Today’s Employment Law class consisted of a lecture on the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Professor I. was underwhelmed by our engagement:
Professor I: “I’ve succeed in glazing over almost every eye in the room. That’s an accomplishment!”
Professor I: “See you tomorrow if you can overcome what I did to you today…”
See also: Socratic Preemption, and all “On the Record” posts.
I wanted to write that my love affair with law school finally wore off.
I also wanted to write about how bored and annoyed I have been these past two weeks.
Instead of writing a whiny, bitchy post, I went on my nightly run. I am training for a marathon, and running is an excellent way to procrastinate writing whiny posts and studying for tax midterms.
During my run, I realized that I am only irritable in my easy classes. The problem I have with easy classes is the curve. Easy classes mean arbitrary grading because everyone understands the material. The difference between an A and a C is usually something obscure or even the format of the answer (instead of the content.)
There’s nothing I can really do about this besides get over it. And yes, I’m totally singing “HEY! Get-get-get-get over it!”
That’s not a bad law school motto actually…
A lot happened in weeks 6 and 7. It snowed several times, but the snow didn’t stick around. I went to my first hockey game (videos here!), rediscovered the Mississippi River, set off a perfume bomb, had a mouse/pig problem, and ran into Mel again…
Here is a 1 minute video of the snow, Joel and Harley, and St. Anthony Falls:
I think I am going to give up studying for my tax midterm and go to bed. I’m to the point where I am just confusing myself. Capital gain? What? Who?
Weekly summaries from this semester:
By the way, I’ve gotten over the weather. A 40 degree mist isn’t that bad when you’re running up hills.
Revenue Ruling 80-362, 1980-2 C.B. 208
It’s confusing. So here’s a chart.
Here are some of my recent posts at The Shark:
Every time I see the word “UMass” I have to think about the Pixies song:
A few minutes into my Conflicts class we heard a ringing sound from the hallway. Jill sits by the door, which has a window to the hallway:
Professor V: “What is that ringing sound?”
Jill: “I think it’s coming from the hallway.”
Professor V: “Hm.”
Jill (opening door): “It’s coming from out here, but I’m not sure what it is. Carbon Monoxide?”
Jack: “Is that a fire alarm?”
Professor V: “Probably not. Jill, let us know if you see flames.”
Jill: “Will do!”
A little Carbon Monoxide isn’t going to interrupt Conflicts.
Other Professor V posts:
…in which I become creepy “laughs to himself” guy.
I am sitting in the cafeteria area of the law school, reading for Conflicts.
It is hard to concentrate because two girls from my Tax Law class are seated two tables over. They are preparing for the midterm, and one of the girls has a booming voice.
Suddenly, I imagined her saying “SORRY. I CANNOT CONTROL THE VOLUME OF MY VOICE!”
And I bust out laughing.
Last class we filled out evaluations:
Professor A: “Thank you for filling out my teaching evaluations. They are being evaluated by the Afghanistan election commission so it’s going to take some time to get a result…”
Professor A, who practices at a fancy firm downtown, gives us practice tips:
Professor A: “Today’s practice tip: You can’t expect all of your clients to like you. You can only hope that they respect you.”
The professor then told us about a news story where a policeman’s wife had an affair with a doctor. The policeman found out, lured the doctor to his house, threatened to sue, and then demanded $150,000. The doctor gave the policeman $25,000, which did not constitute a gift.
Professor A: “The newspaper story did not say what the basis of the policeman’s threatened suit would be…but then again, only people from Arkansas know what their law is.”
At least Professor R is honest about the reading:
“You don’t need to read the mortgage financing forms word-for-word because if you’d try to you’d quickly go insane because they are really boring…”
Should have read your HUD booklet.
Professor E: “Mrs. Smith, do you remember getting your HUD special information booklet when you bought your house?”
Jill: “Uh, no. I don’t remember that at all. But I was young when I bought my house so I sort of rushed through it. I got totally screwed though…”
And the case quote of the day:
There is a group of inmates at the LCC who call themselves “the Peckerwoods.” This group of inmates has been identified by the facility as a security threat group. Gibbens v. Sabatka-Rine, D.Neb.,2009.
