You can’t help anyone if you’re that burnt out. Take more rest. No buts: they’ll manage. No, really, they will.
I don’t know that this is a rant as much as just the weird shit I deal with regularly.
I’m visiting a client in jail. He’s 35 and has been accused of improperly touching a 14 year old. As such, he’s in the “SO wing”; that’s the sex offender section of the jail.
To give context, he’s the kind of schlub that you can imagine being inappropriate with a teenager. He’s short and pudgy, and has had only 1 girlfriend in his life. He smiles a lot, and is generally agreeable - he isn’t a “groomer”, but somebody who went along with an opportunity. I was there to tell him the other is 15 years of prison.
Anyway, he was telling me about the hazing that they do in his pod anytime they get a new inmate. Once the person comes in (carrying their stuff) somebody will yell out “Better not be a sex offender!”
He laughed when he told me how their eyes get real big, and they get all scared, before somebody’s lets them in on the joke: everybody in that section of the jail is a sex offender.
“It’s all fun and games here.”
Yes, he literally said that. Which is why I had to post.
My job is so weird.
There is a large ash tree in my yard that really wants to die. I have it treated for emerald ash borer, some sort of fungus, and fertilized. I’ve had it trimmed of problematic limbs, The main trunk splits into 3 trunks about 15 feet up so I had the trunks cabled together to keep them from failing. It insists on getting every possible problem a tree can get. It provides a lot of shade to my house so I keep spending money on keeping it alive but I think I’m done. It’s now losing leaves at an impressive rate. Who knows what the issue is this time but I’m tired of the hassle. It can die and I’ll replace it with something that actually wants to live.
An interesting view of a side of life I’ve never seen. To me, “lawyer” conjures up images of client consultations in posh offices or making arguments in court proceedings. Visiting weirdos in jail was just never part of that imagery, but it must obviously be routine for a criminal lawyer. I’d find that part of the job pretty depressing.
Read something last week that really pissed me off. A high school baseball team in Ft. Myers Florida was playing another school in an annual game. The coach had the only black players on the team batting first and second in the batting order. With the first player at the plate and the second in the batter’s box, the coach, his other coaches and the rest of the team walked off the field and left the stadium. The reason? This coach did not want the 2 black players on his team. All the coaches were fired, the rest of the players were suspended from all school athletics and the school cancelled it’s baseball season. All because of a racist asshole. Now he is suing claiming his “rights” were violated. It blows my mind thinking crap like this is still happening to this country today.
When I first became a lawyer, I did real estate transactions. It was all conference rooms, all the time. I found it dreadfully boring.
I eventually switched to civil litigation, thinking I’d get to do impressive things in court. Nope: more conference rooms (to mediate all day long).
It was when I finally switched to criminal law that I was in court all the time, being part of the action, acquiring ‘war stories, - much more fun and interesting.
But it also necessitates jail visits. They are not routine - usually the people who can afford a private lawyer can also afford to make bail. But it does happen (usually because you take on a big case with a humongous initial bond amount, or your client violates some condition and gets locked up).
Going to jail sucks. There’s a thick, heavy stench in the air - some combination of sweat and industrial cleaning chemicals- that gets in your nose, so you’re reminded of it for the rest of the day. You go down long concrete hallways and have to hope that the guards watching you on the cameras won’t forget to open the electronic doors that let you pass through each section. It is loud as sound echoes through the walkways.
Eventually you get to the inmates. Well, sort of. Depending on the section, they may sit with me in a room or we may still talk through phones separated by glass.
Their drab clothes (usually orange, sometimes grey stripes) makes me think of concentration camps and dystopian novels.
Usually, though, the conversation is short - they just want to know that you are thinking about their case. I’m usually telling them that I’m waiting to hear back on an offer. I’ve also tried to learn to not say “how are you?” Instead, “it’s good to see you” is a better greeting. It invites less griping.
It’s definitely not glamorous or fun. But the guards at the front (who check IDs) recognize me. And they are friendly, so there’s that.
I’m confused. Did the coach not realize that there were black players on his team until the game started? Did he not notice them at pre-game practices? And why did the rest of the team also walk out?
Thanks for sharing. The limits of my own experience? I was in court once in my life – as a witness in a divorce proceeding. My job was to say “yes, when I visited them they appeared to be living together”. It was possibly the world’s shortest testimony! 
I guess when you have to deal with scum day in and day out, dealing with non-scum must be refreshing.
I’ve been trying to stay more hydrated during the day, so I bought myself some flavored water as an incentive. I got two cases of Bubly sparkling water (two cases because it was buy one get one free!) and it is deee-sgusting. I’m actually wondering if I got a bad can, or is it supposed to taste like this? The hell of it is, I won’t throw it away either. Maybe I should drink it on days when I’ve been a very bad girl. 
The neighbourhood where I live has a number of stately ash trees, all of which are suffering due to the emerald ash borer, although I don’t have any on my property.
One thing you should keep in mind, depending on the size of your yard and the proximity of the tree to buildings (yours or your neighbours) is that it is a lot more dangerous to take down a mostly dead tree than a still somewhat live one. I know that one of my neighbours has had 2 different tree service companies turn down the job of removing a large ash on her property for this reason. If your tree is getting as bad as it seems, I’d suggest you start shopping for someone to bring it down ASAP.
Hopefully, she’ll figure out that it is not the responsibility of strangers around her to baby her to her destination. If you’d asked what floor she wanted, she’d have probably been too engrossed in the precious phone to bother to even look up, let alone answer you.
Personally, I’d be changing pharmacies at that point. If they only work “normal” business hours, they apparently don’t want customers who work those hours themselves and cannot take time off to go to the pharmacy.
It was something that had been festering for a while. Here’s the whole story from ESPN. I thought this happened this year, it actually happened last year.
A racial slur and a Fort Myers High baseball team torn apart - ESPN
Don’t forget that you get water from food, too. Things like fruit can help. And you get credit for tea, if you get bored of H2O.
(Me? I can’t go wrong with ice cold water)
I feel that way about all sparkling water. So I think it’s just how you got it.
Is Pocari Sweat available in your area? I love that stuff. It’s also pretty good if you mix in some drinking vinegar. There a different flavors of the drinking vinegar, but I’ve only ever encountered one flavor of Pocari Sweat.
I had some sparkling water at a Christmas party that I liked, unfortunately I don’t remember the brand.
I’m unsure about drinking Sweat, @Monty! Especially since I’m here in the birthplace of Gatorade. Maybe I should have started with that.
My son has mentioned that he lives in the birthplace of Gatorade. Is that common knowledge to everyone there, or are there active mentions of it?
Both, I guess. All things having to do with Gator football are sacred here.
Youtube comments
I spend a lot of time, too much time, debunking disinformation and talking points on Youtube, and it’s pretty annoying to see that, nowadays, around 50% of my debunks get deleted.
I’m hoping that this is just that the algorithm is stupid and doesn’t distinguish between, say, bigoted comments and refuting bigoted comments, rather than any kind of bias.
Youtube could at least tell me when it deletes them though.
I’ll add it to the list of issues with YT comments:
- Why can’t you just see all comments in a thread?
- The comments that get seen are usually the ones that posted earliest, so often the top comments were all made by people who couldn’t possibly have watched the video through.
- *new* Terrible algorithm for deleting comments
Word. Every “Flavored” sparkling water I’ve tried has been just blah to me. Hearing about one with enough flavor to be deee-sgusting kinda makes me want to try it.