Oh, Please

Chock full o' koans

2007-10-09T19:24:00.000-07:00

The thing you think is keeping you from learning is the thing you need to learn.

Before you start writing, it always feels like it's too early to start writing.

(Alternately: It always feels like it's too early to start writing before you start writing.)

Same name, different location

2007-02-24T15:17:00.000-08:00

Most of what I want to write about lately, I don't want to write about for strangers. I've created a new friends-only blog at livejournal. (Just substitute "livejournal" for "blogspot" in the URL.)

If you're a friend or friend-of-friend or longtime reader:

Create an LJ account (free)
Email me and tell me your account name.
I'll add you to my friends list there.

We'll see if this unlocks any deep-held musings...

Trendwatch: Small Fruit

2007-01-29T15:54:00.000-08:00

I predict that small fruit will be a trend in the coming years and months. Apples and oranges do not need to be 4 inches in diameter. Bananas do not need to be of Jeff-Strykeresque dimensions. Small fruit. Watch for it.

Ballard Vignette

2007-01-26T20:55:00.000-08:00

Me: The hipsters are freaking me out.
S: Activate your disdain centers!
Me: I already have!

Special Guest Blogging from S: Description of Disturbing Hipsters at La Carta Oaxaca

they stood, together yet alone, tragic. hip. pale. emaciated. she: clad in a striped wrap dress and a plaid parka, 80's era chrissie hynde hairstyle. you know, black. layered but overgrown. hanging past her eyebrows and crowding her cheeks. also with the impish face, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the hair, bored, unfocused, expressionless, disaffected gaze. he: striped button down shirt and no jacket. black oblong-framed glasses. same disaffected gaze. brown hair, neither short but long. "textured" with "product." cultivated sense of unease.

ohplease says: i feel bad, because we used to have punks to make us uneasy, but now we only have hipsters. it seems like a loss. i am sad for our culture. oh my god. it's like i'm hillary clinton, speaking about hipsters.

/guest blogging

S: I feel like my hair might be kind of hipster-like.
Me: No, it's not. It's sui generis.
S: [?]
Me: That's a term we use in law school. It means "its own thing."

My entirely non-unique blog conundrum

2007-01-01T01:11:00.000-08:00

Part of why I haven't been blogging is that 2L year is excruciatingly boring. However, Mike pointed out that's probably still worth blogging about. But I've also not been writing because I feel like most of the things I would write about now (my hideous fall quarter classes, my wacky law firm's wacky Christmas party, the most annoying woman in law school) would easily serve to identify me, and I'm not sure if I'm OK with that. This wasn't an issue 1L year because the 1L curriculum is pretty much identical everywhere.

So I dunno.

That goddam Mike tagged me with a meme...

2007-01-01T00:46:00.000-08:00

...and since I've just drunk an entire bottle of champagne, I'll oblige.

(BTW, I've finally figured out I don't like champagne--too yeasty. I prefer prosecco.)

The meme is "FIVE THINGS YOU PROBABLY DON'T KNOW ABOUT ME," which reminds me of "Two truths and a lie," which my old work team used to use as an ice-breaker. I once "won" two truths with the following statements:

I was music direcctor at my college radio station.
In high school, I was vice president of the math club.
[Some forgettable, yet seemingly in-character lie that I honestly can't remember right now.]

Everyone thought the math club thing was the lie, because (1) Who's that big of a geek? and (2) What the hell math club needs a vice president? Little did they know...

Anyway, 5 things you probably don't know about me, but which are entirely in character:

I spent my New Year's Eve at home, alone, cleaning madly, throwing things away, and drinking an entire bottle of champagne by myself. However, due to my solo drunkenness, I still have laundry to fold.
I like fruitcake. I especially like fruitcake with champagne (or prosecco). My favorite part of any fruitcake is the candied citron, and some years, I make my own fruitcake, which is surprisingly expensive what with all the liquor and candied fruit. I have a vague intent to some year make not only my own fruitcake, but my own candied fruit. This would require starting the fruitcake process in August or September.
I can squaredance.
I know all the words to "You're So Vain."
I kind of want to go skiing. For the first time since what? 1988??

Magical elves will write my exam!

2006-12-10T23:14:00.000-08:00

I have two take-home finals in addition to my two in-class finals, and I've now been working on one of the take-homes for four days. I actually have been working. I worked on it for 7 hours on Thursday, 5 hours on Friday, 6 hours yesterday, and 7 (so far) today. My only prayer at this point is that magical elves will write my exam. (Can the elves turn on my computer, or do I have to leave it on for them?)

My real hope, of course, is that the procrastinator's panic will set in, but my friend R has noted that all of our panic thermostats seem to be out of whack this time around. I'm trying now to just outline as much as I can so that when I can finally write, I won't be wasting time looking stuff up.

And it strikes me that actually, that's my usual law school writing process. Assume there will be horrible procrastination, but do enough advance work so that once the panic sets in, you can take advantage.

I'm going to start thinking of it that way.

Evidently I really believe it's going to happen now.

2006-12-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

I just called my insurance weasels to increase my liabililty coverages. I take this to be a sign that I really do think I'm going to be a lawyer now. To worry is to believe.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

2006-11-28T15:14:00.000-08:00

(Apologies to Dr. Johnson.)

I got done with OCI about a month ago, and I'm finally feeling like maybe I understand something in some of my classes. But it's been ugly, and I've been avoiding work a lot because starting behind and feeling like I'm never going to catch up is stressful, unpleasant, and somewhat overwhelming. So it's a gross, anxious, unproductive cycle of avoidance.

However, see the title. Finals here start December 11. So I've moved into "teach yourself law in two weeks" mode. The past three days, it's been Trademarks, and I should finish my outline tonight. Indian Law is next. Those are the two classes I have regular 3-hour finals in. In Patents and Antitrust, I have take-home exams, and frankly, I have no fucking idea how to prepare for those. I'm hoping once I'm done with my Indian Law outline, I'll have some kind of momentum and I'll be able to figure things out.

(For now, we will ignore the fact that my Bluebooking assignment for Law Review is due next week, and that the prof I'm doing research for is (finally) wrapping up his article and needs me to review a bunch of stuff. Urgh.)

Surprisingly effective, but not particularly classy.

2006-11-28T15:05:00.000-08:00

Those of you who know me may recall that my kitchen has no heat. Or maybe you don't. Anyway, no heat in the kitchen.

We're having a bit of a cold snap here, so drafts from the unheated kitchen have been making the living room miserable. My solution? Hang an old wool blanket in the kitchen door to block the draft. I figured this would help a little.

I was wrong--it's totally effective! It's something like 72 degrees in the living room and 38 in the kitchen. Yeah, it looks trashy, but wow!

Blankets: they do a very good job of keeping things warm. Who knew?

Flake Coconut Macaroons

2006-11-15T18:55:00.000-08:00

What are you going to do with the egg whites left over from the Rizogalo? I suggest this.

1 1/4 c sugar
3/4 c water
3 egg whites
3 cups UNSWEETENED flake style coconut (the kind that's like shavings about 1/4" wide)
Electric mixer
Candy thermometer
Big bowl (Big. I would like to emphasize big.)
Saucepan

Using electric mixer, beat egg whites until they form stiff peaks.

Put water and sugar in saucepan on medium heat until sugar is dissolved. Then turn to high and cook to soft ball stage (230ish degrees).

Start beating the egg whites again and slowly pour the sugar syrup in as you do this. The egg whites will get stiffer and start to climb the beater blades and the bowl, so a bigger bowl is better here.

When sugar syrup is beaten into the egg whites, fold the coconut in.

Spoon little blobs out onto baking sheets. You can butter the baking sheets if you like, but the macaroons will come loose once they cool whether you butter the sheets or not.

Bake 10-12 min at 325 degrees.

CHOCOLATE VARIATION
Bake half the macaroons as-is, then fold 6 oz cooled melted semisweetish chocolate into the remaining dough. Spoon out and bake as above.

Wait. Why is it worthwhile to do the whole candy syrup thing and inevitably burn my damn fingers?

The candy syrup makes the meringue base firmer. It holds up under the coconut and makes the resulting macaroons nice and fluffy.

Rizogalo (Greek rice pudding)

2006-11-13T19:45:00.000-08:00

This is outstanding, and relatively easy. You need to stir it frequently to keep it from scorching, lumping up, or forming a skin, but if you're kind of puttering around the kitchen anyway, it's no biggie.

1 cup water
3 cups whole milk
3/4 c rice
3/4 c sugar
1 slice lemon peel
3 egg yolks
Cinnamon

Put the water, milk, rice, and sugar in a heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. Stirring occasionally, let boil, then turn down to a low simmer.

Simmer for 35 minutes, stirring about every 2-3 minutes (just often enough to prevent the pudding from forming a skin).

Add the slice of lemon peel (about a 1/2" x 2" slice)

Simmer for another 10 minutes, stirring every few minutes. Taste to make sure the rice is cooked through. Simmer a little longer if the rice isn't done.

When the rice is cooked through, whisk the egg yolks together, then stir them into the pudding. Stir constantly as the egg yolks thicken, about 5 minutes.

Remove lemon peel. (NOW--you don't want it to get too lemony.)

You're done! Serve either plain or with a dusting of cinnamon.

How is that wacky New York Times bread recipe?

2006-11-09T20:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the NYT published a recipe for no-knead yeast bread. The idea is that you make a very wet dough and give it a long fermentation, and that the magic of fermentation causes the glutens to develop and do their thing just like they would if you kneaded it. Then you bake this very wet dough in a preheated covered pot, essentially creating a little high-humidity oven like the fancy bakeries have. Some total genius baker named Jim Lahey figured this out and decided to tell the world.

Here's the URL for the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/08mini.html

I was inspired. I went to the store and got some yeast and some whole wheat and rye flours and tried this thing.

And...

It's actually really good. It develops a nice, hard, crispy crust. It has big holes in the bread just like fancy bakery bread. Awesome!

The recipe, as reinterpreted by me:

3 c flour (I used 1 1/2 c whole wheat, 3/4 c dark rye, 1/4 c wheat bran, 1/4 c coarse corn meal, and 1/4 c 10-grain cereal)
1/4 t (that's teaspoon, baby) instant yeast
1 1/4 t salt
1 5/8 cups water
6- to 8-quart covered pot (cast iron, ceramic, Pyrex, or enamel--like a dutch oven)
Plastic wrap
Non-terry cotton cloth(s)

Combine ingredients in a large bowl, stir it all up, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and set aside in a warm (70 degree) room to do its thing for 12-20 hours. I let mine go for more like 22, and it was fine.

Lightly flour a work surface and put the dough on it. You may have to scrape the dough out of the bowl. Also, because it's been fermenting for so long, the dough may smell slightly of butyric acid (the smell formerly known as "vomit"). This will be especially pronounced if you used rye flour, as I did. Anyway, flour your hands well (really well), flatten the dough, and fold it over itself a few times.

Let the dough blob "rest" for 15 minutes.

Sprinkle a cotton cloth (flour sack towel or t-shirt) with flour and put it on a flat surface in a relatively warm room.

Flour your hands again and form the dough into a ball. Put the ball smooth side up on the floured cloth. Drape another cloth over the top of the dough ball.

Let the dough ball rise until more than double in size. Just assume this will take 2 hours.

After 1 1/2 hours, put your empty pot in the oven and heat to 450 degrees. (The pot needs to heat for at at least half an hour.)

When the dough ball is ready, remove the hellishly hot pot from the oven and gently transfer the dough ball into the hot pot. It doesn't really matter whether the dough ends up right side up or upside down. The baker dude says you should put the ball ugly side up.

Put the pot back in the 450 degree oven and put on the lid. Bake with the lid on for 30 minutes, then take the lid off and bake for another 15-30 minutes.

OCI, the conclusion.

2006-11-06T20:42:00.000-08:00

Anyway, in the end, I got a job through OCI, and I'm all happy with it.

Total hours expended on OCI (18 applications, 8 screening interviews, 4 callbacks, 1 offer*): about 100. This does not include a day's decompression time for each callback interview.

Here's my OCI advice:

Buy a suit you like, and that expresses your personality. (Yes, such a thing is possible.) Because if you have to spend hours wearing something you hate, it will suck.
By the 18th or 20th time, your answers to questions like, "Why did you go to law school?" will not be fresh. Accept this.

That's it.

And yes, there is a post to be written comparing OCI and dating via the personals.

*The first offer I got was from the firm I liked far more than the others. I contemplated it for a few days, then accepted and called the other firms to let them know so they could cross me off their list.

Strong-Ass Ginger Toddy

2006-11-06T20:23:00.000-08:00

If you have a cold, and you drink a couple of these, you will soon feel much better.

Fill a coffeecup about 1/3 full of brandy. (Delicious, yet moderately priced, Presidente Mexican brandy is an excellent choice.)
Add 2-3 T of honey.
Add 5-15 slices of fresh ginger.
Add a squirt or two of lemon juice (about 2 slices worth).
Add enough water to fill the cup to about an inch below the top.

Heat the above in the microwave for 2-3 minutes, then top it off with boiling water and enjoy. Add more lemon, honey, or brandy to taste.

I think the microwaving burns off at least a little bit of the alcohol.

OCI (WARNING: May be pointless)

2006-09-27T18:24:00.000-07:00

I've been delaying writing about this, thinking "I'll just write about it when it's over and I have some perspective and know what happened," but tonight, after 1.3 beers, I decided "Well, that's a load of inauthentic bullshit. The only possible value of blogging is to write about what you're experiencing when you're experiencing it. Duh. Cowboy up, superannuated1(now 2)L!"

OCI, for those who haven't heard me rant about it in the past few months, is On Campus Interviewing.* Most law schools have a deal where firms solicit resumes, then come on campus to conduct a nearly endless series of 20-minute interviews with second-year law students. If you get a job through this, what you get is usually a well-paid position for the following summer with an extreme inside track for a permanent job. The timeline is wacky: resumes/cover letters/writing samples/references go out in July, the brief on-campus interview is in late August or early-ish September, and 2- to 8-hour callback interviews generally happen over the next month. This timeline explains why 1L grades are so important: those are the only grades you have when you send out that resume in July.

Most schools have some kind of "bidding" system for OCI, and most schools use some kind of online tool to manage the thing. Here, we had about 75 employers participating in OCI. You're allowed to apply to some number of them, and the online tool lets you upload your resume and other documents. You also assign each employer a "bid" number. At some schools, the bid numbers actually help determine which interviews you get. (Georgetown evidently has some system where the employer has very little (no?) input in who they interview.) Here, employers choose interviewees for most of their slots, and your bid number is only relevant if very few employers choose to interview you--in that case, the Career Office people will use your bid numbers to foist you on employers you'd like to meet. Rumor has it that sometimes the interviewer's behavior makes it completely obvious that they didn't really want to talk to you. Nice.

Anyway, I did OCI. In July, I bid on 18 employers. We can bid on almost twice that, but I felt there were only 18 firms I was credibly interested in. In presentations the previous spring, the Career Office folks will tell you that you need to research each employer and do a custom cover letter for each one of them, blah blah blah. When you go in for advising the week before materials are due, the Career folks will just tell you to add more firms to your list. My cover letter is probably one of the worst things I've ever written. Hate cover letters blah.

In September, I had 7 on-campus interviews.

Now, I have 3 callbacks.

[At this point, I became overwhelmed by the awfulness of OCI and ceased writing the blog entry. Update to follow.]

* Note: The following explanation will be stupid and obvious if you are a law student. This is because my imaginary audience for this blog is my friend M, who is not.

Which fig ice cream recipe is the best? This one is.

2006-08-22T20:40:00.000-07:00

It's called "Miss Margaret's Homemade Fig Ice Cream," and it's located at Texas A&M's PLANTanswers, a gardening site run by Texas A&M. You can trust southerners to have mindblowingly great recipes for high-fat foods. I'm going to check out the other recipes at the site for sure. Just FYI, you could probably omit the lemon juice (or half it), you probably don't need to whip the cream, and you need to cool the custard before mixing it with the figs. I did that by pouring it into a big Tupperware and leaving it in the freezer for 10 minutes.

I suspect this fig ice cream recipe is also good, mainly because it claims to be an old Louisiana recipe, and because it calls for some vinegar, which figs need. It's also low fat. However, it requires cooking a sugar syrup to the thread stage, and that was just too much for me tonight.

19 pieces of "advice" for entering 1Ls.

2006-08-21T23:05:00.000-07:00

Peer mentoring season is upon us, and like opinionated 2Ls everywhere (I think upward of 40% of my class has signed up to be peer mentors--this may be some kind of record), I have my list of things I did, things I wish I'd done, and ways I thought about the whole experience to keep myself sane.

So in no particular order...

1. Oh good lord, you do not need to brief every case and highlight in 4 colors. I briefed the first four cases in Torts and that's it. I underlined in mechanical pencil, because I have a fetish for those. I flagged the issue, rationale, test, holding, etc. (wow, I can't even remember that damn acronym anymore) by scribbling "Issue" or "Holding 1" or "Lookee, yet another 4-factor balancing test" in the margin. The tools who write those "how to succeed in law school" books are...tools.

2. You do need to pay attention in class. Maybe. Wireless = huge distraction. Try to avoid getting sucked into instant-messaging and reading blogs and whatnot during class. Especially if you learn well from listening, paying attention in class can save you a lot of time and confusion later. And frankly, half-distracted web surfing is not good recreation. Work when you're working, play when you're playing. Multitasking is bullshit.

