Life change through purchase

I was watching Star Wars IV when a commercial for the new liquid Aquos teevees by Sharp came on. A spokesman raved about the widescreen, contrast, pixels, etc. Then the tag: Change Your TV. Change Your Life.
Seriously? If I buy a $2,000 TV and my life will be different? That's it? That's all I've got to do? And here I've been wasting all this time trying to learn self-discipline and make better decisions...
What a crock.
But on second thought, I guess a big fancy TV would change my life. I'd be deeper in debt and spend less time building meaningful relationships with people and more time in front of the idiot box.

A funny thing happened on the way to Iowa City...

As many of my loyal readers (all 10 of them) know, I drive back and forth to Rockford from Iowa City every weekend to see Nicholas. It's a low-stress drive with no traffic, which makes the three-hour trip easy. And my trusty Ford Explorer is a comfortable way to travel, even if the price of gas is prohibitive. Thank you economic downturn, for the drop in oil prices!
But anyway, last night I was driving back when the engine started making a funny noise. A rattling noise. At first I thought it was exhaust, but when I pulled over to check, it sounded more like a valve pinging with the hood open. Being a moron, I kept on driving. About 120 miles into the trip, the truck lost power and I limped it off of I-80 near Bettendorf. I didn't make it very far toward town and it quit completely on a dark, lonely road. A cheerful tow truck driver picked me up about 11:30 p.m. and took my now useless vehicle to a Ford dealership. He dropped me at a nearby hotel. When I talked to the Ford mechanic the next day, he informed me that the engine block was now a 1,000 pound paperweight because the crankshaft wasn't moving at all.
Waah-waah-waaaahh.
So he wanted almost $5,000 to put a rebuilt long block into it. I took a pass and found a friend in the Quad Cities to point me to a reliable mechanic who's going to charge me $2,800 to replace it with a used engine. Thanks to the relative comparison, that price sounds like it's not so bad even though it's a disaster. Right now I'm waiting in the hotel lobby for a ride to the car rental place so I can get back to Iowa City.
Good times, good times.
Highlight of the story? When the tow truck driver pulled up and jumped out of his cab. Before he started working the hydraulic controls, he looked up and pointed out a cloud above us in the crisp night. The moon was creating an areola of light around it. Sublime.

Freezing up

There's one part of law school that strikes terror into the hearts of every potential student: the Socratic method. The way that all professors teach law is by quizzing students on the previous night's reading, which is always a bunch of judicial opinions. Some professors can be quite demanding, especially if it becomes clear that the student did not do the reading. Most will keep asking questions until the student reaches the end of their knowledge. Some will let a lost student just flounder as a hundred classmates sit, the silence bearing down on his or her fragile psyche. So the first weeks of school are spent in fear of being called on.

But I found a trick to avoid the entire Socratic ordeal. I can participate on my own terms by volunteering answers when the professors ask questions. Then I avoid the pressure of being called on because I'm already participating in the discussion.

This week in contracts class I was scrambling to write down some notes on the case we'd just finished reviewing and wasn't paying attention to the introduction of the next one. So, of course, the professor called on me. All I heard was the end of his question, the part that went, "...what do you think, Mr. Leg?" (He gets my name wrong every time. I've stopped correcting him.) My chest tightened and my throat got dry. Thankfully, he uses PowerPoint, so I scanned the slide and took a shot at the answer, which was about determining damage calculations for certain contract breaches. I took a stab at it and was right. Of course, this professor doesn't just want the "right answer." No, he always pushes for more analysis until you're finally out of your depth. He's always gracious, but he doesn't mess around. So he asks what the justification for this kind of decision was, a big picture question outside the scope of a particular case. He wanted an underlying principle of contract law, but I wasn't sure exactly what he was driving at. I rambled on an idea for a minute and said, "Well, I'm just thinking out loud here."

"That's ok," he said. "You're good at it."

A compliment from a chaired professor! A guy who earned his J.D. from a top 20 school, who's been teaching contracts at the University of Iowa since the year I was born, who has written several textbooks on the subject and who studied at Oxford as a Fulbright scholar. I felt pretty good...