Stella and I are holed up at Starbucks studying for finals.
Stella and I are holed up at Starbucks studying for finals.
See, in law school Saturdays are off the chain. Behold:
How do I contain myself? Someone call Lindsay…
Finals are approaching so I am spending some serious time studying at coffee shops:
It sounds nerdy and perverse now, but this is exactly how I envisioned law school as a college senior. What was I thinking?
What a busy, hilarious week. There is too much to write about, so I am settling for pictures and captions. This is choppy, but appropriate given the state of things…
This week featured a massive iced-tea spill at the office. Amber is cackling as I run to fetch napkins:
I went to Muddy Waters Café for the first time today to study international and corporate tax law.
When I walked in, the café had a natural hipster vibe. The barista had dreadlocks and purple contacts. The patrons might have been homeless, or pot dealers, or both. And of course, there was the 30-something-year-old Mac guy and CSS blaring from the speakers.
As it got dark outside, the hipsters left and the students arrived. The café took on a trendy-library vibe, and I fell in love.
I think the Spyhouse has competition now.
I spent the majority of yesterday popping pseudoephedrine pills1 at Wilde Roast while finishing the final draft of my Moot Court brief. I felt really sick, but this “awful” had to be finished. If Webster’s dictionary had an illustration for the word “tedious” it would look like this:
I think the hypo for the moot court brief is boring and the procedural posture is awkward: an interlocutory appeal of a denial to suppress a subpoena.
Um.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I have completed four oral arguments on this brief, and my last one is this coming week. Although my brief could be better utilized as a weapon to beat skinny-pants-wearers, I am so overjoyed to finish with Moot Court.
I spent some time this week watching real court proceedings in Anoka, which are vastly more interesting than things in the State of Moot.
Watching real lawyers argue also gives me a new appreciation for how important oral arguments are and how easy Moot Court is. If a lawyer can – with a straight face – ask a judge for leniency for a defendant who had a 2.9 BAC when he terrorized his wife with a gun, then I can slap on a tie, waltz in front of my legal writing professors, and advocate for some make-believe Moot Court clients.
Unlike the raging husband, the Moot Court clients aren’t standing next to me. There’s no sobbing wife, angry mother, or threat of jail time. The lack of stakes makes Moot Court feel like a very charmed exercise. And yes, I just said that.
1Tylenol Severe Congestion. But I’ll let you know when I start using illicit drugs.
I have been reading for corporate tax at the Spyhouse for several hours now. My table is cluttered:
It takes some serious bum-glue to finish the corporate tax reading.
There is a lot of information and I have to take breaks before my eyes glaze over and I start seizing. It’s like pausing before pouring more water down a drain lest it overflows.
I am here for another hour, and then I will skip down to Eagan to make an appearance at the office. I need to finish the reading for corporate tax today, so I will probably insert some study periods into my work day.
My tax professor uses an “expert” system, which is essentially a preset schedule of who will be called on. There are 2-3 “experts” assigned for each day, but the list is not updated to accommodate people who drop the course, so there is always the chance that I will be the only one on call for the entire class.
I can see it now:
Professor A: “Mr. Jansen! Does this redemption of stock qualify as a termination of interest under §302(b)(3)?”
Me: “Um, well, I personally believe that U.S. Americans and …uh, suchas… maps?”
I guess the worse-case scenario is that I sound ditzy and clueless in class, which is not unusual or as embarrassing as my seat collapsing… but then again, that could happen too…
The law school building contains brilliant people, but has the aesthetic appeal of a leaky basement. This is why so many of us sneak over to the business school, which has windows and a full-service Starbucks. Behold:
Usually the view is great, but today’s snowstorm makes the usual view of Downtown Minneapolis a little hard to see…
Downtown is still there, somewhere, sort of... but the snowed-out view is still preferable to the dungeon law school building.
Note: Best Week Ever (BWE) posts are a summary of the prior week.
This week had a surreal vacationy feel. It was like spring-break minus the nice weather.There was Trivia, yarking drag queens, dancing, and intense pool tournaments.
On Friday, I somehow found myself at a house party in the exurbs. There were about 8 people, but I only knew Jack. After an unsuccessful game of Categories, Jack’s friends separated into small groups and started bickering.