3. Experiment with your study techniques and pay attention to what works for you. Half of the game of 1L is learning what you need to do to learn this crap. If you can use your first set of finals to do that, you'll be in great shape. Try different things. Buy different study guides. Learn what works for you. Also, understand the purpose and limits of commerical study guides. Basically, if you don't use study guides, you'll probably have difficulty extracting the doctrine from the cases you read. (Or difficulty managing and internalizing the vast amount of it.) But if you rely entirely on study guides, your reasoning will lack suppleness and beauty. Yes, they grade on this.

4. "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." Some dumbass entitled hippie types think this means that when you're ready, the Universe will bring you a really fantastic teacher. No. What it means is: if you want to learn, you can learn from anything. As I recall, this proverb arises in Buddhism in association with some story about a frustrated enlightenment-seeker who's been trying this guru and trying that guru and no guru is perfect enough, whine whine whine. Eventually the guy despairs and just sits on a rock and meditates. After several years of this, a crazy abusive homeless person (allegedly a mendicant monk) comes along and hits the guy on the head with a shoe, at which point the guy suddenly achieves enlightenment.* Law school pedagogy is a lot like this.

5. An outline should not be 65 pages long. Nor do you need to start it before late November. For me, an outline needs to be a boiled-down, scannable version of the course. If your exams are open book, it's a waste of time to flip through some massive, wordy outline. If your exams are closed book, you will never fully internalize a massive, wordy outline. The LONG version of my Contracts outline was 14 pages (it included references to the UCC and Restatement). The short version was 5. My Torts outline was 32 pages, with a big font and lots of white space. Also, it's a waste of time to start your outlines earlier than late November. You don't know what you know, you don't know what you don't know, and you definitely don't know what's important. You'll just spew out a bunch of crap that's useless later.

6. Buy Chemerinsky's treatise for Con Law. It's a model of clarity, fairly well-indexed, and actually makes the subject more meaningful, rather than sucking the meaning out of it like many study guides do.

7. Stress is like a computer virus in your brain. Stress consumes processor speed. It's like you've got some loop running in the background, chewing up RAM. I have been amazed at how much easier and more pleasant it is to get things done when I don’t stress about them. Trust me. I've lived this from both sides. In high school I was an overachieving valedictorian stress monkey who lived on No-Doz and slept 4 hours a night. Not stressing out is like having superpowers. It's like having some kind of hyperdrive at your fingertips. Really. Manage your stress. (Which brings us to the next topic...)

8. Stress is physical. Stress is biochemical. Respect the organism. For me, managing stress is largely about the physical, biochemical cycle. Lack of exercise, crappy diet, and lack of sleep = stress. If you have an exercise routine, keep it up, even during finals. If you don’t have an exercise routine, get one. I suggest yoga.

9. Embrace confusion. It's OK to be a complete fucking idiot. (And a waste of energy to pretend you're not.) I feel like this was one part of 1L that was easy for me, because in my prior job I basically had to learn a new client’s business every 4 to 6 weeks, so I had already learned to be pretty comfortable with my own unavoidable idiocy. The worst thing you can do when you feel stupid and confused is get stressed out about it—it saps your energy and makes your thinking less flexible.

10. Law students are great. Be kind to each other. OK, that’s not entirely true. Some law students are complete fucking tools, and you must learn to avoid them and their bizarro ego games and assorted other bullshit. But honestly, 90% of the people you will meet are fantastic, humane, fascinating people. Also, try to avoid obsessively talking smack about the freaks in your class. It's uncompassionate, and you'll feel shitty about it later.

11. Form a study group with people you like. Yeah yeah, sure, you don’t want to form a study group with idiots, but revisit #9 above: it’s unavoidable. You are all idiots. So focus on grouping up with likeable folks. What I found most important about my study group was that the people were simpatico (in my case, basically a bunch of old farts), we were persistent, and we communicated well. Also, don’t be afraid to change the study group lineup as the year progresses. In my experience, 3 is the minimum functional size for a study group, 6 or 7 might be workable if you get along well, and 8 is probably too big. What should you do in your study group? Whatever you want to. Mine made shared outlines and did a lot of practice tests.

12. Cultivate at least 1 or 2 friends you can be totally, freakishly honest with. The stupidest thing people do in law school is keep their problems to themselves as if everyone else isn’t going through the same fucking thing.

13. If you have buttons, law school will push them. Although law school is basically just school, you are learning a bunch of difficult new things, you are pressed for time, it is stressful, it is competitive, and the instructional style is not…how shall we say…always particularly compassionate. This means that your shit will come up. Depression? Anxiety? Perfectionism? Fear of failure? Fear of success? Pathological self-deprecation? Overweening egotism as a transparent compensation for feeling like shit? Flashbacks to your emotionally abusive family of origin? Yes, all of this stuff was on parade this year among me and my friends. (Well, not so much the overweening egotism thing, but I chose my friends carefully.) Stuff you thought you got over a long time ago may suddenly float up out of your memory and hurt like hell. If this happens to you, rest assured that it’s normal. But don’t go through it alone.

14. Limit your study time. There is a point of diminishing returns. Figure out where it is for you. For me, it’s between 40 and 48 hours/week. More than that and I’m learning less the more I work. I basically worked 8 hours each weekday, one solid day on the weekend, and that’s it. I didn’t work at night. I didn’t work all weekend. Also, do something non-law every day, even if it’s just exercising, reading a book, or watching TV. This all goes out the window about two weeks before finals, but before them, maintain some balance.

15. Do something fun over Thanksgiving. Maybe you'll be feeling stressed and have some kind of desperate overachiever plan to hole up in the library, but don't do that. Cook dinner with friends and drink way too much wine. Go see stupid movies. Go to an island somewhere. Take a fucking break. A guy in my class borrowed a car, took a week off, and drove to Mexico three weeks before finals one term. Our professors were mystified, but he's on Moot Court Honor Board and a journal now.

16. Be irreverent. OK, these last few pieces of advice are about power. There is, in law school and I suspect in the legal profession as a whole, a disappointing tendency to adopt a stick-up-the-ass attitude and severely punish minor transgressions and any manifestation of joie de vivre. Resist this. As far as I can tell, that crap primarily works to maintain power hierarchies by making you afraid to rock the boat. (And by depriving you of your own perspective, your own judgment, and your own sources of joy.) Don't succumb. Law deserves no reverence. Law is just a human creation. It was made up by guys (mostly guys) no smarter than you or I. (Except maybe Karl Llewellyn, who was a genius and a hottie to boot.)

17. (I can't believe I'm saying this, but...) Be entitled. Again, it's about power. Maybe it's different at very highly ranked schools, but at my tops-in-the-region Tier 1, you're sometimes encouraged to sell yourself short. In particular, you get a lot of "realistic" advice about the job market that primarily makes you feel like you should be pathetically grateful to get a job, any job, never mind the hours, never mind the working conditions, never mind whether it's meaningful work. This is bullshit. Would it be good to enter the legal job market not knowing what's what? No. But it's also a terrible mistake to downgrade your expectations before you understand what your real options are. And it's also important not to take the screwed up shit as a given. I honestly believe it will be up to our generation of lawyers to change the legal workplace, because the current model is unsustainable. We won't be able to do that if we're convinced it's a privilege to be chewed up and spat out. It's not.

18. Don't trust people who try to scare you. There's usually something in it for them. They're trying to freak you out or lower your expectations or sell you something or make themselves feel better. Even if your school has moved beyond the old-school Socratic method, you will likely have at least one prof who takes great joy in fucked up chain-yankery. Ignore him. Likewise for any administrators, mentors, and peers who do the same.

19. It's not that hard. It's just school.

BONUS!

20. Getting to Maybe is worth reading. But not before the 5th or 6th week of the term.

* I could be remembering the Buddhist fable wrong. Do you think?

Well-behaved salmon burgers

2006-08-20T18:21:00.000-07:00

Here’s my conundrum: the salmon from Costco is about half the price it is at the PCC or Metropolitan Market, but the quality isn’t as good. It acts like it’s been frozen, or if not "frozen" by whatever technical criteria the FDA uses to define “frozen,” at least “kept at a very low temperature for long enough to rupture some of the cell walls and cause water to leak unappealingly between the flakes of fish flesh when cooked.”

Hence, the salmon burger.

My first round of salmon burgers was a total failure because I thought you needed eggs and bread crumbs to bind the salmon together. Au contraire. Those burgers were mushy and fell apart on the grill. What you need is this:

For 12 salmon burgers:
INGREDIENTS

3 pounds “fresh” salmon filets
¼ to ½ cup fresh shallots
zest of ½ to 1 lemon, grated
1 to 1¼ t salt
1T brown sugar (or less)
3T mayonnaise
whatever spices you want: 1t cayenne, a bunch of paprika, some thyme, some rosemary—one or all
Food processor
Big bowl

To prepare:

Peel the shallot, chuck it in the food processor, and pulse until finely diced
Take the salmon off the skin, cut into 2-3” chunks, and put half in food processor with the shallot and pulse until ground, probably about 15 seconds total.
Put ground salmon/shallot mixture in big bowl, then grind the other half of the salmon in the food processor. Then put that in the bowl too
Add lemon rind, brown sugar, mayonnaise, and spices to the ground salmon. Stir until evenly mixed.

Testing the flavor:

I suggest you under-spice the mixture, cook one burger, then correct the spices in the rest of the mixture.

To form the burgers:

Oil your hands with olive oil and form patties. Make sure each patty is well coated with oil.
Stack in a Tupperware in the fridge or freeze individually, then stack together after frozen.

To grill:

Put about ½ t olive oil on one side of the patty, put that side down on the grill, grill 5-7 minutes at medium heat, coat the uncooked side with olive oil, flip, and grill 3-5 minutes on uncooked side.

On the grill, these behave pretty much exactly like hamburgers--they don't stick, they don't fall apart, and they tend to draw up a bit.

If you freeze the burgers, you can grill them without defrosting. I do 10 min per side with my gas grill on "low."

This recipe would probably work well with frozen salmon, too.

My anal-retentive Kung Fu is powerful.

2006-08-11T22:51:00.000-07:00

OK, I wasn't going to write about this, but my geekiness has overwhelmed me.

Some background: I was an English major in college, and went to grad school in English, and taught freshman writing for a gazillion years, but it wasn't until I took a tech editing job in 2000 that I started doing things like catching typos and usage errors in the New Yorker and the New York Times. I found this...strangely exhiliarating.

Anyway, I assumed that it would take me several years to come up to anal-retentive editing speed in law, but earlier this summer, I was shocked to find a pretty critical punctuation error in The Bluebook (18th Ed.). The error is this: the correct abbreviated citation for the Federal Supplement (where Federal District Court opinions are published) is "F. Supp." or "F. Supp. 2d". However, The Bluebook, on page 195, in T1, the easy reference table, gives "F. Supp 2d" as the correct citation. THERE'S SUPPOSED TO BE A PERIOD AFTER "Supp"!!

(For those of you who aren't law geeks, this is like finding a they're/their error in the Chicago Manual of Style. The only reason The Bluebook even exists is to tell you the correct fucking citation format, preferably in the easy-reference tables at the back of the book.)

Anyway, I had a similar moment this week when I found a substantive error in West's U.S.C.A. (United States Code, Annotated). One of the case summaries had an extra "not" in it, making the summary say the opposite of what the case law says. Thanks to my current obscene level of intimacy with the case law on OSHA whistleblowing provisions, I actually noticed this. And sent an email to the West editors. It's fascinating (but not surprising) that the vast editorial enterprises of West and Lexis Nexis make mistakes like this.

As a recovering perfectionist, I find this kind of thing comforting. It's not personal. There's a certain level of error that's inevitable in the system, and you're only as good as your process.

I'll probably have something more to say about this after I read that New Yorker article about Wikipedia.

Yes, my fig sorbet does kick ass.

2006-08-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

The figs are ripe! The figs are ripe!

After months of waiting and about a week of my elderly Greek neighbor Poppy rattling her jury-rigged soda can contraption from 5:30 am to 9:00 pm to keep the squirrels away, the figs are suddenly ripe!

I'm always at a bit of a loss for what to do with these figs. I think they're green turkey figs. They're not all that sweet, and while I love their texture, I don't really like them plain. Last year I made a fig cake, which was good, but not outstanding. However, I had a feeling that the ice cream maker would solve all my fig problems, so when I first bought it, I went on an epic Internet search for fig ice cream and sorbet recipes. (Those of you who know my obsessive research skills understand exactly what this means.)

Tonight, fig sorbet

INGREDIENTS
About 6-10 large green turkey figs
Simple syrup*
2 small limes
1/4 c or so pink wine**
1/16 - 1/8 t balsamic vinegar

METHOD
Peel the figs, put half of them in the blender, mash the other half in a big bowl. (The point of this is to keep enough whole fig seeds to give that crunchy fig texture, but have enough smooth puree to make the sorbet hang together.)
Add the fig puree to the bowl of mashed figs.
Add balsamic vinegar and the juice of the limes. Taste.
Add simple syrup until the mixture tastes just a little too sweet.
Throw in a few splashes of pink wine. Taste. Add more simple syrup if needed.

Freeze in ice cream maker for 20 minutes. Taste. Add more simple syrup, pink wine, or balsamic vinegar if needed. Freeze 5 more minutes.

*SIMPLE SYRUP
It's simple. It's sugar. It's syrup. For sorbet, use a 1.5:1 ratio of sugar to water. Heat until the sugar dissolves, pour into a jar or something, use.

**PINK WINE
Those of you who know me, I'm going to have my First Annual Rosé Wine Tasting Party sometime between late August and mid-September. There will be drinking of pink wine and stumbling around my tiny yard, and it will be awesome.

Rock on, my badass sister.

2006-08-11T22:10:00.000-07:00

We have now reached the time of year where on Oh, Please we blog about spiders.

This year, there is a big spider that lives on my gas grill. She spins her web between the leg of the grill and the little wooden countertop area on the side. She doesn't hang out in her web--she lurks in the corner, tucked behind the tubular steel of the grill leg.

Last weekend, S and C came over both days to help me prep and paint my house. (Yes, this is a carryover project from last summer.) On Saturday, I grilled a big salmon filet, and part of it fell onto the lava rocks, where it has been attracting lots of yellowjackets, three of whom Ms. Badass Spider has now trapped, killed, and wrapped up for future consumption.

I don't know what kind of spider this Ms. Badass is. The big yellow yard spiders generally hang out in the middle of their webs, rather than lurking behind a support, so I don't think she's one of them. She also seems more brown/black than gold/brown. But she does spin a very symmetrical web.

In other spider news, this morning I disturbed one of the crazy Giant House Spiders (see last year's August archives) amongst the clothes pile on the floor of my bedroom.

Cult of the Mole People

2006-07-30T23:09:00.000-07:00

So,* despite my less-than-stellar spring quarter, I made Law Review and decided to accept the invitation, largely because it opens doors with employers, and I feel like being kind of an odd-duck second-career person, I need that. Also, I'm an anal-retentive freak and enjoy editing.

Orientation was Saturday, and I'm concerned I may have joined a cult. I'm blocking some of it out right now, but what I do remember is that every weekday, there is free breakfast and lunch available in the Law Review office. Because, you know, why would you want to leave campus or go hang out with your other friends or have some fucking balance in your life when instead you could spend all of your time in the windowless Law Review office?

Did I mention it's windowless? It's windowless.

Fuck.

*What percentage of my posts begin with "So"? **
**What percentage contain a footnote?

The Buggles? The motherfucking Buggles??

2006-07-30T22:59:00.000-07:00

So, after being kind of rough and draining, my week took a radical turn in the same direction Friday when a friend emailed me to let me know that the appendicitis she had a while ago was actually the result of a rare kind of tumor, and now there's some concern that tumor cells may have gotten out of the appendix and into the abdominal cavity where they can run amok. There are more specialists yet to be seen, and there are procedures to deal with this, but none of the options are pleasant.

Super.

This is what I hate about working downtown, because what happens next is I wander somewhat shockily down to my building's Starbucks, where "Video Killed the Radio Star" is on the muzak, and although that song has never before had for me any emotional valence at all, it completely sets me off, and I find myself blinking back tears while ordering a mocha, then pacing around the courtyard of this brutalist brown concrete office building wishing I had someplace inconspicuous to lose my shit.

Why I didn’t blog for about a gazillion years

2006-07-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

When I went out for beers with M and his special friend S and her friend L, L asked me why I quit blogging this spring. My answer was something like, “I was feeling kind of weird and screwed up in ways I didn’t particularly want to share with strangers on the internet.”

(Note: I’m drafting this in Microsoft Word, which gives me the squiggly green line unless I capitalize Internet. Guys, the internet is not our Lord. We do not have to capitalize It. Anyway.) (No wait. Weirdly, MS Word also recognizes “gazillion” as a word, but not “blogging.” Maybe I just need to update?)

OK—where was I?

Oh yeah, weird and screwed up, don’t want to share with the internet…until now.

Basically, what happened is, I got my fall/winter grades back, and they were really good, and that made me feel like crap.

No, that doesn’t really follow. Yeah, it seems like I’m bitching about my good fortune. But here’s how it works, as best as my therapist and I can figure out. Way back in the mists of childhood, I made an overachiever-style devil’s bargain with my screwed up family, something along the lines of “I’ll be perfect and you’ll let me exist,” or maybe “I’ll be perfect and you’ll stop screaming.”

During college, I weaseled my way free of this bargain by underachieving, yet somehow managing to exist anyway. Aha! There’s a loophole! Well, not so much, because then the equation became something like: In order to have a self separate from the screwed up demands of my screwed up family, I must underachieve. Once you *have* to underachieve, it’s not fun anymore, and in my case became its own species of neurotic avoidance.

