These Events

It’s reading week! And I could really use it.

Last night was my first on call shift for my volunteer job. I volunteer as a support worker with the sexual assault response team, which means that I meet survivors of sexual assault at the hospital, police station, or just over the phone to provide support. It’s been a really meaningful experience, although I couldn’t have anticipated the amount of anxiety I experienced last night.

I spent last October - December training for this position, during which we learned a lot about the theory behind crisis intervention and practiced through role plays. I picked the pager and binder up from one of my co-volunteers yesterday afternoon though, and from then until this morning when I traded it off, I anxiously checked the pager every 20 minutes to see if I had somehow failed to hear a page. This is of course silly - the pager’s obnoxiously loud and impossible to miss.

I didn’t get paged, which I hope means that everyone had a safe night. All night, though, I felt so terrified that I ended up curling up on the couch and watching all of season one of Community. It wasn’t the idea of being called to the hospital and having to remember my training that was so scary, it was the feeling that I could be asked to respond to an emergency, but without knowing whether or not it would happen, and without knowing if I would respond in the right way.

One of my co-volunteers once said if I can just sit there and tell them that I’m sorry and that it wasn’t their fault, I feel like I’ve done most of my job. I’ve been taking a lot of comfort in this, because while I imagine that I won’t respond perfectly, it really isn’t about whether or not I say the right things. It’s about giving agency back to someone after it’s been taken away and any little bit of support goes a long way.

One good thing that came out of my night was some painting! I’ve gotten started on You’ve Got a Roof, and I’ve still got a long way to go but I’m pretty intrigued by it so far.

I had intended to make the base a warm off-white colour, and I somehow managed to make a really bright mango orange. I’ve decided to try working with it though - it’ll be a more interesting colour palette for sure!

The leaf print is putting up more of a fight on the canvas than I would’ve anticipated - I was hoping the base layer of paint would smooth out the rough texture of the canvas a little more. I think I’ll make several different layers of leaves in different tones of green though. The canopy will hopefully end up looking like an umbrella! And then I’ll work on making rain drops, I’m thinking of long slanted ones. Here’s what it looks like so far:

I recently started the second painting in the series Conventional Wisdom! In case you’re wondering, I wrote a post about it earlier.

This painting is called You’ve Got a Roof, and it’s from something my friend Talia told me: you’ve got a roof over your head and that counts for everything. It’s going to be acrylic on canvas, but I really wanted to use a leaf print as part of it. I thought about buying something quick and inexpensive like scratch board or craft foam and cutting it out, but I thought I’d try carving a lino block.

I haven’t made a carving or a real print since grade seven, but I bought some lino, a cutter and a roller (it’s called a brayer) and I started carving. Here’s what I came up with:

You’re supposed to use print ink, but I thought I’d try printing with acrylic. I rolled the paint out using the brayer on a huge glass mixing palette (a pretty wonderful gift from my last birthday) and then onto the block. 

Here are some of the prints I got:

The top left is beautiful, but the paint wasn’t saturated enough. The next three on the left page were too sticky and the paint didn’t roll too smoothly, so I added some acrylic paint retarder (this clear substance that thins the paint and slows down its drying time). The top right leaf was printed that way, and I think it was the most successful:

For the bottom two on the right, I tried using a paintbrush but it really made the print poorly defined, so I’ll be sticking with the brayer for sure!

The trickiest part now is going to be making prints on canvas. Canvas is super absorbent and it takes a lot of paint to saturate it so it’s going to be hard to make the leaves stand out. I’ll let you know how it goes : ).

I’m writing a legal memo about when evidence of a past crime can be used in the prosecution of a current offence, and it’s made me think a lot about the role of juries. In case you’ve never read into it or served jury duty, juries are triers of fact. This means that while judges make decisions about the law, juries (if they’re present) make decisions about what factually happened (ex. what are truths and what are lies). Judges play a really big role in explaining to juries how they should determine those facts.

My criminal law prof (who writes the leading text on how judges should explain concepts to juries) talked to us in class last week about how the rules and principles that juries have to apply are often really complex, vague and hard to understand correctly. It’s likely that the average juror doesn’t grasp it all. Yet, in Canada, he feels that juries generally make what the judges would consider to be the “right” decision. This is super interesting because it isn’t because they understand the law, but rather because they articulate what they feel is intuitively fair and just. This is cool. Certainly the law is not substantively fair and just, but it’s cool that it reflects intuitive notions that we collectively feel. Because that’s what the law’s all about in the first place.

The last thing I have to say about juries is that I won’t ever be on one. I’ve heard all the time that “educated people” tend not to be retained for jury duty because they “think too critically”. Well, law students can’t be on juries, not because we know too much but because we think we know it all. So then the other juries would tend to listen to us, and we’d probably be wrong/ be citing the law from the 1800s since we learn lots of that/ the law in England/ know nothing relevant about the case but try to analogize to the tiny number of cases we’ve briefly skimmed the summaries of. So anyways, it’s actually protecting the public from our stupidity!

If you ever get called for jury duty, I hope it’s a super great experience. I’ll never see it from that side!

I hadn’t posted anything in a while and figured I’d set blogging down for now. But I just went out and bought a new canvas and I already feel super excited to get the year going! It’s funny what a blank slate will do.

Law school is a funny place - it feels like a black hole. Every so often I remember that I have other things going on (family? outside friends? volunteer work? biology knowledge? what!) and it blows my mind. Perspective is a hard in a black hole, what with there being no time or space.

Having said that, I like it. What I’ve found really challenging though is balancing the parts of the law that I really enjoy and the part of the law that I need to know. I used to read cases with a lot of interest and curiosity - thinking about the kinds of social values different judgements reflected, and the systematic patterns they created. Turns out this wasn’t a very efficient way to use my time and I almost invariably missed the “point” of the case.

Then for a while I started reading cases solely for the legal precedent they set, creating a more succinct idea of what judgements meant, why they mattered, and the situations in which they would be relevant. I had coffee with two old friends from Queen’s last week, Matt and Sarah, and they said that it really sounded like I was being taught how to be a lawyer. I think that’s very true. But I also think that this is a very impoverished way of reading the law. It’s more efficient, but for me, it’s made my work more tedious and has been wearing down my enjoyment of the law.

So now I’m working to strike a balance between the two. It’s been challenging so far! Law school really feels like a marathon. I find that it’s not so much the volume or difficulty of the work that’s challenging. I remember having three labs a week and that was way worse on my free time (especially when I smelled like fly nap half of the week). What’s different though, I think, is the relentless nature of the work. It’s a steady stream, and it’s way too predictable!

My plan for the semester though is to strike that balance between learning what I like and what I need to know. And then to spend the rest of my time doing things that I really enjoy and value! Here are some recent developments that I’m pretty excited about:

1) Modern dance. I’m taking a class and there’s a RECITAL at the end! I hope I get to play the teapot/ watering can

2) Friday night trivia at Fort St. Cafe!! It makes me miss Grad Club Trivia

3) Knitigation - the law knitting club. I’m currently making a scarf!

4) Volunteering

5) Starting a new painting. This I will be posting about very soon!

6) Getting a little better at blogging

For now though, I’m going to research for a legal memo I have to write. Luckily it involves stolen jewelry and throwing stars, so it’s pretty interesting!

PS - HEY CHRISTINE AND LAURA!

Things that have happened in the last 10 days:

1) Halloween

2) First for marks assignment in law school

That pretty much sums it up. Luckily, I’m meeting my friend Karen tonight for a pint at a nearby pub. TUESDAY NIGHT? WELL DESERVED.