Dating and the Death Penalty

No I don’t believe the two are similar; I just don’t wanna blog twice. But let me finish the glass of wine first and I might be whistling a different tune.

Dating.

Sucks.
He didn’t call. Not like I expected him to; frankly I didn’t believe him for one minute. Well maybe just one minute, I do after all, like to hold out hope even if the battle was lost from day one. I would have been a really great cheerleader for the Southerners at Gettysburg. “Don’t worry that you’re out-manned 3 to 1, forget that you’ve barely got enough ammo to defend your hometown, your leaders have no concept of strategery, and no Southern offensive battle has worked yet in the war. Go out there and give em all ya got boys!” Yep that would have been motivational.

I’ve decided that Problem #2 has now been buried and maybe even #1 is gonna get the old “heave, ho!” I’m trying. You’ve gotta give me that at least. So, in an effort to calm my much overworked neurotic neurons, I turned to the internet’s sources on “why didn’t he call?” I love how we’ve moved from “Honey, don’t worry about him, he’s just some lame ass loser who doesn’t know what he’s missing with your fiiine sexy self” to “Move on, no one will ever know why he didn’t, it might be something else but probably not you and he doesn’t even know himself” to “He’s just not interested in YOU.” Now if you followed my lecture on attribution theory, you’ll realize we’ve come a long way from attributing the loss to him---then to something similar to the context—to making negative attributions about yourself. And then we get the brand ass-spanking new book out by former consultants on Sex and the City (one a male and married, the other a female and so single---this book is scoring no points with me already) which details their witty theory on “it’s you---he doesn’t like you.” Okay. So at least it’s moving somewhat away from the just a tiny bit sickening “girls rule, boys drool” theory but ouch, it’s a bit harsh. Maybe I can buy into it for a little bit, but after repeated failures to score anything remotely close to a nice dinner or even coffee talk (well, to be fair maybe scoring human verbal interaction after the scoring—I do want my theory to be generalizable after all), I think a nice round of Zoloft would be necessary in order to prescribe to that theory. It’s okay to be like, “eh-maybe I don’t have good fashion sense” or “maybe I’m not funny enough for him” or “maybe it was a little too early to bring up my sock puppet fetish---maybe it was my sock puppet fetish!” once in a while. But making such negative attributions about yourself after the 6th failed attempt in a row can really get ya down. If this “You Suck” theory is true, then you’re moving into the “alpha(p-value) is less than .05” range that you actually didn’t just meet up with 6 guys in a row who weren’t your type. Maybe you do suck.

Here’s the deal. If the “YS” theory is right, then what’s wrong with me? Tell me, cause if it’s fixable, then I’ll fix it. If it’s an intrinsic part of my being then do I really want to fix it? Am I too intimidating? I promise, it’s not so when I’m naked. But I’m doing something right cause I have a great group of girlfriends who love me, including one who, in a fit from a John Mayer moment, proclaimed she’d have my babies. So I’m less inclined to think it is a fundamental aspect of me. But is it a mixture of my quirks and the situation (with a slightly greater weight on the situation)? I’m more inclined to think so. If this last comment is the case, then those bastards are making money off of an inappropriate attributional theory and making a whole bunch of people in the sucky ass world of dating feel really lousy about themselves. It’s fucking hard enough without someone telling you that there’s something wrong with you. It just doesn’t seem empowering. Do we always have to be realists? Can we be realists and be empowering or do we have to be delusional to be empowering? I should just start writing relationship theories and then I’ll be fucking rich. Go me.

Death Penalty.

Okay, so I’ve been requested to present my ideas on the Scott Peterson verdict (and upcoming penalty phase). I think the request was framed as follows “Oh jury goddess, please bestow upon us your ideas about the SP trial.” Here goes…

I have no idea what went on in that jury delib room. This was a weird ass case, to use the technical phrase of course, especially when they kicked off 3 jurors (2 of which were in the deliberation phase). Um hi, if that doesn’t scream mistrial or overturned conviction on appeal, I don’t know what does. Well actually I do, but I’ll save that for another night. Anyways, kicking off the foreman sucks. The man has a JD and MD; he took 19 notebooks worth of notes, and I’m gonna go with he actually paid attention during the trial and oh my gosh, has brain cells! Functional at that! The average juror has an 8th grade education and wants to a) go home so he doesn’t miss playing bridge at the old folks home or b) wants to get back to work so she can pay her bills on time. To say that the foreman was perhaps kicked off because he actually wanted to go through the evidence breaks me. I’m glad to see someone wanted to take his job seriously but that the Court only wanted a verdict. Good to know. I should pack up my bags and go home now because no one wants to actually have something work in the legal system. I never really liked Miami anyways and lets be honest, at least up North I’d have the remote possibility of getting laid by someone whose native language is English. I’m outta here like a fat kid in dodge ball.

No really. I hope that’s not the case, but I’d love to hear what the jurors thought about the whole process. Let me at them baby! The verdict was probably right, even though circumstantial evidence like that is kinda sketchy from a statistical pov. Think about this. What is the base rate in the US of husbands who cheat on their wives? Of those who cheat, how many of their wives turn up dead from circumstances suggesting a homicide? Of those who qualify under the last one, how many go fishing in the area where she turned up? How many dye their hair blonde, take money out of the bank, and head towards Mexico? Are these additive or independent of each other? What weight should we but more importantly do we give each piece? And is info like this enough to cross the threshold of RD?

As for the penalty phase, I’m going to be bold and predict a sentence of death. I think it is really hard to go from an argument of “It wasn’t me” to “well it still wasn’t me, but I was found guilty, so could you go easy on me and spare my life?” And with the same group of jurors who convicted Peterson, I think it’s silly to think that they’ll actually spare him. Consider the Andrea Yates trial (convicted of killing her babies)…her defense said, “Yes she did it, but here are reasons x, y, and z why you shouldn’t hold her responsible.” It’s so much easier to play with mitigating factors from the first day of voir dire than to do it at what amount to the very last minute when you hit the penalty phase. I’ll be waiting with bated breathe to see what goes on cause yall know how much juries turn me on! Whew!