Getting my good grades back kind of activated the whole weird reaction machine: if I do well, maybe what it means is my existence is contingent on doing well. The whole thing was very PTSD-like—all of those horrible, anxious, terrified, socially isolated, brain-in-a-jar feelings from childhood and high school came flooding back. I felt like I didn’t own my own capabilities, like they were something that had been foisted on me, or something that was only useful as a sacrifice to someone else. I felt like crap.

This whole dynamic is of course only intensified by law school’s screwed up tendency to act like grades are who you are, grades measure and limit you, grades are real.

So anyway, it took me about five weeks to figure this shit out and start feeling better. Five weeks during which I had a very hard time working, thus necessitating a very ugly end of the quarter. But I did learn this: If you haven’t done more than four or five days of the reading for Con Law, Chemerinsky’s mini-treatise is a very good idea.

Ass-Kicking Grapefruit Rosemary Sorbet

2006-07-23T17:11:00.000-07:00

Ingredients:
1 cup water
2 1/2 cups grapefruit juice
about 1-2 T fresh rosemary leaves
about 1/2 cup sugar

Method:
If you're in a hurry like I am today...
Put everything in the blender and blend until the rosemary is chopped to tiny bits and the sugar is dissolved. Use only 1 T rosemary. There should be enough sugar so that when you taste the unfrozen mixture, it's like grapefruit juice but with a slightly-too-sweet undertone. Dump it all in the ice cream maker, taste when mostly frozen and add more grapefruit juice if it's too sweet.

If you have time and don't want green rosemary bits in your sorbet...
Heat the water to boiling, take off heat, add the sugar and stir until dissolved, then let 2 T rosemary steep in there for a while. Take the rosemary out, cool the syrup in the fridge, then mix with the grapefruit juice and freeze.

Another Sorbet That Is Not So Good
3 cups jasmine green tea, chilled
1/2 cup sugar
Put in ice cream maker and freeze.

This is actually a recipe I got from Gourmet magazine or somesuch, but it's just not good. You taste the sugar too much. I suppose that means it could be too sweet, but I already cut down the sugar from 3/4 cup. I think it might be better with a very mild honey. The recipe also had you make the tea really strong, and I actually think it would be better if the tea were weaker. Hmm.

Future Plans for the Ice Cream Maker
Coffee Sorbet/Sherbet (freakishly strong coffee, sugar, some cream)
Orange Blossom Honey Sorbet (water, orange blossom honey, orange blossom water)
Carrot Ginger Lime Sorbet
Hibiscus Mint Sorbet

The ice cream maker does well with sorbet. You end up with something like a very smooth, harder slurpee, then you put it in the freezer to solidify some more.

I bought an ice cream maker!

2006-07-19T17:32:00.000-07:00

Because obviously, what I need in my life is more frozen desserts. And to spend more money at Costco...

First ice cream made: honey chevre with olive oil, lemon, and rosemary.

(Those who know me well may recognize this as the ice cream version of my favorite soup, only without the chicken and the rice. And actually, you could add rice, like in rice gelato. Mmm.)

It's good!

Really!

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups lowfat milk
4 T olive oil
1/4 c lemon juice (or more, to taste)
1/2 c honey
sugar to taste
1 small log chevre (4 oz?? 5 oz??)
1-2 T fresh rosemary, finely diced

Mix it all together (warm the honey first so it will blend), chill, make in the ice cream maker.
It would probably be better if you warmed the milk with some sprigs of rosemary or used rosemary olive oil, but I was in a hurry. The texture of the rosemary is not the most delightful thing. Lemon extract or oil would probably work better, too, because the juice does produce a few ice crystals. The olive oil is just there for the fat. It tastes weird when the mixture isn't frozen, but fine once it is.

Also, as you add the sugar to taste, make the mix a little sweeter than you think it should be, because you can't taste the sugar as much when it's cold.

I can dream, can't I?

2006-04-03T20:58:00.000-07:00

I want there to be a web page I can surf to, as I sit here in the 13th hour of my working day, that will immediately renew me, give me back my sharpness, and most important of all, return to me the TWO MOTHERFUCKING HOURS I SPENT ON THE BUS STUCK IN THE GODDAM MARINERS' OPENING DAY TRAFFIC.

There's no such thing, is there?

Sad.

Belated blogging about law school

2006-03-29T20:10:00.000-08:00

Mike, the person who insisted I start this blog, subtly nags: "How goes the effort to learn the majesty of the law?"

To which I reply:

It's the law, man. New classes this quarter are Criminal and Constitutional, but Constitutional focuses on the Civics-like aspect of the thing, not all the fun rights. However, since I've been a Civics nerd ever since my bizarre obsession with the Bicentennial in 1975-76, I still think it will be fun. Have I told my Bicentennial story yet? Who here read "Common Sense" when they were 8? (If J's still reading this, I expect a comment from him. He became a "miniature Alan Dershowitz" after reading the Declaration and the Constitution. Evidently he wanted to sue his parents for unreasonable search of his room.)

Criminal is so far focusing on how to accurately restate the holding from a case. Should we have learned this earlier? Probably. Our prof is billed as the school's "most Socratic." He chides students who say the opinion "quoted" an authority when it merely cited to it. Today he spent part of class talking about I.A. Richards. So far we've spent every day dragging the holding out of the case, often in excruciating detail. By the time we are done, we have stuff on the white board that looks like sentence diagramming. I'm actually pretty happy with this, being both a former English major and an anal-retentive freak.

Yesterday, I picked up my Contracts problem set from last quarter. I could not remember writing it, and furthermore, I couldn't understand what I said. Nonetheless, I did OK, gradewise (as did everyone). Typical example of my prose:

However, under Rest. 237, a court would impose a constructive condition of exchange and hold that the Broker’s promise to “use reasonable efforts to procure a ready, willing, and able Buyer of the property in accordance with the price, terms, and conditions” of the agreement is a condition of the Seller’s further performance in paying the Broker. A court would probably not hold that the Broker’s advertisement of the property, posting of “for sale” signs, and cooperating with other brokers was a constructive condition of exchange, because those requirements go to method of performance rather than the substance of performance.

WHAT??

Probably the clearest sentence in the whole 7 pages:

A credible reading of the contract would find that the clause is intended to manage the risk of the Seller finding his own buyer while the Broker is performing, not insulate the Broker against the risk of his own nonperformance.

OK, that's recognizable.

Eventually, after re-reading, it began to make sense. It's also kind of unfortunate that I dumped all that knowledge so quickly--I'll need it for the bar.

I got the summer externship of the odd interview, so that's good. However, I'm feeling kind of ambivalent about it because after my trip to New Orleans, I was thinking it would be good to do a volunteer gig down there this summer, because I could probably stay with Ms. C, and because helping people keep their homes is God's work, and because the whole Common Ground vibe took me back to my student co-op days, which were good. But nailing employers for OSHA and minimum wage violations is also God's work, and if I still feel this way next summer, there will be plenty to do then.

Still, I'm worrying that I'm making a choice that's safe and makes sense, but goes against my heart. Since I came to law school to find more meaningful and challenging work, that's not good. Grph.

If I wanted to order shoes, I'd be at the computer right now.

2006-03-23T19:26:00.000-08:00

Last week I went to my favorite comfort shoe store to maybe buy some new Dansko clogs, maybe not, putter around, see what's there. I ask to try on a couple of pairs of shoes, but they don't have ANY of them in my size in black. They have other colors in my size, and bring them out for me to try on. I ask when they'll have black in stock, and the gal says "I don't know. I can order them for you." Um, no. I realize that retailing in the Internet age has got to be a bitch, but this happens to me every time I go to this store, and it's ridiculous. I consciously go to this store rather than Zappo's because I want them to stay in business. But you've got to meet me halfway folks.

New Orleans Photos

2006-03-23T18:30:00.000-08:00

First of all, I need to emphasize: these are from right in front of the industrial canal break in the Lower 9th Ward. The whole city does not look like this. The whole 9th ward doesn't look like this. THE WHOLE LOWER 9th WARD DOESN'T EVEN LOOK LIKE THIS.

This one totally gets to me, because that's a really cute purple bathtub that someone picked out and probably really loved. And please note how the force of the water wrapped the car around the tree.
This is typical of the few blocks near the break. Heavy concrete steps are still there. Lightweight frame house is not.

Common Ground center in the Lower 9th.
Stencil art at the Common Ground base in the Upper 9th.

My extremely annoying car accident.

2006-03-23T17:27:00.000-08:00

Today we have (what I hope is) the denoument of my very annoying car accident of Saturday March 11, aka the Saturday before finals:

[Voicemail] Hi, this is Chad from State Farm calling. We just wanted to let you know that we've concluded our investigation of your March 11 accident and concluded that the other driver was entirely at fault.

OK, does this mean my rates *aren't* going through the roof?

My very annoying car accident involves me driving in the leftmost lane of Western Avenue in Belltown when some rube from Eastern Washington finally figures out where his street is and makes a left turn out of the lane to my right without checking his blind spot first. I lay down rubber trying to avoid hitting him, but end up scuffing his bumper on the left rear side (where it wraps around the quarter panel) with the front right of my bumper. In other words, the front of my car hits the side of his car. Because he's sideways in front of me. Because he's turning. Which, let me tell you, it is scary to just be driving along and then suddenly there's some jackass sideways in front of you.

But wait. That's not all. There's also the part where he yells at me and continually accuses me of trying to drive away and not having insurance, even when I'm 1) Offering him my insurance card, 2) Going back to my car to get pen and paper so he can write down my insurance information (which just causes him to yell that I'm trying to drive away), and 3) Standing there with card, pen, and paper. Meanwhile, he won't actually hand me his insurance card, so all the information I'm able to get is his name and policy number, which I jot down by looking over his shoulder while he's writing down my info. When I ask him for my card back, he says he needs to get my phone number first, and when I tell him I don't have to give that to him and won't give that to him, he won't give me back my card. I end up having to take it out of his hand so I can leave. As I'm getting in my car, he's storming after me yelling "You'd better get ready."

Which I do, by calling my insurance company telling them that I hit some illegal-left-turning maniac who says I'd better get ready. So what he told his insurance company is that he never changed lanes (Technically true--he didn't change lanes. He just turned left out of his lane and across mine), and that I DID drive away, which is kind of hard to reconcile with the fact that he has all of my insurance information, and which made the investigator from State Farm laugh out loud.

Do I have a point here? Maybe a few, like:

So far, my experience with this claim is sucking much less than I thought it would.
This guy is a complete idiot and I hope his insurance company jacks his rates, which he richly deserves for being both a crappy driver and a huge asshole.
I found this guy's behavior really disturbing, not just because of the yelling and threatening and not giving my card back (prima facie disturbing, that), but because he was so entirely unwilling to acknowledge that he might have missed something (such as an entire lane with a car in it), and because his crazy behavior was so weirdly self-righteous. There seemed to be something actually at stake for him not just in getting my information so that he could file a claim, but in making sure that I was wrong. That paranoid leap from "Oh, I've had a car accident with this person." to "This person doesn't have car insurance [never mind the card] and is trying to drive away [never mind the pencil and paper] and is an evil person trying to victimize me and I have to fight fight fight" is just weird.
And um, yeah, kind of reminds me of my mother.

My trip to New Orleans

2006-03-23T09:51:00.000-08:00

I went to New Orleans for part of my spring break, arriving late Saturday and leaving Wednesday afternoon. Here are some of my notes and thoughts. Later I'll upload some photos that my friend C took.

Sunday we toured the devastation, which is totally fucked. OK, it was Sunday, not a work day, but the only neighborhoods with any construction going on were the ones without much damage. Basically, where it didn't flood, people have enough insurance money to fix things. Where it did flood, not much is happening because not everyone had flood insurance, and the government flood insurance program (that they all dutifully paid their premiums to for decades) ran out of money and wasn’t able to send out checks from September to January. There are still huge piles of garbage on the streets, and C thinks the deadline for free FEMA hauling passed last week.

Even folks who did get their money aren't sure it makes sense to rebuild when the city still might bulldoze their houses and take their land. There was an initial orgy of "urban planning," resulting in decisions like "let's bulldoze this relatively prosperous neighborhood where people did have insurance and are back, because it's close to downtown and would make a nice park." Like it's just theirs to take. Current Mayor Nagin has now rejected those parts of the plans, but the current mayoral race* may change that.

Those are just the better-off neighborhoods that got 6 feet of water or less. We also took a drive through the lower 9th ward near the Industrial Canal break. The water came out of there with enough speed and force to snap live oaks with 6' diameter trunks and wrap cars around trees. The houses near the break aren't even piles of rubble--there's just a debris field studded with concrete steps leading up to the front porches that aren't there anymore. A little further from the canal break, there are houses washed into the road, houses on top of cars, cars on top of houses, cars on top of houses on top of cars, etc. They've just started bulldozing the houses that are in the streets, so a lot of folks, including folks from the neighborhood, were out taking pictures to document the devastation while it's still there. We talked to a Nicaraguan guy who was in Colombia at the time, but whose daughter lived about 3 blocks from the canal about 4 blocks over from the break. (Her house was still roughly where it used to be, but a neighbor's place was in her front yard. I said “You must have been so worried!” and he said “Eh, I’m from Nicaragua.”) Now she's living with him in his house and waiting for her FEMA trailer. His house took about a foot of water, but it didn't stand for long--just came in long enough to ruin the furniture, then washed back out, so he feels fortunate. The flooded areas smell like a mixture of mold, motor oil, and some kind of acrid stinging something.

The town is also overrun with jackass out of town building contractors in massive 4x4s, who drive like assholes. (I think they used to call these folks “carpetbaggers.”) Every corner in the flooded areas has about 10 signs for demolition, drywall, tree cutting, etc. People are being gouged, and the city doesn't have the money/staff/wherewithal to regulate these people at all, although they are letting them camp out in City Park. (This may be ending soon.) There's also a lot of tension between the locals and the Central American day laborers actually doing the work. There was some kind of big immigration raid on Lee Circle. This seems extremely counterproductive to me. C hopes that 20 years from now, people will reflect that Katrina brought the Central Americans and their delicious food, heretofore unavailable in New Orleans. There are already a lot of barbecue places opening to accommodate the Texans.

After our drive through the Lower Ninth Ward, we stopped by the Common Ground Collective sites in the Upper Ninth so C could drop off some propaganda for the women’s center. While there, we were recruited to do a store run for dinner, so we took their $40 (very trusting, these Common Ground kids) and brought them back 40 pounds of onions and a big can of olive oil. The guy running the kitchen seemed to be a former professional cook, and was having to train his volunteer helpers on basic things like: peel the onion before you cut it. The Common Ground operation has been cleaning and gutting houses in the Upper Ninth ward, among many other things. Their operation seems very professional—they provide training and personal protective equipment (respirators, Tyvek suits, etc.) for the volunteers, maintain a tight schedule, spray down the houses with anti-mold stuff before the crews go in, etc. They supposedly had about 1,000 volunteers down during these spring break weeks, and gutted up to 60 homes a day. They’re also doing a summer thing.

We finished our day by going to a wine shop in the Bywater, buying a bottle, and drinking it with an incredible middle eastern meal cooked out in the wine shop’s courtyard by the chef from Marisol, one of C’s favorite restaurants, now closed due to the storm. We sat next to a gorgeous pale pink night blooming trumpet plant, and it was lovely. Here at the end of this entry, I want to emphasize that New Orleans is still a great city to visit--a lot of great restaurants are open, and the parks and gardens are still really lovely, if a little windblown. And they need your tourist dollars. Other awesome meals I had include: po boys at Domilise's and [some place I can't remember right now], crawfish and shrimp from Big Fisherman on Magazine (I had to drive to pick these up, and I'm pleased to report that I successfully dodged all the Honda-Civic-sized pits in the street), and some delicious French pizza thing that I packed in my luggage and ate last night after I got home.

*The mayoral race is also potentially very messed up. The neighborhoods that escaped flooding were disproportionately white, so the city is now disproportionately white. Most of the difficult land use decisions are in neighborhoods that are disproportionately black, and the fear is that if all the dispersed residents aren’t able to vote (the deadline for registration was yesterday), those decisions will be made against their interests. Additionally, the city’s top elections official is a bit of a nutball. Now, everyone in New Orleans is fully aware of that and many, many people are working to contain the damage. I don’t want to contribute to the “wacky, corrupt New Orleans” stereotype here. It’s just unfortunate that she’s in charge of this particular election, is all.

I am annoying the shit out of myself.

2006-03-06T17:37:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm stressed. Finals are next week, I had graded homework due today, and a job interview this afternoon. And I couldn't sleep last night because of the wind and ended up lying awake half the night worrying about my mortgage, and what if I can only make $35,000 a year as a lawyer or something, and why did I ever quit my job anyway, and what was I thinking, and who would ever hire me, and do I make sense to anyone anywhere, and let me tell you, these were the absolute BEST thoughts to be subjecting myself to for 2 or 3 vulnerable hours in the middle of the night the day before an interview for an unpaid internship. Super.

I think the whole chain got started because the wind woke me up, but I didn't know the wind woke me up, and the wind always makes me anxious about my house because I fear it might blow away. So I woke up with diffuse house anxiety that attached itself the mortgage rather than to the wind.

