Law School Memories

Vegas Baby!

2009-01-28T20:59:00.000-08:00

We had just gotten back for the second semester of the first year, when one of my civilian friends called me to tell me he had a conference in Las Vegas, and if I were willing to meet him there, I could crash in his company-paid hotel room. I had never been to Vegas so I agreed to the plan without hesitation. But it’s a long drive to Vegas and my friend would have to do a certain bare minimum of actual work, so I thought it would be ideal if one of my law school friends could join me on the trip. Though that, of course, is easier said than done, since it’s hard enough to get a law student off campus for an evening, much less, leave the state for a weekend, and especially if the destination happens to be Sin City. Still, with high hopes, when I met up with my friends that afternoon, I announced,

“Vegas baby! This weekend. Who’s coming with me?”

The crickets sounded, and after the long silence, the excuses followed.

“I got a lot of reading to catch up on.”

“I wanted to start working on the law review write-in.”

“Come on,” I insisted, “It’s the second week of the semester. Exams are four months away. You can afford to take a weekend off.”

“Who cares? It’s a road trip. Anything’s better than staying here for the weekend.”

Then, one of my friends who was a bit older than the rest of us got this nostalgic look about him, and, staring off into space, began an ode to Las Vegas.

“I love Vegas. There’s nothing like her in the world. Driving up to it at night, with all the lights shining in the middle of the desert. All the people going crazy; nothing else matters to them but the next roll of the dice.”

With that sort of reverence, I figured he was a shoe-in to accompany me, but he continued.

“I would definitely go, but my girlfriend would never let me. But do me a favor. I’m giving you $100. Go to the roulette and bet it on black. Bring me back the winnings.”

“Okay. I’ll do it,” I said, disappointed he wouldn’t be coming, “But do you really think if you win I would bring you back the money? I would probably just spend it and then tell you it landed on red.”

“Well in that case, I’ll just give you $20.”

Hearing our older friend speak so passionately, another of my friends built up some nerve and said, “Oh hell. I’ll go with you. I’ve always wanted to go. Why not? Vegas baby!!!”

Any excitement about going to Las Vegas for the weekend withers away and dies during the interminable drive. It is unbelievable how far from the rest of civilization that place is. By the time we got there, we were exhausted. Plus, any excitement left over was drowned out by my friend’s guilt. He could not forgive himself for indulging in a weekend road trip. From the moment he stepped in the car, he regretted his decision.

“But it’s just the weekend,” I tried to comfort him. “We’ll be back on Sunday night. You won’t miss any class.”

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right. It feels irresponsible.”

For some inexplicable reason, law students feel that they are forbidden from indulging in anything. That by attending law school, you are agreeing to a sort of silent covenant where you won’t do anything that might give off the impression of lighthearted enjoyment. We inherit a supposed duty to suffer, and sacrifice our youth in the name of the Constitution. It is probably that very sense of repression that inevitably leads us to go crazy and lose control whenever an opportunity for fun arises.

And that’s precisely what happened in Vegas. But, of course, any details will be omitted here in observance of the old legal doctrine, Quis venio in Vegas subsist in Vegas, whereby a witness at trial cannot be compelled to testify to any events that may have occurred within the city limits of Las Vegas. Laymen affectionately refer to it by its English translation: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Before we knew it, we were back in the car and on our way back home. My friend, now with the lights and excitement behind us, once again became racked with guilt.

“I can’t believe I didn’t do any reading at all this weekend. I’m going to be so behind this week. This might set me back for the entire semester.”

“Relax,” I tried in vain to reassure him as I nodded off in the passenger seat, “You’ll remember this weekend for the rest of your life. You have the rest of the semester to stay at home and study.”

Sure enough, the next morning, after a long weekend of neglecting the books, at my 9:00am Contracts class, the professor called on me, and I made an ass of myself. What are the odds that he would call on me on the Monday after a weekend in Las Vegas? I gambled and lost.

The Law Student at Rest

2009-01-11T18:19:00.000-08:00

Ahhhh winter break. . . Perhaps the best reason to go back to graduate school, and probably the only good reason to go to law school is that month or so of vacation around the holidays. Summer vacation of course would be even better, except that law students are not allowed to enjoy it. The summer break is completely lost on the pressures of finding clerkships, internships or summer associate positions – anything but the audacity of relaxation. But the winter break is too short to do any sort of meaningful apprenticeships, plus since most people take some time off during the holidays and the average professional office comes to a bit of a halt, there is really nothing for a law student to do, unless he wants to play Santa Claus at Macy’s.

Quite possibly the greatest sensation I knew during my three years at law school was the moment the proctor at my last exam of the semester announced, “Pencils down.” Even if I wasn’t confident in my performance, just the thought that my brain could finally rest would fill me with joy. That night, I would join some friends for celebration, where we could fill our bellies with alcohol, and not have to conscientiously ignore that little feeling of guilt that normally followed us everywhere; that annoying voice suggesting: “Slow down. Don’t drink too much tonight. You should probably get up early tomorrow and do a practice exam.”

During winter break, that little voice in your head has no standing. You can tell it to bugger off and leave you alone until the new year. But of course, that little voice, and the anxious, guilty feeling that you could be spending your time more productively becomes such a part of the law student’s anatomy, that it’s hard to just turn it off. Any time I would try to indulge in a nap on the couch by the fire and the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, I would startle awake with a jump, and think, “Wait. Isn’t there something I’m supposed to be doing?” It would take me a few seconds to regroup myself and remember that I was on vacation and perfectly entitled to a nap, but the guilt would prevent me for falling back asleep.

