welcome aol people

I am delighted to be an AOL Editor's Pick. Welcome!

For those of you who haven't been following along, here is a brief synopsis:

1. I was a software engineer.
2. I decided to go back to school.
3. I'm now a law student.

Since this might be boring for my regular readers, I will offer up a few new exciting details from the life of T. (Okay, I admit I'm stretching on that last adjective.)

1. I hate jello.
2. And mayonnaise.
3. But I love peanut butter and banana.
4. I can't tell the difference between left and right. (True!)
5. The darker the chocolate, the better.
6. Despite being in law school, we are getting a dog in March.
7. This is really for my fellow law students, but no, I am not insane. Perhaps a bit of a nutty animal person, though.
8. My favorite numbers are 2 and 8. Age 28 was, like, cosmic.

bad, unfunny things

This one-off post has inspired a tempest in a teapot. Actually, not really a tempest. More of a mild tropical depression. Mmmmm. Tropics.

Anyhow. Heidi asks, quite seriously, "What kind of environment gives rise to those sorts of jokes? And which is best?" Glorfindel of Gondolin, a new-to-me blog, actually reveals her grades.

Goodness dearie me.

Apparently we are not to joke about serious subjects like the existence of a curve in law school. It is Not Funny. It might indicate a Bad Environment.

Yikes!

helpful hint to pet owners

Here's your opportunity to protect your pets from the government.

The site provides somehelpful technical jargon:

This ultra modern aluminum foil hat will protect your pet from the brain scanning rays of the NSA, certain 'auction' websites, fbi.com, and CIA satellites that are monitoring their little subversive thoughts. You may not have considered this before, but your lead lined hat is worthless if your pet can give away your secrets to the very people most dangerous to you - your government!

The PFHT contains space age materials, and is guaranteed to work for your pet. All government I/O is cut off. It's like a firewall for your pet's brain.

Did you see that? A firewall for your pet's brain! Cool!

cold gray weather

It turns me into a formless slug. Normally I have no problem taking myself to the gym. I like to work out and I like how I feel afterwards.

But when it's gray and wet, and my littlest tabby is on my lap purring away, I have a lot of convincing to do.

Me: Come on. You'll feel better.
Body: Yeah, right. I feel pretty damn good right now.
Me: No, I mean it. You'll feel a LOT better.
Body: So let me get this straight. I'll supposedly feel better if I get up from this warm, comfy chair in which I am sitting with a warm, purring cat, get changed into clothes that are utterly inappropriate for the temperature outside, run to the car, drive to the gym, sweat for an hour with lots of other unattractively perspiring people, run back into the cold, and drive home, all so I can come back to the comfy chair where I am currently ensconced? How stupid do you think I am?
Me: Um.

It's hard to argue with my body sometimes.

Update: Hah. I feel better, and I did go to the gym. I win!

taking a place

On Thursday morning, my friends and I found little red envelopes containing a little money and a good luck note in our assigned places. My friend C., the first generation child of Chinese immigrants, had given us all a traditional New Year's gift.

We all thought it was wonderfully sweet.

"Thank you so much," I said, grinning.

M. agreed. "I'm glad to get the luck early in the semester! I need it!"

C. laughed. "Just so long as you don't get too much luck! No taking my place!"

This had been our repeated joke last semester, our way of dealing with the harsh curve. "I'm gonna take your place," we toasted each other when we went out for cocktails. The only way to deal with the unpleasantness of rank is to laugh about it, we decided, and we laughed about it all semester.

M. smiled. "C., you're the best Chinese person ever. And that ranks you above billions."

C. and I giggled. "In that case," C. said, "I am so taking your place."

book recommendation

While I was in Nicaragua, I read Salman Rushdie's account of a three week trip he took to Nicaragua in 1986. The book is called The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey.

I've never been a huge Rushdie fan, but this book was terrific. It's a brilliant observation of an imperfect and young democracy that was struggling not only with its own identity but also with the crushing pressure of Ronald Reagan and the United States.

It's also interesting from a purely historical point of view. The United States did not (overtly) invade Central America, an event that the Nicaraguans almost universally expected in 1986. The Iran-Contra scandal was just beginning to percolate in the greater American public consciousness. Violeta Barrios de Chamorro was still the widow of martyred La Prensa editor Pedro Chamorro, not a presidential candidate, though one can see the formidable evasive speaking skills of a politician in her interview with Rushdie.

