ready to get this show on the mofo road. at least i'm going to be more on point for this last exam: when i was awakened by a power saw nearby this morning, i didn't cuss and wonder why someone was doing something noisy before i was up, i immediately ran through the significant points of a case dealing with power tools. this was succinctly followed by thinking no, i'm wrong, there is a power saw running making the noise. this is more like a different case because it is not pneumatic tools causing arthritis. then i thought about how strange it was that law school had taken over even my semi-conscious mind and how i used pneumatic tools when i worked in that factory for like a month or whatever. i honestly don't know which is worse, but neither proved to be very inspiring.
i am currently sitting around at my sister's place, not focusing on studying. i came over to print my big ass outline and borrow a bag from ben, and realized i should also do early check-in for my flight. however, i was under the impression that i could do that within 48 hours, as opposed to the 24 the website is presently insisting on. so i've just kind of been chilling for a couple hours, another forty minutes to go or something, but i'm not gonna leave and come back. it isn't that far of a walk, of course, but it is cold and there is nothing i would be doing at home that i can't do/haven't been doing here except for dealing with a shitty internet connection instead of basking in the glorious functionality of this one. although my bit torrents are still moving like molasses... oh well. oo, i am also looking forward to taking a vacuum cleaner home with me, they apparently have an extra here. so in a while i will be that guy walking down a sidewalk with a laptop bag, empty suitcase, and a vacuum cleaner. i expect it to look pretty sweet. in my mind i just thought of myself in stride looking like that behind the beatles on the cover of abbey road.
i just got an email about a law book sale coming up in january. great, another thing i will need to spend money i don't have on, nice to be reminded. the best part is that they are calling it a "law book faire", that's right, with the old school spelling. first, there is nothing festive about an organized market for text books. it is just as boring as the regular book store, which does not claim to be a book shoppe. second, where do they get off using that e on the end of fair? just being in the northeast is not enough to append extraneous es. i guess it could have been worse. they could have used "fayre". i'm not going unless guinevere shows up and sings me a request to bring her there.
as much as i am looking forward to going home, i'm also trying to brace myself for disappointment. this is not a dig on anyone else, it is simply a realization that i have perhaps placed too high an expectation on the experience. i left there because i wasn't happy with it most of the time, and it probably won't be that different. this is the same reason law school has been such a disappointment: i pinned too high of hopes on it for changing things. one can shift scenery and some significant settings, but the real problems don't just go away on their own. sad but true. all too true.
i was glad to see dekkinga scored tickets for that big wilco run in chicago, but unfortunately i was not in his shoes in terms of awareness that 2008 dates had been announced, and so the show here was sold out before i even knew it was going to happen. the consolation prize is that tapes from when wilco plays at home are usually fantastic sources, and the threat of serious set list variability has me quite excited about the series. i haven't been to a show in ages. new clutch dates just came out and they are playing NOWHERE CLOSE. absolute bullshit; they used to play the trocadero like every fucking tour. until i moved here. i'll at least get to see the hippo on new years when i go home. at the new founders, where you cannot smoke. absolute bollocks. might go see la famiglia if i'm feeling frisky, will probably go see covert operations because i'm self destructive. well, we've almost reached the magic 24 hours before flight time, and i guess i've written enough optimistic and uplifting things for one post. gonna go home and try to stay on task with the outline from heaven via hell. torts: it's what's for dinner. but not in cake form.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Thursday, December 13, 2007
better all the time
once, word crashed on me and i lost everything i did one day. that day was today. even though the program autosaves constantly, i somehow cannot recover any of it. just tried to undo one autoformat and boom, program freaked. awesome. i guess it doesn't erase what i learned by typing things out, but it would have been nice to have been able to go back and look at it as intended. i am reminded of a favorite catchphrase of mine from a couple years ago: "GOD DAMMIT!"
freakin out
i'm not feeling real great about tomrrow's exam. i have had a terrible time trying to stay focused on studying, and there is just so much detail that i really worry about being able to pull together what the prof is looking for. i certainly have not lived up to his lofty standard of virtual enslavement to law school, and i have a sinking feeling that this test is designed to expose precisely that. shouldn't be too tough to do that to me early tomorrow morning. we'll see. i'm fine with here are the facts, this is the law, how should things shake down, but i'm not so good on here are the facts, tell me about three different jurisdictions' positions on this particular crime and the model penal code provision chapter and verse, tell me how it will shake down in each, and then tell me which one is the best and why. i can do all that except busing out word for word statutes. there's a hell of a lot of those things out there. laws change all the time, and lawyers presumably look up plenty of shit every time the write a brief or whatever. so i really don't see how expecting people to regurgitate snippets of law is an enterprise which actually teaches people about the law write large or how to be a better lawyer. cases are not won or lost based on memorization skills as far as i am aware. all that being said, memorization has been a strong point for me, and if this were an ordinary format test with fill in the blank, short answer and the like, i would feel differently. but it is gonna be more along the lines of three big ass essays, which kind of changes the dynamic. the tension is between focusing on the bigger picture and getting down and dirty in the details, because one particular word in one applicable statute can mean the difference between an acquittal and a death sentence. no one is going to kill me based on how i perform on the exam, but the prospect is still pretty daunting. daunting enough that i am typing this up rather than attempting to engage the material. at this point i have two dead reference books on top of my criminal law text, so i should probably get back to it for a while.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
looking back
"badass sunset" should be a cocktail of some sort, an answer to the tequila sunrise. although tequila is sort of badass in the first place. "badass sunset" sounds more like a drink that leads to passed out rather than pissed off. my most prolific foray into drink-inventing thus far has been the rather unappealing and hence unpopular "bird flu", which i believe contained barenjager, 151, orange juice, and sprite, maybe something else with booze in it too. let's just say i'm open to suggestions regarding the content of a potential badass sunset.
