What, now?

The Death of Motherfucker Girl, and Good-Bye, Anal Speculum, and Pajamas.

2009-04-21T18:52:00.003-05:00

Why are you so shy?

People ask me that, a lot. Usually, it's after they've known me long enough to realize that I'm not, actually, at all shy. It's usually in the same conversation that they tell me that I'm not at all like they thought I was, when they met me.

What did you think I was like?

Quiet, usually. Nice, sometimes. Stuck-up, occasionally. At least three times, developmentally disabled.

So when people ask me why I am so shy, they are really asking me "Why do you SEEM so shy?"

I'm not shy. I'm reserved. Shyness comes from fear; reservation comes from experience. And judgment. I am experienced enough to know that some things that I feel like saying can be taken the exact. wrong. way. I have good enough judgment, though, to be a bit tight-lipped around most people, for perhaps a little longer than is usual.

Judgment, I'm told, is the number one most important characteristic in a good lawyer, as in, one can't be one without it. A lot of other stuff seems to be required, too, but none of it's for shit without good judgment. That's a paraphrase, of course, from the wise words of many. Many, who are wise enough to not use the phrase "for shit," when giving advice.

Judgment, I learned, is why, if one wants to be a successful solo practitioner in a small community, especially when one is a woman, and young - one cannot go to the grocery store in their pajamas in the middle of the night. (Learned this at a class this weekend. Important advice. Because I would go.)

Judgment is why nearly everything about you is open to scrutiny, when you're a lawthing. A sign of bad judgment might bode much worse than a low grade in Fed. Courts. Fed. Courts is hard, and a bad grade might just mean a single misread phrase in a fact pattern, or showing up to the exam with a flu. A facial tattoo...that shows that you lack the ability to weigh the benefits and consequences of a very public decision.

I did the leadership thing, at school, this past term. Demonstrated a bitchload of good judgment, reasoned decisionmaking, self-discipline, setting both examples and boundaries with staff- all that fine-ass shit. Balance. Good time management. Priorities. Professionalism.

At the same time, though, I was blogging. I was writing my very first stand-up comedy routine. It killed, by the way. I opened with an old favorite, went through a quick routine on unemployment, my low expectations from relationships and fear of commitment, into a great bit comparing medical specialties to legal specialties, then came right back around to "Rectum? Damn near killed 'im!"

One of my blogs took the fuck off. I got about 3,000 hits on a post about Polygamy, around the same on a post about Octomom (loathe that moniker, so much), 2,000 on a post about the commerce clause, of all things...

It was around that time that I started to hear the same thing, over and over again, from many trusted sources. Trusted sources who, I'm sure, have "good judgment."

"Hobo, I love your blog. Please delete it." Except, of course, they don't say Hobo.

"Hobo, you have a perfectly good psuedonym which is not at all traceable to your actual identity...why don't you use that?" or,

"Hobo...have you considered that blogging is a better tool for marketing than it is for ensuring that you don't get a job?" or,

"Hobo, have you ever noticed that the more serious the topic you're writing about, the more likely you are to include words like "bullshit" "dickbag" or "motherfucker," and have you considered that that might be a sign of some inherent self-defeating tendency?"

or,

"Hobo, do you think you might have waited until the dean and faculty had left the fundraiser before you got onstage and made a joke which relied, to a great extent, on an extended metaphor comparing your classmates' ambitions to aspiring proctologists' dreams of someday performing invasive rectal exams?"

None of these, however, convinced me to take down the blogs. Then, I went to my sister's engagement party. Her fiancee is very involved in music. The type of music which meant that every single one of his male friends showed up to the party in a scally cap and black work jacket. It was a lovely event. Drinking. Snacks. Standing on a porch. Socializing.

When I next visited my parents, though, I had a little shock. It was Sunday dinner - a lovely tradition. It's a sign of a healthy and satisfying life to have a guaranteed opportunity to drink someone else's wine at least once a week. My father, pouring me a glass of wine, called out to my mother:

"Hey! (my mother's name), Motherfucker Girl is here!"

Yup. Motherfucker girl. Apparently, I'd made a great impression on at least one of my sister's guests. I had been christened. It wasn't surprising that my sister had reported the new appellation to my parents, immediately. Some families are protestant. Some families are agnostic. My family are dyed-in-the-wool anecdotalists. Redemption through storytelling.

It was, however, surprising, when I learned who had found my language quite so salty.

The gentleman who christened me had once worked as a drummer for a quite well known band. A band that would have become MUCH better known, if the name weren't so filthy...that it must be referred to only by its initials. So, I began to reflect upon my use of language.

It doesn't really matter if I gain a reputation in the hard-core music community as a stellar hostess with a filthy mouth - but, it may matter if I gain a reputation as the otherwise shy lawthing...with the inexplicably poor judgment when it comes to online presence.

So, after a bit, I'm going to quit this blog, and my other. And I'll leave it up, but carefully redact identifying information. I'll try to strike any backlinks that identify me, as me. And I'll stop using the word "motherfucker" in front of anyone more sober than I am at the time. There will be a few more posts before the end; then a long absence for the bar.

After a while, I'll start a new blog. It'll either be entirely invitation-only (completely unnappealling to me - I like to shout into the wind), carefully screened for propriety, or carefully screened for identifying information.

I hope I can still wear pajamas in the middle of the night, as long as I don't leave the house. It's going to be hard to sleep in a suit. The drycleaning costs will be intense. I'll go through spray-starch like a ghost with erectile dysfunction.

So, you want to go to law school.

2009-02-16T21:03:00.004-05:00

Sit down, and let's have a chat.

It's a fantastic thing, this whole "law school" experience. And I'm very glad you'll be following in my footsteps. And I'm delighted that you've come to me, a stranger on the internet, for advice. And I'm so happy to share with you some advice.

1. You know how people generally say that such-and-such isn't at all like it is in the movies?

Fuck that. Law school is exactly like the movies. It's exactly like Legally Blonde, in fact.

But wait, Hobo!That movie didn't make any sense! And I'm pretty sure it was sponsored by Pantene!

True. And yet. The one inaccuracy is that Legally Blonde takes place at Harvard. While Harvard exists, you will not be going to Harvard. How do I know? Well. You're looking for advice on the internet. That means at least one of the following statements is true about you.

1. You have poor judgment, and an inability to sort valuable information from useless information. That, or you can't manage your time for shit. I know this because, well, the internet is on all the time, this blog is found easily by google. For real advice, you'd have to find a bookstore, get there while it's open, and either loiter long enough to learn something, or buy your ass a book. Obviously, you were unable to do that.

2. Neither your mommy nor your daddy is a lawyer. Nor are they rich enough that their friends or your relatives are lawyers. How do I know? Because then you'd ask them; or someone else you know, about what law school is like. Not me, the aforesaid stranger on the internet.

How do I know that if either of the above statements are true, you're not going to Harvard? Well. I don't. Actually, and this is good practice for the LSAT's - if both statement one and statement two are true, you're not going to Harvard. If statement two, but not statement one is true, you're not going to Harvard.

If statement one is true, but statement two is false, you could probably still go to Harvard, because nepotism and privilege trump judgment and intelligence. Get used to it. If you can find some shmuck to pay $3,000 for a Kaplan LSAT course, and some shmuck already paid a buttload for your SAT course, and your "rigorous education," so your undergrad degre doesn't have the reek of proletarian accessibility, you'll get into a good law school. But fuck you, if you do.

So anyway, other than the fact that you're not going to Harvard, Legally Blonde is a pretty accurate portrayal of law school. First year is confusing; everyone's a fish out of water; cliques form quickly; you'll be humiliated in class at least once. Then, after first year exams, you'll find out that someone you thought was a dipshit is a genius, and someone you thought was a genius is full of shit (me! me! me!).

After that, there's a montage, and you graduate. Seriously. I have no real memory of second year that doesn't involve Fed Courts or washing Mr. Miyagi's car. And that one time I got so drunk that I fell and actually bounced.

2. Everyone says that the first year of law school is the most challenging year of post-secondary education in America. I don't know if this is true. I'm not, after all, Hoboustabeamedstudent.

It's tough. It's time consuming. It's strange and it's rigorous, and the way that the classes are taught is so completely different than the way that anything else is taught - it's like foreign-language immersion, especially if you are the first person you know to go to law school. I was. I didn't know what a casebook was, what, really, a "case" was. I didn't know what a brief was, or a memorandum.

But I had two advantages that got me through the first year of law school, better than most. First, while I was an undergrad, I was a barista. I worked as close to full time as the coffee shop would let me. That meant that I would often get up at 4:30am to be at work at five, work 'til one, get in my car and go to class until eight or nine o'clock.

As an undergrad, I didn't have time for luxuries like "keeping up with the reading," unless I was willing to sacrifice in other ways, like "not paying my rent" or "living on stale pastries and stolen milk." If you spend your undergraduate years working 14 or 15 hour days, always feeling like you don't have enough time to really get anything done, always having to switch between being a college student and a wage slave -- the eight or nine hour day necessary to keep up with your work as a first year law student seem like a vacation. And, really, it can be. Being able to focus on one thing is amazing. All you have to do is show up, work hard, and learn. How decadent.

The second advantage I had was that I didn't really care about being good at law school. Although I had decided to become a lawyer, it wasn't a long-standing childhood dream. I didn't feel like I was destined to be a lawyer. Thoughts of Clarence Darrow didn't dance through my head. I just wanted to get through it. Law school is hard; you WILL feel like you're doing it wrong. The only way to get through it is to have more investment in working hard than in doing well. Some people do phenomenally well, and always feel like they're failing. Some people feel like they're really getting it...and they end up doing really poorly. If you go to school every day feeling like you must have escaped from a diagnosis of serious mental disability - don't let it bug you. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be a lawyer, or even that you're not getting it.

So relax. Care less. And remember, if you've worked your way through college, or you've been out in the workplace, or you've been in the military, or you have kids - you've done something harder than this.

3. Consider not going.

I mean it. I'm $125,000 in debt. I'm the motherfucking head lady of our publication. I've got actual legal experience. I've gained serious respect for my work, both on the job, and in school. And I have no serious job prospects. None. I've loved law school. I loved, loved, loved working in legal services, and at the tax court. I want to be a lawyer; I realized today, while putting off writing take-home exams in order to work longer on some work for the publication - that I love legal work, even the nitpicky little stuff.

But it might not be worth it. I might have, I'm realizing, been just as happy getting a teaching degree, and working as a substitute teacher. Or, continuing to work as a barista, and spending more time seeing if I coud write. I might have been happy being a housewife, and perfecting my blueberry muffin recipe. Or raising and slaughtering heirloom turkeys. Happiness can come from a lot of places; and not a lot of them result in $125,000 of debt.

So think hard. And don't assume that going to law school means that you're going to get to be a lawyer. And if you can actually sit and think of what it would mean to you, to sit, like I am now, and write about what it is like to have fallen for the law - bereft of any hope of practicing - and you still want to go - more power to you.

4. Think about what school to go to. As I said above, you're not going to Harvard. It's fairly useless to make a list of schools to consider before you've taken the LSAT's. By the way, treat the LSATs like the single meaningful determinant of your admissability - because that's what admissions committees do. A 4.0 is cheap; a 172 is dear.

There are two, and only two, good strategies for picking a law school. I endorse both of them. The first strategy is to go to either the highest ranked school that will accept you, or the highest ranked school that offers you significant scholarship money. I did not do either of these. However, if I had, I might be in a slightly better position than I am now, because the highest ranked school that accepted me also offered me a full scholarship. (Note- consider changing blog title to Hobojackass). This is a strategy which may go far towards ensuring future financial solvency.

The other strategy is to go to my alma mater. Seriously.

I have absolute confidence that the law school I attend provides the best legal education available. This is not mere rah-rah jingoistic chauvinism; I'll admit that my school is lacking, well, in several areas. The physical plant was half-crumbling; now it's constantly under construction. The school can be unreliable, when it comes to getting grades out on time, letting you know about important deadlines. It can be a little bit dishonest about placement figures. It can be freezing and damp and leaky in the summer, and sauna-like and steamy and smelly in the winter.

It offers no, and I repeat, no, long breaks. No summer. No Christmas. It's expensive, and they're cheap with scholarships. The rank is low. There's only one publication, and we haven't published yet, because I'm blogging instead of providing leadership.

But I can't possibly imagine having gone anywhere else. I can't imagine being on the verge of graduating from another school, trying to face the legal world, without the preparation I received at my school. Conversations I've had with students from other schools, purportedly better schools, only confirms my belief that the education my school provides is far superior.

I can't go further into it, because I'd lose all semblance of anonymity. But, if you happen to be actually reading this for advice, email me, and I'll tell you. And when I tell you why, I think you'll agree: considering going anywhere else is fucking ridiculous.

5. Never look back.

Feelings are poo.

2009-02-13T16:29:00.005-05:00

I think that's the most crude title I've ever put on a blog post. Not the most obscene, but the most juvenile. That said, it being the day before Valentines' Day, and also the day after the day after the occasion of my little sister's engagement, I'd like to share a bit of personal philosophy that I originally shared only with her:

Feelings are like bowel movements.

If you can remember this, you will never go wrong.

Everyone has them, barring serious pathology. Although frequency and significance may vary, both feelings and bowel movements are a part of life. This is known to all adults, but very small children are often informed of the fact at appropriate times.

Babies are not expected to be in control of either. Their parents find this endearing, but others, less so.

It is not necessary, and in fact, often displays poor judgment to talk about them in casual conversation. However, it is often appropriate, if something appears seriously amiss, unusual, or painful, to speak with a doctor, very close relative, or trusted friend about them.

No matter how strange, disturbing, or uncomfortable they are - it is very likely that you are not alone. There is no shame in seeking professional advice, if the pain persists for an inordinate amount of time after its' cause. (say, lamb vindaloo, or a bad breakup).

Speaking about either on a cell-phone in an packed elevator or on a crowded train is a guaranteed way to make strangers wish for your death, although sometimes, eavesdropping on these conversations can be quite entertaining.

If you expect to experience either with any degree of severity or violence while in the workplace, you are advised to scout out the most private bathroom in the building, in order to best preserve your professional reputation.

Never trust someone who wants to talk about them, in any depth, on a first date. While the frankness may seem, initially, refreshing - it cannot auger anything good. As well, even in long term relationships, talking too much about them with a romantic partner can result in the loss of all mystery and romance between you.

Attempts to induce either, whether in yourself, or especially in others, are really creepy - although increasingly common on the internet.

While it is best to have some control, attempting to hold either in for any extended period of time will just make things worse. Self-medication, similarly, while occasionally necessary, will similarly come to no good if relied upon. The result is likely to be an absolute inability to have them without chemical assistance, or an unexpected outpouring at an inconvenient time.

It is sometimes best to just let these things take their course, and see how it comes out in the end.

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody.

If you like pina coladas....

2009-01-24T16:28:00.002-05:00

This is just somewhat of a random reflection, but have you heard "The Pina Colada" song lately?

Basically, it's not just about someone seeking a companion who likes to drink cocktails that taste like sunscreen and diabetes...it's a cheery tale of thwarted infidelity, and how it brings people together.

There's a guy, our hero, the narrator of the piece. He has a girlfriend - they live together. It seems to be a long-term relationship, but all the verve is gone. Perhaps, even, sexual intimacy is on the wane. There may be other problems, but all our narrator chooses to emphasize is his boredom.

One night, while his girlfriend is asleep in bed next to him, he starts trawling the personals. He reads one ad, promising outdoor sex, syrupy cocktails, and escape - and that's all it takes. Forgetting all about his girlfriend, he writes back. He arranges to meet with this stranger in a local pub, and take off together.

The purported happy ending of the tale is that the woman who walks into the bar is his old, dull girlfriend. Finding out that they were both into alcohol and mild exhibitionism, their relationship is rekindled, despite the fact that they were both prepared to scuttle the entire thing for the first stranger who happened along with a blender and some docksiders.

Somehow, I don't think this is how it would happen in real life. Somehow, I think the real ending to the song would involve "Cheaters"-style screaming and crying, and the sentence "Get out of my sight, you coke-addled whore!"

I suppose, though, "coke-addled whore" probably didn't fit in to the rhyme scheme.

I love chocolate cake.

2009-01-05T21:51:00.002-05:00

This is not a metaphor.

I really, really love chocolate cake. Fudgy, rich, with that catch-you-on-the-back-of-your-tongue chocolate bitterness, and that jaw-tightening non-sticky sweetness...something with enough chocolate in it that the cake looks almost black. Velvety, but still...resilient. Frosting slightly under-sweetened, cocoa-scented, almost gritty at the moment you put it in your mouth, melting by the time you withdraw your fork.

But I rarely eat chocolate cake. Most chocolate cakes...are not the above. They are fluffy, black, almost foamy, small-grained, sweeter than yellow cake, sick-dog-brown frosting tasting of nothing but table sugar and fat, or worse, artificial butter...

Loving chocolate cake and eating chocolate cake at every opportunity- these things are incompatible. I'm not immune to cake-disappointment yet. I only recently learned that cake can be what I thought it was. I'm not ready to go out and search for...

-let me pause, again, I reiterate -this is really, and truly, and in all earnest, about cake-

I'm not ready to go out and learn more about cakes that will disappoint, and make the memory of the last crumbs of the last good piece seem false or implausible. I would try to convince myself, after a couple failed slices...that all cake is this way. That the ur-cake, the cake which I had imagined, the cake which I have recently pulled, warm, from strange ovens, and barely managed to resist digging into with both hands...never existed, or, if it did, wasn't nearly as good as I remembered...

-again, seriously, this is truly about cake, not heroin, or sex, or ambition, or politics-

Self-protection almost dictates that I go out, find a stop and shop, find some kind of cake with frosting flowers and a yellow sticker that says "Chocolate!" on its plastic dome, and eat it, like cookie monster, but weeping, so that I can relax, and tell myself that dark sponge-and-corn-syrup IS chocolate cake, and that nothing else is possible.

Because, seriously- I've bought three pounds of butter in as many weeks. Someone should intervene, before I'm found bloated and smiling and chewing frosting from underneath my fingernails, in a bewildered neighbor's kitchen.

Two chicks at the same time...

2009-01-02T12:59:00.004-05:00

A very, very important question is posed in this clip. A question I've spent some time considering over the past couple days.

Not - Am I the kind of chick who would double up on Lawrence, if he had a million dollars? I haven't actually considered that.

But I'll give it some thought. Let's see. To be honest, I don't actually KNOW how a man does "two chicks at the same time." So there's, obviously, a flaw in my contemplation. I can figure out how a threesome, in general, would go, but that's not really "doing two chicks at the same time." It's more like the recycling symbol - somebody does something to somebody who is doing something to somebody who happens to be the first somebody mentioned. At least, that's what I imagine. Except, I think, it might be, "something does something to somebody while somebody does something to themselves or waits a bit and then, fortified by the acts of the two somebodies, goes on to act upon either of the first somebodies..." Neither of those situations seem to fit the definition of "two chicks at the same time." I figure what Lawrence really means is that he would do two chicks in a quick succession...

oh. Shit. Never mind. I think I figured it out. Fuckin' mustache.

So, I don't know. I figure that I would double up on Lawrence with a million dollars only to the extent that I would double up on Lawrence without a million dollars. And that requires much further and deeper contemplation, so this whole digression ends here.

But what would I do, if I had a million dollars? (Or, some amount of money that would allow me to not worry about money?)

I think...I'd do very, very close to nothing. I'd dick around, cook elaborate meals and bring them to people, bake far, far too much cake. And pie, jesus christ the pie. And cookies. With butter. Oh, god, butter...

I'd read a lot. Constantly, probably...I'd probably start at about three novels a day until I was able to slow down...which would mean that I would run out of decent books in about three years...and have to start reading grocery-store romances. That's ok. I'm not too intellectual to read about "creamy skin" and "growing stiffness"...

I'd go to the movies a lot - and I think that I would start to go without regard for the merits of the movie, which is one of my dirtiest secrets. Left to my own devices, I would smuggle in those terrible three-pack chocolate chip cookies, and watch whatever movie was playing...often. Three, four times a week.

And when I say..."without regard for the merits"...I'm quite serious about it. I'm not here referring to my bottomless lust for zombie movies. I'm talking about movies that are the products of bad meetings, movies that are the product of ill-conceived multi-picture contracts, movies that all involved would disclaim, if possible.

Two of my favorite movies, which I have never, ever watched in the presence of another human being:

That's what I mean.

I'd also probably write some. And draw a bit. And, yeah, even if I didn't need the money, I'd probably do a bit of law stuff. Thinking about it - without regard to "Could I get a job doing..." or "Could I live on..." ...I'd try and do appeals. I really, really like appeals. I like the closed record; I like that the arguments are in court, and fully legal - no witnesses, no fucking around with cross-examination, credibility...your law mojo against someone else's law mojo. And I wouldn't even haveto do fancy appeals...I mean, even little dippy property tax shit would be fine...as long as there's a brief to write, and the possibility of an oral argument every now and again.

So I guess this means that I should be a lawyer, but a lawyer so fantastically wealthy...that they don't have to work much. How do you do that before you've tricked some motherfucker into giving you that first job?

On running...and kicking...and punching...and moving.

2008-12-14T18:34:00.002-05:00

Soo.

I kickbox now.

It is the most amazing thing that I've ever done. It's hard, but it's straightforward. It's like physical origami - the actual thing you're doing is simple to understand, but the execution is ridiculously difficult.

Block from the outside in. Parry from the inside out. Four steps to every kick. Pivot the foot that's not kicking. Keep your hands up. Don't lean in to a punch. The front hand is the speed hand - the back hand is the power hand. Shuffle forward, shuffle back.

I also run now.

Something else that is incredibly simple. Walk. Then go faster. Then go fast enough that both feet are off the ground at some point in each stride. Don't stop. Until you're back home. Then stop.

I'd stretch, but I'm not that into not being injured.

