magic meter

Law school is depressing right now. It's a little past the middle of the semester, and the glow of new material has rubbed off. The weather has warmed up, briefly, which makes going to class doubly sad. This also means the classroom where I take Criminal Procedure on Monday and Tuesday afternoons is so hot you wonder seriously if you are going to pass out before 75 minutes is up. Today I fanned myself furiously and watched every minute tick by on the wall clock, feeling delirious.

Civil Procedure (on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons) is unwinding in an ever-more dizzying string of rules. The cases all turn on procedural glitches, each of which is assigned its own rule and subsection letter. Twelve-bee motions! Rule eleven charges! Pleading amendments (whose number, alas, I have forgotten already). I try to take notes as best as I can and not fall asleep, or daydream, or check my email, but some days it is so hard. Here I am again. Back where I started from. Stuck in a big classroom, feeling rebellious and stupid, trying to make myself stick with important minutia. The girl in the row in front of me is internet shopping. She is always internet shopping, or reading celebrity gossip. I found out that Anna-Nicole Smith had died because I was idly watching her surf one afternoon. I sometimes wonder how ADD girl does on exams, but I never feel superior in my note-taking. It is possible--very--that she does a lot better than me.

My legal writing teacher has taken a turn with the weather. Lately I've noticed a certain droopiness about her. She's usually nice, but has grown remote. Last week another guy and I walked in at the beginning of her class, papers in hand (they were due that day), but she had just started talking, which meant that we were officially late. I am usually never late to class, but for that day I was one or two minutes off. When I got my memo back I saw she had taken ten per cent off my grade for a late paper. Ten per cent. We broke the rules, and had to pay. The other guy told me he had gone to get a paper clip.

Statutory Interpretation is a little stale too, and even Con Law feels forced. I feel like I have too much personality, like I am too formed for the dormant norm that is supposed to be the awakening law student. I like to talk in class, then feel as if I've said too much. It's not what they were looking for. They wanted the application of principle A from the reading to illustrate hypothetical B. Duh. Stick to the program. Play by the rules. I feel like summer will never come. I feel like I will never be good at this. No one will hire me. I hate rules. I always have. Things will never get better, ever.

Mostly I feel like a freak, as usual. I can't decide whether or not to continue the shocking blonde hair I usually wear, because I am just so weary of being so different all the time. Old, slow, and queer in a sea of young heterosexuals who have never known anything much different from school, just like this. A few who have left and worked and come back, but most, just slogging on, going through the hoops. Traditional--some very conservative. Still their parents' children. Giggling, flirting, never running out of steam. Being exactly the A students they are supposed to be.

Some weekends I go home and GF and I just cling to each other. We sit near each other on the couch with our laptops, or drape over each other in bed with the newspaper. Sundays are especially hard. I put off going back until the sun sets and we are both a bundle of nerves. Then I get in the car and drive to the house I live in for now, the temporary house with too many roomates, with boys I have to share a bathroom with, and who I can hear snoring in the next room at night. I think for the thousandth time about moving but it seems so hard. Sometimes it's better to hearing snoring in the next room than have no one in the next room. Mostly I can't wait for spring break. I can't wait for summer. I can't wait for law school to be over, forever.

Then, last week, I find the magic parking meter.

I discover the meter one morning when I have to park a little farther away from the law school than usual. In a field of digital zeros flashing on and off for empty, this meter stands out. It is a solitary survivor. Its battered white half-moon dial is marked with lines in increments, like a protractor. All along its arc are numbers, signalling the hours from one to twelve. Instead of clock-radio digits, it has a black arrow that points to the numbers to show the time left.

It sits next to a chain-link fence that surrounds a cemetery. Meter 116. On the other side of the fence from the meter is a grave with a little angel on it. I notice the angel because it looks like the one we put on my mother's grave back home.

My mother believed in signs. When birds came back to nest in the back yard, she thought it meant something. When certain items she needed for the week coincidentally went on sale, it was because God was watching out for her. I used to ridicule her. I couldn't believe that God was sensitive enough to arrange for the precise groceries she needed to become magically available. Did He really have time to make sure vanilla extract was in the sale bin at the Star Market for the week of February 10th? She always went along with the teasing but I could tell a part her was dead serious. She really believed that God helped her make ends meet some weeks when it appeared impossible to feed all of us on what was available.

The first time I parked at meter 116, it was noon, and all the closer meters were filled. I noticed its difference from the meters around it, and noted, happily, that its arrow pointed just past the 1 on the dial. I put a quarter in and it jumped to the 3. Wonderful! Usually a quarter only bought twenty minutes. Maybe this meter was an hour per quarter.

When I came out two hours later to add money, though, the meter hadn't really moved. I wondered if it was stuck. I went back in to class, came out, and saw that it remained on the 3. I drove away, feeling the satisfaction of a bargain, but my curiosity was aroused. Was it broken? Would it stay that way? Had anybody else noticed it, besides me?

Sure enough, the next morning was early enough that the whole row of meters was empty. I pulled up to 116, still set at 3 hours. The sun was shining. The morning was new. Even though I had to go to class, I felt a bend in time. Not all rules were absolute. Not every system was monolithic. What luck!

I told my roommate about the magic meter when we drove to class one day. Sometimes I give him a ride to school in the morning. I thought maybe this time I should add some money to it, just in case the arrow fell slowly. I didn't want to impose too much on the universe, or take it for granted. He stood next to me and we both watched in horror as I put in a quarter and the turnhandle stuck for a moment on the yellow "violation" bubble. Oh, no. I wiggled it some more and it fell back down, leaving the arrow on 4. We both exhaled.

"Maybe you shouldn't mess with the luck of it," he murmured as we shuffled across the street. I nodded. It had been a close call. I had to learn respect for my gift horse.

Now I park at the meter every morning. I try not to hog it. I haven't changed my schedule to take advantage of its largess. I still come and go as I please, and sometimes in the afternoon, the spot is taken. I haven't noticed any consistency in the cars that park at it. I don't know if anyone has really put two and two together about its secret powers.

At some point, a parking person will notice. Some keen-eyed cruiser will remember that the arrow was at the same exact number the last time they drove by, and it will be finished. Or someone like me will dare the gods with an additional quarter, and the violation balloon won't snap back down this time. Then the meter will be officially broken, and they'll fix it, or worse, take it out and replace it with one of the soulless digital kindred that surround it.

Until then, it is the bright spot in my morning, like a bit of stolen sunshine. It is always a surprise when it is empty. It makes me happy every time I park at it for an hour, from 9am to 10. I drive slowly by the numbers, scanning the opposite side till I see 116. Empty! Ha! I swing around and pull in, facing away from the school, as if for a quick getaway. I lock up, check the meter dial, and shake my head with immense satisfaction. A free hour! What luck--again!

