Dear Employers. Please Hire Me

Well, I'm back in DC and I just finished finalizing twelve cover letters for summer internship applications.  As I was researching the organizations and writing the letters, I realized how legitimately excited I was about each of the places I chose to apply.  This was nice.  I hope to get an interview with... maybe one or two of them.  That might be asking a lot.

Last night I got to see Absi and Kayface and Brian for dinner, which was lovely.  Kay and Brian got me season one of the BBC series Sherlock and have assured me that I will love it (which, since they know me reasonably well, is probably true).  David is coming over tonight to start one of our traditional multi-day pizza and video-game fests, and I am very excited about that.

Ghost of Christmas Past

Merry Christmas everyone!  We had a great (if unseasonably warm) one in Burlington.  Last night Rachel and I made a vegetarian Moroccan tagine as Christmas Eve dinner.  It was a great success. 

 

She did not shove her hands in the hot skillet.  I'm so proud of her.

Today I received many wonderful gifts, including a bottle of Glenlivet (my first holiday liquor gift- I feel like such an adult), a framed photo montage of Curtains, tickets to The Book of Mormon, a donut-maker, and a photobook full of pictures from my childhood that I have never seen up until today.  Most of them are... extremely embarrassing.  In lieu of an actual post, I will just scan in a few of my favorites.

The Mike in this picture WISHES someone would mistake him for Harry Potter.

 I am Batman. (Read that in the Christian Bale Batman voice.)

 Rachel remains normal looking in almost all these pictures.

 

But not everyone is so lucky.  At least I know from whence I got my general nerdiness.  

Thanks, Aunt Deb.  Uncle Bob- I have lots more of these.

 I did not scan in the many, many pictures of naked-infant-Mike. You're welcome.

We Were Students Once, and Young

My brief trip to Williamsburg was delightful, as always.  Absi and Zan picked me up at the train station and we went out to our traditional Mexican place, La Tolteca.  The owner still recognized us, I think!  Meimei and Absi's mom joined us and we had an excellent time.

The next day we went into Colonial Williamsburg to eat at the Cheese Shop, as is tradition, and then walked around.  Some of the shops had hilarious holiday setups.  One included an angry polar bear.

 

Absi and Meimei were scared.

 

I really don't know why we thought the polar bear was such a great picture backdrop, but it's really the only place we took pictures all day.

That evening Absi told me that I wanted to watch Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas.  Well, how could I say no to something that I was told I wanted to watch?  It turned out to be a very sweet Disney movie and vastly exceeded my extremely low expectations.  

Today I took the train back to Burlington, where I went out to Thai with Mom and Rachel.  Back at home Rachel decided to make some sort of chex-based dessert.  It involved melting chocolate chips in the microwave and then pouring the melted chocolate onto the chex.  I'm not sure that Rachel realized that molten chocolate fresh out of the microwave is... sort of hot... because she just shoved her hands right in the bowl in order to mix the chex and chocolate and ended up burning her hands and screaming.  It was hilarious.  In my infinite compassion I pulled out my phone and took pictures.

One day I think Rachel will forgive me for putting this online.  One day.

(No sisters were harmed in the making of this post.  She's fine.)

On Really Good Things

Hugo is a really good movie.  I highly recommend it.  I got the chance to go see it while celebrating Chris L's birthday on Monday.  The birthday party also involved fish and chips (the BEST fish and chips), chocolate cake, and champagne, so obviously it was great.  The night before I finally made it to an Evensong service at Chris's church and I got to hear him play the organ.  Absolutely gorgeous.  I realized about halfway through the service, though, that this was the first Anglican service I had been to and that I had no idea what everyone was doing.  I figured things out through context.  Guy is swinging an incense ball at your head?  Bow.  Then he'll bow back and swing the incense ball at your head again.  Then you nod at him once more.  I heard this was originally used in temples to mask the smell of animal sacrifice.  At the sound of the bell, everyone kneels.  Why a bell?  No idea.  Didn't get the historical reasoning behind this.  Maybe an angel gets his wings.  Anyway, the real takeaway is that my friend Chris is ridiculously talented at playing the organ and is also a year older. 

