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If

I had a crazy trip to Minnesota in the latter half of last week.  My law school sent two moot court teams, and we competed.  Moot court is where you get up in front of a 3-judge panel and argue a contentious, current legal issue for an hour (each team puts up two people, and each of those gets a quarter hour).  I like to compare it to being like doing a comedic set, except you have to be respectful to the hecklers who are constantly attempting to throw you off your game.

To make a long story short, we lost every match.  The first one was actually against our other team, and basically both sides had their worst arguments of the competition.  We lost to them, but it seemed pretty close to a tie (which would have meant they won, anyway, based off a written portion of the competition).  The next two arguments we thought we had destroyed the other teams -- our coach sent a text out saying we had just "pummelled" one of the other teams ... yet we lost both times, somehow.  Our final tally: 0 - 3.  What we feel our REAL tally should be:  2 - 0 - 1.

But, that is beside the point.  The point was that I still had a great time.  After picking up my bruised ego (which is pretty resilient, me being arrogant and all), my team and I went around Minneapolis and got to know the small sub-section that we could walk to.  There was a great restaurant named "Spill the Wine" that had the most excellent wine, and the manager/owner/server/whatever there was awesome.

So, as I was thinking through the events of the week, Rudyard Kipling's old poem "If" kept going through my head.  I am including the link to it because it is worth reading again, if you never have.

One caveat:  A former female friend of mine (still female, as far as I know -- the former attaches to the "friend" part) threw a fit when I sent this to her during a rough time because she thought Rudyard Kipling was a misogynist and that this poem is sexist.  So, first ... get a life (which was my original response, and thus the "former").  Second ... the perspective is from a father to his son.  The fact that it ends with "you'll be a man, my son" is thus not sexist.

Anyway, read and enjoy.  I think this is a good goal, a philsophical asymptote.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%E2%80%94

muse on,
 B

http://amusingbeam.blogspot.com/

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