advice (not assvice!) to 1Ls

Dear Precious 1Ls,

We need to have a quick chat about study room etiquette. You see, I get that you are new here. I get that you don't quite know how things work yet. I get that you are scared out of your damn minds at least half the time. But that doesn't give you any good reason to act like a bunch of dill-holes. So let's go over some stuff that might make everybody's lives a little easier.

1) Try reserving your own study rooms instead of taking mine. Telling me that you've been kicked out of 3 other study rooms already today doesn't move me to sympathy so much as it makes you look like an idiot. Reserve your own room or go to the library, and get the fuck over it.

2) When somebody starts standing awkwardly outside of a study room you are in, they are not admiring your color-coded underlining technique or your overpriced and underfunctional school bag. They probably have the room reserved, which means you need to get out, poste haste. No, you may not finish that page, that email, that killer convo about who said what to whom at bar review. Pack yo shit up and skeedadle.

3) Study rooms are not soundproof booths. Less shrieking, less screeching, less squee. Many of you have not yet figured out that you are staring down the barrel of a buttload of work, and that you would do well to use less time gossiping. If you are with it enough to have gotten a study room, use it for studying, or at least silent facebooking. I don't really care what you do, as long as I can't hear it.

That being said, you all look like lovely people. I'd be more than happy to help you with your citations. I love seeing your UCC diagrams on the whiteboards. Also, I commend you on the relatively low incidence of over-perfumers. Next year you'll have full discretion to chastise 1Ls as you see fit. Let's just try to work these study room habits into your routine, mmmkay?

Truly yours,

Laughing

this blog is no longer about law school but is instead about my battles with various insects

I now break from your regularly scheduled law school whining to bring you this, my most recent psychotic break:

My next post was going to be about the recent shitsplosion that has happened to my law school friends, or about my mid-semester crisis and subsequent doing absolutely nothing, or about something brilliant that I thought up the other night when BF woke me up at 2 am because he was having a nightmare (only I can't remember exactly what it was), or about how I think that the worst Sex & the City burn ever is that iTunes thinks that it is similar to the 1st Wives Club. My next post (this one) WAS going to be about one of these things, and my next post still may be about some of those things (I like the word shitsplosion and I fully intend to use it).

But. Alas, for there are more motherfucking bugs in my apartment.

I have briefly mentioned before that I am not a lover of spiders. As a matter of fact I am not a fan of any bugs that come into my home (if they would just stay outside!!!). In order of slightly decreasing hatred:

#1 Spiders
#2 Earwigs
#3 Unrecognizable, but gross looking, other bugs
...
#1,000,000 Roly-polies
#1,000,001 Lady bugs
#1,000,002 Caterpillars
#1,000,003 Lightning bugs
#1,000,004 Butterflies

Cockroaches are not in the top 3 because I am lucky to live in a place where there are hardly any around, and in their absence I like to pretend that they do not exist. Also, in my Which Law School Will I Go To pro/con list I put "not many icky bugs in the geographical area" in the pro column for the school I ultimately chose.

When I decided to call it a night 20 minutes ago and came into the bedroom only to find a crawly of the #3 type, ON MY DAMN PILLOW, it became immediately clear that I would not be able to go to sleep right away. And so, to get my mind off of the real bug, I am blogging about this and other recent encounters of the icky kind.

One morning last week I encountered 3 spiders in or near the bed within 5 minutes of waking up. It was at that exact moment that I decided I fucking hate where I live and we are not renewing our lease. We've already had pest control spray once, and that did absolutely nothing to stem the tide. I blame the shit-tay construction of our shit-tay apartment complex (like the fact that the door doesn't seal all the way, and that none of the damn trim actually touches any of the damn floor). BF blames the time of year, and tries to comfort me by saying that they will come inside and soon die. This is crazy talk, as it seems much more likely that they will come inside and nestle themselves in my belongings and multiply and eat my hair and maybe scare me to death.

The cat is useless. Also in the pro column of Getting A Cat was, "will eat bugs in my house". This was a LIE that other cat-owners told me. My cat is nearly perfect in every other way, but all she ever does is meow at the bugs, and occasionally chase them.

Also significant: I have never before lived in an apartment. I have only previously lived in houses, where there is nature on ALL FOUR SIDES of my home. All of these houses have been at least 30 years old. And somehow, in this apartment built 7 years ago, where there is nature on ONLY ONE SIDE of me there are more bugs than I have ever ever ever seen in my life.

