It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature

It's a good thing I typically enjoy being busy, because that's what I've been and I see very little end of that in sight.  

First off, I would like to say how lucky I am that I really enjoy American history.  My Conlaw professor (who is a really really big deal and is aware of that fact) likes to ask people questions that are just outside the range of what someone would be able to answer only having read the material once.  This has resulted in a lot of "maybe your neighbor can help..." transitions in class.  On Wednesday it was my turn, as he looked up into the seats and said "you in the blue shirt."  

I looked around.  I was surrounded by a group of people wearing blue shirts.  We were all looking at each other.  

"The Georgetown Law shirt," he added.  I looked down.  I was wearing a Georgetown Law shirt.  "Yes?" I said.  Then he started asking a series of questions from the reading.  The reading that I had only skimmed over because I had over a hundred pages of reading for Wednesday that I did in just a couple of hours on Tuesday.  Fortunately, the reading was about the First Bank of the United States, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.  What I knew about that came mostly from my reading of a biography of Andrew Jackson (the charter renewal for the SECOND bank of the United States was a major source of contention) but it covered the general idea well enough that I could fish back into my mind for answers as to "What would James Madison say in reply to Hamilton's assertion that the Constitution clearly didn't allow for the incorporation of a bank?"  So... hooray for lucking out.

I forget entirely everything that happened on Thursday.  This is why I should write posts more often.  I know I had a meeting with my team from the Innocence Project and we wrote our client a letter.  Oh, and I met with Tim, a friend of David's who works for the FTC.  He was awesome and we both shared great stories about David in addition to talking about what it's like being a real lawyer and having cases instead of classes.  

On Friday I wrote and memorized a five minute opening statement for Mock Trial tryouts.  My biggest challenge was not talking like Rod Serling and not appending "... in the Twilight Zone" to the end of every paragraph.  This wasn't my intentional doing- it's just the way these things have to be written (or so I've been told).  Examples:

Were it not for the medical attention he received, Paul Tu would be dead....  in the Twilight Zone.

...once you see the overwhelming evidence you will have no doubt that Ms. Richardson is guilty.... in the Twilight Zone.

After that she threatened that she would make him pay... in the Twilight Zone.

...as he closed the door the defendant fired the gun, delivering what would have been a fatal wound... in the Twilight Zone.   

My speech came in at exactly 4:59, and I pretended as though that was on purpose.  It was just lucky.

My direct examination portion of the tryouts did not go so well.  It is difficult not to ask leading questions when you know exactly what the other person knows and you're just trying to get them to say it in the correct order.  I'm not going to make the team, certainly, as there are many people who I'm sure prepared to the point that they actually knew what they were doing, but it was a lot of fun just trying out.

Friday evening was another delightful Emily Goo cast party.  As always I expressed shock and awe that she had appetizers set out on real serving plates.  Very fancy.  Highlights included getting to spend time with Kelsey, who came up from Williamsburg for the weekend, and trying to convince Noah, who plays Hamlet in R&G, that I didn't hate him (which he thought because apparently he has been talking to me once or twice and I have walked away, in his mind, mid-conversation.  I don't remember it going that way, but I'll take his word on it).  

Saturday I went on a run and to the American History Museum with Kelsey, then got lunch with Ben "how about we talk about the reasons I'm awesome" Leatham.   In the afternoon I had two interviews: one with a place in Miami and the other with a place in Philly.  I would prefer to stay in DC, but neither of those would suck, certainly, so I tried to interview well.  

My first interview, Miami, went well because my interviewer had originally gone to school for music education.  So we talked about music.  Score.  

My second interviewer broke one of the cardinal rules (I think it is, at least) by asking me, immediately after I sat down, to tell a joke.  "Jokes" are extremely context-based and the choice of joke depends highly on the personality of the person sitting across from you.  I went with the following:

*Smiling, jovial face*- "Alright- so a duck and a penguin walk into a bar.  The bartender looks at them and says: 'What is this, a joke?'" *SUPER SERIOUS FACE*

It's not a very good joke, but the delivery got a sustained laugh.  I liked the interviewer, because her followup question was an incredulous: "why do you want to work for poor people?"   

I walked back most of the way from the GW campus (where the interviews were held) to my apartment because it was such a nice day.

Today I built more cubes for the show.  I also learned from Steph and Trevor that there had been another very fun game of Beertrek at Josh's place (wish I could have gone- was way too tired).  Also, Eric, the director of Curtains, was in town and helping the paint crew.  After I arrived he asked a question about musical theater and I said "I thought we were done with trivia," to which he responded "welcome back... to hell."  I missed him.

