grand re-opening

at my new location around the corner. haven't been able to post in a couple days due to being busy and in and out internet. it will be all good when i get the wifi modem that was shipped to my old place unsuccessfully, returned to the ups station waaaay down in south philly where i did not get an opportunity to go at the same time as feeling like going, and then all of a sudden they sent it to some place called round rock, texas, where it had never been before. i don't know why there of all the places, but that's where it is now. so i tried to use my shipping number from my confirmation email to re-route the thing, but no, that wasn't the right number. they wanted a number off one of the little slips they leave when they show up at the most inconvenient time possible and you are of course not there. i thought i had one somewhere, but it was packed up in all my shit. my most recent move has brought one of these to light, and so i should be able to make arrangements sometime soon. until then, the connection is usually decent enough to get by. except right now when i'm trying to do some instant messaging. of course.
anyway, the place is great, plenty of room for myself and los gatos. got a nice set-up in the upstairs in one room, using the smaller one for storage for now, although i don't need it for that, plenty of closet space downstairs. the room i hang out in has all my ikea furniture finally set up, and i must say i dig it, most especially the poang chair i'm presently chilling in. the bookcase type thing is also sweet, i have it aligned horizontally, two rows of four cubes, they fit vinyl perfectly and i have the record and cd players and speakers on top of the shelf. beats the old set up on janky chairs with no backs. it felt really good to break out the records; going a few weeks without got real old real fast. really hit the spot when i got it going again a couple days ago. lots of music i had been missing, kicked things off with lou reed's "transformer"... total fuckin classic. but the room has a great feel to it, all up high and apart from everything, much different than being in the middle of a bunch of rowhouses normally is. i should have taken one of the thursday signs i guess, cause this room is totally worthy of being thursday's east. business hasn't exactly picked up just yet, but i'm sure i'll meet some people around here eventually. no one i go to school with lives in this part of the city, they all live in center city or way out in like mt airy or manayunk or even further. a lot of people drive in; i couldn't imagine doing that from far out because most of them wind up on broad for like at least 15 blocks which probably takes an hour in itself. traffic is always fucked on that street, but hey, it is a main drag in a big city, so as much should be expected. the only person from my school i've met out here is a guy who dropped out of the law program. cool dude, and did live here when he went too. hopefully i fare a little bit better than that; i'm sure the neighborhood wasn't the problem. the neighborhood is really sweet. it was the part of philly i knew best when i came out here, and after checking out a few more neighborhoods in a city comprised of them i really think i still like this one the best. it is appealing in many respects. you can check out the wikipedia entry for it, or not, it is called university city. better than the entry is a article it links to which i'll just throw here. honestly a really informative and fairly accurate piece of journalism, i must say.
i finished my first legal memorandum writing assignment this afternoon. i've had a couple other written assignments but they were in the dreaded group format. yeah, we had a guy who didn't do shit, which is frustrating, but on the other hand it was all stuff one needs to work on in order to obtain an understanding of how to do legal research and writing. i am very satisfied with the general pedagogy of the course, which indeed is named legal research and writing. hopefully my memo doesn't get totally eviscerated. in all honesty i feel like i did a pretty good job, and that generally works out okay. i actually worked on it over a few days and completed it before the deadline was imminent and looming, which i believe is a first for me, coming from the school of classical procrastination. on the other hand, i've never written a legal memorandum before and it has some unique demands in regard to format and even more in regard to citations. the good news is that i really shouldn't feel too bad no matter what happens because this is a new thing i am learning to do, and the professor obviously knows that. also, the more i get the feel of school and my pers, the more i feel like i am right where i've always been academically. i try to remind myself that i am a reasonably intelligent and articulate person with a history of success and that there is no way i could really wind up on the bottom of the pile. not that my classmates aren't smart people; they are, but i think it will be the same old story with a mix of people who work hard and people who are naturally gifted and people who get by. after all, there are lots of lawyers out there, and they cover a broad spectrum of aptitude, intelligence, and ability. i'm not trying to stroke my ego here; you're just witnessing some self-therapy and i apologize. but i really hope to communicate something about the law school experience with this blog which is why i keep writing about it. if people always ask me on the phone how school is