SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING

I was only 9 or 10 when the last government shutdown happened and was not aware of it at the time, so the current shutdown is fascinating to me in a morbid gallows-humor sort of way. It would be more entertaining if many of my friends didn't work for the federal government as "non-essential" personnel. The big problem with "non-essential" is that a lot of it works out to "newer" and hence "lower-paid" and hence "people-who-actually-relied-on-their-paychecks" personnel. Then again, there is a bill in place that will get them paid after this is all over, so I suppose they'll be fine.

What has been most interesting, from a structured negotiation point of view, is the framing that has been done surrounding the shutdown debate. It's all very Roshomon, and I would enjoy it a lot more if it wasn't actively wasting billions of dollars and stopping me from going to all of my favorite museums that I always intend to but never actually have time to go to.

Last Monday I went to Emelie and Nathan's wedding. I've been friends with Emelie now for over a decade, meaning it has been over ten years since she was Sandy and I was Eugene in Woodberry's production of Grease. The wedding was beautiful (perfect weather, great location, and I got to sit with some old friends) and it was so nice to see her and her entire family again. I used to entertain her youngest sister when she was five, and now that sister is in high school and is, in fact, basically the same age that Em and I were when we met. I advised the sister to be especially nice to the people she meets this year, because some of them will likely be at her wedding.

The show is progressing nicely- I don't think that I have been a part of such a uniformly talented cast in a long time. The singing (not from me, but from others) is going to be spectacular. Kelsey and the Kit-Kat girls have bonded and she is starting to be a real theater person (one thing that she told me she would never, ever be).

Mock trial is also going well, though I did make a mistake in the most recent draft of my closing argument. Our case is about a man who has to wear prosthetic legs and who may or may not have murdered his girlfriend because he may or may not have thought there was an intruder in the house, and in the middle of my closing I was rising to an emotional and rhetorical high-point when I yelled "It just isn't reasonable to have that sort of CRIPPLING fear."

This is why we do multiple drafts.

Nothing Like a Fall Show

It's September, and that means I once again backtracked on any and all previous declarations that I would not audition for the fall GGSS musical. We're doing Cabaret and I will be playing Schultz, the Jewish fruit-vendor who serves as a reminder to the audience that things in 1930's Germany were about to go in a slightly negative direction.

I am very proud to say that I am one of FIVE William and Mary people who are in this show. I was the only one two years ago in Curtains, and I'm going to go ahead and take the credit for getting at least three out of the other four who are currently participating. I am most proud of Kelsey, who has never expressed any interest in being in a show and who, a day before the audition, decided that she wanted to be a dancer. In true GGSS fashion, they said "OK, but will you sing for us too?" and she ended up getting one of the named Kit Kat Girl roles. Other WM people include Josh, who is playing Ernst (the cuddliest Nazi) and Absi, who just moved to DC and who I'm very excited to do a show with again (since we last did a show together in... 2007?). There is also a new 1L from William and Mary for whom I cannot take credit. Apparently people from William and Mary sometimes just choose to come to Georgetown Law and end up in the Gilbert and Sullivan Society.

The show goes up November 6th-9th, and I will go ahead and highly recommend this one. We did a first read/sing-through last night and some of the leads could sing the exact same way at the performances and still make people cry. I told a couple of them to lay off and leave some room for improvement.

Nothing much else is new. It has started to get cold again. I may have to stop wearing shorts sometime within the next couple of weeks. Always a sad transition. BUT, stores start selling everything with a pumpkin spice flavor, so there is that.

Phoenix

Every time I have wanted to blog in the past month, I have then thought "no, better work on a job application." I rarely actually DID work on a job application, but I was certainly thinking about it and I did get a few finished. Also, I still have a theoretical shot with JAG pending an appointment with an ENT (because my hearing loss isn't the permanent inner-ear kind and may be able to be fixed, though I wouldn't really notice a difference either way except in how it alters my employment status).

I have been touched over the past month by how many people in my life decided to make my post-school job their personal mission. You all are the best. For now, though, there will be no more job posts on the blog until I have a signed contract in my hand (and even then, maybe not until I've been working for a year or so. Don't want to chance it). Back to the boring synopses of my day-to-day life!

To kick off the school year we had a labor day cookout on Monday after plans for a normal weekend brunch morphed into a... labor day cookout. We had a lot of extra meat from Costco due to a miscommunication about meat-buying for another cookout earlier in the summer, so I volunteered to make burgers. I actually followed a recipe instead of just dumping a bottle of Worcestershire into a mixing-bowl of ground beef, which is what I normally do, and the burgers came out great. Justine and Patrick also brought a package of bacon and asked if I wanted to grill it. I had not done bacon on a grill before, but the idea of bacon to put on top of the burgers was appealing so I said sure. I asked Kelsey to lay out the bacon on the grill, shut the lid, and went inside for a second to bring in burgers.