The Peckerwoods case involved a prisoner who had a lot of enemies in jail. He made most of these enemies before he got to the jail – he had ripped someone off, murdered someone else’s brother…
The prisoner was attacked by a member of the Peckerwoods gang in the prison kitchen and alleged that the warden was “deliberately indifferent to the serious risk of harm” that the Peckerwoods member posed to him.
His case was dismissed because he failed to show that the warden was aware that his attacker posed a threat to him.
The room for my Conflicts class always smells like snot.
So I am sitting in this snot-scented room 10 minutes before class. No one else is in the room yet.
The snot smell becomes oppressive, and I decide it is time for a freshness update. And gasp! Surprise, surprise! There is a can of Axe in my bag!
So I spray the Axe.
A minute later Jill walks in.
She puts her stuff down in the back of the room and then starts hacking. I turn around and Jill is running out of the room.
Jill: “Do you TASTE that?”
Me: “What?”
Jill: “Sorry.” (HACK) “Someone released a perfume bomb back there!”
Woops.
See also: The Best of Jill.
Real Estate Law: Professor E on title searches:
Professor E: “There are people who just love to do title searches. To them it’s just a huge puzzle and they love the history involved! But most people would rather shoot themselves…”
My tax professor’s asides:
Professor A: “Part of what started this stink was smartass business school professors…”
Professor A: “I’m sorry I’m not my usual sparkling self. I spent a long weekend in Boston eating way too much seafood…”
My most recent post for The Shark is about California Western Law School’s decision to have school-sponsored student blawgs on their website. I’m not buying it. These blogs scream “infomercial!”
Also on The Shark: Back up your files. Or else.
If I wrote about how I really feel right now, my law school career counselor would probably let out a primal scream and assault me in the hallway.
So, no profanity editorializing – I am just going to state the facts:
Methinks it’s winter now.
Update (post dog walk): so, I officially scrapped tonight’s plans of outlining tax law. Tonight’s new project is teaching Harley how to use a litter box.
The weight of the snow causes mini avalanches from the trees. It feels like the trees are chucking snow down on the sidewalk out of bitterness like “WHY IS THERE SNOW ON ME? I STILL HAVE LEAVES DAMMIT!”
So, I felt like the star of my own video game! I am Super Mario with a golf umbrella and sack of dog poop. The object of the game was to hop around the neighborhood without getting dumped on by the trees. 1up my people!
It was a lot of fun. I take back all my bitching about the snow….which is only getting worse by the way:
It’s Thursday night. I am exhausted from school and work.
My allergies are terrorizing me. I suspect I have swine flu.
My eye is red and throbbing. I suspect I have pink eye.
I open my apartment and immediately sense that the dog messed his kennel. Crap.
I stand there and just look at the books, legal pads, and clothes that are strewn about the room.
The pile of dishes in the kitchen creaks.
The kennel smell is only getting worse.
This is a disaster.
The dog is glaring at me now, but I am still standing there.
I look down and see a piece of paper that had been slid under my door: “Hi this is the building manager and landlord writing to tell you that we were in your apartment today to check if there were any leaks in the bathroom or kitchen.”
My humiliation was complete.
I’ve had a rough two weeks, and that was definitely the low point.
I spent the rest of the weekend working and slowly piecing my apartment together again, but I am still convinced that the next time my landlord sees me he’s going to point and scream “SLOOOB! PIGGY PIGGY PIGGY! SUWEEEE! SUWEEE!”
What made weeks 4 and 5 so bad? School work? Plague weather? Illness?
I want to blame it on all of those reasons, but the real cause of Thursday’s hot-mess-moment was that I failed to follow my own advice and forgot about my non-negotiables: I didn’t eat right, sleep enough, or focus on my goals.
Hence the disaster.
Although school work, plague weather, and illness didn’t help:
The increase in school work was primarily due to moot court because legal research is one of those endless time-sucks where you can “always do more” and I was bad about cutting myself off.
The increase in school work coincided with a week of plague weather: 40 degrees, wet, and gross. And there was this ever-present drizzle that was too light to warrant an umbrella, but quick enough to soak. Fail.
The cold meant that I had to skip to the downtown Target to buy gloves. This was the view from the Macy’s skyway:
And I certainly felt like I had the plague because, my allergies were so bad that I was convinced that I was convinced that I had swine flu. People are very paranoid about h1n1, and I got the filthiest looks from my classmates when I was trying to control my running nose without being distracting. I’m surprised someone didn’t stand up and should “WHY ARE YOU HERE AT ALL? YOU ARE GOING TO INFECT US ALL!”