On the upside, or maybe the downside, or maybe just the side, the interview was interesting. But weird. Encouraging: the interviewer seemed to understand my resume, and see me as qualified, and kind of asked why I wasn't looking for a paid job for the summer, implying that my resume looked like that of someone who could maybe get a paid job their 1L year. (Hmm. I may have new plans for the second half of my spring break now...) Weird: the interviewer asked me how much I made in my last job. And I answered, and then we discussed how I think I'll probably make less than that after I finish law school. Discouraging: I felt kind of diffuse and ill-prepared, and regretted not spending more of my insomniac hours researching the employer. And it was odd to be simultaneously recognized as at least a former adult and professional, but basically a child in the context of the law. The interviewer straddled that chasm with ease, but I still felt kind of awkward and senseless.

So now I'm second-guessing every pause or imperfect statement I made in the interview. Did I seem unfocused? Did I seem like a dilettante? Did I seem like a huge hippie? Am I an irredeemable idiot who no one will ever give a job, even an unpaid job, ever again?

I think the infantilizing nature of schooling has begun to take hold of me a bit too much. How do I stop this?

And also, in the past few weeks I'm just sick of my own anxiety, and mightily annoyed that, although I have worked my ass off to try to find a way of not constantly living as if the world is a hostile place and a fit object of terror, I will never be an effortlessly happy person, and I constantly, constantly, constantly have to work at this. I will be balanced for a while, and then like some kind of tentacle winding itself around my leg, the anxiety will start tugging at me. Good routines are not always enough. 8 hours of sleep and yoga and trying to be present and truthful is not always enough. The chronicness of the whole thing is depressing me. For the past couple of years I've been able to be philosophical about that--it's the hand we're dealt, the life we've got, we're an oddly-wired, jerry-built kind of species that way, blah blah blah. But lately I'm tired, and I just wish things were different.

And also: It annoys the shit out of me that it's only taken SIX MONTHS for law school to strip me of all my confidence about my ability to make a living and survive in the world. (Hmm. Maybe that belongs in the "law school is like a bad boyfriend" entry.)

Look out!

2006-03-06T17:35:00.000-08:00

Sitemeter tells me that someone from the US Marine Corps has been googling "attack crows." Now I'm going to be a little more wary about my feathered friends...

Heath Ledger was robbed!

2006-03-05T20:30:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry, I saw "Capote," and Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance was strained and actory. He was sending two messages: 1) "I'm Truman Capote, man!" and 2) "Look at what a good acting job I'm doing! Watch me act! Watch me act! Ooh, I'm an actorrrrrr!"

Heath Ledger, on the other hand, was transparent and heartbreaking. Maybe he made it look too easy?

Michelle Williams was robbed too, and probably for the same reason--she completely inhabited her character. It didn't look like she was acting.

Idiots. Was this some kind of political bullshit? Even Ang Lee didn't thank his fucking actors. Are they in trouble or something?

And as for Best Picture, don't even get me started on "Crash," which was complete LA cliche tripe, like some kind of inbred degenerate bastard child of "Magnolia" and "Grand Canyon."

Law school is like a bad boyfriend.

2006-02-26T18:16:00.000-08:00

Ha! Psych! This is just me reminding myself to spew out my 10 minute rant on this topic at a later date. Like perhaps after I've finished my paper for legal writing. Which now seems like it will be "never."

Cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other.

2006-02-26T18:09:00.000-08:00

OK, I heard this on KEXP today, and my first thought was, "Wow, that guy's doing a really subtle Willie Nelson imitation." No. It's actually Willie Nelson. Singing a song about gay cowboys. Wow.

Hm. I think this is kind of bad.

2006-02-17T23:11:00.000-08:00

In the February 13 & 20, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, there's a two-page ad on p. 26-27. It's for AT&T communication services, and it features some guy named "Roger." It seems like maybe we're supposed to know who Roger is, but I don't. Some tagline in the ad says, "The World According to Roger: find your passion first, job second." This is "written" on a piece of music paper that overlays the bottom right corner of the ad. The main body of the ad is a large picture of Roger sitting on a swanky couch in a nice library-type room. Does it sound like a bad ad? It's a bad ad.

Anyway, I'm scanning this bad ad for cues to who this "Roger" guy is, and thinking things like:

If Roger's so cool, why does he have a cheapass Dell laptop?
Hm. But I like Roger's coffee table. It's cool.
What's with the portable record player?

And then finally:

Wait--why does Roger have "Examples & Explanations: Civil Procedure" on his bookshelf?
Wow--is that the Torts one too?
I wonder if Roger would let me borrow that?

I don't know who's more pathetic--me or "Roger." (Hint: me.)

Another disturbing thing I have said to my dog.

2006-02-16T21:07:00.000-08:00

(While play-fighting...)

Oh no! Am I gonna need a face transplant? Aaa! I'm gonna need a face transplant!

Completely inappropriate and somewhat disturbing things I say to my dog.

2006-02-13T22:34:00.000-08:00

No. You can't go eat more dirt. I don't want to make you feel like I don't accept you as a dog, but people really don't like that.

You pretend you're play fighting, but I know better. You're a very angry little dog! You're filled with anger! And resentment! Anger and resentment! Grr! Grrrrr!! You're seething! You're seething with anger and resentment!!! (Now switch to voice of dog) "I was supposed to be a wolf! You humans fucked me up! You fucked me up!!"

You stink. You're a stinky little dog.

Why must you torment me like this?

Dogs are so dissatisfied. They're full of desires. Dogs never have enough.

OK you little scuzzly butt, let's go for a walk.

(Singing, to the tune of the Waitresses' "I know what boys like") I know what dogs like, I know what pups want. Dogs like, dogs like, dogs like walks. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah...

You're just evil. You're an evil dog. Evil dog.

Let's see if I can drive this thing...

2006-02-09T20:33:00.000-08:00

Mike, of the creatively named Mike's Web Log, has tagged me for a meme.

I have a couple of fears here:
1) I don't think I have enough blog buddies to send the meme to, so it may die (or become significantly less vigorous) with me.
2) Blogger has a scheduled outage at 9:00 PST, 27 minutes from now.

OK, here's the first part, where according to Mike I have to "Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot."

1) Haligweorc
2) King Alfred
3) polyglot conspiracy
4) mike's web log
5) Oh, Please (or superannuated 1L - I don't really know what to call myself)

Next select five people to tag.

1) eat light
2) velvet rut
3) aporia (who never writes anything. on the blog, I mean.)
4) [and, uh, that's it...]
5)

What were you doing 10 years ago?
I was in a doctoral program in English, just starting to read for my qualifying exams. I think that entailed a lot of drinking. I was teaching a particularly weird section of Freshman Composition which was over 50% foreign students, and me without any ESL training. Superficially, things were going well. However, on another level I was starting to check out on the academic game. I was living in a great apartment on Capitol Hill, a really solid 1922 building with old school plaster (changes the sound of the rooms, smells different too) and lots of Panamanian mahogany. I cried when I moved out of that building.

What were you doing one year ago?
I had just gotten into law school. In fact, my admission letter is dated February 8, 2005. I was working at my old job and I think there was some kind of going-out-to-lunch celebration, but my memory is unclear. At work, I was trying to kickstart some lame project that our sales force had sold, but the client stakeholder didn't really want. Eventually, that died.

Five snacks you enjoy (As I attempt to answer this, I realize that in order to have snacks, one must eat something else as meals. So this is more like "Five things I eat that other people might consider to be snacks.")
1) Bread and stinky cheese
2) Chocolate of whatever form
3) Nuts
4) Those schmancy mini carrots
5) Double tall mocha with whip and a ton of cinnamon.

Five songs you know the words to
1) Lola (The Kinks)
2) You’re So Vain (Carly Simon)
3) Let My Love Open the Door (Pete Townshend)
4) Queen of the Savages (Magnetic Fields)
5) Mexican God (Robyn Hitchcock)
Can you tell that halfway through that, I thought "Oh crap, this is going to be like 'greatest hits of the late 70s and early 80s. Abort! Abort!!'"? If I hadn't done that, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (Rolling Stones) would have been #4 for sure. OK, there’s lots more. Like most of Hank Williams, and all kinds of standards (I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Love for Sale, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes…). Hmm. I don't usually think of myself as a person who knows lots of song lyrics, because I'm not a person who sings. Weird.

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire (Are we talking multi-millionaire, or just a flat million? If just $1M…)
1) Pay off my student loan debt and pay for the rest of school.
2) Pay off my mortgage.
3) Save my house from becoming ‘dozer bait by doing some wacky shit where the current house becomes the middle story of a two-story thing over a full-height basement. Remodel the kitchen too.
4) Help my nephew(s) with college.
5) Get the yard professionally landscaped.

Five Bad Habits
1) Too much time online, reading, or looking for distractions.
2) Nail-biting.
3) Sometimes forgetting to brush my teeth at night.
4) Being self-critical and insecure.
5) Incredibly bad housekeeper.
Most of my bad habits are more about the failure to establish productive routines, like cleaning the house, weeding the yard, etc. Even the routines I establish (brushing teeth, yoga) are surprisingly fragile.

Five things you enjoy doing
1) Eating delicious food with friends.
2) Taking the dog for a long walk.
3) Gardening, actually. Is it supposed to be sunny this weekend?
4) House projects involving power tools.
5) Looking at art.
Hmm. It’s really strange that “reading cases” isn’t on there.

Five things you would never wear again
1) Birkenstocks.
2) An ill-fitting bra.
3) Cosby sweater.
4) Wedge shoes with a hole through the heel.
5) An asymmetrical bob.

Five favorite toys
1) Google.
2) IMDB.
3) LexisNexis.
4) Sitemeter.
5) 5” circular saw (aka trim saw)

Oh jesus fuck, Betty Friedan died.

2006-02-05T01:47:00.000-08:00

Here's the NY Times Obituary.

OK, maybe I'm old school, but Betty Friedan. She's older than my dad, yeah, but The Feminine Mystique was literally and absolutely the first feminist essay/analysis/thing I read, and it sunk in, and ideologically, she's just as much my mother as...who else? It's in the bone.

"It's a picture perfect evening and I'm staring down the sun...

2006-02-05T01:42:00.000-08:00

...fully loaded, deaf and dumb and done."

Again, I love the iPod shuffle...

"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine....

2006-02-05T01:34:00.000-08:00

This here party, I just get bored..."

Perfect. The last guests leave my party, and this Patti Smith song comes on the iPod's shuffle.

I have a certain level of hostess ego, which was satisfied tonight by people who demanded assistance in exchanging emails with each other, which I suppose is as good as it gets in the 21st century...

I've updated...

2006-01-31T21:49:00.000-08:00

"Things that you wouldn't think would still be necessary...", three or four posts down.

Why can't I tell you exactly how many posts down it is? Because this entry and the one about my grades keep switching places because they have the same time stamp. Weird Blogger fun. I wonder if you could create a blog that constantly reshuffled all its posts if you just gave them all the same time stamp? (And yes, I could fix this problem by changing the time stamp, but it's amusing me.)

It's "I wish I knew how to quit you!"

2006-01-31T17:52:00.000-08:00

Not:

I can't quit you!
I don't know how to quit you!
I wish I could quit you!
Why can't I quit you?
I'd kind of like to quit you, but I can't.
I want to quit you!
Why won't you let me quit you?
I'm not a quitter, but I want to quit you!
etc. etc.

This makes me nuts. What's good about the line is the double impossibility in it, and the reason that's good is that it echoes the theme and mood of the whole damn film.

Respect Larry McMurtry, people. The exceptionally tortured dialogue in Brokeback is a serious achievement.

Awkwardly thrust into the role of sexless crone.

2006-01-30T22:57:00.000-08:00

A couple of weekends ago I made the mistake of going to a party hosted close to campus by one of the younger members of my section.

Remark: I got to know my friend S (Not Ms. S, another S) about the time she was 35 and I was 28. At the time, she complained a lot about being around younger people and finding herself thrust into this unpleasantly asexual "wacky crone" role. I realize now that this is a big downside of law school parties for me, and that I don't think I'm approaching it with the same degree of insight S did.

It's very annoying. As a feminist analysis might predict, the persistent and unspoken denigrations of the youth are far-ranging, because many people value women are primarily for their sexuality, so once you're thrust into the sexless crone role, you're pretty much devalued across the board. I don't know why this should surprise me, or frankly, why it should hurt, as it's just another layer on the whole devaluation I've experienced for decades as a not-thin-enough, not-breasty-enough, not-x-enough woman.

It's hard to explain how this manifests in conversation. It's things like not being listened to, or beyond that, getting a kind of "why are you here, why are you speaking, why do you exist" reaction. Annoying.

Things that you wouldn't think would still be necessary...

2006-01-30T22:25:00.000-08:00

But are.

Today I went out to lunch with M from my study group, and while discussing my ongoing irritation and exhaustion with my Torts professor (about which more probably later, after things gel), I mentioned that another student had started keeping track of the number of sexually inappropriate remarks he made, the number of times he tells stories in which women are victimized, generally as a means of evoking some kind of ethical discomfort in the class. (I think for those of us already sensitive to these things, he's quite literally wearing on our nerves.) I mentioned a discussion I'd had with a fellow 1L at a meeting of the women law students' group (she finds herself similarly exhausted/dismayed by the prof), and M asked how the group was, whether it was valuable.

Yes.

And I find this surprising.

And probably shouldn't.

M said she's been thinking of joining the group as a way of finding/creating some kind of community that's supportive of a different way of "doing law." I think that's a good idea, and a real possibility. It's funny, because our class is well more than half women, as are the classes ahead of us, but it's apparent that the men in our class have a much easier time connecting with the institution, playing its games, and living out its visions. I meet all of these interesting, compassionate individuals who are charting different paths for themselves in the law, but as far as the overall atmosphere of the school is concerned, it's like they don't exist. The whole is less than the sum of the parts.

I was joking with M that I didn't join the women's group initially because I wasn't sure how necessary it would be, but after a quarter in school, and after spending some time over break looking at law firm web sites and seeing little group photos of 4 male partners and 1 woman, 5 male partners and 1 woman, 8 male partners and no women, 15 male partners and 1 woman...sign me up.

I'm sure I'll have more on this later.

***********************
It's later. So now here's more on this.

In the Comments, Wordzguy says, "Not so different in high tech. Have a review of the top management at MSFT, Google, et al. See any women? (If so, are they other than Human Resources?) Boys Clubs, all."

To which I say, absolutely. But imagine if 60% of your programmers were women. Imagine if 60% of MS-level computer science degrees were going to women. How much weirder would that boardroom picture seem then?

There's been a bit of research work done on this, but no one's coming up with any great answers (except that yeah, it's an old boys' club that's remarkably flexible about retrenching itself in the face of change). Lani Guinier published a piece based on survey data from University of Pennsylvania Law School back in 1994 ("Becoming Gentlemen," 143 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1). That article includes information like:

"Despite identical entry-level credentials, this performance differential between men and women is created in the first year of law school and maintained over the next three years. By the end of their first year in law school, men are three times more likely than women to be in the top 10% of their law school class."

"[M]any women are alienated by the way the Socratic method is used in large classroom instruction, which is the dominant pedagogy for almost all first-year instruction. Women self-report much lower rates of class participation than do men for all three years of law school. Our data suggest that many women do not 'engage' pedagogically with a methodology that makes them feel strange, alienated, and 'delegitimated.' These women describe a dynamic in which they feel that their voices were 'stolen' from them during the first year."

There have been a number of studies about law school classroom environments being hostile to women, but that's not what I'm experiencing: it's more like what Guinier describes. A blanking-out, a muffling-down, a shutting-up. It's delegitimation of my career goals, my way of going about things, my approach to life. And on top of that, there's a real sense (adopted by many of the older women in the profession) that you shouldn't complain, you shouldn't change things, you should instead "prove yourself" by sucking it up.

I dunno. Law's institutional history with respect to gender is kind of weird. One of our profs started law school in her early 40s. She had considered it in 1971 when she was in her early 20s, but when she talked to someone in the admissions office at her state's law school, she was "reminded" that if she got in, she'd be taking a man's place, and taking away his draft deferment. She didn't apply.

But I think the real thing is more like: law is very good at legitimating its own fucked up culture, which is not particularly surprising, since rationalizing is basically what lawyers do.

New Dog v. Old Dog*

2006-01-30T17:02:00.000-08:00

Small child, observing Miz Biz: "Oooh. That dog is so cute! I like you, little dog! So fluffy!!"

Small child, observing my old dog Bailey: "What is that? Is that a raccoon??"

* I thought this entry wasn't about law skool at all, but then this title flew out of my fingers. Sigh.

Which reminds me...

2006-01-26T00:39:00.000-08:00

Clearly, I've abandoned the old "Tort of the Week" idea. I'm lazy, and it takes too long, and I've actually found Torts kind of dull lately. Even though we are talking about Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress. (Outrageous!)**

However, I'm unexpectedly fascinated by my Property class. Today was all about "Adverse Possession," which is a doctrine, valid in most states, that allows you to keep property if you openly occupy it for some number of years. Usually 7 or 10 years. Wild!

One of the cases (Nome 2000 v. Fagerstrom) was from Alaska, and involved a Native American couple who had adverse possession of some land that bordered their deeded land. (In this case, they weren't knowing squatters--they thought it was theirs. I think.) The land was in an area not suitable for year round habitation, so they mainly stayed there in the summer, did some fishing, berry gathering, kept reindeer, other seasonal subsistence activities. Eventually they built a small cabin. Basically, they used the land about as much as you can use land that's north of Nome. During the trial, the deeded owner (Nome 2000) had an expert witness testify that by such use, they weren't really "occupying" the land, because Native Americans have different conceptions of property, blah de blah. How this reconciles with the fact that these Native Americans with no conception of property are there in court defending their property rights, I don't know. The court rejected this argument, and the Fagerstroms got the land.