When I came back, I noticed that the grill thermometer had gone from 200 degrees (F) to about 700 degrees. A curious development, I thought, but then again - who was I to question the cooking needs of bacon? Upon opening the grill, I realized that something might be wrong by the way the bacon was all literally on fire. Each strip was a tiny inferno, feeding off its ample fat reserves and mocking my belated attempt to turn the grill off. When the fires had all gone out, I took a picture of the bacon-graveyard.

I'm sure we didn't want that bacon anyway.

This is approximately the time that my very helpful friends informed me that placing bacon directly onto a grill was probably not the best of ideas. Noted. 

See Kelsey's blog for a report of things that actually happened. I wasted all my words describing a bacon fire. 

I'm just going to leave this here.

That Would Have Been Too Easy

I had been planning on updating my blog shortly after the last post. I was just going to wait to find out about my waiver, which was only supposed to take a week to process. Well, that week turned into another week and then another week, and it was just today that I finally heard back. 

Anyway, I have been informed that my request for a waiver has been denied and that I should probably stop making plans revolving around a career as a Navy JAG. They didn't say that second part, but it was implied. Prospects for any sort of appeal are low to non-existent, as the decision letter made clear that the Navy was not currently accepting anyone, for any position, who could not pass the hearing test administered at MEPS. This seems like a policy that might have been communicated to me earlier...

I found myself expressing a similar sentiment.

It would have been very nice to have a job at this point, and I really did want to be a Navy JAG, but I'm very glad I at least found out with a year to go. I have proof that I don't suck at the application and interview process, and hopefully I will find something that I want to do equally as much that doesn't require me to take a frequency-specific hearing test in both ears. 

(Edit) Update: Ben Leatham has informed me that I can be his Chief of Staff when he is President. There will be no hearing test. I'm set.

A Good Excuse for the Times I am Accused of Not Listening

I will leave Kelsey the honor of describing all of the fun parts of the weekend. I've been up since 4:40AM and can't really remember anything other than the endless amusement park from hell that today has been.

Remember when I said that after medical processing I would either be in JAG for sure or learn something new about myself? Well play that PBS "The More You Know" theme because I am just chock full of new knowledge. First thing's first- I am extraordinarily healthy. My blood pressure is rock solid and I can go silly-looking calisthenic exercises in my underwear all day long and I have astoundingly good bladder control.  If anything, I thought that some moles on my back might give me problems, but NOPE- not one question about them. In fact, of all of the invasive and embarrassing procedures that I had the pleasure of waiting in line for Disney-style over a seven hour period, the only one that gave me any trouble was the least embarrassing and least intrusive of them all: the hearing test.

I was shocked, given that I have been successfully hearing things for my entire life and I have never had an issue with... not being able to hear something. Apparently, this is because my left ear is SUPER-OVERPOWERED and can hear gnats breathing in a meadow a hundred miles away, while my right ear has tricked me into thinking it works by processing basic information and then letting my left ear fill in the gaps. To be sure that this was truly the case, I went for a $100 ear-flushing (which was almost comically unpleasant) and took the test again. Same results.

Now, this does not mean I am out of the running for being in JAG, but it does serve as a reminder that there are still many things left that might end my journey early. This is potentially one of them. The doctor at medical processing recommended me for a hearing waiver, which he said he thought I should have because being a lawyer does not require the best of hearing (so long as you can hear what the judge is saying, which I can because, as earlier mentioned, I have never been aware of a hearing problem before today). We'll see how that goes. My JAG liaisons think that everything will be fine, but they don't get the deciding vote.  I will keep the blog updated. If I can't be a JAG, that will be really unfortunate, but it'll be better to learn early so that I can start looking for prosecutor/public defender jobs somewhere.

In other news, I also found out that the paper I wrote for my death penalty seminar has been accepted for publication in a law journal. I am still waiting to hear back from other potential journals, so I won't say where it is being published yet, but it will be published somewhere. If that was a karmic tradeoff for my disqualifying hearing condition, then I would say it was a Pyrrhic victory. Then again, I don't believe in karma.

How I Write My Blog Nowadays

Step 1: Check date of last blog post.

Step 2: Feign incredulity that the last time I wrote was so long ago.

Step 3: Check phone for pictures I have taken since the date of the last blog post.

Step 4: Try to remember why I took those pictures and what I have been doing the past two weeks.