Last night I went to hang out with the remnants of GULC and David Husband, who is on break and who I convinced to come into town and sleep on my air mattress.  I often stay up late.  When I don't have a given schedule my body reverts to owl mode and and I find myself up at 3AM and sleeping until noon.  I can't explain why.  That said, it is very rare that I ever stay up past 5AM.  I did so last night though.  Why?  I'm going to go ahead and blame David Husband and the remnants of GULC.  I think the last time I legitimately stayed up until five I was also with David.  And it was in college.  We may be getting too old for this. 

Right now I'm on a train heading for Williamsburg.  The plan is to meet up with Absi and Zanzibar and Meimei and have a colonially good time.  Then on Friday- home for Christmas!  Safe travels to everyone who is traveling over the next few weeks- I know there will be a lot of it. 

Shockball

Sometime around 2AM the night before my last exam I decided that it would be a good idea to buy myself a small present.  It came in the mail the other day.  It's called Shockball.  It is a small ball that emits random electrical shocks every ten to thirty seconds.  That's what it does.  The fun lies in the constant fear of not knowing when the next mini-electrocution is going to occur.  I think I like it because Shockball is sort of like law school, in a way.  Also, on big letters on the front it says "This is not a toy."  

I took Shockball to Sarah's party Friday night.  Tyler Brown and Josh L came with me, which was awesome because it meant I had people from high school, college AND law school all at the same party. Anyway, back to Shockball.  The most common way to play Shockball is via a rousing game of Hot-Potato.  But the fun of Shockball is in inventing new games to play with it.  "Here, hold this," is a classic game, for example (No, I didn't do that, I'm not THAT mean).  The best games were the ones that piggy-backed on other games.  In Shock-Taboo, you play Taboo just like you normally would, except in addition to making people guess random words you're also holding the Shockball.  It ups the stakes a bit.  

Saturday morning (by which I mean afternoon) I went back to the National Gallery for more caroling with Ben and Jeff.  You can't do enough singing of Christmas songs.  I did notice, though, that very few Christmas songs are written in keys which are... singable.  A Capella people tend to do fine singing things like "Jingle Bells" and "Silent Night," but throw in an instrumental accompanist playing the song in its original key and people just lose it.  After that Jeff and I accompanied Ben to the train station where he departed for Rhode Island.  Then I researched internships.  It was super fun and/or terrifying.  Like Shockball.

This is the view from the Capitol around Christmas- it is beautiful and multi-colored and deserves much better treatment than my terrible built-in phone camera can offer.  I took this picture when I was meeting Rachel for dinner this past week.  I'm not sure I actually mentioned it in the blog.  I should have... I, of course, love seeing my little sister.  AND we went to a great barbecue place.

Saturday evening I went over to Josh's new place for an official housewarming.  We played Beertrek (rules found in a previous post) and ate pizza, which is pretty much the best Saturday evening ever.  But then it got better, because we invented a new game to play with Shockball (yes, I brought it.  Yes, I also have the perspective to see that it seems like I'm being a bit obsessive with Shockball.  I am going to be embarrassed of this post one day, but I'm okay with that).  The game is called Shock the Dealer, and is a variation on what is usually a drinking game played with cards.  All you have to do is guess what card is on top of the deck.  You get two tries.  After the first try, the person holding the deck (and who is looking at the card) tells you whether the actual card is higher or lower than your guess.  If you guess correctly, you get to hold the cards and they have to guess.  If you guess incorrectly, you have to guess again.  Oh, and you're holding Shockball.  Best game ever.  And Trevor and Stephanie W were there, which would have made the entire evening awesome even without Shockball.  

