Previously Unpublished

I didn’t want my grades paradox post to be on top. So, I thought I would describe the screensaver on the law newspaper computer. I’m in the office listening to “Apple Blossom” by the White Stripes and I put my head down for a nap. When my phone alarm rings, I look over and there is a giant bottle cap-looking disk spinning haphazardly around the dark screen, changing colors, and devouring these little white drops that appear in front of it.

A. Here, spinning bottle cap equals law school. Drops equal my soul.
B. Someone was high, dropping acid, or both when they came up with this.
C. Here, spinning bottle cap equal life, Drops equal experiences both good and bad to grow on.
D. Someone was listening to “Apple Blossom” too long, wanted to share, used the screensaver as an excuse.
E. None, or all, of the above.

-jd

I made the meatloaf using Guinness Stout. It occurs to me that I am consuming Guinness at school. My life is complete.

Well, got that grade back in international law.

My premonitions were right.

Not my most glorious grade.

In fact, my lowest of the semester.

Of course; this makes sense because it was the only test I’ve ever felt confident on in law school. Meanwhile the class I was much much more confused in half the time, and did not even start reading for until halfway through the semester due to competitions and whatnot, I do the best in. Go figure. It’s like I’m almost not disappointed because it is just so absurd.

Or here’s another spin, I think most people considered the two classes that I did the worst in, evidence and international law, to be the easiest. Evidence was mainly multiple choice and some short answers in the form of sentenses. International law was basically a vocab test (Rebus sic stantibus! Damn, damn, damn - probably everyone got perfect and I missed one!). People were feeling pretty good overall going into these classes and walking out too.

Meanwhile, crim law and corporations were disasters for a lot of people involving long, policy oriented essays. Anyone reading this blog knows that I have no problem writing long, meandering collections of words. I figure when it comes down to it, this must have had something to do with it, overall people are more comfortable with the multiple choice and short answers. I can’t stand not being able to argue in those situations, although it’s not like I deplore them either - short is always better on a test. I think it’s just that everyone is pretty qualified academically, on tests the difference is more what you are adept at handling under pressure.

I write under pressure (notice: blog entry in the middle of my worst day of the week).

Perhaps from now on, this blog should be conducted in multiple choice and short statement (a la Doogie Howser) to prepare for the next round of finals. Anyway, an “A” in an elective just seems too much to hope for in this crazy, mixed up, law school world.

-jd

Other news at noon:

A. Thank you Justice O’Connor for your service.
B. Thank you Mrs. King for your life.
C. I basically announced today that people should be able to kill themselves to sell organs and then had to backtrack.
D. My back would like to thank the Real Estate Convention and the University for making it impossible to park on campus. Instead, I’m parked off campus, halfway down a giant hill.
E. At least I managed for the first time ever to bring lunch to campus. Leftovers from my Guinness Meatloaf and Mac ‘N’ Cheese. Ahhh, comfort food.

Our assigned reading for Bioethics and the Law for tomorrow’s class is a law review note about the rights of great apes that can be accessed here, for those interested. It’s a good read, especially since it’s a subject I never really think about, but that does raise some interesting legal issues. Anyway, I’m going along and there is this bit describing the abilities of great apes in an effort to compare and contrast them, basically, to humans.

Well one example is of a female orangutan in the 1970’s in Borneo who was taught sign language by a male instructor. See where this is going? Well, “Rinnie,” the female orangutan was really enthusiastic about learning sign language and was just blowing these scientists away with her ability to learn. Then one day she tries to “seduce” her instructor. He turns her down and she subsequently loses all interest in learning sign language.

I couldn’t help posting a punch line about “misreading” the “signs.” Get it? He was teaching her signs, and she thought he was hitting on her? Ha ha ha…I know, I’m a riot.

-jd

I’ve decided to drop my two-unit, Monday evening White Collar Crime class. It was a hard decision that goes against a long-running personal principle. However, today was the last day to add or drop and right now after a thorough cost-benefit analysis, this seems to be the best strategy.