Nightmares were common, particularly a recurring one where I had registered for a class and forgotten all about it, suddenly realizing at the end of the semester that I had never showed up to it nor taken the exam. When my grades came out, there was an F next to a ridiculous subject like Condo Association Law. “Oh dear god!! I completely forgot about Condo Association Law.” I would then wake up in a panic and have to count my classes on my fingers, adding up the total credit hours to make sure every course was accounted for.

One thing that can ruin the winter break in a heartbeat is the fact that first semester grades are released at this time, sort of like a diabolical anti-Christmas gift. What’s especially frustrating is that (at least at my school) each professor turned in their grades at their own time, so you had no idea when a grade would come up. So I inevitably adopted a routine of logging in to my student account and checking my grades every time I was near a computer. Before I even checked my email, I would check to see if a new grade had been posted. My mood each day would highly depend on what I found on my transcript, so my emotions were basically one of three: Joy (if a grade of B or higher had been posted); Sadness (if a grade of C+ or lower had been posted); or anxiety (if a grade for a particular class had not yet been posted – for the love of god how long does it take to grade a fucking exam?!!?).

I finally decided to stop worrying about grades. When it got to the point where I couldn’t even walk past the Mac store while out Christmas shopping, without wondering if I could use one of the display computers to log in to my student account and check my grades, I had to stop. I decided that I wouldn’t check my grades until the day before I was to return to school. This way, I could enjoy the holidays, and get the much deserved rest the winter break entitled me to.

Oh how I miss those long winter breaks as a full time student. It might even be worth considering an LLM just to have them back.

Dude, Where's My Car?

2008-12-08T06:47:00.000-08:00

It was the first week of exams. Two exams down, three to go. I had been studying non-stop for days, so I made up an unnecessary errand just to have an excuse to leave the house and think about something else for a while. I walked out to the parking lot, but my car wasn’t there. ‘Hmmm,’ I thought, ‘I could have sworn I parked in this spot.’ Even if I hadn’t parked in that spot, it was a pretty small parking lot, and my car was not in it. ‘Hmmm,’ I thought again, ‘I could’ve sworn I parked in this parking lot.’

I began to rack my brain, which was already discombobulated enough from all the studying. Did I lend my car to a friend? Did I leave it at the bar the other night and take a cab home? Did I maybe sleepwalk and drive it unconsciously off a pier into the Pacific Ocean? Is somebody – possibly Ashton Kutcher – messing with me and secretly filming my reaction?

After standing around and scratching my head for about 20 minutes, I knocked on the residential director's door and said, “I’m still not 100% sure, but I think my car’s been stolen.” We called campus security, and they sent perhaps the most unlikely security guard I’ve ever seen. He spoke at length about how I was to proceed, but I barely registered anything he said because I was so taken aback by the fact that he was wearing makeup, had a woman’s haircut, and wore two pearl earrings. The residential director and I stared at him and tried to pretend we didn’t see anything unusual about a trans-gender campus security officer. This was, after all, California, where such things are to be expected, and it’s not only rude, but the true mark of an outsider to act surprised.When the actual police officer arrived, he also had trouble concentrating on what the security guard was saying.

Finally, he said, “Ok. Thank you sir . . . uh . . . I mean . . . thank you . . . uh . . . thank you officer. If we need anything else from you, we’ll give you a call.”

Then he turned to me, shook his head, and exhaled loudly, with a what’s this world coming to look about him. He had me fill out a report, and was overly blunt and honest about the likelihood of me getting my car back.

“A car like that, they’ll just strip it and sell the parts. Or maybe it’s just kids, and they’ll joyride it till it brakes down.”

So my unnecessary errand would have to be postponed, and I sat down to study again, but the only thing going through my head was the slow realization of what life would now be like without a car. To live in the United States without a car comes awfully close to being denied the privileges and immunities of citizenship. I would have to buy a new car, but how would I even get to the car dealership? I was stuck immobile in law school, and the thought of that terrified me. But no use crying about it now, I had a Civil Procedure exam in two days.

The morning of my exam, I was awakened by a phone call at six in the morning. I was somewhat used to getting early calls by people in the East Coast, oblivious to the time difference, but this was a local call. It was the police department; they had located my car - or at least what was left of it. As happy as I was to hear the news, I had to forget about it for now since I would be spending the next three hours answering essay questions about the Eerie Doctrine.

After the exam, I convinced one of my friends to drive me to the impound lot where my car had ended up. The police department had a contract with a private towing company, and any stolen cars that were recovered, would end up there. The victim of the theft would then have to pay the towing company $250 to get the car back. Thus, the owner of the towing company has a lucrative incentive to hire a handful of goons to go around stealing cars and dropping them off a few blocks away from their original parking spots. And judging from the staff member who greeted me, I have no doubt that this was a criminal enterprise.

I paid the $250 and was shown to my car. I turned the ignition and nothing happened. Thinking the battery might need a jump, I popped the hood, and noticed that there was, in fact, no battery there at all. Along with the battery, the thieves had stripped the stereo, and a few little things – wind shield wipers, antenna – that couldn’t have garnered them more than a few cents in any sort of resale. In place of everything they took, they, for some entirely inexplicable reason, left a disgusting pair of cut-off denim shorts in the back seat.

My friend smiled and said, “At least they didn’t take your cut-offs.”

“They’re not mine. They must belong to the guy who stole the car.”

“Why would he take off his shorts and leave them in your back seat?”

“They’re not mine. I swear.”

“Sure. Whatever you say.”

We drove to the auto parts store and I bought a new battery for about $100. When we got back to my car, my friend and I had to embarrassingly admit to the emasculating truth that we had no idea how to install a car battery. The criminal tow truck driver, who had probably removed my battery in the first place, told us we were pathetic, and offered to do it for $20 cash. I whispered to my friend, trying to redeem our self-worth, “We may not know shit about cars, but I’d like to see this guy try his hand at that Civ Pro exam.”

