My first bit of work for the Criminal Law collaborative notes is done.  That took a fair amount of time, probably somewhere near ten hours total... but I think it's decent work.  There are about 3 weeks left until exams.  To be honest, i don't know if going to class at this point is all that useful-- I don't want to learn more things, I just want to work on what I need to know and practice for the exams.

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Yesterday, classmates of mine participated in the Sydney Half-Marathon.  They took on 21km.  [CM] volunteers with the St-John's Ambulance group, so even though I wasn't participating in the marathon, I was up at 4:30 AM so that we could bike out by about 5AM.  Sydney is definately warmer than Montreal, that goes without saying I think-- but at 5am, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.  It was absolutely freezing out there.

I'm not part of St-John's Ambulance, but I was basically going with CM because she doesn't feel that confident about biking when it's pitch black outside.

It's been a while since I've worked in healthcare-- I was thinking of maybe taking the St-John's First Aid Certification.  I did one in Montreal a long, long time ago, but I mostly don't remember it anymore, beyond what I had to do regularly at the hospital for simple things.  It might be nice to do the course-- maybe I could save a life?  And working with St-John's sounds like a lot of fun-- although I don't know where I could possibly fit something like that in my schedule as it is.

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Scheduling is always such a chore.

I think one of those things I want out of life is immortality. Or at least, I want to decide when i want to kick-off for good.  There's so much to do and see in the world, but there's so little time to do it all that we inevitably rush-- and that leads to missing a lot of the details that make it all worthwhile.

There was a "Pasta Cookoff" for the marathon team on Saturday, and someone at the gathering asked me why I wasn't participating.  The basic reason was that I didn't have enough time to train consistently.  Yeah, I did go on almost weekly runs with [DilligentB], and I'm sure that cycling doesn't hurt, but my joints weren't anywhere near the kind of condition they'd need to be to finish a half.

I think people find it rather surprising just how bad my joints really are.  Muscle pain is one thing-- that kind of stuff goes away.  But joint pain? That has to do with a whole mess of cartilige and ligaments, and that stuff really doesn't 'train' nearly as easily.

Several weeks ago, I went on a long run with the group, and covered something in the neighborhood of about 12-15km-- can't remember the exact number.  My cardio was okay through the event.  Got a few stitches here and there, but I was able to plow through those just fine.  Energy levels were fine too.  But my knee started giving out, and in compensating, it started to affect my hip.  By the end of the run, it was quite uncomfortable.

I find it annoying because I wish that I'd had someone to teach me about sports injuries and all that when I was younger.  I wish that someone would tell me "okay, you need to chill a bit" or that, though a certain amount of injuries are normal in the course of athletics, that some are way more permanent than others.  I try not to let it get me down that I've got the rhematological fitness of a 50 year old, and in most cases it's not an issue-- but every now and then, I get engage in an activity where I actually get to a physical limit-- it's a point where the amount of willpower I have exceeds my body's ability to keep up with it.

I'm not talking about a situation of current fitness, where a limitation can be pushed (eg.: where I will get stronger if I just stick to a routine).  I'm talking about a situation where I am physically limited by the fact that working this particular movement will cause me serious injury if I continue.

It's come up a few times so far-- running was the latest exacmple.  Another one though came up from doing 'overhead' or 'corkscrew' punches on a heavy bag-- either the motion hurts my shoulder (and yes, I'm using the correct technique) or the extra bracing sends feedback up to my head.  As [Terminator] hypothesizes, I probably have accumulated damage to my rotator cuff from playing badminton and doing jiu jitsu.  That probably makes sense, because I have difficulty doing my own weight in a bench press or military press-- my left arm is actually stronger than my right, because my right shoulder is a weak link.

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Regardless, like I said, it's important not to get bogged down too much by what you can't do, I guess.  There's still plenty of things I can do, and that I don't yet know how to do, right?  Focus on that.

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Last week, I was finally starting to understand this whole business of slipping punches.  It's quite cool once you get the hang of it-- but of course, how good you are at it is always measured against how good your opponent is at punching you.  It's something I really want to work on, because, lets be honest, it feels great when your opponent totally whiffs one and you just have big targetting signs all over the openings.

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I've been hearing the stories, post-marathon, from people who were in it.  I really would have liked to be in it.  It's been  a while since I've been in a team event.

Mine, as [Zanshin] points out, is 3.

Since I was in a movie with Wesley Snipes, and Wesley Snipes knows Kevin Bacon.

Ever since I finished the Administrative Law assignment, I've been feeling a lot healthier in general.  The sun is shining again, I can hear birds.  I'm even sleeping better, and  enjoying bike rides as bike rides.

