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.  

Happy New Year!

David and I spent the entirety of the first day of 2012 at an Italian restaurant having lunch and then dinner.  We didn't plan it, we just lacked the motivation to leave after lunch was over and were having such a good discussion that eventually it was just dinnertime.  And then I slept for twelve hours.  We had a full weekend.

On Friday I did some musical singalong with Emily Goo in G12 (I'm probably actually going to do exactly the same after I finish writing this post).  Afterwards we met up with Trevor and Amy Reno to get some food.  At some point while eating someone provoked some sort of staring contest and ended up not blinking for a timed ten minutes, which is nice to know that I can do if I ever need to be a Hannibal Lecter impersonator when I grow up.  After dinner I met up with David and we headed out to Adams Morgan to meet up with Adam Cohen and a bevy of other William and Mary folk.  The bar they were at put liquor in ketchup bottles and handed you a shot glass into which you were to squeeze the spirits.  Great idea!  After that bar we got a little hungry so we stepped into jumbo slice.  The only picture I currently have from this weekend is David with his jumbo slice pizza.

You can see why I felt compelled to take a picture.  No false advertising at Jumbo Slice...

Then we went with the group to the club next door, where I got to explain, as is tradition, that I am perfectly happy just standing and listening to the music and have no urgent need to dance- ever.  Eventually they believed me and I had a very nice evening.  David and I ended the night around 4AM on the roof of Gewirz taking in a wonderful view of the Capitol, which we suspect might cost quite a bit to keep lit up 365 nights a year.

When we awoke the next... afternoon (it was morning to us) I got a text from Margaret telling us that we were going to come to a Georgetown basketball game with her and her friend.  So that's what we did.  We won.  Yay.  I was very invested in the outcome of the game, obviously.  She then made us VERY fancy coffee (putting Starbucks to shame and putting her in the running with  Jeff for "classiest person I know") while planning for her own New Years Eve party later that evening.  David and I took our leave and walked towards the Georgetown area.

We had New Years Eve dinner with the Brian (who forgot to bring Shockball even though it was in his care- it's almost like he did it on purpose.... but then, who wouldn't want to play Shockball?), Kay, Kacey, Megan, Josh, Neena, etc... at a great Indian place.  This one had no inappropriate Bollywood videos playing (which I forgot to mention was a distinguishing feature of the Indian restaurant in my last post).  After the restaurant we went to Kacey's hotel room for cookie cake (it is her birthday in a few days and cookie cake is a good idea EVERY day) and then headed out to our NYE club in Georgetown.  It was the same place we went last year and hopefully some pictures from the club will pop up on Kayface's blog or on facebook and I will move them over to their rightful place on this blog.  

Sometime after midnight we headed back to the hotel and David and I took a cab over to the Eastern Market area (we really covered DC over the weekend) to meet up with Cohen and friends along with a newly arrived Jake Reeder.  We had more fun times playing a game called Boom which I first played while hanging out with the same group during the hurricane (Irene).  Then David and I walked home on the empty streets of DC around 5AM, completing an excellent and exhausting New Year weekend filled with friends, old and new, from Woodberry, William and Mary, Georgetown, and DC in general.  Couldn't imagine a better start to 2012.