Wednesday, August 29, 2007

click it good

Through two years of law school, I've managed to avoid any classes that employ The Clicker. The Clicker is a device that...you know, I don't know what The Clicker does, exactly. I think it's a thirty-some-odd piece of equipment that allows you to vote for a particular response, kind of like the "Ask the Audience" lifeline on Millionaire.*

So I get to the Bookmart today to buy my $500 worth of books (by far the most I've spent during my seven year education). The girl at the window starts assembling my pile, then comes back and asks, "You don't really want a clicker, do you?"

At that moment, I realized that maybe the Bookmart is really on our side. They know that The Clicker is a useless piece of crap...and that the $30 I would spend on a Clicker would be better spent on other things...such as "The Office: Season 3".

So I leftThe Clicker at the Bookmart. And The Clicker won't be joining my schoolbook family until the day when use of The Clicker seriously impacts my grade. Until then, I'll pantomime clicking on my cellphone when I start texting people to tell them that Clickers are ridiculous.


*Apparently, the old "raise your hand" device is too cheap for the faculty to ask the students to use.

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Wednesday, August 22, 2007

chasing ron mexico

Dangerous Mind will be in Richmond, Virginia until early next week.

On Monday, Michael Vick will be entering his guilty plea in the federal district court for the Eastern District of Virginia, also located in Richmond.

(thinks)

I may need some "Mallrats"-style blueprints to crash this party......

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Sunday, August 19, 2007

old friends

J and I became friends on the first day of orientation - we were in the same group as each other, and she lived two floors above me. We had a blast freshman year...and then I committed the ultimate sin: I dated her ex-boyfriend. Basically, this guy came down to visit J after they had broken up, he and I became friends, and then we started dating over the summer.

Well, the ex-boyfriend and I split up shortly into my fall semester sophomore year, and J and I had a falling out shortly after that. After several months of moping around, I decided to just give up on the group of friends we had collected and move on, just living my life as independently and as care-free...well, as I have ever since. A few weeks into the spring semester of our sophomore year, I was having lunch by myself in the dining hall when J came over to join me. It took some time, but we eventually made up and repaired our friendship. (The same could not be said for the rest of our group of friends, who continued to ostracize me.)

J and I stayed friends for the next two years - we managed to plan some times to hang out while we were both studying abroad (once in Salzburg, the other in Edinburgh), we had weekly lunch dates, and we even spent most of graduation weekend celebrating together. A few weeks after graduation, we lost touch - the last I had heard was that she had moved in with the ex-boyfriend that nearly came between us (they had since gotten back together again).

In the four years since college, J isn't the only person with whom I've lost contact. The last friend I was in contact with stopped speaking to me in early 2004, after a falling out at work in which she was convinced that I was trying to get her fired. (I wasn't.)

The other day, though, I was puttering around on the interwebs when I glanced at the e-mail address that I really haven't used since college...and discovered that J had e-mailed me several hours earlier. Now I have a chance to reconnect with someone who played a rather large role in my life, and I'm pretty jazzed about that. Plus, it's always nice to know that, even though I spend the majority of my time alone, I'm not as completely alone as I think.

I think I'm gonna chase that feeling for a while.

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Saturday, August 11, 2007

back in black

So, my ten week sojourn into the north woods of Wisconsin has finally ended....and not a moment too soon. There's something about having internet access and a working telephone (not just a cell phone - ANY phone) that I rather enjoy.

A few brief highlights (and lowlights) of the last ten weeks:
  • I discovered that I don't really suck at legal writing after all. (Either that or the north woods legal community is just really, really impressed when someone can string together a coherent sentence...)
  • I also managed to win two cases and successfully argue against a motion to dismiss. So, even though I had to essentially beg to get into the court room*, when I did manage to get in there, I didn't completely crash and burn.
  • My iPod died. While this normally wouldn't be a highlight, the death of my poor pink iPod mini resulted in me getting a sleek new black video iPod...which means that I can take "The Office" and "Bones" with me wherever I go, and don't need my laptop to do it.
  • I discovered that last semester was my best semester in law school - by FAR. However, that awesomeness doesn't counterbalance my three semesters of extreme suckage, and I still have to try and get a job with a crummy GPA and a sad lack of journal on my resume.
  • Which reminds me - I got rejected from the journal to which I applied.
  • ...and I almost forgot the most important thing: the Cubs climbed from the depths of the National League Central to take over first place. They proceeded to promptly lose their hold on first place...but they've been within a game of the Brewers since July 29th. So I'm pretty confident that I'm going to be seeing some exciting pennant race baseball on September 2nd.

Either way, I'm sure something good will come of this experience. As soon as I figure out what that is, I'll let you know.

*Basically, my boss gets an intern so that he can spend the time he would normally spend on writing/researching on the golf course during the summer. He only showed up to work to go into the courtroom and do every hearing on the calendar - including initial appearances and bond hearings. So I really did have to beg to do more than just hand files to my boss while he was in court.

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