Rushdie has a distinct point of view; in his discussions of the warts of the Sandinistas, he limits his commentary to their reluctant embrace of censorship and avoids the rather more serious allegations of torture and murder, which in 1986 were already being circulated against the Sandinista Secret Police. Sandinista supporters claim that those allegations were exaggerated by the United States in an effort to discredit the Sandinistas. The victims point to mass graves. Probably the murky truth lies, as always, somewhere in the middle. I wish Rushdie had at least acknowledged that censorship was not the worst failing of the Sandinista government.

But otherwise, I thought the book was excellent. Highly recommended.

statement of policy

That crazy Heidi has come out against selling babies for body parts.

Let me just state, for the record, that despite my recent amusement with TiVo's baby obsession, I too do not support selling babies for body parts. In fact, I am against all selling of babies in general, as well as any of Jonathan Swift's ideas for dealing with the overpopulation problems.

We here are entirely against the eating of babies.

The occasional raspberry is permitted.

what did you say?

My Torts professor is a brilliant man, and so far a good teacher, but I'm not sure he hears everything the we say.

This morning, I was struggling with my books as I entered the school and Prof. Torts graciously held the door for me. I thanked him, and he asked me if I was in his class. Our Torts class hadn't yet met for the first time, but I told him I would be in that class when we met later.

"Ah," he exlaimed, "it's always good to meet new students. What's your name?"

I told him.

He beamed. "An Irish lass, I see."

"Um. No, I'm not Irish." My last name is distinctively ethnic, and it's definitely not Irish.

"Yes, I've got a bit of Irish in me as well." He smiled. "Do you have any kids?"

"No."

Prof. Torts smiled again. "Yes, I had a son when I was in law school. It's lovely, isn't it?"

"Um, yes. Well, um, thanks again."

"Goodbye! Luck o' the Irish to you!" He walked off, tipping an imaginary bowler in my direction.

slow on the uptake

Text of conversation I held today.

Sectionmate: Hey, how was break?
Me: Great, how about you?
Sectionmmate: Good until I got my grades.
Me: Oh, I'm sorry.
Sectionmate: Oh, they weren't that bad, but I was really unhappy with one of them. I already mailed the professor.
Me: Oh, I'm sorry.
Sectionmate: How were your grades?
Me, figuring out how to respond: <silent>
Sectionmate, trying another tactic: How did you feel about them?
Me, honestly: Happy.
Sectionmate: Happy happy, or just happy?
Me: Um, happy.
Sectionmate: Some people are happy with, you know, just exceeding their expections. Others have high expections, like me, who had a 3.71 in undergrad, aren't happy with anything under As. Which one were you?
Me, speaking very, very slowly: I'm not going to give you numbers. I.... was... happy...
Sectionmate: Oh, so you were happy.
Me: Yes.

Nice guy, but boy that took a long time.

the keys to the kingdom

Today I received my golden key, otherwise known as my Lexis ID.

To the apparent horror of the technophobes who run the legal writing program, I will not be completing my Moot Court research by candlelight and quill pens. Thrillingly, I can actually 1) approach one of these new-fangled computing machines and 2) ask it to find information for me. If that isn't exciting, I don't know what is.

wouldn't have thought of that one

But I suppose everybody's got a secret fetish.

baggage claim

The flight from Big Corn Island to Managua is always met with several hulking Labradors.

Big Corn Island has a history of piracy. Rum smugglers and slave profiteers coexisted with dissipated English colonists and the wretched native inhabitants. To this day, the locals make eye contact, offer a small but friendly smile, but then slide their eyes down and away, not seeing any baggage or motives carried by an island visitor.

When we arrived in Managua, our bags were pulled from the belly of the little plane and deposited in a pile for the efficient Labradors. They climbed and sniffed. Their handlers, bored, toyed with the straps of their AK-47s.

One of the dogs suddenly stopped and cocked its head in confusion, pawing at a beaten suitcase near the bottom edge of the pile. His handler shouted to two nearby guards, and a weatherbeaten, toothless, elderly black man stepped quickly and voluntarily forward into their custody.

The old man, dignified even while gesticulating wildly at the suitcase, argued with the guards. They hesitated, but then glanced at each other and shrugged. The guards let him open his suitcase, but one of them silently moved his hand up towards the trigger of his gun.

In front of the now-attentive crowd, the man knelt down and cautiously unzipped the suitcase. With evident tenderness, he pulled a tiny, frantically wiggling puppy out of the bag and toward his chest. He looked up hopefully towards the guards. The puppy licked the man's neck.

