Wedding Wows

As I type, two of my friends are dancing away at their wedding reception. They met during that same fateful USAC election that brought Alex and I together. Today also marks the day that one of my friends at law school, who I met over the summer because she is also from California, got engaged to her boyfriend who was visiting this weekend.

It feels like today, I've been in constant disbelief because of both of these events. For different reasons of course. I have a few friends who are married but this is the first marriage where I have seen the whole relationship develop from the very beginning. And the disbelief from my newly engaged friend naturally is the shock from sudden news. I saw them this morning at a BBQ and I had no idea he was going to propose today; I'm sure she didn't have any idea.

I don't want anyone to think that this a bad disbelief. Not at all. I'm genuinely very happy for both of these couples and I'm sad I didn't have the time or money to make it out to the West Coast for the wedding. I think a lot of people mistaken shock for a bad thing when shock may stem from being in awe of something great. But wow, what a happy day.

And since I can't write anything in here without people being suspicious of myself, I'll just say that just because I'm happy for my friends doesn't mean anything like this is going to be happening to me any time soon. This actually puts me in the majority of America. A New York Times story just wrote about how the census shows that out of all American households, married couples are, for the first time, in a minority. By minority, they mean 49.7, but I thought it was funny how it was their front page news. And I'll leave this entry at that since I'm not one for divulging my love life online.

Political Odditities

Sometimes politics is ironic, sometimes it just doesn't make sense, and sometimes it's just funny...

-Missing out on hearing Bill Clinton speak because I'm in the nation's capitol.
I go to UCLA for four years and yes, I did get to see John Kerry speak more times than I could count, Howard Dean, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart; basically everyone who lost the presidency. Yet, as soon as move to the political mecca, President Bill Clinton comes to speak. What's evern weirder is that I had a dream on Tuesday night that I met Clinton at UCLA, and the next day I find out that he's coming. First my dreams are crazy, then they're psychic. I guess I can't complain too much, I was able to see Clinton 4 years ago dancing to California Love in Compton and then 2 years ago at the National Convention.

-Rooting for a Trojan over a Bruin.
In the Virginia Senate Race, Democratic candidate Jim Webb attended USC for a year before transferring to the Naval Academy. Incumbent George Allen attended UCLA for a year before transferring to UVA. Even though they're both only a 1/4 of these two So Cal schools, I think that rivalry is funny. Too bad the schools weren't switched, then I could cheer for the Bruin and the school colors would match up with their political parties.

-Seeing a billion commercials for people I can't even vote for.
I'm still registered in California, but even if I reregistered to my address, I still wouldn't be able to vote for anyone I see on TV. We commercials for candidates on both sides of these races: Virginia Senate Race, Maryland Senate Race, Maryland Gubernatorial Race, Maryland Congressional Races. I think they like taunting Washingtonians.

-Having the party trying to pass a Federal Marriage Amendment be afraid of looking homophobic.
Yes yes, I know that a lot of Republicans don't hate gay people, but when did their leaders ever worry about looking that way? Yet another reason why I can't stand Newt Gingrich is that he says that Republicans didn't come down harder on Foley earlier is because they didn't want to look homophobic. This is either a very dellusional thought, or it's just such a bad situation that he couldn't even come up with a decent excuse. For other excuses, see this funny clip montage.

-I move to the heart of politics, take a break from politics despite a lot of temptation, and the Democrats might win (knock on wood).
If the Democrats take control of the Congress in November, I might just make that political sabbatical a permanent retirement for the good of my party.

Proximate Cause

Yesterday in torts we discussed a case where a driver hits the bumper of another man in a car. The man that the driver hits had a history of severe mental illness. However, the minor injuries inflicted by the fender bender trigger the mental illness (we're not allowed to question the legitimacy of that part because of the expert testimony and that the driver did not object to this part) and the driver ends up paying big damages. Where do we draw the line of causation? The jury finds that the driver is responsible for retriggering the mental illness and awards the injured man a lot of money. Small fender bender, big damages: is it fair or just? A lot of people were skeptical. But when the professor changed the victim from a schizophrenic to a pregnant woman, everyone agreed that the driver should pay big damages if the fender bender induced a miscarriage.

I think the reason why a lot of us like our tort cases is because we have to use the same kind of reasoning that we have to use in every day life. Where do we draw the line? Even if something caused another thing, is the causation too remote? What excuses do we allow?

We all know that our upbringing greatly shapes who we are today. But how much do we allow people to contribute to their childhood and how much do we expect people to overcome those circumstances and obstacles? The obvious childhood hardships that we think of which effect adulthood are major traumas like divorce, abuse, family alcholism, etc. (Think Mark Foley who recently came out as a sexually abused, alcoholic.) But what about the smaller things. How much can we blame our behavior today on having overbearing parents, parents who worked too much, or even being an only child? How much of our past is a proximate cause of our actions today? Just like the law, that line is hard to draw in our everyday life.

Waiting for Godot & Getting Old

It's funny how you can sit in the dining room of your law school and be discussing contributory negligence one minute, and gossiping about who's dating who the next minute. And once again that feeling of jr. high'ness came back to me. Hanging around the lunch room in little established cliques. There's not as big of a range as there was in jr. high because all of us are nerds at heart (you kind of have to be to get into law school, and if you weren't, you will become one after studying 6 hours a day). But you can definitely see the different types of groups like you did in jr. high and high school.

