Why The Grand Jury System Is The Dumbest On Earth

Another post I never finished! This one is from November 2011.

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When I was on a grand jury last year, I would frequently tell people, "I'm on grand jury duty, to explain my horrible mood.  They would invariably ask what case I was on, and I would tell them the following:

In New York, grand juries don't hear one case or decide outcomes: they hear about thirty cases over two weeks (unless you have particularly bad karma and were selected for a month) and decide whether to indict or dismiss them.  The grand jury decision does not have to be unanimous - just 16 out of 23 have to agree - and does not have to indict all the charges.  For instance, someone could have been arrested for possession of a weapon and then also charged with marijuana possession after the cop frisked them and found a joint: you could indict for the gun but not the pot if you so chose.  The 22 of us (it's usually 23, but Juror #23 spoke no English and was excused in the first hour, the lucky bitch) had one identity theft case that left us waving pitchforks and a child abuse case that was satisfying to indict, but the vast majority of cases were petty crimes: stolen cell phones or $10 drug deals.  There were long stretches of nothing, during which I read several books, bitched about life with Juror #8, and caught up on every episode of WTF with Marc Maron.

One of the worst parts of grand jury was that after telling someone about being selected, said someone would invariably ask with a condescending smirk why I didn't "just get out of it," or - decoded - "are you the stupidest person alive?"  Answer: I hope you get a grand jury summons next week, asshole, and see how you fare.  The only effective excuses for getting out of grand jury in Brooklyn are:

• I don't live in Brooklyn.
• No habla ingles, 我不講中文, Nie mówię po polsku, আমি বাংলা বলতে পারি না, etc.
• I'm a felon.
• I don't work and have a small child with no one to watch them.

Everyone else is selected, and they don't care if you're a racist. In other words, if you have not committed a crime, speak English, and use responsible birth control methods, the county of Kings would like to reward you with two weeks of indentured servitude, and they will be complete dicks to you throughout the process.  One warden screamed at me when I asked when our break was, and then screamed at me at random intervals for the rest of the day until I complained to his supervisor.  The ADA bureau chief made rounds about court on a daily basis, leaning on the court stenographer's box during our breaks, gleefully asking how we were doing and giving delighted lectures about how much worse it could be when we said "terribly."

But that isn't the point of this post: that jury service sucks is not news.  But many seem surprised when I get into the ins and outs of how RIDICULOUSLY skewed the indictment process is, so I shall outline some of the reasons here.

In general, defendants don't speak at a grand jury hearing. Usually no lawyer appears on the defendants' behalf. Jurors hear statements from two or more witnesses, generally the victim and a cop, are read the charges (we were not permitted to keep a copy of the statute for reference), and then left alone to vote. We indicted almost everyone. Why wouldn't we? We only heard from the prosecutor and the cop. The few times we argued about a case were the few times a defendant showed up and testified (if you ever have a case going to a grand jury, ALWAYS go testify. Almost no one did for us, but it always made a difference). About halfway through the process Juror #8 and I decided to stop voting to indict any charge relating to pot. This really pissed off Juror #19.

As the indictments piled up, I realized what we were doing. Most of the cases, although technically felonies, were for petty crime. We asked one of the DAs what kind of sentence the defendants would get if found guilty at trial, and he told us that almost all of them would get worked out in a plea deal. So we were arranging for a bunch of mostly young, mostly black, mostly men to have felonies on their records for snatching someone's phone. It felt like we were part of a conspiracy to render a large section of New York's population permanently unemployable. GREAT USE OF RESOURCES, CITY!!!!

This Is A Rescue Teacup Pig Wearing Chanel Sunglasses

Just FYI.

via

Morning Adventures

I had to take a different route into work this morning, and it made me feel like a Haruki Murakami character. Specifically, like Aomame from 1Q84, which is kind of unfortunate as that book sucked.

On the street, everyone had their phones pointed toward the sky, taking photos. Of what I couldn't figure out - I thought it was an office building. I looked next to the office building. It was the World Trade Center.

On my first transfer, I saw a man with two nickel-sized moles on each side of his face, with clusters of four-inch long wiry hairs protruding from each one.

In the subway station, waiting for my third train, an animated middle-aged man repeatedly looked at me and then pointed at a another man sleeping in his seat, inviting me to join in his delighted mockery. At one point he poked his finger into the empty space inside the sleeping man's mouth.

I waved my arms for him to stop. People willing to sleep in public have nothing to lose.

Once in my building, I saw several Tonight Show security guards escorting what had to be a famous band, so I looked up who's on tonight and deduced that I spotted Julian Casablancas.