The confused Labrador sniffed the rest of the suitcase. It was clean. The crowd sighed, happy with a live puppy and no drugs. The guards smiled, the monotony of their job broken for a few moments. The man stepped back into the crowd and was enveloped by cooing women.

A nearby English couple sniffed and shook their heads disapprovingly at us. "Amazing," they clucked, "just amazing what they will do to animals here."

We edged away. It was, after all, a happy ending in a poor country where pets are often simply another mouth to feed. The old man cuddled his puppy, grinning happily at the crowd.

the larger picture

I consoled a friend yesterday who was not happy with her grades. She called me in tears.

The funny thing is that I suspect she did better than me. I don't know; nobody other than my husband, my parents, and a good friend knows my actual grades and I didn't ask her what hers were. I was happy with my grades, but then again, I don't require much in the way of validation to make me happy.

For those of you who are in despair over your grades, I'll repeat what I told her:

In the much larger picture, they are irrelevant. Doing well on a law school exam means precisely one thing: you did well on one exam on one day. It doesn't make you smarter. Conversely, if you didn't do well, it doesn't make you dumber. Be happy if you did better than what you expected, and be aware that the bar for "did better" is different for different people. I know people who freak out over an A-, which is impossible for me to understand, but hey, that's fine.

I have interviewed many software engineers over the years. I never once asked about grades and I don't know any interviewer who did. I have worked for a long time, and I have never seen grades matter.

You know what does matter, what does follow you for the rest of your life? Your treatment of other people. Be honest. Do what you say you will do. Be ethical. Be fair. Be friendly. Don't be arrogant. Remember that we generally know much less than we think we do.

The grades, they fly away. The impression you make on others will never leave.

Update: I realized later that I should probably point out that just because I say this doesn't mean I always manage to do it. But I try.

isn't it that time, dear?

My Tivo thinks I should ditch this whole law school shindig and make babies.

Our normal television viewing includes Angel, Queer Eye, the odd science fiction TV movie, an occasional SNL, and Nova. We're both nutty animal people, so we sometimes watch nature programs and dog shows on Animal Planet. Notice there is nothing remotely related to babies here.

A few months ago, it quietly started recording Birth Day. Curious as to why the show continually showed up in our Tivo suggestions list, I finally watched an episode. It was interesting, but then again, I'm one of five kids and the child of a doula.

That, however, was all the encouragement Tivo needed.

Adoption Stories started showing up. Then, in case my maternal instinct wasn't sufficiently stoked, Adoption Tales. Against my better judgment, I finally watched an episode of both. Adoption Tales is actually about finding new homes for animals, not babies. They were weirdly similar, however, down to the preternaturally calm female narrator.

It recorded public television specials on reproduction, what appeared to be a Very Special Episode of Birth Day, and a Canadian birthing show. I deleted them as soon as they showed up on the list, for fear that Tivo would soon be all babies, all the time.

Tivo is unsatisfied. We have not yet produced sufficient evidence of offspring, such as a season pass to Sesame Street.

So yesterday, Tivo escalated. It recorded an episode of Baby Animals and Their Fuzzy Friends. Truly. I am not lying to you about the title. Against my better judgment I watched a little of it. The entire show consisted of shots of baby animals cavorting to classical music. That's it. No dialogue, no plot. Just baby animals. I had no idea such a TV show existed.

It has never once recorded a show that has anything remotely to do with law.

flabbergasted

I had heard other law students complain about law students who were incredibly obnoxious. I must confess that up until the first day of classes this semester, I had thought the complaints were slightly exaggerated. In my section, there are people who talk more than others, but the discussion is always respectful and usually the comments are concise and intelligent. There was only one person (whom I have never discussed here) that I disliked, and it's because I feel that person acted unethically at times.

Alas, now I know how much I should appreciate my section.

My Employment Discrimination class met for the first time yesterday, and I met the Obnoxious Law Student. He must have raised his hand ten times within the first forty minutes.

This was the first day of class. The very first day! There is simply no way to make repeated intelligent contributions to the class on the first day; a single well-considered contribution should be considered a victory. Ten times, however, is not a victory; it's a bloody mess. The class visibly turned against him.

At first I was ready to forgive the overenthusiasm, but then OLS managed to move me from annoyed to incredulous.

He corrected the professor's opinion. Not his facts, his opinion.