yesterday, i had my first for reals exam. it was contracts, but unfortunately it did not involve linoleum rugs in any way. all in all i feel pretty good about it, wound up hitting the word limit on the nose, not that it matters much. didn't quite use all four hours, and i don't really feel bad about it. i'm more concerned about the next one, which is limited to three hours. these aren't ordinary "do i know it or not" kind of questions; more like, what all am i supposed to talk about here, and how much. the upshot of the memo/exam crunch has been to take my mind off of the extremely troubling meta concerns i have about going to law school/being a lawyer. this respite was rudely interrupted by an email from a friend and classmate who will not drop out but noted that the link he sent me made him want to. i'm not the person who needs encouragement about dropping out. this link wasn't all that disturbing when viewed in a vacuum, but it was enough to throw my mind back into a mode of serious skepticism and doubt. the link included a distribution graph of salaries for lawyers and there really are mostly two choices: making less than a decent factory wage by working your ass off within reasonable hours doing something noble and never being able to escape your crippling debt or get a job with a big firm where you make an assload of money and never have any time to enjoy it while in the meantime getting caught up in firm culture and kissing unfathomable amounts of ass. this is the last thing i needed to be reminded of right about now. i was kinda of cruising along, thinking well, i can probably deal with this law school bullshit, and i could probably be some kind of lawyer maybe. nope. doesn't work like that.
yesterday also afforded me the opportunity to enjoy a nice barley wine down at the local brewpub. it really hit the spot, but the beer itself didn't go anywhere remarkable, kind of dominated by a grape flavor. it was also only like a month and a half past brewed date; perhaps it would improve with a little more age. i also enjoyed a rye ipa which, while refreshing, mostly made me look forward to sipping red's rye in a week or so. these folks over here could use a lesson in hop schedule, and probably hop bill in general. seemed like this place probably went with the more economic high-alpha stuff and kind of skimped on the aromatics. for a second i thought spell check marked that, but no, i had originally just typed it wrong. anyway, it was like they thought simcoes could cover all the bases based on their versatility. news, people: this does not work; just makes it seem like you're brewing for people who don't know better. of course i can't really bitch at this point: my current beer experience is rooted in seeing what pouring from a forty to a pint glass does for pbr. mostly i just can't believe how clear it is; never looks like this at mulligan's. i mean, i know they've probably never cleaned the damn lines, but it is a little disconcerting to know so much shit gets in there that it comes out an opaque pale gold rather than looking like severely diluted apple juice. i have also discovered that pabst is probably better when you don't get the aroma. it smells on clothes that got spilled on the night before. this is something of which i am painfully aware.
the vast majority of time since my previous serious post last week has been spent on the clumsy, painful, grinding process of attempted studying. although it was not all for naught with contracts; something in the process helped me along. on saturday, though, i did kill off a good chunk of the day going to the casino protest to observe. i got down there pretty early, hoping to poke around the area as i had not been up that way. the particular part of the neighborhood i was in did not have a whole lot to look at, however, mostly little-utilized warehouse space and the like. lots of little chunks of trolley track and obvious places where it had been paved over. they're gonna regret doing that one day. i took the el to get there, and for the first time i was actually elevated on the el, and that was kind of a neat view out the window, racing along next to the expressway. i went to where we were supposed to meet, which was not too long of a walk from the el stop. the weather was alright at first, but it just seemed to get colder and more windy, which was probably more perception based on standing outside for a few hours in a row. anyway, when i got there, the only people were one of the chief organizers and some guy. in a little while a few more of the movers and shakers behind the event showed up. from what i heard, the game plan had been kind of open until the very moment people got there, so it was neat to hear them decide how things were going to go down. i guess the original hope (and future plan) was to actually go sit-in on the site of the proposed casino. however, the developers and investors behind the project had asserted that they would utilize legal authority to arrest any people who went on the land and charde them with a third degree misdemeanor or something like that. the long in the short of it was anyone who got cuffed was not going anywhere until monday morning when they could be arraigned, and i don't think anyone had made weekend plans to sit in the lockup. thus, no one actually went on the property, and things were pretty low key, not counting the overwhelming amount of cops they had around. better safe than sorry from their standpoint i guess, but they had like 60 cops. probably only like 50 protesters made it down that day. the observers got there so early that for a while there was roughly one of us for every protester. i guess drexel gives people pro bono credit for doing this, so almost all the people there were drexel folk. i was the lone representative for my school, which is supposedly a model of NLG activity. there was the NLG observer chair dude, who is pretty cool, and one NLG dude who is pretty righteous who always does these things. wish i could say i felt the same way about other NLG folks i've met; most of them have been, well, lawyers in the pejorative sense of the term. oh and the cool rutgers girl was there too. the fact that she was present did not present me with a whole lot more to say to her, however. not that it matters; dating people in serious grad study pursuits is not always so easy, and if both parties are up to such, well, good luck i guess. not something i am going to chase after at this juncture. anyway, although my presence at the thing didn't wind up being too important, the experience was not a total loss. i got to talk to strangers, which is a hobby (whoops typed hoppy instead of hobby at first, still dreaming about red's rye) of mine. i talked to a very inspiring and active person who showed up in a powered wheelchair thing. her speech was a little difficult to understand at times, especially with traffic, but she didn't mind if you said you didn't catch it. she had some pretty cool stories about blocking offending bus drivers and various protests. another person was a lifetime resident of the area they want to put the casino in. he had a ton to say, but i was most interested in what he had to say about this boat. there is a river boat moored where the people were protesting, and it is one sorry sight. all listing off to one side, windows all smashed out, generally looking dilapidated as hell. looks like something out of a stephen king novel, a la abandoned amusement park. the dude told me it had been there and looking like that since he was twelve, which he roughly calculated to date to the early to mid seventies. i just can't believe something like that has sat someplace like that for so long. well, i guess this is believable, but something about it really struck me for whatever reason. the guy had a real cool perspective on all the various shit we talked about, someone who knows what they think and knows why but is pretty sure they've got it all right. at any rate, i was not unhappy i had the experience. if nothing else, the observing gig always provides a veritable feast in the food for thought category, lots of real life sociology and psychology things, and philosophy is always a given.