What strikes me about this case is how casually the weirdly racist argument is offered and dispensed with. This may be an anomaly in Property Law (since dispossessing Native Americans is the whole foundation of real property in the US), but we also had a case in Torts where there had been a bar fight between Native American and white patrons, and the opinion was written with all of these jokes about "braves on the warpath" and whatnot. And the casebook didn't say a peep. And the casebook didn't say a peep here either. But when we've read cases that have racist elements with respect to African Americans, the importance of the racial context will generally be mentioned. And we simply don't have cases where the judge makes offensive jokes about African Americans. Weird.

**OK, see, this is a dumb Restatement of Torts joke, because the part of the Restatement that talks about IIED talks about the conduct being such that a reasonable person in the community, if told of the defendant's acts, would exclaim "outrageous!" Which is funny for a couple of reasons. First, it's trying so hard to build toward something at least quasi-objective, and then so totally fails. And second, it's so archaic! "Outrageous!" Today, wouldn't it be more like, "Dude, that is *so* fucked up!"? (OK no, that would have been in the 80s. Never mind.)

My brand new bizarre and tenuous theory about my Torts professor.

2006-01-26T00:14:00.000-08:00

Tonight I got an email from a classmate speculating about whether our Torts professor is a Buddhist, to which I replied something like "Duh! I knew that in week 2. I mean, how many times has he said 'life is suffering'?"

This little discussion prompted me to do some Googling (insert obligatory NSA joke here) along the lines of:

name-of-Torts-professor buddhism
name-of-Torts-professor buddha

In addition to various items regarding said professor and his work (told you so!), this search turned up a brief news item about the trial of someone with the exact same name as Torts professor, back in the 1950s, for some kind of liquor-related tax evasion during WWII. That news item led me to a Federal case cite, and the appeals case on LexisNexis had a partial account of the facts of the case. As near as I can make out, same-name-fellow had been either a bar owner, a bar part-owner, or a supplier of liquor to bars, and had charged the bars and others a cash premium above the official price for liquor. He didn't pay taxes on this premium, he says because it wasn't profit, as he used all of it to pay suppliers black market prices and ensure a steady supply of liquor during those difficult times. He lost the case, with two circuit court appeals and a denial of cert from the Supreme Court.

So of course my new theory is that professor is actually related to tax evasion guy, and that perhaps this was some kind of formative traumatic childhood incident, and may account for professor's current, frequently odd, behavior.

Unfortunately, I can't quite work the Buddhism angle in there...

The Ethicist

2006-01-22T20:44:00.000-08:00

Dear Ethicist:

A few months ago, I cancelled my Sunday NYT subscription because I'd found the magazine deadly dull for several weeks and I was sick of seeing all those smug rich people in the wedding announcements. However, for the past four weeks, the NYT has appeared on my front porch every Sunday, just as if I had a subscription. I've checked my credit cards, and I haven't been charged. In the past, the NYT subscription weasels have annoyed me by calling me up to four times a day to see if I wanted to upgrade to 7 days a week, and they've also failed to credit me for a few missed papers. Should I call and tell them about the mistake?

My dog is maimed! And has no teeth!

2006-01-11T22:37:00.000-08:00

I'm not even going to take a picture of this because it's simply too horrifying. Today Miz Biz went to the vet for what I suspect is the first dental cleaning in her life. Her teeth were truly horrifying, and her breath was unbearable--kind of a cross between normal bad dog breath and some awful metallic undertone. As I anticipated, she had quite a few teeth that were infected, abscessed, eroded, etc., and they had to take about 10 of them out. She has stitches in her mouth and is still bleeding a little. And bled quite a bit in the cage at the vet, which, because she is white, left some rather shocking stains around her mouth and around her head and such.

I also had them take off the big mole/tumor thing on her nose, so she's got about three or four stitches and a shaved patch there.

So, now I'm cooking "doggie congee" for her (rice, dry dogfood, and chicken broth (because I didn't get to the store to get her some soft food)) and waiting for her to start feeling good enough to growl and grumble instead of whining and whimpering. She's started barking again. That seems to be a good sign.

Poor old girl. I hope this was worth it for her as well as me. (I know I won't miss the deadly breath.)

I stumbled on this in all innocence...

2006-01-08T00:14:00.000-08:00

...while looking for Ganesha line art.

Blotter Art Gallery

Wow. God bless the internets.

I ♥ Group #!

2006-01-07T22:51:00.000-08:00

One of my study group pals had a party tonight for our law school section, Group #. (For those of you who aren't in law school, the key thing to know here is that most law schools assign all 1Ls to small groups of 30 or so. You have your small-section class with these people, your legal writing class with these people, and every other class with these people too. Basically, you're trapped with these people.)

As far as I know, the school assigns groups more or less randomly, but over the year, each group develops its own norms and personality. For instance, my carpool buddy's group, Group Other#, is known as a party group where a lot of folks are hung over on Fridays because they go out on Thursday night.

Group # doesn't play that. We can barely be bothered to attend our own social events. We seem to have embraced an identity as "The Laid Back Group." Especially compared with whatever group it is we're paired with for Property, we seem to have a lot of folks over 30 and a lot of international students. Of the youth, many have spent time overseas, and very few are straight out of college. All of us work pretty hard, but none of us really seemed to freak out at finals, and none of us are real yappy-dog gunners. There's not a lot of toxic ego crap in Group #. As a friend of mine was saying tonight, most of us seem pretty inner-directed.

I ♥ Group #. We should make a T-shirt. I'm thinking with Ganesha, because he vanquishes that prideful little mouse guy.

I am in a painfully foul mood.

2006-01-07T00:25:00.000-08:00

And I'm not sure why. I suspect the components include:

Getting my legal writing grade back.
Not enough break in my break.
Dirty house.
Having to be around law students again.
The fact that law students, at least in their/our schooly interactions with one another, are notably lacking in humility and a sense of humor.* Self-deprecation? Bah! That's not funny! That's for weaklings!
Feeling kind of raw and therefore finding other people's egos both tiresome and painful.

That last bit seems to be related to something I've been noticing for the last couple of years. I've become weirdly sensitive to primate ego posturing. I keep having these moments where I'm interacting with someone, and they start doing that, and it's like I suddenly see a schematic of the person's weird psychic machinery, and it makes me feel sad and disconnected and odd. I'm having a hard time describing this. It's like I'm Keanu in some kind of psychological Matrix. Time even seems to slow down a bit. Very disturbing.

As to the legal writing grade, for this 25% of the year's grade, I'm somewhere in the B+ zone. Which is fine, given the (very low) level of (non-)effort I put into the class. But I am finding it frustrating that although we had about a million stupid little required (but ungraded) assignments over the course of the quarter, this is the first time we've been given any substantive feedback on anything. I'm also annoyed because the points I lost, I lost on format and on legal writing conventions. Which I'm having difficulty internalizing. Why? Um, could it be that over the entire quarter, we were shown ONE example of the kind of memos we're writing? Could it be that we never workshop student writing in class? Could it be that we have no idea of the audience we're writing for? Could it be that we don't write enough to actually learn anything? Could it be that the course's instructional goals were never mentioned prior to the end-of-quarter "self reflection" exercise? Could it be that this course ignores every major principle of writing pedagogy AND of instructional design for adults? Yeah, that might be a factor. (Along with my disengagement, which I'll own.)

Without experiencing this format as a reader (as a member of the discourse community) and seeing how it works, it's not really possible to adopt it as a writer, except in a "because I said so" way, which isn't particularly effective. As a former writing instructor, I can think of about a dozen ways get this stuff across better. None of which will ever be attempted in this course. Sigh. But for myself, basically, if I put more effort to starting drafts very early, and just kind of phone it in on the silly ungraded assignments (most of which don't require any meaningful writing), and make some effort to scrounge up about 8-10 good memo examples to see how they work, I'll be fine.

*Do "humility" and "humor" share a root? Perhaps with...human? Just wondering. This guy suggests they derive from "humus," since we all rot.

And yet another nightmarish date story...

2006-01-04T20:09:00.000-08:00

...has been added to Not Available in Stores, below.

Elements are beginning to repeat.

Now with more links!

2006-01-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

I've added links to some other law student blogs over there on the right. ----------->
And also some other blogs. ------------>

There are about a squillion law student blogs, but these are amusing, rarely talk about sports, and themselves have near-comprehensive links to other law student blogs.

Two more horrifying date stories...

2006-01-02T22:50:00.000-08:00

...have been added to "Not Available in Stores," two posts down.

I have a slight crush on Abraham Lincoln.

2006-01-02T21:37:00.000-08:00

After reading that Lincoln's Melancholy book, I have a little bit of a crush on old Abe. I mean, what's not to like? He's honest (not some kind of sunshine-blowing salesman jackass), he's tall, he tells hilarious stories, he's got that dark, depressed edge that I like so much...

Next crush: Joan Didion.

Not Available in Stores

2006-01-02T19:44:00.000-08:00

My New Year’s Resolution is to stop attempting to date via the online personals because doing so only exposes me to insanely piggish and routinely awful behavior, thus increasing my misandry and making me ever more unattractive as a human being and a date. (In this decision, I’m only a couple of weeks behind the trendsetting Ms. S.)

In three years of doing the online personals on and off, I have had innumerable ridiculous email interactions, only slightly more numerable bad coffee dates, and sporadic relationships of varying quality. I've also made two good male friends, for whom, don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, but it’s not worth it.

(On a side note, both of these guys are a few years north of 45, an age by which most men can be depended upon to have grown up if they’re going to. ( <-------------- See what I mean about the man-hatin'?))

Other bad things about the online personals:

Lack of meaningful social context or “informal sanction” as they call it in contract law (aka “shame”) leads to rampant rudeness. Don't get me wrong. As the examples below prove, I do this too. But that's just my point: it doesn't feel good to be part of this Hobbesian universe.
The piggish behavior already mentioned. I’m particularly galled by the demanding of multiple photos. In doing so, guys generally do one of two things, both of which piss me off:
1. Disavow their piggishness with false protestations of regret: “I hate to be shallow, but…” Yeah, bub, if you hate to be shallow, then how about just NOT DOING IT? Or are you somehow not in control of your behavior here?
2. Go for some version of the “Darwinian” argument: “Men are visual creatures, it’s my hard-wired evolutionary nature, blah blah.” Toward the end of my personals journey, I actually started asking these guys for their tax returns. Because you know, evolutionarily speaking, aren't women supposed to be looking for a good provider? So why would you find it shallow or cold or offensive for me to just act out my hard-wired nature as well?
3. Actually, some guys combine 1 and 2, which are highly compatible, both being variations on the theme of “I’m a pig, but it’s not my fault.”
For people in their 30s, the personals tend to reinforce the freakish pickiness that so many of us already suffer from. After all, if there are 2564 eligible singles online now, why shouldn’t you toss back your current fish and go for someone absolutely perfect?
Again, for people in their 30s, the personals reinforce the tendency to see potential dates as lifestyle accessories. You don’t need to change. You don’t need to be open to another person or learn from them. They need to fit.
Again, for people in their 30s (and 40’s, actually), the personals reinforce a tendency to eschew actual dating in favor of subjecting potential mates to a job interview. Now, if you just read the Newsweek or whatever, you might think it’s only women who do this. You would be wrong. I can’t count the number of times I’ve unknowingly applied for the position of “future wife and mother of my children.” This approach is particularly prevalent among well-off geeks in their early 40s, who face their own kind of biological clock issue: if they want to reproduce, they must either find a semi-age-appropriate woman NOW or manage, at some point in the future, to attract a much-younger (yet still brainy and cool and in all other ways perfect) woman, this despite the fact that they've never actually had a girlfriend. There is some panic involved, and it does not lead to the smoothest social interactions.

Anyway, for your enjoyment, here are some highlights of my delightful experience with the online personals.

"That's not my rap" (December 2005, email to friend, previously featured on this blog):

Have you read my blog? I had a drinks date Tuesday night with that guy from the personals. He was...annoying. I wanted to like him, but he was annoying, and kind of an asshole. Kind of an annoying asshole, yep. For about the first half of the date, I would ask him questions and he would give me the kind of evasive, general answers you give to someone who you don't think is smart enough to understand what you would really say.

Me: So what kind of psychology do you do?
Him: I teach, I consult, that kind of thing.
Me: That doesn't really tell me what you do.
Him: I teach, I consult, I told you what I do.
Me: I'm asking a different question than you think I am. I'm not asking whether you have a job. I'm asking what approach you take to your work.
Him: ??
Me: You know, like, are you a Freudian? A cognitive psychologist? Gestalt? What?
Him: Oh. I take a process-based approach that's kind of loosely Freudian as opposed to cognitive. Let me lay this on you: The therapist is like a jazz drummer: a good one can keep the time, a better one can shift the time.
Me: OK...you're going to need to explain that.
Him: What do you mean explain that?
Me: I mean: you're analogizing therapy to jazz drumming. The therapist is the drummer, something else in the therapy is the drum or the drumsticks, and something else in the therapy is the time. I don't know enough about psychology to really guess what those are.

It just got worse from there. (And yes, I did use the word "analogize" on a date. What's your point?)

He actually had this conversational tag line that he used repeatedly:

"That's not my rap."

At one point, he said "Introspection, that's not really my rap," and I thought: that's got to be the line of the evening.

Generally, he was a pretentious fuck with a psychology PhD, recently divorced, underemployed, and still in some stage of life where he wants to think of himself as an artist/poet/whatever. Ugh. (He, on the other hand, is probably relating a disturbing tale of his date with the goddam wannabe lawyer who interrogated him...)

Actual Worst Date Ever (July 2005, email to friend):

Oh yeah, and Sunday morning I had what may quite possibly have been the world's most awful personal ad date, which was mercifully short because about 10 minutes into the thing I said, "I'm really not enjoying this conversation, and I'm going to leave now," and did just that. This guy showed up to a very small cafe on Queen Anne with a printout of my ad, started off with a TOP VOLUME and somewhat pointless rant about Karl Rove and "the media," then moved on to QUIZZING me about the interests listed in the ad ("OK, so you say HERE you enjoy the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder..."), again at TOP VOLUME, and throughout this all was frighteningly impervious to any sign that I was uncomfortable or bored by how he was proceeding. He lacked all normal intersubjective sense. My attempts to detour the conversation into something less excruciating became increasingly strident, and were entirely disregarded, even when I said things like "I don't know if you can tell by how I'm responding here, or my demeanor or something, but I would really prefer to talk about something else." I began to feel like if I didn't leave, everyone in the cafe (all of whom I'm sure could overhear the conversation) would lose respect for me. So I left. It was good. I felt very free. My friend J was like "Between the loudness and the obliviousness to social cues, it sounds like he was mildly autistic. Do you think he was all Aspergery?"

The Toxic Geek (January 2005, email to friend):

I've refined my taxonomy of problematic men to include a fellow I call "The Toxic Geek." He works at Microsoft, he's spent his entire life having everyone (first his mom, then Bill Gates) tell him he's very smart and very very special, he's never had a relationship longer than 4 months, he's in his early 40s, and he's absolutely certain that he's only single because he "just hasn't found the right girl yet." If you treat him like he's not good enough for you, he might think *you're* the right girl. If you're nice to him, he thinks he can do better. He feels that his money entitles him to date a woman far more attractive and interesting than he is. Oddly, he spends a lot of time complaining about "gold diggers."

"Fax me your tax return" (Late 2003, email to friend):

OK, I wrote some dork on the personals, and when he writes back the first thing out of his mouth is a request for "a photo or three." I've honestly just been too lazy and creeped out to take and post a new photo (And besides, last time I had a photo up I got email from some guy who wanted to be spanked and said I looked "commanding."), but now I'm thinking the photo-less ad is an interesting litmus test. Asking for a photo immediately is tacky. Asking for a photo immediately while lamenting one’s own unfortunate superficiality (as this fellow did) is...weird.

him: I do admit, though, to an outward facade of superficiality; sad to say, looks matter. I guess I look maybe, sorta, perhaps (?) acceptable to you. Would you send a pic or three to see if I feel likewise?

me: Three pictures? THREE pictures? Oh good lord. You know, I talked to a good male friend about your request today, and his take is funny enough to quote: "Three pictures? Yeah, send him like, an up-the-nose one and a crusty-heel one. Zoinks! He should fax you last year's tax return." So there you have it. No pictures. Nice doing business with you.

him: "a pic or three" probably doesn't merit such vehemence. There are three in my profile. I'm sniffing a bit of assymetry. [sic] Sayanora. [sic]

me: Bah, two are identical, the third I could have done without. It's perfect symmetry, no? In our Darwinian little universe, guys care about looks, girls about money. I don't know why you should be so offended. Fax me the tax return and we're in business...

him: Well I would, but I keep having to file extensions because I can't get the tax info from all the offshore corporations I'm a partner in. I'm starting to wonder if all those seven-figure checks come from nefarious sources. I guess it doesn't matter. I can just spend all the money on gorgeous women without a lick o' sense, and I'll be happy! Speaking of money: do you rent your attitude, or are you on a purchase plan?

me: It's bought and paid for, baby.