I did my second 5k today. I was too sick to do it, but I already paid the entry fee. Therefore, I threw up. Somewhat distressingly, my time for 5k-where-I-was-sick-and-threw-up-next-to-someone's-honda is 6 second shorter than my time for 5k-while-healthy-and-not-vomiting.

I also just moved.

Something that seems incredibly simple - find all stuff in apartment, shove into containers, convey to new place, remove from containers - and is in fact incredibly complicated.

Find stuff. Identify stuff. Sort stuff which is meaningful from stuff which is actually retained trash. Sort stuff again into stuff which should occupy new apartment, and stuff that should be shoved into the basement of new apartment. Identify analogous locations for all stuff once conveyed...very, very difficult. Exhausting.

If moving were somebody, I'd punch it, and kick it, and then run away from it - if it ever threatened me again. But, unfortunately, it's a process, not a person. Processes cannot be punched in the kidneys, and running away from moving is actually just making the affirmative decision to either become homeless or never, ever, ever move. Which is hard when one isn't a homeowner.

That's all.

No real point.

Seriously, though - if you ever get the chance, try kickboxing. No matter who you are. No matter what you ordinarily like to do. It's like...1.2 times as fun as making cookies. And that - is my highest endorsement.

Yes, I'm a stereotype.

2008-08-09T18:35:00.003-05:00

Which stereotype?

Well. Basically this one: Yes. Goddamnit. It's come to this.

I mean, I worked for Starbucks for three years. And I went to Bennington. And I spent a term working in legal services. And now I'm going into debt to become a lawthing.

But I think about it.

And you know what? I worked really fucking hard to look this fucking generic. Although I did go to Bennington, I'd like it to be known: I got kicked out.

You want to know what's hard? Getting kicked out of a school with no grades, no homework, no organized structure or requirements of any kind. It took a lot of moping, generally pathological passivity, and a resolute refusal to apply myself to anything but the continuous association and disassociation of inappropriate quasi-sex partners. When I look back, I'm astounded that I was able to make such a consummate wreck of those years without the aid of a respectable substance abuse problem.

You know what's even harder?After being booted from said liberal-arts fairyland, looking at your debt, and your relatively low level of skills, and your transcript...to say "Shit, yeah- I'll try again." But, you know, I did. And I chose, after a while, a school that was happy to take me, as long as my checks cleared. And I found a job that gave me health insurance, even dental. So starbucks. And when I found myself, suddenly and almost inexplicably, graduating from college...I decided to go to law school. And it was hard. And it IS hard. Not the work; the lifestyle. The expectations. The presumption of passion and dedication. The uncomfortable chairs.

And I've taken out a great deal of loans to indulge the manifestations of my stereotypy: a one-bedroom apartment; ikea furniture; occasional bacon. And I've been lucky enough to acquire a lovely boyfriend who, through endurance, patience, intelligence, and kindness- amuses and refreshes me and fulfills my baser needs .

I don't mean to write a love letter to myself, about the heroic way I mitigated the effects of my own self-indulgent blue period. I don't want to solicit boundless praise for acting like a responsible adult when faced with unforeseen, yet ordinary circumstances...

My point is more simple. Some of us are born stereotypes; some achieve stereotypicality, and others have it thrust upon them. And, goddamnit, when you've been staring impotently at an administrative law final for going on ten hours, any achievement seems worth trumpeting.

A Vitamin-Enriched Pork Rinds Solution

2008-07-27T18:52:00.003-05:00

As, I think, I've explained before, a "Vitamin-Enriched Pork Rinds" solution is a situation where you've correctly identified that there IS a problem, and you've tried to find a solution to that problem- but the chosen solution only reveals a deep misunderstanding of the problem you're facing.

For example: Certain people only have access to snack food and overpriced processed food from convenience stores, because they live in so-called "food deserts," where there are no grocery stores nearby which offer fresh produce, meat, and dairy. Therefore, these people are often more likely to suffer from malnutrition than people who have access to grocery stores. There is a problem here. Vitamin-Enriched Pork Rinds are not THE solution, to THE problem, but they might be thought of as A solution, to A problem. They also, in this situation, help avoid any discussion of any larger forces which have caused the immediately apparent problem.

A vitamin-enriched pork rinds solution often has an element of denial.

Here's one.

A doctor on the Cape has been arrested in connection with the death of a patient as a result of general anesthesia, which was administered during an abortion. This is a vitamin-enriched pork rinds situation. Even if the facts alleged in the indictment are true; that the doctor administered general anesthesia without proper monitoring equipment, and as a result, the patient's resuscitation was delayed, and as a result, the patient died - then the apparent problem (bad doctor) and the apparent solution (arrest the doctor), are actually a single, small aspect of a much larger problem:

This was a doctor doing a medical procedure under general anesthesia in an office. Why? Because when necessary medical procedures are so politicized and stigmatized that doctors, medical personnel, and hospitals, are under pressure not to provide or participate in them- the procedures become dangerous. They're performed under different circumstances; they're performed by a different population of professionals. When you take a medical procedure outside of the mainstream- people will be hurt. People will be exploited. And blaming the doctors will not solve the problem.

Dear Cary Tennis,

2008-07-15T08:50:00.001-05:00

You have been trolled.

Love,

The internet.

And yes, I am aware that Mr. Tennis seems to doubt the validity of the letter. But you can't wink and smirk at a dolphin fucker, secure in your advice-columnist seat. The first rule of maintaining the balance between the aspirational, journalistic internet from the powerful, trolly, furries and anime porn internet. You can't beat it, AND you can't join it.

Why?

Well, because the number of people who are able to make a living from the journalism and commentary internet is, approximately, five. And their resources are limited by their involvement in, you know, life- and their professionalism. Whereas, the number of people who are able to find some personal fulfillment, in some horrid-fly-torturing-shit-photographing way- is, approximately, fifty bajillion. And those fifty bajillion don't do it for a paycheck. They do it for love. You can never beat them. They're like the viet cong, if the viet cong had to stop every seven minutes to masturbate. They're legion, they're well-motivated, and they're on their home turf.

God help us.

Saw Wall-e this weekend.

2008-07-05T19:16:00.003-05:00

Movie was good; a little slow paced, not as beautiful as the rat-chef movie- the Chaplin angle, which has been much talked up, could have been fleshed out more. The animation was...incredible. It was entirely possible, until the squidgy globey humans came into the movie, to forget that it was animated at all.

All-in-all, a charming movie. Except that it's entirely the most cynical children's movie I've ever seen; it's like the concept came together in the exuberance and consumption of the up-sizing budget gourmet, mc-mansionizing years of 2003-2006- while the details were finalized during the "we're old and fat and no, seriously, we don't have anything to show for it" late days of 2007. Of course, I think that IS the timeline for the movie. But the thing is- it's a kid's movie, and all the anxieties about encroaching human uselessness through a combination of efficiency and consumption- weren't veiled at all.

Humans, in Wall-E's future, are people who are born into, and die on, a space-bound cruise ship, where no one has a job, people just fill time, and our bones have receded into a general bodily mush after centuries of microgravity and the absence of any actual labor. They are ferried around without walking. They exist only to entertain themselves, go from one activity to the next, slurp all food from giant soda cups at an infinite buffet. Everything they encounter is round and safe and pre-screened and dull.

Essentially, Wall-e's human race has universally achieved the idleness of american middle-class children - the exact audience for this move.

Tomorrow is my birthday.

2008-06-30T21:13:00.003-05:00

I'll be 26.

My plans: Gym, citation seminar, work, school, cake with parents. Other than work, it's identical to the very busy birthday of an over-scheduled four year old.

I suppose you're supposed to reflect on how time passes when you turn 25, but I was just too damned busy. The last birthday I had time to really reflect on was 23; before that, 19. I'm always a little late.

I really can't think about where I am, or what I thought it would be to be 26. I definitely thought I'd have lived in more than three cities; I thought I'd be in some fantastic, creative, unconventional career- instead, I've discovered that really turns me on is a career which requires pantyhose, waking up early, predictability, and good behavior: tax law. Or, just the law, period. There are white-tee-shirt lawyers out there, and certainly tons of fake-indian-tunic-and-crinkly pants lawyers- but I know I'm not going to be one of them. I'll be lucky to be a no-stockings-required-in-august lawyer. I really pictured barefoot-and-typing, not extra shoes under the desk...

But no regrets.

No regrets.

Except I never really learned what shade of lipstick actually looks good on me. And I never traveled to Europe on my own, or went to a nude beach, or made homemade donuts. There are a few other things I'd like to do before I hit the 2-7, but they're totally private.

Chinese nipples.

2008-06-29T21:00:00.002-05:00

"Chinese nipples" is STILL the search term that brings the most people to my blog, thus proving that the internet is, after all, just a machine that exchanges credit card numbers for a tingly feeling in the down-there.

Of course, there are other things that bring people to the internet. Searching for a doctor to prescribe ritalin, viagra, or phenteramine without an actual visit, diagnosis, or screening. There's also the bottomless human appetite for fear-mongering- topics like which foods, activities and household pets may put you at risk for cancer, date rape, autism, fibromyalgia, telemarketing, and organ theft are immortal. After sex, drugs and fear, there's only one last thing left for the internet:

fat. baby. animals.

Don't believe me? This video has been viewed more than three million times. Three million.

That's five times the population of vermont.

I just don't get the internet. But I sure do love fat baby animals.

Weird little case.

2008-06-29T09:07:00.004-05:00

In Providence's Federal Hill neighborhood, there's a building my boyfriend and I call "Crack School," which I've now learned is actually the Grove Street School...

It's abandoned, long-term, hard-core abandoned. More than that, it's half torn down.

It turns out that the reason it's been left, for a year, half-torn down- is because the city is trying to prevent the building from being pulled down. In fact, the city wants the owner of the building to re-build the parts that have been torn down. (Registration Required).

That's not the weird part; well, it's a little weird to imagine that a city would demand that a long-abandoned building, half-rubble, be restored to its former condition- but that's Providence. That's New England city politics. Court battles are fought over minor infractions against city procedures; offenses against minor fiefdoms within the bureaucracy are never forgotten. It's not unheard of, in my town, for example, for someone to be denied a liquor license over something their father said to a city counselor fifteen years before they were born. It's not impossible that the owner of the building here outbid someone's cousin for the lot, and will thus never obtain any benefit from the fair city of providence ever again.

The weird part is the way that the owner of the building has attempted to get the permit to finish demolishing crack school. The building owner went to court for a writ of mandemus, an order which requires a public official to perform a non-discretionary function. In this case, the building owner wanted the trial court judge to issue an order requiring a building official to issue a demolition permit.

These writs are strictly common-law, older than our nation, and very rarely used. They're rarely used because in most cases, a really good argument can be made that the given public official's function IS discretionary, and therefore political, and therefore, to issue a court order requiring action would violate separation of powers.

So this is weird. And it's a desperate little move from the property owner's lawyer, and it's even weirder that the lower court judge granted the owner's request and issued the writ of mandemus- essentially ruling that even though demolition permits require assessment of many factors, and demolition permits are not an entitlement, because it's city practice to issue demolition permits in cases like these, then the function was no longer discretionary, but compulsory.

A very, very weird ruling- but, as they say, hard cases make bad law. You've got to wonder what's really going on here. And I bet the Rhode Island Supreme Court was wondering that, too...and that's why they have forced mediation on the parties. By forcing mediation, the parties may be able to agree to tear down Crack School before it gets hit by lightning again, or before anyone tries to climb around in there, and gets killed, or before anyone sues anyone for creating a public nuisance- and the Rhode Island Supreme Court is able to avoid ruling on the lower court's definition of "non-discretionary function."

More photos of Crack School/ the Grove Street School are at the Rhode Islander's flickr photostream .

More

Ethical Quandary.

2008-06-28T23:17:00.003-05:00

So last week, I was in a weird position.

A fellow student asked for help with some legal research; nothing too involved, and nothing relating to classwork. Essentially, it involved figuring out the requirements to make a motion, what papers needed to be filed along with the motion, what the standards were for the motion being granted. No big deal.

Except that this motion involved an aspect of Massachusetts law that is in dire need of reform. And it wasn't just an academic exercise; this classmate was doing the research for an attorney that she was working for outside of school.

So I pointed my classmate to a legal encyclopedia, figuring that pointing someone in the general direction of pre-existing answers is so remote from actually giving someone an answer, or rendering material help to the outside attorney's actual clients...that my feelings about the law on this topic were not only irrelevant, but kinda self-indulgent, too. It's not as if Mass Practice is some kind of secret weapon; it takes up several shelves in the library, and is often considered the most-consulted secondary source in the state. So I told my classmate about my ethical problems with the law, and I helped her anyway.

Then my classmate couldn't quite find the answers in the encyclopedia.

So she asked for a bit more help. I actually found the relevant passages, and the forms, and noted what the relevant law was on the topic. And, again, it would be self-indulgent to imply that the research help I did was anything irreplicable- the research took me about- two and a half minutes.

But, did I do the right thing?

If people are against things, say, laws creating tax shelters, or the old-timey laws that protected married women's property from creditors, for ethical reasons - is it ethical to help others take advantage of them? How removed can the help be before you're compromising yourself? Can you render help to someone who wouldn't have the authority to make the decision to not exploit this law, or this regulation? My fellow student didn't have the choice between using this law, and counseling a client to use another ... she had the choice between completing the work assigned to her, and not completing it. The attorney would have probably groaned, picked up the same volume I did, and came to the same result.

But, in rendering legal services, many of these decisions lie with the client, not the attorney, so the attorney may claim that even they don't have the authority to choose to exploit or not exploit a certain law. They may argue that zealous advocacy actually requires the use of this or that law, regardless of personal ethics.

So it may not be self-indulgent to worry about the ethics of helping someone with something, even if the help rendered is not unique, and even if the person who is helped doesn't have the authority to avoid the controversial tactic.

So what do you think? Does it matter whether or not you're personally going to profit from giving this advice?

Follow your ethics?

Thinking about being a lawthing...

2008-06-24T14:34:00.003-05:00

I've got two interviews this week for my next round of internships.

I'd be happy to get either of them; I'd even be delighted to get neither of them. Basically, either internship will pay a great deal of money, but I've applied for some that pay a great deal more.

And by a great deal of money, I mean more money than I have ever been paid, in my life. Not just more per hour, but if I were to get one of these internships, over the length of the internship, I'd make more money than I've made before in my life, total. Period.

These figures have got me thinking: am I worth it? and is the work worth it?

The work of a lawthing is not the hardest work I've ever done; it's not got the worst hours, and it's not the dullest, or thus far, the most distasteful. By and large, it's not just more pleasant, but easier, than the work I did as a barista.

Yes. Easier.

I think everyone would expect more pleasant; after all, being a barista does occasionally involve spills of hot things, cleaning up various goos of various origins, long hours on your feet, customers who can be demanding, demeaning, bitter, and ungrateful...while lawthing work mostly takes place in fairly clean offices, seated on a chair, with periods set aside for eating and staring at things.

But being a lawthing, even a really, really good lawthing, as I have turned out to be- is easier than being a mediocre barista, which is what I was. Being a barista required knowing what was going on, all around me, on multiple levels- predicting what to do in the next fifteen seconds, the next five minutes, and the next four hours. No time for dicking around; any mistake is immediately evident. Well, most mistakes are immediately evident -one time a trainee used the urn-brush to clean the toilets. It would have been nice if that were known sooner. Like, before someone cleaned the coffee urns.

Being a lawthing is like...being a high school student. Deadlines are written down and known in advance. Nothing is turned over without exhaustive checking and re-checking. It's research, writing, interviewing, responding, and minor administrative stuff...nothing but the actual legal reasoning, and to some extent, the writing is in any way difficult. And it's interesting stuff, too.

So at the coffee shop, I made no more than $8.44 an hour, plus tips. None of the internships I have applied for will pay me less than three times that amount. So- was I underpaid at the coffeeshop? Will I be overpaid in the fall?

Last friday-

2008-06-22T20:42:00.001-05:00

I killed these.

With this.

I'm so bad-ass.

Gloucester High School.

2008-06-21T20:58:00.002-05:00

Ever read a news story and think "Wow, Dick Wolf is going to make some poor writer's guild motherfucker turn that into a 'Law and Order: SVU' episode by noon tomorrow." Sometimes, things just cry out to be "ripped from the headlines."

Generally, anything that combines the three magic ingredients:

1. Favorite victims. Somebody demographically attractive to the psyche. Children are best, teenagers will do, women are acceptable, upper-class is ideal, but middle class will do and white will suffice. Essentially, news that happens to people as unlike urban minority young men as possible is the most marketable kind of news, and thus, ripe for the ripping.

2. Sex. Ideally, there will be actual sex, somewhere involved. A sex act is best, including rape, sodomy, or molestation. Next best is things that are tangentially related to sex, but isn't actually a sex act- the results of sex or the need to avoid sexualized environments. A distant third best would be something unrelated to sex, but having to do with sexualized parts of the body- breasts, genitals, buttocks.

3. Something weird to spice it up, and add distance or a feeling of superiority for the viewer: a strange religion, drug involvement, something culturally, geographically, or ethnically distant.

For example, take the "Dateline: NBC- To Catch a Predator" phenomenon. It presents a sympathetic victim (a young, middle-class white woman, pretending to be a young, middle class white pre-teen), sex (the predator assumes he's going to participate in a sex act, and may have already been...participating in one...on the way over), and spice (internet chat rooms- our new favorite danger).

Another example- the goodole texas polygamy raid. It involved young, white teenage girls (and some children!). It involved sex- not a sex act, but the looming specter of child marriage, which implies sex. It involved that third element- a religion so different that every woman capable of menstruating has to wear her hair like Alice on the Brady Bunch.

As a blast from the past, remember the whole pre-teen blowjob thing years ago? Everyone was so concerned that twelve year old girls were blowing entire varsity teams...it was featured on every prime-time drama with a captive writing room and quick turn-around time, every network news magazine? Young girls, check. Sex act, check. Extra spice? That was the problem. There was nothing to give it distance. Parents got too scared, and didn't want to watch anymore; sensible people began to ask whether the acts described were physically possible to perform - nevertheless perform without being caught.

So this week's story on the Gloucester High School teen pregnancy squad will be a Law and Order. It WILL be a Dr. Phil. Goddamn right it'll be a dateline. Look at the article.

Young girls. Who are middle class.

Sex. And, even better than sex qua sex, pregnancy can be daytime fare, because you can talk about teen pregnancy while pretending you're not talking about sex. Sex is so much... more clean, more pure, more family-friendly...when people aren't having it because it feels good.

A third element: religion. (Catholic). And if that's not distancing enough for you, then the pact. It adds spice. It hints at a subculture in the way that the pre-teen blowjob party story did.

I was going to blog about the story in the context of choice- in that, it will always be a challenge for people who are pro choice, pro reproductive rights, to step up, and say: If I stand for a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, at any age- I will stand for a woman's right to choose to become pregnant, at any age. And I was going to blog about whether there is, or should be a discussion about whether choice has to incorporate the right to choose to become pregnant, at any age, or whether pro-choice people get to backdoor out of the discussion by saying "after the age of consent, of course..."

All we women, we future ex-wives

2008-02-09T21:36:00.000-05:00

There are more women than men in law school right now, and mine is no exception. Some of my classes are seas of women; long-haired, short-haired, stout, curvy, smart, witty, humorless, political, apathetic...basically, a swathe of female humanity from the middle-class cut-throat ambitious to the upper-class post-undergrad founderers...

Future ex-wives.

We female law students, already, most of us, in our mid twenties; likely to graduate in our mid-to-late twenties; we women who have decided to forego our prime dating years, our prime-pop-culture consuming years; we women who, likely, lose most of our patience and half our social skills somewhere between the library and the court clerk's office...

The men that we will someday marry are out there, in other law schools; business schools, graduate programs, jobs- doing, substantially, the same things we are. Learning and unlearning the things that we are learning. And we'll meet them, and find ourselves in them, and develop respect and lovely even relationships...

until we get older. And they get more successful. And we're still equals; but they're offered something better. Something younger. Something softer. Something like we were before law school. Something with the sense of humor that we don't have. Something- someone- who is in middle school right now, or elementary, or a stroller.

I don't blame my future ex-husband for his future second wife. I'm so old already. I'm so tired. I'm brittle, and impatient. My eyebrows go together in the center, all the time. I am intimately aware of what soy does to my digestion. I'm cautious about new food and late nights. I can't afford a single misstep; a morning off can wipe out an entire term's work. I already need a break from me.

But what I hate is that I'm not going to get this young, easy, break-of-a-man- this lithe reward for hard work and a tax bracket greater than 35%...who is fascinated with me. Who wants to listen, and make my life easier. Someone who will love me without knowing me as...personally...and evenly, as I'd be known as a contemporary. Someone who wants to take dance classes and has an almost imperceptible refractory period.

Because, dammit, women don't get 23 year old refresh-men. Too bad.

Writer's Block.

2007-11-18T21:42:00.000-05:00

For the first time in a long time, I'm having trouble writing- everything. Blog posts. A paper for something. A confusing letter to a celebrity I'm obsessed with. Emails to friends...

I think I may blame Christopher Hitchens. Probably not. But I may.

Christopher Hitchens wrote an article for last month's Vanity Fair about an American soldier who died in Iraq. This soldier was inspired to go to Iraq because of Christpher Hitchens' writing. The article was really well done; sensitive, even. Not in the new-age-guy sense; I don't think that Christopher Hitchens will ever don a lavender sweatervest and earnestly consider his feminine side, then decide to give people the benefit of the doubt and look on the world with winsome tenderness. Sensitive in the it-was-written-with-near-tactile-awareness-of-the-people-and-issues-at-hand sense. Hitchens quotes Yeats, a poet that once found that a play of his was quoted by dying revolutionaries-

We learn to write in elementary school, as a speech substitute. It's clumsy. Little kids don't have the fine motor control to write with the facility they speak. They can't spell words that they can easily pronounce. Punctuation is imposed where pauses and tone changes have already become instinctual. Writing is acquired first as a laborious superfluety. If you want to know what a seven year old knows, don't ask him to write it down for you; it's almost cruel.