Oh, and the eye. My nasty eye irritation was completely my fault. My optometrist never told me that I have to dump my contact fluid every time that I use my contacts.
So…I used the same fluid for about three weeks.
Every one that I have told this to has gasped in horror as if I just realized that an oven is an inappropriate place to let a toddler sleep. Pfft.
Well, I chucked the bacteria-filled contacts and fluid, and my eye is much better. With clear eyes, a clean apartment, fresh diet, and enough sleep, so I begin again.
This is from a case I came across today. And no, I did not make up any of the names:
“He testified that Ms. Tuggle told him that the defendant said McGory had shot at the defendant’s brother on one occasion and had chased the defendant with a machete earlier on the day of the shooting.” State v. Holmes, Tenn.Crim.App.,2009.
Ms. Tuggle had seen the defendant get out of his car and attempt to gun McGory down.
McGory was a quick thinker however, and used a friend as a body shield…and here I thought Law & Order made this stuff up…
My newest post over at The Shark is about a Stanford law graduate who took an alternative route and used her JD to launch a high-end call-girl service.
Highest hourly rate? $1,300. Read the post here.
Someone flipped the fall switch in Minneapolis because evening temperatures have been dipping to the 40’s.
This means it is scarf time!
I initially tried to take the picture for this post with Harley, but it didn’t turn out well:
Did my law school really just email me a picture of Paula Abdul?
I’m sure someone thought this was really cute…and, well, “reasonable minds could disagree.”
Stay classy, Minnesota.
“Inside Law” is the name of the law school’s password-protected student website. The law school realized that students were ignoring the copious amounts of spam email that it sent, so now we get a weekly email that directs us to check a website.
Personally, I think this is more annoying than sorting through the law school emails because it involves yet-another step in getting information. And I might be retarded but, I always get bewildered and confused by the law school’s website(s).
It’s a level of confusion up there with finding the right terminal at the airport…
Note: I understand people are busy, so here are some cliffnotes for the rant:
Today’s reading assignment for Employment law involved Title VII workplace discrimination claims.
I was reminded of the “I am not Tyrone” post that I wrote during the law school admissions process when I was worried about law schools balking at my lack of stereotypical African-American “blackness” because that was exactly what some schools were recruiting me for.
After the first day of orientation, my housemates pointed out that I was the only black person in our year.1 This was a recurring conversation during my 1L year, and I was amused that the lack of “diversity” bothered2 white students more than it did me.
This year the law school gave fee vouchers to black applicants and (surprise, surprise) we have more black students.
Several of our 50-some-odd transfers are also black. Of course the Black Law Students Association is thrilled, but I think the black students serve a dual purpose by giving the white students a piece of mind.3
Congratulations. You can feel like you go to a “diverse” school now.
Out of the seven 1Ls at the BLSA meeting, I think only one of them wasn’t mixed (ie, half/white or Asian) but Americans who want diversity for diversity’s sake care primarily about appearance of African-American ancestry.4
The most obvious example of this is our president, and the reaction of the African-American community to his election.
No one stopped to ask whether the son of white woman and an African immigrant bore anything more than a superficial relation to the African-American community.4 Obama is not the progeny of the people who have been oppressed in this country for 400 years any more than Bobby Jindal is.
And what about an Indian candidate? Would Jessie Jackson be as excited to see Bobby Jindal win the presidency? What if Jindal was married to a black woman? Would we have Jindal T-shirts at Urban Outfitters then?
The answer is no.
The civil rights movement opened the door for Jindal just as it did for people of every race and sex, but we would not have the same homecoming celebration for anyone that did not “appear” African-American because the focus on diversity is as superficial as the discriminatory practices it aims to counter.
Anyhoot, before I start parroting Michelle Malkin, let me just get to the holding5 of the post:
A diversity initiative is bigoted and backward if it simply seeks people of a particular skin color irrespective of whether that person truly represents the historically oppressed group that the diversity initiative is trying to promote.
If a Haitian-American student is eligible for the “black scholarship” then why not an Asian American? The only difference is that we didn’t historically oppress as many people that look like the Asian as much as we did people who look like the Haitian. Why should the Haitian benefit from this?
