i know what i did next summer

wait, no i don't. but many of my peers are well on their way. it is hardly half way through fucking october and already my inbox is filling up with events concerning what i should presumably be planning on already. this kind of shit just drives me up a wall. oh, it is also time to start freaking out about exams - they're ONLY two months away, after all. i'd rather be in the timbers of fennario worrying about the dire wolf. either way, i get the distinct feeling that my suppers will be comprised of a bottle of red whiskey on a semi-regular basis.
but let's have some good law school news. i recently read a case known as wagon mound (1). i find it great that such could be the name of a party in a case, but better still is the fact that it refers to a boat called the s.s. wagon mound (there is also a place called wagon mound new mexico). what the fuck is up with that? and it was an "oil burning vessel". what, was this thing powered by lamp oil? seems a little unlikely, but i have much to learn about ships. admirality law is still one venue i think i would dig, but if i wanted to get into it i really should have gone to tulane.
philly, of course, has many of its own benefits, including being much bigger, not recently devastated, and no so hurricane-prone. the only hurricanes i may encounter are the dylan track and the malt liquor. i'm sure public transport has its interesting elements wherever one is, but i had a couple odd ones recently. the other day this chick got on the subway with a dog. think it was a pomeranian. seriously. she was just holding onto it in her arm, little girl couldn't have been more then 13 or so, just her and the dog. she had a weird purse with some netting on some parts, looked like dog and purse may have been compatible, but it was definitely not in the purse. or the sandwich. just there, hanging out. a while back i saw a crazy looking dude get off the subway with the prettiest kitten since mine wrapped up in the bottom of his shirt. real kitten too, so it was almost as little as mine. kitties gotta get places too. aside from animals, today's subway ride home had its own interesting element. i got on and four young men began to make fun of my appearance without any pretense of keeping me from hearing. i guess if comparing a random white guy to two well known white guys is so funny that it has you falling out of both seats you were occupying, you must have really needed the chuckle, so i won't begrudge it. first comparison was silent bob, which is of course pretty far from accurate, but really not inherently offensive. but "drew carey with a ponytail" was enough to bring the pulse up a little. then i thought a little and decided that while they chose to laugh at me for a way i choose to appear at this time (well, i don't actively choose to be corpulent enough to draw the drew carey comparison - i hope i haven't gained that much of it back), they have to deal with a lifetime of people doing something more subtle and sinister than making ill-advised likenesses to celebrities based on a way they look but never chose to. and concluded there was really no reason to be upset - i had nothing to prove to these four young men. it is sad and primitive and human that superficial differences in natural appearance shuffle the vast majority of people in this country into a lifetime compulsory cooperation with a largely separate and relatively narrow culture. the result is unavoidable misunderstanding. america has a unique problem in that the tradition of the geographic area's culture has been devastated and while such cultures were far from monolithic, the replacement result is far more disparate. and it never seems to get better; few things really change. i had always found it helpful and admittedly occasionally preferable to term things as class-based with the assumption that it was more fundamental. but that isn't how things work; class cannot trump race and neither can race trump class, the two exist in interplay. a few weeks back i read an incredibly well-written article about michael vick, even though i don't give a shit about american football. but the vick thing has been labeled as 'racialized'. while this cannot be true since race was always already a factor without anyone slapping any labels anywhere, the article was really chiefly about race in relation to the vick issue. it was helpful to enhance one's understanding, i felt. and written by a temple alum, no less, guess he's a writer for espn. but the one thing that has stuck with me the most about the article was when he addressed the question of class standing, considering the millions vick has made, allowing him to retain high-powered, high-priced counsel not commeasurate with what is provided for the average victim of racial profiling. this writer pointed out that vick had transcended class bounds in the financial sense only, which at the end of the day carries a minute portion of weight when compared to the true realization of class ascention, which in his case would still never fail to take his race into account, but still. i don't claim to have "the race issue" all figured out, but i think that i've come a ways toward realizing that no matter what, it doesn't go away in society as i know it. would these four people have made fun of someone bearing more surface resemblance to themselves in the same manner? perhaps, probably not, and almost certainly not by making the worst appearance comparisons i've ever heard. does it matter? probably not a whole lot. what is my point? i don't really know for sure; this is just something that happened to me and this is some of what i have been thinking about it.