Then, as we get older, writing, splits into compulsory and voluntary. We are compelled to write five paragraph essays on the French and Indian War, letters to dead Presidents and imaginary Quebecois penpals. (Dear President Lincoln. I hope you are well. Thank you for emancipating the slaves. Je m'appelle Therese, et J'ai dix ans...) We take notes. We forge notes. We pass notes. It's at this time, some begin to imagine that writing is- something that, someday, or now, they can do and be and enjoy. It's at this time we're most vulnerable to writing endless fantasy novels starring ourselves with cooler hair and a better first name and mysteriously absent parents, or greasy swooning romances, again, starring ourselves with cooler hair, etc.

These vulnerabilities persist until death or fulfilling employment end them.

College. College is where you learn to write. Occasionally. Sometimes in class, sometimes after. Sometimes after getting your ass handed to you on your way out the door. You'll figure out how to write nonfiction thingies that aren't assigned and fiction thingies that are more than a congealed mass of self-revelatory fantasy and masturbatory optimism....maybe. (I'm not sure I did. That's why I don't write fiction anymore)

And through all of this...

From the first time you took a purple crayon in your fist and wrote "by ST EV i E," to your breathless, middle-school epic "The Mysts of the Dragyns of LothynDwaryn," to the first time you really felt, turning in a paper, that you'd said something no one ever said before,

nothing really happened afterward. The writing stayed in its world. Papery. Pixelly. Talky. Red-pen-satisfying, semi-colon misplacing, world.

I just completed my first long legal internship. Eleven weeks, full time. I worked in a legal services office in a large city in the Northeast. I haven't been blogging a lot because of confidentiality issues; my work has been incredibly interesting, and absorbing, but I can't talk directly about much of it.

For one of the cases I was working on, I did a great deal of investigation. Turns out I'm very good at it. I'm the Dr. Gregory House of semi-competant lawthings. One of the last things I wrote at work was a document for this case; it was a document which is useful in the beginning of a specific type of legal situation. And I loved writing it. I felt as if my canine teeth should be long enough to see when I caught my reflection in the monitor. It was writing as consumation of investigation; confirmation that my chosen profession was the right choice; and beyond that, there was this sense that I was competent and right and potent...

And then I realized.

This document was the first step towards bad things happening to the people I investigated. The people had done bad things to deserve the bad things that were/are about to happen- but this document will be the first thing that happens to them when their lives come crashing down. And I've learned enough about these people to picture those lives.

It was nauseating.

And until I read the Hitchens article, I couldn't quite put my finger on why. I have no ethical problem with the legal process that has been set in motion. This time, I even had the luxury of being on the right side. Justice, even.

I'm 25 (very old). I've been using written communication, and composing various types of works in writing, for twenty years. And I refuse to find it absurd to clump "If I had a dog" in with my notoriously failed screenplay, by claiming twenty years of writing. But until a few weeks ago, when I wrote, I was always safe. I couldn't fuck anybody but myself. Now the safety's off, and I wonder if it was ever on.

For Yeats it was a play. For Hitchens it was an essay. Journalism and theater are not immune, and it's absurd to think that they would be. Even the most ridiculously masturbatory academic writing has some potential to reach outside of itself, if someone actually picks it up. The only safe writing is writing which isn't read; writing lost in the clamor. Otherwise, it's all a question of degree.

And yes, I did write this instead of writing my paper on Faulkner.

And no, I won't tell you why I should be writing about Faulkner, as a lawthing.

In other news, there's a difference between my vagina and your wallet.

2007-11-09T06:39:00.000-05:00

A case, annoyingly, patronizingly, and sickeningly referred to as "Roe v. Wade for Men" has finally been dismissed by a federal appeals court.

This case was brought by a gentleman who had a relationship with a woman who told him she was infertile. They had sex. They conceived. He preferred that she have an abortion; she did not. They had a daughter. He prefers not to pay child support. She, and Saginaw County (because remember, kids, to prevent the endless evil caused by 'welfare queens', welfare reform gives the government the right to collect child support on behalf of any child who may receive any form of public assistance) would prefer that he did.

Roe v. Wade for men implies that the issues are the same. They're not. My right not to have someone/something LIVE INSIDE MY BODY, and raise my blood pressure, give me diabetes, hijack my immune system, and possibly kill me on its/his way out, is completely unrelated to anyone's right not to pay any obligation imposed by society. An abortion isn't about not wanting to be a parent, or have parental rights; it's about terminating a pregnancy. Ending the imposition (and I wish I had a stronger word) on a woman's body, by a fetus, has, as a side effect, that no child results. Thus no parental rights. Thus no liability for child support. What this gentleman and his supporters are doing is saying that abortion is about not wanting a child; thus, men should have a post-conception option to disclaim pregnancy, just as women do, through abortion.

"Well, then what is he supposed to do? It's not FAAIIIR." Life isn't fair. It's not fair that a man can dick around for thirty, forty, fifty years after puberty, then start fucking someone twenty-thirty-forty years younger, and still have a child, and women have to decide whether to put up or shut up in less than a dozen years after college. It's not FAIIIIIR that my clothes are more poorly made because they button from right to left instead of left to right. It's not fair that if I accidentally became pregnant, I'd have to begin immediately planning how to pay for, when to have, and where to get an abortion- and then have it. It's not fair that if I did get one, I'd be the one being sedated, dilated, scraped, and reviled, and my boyfriend would only have to suffer the indignities of a less-than comfortable waiting room.

And let's remember: Once a child is born, the obligations to father and mother are equal. It's only prior to birth that the mother appears to enjoy any special privilege. I say "appears" because a pregnant woman is simply an individual who has the legal right to the same bodily sovereignty enjoyed by every other adult or child in America. I cannot force you to have surgery, or not have it- whether it's breast augmentation, penis lengthening, heart surgery, or abortion.

Script-writing robot writes my life.

2007-10-21T18:19:00.001-05:00

You know that point in a drama series where Joe Supporting Actor has gotten all caught up in corruption/addiction/scandal, and his daughter/wife/hardy, yet supportive secretary will talk to Jim, Dramatic Guest Star playing tortured public crusader against corruption/addiction/scandal...and they'll have this conversation:

Gal Friday: You can't put him in prison...

Jim, Dramatic Guest Star: I offered him a deal. All he'd have to do is give us some names/check into rehab/put his pants back on and give up the ducks and resign/retire/turn in his badge. No charges would be filed/he'd get off on time served/I'd drop the indictment. He wouldn't take it.

Gal Friday: Don't you understand? Being a doctor/cop/military chaplain/conflicted, yet sexually apealling member of another career track with an inexplicably comfortable apartment for a public servant's salary in this, our over priced metropolis is everything to him. If he's not a doctor or a cop or a military chaplain or said conflicted, sexually apealling member of another career track, he wouldn't be anything at all.

I wonder if that'll be me. I think it might be. I tend to overly identify with what I do. I still miss being a barista. I miss having that identity, being a part of something ... even if that something sometimes was the psychological equivalent of wiping noses and cutting crusts off sandwiches. I think that I'm definitely starting to identify myself as a lawthing. I think as a lawyer, the lawthing thing will become much more of my identity.

I wonder if I'll be grizzled enough to be a Joe Supporting Actor type. Can women be grizzled?

Yeah, women can be grizzled.

Why a man wearing a dress is the straightest man ever...

2007-10-18T20:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was talking to some other law students, from another law school.

The other law student, a lovely young man from the mid-west, whose hair has assuredly never grown to a length of more than 1 and 1 quarter inches, and owns sneakers which match his tie, asserted that he didn't think there was any difference between being a drag queen, a transsexual, and a transvestite.

I tried to explain it in the driest terms possible. We were at work, after all. "Well, if you're a drag queen, it's just something you do, for any reason, but only sometimes. And if you're a transvestite, you're doing it because it's part of your, um, expression of enjoyment, with another person, or alone. And if you're a transsexual, you're doing it as treatment for a problem you have, like therapy or braces."

Still no understanding. A man in a dress is a man in a dress, right.

I tried to explain it in more oblique, less dry terms:

"Well, see, if dressing up like a woman is any other activity, like, say, stamp collecting, if you're a drag queen, maybe you're a collector, or you're a dealer or something in stamps, but it's just something that you like and maybe you have a talent for it. Like you have a lot of fun collecting stamps and go to a convention, but maybe you only do it for an hour a day, or on weekends, and it's not, like...who you are.

And if you're a transvestite, it's like, well, you're really into stamps. You might, um, think about stamps when you're alone. Or you might have stamps in your pocket while you're at work...as, you know, a token...of your...love for stamps.

And if you're transsexual, everyone always told you that you were a scrapbooker, and you never liked pinking shears, and you tried to stick pictures in books forever, but you always pretended they were stamps, and you really, really, really, want to be known as a stamp collector. So you collect stamps every day, and get active in stamp circles, and soon enough, your whole life is stamps, because cutting out pictures of puppies made you want to die."

That was a really bad metaphor. And I think it made midwestern guy think that I was probably a little more enthusiastic about stamps (the real kind) and too knowledgeable about stamp collecting (metaphorical), to be entirely comfortable.

but, motherfucker, I need to be right. I need to make people understand. So I rolled my chair over to his chair, and I said...

"Listen. Drag queens do it for work or for fun, transvestites do it to get off, and transsexuals do it because that's the way they were meant to be."

And this got me thinking: No matter how much we talk about gay and straight, and worry ourselves over whether we live in a post-gay world, or mutter and furrow brows over the tyranny of the hetero/homo dichotomy...

We're not post-gay. We're not even gay. We're pre-gay. We still believe that the fundamental measure of a person's sexuality is whether they pitch or catch. For thousands of years, across continents, the question wasn't: Are you attracted to people with the same parts, or different parts? It was: Are you going to put something in me, or will you tolerate letting someone put something in you?

My midwestern colleague's stolid, ranch-scented insistence that there is always something gay about a man in a dress, regardless of that man's motivation or attitude towards the dress, or what he plans to do once he's got it on, reveals the persistence of the penetrator/penetrated theory of sexuality. (The positional, rather than orientational theory).

A man in a dress may not always be intending to do something traditionally "gay", but he is always allying himself with the penetrated camp. And when someone capable of penetrating signals that he is open to being penetrated, then he has breached his positional privilege. By breaching his positional privilege, he becomes positionally queer.

by "positionally queer," I mean that he has done something that would cause townies to sneer "faggot" at him, even though what he has done involves no actual attraction towards men. This is, of course, why activities which are distinctively heterosexual (a man taking his girlfriend to a movie involving more than one horse, several moors, and a sweeping orchestral score) can still seem "queer."

I've started an additional blog.

2007-10-04T21:40:00.000-05:00

It seems that mostly I write about food, lately- so I've started a new blog exclusively for my absurd, insane recipes which I use as substitutes for human emotion.

I'll try to blog over here more, too; I think it was hard for me to follow up a post about macaroni and cheese, or naming a meatloaf with my take on the candidates for president, or the importance of intellectual property law, or anything that a psuedo-serious law student would like to pretend that she'd blog about.

Hell, or zombies.

Maybe I'll make a pie about zombies, though. That'd have to be posted in both places...

here's the link to my new-ass blog, with one never-before-published recipe.

But seriously, some recipes won't be pie. Some will be other things. Like the empanada I want to make about Rajon Rondo.

Why does everyone always move to brooklyn? Brunch Pie Recipe.

2007-09-29T09:05:00.000-05:00

This is a pie which is about people moving from the greater New England area, in their twenties. I shared this pie with some fantastic people who are moving from Boston to Brooklyn this weekend, (good luck, folks, if you read this), and a variation follows if you want to serve it as a dessert rather than a brunch pie.

Crust:
1 c. white flour
6 tbl, butter, frozen (takes about 90 minutes in the freezer, but longer won't hurt it).
1 tbl, brown sugar
1/2 tsp, nutmeg.

Pie:
2-3 large apples, peeled, cored, and chopped.
1 cup milk
2 eggs and one egg yolk
1/2 c. brown or white sugar
1/4 c. brown or white sugar
1/2 c. walnuts, crushed and toasted.
1/2 c. maple syrup.
1/4 c. flour
1 tsp apple pie spice/or cinnamon and nutmeg.
Vanilla

(Optional- substitute one cup of chunked white bread or pound cake for some of the apple)

Brunch variation (slightly eggier flavor, more firm)

First, make the crust. Grate the frozen butter into a bowl. Work in the flour and sugar and nutmeg, and then add just enough water so that when squeezed, the crumbs form a dough. Don't overwork- some butter lumps are ok, and you want the mixture to remain fairly cold. It won't form a dough per se, but what you want is a mixture which is fairly moist but crumbly. Press into the bottom of a pie pan, and chill for at least fifteen minutes. (Look, ma! you don't roll it out!)

Preheat oven to 425, and bake crust for 12 minutes. It won't be done, but you just want it set enough so the wet ingredients don't sink in.

Into a large bowl, dump your apples, nuts, and spices, and 1/2 cup of the sugar.
toss around a bit, then put into your semi-baked pie shell. Return to the oven for about 12 minutes at 425. (Apples take longer to cook than other things, so this is semi-important - but if you're making it the night before and reheating it in the oven, you don't have to do this.) Remove from the oven.

(AFTER THIS POINT, the recipe is for the eggier, brunchier version- the dessert version will pick up from this point)

You may want to leave your milk out from the moment you start making this if you're using a glass pan, because cold milk hitting hot glass is a recipe for explosions. just keep that in mind.

In another bowl (jesus, do you need a lot of bowls to do this), beat the eggs, egg yolk, milk, maple syrup, remaining flour, remaining sugar, and vanilla. Pour over the apples, and bake at 350 until the middle doesn't wobble. (Maybe an hour, possibly longer. Depends on your eggs)

Dessert Variation:

Remove apples, nuts, and crust from oven and put aside to cool; set oven temp. at 300.

In a heavy saucepan, melt 2tbl of butter with 1tbl of the milk and the flour. Stir slowly until the color is like the wood grain paper that covers cardboard furniture at ikea. Slowly stir in the rest of the milk, and the sugar, and the vanilla, and hold well below boiling. Remove from heat. It should be somewhat thick. In another bowl, beat together the eggs and egg yolk.

Slowly slowly, drizzle a tablespoon of the hot milk mixture into the eggs, and stir. Drizzle another tablespoon of the hot milk into the eggs, and stir. Another tablespoon of hot milk into the eggs, and stir. Another tablespoon of the hot milk into the eggs, and stir. Continue like this until most of the milk is gone, then scrape the rest into the bowl.

Pour eggs and milk mixture over pie crust, apple, walnut mixture. Bake at 300 for fifteen minutes, then 350 until the custard is well set and golden. (As little as a half an hour, as much as an hour- just keep checking it).

What I'd really like to do today...

2007-08-08T10:33:00.000-05:00

I'd like to lie on my living room floor. For several hours. I'd like to do this with cds playing, perhaps, because I only own three cds, and yet have a five-disk cd changer, all three.

I'd like to have a chocolate cupcake, only propping myself up sufficient not to choke, and a glass of red wine, and go back to lying on the floor, semi-comatose, until I transition seamlessly into sleep.

What I am doing today: Studying in the library, only interrupted long enough to choke down enough cola and peanut butter sandwiches to keep my brain supplied with life's two most vital nutrients: caffeine and sugar, until I pack up my shit into a backpack and several reuseable grocery bags and bag-lady my way home.

In other news, life ceases to have all meaning.

2007-07-30T21:16:00.000-05:00

Evil, selfishness, and short-sightedness have triumphed. The celtics have traded Al Jefferson for Kevin Garnett.

Why would someone trade a decade of wins and the rekindling of a legacy, starting in two years, for a year or two of above-average performance, starting right now? What kind of manager would make that type of decision?

Why, a manager who believed that he would be fired before his long-term investment matured, and is willing to sell a team's future down the river. The difference between the celtics and the knicks is no more. The difference between life and death is no more. The difference between Danny Ainge and Isaiah Thomas is only in the color and cut of their suits.

I no longer have anything to look forward to. I dread the fall, I dread finals, I dread beginning my new, unpaid, job, and I dread whatever horrid creature I'm becoming, in this worthless, valueless, hopeless world.

So, where have you been? Part Two: A day in the life.

2007-07-30T19:59:00.000-05:00

5:20 AM. I wake up before my alarm goes off, or maybe I was already awake and just waiting to turn it off. I make my bed (this consists of folding it up, because right now I'm sleeping on a futon in my living room, and re-arranging the pillows and blankets until it resembles a couch.

5:30 AM. Breakfast. I slice a banana into some store-brand pink flavored yogurt, top it with slightly stale cereal, and eat it watching the morning news. A paper mill is on fire out on route 2; a girl was raped on the esplanade; and thunderstorms are predicted.

5:45 AM: Thunderstorms begin. I get dressed. I pack my lunch, brush my teeth, and consider fixing my eyebrows.

6:00 AM: I check my email, read the news, and look over my notes for corporations. My group is on today, so preparedness is key. After a bit, I pack up my backpack, put my lunch in a bag, and make sure I have my goddamned Charlie Card.

6:30 AM: Out the door.

6:45 AM: Back in the door. It's raining too hard, and my backpack isn't waterproof. I can't risk my laptop, so I get in the car and drive to the train station.

7:05 AM: Onto the train. Watching the lightning through the windows of the train is pretty cool. Random sudden stops and power outages slightly less cool.

7:45 AM: Arrive at school. I put my books away, get the keys and the cashbox from a locker, and open the CISP kitchen, which is a small room with linoleum floors and a very subtle rodent problem, where I work several hours a week.

8:00 AM-10:00 AM: Work. Mostly sitting. Some counting of money. A little bit of arranging things. Mostly I review my reading for the classes I'll have today, and start the reading for the classes I will have tomorrow.

10:10 AM- 10:25 AM: Run across the street on an errand for work. Run back, grab books, run up three flights of stares, and sit down for...

10:25 AM- 11:45AM: Basic Income Taxation. Fun times were had by all. About a third of my time was spent checking emails and reading CNN. This is considerably more productive than certain other members of the class, who are playing sudoku, doing crosswords, and internet gambling.

11:50 AM- 12:00PM: I am a jackass. I forgot to print out the assignment for corporations. I run up the stairs to the library, print out my document, grab my lunch from the fridge, and manage to get to my seat in corporations in time to get out my books, drop off the assignment, and start to eat my lunch (Yogurt, a granola bar, and half a banana). I like to cut up the banana and put it in the yogurt. It keeps me awake.

12:00PM - 12:40PM, Approx: Corporations, awake.

1:10PM - 1:30PM, Approx: Corporations, asleep.

1:30PM - 2:00PM: Corporations, Awake.

2:00PM - 2:05PM: I run to my locker, trade my corporations books for my Intellectual property books, buy a soda, and get back to I.P.

2:15PM - 3:45PM: Intellectual Property. My favorite class. I don't make a jackass out of myself today, I stay awake, and I'm prepared. A+

4:00PM - 5:00PM: Back to work. This time I'm tabling, sitting in a hallway begging other students to cast votes for...something. I pretend to read evidence for tomorrow, but mostly I zone out.

5:00PM - 6:55PM: My favorite spot in the library is taken. It's a nice little nook on the fourth floor, where there's no wireless reception and a lot of sunlight. I pick another spot, and settle in. I finish my reading for tomorrow, pack up my computer, and trade my books for my gym clothes.

7:00PM - 7:40PM: I arrive at the gym. It's full of undergrads. The girl at the front desk tells me they're closing at 7:45 tonight. I get a magazine and a sweat rag, change, and get upstairs, where I proceed to beat an elliptical trainer half to death.

7:55 PM: Back on the green line. Give up my seat to an old woman carrying a large child.

8:38 PM: Home. I consider dinner. I consider the prospect of doing dishes, and wonder what can be had without doing any before I actually get to eat anything. I microwave a pre-frozen sandwich I bought on sale last week, and cut up a cucumber on the side.

9:10PM - 9:30PM: Eat dinner, blog, make an attempt to call my boyfriend.

And what are my plans for the rest of the night? I'll spend at least an hour, probably two, studying evidence. Then a shower which covers at least the three major areas, followed by collapsing into bed, setting my alarm, putting on a DVD and, before the titles finish, passing out.

Tomorrow will be very similar, and the day after that. The only expected variations will be a decline in the number of hours I can devote to sleep...because, you have to understand, this was me slacking off.

Kill it! Kill it!

2007-07-25T18:55:00.000-05:00

I was walking home from the train station today when something...terrible...happened.

I was just past the fire station when I passed a man pushing a stroller. In the stroller was a baby. It was a classic baby, I suppose, nothing exotic or imported. It was a young baby; I'm not good at the ages of young people; I have to go by size. It was small for a baby, large for a liquor bottle. It was about 1.5 gallon baby. Redheaded, squinty, with that wierd accusatory old man face that the small type of baby generally has. It was drooling and just a little bit crusty.

And it wasn't wearing a hat.

I remember that, because as I passed them, some voice said in my head "Oh, don't you want to put a hat on his little head?".

Don't. You. Want. To. Put. A. Hat. On. His. Little. Head.

Not: For the good of society, will you please wipe that little fucker down or consider a rear-facing stroller? He's gone past sticky to greasy, and it's unpleasant to have that thing wheeled at you on a hill, like that.

But: Don't you want to put a hat on his little head?

Remember, I'm the person who is ready to advocate for a thirty day, no questions asked return policy on those things. I'm the person who seriously considered writing a paper for my animal behavior class that suggested that the delayed appearance of features triggering the "aw" response in human infants is a result of the evolutionary advantage to abandoning infants below a certain age.

Not only am I suspicious of, and hostile to, infants - I don't know a thing about them. I've taken, and passed, child development, but the only thing I got from it is that Russian learning theorists tend to die as young, and of similar (hepatic) causes as other Russian intellectuals. And yet, apparently, I know one thing about babies: They should wear hats. On their little heads. When it's sunny out.

