The only reason I don't trash the phone book

I feel kind of bad

I got an interesting email the other day. I was the top searcher on Lexis at my school. Wonder how that looks on the resume.

Between my law review comment and moot court I have printed probably 6 boxes of papers. I'm starting to feel bad. Not to mention for every item I print in Lexis it wastes 2 pages as a cover sheet and an end sheet. 

I wish I could use my rewards points to plant a tree or something. Something like the Carbon Offset where you buy more points for your carbon footprint. 

All else aside, I've got very little to complain about . . . or at least I am so busy that I don't have time to complain. January and February are going to be busier than any other time in law school. On another note, I sent my resume back out to a firm that rejected me in the fall with my new grades (slightly lower) and got a really contrite email asking me to come interview at their expense. They said that my resume had been "misplaced" (I guess we both "forgot about" that rejection letter they sent me). I should have some more fun posts coming up soon, I've somewhat started on a few in class, but then I get distracted by the LA Times crossword. I'll be free around Feb. 15 and maybe I can actually blog. I do love how I get the reputation for disappearing because of the woman. At least we don't disappear to make salads.

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.

Sometimes Online Bots Win in Real Life

Here is a copy/paste of a bot post on an online forum I read. The porn bots hit this particular forum in force recently, but this online-pharmacy-virus/trojan post takes the cake. Read the entire post. It's worth it. My favorite is "[i]nstead of asking your babe about his or her friends, launch a barbeque organization and interrogate your baby to invite some of his or her friends."

"Statistics compass shown that instances of teen drug addiction escape in continued chains from parents to children. This is why like now is the day to either cleft the chain of teen drug addiction or mark it from forming. No proportions of dense work, money, renunciation is payment another than breaking a chain of substance abuse or preventing one from forming.

For some, the vicious cycle of teen drug abuse begins at familiar when they are influenced by the addictive behaviors their parents exhibit. For example, children of alcoholics (COAs) are a party of individuals who suffer the plight of their parents' alcoholism.

As a teenager, the likelihood of exposing to drugs and alcohol is genuine high, and there is a congenial chance that you testament effort drugs and alcohol.

Much though you impart yourself that you will lone buy tramadol slap drugs once, you engage in it one aggrandized time, and then one deeper future after that, and before you discriminate it you are developing a drug problem. One of the consequences of drug and alcohol abuse is addiction. Most teens don't envisage that they will mature addicted, and simply benefit drug and alcohol to own a bad time.

However, the deed of addiction to drugs and alcohol can conclusion in some appealing undesirable consequences, such as loss of friendships, health problems, behavioral problems, alienation of family, and a loss of care in sports, academics, hobbies, etc. Substance abuse and addiction can emphatically modify behavior, and a latest preoccupation with drugs can assemblage absent activities that were formerly important, adore sports or academics.


End this is a discreet and non-invasive way. Always enshrine that teenagers can be fully protective of their privacy. Instead of asking your babe about his or her friends, launch a barbeque organization and interrogate your baby to invite some of his or her friends.

Inviting your kid"s friends over to the apartment is the ace conduct to shop for to apprehend them better. You may further embolden the kids to hang environing the co-op every instantly and then so that you can inspect them without truly appearing as well nosy or something. Duration busy in some worthwhile activities can cure grip your girl elsewhere from drug addiction."

I couldn't make this shit up. It would take days.

Tornado Warning

Today law school shut down due to a tornado warning. Thanks to my schedule, I wasn't on campus today. It did remind me of last year. After the high school in Enterprise got hit by a tornado, our school decided to close campus down due to tornado warnings. So now instead of being relatively safe inside a large 1970's architectural nightmare of a school/bomb shelter made of concrete and brick, I'm in a Toyota Camry driving home. I felt much safer thank you.

I know that we're all trying to avoid liability here but for the commuting students, and those in cheap housing, clearing campus endangers more than it helps.

Free Books, In MY Law School?

There are three texts for the Military Law:  Global War on Terror, but we didn't know this until we came to class.  Apparently the Air Force has been kind enough to provide our course materials for free because they're using the same materials they use to train JAG officers at a nearby base.  This was quite a refreshing discovery after dropping a few hundred dollars on books for all my other classes.

This makes two positive occurrences directly related to the law school itself in one week, while there has only been one notable dismal failure.  The pessimist in me is waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I can't help but think that this could be a good semester.