most of what goes on in the city of any interest has nothing to do with me, of course. but it might interest me. over the past couple days i've been seeing this plane flying above the city, one of those little planes flying a big ass banner, just like back in the day. still see that sort of thing sometimes. this one doesn't really bear much of a message, though i don't think. it always catches me off guard, though, because i usually see the side of the banner where things are backwards, and i always think this banner has a picture of che guevara on it, which is quite confusing. and then i get a better look and realize that the picture is supposed to be one of those cave men from the geico ads. i guess they have a t.v. show now or something? a movie? anyway, backwards cave man looks like che. i swear. one of the upshot of being on broad street is you get to see a little of everything going past in traffic, sometimes vehicles bumping music so loud you can tell through the concrete walls when inside the school. but while i was outside on the stairs today a car was stopped in traffic. this car stood out not only because it was very sleek sharp and slick - an all-black grand prix, probably an '04, with really tasteful rims, but mostly because the high-quality high-volume stereo system was BLASTING milli vanilli. true story. girl, you know it's true. true that whoever that crazy bastard was got that song stuck in my head.
remember how i mentioned i was looking forward to going to that debate on drug policy on tuesday? no? well, i did, and i was. but i turned out my business basics class was meeting during the same time; it is taking an hour out of our lunch break for the next few weeks so that it will end sooner. take the good with the bad. irksome as that is, on tuesdays we actually have nothing mandatory from eleven until one-thirty, with school-wide break not beginning til noon, so there is still plenty of time for lunch. so on this tuesday i decided to comfort my lack of a free lunch which is the guaranteed benefit of almost any event put on by an organization with some semblance of funding with a lunch i could hopefully enjoy. this meant a return to the legendary crepe truck. honestly, this experience did not go as well as the first. the first one was delicious, but a little crowded, so i crossed a couple veggies of the list, and apparently "no broccoli, no spinach" can be translated as "no broccoli, no spinach, so please load the thing with onions, peppers, and unidentifiable yellowish-green chunks of something else". i got this gyro crepe, and i won't make the mistake again. i don't know what they were using, but it was unlike even the most unfortunate gyro meat i've ever encountered. it wasn't all bad altogether, but it wasn't nearly as good as i had hoped. perhaps tatziki sauce is truly the rug that ties the gyro room together; and that was certainly lacking and the "zesty feta spread" was not an adequate substitute. ah well, many more crepes wait to be experienced. this won't stop me at all; i know they can be great and they leave me full for like six, seven hours.
this afternoon, however, i did not have anything cutting into the normally-free time enjoyed by all students, and was thus able to attend some other event with a purported free lunch, and also a free book. the good news was the same as the bad news: this was a talk about doing well on exams, given by an odd-looking fellow whose last name was, believe it or not, whitebread. fairly accurate. not only was a free lunch promised, but also a free book; a copy of one he has written about taking law school exams. when i showed up i did get said book, and also a free bar/bri t-shirt (they were putting the talk on; bar/bri is a bar review service demanding several thousand dollars of tuition and they're already after us. here i thought it was bad to feel pressure about exams two months away and summer employment two seasons away, but to worry about the bar way more than two years before the fact? damn). unfortunately, i was mostly interested in getting a free lunch, which was nowhere in sight. fortunately, the talk turned out to be way better than i had expected. the speaker is a prof at USC law school and has been a law prof for like 40 years. pleasant old man in a bow tie, incredibly enthusiastic in his manner and about his work. he mentioned philadelphia and temple over and over, and some people poked fun at this, but i was kind of impressed. he goes to like 60 law schools between start and thanksgiving while continuing full time prof work, and i have to credit him for knowing where he was, even if he may have been reminding himself. he's good buddies with my criminal law prof though, and i find that good will spills over easily in this line of work, so i'm sure he did his best. seemed helpful to me, even though thinking about exams, especially this early, is particularly nauseating. he got a lot of laughs from the crowd, mostly by being excitable and strange, a little juvenile but seemingly the right tonic for 1L students. and then, at the end, on the way out, they had the pizza they had promised. papa john's even, which was surprising, since the ubiquitous pizza for meetings of this sort is city view, more on that later. but papa john's has never seemed better than it did at that point today. sometimes, the little things are all you have to get by and seemingly all you need.