Basically, since my days at summer camp, I have always sought to maximize my return on investments. This is especially true when it comes to things like merit badges and classes. For instance, I would go away for a couple of weeks and make sure to fit every possible merit badge class into my schedule. I would often come away with seven or eight merit badges while everyone else got three or four. However, this came at a cost: I rarely took part in any other extra curricular that did not gain me some sort of recognition, I dropped archery, for instance, when it became clear the time I would need to put into it would cost me other badges, etc.

In college, I often acted the same way, I would routinely petition to go above whatever the maximum unit threshold was just so I could add in some quirky film-theatre class or the history of the Beatles. I liked the courses, but I think I also just wanted to say I did it or recklessly challenge myself where quantity meant quality, and most of all, it seemed like a free class since I didn’t have to pay any extra and now it would be on my transcript that I had in fact, taken a course on John, Paul, George, and Ringo at a highly ranked, national university.

So flash forward to now and the schedule I described in an earlier post. It is like summer camp on steroids. I like all of my classes, included White Collar Crime, which has a lot of cases on banking law that I am familiar with in practice, and moreover the professor gets great marks. Additionally since I took summer school at the cost of over ten grand last summer, I was supposed to go part-time next year because I didn’t need the units and would thus save myself approximately another ten grand to make up for my not finding a job last summer.

Well, that means this is the last semester where I can basically pack as many courses in as possible for “free.” And, as stated, it isn’t just to class-pack; this is an interesting, two-unit topic that seemed to fit nicely in my schedule on Monday nights. I felt compelled to take it almost. However, all my life I have been doing this out of some feeling that I need to maximize everything. Then I started looking at the 80 page readings, on top of having essentially four other classes plus this competition which is like having law skills again. Would I really get that much joy and actually do all the readings in this class while trying to maintain a steady improvement of my GPA so that I can be employed upon graduation? There are costs, even though in law school, as stated in the “Complete Me!” post, fewer classes by no means guarantee better grades; they are far too random to predict.

I tried to reason that this is such a great time to take White Collar Crime because the Ken Lay trial is just starting, but then, won’t we have a better perspective next year? (This was the same reasoning I used for Bankruptcy since new laws just went into effect this year). Additionally, shouldn’t I savor and put that much more effort into the classes I currently have? If I’m diligent, perhaps I can appreciate the chance to really learn Copyright, and appreciate the undergrad-flashbacks of Advanced Political Science and Bioethics. Maybe I can write a better paper for the seminar class and try to get published. Are employers going to be that impressed that I fit White Collar Crime into my schedule. It’s really more of a criminal law thing as opposed to business law. Plus, I can take it next year. If this was the most attractive two-unit class in my schedule this spring, what’s to say it won’t be next spring too? Dropping to eleven units for part time means I can take three, three-unit courses and one, two-unit course each semester next year. Then I can wade into White Collar Crime and its four-unit sized readings leisurely, as my law school career fades away. It’ll be like getting that archery merit badge I gave up so long ago.

So, we’ll see how this goes; actually cutting back instead of trying to do everything. Although my plate is still pretty damn full. Plus, if moot court goes well, I’m thinking of trying out for the Mock Trial Team. It was never my thing before, but when am I going to get the chance to run a trial again? So this gives me options. I still feel guilty like I’m giving up, but maybe I’m really getting better. (Anyway, my college GPA would be a lot better had I not tacked-on a bunch of extra courses. My five worse grades are all from elective classes outside of my major and minors.)

-jd

So it seems the internet limitations are spreading like a hypothetical Avian Bird Flu model. I can’t get internet anywhere at the law school today, whether I plug into a wall or use wireless. The only computers that seem to work for anyone are the ones in the computer lab, which is of course crowded because everyone wants to use them to download free cases for the moot court competition. And that is why I want to use them too. I guess I’ll have to go home and exercise self-discipline.

No, this is not what I am having inscribed on those little “better-than-peeps in the best-holiday-candy-competition” hard candy hearts to give out to all the girls in law school.