Shit...Here Again

Triumphant Return and Class Schedule:

I learned over the holidays that non-law school time gives rise to very little blogging material.  There are lots of other things to do of course, but it really seems like nothing makes me think "oh shit, this needs to be blogged."  Perhaps this makes me a bad blogger.

The holidays were miraculous.  I swear it felt like there was a physical weight off my back.  The stress seemed to flow out of my skin and disappear into the surroundings.  I slept well, worked out a bit, and actually lost a couple of pounds.  Life seemed enjoyable in ways I had almost forgotten or at least stopped understanding.  Spending time in Texas with the girl was even better than usual because neither of us was stressed out.

In any case, we're back in the ninth circle of hell as of Monday 1/7.  I'm taking Law and Economics, Insurance Law, Environmental Law II, Conflicts of Law, and a military law class about the "war on terror."  I have no class before 10:45 AM or after 2:50 PM on any day of the week, and I have no classes on Friday.  It was miraculous that I was able to achieve this degree of streamlining while only taking one class I didn't initially want to take (Insurance).  However, even Insurance is starting to seem somewhat interesting, and I'll probably deal with it a lot in practice anyway.  All my classes this term have fewer than 30 people, which I definitely like.  Taking Bus Orgs and Legal Profession (ethics) in the same semester sucked last fall.

Obligatory Guy Fawkes Bitterness:

All this happiness and sunshine feels so out of character for my blogging persona, so here's a little bitterness.  Our grades aren't even officially due until January 15, and I will be astounded if they're all in by that time.  Consequently, many people have no grades posted yet, and I only have one.  Professor Hair Club had our Administrative Law finals graded within 5 days of the due date (meaning he submitted the grades well before Christmas), but the records office neglected to post them until Monday.  I was elated and somewhat surprised to see that I got perhaps the only A in the class (or one of two depending on the source).  Of course, this was too good to be true without some sort of fuck-up along the way.  After being posted online for two days, the grade was nowhere to be found when I checked grades again Wednesday morning.  Additionally, Administrative Law was no longer listed in the list of courses I took last semester.  Even worse, my friends' grades from the class remained unchanged.  As a typical Type A, pessimistic law student, my mind immediately envisioned nightmare scenarios such as the records office having entered the grade incorrectly or the professor revisiting my exam and thinking I had plagiarized something.  

It took most of yesterday to figure out what happened, but the records office finally informed me that another course had accidentally been added to my transcript during the semester without my knowledge.  I have no idea how something like that even happens.  To correct the problem, they had to remove last semester's records from the system and re-add everything.  Apparently it took a bit longer to get Admin Law back in there for some reason.   Fortunately, everything worked out in the end and my A is back in the system.  Looking at it is like a warm law school security blanket.  Imagine that, a happy ending for a law school problem.

What the Constitution Does Not Say (Excerpts from profound 1L comments in ConLaw) Part 1

Prof: Where do rights come from?

Profound Lawdolecent of the Day: Human rights.

I get to sit in on the 1L ConLaw class this semester. It's a new semester, the LawTots have matured into Lawdolecents. While a few LawTot gunners have gotten their grades and have learned to refrain from contributing their opinion, there are still a few who will never learn that their opinion is not as profound as they think. Since I'm on the downhill coast for the rest of law school ConLaw is very entertaining because people get involved and feel the need to defend their opinion. (Un) Fortunately for the (learning)entertainment process, this leads to a lot of opinions which represent what the Constitution does not say.

In the spirit of the inaugural  What the Constitution Does Not Say, here are a few more first day goodies:

Prof: Where do rights come from?

Profound Lawdolecent of the Day: Dignity. (Think about it)

Prof: Where do rights come from?

Profound Lawdolecent of the Day: I think the Creator, God. (You knew someone was going to say it.)

Phaedrus: (Thinking) aka: Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Thank you George Frederic Handel. Then again, as the song says (For Unto Us a Child is Born- Handel's Messiah) "and the government shall be upon his shoulder." Profound Lawdolecent May be onto something... nah.

White Collar Crime Field Trip

For White Collar Crime class we are taking a field trip to the Federal Penitentiary. The Prof. (who is a former US Prosecutor) told us that our assignment is to ask the inmates questions.

MEMO
TO: LAW STUDENTS
FROM: Prof. Prosecutor
RE: Field trip to see White Collar Inmates


Assignment: Be a dick to an inmate.

Books

College bookstores are a scam. I caught my visit today on film.



I need to start shopping online.