The set crew came up with a number of slogans and sayings.

"Is it 'ish'?" - as in "Is this exactly 24 inches?"  "Ish."  "Close enough."

"It's a paint problem." - as in "paint crew, you can fix this, right?" 

"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"  - as in "This door overlaps the top of the box by a few inches."  "Well they need a handle if they're trying to open it from the outside." Thanks, Trevor.  

What a great set crew.  And a great weekend.  Okay, back to work.

 

Now I Know My ABC's

Well, grades are in, and if there's anything to determined by them, it's that I am terrible at law school and shouldn't be here.  And also that I'm great at law school and absolutely should be here.  And also that I'm okay at law school.  Spoiler alert: I'm going to list my grades.

As predicted, my Torts exam did not go too well.  I blame myself for not reacting quite as well as the rest of my classmates to the seeming randomness of the exam.  Clearly I missed something very important.  Whoops.  "C"

I am placated that no amount of studying would have prepared me to react to that exam other than in the way that I did.  Don't worry, my self-esteem is still ragingly high.

For the record, the only other "C" I ever got was a in class on Information Technology.  I was equally passive aggressive and snarky on that exam and so I should have expected this.  I did like my Torts professor significantly more than I liked my IT professor, though.


My Contracts grade was, I felt, the most predictable.  "B+"
Yay. I don't suck at something.  Thanks, morale booster.


I could not have predicted my Civil Procedure grade.  This is the one I care most about because it applies to almost every type of law that one could practice.  "A-"
Yay.  I not only don't suck at something, I actually might be good at it.

Legal Research and Writing is a year-long course so I get no grade in it.

Overall GPA: 3.0

The lowest GPA I've ever had, and yet, I'm hoping, also the lowest I will ever have.  I think that as long as I avoid stepping on another landmine like that Torts exam I should be fine.

Apart from that I'm having a great week.

Re-Energized

School started back on January 9th.  On January 11th, Monster (the energy drink) announced a two for one stock split.  Coincidence?  I certainly drink enough of their product to keep them in business.

You may have been able to tell that I was feeling a bit overworked and rundown at the start of the week.  Since then I have had just as much work (and gotten just as little sleep) but I have been having a much better time.  I have decided that my classes are going to be great.  My Con Law professor has been on the Colbert Report twice (I wikipedia'd him) and actually argued several of the cases we will be studying.  We are all huge fans.

I'm actually a fan of all my classes, now.  Even my Property class.  After a disappointing opening, our professor really upped her game with a discussion about 18th century property rights as they related to whales shot with bomb-lances.  Upon further inquiry I discovered that bomb-lances were, in fact, just as cool as I imagined they would be.  Why there has not been some steampunk superhero wielding bomb-lances in an action movie is entirely beyond me.

Yes, it's a lawn-dart packed with explosives and stuffed into a sawed-off shotgun.

The point of the lesson?  Something along the lines of- if you shoot the whale, it's your whale.  This ruling came at a time when we wanted to promote the shooting of whales.  You see, the legal system can shift occasionally.  

Yesterday I got to start work on my case for the Innocence Project.  I went in for twenty minutes and came out four hours later, having skipped dinner (which you KNOW I don't do lightly) because I just needed to read every single case file.  I wish I could talk about it, but I can't.  I will just say it was better than every episode of Law and Order ever and I am super pumped to do more investigating to see: 

1. If our guy is actually innocent

and

2. If there is anything we can do to prove it

It confirmed, again, that I am in the right place.  Which is nice because the schedule for this semester is terrible and I needed to be reminded why I was here.

Today I got lunch with Josh over by the Capitol.  Passed a lot of Occupy DC protesters who seemed to be particularly angry at the Supreme Court for the Citizens United ruling.  Which I get.  That said, chanting catchy phrases about how the SC sold you out in favor of corporate interests, though it may be true, doesn't seem especially productive.  After that I went to CVS with Davia to pick up medicine because she has the plague.  No, not really.  She has whooping cough.  You know, like from the Oregon Trail.  Good thing I was forced to get a TDAP shot in September, because that theoretically makes me immune.  

Then I did summer internship applications the rest of the afternoon.  Then I ate dinner with Emily and we shared a meatball sub.  Then I sat down to write this blog post.  Then I'm going to rehearsal.  Then I might go to the Friday cast party, but I'm not sure.  