Rather, it is my plea to the powers that be who control access to my final grade. Over a month and a half after our last final, nearly two months after this particular final, I have still not received my grade in international law. Moreover, I fear for its safety. I was in the records office today adding and dropping for probably the 10th time this semester when a receptionist picks up the phone and fields a call obviously from someone in my same predicament. She explains that often professors don’t set the curve right and the grades are checked and then must be sent back if they don’t fall into the right division in appropriate quantities along the bell curve.

My conclusion is that professors probably swing the curve as favorably as possible. I mean, I can’t imagine if the grades are skewed, that they would skew downward. Plus I have proof, if you look at the grade curves for each class posted from last semester, they all show an average at or very slightly above a 3.0. Now this was may ace-in-the-hole class. The class where I actually felt confident for the first time walking out of a test. Okay, confident is a strong word for law school, but at least it was the only class that I didn’t complain about wholeheartedly over the break. I didn’t think I failed, put it that way.

Thus, here’s how my mind works: 1. The test was considered pretty easy by just about everyone I talked to, so I doubt I actually aced it. (In fact given that I did much better than expected in the classes I did think I failed, logically, I should fail international law). However, I did feel good about it. 2. This makes me think that I might be affected by professor skewing, like say he gave out too many B+’s or something. 3. Now that I know the classes still not available for viewing are ones that had a problem applying the curve, I think that 4. I am in danger of losing a more favorable grade should the professor need to ax some of those plusher scores back a little bit. 5. This class was half full of LLM’s and foreign lawyers. 6. As much as I’m always willing to brag about my writing skills, I’ll concede that some may be able to communicate more succinctly than myself. 7. My grade slips every day longer that we wait for our transcripts to be finalized.

Conclusion: Like so much registrar-office magic, I can just picture my grade from say, two weeks ago, not being the same as the grade that it becomes everytime the class spread is taken back for revision. I mean, grades certainly aren’t going up in this time period. Someone’s grade is falling, with the click of a calculator. It reminds me a lot of when I worked at the bank and you could, albeit temporarily, make all of someone’s money disappear, just by making one keystroke.

Now yes, I may be crazy, it’s from the cabin fever of being stuck with only three grades while my comrades all possess all of their new crayon-drawing sheets. My parents must already think I’m nuts for complaining about my other classes when they turned out okay. The point of this post is mainly to highlight the time it is taking to figure these things out. I wrote essays in place of doing equations on the Calculus AP test, and yet I am sure I could do the math necessary to equalize all these grades in less than half an hour. It’s not that I’m terribly worried about getting a bad grade or anything, I was over that last year. I’d like to do well, but really what it comes down to is being complete. I want finality so that I can move on into this semester. Focus more on making a profit through the used-book black market, focus more on the girls sitting next to me in class, focus more on buying little candy hearts that make loud crunchy noises in the library.

It is a new day, and the circle must be complete. It is a new day, give me my last frickin’ grade!

-jd

My other rant for the day is about the parking fiasco this morning. Basically, I didn’t end up going to Copyright because there was no parking anywhere except the far west of campus and by then I would have been a half hour late to an hour class anyway. But, I’ve already covered this subject.

Apparently, though unconfirmed as of the moment, the administration has figured out how to shield certain classrooms from the internet during class sessions. For example, I was sitting in Wills and Trusts today having a nice conversation and surfing the internet at about 5 minutes until class time. In fact, mentioning how I was glad I got here early on seating chart day because I couldn’t get reception in my old location. Well the girl I was talking to mentioned the same thing. Then a minute later, the professor walks in and sure enough, everyone in the near vicinity loses their connection. You see people frantically searching for available networks for their wireless to latch onto. There are murmurs of a conspiracy by the higher-ups to force us to pay attention. Sure enough everyone busts out solitaire and hearts and their notes. Then class ends, and miraculously, the net comes back on again and I’m able to cut and paste this post which I composed during class on word.