I walk inside, thinking about the simple pleasure of it. I know that it might seem silly--hokey, even--but in a universe that often takes without justice or kindness, my meter could very well be a sign that even when you are not looking for a bit of luck, even when you don't believe in it anymore, it can sometimes find you, in a tiny, dumb, immensely satisfying way.

public interest

The day of the public interest job fair, the temperature hovered at five degrees. I had to be downtown at 7:30 a.m. to sign up for an extra interview slot and register. The wind razored its way through the legs of my suit pants. I was grumpy because my day to sleep in was taken from me. I wore a down jacket over my suit jacket. GF drove me down, bless her heart, and dropped me off at the pretentious gothic gates of Secondmost Elite City Law School.

Secondmost had waitlisted me the first year I applied, but my LSAT scores were too low, and they cut me loose. They had been my first choice early admission school. They make you interview. I spoke with a very nice woman who had gone to law school elsewhere and was now working for them. Not a good sign about satisfaction in the profession, I remember thinking. She asked me about teaching, then grilled me about whether or not I really wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to ask her the same question, but I couldn't.

The next year I spoke with an impatient young woman who grew irritated when we both realized my most recent freelance job was not on my resume. I had been bouncing around by then, and was trying not to look unemployed, but my piecemeal writing gig was not what I thought of as a real job, and I had forgotten it. She didn't like that. My LSATs were slightly higher, and I applied early decision again, even though everyone told me the school was a corporate lawyer mill. What law school isn't, though? They didn't bother to waitlist me this time. No corpora te lawyer mill for me.

Now I had a whole day to wander their halls, stuck without a car until after my one scheduled interview at 4:15. Thier cavernous stone entryway reminded me of similarly uninviting halls down at Most Elite University. Impressive but not at all friendly or warm. Interesting that this was the site of the public interest fair, given how many other law schools are in the city. I sat down on a hard wooden bench and tried to keep warm.

At 9 a.m. we were herded into a big parliamentary classroom with high-backed pews that faced each other, descending down to the middle of the room like old-fashioned medical classrooms sometimes have. Medieval-looking crests sat on either side of the stage and podium at the front of the hall. Impressive, but hardly friendly, this room strained to convey an impression of striving, reminding one of nothing so much as the ermine-trimmed patrons in Renaissance altarpieces kneeling with their families on either side of the Annunciation. Rich enough to pay for the painting and even be in it, but not good enough to come inside the house and hang out with the Virgin.

The lottery commenced, and I signed up for an open interview slot with a policy group. I thought they might be interesting because they worked on affordable housing, public housing, and educational policy.

After this we were free to wander among tables where different representatives from city and state government services and public interest organizations sat ready to answer questions, hand out forms, and take resumes. I spoke with people at legal aid clinics, child services, and the public defender's office--all lovely, friendly, skeptical people who loved their work. After that lunch, then the wait to interview. The interviewer at the policy place was not a decision maker, but was there as a kind of intake person. I gave her my resume and tried to be enthusiastic. She was slick, wooden, heavily made up, and under 30. I think her hair was made of polystyrene. I think also she didn't like me so very much.

Finally the whole reason for my being there all day approached. My one interview. I climbed the steps of the library, up into the stacks, looking for the room where I was supposed to be.

The stairs of the law library rose before me, up through the center of the library itself, modern stairs with see-through steps. As I climbed, I looked out at magnificent panoramic views of the frozen lake glittering brightly beyond the huge floor-to-ceiling glass expanse of the far wall. Students sat quietly at tables, reading, oblivious. This treat was only for them, but none of them even raised their eyes to it. I wondered if they noticed it anymore.

The room at the top of the third floor stairs on the right was small, flourescent, and windowless. A little man with white hair that stood out in wispy strands around his face shook my hand. His baggy sweater hung on his shoulders. He asked me why I was in law school. I fed him some line about opportunity he only half-listened to. He cocked his head and looked intently at me. "Do you know what we do?" he asked.

I confessed that I didn't. I hadn't been able to find a web page, or a google reference of any kind, and they weren't listed in the big books that had been in the law theater that morning.

He nodded his head, satisfied. "We do post-conviction habeus petitions for people on death row."

"Fabulous!" I breathed. I couldn't help it. It just came out.

He went on to emphasize that this was no Innocence Project. "These are the guilty!" he announced, happily. Then he told me some of the petitioners were mentally handicapped. Others had been victims of spousal abuse. One woman was on death row for attempting to kill her husband, though no one was hurt.

He asked me what it was like to be back in school at my age, and told me his wife had gone to law school in her fifties. he told me he was 69. He spoke contemptuously of young law students, who he warned me would sit at work and tell me about their boyfriends and their girlfriends. "You're lucky if you can get six hours of work out of 'em!' he cackled.

Then he leaned forward. "I had a guy like you," he said, looking at me steadily. I think he meant an ex-academic going back to school, not an overweight blonde lesbian with a nose ring. He told me that first year students were the best for what he did, because second year students had to take the money of the big firms in the 2L summer, whether they wanted to eventually work at a firm or not. He told me that my writing skills would be perfect for his little storefront office, where he and his wife toiled together to try to save people from being gassed, or electrocuted, or lethally injected for the bad decisions they had made in their fairly awful lives. He gestured to my resume with disgust. "I mean, an English Professor! Of course you can write! How do you like law school? How did you do?"

I confessed I hadn't done so well. He shook his head, as if I had confirmed his worst thoughts. "We'll teach you something that'll be USEFUL to you," he said. "My wife and I, we gotta take care of the older people."

He asked me if I had any questions, and I asked him when he might know about his selections for the summer. His eyes twinkled. "If I offered it to you right now, what would you say?"

I was flabbergasted. "I'd say I'll take it, of course!"

He nodded, satisfied. "Send me an email accepting it," he said. "My wife and I, we'll protect you from the teenyboppers."

I stumbled out of the flourescent room onto the stairs, past the reading students and their panoramic vistas, past night and day and into the stone hallway, out the heavy oak doors and into my gf's waiting car. "I think I just got a summer internship!" I breathed. "He actually PICKED me!" I couldn't believe it. I hadn't imagined that I would actually get something out of the day beyond information and a few applications.

As we drove home past the expensive highrises, past the lake and the big houses near its shores, I thought about people who spend their lives making no money, wearing scuffed shoes and stretched-out cardigans, saving the world in their classrooms and storefront offices and legal aid clinics, day after day. And for the first time, really, since starting law school, I felt happy.

V-Day

Happy Valentine's to all! This week has been (happily) hijacked by the freedom to marry people (freedom to marrieds?). I want to give a shout out to Mombian, who has assembled a carnival of freedom to marry posts for your enjoyment.
Oh, and she mentions me. Just saying.

Valentine's Day is great in the abstract but often hellish in real life, especially for gay people, who have to decide whether or not to brave the het crowds in order to drag sweetie out for the ritual meal, so it's nice to have some queer activism putting its mark on this year's mix.

