I blogged at that waterfront too

Being deeply under the weather this past weekend, I resigned myself to doing the week's reading in advance, with the odd Harry Potter flick playing in the background. (I must remember that since being on the cover of a magazine, these are dangerous admissions to make.) Anyway, pained as I was already, I wasn't helped by the readings themselves. Securities Regulation reading is simple enough, like first-year Economics where authors had you believe the economy could be boiled down to a couple of intersecting lines.

On the other hand, European Union law reading is particularly gruesome. It's not that its immensely difficult to distinguish between the myriad layers of this new government (European Council vs. Council of Europe... go!), it's that each page is actually two pages. You've seen it before - the casebook is slyly put together so that one page reproduces two pages of a flattened textbook with already small print. It's like playing limbo with font sizes. Suddenly, 10 pages feels like 100.

The last time I did this much European Union reading was on a ferry sailing across the English Channel in 2003. I was returning from an educational field trip/unofficial brasserie tour of Normandy and meanwhile preparing an essay on the UK's reluctance to jump on board the Euro money train. I went on to present the topic in my typical anti-all-things-powerpoint style, using Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Richard II as a prime source. No, really.



Though, what I remember most about that ferry ride was that I turned down the chance to see the movie Chicago on board, and am still strangely glad to this day that I haven't seen it.