Color me astonished.

reason #39103 to like Judge Learned Hand

I have no doubt that if the records of the time of that ancient and apparently earliest of law-givers, Hammurabi, could be completely restored, we should learn that in the third millennium before Christ men were complaining about the inefficiency of legal procedure, and I fancy that if any of you are destined in the year 7000 A.D. to revisit the glimpses of the moon to examine and write a monograph for the celestial choirs upon the condition of human law courts, you will be obliged to report to some Seraphic Commission that mankind still exhibits the same discontentment with its methods of adjusting human differences that you know to-day.

From an address by Judge Learned Hand before the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Nov. 17, 1921.

they're here

My grades, that is, the all-important ranking mechanism that is apparently cherished by the legal profession.

I feel a little weird discussing grades on a public site, especially because I don't really hide any identifying details about myself. I'm not going to explicitly list them out, even though I think grades are an inevitable part of the story I'm telling on this blog.

However, I will say that I am in quite a good mood now.

the itinerary

We arrived in Managua by flying first to Miami and then to Nicaragua. We didn’t spend long in Managua. Very early the next morning we caught a local flight to Bluefields, a port city on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. The airplane was square and utilitarian in design, and appeared held together with glue and string, but it worked very well.

After a short period of time in Bluefields, we took off for Big Corn Island, Nicaragua’s biggest Caribbean island. From Big Corn Island, we piled into a very crowded water taxi (the boat was designed for about 25 people, and I counted approximately 40, including ourselves, a puppy, a toddler, the other adults, and boxes of milk, eggs, and meat) for a somewhat nerve-wracking ride to Little Corn Island. We were soaked by the time we arrived.

We stayed four nights on Little Corn. During that time we explored the island, went diving and swimming, fell into the pace of life in a remote village with no cars, ate dinner with some wonderful travelers we met from New Zealand, and spent a good amount of time sitting in our hammocks and reading. It was blissful. As expected, there was no hot water, and the electricity was limited, though reliable, so we quickly adjusted to a tropical schedule, rising around 6:00 am and going to bed around 9:00 pm.

On the fifth day, we piled back into the water taxi and scooted up to Big Corn’s ramshackle airport. After some careful negotiation in Spanish with the local agent, we managed to get back on the flight to Managua even though our reservations had disappeared.

We again spent an evening in Managua, and took a very early flight back to Miami and then home yesterday.

made it back

And we had a wonderful time.

I have stories to tell you all, but for now I am rushing through my reading assignments for tomorrow, the first day of classes.

I am quite content. I'm a wanderer, and nothing scratches that itch like a new place, a new people, and some new stories.

Now back to law school!

the list

Sunscreen? Check.
SPF 30 lip balm? Check.
Bathing suit? Check.
Imodium A-D? Check, but I do sincerely hope that I keep my record of never opening it. I never take anti-malarials either, so while we're hoping, let's hope the mosquitos stay away too.
Books? Check, maybe too many.
Towel? Of course. Can't travel without one.

I've got my hiking boots for jungle hiking, tweezers for removing ticks and other nasties, flashlights (another travel necessity), and then mundane items like clothing. Lots of small bills (always useful in Central America), and my Spanish dictionary, though there is a lot of Caribbean English found on the Caribbean side of Nicaragua.

If I don't manage to blog while I'm in Nicaragua, I'll see you in a week.

ranking time

I think that my grades come out soon. I'm not sure of the exact date, but it's somewhere around now. I checked this morning and they weren't there.

Grades are the most annoying aspect of law school. They take a perfectly alluring intellectual experience and tabulate and twist it into a single letter. Furthermore, because the legal world is rank-obsessed, I am forced to care about them.

I complained about this to our littlest tabby.

"I've learned so much more than what they tested me on!" I grumped.

Littlest Tabby, who is the sweetest of all of our cats, jumped onto my lap, curled up, and pointedly purred. She knows her job description well.

"I could have written about retributive philosophy in Criminal Law. Or the origin of the fee simple absolute in Property." These were both subjects that I found interesting enough to read not only the required reading, but the pages in the book that weren't assigned reading.

"Purr." Littlest Tabby was not impressed by my whine.

I will check again before I leave on Thursday. If the news is bad, at least I can recover on an isolated Nicaraguan beach before classes start up again.

the web is an amazing invention

By the end of December, I had recovered from my nasty post-finals cold, had visited my friends and family, and had done all the housework I wanted to do. It was wet and miserable outside. I started bouncing off the walls.