I'm sure plenty of straight couples also find V-Day a bit hellish. It's like New year's Eve, only worse. New Year's is about getting loaded in a crowd, whereas V-Day is all about squeezing intimacy out of a date with Special Someone, at a restaurant with Tripled Prices in Honor of the Day, all while trying not to notice your waiter hurrying you along so as to turn your table for another Special Pair with later reservations. And then what are you supposed to do? Go home to your messy house and have sex while the cats walk on your head and the family upstairs stomps up and down, over and over? How romantic.

My Valentine and I are apart this year, since I'm in school and the date falls on a Wednesday. Still, we spent a good part of today talking on the phone and texting each other. She went to the Auto Show and sent me pictures of dream cars. If I was home tonight we'd probably order Thai and watch tv. Maybe get under a blanket together on the couch, feed shrimp tails to the cats, flip channels. Try a new show on On Demand. Talk about the blizzard that just ended. Drink bourbon. Smell each other's hair. Smell each other's farts, probably, if we stayed on the couch long enough. Give neck rubs. Gossip. Text message friends. Watch the Daily Show and scroll Craig's List on our laptops.


Now THAT would be the perfect Valentine's Day. A normal, quiet night at home. Sigh.

Happy V-Day to all, and to all a V-Night.

Snow day

I should be in class right now, but I'm home eating oatmeal and bananas with gf, watching the snow taper off. Yesterday when it was time to leave to drive back to school I found myself feeling chilled, hungry, upset, achy, and sleepy. Psychosomatic? Maybe--although I did have a fever of 100.6. So we ordered thai, lay on the couch with blankets, and watched Battlestar Galactica, The L Word, and Rome. Eventually I warmed up and felt better, but not before my window to drive back disappeared. Then it started snowing.

This morning it is still spitting snow. I need to drive back, and I will, and the strange part is, I don't even feel guilty. I needed a lazy weekend. I needed this snow day, this putting off the week for a few more hours.

Last week was perhaps the craziest week of my life (and remember, I was on the academic job market for four years). It began with a Monday morning interrogation in Constitutional Law. Some of my classes have scheduled participation instead of random hazing. This means that class may be organized into panels, so each day some students must be extra-prepared, knowing they will be called upon at length. Monday morning at nine o'clock was my time. I got up early to be extra-prepared. Tuesday we had a rough draft of a change of venue memo due. I got home from class at three, sat down, and worked on the memo till one. I sat up till two reading for Con Law, then went to bed and was up at eight.

I have another class--Civil Procedure-- where the teacher is running down names alphabetically. Guess whose name was due to come up on Thursday or Friday? Also, the final draft of the venue memo was due Friday morning. And there was an extra Civ Pro squeezed in there--a makeup on Friday at noon. By Thursday afternoon it was clear that THAT particular makeup class would be the one where I was called on.

Up till two Thursday night finishing the memo, then up at 8:45 the next day. Skip Statutory Interpretation, unfortunately, because there would be no time to prepare to be called on in Civ Pro at noon otherwise, since the writing class where the memo was due was at 11 am.

Get up and read, read, read for Civ Pro, and try desperately to nderstand the rules for diversity jurisdiction in the cases we were studying. Ah! Not finished, and it's 10:50! Throw on clothes and screech out of driveway. Parking meter at 10:59. Dash to class to turn in paper. Read more in the ten minutes between that class and the next. Go to class and be grilled for 20 minutes straight. Slump over in seat when he moves on.

Home for lunch before next class. Pack and throw stuff in the car for trip home this weekend. Too tired to make sense of the reading. Dash to class, nod off, jump in car and drive home.

Hit traffic. Add extra hour on trip.

Get home three and a half hours later and swing by apt. to pick up gf for dinner plans with other friends. Go pee. Go to restaurant.

Sit and talk with friends. Drink martini. Drink wine. Come home and collapse.

Slow Saturday. Slower Sunday. Lazy Monday.

Time to get up and get going. Gf off to teach. Together we will brush off our cars, parked in the street. We will hold each other tight and whisper about Friday. She will drive to school and I will drive away and we will listen to music and think about each other and think about the week, starting slowly, rolling faster now, passing by in the minutes and hours wished away, our precious time in this life spent waiting between the weeks, between the snowstorms, watching the clock tick by until we can be together again for another timeless, lazy weekend.

Why does it take so long to read for class?

Sorry for taking so long to write in. I've been soo tempted, but I'm tring to be good this semester, whatever that means, and study harder and longer. I love love love my classes. What a difference from last semester! The procedures classes--civil and criminal-- are perfectly fine, since they are directly concerned with rules of justice; constitutional law is interesting, and my statutory interpretation class is the best class EVER. The name alone says it all: Statutory Interpretation. Sigh. I'm home.

Our topic is Fair Housing. I know--what's not to love, right? But the best part is that the professor is an intellectual. She's a woman, too, which is great, but she has exactly the teaching style that any academic enjoys or would love to have. When I mention to other people in my class how much I heart her, they hesitate, and say, "I don't know . . ." When I press them, they say that she wanders off the topic, or says too much. They say they can't tell what information they're supposed to write down. That they think she is too abstract. What she does, in fact, is raise issues and answer questions by exploring every angle of any comment you make. She paces back and forth and thinks out loud. Think Judy Butler lecturing.

I know, right? Yummy. So when she asks what the factors might be that contribute to the ongoing existence of segregated neighborhoods even after courts refuse to enforce racist housing covenants, and I say something like, "Who wants to live in a hostile environment?" she proceeds to explain how some recent academic work on this topic has addressed the instrumentality of "vibes" and the way they contribute to moving in--or not moving in--to certain areas.

Great, right? This is an intelligent, engaged person who knows a lot and is telling us what she knows. But it's not pure information, and that is bugging a lot of people. Me, I feel like I'm finally back in my own country.

Which maybe gives you a window into how shitty last semester was for me.

So anyway, things are looking up, at least as far as engaging material. I also figured out that the biggest reason for my bad grades last semester is . . .drumroll . . . that I don't type.

I know--how lame is that? We can write or type our exams, so of course idiot me thinks typing is easier to read, so I should type. The problem is, I think I actually type slower than I write, since I am a two-finger typist (three, actually--two on my right hand and one on my left). My contracts exam was six single-spaced, frantically-typed pages. My friend who got an A let me read his exam, and it was . . .13. He claims that two of those were canned answers he had already, but we're still talking twice as much as I wrote.

Do I still think like a professor? I wanted to make it easier on them. Students, on the other hand, think, "Who am I going to be measured against? Who do I have to compete with? How can I show a tired, skeptical grader that I know stuff?"

So to hell with it. I'm a student, and I'm writing my exams from now on. I suspect written exams are graded against each other in a way that is far more favorable than my typed exams will ever be. I'm also going to talk to my teachers from last semester, and I'm going to buy one of those exam writing courses. But seriously, what if it comes down to typing? Ye gods.

So I'm in a coffee house the other night, trying to read for Constitutional law, and I realize for the first time how fidgety I am. I want to go on line. I want to text message GF on my phone. I want to bother the guy next to me. The bench is hard. Con law is dry. I'm bored. I want to go home and drink a beer and watch the Daily Show.

