WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here.
Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
Please follow me below the fold to hear more about my two FPs tonight--failed punditry and jury duty.
When I chose to host WYFP several weeks ago, I hoped that the February 5th primaries would be decisive and that we could all rally around our new Democratic nominee. This just shows that I will never have a future in political punditry. I should probably stick to garden blogging. I do, however, look forward to the day when the rec list is not filled with candidate diaries and when we can all work together to put a Democrat in the White House. I also want our next president to have a real working majority in the House and Senate.
My other FP is jury duty. Like most academics, it is hard for me to get a lot of writing done during the school year. Teaching, committee meetings, prep time, etc. take up a lot of my time. While I can get some lab work done between classes, it is hard for me to sit down and write unless I have a large stretch of uninterrupted time. That was my plan for the first few weeks of January. Well, you know what they say about plans. Instead, I spent the first half of January on jury duty in Trenton.
I spent most of my adult life avoiding jury duty like the plague. When I was a grad student, I just moved a lot. When my kids were small, I could claim child care issues, but that's a bit of a hard sell when your "baby" is in 10th grade and your other "children" are in graduate school. I was called in 2004, but I was not selected for a trial. This time my luck ran out.
I showed up for jury duty with my laptop, a piece of a manuscript, and my seed catalogs. I had just started looking at the catalogs when I was called for a jury pool. We were not allowed to bring anything into the court room--no books, newspapers, laptops, cell phones--nothing.
While the jury pool was quite large, many of the jurors were dismissed for medical, childcare, financial, and other issues. I had no good excuse. I tried humor during the voir dire, and while I got a lot of laughter from the court room, it did not get me a peremptory challenge. I even said that I was a blogger on Daily Kos, hoping that one of the attorneys would think that I was just a rabid lamb. Even that didn't work. Instead I spent almost two weeks on a medical malpractice trial, and most of my grand plans for my winter break went up in smoke.
I did learn several things from my jury service.
I know where lots of good Italian restaurants are. Since we were not allowed to discuss the trial, we spent a lot of time talking about food and the Giants (definitely not an FP).
Jury duty in central Jersey is like something out of a Janet Evanovich novel, but with fewer firearms (we were screened on the way into the building). Central NJ is just one big small town. When I was first called, the judge realized that I had been on the School Board in my hometown. He spent the first two days of the trial complaining about school buses. During the voir dire, all the jurors had to show that we did not know each other. However, we had many acquaintances in common. For example, one of the other jurors was married to my sons' elementary school PE teacher.
If you are under 30, your case will be tried by a jury of your parents' peers. Central NJ is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the country. We have the largest Cuban-American community outside S. Florida and the largest South Asian community in the US. The jury pool, however, looked more like the central NJ of 25 years ago. The jury pool and the final jury were made up mostly of middle-aged African-Americans and whites. Many of us had grown children.
I think that the system actually works. We were asked to try a complicated civil case. The case resulted from an operating room fire, and the plaintiff received burns, but no permanent scarring. The anesthesiologist has already settled with the plaintiff, but we had to determine whether the surgeon was also responsible. Although the jury was initially split, we came to what was probably a fair verdict in the end. We held the surgeon partially responsible, but attributed the majority of the blame to the anesthesiologist. I don't think that either side was happy with the verdict, which may be a good sign.
So those are my FPs for tonight. Tell me what's bothering you. The pooties and I are here to listen.