Dutch directness

I was just talking with someone in my class, casually, small talk, and one thing led to another...

"...yeah, I've been basically living alone since I was like 13," I said as-a-matter-of-factly.
"Oh, it must be lonely. Or maybe not so much with a girlfriend?" After a slight pause she continued ,"Or maybe a boyfriend. You know in the Netherlands it can be girlfriend or boyfriend."
I squirmed a little and my mind wondered what to say. The only thing that I could say was a weak "Yes..."
"So do you like girls or boys?"
I hesitated slightly, wondering whether the truth could come out. And I knew what to do. I knew I had to be true. And it came out. "I prefer boys."
"That's good. I understand. I won't tell anyone," she said sympathetically and winked.
I smiled back, a little relieved, a little proud, a little flustered, a little out. "When people ask, I tell."

The rest of my (English-speaking) friends sat around us, all engaged in their conversation. Perhaps they were too busy talking and listening to even notice the significance of what I just said, and the meaning of what I just revealed. But a part of me inside felt it was unfortanate the dialogue was in Dutch.

Assignment

He was pretty upset and disappointed, our lecturer. After having marked our first papers, it seemed obvious that some of the people in class are not taking this study seriously enough. The average was below a six (out of ten), and he'd been lenient not to give any mark lower than a four.

The next ten minutes were spent laying out the common mistakes. Poor citations, poor use of footnotes, poor sources (some people actually used Wikipedia)... bad and groundless arguments, irrelevant discussions of history and politics. It was an assignment discussing the law surrounding Palestine's right to self-determination and statehood, pure and simple. And if people had been paying attention in the lectures and tutorials there was really no excuse to get a poor grade. Some 'creative' person included a cartoon in the paper, which caused our lectuerer to sarcastically point out that the art faculty is down the road. Another stuck a sticker bearing the Palestinian flag on the front page.

I sat there wondering whether this is still the masters class I had enrolled myself on. I mean basic paper writing are skills taught and drilled into you since the very first day of undergrad studies. A paper must have a beginning, a middle and an end. You take (an) argument(s), discuss it, support it, compare it, contrast it, and reach your own conclusion. You use authoritive sources, cases, resolutions, academic articles, legal journals to back up your arguments. You include footnotes, references, a bibligraphy...and most important of all, you include your name in the paper. If you don't know this, how can you even be prepared to start writing a 20,000word dissertation towards the end of the year?

As a result the next assignment will be even more strict. To avoid people writing useless and irrelevant political and historical analysis, the word limit has been cut to 1200words. A bunch of us, who had finished the paper already, protested. No use, since we, the class as a whole, must learn, and there can be no exceptions. Which means I'll now have to spend more time trimming my essay, whereas I've got a mid-term test next week as well.

Not happy...

snapshots

Saturday 14 Oct 2006
He sat in his wheelchair, his hands fidgeting with pieces of crumpled paper. I always see him when I work on Saturdays. Always alone, just by the entrance to the retirement home, with swollen, tired, red eyes, a wrinkled and haggard face bearing the marks of old age and scars. But it was only today I noticed that he only had one leg. The trunk of the trouser was rolled up to cover the stump of his missing leg.

I grabbed my bags of post, hauled it over to my bike. As I jumped, ran, and sprinted around delivering mail in the street, I thought of the old man watching me from his wheelchair. Perhaps my youthful strength, my ability to walk and go anywhere was a constant stab in his heart, a constant reminder of what he had lost.

I always greet him when I see him, and wish him well whenever I go leave again, half expecting, and half knowing that the same time next week he might very well be there. Or he might not.

Friday 13 October 2006
The train pulled away slowly, the gentle rocking motion enticing me to close my eyes and doze for the ten minutes or so I had before Leiden. The clinking and clanking of the rails was an upbeat, rhytmic beat.

Silently we sped out of the urban sprawl and into the countryside. I looked outside and what a sight. Green meadows covered with a mystic veil of morning mist, looking like clouds that had fallen, fallen to earth. The mist cloud hung low above the ground, suspended in mid-air as if time had stopped, and shrouded the trees and streams flashing by in a thin sheeth of pure white. Is this what heavens looks like? Sleep left, and instead I was captured by the view outside the window. Everyone else had their heads down, buried in their books and papers, or in deep slumber.

I wondered who else noticed the beauty that vanished before us outside...beauty that will never be the same again.



Thursday 12 October 2006
In the middle of the train station, rush hour. People rushed mindlessly on their way to and fro, minding their own business, passing one another as if everyone else was invisible.

I walked amongst the crowd, a little dazed, a little lost. Suddenly from nowhere a man started yelling. I turned to see a man shouting at a woman, and the woman screaming abuse back. And in the corner a little kid, perhaps not more than five, howling and crying. Perhaps the grownups were the parents, but they were too busy hurling angry and swear words at each other to notice how red the kid's eyes had gotten. Their screams and shouts drowned out the cries. Their words overshadowed the tears.

I walked away slowly, more dazed, more lost.

Silent night

22.15
Just came home from uni. On the way back I walked passed this forest. It's one of those still, silent nights, cold but not too cold, misty but not too misty, one of those nights that everything just seems about right. Even my mood.

Yeah, it's been a long day at work and uni. Started off with a meeting of my colleagues at the moot court organising committee, then headed into the library just after lunch to quickly get through the reading for today's lecture. At one point, our dramatic lecturer burst into song as he explained, more as an 'aside', how at the signing of the NATO Treaty the accompanying banddeliberately played songs by George Gershin's "It ain't necessarily so". Just reading the lyrics, and putting it in the Cold War context, I realised why:

Li'l David was small, but oh my !
Li'l David was small, but oh my !
He fought Big Goliath
Who lay down an' dieth !
Li'l David was small, but oh my !

Well, after the lecture and a quick bite to eat it was library time. Spent a lot of time discussing the paper with my friends, like good lawyers we are, construing the meaning behind the words. At first glance, the assignment seems easy enough: who, out of the three suspected states of Lebanon, Syria and Iran, is attributable for the acts of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel.

Given the facts, and what we know from the international case law, it seemed like it was easy to just apply the rules. But which rules, how, to what extent, in what context...? All sorts of questions starting coming up. On the face of it, it seemed like an easy assignment. A state is attributable for acts of private groups if it can be proven that the state has "control" over that group. But what is the extent of the control? Nicaragua says "effective control", meaning that mere financing and sponsoring with armaments is not enough. You need to be issuing direct orders and instructions to that militant group to be in "effective control". But another case, Tadic, holds the control need only be "overall control"...meaning a state need not be directing or issuing orders to be held attributable for acts of a militant group like Hezbollah. And we've not even discussed whether under the new international legal regime in the 'War on Terror' whether states 'sponsoring' or 'harbouring' terrorism will be attributable for carried acts by militant groups which cause international wrongs.

Spent the past weekend with my head stuck between the cases, legal texts and academic articles...and the more you read, the more questions you have, the more you can interpret and re-interpret the words of the assignment in another way, which gives rise to a whole new rule and application of that rule. Are we making this more complicated than it really is, and giving ourselves more work than is actually required? Will the lecturer even notice how much thought, work and effort is being put into this assignment? One cynic calculated that each paper we write actually only counts 3% of the total mark of the whole masters programme. Which makes you wonder if it's worth the many moments of conceptualising, footnoting, editing, comparing, contrasting and wrangling word games.

After almost one and a half hours of discussion, arguing, we were no further than we were when we started....but we agreed on one thing: we need to read more, brush up on our supporting arguements and will reconvene tomorrow. Court is now in recess, and will open then. Again.