Today at work I stumbled across this convenient rule of interpretation in the Texas Tax Code:

§ 101.005. GRAMMATICAL ERRORS: PUNCTUATION.
  (a) A grammatical error does not vitiate a law, and when a sentence or clause is without meaning, words and clauses may be transposed to determine the intended meaning.
  (b) The punctuation of a sentence does not control or affect the intention of the legislature in the enactment of this title.

No need to bother learning to write clearly, dear legislators. Just throw in whatever punctuation tickles your fancy, and we’ll divine your true intent. Swirl some tea leaves around or something.

Well, I failed the Bar Exam. That’s probably enough news for today.

What did I do today? Oh right, I started a new job. It’s my third part-time job, and it puts me at around 35 hours a week total, which is close enough to full employment (minus the health benefits) that I’m no longer overcome with shame and despair when someone (my parents, say) asks what I do for a living.

This one’s more or less a legal job, in that I’m doing some research to support the development of new legal-type software. And when I say “legal-type,” I don’t mean software for legal typesetting (how awesome would that be?), but rather software that helps businesses do things that they might sometimes pay lawyers to do. How’s that for vagueness?

Anyway, my job today consisted of looking up information online to enter into a big empty spreadsheet, and that, seriously, is an enjoyable way to spend six hours. Plus, the office, unlike most, was not teeth-chatteringly cold. What more could I ask for? Again, seriously. This is not sarcasm. The job is a good fit.

Oh, and have you seen this new video of an awesome superconductor demo? Physics does some pretty amazing things. I mean, there’s everything in the universe ever, which is pretty neat. And also superconductors.

(Also also, watch the video that comes up in the top left when that one finishes. Zoom zoom!)

I’m sitting in my Tax Accounting class. The professors (there are two) explain things. Some of the students ask questions. The professors respond. They are speaking in sentences. They seem to be having a meaningful exchange of information, but I can’t follow it for the life of me.

I don’t know if it’s because they’re speaking in jargony jarglejarg, or if the underlying concepts are actually difficult. A little of both? Sometimes the “relation words” they use imply that the connections between these concepts are straightforward, but what on earth are they talking about?

I can’t visualize this stuff easily. If you tell me somebody buys a company, and the seller indemnifies the buyer, I already have to stop and draw a diagram to remember who is who. This doesn’t happen to me often, but . . . I don’t understand, and I don’t understand how other people understand. Trying to parse just one sentence the professor says would take me a minute or two—it’s not long before I’m completely lost.

I did take the basic Federal Income Tax class last semester, but I’ve never taken any kind of Accounting class. And of course I’ve never been involved in any complex financial transaction or made enough money to have an interesting tax return. Maybe that has something to do with it? But I am smart. I pick things up quickly. Not everything, I guess.

The frustrating thing is that I can’t tell if I’m anywhere close to understanding, or if I’m hopeless. I wish someone who (1) understood this stuff, (2) comprehended how dumb I am about finance, and (3) had a math brain could explain this to me.

Here, I’ll transcribe for a while, so you can get a sense of the language. If this makes perfect sense to you, then maybe you are my magic 1+2+3 explainer person.

Concurrent with the $500k that’s royalty income, you get to claim a percentage depletion, and that gives you a tax percentage rate on the tax coming in. So we need to find you a deduction on the tax you paid in the earlier year so that your give-back is exactly the same, or you’ve been over-compensated.

And so the Court looks to the policy arguments and says, “If we don’t do this, you’re going to get a double deduction.” Now the dissent makes much of the fact that 1341 was Congress’s reply to these kinds of questions, and they didn’t choose to deal with tax preference items in 1341. But the court blows through that and says that 1341 isn’t the only place we deal with transactional parity, it’s just one example. And the dissent has great fun with that, but the majority says no, we are not going to believe that Congress intended to create something that says no, you have no net benefit.

So even though this isn’t covered by 1341, we’re going to say that $500k needs to be a deduction at 72% of the $500k. Why? Because we need to grind down the percentage depletion deduction. And the policy reason for that is on p. 517, that the Court simply does not want a double deduction situation to occur.

See what I mean? If you went through and replaced all the nouns, these paragraphs would make plenty of sense. But as they are, to me, they’re gobbledygook. Comprehensibility feels so close, but so far away.

When I signed up for my first tax class, I thought it would be fun because tax is all about math and lots of fiddly rules. I like math, and I like fiddly rules: slam dunk. Not so. It’s about words, and not in the way that I like words. It feels like a bunch of English majors trying to rederive freshman physics, but without equations. And then they have to use it to build an aircraft carrier. And the damn thing floats, but fuck if I can figure out how. You know?

All heard on a lunch panel today, from three different attorneys. All spoken with no apparent irony.

“You can totally balance your work and family life—you just have to manage your time. For example, my son plays Little League, and I really enjoy going out to his games. What I do is focus on being as productive as I can from eight to six. Then I can go to the game and pick back up with work at nine or ten.”

“I tell you, these Blackberries are the best thing ever. If you’re on a family trip to the Grand Canyon, and you’re talking on your cell phone the whole time, that kinda puts a damper on things. But with the Blackberry, I just asked my wife to drive while I sat in the back seat typing away.”

“I have a two-year-old, so what I like to do is log on and work for an hour or two after we put her to bed.”

Eff that noise.

How lucky I am that the top-tier firms these attorneys work for would never hire a middle-of-the-road student like me.

If I ran the world, I would decree that each additional year of education would qualify a person to work LESS, not more. Money is nice and all, but you can’t buy back your time.

Tonight I mediated my first real case, and I’m hooked.

I enrolled in the mediation clinic this semester because the transactional clinic (helping small businesses) was full. Within the first hour of the 40-hour training course, I was pumped.* Mediation seemed like the perfect fit for my personality: you don’t take sides, don’t make judgments, don’t try to game the system to get ahead; you’re there to ask questions, keep everyone on track, and help people resolve their own problems.

Here’s one thing I’ve learned in law school: the more I hear about the lives of everyday attorneys, the more I want out. It sounds like hell, especially during the first few years. And lawyering can be . . . ethically challenging. Alternative dispute resolution, on the other hand, is something I can get behind. It patches up gaps in the legal system, frees up overburdened courts, and leaves participants feeling empowered. Unicorns and hugs all around.

So I figured I’d enjoy mediation. Heck, maybe I could even make a career out of it. But I worried that it would be hard to get started. Even though I’m certified to mediate, who would trust me, not even an attorney, with their case? Won’t they see how young I am? Some hard-ass would probably ask for my bar card, then throw me out of the room. Or some legal topic would come up from a class I hadn’t taken (or didn’t pay attention in), and I would be crushed under the weight of my own inexcusable ignorance.

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I’m taking Professional Responsibility this semester. It’s a required class that covers the rules of ethics regarding lawyers in preparation for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam, which everyone has to pass in order to be admitted to the bar.

As in all law school classes, most of the cases and hypos we discuss fall right on the boundaries between rules, where the decisions are most difficult. It’s hard for me to say how often ethical dilemmas like these come up in practice, but for some of these, once in a career is enough to destroy a person.

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