Rector, Holy Trinity v United States

[raven]

Tomorrow gavagai will be here! I am so excited, and if there is more airport-closing snow I shall personally go and nut people. In other news there is no other news. The snow is still pretty thick; I went to class and had breakfast with the Siren and went to class again; my apartment is a mess; I have to read Grutter v Bollinger this afternoon and it will probably make me very angry; still eating Swedish Fish and watching Frasier. (Speaking of which, the links in my last post are still up, but I'll take them down tomorrow, I think.) Also gavagai suggests that as I apparently adore shows involving family dynamics and inherently funny professions, I might also like Six Feet Under.

Census meme! I am disproportionately upset by the fact I will not be counted; I arrived a few weeks too late to be counted in the US census, and now I fail to register on the British one. Sigh. The fact I will not be counted as a British adult until I am thirty-four years old is a little disconcerting.

March 2011 - I am twenty-four years old. I live in an airy one-bedroom apartment that I love in upstate New York. I'm reading for a Masters degree in legal philosophy, and while I miss home, my friends, family, my partner, I'm happy. The weather is godawful, but I have interesting work and friends I love. I do research into Aristotle and into statutory interpretation, I have a raft of adorable tutors and one who thinks I ought to do a doctorate. In May I'm going home to a job and my first time living with a partner. I'm happy.

March 2001 - I am fourteen years old, in my third year of secondary school, intelligent, socially awkward and frustrated. I live with my parents at Formby Point, by the sea. I love that house (and I still do). I've been in online fandom for two months. I am a shy little mouse who is already a committed political liberal, but thinks rightly that her opinions are very unpopular and never ever ever discusses them.

March 1991 - I am four years old, and haven't started primary school yet. I live with my parents in a small house on the Wirral with a black door. My English is very limited and I am so painfully shy that I don't speak outside the house. I make up stories in my head.

(Like many people, I'm impressed by how this manages to miss so many interesting bits of my life: my five years living in Oxford and the five different places I lived there, the years I spent living in hospital accommodation, the summer of 1992 which I spent living in Delhi. It also misses the major life event that happened just before the 1991 census - British citizenship.)

Right. Lunch then Grutter.

Comments

[flick]

Six Feet Under is brilliant. It gets a little slow int he middle couple of seasons, but it's well worth watching. Best Final Episode Ever.

[raven]

Thanks for the rec! I have now seen the pilot, and want to watch more...

[thingswithwings]

oh my gosh, I think you would ADORE Six Feet Under.

. . . and there is not enough awwwwww in the world for the image of tiny adorable shy bookish Raven. <3

[raven]

I hope I do! I've now seen the first couple of episodes, and so far so hoopy. :)

(awwww. *blushes* gavagai is always on at me to find pictures of myself as a small person and put them on the internet. Maybe I should.)

[gavagai]

I still don't know if you would reaaally like SFU - it's a lot more straight dramatic than similar things you like - but I do think it deserves you to at least try the first season if you don't actively hate the first couple of episodes. I am not just saying this because the penultimate episode of s1 is very much about the gay (more than the rest of it, that is!) and made me cry and cry and cry.

(Still haven't seen the last two seasons, though I have been thoroughly spoiled and reading yr rec comments makes me want to go back RIGHT NOW)


GOING NOW AAAGJNDGKJDNJGDNJGDN

[fyrdrakken]

Ah, Six Feet Under! I marathoned that after seeing the first season or two or three of Dexter, so it was very odd seeing Michael C. Hall playing a gay undertaker. But yes, a show worth seeing. It's not a funny show, it's a drama, and just to keep the viewer off-balance there are lots and lots of moments that seem to be taking place solely in the mind of one of the characters -- everyone sees dead people talking to them, and then there are the dream sequences and fantasies and the bits where a little continuity glitch happens and you realize that the last few lines of dialogue didn't actually happen except in someone's head. There are some bizarre commercials in the pilot ep for mortuary products, but don't worry -- those never appear again past that ep, and aside from that the pilot is a pretty good set-up for how the entire show goes.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the detailed rec! I shall have to check it out sometime.

[gummitch.livejournal.com]

Also, Best Last Episode EVER!

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Yes, Six Feet Under is brilliant. We're just watching/re-watching it at the moment (I saw lots of it on telly, Helen hadn't seen any of it.)

Although, if you do watch it, and you watch it to the fourth series, and you see one where David picks up a hitchhiker in the van, STOP WATCHING RIGHT THERE. Just go to the next episode. You don't need to see it.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

*grin* I've only seen the first three seasons, though have been quiiiite spoiled for future events, and people keep saying this to me as well. And yet I am really bad at not looking into the metaphorical sun, even if it would be for my own good...

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

While we're on things you should definitely skip if you make it to s4: with 4x12, consider starting the episode at 3 minutes 15 seconds. The death is someone in a lift and I really really think you would hate it.