I've lately started thinking that one of the real foundations of me surviving mentally strenuous times is because I invest the time to make sure my body works well.  Food goes in, boxing and cycling comes out.

[On a side note, and I've said this before, it pisses me off to no limit how cyclists will pass me on a downhill (I tend to go slower when going downhill, because with all my cargo and heavier bike, I need more space to slow down than the average roadie) and then totally fail at hill climbing.  What if you were driving a car, someone passed you, and then slowed down? Get the fuck out of my way, asshats!! Stay in the God damned slow lane!  I don't mind if people pass me and keep on going, but it really, really irks me when people get in my way-- even worse when they're the terrible sorts of hill climbers who rock the bike left and right and take up huge amounts of space, making it dangerous to pass them uphill with traffic close by.]

I think I've found a good balance of work and play.  Lets see how well it carries me through finals.

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I want to try kyaking, or some sort of rowing.  Given that [CM] and I live a block away from water, it'd be a shame not to take advantage of it, right?

In light of the recent debates about the "War on Women" in the US, I've started thinking that perhaps countries like Canada and the United States are just too big. Geographically, they're huge areas. It seems unlikely that you'd be able to unite an entire country, which makes one wonder why anyone would ever want to be a president or a prime minister-- it just seems like such a headache.

The individual states just have such self-interested agendas.

Why can't we do things the old school way-- let people have their own countries and beleifs.  And then if we disagree-- wipe them out?

An amputation approach to problems seems better than letting wounds fester for decades.  And the problem will only get worse as medical science makes people live longer-- because, frankly, a lot of people just come up with opinions without really opening themselves up to the possibility of seeing things differently.  Yes, times are changing-- but that's because of the dilution of old values by the births of new generations, not because the old one has changed their mind about things.

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I've been thinking about why people don't care about certain things.  I've never really said that I'm a saint-- but I think I do what I can in the major areas of my life to make sure that I'm doing what I believe in. I also think I try, with over average effort, to look into an overall system impact of the decisions I make and balance it all out so that most of my decisions have a neutral or positive impact on the world, or, at least, a projected neutral or positive impact overall over time.

I think the steam against corporatism is slowly running out.  Yeah, we made a good run for it, but now people don't care-- it's become a cliche.  I was talking to my peers at school the other day, and six out of seven of them had pretty much decided that they were basically going to take their law degrees wherever the big bucks were, without really thinking too much about the content of it beyond interestingness.

I brought up the idea that working for large corporate firms who take on large corporate clients who stick it to the common man seems kinda... well, evil.  But the idea was met with dismissive laughter.

I didn't press the issue too much.  I don't know why I didn't.  Maybe it's because I was outnumbered.

I am not someone who thinks that we will all be able to work in civil rights, or the ombudsman's office, or whatever "progressive" sorts of law there are out there that make a positive impact on humanity.  The statistics are against us.

However, I guess I was just shocked that even before the we graduate, the idea of doing law that promotes such humanitarian causes is already out the window.  I guess, you can say, I'm disappointed.

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I've never really understood how we, as humans, have such a keen ability to compartmentalise and isolate things.  We see this, we classify it, we put it in this box on the left.  We see that, we classify it, we put it in the box on the right.  And we have infinite boxes.  But somehow, the idea that all these boxes are in the same room and that everything on the whole is flamable.... somehow, this seldom crosses peoples' minds.

I guess I wish I knew more people who not only had a glimpse of the "bigger picture" but who were willing to base their lives on an acknowledgement of it-- this, as opposed to  seeing the bigger picture as an alternate reality or philosophy that sounds good in theory, but sure, here is my life, here are my conveniences, here are the things I want.

It's a first world problem.  It's a first world problem that we're driven to this idea that we're still fighting for survival-- we're not.  No matter how bad we have it in the first world, us lower middle class and higher really don't have it that bad at all-- we don't need to be constantly pushing eachothers' heads under water.  We need to start thinking that at a certain point, this world's population is going to make things seem a hella lot tighter, and at that point, we're going to think-- oh man-- if only we'd started working on cooperation and sustainability at lot earlier, maybe we'd have gotten enough practice to prevent this multinational corporation from being put on the throne of the world.

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It's not that I think that Law is a noble profession or anything.  I just think that people, in general, should aspire to be nobler people.

There's really no such thing as a noble profession.  You could be a doctor-- but you help good people and bad people alike.   You could be a priest, you could volunteer, you could be a consellor or a psychiatrist-- all the results of your work, in reality, could be a plus or minus on the world.

However, you do have control over what you think.  Attitudes.  Outlook.

So whil some people assume the nobleness or evil of a particular profession, I think on the whole it's a misguided analysis-- what we need are values, at the hearts of individuals.

