This is known in the army — or at least among 1970′s Madigan Hospital WACs — as handing your head on a plate.  The other guy doesn’t want it.

I recently got out of serving on a jury without meaning to.  The morning of duty, Hector had a nasty bleeding ulcer attack.  I gave him Kaopectate and MSM, and then had to drive to Forks.  My name puts me in the front row of the jury box.  I kept trying to straighten out my miserable face — which probably looked worse than if I’d just left my teeth clenched.

It was a stupid suspended-license case, just another instance of some Forks meth-head or logger trying to get out of an obvious law-scoff.  As other people tried to get out of service — lengthening the whole process — I took off my silver Makah bracelet and was playing with it, trying to control rising impatience and not hit the guy next to me.

That’s when the prosecution attorney said, “I’ve been watching you and you look very unhappy.”  (This was embarrassing. He probably assumed I was pissed about the stupid case.)  “Will you be able to serve on this jury?”

I explained I was monitoring a dying animal, and it had had a bad attack, but I was sure I could serve for at least a day.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“I can do it for a day,”  I repeated, admittedly rather snappishly.

The defense attorney asked me if I thought it was possible to not recognize someone at a distance.

I was pretty pre-occupied when I said, “It depends on how far away the other person was, what the weather or light conditions were, whether they were looking at you, and how fast they were moving.”

Neither one of ‘em wanted me.  Would YOU put a twitchy, pre-occupied, snappish, hyperbrained woman on YOUR jury?

(After I left the courthouse I called Dan and Hector was much better, even eating.  The meds worked.  He’s still here today, but very very thin.)