compacts clause

i am at school doing a few things, including sitting around and wasting time doing this. i have begun my summer job working as a research assistant for one of the profs i had last semester. i don't actually need to be at school to do most of the work, it seems, but i stopped by today in hopes of catching the prof i am working for. i wanted to ask him about registration, which closes today. he, of course, is not here. that's okay. the school is a strange place in the off-season. there are still a lot of people around. massive groups of asians. i have heard the front desk clerk expound upon the virtues of her lunch, a salad, at least four times. i have almost memorized the elements of the salad. lots of people just filtering through, too, some profs, some students, who knows what else. overall, not near as unbearable as it normally is. or maybe it just seems that way because i haven't been in for a couple of weeks. also on the good side is that the school no longer smells like a subway garbage can that someone puked in. i don't know if i mentioned this, but during the exam period the whole damn law building smelled awful due to repeated flooding related to problems with the heating and cooling system. fuckin' sweet is what that was. fortunately none of the rooms i took my exams in were egregiously foul; i walked past the room where people who were handwriting took the exams and about lost my lunch. strangely, i kind of appreciate the fact that this massive flaw in the structure developed at a totally inopportune time. it gives flavor to my law school experience. i bet you very few people i will meet from other schools will be able to relate similar terrible problems. go us.
anyway, like i said, i'm supposedly doing research. i know other people who are more or less doing the same thing. except all of them have like gone to these bullshit training sessions and have filled out some stupid paperwork and yeah. i am sort of concerned about the prospects of getting paid as i have not gone through any of this. i anticipate speaking with my hiring prof about this. on the other hand, i will be thrilled if i get to dodge the training session, because it is a lesson for people who do not know how to use a library. i know how to use a library. i wish i had a large library named after me so i could threaten people by truly claiming that i have a library and i am not afraid to use it.
my research seems to be pretty obscure. my top result for one of the things i am looking into, this agreement between some states and the province of manitoba, was a pdf of a memo that some senator sent to my prof when my prof worked in the state department a few years back. i don't know if he quit before he got an answer for this dude or what, but what the prof is asking me to do is pretty much what he got asked to do in this memo. not exactly, but kind of. the point is, i don't know how much i'm gonna be able to tell this guy that he doesn't alreay know, but i will try my best. my best includes sitting around and typing this. i don't know if i am on the clock or what or how people keep track or anything. whatever, i've sifted through a lot of bullshit already and i've had enough for the moment.
i am also waiting (oh man here comes the salad speech again, i should have remembered my headphones) to maybe hear back from another prof i emailed about this class he is teaching next semester. i kind of want to hear what he has to say before i click the final registration button. what do you know, after fighting with the always-problematic wireless for a moment, i got a reply. however, the reply says he forwarded the email i sent him to the other person he's teaching the class with and now i'm going to wait for the other guy to get back to him so he can get back to me again. got that? it was real important. i originally was just gonna try and register for it and see what happened, but judging by the tone of the reply it is probably a good thing i didn't. my special dispensation is pending, and probably will be while i write the rest of this post because this is pretty much what i am going to do while i wait. i've been meaning to update anyway. anyway, the class is a colloquium and there are only like 36 seats, so i probably won't get in anyway; i'm pretty low on the registration ladder. on the other hand, so many people here are so job-focused that they might not be interested in talking about law and human behavior from the viewpoints of various disciplines. sounds like fun to me.
god, here i am out of school for the summer and yet all i have to talk about is school. it just never stops. i have done other things, sort of. i went down to jam on the river on sunday because it was free due to some sort of scheduling problem and cancellations. it was good people watching but it was overall just kind of strange. i didn't go all day, just at the end. the whole thing was sponsored by captain morgan, which is pretty tacky and lame, but someone had to pony up the bucks. they had some pretty bizarre promotional stuff going on, including some dude made to look like captain jack sparrow moreso than the captain morgan on the bottle. that would be a strange job. they used the same lettering as bonnaroo, which makes me stop and be like, what? silly people, silly place. it was kind of cool to be right next to the water. the music wasn't bad but it could have been better. lotus is okay, but the first day was the flaming lips and the disco biscuits. i would pay 20 or 25 bucks to see either of those bands on their own at a venue, but not 45 to see them both at once in what amounted to a parking lot (first day was someplace different than second day). poor festival marketing on their part. i wonder if anyone has worked out the mechanics of the most profitable summer music festivals. i'm sure someone has; rothbury is definitely a clear channel event. i would be curious to hear the conclusions on what makes a successful festival though. there are so many every summer now, it is kind of unbelievable. some people and many bands actually call memorial day to labor day "festival season". it wasn't always like this, was it? was i just unaware? most of the big ones on the circuit have celebrated their tenth birthday, but i don't think any big ones are much older than that. i got a flier for a totally half-ass festival when i was leaving jam on the river, some place on the PA/OH border. they had nothing. no bands i had ever heard of on the actual bill (except one who gave me their cd at that TLG show) . i'm guessing most of it is pittsburgh or cleveland area bands. i don't know. the weird thing was that there was also a drum and bass/deejay stage and i had actually heard of a good chunk of those performers. strange to have a secondary stage (in a cave, too) with better-known acts than the primary stage. in summation, i am not going to that bullshit.
in other news, most of my friends from school have left for rome for the summer to take classes. i wish i was there, but it was not so practical. i am at peace with this. the upshot is that one of my friends has left his ps3 with me while he is gone, so i will be playing the shit out of gta4 for the next six weeks. i am looking forward to this. i was looking forward to it, anyway, when i tried to make it actually work. nothing doing. fortunately, someone else found the answer to my problem. the console was freaked because i was feeding it through a vcr, which it regards as a 6 year old might regard a record. turned out i had to just keep holding to power button down after i turned it on. of course. why wouldn't holding the power button down for an extra fifteen seconds reset the defaults? whatever, it works now, and part of the reason i hauled my ass all the way to school was to resist the temptation to keep playing it while i should be accomplishing a couple of other things. like typing this and downloading music while nominally stalled from accomplishing anything else as i wait and constantly refresh my inbox and achewood, which hasn't updated in like forty-eight hours and is threatening to send me into withdrawal.
last friday i neglected to check myself. consequently, i wrecked myself. pretty bad. i was actually carrying the remnants of a case, and therefore had strange hand positioning that led to some really strange back of the hand injuries. the real problem is my knee. not a real problem, like it was the day after, but it does not look so great. i'm just glad that it works; i couldn't walk so hot the day after. these things happen. but i am back at it. possibly related to this fall is the continuing decline of my venerable crocs. i think they might have to be retired to household use only, and i should probably get real-people sandals as well. i might do that on my way home from here, if i ever make it out. two hours until the registration deadline, will i get this email before then? will the day be saved or will the world end? the suspense is killing me. i should probably go have a cig.