After the battery was installed, I turned the car on, and was delighted to finally be able to drive again. Had my stereo not been stripped, I would have blasted Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild. But as I threw the car into first gear and pulled away from the impound lot, I noticed that no matter how hard I pushed down on the gas pedal, the car was incapable of going any faster than 3 miles per hour. My friend, wondering why I was driving so slowly and cautiously, honked his horn furiously, and motioned for me to hurry up.

I went back to the criminal and tried to explain my new dilemma, but he told me, “Not my problem. I’m not a mechanic, I just tow cars. If you want, I can tow your car to a mechanic, but it’ll cost you another $250.” I told him thanks but no thanks, and if he hadn’t looked so menacing, I would have called him an asshole. I would drive myself to the mechanic, ever so slowly.

So I drove at 3mph down a busy city street with a 45mph speed limit, while my friend, regretting having ever befriending me, drove behind me, the two of us forming a ridiculous caravan, and one hell of a road hazard. We finally saw an auto mechanic, but the whole ordeal had taken so long that night had fallen and everything was closed. I left my car there with a note that read, “Please don’t tow. Needs to be fixed. Will call tomorrow morning.”

As promised on the note, I called the mechanic early the next morning, and explained why I had left my car on their parking lot overnight.

“Oh, that’s your car?” the mechanic said, “We were just about to have it towed out of here.”

“Didn’t you read the note I left?”

“We couldn’t make out what it said. The handwriting was pretty bad. And did you write it with a highlighter?”

“Never mind. Just please don’t tow it.”

Apparently, the car thieves had driven it so aggressively, that they destroyed the clutch kit. Their little joyride would now cost me $500, bringing the total of this whole experience to about $1,000 in monetary damages, not to mention all the hours of lost study time. But at least I was now mobile again, and it was reassuring to know that if I ever became too fed up with law school, I could always hop in my car, and exercise the freedom of the American road, leaving everything behind in my rear-view mirror. And with Torts and Property exams just around the corner, this was a very tempting option.

(Un)Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving during law school was always a wasted holiday, since the break was conveniently used as the reading period leading up to exams. Wednesday was the last day of class, and exams started the following week, so any sort of long distance travel or time spent with family seemed highly reckless and irresponsible. So as a 1L, for the first time ever, I had to tell my mom I would not be coming home for Thanksgiving.

The only thing worse than being alone on Thanksgiving, I thought, would have been having to spend the holiday with my roommate. We had recently gotten into a bit of a fight. It was your typical skirmish between roommates: He was trying to study for a Criminal Law midterm, and I was watching his DVD copy of Matrix 2 with the volume up a little too loud, so he couldn’t concentrate on classifying the different degrees of murder with all that gunfire coming from the living room. He waited patiently for the movie to end, and then he approached me:

“Did you know I was studying upstairs?”

“Oh sorry. Was it too loud?”

“Yes. And did you know that I just bought that DVD yesterday, and I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet?”

“Uhm. I didn’t think you would mind.”

And then he used the opportunity to bring up everything I had ever done since I had moved into the apartment that had bothered him. Obviously, he had not gotten much productive studying done in his room, because he was too busy brainstorming about all my faults. Since I had just watched one of the Matrix movies, I had an incredible urge to jump, hang in midair while the camera rotated around the room, and roundhouse kick him in the face, all in slow-motion. But I wisely decided against it, since I would have probably pulled my groin, quite possibly broken the coffee table, and hurt myself more than my opponent. I was so preoccupied envisioning my roundhouse kick, that I missed most of my roommate’s comments:

“You don’t clean the bathroom . . . blah blah . . . You leave the toilette seat up . . . blah blah . . . You don’t wipe the kitchen counter . . . blah blah . . . You dropped some popcorn kernels in the couch . . .blah blah blah."

But he mentioned one thing that immediately snapped me out of my daydream and made me realize that I was living with a mad person, as opposed to just an insanely clean one. He thought my recycling was too dirty.

“I don’t know how you people recycle in Indiana. But here, you’re supposed to rinse out your bottles and cans and make sure they’re clean before you recycle them.”

He was basically telling me that I had to clean my garbage before throwing it away. But I figured if that’s what it would take to keep peace in the house, I could take the extra effort to do it. So from that day on, I couldn’t just toss an empty beer bottle into the recycling bin, I had to first rinse it out thoroughly, and make sure it was spotless.

On Thanksgiving Day, the thing I was most grateful for was that my roommate would be out of town for a few days, leaving me with the apartment to myself, so I could get some studying done without having to worry about whether I had left the toilette seat up. I called up a few of my friends whom I knew were in town studying, and we got together at my place for our own Thanksgiving dinner. The supermarket had, by then, sold out of turkeys, so we bought some lamb instead. We had a lovely little Thanksgiving dinner, with a nice lamb and plenty of wine, and for a few hours we forgot that we were stuck in school, away from our families.

When we were finished, my friends – well aware that I lived with an obsessive compulsive Nazi – volunteered to help me clean up. I was grateful for the help, but I should have been more vigilant in their supervision, because I failed to notice one of my friends empty his plate of leftover lamb and mashed potatoes into the recycling bin. There were two trash cans next to each other – one was for garbage, and the other for recycling. My friend, didn’t notice a difference, and dumped his food all over the empty bottles of wine.

On Saturday, after my roommate returned, I walked into the living room and found him steaming with anger. He looked like he was about to turn into the Incredible Hulk.

“How was your Thanksgiving?” I asked.

But he ignored my question, and in turn asked me, “Did you have a party while I was gone?”

