The word constructive, a modifier familiar to all lawyers, will appear regularly in this and other courses. One could say that the word is a way of pretending that whatever word it modifies depicts a state of affairs that actually exists when actually it does not. The pretense is made whenever judges wish, usually for good but often undisclosed reasons, a slightly different reality than the one confronting them. One might call this reasoning by strict analogy: situation A is magically transformed into Situation B by incantation of the word constructive. Then the rule governing Situation B is applied to Situation A because the two situations are, after all, identical!
WTF?! I might as well stop reading this now, decide that looking at the text book is constructive reading, and take a nap. I wonder if this would work with my grade? "Yes, I know I blew the final, but that C is really a constructive A, so you see I still have a 4.0."
Anyway, I am feeling totally overwhelmed by homework. The POiS iBook finally died in a grand and catastrophic way on Wednesday, so I spent more of Wednesday night and Thursday freaking out about lack of a computer and my sad inability to pull my class notes off the iBook. The notes got salvaged, and I broke down and bought a new laptop, but it wasn't very much fun. Especially since I up and broke the first one I got last night when I tried to put Linux on it. It wouldn't book with Linux, so I tried to go back to XP, and it wouldn't boot after the recovery process either, so I had to take the thing back. Luckily, they exchanged it without any problem, but they were out stock on the same model so I ended up getting a different one that cost more and had fewer rebates. Grr. I really can't afford this thing, but at least it's functional and light and will get my through school. I've named it Clovis. Clovis is a Toshiba Satellite M55-S325 with a 100 gig hard drive (and a pretty blue case). So far I like it, except for the whole running XP issue, but with some luck I should be able to get it to dual boot so I can use Linux. I hope anyway. I'm a little afraid to try.
All of this computer drama has got me more tense and stressed than I need to be, even more broke, and seriously exhausted, but at least it's Friday. I'm looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow and spending at least some time this weekend knitting or maybe spinning. I want to go check out the LYS, which would be fun, but possibly less than a good idea given the wad o' cash I had to drop to get this laptop problem dealt with. We'll see. I might be able to resist more yarn purchases if I get my projects out so I can see all the fun stuff I should be working on.
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