Appassionato

A good-things round-up of a bad 2011

Categorised as Personal, Rants & tagged with celebration, law, lists, uni.

Year 2011 has been — to say the least — the most horrible year of all the years in my memory. The best of the worst is, of course, having neglected my blog for almost 10 months, and not finding the time nor motiv­a­tion to redesign it.

But since it’s already three days into a brand new year, let me not dwell on the past and instead write a summary of what has given me the greatest joy amongst the bad:

• In January, I turned 21.
• In June, I completed all my LLB exams, one semester ahead of expected com­ple­tion date.
• In July, I received con­firm­a­tion that I satisfied all require­ments for my BCom/LLB degrees.
• In September, I offi­cially graduated from the Uni­ver­sity of Auckland with conjoint BCom/LLB.
• In October, I completed my Pro­fes­sional Legal Studies course, and the New Zealand All Blacks team won the Rugby World Cup 2011 yay!
• In November, I got my first ever smart-phone — iPhone 4S, baby!
• In December, I was admitted as a Solicitor and Barrister of the High Court of New Zealand, received my prac­tising cer­ti­fic­ate, and received LLM offers from both uni­ver­sit­ies I applied to.

I mean, how could that sound like a bad year, right? But at each and every step to attaining an achieve­ment in 2011 I was met with a challenge, an obstacle, and (what seemed like at the time) the biggest headache of my life. Even when signing the contract for the new iPhone plan I became the victim of a muck-up that has less than a one-in-thousands chance of happening. The bigger the achieve­ment, the bigger the headache. *facepalm*

But hey, the year is now behind me and I am ready to face what may be the last 12 months of the human history. Happy (belated) New Year!

Academia has taken a toll on my creativity

Categorised as Literature, Personal, Rants, School & tagged with language, law, uni, writing.

Team work, creative solutions… has uni (law school at least) been for­get­ting this? Out of five years’ worth of courses in Law, Finance and Economics, I have come across one class with a strong group work element. It’s true that law lecturers always encour­aged creative thinking, yet did they ever endow us with the skills to properly develop our cre­ativ­ity?¹ Not in my classes. We all know that in the real world we will need to cooperate with one another (even if grudgingly for some of us), but for most of the past four years I’ve gotten nothing but an indi­vidu­al­istic, com­pet­it­ive vibe from my envir­on­ment. 90% of you respons­ible and academic-oriented ones may enjoy this, because all if not most of you would have exper­i­enced having to cover three other group members’ work in the last minute. And I was indeed one of the 90% who stood by indi­vidu­al­ism yet shame­lessly stressed how much of a team worker I am in job applic­a­tions. Was.

The dispute res­ol­u­tion paper I took over January-February involved a group present­a­tion, with seven students in each group. When this course require­ment was intro­duced in the first class, I cringed. By the end of the course, I have made six new friends, allowed my cre­ativ­ity to soar, and exper­i­enced staying so late in law school that we got locked in the building. The group present­a­tion deprived me of a golden A, but was non­ethe­less the most rewarding exper­i­ence I have had through­out my years of uni.

By fifth-year in uni, most law students tend to think of them­selves as working indi­vidu­ally in small cubicles, little to do with other “lowly dumb commoners”. When people are put in groups whether it be during class or in a co-curricular activity, the ambitious ones are fighting to be the only one to present all the ideas for the group (as if they did all the work), the less-ambitious ones are as quiet and non-contributing as they were five years ago, and the “leaders”² are bossing other people around without ‘please’ and ‘thank you’s.³

Creativity-wise, I used to create admirable artworks and designs. Recently, I’ve struggled to create an averagely-attractive blog design for even the simplest blog.

Stories and poetry used to flow out of my head any time, anywhere. These days I’m hitting walls trying to come up with any decent descript­ive language to write average quality fiction. After all, I’ve written five-years’ worth of research essays in a strictly pro­fes­sional tone about nothing but law and economics.

Those studying in the creative fields may not be able to sym­path­ise, but I’m dying to finish this semester so I can escape this rigid cage, con­fine­ment, whatever. Of course, while at work I’ll still be referring to statutes and reg­u­la­tions, but at work I support and am supported by a team of amazing col­leagues and I can once again bring back the daily usage of Adobe Photoshop and flowery adject­ives after 6pm without a trace of guilt.

1. By this I mean not just telling us to think outside the square, but teach or train us how to think outside the square. [↩]
2. Thank you very much for encour­aging this, law firms. [↩]
3. Dis­claimer: these come from my personal exper­i­ences and my obser­va­tions on a general scale. And I said “tend do”. [↩]

Loyalty is difficult when it’s ugly!

Categorised as Design, Site-Related & tagged with blog, Design, law, uni, wow.

I’m currently going through the busiest time of my semester so far:

1. 1500-word essay.
2. Legal Research assignment.
3. Moot (mock case trial).
4. 3000-word essay.

But, enough with the excuses, for I have still been spending some hours here and there on World of Warcraft for breaks. I’ve written a few draft blog posts, but never put in the effort to finish them for pub­lish­ing, because I don’t get that blogging mood often when I’m pub­lish­ing posts to a layout I feel is ugly.

I still like some concepts of this design: the colours, the organ­isa­tion of the footer, the comments link… but I feel funkiness may be what keeps me inter­ested in my own blog when I have to spend perhaps 10 hours each week on it, despite having des­per­ately wanted a min­im­al­istic design.

So here’s going into a new design brain­storm­ing stage again…