Mock Trial Weekend in Detroit

After enduring two months of learning how to mock trial, I was sent by plane to Detroit to actively participate in a mock trial competition. Our case was a thinly veiled Oscar Pistorius story using How I Met Your Mother names. I, of course, got to play the defendant in addition to my responsibilities as prosecution closer and expert-witness examiner.

Team D (from left to right): Jessica, Nik (our wonderful coach), Caitlin, Travis, and Me.

We arrived in Detroit last Wednesday and were immediately struck by how not-bankrupt the airport and the immediately surrounding area looked. Then we realized that the airport was about a half hour from real Detroit, where we would be headed.

This is more like it.

When we got to the downtown area, all of the buildings were beautiful but something seemed... off. We slowly realized that there were just no people around. None. We were in the middle of what looked like a large downtown metropolitan area, and there we were the only people. We sauntered across a six-lane highway while the red hand was on. It was like a zombie movie. A very dull zombie movie. We were hungry so we went into a large sports bar. It was not late, but we were the only people there. When we walked in there was some loud rap music, but when the bartender saw us he changed it to quiet Bon Jovi. I'm not sure what to make of that. 

A view of our bar in the daytime. Note that we are right in the middle of downtown and you can see one whole person in this picture. 

A view of the "People Mover" (two-car monorail) tracks and the GM Renaissance Center.

Apparently Detroit refers to itself as "The D." I don't believe that has caught on outside the immediate area.

Closer view of the GM center, which was pretty great. 

View from the top of the GM Center. You can see Canada over the river.

Anyway, my team was great and we had a lot of fun. We won two rounds and lost one, which was probably my fault for using the wrong inflection in a sentence about the nature of intent. That was almost good enough to break into the top 4, but we ended up in 5th place. For a team full of first-timers, it was a very good result. Hopefully I will have another opportunity to do a trial next semester.

Now it's time to do all-Cabaret all-the-time. We go up next week!

The Mystery of the Ossicles

First off, I suppose I should talk about the ENT appointment that I had last Monday. I just got the official results back this Monday, and, SURPRISE, we continue to have no idea why my right ear sucks so very slightly. My right ear and Stonehenge- mysteries we may never solve.

The diagnosis, though, is that since there is nothing to explain the hearing loss, I may have had something percussive happen near or in my ear at the exact wrong time that caused one of my tiny ossicles to move the tiniest bit. If I absolutely had to, then technically I could have a minor surgery that complies with all Navy regulations and that would let me join in 120 days. I say "technically" because it is clear that lawyers did not write the Navy's medical manual and the procedure that they say they allow is more like ten different procedures that all happen to have the same name. Well, I am appealing on the basis of "this is dumb" but am also requesting an advisory opinion as to whether I am correct in my interpretation of their regulations.

In the meantime, I have been going on some fun job interviews. I had one this morning, actually, with a judge in Maryland. We talked about law for about thirty seconds and then we spent the remainder of the hour discussing musical theater and Battlestar Galactica. Boy am I glad that I learned all that law to prepare for interviews for legal jobs. (But really, I'm very happy that I finished Battlestar Galactica in spite of a couple lackluster seasons because the judge was a HUGE fan and apparently requires all of his clerks to watch the full series as homework.)

I leave for Detroit tomorrow and will hopefully do a writeup of how the competition goes, but until then here's a picture of my costume design for Cabaret. I may or may not end up looking anything like this, but I really like the concept.

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.