the only other recent highlight i may have missed was a good meal. got some goat the other night in some kind of "west indies" sauce. lots of rice and beans. some fried plantains. shit was delicious. i talked to the dude at the place about it to build some good will, and he got real excited. apparently goat is definitely his favorite meat: some people think it is not good meat, but it is the best. i asked him about where they get it, and he gave me the regional breakdown for where to get goat. at like half the places, you pick a goat. like a live goat that is there and you see and you say i would like this goat, or more precisely, i would like this goat butchered for me, and that is how you get your goat meat. sounds like quite an adventure. i thought that this was my first time enjoying goat, but my sister (who shared this dish with me; only way to order it is as a massive platter thing) informed me we had gotten it before when we went out for ethiopian once. all i knew was that the food then was delicious and i was not in a hurry to wonder what it was. if you have not had the pleasure, i would say that goat is really pretty close to beef. more like beef than it is like, say, lamb.
in music news, go ahead... ask me about brent mydland. feel free, any time. i have some things to say about all that. in fact, i have a lot of things to say about that. and if ya wanna know ya just got ta ask.
this is going to be one long week waiting for things to wrap up. i already don't give a fuck about my last exam. well, that is not really true, but i give a minimal fuck about it, minimal enough that i would just as soon take it the day after the next one and have it over. that class was a hopeless clusterfuck of cloudy terminology and poorly articulated theory, but i kicked the shit out of the practice exam and the real one is apparently open book. not that the book was great, but it will provide plenty of fodder to yammer on about in a manner which conveys that yes, i went to class and i have as good of an idea about what was supposed to be taught as anyone. unfortunately i have like five days where i will feel like i'm supposed to study but will be wholly unable to accomplish anything meaningful of the sort. that will probably call for more pabst. and general time killing, so this is the place you will want to look if you're up to more of the same. if you are or will be in west michigan, think of something fun and memorable we can do over the break. i'll be there, man.
yesterday, i had my first for reals exam. it was contracts, but unfortunately it did not involve linoleum rugs in any way. all in all i feel pretty good about it, wound up hitting the word limit on the nose, not that it matters much. didn't quite use all four hours, and i don't really feel bad about it. i'm more concerned about the next one, which is limited to three hours. these aren't ordinary "do i know it or not" kind of questions; more like, what all am i supposed to talk about here, and how much. the upshot of the memo/exam crunch has been to take my mind off of the extremely troubling meta concerns i have about going to law school/being a lawyer. this respite was rudely interrupted by an email from a friend and classmate who will not drop out but noted that the link he sent me made him want to. i'm not the person who needs encouragement about dropping out. this link wasn't all that disturbing when viewed in a vacuum, but it was enough to throw my mind back into a mode of serious skepticism and doubt. the link included a distribution graph of salaries for lawyers and there really are mostly two choices: making less than a decent factory wage by working your ass off within reasonable hours doing something noble and never being able to escape your crippling debt or get a job with a big firm where you make an assload of money and never have any time to enjoy it while in the meantime getting caught up in firm culture and kissing unfathomable amounts of ass. this is the last thing i needed to be reminded of right about now. i was kinda of cruising along, thinking well, i can probably deal with this law school bullshit, and i could probably be some kind of lawyer maybe. nope. doesn't work like that.
yesterday also afforded me the opportunity to enjoy a nice barley wine down at the local brewpub. it really hit the spot, but the beer itself didn't go anywhere remarkable, kind of dominated by a grape flavor. it was also only like a month and a half past brewed date; perhaps it would improve with a little more age. i also enjoyed a rye ipa which, while refreshing, mostly made me look forward to sipping red's rye in a week or so. these folks over here could use a lesson in hop schedule, and probably hop bill in general. seemed like this place probably went with the more economic high-alpha stuff and kind of skimped on the aromatics. for a second i thought spell check marked that, but no, i had originally just typed it wrong. anyway, it was like they thought simcoes could cover all the bases based on their versatility. news, people: this does not work; just makes it seem like you're brewing for people who don't know better. of course i can't really bitch at this point: my current beer experience is rooted in seeing what pouring from a forty to a pint glass does for pbr. mostly i just can't believe how clear it is; never looks like this at mulligan's. i mean, i know they've probably never cleaned the damn lines, but it is a little disconcerting to know so much shit gets in there that it comes out an opaque pale gold rather than looking like severely diluted apple juice. i have also discovered that pabst is probably better when you don't get the aroma. it smells on clothes that got spilled on the night before. this is something of which i am painfully aware.