going, i take that to mean people have at least some interest in what law school is like. and obviously my experience will be far from monolithic, but it is a narrative for me to go back and look at and you to reflect on as you see fit. a certain perception surrounds the profession and has for centuries upon memory, but everyone in the modern era who has been a lawyer has most likely experienced law school in one way or another, and it is a special environment, just like business school or graduate school. i wonder if there are many people who attend business school just for the interest of learning about business; people who have no interest in climbing some corporate ladder or even calling the shots at a socially just and very likable non-profit. not that i am necessarily attending solely to learn, but it really tops my list. i'll probably be some sort of a lawyer for some period of time, but the details there are very sketchy at this point, and i think that is the way it should be. i've got three years to go, and that is a damn long time. think how your life was three years ago. it might not have been all that different, but if you really think about it many things have changed. you're still you, but experience just builds upon itself inevitably to produce new and different perceptions and opinions. ah, listen to me gettin all philisophical and whatnot. i really don't think a grad program in philosophy would have been for me; there really is a big gap between being interested in the material and being interested in following a program of study with all attendant hassles. i miss the approach, though. my schooling now really operates as a professional program, not as an extended humanities study. there are lots of big meta questions i think about while i sit in class, but i honestly think i would get shut down pretty quickly if i started asking questions about societal relations with the law on a purely theoretical scale. there's probably more room for that sort of thing in upper level classes. i kinda hope so anyway. but enough about law school; you're probably not gonna go. but if you don't know what to do with yourself, take a practice lsat, you can download one at lsac.org, and you'll probably do just fine. good enough to get into a decent law school anyway. it's something to do. or at least it was for me. but enough about all that. there's more to life.
like music. i just finished listening to a godspeed you! black emporer show. i haven't given those guys a shot since senior year of high school when i was like yeah, whatever. now, different story. i can dig it the most. too bad i'm late in the game like always, guess they are on indefinite hiatus, with certain plans to reconvene at some point. i decided to check them out again cause i was dicking around on archive.org downloading shows of bands that are gonna play at that venue i'm excited about (not crane jackson's fountain street theater; that is where i'm performing my dance quintet, you know, my cycle) and after i exhausted the list i just grabbed more because i was getting good speeds. i've got my ticket for tea leaf green tomorrow and i'm pretty excited about that. i saw a show from a couple days ago posted on etree this morning and they did an opening set as coffee bean brown, the name they use when they play acoustic. that would be pretty cool, and not surprising as the venue seems to book concurrent shows at the downstairs and the upstairs. i was surprised to learn that upenn owns the place, or at least i assume so, the name of the place is copyrighted by the trustees of the university of pennsylvania. oh well, they apparently book sweet shit. really diggin' this agent moosehead stuff i've got; they are philly's macpodz. with a better understanding of setlist theory, which is very important. if i could study setlist theory in a professional setting, my life would be complete. also got some lotus, and the recording sucked, gotta try a different show. or the alternate source for that one. but it was listenable despite the recording; i needed a little electronica. sound tribe sector nine and the disco biscuits do it better though. i can't wait for some sick db shit, those guys play philly a lot; they all were upenn students, which cracks me the fuck up. funny how the east and west coasts of the country spawned two bands so similar in idea but so different in practice; really speaks to the effect region can have. the difference actually reminds me of phish and the dead. bands two people unfailingly associate with one another who do something similar but sound nothing alike. if you've missed it before now somehow, check out the ultimate site delineating difference between things that are superficially similar. good times. all that aside, i'm actually diggin some live little feat on vinyl right now. time and a place for everything, you know?
life, in the end, is mostly alright for me these days. i have everything i need to enjoy life except for the glaring hole left by leaving (almost spelled that leavening - watch out folks) my friends and family. i hope to meet somebody, anybody tomorrow at tea leaf green. gotta be some good people in there; i can spot the difference between a hippy wearing the uniform and a decent person, i hope. i've seen enough small-time jam shows in bars to have a pretty good cross-section of people, and many have spoken with me. i hold my usual position of just hearing them out. i can think what i want, but i try not to ever be too sure. we'll call it a post before things get out of hand.