I'm trying to reassure myself that my reaction was not some bastard emergence of then nurturing instinct I have thus far only hoped to extend to large, wealthy african-american men who are strangers to me
.

It's probably nothing to do with babies, and a lot to do with my mom. "Don't you think that baby should wear a hat?" is the only female conversational game* that my mother will consent to play. The rules are simple: Is it sunny out? Can that thing be identified as a baby? Then it should be wearing a hat. So you get to say "Don't you want to put a hat on his little head?" I still haven't figured out whether this game works without accompanying weather conditions. Can hats be suggested on babies for one's own amusement? To go with the general tenor of the moment? If I see a baby at a funeral, can I say "Don't you want to put a comically small hat with a black tulle veil on his widdle head?," or, in the North End "Shouldn't that baby be wearing a fedora?"

*Other famous female conversational games include "Other people's medical problems" "Lets enumerate our imaginary flaws" "Things I would like to buy or own but haven't yet." and "Who would you let put it in your butt?**"

**This is not actually a female conversational game +.

+But if it were, I've got my answer: Prince William, and Prince William only.++

++ Not out of some ridiculous anglo-royo-philia, but because the dollar's down. And if I'm going to have somebody stick something in my pooper, I want to be able to sell the story to the tabloids. And nobody's got a more thriving tabloid culture than the UK. And damn, the Brits would pay a lot for the story of the night the Prince got his brown wings. With exchange rates being what they are, it's likely that royal weiner + my bum could be the smartest investment I'd ever get to make.

I have committed...agriculture.

2007-07-23T08:17:00.000-05:00

I grew it! Bask in the glory! Bask!

From my walk today.

2007-07-19T07:43:00.000-05:00

For some reason, this picture put this mini-movie in my head: Crucified Jesus, on a hill. Red skies. Bible epic costumes and sound. For some reason, Yul Brynner is there. And hanging around Jesus' neck, just like on the door of a small barber shop at lunch time, is one of those signs with the plastic clock face on it, one of those : Back at - signs. Some roman soldier runs up, sniggering, and takes the hands off the plastic clock. The apostles titter among themselves, dissappointed that no one wrote it down. Then somebody goes up there with a sharpie and writes "Soon."

Jesus will be right back, people. As soon as he drops his netflix in the mail and buys a grape slurpie - there's gonna be redemption and there's gonna be half-priced french pedis.

Blogging Backup.

2007-07-17T12:08:00.000-05:00

I haven't blogged seriously for most of this term; I've let so many important events go by: being solicited as a caterer for a friend's wedding; a trip down south; the whole employment thang.

Why haven't I blogged? Well. Here's the thing:

1. I have much more time now than I had as a 1L.
2. I have much less time now that I am a 2L.

If those two statements seem contradictory, it's because they are. They're also both true. I have much more time now. I've grown my interests back; I've been baking bread and making bagels. I've been getting to the gym more; I've been seeing my family. Unfortunately, the amount of time required to do these things is actually greater than the free time I've acquired by virtue of being a 2L.

It all comes down to poor time management.

So, a month's worth of blogs, in a few sentences, in simplified English, with accompanying illustrations.

June 29 : I had job interviews. Basic Summary, as an east german lolcat: "Yes. I is qualified law thing. Pleaz to hire me for law. Pleaz? K Thx."

June 30 - July 1 : Donuts are good. They are far away. Maryland is pretty. I drank beer. Many barbeque sauces. Oh! So many! Did not see Lincoln. Another time. Happy Birthday to me.

July 3- July 5 : Went to the beach. Nice beach. Wine. Fireworks, yay! I drank beer. Had burger. my friends were there! Yay! Hi Joe! Later.

July 6-July 12 : Holy Shit! Everything is broken! My car goes click click click. My phone won't beep. And sprint smells suspiciously like vinegar and morning dew to me.

Recipe: Big Fluffy Bagels of Sorrow and the Pain of Growing Alienation

2007-06-28T21:08:00.000-05:00

For the Bagels:

2 and 1/2 cups of white flour.
1/3 cup of oat bran, ground fine.
1/2 cup of whole oats, ground fine.
1 teaspoon of salt.
1 teaspoon of yeast.

For the water:

Brown Sugar
Salt

For the Sorrow:

The news that someone you love deeply will be taken far away from you, to not only grow apart, but potentially even begin working against you. This needs to be a betrayal you are entirely powerless to prevent, yet something that is considered an inconsequential loss by society at large, so that your family and dearest friends cannot even begin to comprehend the depths of your emotions at this moment.

Suitable sorrows, ranked from highest to lowest yield:
-Delonte West, the best and greatest and most awesome basketball personality to cross the TD Banknorth Fleet O'Rama Parquet, getting traded to Seattle, which means he'll end up in Oklahoma, which means it will be hot and nobody will come to see him, and no one will care about the things he wants to do, like strip naked and drive down crowded highways in a convertible, or believe that he really did talk to Bugs Bunny one time.

-The cancellation, mid-show, of a Morrissey concert. (hi nichole! my bagels refer to you!)

-Kitten abortion.

Assemble dry ingredients, oatbran flour, oat flour, white flour, salt, and yeast, in a bowl. Add, slowly slowly, and mixing from the sides of the bowl, slightly more than one cup of warm water. After dough is mixed, dump into a slightly greased bowl, cover, and set aside for two or three hours.

During those two hours, mope as necessary.

Turn dough out onto floured board, and work until dough is somewhat elastic and oblong. Cut into eight hunks. Shape hunks into bagels, by poking your thumb through, and in a wringing motion, as if you're ringing out unshed tears, form the bagel with your fingers. Set each bagel on surface, cover, and leave to double in bulk.

After dough has nearly doubled, take out your biggest pot, and fill nearly all the way with water. Add salt (again, think tears) and sugar to the water (bittersweet, such is the nature of loss. Also doughy.) Put on high heat and bring to a really, really rapid boil.

Drop bagels two by two into the boiling water. Cook for 3 or 4 minutes each side, and set on dish towel or pile of paper towels to drain. As you're nearly halfway done, preheat the oven to 425. When all bagels have been boiled, allow the last batch to drain for at least five minutes, then place on waxed paper on cookie sheet, and bake for 30 minutes.

Bagels, sorrow, unfathomable loss - good with peanut butter.

Dear Sandwich:

2007-06-24T18:50:00.000-05:00

It seems like a cliche, but can I just say that I never thought it could be like this?
I didn't.
I ordered you on a whim, I admit, because I'd seen others enjoy you. And I'll admit, there'd been many, many sandwiches to pass through my life: club sandwiches, cuban sandwiches, peanut butter sandwiches.
I had, in times past, even eaten margarine on graham crackers and called that a sandwich.

For a while, I'd considered sandwich toppings to be the cutting edge of sandwich consumption; that all that could be done with sandwich fillings, the meat of the sandwich, was to coordinate what kind of bread it was on, and what vegetables, sauces, and cheeses it was paired with.

Little did I know that a sandwich of nothing but meat on a soft roll could be so much.
Then I ordered you, sandwich. You, the Burnt Ends Sandwich from Blue Ribbon Barbecue in Arlington.

Just one bite and I closed my eyes and I was sitting in front of every campfire I'd ever seen. The smoke, the meat, the soft roll- it was like childhood and summertime- but I'd never had barbecue as a child.

Until I was twenty-three years old all I knew of brisket was boiled corned beef on Saint Patrick's Day. How can a sandwich make me feel nostalgia when it evokes nothing I've ever experienced before?

The cole slaw wasn't so bad, either.

Love,
Hobolawstudent.

P.S. Sorry about digesting you and everything, but you understand.

In defense of Paris Hilton.

2007-06-09T10:30:00.000-05:00

I think I've mentioned before that I feel a certain...warmth towards Britney Spears, the more she falters in life, insofar as I feel anything at all towards her. People who express surprise and shock about her "antics," I think, aren't really thinking. What did people think would happen when a girl from a lower-middle class background in the south is taken out of school, given millions of dollars, and called a sex symbol from the age of 16 on? Without the millions of dollars, she's just like any other girl from Florida - except she's had no formal education, no friends, and no experience with normal life. Of course she's a train wreck. Millions of dollars don't stop the train wreck; they just make it more sparkly. People make disdainful faces about her now; they furrow their brows, flipping through magazines at the check out counter,

"Well, before, it was all in good fun...but now she's brought a child into it."

The kid's going to be fine. When you have millions of dollars, it doesn't matter how together your mom is, as long as she can find a way to buy you a doting nanny with a good handle on child development. And even if not, it's not as if Britney Spears minus money and fame would be any better of a parent (or less likely to be a parent) than she is now. She's just more visible, and, as I said, much more sparkly to look at.

Paris Hilton I don't find as charming. I bet she actually is nearly everything she's accused of: vapid, talentless, shallow, ignorant. I doubt she is, as some seem to think, a harbinger of the apocalypse or a destroyer of the integrity of a generation...but really, believe what you want. But allow me to pose a question: What would you rather she be? Who else could she be?

Lauren Bush? Lauren Bush, Ralph Lauren model from the age of thirteen, from the same family that produced George H.W. Bush, Jeb Bush, and George W. Bush...could have very easily been Paris Hilton. Instead, she's gone to college. She received a prestigious fellowship, to travel around the world and visit children in orphanages. She was recently interviewed about this travel in Marie Claire. It was a two-page interview, followed by an opportunity to purchase a T-Shirt, designed by the young Ms. Bush, to support children in orphanages in impoverished countries.

Ms. Bush is ambitious. She contemplates a career in human service. She mentions in this interview that she did not get this fellowship because of her celebrity status; she had just applied, and she got it. Oh, Ms. Bush. I believe you, precious. I believe that you believe that. Because, otherwise, you wouldn't be able to live with yourself.

Think about Lauren Bush. She will have a fabulous education, followed by a wonderful career in whatever she chooses, which will provide her with money she will not need, some of which she will donate to people who do, most of which will go to buy trinkets and stocks and ridiculous luxuries, made guilt-less by her orphan safari and other ventures. And each opportunity she gets, like the fellowship- is one that she takes away from someone else.

Her college admission. Her future internships. Her career. Every thing she does, which she is RICH ENOUGH NOT TO NEED TO DO, is going to be another opportunity lost to someone who may have achieved it through merit and hard work (I'm not saying Ms. Bush has no merit, or has never worked hard; only that when one is that privileged, and that connected, it is impossible to suss out what has come from what source).

I prefer Ms. Hilton. She will never need a job. She will never need an education. Thus, she declined to get one. Even her ridiculous television programs took nothing away from anyone. No one could star in The Simple Life, except for a vapid and useless socialite. She is the embodiment, the open and naked result of privilege and nepotism, un-shrouded in virtue or charity or stylish concerns...The only thing she has ever done that was actually, literally, destructive to society was drive drunk. And, arguably, by sparking a debate and outrage over her preferential treatment in prison, perhaps some good will come from it. If people grow outraged enough, perhaps some change will happen. Maybe public support for prisoner's rights will grow, as stories about young men dying in prison from neglected absesses and apendicitis while Paris gets a pass because she can't get her lithium.

In which the Hobo says she prefers mental retardation to tort reform.

2007-06-05T13:56:00.000-05:00

Actually, that's not the essence of my argument.

I don't prefer mental retardation to tort reform; I prefer mental retardation to death. Unfortunately, I'm not HoboDeathStudent, and I like to pretend sometimes that I care about issues relating to my future career. (Actually, I do. But no one wants to debate the intersection of contract law and social policy with me. So I will continue to mostly write about things I cook)

So there is a massive, massive lawsuit in the works. If you're unfamiliar with the thimoseral/autism thing, here's a summary: In the past fifteen or twenty years, autism has been being diagnosed far more often than it had been previously. This increase cannot be explained by an increase in the population, although it is theorized, that, among many possible factors, it may be related to the aging of the population. There are a great many people, and very many parents of autistic children, who believe that a mercury-containing preservative in vaccines, thimoseral, is the cause of some cases of autism.

The proposed mechanism of action is inconsistent; some people believe it is the mercury in the thimoseral which causes brain damage, which causes autism, in certain very vulnerable children. Others believe that it is the combination of vaccines now given, which overwhelm the immune system in some children, and cause an auto-immune reaction, which causes autism.

The science isn't good; and the law isn't any better. For many reasons, it would be hard to make this case out in regular court. First, unlike, say, DES, which caused a characteristic type of cancer, (clear cell adenoma)at an unusual age; there is nothing distinct about autism potentially caused by a vaccine and other cases of autism. Any potential plaintiff may have contracted autism anyway (factual causation problem, for tort students).

Plaintiffs have, however, killed their legal and scientific problems by bringing suit in "Vaccine Court", which, as far as I can tell, has lowered their burdens of proof in order to create a more streamlined process for people injured by vaccines. All settlements in vaccine court come out of a general pool; mumps vaccine makes your balls fall off, flu vaccine gives you a seizure - it all comes from the same account. That way, no one has to identify the manufacturer or distributor of their particular dose of vaccine.

I could go on legally, but I won't.

Before I go into my next argument, let me just say: I have tremendous respect for parents of autistic children and all people who work with them. If I had the balls and the strength of character, not to mention the patience and internal reserves, to be in a nurturing profession like that...I wouldn't be going up to my eyelashes in debt to be able to sit in a room with papers all day.

But basically, if you're a parent, what these parents are saying, with their lawsuit is "Fuck your kids."

Vaccines aren't fun; they're not a government plot. They're not a pharmaceutical plot. They're dangerous tools of the medical profession, yes. But they're necessary. And the reason they're necessary is because if we did not vaccinate children, we'd be back to the era of birthing four to raise three. Mumps, measles, rubella, polio. All these things didn't just hurt kids, or make their lives difficult, lonely, unpleasant, frustrating, undignified- they killed them. If thimoseral causes autism (and I have seen nothing to convince me it does), it's still worth vaccinating every child.

Autism doesn't kill you. Polio might.

So what these parents are saying is "I would prefer that my child be normal, and two children I do not know be dead." It's a fair thing to feel. If we didn't want to save kin over strangers, especially unseen strangers, we'd have run out of ourselves, long ago. It's not a fair thing, however, to enact. If vaccines become too much of a liability for companies to produce, they'll stop. And when they stop, people will start to die. Mostly children.

I've been thinking about the outcry against increased genetic testing for down syndrome. Parents of children with downs syndrome are concerned that if people find out that they're having a child with downs syndrome, they will abort it. They feel that if these parents knew what living with a child with downs is like, they'd keep the baby. People are concerned about the ethics of ending a pregnancy, to spare a family from having a mentally disabled child, or to spare a child from having to live with a mental disability - when we have a whole lobby of people who openly prefer the painful deaths of other children, to the possibility that their child may not be perfect.

By the way, kids: The vaccine court is a form of tort reform. A limited pool of compensation. Specific rules for specific injuries. Streamlined process. Tort reform ain't the answer.

2L, baby!

2007-05-31T20:19:00.000-05:00

Man, it's been a...couple of weeks.

Finals ended on a note of triumph for me. I strode out of my constitutional law final with the smugness of a pimp with a solid gold dick. I had the greasy self-satisfaction that can only come from knowing you've passed a class without listening to a full sentence the professor said for at least four months. Solitaire was as close as I came to paying attention; unlike when I was checking my email, blogging, or reading...when I was playing solitaire I wasn't actively trying to block the fucker out.

I'm not (well, normally I am) one of those annoying folks who roll out of bed and into the first and last classes of the semester and, chuckling softly, complete the final with twenty minutes to spare, pausing only to inquire what the actual name of the course and professor are. I dedicated serious time and energy to this awesome feat of not-failure.

I knew I would be ignoring this professor. Whatever shreds of self-regard I still clung to as a 1L were just barely sufficient to keep me from listening to his half-sermonizing, half-self-consciously ironic tone. That, and refrain from eating out of the garbage.

Other than that, the exams were not terribly memorable.

And here I am, starting the first term of my 2L year. I'm taking Corporations, Basic Income Taxation, Intellectual Property, and Evidence. I'd dearly love to pay off my student loans, and thus, am taking anything that I can imagine that might lead down that road. I've even developed a charming justification, with the obligitory thin veneer of moral superiority, for my coming legal prostitution:

You see, despite my passion for subjects in the public interest (affordable housing, reproductive rights), I could never actually work in those fields vocationally. Because, regardless of how deeply you feel about the field, if you're getting paid, you will be advocating for someone else's agenda, someone else's priorities. And I just care too darned much about my interests (affordable housing, reproductive rights) to compromise. The only ethical thing, then, for someone of my deep and abiding moral code, is to work in a field unrelated to my beliefs, with the hope of contributing in a self-directed, avocational way, as time moves on.

Morally consistent, no? And it only took me a year at the "Nation's Premier Public Interest Law School" to develop a nuanced and comprehensive justification for how quickly and thoroughly I hope to sell out after graduation.

Yes, another food post.

2007-05-05T16:03:00.000-05:00

The Great Pizza Crust Experiment.

As you know, I have no money. As you may or may not know, I love pizza. I probably love pizza more than I love you, no matter who you are. Random blog reader, friend, accomplice, undisclosed romantic interest- unless you happen to be a certain gentleman who has quite impressive skills in the paint- I am almost certain to have a deeper and more tender regard for pizza than I shall ever have for you.

No money plus great love for pizza = debt. Sadness. Tragedy. So, as I am wont to do when faced with tragedy, I went to my parents house. They did not make any donations to the cause. Then, I made my way to the traditional homeland of pizza: Rhode Island.

And in Rhode Island, I conducted a scientific study,of similar historic import to when that french fuck discovered oxygen by killing a pigeon, in order to answer the timeless question: How the fuck am I going to make good pizza without a pizza oven?

We've all experienced it. In order to save money, people will decide "Hey, it's just sauce, cheese, and bread. I can make that." And it never works. Why? Because pizza depends on heat sources unavailable to home cooks.

Problem- Fat melts at 100 degrees. Sugar burns at 400-ish. While water boils at 212, it takes time to get there, whereas your fat and your sugar go faster. In order for pizza crust to get chewy before it burns, the oven has to be hot enough that the water in the dough boils out before the sugars and fats start to incinerate.

Further problem: If your oven isn't hot enough to cook the dough fast, your dough will rise too much as it cooks. This creates the most loathsome situation known to man: Domino's Pizza. Doughy, bready, like an irish girl's low-rent approximation of focaccia...it's not pizza. It's bread with sauce, cheese added for modesty. No good. You simply can't bake a pizza longer to compensate for your tepid-ass, suzy-homemaker oven.

The solution is obvious: Raise the heat. Pizza stones were created for this; unfortunately, they're either expensive or shitty, or both. The stone you buy at the store is likely to be a rotten heat absorber and reflector. Alton Brown says to buy a marble tile at a home supply store, but as I mentioned, I have no money. So what's a girl to do?

Strategery, folks.

Strategy One:
My first strategy, one I've perfected in my dorm, is the old fall-back: Direct conduction. While the hottest setting on the dial of your stove may be 500 degrees, the temp. inside your oven varies. Gas only burns at one temp, after all. It's just that your stove is programed to turn the flame off and on, intensify it and temper it, until some part of the stove reaches the temp. on your oven dial. The hottest part of your oven is the floor, because it's closest to the flame. And the flame heats the bottom of the oven directly, instead of by heating the air around it, so it's even hotter.

So, in order to take advantage of the hot spot, make your pizza on your thinnest cookie sheet or cookie sheet substitute. Cover that sheet in tin foil, oil, and a dusting of either cornmeal or semolina flour.

At left, you can see our crust on the sheet, pre-toppings. After the pizza is constructed, into the oven at the hottest setting it has, for 9-12 minutes. (Results to follow at end.)

However, the direct conduction method has flaws. First, it's not translatable to electric ovens, for a variety of reasons. Second, it requires that the oven be turned up as high as it goes, which can be a problem; errant bits of oil on the cookie sheet, those that aren't covered by dough, may smoke and set off your fire alarm. Third, it makes people nervous to put things directly on the floor of the oven. They think it's unnatural, unsavory, perverse.

There's a second method that doesn't require putting the pizza directly on the floor of the oven; and, I'd hoped, would allow the pizza to be cooked at a lower temp. without sacrificing texture. Unscientifically, I'll call this "the less direct conduction method"; or the "I don't have a pizza stone method".

Cast iron is a fantastic conductor, store-er reflector, and distributor of heat. It's also durable, traditional, and non-stick. Really, cast iron pans are fantastic. They just require a little more responsibility than other pans. Or a significant other who is willing to do the maintenance.

So I took the cast iron skillet and put it in the oven, middle rack, upside down at 400 degrees, for 25 minutes, while I was assembling the pizzas. Then, I placed a pizza (on an improvised, reinforced tinfoil disk), on top of the skillet. This, I hoped, would allow the pizza to take advantage of the fantastic heat-transferring properties of cast iron, without resorting to deep-dish. In the purposes of science, I have to disclose that I made this pizza sauceless, because I was scared that if there was sauce that dripped, and the skillet was too hot to take out of the oven (and it was, for hours after), then we may have rust.

The third method was cast iron, not preheated. I took a little cast iron pan (a tortilla warmer- ten dollars at your local ethnic grocery), and tossed that onto the top rack. Let's call this the control group.

How'd they come out? Well, all three were edible. And all three were special in their own way, although they shared a common flaw: lack of cheese browning. As we all know, the ideal pizza has stretchy, gooey cheese, topped with an almost imperceptible layer of stiffer, crisper cheese. (This allows the pizza to be cut, without the cheese sliding off). All three of my methods focused on getting the crust cooked, not the cheese- so after the crust was done, I slid each pizza under the broiler for a few seconds.

Our tortilla-warmer pizza was beautiful, and only took a few minutes longer to cook than the other two pizzas. The crust was golden, the toppings were perfectly done, and it really did look like a delivery pizza. Check out the browning on the crust; the bottom was golden, and not a bit burnt.

