It is over!

It is over, so over. I feel as though I have emerged from a deep, dark hole, hung-over. The two days, 12 hour test was not fun at the slightest. The MBE (200 multiple choice questions) was terrible; I almost had a breakdown after the first 30 questions because I think I got the first 29 wrong, really. The test is not fun. My favorite question is: “which argument is the strongest?” So all four choices are correct, you just need to find the most correct one. That is fun. Now we have to wait until October to find out the results. There will be lots of prayers until then.

The test ended on Wednesday. Matt and I returned to Phoenix to hang out with friends. We are thankful for such great friends: Brittany and Barry surprised us with a bottle of champagne, Eric drove us (keep in mind everyone had to work the next day), and Ryan, Jeff, and Chris came to celebrate with us. We also met up with April and her friends at Dos Gringos. It was great to hang out with friends again stress-free. Thank you to all who celebrated with us!

We had to wake up at 5:00 on Thursday to make our 7:30 flight out of Phoenix to Omaha. We were picked up by Eric, who drove the night before – we are very thankful for great friends. We arrived in Omaha and it is HUMID. But it is great to be back. I am excited to go boating, water skiing, and Barbie’s wedding!! I woke up at 7:00 this morning and went to the gym with her. She is going to have a great wedding.

As I said, it is great to be back as I am typing in my area of the house, the basement. A toad is trapped in our window well, poor guy. I will free him soon. There have been lots of critters trapped through the years: rabbits, toads, neighbor’s dog, and such. I free most, and once negligently ended the life of a toad. So I am hoping to successfully free this guy.

I love being home and look forward to seeing friends and family. I am excited to return to Phoenix bar-free. Brittany and I will have some major wedding planning to do. And hopefully Mike, the stationary guy, will send me the proof for the save-the-dates. For now, I am enjoying life guilt-free.
-Jen

What the World Needs

What the world needs now (besides love) is a bit more tolerance, specifically religious tolerance. I do not like to wear my religion on my sleeve, but I feel the need to get this out before I criticize. I was born and raised Catholic and I now attend church weekly. Not that this is what qualifies me to have an opinion, but I am a proud and happy Catholic.

I am very tolerant about other religions, in fact, I love that the world is rich with so many varieties of religion. Not one religion works for everyone and if someone finds a religion or spirituality that makes them a happy and good person, I think that is fantastic. I am happy I found that in Catholicism and I hope everyone finds something that works for them.

What brought this blog on: I do not like it when I am told in my Catholic Church to “evangelize.” Catholics are Christians (anyone who believes in Christ is a Christian) and have been doing this since the time of Jesus. I think we know how to worship. I am willing to talk about my religion to others who ask and I will show it through my every day actions, but I am not going to say grace before dinner in a restaurant to show people that I am Catholic. That is superficial. I know what is in the Bible. I know in Matthew it is stated to go and make disciples of all nations. It comes down to interpretation. The Catholic Church for years has used actions and love to spread the Word, not “evangelizing.” This is the state of religion in the United States, whoever can shout and yell the loudest about their religion wins. I do not think so.

And I also resent the fact that religion is used in politics. How dare politicians use a person's religious fervor to advance their own political cause. I agree that religions and political beliefs can overlap at times, but how dare they use religion to get a vote. That is cheap. There are religious, spiritual people of all brands of political parties.

Religion is not something to brag about or to shove in other people’s faces. It is easy to speak about religion, but harder to show it in actions. This is why some nuns no longer wear their habits, because they choose to show love through actions and some do still wear it because they are comfortable in it and that is great too. One person’s religion is not better than another’s choice. No individual is going to “hell” because their choice of religion – and I have heard individuals state this and I wish those individual realize this is what the Islamic fundamentalists believe. I went to a private Catholic school and loved it. One of the required classes I had to take was World Religions and it was a great class. I grew to appreciate Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and so forth. Each religion has great things about it and we could learn from each. If we could all appreciate one another’s choice of religion, things would run much smoother. Religion is about love, not judging others. I think that is God’s job.