It was a chaotic scene that felt like an episode of The Real World because the partygoers kept interrupting their trash talk to give me back story as if I was one of the confessionals.
The hostess and her boyfriend fought mostly because he didn’t like her tone, which she couldn’t control because she was drunk. They were too crunk for Jesus to communicate properly, so there was a lot of running around to separate rooms, screaming, and dramatics.
One guy kept rattling on about his most recent trip to jail, and another girl spent a hour telling me an epic story about her evil Russian stepmother. The girl’s stepmother stories apparently enraged one of the partygoers who started mumbling dark threats and eventually went up to the girl and shouted, “NO ONE LIKES YOU! WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE? NO ONE WANTS YOU HERE! YOU’RE A BITCH!”
This happened as she stood near the hostess’s awkward apartment-mate, who spent most of the evening by himself playing shoot-em-up video games. The gamer and I exchanged a look like “oh snap, thank god we aren’t involved in this….”
Aside from my social activities and Real World cameos, I also worked on my days off from school.
Apparently this is what I look like when I get a securities regulation case at work:
I really like my job, but I hope that if they hire me after graduation that my coworkers won’t wear hot pink skinny pants. Amber was so shocked by the pepto bismol pants on Friday that she sent me an emergency text. It was glorious.
I spent most of my non-working time this weekend cleaning and doing homework. Today I went to Dunn Brothers to study for corporate tax, but I failed to notice that there were no open seats until after I ordered my coffee. So I chugged the coffee and went to the Purple Onion, which is closer to campus.
The cafes immediately surrounding campus aren’t busy at the beginning of the semester since the undergrads are still doing more drinking than reading. They complete the transition from bars to books about a week before finals, so there is room for me for majority of the semester.
The last major thing that happened this week was the end of the relationship.
The cattle call started once my “single” status hit people’s facebook streams – dozens1 of casual friends who barely kept in touch while I had a boyfriend are suddenly coming out of the woodwork and are desperate to “hang out.”
I am like the 10-year old girl who is suddenly popular because she is the first one in her class to use a training bra. I feel suspicious and harassed essentially for the reasons stated in this post.
Over the coming weeks I will weed out the true friends from the fair-weather suitors. We’ll see how that goes.
1 Literally, dozens. My inbox is full. You’d think Beyonce was on auction or something…
Funny, I was thinking the same thing:
I reviewed property between dog walks.
I ran into my downstairs neighbor during my first walk. I was surprised to see him awake and intoxicated so early…no-so-good morning to you too! He gets this gooey look when he sees my dog and starts cooing.1 I smile politely and keep it moving.
The neighbor’s debauchery was the soundtrack for today’s property review. The final is tomorrow.
Harley’s second walk was spurred by my apartment building’s fire alarm. I immediately thought of how horrible it would be to have to call the dean and say, “Hi, can I write my exam? Turns out I lost laptop in a fire yesterday…”
I grabbed Harley, my property books, and laptop and skipped out of the building. There was no way in hell I was going to miss another final due to some unexpected remmidemmi…
I refuse to be that kid twice.
I threw my school stuff in the car and took Harley on his second walk.
The building was still intact when I came back. The cause of the alarm was the downstairs neighbor’s burning cooking. Downstairs neighbor was in the hallway shouting “CALIFORNIA!” when I came back. I resisted the urge to shout “ITS ALL ABOUT FLORIDA FOO!”
I decided it was time to finally cook a legitimate meal. I think I did alright:
Yes. I know. Mad culinary skills! And I only2 burned the rice…
Harley and I just got back from our third walk. We were at the end of my street when we ran into a middle-aged man with a dog.
He gave me the look.3
I smiled politely and kept it moving.
I turned the corner…and he was walking the other way, so I thought it was a done-datta…
But of course two blocks later he’s behind us and insists that our dogs meet.
He tells me that the dog was his partner’s idea and was really interested in my walking schedule. He walks around this time every night you know?
Oh really? I’m sure your partner is well aware of that too…
Now, maybe I’m being cynical. Maybe he’s a perfectly normal, social person and I’m just the snotty 20-something that assumes every 40 year old wants him.
That could be…But I have somehow managed to establish myself as prime territory for the married, mentally handicapped, and fast-food workers. Oh my goodness.
