just don't tell 'em that you know me

back at it again today, it being school and here, i guess. the five on, three off day schedule is still as jarring as it was back at work. yesterday was my first MLK day off, ever. am i a bad person for not doing a service project? no, i am probably a bad person for some more cogent reasons. moving to a place not overwhelmingly white has provided me with more opportunity to reflect on "race" and all subtopics. i think that is a good thing. on the other hand, i have mixed feelings about the notion that the day calls for service projects. from one standpoint, i dig the notion that the day is not to celebrate a problem that we as a nation solved, but a chance to take part in an ongoing effort. alternatively, there seems to be some implication that the day is for people who need "us" to help "them". kind of like the whole aid to africa thing. i dunno, just a feeling of baudrillard (man i cannot spell french shit, somehow got that one right. yeah, i totally checked) disaster porn. merits of the argument aside, that was always a debate favorite, probably most run by teams who had the file but not the understanding. that itself forms a strange metaphor for the way the day was approached by schools i have previously attended.
all that aside, the day after was set aside on our academic calender as another somewhat dubious occasion: the posting of grades. well, really, the alleged posting of grades. half of mine were not in by the "final deadline" and none were in by the "original deadline" which was like four days ago. this is probably one reason why these people teach and don't practice. real life lawyer shit cannot pass deadlines, like for real, that just cannot happen. they won't let it. anyway, i have not failed anything. this was the first time in my life where that was a serious concern. everything is just so different. and they do their damndest to scare the hell out of you and make you realize that this is a thing that could happen. and it is not entirely far-fetched. knowing some of my classmates, i would actually be a little disheartened if some of them did not fail something, given their earlier indications of having no idea what was going on.
despite that looming specter, it was business as usual in the classroom. my time off did not really recharge me for the same bullshit all over again. one class today seemed overly simplistic. the other one was interesting for reasons that will not be on the exam. as i think i mentioned before, constitutional law gives rise to many in-depth historical discussions, and the prof really knows his shit when it comes to that. unfortunately, and this is also probably repeat, i cannot stand reading jurisprudence more than fifty years old. modern court reporting/stenography is an oft-overlooked blessing to everyone who comes in contact with the legal system in any way. the old stuff is typically real dodgy as to the actual facts leading to the lawsuit, and is written in a terribly verbose manner. i encountered a sentence with seven commas and a semicolon today. also, remember, these people are judges, and such types work with a peculiar lexicon. i could go on, but the point is that shit is a serious pain in the ass to read because it is so difficult to focus on for reasons listed. the reason that this bothers me more than any equally dense reading i've done (19th century philosophy translated from german, anyone? followed up by contemporary continental thought of any nationality) is that what they are trying to say in the opinions can be stated in a much more readable manner, whereas other difficult to read language owes to the complexity of the idea it is trying to get across and often painfully self-aware of language. the old opinions sometimes seem to be difficult for the sake of being difficult, and i feel that is a near-universal annoyance to everyone. other times, my brain just makes things worse: i totally read about the native population of a pacific island in the middle of nowhere paying their taxes in "rats, mice, and other objects". i couldn't decide if it was stranger that they would pay tribute in this way, or that the colonial power would accept it. i also had a brief though about animals not being objects. turns out they were paying in mats, rice, and other objects. just when things were getting appealingly odd.
perhaps in an attempt to counteract the difficult to read with a diametric opposition, or maybe just because i, like most people, crave distraction and amusement, i have been getting into more web comics. i know that this is a dangerous road to tread upon, or at least i believe it to be such. kind of like getting into an anime series is dangerous. there are innumerable web comics out there and most of them are probably not very good, but i have been consistently entertained by the few i have read for a while that people i am friends with in real life (serves as an important distinction to just going out there and reading whatever) that i have given a shot to a couple more referred to on the achewood boards. so far, so good. i went through the archives for xkcd recently, and they were mercifully brief compared to the others i have caught up on. oh, yeah, they were mostly pretty good too. some really funny, some puzzling in more than one sense, some over my head. i do not know enough about physics and computer programming to get all the jokes, but thankfully those themes are far from omnipresent in the strip. it is not like penny arcade where you have to be a for reals gamer for life to get what are undoubtedly hilarious jokes. overall, the comic usually tries and succeeds at geekily intelligent humor. i liked it enough that i will probably check it when it updates. married to the sea/tfd/natalie dee spoiled me with those daily updates. i am also getting into dinosaur comics, but cannot yet fully explain the appeal. i suspect you may hear more about it later. or not, but you should probably give it a shot too. achewood still takes the cake in my view, so i will take this opportunity to once more plug it for those of you who still haven't seen the light. is so good. is so funny.
