Hast Any Philosophy in Thee, Blogger?

September is upon us. The temperature has dropped a handful of degrees and our beloved Cougars have won their season opener for the first time under the militant leadership of Bronco Mendenhall. Life, in other words, is quite good. The general exhilaration of our autumnal fervor is dimmed only by the vague realization that summer is past; the harvest is ended; and school starts again in a couple of days. But let the morrow take thought for the things of itself. We have a blog to write.

Monday (August 28): Not to be outdone by Caci and Trevor who generously flung their child into the beleaguered arms of its paternal grandmother before fleeing to Jamaica for an anniversary to end all anniversaries, we mounted the Bull and drove to Jamaica ourselves. How does one drive to Jamaica, you ask? Well, one simply chooses the right Jamaica. Ours happened to be Jamaica, New York, home to the country’s largest (or nearly so) international airport where we picked up Justin’s friend and classmate Nick Thompson and drove him back to New Haven. During the trip Julia and Eli watched Madagascar something on the order of thirty-seven times. When Nick began his first Bull experience, Eli assured him in emphatic terms that she “like[s] to move it, move it.”

Tuesday (August 28): Having virtually exhausted, or so we thought, all the uses of which the mind of mortals was capable of conceiving to which excess zucchini might be put, we tried—that is, Lia tried—a recipe for zucchini pie graciously sent her by Alison Johnsen. The pie was a smashing success (which means one forgot one was eating zucchini), such as almost to make one regret that within the week we were forced to disburse seven-hundred and thirty-four cubic tons of zucchini in unequal proportions upon the unsuspecting doorsteps of New England.

Wednesday (August 30): This day marked the beginning of Justin’s life as a first-year editor [FYE] of the Yale Law Journal [YLJ]. His days labors consisted of pulling books off of shelves and making photocopies of microfilm. No wonder the blue-chip law firms of the land seek out the Journal’s editors with such relentless pertinacity.

Thursday (August 31): This day marked an epoch, if not in the history of this illustrious blog, than at least in the history of the civilized world. Lia organized and presided over the first gathering of the newly formed Yale Law Wives Society. Husbands were generously invited, and all parties were to bring a favorite incarnation of bread. The bread was tasty and the company was butter to our bread. May the society have a life as long and nearly as illustrious as the life of this blog. Earlier in the day, Justin had his first experience source-citing a forthcoming publication in the Yale Law Journal. A tedious experience but not altogether uncongenial to Justin’s refined taste for patient, mindless plodding. After all, the lawyer must be as inured to boredom as the soldier is to danger.

Friday (September 1): Justin had a source cite from 3 to 7. Bad in itself, this was rendered almost devastating by the chance occurrence that Lia was to baby-sit for Mike and Rhonda Turner (this week was Mike’s birthday) this evening beginning at 6. The upshot of this was that for an hour Lia was alone, embattled against the collective clamor of a five-child frenzy of rumbustious revelry and interminable noise. As it happened, Justin returned home to learn that reports of his wife’s untimely demise had been greatly exaggerated—well, at least modestly exaggerated.

Saturday (September 2): Having babysat for the Turners on Friday, the parents of that family “owed us one” on Saturday. On this debt they made good, as Rhonda kept vigil over our sleeping sprites while Lia and I went on an authentic date. Said date consisted of descending with a mass of fellow Havenites upon Edgerton Park where we saw the Elm Shakespeare company perform As You Like It. The Shakespearean comedies present the thunderously odd mixture of transcendent lyricism soaring over the preposterous concatenation of rambling badinage, unconvincing love affairs, and superabundant cross-dressing that constitute what passes as the comic plot. “Is this the Bard that wrote the play Macbeth?” we call out. We do not, however, call out too loudly, for the guilty fact is that the comedies (The Taming of the Shrew excepted—that play is an execrable sheet of idiocy unworthy of Shakespeare’s name) provide as much unbounded good fun as they provide belligerent balderdash. This production was no exception. Set in the 1960’s (the Forest of Arden is a hippie enclave; the usurping Duke is a tyrannical Vietnam-era drill sergeant) and accompanied by period music which Lia adored and Justin countenanced, the play was a lighthearted frolic of pastoral twitterpation—amusingly conceived and effectively executed (though we can never quite understand the apparent necessity in all modern productions of Shakespeare to accompany with vulgar gestures the ribald humor with which the Bard pandered to the groundlings; apparently the jokes themselves fly right past the contemporary audience—not so the hip thrust). We had a wonderful time, the absence of our angelic offspring notwithstanding.

And so we bid you farewell, fond Reader, hoping that you will forever avoid those cardinal sins--growing ever more rampant in our decadent society--of fighting land wars in Asia and talking about Fight Club.