Red Robin? Red Fucking Robin?? (sometime in 2005,never written about before):

This Ukrainian architect guy (who it turned out designed large assisted living communities, a job that would make me want to kill myself) suggested we meet at a bar down on one of the piers. Normally, I avoid the waterfront because it's...well, it's tacky and awful and full of tourists, but we'd had a work happy hour at the place this guy suggested and I knew it to be bearable. Just. So I'm waiting out front, and this guy shows up, says something like "Shall we?" and makes a beeline for the Red Robin that's next to the appointed place. I don't know what was going on here. Was this was a case of him seeing me, finding me unattractive, and deciding I merited no better than the "Dead Robin?" Was this guy just pathologically cheap, but socially savvy enough to know that no woman would actually agree to meet him at the Red Robin? Because he hadn't just suggested meeting at that particular pier. He had suggested meeting at that particular restaurant. I should have turned on my heel right then and there, because even if this guy had been interesting (he wasn't, except maybe like a sad character in a short story...a sad character with a lot of weird contempt for women), there was no way for him to recover from that Red Robin bullshit.

The one time I was actually scared (early 2004, never written about before):

This guy seemed smart and interesting and funny on email, and as a result I didn't insist on talking to him on the phone before meeting. I came to regret that. We met for coffee at Victrola on Capitol Hill. In person, he was anxious and strangely empty. He maintained a nearly compulsive schedule of groups and activities: readings, singles movie nights, etc. In an email, he had mentioned something about having "dating horror stories" so, anticipating something like what you've just been reading, I asked him about that. His "dating horror story" went as follows: he had joined the discussion board at some web site called "QuirkyAlone," evidently devoted to odd single people. There's also a book. The book's author was trying to promote February 14 as "National QuirkyAlone Day," and sent out some press releases, which drew a local, female, Asian-American TV news reporter to the discussion board. This guy started emailing with the reporter, evidently serving as a valuable informant about the QuirkyAlone lifestyle, and when the "National QuirkyAlone Day" story fell through, he kept emailing her, even though she didn't really seem to have time to pursue a friendship due to her "busy, glamorous life" (this said with some venom). Eventually, he persuaded her to have coffee with him and "She was really charismatic, like people from television ARE!" (At this point in the story, it becomes apparent to me (and probably to her) that this guy is creepily obsessed with the newscaster, and that he's furthermore so unhinged from reality that he doesn't realize that he's not telling me a "dating horror story," he's telling me a "stalking horror story.") Anyway, after the coffee, she never emailed him again. "She has her busy life and her busy job and her busy friends, and she just doesn't care about me." (This said with a truly chilling blend of hatred and self-pity.) After this date, I started referring to the phone call as the "real-time psychopathology check."

Quadrafecta! (nutty shrink, entitlement issues about womens’ appearance, "it's not my fault I'm a pig" move, and problems with expectation-to-time ratio) (May 2005):

Here’s an example where the date itself was not so awful, but the post-date behavior was both baffling and execrable. This may also support Wordzguy’s theory (in the comments to this post) that part of what’s wrong with the personals is “the absurd expectation-to-time ratio.” This guy was a couples counselor of all things, mid-40s, originally from LA. We emailed and he seemed reasonably insightful. We exchanged photos, we talked on the phone, he seemed like he wasn’t nuts, so we made arrangements to get some sushi.

The dinner was…OK. He had lied about his height by an inch or two, but I had gotten to where I almost expected that, although I found it kind of odd that he’d even told me his height at all, as I hadn’t asked for it. He was a little bit pedantic and self-involved, but that’s a common first-date tic for geeky guys, so I was willing to overlook it. Generally I felt like, “OK, I'm not in love with this guy, but it seems like he’d be worth getting to know.”

Anyway, we wrap up the dinner, and then since his car was parked right outside the restaurant, he suggests giving me a ride to my car a couple of blocks away. Since it was starting to rain and he was not a psycho, I accepted.

Big mistake. Once I get in the car, he wants to sit there and “process” the date WHILE WE’RE STILL ON IT. Unfortunately, I can’t remember much exact dialogue from this 20-minute conversation, but I do remember him saying something like “It seems like you really don’t feel anything for me” and me saying something like “You seem like you’d be worth getting to know, and in this context, that’s about as good as it gets.” I also remember saying something like “What conversation are we having here? Are you just processing? Are you wanting me to say I want to date you? I like you, but you seem to expect something else. I’m finding this very confusing.” Anyway, eventually the conversation wound down (helped along by me saying “You know, I really don’t feel comfortable processing the date while I’m still on it”), we agreed that he should just email me later, and he drove me to my car.

A couple of days later I get the following email from him:

My thoughts since Sunday are that I did not pick up any sign of attraction from you, and that something along those lines would be necessary. I may not have genuinely conveyed much attraction to you either. I try to charm, but sometimes it covers for a sense of deficit of one sort or another. You don't seem to want to charm, perhaps for some good reasons, authenticity for one.

I'll admit that I did not find you nearly as "cute" as you described yourself. I regret that the physical attraction is that much of a factor for me. In some ways, I know better than to factor that into my judgment very heavily.

So, I am content to leave things as they are, meaning no further contact.

I would like to take this opportunity to note that my ad had said I was "Kinda cute, but no great looker," which is accurate (if not self-deprecating). My dark side would like to take the opportunity to note that the same description would be charitable if applied to my date. In addition to being short and lying about his height, he was a pointy-headed bald guy with unfortunate granny lips.

My reply:

Oh good lord. First the surprise processing in the car, now this. Listen, I'm sorry if you didn't think I was attracted to you, but that really doesn't give you license to bag on my appearance and then try to win some kind of "good guy" points by going on about how regretful you are about that. That's pretty much across the line.

Good luck falling in love on your next first date.

What gets me about this one is that he takes the whole "I'm a pig, but it's not my fault" thing a step or two further. It's not just "I'm sorry I'm so superficial." It's "I'm sorry I'm so superficial, and by the way, you don't measure up, and I'm going to tell you this even though there's no earthly reason to do so, but I want you to know that I'm self-aware enough to know that I'm acting like a jerk."

Gah.

It is mine!!!

2005-12-30T20:34:00.000-08:00

When I quit my job, various managers, proving that great minds think alike, gave me a grand total of $400 worth of gift certificates to a local independent bookstore. I stopped by today to pick up a copy of Lincoln's Melancholy for myself (gave it to my sister and her husband for Christmas and made the deadly mistake of reading the first 30 pages myself before I wrapped it) and ended up buying The Complete New Yorker, which I've been lusting for since it was first announced. I think it's the perfect use of a gift certificate: I'd never buy it for myself if I had to pay cash, and it's probably the largest number of quality words obtainable for $100. Now I just have to install the dang thing. Can I put it on both my computers?

Crows, do your job!

2005-12-29T21:58:00.000-08:00

OK crows, it's time to do your job. This opossum has been lying in the gutter across the street from my house for two full days. Did I not feed you delicious bits of my croissant every weekend last summer? Did I not allow you to take the salmon skin from my grill and steal the toasted buns? Do I ever complain when you land on the roof with your loud feet and stuff my gutters full of god knows what? So can you do this for me? Thanks.

Your friend,

The Superannuated 1L

P.S. Even Cornell University says that you eat dead opossum. What kind of defective crows are you? Get to it!!

Do you think she was trying to pick me up?

2005-12-29T21:26:00.000-08:00

Today Ms. S and I went to the fabulous Olympus Korean Spa (the Tacoma location) and soaked and sweated and had our dead skin scrubbed away by a Korean gal wearing demonically abrasive green mitts. I found my scrub mildly embarrassing--they really go to town with those mitts, and my scrubber was actually flinging around little clumps of soggy dead skin.

Anyway, pre-scrub I was soaking in the mineral pool and this woman came in, asked me about my tattoo, then lamented the fact that Olympus doesn't have a motel attached. I said something like "I was just happy to see they had a restaurant." We engaged in a little bit more lame chit-chat, then she got out of the pool, revealing a not-very-well-executed tattoo of a split-tailed mermaid/siren thingy on her lower back with the tails uncurled and and spread on either side of her (the woman's) ass crack. The mermaid in the tattoo was also wearing a woman-symbol necklace. Just to avoid any confusion.

(And for more on the mermaid, siren, sheela-na-gig, and the Starbucks logo, see this and this.

Your correspondent, not drunk at all, reflects on her Torts exam.

2005-12-14T20:19:00.000-08:00

It was not particularly difficult, but I did fail to fully discuss the balancing of "burden of precaution" v. "likelihood and magnitude of harm" when evaluating the primary negligence claim. I remembered I should discuss it. I said to myself, "You need to make a note NOW so you don't forget to discuss that." And then I just kept hurtling along through the rest of my argument, failed to make the note, and left it out entirely.

What is it with the boy law students in my section that they got so obsessed with Samaritan statutes? I think one of them developed some kind of fascination, then it spread. After the exam, the hallways were all like "bzzz bzzz Samaritan defense bzz bz Samaritan." Just the guys. None of the girls. I have no theory about this. Maybe the Samaritan disease vector has primarily male friends?

But dudes, first, the Samaritan thing is a DEFENSE. Second, we haven't learned defenses yet. The prof talked about the Samaritan thing once, for about 10 seconds, probably in response to a question from the original source of the Samaritan contagion. Third, the test instructions explicitly stated that we should not waste our time discussing defenses. The only possible Samaritan action in the fact pattern was on the "duty to keep helping once you've started" exception to the "no duty to strangers" rule.

Dorks. (<------please note irony-------<<)

Will I feel like a total jackass if I'm wrong about this? Yes. Well, more like a partial jackass. We'll see.

The fact that the exam was not so hard makes me fear that the curve will be brutal.

Learnings: Make the damn note to yourself.

I got a new adult sippy cup!

2005-12-14T20:16:00.000-08:00

Mine's green plastic. I predict that the sophisticated push-button silicon seal thing will very quickly get gummed up with nutmeg from the many eggnog lattes that bring joy to my days.

I love my wine. (Zero Manipulation, Peterson Winery)

2005-12-12T20:25:00.000-08:00

(Yes, of course tonight I would decide to open the first bottle of the mixed case of wine I brought back from Sonoma...)

Zero Manipulation 2003

ZM2003 is one of the many fine wines I got over Thanksgiving at Locals in Geyserville. (4 bottles) I was a bit concerned that maybe it wasn't so lovely, since I tasted it about halfway through our Locals odyssey, when I was drunk and my palate was probably completely desensitized. Now, I'm not sure how my current tipsiness on eggnog and residual beer affects my ability to judge wine, but...

It's an outstanding, very reasonably priced table wine. Nice vanilla-y aroma (I think that's the oak, yes?), also a leather thing and something a bit acrid. Not too sweet, well-structured, lean on the finish. (See, I'm attempting to learn wine vocabulary and law vocabulary at once. Making me a...retro-yuppie? I dunno, but I SWEAR I'm going to get a summer externship with a plaintiff-side employment law firm...(Have I become repugnant yet? I think I may have just become repugnant.)) At $12.50, for my money it's better than the $11.00 (on sale) Syrah De Blageurs from Bonny Doon, which is the best wine I've found in that price range.

And it's got an interesting story. Very small winery. The wine's a blend of 78% Carignane, 14% Syrah, 8% Mourvedre, unfiletered, not scientifically made, and the Locals guy told me they do the blend before the fermentation. That might be bullshit. "Zero Manipulation" is the winemaker's term for his wine philosophy, which seems to aspire to being Dogme 5 for wine.

It's good wine. With no Washington distributor. Damn.

Your correspondent, drunk on eggnog, reflects on her Contracts exam.

2005-12-12T19:57:00.000-08:00

(Secret to tasty eggnog: shake it with whatever liquor you're mixing it with. Presidente Mexican brandy is best. And add some nutmeg...)

Hm. So, having taken my Contracts exam this afternoon (before going out for beer with the youth and having a little eggnog at home), I have the following thoughts:

My need for latency time may be a serious problem on law school exams. I'm not sure if I have this problem to any greater extent than anyone else, but it quite simply takes me a while to ruminate on things and figure them out. This doesn't bear much relation to whether I've memorized the doctrine and have the facts at my fingertips or not--it simply takes me a while to think through the facts and all the different ways you could argue them. I don't really know how to handle this on future exams. I may try to bomb through the answers faster, then take a walk and reflect.
It would definitely be better to outline earlier and take a break the day before the exam. I didn't actually outline for this one--just spent some serious "quality time" with the Uniform Commercial Code (keep wanting to call it the Universal Commercial Code, like maybe it applies on Star Trek too...) and the Restatement of Contracts yesterday. I think that was fine, but I think it left me thinking a little *too* much about issue-spotting and rule-matching, and not enough about being a weaselly attorney and wrangling with the facts. I was too much, "Ah, x fulfills this clause of the code, therefore y" and not enough "one could characterize x broadly or narrowly depending on whether one wanted to argue y or z."
Do you think drinking *during* the exam would help? Like maybe drafting the answers, then taking a shot and revisiting them?

We'll see how I do. I imagine these problems are not unusual, so they may not be a problem as far as grades are concerned, but you know there's *someone* out there who can do this stuff on a dime.

Practice exams might help, but not the day before. Over the course of the quarter, maybe.

Why do Commercial Study Guides Exist?/Why is Law Taught via the Case Method?

2005-12-09T22:19:00.000-08:00

Until recently, I've been mystified by the vast number of commercial study guides available for law school. I think my initial attitude was something like: If you can't extract a rule from a case, you'd might as well save your money and shoot yourself now.

Conversely, at times I've been mystified by the case method: Why teach law this way when it's clearly not the fastest way to learn doctrine?

Now it all makes sense...

Law is taught by the case method because:

Otherwise, it would be brain-searingly dull. The "stories" in the case books are the only thing that's kept me going some weeks.
What you learn via the case method is not doctrine, but legal reasoning and reading.

Commercial study guides exist because:

The legal reasoning and reading taught via the case method is hard. The more comprehensive study guides (like the Examples & Explanations* series) often explain things very much as the prof did in class, so they give you a second chance to make it stick.
The commercial outlines pull together all the doctrine in an organized (sometimes even systematic) fashion. You could do this from the cases, but:
1. It would take a long time.
2. Much of that time would be spent on essentially clerical tasks, and who needs that?
3. You may have missed some of the doctrine in class while the reasoning methodology was melting your tiny little brain.

To perform well on finals, you have to both know the doctrine and apply it in a lawyerly way.** Therefore, if you just rely on the cases from class and don't either extract the doctrine yourself OR use a study guide to do so, you'll be screwed. Likewise if you just learn from a commercial outline and didn't get the reasoning of the cases.

*Pedantic point: These should really be called Explanations & Examples, because FIRST they explain, then they give you examples.
**Or so I've been told.

Let the studying for mini-finals begin.

2005-12-09T22:05:00.000-08:00

[Note: Some asswipe in my neighborhood is downloading porn or something and my cable internets is really, really slow.]

Studying for my Civ Pro final today has made me realize that I hate studying for finals SO MUCH that I think it might actually be preferable to outline as I go next quarter. Then before finals, I’d just have to do practice exams and read study guides. That’s pretty much what I did as an undergraduate—learned stuff during the quarter, didn’t really do much for finals. Actually, that’s kind of what I’ve done this quarter, except in Civ Pro. Fuck.

I now have calluses on the heels of my hands where they hit the edge of my laptop.

Some stuff.

2005-12-07T19:48:00.000-08:00

--The two gayest-seeming allegedly straight young men in my law school class have now become friends.

--Last night I had dinner out by myself, and was surrounded by couples on bad first (or near-first) dates. Here's a selection of quotes from the male half of the goth couple seated behind me:

[at top volume] "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!" "It's just a flesh wound!" "I'm a loud person."

"My favorite movie is Amelie. It's just really beautiful."

"I'm sorry. I had a few, a few drinks beforehand. You should catch up!"

Superb. The other date guy I could overhear was talking about veal (did you know it's inhumane?), and his brother's diet and cholesterol level. ("Cheese, eggs, butter, cheese with eggs and butter.")

--I hate everyone.

--I went to visit a friend in the hospital. She'd had spinal fusion and was shaking from the pain, this despite the morphine pump. I wish I would have gone on more bad dates so I'd have had more entertaining stories for her. Or puppets. Finger puppets? More morphine.

--Why is this motherfucking Pope John Paul II miniseries on TV when I need something actually distracting to watch?

--Despite my bile, today was a good day. I had lunch with Ms. K and tea with Ms. P (yes, *the* Ms. P), both of whom invited me, which makes me feel like they get me and find me entertaining as a person and all. I bought BIG PAPER for timelining exam problems and drawing flow charts. (I have inexplicable faith in the big paper. It's just that most of the fact patterns I've seen on practice exams have had more relevant facts than you can really chart out on a regular piece of paper. Therefore, big paper. (OK, I just explic'd my inexplicable faith, yes?) No, not legal size paper--I think it's become obsolete due to a wave of new filing rules. Everyone keeps asking why I'm so excited about the big paper. I just hold it up and say "It's big!!)

--Also today, I attended a Bar/Bri torts review video featuring the founder of Bar/Bri. The running joke among those attending was that his little plastic glass of "water" was actually vodka. This seemed plausible because his affect was so disproportionate to the subject matter. (It's proximate cause! There's no need to bellow!!) And because there was a bad transition where he kind of banged his head on the podium, then there was an edit and he reappeared, much fresher. It was all very suspicious.

--Yesterday at the shrink, I realized that the worst thing about law school for me so far is that it makes me feel disconnected. Now, I'm sure this is partly due to the complete change in social situation and day-to-day-activities, the lack of real friends, etc. But it also seems like the legal thinking interposes itself between me and reality like some big dense gray cloud. It makes it a lot harder to be present, and to be in touch with my feelings. It makes yoga harder. It can make things feel kind of empty. And then it takes me a day or so of just sitting around stewing to start being aware of my feelings again.

