Sunday, October 31, 2004

A kind of postscript thought to the previous: as I was walking around with the kiddies, I suddenly remembered last year's Halloween at KB's guesthouse in Seoul, where an Irishman handing out lollipops opened his mouth and accidentally let out a waterfall of spittle on the floor, where Maiko was hit on by a resentful Korean art student, where a smelly Frenchman and a Korean woman monopolized the sleeping space and left us sitting in the hall until 6 am, and where a different Irishman got drunk off his ass and wouldn't let us leave in the morning.

What a difference a year makes.

Yesterday I felt very college-y. Freshman-like, even. Went out with hallmates to three of four parties we had lined up, with various members of the group dressed as roadkill, a greaser, a reporter, a she-devil, and Hermione from Harry Potter. Nina joined us at the first party, dressed as Martha Stewart, which elicited lots of "Free Martha!" cries from other partygoers.

We first went to a small law school party in a basement apartment, then walked what seemed liked miles to a full-on rockin' house party, complete with kegs on the porch and hundreds of people jammed into three floors of narrow halls and small kitchens. I didn't recognize too many people from my section, which doesn't mean the party wasn't law-student-heavy, since there are 480 other members of my class I don't come into regular contact with, but does mean that there were lots of opportunities to meet people. Which I did not take advantage of. Because people are scary. And probably because I didn't have enough to drink.

The third and last party was back near the law school, and dying down as we got there -- no more liquor equals no more fun, and walking three miles in one night equals tiredness at 1:30 am. So we went back to the dorms, where four of us ended up watching the tail end of The Exorcist on TV -- missed the projectile vomiting, though -- and sitting through a countdown of the scariest movies. The youngsters pooh poohed the notion of The Exorcist (#4), Alien (#2), or Jaws (#1) being scary. Ah, youth.

I finally got to bed around 3 am. Woke up pleasantly surprised to find that it was 9 am instead of 10 am, which means an extra hour before the party tonight. Yes, the hall is having a Halloween party tonight. Sunday. I saw the boxes of liquor last night. Ah, youth! Their endless energy! Their holiday enthusiasm! Their joyful disregard of normal person hours!

Help.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

It's chilly in Crimson City, and I can see the maple tree outside my window, so resplendent last week, becoming barer and barer.

Today I actually volunteered an answer in my Contracts class, the first time ever, and got a confused look from the professor, who asked, "But how does that help the defendant? He wants to leave the law firm," and turned to someone else. Well, I tried. And you know what I learned? DO NOT RAISE YOUR HAND. You will be called on. You will try to guess what the prof is thinking. You will be wrong.

At least when you don't raise your hand, you can shrug and say, "Well, I wasn't prepared for that question." But raising your hand? You're just asking for it.

I think this lapse in judgment and character stems from sleep debt. Some studies show that when you are sleep deprived, your natural appetite suppressants are less effective. So say you normally get full after one tuna fish sandwich. If you've been getting 5 or 6 hours of sleep per night for the past several days, you may eat that tuna fish sandwich and continue on to the bag of chips, the apple and the leftover rice in the rice cooker.

Yes, this is a hypothetical. No, it doesn't have anything to do with raising my hand in class. Yes, I am sleep deprived. In fact, I'm going to take a nap right now.

Monday, October 18, 2004

On Friday night I watched Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" with my one friend in law school, and on Saturday night I read recaps of "Queer as Folk" (the U.S. version) on televisionwithoutpity.com for four hours. I went to bed at four last night. I am retarded.

But you know what's not retarded? Marriage. And friends getting married. This weekend, Miss D, my junior high math class buddy, got married to Walt in L.A. Congratulations, Miss D.

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Video Killed My Work Ethic

What is wrong with me? I've been playing a stupid video game for 3 and a half hours, and have not gotten a lick of reading done. I must stop. Grr.

So yesterday marked the day I officially got called on in all my classes. In my Property class, the prof usually sets out the facts of the case and then has us debate each side, half of the class acting as the defendant's lawyer, half as the plaintiff's lawyer. Yesterday we were talking about easement by estoppel (kind of like squatter's rights), and I was on the side arguing that buyers of land should be able to claim an easement. The prof of course asked me to present the policy argument, which was the exact argument I had had the most trouble thinking of. Luckily, smart people sit next to me, and I had asked them about policy reasons supporting our side just two minutes earlier.

Not much to say about my debut in Property, except that I used the word "tautological" in my answer. As in, "Well, it seems sort of tautological -- trust is good, faith is good, so therefore trust and good faith are good for society." Christ. I really don't know where the word came from. Seriously. I had to look it up after class to make sure I used it correctly. I don't think I did. But I don't think most people knew what it meant either. Mwah ha ha!

