Five purple crocuses and “Glorious Spring”

I’ve been seeing the white snow drops for several weeks now, but this is the first day that I have a patch of blooming crocuses out front underneath the birch. The season of cultivating perennial flowers has begun!

I was taking a blog trail break and I came across this story, referenced in Mary’s blog (here; mine is an abbreviated version): There is this horse in Japan. She is beloved by all. She draws huge crowds for each race. She has the wonderful name of Haru-urara (translates: Glorious Spring). A song has been written about her and a movie is in the works.
Is this a remake of Seabiscuit? No, Haru-urara has lost more than 100 races in a row. It’s not even close: in the last race she came in 10th out of 11 horses running.

What brings out this affection for a horse that is a sure-fire loser? The author of the piece speculates that perhaps it arises out of a Japanese fondness for the “hopeless but determined underdog.”

If you are beloved in spite of, or perhaps even because of the fact that you are not at the top of the heap, but still are making the effort, isn’t that the most glorious validation of your character, heartfelt perseverance, and sheer SPUNK? The fans seem to be saying “we’ve come to watch you because of your will to give it all, even though there is likely to be no reward at the end of the race.” Of course, the cliché (yet still lovely) ending is that Haru-urara gets the ultimate reward – the adoration of those whom she aims to impress. It seems that’s worth racing-losing for.

Teaching law

There are days when, simply put, you love your job. You come to class, see most everyone in place, you launch your topic for the day, hardly being able to contain your excitement.

My subject for today certainly remains high on the scale of bleakness: there’s virtually nothing happy to be said about enforcement of child support orders. But no matter. Blame the sunshine, the Spring Break rest, the electric quality of teaching on this day, in this mood, at this time—complete joy.

It’s worth recording this post – just to recall it on those other days, when you’re certain that you are not in a conversation with any of the students per se, but in the triangular communication between you, them, and whatever it is that they’re reading off the Net on their laptops. At those moments I feel the classroom should have a big TV screen on the back wall –sort of like the ones they have in gyms or in bars around town –with a Fox News or CNN headline banner running along the bottom, for when a student is speaking and I find I could use a momentary distraction [a reader and a law student elsewhere recently told me that in her class, when a student asks what amounts to a tangential question, you can see from where the students are sitting all the laptop screens automatically jump to email, CNN, blogs, spider solitaire etc, only to return to the notes page when the exchange is over].

Roll back the clock, this was me!

(or, a pre-breakfast post on the value of breakfast)

A WashPost article (here) describes an old health issue that has been retrieved out of the closet and reconsidered in light of the obesity epidemic in this country: NES (Nighttime Eating Syndrome). According to experts, persons with NES have a tendency to eat most of their calories after dinner (as best as I can understand from the article, there are “chemical-brain” issues that predispose some toward this), they then cannot sleep fitfully, and wake up not especially hungry for breakfast, repeating the cycle over and over again. Ultimately, what gets you in trouble is your messed up circadian eating rhythms (though I’m still not sure if this is the result or the cause of NES).

Looking back over my graduate school years (less so later in law school) I have to say that this describes me to the last inch. It also describes a great number of students I hung out with, and perhaps a great number of people today, since the article tells us that some significant portion of the population manifests symptoms of NES.
One of the solutions, according to the authors, is to reprogram your system by forcing yourself to start each day with breakfast. Of course, a person who is wolfing all sorts of heavy duty calories at 1 am hardly feels like granola at 7 am the next day, but the strategy makes sense to me (and indeed, it is one I eventually adopted since I was later surrounded by breakfast-eaters and did not want to miss out on the morning fun; it took me years to realize that no one ever has FUN at the breakfast table, but by then I was addicted to my morning granola).

It’s nice to know that there’s a label for just about every bad habit that you pick up in life. Had I known then that I was a marked NES-er, I may have felt a great urge to dig myself out of NES-dom. At the very least, I would have tried the breakfast routine.