i was going through one of the spin-off blogs for achewood that i haven't read while i was killing time during a break and took notice of the google ads you can put on your blogger account. diss my internet knowledge if you must, but for some reason i hadn't previously realized that the spiders try to fit the ads to the blog. i have no interest or hope for making money from a blog, least of all this one, but i must admit i really wonder what kinds of ads would go with this blog, or your blogs. although i did mention disaster porn theory in this post, and that would probably fuck things up for a while, no pun intended. i was also reminded about using labels for this post. i would still limit to the suggested scooters, fall, and vacation. albuquerque, sushi, and the smashing pumpkins are also fair game, since they were in the "how to use labels" (man i am all about the quotation marks tonight) tutorial. they never seemed to attract anything good or bad though, so i suppose it is mostly a matter of personal amusement. yeah, i still think it is kind of funny.
so while i was reading this particular blog the other day, i also came across a mention of sierra nevada, and i have lusted after one of their pale ales every moment since. it has been a little while, and it just sounded like it would hit the spot. but when i went to go buy it, there, right next to it was sierra nevada esb, which i was unaware existed and may very well be a recent addition to their arsenal. so i got one of each and even though i wanted the pale really bad, i just couldn't resist the urge to try something new. years of trying to develop as broad as possible knowledge of beers of the world has made this an irrepressible impulse of mine. so here i am, drinking the esb, and i probably won't even open the pale tonight. oh well. maybe putting it off will make it even better. but for now, not much to complain about with the esb. there is one thing. upon closer inspection of the label, the text underneath the graphic reads "early spring beer". i had a moment of apprehension, as if i had purchased something i had not meant to. ordinarily, esb is supposed to stand for extra special bitter. this is a gradation of the family of beers known as bitter, which, despite the name, really are not particularly bitter, doubly so to modern american craft beer aficionados who regularly rock our palettes with barrels of high alpha pacific northwest cascade hops and the like. the idea is that there was bitter, for a time the standard english beer, mild, lower alcohol, suitable for quaffing a couple quarts after a day in the coal mine. special bitter has more alcohol and hops, and extra special bitter is another notch up from that. the good news is that despite the label (which really annoys me for some reason, imagine some fuckers putting "internationally prized ale" on a bottle of ipa), this is that precise style of beer, fairly adjusted to the current american craft brewing standards. alcohol just under six, classy and classic maris otter malt base and old school british hops for the base, with some american counterparts to top it off. i wouldn't want an uncompromising historical imitation from sierra nevada anyway. poured with a great head, those folks are well known to have that bit literally down to a science. the aroma was very pleasant, and not overwhelmed by the hops, and much the same can be said of the taste. eminently drinkable, i almost feel like it should be consumed someplace that can rightly be called a pub, and nowhere else. that being said, the carbonation out of the bottle is ideal for the style, a happy medium between the effervescent canned corporate brew and the nearly still quality of some heavier beers; enough to facilitate drinking, not so much as to slow anything down. nice color too, some varieties of the style come out too amber in flavor in appearance. overall, a good beer, solid on all sides, nothing to scream about, because then too many people might find out and it won't be there when you want it. speaking of which, the style has never been seasonal, and i will be annoyed if i discover that they called it early spring beer because they're only gonna run it for a quarter. but not really upset, because although this is a very good beer, i live at a time and place where i have the luxury of selecting from several fine varieties of a micro style. i sympathize for the proto-revolutionaries who had to make due on hard-to-find imports back in the 80s. may american craft brewing never fail again!