It's so difficult to write about this. Someone has hurt our family, our livelihood so deeply that I do not think we will ever be able to recover from it.

I cannot even speak of what has been done to us. It is too embarrassing. I have been sick for days just thinking about it. I have been unable to focus for days. This person has harmed both me and my family. I wouldn't want the assailant to read this and feel victory. Just know, I will overcome what you have done to us, and I will do what it takes to have justice come out on the side of truth.

There is an old Chinese saying that if you are going to hurt someone, finish them off because if you don't, they'll get stronger, they'll bide their time, and when the time is right, they'll show you no mercy. I am that harmed person. You haven't killed me. I will lie in wait. I will rebuild my strength, my family, my reputation. As soon as you slip, I will be there ready to finish you off, my old friend.

Until then, it will remain a secret. I will not tell others what has been done to us, to my family, to the safety of my children. People who act with such evil always get what comes to them. I have no need to be the avenger. Justice has its own sword. But I will think of you always until I finish you off.

Be kind to each other.

I received a posting on an old blog entry that I thought I deleted, "Angry with my wife...". It is such an interesting feeling going back to old blog entries and re-reading the rage or emotion I felt over one topic or another (especially because she'll be giving birth any week now with our THIRD child), knowing that I'm about to go through the same thing all over again. The question this time around is, "will I be a jerk again and will I think her evil for the things she leans on me to do?" Or this time around, can I be a better person and a more loving husband?

Every day these past few weeks, I've had this wonderful EXCUSE of why I don't have to help, contribute, wake up in the middle of the night, take care of the kids, etc. -- that I'm spending all my time preparing for the bar exam -- and honestly, I often ask myself whether I can be better at being a good person. This is the perfect excuse because she expects so little of me (probably because she's just as afraid as I am that I might not succeed) because she wants me to focus all my energy on studying, but often enough, I'm sitting there with the books open and I see she's having a difficult time, and while sometimes I won't help because I don't want to be distracted, often to the detriment of my studies, I do help.

It's very interesting being NOT nearly close to my best, either in physical shape and form, discipline, religious observance (in terms of midot, taivas, and controlling my emotions and my habits). I am also far from being my best when it comes to being a good husband. I feel in many ways that I've left my wife out to dry, so to speak, in so many ways because I've taken on this burdensome task of studying for the bar exam, and now she feels that her parenting duties have doubled because I am no longer around. In truth, I actually think that I am just as helpful as I usually am, but the perception of the matter is that I'm not because so many evenings and mornings I am just not around when in the past I would be. I'm rambling.

I suppose what I am saying is that from taking a step back because I had to study for this exam, I've seen what a trooper my wife is. She's really wonderful, and she gives of herself way beyond her natural capabilities.

In response to "Inclusion in Art" in my posting from a little over a year ago, I no longer see my wife as manipulative or mean when she asks me to shoulder more than I already am in terms of lightening her load. She works hard and very often, she really needs a break. Case in point, she often thinks that our involvement in the parenting is off-balance; we got into a fight on Saturday morning and in anger (and exhaustion from a fight which she instigated over me using the word "taiva" in a sentence), I was drained of energy and I went back to sleep to start the day over. She didn't say anything, but from the slamming of the doors, I knew she was upset. When I woke up, a few minutes later, I saw her sneak away into the room and lay down in bed, leaving me with the kids when I would normally have gone to shul (synagogue). Instead of starting a fight, I let her sleep because I knew she needed it. When she woke up hours later, she was still upset at me and felt that it was her "turn" to take the nap and that she was justified in doing so because I took mine just a few hours earlier. However, I corrected her that I let her sleep because she looked like she needed it, turning the issue from one of right and wrong and fair and unfair to me being a good husband and her being the immature one who let the "my turn" arguments of our two-year-old rub off on her adult mindset.

In sum, husbands and wives owe a duty to be nice to each other, even when the burden one or both is shouldering is not fair. On top of that, each should go out of their way to do things for the other person just because that spouse is likely having a difficult time too. Okay, I'm not making sense and I'm sorry for giving you guys the run-on blog entry (these annoy me to no end), but in short, just be nice to each other. Seriously.

Butt kicked and then studied and kicked butt on Wills, Trusts & Estates Barbri lecture.

Almost falling asleep after a LONG two days of intensive study, I'm proud of my accomplishment.

I spent the past two days learning Wills & Trusts. The first day kicked my butt. I showed up to class after doing the readings, but the professor's style was to go over one hypothetical after another after another for HOURS, expecting us to understand rules from the results of who wins and who loses in each scenario.

This was TOTALLY against my learning style. Like the first few days of this bar review, and like my first successful bar review in Colorado, I did will sitting by my laptop and typing in and memorizing rules as the lecturer dictated them to us. This was impossible when we were trying to figure out who takes under the will, and who improperly destroyed their will, etc. This was quite frustrating.

So after class yesterday, I sat down and reviewed EACH AND EVERY HYPOTHETICAL. I extracted the rules from the result, and I wrote the rules in my word processor in a BLACK LETTER LAW "RULE" format. It took me so many hours that by the time I was not even finished studying, the evening Barbri class video started and I was still in my seat from the morning live lecture.

When I got home, I decided that I wasn't going to let this SOB law professor make us look stupid again. I went through the books, did the readings as I did last time, but this time I REVIEWED EACH AND EVERY HYPOTHETICAL and where I could (many I couldn't because there were fill-in-the-blanks, Barbri's special style of lecture learning), I extracted and wrote up the black letter rules from the hypotheticals so that when I showed up to class today, I already had the rules and I could focus on the application of the rules in the hypotheticals. Victory. I understood everything the lecturer said, and while I still think he's an a*hole for writing his notes in this fashion, I still mastered the material on my own terms.

Tomorrow is Torts, an MBE topic. I'm excited about this because the notes I have from my Colorado bar review will be more than sufficient to prepare me for the MBE portion on this exam. I've ripped out the notes from the Barbri lecture handbook and even though I have the notes already written out from last time, I'll still play their fill-in-the-blank game. However, I don't think that transcribing all those notes on my computer will be worth my time as it was for these past few Wills & Trusts lectures. The rules on the fill-in-the-blank page seem to be quite straightforward. I'll just remember to write neatly so I can review my notes later on. If I have the time, the motivation or the energy, maybe I'll write them.

On another note, on my downtime I've been playing a really wacky and yet fun game, WORLD OF GOO. A demo is downloadable on their web site, and it's certainly worth the money. I'm having a wonderful time with it; I played it late last night before I went to sleep, and just like the goo-based structures you build in the game wobble, my eyes were wobbling when I went to sleep (and thus the room appeared to be wobbling), an interesting effect of the game. Funny enough, I experienced the wobbling randomly today after thinking about the game during the bar review today. I thought that was a strange recall kind of experience.

On a final note, some time ago, I purchased Centerpointe's Holosync Awakening course and Monroe Institute's Hemisync course which I now have backed up on a .flac format which my wife's Samsung YP-S3 music player doesn't play. So I bought myself today a SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 8GB MP3 Player which can play my .flac files so that I can listen to them with headphones on my mp3 player and maybe I can fall asleep with them over my ears and get some sleep programming. I used to do that with my iPod mini mp3 player with Rockbox firmware installed, but I dropped that over a year ago and I haven't been able to listen to my files since. (I'd listen to it on my laptop, but the last thing I need is to fall asleep while listening to the audios and to roll over and crack my laptop's LCD screen. So I'm very excited that I'll be able to get back into listening to holosync and hemisync CDs.