Home for Good

Yes, it's turkey.

It’s harder than you might think to study with your parents playing the Mamma Mia DVD (Special Edition, of course) at full volume. Not because it’s too loud, but because I have the constant, nagging urge to get up and dance. So, Starbucks.

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What would Thanksgiving be without some totally unrelated but still awesome music?

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A special mention to IT, who’s abroad. I’m sorry you can’t be with your family this Thanksgiving, but you’ll be home soon enough.

FU (looks like my re-naming conventions didn’t quite work out there) is also abroad, away from her family on Thanksgiving, in another country where they are foolish enough not to celebrate a holiday devoted entirely to doing nothing but eating. A distinctly American holiday, in other words. She tells me that she and a few compatriots had Thanksgiving and even invited an Aussie. I told her Aussies are allowed since they also persecuted their natives. It’s important to keep up Thanksgiving traditions, after all.

I would give all of you special mentions, but the thing is, I’ve endeavored over the past few years to surround myself with so many caring, unique and interesting individuals that listing and thanking each one of them would take me hours that, sadly, I don’t have. If I talk to you through any medium on any kind of regular or even sporadic basis, take to heart that there’s at least one person in this world of ours that’s thankful for you. Well done, sirs and madams.

Liveblog Adventures: New Moon

I finally caved and watched Twilight. It exceeded all of my expectations, which is to say that it sunk like an old, barnacled anchor, scraping the ocean bottom on its way to stopping at the Port of Boring Me Senseless.

After studying all day, I decided to take my masochistic tendencies one step further. I decided to watch New Moon. And liveblog.

I went to the corner store and got supplies. Yet another post-worthy event happened, but that’s for another day. I got some chips, dip and pudding and stumbled back to my apartment. I poured myself some amaretto, mixed it with Brandy. I found a pirated copy of the movie online (filmed in a theater).

Before we begin, maybe you’d like some musical accompaniment?

Away we go.

The Only Numbers You’ll See in Law School Without Dollar Signs Attached

I’m at school, early as usual, rocking out with my Contracts out.

Zut!

The Lawffel Tower

At left, you can observe what happens when you mix 3AM labor and a whiteboard. It’s hard to make out, but if you look closely, you can see that I’m getting double-teamed by the research memo and finals. When the research memo was done (I rocked its world, by the way), it was quickly replaced by internship-searching.

Confused? You were warned.

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I hit 1000 visits! Exciting!

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New song! It contains my favorite lyric of all time – can you spot it?

Beware the Burgers

Music!

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The man sitting next to me at Starbucks smells terrible. This would be a perfect use for Axe body spray. Sure, it smells terrible and repels women, but it masks BO admirably.

Law Fu

I forgot to mention that Friday was the first day that I’ve ever hated New York. It’s tough not to when you spend the day dog-paddling through a sea of humanity – pinstriped, greasy-haired, soul-patched, knuckle-dragging humanity. As it turns out, Moses – that selfish bastard – used up all of the sea-parting power getting my people out of Egypt. I’d be more thankful if he hadn’t then proceeded to get them lost and provide them with yet another crappy plot of desert.

The parade stood between me and physical therapy. Getting through it turned out to be even more difficult than therapy itself. A 15-minute walk took an hour as I traversed subway passages, barricades and drunk, fairweather Yankees fans. After begging police officers to let me through failed, I broke out the big guns. I don’t usually use the law for evil (like martial arts, you’re encouraged to use it only when necessary), but in one particularly tough stretch, I turned to a cop and said: “Let me get this straight: You’re going to make a law student on crutches and in a knee brace risk serious injury by going through a crowd of people, down several flights of stairs and around barricades? That doesn’t sound like the smartest idea.”

That got his attention.

I Just Wanted Some Pudding

I just wanted some pudding.

It was midnight and, after a day of studying interspersed with resume restructuring and the occasional episode of Mad Men (“smoker porn,” as a friend of mine calls it), I was ready to curl up in bed with one more episode. And some pudding.

Odd things happen at midnight. Fun things, quirky things, unfortunate things, memorable things. I grabbed a crutch (I’m down to one now), put on my finest pair of $5 sandals and hopped my way down the stairs and over to the 24-hour corner store – the one run by the most unfriendly people within 10 miles. I guess when you run the only 24-hour convenience store, you can afford to be hostile to everyone who walks in. And, considering what happened while I was there, I’m beginning to understand their temperament.

Secret Admirer

Look at me gettin’ all prolific. For all those tired of staid paragraph structure, here are a bunch of random words thrust arbitrarily into lines.

Haunting

Silly me, I forgot to upload a new song. In the spirit of the impending winter and the haunting, unsettling melancholy that it tugs along behind it, here’s some Bon Iver.

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Legal writing is normally (and purposefully) dry, humorless and straightforward. In my own notes, I try to interrupt the monotony – a carefully placed “aw snap!” when a superior judge lays down the law on a lowly trial court judge, etc. In certain instances, you can tell that there are certain judges that did the same thing.

Enter Stambovsky v. Ackley in 1991. The relevant facts of the case are that Stambovsky bought a house, through a broker, from Ackley that the latter knew was haunted by a poltergeist. In fact, Ackley had written to Reader’s Digest and most of the town knew about the house. Stambovsky, a well-meaning but unassuming city mouse from New York had no idea of the house’s reputation and found out the hard way. He sued to get the contract voided.

The best judges embrace absurdity and use the staid language of the law to inject renewed relevance and context. In other words, they’re trying to get published in legal texts and become my new personal hero. Mission accomplished, Justice Rubin. May you live forever in the hallowed halls of this blog and its 3 readers:

On Crutches

BD says I have DuBose syndrome, another arbitrary psychological condition (I say that because it’s not on Wikipedia and therefore has no legitimacy) where an individual believes that suffering builds character. This theory may hold water. It might be the whole fucking dam.

Per my orthopedist’s recommendations and my apparent, deep-seated self-hatred, I recently had ACL reconstruction and meniscus repair done during the heart of my first semester. Getting around and performing basic activities – in other words, being a functional human being – was somewhat of  a challenge during the first week. To add to my issues, the temporary crown that my dentist put in fell out, meaning that I had to avoid solid foods for a day or two.

So, in sum, I couldn’t walk and couldn’t chew. Most people pay good money to mental health professionals to relive their childhoods, but I apparently paid an orthopedist and a dentist to bring me back to toddlerhood. Odd means to an end, I think.