the vast majority of time since my previous serious post last week has been spent on the clumsy, painful, grinding process of attempted studying. although it was not all for naught with contracts; something in the process helped me along. on saturday, though, i did kill off a good chunk of the day going to the casino protest to observe. i got down there pretty early, hoping to poke around the area as i had not been up that way. the particular part of the neighborhood i was in did not have a whole lot to look at, however, mostly little-utilized warehouse space and the like. lots of little chunks of trolley track and obvious places where it had been paved over. they're gonna regret doing that one day. i took the el to get there, and for the first time i was actually elevated on the el, and that was kind of a neat view out the window, racing along next to the expressway. i went to where we were supposed to meet, which was not too long of a walk from the el stop. the weather was alright at first, but it just seemed to get colder and more windy, which was probably more perception based on standing outside for a few hours in a row. anyway, when i got there, the only people were one of the chief organizers and some guy. in a little while a few more of the movers and shakers behind the event showed up. from what i heard, the game plan had been kind of open until the very moment people got there, so it was neat to hear them decide how things were going to go down. i guess the original hope (and future plan) was to actually go sit-in on the site of the proposed casino. however, the developers and investors behind the project had asserted that they would utilize legal authority to arrest any people who went on the land and charde them with a third degree misdemeanor or something like that. the long in the short of it was anyone who got cuffed was not going anywhere until monday morning when they could be arraigned, and i don't think anyone had made weekend plans to sit in the lockup. thus, no one actually went on the property, and things were pretty low key, not counting the overwhelming amount of cops they had around. better safe than sorry from their standpoint i guess, but they had like 60 cops. probably only like 50 protesters made it down that day. the observers got there so early that for a while there was roughly one of us for every protester. i guess drexel gives people pro bono credit for doing this, so almost all the people there were drexel folk. i was the lone representative for my school, which is supposedly a model of NLG activity. there was the NLG observer chair dude, who is pretty cool, and one NLG dude who is pretty righteous who always does these things. wish i could say i felt the same way about other NLG folks i've met; most of them have been, well, lawyers in the pejorative sense of the term. oh and the cool rutgers girl was there too. the fact that she was present did not present me with a whole lot more to say to her, however. not that it matters; dating people in serious grad study pursuits is not always so easy, and if both parties are up to such, well, good luck i guess. not something i am going to chase after at this juncture. anyway, although my presence at the thing didn't wind up being too important, the experience was not a total loss. i got to talk to strangers, which is a hobby (whoops typed hoppy instead of hobby at first, still dreaming about red's rye) of mine. i talked to a very inspiring and active person who showed up in a powered wheelchair thing. her speech was a little difficult to understand at times, especially with traffic, but she didn't mind if you said you didn't catch it. she had some pretty cool stories about blocking offending bus drivers and various protests. another person was a lifetime resident of the area they want to put the casino in. he had a ton to say, but i was most interested in what he had to say about this boat. there is a river boat moored where the people were protesting, and it is one sorry sight. all listing off to one side, windows all smashed out, generally looking dilapidated as hell. looks like something out of a stephen king novel, a la abandoned amusement park. the dude told me it had been there and looking like that since he was twelve, which he roughly calculated to date to the early to mid seventies. i just can't believe something like that has sat someplace like that for so long. well, i guess this is believable, but something about it really struck me for whatever reason. the guy had a real cool perspective on all the various shit we talked about, someone who knows what they think and knows why but is pretty sure they've got it all right. at any rate, i was not unhappy i had the experience. if nothing else, the observing gig always provides a veritable feast in the food for thought category, lots of real life sociology and psychology things, and philosophy is always a given.
the only other recent highlight i may have missed was a good meal. got some goat the other night in some kind of "west indies" sauce. lots of rice and beans. some fried plantains. shit was delicious. i talked to the dude at the place about it to build some good will, and he got real excited. apparently goat is definitely his favorite meat: some people think it is not good meat, but it is the best. i asked him about where they get it, and he gave me the regional breakdown for where to get goat. at like half the places, you pick a goat. like a live goat that is there and you see and you say i would like this goat, or more precisely, i would like this goat butchered for me, and that is how you get your goat meat. sounds like quite an adventure. i thought that this was my first time enjoying goat, but my sister (who shared this dish with me; only way to order it is as a massive platter thing) informed me we had gotten it before when we went out for ethiopian once. all i knew was that the food then was delicious and i was not in a hurry to wonder what it was. if you have not had the pleasure, i would say that goat is really pretty close to beef. more like beef than it is like, say, lamb.
in music news, go ahead... ask me about brent mydland. feel free, any time. i have some things to say about all that. in fact, i have a lot of things to say about that. and if ya wanna know ya just got ta ask.
this is going to be one long week waiting for things to wrap up. i already don't give a fuck about my last exam. well, that is not really true, but i give a minimal fuck about it, minimal enough that i would just as soon take it the day after the next one and have it over. that class was a hopeless clusterfuck of cloudy terminology and poorly articulated theory, but i kicked the shit out of the practice exam and the real one is apparently open book. not that the book was great, but it will provide plenty of fodder to yammer on about in a manner which conveys that yes, i went to class and i have as good of an idea about what was supposed to be taught as anyone. unfortunately i have like five days where i will feel like i'm supposed to study but will be wholly unable to accomplish anything meaningful of the sort. that will probably call for more pabst. and general time killing, so this is the place you will want to look if you're up to more of the same. if you are or will be in west michigan, think of something fun and memorable we can do over the break. i'll be there, man.
badass sunset
well, if it had to get dark, this was a pretty sweet way to go about it. dark purple clouds with neon pink underbellies, wispy grey clouds off in the further parts of the sky that range from baby blue to whitish grey. fiery orange base silhouetting the massive dome of some nearby house of worship in the foreground. slowly dissipating jet trail cutting across the whole scene which is itself slipping away. choose your own metaphor.
and all that while axis: bold as love was on, with its excellent color-based lyrics. some hendrix tunes just never get the love they deserve. corollary: some get way too fucking much. seriously, i think i could go at least five years without hearing his version of watchtower. he did like a rolling stone way better anyway. that dude really dug dylan. like anyone should really. speaking of which, i still haven't seen i'm not there and probably won't catch it in the theater. this is the least of my losses resulting from educational commitments. the only element of my life which has not been rendered lossy (wow, spell check does not mark that) is my audio files. hooray for flac. i swear sometimes it sounds better than cds played through the exact same equipment. this does not change the fact that at this very moment a number of my classmates are studying more effectively while listening to 64 kbps mp3s played through the earbuds that came with their ipod. i know itunes uses some fucked up audio format that isn't that bad to listen to, but i also know that most people haven't filled their ipods exclusively via itunes. the feds know you didn't, and they are coming to get you. do not ask me what to do when they get you. i'm ass deep in criminal defenses as i write, and i will probably drown in them before i get the call. also, it would be against rules of professional conduct for me to give advice. this is a thing i have learned. it will not be on this exam, whereas myriad nuanced and incredibly detailed aspects of criminal law i have yet to fully penetrate (sorry, working on the rape materials right now) are more likely to be the order of the day in, uh, less than two days. shit.