It comes down to a question then: why don't we care enough?  Enough to do things we believe in?  Enough to not do things we don't believe in?

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I guess what I'm getting at is that, in my view, if you were a totally evil corporate lawyer, that'd be okay-- as long as you believed in your ways.  I mean, truly.  Because who knows, maybe it's what the world needs-- maybe I'm on the side destined to lose.  The only way we'll know, however, is if you're willing to fight tooth and nail with me, heart and soul.  In the end? Even if you don't believe, your company may win-- but in life, you lose.  You lose so badly.

When people say they're going to do something because "that's just the way it is," it makes me want to just jump on a table and yell at them: "No, that's the way you are!"

You don't build Rome in a day, but you sure as hell need to start somewhere.  Now's as good a time as any.

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Back to compartmentalisation:

People are good to their friends.

People would not intentionally hurt their friends.

People would not intentionally hurt random people either.

It might be a stretch, but people generally would not uninentionally hurt random people if they could avoid it.

But... once you get paid, suddenly it's okay to do things that intentionally and unintentionally hurt people in unwarranted and downright unfair ways.  The business transaction, the degrees of disconnection between the product of our work and the people affected by it-- somehow, that's like a progressive disconnection that we rely on to mitigate our primal sense of responsibility not to hurt eachother.

Next thing you know, you're buying coffee, just because you can, and it's cheap.  And somewhere in the world, someone dies under the sweltering sun, with dirt in his nails.

Next thing you know, you're complaining about parking, just because you paid for your car and your gas.  Meanwhile, automotive accidents account for increasing amoounts of injury and death in metropolitain societies.

Next thing you know, 1 third of the time you spend watching television is advertisments.  But you get to watch the show for "free," right?

Complacency is just... so disgusting. We're trading our way to bigger and better things in the wrong direction.

I'm not saying we need to get it all right.  What I am saying is that we ought all try.  In all our small ways, just do a bit more every day.

Okay, so admittedly, I'm not the biggest fan of Avengers comics.  But that movie?

It was great.

When I was growing up, most of my Marvel reading was in the camp of Thor, Punisher and Spider-Man.  However, peripherally, I still read a fair number of Iron Man, and Captain America.  Never really liked Hawkeye or Black Widow (I'm not even sure if they had their own serieses) until their supporting roles in the Ultimates series.  But in any case, the Avengers movie was a real blast from the past-- I loved the feeling that I was reading an the old school Marvel Team-Up comic book.

The Marvel Team-Up comics were basically a series based entirely on teaming up superheroes-- so you'd have crosses of just about anyone.  Dr. Strange and the Thing.  Iron Man and the Hulk.  Havok and Spider-Man.  Whatever-- anything went.  It was a fun way to see different character styles clash, quite literally, because as in the Avengers movie, the thing that almost always happened in a Marvel Team-Up was first some sort of misunderstanding that got the heroes fighting against one another.  Only after they teamed up could they eventually take on the baddies for the issue.

Contrary to the way the X-Men movies were kind of lamed (I didn't like the first one all that much, and they got progressively worse; although I really enjoyed X-Men: First Class), Avengers managed to really give characterisation to each individual character.  I didn't feel that anyone got reduced to a stereotype of themselves.  I still had a distinct feeling that  each person still had their own issues, and that within the span of a movie, they found a way to get better at that.

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Other things I've been watching (while procrastinating):

Started on Persona 4 the Anime.  Only seen one episode.  Not bad, but I'll have to see more to be convinced.

Watched the entire series of Giant Killing. This seems like it would make a more interesting book, because as an anime, it was only 26 episodes and I feel that it was going too fast-- there really isn't enough time to go over any character development.  Although the coach in the series is pretty interesting in his strategies, none of the characters really go through any bildungs so all in all-- kinda forgettable.  It does have a few good quotes though.  I think Eyeshield 21  was better, though even that didn't have all that much character development.

I finished watching all of Bleach.  I think the series is done, but I'm not sure whether it is or isn't.  I didn't like the ending, and as many people point out, maybe I should have stopped a long time ago-- like.. right after Aizen turned evil.

I'm still watching Naruto, but I find it kinda annoying that they're doing recap episodes that have a bit of added internal monologue.  It's the lowest order of money making gimicks, I think.

I started watching a series called Kuroko's Basketball. I'm impressed by the animation quality (considering it's more shonen fare).  Not sure whether or not I like the story yet.  It's very Slam Dunk reminiscient.

Inu Boku Secret Service was really good. Surprisingly thoughtful with twists here and there.  Again, feels like the mange (which I haven't read) would be better.

Anyone know anything good to watch?