“I wouldn’t call it a party. Some of the guys came over for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Oh Yeah?” By this point, he was screaming, “Well, one of your buddies vomited all over my recycling.”

I took a look at it and concluded, “It’s not vomit. It’s lamb.”

“Lamb?”

“Yeah. We cooked a lamb.”

“Who the hell eats lamb on Thanksgiving?”

“They were sold out of turkeys.”

“I don’t care what it is. I want you to clean it up.”

I asked him to stop and think about what he was saying. That he was actually suggesting I clean the garbage. That a reasonable person would not request another human being to do such a thing. But he insisted with his request, so I told him f**k you, and suggested that instead of cleaning his garbage, how about I just roundhouse kick him in the face in slow-motion.

Even the Pilgrims and the Indians were able to put aside their differences during Thanksgiving. Why couldn’t we?

Moot (Basketball) Court

2008-11-16T20:53:00.000-08:00

With the advent of the college basketball season, some proactive, athletic-minded law students organized an intramural basketball league for the law school. In the past, if law students wanted to play, they had to join the university-wide intramural league, but this meant going up against undergrads, who were almost always younger, stronger, faster, and generally better at sports. This newly created law school league offered a safe refuge for those of us who didn’t have time to lift weights every day, and who hadn’t shot a basket in a few years. In this league, you didn’t have to worry about getting dunked on and having your glasses fly off your face and shatter on the floor. It was supposed to be a nice escape from the classroom, an opportunity to blow off a little steam, have some friendly fun, and get some much needed exercise. It sounded great in theory, except that law students can’t seem to do something for the friendly fun of it. As everything else that surrounds the study of law, things got insanely competitive.

Some friends and I formed a team and joined the league. The requisite for being on the team was practically that you had to own a pair of gym shoes, because only about half of us had ever played any sort of competitive basketball. The other half, with any luck, might have shot mini-hoops at a sports bar at some point in their lives. That seemed to be a common trend throughout the league. There was only one team that looked somewhat competent. They had two black players, so they immediately intimidated everyone they went up against, and eventually blew everyone out and easily won the league championship. But even they would have probably been crushed by the last place team in the undergrad league.

As bad as the game-play was, it still didn’t prevent most participants from taking the tournament extremely seriously. With the way we are pitted against each other in the class ranks, law students can’t seem to help being competitive about anything and everything. This was evident on the basketball court, as not a single game went by without a severe argument breaking out. One player was kicked off the league – and nearly expelled from the school – for punching an opponent in the face during a game.

Not even the referees could keep their cool. During one of our games, a friend of mine had a problem with the referee, a 2L being paid $20 a game by the university. Every time the ref made a call, my friend would argue it, and anytime he didn’t make a call, my friend would yell at him for not doing so. This went on the entire game, and everyone was baffled as to why he wouldn’t just exercise is power as referee, give him two technical fouls, and send him to the showers. Instead, he put up with the harassment for two thirds of the game, until he finally snapped. He made a 3-seconds call against our center, a big fat guy who had no idea that he couldn't just stand underneath the basket all day and wait for an easy layup.

My friend went up to the ref and said, “Wow, I can’t believe you know what the 3-seconds rule is. Now if you could only learn what a foul is.”

At hearing this, the referee slammed the ball, and charged at my friend, grabbing him by the throat. He literally tried to strangle him. Everyone looked on, mouths wide open in shock. Our big fat center broke them up, and my friend let out a few coughs, regained his breath, and said to the ref, “You better learn to keep your cool, buddy. You can’t do that in the courtroom.”

The referee stared at him for a few seconds, but he didn’t say anything. He just turned around and walked off the court. You can’t very well have a trial without a judge, so the game was forfeited.

I’ve seen a lot of basketball in my lifetime. Prior to moving to California, I lived in North Carolina and Indiana, two states where basketball is an obsession. But for as long as I’ve played and followed the sport, I will always consider that unfinished game in our pathetic law school intramural league to be a milestone in the history of basketball. First of all, it’s the only time I’ve ever heard of a referee getting so upset at one of the players, that he attacks him and tries to strangle him. Second, it’s the only instance I’ve heard of a referee getting so upset that he quits, forcing the game to end abruptly. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the participants in that game heard the lamest piece of trash-talking ever spoken in a basketball court: “You better learn to keep your cool, buddy. You can’t do that in the courtroom.”

Damn Undergrads!

2008-11-09T20:17:00.000-08:00

For the first month of classes, since the law school starts in late August, and the rest of the university doesn’t pick up until mid September, the campus was virtually empty aside from the law students. It made for a surreal setting, where every person you saw was a future lawyer. Then, one Monday morning, as we routinely headed off to class, all of a sudden, the campus became packed with young, good looking undergrads. Guys with backward baseball caps, breezing by on elongated skateboards, and girls with short shorts, yapping on cell phones. They all looked tan, relaxed, and genuinely happy to be there, greeting the friends they hadn’t seen over the summer.

Once, on New Year’s Eve, I was out with a big group of friends, and having been priced out of all the fancy clubs with their $100 entry fees that include a glass of sparkling white wine at midnight, we ended up at a depressing local dive bar. The regulars were each sitting at their usual seats, which might as well have had their names on them, because you could tell that rarely did a night pass without them sitting at their respective barstools. Though it was New Year’s Eve, I guessed that the celebrations there were no different than any other night of the year – a bunch of old men staring at their drinks and waiting patiently for closing time. The only thing that varied on that December 31^st was that a group of rowdy youngsters had stormed the place, and were ordering shots, toasting the new year, and having more fun than that bar had ever seen.

Not until that Monday morning, the first day of classes for the undergrads, did I stop to think how exactly those bar regulars must have felt. Their environment had been taken over by a group of people who would be able to enjoy it at an incomparably superior level. It was sad. Our campus, just as that bar on New Year’s Eve, had been taken over by fun-loving youngsters.