P.S. – Great homily today at Mass about King Solomon and it is pertinent to taking the bar on Tuesday and Wednesday. King Solomon asked God for wisdom, that he may be able to rule wisely. The Priest noted that many people ask him to pray for football games, safe vacations, all sorts of things, but rarely does one ask for wisdom. Wisdom is not only about intelligence, but showing humility and making good choices as well as decisions. With that, I hope God graces all of us taking the Bar with wisdom this upcoming week.

-Jen

Candy "Bombs"

It is nice to hear a heart-warming story about the US, especially since there are so many negative news stories. Here is an uplifting story that aired tonight on ABC World News about the Berlin Airlift:

http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=5453206

Author Andrei Cherny is featured in the news clip as well.

-Jen

Soon...

While Matt and I were studying last night (I was doing PMBR Constitutional Law questions, very depressing), the electricity went out. We knew it was not going to come back on when we heard the sirens outside. I was also perplexed because back in the Midwest, the electricity only seems to go out when there is a big thunderstorm and that was definitely not the case last night.

Matt called Barry, we packed up our books, drove over to Brittany and Barry’s house, and stayed the night. You forget how vital electricity is, especially since it took us a few minutes to figure out how to manually open the garage door… And we definitely did not get electicity back for awhile - someone hit the electricity box with his car, which when I saw that, all I could think about was private necessity, trespass to land, etc. It was like a multiple choice question had come to life. Then I thought there was definitely an issue of negligent infliction of emotional distress. Ahh! At their house, we watched the the Diamondbacks lose to the Cubs, which was annoying too, but at least the Diamondbacks won the series.

I did not have a hard time falling asleep last night, but I did not have pleasant thoughts. Elements of crimes and torts, community property definitions, and then hearing “dooooooooooing” business for civil procedure kept running through my head. It was not in an organized manner either; my thoughts would jump from subject to subject randomly. I can not wait until next week, in which I will probably forget everything all over again.

Looking forward to: movies, dinner with friends without outlines, golf, unpacking, scrap booking, playing my guitar hero…

Days until day one of the Bar: 5

-Jen

Defeating the Communists with Candy

Kind of.

Author Andrei Cherny wrote about the Berlin airlift in his new book The Candy Bombers. Mr. Cherny works in the Arizona Attorney General's Office, in the division I interned last summer. It is interesting how themes repeat throughout history and only if we could learn from them. After WWII, the United States was the moral authority and leader in the world with its impeccable performance with difficult situations. It is too bad the United States, in recent years, has given the world a reason to question its moral authority, with Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, water boarding (note that some Japanese soldiers during WWII were prosecuted for water boarding US troops, it is most definitely torture, thank you Senator McCain for voting for the torture bill), extraordinary rendition, the "CIA torture flights" and other things. The US did not do this kind of low-level stuff during WWII, which that War was perhaps the biggest threat to modern democracy. Remember the Nuremberg Trials to prosecute the Nazis? Seems like amuch better idea than locking "terrorists" up in some random prison.

Story about Mr. Cherny's book in The Washington Post today:

From Berlin to Baghdad

By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, July 23, 2008; Page A15

The city is in dire straits -- its economy shattered, its citizens desperately hungry. Random violence is rising, electricity is sporadic. Three years after the invasion, hope for a brief occupation has faded. The mission is to build democracy from the ruins of dictatorship, but sober analysts question whether a flaw in the national character makes freedom unattainable.

This is not Baghdad 2008 but Berlin 1948, which makes the reunified German capital a particularly fitting venue for Barack Obama's speech tomorrow. The lush Tiergarten where Obama will speak was then a wasteland where Berliners struggled to grow vegetables in the shadow of the bombed-out Reichstag.

Sixty years ago this month, Berlin stood on the pivot point of history. The Soviet Union choked off food and fuel for the western sector of the divided city. The United States launched an improbable mission to supply it by air.