However, this pizza was, when cut, very doughy. Because the cast iron wasn't pre-heated, the dough got a lot of time to rise before coming up to temp. For illustrative purposes, check out this picture of an earlier, pepperoni pizza, made with that method. Take a close look at how thick the crust, how midwestern the profile. It was edible, tasty, even. Better than gourmet frozen, better than Pizza Hut; but not better than your finer House-Of-Pizzas.

Our other cast-iron pizza had a less pleasant appearance. This may be because it was the only pizza not to spend any time below the cast iron pan, so the crust didn't get as nice and brown from reflected heat. However, the crust was chewy, flexible, foldable. The cheese was nicely melty, and the short cooking time and moderate heat left vegetable toppings cooked, but not mushy. The ideal, I think, would be to bake a pizza both on top of, and immediately below, pre-heated cast iron pans- that way, the crust is golden brown and crisp on top, tender and chewy on the bottom.

This pizza crust did not have the traditional Dominos/Pizza Hut/Boboli thickness. It was thin enough that, if the pan had been large enough, one could pass it off as delivery.

Finally, we come to the old favorite, my standby direct conduction pie. This pie was tasty. The crust was a little too thin in places- it was hard to keep the toppings on; however, that may have been due more to the large size of the pizza than the method of cooking. It was delicious otherwise, with fine browning, and the cookie sheet made it easy to take out of the oven and put under the broiler to crisp the cheese.

This method works better with fatty, lightweight toppings, than with high-water, high-weight vegetable toppings. While it was difficult to keep hold of our peppers, onions, and mushrooms, an earlier pizza made using this method was able to handle garlic sausages, fresh mozz, and pepperoni quite nicely, as seen at right.

Conclusion: If you want a big pizza, and you have a gas oven- just fearlessly, boldly, bravely, put it on the floor of your oven. Remember that pepperoni always helps, and that turning the dial as far as it goes feels so good. If you don't have a gas oven, but you do have a cast iron skillet, try that. Better yet, use two, and preheat them both. Finally, if you haven't got the foresight to preheat your skillet, but somehow have come into possession of pizza dough, cold cast iron works almost as well, as long as you're willing to accept a little more dough in your life.

"Barry"

2007-04-15T19:27:00.001-05:00

Ok.

There's something you need to know about me. This is the kind of thing, that if you were totally in love with me, and I died suddenly, in an elaborate bus accident, or of some shadowy yet well-publicized female cancer, you would remember in a slow-motion montage accompanied by tedious acoustic pseudo-rock. Whereas, if you were half-interested in me, and then we broke up, you would use it as evidence that I was not charming insane, but actually beyond the limit of being salvageable for occasional hook-ups.

I name my meatloaf recipes.

Men's names. "Andy" is stuffed with mashed potatoes and has the classic diner-style ketchup sauce. This one is "Barry". Barry is...deceptively simple, delivering complex, yet starkly middle-American flavors, reminiscent of a small-town deli. Without further ado,

"Barry"

2 lb ground beef.
1 egg
1/4 cup brown mustard
2/3 cup crushed sour cream and onion potato chips
4-5 slices swiss cheese
garlic.
salt.
pepper.

In a large bowl, beat egg. Add mustard, meat, and potato chips. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and add garlic.

On a large, foil covered cookie sheet, form 2/3 of meat mixture into a loaf. Make a "well" in the center. Cut or roll cheese to fit into well. Add the rest of meat mixture as a "roof". Bake at 375 for one hour. Tasty, no?

Thus, "Barry".

I love Delonte West.

2007-04-12T22:43:00.000-05:00

I fucking love him.

He is insane. And I love him.

Watch this. Immediately. I don't care if you don't like basketball. I don't care if you don't have time. You need to watch this. You need to see what he has to say about theology.

"Jesus, he knew about the beach...because it's hot in isreal...you think it's a robe..but it's a toga"

and about his aspirations for the future. Naked. With tube socks.

And about everything. You cannot understand me if you do not embrace Delonte. I love him. I will stalk him. And I will teach him that you don't need to take the Mass Pike to Boston from Waltham. I will make him a bouquet out of carrots and sweat socks.

We will run away together.

And now this. Damn you.

Love him immediately. No! Don't love him! All for me.

I'm so lonely.

This post is about my breasts. Plan accordingly.

2007-04-05T17:23:00.000-05:00

My back hurts.

My back hurts a lot.

I didn't notice for a couple of days, because my leg hurt, too.

I blame Isaac Hayes for the leg. Long story. Basically, pasty, out of shape white girl + soundtrack to Shaft + gym = over exertion. I am not a sex machine with all the chicks, and I just have to accept that. I'm in search of a movie soundtrack more attuned to my fitness level. I'm deliberating between "The Graduate" and "The Little Mermaid."

It's hard to get pumped enough to hurt yourself listening to "The Sounds of Silence." Then again, "Mrs. Robinson" is pretty kicky. On the other hand, "Under The Sea" could be dangerous. My complete lack of co-ordination, yet incomplete immunity to rhythm makes me a danger to myself.

But my back hurts a lot. I couldn't figure it out. Every day this week, at about six pm, my back starts hurting. Like crazy. Like...back when my bra didn't fit. Or that time I was talked into going braless for three days.

Then I realized: My bras don't fit.

My bras don't fit because I've lost thirty pounds in three months. Nothing fits. However, due to poverty and not really caring, I've been ignoring everything that isn't actively falling off. Bras, if you've worn or interacted with one lately, do not fall off. They just scooch down, like lazy teamsters. And when they slouch, perhaps thinking about increased disability benefits, or extortive bargaining tactics, they don't do their work.

The tit-wranglers have been on vacation, and I never noticed. And my back has been paying the price. Of course, I still have no money. And I'm not going to spend my vital burger money taking the train to buy a bra that'll just betray me in 20 more pounds.

Listen...to the sounds...of silence.

A Recipe: "Tell me all your goddamned hopes and dreams" Risotto

2007-03-25T10:02:00.000-05:00

Ingredients:
1 and 1/2 c. arborio rice.
1 carton chicken or other stock
1 cup juicy red wine
1 box frozen petite peas, or 2 cups fresh spring peas (cooked and set aside).
1 container sliced baby bella or crimini mushrooms
1/4 cup parmesan or pecorino romano cheese, grated
Olive Oil
Patience

Pour the chicken stock into a small saucepan on low. Do not allow it to boil. Move on.

On the bottom of a heavy saucepan, set over medium heat, drizzle about a tablespoon of olive oil. Dump in the mushrooms. Do not salt. Do you notice how there's no salt in the recipe? The salt is in the stock. No where else. Don't fucking salt anything. Anyway, stir the mushrooms around for about three minutes, until they get resilient in texture and give up their juices to the pan.

Remove mushrooms from the pan, reserving as much of the mushroom liquid as possible. Add about another teaspoon of olive oil to the bottom of the pan, and dump in the rice. Stir the rice around for about two minutes.

Pour in the red wine and stir until the wine is absorbed by the rice. Settle in. Maybe get someone to put on some music, maybe romantic-y type music. Al Green. Put on some Al Green. Love and Happiness...

Now you're going to want to keep pouring stock slowly into the rice. Add a half cup, stir for about...oh, three minutes, maybe five, until each stir reveals the bottom of the pan. Then add another half cup. You've got four cups of stock, so you'll want the stirring to take about a half an hour, total. After there's no more stock, combine risotto, peas, mushrooms, and cheese, and put in a casserole in a 200 degree oven to rest for ten minutes. Have a glass of wine. LOVE AND HAPP-Y-NESS...then serve. Delicious.

Here's a picture. The rice is actually, in person, a really pretty lilac-purple color, not brown. The lighting was not the best.

I am a crackpot.

2007-03-22T12:47:00.000-05:00

My letter to the editor of a well-respected, left-leaning, newspaper:

Dear (Newspaper) Magazine;
I am disgusted.
Your weekly feature, "Feature," is possibly one of the most obscene manifestations of elitist housing pornography that I've ever seen. Eastern Massachusetts has been experiencing an affordable housing crisis, and yet you run features on million dollar condominiums, half-million dollar fixer-uppers, and other offensive manifestations of the ludicrously inflated market that shuts so many out.
So many Massachusetts residents are quasi-homeless or paying 60% of their income for housing, dreaming of the day that prices fall so that they can have a permanent address, a cat, a single school district to in which to raise their children; this feature mocks them. It's as if, in a region experiencing famine, food shortages and inflation; you're running a weekly feature on the chic-est ways to throw food away.With the handy links provided to the listing agents, the indulgent descriptions of amenities, you're adding a coat of protective lacquer to the bubble that deserves to burst.
This feature is distasteful and irresponsible. I wonder about the Magazine's motivation in running it. To prop up the market? To inspire envy? To help the poor real estate agents? To pretend that $400,000 starter homes in Dorchester are within anyone's reach? To make the good old (Newspaper)Magazine as lofty and aspirational as the New York Times Magazine? What this feature accomplishes is to firmly establish the Globe as the paper of the "haves", "have-nots" be damned.
Sincerely, respectfully,
(Hobolawstudent)
(Wrong Side of The Tracks), Ma.

Response:

Dear (Hobo)

I got your email about your displeasure with our real estate feature in the
magazine. Respectfully, I think you are picking on one week of the feature.
The truth is that in recent weeks we have focused on inexpensive Cape
homes, $350,000 condos, and other prices. Each week it varies, sometimes
pricey, sometimes not, sometimes city, sometimes suburban. The feature is
addressing the wild fascination with real estate these days. Whether
$400,000 starter homes in Dorchester are within reach is unfortunately the
reality of today's market. If you want to live here, it's costly. I feel
like you are more angry at the real estate market's realities than at this
feature perhaps, which is something all of us can relate to. This feature
is merely stating the facts as they are.

I appreciate you writing us, though.
Best
(Some Guy), editor, (Newspaper) magazine

My trip to Wholefoods.

2007-03-12T21:36:00.000-05:00

I went to Wholefoods on Sunday night. I generally don't; my brand of socially conscious grocery is usually Trader Joe's, but Whole Foods is just a little bit closer to my apartment. It wasn't so bad; I was expecting to be charged 26.50 at the door, and checked for toxins on my way into the produce section. Really, the admission was reasonable and no one looked like they were even thinking about telling me about optimal colonic maintenance.

All I needed was one tomato, a bag of greens, and something premade-y for dinner. Frozen raspberries were on sale at a shockingly reasonable price, so I picked up some of them, too. I got a nice quesadilla, because it was the only item I could find with nutrition facts on it, and navigated my way through aisles of cruelty-free cheeses and fair-trade dish detergent to the registers. I admit, I gaped a little, drooled, let my jaw drop and stared at some wonders (goat milk ice cream!) like the suburbilly I am, but all in all, it was just a market.

Then I got in line.

The lines were long. I don't know if Whole Foods doesn't believe in express lanes; but this store certainly didn't. The registers were placed so close to the aisles that the lines bent around displays and doubled back on themselves like crazy vines. Organic, hand-picked, sun-dried, single-origin vines.

The guy behind me, dressed in the hempy, non-weather resistant livery of a vegan bike messenger, had only one item. I had four.

The woman at the front of the line was arguing with the patient, unfortunate, unenvied cashier over the ethics of pricing some vegetables per each, while others were priced per pound. The price difference between one avocado and one pound of avocado could not have been more than thirty five cents; the woman carried a two thousand dollar purse. She was enjoying herself. The cashier, less so.

Eventually, as Ms. Hermes-Guacamole was completing her transaction, I asked the guy behind me if he'd like to go in front of me.

We chatted. It was pleasant. I am charming.

Then, after a moment, he said "I hope that whoever bought you that ring knows that the diamond trade fuel civil war in Africa.*"

"Not this diamond, guy."

"Well, even with antiques..."

"No, guy- this ring is plastic."

I stood awkwardly for a moment, paid, and left. I was crossing the train tracks when I realized: That was flirting. That was how flirting goes in a world of organic salt and deodorant stones. Just as the proud peacock spreads his ludicrous tail, and the mighty gorilla scratches his tiny balls, so does the vegan bike messenger display his heightened sensitivity to the horrors of globalization to the unsuspecting law student.

*P.S. To all those hoping to impress girls holding organic produce, please be advised: Once Leonardo DiCaprio has starred in a movie about your pet cause, it becomes less impressive. Once one of Dick Wolf's ubiquitous teledramas does 42 minutes on it, it becomes a liability.

Hey! Somebody searched for prairie dog

2007-02-28T17:20:00.000-05:00

infanticide!

Somebody from Beloit College. Listen...if you happen to read this, and you're actually looking for information on prairie dog infanticide...email me! I've got a ton of information and it's a fascinating subject. I could at least reccommend some books and studies.

Three notes, unexplained.

2007-02-26T16:56:00.000-05:00

Just three things that are on my mind today, without much explanation:

1. Maybe we should bring back courts of equity.
2. Caffiene addiction, which strikes only after one has constant access to free coffee, is a cosmic bitch.
3. Quilted toilet paper: Placebo or innovation?

A public service.

2007-02-18T19:40:00.000-05:00

I've recently started tracking my site statistics. It lets me see what people want, what they searched for to get here, and how long they stay. It's become fairly obvious that my blog isn't what they were expecting.

I hate to leave my pseudo- or proto-readers hanging.

So, let's make a FAQ, shall we?

Q. How can I make granola?
A. Many fine recipes are available online. Here
is one for granola bars from Alton Brown. I haven't tried it, but I trust that it's very good. "Good Eats" has never done me wrong. Here's his recipe for granola. Most people who come to my blog are looking for a granola recipe. I honestly will try to come up with one. But these'll do for now.

Q. Where can I buy marshmallow fluff?
A. At the grocery store. If you're asking because you're outside of the U.S, or far from New England, where it's made... here is a handy "Fluff Finder", where you can find a fluff-selling store near you. Remember, Fluff never needs to be refridgerated, and is a MUST if you're making titty cake.

Q. Chinese Nipples?
A. Two, Mostly. Nipple color and areaola size varies from woman to woman, not nation to nation. During pregnancy, nearly all women's areaolae enlarge and darken. Men's nipples vary along the same lines as womens. The function of the male nipple is as yet unknown to science. Sometimes, men who have been extremely obese experience stretching of the areaolae, which after weight loss may be corrected surgically. Again, this varies person to person. There is no one "Chinese" nipple, as there is no archetypal "American" nipple. I hope that answers your question.

Q. Is jackassery a word?
A. A word? Well, what is a word? It is a collection of phonemes that conveys a specific, if abstract, meaning. So in that sense, it is a word. Is it recognized by the OED? No. Black's legal dictionary? No. Webster's? No. Can you use it in a serious academic paper? I would. But then again, I just did scientific nipple research.

Q. Has Annabel Gish made any movies recently?
A. Annabel Gish hasn't done anything. She's a misspelling. Thus, she cannot act in movies. Annabeth Gish has been mostly occupied with "Brotherhood", a series that imagines that the mafia in Providence is Irish, and that Federal Hill is now, and always has been, a thriving Irish-American neighborhood. Not so. Italian, italian, italian. Recently, Guatemalan, Guatemalan, Guatemalan. Trust me. I'm there right now.

Q. Circumcision and precome?
A. Circumcision should have no effect on output of pre-ejaculatory fluid, as that fluid is produced by the Cowper's glands, which are internal. They are nestled right next to the prostate, and produce fluid in response to sexual excitement. That amount may vary from indiivudal to individual, and may be affected by level of hydration, and medications like anti-histamines.

Q. Green Bar Olneyville.
A. Over by the kickball field. Never been, but drove by it today. Looks shady.

Thanks for searching, folks. And if you're frustrated by irrelevant results, let me offer you one piece of advice: PUT QUOTATION MARKS IN YOUR SEARCHES. That way, google will return the whole phrase.

First chinese nipples, now literary scrotums.

2007-02-18T16:26:00.000-05:00

"Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

From a New York Times article describing the furor over a children's book with the word "scrotum" in it.

The book, a Newbery Medal winner, contains an incident where the book's protagonist hears someone say that a rattlesnake bit his dog on the scrotum. In a wave of save-the-children zealotry, libraries and schools have banned the book, in order to prevent this conversation:

"What does 'scrotum' mean?"
"It's a part of the male body."
"Oh. Ok."

Again, the media has exposed one of the leading causes of death in children 4-14
1. Lack of proper enrichment activities
2. Accidentally hearing about or seeing genitalia or breasts.
3. Pedophiles

(Attn: It has come to my attention that the actual leading causes of death of children ages 4-14 are car accidents, accidents in the home, and cancer. Please alert the New York Times)

Guys sure do make passes at girls who wear glasses...

2007-02-18T14:39:00.001-05:00

and get advanced degrees, cheerily chirps the Boston Globe Magazine today.

Educated women are getting married more, staying married longer, and having better sex.

Apparently, even if you're black or have a Ph.D, you can still hope for a chance at wedded bliss. (What IS wedded bliss- someone else to do the breakfast dishes? The toothsome joys of letting oneself go? The tender security that comes from knowing that if you fart during a candlelit dinner, someone is still obligated to fiddle with your genitals later?)

Thanks, Boston Globe, for de-bunking the myth of the "bitter, sexually unsatisfied college graduate."

Questions the article did not adress:
1. If college-educated women are outpacing high-school educated women in the marriage market, what does this mean for high school educated women? What does it mean for children and families that women with lower earning potential are less likely to be in secure, income-sharing relationships than women with higher independant earning potential?

2. If college educated women, and women with graduate degrees are getting married at far higher rates, and women are getting more college degrees than men, what does this mean when the higher-earning-potential partner in a relationship is the one more likely to interrupt career for pregnancy and childbearing?

3. If I have a bachelor's degree, an associates degree, and eventually a J.D., will my sex life become eventually so satisfying that my life will dissolve into a miasma of lust and reading? If so, when can I expect this? I assume I've got to buy better underpants before that happens.

It's National Freedom to Marry Week.

2007-02-11T22:45:00.000-05:00

I know that a lot of people think that "equal marriage" or "freedom to marry" are just euphemisms for gay marriage. As I've studied more, and read more- that seems to be untrue. While it is true that the politics of marriage, and the fundamental nature of marriage, are being brought up in the context of same-sex marriage, the context and the import of the movement go far beyond gay rights.

Marriage has been changing for hundreds of years. It's become much less a machine for societal replication and stability of inheritance, and become much more a reflection of the importance we place on intimate human connection. Children born inside of marriage have the same inheritance rights as those born outside of it, thus nullifying its importance in inheritance. A man can no longer rape his wife, thus making the criteria for lawful intercourse both inside and outside of marriage the same: consent. These changes, made over hundreds of years, have transformed what was once a codification of male soveriegnty over a household into what it is today: a voluntary instutution based on consent and whatever the partners bring to it, from poor impulse control, to a deep and abiding regard for each other.

There is simply no longer any reason to deny any two people, who are not legally married to anybody else, who are old enough to decide for themselves, who are ridiculously optimistic enough to believe in the thing, access to the institution of marriage. When anyone can marry, marriage will finally reflect the romantic ideal that we pretend it does, instead of the archaic history that we're loathe to acknowledge.

I'd write this longer and thinkier, but, hey, I'm tired and hopped up on sudafed and I'm supposed to be reading for Contracts.

I have been asked-

2007-02-11T12:58:00.000-05:00

Why all the peanut butter?

To which I answer: Read the archive.

One doesn't have to be drunk to make outrageous claims.

Unfortunately, due to the lateness of evaluations coming out, there are only about 15 more weekdays in the month of february. Which is lucky, because I can't afford that much jelly.

To review:
Two months ago, I made a promise. That promise: To eat nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, every weekday, in the month of february, if I got an outstanding on any evaluation.
I got that outstanding, in property.

To review from the review:
The law school I go to is one of three that doesn't give grades; instead, it gives narrative evaluations. It's not Yale, kids. However, in order to make narrative evaluations 'mean something', all evaluations contain a 'buzzword'. Outstanding is the best.

To review from the review of the review:
I am a law student. I go to school and I like zombies.

I am going to be eating a LOT of peanut butter.

2007-02-08T12:18:00.000-05:00

Starting monday.

A LOT of peanut butter.

Without my security blanket...

2007-02-07T18:16:00.000-05:00

It's odd how being a law student changes your relationship with free time, with normal boundaries, with ... everything.

Example: Yesterday I got sick. Real sick. Bathroom sick. (Some kind of multi-stage devil flu- first it was a chest cold, then a stomach virus, and now it's rattling my bones and pulling at my muscles. Grossness.) My apartment was ten trafficky miles away. So I went to my parents' house. I can't convey how nice it is, as an adult, to have an excuse to have someone take care of you, instead of taking care of myself. However, I was whipped into a frenzy when I realized that I was pretty much stuck there, overnight, without my laptop, my books...anything.

A human being would have focused on not having a toothbrush, or clothes, or the fact that they were horking up their insides- but a law student thinks "Shit! No laptop! How the fuck am I going to study?"

Grrr...I'm a jackass.

2007-02-05T16:46:00.000-05:00

There is a principle in social psychology that people, whenever possible, will ascribe negative things that happen to them to external motivations; negative things that involve other people internal motivations; positive things that happen to them internal motivations; positive things that involve other people external motivations. It's called the "attribution theory"

For example:
Suzy and Johnny take a test.
Suzy gets a 55%, failing.
Johnny gets a 98%, passing.

If you ask Suzy why she failed the test, it's likely she'll say that the test was hard, or that the professor's instructions weren't clear enough. If you ask her why Johnny passed the test, she'll say he was lucky. If you asked Johnny why he passed the test, he'd say it was because he was smart, or because he studied very hard. If you ask Johnny why Suzy failed the test, he'll say it was because she was unprepared, or because she wasn't very smart.

There's also something called a locus of control scale, a personality test that is designed to find out whether a person, in general, believes that they do things because of internal motivations, or in reaction to the outside world.