In these moments, I ask myself when am I going to feel older (I had an entry about this just a few days ago), but then it dawned on me "this is it, I am a grown up." I think I keep expecting this miraculous transformation in my life but I'm realizing that I'm waiting for something that doesn't exist. Even bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, quinceaneras are just symbolic passages into adulthood. Though I never had one, I doubt anyone comes out saying "wow, I felt like a kid this morning but now I feel like an adult now!"

This whole growing up thing, it's as gradual change and I know that I'm different than I was in jr. high, high school, or even college. Just because you have jr. high flashbacks doesn't mean you haven't matured since then. Because maybe even if you change, some things don't, like gossiping in the lunchroom.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

I'm almost afraid to go to bed at night now because of what dreams I'll have. They aren't always bad or scary, but they've been extremley vivid and strange lately. As fun as they are, I need to figure out how to stop them because I wake up exhausted in the morning. I don't know what it is; I'm not more stressed than usual, I go to bed fairly early, I do all the usual things you're supposed to do to take care of yourself. I blame the change in the weather, it's messing with my mind.

Moreover, a lot of them involve people I go to school with so it's weird seeing them the next day. For example, I had a dream about how everyone couldn't stand this one girl in my class and the next day she sat next to me in two of my classes and I couldn't look at her because all I could think about were the things people were saying in my dream. I've had a dream where my dean's fellow was the drill sargent when I joined the Navy officer program at Guantanamo Bay (think "A Few Good Men), a dream where I competed against this other girl in my class Project Runway style for dresses for the law school prom (yes, there really is a formal in law school), and a dream where this other girl was the head of the Bruin Republicans (even though she's liberal).

I don't know if studying all day has made my imagination go into hyperdrive when I go to sleep but something lately has been triggering all these crazy dreams. I know there's all that dream analysis stuff. But instead of wondering what my dreams mean, I kind of wonder why we have dreams at all. I never realized until now what a strange phenomenon it is.

What are you?

At UCLA, almost everyone used to ask me what race I was. I'm not sure why there was such an obsession with trying to figure out, but it was almost always one of the first questions that people asked me, especially other Asian-Americans. At American, no one had asked me until a funny little exchange yesterday on the metro.

Vicki: Andrew calls our little section of the three of us sitting together "Chinatown."
Me: You know I'm not Chinese right?
Vicki: Wait, you're not?
Liam: Right, because you're Korean?
Me: *laughs*
Vicki: What are you?
Me: I'm Vietnamese!

Today, on a completely different topic than race...
Andrew (another Andrew, not the Chinese one): Don't you hate it when the cork gets stuck in the wine bottle?
Me: My dad can get corks that fell in the wine bottle with a pair of chopsticks.
Andrew: Can he catch flies with them too? (Karate kid reference, for those of you who live under a rock)
Vicki: Kristina's last name is actually Miyagi
Me: Geeze Vicki, I'm not Japanese either! I thought we straightened this out yesterday. (joking of course).
Vicki: I still can't believe you were Chinese all this time.
Alexia: Wait, what are you?
Andrew: Wow, I always thought Kristina was American.

I really don't mind if people ask me what ethnicity I am. I'm proud of my Vietnamese heritage and I thoroughly enjoy learning about other people's backgrounds, traditions, customs, etc. I would just rather have the discussion come naturally in discussion (strangely, like it did in these interchanges), rather than the very first question someone asks me (like what happened for 4 years at UCLA). Then, it just feels like I'm being classified immediately into a box and I feel like there's more to me than just one part of my identity.

As Andrew said, I'm an American, and I'm also Vietnamese, and I was born in Minnesota (yeah, that always throws people way off about their perception of Asians), and I'm a true Californian, and I'm a lot of other things.

There's No Escaping

Have you ever felt like everything around you seems to point to a common theme or just a general commonality? You know when tv shows have an episode title and all of the unrelated events of the show all revolve around that title in a nice little 30 minute to one hour package. (I always thought Ally McBeal, Sex & the City, and Grey's Anatomy did this the best.) So what keeps popping up everywhere around me?

1. Wedding Bells: Definitely not for me yet but it seems like everyone else. Last year one of summer rommates who had just graduated said that all her friends were getting married. That seemed like a foreign concept to me. Little did I know that one year later, I would feel exactly like her. It feels like every other day I'm finding out that my friends got engaged, I'm getting invited to a wedding, my friends at law school are flying out to bridal receptions or weddings, I'm seeing wedding pictures on facebook (soooo many wedding pictures), or my roommate is getting wedding invitations in the mail here. Even today's homily at church was about the sacrement of marriage.

2. California (and how weird everyone there is): ABC sports commentators characterized our football is explosive and our fans as colorful, Sex & the City portrayed as hippie dippy tofu-eating non-smoking want-to-be movie stars, the news says we're trying to steal away the cheese title from Wisconsin, and Law and Order summed it up by saying we're the land of fruits and nuts. Any reference to California in any of my classes usually has to do with how sue-happy we are because it is so easy to bring a lawsuit in the state or how Californians can't deal with adverse weather conditions and thus get into accidents (I wonder where they got that idea, see prior blogs).

3. Syracuse: For a school that I have only recently become attached to merely because of Alex, I see it everywhere now. I read cases occuring in the city of Syracuse. I can't walk down the street without seeing people in Syracuse caps, tshirts, or sweatpants. People's brothers, sisters, fiances went to Syracuse. I wonder if this school has always been so prominent or I'm just starting to notice.

4. The law: Ok, this one is no coincidence and sheerly of my own doing. I see the law everywhere and while watching Law and Order, they went in to this bit about widgets, contracts, and consideration. I shrieked.