music, weather, food, law school

first off, music:





the past couple days have been cold (weirdly) so i've been listening to laura veirs' most recent thing, amon tobin, god is an astronaut (sounds like mogwai, like everything else metal i have), and yo la tengo. yo la tengo is probably the best music for fall. of all time. it helps that they have more records than i am old, so i can just loop them endlessly and get hours of tunes.

we've been having these 20km/hr and worse windstorms, and for the whole weekend i heard yo la tengo over the sound of flying plastic trashcans flying into the railing, slamming windows/doors, and rattly tree branches hitting more railings. when we ran there was this headwind up the one side of the track that would make my eyes water.

other things: eating huge quantities of naartjies, a 5kg bag for a buck fifty US. so good. working on colloquium and rationale ideas and a preliminary book list. thinking about law school applications, dreading paying folks a fortune to copy paper from the lsds files/mail things on my behalf.

one thing about south africa: lawyers are into public service work here, more so the progressive ones, but luckily a progressive place like wits is also a very competitive law program (which, i hear, lets you take the NY bar without conversion). the work going on around refugees, land claims, HIV/AIDS and access to healthcare, as well as combating law enforcement corruption is a good reminder that not all lawyers are doing BigFirm securities/corporate contract type jobs. actually, to be fair, i volunteered with people doing that work and it didn't stop them from getting involved in human rights. you'd just have less time for it.

certainly public interest is complicated and difficult, especially in south africa because the transition turned everything legally upside down (rightly so) starting at the top with the constitution. since one of my 12 week classes is taught by cathi albertyn, who helped negotiate over the south african constitution/is a human rights lawyer, public interest law has been on my mind. lucky i picked ny...there are a lot of good human rights and public interest law programs within the reach of public transit.