New Semester...

...but pretty much everything about law school has stayed the same.  Professors are actually bigger slackasses than students, so grades aren't entirely posted until three days after they are due.  Grades are still arbitrary, and they start out well but end with mild disappointment.  Rankings still aren't out.  The holidays almost let us forget about law review, but it's still around.  In fact, managing board elections are next week, and I'm going run for a couple of positions.  As El Guapo would say, I'm probably the biggest sucker of them all.  I suspect that the "resume builder" of being on managing board will turn out a lot like being on law review on the first place (read:  it hasn't yielded any tangible benefit, but it exponentially increases one's stress level), but we shall see.  I'm still bitter about things I can't change and incredulous about others' ambivalence to those things.  I still refuse to use a thesaurus for blog posting.  Ever.

    

A few things have changed.  It's no longer football season, which means we have one less "fun" thing to do, but we actually get to rest on the weekends.  Instead of spending every minute of class time blogging, the All Against All Bloggers have gone weeks without a genuine substantive post.  El Guapo loaded his schedule with criminal law classes, so this is the first time we haven't had at least one class together since starting law school.  It's strange to look to the left and see one of these crazy transfer kids I've befriended instead of El Guapo.  

Phaedrus has vanished into his girlfriend, both literally and figuratively.  Phaedrus' disappearing act when he has a girlfriend actually isn't anything new, but it's a change in the law school context.  She goes to what Phaedrus likes to call the state's "short bus" law school in the larger city roughly an hour away, so Phaedrus is routinely out of town.  This is the same girl whose friend caused quite a stir at the Halloween party, an incident that almost got Phaedrus put in the Honor Court pillory.  Perhaps this incident is related to why Phaedrus is constantly out of town instead of having his girlfriend in town.

I also have the summer covered in employment terms.  One half is with the state AG's office, which is an unpaid position, but I will get paid at least a little bit working for the Office of General Counsel at a large university.  It's amazing how much less stressful this semester has already been simply because I'm no longer looking for a summer job.  It's also astounding how much easier the job search became when I said "fuck it" to working at a private firm and took advantage of the minimal connections available to me.  I don't hold connections against those who take advantage of them, but dear god, it sucks to be one of the people without any obvious ones.

Over the holidays, I visited Austin, Texas, a glorious city that has a gem called "SPEC's."  This place is quite literally a supermarket for gourmet food, beer, wine, and liquor.  I'm a liquor drinker from the Bible Belt, so this place was like nirvana.  I dropped roughly $250 on liquor that would have cost over $550 in my home state.  Hopefully transporting large amounts of liquor over state lines is not a crime.  If it is, the prohibitionists can go fuck themselves with their "sin taxes."

One other thing is different.  It SNOWED.  None of it stuck to the ground here, but there were actual flakes.  Of snow.  The snow came less than one week after temperatures were in the mid-70s.  My Environmental Law professor blames global warming.