On Monday afternoon, after class, my friends and I sat by a central fountain and watched the undergrads pass by. We envied the males to the point of hatred. One of them stopped near us to talk on his cell phone. We overheard part of a conversation, and it went like this:

“So tomorrow we’re going golfing in the morning. Then, I’ll probably take a nap and start drinking in the early afternoon.”

That was his plan for Tuesday: golfing, sleeping, and drinking. No mention of class, of studying, or of any sort of worry or responsibility. And the son of a bitch had just come off a 3 month summer vacation. Oh to go back in time and be an undergrad again. We thought about the contrast of what our Tuesday looked like:

“I’m on call in Civ Pro.”

“I’ll be at the library all day working on that ridiculous legal writing project.”

While we envied the males, we admired the females. Law school girls are . . . very smart. But in terms of aesthetics, the undergrad girls at this university were impossible to compete with. You could not study five hours a night and look like that.

“Dude,” one of my friends suggested, “We have to start dating undergrads.”

I took a good look at him and then at some of the girls walking by, and I didn’t think it was a very realistic proposition. But he hypothesized:“They probably love law students. They see us as stable and mature, and they think we’re going to be rich one day.”

As nice a thought as that was, it didn’t exactly prove to be true. The undergrad girls always seemed much more interested in dating undergrad boys who could play golf on a Tuesday morning and get drunk on a Tuesday afternoon. Plus, we might eventually become rich lawyers one day, but those undergrad guys had rich, generous parents, and at this stage in a girl’s life, that’s much better.

Since the start of the school year, I had been taking advantage of the university pool, swimming laps most days after class. That afternoon, my friend who had proposed we date undergrads, asked me if he could join me. I was a little surprised since he had never shown any sort of interest in swimming, or any sort of physical activity, but I was happy to have the company, so I encouraged him to come along. When we got to the pool, I realized that he still had no interest in swimming. He didn’t even bring a pair of goggles. The pool, as the rest of the campus, had been taken over by undergrads. It used to be that I would usually be the only one swimming laps. Every once in a while an old white-haired professor would dive in and swim the slowest stroke I have ever seen. Today, however, it was packed, though nobody was at all interested in cardiovascular exercise. Girls were sunbathing and guys were tossing footballs and flirting. Only one lane seemed to be designated for laps, and as my luck would have it, the old white haired professor had beaten me to it. I would have to wait for him as he pushed his painfully slow stroke along and took thirty minutes to complete four laps.

I complained to my friend. “Damn undergrads think they own the place. If they want to play in the water, they should go to the beach.”

But he barely acknowledged me. He was in heaven, wading in the water, wearing his sunglasses so he could stare inconspicuously at the glistening, bikini-clad bodies around the pool. This was precisely what he had come for.

Elections on Campus

2008-11-02T20:49:00.000-08:00

I took a stroll down the local university the other day, and lost count of how many Barack Obama signs I saw. There were a few defiant McCain/Palin posters, but they were the equivalent of a neon O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beer sign at a bar – a futile attempt to advertise a product where it doesn’t stand a chance.

Elections are rambunctiously felt in college campuses. However, I always get the impression that despite all the hype, on Election Day most college students forget to vote. Or they realize too late that they were supposed to register to vote; you can’t just show up and do it. Or they have no idea where their precinct is; they thought you could vote online. Or they realize too late that you’re supposed to vote in your home state, not the state where you go to college and by then, it’s too late to request an absentee ballot. So I don’t know just how reliable the college student vote is, but I do know that a university campus is an exciting place to be during an election. It’s like downtown Chicago around Christmas time, all the decorations, the aura, and the atmosphere really put you in the spirit of the season.

During my tenure at law school, I saw two exciting elections. The first one was the ridiculously entertaining gubernatorial recall election, starring Gray Davis (played by himself), the Governator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), and with cameo appearances by Gary Coleman and Larry Flynt. The recall election happened a few months after I moved to California, and I couldn’t believe how absurd the State actually was in real life. A few months before, I had met the governor of Indiana (the late Frank O’Bannon) and I remember being taken aback by how unremarkable he was. He looked and sounded like someone’s senile grandfather. Quite fitting for such an unremarkable State. On the other hand, the new governor of California would be the guy whom I had watched fanatically as a kid blowing people up in all my favorite action movies. I remember when Terminator 2 came out, I thought it was too much of a stretch that Schwarzenegger, after playing the evil Terminator in the original, would now play the good Terminator. Apparently, the majority of Californians did not think it was too much of a stretch for the man who had played any sort of Terminator – not to mention Danny Devito’s long lost twin – to hold the top executive position in the biggest, richest State in the Union.

The other election I witnessed as a law student was George W. Bush’s re-election. The campus obviously showed a general preference for John Kerry, though there were sufficient pockets of support for the incumbent. The same students who had flown “Join Arnold” flags during the recall were now sporting “W” t-shirts to class. You might normally refer to them as young republicans, or junior conservatives, but in California, we call them “kids from Orange County.”

But the politician who received the staunchest support on campus that year was neither of the two presidential candidates. It was actually former Vermont governor, Howard Dean, who made an impressive, though ultimately unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination during the primaries. For months, the slogan, “Dean for America” was displayed everywhere on posters, buttons, bumper stickers, t-shirts, you name it. Anyone confined to the boundaries of the campus would have thought the primaries were no contest, and that Bush would stand little chance for re-election. But when it came time for the actual voting, all those college kids in Iowa apparently stayed at home for the caucuses, because Howard Dean got crushed, not only by winner John Kerry, but also by the Southern trial lawyer turned senator, John Edwards.