And I am a wicked, wicked procrastinator. Procrastinator. Capitalize it. The solitary vice of OUR times. But instead of the palsied figure of the trembling Masturbator, with his thinning hair and scoliosis, picture a gal with white ipod headphones trickling from her ears, a mouse in one hand, a cell phone in the other, a Neverwinter Nights disk whirring away in her laptop, her eyes shifting around the room. reading the same paragraph over and over from the book in front of her.

I know--I blog, yes? Any of us knows that blogging IS the prima facie evidence of a Procrastinating temperament. But this is somehow news to me. What image of myself have I been carrying around all this time? Mrs. Concentration? Scholarly Lady? The Duchess of Deep Thinking?

I saw myself, and it wasn't pretty. A frenetic shadow on the wall of the cafe booth, looking for a way out of work.

So I am reformed, though as you can see by this post, not so very reformed. I have caught myself, and I will try to stop the urge to disengage before the reading gets done.

Which brings me to my real reason for posting. MySpace. Who the hell invented this thing? I have for so long adamantly refused to join, not from snobbery--ok, actually, yes, from snobbery. But today GF posted me a scary antigay video--the pathetic guy singing "God Hates Fags"--and I watched it in horror on MySpace. Because he's SERIOUS. And he's so, so gay. And his organization is called God'sLove or something like that. And his horrifying song is only about hate. Then I found some people who were commenting on the video, including a cool guy from the UK who was making fun of him. And I wanted to send this cool guy a message, just to say, you know, how cool it is that he's a decent person. But in order to send a comment, I had to join MySpace.

So I joined MySpace. OMG.

MySpace is scaaary! Not only do you get sucked into a profile, but people want to be your friends! Right away! Why? because they are nice, for one. And often interesting, for two. But also? because they are on line, looking for something to distract them. Because they are bored. Because they know they should be doing something serious, but they really just want to party, even if it is only on line. Because they are, when you get right down to it, wicked, wicked Procrastinators.

And I am too.

professional writing

What Now asked me a great question about professional writing in a comment, and it got me thinking generally about how schools do--and don't--train people to write professionally. Law school seems better than most in offering legal writing, which teaches students legal reasoning and memo-writing. There is a system of analysis called IRAC or IREAC, where you identify the Issue, state the Rule, give an Explanation of the Rule, Analyze the situation, and Conclude. This is the method for briefing cases when you read them, and this is how you go about applying precedent cases to a new situation in order to fashion an argument.

In a legal memo, for example, you might have a situation you have to evaluate. Say, a woman has seen a family member gravely injured by a speeding automobile, and it has affected her life in profound ways. She can't sleep, is depressed, jumpy, irritable, freaked out, and unable to return to work. The driver is already liable to the injured party, but is he liable to her? You have to figure it out.

You realize that her charge resembles a tort called Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress (usually abbreviated IIED), but in this case it is linked to a driver's negligence, so it may be Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress. You look for similar cases in your state that qualify as precedent cases (appellate decisions, circuit courts using your state's laws, etc. that haven't been overturned and thus are still "good law"). You do the IRAC or IREAC analysis to argue why these precedents apply to your case. You then do the IREAC analysis on your case and make an argument in the memo whether you think the woman has a case or not.

All this we learn, and this is the basis for good legal writing and reasoning.

What we DON'T learn is how to write for a test. Supposedly we apply some form of IRAC to test-taking, but as you can see, this rather lengthy process takes a lot of time to spell out, so it has to be different. Also, the point on a test is not to brief cases, but to analyze a situation and apply rules to it.

Let me explain. We spend the entire semester in any given class studying case law. Cases. We IRAC them in some form or other. So far, so good.

Then we get to the test. Even though the semester has been spent reading cases, they don't matter on the test. What matters is the rules that come from the cases. The rules are called "black letter law," as opposed to case law. You will have little practice applying and analyzing the rules at length before hand. Mostly, you will discuss them in their textual (case) context.

The closest comparison I can think of is studying Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway the way one would, then taking a test where you have to recognize metempsychosis or Time Passing in a completely different, silly made-up scenario. The professor has said he doesn't care about cases (novels), only the rules. And there are lots of rules from hundreds of novels (really, short stories). So what exactly do you say, once you have identified metempsychosis or stream-of-consciousness? DO you talk about the story(case)? How much? The new scenario? How much do you say? Time is so short on the exam--have you said too much? Not enough? Have you analyzed it enough? Too much? What did you leave out? You have to stop now and move on to the next question. And you already wasted a lot of time writing complete sentences.

I explained it to a friend as spending the entire semester building a Ferrari as a class project, then being tested on whether or not you could drive it really fast on a racetrack. You never learned how to drive it, and building it won't teach you that. You have to go out and get a Racecar Driving for Dummies book and figure it out.

You can see where this kind of abstraction would trip up an English type like me, even when she can logically see how the abstraction works. Methodical, careful, textual people have got to give it up and get faster, looser, more abstract, more information-managing. Dump it, splatter it, and move on. It's not about thinking, folks.

I've already decided to shell out for at least one of those day-long seminar courses in writing exams. I just have to make the transition and figure it out.

Now, this is a bit like sink-or-swim, but even though I am whiny and cross and depressed, I think it is a lot LESS sink-or-swim than horror stories I have heard about some elite grad school literature programs that cut their MA students after a year. A friend of mine went to one of those superfancy programs, and they kept telling her she needed to write better, but nobody could tell her how (because none of them could teach writing--they just knew good or bad writing when they saw it). She tried and tried and sweated and worked like a maniac and got cut anyway. After running up a year's worth of Elite University tuition debt.

So I know I will figure it out, and hopefully won't get cut after a year! Maybe professional writing can be about flexibility and growth rather than limitations and failure. Learning another kind of writing and thinking doesn't have to be about loss of the expertise one has already acquired. There's a Roz Chast cartoon I love where a woman is reading a tabloid and happily exclaiming: "Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow are on the outs!" Behind her, a fat suitcase labelled "Medieval Art History" is falling from the sky into a big trash can. But we don't have to erase what we've learned from our hard drives in order to make room for new stuff, do we? Can't we just grow the RAM to run it all at once? I love Lucyrain's story--also in a comment-- about her successful lawyer friend who had to overcome writing problems her first year. Thanks for that--and for giving me the chance to talk about all this, and think about professional writing more generally.

Friends rock

I'm getting lots of support from all over, and I love it. Thanks everyone! Yesterday was pretty rough, but GF took me to a basketball game and I yelled till I was hoarse. And I also cheered the game.

Had two conversations with friends who made me feel better. One was with a friend who just felt angry for me. Everyone needs a friend like that sometimes: no wrangling or reasoning; just pure loyalty.