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

How d'ya like them apples? A lot, actually
(or, If An Apple A Day Keeps The Doctor Away, Four Apples A Day Keep... Three Doctors Away?)

I was playing video games on the computer yesterday morning when I got a call from one of my classmates. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Playing video games on my computer," I sheepishly admitted.

"Well then, you have no excuse," she said, "you have to come with us to Walden Pond and then apple picking. We're leaving in 20 minutes."

The funny thing was that Nina and I had planned to go to Walden Pond that day, but gave up because of the lack of public transportation there. So after negotiating for her participation too, a big group of 9 us set out.

Walden Pond, which is much, much too big to be called a pond -- it'd be like calling the Rockies "the Rocky Hills" -- was beautiful. We ate lunch by the water and walked around, and checked out the site where Thoreau did his Transcendental thing for 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days. The running joke among us was that he went home every Friday night for pizza at his parents' house, located a few miles away. It's apocryphal, yes, but he actually did walk the 1.5 miles into town every few weeks for supplies and, one would hope, a proper bath. There was a replica of his house, a one-room building 10 by 15 feet, which he built with supplies costing $30 (not adjusted for inflation, obviously). What with the twin bed, the desk and the chair, it looked almost like a dorm room, really. Except bigger than my dorm room (8X12 feet).

All kidding aside, there was a wooden placard near the site of the actual house (marked by stone posts now), inscribed with the famous quote from _Walden_, and when I read it, I actually felt the chills.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

After Walden Pond, we headed to Berlin Orchard, where yes, I ate four apples, but I really couldn't help it -- they're very seductive, the blushing pinks and reds of the Galas, the deep plum-like dark reds of the Empires, the shocking white meat of the Cortlands, the crispity, crunchity goodness of them all. And the day didn't help either; it was a cool fall day but warm in the sun, and at the top of the rows of apple trees, you could look down across the county, covered with trees going dormant for the year in the least dormant way possible: violent reds, oranges, and yellows between areas of valiantly still-green foliage.

Apple-picking. When I think of all the years I missed out on it, growing up in California -- which for some reason can do every other fruit well except apples -- I'm almost persuaded to say that yes, the East Coast is superior. There's just no experience that can hold up to apple-picking in the fall -- it makes you fall in love with the world, with the season, with the fruit. Speaking of which -- did I mention I ate three again today? This, after yesterday, when I ate:
- four apples down to the core
- apple crisp (with vanilla ice cream on top)
- a cup of apple cider
- half a cider donut

Oog. Slightly sick. But also yum. If that makes sense.

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

When I first got to Korea two years ago (and my goodness, I think it was actually two years ago this past Saturday), I wondered why I felt so tired all the time. In retrospect, it was partly because I was doing close to three hours of commuting every day and trying to keep up with class by doing homework on the subways and the like, but it was mainly, I think, the result of adjusting. Adjusting to a new city, new lifestyle, new language, new food, new everything.

Law school is the same. I was wondering: "how can you be so tired when you do nothing but go to classes and read and go to meetings every day?" when I caught myself. Adjusting to a new city, new lifestyle, new language (of law), new/old food. Not everything is new, but even the old things are packaged in a slightly different way -- I've been to this city and school numerous times before, but never as an enrolled student. Things don't look the same way they did when I came here for the big Ivy League football games -- I was a different person then. Or maybe just not quite yet the person I have become.

That's the big trick, I guess, coming back from a life-changing experience. Yeah, things change in your absence, but more than that, you change. Which in turns changes everything.

And in some ways, you never change. For example: today I spoke in my civil procedure class for the first time. My prof was quite nice about it, emailing a warning to the four people who were to speak today. She normally doesn't do that, but since we had to come up in front of the class and present oral arguments for a case we had read, she asked if we'd be willing to do it. I considered saying no, actually, but you can't really say no to something like that. In any case, I figured it was better to accept and be in her good graces than refuse and be called on out of the blue one day. At least this way I'd earn a few days of not living in fear of being called on.

Anyway. The way I haven't changed: I got the prof's email about 2.5 hours before class, stared at it a while, replied affirmatively, and then spent the rest of the time freaking out about it. One of the guys in my hall tried to help me out by reading the case online and talking about it, but since he's not in my section, he couldn't offer much insight into what my professor wanted. So I read the case thoroughly, wrote several pages of notes and drawings, and went upstairs to discuss it with someone in my section who lives on the second floor of my dorm.

