Ooh, look, I clicked on the “write a new post” button!

Speaking of posting again, some people suggested that my compulsion for blogging may have waned because my life is too good, too stable. There’s no single-life drama to report. Well okay, here’s some drama from this week reminiscent of the single days. For the past week, we’d been engaged in a medical malpractice jury trial. It was an unusually grueling trial because some of the testimony was just ridiculous, and it became quickly obvious that the jurors are HATING the plaintiff. (She’s suing her chiropractor, and chose to represent herself instead of hire an attorney, and she was unable to process the proceedings at all. We’ll say she was of sub-average intelligence. Without getting into examples, it was very frustrating to sit through.) One juror in particular, a motorcycle-riding man in his 30s who was always fashionably late, had the least impulse-control I’d ever seen in an adult; he wise-cracked from the jury box, openly sighed and laughed at the plaintiff’s ineptitude, and once in awhile I’d look up in surprise when the plaintiff did or said something shockingly inane and accidentally meet this juror’s eyes, who seemed to try to share a moment with me silently. You know, that “OMG she’s RETARDED, isn’t she?” communication look. It is my job to be impartial, so I never acknowledged the look and would look down at my work again instead. (One such time, I looked down and used my left hand to hold my layered hair out of my face and leaned into that hand. It occurred to me a few seconds later that as my left hand faced the jury, it appeared like I’m deliberately displaying my wedding rings after incidentally meeting this juror’s eyes, but I wasn’t.) The last day of testimony, this irreverent juror actually whistled as if in boredom while we were in session. My judge said that he gave this juror such a deathly glare that if his eyes were laser beams, the juror would have holes in his body already. I’d always thought something was kinda familiar in an unpleasant way about this juror; other jurors would snicker when he did, I got the sense he intimidated them with his mannerism so they’d rather be on his team than be subject to being one of his mocked victims. It was very playground. And I soon realized why he was familiar to me — he reminded of that asshole I almost got into the physical altercation with at Cirque du Soleil; he was too attractive, too witty, too confident, and was being a jackass just because he could and because he’d always gotten away with bullying others into submission.

After the verdict, the jurors were dismissed but told to go to back up to the jury assembly room to turn in their juror badges and to check out of jury duty. About an hour after their dismissal, I got a call from the jury room coordinator. “So you got your verdict,” she said gleefully. “It sounds like a crazy trial; one of the jurors was telling me about it.”
“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” I admitted. She told me some of the negative stuff the juror had hung around to tell her about, and I asked if it was Juror 10, the jerk. Indeed, it was him.
“AND,” she continued, her audible excitement telling me this is the real reason of her call, “He let something slip. He said ‘…and that cutie — oh, I shouldn’t have said that, huh?’ ” I was about to say that he could’ve been talking about anyone, but she mentioned some castle or something I had behind me. There is indeed a castle on the filing cabinet behind me; it’s a 3-D puzzle of Cinderella’s Castle that my dad put together for me. It was at work because when I was packing for the move to our current house, I knew that Mr. W would consider it space-stealing clutter and would probably make me throw it away, so I brought it to work to liven the courtroom up. I’ve gotten a lot of admiring compliments about the castle since. The jury coordinator said, “Well, he said, ‘Tell her that she and I spent A LOT of hours together in that castle.’ ”

I was confused. What the hell does that mean? I was too big to fit in the castle and I certainly would’ve noticed of I’d spent time with a stranger inside a 3-D puzzle. And then I understood the fantasy, and laughed. I thanked her for making my day, and we hung up.

I turned to my courtroom assistant. “Hey, do you have Juror 10’s notebook still?” I asked. She was ripping the jurors’ notes out of the spiral stenopad we provide to the jurors for note-taking, getting the pads cleared and ready for the next trial.
“Yeah,” she said and walked it over.
I flipped through the book. The first thing I saw that wasn’t notes about the trial was at the top of a blank page. Three lines of handwriting read:

Is that a castle up there? [arrow pointing up]
Up on the file cab.
It’s my Happy Place. She’s already in there w/me.

I laughed. I flipped some more, skimming the pages of his thoughts for the past week with us. There were a lot of smart-ass things written about the plaintiff, a couple about the defense attorney. I noted with amusement that a lot of the rude things I’d thought about the plaintiff or noted was said by her, he’d caught as well and had them written down. “What an ass,” I thought to myself, realized with a gasp, “That means I’M an ass!” He and I disturbingly appear to have the same sense of humor. I saw another line, buried in his notes about the defendant chiropractor’s testimony, and was unsure whether he referred to the doctor or to me when he wrote:

Showing wedding ring on purpose.

The comment was pretty gender-neutral.
I turned a couple of pages, laughed at his other comments about the words that the plaintiff would misuse and mispronounce. Testimony about back vertebrae problems, annual tears, disk bulges. And then, the worst comment EVER:

I’d like to get my hands on the Judge’s Assistant’s bulges.

I felt my face get hot. And yet it was oddly flattering. And equally oddly was how Mr. W was completely unaffected with this story when I told it to him. He didn’t even understand how that last comment was any big deal, certainly no bigger than the other comments in the notebook, despite the fact that I had major difficulty bringing myself to be able to even say those words aloud to him. Mr. W suggested an even more crass play on words that he felt would’ve deserved the embarrassed reaction that Juror 10’s line created in me.

…That must mean it’s okay that I keep the notepad as a souvenir.