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What an exhausting week.  We have been working very hard at school, and combined with the fact that I’m getting very little physical exercise in the winter, I have been both physically and mentally worn-out.  It will be good to have a calming night tonight.

Tomorrow I will be in Boston all day at the Berklee High School Jazz competition.  This will be a ton of fun, especially if we win.  It will be fun even if we don’t, though; we will get to see a ton of really good music, and generally have an exciting time.

I have been working on a really cool piece of code that I hope to finish soon.  When I do, I am going to put it up in the Projects section.  It is based on software that I saw demonstrated at Olin College of Engineering when I toured there.  I will say no more until it is finished, but it is really awesome.

Because of the snow, very few people were able to come to the meeting, so it quickly degenerated into watching The Daily Show, and snowball fights.  We walked over to a nearby friend and teammate’s house with a ladder, intending to lay siege to his bedroom, but since he was downstairs, we had to settle for a gigantic snow battle, after which we drank a great deal of hot chocolate, ate popcorn, and watched Firefly.

All in all, a successful afternoon.

A significant portion of the Mock Trial team will be descending on my house within the hour.  It is a snow day and our trial has been cancelled, so we are making up the lost work time by working here.  We are preparing great quantities of food, and steeling ourselves for the reality of having no fruit left for the next week.

It looks as though school may be cancelled tomorrow.  If it is, our trial will be postponed until the designated make-up week.  This would be disappointing, but not terribly unwelcome; I suppose it would be nice to have some more time to prepare.

Bed is nigh.  I am going to get a lot of sleep tonight and tomorrow night in preparation for our trial.

Today was my first full day of school since I returned from DC.  Since the Mock Trial team had scrimmages on Thursday and Friday, we were only there for the morning.

More to the point, we are in the three-week long break between semesters called Paidea that happens at my school.  Although this began last Tuesday, I was not there, and today was my first full day of it.  During Paidea, you choose one activity or group-type thing, and you do it all day everyday.  There is everything from rock climbing (which my sister is in) to conspiracy theories, to Mock Trial.  This is when the team does most of its work; we essentially do nothing but Mock Trial from 8:30 to 2:30.  It is intense.  I got a whole lot done today.

Our first trial is on Wednesday.  Tomorrow after school I am going to get a haircut with a bunch of other people from the team.  Now that the season is beginning, we have to trim up.

Basically, the way the competition works is that the state is divided into sixteen regions.  We are in #15.  There are three weeks of regional trials, during which you play other teams in your region.  At the end of the three weeks, the team in each region with the best record (percentage of trials won), is declared the winner of that region.  If more than one team has the same record, there is a week reserved for tiebreaker trials.  Then the sixteen regional winners play each other in the playoffs, which are elimination; if you lose a trial, you are out and done for the season.  The state winner goes to the national tournament.

Within each trial, though, things are more complicated.  Every team receives the case materials; signed affidavits, exhibits, rules of evidence and procedure, and applicable case law.  Then, they must prepare both sides of the case; since it’s a criminal case this year, that means both prosecution and defense.  In the regional trials, the sides each team will present are predetermined.  However, in the playoffs, the two teams arrive at the trial and flip a coin.  The winner of the coin flip decides which side their team will present, thus forcing the other team to play the opposite side.  For this reason, everyone has to be ready to go at any given trial.  Our first two regional trials are our prosecution, and the last is defense.  I have parts on both sides, but I am focusing on my prosecution roles at this point.

This year’s case is first-degree murder with an insanity defense.  The defendant is an ex-Marine who came home from Iraq and shortly thereafter killed his childhood rival.  He claims innocence by reason of a PTSD-induced hallucination, contending that the military failed to diagnose him.  On the prosecution side, the witnesses are a close friend of the victim who was present at the shooting, the detective in charge of the investigation after the shooting, and the military psychologist who approved him for discharge.  On the defense are a friend of the defendant, also present at the shooting, the defendant, and a psychologist whom he met before the shooting, and was evaluated by afterwards, who claims that he does in fact have PTSD.  It is a fascinating case, probably the best I’ve seen in the four years I’ve been on the team.  It is not quite as applicable to real life as last year’s case, which was a civil suit involving a sexually hostile work environment, and retaliation by the defendant, but it is very demanding legally.  This looks to be an excellent competition season.

…is a fabulous movie.  After our Mock Trial meeting today, I went to see it with two other friends.

It has been a busy day.  I didn’t go in to work, so Will and I worked on the LC(A) website until about two forty-five.  The meeting was very productive, but tiring, and I was glad to get to let of some steam.  The movie was not terribly relaxing, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.  The main character’s brother Salim looked strikingly like Michael Jackson.

I am now officially a denizen of the Intertubes.  I have a Twitter.  I’m only using it to track my blog posts; whenever I post, a new Twitter with a link to the post is automatically created.  Still, though, I feel as though I have sacrificed a little bit of my Internet individuality.  On the other hand, Twitter is a widely used tool, and if it can help me get my content out to a wider audience, it is rational for me to use it.  We shall see.

I have been extremely busy for the past two days with Mock Trial.  We had scrimmages both yesterday and the day before with Holy Name and Newton South, respectively.  Both were extremely productive, and exhausting.  On Thursday I didn’t get home until after ten.

In other news, my iPhone is, as the name of this post implies, missing in action.  It may have been stolen at school, or it may be in the locked lost-and-found, or it may be in the maintenance supervisor’s office if the cleaners found it.  I will not know for sure until tomorrow or Monday.  Until then, I am rendered iPwnageless.  I have deactivated my cel service and changed all of my passwords, and now I just have to wait.

I have just returned home.  My various meetings went very well, and a couple of us went to see Milk after we had dinner.  I had already seen it, and was happy to do so again.  It did not disappoint.

And now, to bed.  I have to wake up early for school, and I need to pack tomorrow evening.  I was supposed to do it tonight when I got home, but I had not originally planned on going to the movie.  Sleep is more important.

My boss just called to say that work is closed today. Will and I will probably do some more work on the website before I leave for a Mock Trial meeting. Will might stick around at my house for the afternoon, since our old calc class has a reunion this evening. Coincedentally, it is at the same place as my Mock Trial meeting, so I’ll be spending the whole day at home and there.