And then came the tragically defining moment of Howard Dean’s political career. During an attempt to rally his troops and move on to New Hampshire, someone stuck a mouse trap into his pants and it shut violently on his testicles. He let out a high-pitched squeal of a scream, which all the news networks found to be hilarious and played on a loop pretty much until Dean dropped out of the race. And just like that, Howard Dean’s run at the presidency was over.

Back on campus, the Dean supporters had no idea what had happened. They didn’t understand what was so bad about a feverish, inarticulate scream during a public speech. What was the big deal? The only ones who understood the magnitude of his screw-up were law students. We had seen it happen on several occasions to our classmates on call. A slight slip of the tongue, or a minimal misunderstanding of a concept, vocalized in front of the whole class is the academic equivalent of the Dean Scream. It’s no wonder so many politicians are law grads. Getting grilled by a law professor is good preparation for running for office. Howard Dean went to med school.

Happy Halloween

2008-10-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

Halloween during my first year of law school completely sneaked up on me. Law school has a tendency to make you forget the outside world, so when on a Friday morning, I showed up to my 9:00am Contracts class and saw one of my classmates dressed as a clown - with a red nose, a red curly haired wig, and a bright yellow jumpsuit - I figured he had lost his mind. I wasn’t the only one. Several of my classmates watched him cautiously from a distance, paranoid our time might have come for one of those horrific school shootings, only instead of a trench coat, the shooter had chosen a more jovial, but no less terrifying clown outfit. Finally, it was the professor who remembered that Halloween would take place over the weekend, so he acknowledged the clown and wished the class a happy holiday. Collectively, everyone went, “Oh yeahhhh.”

After class and a nap, I went to find some of my friends and try to come up with some Halloween plans. Only one of my friends had marked the holiday on his calendar. Everyone else, like me, had completely forgotten it was late October. He announced there was a big rave in San Francisco and one of Europe’s hottest deejays would be spinning. We all hated techno, so we were far from impressed, but the idea of going to a rave in the city sounded exciting and refreshingly unlike what law students would normally do on a Friday night.

Of course, there was the matter of finding costumes.

“We should all be Supreme Court Justices,” I suggested. Everyone liked the idea and started shouting off which justice they wanted to be.

“I’ll be Scalia”

“I’ll be Clarence Thomas.”

And that’s were it stopped. It was a little embarrassing, but after two full months of law school, we were having trouble naming the rest of the justices, let alone knowing what they looked like. My short Jewish friend chimed in saying, “I guess I could be Ruth Bader Ginsberg.”

Then we thought twice about it. Did we really want to be in the middle of a rave, trying to explain to every girl we met who exactly William Renquist or Stephen Breyer were, and why we had chosen to dress up like them? So we went with more generic costumes. Instead of Chief Justice Renquist, I went as a cowboy. Instead of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, my Jewish friend, whose dad was a surgeon, wore scrubs and said he was an ER doctor. Clarence Thomas went as Hugh Hefner. And Scalia put on a headband, wristbands, and some running shoes, and claimed to be “a guy at the gym.”

The rave was fun, tough we felt a little out of place. We stood in a corner of the room, drinking beer and watching everyone dance and enjoy the drugs they were on. At that moment I was very glad we hadn’t dressed as the Supreme Court justices because we would’ve probably freaked everybody out – standing there with our robes and gavels, passing judgment on everyone. We might’ve been asked to leave.

“Is this the famous deejay?” I asked, yelling over the music, to my friend the techno fan.

“I don’t think so.” He said “Actually, I have no idea what he looks like.”

I asked him the same thing each time a new deejay took the stage, and he answered the same way, until finally the rave was over. We knew we had seen a famous European deejay, but we never specifically learned which one he was. During the car ride home, we each gave our best guess as to which one it might have been.

“It was probably the one in the orange tank-top. He looked pretty European.”

“No. I think it was the one with the bongo drums. He seemed to get the best response from the crowd.”

And that was a fitting theme for the night. We could say we had been to a rave and seen a famous European deejay. We could tell people that, and sound like hip twenty-somethings. But in all actuality, we felt awkward and out of place the entire night. We weren’t cool; we were law students. Our costumes sucked and we couldn’t even tell who the famous European deejay was.

But at least we tried. And that’s what’s important. Law school has a tendency to make you forget that you are still young. It’s almost impossible for a law student to feel cool. But every once in a while it’s important to try. Whether we fit in or not, we spent Halloween at a rave in San Francisco. And it beat the hell out of dressing up like a clown for a 9:00am Contracts class.

Guard Your Reputation

2008-10-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

The first piece of advice that I would give to someone upon arriving at law school for their first year would be to guard their reputation. While people will be pretty eager to make new acquaintances and friends, they’ll be just as eager to see others fail. Exams and grades are a full semester away, so people feel the need to draw on just about anything else they can get their hands on to establish a de facto class rank.

Getting caught with your pants down (metaphorically I hope) by a professor who randomly calls on you, or slipping up when you’re on call are probably the quickest ways to shoot yourself in the foot. I once had a classmate who, in front of the entire class, meant to say that he wanted to become a public defender. But he messed up and instead said he wanted to be a public defendant. The professor couldn’t resist and said, “Whatever you do, you should never aspire to be a public defendant.” Even though it wasn’t all that funny, the whole class laughed maliciously for about two whole minutes. The guy was done. He became an instant idiot. People wrote him off, and as far as popular opinion went, his future career prospects more likely involved him as a defendant on trial than any sort of competent attorney, even a public defender.