If someone has a very, very internal locus of control, they have a belief that everything that happens, happens in some way because of something they did or something about them. It can be a symptom of a couple really festive personality disorders. They believe that the mail is late because the mailman is mad at them; the countergirl at the coffee shop smiled because she's in love with them; it rained because they wore new boots to work. If someone has a really, really, external locus of control, it's a sign of a couple other fun diagnoses. They believe that their girlfriend dumped them because she's a lesbian; their boss fired them because he's a racist; they failed the class because the professor is an idiot. They believe that nothing that happens to them is within their control.

Most normal people are in the middle of the two.

Today, I was Mrs. Sociopathic External Locus of control. I wonder if this means I'm going crazy; or that, because I noticed it, that I'm completely sane. At this moment I know that I didn't talk in class because I didn't raise my hand; that I didn't get my point across because I wasn't forceful enough. I was also Mrs. Baseline Attribution theory. It's not people's gender or previous education that makes them more assertive than I am; it's that they speak the fuck up- and I don't.

And I feel like a douchebag because of it.

Ten miles.

2007-02-04T00:56:00.000-05:00

My school is only about ten miles away from the house where I grew up.

It feels like a thousand. Saturday night was my little sister's birthday. She turned twenty-three. This week she moved in with my old roommate, my childhood and most constant friend. They've become close since I started law school.

If I were egotistical, I'd say...somehow, I think they're using each other to fill the vast void I've left...and so on. But as I said, only ten miles away. Also, I don't think that I left any void in anybody. But really, my sister and my roommate love the same music, the same bars, the same beers, and the same mammals. They both love Domino's pizza, Clairol hair dye, and posters of teddy bears. My friend and I were always unlikely friends. Other than some difficult to notice characteristics (heartlessness, irritable bowel, suspicion of ethnic cuisine), we didn't have much in common. We are unrelated sisters, almost.

So I went out tonight with my sister, my sister's crush, my friend, and for a few moments, my brother. We went to a bar to see a local band. It was like a high school reunion. Awkward, loud, and forgetable.

I don't belong there anymore. I don't know what it is; maybe I never did. I like to talk in bars. I don't like drinking and not talking, and I'm a lousy dancer. I showed up wearing a light blue button down shirt, a black sweater, and jeans; I looked like a chaperone. I didn't drink, because I'm neurotic about bar eligibility, and I had to drive. My sister had the time of her life, drinking vodka and cran, wearing three shades of eyeshadow and three different types of petroleum based fabric. My friend was also quite pleased by the whole event.

I feel isolated all the time. I'm not quite into my identity as a law student (this blog notwithstanding). I was much more a barista than I ever was a student; I had an apron to wear, and I had friends to drink with; I threw parties. I'm not good at self-identifying through what I'm studying. It was hard for me, at Bennington, because people almost never talked about their majors; they always talked about their work.

"I'm a painter."
"I'm an actor."
"I write poetry."

Ummm...really? I was a lousy student, and a lousier whatever I was meant to identify as. So now that I'm not a barista, and I'm not a college student, and I'm not with my friends, and I'm not with my family- I'm not really anything to anybody. I don't belong in the bars my sister goes to. It's too loud. I don't have fun. I don't like the bands. I don't dance. I'm quickly becoming such a pompous, self-important jackass that I risk alienating my coffee friends.

I lack context. It's becoming quite dire.

Struggling with choice.

2007-02-01T13:43:00.000-05:00

Everyone who is pro-choice will have a moment that challenges that belief. No matter how hard-line, pro-abortion, pro-contraception, there will be a moment when the temptation is to limit choice. It could be multiple abortions, or late-term abortions, or parental notification, or drug use during pregnancy; an issue that forces people to confront their own emotional reactions and assumptions about choice.

Failure to fully confront their own reactions is what leads some people to become pro-choice-but. "I'm pro-choice, but I don't think that women should get lots of abortions." "I'm pro-choice, but I don't think that women should have abortions for just any reason." "I'm pro-choice, but I believe that women should get their parents/partners permission." "I'm pro-choice, but I think that women should be prosecuted for drinking/smoking/using drugs during pregnancy."

I found mine.

I'm not at all comfortable with fertility treatments being used to allow women over 65 to become pregnant. I don't think it's a good decision. I think it's a waste of money. I think that it's not fair. BUT. I refuse to become "pro-choice-but". I won't do it.

Becoming pregnant, even at 67, is choice. And I do not, and refuse to allow myself, to support any kind of restriction on who can become pregnant, and by what means. I may be uncomfortable with it, but I don't think I'll ever be uncomfortable enough with anything to believe that my discomfort is worth someone else's choice.

Mice! Mice! Oh no!

2007-01-31T21:15:00.001-05:00

So many mice. Loud mice. Under the sink.

My con law prof. has less emotional maturity than a 12 year old.

2007-01-30T15:34:00.000-05:00

I can give a presentation on the importance of safe sex to twenty pubescent little monsters, without myself blushing, or allowing anyone to get uncomfortable or embarassed...

But I can't allude to the differences between men and women to my constitutional law professor without him turning it into a punchline, and me into a joke. I want to set a small series of fires. Fuck him.

Here's the email I just sent him:

Just to convey that my comment had some context, rather than the late-afternoon comic relief that it became-
What I intended to say was that, if the different bathrooms, and escort service for women, were founded in actual differences between men and women (different genital structures requiring different facilities, and differing rates of violence targeting women) then they would not be unconstitutional, whereas if the different bathrooms and escort services for women were founded in ideas reflecting irrational and unfounded beliefs about the difference between men and women (say, that women require great privacy, and greater supervision) then they would be unconstitutional...

Sorry that you found my word choice so distracting.
(Hobolawstudent's Real Name)

Woman charged with attempted abortion.

2007-01-24T19:55:00.000-05:00

Not in Nicaragua.

In Massachusetts.

What a fantastic way to celebrate the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

In an alleged era of choice, in my home state, a woman chose a dangerous, back-alley psuedo-medical abortion, instead of getting help from a doctor. Was she turned away for being too far along? Did she not know where to go, or how to find out? Why did she wait so long?

And what about the prosecutor? We're learning, in my crim law class, about how laws that exist with such a potential for abuse are often pushed through with legislative murmurings about prosecutorial discretion and wise juries...

And yet a woman is being prosecuted on the basis of a pre-civil war law, and is listed in a section of the MGL dealing with "Crimes against Chastity, Morality, Decency, and Good Order." This is also the section where you find that fornication may be punished by a fine of thirty dollars and three months in jail.

Here's the text of the law:

§ 19. Unlawful Attempt, etc., to Procure Miscarriage.

Whoever, with intent to procure the miscarriage of a woman, unlawfully administers to her, or advises or prescribes for her, or causes any poison, drug, medicine or other noxious thing to be taken by her or, with the like intent, unlawfully uses any instrument or other means whatever, or, with like intent, aids or assists therein, shall, if she dies in consequence thereof, be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than five nor more than twenty years; and, if she does not die in consequence thereof, by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than seven years and by a fine of not more than two thousand dollars.

ALM GL ch. 272, § 19

Prosecutorial discretion can eat me. This law wasn't even intended to be used against women when it was written, in 1845. All the annotations suggest that a woman cannot even be charged as an accessory to this crime.

This is a prosecutor abusing his/her discretion.

And I have two guesses why:
1. Perhaps the prosecutor was feeling especially zealous, and yet couldn't charge the woman with manslaughter or homicide, because at the time of the act (when Ms. Abreu ingested the misoprostol), the fetus was not a person. The fetus only legally became a person when Ms. Abreu gave birth to it.
2. Perhaps there may have been a way to charge Ms. Abreu with some crime against the infant who died, but the causal relationship between the misoprostol, the premature birth, and the death of the infant were insufficient. Perhaps Ms. Abreu's pregnancy was already at risk; perhaps the infant's death was caused by something unrelated to its prematurity.

I said it before, and I'll say it again: Prosecutorial discretion can eat me.

I am disgusted, and as a potential-someday-lawyer- fucking balls-ass-ashamed. I hope that it's my incompetence at legal research that makes me think that the state is using (abusing) this irrelevant statute to prosecute this woman...

And it's not. It can't be. Because I've got six months of law school under my belt, and that's certainly sufficient to find a statute.

I keep re-checking the article to make sure it's really happening in Massachusetts. It is.

I'm hoping that the article is wrong on the charges...I mean, there's already one error. (Misoprostol is often USED, not misused, to begin uterine contractions. It's the second phase of a legal, medical abortion)

I feel the need to add something...

2007-01-24T19:54:00.000-05:00

something about feelings. (Guy, you have permission to skip over this post. In fact, as this post will advocate giving government services to an individual, you're encouraged to skip this post, so we can continue going out.)

I can't gloss over that in the entry above, there wasn't just an attempted abortion; a child was born and died. I feel that I can't really be as honest with myself as I'd like to be if I didn't talk about that for a bit. Being pro-choice isn't being pro-death; it's sad, tragic, even that a baby endured four days of suffering, and finally died.

I even sympathize a little bit with people who want to find someone responsible, and just...DO something. I can understand that it's possible that at the root of this prosecution is not anti-roe sentiment, but some idea that the preventable death of a child should not be ignored.

However, prosecution is not the way to mark this death. A woman doesn't just choose, after 24 weeks of pregnancy (which is a lot, maybe- I'm not up on teh gravidity-ology), to attempt to abort, on her own, without medical advise. There must be desperation. And it's that desperation that caused the death here. The woman (I keep wanting to say the girl- She's 18) must have been terrified of something; of childbirth, of someone discovering she was pregnant (likely- with the name and the city, I bet she's Catholic, and possibly first-generation American). She probably had no pre-natal care, didn't know if she could get an abortion before it was too late. If there had been any service, any intervention, anything available to her, this would not have happened. She must have felt, every day of that pregnancy, that her world was about to end.

I would have.

Prosecuting her serves no purpose, but to satisify those who feel that "something should be done." Something should be done. And that something should ensure that all women of reproductive age, in this country, have knowledge about and access to abortion, contraception, and pre-natal care.

(See, guy, and I didn't even say "free" or "affordable", even though I believe "free" or at least "affordable." Out of deference to your political viewpoint, such as it is.)

Chinese Nipples threaten the world.

2007-01-23T23:04:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Aimee for the heads up.

A woman dies of esophageal cancer, caused by contaminated water.
A documentary filmmaker catches some of her final moments.
She was filmed wearing few clothes, her frail torso outlining the ravages of disease.

PBS, concerned for the future of America's young people, blurred out her nipples.

What heroes you are, PBS. Without your concern, and your quick-thinking, American families just settling in for an evening of public television, maybe with some popcorn, cuddling under an afgan to watch a documentary about river pollution in China, would be devasted by having to have a conversation with their children about nipples.

"Mommy! What are those!" Betsey cries out. "They look like raisins. I'm scared!"
Junior starts to cry and begins to contemplate other mysteries his parents have hid from him, like refined sugar and auto-erotic asphyxiation.

But wait...everybody has nipples. Even children. I hope I'm not labeled an internet predator for saying so. So why would PBS choose to blur these ones? These nipples, so entirely divorced from an erotic or sexualized context? If there is any nipple more innocent than a nursing nipple, certainly, a dying-of-cancer nipple would qualify.

A nursing nipple at least has a loaded oedipal context, and a moderately sized group of eager fetishists- I don't think that the dying-of-cancer nipple will stir any confused Freudian longings, nor spark leering from lurking dying-of-cancer nipple-lifestyle groups.

I used to wonder why we hide the naked body so completely in this country. I suppose I still do. I couldn't figure out, until I was 15 or 16 years old, how an erection would work. I knew, somehow, that a penis did something- stiffened, went outwards somehow- but was it vertical? Horizontal? Did it change shape? I suppose, then, I am the poster child for protective blurring and censorship.

I scoured art books, medical books, biology books, national geographic, the anthropology section at the Boston Public Library...all trying to figure out what this whole erection/foreskin situation was. Instead of dulling the prurient interest, censorship sparked a prurient obsession. A research project on obscenity. I am sure that the sudden interest of adolescent boys in national Geographic has similar origins. This is not a reason to pull National Geographic from the shelf- this is a reason to put MORE breasts, MORE penises, MORE foreskins, MORE nipples...on television.

Because it doesn't matter. Curiousity about the human body will exist, regardless of whether it is hidden or shown. Eroticisation of certain parts of certain human bodies in certain contexts will exist, regardless of how many other parts have been flung around in other contexts...

Seeing a now-deceased chinese woman's nipple, which, I'm sure, looked remarkably like most nipples on most people, everywhere, will not turn anyone's angelic child into a sex pervert.

Forget about bringing sexy back...

2007-01-23T20:53:00.000-05:00

can we at least bring lipstick back?

It seems no one under 50 wears lipstick these days, which is unfortunate. Because wearing lipstick is something that I spent years of my life looking forward to. Then I went off to college, where regular and vigorous grooming was the highest standard of beauty, and came back- BAM!

The tyranny of lipgloss had begun.

Everywhere, lipgloss. On everyone, lipgloss. I really don't understand why looking slightly drooly is considered the standard for lower-face cosmetics.Lip Vinyl. Lip Shine. Lip Sheer. In fact, if I wear lipgloss, I start to drool a little. Lip gloss comes off immediately if you eat, drink, kiss, move, bite your lip, or think about nihilism. It's inexplicable.

The message of lipstick: Look! Lips! Hotsexy!

The message of lip gloss: Help! I don't know how to eat red jello, so I just mashed my lips into it. Hotsexy?

I have been eating nothing but oatmeal and chili.

2007-01-18T22:43:00.000-05:00

I miss chewing.

Not having dental problems; money problems.

I drank a beer tonight.

2007-01-15T23:02:00.000-05:00

It was a Naragansett.

I also had a hamburger.

Total cost for beer and hamburger, without tax or tip: 5.17

Guess how much the hamburger cost.

Salmon and Mashed Potatoes

2007-01-11T22:57:00.000-05:00

Tony Allen played 48 minutes a few weeks ago, leading the injury-plagued Celtics to a very psychologically important win.

He credited his endurance to salmon, and mashed potatoes.

Last night, Tony Allen tore three ligaments in his knee. Today is his 25th birthday. All the warm wishes, hope, and love that I withhold from my boyfriend are at New England Baptist with him.

Get Well, Tony.

If you are a young man, and jewish, and roughly my age,

2007-01-08T22:47:00.000-05:00

you may be among the few remaining American men whose mothers did not spend much time thinking about your penis. At least, you may be amoungh the few American men with plausible deniability on that topic.

You can gaze down at your wanker, and sigh contentedly, knowing that your mother never stroked her pregnant belly and gazed winsomely out the window, picturing the day that her beloved son would get his first blowjob.

You know why you don't have a foreskin. Tradition and all that.

It's not, as many young, circumsised, presbymethodist episcoversalist men will come to realize, because their mother didn't want some trembling, confused teen girl on some moonlit night in a Wendy's parking lot to hesitate before optimistically gnawing their member.

There's a rather, um, earnest account of a couple's decision to circumcise their son in Salon today. Bullying, crying, religious agnosticism; between the article and the letters following, every corner of the circumcision debate is already covered, and the article's only been up a half hour. I have my own stance on circumcision, however, as I don't plan to have children, and currently do not have a penis, it is somewhat irrelevant.

What is interesting to me is the unspoken undercurrent of the circumcision debate: How much do we own our children's future sex lives? How much did our parents own ours? A lot of time is spent, in both therapy and feminist theory, detaching women's sexuality, as adults, from the implied sexual expectations of her parents.* There is still a knee-jerk presumption that when a woman is mal-used, sexually, there has been some collateral damage to her male relatives.** The circumcision debate finally offers a chance to take a long, creepy look at parental expectations concerning male sexuality.

On the no-circ side, there are people defending the future sexual pleasure of children whose gonads are still refusing to drop. The possible loss of sensation by keratinization of the glans penis of unborn baby boys is of deep concern, not only to activists, but to their parents. If you have a foreskin, and you enjoy it, and you were born in America, be advised: It was a gift from your mother.+

On the pro-circ side, the projected sexual preferences of unborn children's presumably also unborn sexual partners are being defended. If you are a woman***, and you find yourself fellating some charming young man this long weekend, and are relieved to find a sheathless shlong, thank his mother. She was thinking of you. ++

*Possible communicated expectations: It's fine when you're married. It's fine when you're in college. It's fine as long as you don't enjoy it. It's fine as long as you're in love. It's fine as long as we don't find out.

**Don't believe me? Watch an episode of Law and Order, SVU.
Or, try this(you have to be a man): Next time you're at a party, wait until someone is obviously checking out a girl. Even better if he says something. Then say "Hey, man, that's my SISTER." Observe the effects.

***I do recognize that men do also perform fellatio. However, as men also have penises, they can contemplate how theirs got that way.

+Yes, yes, there are other reasons not to circumcise. But, really, loss of sexual sensation is a big factor. And it means that your parents thought about your sexual experience. Creepy.

++I'm sure there are other reasons to circumcise. AIDs, perhaps. But if you're giving a blowjob this weekend, the person getting it would not have been circumcised on those grounds. However, they were probably circumcised for "appearance" and "cleanliness", which all come down to "For her pleasure".

I have a mouse in my room,

2007-01-07T20:30:00.000-05:00

Obviously, there are other mice in the building.

As far as I know, however, there is only one mouse in my room. Right now.

I will not kill this mouse. I will not glue this mouse, or harm this mouse. I am trying not to scare this mouse. I would like, however, to relocate this mouse.

Normally, I would just make sure that all food was in tightly sealed containers, and wait for the mouse to find somewhere else to be.

Unfortunately, this mouse is an idiot.

This mouse does not know how to be a mouse. It is not sneaky. It is not skillful. It does not make good decisions. It will run from the dark kitchen, where mountainous cookie crumbs sit, unsupervised, into my well-lit room where I talk loudly on the phone and there is no sustenance.

This mouse is the me of mice. I have sympathy for it. However, as the me of mice, this mouse is profoundly annoying. Mice are foldy. They can get through cracks and small little holes. I have watched this mouse be foldy, scurrying under closed doors.

And yet, this mouse occasionally forgets that it is foldy, and spends many minutes in the middle of the night scratching at the only part of the door to my room that it cannot scooch under.

It prefers to do this when I have something to do in the morning. The more important, the longer the mouse spends scratching.

This mouse and I, we are at an impasse.

Regal Banana French Toast

2007-01-03T00:05:00.000-05:00

For the toast:
5 slices stale bread
3 eggs
2 cups milk or half and half or eggnog
Spices that you like.
2 tbl honey

For the sauce:
2 bananas
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 pint blueberries

Beat eggs until they look like almost scrambled egg color. I can't make scrambled eggs, so I beat them until somebody tells me they're beaten. Stir in milk, spices, and honey. Pour mixture into a shallow pan. Maybe a pie plate. Maybe a frying pan. If you only have one frying pan, you've made a bad decision, but soldier on. It gets worse.

Dip bread pieces in egg mixture (it's technically a custard- isn't that great?), first one side, and then the other. Pile vertically on a plate. Wait a minute. Don't worry so much about leaving raw eggs around. Wait another minute. Maybe five. If you're not too nervous, maybe longer. Maybe seven.

Dip each piece again. Yeah, again. Both sides. Dammit. If your bread isn't very thick or very good, then probably it'll start to fall apart. Maybe have pancakes instead. If it doesn't fall apart, maybe you can still have french toast.

Get some butter, and put it near the stove. Put a frying pan on your stove. If the only frying pan you have is the frying pan with egg in it, wash it, then put it on the stove. High heat for a little bit, then medium/low heat. When the pan is hot enough for pancakes, take a little bit of butter and rub the pan with it. Don't use your hands. Use a fork.

Plonk, one or two at a time, each piece of french toast in the pan. Between slices of toast, rebutter the pan. That's what makes it nice. Brown each side. As each piece of french toast comes out of the pan, stick it on a cookie sheet in the oven, which you should have preheated to 350 a while ago.

Slice the bananas into rounds. Toss with brown sugar, spices, and vanilla. Leave the blueberries alone. If you only have one frying pan, wash it again, dammit. If you have another one, scam somebody into washing the eggy one anyway. Then put it away. But if you only have one, use that one. Put it on the stove on medium heat. Melt a couple tablespoons of butter in the bottom. Toss the bananas and sugar into the pan, and push them around until the sugar is goo instead of grain. Everything should smell delicious. When there are no more sugar crystals, and everything that isn't banana is goo, put the bananas into a bowl. Now mix the blueberries in.

Take the french toast out of the oven, put it on plates, and drizzle with bananas and blueberries. Top with powdered sugar. Consider expanding your empire.

Don't fear the sauce: Parmesan and Garlic Sauce (For Pasta)

2007-01-02T23:52:00.000-05:00

2 tbl olive oil
2 tbl flour
4 oz parmesan cheese
minced roasted garlic, from that neat little jar.
3/4 c milk
Something fresh and green (basil, oregano, green onions)
Salt, Pepper

Heat olive oil in the bottom of a saucepan.
Whisk in flour.
Walk around the kitchen three times.
Slowly add milk.
Stir.
Walk around the kitchen three more times.
Stir slowly, while someone else walks around the kitchen three times.
It will get real thick.
Add a half teaspoon of garlic, and all the parmesan cheese.
Wait a little bit.
Stir.
Taste.
Add salt and pepper.
Toss with pasta.
Call it "alfredo sauce."

Add shreds of something green on top.

(All times are estimated. Laps around the kitchen replace time spent explaining myself to the parrot. If you have a parrot, try explaining yourself to it instead. Return only when you've given up on trying to convince the parrot that he really would set himself on fire if he was allowed to hang around while you're cooking)

How to make your own granola.