The other conversation was with a friend who was a lawyer before she became an English professor. She said I was overtrained in reading and writing and I just needed to learn to take law school exams. I asked her if I was doing the wrong thing going to law schooland she said absolutely not, which since she is pretty pragmatic about the suckyness of most jobs, including lawyering and professorializing, I appreciated. Also she could care less about grades of any kind, which I also like.

GF has been amazing. After freaking out for less than ten whole minutes, she pulled an about face and kicked into super-support mode. Last night I tossed and turned with worry but tonight will be better.

And you friends reading out there are awesome. Thanks for writing nice things.

Time to regroup. I'm trying not to dread the semester, and you all cheered me up. Thanks!

if grades equal identity, i'm a gentleman

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Grades came out today. I don't really know how to talk about my unbelievably mediocre performance, other than to say that I am clearly not the only person demanding answers from Google right now. The web is full of comforting voices trying to reassure the desperate and suicidal that indeed, plenty of people get Cs their first term and go on to get stellar grades and great jobs afterwards. I am trying to listen to them and refrain from what I really want to do right now, which is withdraw from next semester, cash in my entire TIAA-CREF retirement account, and try something else.

If I hadn't worked so hard last semester I wouldn't be so devastated--after all, you know when you didn't go that extra mile and you should have, and when you get your grades, you say, yeah, I really didn't work as hard as I should have in this one particular way. But the truth is, I did go that extra mile. My problem is efficiency. I worked hard, studied hard, outlined, read supplements, and sucked at taking the actual exams. Sucked hard, apparently.

Why?

I have no idea. I suspect some of it has to do with my inability to touch type and my slow, plodding insistence on full sentences. Maybe I should have hand-written the exams. I have talked to at least one 3L who tried this after her bad first semester grades, and subsequently did much better on exams.

I've already been on the phone to my school and made an appointment for the first day of classes to talk to a career counselor. The secretary and I joked about making an appointment for my "friend" who needed academic help. Ha ha.

"Law school," a fellow student in my section is fond of saying, "when your best just isn't good enough." She gets called on all the time and often appears to be asleep. I bet even she did better than I did.

Then I found Harry Blackmun's law school grades on "too much about nothing," and it comforted me. Granted, Blackmun still finished 120 out of 451 at Harvard, but still, these babies make a gentleman girl failure like me feel a teensie bit better.

Harry Blackmun's Law School grades, courtesy of Too Much About Nothing:

Year One:

Civil Procedure: B
Contracts: C
Criminal Law: C
Property I: D
Torts: C

Year Two:

Bills & Notes: C
Equity II: D
Evidence: C
Property II: A
Sales: C
Trusts: D

Year Three:

Conflict of Laws: C
Constitutional Law: C
Corporations: B
Property III: A
Public Utilities: B
Suretyship & Mortgage: B

So there you have it. It's a low bar and I'm certainly not at Harvard, but mostly, the only way to go is up. Cheers, Harry.

the gayest christmas

I'm home and I get to sleep in my bed next to my very own person. I swear to you I will never take it for granted again that I can roll over and see her sleeping face. She sleeps with great determination, her lips pressed tight together. Some days we sleep in to ridiculous hours. Today we slept till almost 11, for no good reason other than that we liked it. Our Christmas tree glitters in the next room. The cats have developed an obsession for plastic garland. We find it in the hallway when we get up. Sometimes it is in the groove lounge next to the kitchen. The cats always look guilty when we find them chewing it. The girl, especially, looked ashamed yet defiant, as if we have caught her masturbating. Which, since she's a cat, would be a lot more socially acceptable in our house than her inexplicable garland fetish.

It is gray and cold outside, but we have leftover apple-glazed ham from Christmas is the fridge, which means I can make extravagant egg, cheese, and ham sandwiches on english muffins in the morning. I don't usually like or eat ham, but our friend Travis had a hankering for Christmas ham, and brought a giant spiral ham to add to our 18-pound turkey on Christmas Day. We warmed it in a porcelain cooker plugged in under my desk in the study. I've never wanted to sit down at my desk as much as I did smelling that ham.

People drifted over all during the day on Christmas. These last few years we have been having gay Christmases, which is the Christmas you really want to have with all your gay friends where you sit around and eat and drink and watch something campy. One year I made everyone watch The Littlest Angel, which to me is the best blend of bizarro psychedelia, Hallmark sentimentality, and queer sensibility ever seen in a made for TV Christmas special. Think muscle-y angels in impossibly short togas doing calisthenics. Think Tony Randall as an administrator in heaven. Think Johnny Whittaker being sung to and softly caressed every now and then by Fred Gwynne.

This year I got up at 730 and made celery, onion, and mushroom stuffing with fresh herbs, then rubbed the turkey with oranges and stuffed it. I went back to sleep for an hour, then got up and made sweet potato-carrot puree with creme fraiche and two apple pies. I gave my neighbor the bag of potatos and he made them in his kitchen. Friends brought nuts, chocolate, and wine. We heated up rum punch and it made the kitchen smell like apples and allspice. The turkey reached a nutty brown color and we took it out. We threw in the pies. Damian put his green bean casserole (the kind you eat at church suppers) in the oven to warm up. Travis and I snapped the tops off the fresh green beans and cooked up a bunch in a little butter and garlic. The neighbor showed up with the potatos, and brought a homemade cheesecake. Damian made fresh cranberry sauce. Travis finished the beans and I made a lush tub of gravy from the turkey pan drippings. Someone started carving the turkey in the next room. Bottles of wine appeared and were opened with satisfying pops. GF lit the Lily Munsterish candleabra, a grandiose thing we found last year at Target, and put it in the livingroom on the coffee table. The tree glittered. The candles burned. Everyone heaped their plates with food and gravy. When no one could eat any more everyone flopped down on couches and the floor and watched Auntie Mame. Later, inexplicably, we all roared through four or five kinds of cheese, literally licking the rinds.

Yesterday GF and I had great plans to go to the gym, but instead we did a little work and GF surpised me with a spontaneous Dream Date. She took me out to a nice restaurant where I had mussels, then lamb in the most amazing reduction, which I am still thinking about. Then we went to see the movie The Queen, which was remarkably emotionally gripping. If you were wondering whether you still could cry at Diana's funeral, the answer is Yes. A lot.

Today is a late start, but we have sworn to really, really go to the gym today. I have to. I think my cholesterol must be at record levels. But first, I think I'll help myself to just a bite of leftover pie. Then I'll sit next to the Christmas tree, and look at it, and think about all the people I love who are gone, or far away. And I'll miss them, but feel only the tiniest bit guilty that I'm all alone with GF, and the cats, and the gentle crunching sound of plastic garland.

I wish I was more surprised

I'm Caligula. Who knew? And I thought that girlhood love of horses was just . . . dykey.


Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
You are Gaius Caesar Germanicus - better known as Caligula!

Third Emperor of Rome and ruler of one of the most powerful empires of all time, your common name means "little boots". Although you only reigned for four years, brief even by Roman standards, you still managed to garner a reputation as a cruel, extravagant and downright insane despot. Your father died in suspicious circumstances, you were not the intended heir, and one of your first acts as Emperor was to force the suicide of your father-in-law. Your sister Drusilla died that same year; faced with allegations that your relationship with her had been incestuous, you responded, bafflingly, by declaring her a god.

