November?

Where has this month gone?? I officially have 2 weeks left to study before finals! And my outlines are only half finished at best. I haven’t even started my outline for one class… ug. My birthday is only 2 weeks away! And Thanksgiving is just over a week away! When did this happen?

Clearly I can’t be that concerned, since I spend my mornings on the couch watching bad 80s videos on Vh1 Classics with John. Gary Newman’s “Cars” is way better than putting together my Crim Law outline. Well… sort of.  Instead of outlining the elements of inchoate crimes, I am listening to John discuss why FOUR synthesizers are necessary (because Kraftwerk has that many, duh) and ripping on Bad English’s hair.

So, for your enjoyment, I present “What I Waste My Time Watching”:

Gift list.

My mom keeps asking me for my birthday/Christmas list. I think the past few years, we’ve just gone shopping and I get a nice pair of shoes (since, as I’ve mentioned, I can’t fathom spending more than $50 on a pair) and a sweater or two. But this year, I have NO clue what I want! I do need a new pair of shoes… I have been wearing my current pair for at least 3.5 years. And I can always use a nice sweater to bolster my non-existent wardrobe. But these things seem so blah. I honestly can’t think of a single thing to put on a gift list this year. I do want some things that might be fun to have (or I just don’t feel like shopping for), but they don’t seem “list-worthy.”

1. I think Guitar Hero for the Wii sounds fun. However, I don’t really want to put it on my list because I’m afraid I wouldn’t play it enough and then I’d just feel guilty. Plus, I don’t want to turn into this guy:

2. Luggage for the Ireland trip. This is lame though. And we can always borrow some from my parents.

3. Perfume. I am 100% out of perfume and now I just smell like shampoo and deodorant. But I don’t know what I want and I am too indecisive. Last time I was at Sephora, I spent an hour smelling stuff and ended up at home with a perfume I hated and a wallet that was $75 lighter.

4. A new comforter. I hate our current duvet, but if we got a new one, our matching curtains and bath ensemble would then look out of place.

5. Christmas ornaments. I LOVE shopping for Christmas ornaments… last year I reorganized and went to a blue and green theme. But it seems like a silly thing to ask for- especially since I can only enjoy them for one month a year.

6. Spa gift card. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for an hour-long massage. This is the kind of thing I just don’t buy for myself. But at the same time, it feels wasteful to spend all that money on such a fleeting pleasure. Which is probably exactly why I don’t buy those things for myself.

7. An iPhone. Why not, right? Besides, I want to feel this triumphant over spending $400 on technology that will be obsolete in mere months thanks to Steve Jobs:

8. Take Maggie to the vet. No, this is not my to-do list. But I am so tired of spending money to figure out WTF is wrong with Maggie’s skin when no one can give a decent answer. Maybe Dr. Mom can just give me a huge tub of Bactroban so that I can dip Maggie in it daily.

9. Textbooks. This is lame (just as all the others are), but law school text books add up and I hate spending money on that kind of thing. What’s on the docket for next semester? Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Advanced Legal Writing, and Property. These actually all sound interesting to me… we shall see.

10. A sweater. And we’re back to square one.

I guess I will focus on shoes. This is pretty close to what I’ve been wearing forever:

I also have the shoes on the right (except mine are more shoe-like, with a tongue and more fabric… less ballet-slipper-y). These are the two pairs I wear 95% of the time. The other pair is a tall black boot with a high heel, but since I am already tall (5’11”), I avoid those because they make my pants too short.

What I REALLY want is a black boot-ish shoe that is not high heeled, that looks polished, and that does not go all the way up my calf. I swear I didn’t mean for this post to turn into a shoe odyssey, but well here we are. This is what I have found so far, thanks to Zappos:

I am pretty sure #1 is closest to what I want, but are they totally ugly? I like #2 the best, but there are those damn heels again. As I have said before, I don’t know how these things work… Should I just stick with what I have? I mean, no one looks at my feet anyway. I should just stop worrying and get a massage, right?

Man dies but once.

I’ve been blogging a lot about law school lately, and if it bores you I apologize. Maybe it’s just been on my mind too much lately. With job searching and finals around the corner, it is pretty much all I think about. One of my big conundrums is what kind of law to practice. Previous events have shown that I suck at choosing my life’s direction. It took me 3 years of undergraduate study to decide what I wanted to pursue for a major. And after a Master’s Degree in History, I realized I had chosen incorrectly. I think maybe one of the issues is that too much fascinates me. I remember loving geology, sociology, climatology, etc. Everything seemed worthy of study. I loved my Shakespeare classes as much as I did the ones about ancient Egypt. There were very few things I hated: math, physics, and architecture. So I didn’t exactly narrow the field much.