For that reason, law students, especially at the outset, are very careful to be on top form in the classroom. But the second easiest place to tarnish your reputation, and a setting where law students tend to be much less reserved, is the bar. As much as I recommend for law students to go out and have fun, you should never forget who exactly it is you are out drinking with. The first thing you know, you’re clinging glasses and taking shots with your buddies, and all of a sudden, when you show up to class the next day, everybody is staring at you with a big smile on their face, and whispering things as you set up your laptop:

“I heard he got a girl a pregnant. And he was so traumatized by the experience that he can’t get it up anymore. So he has to take Viagra. But one time he took too many, and he had an erection for a week. He actually had to go to work with a big boner in his pants. He said something to the receptionist, she freaked out, and he got fired for sexual harassment. That’s why he’s in law school.”

“Seriously? Where’d you hear that?”

“He told everyone at the bar last night.”

So maybe you just mentioned to a few people in confidence that you had tried Viagra once. But you know how these things can snowball.

Later on, as the semesters pass, you start to figure out who your real friends are, and who you can be drunk around without having to watch what you say. But at the beginning of the first year, you have no clue. Everyone seems friendly enough. You drink a couple of beers. You feel a bond forming with your new classmates. You take a couple of shots. And then you open your big fat mouth.

On the first night of orientation, the Student Bar Association organized an outing for all the 1Ls at a local bar. I went with my new roommate since he was the only person I knew well enough. I mingled and met many new classmates, but for the most part, I hung out with my roommate and had a good time with him. So, though we had just met the day before, we gave off the impression to everybody that we were good friends. We both had too much to drink, but our reactions to the alcohol were pretty different.

My roommate started dancing all over the place. He looked like a character from Footloose, who had been forbidden to dance by a town ordinance all his life, and now, he was finally free to give in to the music. He did just that. He must have danced for an hour and a half straight. He was not a terrible dancer, but he certainly wasn’t a good one. He had a strange style – very jerky yet methodical, like a marionette fighting jujitsu. He might have been able to blend in at a rave or a dance club, but this was a low-key bar with neon beer signs and sports decorations on the walls. And he was the only one dancing.

I was just as drunk as he was, so I thought, ‘Holy shit. My new roommate is hilarious.’ Everybody else stared at him like he had set himself on fire. They were clearly thinking, ‘How did this guy get into law school? He’s obviously insane.’

As if being associated with the crazy dancing guy wasn’t bad enough, I had my own turn at making an ass of myself that night. I stumbled onto a table where I recognized a few people from my section. They were talking about Israel. It is never good to join an argument about Israel and Palestine, especially not with people you don’t know, and especially not when you’re intoxicated. But I figured I had come to law school to argue, so I dove right in. I had recently read a book by Edward Said called “The Question of Palestine.” I had read Said’s “Orientalism” in college and, intrigued to read something else by him, I bought a used copy of “The Question of Palestine” on Amazon for something like 35 cents. This was a mistake, despite the bargain price, because Amazon now thinks that I am a terrorist, and every time I log on to the website, it greets me by my first name and suggests I might be interested in some pretty outrageous Islamic fundamentalist titles. I’m somewhat paranoid that Amazon, following some kind of Patriot Act obligation, might have leaked my name to Homeland Security.

Edward Said’s book, and his pro-Palestine thesis was still fresh in my head, and though I didn’t intend to plagiarize from the book, I sort of went off and recited Said’s main ideas and didn’t bother to clarify that they were not my thoughts or beliefs, but those of a Palestinian-American comparative literature professor from Columbia. It wasn’t until I left the table to get another drink that it hit me. ‘Oh no,’ I thought, ‘I hope I didn’t come across as an anti-semite.’

But it was too late. After one day of orientation, before the first class even started, my roommate and I had stamped ourselves as the dancing fool and the bigot. Needless to say, we did not get many visitors for a while.

Welcome to Your New Home

2008-10-12T20:35:00.000-07:00

The road trip was brutal. Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, I would have gladly slept through, but once you cross the border into California, you immediately realize why everyone wants to live there, and why people pay so much money to do so. When God created North America, he must have started full of enthusiasm at the West Coast, spending an elaborate amount of time creating a detailed masterpiece for the first 500 miles or so. Then he apparently went on vacation and delegated the next 2,000 miles to an intern, before picking back up at, I don’t know, maybe Pennsylvania.

I would have liked more time to take some detours, but the countdown to orientation was winding down. I finally arrived at my destination the night before orientation started. It was around midnight, too late to check into my campus apartment, so I spent one last night in a cheap motel. The next morning, I filled out some forms and got the key to my new apartment, but when I got to the door, it was already open.

“Hello?” I called out.

“Hello,” a guy answered with that California accent normally associated with surfers. He didn’t look like a surfer though. He had big ears and eyes about one centimeter apart from each other.

After a certain age, it is simply dangerous to randomly pair people up to be roommates. It makes for a frightening yet interesting experience freshman year of college, and almost works as a pedagogical element of college life – learning to live with someone from a different background, social class, or country. But by the time you get to law school, you are way past that bullshit. At that age, there is nothing educational about finding someone else’s pubic hair in your bar of soap.

I had signed up to live in campus housing because I didn’t have the time or the desire to go apartment hunting. Then, I was a little taken aback when, after all the paperwork had been finalized, I realized I had volunteered to live with a random roommate. I received the information about the apartment that had been assigned to me, and among the dimensions and amenities, as if he were a dishwasher, my roommate’s name and contact information appeared. At least it was a moderately big apartment, and we each had separate rooms. But I get annoyed when the person next to me in an airplane takes my armrest. And now I would be sharing a kitchen, living room, and bathroom with a man I had never met. The thought of this made me hyperventilate.

Not surprisingly, my roommate and I would grow to hate each other. But that was a few months away, when the stress of looming exams would make him irritable and cause him to find fault in everything I did. Actually, upon first meeting, I was pretty grateful to have him as a roommate, because by the time I moved in, he had furnished and outfitted the entire place.