You revived a number of unpopular traditions, including auctions of properties left over from public shows. When a senator fell asleep at one such auction, you took each of his nods as bids, selling him 13 gladiators for a vast sum. You attempted to have your horse, Incitatus, made into a consul and hence one of the most powerful figures in Rome. It was granted a marble stable with jewels and a staff of servants. At one point you forced your comrade Macro to kill himself - in much the same vein as your father-in-law - accusing him of being his wife's pimp. You, of course, were having an affair with said wife at the time.

Things went from bad to worse. When supplies of condemned men ran short in the circus, you had innocent spectators dragged into the arena with the lions to fill their place. You claimed mastery of the sea by walking across a three-mile bridge of boats in the Bay of Naples; kissed the necks of your lovers, whispering sweet nothings like "This lovely neck will be chopped as soon as I say so,"; dallied with your sister's lover and made her pull her unborn child out of her womb prematurely. Towards the end of your reign, you had a golden statue of yourself made and dressed each day in the same clothes you yourself wore. When you eventually died, the terrified people of Rome refused to believe that such a cruel reign could ever end, and believed you to be alive for years afterwards.

three down

Three exams down; one to go. I've been off-line at home most nights till recently, since my airport card had a conflict with my roommate's wireless server. It's kept me from internet shopping. I know I can write at night off-line and save the document to post later, but there's something about writing on line that makes blogging easier.

Anyway, the semester draws to a close. I'd like to be able to say I aced all my exams, or bombed them, but the truth is I did ok on all of them so far, and left the room knowing precisely what I had done right--and what I had messed up. Contracts--the class I worked the hardest to stay on top of--was the most satisfying exam. Open book and open computer, it rewarded preparation and organization. I went in to that exam with an outline bristling with multi-colored tabs and filled with red-highlighted Restatements (Second, of course). Sometimes I was flinging myself out into space answering those questions. I think I missed things and got some things wrong. I talked at length about a parol evidence problem, for example, without ever managing to use the words "parol evidence."

Criminal Law was the exam I feared most. Closed book, it seemed that we not only had to memorize endless information, but apply it quickly and with precision and economy as well. Again, I felt when I got in there as if I was bursting with things to say--more than I had time to write. So much more, in fact, that i left myself too little time to round out the last question. I ended with the word "mens," in mid-sentence and mid-thought, trying to explain the mens rea that a prosecutor would have to prove for a battery charge. It should have been simple--I had already done the more difficult one for attempt, with the enhancements you have to apply for inchoate crimes such as conspiracy, attempt, and accomplice liability--but I hadn't left myself enough time. I walked out of that one kicking myself. In a good way, I guess.

Today was Property. I thought Property was a slam dunk--until I started really studying and realized how much information I had to memorize. I did what I could, but I definitely felt tiny details escaping me today as I tried to remember them. The difference between covenants and equitable servitudes? DIdn't seem to know it--though I knew future interests and estates cold. But we were not asked about these, alas. Adverse Possession? Yes--at least I knew adverse possession. I made up NO ACHE to help me remember: notorious and open, actual, continuous, hostile, and exclusive occupation of someone else's land in an effort to claim title for one's self. Joint Tenancy? I knew Joint Tenancy. Four unities, right? Time, Title, Interest, and . . . something beginning with P. Place? Didn't make sense. But say place.

Even though the answer is . . . Possession.

Idiot.

Ah well. On to the three ring circus of Torts. And after Saturday, my first semester of law school is over.

And no matter how well I didn't do, or how well I did, it's almost 1/6 over. And that, as the phoenix-like Martha would say, is a Good thing.

turkey hand

I wanted to write Happy Thanksgiving, but it hardly seems fair to stand behind a celebration of the beginning of the upper North American project of conquest and genocide, as brought to you by the English. So I decided to wish you all happy fellowship, which is what Thanksgiving is supposed to celebrate, in theory. At least, that's what they tell us in second grade when we are making our hand turkeys. But then I realized that the other part of Thanksgiving is sheer gratitude for survival. Those darn Pilgrims were just happy to be alive. And it seems, with apologies to those whose survival was snuffed out by said Pilgrims, that survival is not such a bad thing to be thankful for.

Growing up in the 1960s, I got the usual spiel about the first Thanksgiving, from the unexamined perspective of the Pilgrims. How happy it was. How we all had to be grateful for the harvest, for surviving the autumn, for peace with our neighbors. In New England, where I am from, the language of the local tribes has sunk into the land for hundreds of years now. Lake Winnipisaukee. Mount Monadnok. Mount Chocorua. Big Squam Lake. Mount Passaconway. Kangamangus highway. Penacook. All Indian names. All those people gone, mostly wiped out and finally, driven into Canada. The great chief of the Pennacooks was Passaconway, the Merlin and Arthur of the New World, six feet tall and a wondrous magician, able to wipe out the white invaders but choosing not to do so, keeping peace treaty after peace treaty until he himself was finally driven north out of the lands his people had lived on for centuries. Born as early as 1555, he is said to have live beyond 100 and to have finally been taken in a burning sled up into the sky, like Elijah.

Then there was Chocorua. Sometimes he is given another name, but this chief trusted his son to the care of a white friend when he went on a hunting trip. The boy ate rat poison left out for varmints in a bowl of porridge, and died. When his father returned, he went wild with grief, and set about massacreing as many settlers as possible. When they finally cornered him at the top of a steep peak, he leapt to his death, but not before cursing the land and all its inhabitants.

Many scholars have written eloquently about primitivism, about the lure of the fantasy of unfettered freedom that indiginous peoples symbolize to many westerners. I wonder if this is part of the attraction of Thanksgiving, but I wonder if it is more ambivalent and vacillating in its fetishism than stable on one side or the other. It's not that you are the Indian, or the Pilgrim, but that you can be the Pilgrim and the Indian too. Isn't that so American? That kind of identification seems predicated on a certain security as a survivor, doesn't it? You know you will survive, so you have the luxury of being either side, or both sides at once.

There is a road just north of where I grew up, a dirt road running nine miles through the wilderness, that once housed an entire settlement. Now all that is left are the cellarholes of farms, schoolhouses, taverns. These people moved on when the Ohio valley and beyond opened up. They felt Chocorua's curse on their farms, tiring eventually of pulling one granite boulder after another out of the sandy soil in a vain attempt to plow. They kept the exodus going after the Civil War, taking their doors and expensive windows off their hinges and frames, leaving the snow and rain to sift in and quietly pull the houses apart with soft fingers. In the heart of what used to be a town there is a tall rock where a minister famously spoke in good weather to the congregants below, exhorting them to cling to each other in the wilderness. It is still known as Pulpit Rock. If you go there you can hear the river bubble on the rocks nearby, and hear the wind in the leaves.