--I'm happy and impressed that our impending mini-finals are generally bringing out pro-social and caring behavior from the 1Ls I know. (Ex: Lunch and tea invites, genuine inquiries into one another's welfare, offers to take notes for one another at the deadly dull Bar/Bri videos, bringing snacks to same.)

I think my brain is resisting the law.

2005-12-05T19:51:00.000-08:00

The transplant is being rejected, perhaps.

We were going over old exam questions in Contracts today, and I think my ability to spot issues and argue them is significantly WORSE than it was three or four weeks ago. I have a total lack of joy--when we did problem sets a few weeks ago, I found the if/then, oh-you're-not-out-of-the-woods-yet nature of the analysis...actually fun. Today? Bleh.

Of course, this could be burnout brought on by doing my Legal Writing memo in a marathon session over the weekend. But. I don't think I can really chide myself about that: I have a hard time synthesizing stuff unless I just immerse myself in it. Of course, the immersion makes me non-functional in other ways, and I end up doing things like taking my wet sweaters out of the washer and leaving them wadded up on a chair for a day, or being late to class because I can't find my wallet and therefore can't leave the house.

I have no other news. Exams start in a week and I still need to outline all my classes and get my exam mojo back.

I want to eat nothing but Trader Joe's cheese enchiladas.

2005-12-05T19:49:00.000-08:00

If I keep this up, I will no doubt suffer hardening of the arteries brought on by Trader Joe's cheese enchiladas...

That's not my rap. (Line of the evening.)

2005-11-29T22:17:00.000-08:00

After taking two practice exams this evening (Contracts and Torts), I had an awkward personal ad date with a guy whose tag line is "That's not my rap."

I repeat.

"That's not my rap."

At one point he said something completely absurd, which may have been, "Introspection, that's not my rap," and at the time I thought "Aha! It's the line of the evening. I have to remember this!" but now of course I can't quite be sure.

That's not my rap.

I would like to note that if I were really mean, I would link to his ad. And I'm not. Therefore, I'm not really mean. At least not if "linking to someone's personal ad while making fun of their tag line" is the only standard for meanness.

(Insert self-deprecating law student joke here.)

I'm back!

2005-11-27T21:56:00.000-08:00

I'm finally back from my incredible San Francisco Thanksgiving, and with me, I bring this wisdom:

Do not go see the film version of "Rent." To call it bad would be charitable.
Do not go to a multi-winery tasting room, taste something like 25 wines, and then buy way too many of them, especially if you're too tipsy to ask them to ship and you and your friend end up having to schlep a case and a half of wine home on your oversold Southwest flight. (Bonus knowledge: a case of wine WILL fit under the seat in front of you. It will. Especially if you kind of kick it.) (The tasting place is Locals in Geyserville. Aside from all the drunken buying of wine, it was lovely. They have wines from 6 tiny vineyards in the area and you get to taste flights so you can compare and contrast all the Zinfandels or Malbecs or whatever. And you share each flight with your group, so it's extra social.)
If you do happen to be in Geyserville, Santi is an incredible place to eat.
If you only have four people at your Thanksgiving dinner, it is probably not necessary to have 5 pies, 4 vegetable dishes, and two kinds of potatoes in addition to the turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, etc.
Euchre is fun, and not that hard to learn.
The brussels sprouts with chestnuts recipe from "The Joy of Cooking" is really good.
They built a new elevated highway extension. The on-ramp is at Octavia and Market. Weird.
Acorn Syrah (Sonoma, but not one of the wines I bought--we had it with dinner in SF) kicks ass, and isn't that expensive. It's one of those well-balanced, grassy-smelling Syrahs like that Isenhower Wild Alfalfa Syrah.
Broadley Pinot Noir (McMinnville) is also really nice. They make several Pinots. Ours was $20 retail, so I think it's the cheap one. We had it Thanksgiving Day.

Pie Recipes

2005-11-21T16:41:00.000-08:00

Pecan (my Aunt Myrtle's recipe)

5 eggs - beat until thick
1.5 c sugar - add and stir well
3/4 c white Karo - add
pinch salt - add
1.5 t vanilla - add
5 oz evaporated milk - add
stir all well
Add 1 c pecans (or more. chopped or unchopped. do your thing.)
Pour into two unbaked pie shells
Bake at 350 for 40 minutes

Sweet Potato (my modification on The Stranger's recipe

2 c baked garnet yam
2 c baked sweet potato
(both fresh, not canned)
mashed with 2T butter
add 4 egg yolks, 2 cups evaporated milk, 1 c brown sugar, 1/2 c light Karo, 1/2 c honey, 2t vanilla, 1 t each ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg.
Stir this mixture

Beat the 4 egg whites until soft peaks, fold into rest of mixture gently.

Bake 40-45 min at 375.

In both of these recipes, for crying out loud please use the full fat evaporated milk unless you have a darn good reason not to.

Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult? Or: I am a social retard. See: Law school is just like high school.

2005-11-14T16:46:00.000-08:00

(Oh, by the way, for those of you (um, Mike) who are awaiting the Tort of the Week, it's on hold pending my actually doing my Torts reading for the week. I took the weekend off to think my own thoughts and not think about law. I think I'm the saner for it. I didn't do any of my Contracts reading either, yet I talked TWICE in class today. Now that's ballsy. Although we were talking about employment law, and the questions were mainly things that one could answer from arcane experiences I've been privy to, such as having a job.)

So, as Ms. S knows from my calling her and whining, "I'm a social retard! Why am I such a social retard?" I'm feeling like a bit of a social retard lately. (BTW, in law school they teach us that it's OK to use the same term repeatedly as long as it's technically correct. Do you see what a quick learner I am?)

Much of my social retardedness has focused on the question: How can I become friends with Ms. P? P's one of the few folks in Law School who seems to be congenial (as Jane Austen might say), on the same wavelength (as the hippies might say), etc (as I, at a loss to describe that ineffable kind of "yeah, I like the way this person's pieces fit together" thing, might say). But alas, P and I are not in the same section, so I only see her in one class, and pursuing a friendship requires actual social overtures. At which I am rather awkward. And which feel a lot like trying to ask someone out on a date. Which only makes things worse.

A few weeks ago, I ran into P in the library and said, "We should get lunch sometime, because you're irreverent, and that's scarce around here." So the next week, P caught me on the way out of class, and we made arrangements to have lunch, and then we had lunch, which was fun and good. After the lunch, I called Ms S and whined "How do I make friends with Ms. P??" S suggested that I get her a cupcake that says "Be my friend," but on further reflection we realized that stopped working in grade school and seemed kind of desperate even then. So then S suggested that I ask her out to lunch, and I said "We already went out to lunch," and S said "OK, you retard, she already wants to be your friend" (only maybe without the "retard" part).

So anyway, last week I asked Ms. P for her email address, and over the weekend I emailed her to propose a beer break and mention that there were a bunch of David Cronenberg films playing, but I didn't hear back from her, so I was like "Huh. Maybe she shares my belief that I'm a social retard."

But this morning after class, she asked, "Hey, how did your weekend go?" and I said "Good, did you get my mail? I was trying to entice you out for beer," and she said "No. My computer freaked out a couple of weeks ago and now I can't get email at home," so I said, "Oh my god, it's like you live in another decade," and she said "It is! At first I thought that was bad, but now I'm like, 'Hey, it's good to spend my weekend interacting with people who have my phone number,' which by the way I'd be glad to give you." So we exchanged stories of getting ridiculous demanding work emails at home or on vacation, and then I was like "Email me your phone number, and then we will go get some beers," and she said "Cool," and then she emailed me her phone number and some kind of note like "I can't fucking believe I missed this."

Woo hoo! I have her phone number! I have her phone number!!

God, I'm a social retard.

Yet more evidence that dogs are disgusting.

2005-11-14T16:07:00.000-08:00

(And that I'm a really lousy housekeeper.)

A few weeks ago, a partially eaten take-out container of Chinese food ended up in my yard, and after eating as much of it as she could before I noticed, Biz licked and ate the dirt in the area for a couple of weeks. She'd come in every day with a little dirt mustache I had to wipe off, and she'd stink like...like...like really funky chicken and sesame oil.

Lately, she's started eating dirt again, only now she smells like...fish? Dead fish? Something else dead, that's been dead for a really long time? Fermented squirrel? Well, today I followed her out into the yard and discovered what she's been eating. Evidently I let my not-quite-closed container of Alaska Fish Fertilizer roll onto its side on the deck, and drip drip drip onto the dirt below, and in the past two weeks Biz has eaten about 1/2 cup of fish-emulsion-soaked dirt.

As far as I can tell from the Internets, it's not toxic.

Lead us not into pathological cheapness.

2005-11-06T18:04:00.000-08:00

Although I made my law school budget as humane as possible, it's still a pain in the ass. I generally have enough money each week to care for myself in one of a number of ways:

Cook nice foods on the weekend and eat them all week, but NO EATING OUT.
Go out to eat on the weekend and eat beans and rice or scrounged free pizza all week.
Cook some foods and eat at the many cheap lunch places near campus all week.
Frozen dinners.
Trader Joe's.

This week is the first week of attempting Trader Joe's. Unfortunately (but predictably), my trip to TJ's resulted in enough food and spending for two weeks. I suppose it won't go to waste.

One fortunate discovery: Miz Biz, unlike old Miz Bailey, will eat foods that are not laden with delicious meats and fats. She enjoys apples, carrots, banana. Why is this fortunate? Three words: canine garbage disposal. Mealy apple? Cut tiny pieces off of it and create 3 or 4 days' worth of "cookies" for the dog. Buy too many carrots for the stew? Ditto. Pear getting a little weird? The dog doesn't care! And they're all high in fiber and nutrients. Yay. Why pay $2.79/lb for dog cookies when you already paid $1.49/lb for that apple that's going to waste? (OK, maybe if the dog got horrible noxious gas, that might be a "why," but so far that's not a problem.)

Wauwatosa Band Mothers follow-up

2005-11-04T07:19:00.001-08:00

In her comment on the Tort of the Week, velvet says:

i'm a fan of the "tenth mother" theory, myself.

i'd want to throw some responsibility on the "reasonable person" devouring the turkey salad, too. is that allowed?

Didn't you also believe in the second gunman?

Anyway, so velvet's kind of saying "what happens when res ipsa loquitur meets caveat emptor?"

That depends on the jurisdiction. Most states follow a doctrine of comparative fault, where if the plaintiff committed negligent acts that contributed to his own demise, the jury is expected to wing some kind of calculation like "Hmm. Seems like the defendant is about twice as much of an asshole as the plaintiff, so we'll knock down the plaintiff's award by about a third and call it a day." Or at least this is how I assume it works. We don't learn this until sometime in early 2006,

(This is why we love juries. Because they do all this judgment-call work, and essentially for free, and after they're done, people can't complain about being victimized by the judge. Although they can complain about how the jury was misled by some slick lawyer and characterize 12 of their fellow citizens as rubes. Discourse about juries is very odd...)

There are a few jurisdictions (and Louisiana may be one of them), which work on a strict contributory negligence doctrine, where if the plaintiff was negligent at all, he can't get bupkis from the defendant. So you could have a situation where if a 18-wheeler with bad brakes owned by a company with a notorious history of maintenance violations and driven by a guy who was drunk at the time hits a little old lady who stepped off the curb to help a kitten, the old lady gets nothing.

But yeah, turkey salad. Would the reasonable person eat turkey salad at the band mothers' buffet? And if so, could that person be understood to be assuming some risk? I think that is how we operate in real life. I know when we were eating that funky crawfish stuff at the St. Joseph's day altar, I was running a cost-benefit thing in my head.

Another important fact of the Wauwatosa case is: the woman who got the food poisoning was sick for like, a year. She was one of those people who just can't shed salmonella very well. And in that case, where the plaintiff has some kind of condition that's not due to an act of the defendant or the plaintiff, but that makes the damage caused by the defendant much worse that it would usually be, it's just tough luck for the defendant. At least I think it is. Again, I don't think we learn that until next quarter.

Who wants an obscenely phallic LexisNexis water bottle?

2005-11-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

Evidently Lexis wants to be thought of as the manly search alternative...

No really, WHO WANTS IT?

Here's what I propose: I will GIVE this fine, phallic water bottle to the reader who comes up with the most amusing idea for a "Win the obscene LexisNexis water bottle" contest.

Dawgdaddy

2005-11-02T19:12:00.000-08:00

They have wireless everywhere at the law school. This means I can watch the guy who sits in front of me in Torts run two instant message windows at once. The font's not large enough for me to see what he's saying, but I can tell that one of his usernames ends in "Dawg" and the other ends in "daddy."

He also wears a backward baseball cap most days.

I've started having dreams about school, but they're very abstract. It's all just like "There's chaos, and I've got to apply rules to bring order. Where are the rules? Could I classify things this way? Did that thing slip away before I classified it?" I'm sure this is the primal law student dream. But there's no real content to this process, in the dream (and maybe in life). It's slightly like being on acid, where you see the abstract machinery of your thoughts, and can't stop seeing it.

I guess it feels good to be known....

2005-11-02T18:51:00.000-08:00

I got this from my sister today.

And that reminds me. I need to pay my bills...

Tort of the Week: Samson v. Reising (1974)

2005-11-02T17:31:00.000-08:00

This week in Torts, we encounter our first Latinate doctrine: res ipsa loquitur. (Appx: The thing speaks for itself.) In res cases, the mere fact of the accident is taken as evidence of negligence.

Res ipsa loquitur allows an injured plaintiff to claim a common-sense inference of negligence when direct evidence of negligence is lacking. The res ur-case is Byrne v. Boadle, Court of Exchequer, 1863, in which the plaintiff was NOT required to give affirmative proof of negligence after being hit by a barrel of flour falling out of a flour warehouse. In the verdict, an exasperated Chief Baron Pollock says, "A barrel could not roll out of a warehouse without some negligence, and to say that a plaintiff who is injured by it must call witnesses from the warehouse...seems to me preposterous. * * * The present case upon the evidence comes down to this, a man is passing in front of the premises of a dealer in flour, and there falls down upon him a barrel of flour." (This kind of repetition is common when people start trying to explain res. The thing speaks for itself, so it's hard to say anything else about it. You just keep saying the thing over and over again: "Flour, dammit! Don't you see? Flour! Duh!!")

Res doctrine now requires that the plaintiff introduce evidence to prove four things:

That the accident happened.
Via an instrumentality in the defendant's "exclusive control."
That the accident is something that does not usually happen without negligence by someone.
That he himself was not at fault.

In Ybarra v. Spangard (1944), the doctrine was extended to allow a patient in a medical malpractice case to bring a res action against his surgeon, the nurses, the anaesthesiologist, and the hospital after the patient suffered permanent nerve damage to his shoulder during an appendectomy. Although clearly the instrumentality was not under the control of any one defendant, the California Supreme Court reasoned that to prevent the patient from pursuing his case under res would be to deny any relief to patients injured while unconscious. Another important policy reason is that a res case gives the plaintiff some leverage to get the truth out of parties who might otherwise stonewall.

OK, now I think we're set up for the Tort of the Week, as usual, from Prosser.

Nine members of the Wauwatosa High School Band Mothers individually cooked turkeys in their own homes from which turkey salad was made at a church kitchen by some of them. Plaintiff ate the turkey salad and suffered food poisoning.

Does res ipsa loquitur apply?

Let's walk through the factors:

Yes, the accident happened.
Instrumentality was not under any one defendant's exclusive control, but that was also true in Ybarra.
I'd say that food poisoning generally doesn't happen without negligence by someone.
We weren't given any evidence pertaining to the plaintiff's fault, so I'm going to assume it's not at issue.

My prediction: The court will find some way to distinguish the case from Ybarra and will not allow the plaintiff to use res ipsa loquitur. This may hinge on the fact that it's not a medical malpractice case, or it may hinge on the fact that the possible negligent act could have been done by so many essentially unrelated parties. I'm thinking the second. Part of the rationale in Ybarra was based on getting the surgeons/nurses/anaesthesiologists to rat out the guilty party, and the parties here aren't in a position to have any knowledge of each other's negligent acts. Directed verdict for the defendant.

[Pause to look it up on LexisNexis (62 Wis.2d 698), still my favorite database despite the obscene water bottle.]

What actually happened:

Trial court: Directed verdict for the defendant.

Wisconsin Supreme Court: Affirms trial court.

Rationale: Too many defendants and no real connection between them.

And from Prosser, we learn that "Courts have applied res ipsa loquitur against multiple defendants outside the medical context in only a handful of cases."

Ghost Story

2005-10-31T21:26:00.000-08:00

I lived in Tacoma from October 2000 to April 2001, in a large one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a historic building at 9th and J, in the Hilltop. The apartment was laid out along a long hallway that ran down one side. There was a bedroom in the back, but I slept in a small room off the living room because the heater in the bedroom didn't work, and because something about the back end of the apartment just creeped me out. All of the floors in the apartment were painted red, and in the dining room there were a couple of large splotches or splashes of something that had prevented the paint from curing right, and it was rough in those areas.

For music in the kitchen, I had a boombox with a CD player, and that fall I felt like listening to a lot of Hank Williams, so I did. But when I would play the first disc of Hank Williams' Greatest Hits, the boombox would just return to "Lost Highway" again and again. It would play a song or two, then go back to "Lost Highway." Then another couple of songs, then "Lost Highway." The CD player wasn't programmable, and for a long time I thought maybe the CD weirdness was just due to the same electrical stuff that caused the heater problem and that made the main burners on the stove function only intermittently.

