Otherwise Maladroit

26 May 2004

26 May 2004

You may have come into law school filled with soaring dreams of altruism and sacrifice, or looking forward to brisk semantic scuffles, or revved to explore unchartered moral landscapes. You have probably hoarded a treasure load of tips and techniques, and abstracts and reviewers. You may even have gone as far as piecing together character sheets for each and every professor, and if you're this fastidious chances are you already have a game plan on how to avoid the terrors in the bunch (admit it). But you're all wrong! The lot of you! Yes, even you who finished with summas and laudes, with commendations and appendages to your name, and with a Masters or even Doctorate swinging on your belt! Yes, even you are wrong!

Because law school is about one thing, and only one thing alone, and that is...sleep. And how many hours you could get of it.

If only sleep was a tangible commodity, it would be doing brisk business among law schools:

"A pound of sleep please."
"Your in luck I gotta special. Imported from China. Good for two hours."
"Ok, that one."
"Half a grand. Paper or plastic?"

Sleep, people, is a concept that will become alien after you've signed up for a year of penitentiary hell. If you've come straight out of college, hardly even wiping off you're milk moustache, then you're in for a shock. Law school is not college. Law school is an organic collective. There is no life out of it. It IS life. If you're in for the long haul (God, have mercy on you) then for four years Law school will be you're most strictest parent, you're most jealous lover, and the most tight-assed CO this side of the planet!

Do you know why?

If you're between a rock and a hard-place, would you want Pee Wee Herman to defend you? I didn't think so.

The subject of law requires precision in interpreting a staggering amount of information, where each detail has a nuance, and each nuance an outcome. It will be your knowledge of the law that will be between the client and the court. (On this note, I strongly discourage attempts to sway the judge by doing the macarena/spaghetti dance medley lest you rise the ire of the judge and get slapped with contempt.)

So what has sleep got to do with all of this? Well, between losing sleep worrying over recitation and studying for exams, there's losing sleep worrying about everything else and studying for all other schooldays that don't have an exam, which is around the rest of the year minus summer and holidays, but its always prudent to read up in advance. Then, there's research, memorization, digests, and more reading, reading, reading ad nauseam.

Plus, there's the Latin (which is kind of appropriate since your going to be living a monk's life minus the monastery) and all other legal terms that aren't in Latin.

However, all this self-denial is actually good practice - for learning to be chaste.

Chastity, you say? What makes you think that you'll have a social life after the bar? Have you learned nothing from Ally McBeal? (Or L.A. Law for all of you late-bloomers.) If you spend your time getting-jiggy-with-it to an imaginary dancing baby and drinking up your evenings with Vonda Shepard, you'll be stuck in kookiness hell with all the weird cases that never made it on The Practice (whose lives are all shot and angsty, for the matter).

In the interest of keeping things fair (I wouldn't want to scare you away), you do get something to ease your burden. Law students are provided with a place to sleep. Just look for a room that has the sign "LIBRARY". You may have heard of such a facility before - here's a hint: it has a lot of books, and at least one stiff-lipped person that likes to shush noisy miscreants. Given that the chairs are hard on the bum and it's forbidden to snore, at least you have a place to catch a few Z's in between cramming. On the bright side, aside from trips to the toilet and actual classes you'll already be in the one place that you should be 90% of the day. Pack a cooler and pitch a tent and you will never miss quality time with Cruz, Jurado, Reyes and other luminaries that guide the path down statutory enlightenment.

When the time comes for the results of your bar exam, stuff everything into a huge gym bag, and move your operations beside the picket of hungry people and impassioned student activists uniformed in Che Guevarra shirts outside the Supreme Court gate. You can even start your career there by giving out free legal advice.

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If I had any doubts that America is being hispanized they were completely "blown" away today. They now dub US porn in Spanish...telenovela style no less!

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Call center work is like being stuck in Monty Python's Clinic of Abuse and Argument.

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Never one to shy away from my dark side I've long acknowledged my capacity to keep eternal grudges, to intensely hate, to disdain with haughty iciness, to be stubbornly prejudiced, and to be an all-around asshole. Where others are wise enough to feel embarrassed, this ideological hypocrite revels in it. Yeah, it's sick!

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Why the Cutting Edge is so addictive, a self-justification

Because! How can any girl not like it? It's classic poor boy meets rich girl, they fight then fall in love, plus it's on ice! It's like all the best Sweet Dreams books combined into one script.

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Why I go gaga over Chinese movies, a confession

(It's all Cheung Man's fault!) At first, because it was unusual and frenetic but fun - then as I got used to the general feel of their movies, I began to appreciate their way of storytelling, their mythology, their expressions, and how their values are nearer to mine than what Hollywood portrays. But what I like best is their romanticism, fatalism, and how they do "open" endings without any closure for the viewer. Leaving one in a mellow funk for days, so that you can wistfully smile over the memorable parts like some long-lost love in your own past.

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I'm the only literate person (being able to read in not literacy) below the poverty line (minus the schoolteachers and professors whose masochistic streak pushed them into their thankless jobs...just kidding! But seriously...)

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10 Things To Love About "10 Things I Hate About You"

1. Kat's face when she was told that she's a heinous bitch
2. Ms. Perky's antics
3. Verona's wicked grin
4. Keegan's character showing the difference between underwear and swimsuit
5. Kat's comeback when Verona teased her that she's imagined him naked
6. the OST
7. the White Rastas, the Future MBAs, and the Cowboys (but particularly the White Rastas)
8. Verona singing in the bleachers
9. Kat in soccer uniform
10. Gym teacher confiscating a pack of chips

(There was a faux pas in the scene where Kat gets Verona out of detention - the moment she flashed the teacher Verona was looking right at them and wasn't out of the window yet, in later scenes it was indicated that he didn't know what Kat did to keep the teacher distracted. But he was there looking!!!)

posted by Otherwise Maladroit @ 6:01 PM