This whole time I had to pee, and had that latent "will I vomit?" feeling from taking a new and disgusting liquid iron supplement before leaving the house. Maybe I should just take the anemia.

2011 Rock Memoirs: A Comparison

I wrote this post in April 2011 but never posted it, so here you go:
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I finally finished Life, the Keith Richards memoir, last night, after blitzing through Patti Smith's gorgeous Just Kids in Costa Rica. My absence of qualifiers for Life (because, as you'll see shortly, I have many for Just Kids) stems from not really knowing what to say about it. I got more out of its reviews than from the book itself, which is a name-dropping mishmash of Keith's random memories, coupled with several incredibly boring sections on tuning guitars.

The best bit comes from his oldest son Marlon, who weighs in with a few anecdotes and 100% needs a memoir of his own. While it's all well and good to read twelve pages about how much heroin Keith feels you can take without going overboard (he is particularly unrepentant about his drug use), Marlon went on the Rolling Stones '74 European tour when he was ten. Did Keith ever kick groupies out of his dad's room? Did he spend his early adolescence living in a succession of stately Long Island mansions with his just-recently-not-estranged grandfather and a random junkie? Was he in the house when his mother's seventeen-year-old boyfriend blew out his brains playing Russian roulette? Dear lord, Marlon Richards, the fact that you are now relatively normal and married with children is a mind-bending proposition.

The book wasn't bad. I just thought it would be better, particularly when I compare it to Just Kids.

A few years ago Dan and I went to some kind of Buddhist center benefit at Carnegie Hall, featuring My Morning Jacket, Sufjan Stevens, and Patti Smith. The crowd was politely detached throughout most of the evening, until Patti Smith came on and forced us to engage. She was going out into the crowd with her microphone, standing on the seats, waving for people to gather around her and sing along. Coming from anyone else, you would have been cringed, but you could tell that this woman had earned the right to demand our enthusiasm.

Anyway, Just Kids details her first years in New York City as a struggling artist, nascent performer, and immediate mirror for Robert Mapplethorpe. Together they lived in a variety of condemned lots and eventually the Chelsea Hotel, and even after he had discovered his homosexuality they remained fiercely devoted to one another. "This book is so honest and pure as to count as pure rapture," reads Joan Didion's blurb in the front flap, and that about sums it up. It's romantic. Romantic about that early relationship, romantic about life in sixties New York, romantic about art and the life of a poor young artist. The New York she depicts - the New York I romanticized myself up until I moved there - no longer exists, which is a downer. The book, however, is not.

I Guess This Is Growing Up

We ditched a lot of our furniture when we moved. "I'm making Dan get rid of his dresser," I told my mom. "Oh..." she replied, "you mean the one that's made of cardboard?"

The idea was to buy new, nicer furniture, that we'd keep for a long time. Furniture that was carefully selected, rather than dug up from Mom's basement or picked off the trash. Grown-up furniture. 

Grown-up furniture is great, but it has its own pains.

Our dining table arrived today. It's beauteous.

($) Our last apartment was too narrow for such an extravagance, so we ate off a desk. A dining table that was actually designed for dining means we could fit more than two chairs around it. So I ordered a few more of these:

($$) But that's not all! The new apartment has a big granite island in the kitchen/living area, requiring new stools in order to sit at it:

($$$) All that together cost about eleventy billion dollars. But what of clothing storage!? Although we have two (!) closets in our bedroom, a luxury I've done without since 2006, t-shirts are in boxes on the floor. So I ordered a pair of blue dressers, to be arranged as in the photo below:

($$$$)

We haven't bought a couch yet. ($$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$)

Finally, Dan and I have been test-driving cars and looking at local day cares (∞ $). Like David Sedaris, I tend to sweat when discussing sums over sixty dollars, so the large cash outlay, while not unexpected, has been giving me The Shivers. Raising a child I can handle. Buying that child a dresser? AHHHHHHHHRGH.

Meghan's Pregnancy Tips

I'm in the third trimester now, which is terrifying. Although I wouldn't mind unscrewing my belly and putting it aside for a few hours to enjoy a walk, a beer, and taking a full, heartburn-free breath, it hasn't been bad. The scary part is how much is left to figure out and prepare for, but I guess it's happening either way. Pregnancy hasn't been as bad as everyone led me to believe it would be, so I'm hoping parenthood will be the same way.

In that spirit, here is what I've learned in the past seven months:

1. Fuck the internet. This was a parenting tip, but I apply it to pregnancy as well. The internet is a great place to convince yourself that everything you've done will make your unborn child grow gills. Don't do it.

I guess that means you should ignore the rest of this list. Whatever, it's up to you! Fuck the internet!