and all that while axis: bold as love was on, with its excellent color-based lyrics. some hendrix tunes just never get the love they deserve. corollary: some get way too fucking much. seriously, i think i could go at least five years without hearing his version of watchtower. he did like a rolling stone way better anyway. that dude really dug dylan. like anyone should really. speaking of which, i still haven't seen i'm not there and probably won't catch it in the theater. this is the least of my losses resulting from educational commitments. the only element of my life which has not been rendered lossy (wow, spell check does not mark that) is my audio files. hooray for flac. i swear sometimes it sounds better than cds played through the exact same equipment. this does not change the fact that at this very moment a number of my classmates are studying more effectively while listening to 64 kbps mp3s played through the earbuds that came with their ipod. i know itunes uses some fucked up audio format that isn't that bad to listen to, but i also know that most people haven't filled their ipods exclusively via itunes. the feds know you didn't, and they are coming to get you. do not ask me what to do when they get you. i'm ass deep in criminal defenses as i write, and i will probably drown in them before i get the call. also, it would be against rules of professional conduct for me to give advice. this is a thing i have learned. it will not be on this exam, whereas myriad nuanced and incredibly detailed aspects of criminal law i have yet to fully penetrate (sorry, working on the rape materials right now) are more likely to be the order of the day in, uh, less than two days. shit.
fuck auto format
caffeine + nicotine = some progress. but the auto format function of word cuts both ways. sometimes it is really nice and other times it fucks my shit up so bad i spend more time trying to make things appear to have some semblance of organization than i do writing things down. why don't i just turn it off? one, i don't remember where that function is, and i am not about to ask a damn animated paper clip how to find it and two, sometimes it works well. why so inconsistent? remember when word was made by microsoft and how it still is? that's why. can't bitch too much since my beloved diet coke is sort of doing the same thing, fueling my progress while causing the distraction of having to get up and piss like every half hour. the sun is already on its way down, meaning it is past four. by five i will have to study under the dreaded overhead light as the pleasing lamp does not give enough light from its location. life is just not fair.
another hour
and i have accomplished nothing more. half was due to eating, the other half was due to not wanting to disturb the cat on my lap. he seemed so happy and comfortable. i think they will miss me. they have not offered to take my exams to get me to stay around though. i now plan to waste ten minutes or so choosing music. i also just noticed that my computer was running on battery power because i set the plug next to the power strip instead of actually plugging it in. this is going swimmingly. i got sick of my computer asking to restart for updates and reset it. without saving the notes i've been making while studying. i've made so little recent progress that word recovered the whole document. mixed blessing. moving forward with a big glass of diet coke and some '73 dead. most of those shows are longer than three hours with more than 25 cuts, and they don't even have drums and space segments (no mickey). i'll say it again, '73 was a great year for the dead. and 2003 was a great year for doritos.
bad at studying
too much effort for too little payoff day after day after day.
i want to get drunk.
it is about noon.
thanks, four-hour exams.
i want to get drunk.
it is about noon.
thanks, four-hour exams.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
when am i going to post again?
sometime shortly after i stop becoming more depressed and boring with every passing day. ha ha ha. i've honestly tried to post a couple of times and i've been pretty unhappy with the attempts, which is why they are not here. things are pretty sad when blogging seems like too much work. well, sometimes that is the issue, and other times it seems like i am incapable of typing anything even the generous perusers of this backwater blog would not feel cheated to have read. the past several surgeons general have been derelict in their duty by failing to make public warnings about the possible harmful side effects of legal education; the whole ordeal has harmed my brain. studies show this, man.
classes ended yesterday, leaving me with little more than fumes left in the proverbial tank. when i was running my mouth about going back to school and leaving the widely disparaged world of wage labor, i often fielded questions about the difficulty of transitioning from work to education. i wrote that shit off writ large; i felt like school was something i had a long background in and would be more than happy to return to the friendly confines thereof. i was sort of wrong, of course. law school is a horse of a different color. magenta, i believe. but the peculiarities of law school extend beyond pedagogy to the scope of swallowing one's life wholesale. that is something else i had counted on. not that i have been able to bring myself to attack law school with the same zealous unabating (marked, what the hell?) fervor some of my contemporaries display. but i have spent a lot more time on this bullshit than i recall ever spending simply on school, and also significantly more time just worrying when not working. in short, school work never followed me home the way it does these days, and the end result is exhaustion.
which brings up the sore and unavoidable subject of finals. yes, they're coming, like they have been for an awful long time. so i'm going to have to dig real deep in the pocket and try and scrape together some brainpower (not marked as one word), motivation, and focus to make it through this most critical pass in hellish unnecessary and entirely avoidable mountain range known as law school. today was most unproductive, and i really feel more bored than bad about it. oh well, that time was killed earlier today, with a vengeance (who knew how to spell that? be honest). the point is, as is my wont, i perpetually disregarded advice about progressive outlining. you know, authorities at law school are constantly telling you about all this bullshit you're supposed to be doing to avoid being unequivocally fucked, but the problem is these are the same people who repeat mantras about making time for things which are not law school. the two approaches simply cannot be reconciled. given that much, i'll take the one where law school doesn't take up every minute of existence.