Our house was built in 1780. A man named Sturtevant climbed an enormous pine tree and surveyed the land around it, eventually building several houses, including ours. It served as a summer camp for girls from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen sixties. Supposedly the girls dressed as Indians and rowed out on the lake in canoes. They had rituals and songs about warriors, adventure, and magic. They gave themselves and their lodges Indian names.

In the fall when I was little we gathered the flaming orange and yellow leaves from the road for our school bulletin boards. We made Indian headdresses out of construction paper and string. In late October or early November the chill might warm for a week or two to 60 or even 70 degrees--Indian summer. Some said it was called that because the warm weather had meant new attacks on white colonists. Indian summer was a scary time once.

We played on stone walls covered with moss and thought nothing of it. When you walk in the woods up there, even in dense trees, you will cross stone walls. Beautifully built stone walls that remain sturdy and thick, stretching on over the tops of the hills. And you know that you are walking in someone's field, and that it has been reclaimed these long years past by the trees and the pine needles and the underbrush. I wonder if these farmers thought they would stay forever.

I'm not sure what kind of alibi or consolation it is to remember the Indians like Passaconway, who could have wiped everyone out but chose peace. I'm not sure where it gets you to think about why people like disidentifying with the rulers they are and identifying with the people they have wiped out. I like to think about Passaconway, though. I wonder why someone so powerful and intimidating chose diplomacy and forbearance.

I remember the giant pine trees in our driveway at home, sighing in the wind. Sometimes you could see the silhouette of a great horned owl in one of them. Of course we never felt like pilgrim stock. We were children free on the land. We were powerless yet we had all the wealth of exuberant childhood, and all the righteousness of people who were not grownups. We had survived the centuries to be there, yet we would never forget what the land whispered to us, or so we thought. We were so American. We were Indians, with Pilgrim futures. We still are.

Breaking the Syndrome

If you are anything like me, you experienced a roller-coaster feeling on Tuesday night. By "roller-coaster" I mean that mix of queasy and happy, alien and familiar in your stomach that started to set in as the poll numbers came back. Like a middle-aged person who has found love again, I felt hope, and it was a strange feeling.

Remember 1992? Remember how it felt after the bleakness of the long Reagan-Bush era to see the country choose someone intelligent, liberal, vibrant, and in touch?

That night I celebrated with friends now long gone from my life, sitting around the tv with champagne and cheering as the states came in for Clinton. I was just thirty years old and the country had come to its senses for the first time since I had been old enough to cast my vote at eighteen for Jimmy Carter in the Reagan landslide.

I don't even have to say how much has happened in the last fourteen years, besides pointing out that I can't believe it's been fourteen years. The personal and political tragedies that have ocurred in the interim seem common to people all over. Very few of us have not lost jobs or seen our wages stagnate or fall. Some have gotten rich on real estate, but not the people I know. My friends have battled depression, illness, unemployment. When we looked to the national mood, it routinely confirmed the bleakness in our hearts.

There was little joy in soldiering on, though we did. Of course Howard Dean was ousted by the crypt-keeping party elite, the compromisers and slick operators like Kerry and Hillary who sold out so long ago they can't remember who they were. They voted for a war we knew was wrong, and what was worse, we knew as we watched them that they knew it was wrong, too. We watched them lose and we didn't care. They were a bad TV show we dutifully sat down to because it was a habit from younger days and there was nothing better on. Like ER.

So last Tuesday was a revelation. As the numbers came in and I watched the tide turn, I felt something lifting and moving away. People were coming to their senses. They finally saw this administration for what it is--an abusive husband who isolates you from your friends, beats and exiles your sons and daughters, cuts your spending allowance while demanding more and more of your labor, lavishes scarce resources on opportunistic cronies that prop up his masculinity, and pays for his self-indulgent new gadgets by mortgaging the family farm.

Like battered wives, the nation returns over and over again to these strong men, these people who threaten you with fear and violence, who take from you and tell you that you need to be taken from, who tell you that you are evil and immoral and must be punished. Republican hegemony has created and played on the masochistic psyche of our guilty culture. We know we are pillaging the earth but we don't care. Beat me daddy. I'm a bad, bad girl.

After a while, though, even whips and chains can become routine. So maybe our bored consumers are ready for a less perverse adventure in political optimism. Maybe they are ready to like themselves enough to end the ridiculous blood and penance kick of the post 9-11 neofascists, and get on with being grownups in a morally-nuanced world.

How did you feel when you watched the tv this week? Surprised? I would like to say that this feeling I experienced when I saw state after state turn blue was happiness, or even exultation, but I think it was more basic than that.

I think I just felt relief.

Ima peach

Thanks Hilaire and LucyRain for this fun test.

The Peach Random Gentle Love Master (RGLMf)     Playful, kind, and well-loved, you are The Peach.     For such a warm-hearted, generous person, you're surprisingly experienced in both love and sex. We credit your spontaneous side; you tend to live in the moment, and you don't get bogged down by inhibitions like most women your age. If you see something wonderful, you confidently embrace it. Your exact opposite: The Nymph Deliberate Brutal Sex Dreamer     You are a fun flirt and an instant sweetheart, but our guess is you're becoming more selective about long-term love. It's getting tougher for you to become permanently attached; and a girl who's in a different place emotionally might misunderstand your early enthusiasm. You can wreck someone simply by enjoying her.     Your ideal mate is adventurous and giving, like you. But not overly intense. DREAD: The Battleaxe CONSIDER: The Peach, The Playstation, or The Window Shopper Link: The 32-Type Dating Test by OkCupid - Free Online Dating. My profile name: sfrajett

the competition

After working all weekend to revise legal writing memo number one, due today by noon, I have a little breathing room. Property is cancelled this week, although there is a makeup Criminal class tomorrow in that time slot (but not today! and not Wednesday!) I could be studying Contracts, but I'd rather blog.

Contracts gets me down. I enjoy the reading so much and I hate the class itself. Contracts is evil. Something happens to my mind when I get there. No matter how much or how little time I spend on the reading, I always feel blank and unbalanced. Today we did math. We calculated, or attempted to calculate, damages. We read a case where a lady had bad plastic surgery and ruined her nose. The doctor had promised her beauty and perfection, and delivered disaster. We had to plug in figures and variously calculate restitution, reliance, and expectation damages for her. I missed that she would still pay the hospital, since she was actually suing the doctor. How did I miss that? Dumb.

I think I have mentioned that the girl sitting next to me bugs me. She started out nice but then I think decided that I wasn't very smart since I never answer his questions very well. So she is snappish. I think she worries I'll ask her for something. Competititive people are like that. They always worry that in a world of finite resources, someone will try to take away from them what they have justly earned. I don't want to think about her. Why do I have to think about her? I feel this way about school often. I can't keep myself apart enough to remain unruffled by the bizarre emotions of these first-time graduate students. If I try to hang out with them, though, something is never right.

There she sits, typing furiously next to me in two classes, three days a week, driving me insane.

