Thanks For the Memories

Today, I am trying to reconnect with my high school GPA by recreating my high school experience. To that end, I am carrying my books in my old high school standard-issue mesh backpack. Executing this plan would become a lot more authentic if I were to get metal-detectored on the way into the building, or if a fist fight were to break out in the student lounge, or if half the school were to sit around and listen to Paul Wall really loudly on Discmans (Discmen?).

It Gets Lonely

Sometimes I feel like I am the only person on earth underwhelmed by the “music” of Lady Gaga.

“IMPORTED BEEF!”

Alright, a brief break from drafting The Best Mock Will Ever:

I went to the grocery store to pick up my traditional finals-time Bad Snacks. In the cashier’s line, I spotted the following headline on the current issue of the National Enquirer: “Outrage over Obama’s Drunken White House Parties! CRAZY CONGA LINES! PRICEY BOOZE! IMPORTED BEEF!”

…

Is it just me, or does this sound like a minimally scandalous event? I don’t know the target audience of the National Enquirer (I doubt it’s me because I have this fascination with facts), but apparently its members consider a conga line to be the at the apex of debauchery. Such Bacchanalian propensities. For shame. I’d have been much more impressed with something like “OPIUM DEN! ABSINTHE! DOING LINES OFF THE THE OVAL OFFICE DESK WITH YOUR TAX DOLLARS!” But no, forget that. We’ve got a conga line on our hands.

And don’t even get them started on the Kobe beef and Johnnie Walker Blue Label. The hedonism! I think I’ve always just assumed that the President ate and drank well. He has a personal chef and other kitchen staff. And even if he lived on Ramen most days, I would expect him to pull out all the stops when company came. Personally, I’d be pretty embarrassed if the country’s leader served Crystal Palace vodka and ground chuck at hoity-toity White House functions attended by the dignitaries of the world. Not that I have a problem with ground chuck, but that doesn’t mean I want my country to serve it to Queen Elizabeth or Pope Benedict XVI.

Just more “quality journalism” from the National Enquirer. And with all that in mind, I am off to eat steak.

ESTATE PLANNING

I LOVE DRAFTING WILLS

(totally serious)

Also, I got into Criminal Practice and Procedure for my next set of classes. Not everyone was so lucky. REALLY excited.

Holla

I haven’t been blogging in a long time because I (1) haven’t had anything interesting to write about and (2) have been working almost non-stop on the avalanche of Advanced Legal Research Assignment that accumulated over the past two months. I have finals next week. I’ll return on or about Feb. 5th.

Christmas Break, Part Three

Woke up to a broken window on the new car. Nothing stolen. Found a small, yet heavy, metal disk on the front floorboad, thus solving part of the crime. The little miscreant doesn’t appear to have stolen anything, but he missed a treasure trove – there was an iPod and a spare key in the console, plus quite a bit of IKEA merchandise in the trunk. What a bummer for him that he missed all that. For those keeping score, this is two cars that have gotten windows broken out whilst sitting at my parents’ house.

I am highly irked because I just got this car in June, am paying the note every month, and have been being very careful not to damage it. I think the time is right for me to have a car in nice condition. I had to endure not only several years of the old Jetta that beeped for no reason, frequently was without air conditioning, leaked gas, and was bashed up on the front end, but also two years of driving a Ford Probe, which flooded during The Great Houston Flood of 2001 and never smelled quite right afterwards. In short, I have done my time with crappy cars. The only other time I had a new car was when I graduated from high school. That one got damaged when some barred-out woman rear-ended me at a stoplight at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday because she fell asleep at the wheel. I’d had it for about eight months. Can I just have a nice car for a while?

The window is being fixed right now as we speak, but it might not be the same. It might rattle. And if somehow a piece of glass debris cuts the leather seats, I will come unglued. I wish it had been happening just as I went outside in the wee hours of the morning to get my Biz Org II supplement. The little delinquent would not have been ready to handle my response, a complex hybrid of suburban-girl whining and urban-girl verbal blitzkrieg, with a dash of cursing like a sailor thrown in for emphasis. Trust me, he would not have enjoyed it.

Christmas Break, Part Two

slowly going crazy

Christmas Break, Part One

I made it to Houston from Small City on Friday night, safe and in one piece despite terrible driving by indefatigably bad Texas drivers. Maximum tailgating.

I spent Saturday night at the trendy Montrose abode of LT and CD. Dinner at Niko Niko’s (loving the potatoes here, as usual), followed by looking at Christmas lights in River Oaks (anticlimactic), followed by chats back at said abode. We didn’t make it out to Anvil, though. Going to this bar has been my goal the last three times I have come to Houston. It is now tentatively slated to happen on New Year’s Eve. I spent the night in LT and CD’s guest room, in borrowed clothing that included absolutely the oddest pair of pyjama pants I have ever seen. I can’t really describe them. I woke up to waffles and soy sausage, then LT and I got serious about our morning plans to go to IKEA. Pro tip: hit up IKEA at 10 a.m. on a Sunday. It’s not quite as crowded then because of church. God bless being faux-Jewish/faux-Catholic. I came home with some choice items, like a new blanket, some glass bowls, and some gnome gift bags. If you get a gift from me next year, expect that it will be in a gnome gift bag. I also got these Christmas ornaments. Rest assured that they are awesome. They’re chickens wearing crowns, how could they not be awesome? I really wanted this straw goat, but LT talked me out of it because she said it would be “weird” if I just set it in the corner of my office at home. Whatever, if it goes on clearance after the holidays, I am definitely buying it. Tomorrow, I’ll be going to Pottery Barn, a rare occurrence for me. They allegedly have magnetic spice containers that you can put on the refrigerator. My current spice rack takes up a lot of countertop space. Problem solved?