one last complaint about the way law school is run: yesterday marked the seventy-fourth anniversary of the enactment of the twenty-first amendment, repealing the eighteenth and worst. this fact failed to find its way into either class i had, however. in a profession where drinking is at least approved if not outright encouraged and which is supposedly concerned with the fucking law, you would think someone would have brought celebratory beer. despite this lack, both classes concluded with rounds of applause for the profs though, which was fairly odd. they were both quite good, really. i will say that other classes have ended, none of which finished with appreciative clapping. *cough cough terriblefuckingtortsclasswithineffectiveunhelpfulprof cough*
but what was that i was saying about getting more boring every day? maybe i shouldn't talk about law school. the other day i had the distinct pleasure of viewing r. kelly's "trapped in the closet" chapters one through twenty with my sister and some of her folks. i cannot recall the last time i encountered such a source of entertainment where i walked away mostly just thinking that i had been adequately entertained and not much more. not that scholarly questions are irrelevant to the whole piece, in fact i had many, but damn was it a good time. if you are unfamiliar, you should avail yourself somehow. i know that netflix can help. one of my facorite moments was the lead-in to the second act where eventually multiple r. kelly figures appear in outrageous white suits harmonizing the phrase "oh shit" while retelling the story to that point. to improve the experience further, one of my sister's friends brought over some gourmet chocolate. now, i'm not real huge on chocolate, but it can really hit the spot sometimes. here's the thing: this chocolate was no ordinary chocolate. the credibility of this bar did not come from its cocoa percentage or national pedigree or anything. no, this was a chocolate beyond all chocolates, a previously unthought (fuck that marking) culinary concept. this, friends, was bacon chocolate. actual chocolate bar with actual bacon in it. yeah, that's what we thought too. could be really good or really terrible. it was really good. like i could not have possibly imagined it being. this was unquestionably my best chocolate related experience of all time, and certainly helped to heighten what was my best r. kelly related experience of all time. that dude has a serious midwestern (also marked, whatever) accent. more serious than i have ever contemplated. overall, i guess i'd have to say my mind was blown. look at that, i can use the passive voice without getting bitched at. if you bitch at me for using the passive voice, i sentence you to two semesters of legal writing. that'll learn ya. learn ya real good. legal writing is like bizarro writing: if you're bad at the real thing but you're smart, you'll probably be good at legal writing. if you're good at real writing, whether you're smart or dumb, fuck you. legal people apparently hate people who know how to write like human beings.
wasn't i going to move on from yammering about that shit? oh yeah, i was also talking about how it swallows everything in my life. that causes these things to happen. well, one of my favorite distractions from it lately has been reading this really really nice dead book i have. mostly appealing to the dead fan, of course, but actually a beautiful collage of all sorts of historically meaningful photos, thing is all set out time line style, national news events included. lots of great stuff, despite the purported dead focus. not that such was a problem for me. oddly, my favorite part to read is the small bit about the very last tour in summer of 95. i don't really know why that is. perhaps just that so many things go wrong and the entire experience was basically just shit, which is how i feel about my position sometimes. i don't know. i like the fact that a book about a band is forthcoming about the painful experiences and mostly forthcoming about the problems, although they leave out some things like portable toilets (with occupants) getting turned over by gate crashers at like half the shows that tour. but the book still includes most of the big stuff. the band constantly played with about TWENTY THOUSAND ticketless motherfuckers outside every gig, creating quite the incubator for problems. even the first show, way up in vermont, had so many riotous fools that they had to open the gates to avoid a disaster. the band didn't even play well. they go down to jersey and jerry sits out for whole songs. they go to upstate (not marked) new york and a bunch of fans and cops get hurt in the ruckus. they go to d.c. and lighting strikes. literally. three people. the weather is shitty for a bunch of the tour. they go to the palace of auburn hills and things actually go alright. imagine that, detroit being the bright spot of your ginormous stadium tour. the band goes to pittsburgh and gets poured on again, but they play like four songs with rain in the title to coincide. pretty cool, but not as good as the band actually playing well. they cut back to deer creek in indiana, where some asshole phones in a death threat against jerry. they still play, but with the lights all on, and in the middle of the first set, the band shows a little humor and plays dire wolf, where the chorus goes "don't murder me, i beg of you, don't murder me, please, don't murder me". about this time, as many as five thousand people crash the gates, and people inside help them get in. ugly scene. the cops don't like it, and refuse to act as security for the next night, and the band has to cancel the show. they go down to missouri and play with the house lights on again. show goes ok, but the rain keeps coming down and a bunch of people cram onto some cabin porch and the whole building collapses, injuring like 100. then they made it to chicago, and if you care about any of this you know enough about the last shows already. the last one is a fine show in my book, say what you will. the best part is after the tour is over and jerry is getting on the bus, he says he had a great time and wishes the tour didn't have to end. little did he know it was over for good. ah, the dead. they were the band for a lot of times and a lot of places. mostly america, so america, in the best sense of the term.
speaking of which, i'm about to get back into a little more america via another legal observing gig, hopefully. the big stink in town recently has been about this casino they're supposed to put in fishtown. the state supreme court recently told the city government they were not allowed to drag their feet anymore and had to hand over the permits. the neighborhood is not pleased. there is some general disapproval thing going on saturday and people who are not authorized to hang out on the premises of what will become said casino will do just that. has the potential to be a little more volatile than the peace chain thing i did before. mostly i'm looking forward to seeing a little bit of the city i have not been to yet, and hoping things go alright. as long as it doesn't rain on me all day again, it should all be alright. may have a few more notes to jot down than last time though; this isn't the sort of happening that has a permit and such. legal observing is a great crucible for immersing oneself in the actuality of legal happening though. personal sympathies aside, one must track the facts as they happen as best as can be. stranger in a strange land (still haven't read it? fuck is wrong with you?) has a pretty good legal observer concept in the form of a "fair witness". just another fictional job i would love to have. fuckin' jobs. either i can't have 'em or they aren't real, or if real are fairly impractical. aquarium owner!?!?