So if you're passing by a poorly built, maintained and managed apartment complex in a part of the country that doesn't have many cockroaches and you hear "guhgaaaahguhugh eeeeeeeeeeuuuuwwwww ick ick uhahha aha aha pheeeewwww," then you will know that you have found the non-internet human being behind this horrible-excuse-for-entertainment blog, and that I am killing a spider.

d'oh

I have been remiss in my blogging duties. Sorry. Between packing, moving, unpacking, wrangling with the apartment complex and trying to set up the freaking internet, things have been hit or miss with me. Plus, the cat keeps looking at me like, "Ok, this is cool and all but when are we going home?"

But now I'm (mostly, almost) settled in to Law School City, which means that I'm thinking more and more about actual Law School starting. So stay tuned.

open letter to the driver of a yellow H3, who stopped behind me at a light

In case it wasn’t already apparent to you from 1) the fact that I’m driving a car that is over 15 years old*; 2) I have all of the windows all the way down; or 3) I’m leaning forward away from my seat and holding my elbows up perpendicular to my sides even though it makes me look like a crazy person; I do not have air conditioning. I understand that the fumes from the ridiculous amount of gas you put in your vehicle might have started to affect your cognitive reasoning skills, so I thought it would be helpful for me to make that clear.

That being said, STOP HONKING AT ME if I stop in the shade instead of five feet further up. Its hot as balls out, though once again you may not have noticed, since you probably park your air-conditioned monstrosity in the garage of your air-conditioned pre-fab house. You can also cut it out with the waving of the arms, I’m not leaving the shade until the light turns green.




*Despite the fact that my car is over 15 years old, and yours is significantly newer, my car’s fuel efficiency still kicks your car’s fuel efficiency in the ass. By over twice. So I’ve earned that spot in the shade, gashole.

p.s. work advice

I forgot to add this sage piece of advice to my work-complaining.

If you are in a situation where your boss has taken away almost all of your responsibilities at work and left you with bullshit to do, do not under any circumstances, change a shared password (that he never ever ever uses) to "No work to do".

yay bicycle boo birds

My personal plan for avoiding gas prices, reducing my carbon footprint and getting some exercise? I ride my bike to work (usually). As long as I remember to keep my mouth shut to keep from swallowing a bunch of bugs, I have a great time.

Except for today, when a bird flew so near (i.e. the space between where I lean forward and my handlebars) that I almost got feather-clocked. I felt the whoosh of beating wings just under my chin as I pulled back to keep from colliding.

Eeeeks. At least the bird was as surprised as I was.

social skills that may not be useful in law school

Laughing: I realized that I'm kind of a bitch in class.
BF: What do you mean?
Laughing: I'm not friendly. I don't give people the benefit of the doubt, I just assume that they're idiots and wait for them to prove me wrong.
BF: Uh, that's not cool.
Laughing: But they are idiots!

weird trash i've picked up while working at the storage facility

1. condom...not so much weird as gross
2. chicken bone
3. a lot of Barbie shoes
4. half of a set of dentures
5. laundry detergent
6. longboard
7. fish tank rocks
8. half of a dead snake

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed picking this shit up.

there is this one place that does this one thing

Last week in class we experienced a perfect example of one of my biggest pet peeves (when I say one of I recognize that, according to some, I am relatively neurotic and may have many, many pet peeves). We were discussing the ever-present wage gap between men and women, and of course, someone had to rebut with "I don't know about that but I do know that this one tech company will only hire women, and you can't even get a raise if you are a guy, so I don't know about how accurate that is anymore." AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGHH! Stupid stupid stupid shut up shut up shut up!!

Don't get me wrong, I totally support first-hand experience as knowledge, but I have a lot of problems with this kind of example. First of all, it completely disregards all of the studies and hard work done that reveals hard data proving the existence of a pay gap. Second, it takes one example of one situation and mistakes it as being representative of all situations. Plus, you would think that someone in a WS class would pretty much accept the existence of the pay gap by now, considering the fact that it has existed since the beginning of time.

wtf?

A recent comment by my political science capstone professor, describing the limits of the political science faculty: "We're not a bunch of whores where we're going to do anything."

Just let that one sink in a little bit.