2. Do wait to tell people. I had a miscarriage before this pregnancy (remember how depressed I was last year? Yeah) and while I'm glad that I had already told our family and close friends about the pregnancy, I was also glad that I kept my mouth shut to everyone else. If you can't imagine telling someone that it didn't work out, or don't think that they'll be able to support you, don't tell them until the 14-week mark. Some people really impressed me with how they stepped up the love and support. Others did not.

3. Enjoy the seven pounds that will melt off right in the beginning because you can't have a daily beer anymore, and try to ignore the fact that you were carrying around seven pounds of beer weight.

4. If you want a subway seat, wear tight clothes. No one will give up a seat unless they are 110% sure that a woman is pregnant rather than bloated. New Jersey PATH riders give me seats all the time, and I LOVE THEM for it.

On the flip side, if a NYC subway rider gives up their seat, it merits a press release.

5. Personally, I think that life is too short for uncomfortable clothes. If you buy and wear maternity clothes early, they'll amortize over a longer period of time. You're going to need them anyway, so skip the belly bands or whatever and just buy some stretchy pants as soon as your regular ones stop closing. Liz Lange for Target: write it down.

6. Take it easy. You're growing a human.

7. Learn what could give you food poisoning vs. what could give you listeria, and then don't eat anything that could give you listeria.

The FDA says it's ok to eat pasteurized soft cheese (probably 90%+ of the soft cheese available in America). You can have one caffeinated beverage per day in the beginning and a little more later on. Even sushi is pretty much ok. You should definitely not eat deli meat, hot dogs, queso fresco, high-mercury fish (cooked or not), or raw sprouts. Very little to no booze. That's kind of it. You can even eat runny eggs if they've been pasteurized. People ask if I miss coffee and I'm like, "nope!" Because I STILL DRINK IT.

However:

7b. All of that said, I know that if I ate sushi or oysters, I would spend the next two days analyzing every single stomach gurgle. If indulging your paranoia makes you feel better, then live on Luna bars. Whatever works.

8. To quote Hitchhiker's Guide: DON'T PANIC.

I could use some help with #8.

@bethostern

I recently started following the Instagram account of Beth Stern. Beth (we're very close at this point) is a model and animal welfare advocate who is married to Howard Stern. She has the BEST LIFE EVER. Here she is sunning herself on the balcony of her and Howard's oceanfront Hamptons compound.

But I don't say "best life" because of the enviable real estate/bikini bod. It's the kittens. Beth fosters kittens. Her feed is 90% kitten photos. All day. Every day. 

Like I said: best life ever.

Never one to keep my obsessions private, I immediately clued in some fellow feline-crazed coworkers. Soon enough, we were sending each other screenshots of her cutest charges on a semi-daily basis with messages like "I CAN'T!!!!!!!"

Beth's own cats are the cast-offs - the blind, the in-bred. For example, Yoda, below with the squashy face, has a heart defect. He spends his days in the foster room, grooming the kittens. He is REALLY adorable and entertaining, and unless some miracle of veterinary science manages to keep his heart going (fingers crossed), the day he dies is going to be a rough one in the office.

Anyway, one day, while skimming the comments on a particularly adorable photo, I saw that Beth has an email address for people wanting to adopt her fosters. 

(Side note: when you foster kittens, you don't keep them. You socialize the kittens with lots of human interaction so they'll eventually make good pets, and help keep the shelter less crowded. Once the kittens are two pounds (!), they can be spayed/neutered and put up for adoption. Carla and Bianca were Mom's first foster kittens). 

I sent the email address to my co-worker, whose beloved family cat died earlier this year, and who had mentioned that they were finally ready for a new cat. She immediately freaked out and wrote a long, touching missive to Beth.

It was a BRILLIANT email. "Now is not the time for subtlety," she said, showing it to me. It included many photos of their deceased family cat, displaying his integration into their family life. There was a Sears-style Christmas card photo of my co-worker at age nine with her sister - and the cat. There were photos of Socks as a kitten, and as an old, happy house cat, to show off their track record as a "forever family." She threw in a shot of Socks at home, so Beth could see that they live in a nice house and aren't paupers. 

It worked! Beth wrote back, and the process was started. My co-worker is adopting Archie and Dweezil, below, and their two thousand Instagram likes. 

Cat ladies are the best. I once asked my team if they went home at the end of the day and complained about how I make them look at pictures of Carla and Bianca like, sitting around. One of them gave me a look and held up her new iPhone case, emblazoned with a cat and the caption "CHECK MEOWT." We squeal equally over kitten photos and shots of our fat old family cats doing nothing. "But LOOK AT HIM!!!!!!!!!!" we squee. "LOOK AT HOW CUTE HE IS JUST SITTING THERE!!!!!"