This note was on Josh's refrigerator.  It says "Welcome Home Josh" and is signed "Josh."  As it turns out, Josh was the name of Josh's apartment rental agent.  The note is much funnier and also much sadder if you don't know that fact the first time you read it.  We purposefully placed all the liquor in the apartment on top of the fridge for this picture to play up the "much sadder" angle.

I'm very glad to be able to officially welcome Josh to DC.  The House never had a better historian and we're going to have many excellent times together in the next three years.  Maybe longer.  I do like DC quite a bit, and as I hear it the city has a shortage of lawyers (it sounds like a joke, but people keep telling me this fact like they're serious and once enough serious people tell me something I start to believe them.  Character flaw, I know).  

Final Countdown

I'm officially a half-L.  Or a... 1.5L?  I'm not sure how to put it.  I finished exams for the first semester of 1L year.  If I passed, I'm 1/6th the way to a JD.  I hope I passed.  I'm pretty sure I passed  everything but torts.  There are no words for what may have happened with torts.  Actually, there are words, but I can't blog them.

This morning Ben and I went down to grab donuts (free food all the time- really) and then came back up to prepare for our exam at 8:30.  He had relabeled a half-gallon of Bojangles sweet tea as "Civ-Pro Fuel," which I appreciated.  We started our exams.  I attempted to care for about seven hours.  I did my best at caring about Civil Procedure.  Then I went to a law office party that Cate G invited me to.  She works there in HR.  None of them cared about Civil Procedure, I don't think.  They did, however, care about having top-quality well drinks.  Like... Grey Goose was their crappy vodka and Bombay Sapphire was their crappy gin.  I accepted this in as gracious and appreciative a way as I knew how.

I'm going to apply to internships over the next few days.  Or sleep.  Whichever comes first.

My Second Contracts Exam

I'm pretty sure my torts teacher just trolled the entire class.

Troll: to purposefully do something WAY outside the bounds of reasonableness just to laugh as others freak out about it.

Our three-hour Torts exam is meant, like all of our other exams, to allow us to show what we learned over the course of the semester in order for the teacher to allocate to us 100% of our grade in the class.  I imagine that's how that works, at least.  So imagine our surprise when we opened up our exam to find one (1) two-page question entirely about contracts.  To clarify: a question for a torts exam in which absolutely no one gets hurt or claims to get hurt.  Two people got up to ask whether we were given the correct exam.  Everyone else just looked sort of dazed.  When we received word that it was indeed the right exam, we proceeded to do the greatest making-stuff-up session ever.

Marginally reasonable things I said in my exam: there could have been, according to the question, a very weak argument for a tort involving economic harm (which we studied for about five minutes).  I took that and ran with it.  I also introduced a lot of "well, if someone HAD gotten hurt, then..." hypotheticals, even though the question did not ask for any such things.

Completely unreasonable things I said in my exam:  I claimed that a blueprint was a consumer product which consumers expected to be able to "operate" safely.  I offered up the possibility for a strict liability regime based on the negligent product design of blueprints.  I said (in my most passive-aggressive moment) "I would cite the cases which allow for voiding a contract in this case, but those cases are in my outline for Contracts."  I made arguments for affirmative duty (which you make when dealing with strangers who are not in privity of contract) in a case in which everyone was in contract with one another, simply because I had run out of other things to say.

At one point I had deleted everything else on my exam and started a new answer about negligent infliction of emotional distress on students by giving an unforeseeable and nonsensical exam.  At another point I had written down "if this question seriously wouldn't be better answered through a contracts analysis, then please please fail me out of this class because I obviously missed something hugely important."  I deleted both of those, which is probably for the best.

Afterwards the entire class got together just to assure themselves that everyone else felt the same way.  Even the most hardened gunners in the class were perplexed and admitted to just making up terrible theories in order to fill pages.  So on the one hand, I guess it is good that we are all in the same boat.  On the other hand: what happened???

No real time to think about that now, though- I've got Civil Procedure to study for.