Color in Space." For an assignment this week she's taking pictures of different kinds of color. The three kinds of color are surface color, film color, and volume color. Surface color is fairly obvious -- the color of an object as you look at it. Trickier are volume color and film color. Film color is apparently an edgeless kind of color -- the color of the sky, or the translucency of light shining through something, a shadow, or reflection on a surface. Volume color is the effect of a gas or liquid in a container -- so, perhaps, orange juice in a glass. Or a cloud, we think. On our walk yesterday (both of us have, reluctantly, given up running, at least for now) we looked at the trees and the water and the reflections and the sky and the seagrass, all textured and green and yellowy-red, and discussed the attributes of the color. The morning light was hazy and a little thick and across the cove the city buildings were hazier than usual. Is that volume color, the fact of the intervening vague indistinct mist, the slight faded blurring over distance? Maybe that's just the surface color? Can you describe a lack of crispness as a color at all? But the trees in the foreground were clear and in focus; by comparison the pastel softness of the city across the water made it clear that there was light mist in between, even though you couldn't see the mist itself, just the way it softened the buildings. Is that volume color?

We walked past a smallish tidepool on which an egret, some birds that looked like curlews, and a few ducks were fishing. The water was flat silver, a reflection of the sky, except here and there where you'd see a sprinkling of rings appearing at the surface where a flicker of minnows would appear, and where the birds would run and chase the minnows. We stopped and watched the birds, hunting more actively than you usually see, and in an unusual display of interspecies togetherness. The periodic rippling punctuating the surface of the tidepool made it clear that it was a liquid, but the color you saw on the surface was reflected sky -- film color or volume color? We kept stopping and looking at things, trying to describe to one another the way a color was manifesting itself. I wondered about the seagrass -- its green an obvious textured mix of separate blades, each a flat green fading at the top to a yellow, a red, or a golden brown. Looking across the marsh at a patch of shore you got not just a splash of surface colors, but a sense of texture and volume from the aggregation and the feathery groupings of all these separate colors and their shadows. How do you describe that, the way the color of a patch of grass is distinct and different than the color of any individual blade of grass, the way the variation of colors can convey texture and volume and shape?

It's funny how a new set of vocabulary words can open your eyes to the world in a whole new way.

Anniversary

I started this blog a year ago tomorrow. I'd had two Blogger experiments before this one, beginning in the spring of 2002, but neither one held my interest all that long.

Blogging has become a habit for me in the past year. I think it's a good one. It's taught me a lot and it's made me much more aware of the thoughts that cross my mind all the time. I've been thinking about what I've learned from doing it. Yesterday in the professional responsibility class a student introduced herself to me after class. "I read your blog every day." Another student mentioned a post from last April in the class discussion. This kind of thing happens more and more -- people I know in one context mention the blog. It's become a small extension of my identity. I've been thinking about that phenomenon, and how I feel about that.

I've decided to mark the anniversary by not posting for a while -- at least several days, maybe a week. I want to see what it feels like to stop.

I'll leave you with a couple of posts I like -- this one by my mom, about seeing an old shoe on the road, and this one by Jeff Jarvis, about a much more important anniversary than the origin of this blog.

Why I'm a Hypocrite

So the other night I popped into a nice downtown restaurant to say hello to the bartender there. He was a year behind me in law school, and was a buddy of a guy who shared this house with me my 3L year. He's smart, kind, and personable. He was active with the legal clinic and I read about one of his cases in the paper sometime after I graduated. I remember thinking, that's a good guy, and he's a lawyer with a conscience, doing really good work.

But he didn't pass the bar exam, not the first time, or the second, or the third, and so he's still a bartender. We talked about this briefly when I popped in to see him. He was bitter and angry about it. "You can do so much good with a law degree," he said, "but I can't get around that damn exam."

Now I know people from my law school who haven't passed the bar exam and some of them I think, "Thank heavens, and no wonder." But this guy isn't one of those people. He's bright, and conscientious. He SHOULD be a lawyer. I imagine whatever anxiety or mental barrier kept him from passing the first time intensified the second time and was crippling the third time. I think he's given up, and the profession is the poorer for it.

Now I have thought from the beginning that the bar exam is ridiculous. It doesn't seem to test for the practical skills of lawyering, and everyone knows that whatever substantive knowledge you've crammed into your head for the sole purpose of taking the exam will be gone almost immediately after taking it. I understand, vaguely, the rationale for some basic "bar" to keep chumps from bilking clients, but I do not believe the one we use -- a multiple choice exam designed to trick the unwary, for heaven's sake, accompanied by overly broad essay questions with unclear scoring criteria -- is narrowly tailored to effect such purpose. Sure, passing the bar is a hurdle that requires time management, self-knowledge, discipline, preparation, etc., and perhaps those are skills that will serve a lawyer well in practice. But planning a wedding or running a marathon are important life lessons that teach valuable lessons and skills that might serve someone well professionally. I'm not sure the bar exam is any more relevant to practice than those challenges.

And I've done nothing since passing the bar, other than drafting a long letter to the Board of Bar Examiners that I never sent, to effect any change. When I saw the bartender who could be a talented and compassionate lawyer I felt ashamed of myself.

I'm not an apologist for laziness or incompetence or dim bulbs. I don't want them admitted to practice any more than anyone else. Trust me when I say this is not the case with this guy. We have a filter that doesn't work, and the only ones who benefit from it are Bar Bri and perhaps a guild of lawyers who don't want additional competition. Those of us who've gotten to the other side should think about the fence that separates us from people who want to use their law degree, and whether it is too high.