so somewhere in all this mess, christmas is still supposed to happen. i phoned my mother earlier to attempt to articulate a minimal list of potential gifts she had asked for. unfortunately she either did not hear or did not understand my lead-in to this part of the conversation and proceeded to let me know what other family members might want as presents. this led to a fairly awkward juncture where i really did not know what to say, because i am probably not funded well enough to get anyone anything more than a dollar deuce or maybe their favorite item from a fast food value menu (this was all offset by a previous conversation with my father wherein he spoke of avoiding calories so he could save them for taking me out for lunches with heady brews and dank food; bad nutrition science, great logic, appraised via ourcome). the worst part is that i could not manage to artfully transition from that explanation to answering the original query from a separate talk about what i might want from those who may be better funded and disposed to give me uh, something. well, whatever. the saddest thing is that i will not be at all disappointed upon receiving gifts of socks and underwear. i need that shit. you might be getting old if something that was used as a device of terror to motivate you to compile a christmas list in your teenage years is now a perfectly acceptable suggestion. but it has gotten tougher to work up a list as legos lost their appeal. what now? septa tokens? do the state-run wine and spirits shoppes sell gift certificates? they probably have gift cards which only function properly at the nicer outlets not located near to my apartment.
well, for all of my complaints, i must say i'm alright overall for the moment. sometimes things work out suitably. it is not impossible to have a good day. it just takes a lot of bad ones to put things into perspective sometimes. other times it just takes something you've been missing that you know full well could improve everything all at once to come back into play. right now i want to check back into my blog and find that link to the website for jsnack connoisseurs and join in a community that feels like i do about the herr's kettle cooked sour cream and onion potato chips i'm eating right now (hint: i feel pretty good about them). the world is a crazy place with no good answers, but i feel like junk food must fit in there some place important. if it doesn't, that would only further negative perceptions about the national way of life. this is not something anyone needs at this point. like this post getting longer. i missed you too. and not editing posts, fucking school.
classes ended yesterday, leaving me with little more than fumes left in the proverbial tank. when i was running my mouth about going back to school and leaving the widely disparaged world of wage labor, i often fielded questions about the difficulty of transitioning from work to education. i wrote that shit off writ large; i felt like school was something i had a long background in and would be more than happy to return to the friendly confines thereof. i was sort of wrong, of course. law school is a horse of a different color. magenta, i believe. but the peculiarities of law school extend beyond pedagogy to the scope of swallowing one's life wholesale. that is something else i had counted on. not that i have been able to bring myself to attack law school with the same zealous unabating (marked, what the hell?) fervor some of my contemporaries display. but i have spent a lot more time on this bullshit than i recall ever spending simply on school, and also significantly more time just worrying when not working. in short, school work never followed me home the way it does these days, and the end result is exhaustion.
which brings up the sore and unavoidable subject of finals. yes, they're coming, like they have been for an awful long time. so i'm going to have to dig real deep in the pocket and try and scrape together some brainpower (not marked as one word), motivation, and focus to make it through this most critical pass in hellish unnecessary and entirely avoidable mountain range known as law school. today was most unproductive, and i really feel more bored than bad about it. oh well, that time was killed earlier today, with a vengeance (who knew how to spell that? be honest). the point is, as is my wont, i perpetually disregarded advice about progressive outlining. you know, authorities at law school are constantly telling you about all this bullshit you're supposed to be doing to avoid being unequivocally fucked, but the problem is these are the same people who repeat mantras about making time for things which are not law school. the two approaches simply cannot be reconciled. given that much, i'll take the one where law school doesn't take up every minute of existence.
one last complaint about the way law school is run: yesterday marked the seventy-fourth anniversary of the enactment of the twenty-first amendment, repealing the eighteenth and worst. this fact failed to find its way into either class i had, however. in a profession where drinking is at least approved if not outright encouraged and which is supposedly concerned with the fucking law, you would think someone would have brought celebratory beer. despite this lack, both classes concluded with rounds of applause for the profs though, which was fairly odd. they were both quite good, really. i will say that other classes have ended, none of which finished with appreciative clapping. *cough cough terriblefuckingtortsclasswithineffectiveunhelpfulprof cough*
but what was that i was saying about getting more boring every day? maybe i shouldn't talk about law school. the other day i had the distinct pleasure of viewing r. kelly's "trapped in the closet" chapters one through twenty with my sister and some of her folks. i cannot recall the last time i encountered such a source of entertainment where i walked away mostly just thinking that i had been adequately entertained and not much more. not that scholarly questions are irrelevant to the whole piece, in fact i had many, but damn was it a good time. if you are unfamiliar, you should avail yourself somehow. i know that netflix can help. one of my facorite moments was the lead-in to the second act where eventually multiple r. kelly figures appear in outrageous white suits harmonizing the phrase "oh shit" while retelling the story to that point. to improve the experience further, one of my sister's friends brought over some gourmet chocolate. now, i'm not real huge on chocolate, but it can really hit the spot sometimes. here's the thing: this chocolate was no ordinary chocolate. the credibility of this bar did not come from its cocoa percentage or national pedigree or anything. no, this was a chocolate beyond all chocolates, a previously unthought (fuck that marking) culinary concept. this, friends, was bacon chocolate. actual chocolate bar with actual bacon in it. yeah, that's what we thought too. could be really good or really terrible. it was really good. like i could not have possibly imagined it being. this was unquestionably my best chocolate related experience of all time, and certainly helped to heighten what was my best r. kelly related experience of all time. that dude has a serious midwestern (also marked, whatever) accent. more serious than i have ever contemplated. overall, i guess i'd have to say my mind was blown. look at that, i can use the passive voice without getting bitched at. if you bitch at me for using the passive voice, i sentence you to two semesters of legal writing. that'll learn ya. learn ya real good. legal writing is like bizarro writing: if you're bad at the real thing but you're smart, you'll probably be good at legal writing. if you're good at real writing, whether you're smart or dumb, fuck you. legal people apparently hate people who know how to write like human beings.