2007-01-02T23:41:00.000-05:00

Ingredients:
1 bottle red wine
1 can, pumpkin puree.
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup sugar and 1/2 cup sugar
Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Spices
3 crunchy granola bars
1/2 bag white chocolate chips
2 sticks butter
No shame

1. Drink at least half a bottle of red wine.
2. Begin to make a pumpkin pie.
3. Realize that you have no flour.
4. Decide that you will make a graham cracker crust.
5. Realize that you have no graham crackers.
6. Decide that graham grackers and granola bars are essentially the same thing.
7. Melt 3/4 cup of butter in a microwave safe bowl.
8. Add 1/2 cup of sugar, and 1/4 tsp of vanilla.
9. Realize you don't have a rolling pin.
10. Or a food processer.
11. Put the granola bars into a heavy plastic bag.
12. Slam the granola bars into heavy things, like books and walls and in car doors.
13. While you're wrecking the kitchen, someone goes out to the store.
14. And brings back a premade pie crust.
15. Pour the pumpkin custard into the premade pie shell.
16. Put the granola chunks into the bowl of butter and sugar.
17. It smells good.
18. Put the granola mixture onto a cookie sheet. Decide that it will stick. Scrape it off. Put parchment paper on the cookie sheet, then put the granola on. Toss whatever happens to be around, say, the white chocolate chips, on top.
19. Bake the pie, and the granola mixture, in the oven at 320, then 450. Forget how to make custard.
20. Take out the granola. It smells good. Consider that it may be bar cookies.
21. Cut it into bars.
22. When it crumbles into unrecognizable bits, switch to hard liquor. Laugh.
23. Begin smashing at the hard mass with manual can opener, kitchen scissors, and anything stainless steel weighing less than 3 lbs.
24. Taste the crumbs.
25. Decide to try them over yogurt.

Congratulations, genius, you've just made granola out of granola bars.

Recipe for Awesome.

2007-01-02T15:51:00.000-05:00

2 cups milk
8 oz cheddar cheese. grated
4 oz bacon, raw, diced.
1 small yellow onion, diced
1 package frozen spinach, cooked according to package directions.
Handful Panko Crumbs, or bread crumbs, or crushed potato chips.
1 big, heaping spoonful flour
3 tbl`butter
1 lb pasta
Dash beer, or vinegar, or wine, or lemon juice

Put on water for pasta, salt liberally.
Dump the spinach into a large casserole pan.
In a heavy skillet, put the diced bacon and onion. Cook together until the onion is translucent and the bacon is crisp. Dump into the pan with the spinach. By now, your water should be boiling. If it is, dump the pasta in.
In a small saucepan on low/medium heat, melt the butter.
Stir the flour into the butter. When the flour and butter are completely incorporated, and smell a little like pancakes, slowly add the milk. Wait a bit, stirring, until the milk is thickened. It should be thicker than eggnog, but thinner than pudding.
Slowly stir in most of the shredded cheese. If the sauce begins to look lumpy, add the dash of beer, vinegar, wine, or lemon juice. The sauce will smooth out quickly.
Your pasta is probably done. If it is, dump it into the casserole with the other ingredients. Toss it around a little. Don't rinse it in cold water. That's a stupid thing to do.
Your sauce is done, too. Toss the sauce with the rest of it, put the rest of the cheese on top, then add the panko crumbs, and put it under the broiler for five minutes.

Things will soon become awesome.

Natasha Lyonne turns herself in after threatening to sexually molest a dog.

2006-12-18T20:24:00.000-05:00

You can read about it here.

And the biggest surprise, she actually said "I'm going to sexually molest your dog."

Is it possible to be classier and more charming than Britney Spears' faux non-chalant (if it's faux-non, does that mean it's chalant?) beave-sposure? I think so. Natasha just proved it.

Mel Gibson and Mark Foley ought to take a lesson from Ms. Lyonne. This is the kind of thing that you say when you have an alcohol or drug problem. Not something about the jews. Not asking a 16 year old boy about a potential semi, but "I'm going to sexually molest your dog."

In other, more serious news, a Houston-area serial rapist and mugger has been targetting men. Five rapes have been reported; policed are concerned that there be many more men who are too ashamed to come forward.

Years ago, women were often reluctant to come forward after a rape, because rape was a failure of their virtue. Obviously, if they'd been chaste enough, careful enough, modest enough; it wouldn't have happened. Decades of counseling and public relations and feminism have finally allowed many more women to come forward; the culture has changed.

But these men have not benefited. When a man is raped, it is a failure of his manhood. If he had been stronger, more masculine, better at defending himself; it wouldn't have happened. We're in need of a cultural change that allows men who have been sexually victimized to report it.

Part of me wonders if this mugger is just completely taking advantage of the fact that men will not report rape, and is just hoping that his young (most in their late teens) victims will be too ashamed of the rape to report the robbery.

I feel like I'm training to be a ninja.

2006-12-17T21:49:00.000-05:00

I could go into it longer, but that's all I really want to convey.

Law school=ninja school.

Lawyer=Ninja.

Me=Ninja in training.

Vast Media Conspiracy.

2006-12-17T10:31:00.000-05:00

It must be.

The New York Times must be owned and directed by some extraordinarily saavy conservative think tank, with the express goal of making coastal progressive types hateable. Because some of their articles serve no purpose but to make wealthy urbanites seem like effete, clueless assholes (shitbird one-upsmanship, etc, tm Paul V.)

This article in the Sunday Times could not possibly have been written as a genuine piece of journalism. It's about wealthy New Yorkers, who feel terribly oppressed by having to make conversation with baristas, doormen, masseuses, and others. Apparently, instead of developing adult strategies to extract themselves from conversation, or just learning to enjoy human interaction, these poor, set-upon people have had to endure banter from service professionals, for years now.

"THERE are days when Shannon Lanier, a producer at CBS Television, is too tired to have conversations with his doormen, all of whom are brimming with stories, none of which are brief. Sometimes, on his way up to his Bronx apartment, he dashes by them, pretending to be in a hurry. Occasionally he acts as if he’s on his cellphone.

“You don’t want to blow them off, because they’re nice and helpful, but the last thing you want to do is stand there and have a conversation when you’re so close to being home,” he said. It’s especially bad during this time of year. “They’re definitely extra chatty because they’re trying to get that holiday tip,” Mr. Lanier said."

Poor Mr. Lanier. I wonder if he didn't know his building had a doorman, before he moved in. And now, every day, he's accosted by having to make some kind of brief conversation. Mr. Lanier even understands that as a tipped professional, the doorman must depend on some form of individual gratuity as part of his compensation. And yet Mr. Lanier doesn't know what to do. Mr. Lanier is upset. And disturbed. Why don't these proles know their place?

"many people find it annoying to be cornered by a loquacious stranger, especially one whom they’re paying.

Lauren Booth, a legal recruiter in Manhattan, said that the barista at her Starbucks loves to yak away while whipping up peppermint mocha lattes and Guatemalan-blend coffees for his customers. He once told Ms. Booth a lengthy tale about his son finding his hidden Christmas presents early; he regularly gives her unsolicited advice about rearing her infant daughter; and he recently brought in pictures from his vacation and made her flip through the stack as he reminisced.

Though she had to get to work, Ms. Booth felt compelled to listen. “You can’t be rude to him,” she said. “I drink only decaf and if I make him mad, he might give me caffeine and I’ll be shaking all day.”

Oh, Ms. Booth. It's tragic. Have you considered, perhaps, not going to Starbucks? Because, I'm sure, as a "legal recruiter" you have enough money to buy an espresso machine and make your own goddamned decaf drinks. In silence.

As a former Barista, this is what I know about Ms. Booth from that paragraph:

1. She sucks so bad.
2. Since she is "held captive" by that savage barista, I know that she's not getting a plain decaf coffee or tea. She must be getting a drink from the bar. Something that takes a while, and makes her wait anyway. Possibly a decaf latte. Almost definitely nonfat. I bet no foam, too. (No foam people mostly suck, with very few exceptions. They think that the addition of foam just takes up space in the cup, and "that's how they screw ya")
3. She feels victimized easily. This is the kind of woman who, if the waitress forgets that she wanted her spinach steamed and no skin on her chicken breast, slumps in her chair and pouts, tips ten percent, and then, three days later, calls the manager.

Ms. Booth, make your own beverage if you don't want the human interaction that comes with it. If you'd feel too put-upon, making your own coffee in the morning, then perhaps order something that gets you back on your way sooner. If neither of these solutions appeal to you, maybe try acting like an adult and say "You know, I appreciate the conversation, but ..."

"Melissa Hobley, a publicist at Coburn Communication in Manhattan, said she has a high tolerance for talkative people, given that she is one herself. But she recently met her match in her new housekeeper, who likes to talk incessantly about everything from her own life to where Ms. Hobley shops. Even her housekeeper’s notes are lengthy.

“She’s sweet, so it wasn’t offensive,” Ms. Hobley said, “but it felt like a tornado had just come in the room.”"

Poor Ms. Hobley. She has to make time to talk to a servant. Nothing makes it more clear than Ms. Hobley's tragic situation, that this isn't about being pressed for time. This isn't about being tired on the way into the building. This isn't about being scared to piss off the all-powerful barista who might give you caffeine (watch out, maybe he'll slip some trans-fats in there, too, and you'll die.) this is about not wanting to be bothered to be pleasant or human to people who are below you.

Poor Ms. Hobley. Poor Ms. Booth. Poor Mr. Lanier. They have to interact with people who make less money than they do. They may have to listen to stories that aren't immediately interesting to them. They may have to endure some momentary disruption of their schedule on a regular basis.

If you don't want to interact with human beings, then don't contract for their services. Period. The end. Make your own coffee, open your own door, wax your own vulva, cut your own hair.

Or, if you really, really need that coffee, that spanking-clean mons, that whatever-the-hell doormen do, then campaign for a universal living wage, like poor, crazy Grace Ross. If nobody needs tips to survive, then maybe baristas won't have to guess how to ingratiate themselves, and will focus instead on delivering quality beverages instead of social stroking.

In the library, night before the first law school exam...

2006-12-14T17:06:00.000-05:00

Just a thought.

You couldn't really ever write a movie about being a 1L that accurately conveys the experience. But it would make a bitchin' montage.

Al Jefferson: My soulmate in peril.

2006-12-11T23:12:00.000-05:00

Rumors abound that Al Jefferson, Delonte West, Theo Ratliff, and Sebastian Telfair are about to be traded to Philadelphia.

Tonight, I've gone through the five stages of mourning.

Denial: Won't happen. Danny Ainge isn't going to trade his only big man for rapidly aging (though prolifically scoring) ego.
Anger: Wait, Danny Ainge would trade his only big man for four girl scouts and a quantity of smoked meat to be named later, if he thought it would also include a draft pick in 2011. Must burn things. Must break things. Must bite things.
Bargaining: If Al Jefferson stays a Celtic, I'll dedicate my life to the public interest. I'll teach children to read. I'll stop trying to teach my boyfriend's parrot Maoist slogans. I'll go out of my way to wave at the homeless guy; anything, if Al gets to stay.
Depression: This is it. This is the end. Life is not worth living. These last two wins were just a taste of joy that I will never again experience. This is the end of watching basketball, and thus the end of my relationship. And, without a supportive boyfriend AND without the spiritual guidance of my soul mate, Al Jefferson- what's the point in continuing this law thing.
Acceptance: Not fucking there yet, buddy.

In all seriousness, I love Al Jefferson. He is my soulmate. We are as close as two people who have never met, and have only ever been in the same room insofar as the TD Banknorth Garden or the Meadowlands are rooms, can possibly be. We are as similar as a 21 year old, high-school educated African-American NBA player who grew up as an orphan in rural Mississippi and a 24 year old over-educated pudgy law student from the suburbs can be. By that I mean that we both enjoy pie and have had unpleasant experiences in New Jersey.

Al Jefferson doesn't want to leave Boston. He told Mike Gorman that he didn't want to leave; he told him that he thought it was important that the team stay together. Al Jefferson said that the Celtics don't need Allen Iverson, and they don't. Al Jefferson is maturing, and learning to temper his talent with good judgment. He's rebounding, blocking, and scoring like a future all-star. So of course Danny Ainge is going to trade him.

Allow me to be petty, for a moment:

2006-12-06T18:28:00.000-05:00

I posted a letter, significantly more mature and serious in tone, but basically repeating the points below, on Salon.Com, in response to an interview with a nutritionist regarding the trans fat ban.

As I really don't believe in continued trolling of those I don't agree with (ahem, guy.) I'll post my responses to the responses that my letter generated:

"Chas", wrote "Actually, trans-fats are poison, before you take hobolawstudent too seriously, check out the book (written by this shady looking character who, if he's done any research or holds any credentials other than a snazzy website, doesn't see fit to list them, oh, and he was apparently sued for fraud in the mid-90s) Trans fats never existed in nature, for good reason: human metabolism turns them into toxins. "

Chas makes three errors here:
One, he cites a pop-nutrition book by someone who stands to profit greatly (by selling you his special ~~snake~~ flaxseed oil, instead of a scientific study, journal article, or even article from a reputable news source. It's ok that he does- it doesn't make him a bad person. Just not very scientifically aware.

The second and the third are neatly contained within this sentence: "Trans Fats never existed in nature, for good reason: human metabolism turns them into toxins"
Things that exist in nature that will kill you:
-Snake Venom
-Cone Snails
-Rocks (when falling)
-Mercury
-Brightly Colored Frogs
-Mushrooms
-Scorpions
-Botulism

Natural does not equal good. Artificial does not equal bad. I'll admit, trans fats aren't healthy. But neither are water, if it's over your head, or air, if it's in your veins.

Also it displays a shocking ignorance of evolution, biology, botany, and and several other -ologies that "Chas" believes that things that are bad for humans will not be found in nature. I would not like to go hiking with Chas.

"Chas...don't lick that. You don't know where it's been."
"But things that harm me won't be found in nature! A man named Udo said so!"
I don't want to degenerate into a personal attack on Chas.

So here are a sampling of other statements about trans fats that, I think, aren't scientifically backed by any, well, science.

Trans fats, apparently "aren't broken down in the body"; but if they aren't, then how does the "human metabolism turns them into toxins"?

And what are Trans Fats? And how do they hurt you? "Trans fat is dangerous for human beings. It shouldn't be injested, just like tar and bleach and paint shouldn't be injested", (tar and bleach and paint make terrible donuts), and it's "slow-acting poison. (like) cyanide or arsenic in the food supply."

So, apparently, trans fats are poisons, that act slowly in the body, and should never be injested, because they are dangerous, but are never broken down in the body, except when they're turned into toxins. I see.

I don't just want to make fun of these people. (Well, a little.) See, it's not that I love trans fats. It's that I'm deeply disturbed when people don't criticize the information they're given. None of these people listed their sources, or explained a mechanism of action. I bet, if you asked them, they couldn't list (except for our friend chas, who has a problem differentiating between objective and subjective sources) where they got the ideas they have about trans fats, and exactly how trans fats do these things that they think they do.

Just as not to be a hypocrite; I just took a minute and did a search for scholarly articles on trans fats, to see if I could find out what they do, exactly, and what the mechanism of action is.

Because trans fats become saturated fats, they raise the risk of insulin resistance and type two diabetes in the same way that saturated fats do. (Odegaard, Et al "Trans Fatty Acids, Insulin Resistance, and Type II Diabetes"
Trans fats raise "bad cholesterol" and lower "good cholesterol", and thus, raise the risk of heart disease. Good review article. Canadian. Citation later.

New York finds a way to raise cost of living even higher.

2006-12-05T20:03:00.000-05:00

So New York banned trans fats in all restaurants, in a bold move to make one of Americas most expensive cities even more expensive and less fun. Trans fats are lovely things to cheap restaurants: they make cookies soft, french fries crisp, and pizza greazy. Now that trans fats are banned, every food seller will have to switch from cheap, stable hydrogenated vegetable oils to more expensive products.

Please, Boston- you decided to follow New York's lead on banning smoking, getting rid of convenient, reasonably priced tokens in favor of overpriced easily lost plastic cards- we forgive you. Just don't follow New York's lead on this.

Most people who are for banning trans fats don't even know what trans fats are. I'll explain them, so you all (you all being the four people who read this blog) feel cool. "Fats" are long strings of fatty acids, which are connected to each other with two bondy guys, or with one bondy guy. If all the bonds on the long string of fatty acids are made with two bondy guys, it's a saturated fat. If some of the bonds on the long string of fatty acids have only one bondy guy, its a poly-unsaturated fat. If only one of the bonds on the long string of fatty acids have one bondy guy, it's a mono-unsaturated fat. If the first single bondy guy is on the third link in the chain, it's Omega 3. If the first single bondy guy is on the sixth link in the chain, it's Omega 6.

Either kind of unsaturated fat makes health nuts orgasm uncontrollably all over themselves, currently.

A trans fat starts out as an unsaturated fat, but then some sciency guy or process makes one single bondy guy into a double bondy guy. This turns a fat which was "cis", or all straight looking, into one that's "trans", or all bendy looking.

It doesn't take vegetable oil and turn it into pure evil that waits in your cells to kill you later. It takes a cheap, liquid fat and makes it behave like an expensive, solid fat. Also, it may raise your bad cholesterol. But you could always eat less damned fat anyway.

It used to be that New Yorkers had a reputation for being thick skinned, jaded, cynical people who ate pizza and hot dogs and pretzels while chain-smoking and watching people get mugged. And now New Yorkers are worse than Californians. A city that once did nothing while Kitty Genovese was stabbed thirty times is now paralysed with fright over of one single extra hydrogen in the oil that fried their authentic Belgian-Style Frites served with an insoucient roasted red pepper aoli.

In fact, I'll up the ante.

2006-12-05T13:06:00.000-05:00

If I get even one "outstanding" or similar code word- I will eat nothing but peanut butter sandwiches, and reasonable equivalents, every weekday in the month of February.

Yes, yes I do make really bad decisions.

Coffee and Peanut Butter.

2006-12-05T12:46:00.000-05:00

If you are what you eat, I'm the roasted seed of a berry originally cultivated in ethiopia, ground and brewed into a tea, and also a salted, oily paste made of a legume native to Nigeria and originally called "nguba". Pretty exotic for a pasty and prosaic irish girl from the south shore.

All coffee, all peanut butter. And if I didn't drink so much coffee, I might be able to afford something other than peanut butter to eat.

However, I make bad decisions in life.

Here's another one!

I hereby swear that if I do well on my finals, I will eat, in recognition of its sustaining powers over this term, only peanut butter sandwiches, and drink nothing but coffee (and water) for one week (seven days) after evaluations come out in February.

I know what you're thinking...

2006-11-30T12:32:00.000-05:00

is life worth living, in a world where the Celtics lose to the New Jersey Nets?

And the answer is no.

It's not.

Indentured Servitude (No easements)

2006-11-28T12:22:00.000-05:00

Yeah, it's a law joke.

Yeah, it's in the headline.

Yeah...I suck.

Anyway. I'm reading this jackass article in the New York Times. "Lure of Great Wealth Affects Career Choices". The jist of it is that people are leaving law and medecine for careers in investiment banking and consulting, and becoming bajillionaires instead of millionaires. That doesn't bother me. Because I, myself, am an aspiring sell-out. What got me thining, though, is this passage:

Three decades ago, compensation among occupations differed far less than it does today. That growing difference is diverting people from some critical fields, experts say. The American Bar Foundation, a research group, has found in its surveys, for instance, that fewer law school graduates are going into public-interest law or government jobs and filling all the openings is becoming harder.

and this one

What Dr. Glassman represents, along with other very rich people interviewed for this article, is the growing number of Americans who acknowledge that they have accumulated, or soon will, more than enough money to live comfortably, even luxuriously, and also enough so that their children, as adults, will then be free to pursue careers “they have a hunger for,” as Dr. Glassman put it, “and not feel a need to do something just to pay the bills.”

So law school graduates are choosing money over public service. Is this at all surprising? I'll graduate with 200,000 dollars in student loans. Unless the Go-Gettum Abortion Rights Legal Brigade pays 100,000 a year in 2009, I bet I won't end up in public service.

Maybe, someday, I'll become a millionaire legal consultant so some chinese baby I buy in my post-menopausal years to amuse me in the face of encroaching boredom and senility will be able to become a public interest lawyer, or film-maker, or ethnic muralist. Because I certainly won't be able to be any of those things.

Because, essentially, I've sold myself into servitude. Like a drunk English bastard on his way to the new world in 1670, I've signed away my occupational freedom for a period of years, in order to get a chance at a better life. Once I signed for that first loan, I made a commitment to the law. Because there's no other way I'll ever pay it back.

Reasons I have not yet failed out of law school.

2006-11-20T15:49:00.000-05:00

By H. Law Student.

There have been no exams yet.
My law school does not have grades.
My boyfriend does not own an x-box 360, and the video game Dead Rising, and was not irresponsible enough to give me a key to his apartment, knowing that I have a car, he works nights, and I make bad decisions.

No, really, law school ate my brain.

2006-11-19T19:17:00.000-05:00

I was watching the Celtics play the Trailblazers on Friday. I was lying on my boyfriend's couch, belly full of onion rings, and suddenly, this thought came into my head (after a foul was called on Kendrick Perkins)

"I wish that there were some advisory committe notes to the rules in basketball, like there were to the federal rules of civil procedure, so that I could see what the intent of the drafter of that rule was...It couldn't possibly be meant to apply to this situation, surely"

Which is not actually the proper reaction to a bitchy little ticky-tack foul being called on such a soulful, attractive, well-meaning, skillfull player as Kendrick Perkins.

Hair Gel = Democracy.

2006-11-19T16:29:00.000-05:00

In 1989, in Tienamen Square, a lone protester allowed himself to be mowed down by tanks in protest of the political repression that characterized the regime in the People's Republic of China.

Didn't he know that freedom from totalitarianism is much more easily arrived at by achieving a sassy hairstyle?

This commercial is so fucked up that people didn't believe me when I described it to them. It's people...escaping...communist indoctrination...through....hair gel.

Sure, the young people wear no communist logo as such, but the implication is clear. Asian teenagers wearing tan shirts and red bandannas = red guard as surely as universally blonde blue-eyed children burning books = hitler youth. No one is going to use escaping from Nazi indoctrination as a metaphor for the freedom from unwanted vaginal odor that comes from using new lightdays scented pantiliners.

No one...yet.

I hate the New York Times.

2006-11-13T10:49:00.000-05:00

From a story on people who moved out of New York City in order to send their children to superior public schools, but were dissappointed.