Fortunately, Priceline exists and I have that most precious of commodities, time flexibility. Even better, my husband was able to wrangle last minute vacation time from work and he’s coming with me.

After some poking around online, I am now in possession of two extremely cheap tickets to Managua. I leave on January 8th and return on January 14th.

Since I’m not hung up about requiring electricity or warm running water when I travel to the tropics, this trip will be very inexpensive. I’m headed to the Caribbean side of Nicaragua. I will attempt to blog, but given that electricity is a luxury where I’m headed, it’s unlikely that I’ll get reliable internet access.

I plan to consume many fruity drinks made of local mangos after a few days spent swimming in warm Caribbean water, hiking around the jungle, and simply watching the pace of life in a remote Nicaraguan village.

Don’t let anybody tell you that law school is awful. After working for years with two weeks of vacation a year, this time flexibility is nothing short of astonishing. I’m very lucky; I doubt I’ll ever have a chance like this again. Seize the day, as they say.

another tool

Scheherazade, TPB, and EthicalEsq have been discussing gender and law.

Being that I 1) have now been in the legal world approximately twenty weeks and 2) am female, I’m clearly qualified to comment.

When I first started law school I was surprised at the number of women. Coming from engineering, law school was bursting with estrogen. In my prior work and school, I was frequently the only woman in the room.

It never bothered me much. I liked working in a mostly-male environment. The worst part was meeting the new life forms that grew in the kitchen because young male engineers have an aversion to dumping old food in the trash.

EthicalEsq opines that while the legal profession has many problems, gender bias is not one of them. Perhaps. I haven’t been in the game long enough to know. But I am a little skeptical that any profession can be truly free of bias.

Most men and women are decent, but in any group there is a small percentage of jerks. They’re usually the people that nobody else likes anyhow, but if you’re a woman or a minority or stand out in any other way, the jerks have an extra weapon against you.

When I was an undergraduate in computer science, I had a TA who was adamant that women didn’t belong in engineering. When I asked him questions, he’d answer in monosyllables. He graded me more harshly. He was nasty to me in front of the class.

My male classmates were appalled, and, though they shouldn’t have been, embarrassed. Without ever speaking to me about it directly, they rallied around me. If I had a question, I asked one of them, and they asked the TA, pretending it was their question. They made sure that I got the homework. One of them quietly recommended to the professor that the professor grade my homework. Thanks to them, I passed the class with a very good grade, despite the TA. I’m still good friends with my former classmates.

Perhaps an overt act of bias like this wouldn’t happen in law now, given the percentage of women in the field. However, so long as there are blonde jokes and female driver jokes, the jerks out there will have a another tool at their disposal. I’m skeptical that they wouldn’t use it.

what's in a name

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago about recent trends in baby names. There has been an increase in babies named after products, such as Chanel, Armani, Manolo, or, for that name which screams high quality, Rayon. There were examples: somewhere in this country there is a set of unfortunate twins named Camry and Lexus.

This alone is troubling, but it doesn't stop there. Another growing trend is to name your child after the alcohol that you were drinking when the kid was conceived. To this end there has been an increase in the number of Courvoisiers, Skyys, and Bacardis. The brand-agnostic have generated an increase in Martinis.

I suppose nothing says, "I love you, honey" like reminding your child every time he hears his name that he was the product of a drunken hook-up.

rich in time

Winter break is such a civilized notion. I have four weeks, count 'em, FOUR weeks of time off. I've celebrated Christmas and New Year's, with nothing on my agenda other than some long-delayed housework and visits with family and friends whom I didn't see during the exam season.

The exam season was difficult, but anything that's followed by four weeks of recovery can't be that bad. And I still have two weeks!

In a sure sign of how luxurious this life is, I'm starting to go a little stir-crazy. The weather is terrible, so my normal outdoor activities have been curtailed. So yesterday I started looking around at cheap flights. There are many of them available when you can fly whenever you want. It's astonishing, this time flexibility. I can see why people stay in school for Ph.D.'s.

I found a very cheap flight to Managua. I've always wanted to visit Nicaragua; I've been within spitting distance of the border a few times and never crossed over. It fills my requirement for a cheap vacation, luxury resorts being the provenance of the employed, and Spanish is a language I can manage.

Or maybe I could go to Belize! Or the Honduras! Or San Diego, or the Florida Keys, or Ecuador! All warm, inviting places, with the added feature of cheap accomodation (I have family in the US locations).

This concept of time is amazing. I treasure it.