wasn't i going to move on from yammering about that shit? oh yeah, i was also talking about how it swallows everything in my life. that causes these things to happen. well, one of my favorite distractions from it lately has been reading this really really nice dead book i have. mostly appealing to the dead fan, of course, but actually a beautiful collage of all sorts of historically meaningful photos, thing is all set out time line style, national news events included. lots of great stuff, despite the purported dead focus. not that such was a problem for me. oddly, my favorite part to read is the small bit about the very last tour in summer of 95. i don't really know why that is. perhaps just that so many things go wrong and the entire experience was basically just shit, which is how i feel about my position sometimes. i don't know. i like the fact that a book about a band is forthcoming about the painful experiences and mostly forthcoming about the problems, although they leave out some things like portable toilets (with occupants) getting turned over by gate crashers at like half the shows that tour. but the book still includes most of the big stuff. the band constantly played with about TWENTY THOUSAND ticketless motherfuckers outside every gig, creating quite the incubator for problems. even the first show, way up in vermont, had so many riotous fools that they had to open the gates to avoid a disaster. the band didn't even play well. they go down to jersey and jerry sits out for whole songs. they go to upstate (not marked) new york and a bunch of fans and cops get hurt in the ruckus. they go to d.c. and lighting strikes. literally. three people. the weather is shitty for a bunch of the tour. they go to the palace of auburn hills and things actually go alright. imagine that, detroit being the bright spot of your ginormous stadium tour. the band goes to pittsburgh and gets poured on again, but they play like four songs with rain in the title to coincide. pretty cool, but not as good as the band actually playing well. they cut back to deer creek in indiana, where some asshole phones in a death threat against jerry. they still play, but with the lights all on, and in the middle of the first set, the band shows a little humor and plays dire wolf, where the chorus goes "don't murder me, i beg of you, don't murder me, please, don't murder me". about this time, as many as five thousand people crash the gates, and people inside help them get in. ugly scene. the cops don't like it, and refuse to act as security for the next night, and the band has to cancel the show. they go down to missouri and play with the house lights on again. show goes ok, but the rain keeps coming down and a bunch of people cram onto some cabin porch and the whole building collapses, injuring like 100. then they made it to chicago, and if you care about any of this you know enough about the last shows already. the last one is a fine show in my book, say what you will. the best part is after the tour is over and jerry is getting on the bus, he says he had a great time and wishes the tour didn't have to end. little did he know it was over for good. ah, the dead. they were the band for a lot of times and a lot of places. mostly america, so america, in the best sense of the term.
speaking of which, i'm about to get back into a little more america via another legal observing gig, hopefully. the big stink in town recently has been about this casino they're supposed to put in fishtown. the state supreme court recently told the city government they were not allowed to drag their feet anymore and had to hand over the permits. the neighborhood is not pleased. there is some general disapproval thing going on saturday and people who are not authorized to hang out on the premises of what will become said casino will do just that. has the potential to be a little more volatile than the peace chain thing i did before. mostly i'm looking forward to seeing a little bit of the city i have not been to yet, and hoping things go alright. as long as it doesn't rain on me all day again, it should all be alright. may have a few more notes to jot down than last time though; this isn't the sort of happening that has a permit and such. legal observing is a great crucible for immersing oneself in the actuality of legal happening though. personal sympathies aside, one must track the facts as they happen as best as can be. stranger in a strange land (still haven't read it? fuck is wrong with you?) has a pretty good legal observer concept in the form of a "fair witness". just another fictional job i would love to have. fuckin' jobs. either i can't have 'em or they aren't real, or if real are fairly impractical. aquarium owner!?!?
so somewhere in all this mess, christmas is still supposed to happen. i phoned my mother earlier to attempt to articulate a minimal list of potential gifts she had asked for. unfortunately she either did not hear or did not understand my lead-in to this part of the conversation and proceeded to let me know what other family members might want as presents. this led to a fairly awkward juncture where i really did not know what to say, because i am probably not funded well enough to get anyone anything more than a dollar deuce or maybe their favorite item from a fast food value menu (this was all offset by a previous conversation with my father wherein he spoke of avoiding calories so he could save them for taking me out for lunches with heady brews and dank food; bad nutrition science, great logic, appraised via ourcome). the worst part is that i could not manage to artfully transition from that explanation to answering the original query from a separate talk about what i might want from those who may be better funded and disposed to give me uh, something. well, whatever. the saddest thing is that i will not be at all disappointed upon receiving gifts of socks and underwear. i need that shit. you might be getting old if something that was used as a device of terror to motivate you to compile a christmas list in your teenage years is now a perfectly acceptable suggestion. but it has gotten tougher to work up a list as legos lost their appeal. what now? septa tokens? do the state-run wine and spirits shoppes sell gift certificates? they probably have gift cards which only function properly at the nicer outlets not located near to my apartment.
well, for all of my complaints, i must say i'm alright overall for the moment. sometimes things work out suitably. it is not impossible to have a good day. it just takes a lot of bad ones to put things into perspective sometimes. other times it just takes something you've been missing that you know full well could improve everything all at once to come back into play. right now i want to check back into my blog and find that link to the website for jsnack connoisseurs and join in a community that feels like i do about the herr's kettle cooked sour cream and onion potato chips i'm eating right now (hint: i feel pretty good about them). the world is a crazy place with no good answers, but i feel like junk food must fit in there some place important. if it doesn't, that would only further negative perceptions about the national way of life. this is not something anyone needs at this point. like this post getting longer. i missed you too. and not editing posts, fucking school.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)