He gave me a tour and showed me everything he had already contributed, “I brought a TV, DVD player, stereo, surround sound speakers, dishes, silverware, pots and pans, an air purifier, and . . . well that’s about it.”

I realized at that moment that I was not a man with much property to my name.

“Uhm. I just brought my clothes,” I said, a little ashamed, as I pointed to one of my garbage bags sitting by the door. “And my guitar.”

A few seconds of awkward silence ensued, and I could tell he was disappointed I had not brought anything of communal use. Then I remembered something, and my eyes lit up.

“Oh yeah. I brought a George Foreman grill.”

He was not impressed. He showed me his nice propane grill which sat in our patio. Maybe, I thought, we’ll balance each other out and get along. He’ll be the responsible one with all the material possessions, and I’ll be the lovable slacker, occasionally contributing a song from my guitar. It didn’t quite work out that way. But it was the first day of orientation, and with no idea of what lay ahead, anything seemed possible.

Westward Ho

2008-10-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

When the time came to leave home for law school, I was in a hurry. I had just gotten back from a summer in France, spent a few days running errands around Indianapolis, I packed all my clothes into garbage bags and stuffed them in my car, said goodbye to my parents, turned the key in the ignition, and nothing happened. I was supposed to drive 3,000 miles west to California in three days, and now my old Honda Accord, on which I was placing an incredible amount of trust, had decided it did not want to go through with the road trip. I called AAA, and a guy came over and jumped my car.

“You’re all set,” he said, dusting off his hands.

“So is it safe to drive it a far distance?” I asked.

“Yeah. It should be okay. How far do you need to go?”

“Uhm. To California.”

At first, he thought I was kidding, so he laughed. My car was filthy after sitting in the driveway for months, and washing it had not made my list of last minute errands. All that was visible of the interior was a mound of black garbage bags filled to capacity. Upon first sight, he probably thought my trash service had been cut off and I was on my way to the dump. When I finally convinced him that I was seriously planning on driving to California that afternoon, he scratched his head, and said, “I probably wouldn’t drive it that far right off the bat. Maybe test it out around town for a day or two, and if it seems okay, you can go ahead and take off.”

“I can’t. Law school starts in three days.”

He gave me that puzzled look that skilled blue collar workers – like mechanics, barbers, or any sort of repairman – often give to people like me. A look that says, ‘Why are the highly educated so stupid?’

So I ignored the advice of the AAA guy, and my dad’s suggestion that I junk my piece of shit car and buy an airplane ticket, and as the sun was setting, several hours behind schedule, I left home in Indiana and headed West.

Though I suppose heading West was once a noble American tradition, now a days, for a 23 year old to want to leave a state like Indiana and move to California seems like a ridiculous cliché. But while I didn’t ride a pioneer wagon through the Oregon Trail, I at least didn’t move there to try and become an actor, a rock star, a screenwriter, or any sort of showbiz ambition that usually leads to no more than waiting tables for a few years before eventually returning home with your tail between your legs and going into a career in sales.

Moving to California to attend law school retains a shred of originality. At least that’s what the State Trooper who pulled me over in Wyoming seemed to think. It was around two in the morning, and there was nobody on the highway except for the occasional semi-truck whom I would fly by at about 20 miles over the speed limit in a generous 75mph speed zone. So while I was surprised enough to see another car on the road, I was shocked when it turned on a set of flashing lights.

“Indiana huh?” He asked rhetorically as he shined a flashlight in my eyes. “What are you doing in Wyoming with all them garbage bags?”

I got nervous and overly polite as all guilty people do when confronted by cops. With a slight stutter, I told him I was on my way to California. I should have said Nevada, because as soon as he heard California, he suspected I was up to no good. He was shining the flashlight all over the car, looking desperately for drugs.

“And what exactly are you planning to do in California with all them garbage bags?”

“I’m going to law school.”

“Law school?”

“Yeah. I would like to be a prosecutor one day.”

Actually, I would probably rather be a State Trooper in Wyoming than a prosecutor, but the only possible bond I could think to accomplish with him was a shared passion for the enforcement of law. He softened up and gave an approving nod to my willingness to spend three years in school in order to help people like him put criminals in prison.

“What? They ain’t got no law schools in Indiana? Just slow it down. California ain’t going nowhere.”

For a second there, I thought my lie had worked, but then he handed me a $200 speeding ticket. Then again, maybe I did mitigate the damage because he guaranteed me that, as fast as I was going, he would normally have confiscated my license. Had I been on my way to California to try and make it in showbiz, I might have spent that night in jail.

Though as compared to where I slept that night, jail would not have been much worse. I pulled off in the next exit, which it being Wyoming, was some 50 miles down the highway. I stopped at a seedy motel where the only room available was the honeymoon suite. The thought of a couple honeymooning in these parts of Wyoming seemed beyond sad. I assume they called it the honeymoon suite because calling it the trucker brothel suite would raise suspicions. The room was for the most part a standard cheap motel room, except for a heart shaped hot tub in the middle of it. Along with the romantic name, the tub also allowed for the room to be priced at $20 higher than all the others.

Though I was exhausted, I wanted to get my money’s worth, so I filled up the hot tub, and turned on the jets. And so I sat naked and alone in a heart-shaped hot tub in the honeymoon suite in a roadside motel in the middle of nowhere Wyoming. It was perhaps the most absurd moment of my life. One of those times when you stop and think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’

And it occurred to me that it was an omen. The car engine that wouldn’t start, the state trooper that pulled me over, the motel room where I sat that would drive the happiest newlywed couple into an instant depression. Were these all signs that I should not be going to law school?