Today I was doing some homework and I think I have officially eliminated criminal law. I kind of already knew that I didn’t want to go that direction. I could see myself getting burned out pretty quickly, especially if I worked as a public defender. But I know a lot of people have a gruesome fascination with criminal law these days, thanks to shows like C.S.I. and Law and Order. Now, I love me some Law and Order SVU as much as the next weirdo, but something about reading cases that actually happened… I find myself getting physically ill. I never expected this.

All the sick shit that people do… man, it’s messed up. The case that prompted my reaction was about legal and factual impossibility as a defense to a crime. Can you charge someone with a crime when no crime, according to statute, was actually committed? What if a crime was committed, but the defendant’s actions weren’t the true cause of it, even though he thought they were? Example: some sicko drug dealer got mad at a guy because he owed him money. The debtor had already been shot twice in the chest a few minutes earlier by some other sicko. The chest wounds would have proved fatal within 5-10 minutes, but the sicko drug dealer came in and shot the guy again- 7 times at point blank range in the head. So who killed the victim? Does it matter? What if no expert can even say?

Or how about the group of freaks who decided to gang-rape a woman? They raped her, but it turned out she was already dead and they just didn’t know it. I don’t even want to *think* about the facts of this case. It just makes me sick. And I don’t want to *care* about the facts. Never, EVER do I want to find myself in court, prosecuting OR defending these people. While some people think the lawsuits they hear about in the news are frivolous, I would rather deal with something like a coffee burn than a corpse-rape.

And in all honesty, the cases that most people read about in the papers are dismissed or settled long before they make it to a jury. That, or the facts are not clearly presented in the media and what appears to be frivolous to the general public might actually be a compelling case to a court. Either way, I have officially crossed off criminal law from my list of possible choices, despite any lingering fascination. And I am pretty positive that I will not regret it for even a second.

Winter “break” wasn’t meant to be.

I just went to a career seminar held by the law school’s Career Development Center. I already knew that law firms couldn’t start recruiting 1Ls until after December 1st for summer positions. And I also knew that almost all of them go by our first semester grades, which do not get posted until mid-January. So I am in no hurry to do any career-related work at the moment. And considering that finals are less than a month away, it really should be the last thing on my mind.

All of this was basically reiterated at the seminar, but they did tell us that we should plan on working on cover letters and our resume over winter break. This did elicit a tear or two from me. I was SO looking forward to vegetating for an entire month, curled up on the couch reading delicious novels while sipping hot cocoa. I guess that dream shall never be. The other thing that made me cry? “Networking.”

Because jobs for 1Ls are few and far between, they encourage us to use any and all connections to find our own employment. And if we don’t have connections, we need to start making them. Nothing strikes fear into my heart faster than the mention of the word “networking.” (Okay, well maybe “cancer” or “terminal illness” or “tumor” would, but you get my drift.) I hate the idea of schmoozing with smarmy, greasy lawyer-types who get their teeth whitened weekly and who wear diamond-encrusted tie tacks. They smoke their pipes and wear crests on their jackets which fit well over their argyle sweater vests. They get their loafers shined daily and use entirely too much pomade in their thinning hair. They also smell of Aqua Velva. “Networking,” for me, conjures up images of Gollum-like old men with stinky-old-man-coffee-breath invading my space bubble. Or so I imagine…

Just put a dinner jacket on this guy and a pipe in his mouth and you have my nightmare. I can smell him now.

I am not lacking social skills and I can converse on a professional level rather well. But I still dread the idea of walking up to a stranger and trying to strike up a conversation without blushing or making some other major faux pas. However, the speakers did inform us that if our grades are especially good, particularly our legal writing grade, we might have an easier time avoiding the networking. They also said that although many jobs for 1Ls do not pay all that well, some of the best jobs can pay as much as $3000 a week. A WEEK. That is way more than I have ever made before. The thought of making that much money, combined with the knowledge that I could avoid networking with gollums, just about made me shit my pants. I could pay for my entire tuition just from my summer salary!!

If that’s not incentive to study hard and do well, I don’t know what is… And I guess I don’t mind giving up my winter break for that kind of opportunity. I guess…

BFFs.