I am getting to be quite well verse in the art of sitting around my house doing nothing, well that’s to my obligations as an American citizen I was given a break in the heart pounding sitting around action in the form of jury duty, dum dum dum!!!!! However, this turned my sitting around and doing nothing from a home game into an away game. I reported to duty at the courthouse on Tuesday. When I hear, since I was reporting for the government to do my civic duty I kept saluting everyone…and I got plenty of weird looks. Sadly, this isn’t true, but I think that if I had arrived at the courthouse and walked up to the security guard and saluted saying, “Jason Moss reporting for jury duty, at your service,” I’d be the coolest person ever. Next time. While I didn’t salute they must’ve liked something about me because I was actually put on a jury…as an alternate. As an alternate I got to be witness to everything about the trial…except the deliberation. Me, and the other 2 alternates, spent the deliberation time on the computers facebooking and reading the news…but this was the day that I discovered that Mario Vargas LLosa had won the Nobel Prize for literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Vargas_Llosa, He is a Peruvian author and I was actually reading one of his books during my time in Peru. I have yet to finish it but my next book is to be a Spanish book, I think I’ll pick up where I left off in Travesuras de La Niña Mala or I’ll start La Ciudad y Los Perros. I am currently reading Alicia en el Pais de las Maravillas, it is an easy read because I know the story, and it’s not on the same literature level as Vargas LLosa. To read real literature in Spanish is much more challenging meaning that I will need to bring a dictionary with me every time I go to read in a park or coffee shop.
Fiddlesticks, I’ve been sidetracked…I blame the Nazis. So, I was picked for a case in the courtroom S, for Special, so says Ted, our bailiff…who seemed to leave a lot to host lectures and put them online…he he, ha ha I is funny. The trial didn’t actually start until Wedneday, where we began by being read to…dear Heyzuez was that boring. The judge read us basic instructions for being a jury…which I’m sure he’s read thousands of times before. I wish he had taken some liberties and added random words and phrases just to spice it up, like some pilots do for their speech before takeoff. “The presumption of innocence states that the defendant is innocent until the prosecution can prove him guilty, which is unlikely because I had the tie the prosecutions shoes this morning…things are looking up for the defendant,” Or something funnier. We heard all witnesses on Wednesday and then heard from the defendant on Thursday. Finally deliberations started on Thursday…ergo the one of facebook started on Thursday. Around 430 on Thursday, the judge called us all back in and told us that we had to come back Friday, I think he just really wanted to make sure that we got all of the facebooking done that we could…I must’ve known that facebook is how I communicate with my international amigos ( I really wanted to make an alliteration there…too bad, yes, I’m rambling). It was getting on lunch on Friday and we were worring how much longer we’d be stuck in the amazing luxurious couthouse in Pomona. Around 1130 we got called in and finally the verdict was read…we got out of there around 1230. I rushed over to watch my dad in a concert put on by Pomona College. I hadn’t seen one in probably ten years and it was nice being there.
Jury duty paid…and it has actually doubled my bank account in the three days that I served…gross I know. I got a lot of reading done, I raced through George Saunders’ Civilwarland In Bad Decline in three days, it was a great read but I still would like to memorize his story, I Can Speakä, I can’t get enough of that story. JD, not the scrubs guy, really messed up my work out schedule…I actually didn’t work out one of the days…a first in about a month….luckily I had done a double workout the day before…I mean I’ve already run 4 miles today and I’ll probably go to the gym later today too….why, because I have the time.
So, I still have homework that needs to be done by tomorrow. The Internet tells me that my homework will take me just about an hour. How does the Internet know how long my homework will take? Well, because my homework is to make something for a multicultural potluck. Being that I have no culture, I have decided to make something Peruvian, a culture that I am forcing my way into. I am going to make Lomo Saltado, which is quite simple…I’m not a great…lets face it, I’m a bad….cook. The dish is really just meat, veggies, french fries, and rice…I’ll find a way to make it taste not the best. Oh well, I have to stay connected with my Peruvian experiences. I have been noticing a curious thing. I walk by many meaningful objects in my room 10+ times per day. There are my flags on my way, with all their signatures, a ltter from a study right by my TV, my amazingly technologically advance cell from Cusco, and countless other things. Each day though, I focus on them longer and the memory becomes stronger than the object. This is completely nature, however, at times, I do feel as though that parts of my life are atrophying. I haven’t used my Spanish since I’ve been back, I haven’t done any teaching, and I haven’t done any community service, major staples of my life seem to be just distant memories…I suppose this is normal. My mind is always thinking of countless, and most ridiculous, metaphors for me to get a better understanding of the way things are unfolding. One example being that I’ve been off to the races but someone has put a big chunk of Jello in the middle of the track and I find myself treading Jello.
Random factoid: USC really needs to get their D sorted out
La Cultura Cura