Frankly, I need to pay attention this class because of the way the professor lectures. In fact, I am almost certain so far, I could take the final on the basis of his notes alone. There is nothing left to be desired. Speaking of desired, the title. Well, turning off the internet, at least from a guy perspective is as if the professor suddenly started talking about satin lingerie, preferably with powerpoint examples. Or, for girls, shoes. I took this from the later episode of Scrubs from Tuesday since when the girls didn’t want the guys to pay attention they started talking about shoes and then to bring them out of their “coma,” they mentioned satin panties. I know the analogy is not perfect since it’s not like the professor is suddenly so interesting that I have a hard time fumbling with hooks and catches in a moment of lust for the law. Moreover, my example might not be applicable to all orientations. Anyway, I just wanted to spice up a post complaining about the loss of the internet. As a professor last semester put it, we only have 8 minute time spans-max!

You might think it would be a good experiment to see if my grades rise, but unfortunately there is no control since the subject might just be intuitively easy for me, and also, everyone except those on the very edges of the classroom are now forced to be slightly more attentive and take notes too. Personally, I’m going to use the paint program to start drawing classroom scenes like a courtroom artist. (Inspiration drawn from the entry on 12/10/2005 from Blonde Justice’s blog called “Some Pig.”) For instance, today when the professor caught me making eye contact (because I couldn’t AIM) and asked me if there was common law marriage in California and I quickly and overly-smuggly replied yes and then he got another student to shoot me down and then said something to the effect that my confidence might not be as high anymore. I would, in that case, paint a portrait of me crossing my arms defiantly in front of myself with a look of indifference; I’m more than halfway done with law school.

-jd

(I was actually shocked I was wrong, sort of like when I was little and my dad took apart a toy that had different Disney characters pop up when you pressed a button. He was a psych major and said I was so sure of myself that he wanted to see my look of disbelief when I pressed Mickey and Donald popped up).

First, I would like to report that I received my first porn spam under the “comments” moderation tab. Since I felt that “South Park Graphic Anime” and “French Lesbiennes Underground” were not a focal point of this blog, I deleted the comment before publishing. However, I felt that this milestone should be reported. Also, as I wrote the term “milestone,” it just felt funny to say and I wondered the history of this modern-archaic compound and so check out this link for the wiki rundown.

Second, I feel the blog-bug coming back after being symptom free for over a month during vacation. (Correlation with study-induced procrastination, the world may never know!) Thus, I will find a nice tension between wanting to post my every thought all the time and managing a heavy spring schedule.

Third, and related to the above, I think my class schedule is finally set after a grueling two weeks of chess and jedi mind games with the registrar’s office. I think much like dating, in the end as much as I complain about the process, I’m enamored with hacking through all the scenarios and possible outcomes-romantic huh? Hey, February is coming up. You think “hacking” is unemotional, wait till I publish what is possibly my favorite poem I’ve ever written. It’s called, coincidentally, “St. Valentine’s Day” and I wrote it in high school.

Anyway, to bring back the law relation, it looks like I’ll have a very interesting and diverse semester (Ignore this, looking back, it is just an example of lawyer resume-puffing, especially the discourse after mentioning the cool class topics, sorry):

Political Science graduate research
Bioethics and the Law
Copyright Law
Wills and Trusts
White Collar Crime
Honors Moot Court Competition

Yeah, it’s pretty involved, plus time out for writing and editing articles, the negotiations tournament, business law society, band, and finding a job for the summer. Oh, and watching the final 9 episodes of The West Wing. However, moot court will be over after a hellish 2-3 weeks starting now. Poli Sci is mainly editing and cite-checking for a Journal. Bioethics is a paper. That really leaves 3 serious classes. So yeah, I’ll still be around for drinks and stuff.

That’s all for now, this was just sort of a house-cleaning post of general “milestones” I wanted to chart on this blog, like my class schedule et al.

-jd

Yes, I do believe that was my article that was mentioned on Friday at the moot court orientation. The one about transferring to Harvard. When he said there was recently a story in our newspaper where the interviewee said his experience at Harvard was the same as our humble little law school. Me. I conducted the interview. Now how come no one noticed there was a celebrity in their midst?

Ha ha. I apologise. Unlike our school, that was not very humble. But maybe we shouldn’t be humble. We fixed the grading system, we’re fixing career services, and as soon as we make registration a live, online process, I will feel that our school has reached nirvana. We should be making a meteoric rise in the standings and our competitions like honors moot court, which have drawn Supreme Court Justices, are evidence of that. As the good Professor D was trying to convey; I believe. Anyway, I’m quite pleased with this last issue, since I was reading it over again tonight. Besides the Harvard article, the Alaska article is pretty good too.