Sure, we aren’t going to inquire about a black person’s background to determine whether they are African American like we ask for tribal affiliation of a Native American. So why bother?
What is the point of recruiting black students, or persons of any minority status at all? Under the current system the half-black student raised in a white household gets a fee voucher and a tour, but the Persian or Korean applicant is ignored.
And I’m not saying that I don’t appreciate the diversity of my school., because I think it’s fascinating.
But to me the diversity includes the ignored minorities (the Persians, Koreans, Chinese), the variety6 of black students, and even the white students who come from different parts of the country and have different education/vocational backgrounds.
And I think it is sad that this diversity is lost on the students and administrators who are only looking for more brown faces.7
1 There are two others, but they were not as readily identifiable.
2 It annoys me that people refer to the lack of one minority group (blacks) as “a lack of diversity.” Nevermind the East-Asians, Indians, Hispanics, and Native Americans we have in our year – everyone wants to see Tyrone.
3 Not to say that being half-black somehow makes one “not black” but what I’m harping on is the assumption that all black people share the same African-American background, which is the only assumption that can justify the focus on the community. Do people really care about the Ethiopian or Somali students? If so, why are these people not equally thrilled by the amount of East-Indians and Koreans at our school?
4 Community organizing and marrying an African-Woman helps. I’m not saying that he’s not special for his own reasons, but the phrase “the first black president” implies “the first African-American president” rather than “the first Kenyan-American president.”
5 If blog posting interrupts my legal research I can use “Holding.”
6 Somali, Caribbean, black-white, black-filipino, black-Cuban…Africans…etc. Really this is a forest/for the trees statement. The “black” community is more diverse than your average person cares about.
7 These are the same people that don’t realize that Hispanics in Miami look more like Gloria, Enrique, and Pitbull than Carlos Mencia.
So I am in the parking garage by school, digging through my bag for my keys. Again.
I have a tumi bag. Tumi bags have way too many pockets. I’ve wasted many flustered hours in the parking garage, dumping my bag – legal pads and highlighters flying … and here I am again. Dammit.
I usually find my keys after 5 minutes or so, but not this time. I’m fumbling through my bag and about to let out a Charlie-Brown style ARGG! when my ziplock bag of carrots pops open and unleashes a horde of cut carrots onto the parking ramp.
The chopped carrots race the ramp. Passersby dodge the carrots and avoid eye contact lest I’m as crazy as I look. This is shaping up to be a pretty solid fail moment.
So, after 10 minutes and two bag dumps, I feel defeated and head back across the street to the law school.
It was only when I got inside the law school that I realize:
Well hot damn.
I had lunch at the Purple Onion to make myself feel better.
And yes, the parking ramp was still covered in carrots when I came back.
New readers: BWE (Best Week Ever) is a “week in review” post series, and no, this blog hasn’t gone NC-17: the title is a juggling reference.
The semester has definitely started. Week #2 was marked by my extremely off-kilter sleep schedule. I woke up every day between 2 and 4 a.m., read, went to class, and wasted my afternoons in a zombie-like state. This cycle was self-reinforcing and pretty awful.
That week I also started writing for The Shark, and was signed on as the University of Minnesota examiner for Examiner.com. I think this will be the extent of my online writing commitments.
I finally normalized my sleep schedule in week 3, and also made a commitment to walk Harley around a lake every day. I was good about keeping my promise…even if it involved dragging a very confused bulmastiff at a speed-walking pace 30 minutes before class.
And classes? They fit into three categories:
My 17-credit class schedule is pretty front-loaded, which means that I spend the end of the week and some of the weekend at work. I really enjoy my job and hope to stay on after graduation…this will involve a combination of staying productive, luck (ie, they need to have an opening), and keeping the RuPaul moments to a minimum.
The past two weekends also involved a lot of hanging out. For some reason my social life has really kicked off this semester, and so has my dating life.
I generally don’t write about dating because a lot of the guys read this blog (hi!), but I think it’s fair to say that the guys I’m running into generally fit into three categories:
And run I shall. An aggressive guy is nice, but please, don’t propose to me if you can’t remember my last name or what city I’m from. Ugh. We’ll see how things play out this week. Maybe someone will break the trend?
Please?