Catching Up

Wednesday

The moot court went quite well and was quite enjoyable. Our "client" was someone who had been arrested, beaten, and jailed under terrorism legislation in a fictional European country. We successfully argued that his rights had been violated in two instances (although I was pissed because I thought we should have won a third, but whatever). I enjoyed it a lot because my group (3 others) basically didn't want to talk that much so I did most of the speaking. And, I must say, that my long experience of power wording speeches to make them persuasive were pretty much an unfair advantage. The other side not only had a huge handicap in that Real World was one of their "lawyers", but they had the weaker case, and they were just not prepared for the onslaught that I delivered. It was, quite simply, brutal to the point that the 57 year old South African gent, who was on the other side, just shook his head in shame.

Thursday

Class was annoyingly futile on Thursday. My prof really isn't a very good teacher and we never get anything done. I was so frustrated that I urged him to move on at several points. The "conversations" were pointless and we had material to get through. I'm only taking one more class with this guy, which is good because he's a really nice guy, but I just can't deal with his lectures anymore.

While in class, we did have one argument that I found to be fairly surprising. Somehow, we got to talking about discrimination and our prof said, "if you look at parliament's in Europe, you have less than 50% representation by women. That proves there is discrimination. If there was no discrimination, there would be the same number of women as men." I was fired up. There's nothing like sophomoric analysis that does harm to the social good. No, I declared. That's a call for quotas. There should be equality of opportunity, not of results. I was castigated. I was called out. I was practically shouted at. I stood my ground. Not only that, I bludgeoned their paltry excuse for "arguments" with more vitriol and scorn. The most disgusting thing I found is that there was such an essentializing bias about women - i.e. "women are more peaceful" type shite. Tell that to Margaret Thatcher. Anyway, my prof suggested that we table the discussion until next term when we have a politics of development class that does involve inequality issues. I was and still am perturbed by this. If any of those clowns had stopped for a second and listened to my argument they may have realized that i was not a closet GOPer and that I want equality just as much as they do. Still, I've marked it on my calender. I will disabuse them of their paltry views at a later date.

Thursday, as you may have heard, was also the day of the general election here in the UK. Their system is fairly quaint and extremely amusing. They have tons of minority parties, which are basically people that could scrounge up 500 quid and 40 signatures to get on the ballot. So, you have people that dress up as jesters and have absurd names for their "parties" like "People's Liberation Front for Beer Drinking" and things like that. I stayed up watching the results until 4 am. Probably not the wisest thing since I had a big paper due on Friday that I had not completed, but I just couldn't drag myself away. Finally, I went to sleep after the outcome was clear: Labour victory, but a bloody nose over Iraq.

Friday

I managed to get up very early and finish my paper. I think it turned out quite well. I had to present the paper and turn it in to my prof at 1:30 and that went well too. I'm sure I'll ace that "class". After, I met up with some classmates and had coffee (after a long bus ride on an exploratory adventure into parts previously unvisited). Good times.

Last night, I went out to a pub, then a club with some mates. I had not cut loose in awhile and I was getting ancy. We ended up at a shite club (as this group likes to go to), but that was ok. I met a nice Peruvian woman (working my way around that particular continent) and danced with her all night. We're going out on Tuesday.

Today has been utterly wasteful. I'm currently cooking up a big meal and then later I'm going to help Eurotrash move. He's still finalizing the details of his new apartment as I write this. I need to study, but I'm ok for my exams now that they're around the corner.