July 4th was an excellent holiday, as always. I had somewhat of a long weekend (Kelsey did not, she had to work Friday and Saturday) since I had Thursday off. I did go into the office on Friday, but halfway through the day the assistant to the Special Counsel came in and asked me (and the one other intern who was there) why we were there. So I left. Kelsey and I mainly watched Game of Thrones and shopped at Costco. On Sunday, Kelsey threw a Wimbledon party and we ate cucumber sandwiches and scones and strawberries and cream. After that we went to get lunch with Brian and Kay during their stopover at Union Station (we didn't eat- too much hand-whipped cream. As a side-note, whipping cream by hand with only one whipping-thingy is time consuming. I'm sure everyone else already knew that.). After lunch, we went to a surprise party that Josh put together for Steph W. It had to be a surprise because if Steph had known it was a party she would have brought all the food and drinks regardless of us telling her not to. Hence the party's theme: a "Niceness Intervention." I'm not sure it worked.

This weekend Kelsey and I will be going down to North Carolina for Tyler and Bitsy's wedding. As luck would have it, my medical exam for the Navy was scheduled for Monday near Richmond, so I got Kelsey a bus ticket back (a nice bus, with wi-fi) and she is letting me borrow her car to drive from NC to Fort Lee, which is considerably closer to NC than it is to DC. The Navy has gotten me a hotel room, which is nice, and told me to be up at 5:30AM the next morning to be prodded all day, which is... less nice, but understandable. So, on Monday I will either know that I am medically qualified to be a Navy JAG or I will learn about a disease or disorder that was otherwise unknown to me that disqualifies me. Good information to have, either way. 

Now, onto the lone picture that I found on my phone:

I suppose I took this on my way home from work last week because they were demolishing a building and I thought it looked cool. Thank goodness I got a picture of this instead of, you know, all of the actually interesting things I did over the past 11 days. I would have stolen Kelsey's pictures, as usual, but her phone lost them when she loaded music onto it. 

Brief Stop in Annapolis

The DC summer is finally here. Gone are the predictable nice days with clear skies and highs in the 80's, and we have given a warm welcome to the insane and manic days of much intermittent storming and soup-like humidity. As I have functionally lived in a swamp since starting at William and Mary, this is not new to me and I have come to enjoy the extremes that may pop up on any given day. This past Thursday, for example, I experienced the loudest thunderclap of my life, followed by three minutes of torrential downpour, followed by sunshine, followed by a light drizzle.

I am relatively immune to the weather at my internship since I work in a room with no windows. My investigations are still a constant source of entertainment. This past week I found someone who I thought would be my first legitimate whistleblower case to refer to the official investigation division. I spoke on the phone with the complainant for an hour, verifying all of the information that he said he had and would send to me, before writing up my first case referral memo. The next day he sent me all of the promised documentation, and as it turned out it all evidenced information that was the exact opposite of what he had told me on the phone. I understand complainants misconstruing things to put themselves in a more favorable light, but when someone literally tells me that they have a document stating "A" and then they send me a document that says "B," I am just downright confused. I mean, I appreciate his help in closing his own case, I suppose.... Much of internship this week was taken up sitting on Scotusblog and waiting for the final opinions of the year to come down. I correctly predicted the dispositions of three of the big four cases (I did not see Fisher, the affirmative action case, being remanded- though I think the end result will still end up being what I had predicted).

For a date night Kels and I decided to get out of town and go see a musical in Annapolis, which is only about 40 minutes away from DC. We got free tickets to see [Title of Show] (that's the name of a musical, not a placeholder), and drove in on Thursday night. We were afraid that we might be a few minutes late due to an inability to find parking, so Kelsey called the theater and was told that an actor had just fallen and broken his leg so the show was canceled so... problem solved. They told us to come by anyway, and were very apologetic and nice and gave us free tickets to any of their shows in the future. They also gave us a tour of the theater and recommendations for dinner.

Downtown Annapolis reminded us of Williamsburg, with its very narrow streets and multitude of touristy businesses. 

On Friday I got foodtruck lunch with Jake and Alex and then I went out after work to celebrate with my friend Kacey (aka Kiki) due to her graduation from police academy. My smallest (yet fiercest) friend from college now carries a gun around DC and has the power to arrest people. I feel safer already. I was told that I could not bring her donuts on the job as that would be "frowned upon." 

Saturday we went to see "The Heat" with Emily Goo. Goo did not know that this movie was set in Boston, but when she realized that, it became her favorite movie ever. Kelsey and I thought it was very funny, too. Afterwards we met Jeff and Sara in Chinatown for some tapas. 

Today was another day of stormy-sunniness. Davia's birthday was this week, and since birthday brunches are the trend (I don't think I started that, as much as I would like to take credit) we had her birthday brunch today at Founding Farmer's!

Obligatory group photo.

After brunch, Kelsey and I walked around for the city a bit and went into one of the few remaining Smithsonians that we have not yet visited- the Renwick. This one had exhibits of American craftsmanship and was very well curated- we were captivated by a video showing all of the different ways wood can be joined together in furniture-making.