Oh, and I'm trying out for Mock Trial.  BUT I did buy a new printer cartridge, so it's not like I'm completely violating my list of things I shouldn't do.  It would probably be best if I did not make the Mock Trial team, but I can't help wanting to try out at the very least...

This Will Almost Certainly End Well

Had an excellent and epic weekend in Williamsburg with Kelly, Cohen, Mayer, Kylie, Andrew, Stephen, and Kelsey.  Highlights included a marathon game of Boom (which is a game that should not be marathoned) and a triumphant return to mug night at the Leafe.

But I don't have time to talk about the weekend.  Because real classes started again today, and somehow they are already making me feel as busy as I was at the end of last semester- which is not good.  That's okay, though.  I can handle this for one month (really? Can I?) until R&G is over and then I get some breaks.  I will NOT (I repeat) NOT try out for The Mikado.  If I say it and write it down enough times, perhaps it will be true.

Other things I should not do:

Try out for LawCappella, even though one of the songs they will be singing is Africa by Toto and I love that song and want to sing it.

Try out for Moot Court/Mock Trial.

Attempt to refill printer ink manually ever again.

Try to sit through Property class without a Monster energy drink (I attempted this today because it was the first class.  The professor started out by saying "most students think Property is boring and the worst class they had during their first year."  Let's all synchronize our self-fulfilling prophesy countdown timers.)

The good news is that my other professors (haven't had their classes yet) have much better general ratings on the rate-my-professor site and are teaching more inherently interesting classes.  So I'm hopeful.

I Continue to Lack Physical Coordination and Grace

I wish I had a picture of the Christmas present that Davia and Ben got me- it's a beautiful trench coat that makes me feel like Lieutenant Frank Cioffi all over again.  Now I can go out in the rain even while wearing my suits!  Very excellent.  Speaking of Curtains, my wonderful friend and fellow actor Emily Goo just got a new car and named it Lieutenant Frank Cioffi.  May my character namesake always transport her safely and comfortably to her destination.

Week One continues to go well- we had negotiations this morning for a fake contract dispute clause.  I discovered that the rules of improvisation work very well while negotiating.  The general rule that I used can be distilled into the concept "yes, and...."  It was used to great success this morning when the other side demanded that the dispute be arbitrated according to what were in essence Civil Code procedural issues and I said "sure, and ... (and proceeded to list a bunch of things that completely contracted around the Civil Code, making the original concession entirely meaningless)."  To my great surprise it worked brilliantly, so I'm going to keep doing that in the future instead of trying to argue.

Rehearsals for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are off to a good start.  I mean, I have to memorize the entire show in something like ten days, but other than that it's off to a good start.  That said, I thought I had abandoned the world of "things-that-make-me-look-incompetent" after the whole "stomp hop slap step" debacle of Curtains last semester.  That was incorrect.  Because Ben was a mime.  Of course he was.  And so we have to learn how to mime-walk.  Of course we do.  While flipping coins.  Great.

After I started mime-walking everyone else who was there had to study me for a good five minutes because each of them knew that I was doing something terribly wrong but couldn't put their finger on it.  Then Sara helpfully pointed out that the way I walked normally was wrong and that was simply translating over into my mime-walk.  So last night four people helped me learn how to walk.  It only took twenty-four years.  I imagine this will continue to be my Achilles Heel for the rest of the rehearsal process.

Tomorrow I have a five minute oral argument about... something to do with the enforcement of an arbitration agreement.  I'll figure it out later today.  Should be fun.  Tomorrow night we have our first cast party of the new year (we weren't going to let THAT tradition slide) and on Saturday I'm heading down to Williamsburg to hang out with Adam Cohen and others who I hung out with in late December because we have a three day weekend and I just had too much fun with them over New Years not to get in some more time before the real semester starts.

P.S.  I just now tried to refill the ink in my printer myself using a kit I bought online.  You fill a syringe with ink and drill a hole in the cartridge and then inject it.  Just a word of caution if you choose to do the same- if you do not read the precise instructions for how much ink you should inject, the cartridge may explode.  Black ink, as I have JUST discovered, is difficult to clean.

Week One

Well, it's that time again.  Real classes haven't started yet, but Georgetown has a program called "Week One" during which we spend a week analyzing a complicated international law problem as a group.  Ours has to do with the contract surrounding the construction of a dam in Laos.  My group is playing the role of the American company that ordered barges from a French company in order to help with the construction.  The French company was burning tires in order to keep their costs down, and the outlawing of that practice in China sent their costs skyrocketing and as a result they are trying to rescind the contract on the basis of impracticability/impossibility.  Fun stuff!

