Either Is Correct

[Unsettled, with a long weekend of studying ahead of me. Violet's kicking my ass to get outlines in shape for all three substantive classes (that's the classic triad of Torts, Contracts, and Criminal, for those of you for whom law school is a distant memory), and Phase One of the Legal Research and Writing Big Project needs to get underway, too. Damn, it's going to be the warmest weekend of the year here in San Francisco, and I'm going to be stuck in front of the computer, the blue sky over Potrero Hill taunting me outside the bedroom window.]

[Even now, after 10:30 P.M., it's never-get-to-sleep warm. And I'm tired enough: after sitting thru an interminable Contracts lecture yesterday afternoon (I adore my professor, but if I have to hear the phrase "disconnected monads" one more time...but more about that later), I came home and glazed, stuffed and roasted a frickin' chicken for John and Sean. (My secret glaze: Mix together one large squirt of grainy Dijon, several packets of Chinese hot mustard left over from months' worth of takeout, and one packet of sweet and sour sauce remaining from an ill-advised McNugget binge a couple of weeks ago. I save everything.) It was delicious.]

[After that, Sean and I met up with Andrew and we saw the late showing of Happy Accidents at the Opera Plaza. It was a good movie that seems already to have passed from the public consciousness. Vincent D'Onofrio! Anthony Michael Hall! Holland Taylor! And poor Marisa Tomei. After that, we grabbed a coupla beers and games of pool at Marlena's and I didn't get home until 1 A.M. I haven't done that on a week night in ages.]

[Yes, I was tired today, but my little temp assignment at John's work (for which I'm grateful, don't get me wrong) wouldn't wait, so I sat in front of a teensy terminal and did the data entry they needed me to do. Home again, cleaned up after the chicken fest of the night before, and John and I went out to be in the warm night air. We got as far as Borders, where we remembered that Margaret Cho's concert had just been released on video, so we picked that up and just finished watching it. Yes, a gay cliche (we were at that concert, at the Warfield, almost two years ago; you can't spot us in the audience, like you can on the Sandra Bernhard "I'm Still Here Dammit" video), but there's a reason. She rocks.]

[While John indulges his Law & Order addiction in the living room, I'm in here getting caught up on telling you about my day. I'm suffering from a wee case of socialist fatigue, and I'm not even actually doing anything to, y'know, protest the war or anything. But being at New College is a saturating experience: every class comes with a healthy dose of political posturing, both from the instructors and the students, and...oh, I'd much rather be here than Oral Roberts Law School, of course, but geez. Another lengthy windstorm in yesterday morning's Research and Writing session, and I just couldn't bring myself to participate. Nothing new ever seems to get said, and at some point during my Contracts professor's aforementioned subsequent diatribe in the afternoon about how the adversarial system assumes we are all disconnected monads with no recognition of a deeper moral or loving commitment to each other, I thought of Danny Elfman, before he became a famous film scorer.]

[Back at UCSB in the late 80's and early 90's, Jessica and I used to play Duelling Songs, and two of our favorites to contrapose were "Marching Song of the Covert Battalions" by Billy Bragg (a great, catchily strident critique of aggressive, capitalist American foreign policy), and "Capitalism," a fun ditty on Danny Elfman's mid-80's Oingo Boing-less album So-Lo, the chorus of which goes something like:]

[You're just a middle-class Socialist brat
From a suburban family, and you've never really had to work
And you talk about how we've got to get back
To the struggling masses (whoever they are)
You talk, talk, talk about the suffering and pain
Your mouth is bigger than your entire brain
What the hell do you know about suffering and pain, you dumbfuck?]

[And I know it's an oversimplification: many of the students in my school don't come from middle-class backgrounds (regardless of the experiences we've had due to color, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation and/or disability), but every once in a while, I just get so tired of the noise. We all know why we're there, and not at Stanford; can't we just get on with it already?]

[One last bit: I've been having my usual smug sense of superiority in noticing that many of my schoolmates have been misspelling the word guerrilla (using only one "r," usually, but also, occasionally, substituting "gorilla"; maybe there's another reason why some aren't at Stanford...) It's based on guerra, war, after all, right? So I finally looked it up, just to be sure, and my big, fabulous dictionary that I love says either spelling, guerrilla and guerilla is accurate! I hate when that happens!]

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