I’ll work on appealing to normal guys after finals…
1 You’d think it’s the crack, but other people do it too…maybe Harley’s just cute?
2 And I only set off my apartment’s fire alarm…I wouldn’t want to steal the neighbor’s thunder…
3 Okay, so that video that I linked has a pretty raunchy title, but it describes what gay men go through PERFECTLY – “it’s a very violating gaze that literally eats your soul…it’s a penetrating gaze that goes to your heart of who you are and hurts.” – welcome to my world… also, what he says about eye contact is EXACTLY what happened. Bah…
Ding-dum The Awful is done!
That’s right! My spring brief is DONE! Yes indeedy! Blogging right now is the only thing1 keeping me from doing cartwheels around the library while screaming obscenities about the Bank Fraud Statute.
My brief is 4,060 words of pure legal genius.2 Scalia, eat your heart out!
This is the scene:
Yes I printed about a million proofs and deforested Cambodia. I apologize. It was in the name of my pass/fail legal writing class. You can blame my law school. They’ll send you some seeds to replant. Thank you.
1 Okay, Okay, Okay, plus the fact that the undergrad security monitors would take me down and give me acme…and the fact that I can’t do cartwheels…
2 Sure to-morrow I’ll find that I somehow managed to leave an important word out of EVERY SINGLE HEADER or something awful…but tonight the brief = genius!
3 As I tweeted earlier: “Okay, how about this: ignore my 2lb can of roasted peanuts and I won’t bring up your rolly-backpack. Deal?”
So the rule here at the law school is that the week some big-honking brief is due, all of our professors are required to pack our schedule. I suspect they love seeing how busted the 1Ls are the morning we turn in the brief.
The brief is due Wednesday at 8am, so of course my Thursday-Friday Corporations class was rescheduled to Tuesday and Wednesday. The case for tomorrow is 30 pages. The Civil Procedure case for tomorrow is 24 pages.
This is why I am so grateful that I managed to get some work done during the weekend. Otherwise I would be that kid snoring in the back row of Corps.1
Tonight I’m editing my brief and then tackling the Corps and property reading.
I brought the best thing ever with me to the library:
Yes. That’s right. 64 oz. It’s glorious, and full of decaffeinated peach tea. No refills needed.
Now its time for work…
1 Jill gets to keep that distinction…
Our spring brief was due this week. Some people simply refer to the brief as “The Awful.”
The Awful wasn’t that awful – I actually had a lot of fun writing it. This semester’s brief was fun to write because it is a persuasive analysis. Last semester’s memo was a predictive analysis. Writing “I am right and this is why” is much more interesting than writing, “well it may go this way, or may go that way…”
Yesterday was, however, quite awful.
My schedule on Monday and Tuesday was packed1, so I could only work on my brief during the evenings. This meant that Tuesday night the hurricane hit my desk:2
And yesterday (the day the brief was due) I was on a grand total of 3 hours of sleep.
This made it extremely hard to be charitable in Crimlaw.
I’ve written about my Criminal Law class before. The gist: we have Crimlaw with another section full of loud, dominant personalities, and the professor doesn’t control class discussion.
It’s like having Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh locked in a room with Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. Add a chimpanzee and a drug dealer to the mix and you have my Crimlaw class.3
I could not deal with Colb (Crass Overly Loud Boy) yesterday. It’s hard to listen to what Colb says because he shouts all of his answers and sometimes sprinkles the word “damn” throughout a response.
I felt bad, but I couldn’t even look at Colb when he responded to the professor. I was tired and this was not happening. Instead, I sorted my email.
I went come and got 15 hours of sleep, so I’m back in Pollyanna mode. So Mr. Colb can bring it.
I had a bag of Vanilla-Carmel tea at lunch.
Stella didn’t approve of the tea’s smell:
Stella: “That’s so gross! You know like those nasty candles at the store? It smells like that. It’s like those disgusting pumpkin spice candles that you smell and recoil. It’s like you melted the candle and put it in your cup! Ugh. Seriously, that’s so unsavory. I wouldn’t even put that in my room and you’re drinking it!“
Here are some pictures of My Legal Space this weekend.
I went to the East Lake public library for the first time this weekend. It looks like a baby-version of the Pelli Library, and the parking is free.
I left after about an hour because the middle schoolers obviously had unlimited weekend minutes…