I've Been Listening To Too Much Rock And Roll

Sitting here this morning with the digital playlist feeding me a random mix of infrequently played songs, and June Carter Cash comes on with this lonesome, tired, yearning voice, and the dobro and steel guitar filling in around her voice with layers of sweet, plaintive, hopeful, rich sound. It opened my heart up and reminded me that there's something about old time country music that tugs at me in a way that not much else does.

Ugh

Showing up late to be a guest speaker in a Professional Responsibility class just guarantees that nobody is going to think of you as either professional or responsible.

Gong

Pjm has posted pictures of the Maine coast, including a nice one of a gong. If you came sailing with me I'd probably take you out around Clapboard, halfway out the Hussey, through Whitehead Passage between Cliff Island and Peak's Island, and then around by the fort and back past Little Diamond, Great Diamond, Cow, Mackworth, and the Brothers. In fact, I'm going for a sail this morning and I expect to do that loop.

We'll go past some gongs and some bells on the excursion. A bell buoy makes sounds, like a gong. In the fog it's hard to tell a bell from a gong. The gong's clang is lower pitched than the bell, as you might imagine, but it takes time to know just from listening which you're hearing. The bell buoy looks different, though. It has a broader base and is shaped more like a cone, with the structure containing the bell and the flasher narrowing from its wide bottom to a narrow top. A third kind of noisy buoy is a groaner. The groaner has some kind of rudimentary pipe organ mechanism so that when it moves on the waves air is forced through the pipes, making a low groaning sound. Groaners are shaped more like a gong than a bell buoy. I like groaners the best, although there's not one in the little section of Casco Bay I haunt most regularly. They do sound like a groan, and there's nothing really quite like the noise. Bells and gongs are distinctive, too. I can't think of anything else that makes noise as predictably and reliably as a navigational buoy, yet without a regular or mechanical pattern of sound. I suppose wind chimes are the closest thing. You know the range of sounds they'll make, and you know you'll hear them, but you never know just when they'll tinkle or what rhythm it will take on.

My favorite thing about noisemaking buoys is the game I play everytime I pass one (and am not in a sailboat race). The game is to throw a penny onto the buoy. If the penny lands on the base and doesn't roll off into the water, you get to make a wish. It's harder than it sounds. You're on a moving boat; you can't get too close. There is tide and wind to take into account. The buoy is moving on the waves, so the surface you are throwing at is at a constantly tilting unpredictably. And hitting the base is one thing, but getting the penny to stop and not ricochet or roll away is very unlikely. If you can do it you deserve to get your wish. The rule about the game is that it can only be played on a bell or a gong -- a silent flasher doesn't count. It's an open question whether you can do it with a groaner; I'm inclined to say yes although I think that might be cheating. I'm not sure where the game comes from -- I imagine my dad made it up once when we were cruising, because nobody else I know is familiar with the game and even my dad seems to have forgotten it sometimes. But it ranks up there with Pooh sticks as one of the pointless activities I find disproportionately fun.

Dog Bite

So I was walking along downtown this afternoon and got bitten by a dog. The dog seemed friendly, wagged, and I patted it and all of a sudden it was snarling and on me and my elbow was burning and painful. Ouch. It somehow broke the skin with two tidy teeth marks just below my elbow. My gracious date ushered me to a bar where I had a gin and tonic and iced it, and tried hard not to cry like a little girl. The bruise is beginning to appear, and the pain is starting to subside, but the feeling of distrust for strange dogs who wag their tails will persist for a while, I think.

Windy Day

I'm sitting upstairs in the tiny library/study adjacent to my bedroom. I'm hardly ever in here. From my chair I can look into my newly painted room and watch the white curtains billowing in the breeze, their reflections making shadow patterns in the sunlight on the wood floor. There's a breeze coming in the window in this room, too, and I can smell that my neighbors have just mown their lawn. The printer is humming gently and I'm trying to ignore the pile of laundry waiting to be washed.

Last night was just wild enough and late enough that today I'm moving slowly, without much ambition. Occasionally I remember a piece of the evening -- the antics on our ferry ride back from the island restaurant where we had dinner and drinks, for example -- and laugh to myself. We went to some establishments in Portland I never go to, and I'm glad both that we went and that I ordinarily don't.

Always a Bridesmaid

So in a few minutes a bunch of bachelorettes will descend upon my home for the start of a bachelorette party for a dear friend.  While I was cutting flowers in the garden getting ready I thought about the wedding, and that made me think about another wedding coming right up.  This one will be the second of two weddings this year where I've introduced the bride and the groom.  I started wondering whether I'll have any more weddings to my credit.  The rumor is you get into heaven automatically if you bring about three marriages.  I figure that's the best shot I've got.  There's a third couple who've been dating for a year, but I've tried to stay out of the way once I made the introduction so I'm not asking any questions about wedding bells.  I started thinking about who else I could fix up.  Hummdedumdedum.  I realized all of a sudden, hands full of poppies and cosmos, that I don't have any single friends anymore.  I used to have a couple of aces in the hole -- a top notch single girl and a superduper single guy that I was always thinking about finding counterparts for.  But both of them are in relationships, and so is everyone else I hang with most of the time.  Could that be true?  I scrolled through my cell phone listings.  A few singles here and there but not among my closest friends, at least not the ones who are local.  And not many among my outer circle, either.  Good heavens, I've become one of those people.