I should have been a lawyer

In honor of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, I'm listening to Better Than Ezra, specifically Friction, Baby. No one listened to this album. But I have special sentiments attached to it because a) I was a member of the BTE fan club and b) I had a dream in which Desperately Wanting played as a soundtrack. It was a dream of love and loss. I actually wrote it down in my journal back in the day because the feelings of loss were so intense and, as a mopey teenager, I wanted the ability to conjure up those feelings whenever I was feeling happy. This album, along with New Adventure in Hi-Fi, also represents the period in my life when my parents began allowing me a lot of freedom, thus I was able to drive to Circuit City with my buddy Eric J. to buy this CD the day it came out. We spent a couple hours looking around at CDs, during which time Eric's protective mother called up my mom and asked, "Where are they? What are they doing?? They should be back by now!" and my mom, turning into cool mom at that moment told her, "Carol, quit worrying. Their teenagers and they like music. They're probably just browsing. No big deal." She totally understood the 16 year old need to express independence and freedom. Eric, on the other hand, suffered increasing restrictions of freedom until he left the house which meant that if he ever came along on Fri. or Sat. night we couldn't go past Center Street. So, after being left out of the loop on some things, he turned to finding where every stake dance was in the Orem area and convinced his mom to let him go to those. This often led to us driving to the dance, not going in, and then cruising State. And eating Del Taco.

Last night we had the Carrollton Ward mock trial. It was a circus affair. At the last minute I was roped in to be the assistant DA because the assistant DA wasn't coming in. Now, I had put the whole even together but I was planning on stepping aside to be in the jury. I've participated in two mock trials in my life, in which I was the defense attorney and in both cases my client was found not guilty (the latter one included introducing controversial new evidence showing that the police chief was at a brothel the night of the "crime" and thus was not where he was supposed to be when the dying teenager was found). Being the prosecuting attorney was a new challenge. I should mention that this was for Scouts, that all the Scouts were either prosecution witnesses, the DA, the defense attorney, the defendent, or defense witnesses. We got the young women to play the jury, the Bishop to be the Bailiff and the 2nd counselor to be the judge. Another Assistant Scoutmaster was another defense attorney. From the outset, the DA didn't act up to the challenge. So he dumped it all to me. We were doing well, barely holding our own through the trial but when the defense brought their last witness, the defendent on the stand, I was feeling it. I torched him in cross-ex and then presented a scintillating closing arguement. The jury didn't have much time to deliberate and we went on the majority vote which we won 5-2. It was awesome. I was pumped even though it was just a stupid Scout mock trial. I really should have been a lawyer. After the trial, people were still talking about it, debating it, arguing over it, it was great. We might do it again. And I want to be a lawyer.