Eventually, I started feeling like something else was going on, and as fall wore on toward Thanksgiving something in the song, and the lyrics about sin without redemption, and the splotches, and the coldness, and the weird smells in the kitchen, and the big deep chip in the big cast-iron laundry sink began to add up. I began to feel like something was there, and like it was male, and like it was trapped, and like it was trying to tell me about a murder-suicide.

At Thanksgiving, I left a piece of pumpkin pie and a glass of bourbon for the ghost, and I made a little speech to the effect that I knew, and I saw, and I believed forgiveness was possible. And all of the weird shit stopped.

LOST HIGHWAY

I'm a rolling stone, all alone and lost,
For a life of sin, I have paid the cost.
When I pass by, all the people say
"Just another guy on the lost highway."

Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine
And a woman's lies make a life like mine.
Oh, the day we met, I went astray,
I started rollin' down that lost highway.

I was just a lad, nearly twenty-two,
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you,
And now I'm lost, too late to pray,
Lord, I've paid the cost on the lost highway.

Now, boys, don't start your ramblin' round,
On this road of sin or you're sorrow bound.
Take my advice or you'll curse the day
You started rollin' down that lost highway.

Could my TV be dying??

2005-10-25T21:01:00.000-07:00

I'm a little concerned that my TV may be dying. It's the TV that used to be in my parents' basement, so it dates to 1980 or so, making it older than most of my law school classmates. I think it's one of the last era of televisions to feature large amounts of fake woodgrain plastic. I like it because (to me at least) it was free, it's got a pretty clear picture, and it's not all "ooh, look at me, I'm a sleek technological object," which seems to be the current ruling TV aesthetic. Unfortunately, the picture has started rolling a lot, like the vertical hold is permanently screwed up. Sometimes that's a reception problem, but I don't know why the reception would suddenly get so much worse. Hmm. Is there a "vertical hold" adjustment behind that little fake wood door? Nope. Damn.

Law Student Self-Loathing: A Continuing Feature

2005-10-23T22:10:00.001-07:00

While planning our study group...

Me: Do they let you reserve those little library rooms?
N: I'm not sure, but I can go check.
K: Groups have priority over individuals for those, right?
Me: Yeah, but the last thing you want to do is get in an argument about that with some goddam wannabe lawyer, you know?
N: That actually happened to me and my moot court partner last week.

(Non-) Tort of the Week: Employment Lawyers are Entertaining

2005-10-23T22:03:00.000-07:00

Last week, I took a day off from school and attended the state Bar Association's annual Labor and Employment Law CLE (Continuing Legal Education). I had to make excuses to my Contracts professor (who asked me if I'd been sick and then pronounced the CLE "a good excuse"), but it was worth it.

Mainly, what lawyers do at this kind of CLE is review the year's new case law. At the Labor and Employment Law CLE, this means a lot of time spent making fun of "Neanderthal managers." It was a defense attorney making that joke, a guy who's made his living since 1988 arguing FOR the employers of the Neanderthal managers. Evidently that makes one exhausted and cynical, and you just wish that people would stop being such fucking morons and behave like decent human beings, already.

Other interesting learnings from the CLE:

In news sure to gladden Mike's heart, the Ninth Circuit found, in Head v. Glacier Northwest Inc. 413 F.3d 1053, that reading is a major life activity under the ADA.
The Ninth Circuit used a "reasonable Arab" standard to find hostile environment when a supervisor refused to call the Plaintiff by his real name (Mamdouh) and instead insisted on calling him "Manny." When Mamdouh suggested that maybe the supervisor would have an easier time with his last name (Hakem), the supervisor started calling him "Hank." As a defense, the employer asserted that neither "Manny" nor "Hank" was actually a racial slur. In the words of the presenter, "The Ninth Circuit was not impressed by that argument" and found for the plaintiff.
In Tellis v. Alaska Airlines 414 F.3d 1045, the Ninth Circuit found that Alaska Airlines was justified in firing an employee who took FMLA leave to care for his pregnant wife, but instead took a four-day cross-country trip to pick up a new car, missing the birth entirely. The employee asserted that he did "care for" his wife by calling her on his cell phone during the trip. The court wasn't buying it.
In Al-Safin v. Circuit City Stores, Inc., the Ninth Circuit cut to the chase and ruled that Circuit City is the weaselliest employer on the West Coast. OK, not really, but the court found YET AGAIN that Circuit City's arbitration agreement was "unconscionable * * * because (1) it required employees to forgo essential substantive and procedural rights, and (2) the clauses regarding coverage of claims, remedies, arbitration fees, cost-splitting, the statute of limitations, class actions, and modifications rendered the agreement excessively one-sided." There are about a billion Ninth Circuit cases invalidating Circuit City's odious employee arbitration clauses, but every time, Circuit City's attorneys turn around and draft another one. You just can't keep those guys down. I'm sure we can expect another Circuit City case sometime in 2007. Writers of future casebooks will refer to this period as "The Circuit City Era."

I think the best thing about the CLE was the extremely terse and witty briefs they gave us for all these cases. I want to find out who wrote the briefs for the Ninth Circuit cases and go worship at his/her feet.

Last roses of the season.

2005-10-23T19:04:00.000-07:00

Festival! Of!! Neuroses!!!

2005-10-23T18:53:00.000-07:00

(OK, I realize that could be the subject heading for any one of these entries...)

Neurosis #1: I fear my inner surly teenager may be running amok.

Everyone keeps asking me how I'm liking law school. The short answer is: I'm liking the "law" part. I'm not liking the "school" part.

Pretty much from Day 1, law school has made me uneasy. Initially I thought there was just something about being part of a large institution again that icked me out.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote my friend S and said, "I think I've decided that it's not new people who exhaust me, but the way I act around them. Or something like that. There's no story."

Now I think I've put my finger on it: LAW SCHOOL IS JUST LIKE HIGH SCHOOL, and as a result, my tendency is to take up my old adolescent defense of hostile withdrawal into my own superiority. Which is, um, ugly and weird and neurotic and inauthentic and bad. But hard to avoid. There are lockers. There are cliques. There are "extracurricular activities." I'm told that in the spring, there will be a prom. Do you know how much this shit pushes my buttons??

At least I'm not alone. If you Google the phrase "law school is like high school," you'll get about 180 hits. ("Law school is JUST like high school" gets you another 60 or so.)

Neurosis #2: What the fuck is wrong with me that I can't keep my fucking house clean?

I was talking to The Other M this morning about this. I had my house all clean, and felt pretty happy about it, then I slumped into some mild post-head-cold depression last week and just started letting things fall where they would, with the result that by the end of the week my living room was kind of a soup of shoes, papers, subscription cards, and crumpled receipts. The bedroom is carpeted with clothes. Don't ask about the kitchen.

I can't figure this out. I don't know what this is. What it feels like is I'm overwhelmed by herding all these objects around. All these little things that each need to go some specific place, and that enter my life largely unbidden (junk mail is the worst), then run amok. But I also think I feel slightly stressed out and agoraphobic when my house is too clean, like "OK, the house is clean--what are you going to do now?" It feels like maybe the mess is what I procrastinate against--it's the thing that helps me delay and resist other demands. It's comfortable.

It's weird.

Some of you may recall that two winters ago, I went through a whole delving into my psychology of money. This year, it may be my psychology of mess.

Learned Hand was consumed by anxiety and boredom...

2005-10-23T11:56:00.000-07:00

This weekend I'm reviewing my class notes as part of starting to outline. Those of you who've gone to school with me before may recall that I'm a freakishly comprehensive notetaker. Little escapes my notes. I offer you the following:
From Contracts

Learned Hand was consumed by anxiety and boredom at law school, so we can all take heart from that.
Things that are time-consuming for the court generally don't happen. They just try to figure out a way to make the parties go away. In Copylease, the judge is trying to raise the parties' litigation costs partly to drive them into negotiation.

From Torts (all direct quotes from my wacky Torts professor)

Law is violence. Law is force. That's why people are attracted to it.
Tort law is fundamentally socialistic. There's an ethics embedded here. The state enforces social solidarity between people.
Judicial Opinions generally don't acknowledge the horrible magnitude fo their task. This is a weird blind spot in legal culture.
Without freedom, what are we? Wage slaves, like you all will be.

Apologies: No Tort of the Week Yet

2005-10-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

OK, so no tort of the week yet, and I don't have time to toss one up here now because I've only got 10 minutes before I have to walk the dog, put on some bidness clothes, and head back to school for the goddam Moot Court Mediation Competition, which I am now actively hoping to lose so that I won't have to do this again Wednesday or Thursday night.

But the tort will be good, because it's Medical Malpractice Week. Many to choose from. Hedy Lamar's nose!! (Oh, just Google it.)

And I've got a lot of rants on tap this week, including one about the extremely oversubscribed yoga workshop of last weekend, in which we were all stacked into the studio like cordwood because evidently the studio decided they'd rather sell another 12 spaces than allow us to have enough space to actually practice yoga. There's so much wrong with this I don't even know where to start. The woman running the workshop was also kind of an egocentric dip, which I suppose is an occupational hazard in the yoga workshop business. OK, must turn off the rant-spigot before I accidentally rant the whole rant.

And this morning sucked because my coffeemaker broke, (Some little springy thing came undone from the bottom of the funnel and now the water goes through too fast and there's no pour-while-brewing feature any more. I think I lost a part. I think I may have to fabricate a part...) then Miz Biz went on a disgusting poo-eating jag while on her walk, and I just couldn't take it anymore.

"Getting to Yes"

2005-10-11T19:18:00.000-07:00

One of my vague intentions for this afternoon/evening was to re-reread "Getting to Yes" in preparation for next week's mediation competition. I know at one time I owned and read "Getting to Yes." However, at this time, on my shelves, I can only find:

Getting Past No
Getting Together, and
Getting to Maybe.

The first two are "sequels" to "Getting to Yes." The third is a book on writing law school exams.

I think I may have lent out "Getting to Yes." Anyway, all you need to remember from "Yes" is "BATNA" and "don't be a huge asshole." Right?

Student Loan Magic

2005-10-11T17:45:00.000-07:00

So, to finance my fabulous law school education, I took out new federal student loans. All of my old student loans live on as a consolidation loan, also done through the Direct Loan program. I need to get that deferred while I'm back in school.

I thought this would involve my filling out and sending in a deferment request, which requires certification by the school, so yesterday I dutifully trudged to the admin building, stood in line at the wrong window for 10 minutes, and was eventually directed to the right window, where the window person printed and stamped and bustled around and handed me back a bunch of papers that I guess I'm supposed to mail in. (I actually *know* I'm supposed to mail it in, but only because I asked, "Am I supposed to mail this in myself, then?" My rant about the customer service values of the university bureaucracy is a matter for another time.)

BUT! Yesterday I arrived home to find a letter from the Direct Loan program stating

Electronic debiting of your Direct Loan payment is being halted temporarily because we granted a deferment...on your Direct Loan(s).

Now, I'm going to call the Direct Loan people just to make sure, but I think this means that my new Direct Loan somehow triggered the deferment on my old Direct Loan automatically.

Amazing, no?

Tort of the Week: The Reasonable Person, Reasonable Child, Reasonable Insane Person...

2005-10-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

OK, I combed my torts reading this week for an amusing tort, but...none. This week's reading is about the "reasonably prudent person" standard for negligence. (Nutshell: If you're acting at least as carefully as the "reasonably prudent person" would under the same circumstances, you're not negligent.)

So, while I was in the kitchen baking banana bread, I was feeling all guilty about my lack of a good tort this week, and thinking about the reading, I did come up with this interesting object for discussion:

There are limited exceptions to the "reasonably prudent person" standard. For instance, children are generally not expected to act as the RPP would. (However, when operating dangerous machinery, children may be held to the adult RPP.) There are no exceptions for the exceptionally clumsy or scatterbrained. And generally, there are no RPP exceptions for the mentally ill.

From Section 283B of the 2nd Restatement of Torts (1965):

Unless the actor is a child, his insanity or other mental deficiency does not relieve the actor from liability for conduct which does not conform to the standard of a reasonable man under like circumstances.

The Restatement theorizes that the mentally ill are not exempt from the reasonable person standard in part because of "The belief that their liability will mean that those who have charge of them or their estates will be stimulated to look after them, keep them in order, and see that they do no harm."

Now, two things:

Wouldn't the above also argue for holding children to the RPP? I suppose the rationale is that since children are "the future and whatever" (as a classmate of mine put it last week), we have a broader social interest in allowing them more freedom to err.
Doesn't the idea that someone has "charge of" the mentally ill seem kind of quaint in these days of wholesale deinstitutionalization?

Tort of the week: Williams v. Jordan (1961)

2005-10-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

[I anticipate this will be sustainable as a weekly feature, as the casebook, being a casebook, is full of these.]

Prosser p. 134:

"Defendant parks his car on the edge of a city street without a curb, in front of a house where a mother and a 13-month old toddler are sitting on a front porch. He goes across the street to visit a friend there. He comes back in 5 minutes, gets in the car and drives off. There is a bump that he thought was a paving stone, but that turned out to be the toddler who had crawled under the car. Was he negligent? (Williams v. Jordan, 208 Tenn. 456 (1961))"

First guess discussion:

I am anticipating that some of you may want to play along at home, so I'll outline a few concepts here.

Basically, for there to be a cause of action for negligence, there must be:

A DUTY to use reasonable care.
A BREACH of that duty.
A reasonably close CAUSAL connection between the breach and the resulting injury.
DAMAGE resulting from the breach.

To me, this case fails on duty: Can a person exercising reasonable care be in any way said to have an affirmative duty to check for toddlers under his car? I think NO. Case should have been dismissed before even going to a jury as there is no triable issue of fact.

Let's see what the appeals court said.... [Pause for LexisNexis search]

YEAH!! Suit dismissed!!!

"A driver * * * is under no legal obligation to make a search around and under his car 'lest a child too young for discretion and undirected by parents had tucked herself away in an obscure place, beyond the casual and convenient notice of the driver.'"

However, some of the LexisNexis notes surrounding the opinion note that IF clearly unsupervised toddlers were visibly swarming around your car at the time you were starting to drive away, ordinary care would generally require you to make sure none of them were under there before you took off.

And also, Lexis flags the case as possibly having some adverse history, meaning that some other court somewhere may have decided that you do have an affirmative duty to check for toddlers under there. Or not. I haven't learned enough about Lexis to be able to find the adverse history yet. Maybe next week.

And so ends our Tort of the Week. Let's all be careful out there.

Something is making me uneasy this week. Something that I probably should have considered earlier.

2005-09-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

So, Law. What is Law about?

(Pause for reflection)

Clearly, there are many possible answers to this question.

But one answer is: Law is about things that could go wrong. Further, the practice of law is to some extent about anticipating things that could go wrong, predicting their consequences, and attempting to head them off via various maneuvers.

In other words, Law is about worrying.

Those of you who know me know that a tremendous amount of my psychic energy over the last few years has gone into resisting, unraveling, and generally just trying to get the fuck over my anxiety, part of which is probably a hard-wired thing about how I respond to stimulus in the world, a lot of which comes from my mom and the ways she chose to use me as a vessel into which to pour her own historical and personal trauma (by way of teaching me how to "survive" in a hostile world). Despite the fact that I've been dealt a pretty damn good hand in this life (smarts, general good health, economic stability, humor, and some degree of charm), I have spent far too many years of my life seeing the world as a dangerous place where it's best to trust no one and you have to fight to survive.

Ringing any bells?

I'm good at this, but it is also going to be hard to play.

Shingles at last, shingles at last, thank God almighty....

2005-09-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

(Apologies to Martin Luther King.)

The pre-stained #1 rejoined and rebutted western red cedar sidewall shingles are finally here!

This presents me with a number of issues:

#1 Getting them into the basement, because each box says "keep dry until installed." Luckily, the nice guy from the freight company, seeing that working alone I would have to schlep each box over to the basement door, hop down into the basement, pick up the box, put it down, climb back out of the basement, and repeat the whole thing, helped me tremendously by schlepping the boxes over while I stayed in the basement and stacked. This plan was almost nixed by Miz Biz (now known, in true 1L style, as "my little tortious liability") and her desire to attack. I whisked her into the basement where she could do no harm to the plaintiff.

#2 The shingles are stained with an oil-based stain, which is still curing, thus they stink. They're piled right below my bedroom. I can smell the fumes inside. This is the kind of thing that gives me a migraine.

#3 The shingles cannot be installed until we get a few dry days.

#4 Because there's only one coat of stain on the shingles, they're a bit blotchy. (See picture 2.) Ideally, I would throw an additional coat of stain on them immediately after installation, but that means I need at least two sequential weekends of dry weather.

So, my prediction is: barring a very nice October, no shingling until next spring.

But October's often nice, right? Right??

Accident prone

2005-09-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

Does everyone else go through phases where they're abnormally accident prone? This week has been a doozy for me.

First, Sunday night I nearly lobotomized myself on the corner of a kitchen cabinet door. I still have a sore spot right above my forehead, in my part.

Then, Tuesday night, while walking back to my car after having had 1.5 beers at the Elysian, I caught one of my goddam Dansko clogs on a piece of uneven sidewalk and fell right down. I think injury was prevented only because the large amount of carbon dioxide expelled by my swearing created a kind of air cushion, slowing my descent. (Plausible, right?)

Then, Wednesday morning while putting my book bag into my carpool buddy's car, I bonked my forehead on the protruding end of his snowboard rack. It still hurts.