As another part of the week we're doing teambuilding exercises.  The first one asks us to imagine that we were in a helicopter crash somewhere in the remote snowy wilderness and were able to salvage twelve items.  We are to rank the items in order of survival importance, then rank them again as a team, and then compare our rankings to the rankings of survival experts.  With any luck, years of watching Man vs. Wild will help me out here.

But I'm getting ahead of myself- before I got home (where I received a heartwarming reception from Ben/Davia/Jeff/Emily/Margaret/etc... (a surprise-attack on my way to the elevator was involved)) I went up to Boston to visit Beau!

As an added bonus, David also lives in Boston (he's studying at another law school up there- not a great one, but, you know, pretty good.  Forget the exact name.  Starts with an H.  Anyway...) and was getting out of class just as I arrived on the T (I am now excellent at navigating large cities).  We set up camp at a bar and then met with Beau and Jen once he got out of work.  We went out to dinner with them and Beau's roommate Ben (I have really got to stop meeting people named Ben-it's starting to confuse me, even) and had a great time.  As would be expected, my former roommates got along swimmingly.  It's as though they had something in common.

We all went back to Beau's apartment so that he could test out his new Margaritaville machine.  I must say, it seems to have been an excellent investment because it made some pretty great margaritas.  While there, someone (it may have been Jen) pointed out (with no prompting from me) that David looked like Vince Vaughn.  Someone pulled up a picture for comparison, and we took a picture.

It's not super close, but it's closer than it should be.

The next day Beau and I woke up at 4:30AM (three hours of sleep yay) to hop on a bus and go to Stowe in Vermont.  I had never gone skiing in Vermont, and so I was expecting some variation of the east coast skiing I was used to: the kind where it takes about one minute to get all the way down the mountain and twenty for the chairlift to take you back up.  I was pleasantly surprised that this was not the case.  The mountain was huge, had a gondola lift, and had really excellent snow.  The last time Beau and I went skiing together, we were both either sixteen or seventeen (I forget which) and Beau decided to try snowboarding for the first time (I did too, but after three days I gave up on life. Not just snowboarding, but life.  Never before and never since has an activity so utterly sapped me of my will to go on.). 

But Beau was pretty good at it so he kept doing it.

This picture was supposed to have a mountain in the background.

We made the most of our time on the slopes between 9 and 4PM, breaking only for lunch.  On our last run I pulled out my camera and filmed a bit, because I can and I do dumb things like hold expensive technology while heading down a steep slope.  Because, you know, nothing bad could ever happen there.

Well, it didn't this time, at least.  

Come for the views, stay for my scintillating commentary about fog and cameras.  

At four we returned our equipment and had time for a drink at the lodge.  There was a very decent band playing.

Then we drove back to Boston where I pretended for Beau that I was interested in watching football because the Saints were playing.  (Actually it was a good game, so I did sort of grudgingly enjoy it.)  A most excellent weekend!  Special thanks to Beau for planning it all!

Winter Law School Summer Camp

Okay, so I've been having too much fun in this pre-second-semester week.  I'm sure I'll pay for it starting on Monday.

I've been learning lines (the Guildenstern "Unicorn" speech is one of my monologues ever), finalizing applications for summer internships (fingers crossed), checking out what I need to start thinking about doing for next semester (more books?!), and doing other useful things (cleaning my room is useful, right?).

But mostly I've been singing songs in G12 with Emily Goo, going to museums to see the dinosaurs and the squid/alien from Independence Day (and yesterday I wasn't the first person to make that comparison so it's not just me), trying to go ice-skating (but going to another museum because the rink was closed), hanging out with Margaret and her brother and Mike W, playing racquetball with Stephanie R, having sushi with Pete, having quiche with Tyler and Bitsy, and taking a trip to Boston to see Beau (well, I'm doing that tomorrow, but it belongs on the list).

Emily brought an entire suitcase full of musical songbooks for our epic and silly singalong day.

This compares very favorably with the Law School Summer Camp over the summer, with the added bonus that now I know the people I'm hanging out with a lot better.  Looking forward to getting back from Boston on Sunday and seeing Jeff, Davia, roommate Ben, other Ben, and the rest who are returning over the weekend.