Between legislative history and perestroika, I’ll take perestroika.

Occasionally, I see people around Small City who are obviously academics. How can I tell? The top four indicators are pallor, thick glasses, books, and usually some anachronistic clothing choices. Or a wolf t-shirt on a grown person. And naturally, none of these four characteristics are meant in an ironic way; think negligent, not intentional.

Now, I am certain that the majority of Small City’s fashionable residents would probably be prompted to make fun of these academics for their decidedly unfashionable external appearances. What does it prompt me to do? Reminisce fondly on the time when I learned for the sake of learning.

Don’t get me wrong, I like law school. But I loved undergrad. It’s the difference between learning something mostly practical (like how to compile legislative histories for federal statutes) and learning something mostly esoteric (like perestroika). Personally, I prefer the latter because it’s more interesting. However, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever be called on to perform any task related to Russia’s 1987 economic and political reforms. It’s unfortunate.

I suppose I could have taken the PhD route. However, there is thing called money, and I want to amass some moderately comfortable amount of it. Academia doesn’t always pay. And that historian job market is also pretty glutted. And my only real interest was European history, and as my Latin American history professor in college put it, “Europe is over.” So I made a more responsible decision even though I knew it would probably make me less happy. I reasoned that I could fit the stuff I liked more into my free time.

Unfortunately, I also happened to choose a career in which “free time” is apparently a myth, a magical thing enjoyed by creatures of some nebulous hinterland far, far away from the drones working overnight in the bowels of Baker Botts and Sidley Austin. And it’s not even a career in which you can trade off less money for more time, usually. The word on the street is that even the $60K/year jobs require lots of overtime. Public defenders probably have the lowest average salaries in the business, yet are usually overworked. I hear that if a person is lucky enough to work for the government, then it’s not as bad. But in this economy, even the top students are deigning to take government jobs in lieu of litigation associate positions at Jones Day or whatever BigLaw firms they wanted to work for when they started law school. What are the mediocre people with outside interests to do?

The best solution I have been able to come up with is not a solution at all. It’s more like sugar to make the medicine go down more easily. The “solution” is just working for myself. It is (according to many websites) just as much (if not more) work than working for someone else. So, it wouldn’t really give me any extra time. However, sometimes I think it would assuage my negativity toward this career somewhat because I would be working for myself, largely on my own terms, instead of for some old guy that works me into the ground because his wife “desperately needs” a new Mercedes. (I mean, I have a really, really negative attitude about the leadership in the legal field sometimes.) I just wasn’t born to be someone else’s workhorse.

I guess I could summarize this entry by saying that:
(1) I’m not really doing what I would prefer to be doing with my life, but I value monetary comfort enough to stick with the decision I’ve made.
(2) I do not value monetary comfort enough to do something that I have lukewarm feelings on someone else’s terms.

The one hitch in my “solution” that everyone should be pointing out right now is that it is largely problematic to go into law without ever having worked for anyone else. One issue is getting clientele. Another is having enough on-the-job experience to not commit malpractice. Ideally, I could partner up with someone with slightly more experience than me to make sure that I don’t make any monumental snafus. How in the heck is that going to happen? I don’t know. I’m not even sure why I’m still typing; this entry should have ended awhile back.

In conclusion, I guess the world should know that my future plans are now, as always, in flux.

Macarena

One of the many benefits of being a new car owner these days is the free six-month satellite radio trial. Lately, I’ve been reliving some of my glory days by listening to the 90s on 9 station. Yesterday, I heard the mid-90s pop sensation “Macarena.” Apparently, in the mid-90s my radar for sexual subtext was sorely underdeveloped. Let’s review some lyrical context clues that I didn’t pick up on at the tender age of thirteen. (Lyrics are approximations because this was just too stupid to even google.)

“. . .They all want me/they can’t have me/so they all come and dance beside me/
move with me/jam with me/and if you’re good I’ll take you home with me.”

Yeah, so…I didn’t really understand that taking someone home meant taking them home for sex. I don’t recall what I thought it meant. Take them home to meet the parents? To play pogs? To watch Singled Out on MTV? The world will never know. At any rate, Macarena was downright skanky if she was meeting randos on the dancefloor and taking them home for late night trysts. But it gets better.

“. . .Don’t you worry about my boyfriend. . .I didn’t want him/couldn’t stand him. . .He was out of town and his two friends were soooo fine.”

So, she had a threesome with her boyfriend’s friends while her boyfriend was out of town? Classy. I’m sure that won’t cause any drama. Welcome to the bullet train to domestic violence or, at the very least, some pretty awkward moments when the boyfriend finds out. Which he inevitably will, since she talked about it on a wildly popular song. Gross.

In hindsight, the song’s eponymous character was a pretty big slut.

I would love to expand this discussion into some commentary about how I think members of the group of people several years younger than me (think kids in high school and college) are much to freewheeling with sex and sexuality, but I have quite a lot of work to do and thus don’t have the time to whine about “kids today.” Advanced Legal Research assignments wait for no one.

Oh, and I know I promised a series of World Cup posts, and I’m going to write and post them, but I decided it would make more sense to wait until it’s closer to game time. Who know what changes will happen between now and then. Ronaldo could come back.