"Susan Drews, 49, who lives in Yorktown Heights, in Westchester, said that art in the first grade at her son’s public school, for instance, involved “half-baked projects” like gold-sprayed macaroni glued to paper plates. “People went through the motions, they could claim there was an art program, but I didn’t feel it was very rich,” she said."

Macaroni Pictures? In first grade? Criminal! He should be learning to mix his own egg tempera for frescoes, preferably with historically appropriate yet completely secular contextual references to the cloistered Italian monks who developed the technique. He's six years old, after all.

"Diane Morash, 42, said she switched her three teenage daughters to the Pingry School, in northern New Jersey, after the oldest, Katie, a straight-A student who was not into clothes or makeup, became excluded from social cliques at her public school. Mrs. Morash said that complaining to officials there did not help."

So she complained to the administration because her daughter didn't have any friends (or enough friends, or the right friends...) and they didn't do anything about it. Tragic. I wonder what her reaction would be if her daughter were confronted by an authority figure over her choice of friends.

This quote seems to be a more rational complaint:

'“He didn’t learn anything — I was a neurotic mess,” she said. “He was developing all sorts of bad habits. He thought school was playtime. He didn’t want to apply himself.”'

Until you realize that the student in question is a kindergartener. For a five year old, the best possible result is to think that school is playtime. I'd be terrified if he did want to apply himself. I wonder how this mother came to realize that her son was failing to work hard and press his little nose to the grindstone; did she interrogate him when he got home? Parse crayon drawings for meaning and progress?

Parents "complained about what they considered rigid curriculums, excessive standardized testing", which ought to be no surprise when they chose the school systems they did because it was a "relatively well-off district whose students consistently outscore their peers on state tests."

Jesus christ.

Cemetery Man

2006-11-12T22:28:00.002-05:00

See it.

It may be your only chance to see an Italian/French zombie movie, dubbed into english, with an english actor in the lead role, produced in part by both the BBC and the prime minister of Italy.

Who am I kidding. No, it isn't. But it's a fantastic picture anyway. Rupert Everett. Necrophilia. Terrible special effects. Terrible. Visible wires on flies, and lumps of glue holding on parts of zombies. Bad continuity. Here, the device of putting all exposition into voice-over narration that nearly drove me to violence while watching "New World" (fuck you, Terry Malick. Fuck you with a rotten imperialist cock. With syphilis.) is actually done deftly and appeallingly.

Even though the tone, dialogue, and cinematography mirror the style of late sixties and early seventies italian film, and the film does seem to be set at sometime in the sixties, the extras seem to wear whatever they happened to show up in. There is no real consistency to the time period, or to geography. This film is many things- well thought out, well written, well acted- but not expensive. And that's ok. That's great, actually.

This movie is the Target of zombie movies. Target makes all their money from the realization that compared to all other components of a product, design is cheap. And design can be enough. A cute red plastic breadbox brings them into the stores; a cheap t-shirt with some jackass design on it works as well. Cemetary Man is all thought and no wallet. Because if there's anything cheaper than design, it's good writing.

Watch this movie. Even if you don't like zombie movies. It may be better if you don't. These zombies may be slow, but they sometimes...well, they talk.

Highlights:
Zombie nun.
Zombie boyscouts.
Fat guy vomiting.
Nicest tits I've ever seen on a zombie.
Things on strings as special effects.
Sexual use of the word "ossuary".
A zombie on a motorcycle.
Bus accident (with decapitation)

I'll tell you a secret, though...it's not really a zombie movie. See it.

Man Convicted in Female Circumcision

2006-11-01T21:43:00.000-05:00

Here's the story

A man allegedly cut his daughter's clitoris off when she was two years old. His wife, the girl's mother, testified that she didn't notice the injury until a year later. His defense claimed that the circumcision was actually done by the girl's mother's family.

I find it very unlikely that a mother wouldn't notice that her daughter had been (circumcised/mutilated) until a year later. I don't know anything about babies and diapers and all that, but I would assume that if a two year old is toilet trained (are they? I don't know), she still needs help in the toileting process (buttons and zippers and doors and handwashing). I also doubt two year olds bathe alone. Further, if the father is enough of a staunch traditionalist to actually circumcise his daughter, I doubt that he was the primary caregiver during that post-circumcision year. I'm not sure of the laws in Georgia, but that claim of delayed discovery may have been introduced to push back the statute of limitations.

I also don't buy that the mother was completely ignorant of any intent or plans on her husbands (or anyone else's) part to circumcise her daughter. I would buy that the mother, during her marriage (The parents have since divorced) could have been scared or intimidated into allowing a circumcision, and not reporting it. I don't buy; because it's just not likely, and just not the way that it's done- that the father could have circumcised the girl without the mother's knowledge or assistance. And I also think that it's far more likely that a mother would circumcise than a father.

Why do I think that?

Because, actually, female circumcision is by and large a woman-on-woman (practice, crime, operation, abuse). In areas that have been successful at eradicating F.G.M- they've been successful only when education and incentives were offered to women not to cut/ have their daughters cut. It's hard to reconcile the impression of F.G.M. as a mechanism of controlling women, protecting their chastity, enforcing the values of the (oh-so-rhetorically popular) patriarchy, with the well-meaning grandmothers and aunts and midwives who actually perform and arrange these operations.

All that said. I wasn't there. I don't know what this father did, or what that mother knew, or what that mother's family knew; which is a very important thing to keep in mind when reading news stories of this nature.

I'm not as smart as I used to be.

2006-10-30T16:58:00.000-05:00

I think law school is eating my brain, and my social skills. Also, having so much goddamned free time, which must be filled with just enough schoolwork, and just enough bathing and eating and social interaction- is incredibly stressful.

I'm used to the working full time/ school full time method of time management: Everything had to be done at the exact moment I had the first opportunity to do it- because otherwise, it wouldn't get done. This applied to all activities, from writing papers to bowel movements.

I've been meaning to write a lot of entries lately.
-An open letter to Charles Barkley
-A Review of "The Last King of Scotland"
-Something vaguely coherent.

Remember when I was coherent?

Remember this? and this one ? and how about this?

Scratch that. I was never coherent.

Vampires and Zombies.

2006-10-29T19:52:00.000-05:00

Some people don't like scary movies at all. Some only like slasher movies; nothing with the supernatural. Everybody else either likes zombies or vampires. And nobody likes them both the same. You've got to love one more.

I love zombies more.
My friend, N, loves vampires more.

Why vampires?
N says they're sexy.

Are they? Certainly, the vampire is a metaphor for sex. There is an element of desire, of carnality, to the vampire archetype. The vampire is a penetrator; and with his penetration and consumption of the 'innocent' infects them with the same carnality, and need to consume. The victims of the vampire are preserved in the moment of their victimhood.

Dracula is Prince Charming, with sex and death all mixed up. Instead of living happily ever after, pumping out heirs to the fairy tale kingdom, Cinderella finds herself infected by desire, trapped in some elegant night-time demi-monde. She never really dies; she never really gets old. Thus, there is also an element of escape;. The vampires victim, though she loses her soul (the catholic in me would relate the loss of soul to the mortal sin of premarital sex), is also disconnected from the mundane world of work and family.

Vampires work as a romantic metaphor for the loss of virginity. Except, instead of the dull, dissapointed, sticky feelings that often follow deflowering in real life, things actually change after you've been with the vampire.

So why zombies?
No one says that zombies are sexy. Even though some of the same elements are common to the zombie and the vampire. The vampire bites, the zombie bites, they both transform their victims. The zombie, however, is indiscriminate. They don't choose a single victim, so the element of seduction isn't there. In fact, there are very few zombie movies that feature any zombies identifiable as characters. There is no anticipation. A zombie doesn't care if he bites you or your friend. And you're not you, once you're a zombie. You rot. You're gross. If zombie movies are at all about sex, they're a very clumsy metaphor for promiscuity and fear of venereal disease. But I don't buy that they're about sex.

Zombies are not about sex. And zombie movies are not about zombies, per se. They're about survivors. They're about making do. They're about being prepared, being creative. It's another kind of escapism; suddenly, the world is very small, and traditional social constraints are gone. Nearly all zombie movies contain looting. Dawn of the Dead (original and remake) is about almost nothing but looting.

It's also about unemployment. People, the survivors, have jobs. Then the zombies come, and there are no jobs. There are no careers. Skills matter a lot. Ingenuity matters a lot. People who love zombie movies nearly always think they'd be survivors. And that they'd be valuable. Being a zombie survior is almost like being a pilgrim, or a pioneer. It's a whole new world, full of dangers, but at the same time with more potential than the old world. Sure, you'll probably die. There are no new worlds left. There are no indian lands to steal. But, if everybody becomes a zombie, all their stuff is up for grabs. And, the old social order doesn't matter.

Who is always sure to die in zombie movies? The social climber. The person who wants to rely on their status in the pre-zombie world for power in the post-zombie world. They never survive. Think of the douchebag with the boat keys in Dawn of the Dead. The Colonel in 28 Days Later.

The fundamental escapist fantasy underlying the zombie movie is that the zombies will come, and transform the world into a brutal meritocracy.

Ugly Betty is awesome.

2006-10-26T19:07:00.000-05:00

I liked it in spanish...in english it's even better. Because in english, I even know some nouns and the past tense, and because this Betty is perfect.

This show could be cringing, embarassing, blushing in the old sitcom "Boy, is she going to look like an ass"...but the actress who plays Betty doesn't cringe. I need to be more Betty in my life.

I loathe Sofia Coppola

2006-10-20T09:42:00.000-05:00

But I enjoy her movies.

Recall that I am a resentful, jealous person, and read on.

She makes movies about the problem of being beautiful and static. Movies that are in general assumed to be artful, distorted memoirs of her life as daughter of the glamourous rich and wife of the jet-setting creative. I loved Lost in Translation. The film has the charm of being taken as temporary confidante by the charming high school queen bee, too guileless to be a mean girl.

But I want her to stop making movies. I want to beg her to sit down and resolve her life, with her friends and family, talk endlessly about the terrible burden of never being challenged enough in life and in marriage, being valued shallowly.

I will see Marie Antoinette. I will, likely, enjoy it. And I will leave the theater angry. I loathe that there are some types of work, always the most fulfilling, reserved for the children of the rich and connected. Sofia Coppola, born Sophie Smith, would not be a filmmaker.

It doesn't matter that she is a good filmmaker, and that some would argue they are valid and interesting contributions to the marketplace; it would matter if, say, she were an excellent accountant whose daddy happens to be the inventor accounting. Then, one might say, what does it matter if she does as good a job as the next person who would have been hired?

The difference is that if you are qualified to be an accountant, and you are talented, and hardworking, and skillful- you have a very good chance of becoming an accountant. A talented, hardworking, skillful, qualified filmmaker (or writer, or artist, or actor, or actress, or designer) has almost no ability to compete with Sofia Coppola and her ilk. The nepotism inherent in creative fields, the fields that would benefit most from the elevation of the talented over the connected is vulgar, disgusting, and nauseating to any person who consumes or creates entertainment, art, or media.

Nepotism destroys the impression of meritocracy on which American dreams are built. We should legislate against it, as we do discrimination. Perhaps we should allow some nepotism, in small, private businesses, or home businesses- but in any business over 50 employees, or publicly traded stock, we should recognize that there is a vital public policy interest in forcing qualifications and talent to dictate opportunity.

First Law School Exam.

2006-10-19T09:41:00.000-05:00

They gave us cookies and juice afterwards.

I go to the cuddliest law school in the world

Some old-time, down-home xenophobia.

2006-10-16T12:56:00.000-05:00

I'm from Quincy, Massachusetts. It's a small city south of Boston. It boasts America's only full-time Uncle Sam impersonator, and seething racial and ethnic tensions, which may be right about to erupt.

In the past fifteen years, there has been significant Asian immigration to Quincy. These immigrants have had a fundamental impact on the city; an impact that has in part contributed to a revitalization of the city. Vacant commercial real estate, once a visual and economic blight on the city, becomes filled with new businesses: Bakeries, laundries, bridal shops, hair salons. In the cavernous empty space left by Bradlees came a sparkling new grocery store, department store, bank, and retail space.

But there was significant push-back against the immigrants. The standard complaints were heard: The immigrants 'take up' too much space in the classrooms. They receive too many services. They don't maintain their houses and yards to neighborhood standards. They don't want to integrate. Their cooking smells different. These allegations were no more or less true than they were when made against Irish immigrants, or Italian, or Hispanic.

For a while, the ethnic tensions seemed to quiet down.

Until the flag. The Quincy Chinese Business Association purchased a new sign for their building. And they put up, along with other banners and flags, the flag of the People's republic of China. Letters were written to local Quincy papers about the "commie" flag. The business association did not remove it; it is, after all, the flag of China. The protests started on Saturday. At the main intersection in the Wollaston Section of Quincy, one of the more heavily Asian neighborhoods (and the one I grew up in), a protest sponsored by a Vietnam Veteran's group, clogged traffic and drew a significant police presence. The signs carried were inflammatory: We don't negotiate with terrorists. No Commie Flags in Quincy.

I'm nervous.

I can't really convey the dangerous feeling in that neighborhood, MY neighborhood. I wish I had photographs of the protest, and the signs. The feeling of anger in those men; the feeling of intimidation experienced walking by them, to get to the bank. I have watched my hometown change. I have watched the people change; I've watched people who were once tolerant, reasonable, begin spewing irrational, paranoid hate when discussing their new neighbors. It's sickening. And it makes me nervous.

It's not for me.

2006-10-12T23:59:00.000-05:00

It's not.

I can't do it.

I expected to feel a slight twinge tonight, at my friend's wedding rehearsal.

Actually, that's not accurate. I expected to be infected, tonight, at my friend's wedding rehearsal. I expected, that somehow, by watching my friend be treated as 'the bride', I would feel jealousy, and be filled with the desire to have "my day", as my friend will have "her day" on Saturday. I am, by nature, a jealous person. If someone is treated specially for any reason, I can be relied upon to feel jealous. I've been jealous of a tonsilectomy.

I wasn't jealous tonight. I wasn't anything. All I knew, being taught how to process, being slapped on the back of the head by an old woman, watching my friend be taught how to light candles and not trip over her husband's feet at the kneeler, was that I didn't want to do this again.

I'm just not interested. I can't imagine dressing my closest friends up in little formal uniforms and marching them down an aisle, to watch me perform religious rituals that approach personal meaninglessness. I can't imagine paying and paying and paying and paying and paying, just to throw one party that makes almost no one happy.

Let's shock some kids!

2006-10-11T18:34:00.000-05:00

Which story am I referring to? Is it this one about a Texas school teacher fired for taking ten year olds to an art museum where they may have encountered nude artwork, or is it this one, about a school for the handicapped and disturbed that uses electric shock as a behavior modification tool?

Let me do the second one first and the first one second.

I'm for shocking the mentally handicapped. Let me tell you a story. My mother teaches autistic children, in the public school system of the town I grew up in. She had a student several years ago who was autistic, had downs syndrome, and was born with both fetal alcohol syndrome and a serious, rare neurological defect that vastly diminished the size of the pre-frontal cortex. The pre-frontal cortex is beginning to be thought of as the moral center of the brain. It's involved in weighing rewards and consequences. This student did not have one. She could not 'learn', as we know it. She had preferences. She had behaviors. She could not plan, or delay gratification.

She learned exactly one thing in my mother's classroom: Not to touch the radiator. Because the radiator hurt. Operant conditioning, and classical conditioning don't (as far as we're able to tell right now) use the same pathways as other forms of learning. It's hard to think about hurting children; it's hard to think of a child in pain and not think of abuse; but when a child may not be able to learn to stop harming themselves, or to stay out of danger, or to develop skills that may allow them to walk down the street, or visit their parents, or sit on a bus, without that- I'm not going to deprive them of it. We know how it works. We know that it works.

Ok. Done shocking kids like that.

How about nudity?

This I actually need explained to me. By what mechanism is seeing nudity harmful to children? In what way is Janet Jackson's tit, or marble David's teensy dick, at all dangerous or innappropriate for children? I would understand, perhaps, if we all had a cloaca until age 18, when genitals appear in our pants like fungus after rain...but not when all children have a set of goods of their own.

I understand, completely, the rationale for shielding as much as possible, children from depictions of sexuality and sexual behavior in adults. It's confusing for them, and too much information, and very graphic or lurid depictions may actually be traumatic. But nudity is not sex. (Which is not to say that children don't have any sexual-like behaviors. Fetuses masturbate in the womb. But a fetus doesn't fantasize about putting its penis stub in an unseen unimagined vagina)

How will children be harmed by seeing non-sexual nudity in a completely non-sexual environment? I saw nude statues and nude art often as a child. I'll admit, later (age 12-17) I did spend a good amount of time researching in various books of nordic, south american, greek and roman art for what this thing called an "erection" looked like. I couldn't quite get whether it came up or went out or what, and I certainly didn't know it got any BIGGER. What can I say. I was a late bloomer.

That's off-topic, though. What I really want, and what I'd love someone to tell me, is the PROCESS by which children are harmed by nudity. How was a ten year old boy or girl, verging on puberty themselves, possibly put in danger in any way, by seeing a depiction of some long-dead nipple? I can imagine how their parents were harmed. Perhaps, if you've got a ten year old child who does not yet know that the opposite sex has a different set of equipment, that may be embarassing for you as a parent.

I suggest you visit

2006-10-11T14:59:00.000-05:00

a lush in rio.

No, not him.

This.

Because not only does it feature my writing,(here and here) it also features my (lack of) improv talent, and some (geniunely) talented individuals, exploring such topical humor as "What if thirty koalas attacked a leprechaun?" (warning, link contains sound)

A-ha!

2006-10-08T17:10:00.000-05:00

Mixed drinks with diet soda gets you drunk faster.

Finally, something to explain that when I almost never drank, it was so hard to get drunk; and now, when I drink more often, I get goofy fairly swiftly.

It's because I don't want to get fat(ter). As a woman, I have three constant, insane, shameful, horrid goals, which I was indoctrinated with in childhood, possibly by ghosts or the patriarchy. 1)Make people like me. 2)Don't get too fat. 3) Never be not-so-fresh.

Don't worry, I haven't fallen for these. And I won't. Because they terrify me. I, as an adult, am able to live a life while my vagina smells like vagina, and not fruit or flowers. I am sure that anyone would find it discomfiting to find a box that smells like products from Yankee Candle.

But I have fallen for splenda. I love diet soft drinks. I love them so. I love anything fizzy with no calories, because I hate drinking water. I don't have the attention span. Without diet soft drinks, I would probably dry up and blow away.

When I drank very little, I would drink things like Grape Crushes, Midori Sours (I know, gross-I can't believe it myself), Cosmopolitans, Lemon Drops, etc. I'd drink the kind of sugary-sweet drinks that would be very useful, were one trying to get a middle-schooler absolutely toasted. If it was the color of gatorade, and served chilled or over ice, I'd drink the hell out of it.

But when I began to drink a little more often, I switched to rum and diet coke. And suddenly, I was getting rowdy from amounts of alcohol that would ordinarily leave me dull-faced and inhibited. I didn't know what to blame. I wondered if I'd offended my liver or other organ. I breifly had a theory that related to my shoes. I wondered if I'd ever NOT been such a cheap date.

But now I know. It was my beloved artificial sweetener, my bitch juice. My bitch juice was turning me into a two-beer queer. But knowing is half the battle. And now that I am poor, and plan to never, ever drive again (more on that later- suffice it to say, I hate the motherfucking ghetto) I know how to get drunk more cheaply without resorting to beer. Which is awesome. Diet Coke and me: Drunkening since 2003.

CIANA didn't pass.

2006-10-04T15:04:00.000-05:00

Awesome.

Do you know what CIANA is? It was legislation that republicans and sundry other conservatives wanted to pass, criminalizing the act of bringing a minor across state lines to secure an abortion, by anyone but her parents. It also criminalizes any doctor, even in states without parental consent laws, who does not obtain sufficient proof that a minor obtaining abortion is from the state she is having the abortion in, and that anyone accompanying her has the legal right to.

A lot of people seem to think there's nothing wrong with this act. They think that an abortion is a medical procedure, and as such, it's reasonable to need parental presence or consent. Of course, there are tons of cases where we allow people to act in loco parentis. For example, on a field trip to New York fifteen hundred years ago, when I was young, a girl traveling with our group had abdominal pains in the middle of the night. She was rushed to the hospital, where it was discovered that she had mono and her spleen had burst. She had emergency surgery. The chaperone was not prosecuted for having secured medical care for a minor without parental consent, because that's not a crime.

There's also the impression that the ONLY reason that a person, not a parent, to take a minor across state lines for an abortion is to circumvent parental consent laws. Not true. There are many states with few abortion providers- it's likely someone in that state may be closer to an out-of state abortion provider than an in-state one.

Another joy to this act not passing is that if it did pass, it would set a dangerous precedent for when Roe is overturned (if it ever is, which I do not think is out of the question), allowing states where abortion is illegal to prosecute residents who have had abortions in other states. Imagine, someone living in South Dakota, traveling to Minnesota for an abortion, and being tried for murder upon return home; or, alternately, never being able to return home. Imagine female refugees, millions, unable to ever return to anti-abortion states for fear of prosecution.

I wanna be an ambulance chaser.

2006-10-04T09:09:00.000-05:00

I do.

I love my torts class. I love my civil procedure class, and I love taking 30% of things.

I don't care what the common perception is of personal injury law. I don't care. People get hurt by other people. Then, they get to have some of the money of the person who hurt them. Also, their lawyer gets some money. I will be a lawyer, and I would like to have some money.

This is simplistic. Far too simplistic. But it's no more simplistic than the argument against tort lawyers. When an injury happens, either the person to whom the injury happens ends up bearing the burden, or someone else does. It would be equally unfair for the injured person to always bear the burden, or for someone else to always bear the burden.

So we have a system that serves to determine who should pay. And it's a good system. And someday, I'm going to have a very large television.