…is not sexy, y’all. To me he looks greasy and icky. I don’t have any desire to even shake his hand, much less touch his boy parts.
He looks like he should be selling cigarettes to kids a third his age out of an old beat-up El Camino. Get a haircut already, dude. Yick.
Good news! Google Scholar has added a vast swath of federal and state opinions, journal articles, and patents to its database. Huzzah!
As a law student, I have free suck-you-in-and-get-you-hooked full access to Lexis and Westlaw, but that will evaporate when I graduate**. Getting access to the pay databases through a firm is expensive and can be touchy, especially if you’re made to feel guilty for every minute you spend logged in and every case you print; the expense can keep smaller firms and solo practitioners out of the easy-online-access game altogether.
I’ve spent a few minutes poking around Google Scholar’s legal offerings by looking up a case we’re discussing tonight in Professional Responsibility: Gaspard v. Beadle, 36 S.W.3d 229. It’s worth a skim, even if you’re not used to reading cases; sex, betrayal, and a UH Law grad in the role of the asshole lawyer make for a juicy story.
No, my Kroger card will not let me into the law school basement. Not the debit card, either.
It’s been a long day.
So yeah, my level of fail at NaBlo 2009 is reaching epic proportions. I’ve come to accept it. November’s been busy, and it’s flying by. Ten pages of my journal paper, complete with footnotes, due in two days? Criminy.
Today was my third day in a row of taiko performances—two at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in the Woodlands, and one in College Station. Next weekend we’re on the road again to Alexandria, and it’s a 90-minute show, so we’ve got two practices (maybe three) this week to prepare for that.
But right now, if I can deny the existence of my paper deadline for a little longer, life is good. I just took a hot shower, and now I’m sitting on John’s balcony with a beer and my laptop, enjoying the November weather. What’s that? It’s snowing where you live? You can’t go outside with wet hair and bare feet? Suck it. This is our reward for making it through the summer.
Also, I just got to watch a guy throw up over the side of his balcony at an apartment across the street. So that’s nice.
I was on the road with Kaminari from 9:30 Saturday morning to 1:15 Monday morning, making our annual appearance at the New Orleans Japan Fest. When we got to the hotel, I was disappointed to find that my laptop didn’t like the smell of the hotel’s wireless.
New Orleans, the gig, and my taiko family managed to keep me alive and happy for a whole weekend without internet access. I did tweet a lot, though, especially on the bus ride home. The fuse to the interior lights and the door blew in the first hour, so our entertainment options got pretty limited. But you won’t hear any complaints from me—having to climb in and out of the driver’s door a few times and riding home in the dark are two of smaller sacrifices we’ve had to make for this poor bus.
After one of our sets yesterday a middle-aged guy came up to me and struck up the following conversation.
Guy: I have a question for you.
Me: Okay, sure.
Guy: Do those outfits you’re wearing have built-in bras?
Me: Uh, no.
Guy: Because my wife and I were trying to figure it out, and then you bent over and we were like, nope, guess not.
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.
I was in the middle of writing a post about some of the icky ethical dilemmas posed in my Professional Responsibility class, but now I’m home, and my book’s in the car, so I think I’ll finish that one later.
Instead, I’ll (again) share something I dreamed last night. Dull, I know, but hey, no one’s forcing you to read it.
I was walking through a super fancy store in a mall when I spotted a designer “dress” on a display stand. I put “dress” in quotation marks because it was really a big circle of wood with a clock face painted on it, held up by a chain of paperclips. The back had a smaller wooden circle just big enough to cover my butt.
I tried it on naked (shocking a few small children in the process) and fell in love with it. It cost a thousand dollars, but I knew I had to have it. What a fashion-forward figure I’d cut, walking around town in my fancy clock-dress! I figured I might as well wear something under it, so I picked out a little blue dress* to go with it.
The sales lady tried to convince me that I’d also picked out a pair of purple sequined flip-flops for $9000, but I knew that couldn’t be true because I was boycotting everything sparkly, and anyway, could we please hurry this up? The waiting around was aggravating my dad’s cancer.
The End.
———
* Even now that I’m awake, I still love this imaginary blue dress. If I can find fabric like I dreamed of, I’m totally going to make it.
… and it’s only Day 3. Welcome to NaBlo, folks!
I’m going to fall back on what will likely be my default blog topic, which is to tell you about a segment of my dreams from the previous night. I’ll warn you that this one is slightly unpleasant.
I was about eighteen and still living with my parents. I went up to my room and found either a rat or a snake, I don’t remember. Deciding to keep it as a pet, I put it in a box I had lying around, only to discover that my hamster Stripey, who (I thought) had died and been buried in the backyard when I was ten, had actually survived and was living in that box. I threw the rat-snake in there, too. Why not, right?
They did okay for a while until I went on vacation and forgot about them. When I got back I wondered whether I should open the box. Maybe my wee pets had survived on whatever magical food source had sustained the hamster for eight years. On second thought, I realized that if they had died, then one of them had probably died first, which meant the other would have eaten it.* I decided not to open the box.
The End.
———
* This actually happened with two mice our ninth grade biology teacher left at school over winter break with no food. I was so angry. And disgusted. But mostly angry.
November will be a busy month.
To start with (of course I have my priorities in order), we have four taiko performances in November. The Woodlands, College Station, New Orleans, and Alexandria, LA. For the non-Houstonians, I’ll note that The Woodlands is the only one of those in the Houston area, and even that’s fudging a little. We’ll be spending a lot of time on the bus, is what I’m saying. The aging, decrepit bus. I hope it holds up. If it doesn’t … well, I hope it holds up.
We usually have our intensive practices on Sundays, but now that we’ll be performing every weekend, we’ll have to spend more weeknights practicing. Practice-show-practice-show-practice-show. It would be a bit stressful if I didn’t love it so much. Instead it’s exhilarating. Plus who doesn’t love road trips? Every trip, I’m reminded of how much taiko is like quiz bowl or math club. My friends are just a different kind of weird than they used to be, that’s all.