(The case, incidentally, was pretty interesting, and very fact-heavy: a 1946 Supreme Court case involving a railroad worker who was killed on the job; his widow filed a suit for negligence. The theory was that, in the course of his duties as a switch operator, he was struck on the back of the head by a hook for mail located on the mail car of a train that was backing into the station. There was all kinds of crazy-ass evidence, including the height and swing-out radius of the hook, the height of the worker, the height and location of dirt mounds near the tracks that elevated the worker to a height where he could have been struck by the hook. The defense, arguing for the railroads, pushed a wacked-out theory of murderous hobos in the area, pointing out that the the worker fell with his head to the south; if he'd been hit by the train, he would have fallen with his head to the north.)

Anyway. Again. I was freaking out the hour before class, and then got up with my co-counsel, along with the two students for the plaintiff, and ... it was fun. Yeah, it was actually kind of fun. Mostly because we stuck to the facts of the case and didn't get asked about any points of civil procedure, which I suck at. It was just like talking with the other three students up there, cracking jokes, and making fun. I was too afraid to take first crack at presenting the case, so my co-counsel did it, and then left the explanation of the murderous hobo theory to me, which I presented to the class with: "The area in question is very dark and frequented by hobos and vagrants, who are, as everyone knows, untrustworthy and suspicious."

So the part about how this shows I'm still the same? Well, I'm still the person who wants to make the class laugh, to make the audience like me, and I am ridiculously susceptible to compliments about performance. A couple people said I did a good job, and one said I was funny in class. Sad to say, this made my day. Possibly my week. Ask me at the end of the semester if it made my year.

I thought afterwards that it was rather clever of my professor (if indeed she was thinking this at all) to call on me to speak on a day when the speaker didn't have to know a shred of civil procedure to do well. (It really was all about facts of the case.) I feel like she knows that I'm completely clueless in that class, mostly because I sent her an email on Monday that was all like, um, I didn't understand the point of class today. Add to that the fact that I have never raised my hand or spoken in that class, and I have to say, if this assignment was on purpose, she couldn't have done better -- I had to fight the urge to raise my hand to answer questions in the latter half of class (when, mind you, I had no idea what was going on -- it was just the urge to speak!). And I feel less like: "dear god, I haven't spoken yet and it's been a month since class started and now I really have to say something brilliant since it's gonna be my first words in class." Pressure's off, I got a couple laughs, and now I just have to stop beating myself about missing a couple opportunities to get more laughs.

I should be a freakin' comedienne, that's what. Not because I'm funny, but because I'm so eager to please and so neurotic about it.

I so need to read now. What the hell am I doing writing this ode to myself here?

Friday, October 01, 2004

Am taking a break from trying to figure out why it is more efficient, in the economic analysis paradigm, to let a hotel owner build onto his hotel at the expense of blocking his neighbor's access to sunlight in the winter. Yeah, I don't understand it either. Although oddly enough, I think my Property class is the one I understand the best. It's so tangible and visible in real life -- I've been a tenant, I've had landlords, I've heard about smoke and chemicals affecting people who live by factories. Contracts is a little less accessible -- while the facts of the cases are often compelling (an uncle promises to give his nephew $500 if he quits swearing and drinking and gambling -- the uncle kicks the bucket before paying up and the nephew sues the estate for the money), the arguments seem dry to me.

And civil procedure -- the less said, the better. Civ pro is famously difficult to understand for first year law students, and my prof, I think, shoots too high. She admits as much, and I wish she'd dumb it down already. It's all well and good if you're a brilliant young scholar, but for regular mortals, a good basic larnin' would be just dandy, thanks.

Anyway. I've signed up for far too many activities, including two clinical programs, one dealing with mediation and one with defending low income people in show-cause hearings, which, as I understand it, is the step before you are offiically charged with a crime, which goes on your record and can be detrimental in getting a job, for example, even if you win your case and are proven innocent.

It's 2 am, and I am again going to be very sleepy in my 9 am Property class. I was up late last night too, having met my old sophomore year roommate Skippy for coffee. I haven't seen Skippy for about two and a half years, and she looks fabulous. She's doing fabu too -- finished business school this past spring (paid for by her employer) and just bought a condo in Westchester.

I've been terribly lucky the past few weeks -- Dr. Slow was here three weeks ago, One Armed Maggie this past weekend, and Skippy yesterday. And it don't stop there -- I get to see the Junebug tomorrow night, and then Magnetic D on Saturday. It's like I'm exerting this irresistable attractive force and my friends are getting zapped here, like so many straight pins to a magnet. (Oh, it's late, give me a break.)