And a Utah farm boy named Hal Halvorsen, flying C-54 Skymasters in the relentless shuttle, made an impulsive promise to the scrawny children gathered behind the barbed wire fence at Berlin's Tempelhof airport: He would drop some candy for them. Operation "Little Vittles" eventually delivered tons of chocolate, attached to tiny parachutes fashioned from handkerchiefs.

The story of the Berlin Airlift and Halvorsen's mission is told in "The Candy Bombers," a new book by Democratic strategist Andrei Cherny. If the plural of anecdotes is not data, the stacking of historical analogies is not sound policy. Yet, as Cherny writes, "Their story has powerful resonance for our own time. In confronting the Berlin blockade, America went to battle against a destructive ideology that threatened free people around the world. In a country we invaded and occupied that had never had a stable democracy, we brought freedom and turned their people's hatred of America into love for this country, its people, and its ideals."

The lessons of the Berlin Airlift are anything but simple, which is what makes it such a useful historical moment. Cherny's book is something of a Rorschach test on Iraq: The message readers receive may depend on the mindset with which they arrived.

Thus, Obama can rightly point to the airlift as evidence that maintaining America's moral voice is an essential component of its foreign policy. The United States stands to gain as much from a modern-day Candy Bomber as it risks losing from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Those who doubt the capacity of government, in the aftermath of Katrina, to mobilize quickly and implement deftly can take heart from the example of organizational whiz Bill Tunner, who turned a slapdash operation incapable of supplying Berlin into a precision drill that kept the beleaguered city going through a long winter.

The rest of the article can be read at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/22/AR2008072202113.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

-Jen

Finding "the One"

I picked up my bridesmaid dress for Barbie’s wedding yesterday and then I shipped it this morning. I am good at stressing myself out and I have definitely done that with this dress. I can not carry it on the plane when we fly back unless I pack it in a carry-on and I did not want to put it in a checked bag. Thus, I shipped it with super insurance. Barbie gets married the Saturday after the bar, three days after the nasty test. (Barbie is my best childhood friend and I have known her since we were babies; we were also neighbors. I do not know what my life would have been like without her!)

I had my first nightmare of the summer the other night. It was not about the bar, which I am perplexed why I have not had a dream about that disaster yet. My dream was about the bridesmaid dress. I dreamt that the day of Barbie’s wedding the dress was missing – it never arrived. I did not have the heart to tell Barbie until right before we had to walk down the aisle. Oh what a catastrophe!

The bridal shop that did the alterations for the bridesmaid dress, Suzanne’s Bridal in Gilbert, is great. Both Brittany and I like the store and will probably get our wedding dresses there. But they freaked me out. When I took Barbie’s bridesmaid dress in for alterations, I told the lady when my wedding is and she told me I should order my dress soon. Yikes! There is no way I am going to find a wedding dress during bar season. But the pressure is on.

What if I never “find the one?” I have tried on various dresses, which I definitely like some a lot more than others. And there are a couple of dresses I really like. One I think could possibly be the winner. It is a lot of pressure to find a wedding dress. I do not want to buy one just because time is running out. Do you immediately know when it is the one or does it take time to let it sink in? Do all girls find “the one?” Or am I just expecting too much?

I think Brittany’s theory is correct. Some girls, when they try on “the one,” those present with her (mothers) cry. I think this is interesting; after all, it is just a dress. Her theory is that for some mothers, the most important thing in life is for their daughter to get married and have the perfect wedding dress. I know my mother will not cry when I find “the one” and for that, I am thankful to save me from the embarrassment and that she had bigger dreams for me. I know she will be excited and happy for me, but there is more to life than getting a wedding dress, although it is very exciting.

Also, to those spectator women in bridal shops, stop making elaborate comments about a stranger and the dress she is trying on. I do not care about your sundry opinions about the dress I currently have one and which one you like the most, especially if it is a negative opinion! If you make comments, only share friendly opinions.

Do not get me wrong – I am very excited to find a wedding dress, and I think I have already found "the one," the most important one, Matt. That is all that matters in the end, right?

And there may be tears if I pass the Bar.

-Jen