WHY NO SFU ICON

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I LOVE Six Feet Under. Sometimes it goes a liiittle over the top for my tastes, but in general it's one of my favorite portrayals of family on TV. I think you would like it-- the writing is mostly very good, it can be hilariously funny, and I think that it has more moving conversations/moments/scenes/whatever than almost any other show I've seen. (Read: I am a crier for Six Feet Under. And I have never cried so hard at an episode of television as I did at the series finale. I am not unique in this.)

Also. Lauren Ambrose is smoking. I'm just sayin'. And it has Peter Krause!

Re: census... gosh, yes, that leaves out pretty much every interesting part of life. No real childhood! No college and beyond! My answers would make it seem as though I'd never lived anywhere but the American northeast. WHAT.

Is Grutter the one that has something to do with affirmative action?

Re: WHY NO SFU ICON

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Well, I trust your taste! I will try to check it out if I can. :)

Grutter is about affirmative action, but I malign it a bit; it's okay, the one that really really winds me up is the nineties sequel, Parents Involved. God, that makes it sound like a sitcom.

This turned into a mini LJ post of its own, but what can I say, you inspired me.

[ladyfalcon.livejournal.com]

I recently watched all the episodes of Who Do You Think You Are that dealt with British celebrities I knew something about (starting with Stephen Fry). If you haven't seen it, one of the weird things is the different sense of scale that happens between families - Stephen Fry, for instance, only follows his family back to the now-Slovakian town they lived in prior to the second World War - there was still someone living in that town who knew family members. But then David Mitchell went back to at least the early 1800s with his family of wealthy sheep farmers.

I realized something I didn't before, which is how quickly personal information about individual humans drops off into Only Official Records territory. Martin Freeman didn't go that far back in time, but the longest-ago person he focused on, he learnt the most about her from nothing more than birth and death records, and the census. There were a few photographs, sure, but the most interesting details of her life were largely only available in extrapolation from census records and specifically the death records of her children.

If you haven't seen any of that program, I urge you to, you'd probably be able to watch a lot more people than I could (as I said, I only watched for celebrities I already knew about). One thing it made me think about is how much easier it is given the internet to leave lasting, personal traces of ourself in the world. We are constantly reminded that nothing on the internet ever really dies, and with the continued cheapening of storage space for digital information I don't think there's going to be a spring cleaning of dead space on the internet anytime soon. It seems likely that in a hundred years many more people looking for their ancestors will be able to reach back and have deeply personal contact with family members they never knew.

Erin

Re: This turned into a mini LJ post of its own, but what can I say, you inspired me.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

So, I am being epically late in replying to comments, please forgive me! I have watched Who Do You Think You Are - oddly enough my parents are big fans, and always get me sucked in when I'm home. My favourite so far has been Bruce Forsyth - he ended up finding a bunch of really close relatives (first cousins!) in Georgia, and he'd never known they existed.

My own family is a good exercise in how quickly records can be lost. My mother's father's family fled then-East Pakistan in the months before Partition, and lost everything. We still don't have much of an idea of where they came from, who their parents were, anything. This was only 1947, hardly ancient history. It frightens me.

[sriti.livejournal.com]

Hey, nothing at all to do with your post (besides your love of constitutional law) but just wanted to ask your personal opinion of the the anti-Shariah laws promulgated which I've been hearing about. Are they constitutional? Do you have any discussions about it at all in law school?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I think - I think! - they're unconstitutional at the state level. I did a bit about it in conflicts of law last semester, but I am really not your girl, I know very little!

[furies.livejournal.com]

ahh, grutter! did you have to read both bollinger cases?

i remember reading them fondly . . . in my first amendment law course, right as columbia announced he would be our new university president.

(did you already do bakke? i always liked that one more, though i couldn't tell you why.)

even though i decided not to go the law school route, i love con law so hard. while at rutgers (where i was supposed to be taking only psych courses) i took con law from 1898 to 1998 (so weird that the 90s are now a decade for course titles!!) and man. our exams were writing decisions as if we were the justice on the case, and I LOVE AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW. it's so . . . quirky! and malleable, yet not!

< / end nerding out>

(writing decisions is FUN.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I probably should, though I haven't yet! My focus is actually one particular amicus brief, I'm just reading the whole thing for context. Con law is the area where American law is most unlike British law, so it's where I'm most lost! Fascinating stuff, though. Specially this equal protection stuff which we just don't have.

[tau_sigma]

This is a lovely meme; although it misses huge chunks of your life, I am enlightened to learn than you were a small child who didn't speak English very well. Also, you didn't have British citizenship before 1991? That surprises me, after all, you were born here, weren't you?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*smiles* I had the unfortunate combination of painful shyness, lack of English and undiagnosed myopia. Late bloomer, me. :P

I was born in 1987, mere months after the law changed so people born in the UK didn't get automatic citizenship. I was a baby of Indian origin born to Indian citizens, so that's the citizenship I got; by 1991 my parents had been here nine and seven years, and were naturalised, and of course I was naturalised alongside them. The funny thing is, I didn't even know this until 2005, when I applied for Indian dual citizenship and found it much easier than expected, because I had been an Indian citizen before!

(The frightening thing: this naturalisation process wouldn't happen now. In the eyes of the current government, I'm very much an immigrant, still.)