Sorry Jack, the bar ceremony photos were axed when we got new articles at the last minute. I’m new to the whole editing deal, so I didn’t realize that the submission deadline really means anytime until right before the file is emailed to the press. Plus I have no say whatsoever in selection of content. However, for my small contribution, it’s awesome having access to an office on campus. Yes, that’s right. It’s like I’m a professor or something.

-jd

It’s Saturday night after a very trying first week of class shuffling. So I’m trying to re-arrange the lighting in my room so that all the lights turn on and off at the same time when I use the light switch. Well, except for the new reading lamp which needs to be on a different circuit so that I can control that from my bed. Anyway, Cruel Intentions is on in the background and this scene comes up where Ryan Phillipe is making a plea to Reese Witherspoon and it strikes me that this scene is in some places word for word and even inflection for inflection just like the scene in Star Wars, Episode II where Anakin challenges Padme to say she feels something for her too. It’s the infamous(ly cheese ball) scene in Padme’s quarters with the fireplace in the background. I was shocked that it was so similar. Of course, it was rumored that Phillipe was in the running to play Anakin originially. Lucas must have loved his work in the former film. Heck, I used Cruel Intentions to get some action myself when that movie first came out.

-jd

I am facinated by ideas of fate, coincidence, alternative possibilities whether they are ultimately “explained” or pondered using religion, science, or pure speculation. It’s just interesting to consider the what-if’s of life. I think for me personally, this stems from those choose-your-own adventure books I read as a kid, or possibly from a book I used to have that had a whole list of questions that you would reflect on how you would do something differently if you could go back in time. Anyway, for awhile now, I’ve been completely intrigued by the idea that there is this whole genre out there that explores alternate histories. I knew this from a Civil War class I occasionally sat in on during my tenure in DC, but I never actively sought out any of these books. Well, on Friday the 13th (yes, for dramatic effect), one sought me out. In fact, it seems according to Amazon.com that this book is one of the premier collections of essays out there. It’s called, most appropriately, What If?. I actually got a collection that has both volume in it. The point? Well, last night I’m reading the bit about what if China has discovered America first and lo and behold, today in the news there is an article discussing this very phenomena with the same players involved from the early Ming Dynasty. Yeah, I thought that was a pretty crazy coincidence too. It’s really quite interesting to think how the course of history would have been different if China has not retreated into isolationism shortly after building up a huge navy.

Anyway, the long winter break is coming to a close this Martin Luther King day and tomorrow begins a hellish cycle of going to waitlist classes, trying to stay caught up without actually knowing what your schedule is yet.

To mark another semester of resolutions to stay focused, I picked up a new tv show to watch. It’s on Monday nights and its called “How I Met Your Mother.” How do I tie all this together and fit it into the vague law student frame within which this blog is set? Glad you asked. Well, figuring out how to watch tv shows and using them as a tool to unwind after a day of classes and studying is an important part of any law student’s career. Moreover, this particular show has a lot of stuff about fate in it, which is how I fit the alternative history stuff in. Plus, alternative history stuff is just cool and there are certainly a lot of legal dramas that could have gone two different ways (Gore v. Bush, calling Gore v. Bush). Anyway, it has a sort of cheesy, stupid title, but the concept is very interesting. Apparently the main character (I have only seen two shows, so this is all a paraphrase from various sources) is telling his kids in the present about everything he went to to meet their mother. You don’t know ahead of time who she is or whether he has already met her and she is one of the main characters, or else if he hasn’t met her yet. It’s catchy and has a lot of recognizable support cast including Doogie Howser and the flute player from American Pie. Today it had a lot of stuff about meeting the right people at the wrong times or the wrong people and then they become the right people. Sort of like the movie Sliding Doors. See, fate, alternative histories. That’s right.

Anyway, I have a paper to write already, but never fear…Previously Unpublished is here.

-jd