We are different species. She is trying to be smart, but she talks like a Valley Girl so the boys will like her. I have spent my life learning to be critical, and I don't care who knows it. Her smile is brittle under the strain of trying to seem nicer than she feels herself to be. A lot of the things I say and think would be considered mean and judgmental, or "too intense," by people like her, people in their twenties. She is compulsively overprepared. I gave up briefing cases weeks ago when I realized that it took up enormous amounts of time merely for the benefit of helping professors teach their classes by calling on you and having you recite facts. She is the kind of girl who would have a Mean People Suck sticker, or at least, agree with it. I am a mean person. I suck.

I like to judge people, measure them, put them in categories, find their limitations, then fall in love with them when they try hard to be smart, or interesting, or kind. I like passionate people. I like people who are messy and unruly. You would think this was the very definition of a young person, but in fact, young people are rigid. Very young people are still worried about what other people will think of them. Other young people. Their professors. Job interviewers.

When people, any people, are worried about what other people will think about them, they make you feel that way, too. You know the feeling--you suddenly feel too loud, too cynical, too fat, too old, too learned, too butch, too opinionated. Too much. People in their twenties can make you feel like that. A lot of women of all ages make each other feel like that. Women in general have a lot in common with twenty-somethings in the way they monitor other people's behavior. Women are idealists. So are twenty-somethings. Idealists want a utopia. They want purity and goodness. They want to uniformity so that the rules can work. They also compete with each other. Monitor, compete. Two sides of a coin that replicates itself, mother to daughter, down through the ages.

Men, they are angels for remembering to breathe. But women? They'll drive you crazy. They drive me crazy.

GF came to visit me for the first time this weekend. She has offered before, but I have insisted on getting the hell out of here instead. This weekend she had a conference paper to write and wanted to work in the law library. We spent the whole day Saturday sitting quietly next to each other getting work done. It felt heavenly. Getting her away from the stresses of our apartment--two needy Siamese cats and a running toddler pounding the upstairs floorboards day in and day out--made us both realize that we enjoy each other a lot. Even just sitting quietly, working.

GF and I fight sometimes under the strain of it all. Not this weekend, thank goodness, but sometimes. She calls me a beast. I call her a horrible person. At some point it blows over like a summer storm. It is never about anything except its own energy released. The energy of idealism, of being nice, of being women. Women and lesbians in a stern world.

I think maybe it is the best kind of feminism to fight with women, to tell them what you think of them, to forgive them and love them again, to let them be themselves in a world where only men are allowed to march differently. I wish I could crack the manic achiever facade of the mad typing girl. I wish she would blow up or calm down. Throw things or laugh. If she did we could be friends. But her mask is tight on her head, and she's not coming up for air until after exams on December 16th. Tll then, we'll be at an impasse--she with her pursed lips and flying fingers on one side of the long table, me with my rolling eyes and slouchy sweaters on the other side. Worlds, genders, generations apart.

Unless I kill her first.

Solidarity

Half way through our second section of Contracts, the room started to get tense. Forty minutes earlier I had asked someone how far she thought we'd get in the reading. She looked down at my open page covered in highlighting. "Oh we'll NEVER get that far," she assured me. I certainly haven't read to where you are. If we do, you'll be the best-prepared one!" I laughed uneasily. I wasn't so sure.

Thirty minutes in, the professor called out a case and page number. I heard several indrawn hisses from the seats around me. The girl next to me muttered "Oh Jesus" under her breath. Suddenly I realized that the whole class was worried. Would he get beyond where anyone had read, or would he stop at the very precipice of our preparation?

We marched on, working our way through the textbook. I watched every minute tick by on my computer clock. On through the cases I knew, into the thicket of discussion notes and hypotheticals that provided filler. One note concerned a man who checked a parcel of furs and sued when the checkroom lost it. The checkroom insisted that the disclaimer on his ticket stub amounted to a contract. The case referrred to a "bailer" and a "bailee" in a most confusing manner. The language was convoluted and archaic, and included several confusing court results. The appellate judges had disagreed about whether the man should get a thousand dollars or 25, as per the stub disclaimer. I had barely noticed it in my careful reading of the surrounding cases.

"Ms. Sfrajett." My heart stabbed. I felt it stab. With five minutes to go, he called on me.

No problem. I scanned the case. No highlighting. No notes. Why had I not written any notes? He asked me who won. I couldn't say. I read it again. I gave one result, but that wasn't the one he meant. He badgered me for the final ruling. I swear I couldn't find it in the oddly-worded argument. One guy piped up from across the room that it was hard to tell what it said. The professor moved on, just as I found the answer. The court held that the ticket was not a contract becuase the ticketholder thought it was just a ticket. But I was too late. I remained an idiot, unredeemed in the eyes of my peers. The ex-English professor. What a joke!

Class ended and the room erupted. I heard one woman behind me complain bitterly that she hadn't been able to tell what he was asking when he called on her. She said she knew he thought she was stupid.

I didn't think she was stupid. I don't think anybody else did, either. The person I had spoken with in the library laughed about how she had nearly peed herself when he started jumping pages. I laughed back. What can you do?

I thought about the guy across the room who had piped up in my defense. The relief when class ended was palpable in people's voices, as they rushed out of the room in a warm wind. I felt it all around me.

Solidarity.

A Gay Wedding

Last weekend, gf and I flew to Massachusetts for a gay wedding. I remember getting the first draft of the ceremony on email a week or two before. "Oh no," I told gf, as I gazed in horror at the clauses of a Pablo Neruda poem, something codependent about your hand being my hand and my hand being your hand. "It's so . . . sentimental!"

I also freaked out about the date. A whole weekend spent travelling in the middle of the semester. Flights with two legs each way so we could afford them. A day of missed classes on Friday, and Monday morning missed as well. And what--with my year of overweight unemployment wardrobe--to wear?

"Why, why do gay people have to get married?" I wailed. Why indeed. Weddings are a drag. At my sister's wedding, my mother freaked out and wouldn't let me stay at the house. All the lesbians sat at one table together. None of us felt very comfortable dancing. Weddings seem always to be more for the older people than the people getting married. Weddings are about the fact that you made your parents happy
1. by actually finding someone unwary enough to marry you
2. by giving them the occasion to show their own siblings and cousins that they are not such dysfunctional parents that they can't produce reproducers, and
3. by giving them the chance to look as if they are big spenders.

Now, a gay wedding to go to, for one of my oldest friends. The first gay wedding I'd ever been invited to, and that rarity of rarities besides, a LEGAL one. I'd been asked to co-officiate. Because I don't live in Massachusetts, I couldn't be the "official for a day" that married them, but I could help the official. I could write something sweet to say. Ugh! Now I had to find something to wear AND do wedding homework.

GF and I flew into Providence and were picked up at the airport by friends of my friend. They had an SUV with a navigation system that talked. They had named her Dolly, and we joked about what would happen if Dolly snapped. What if you caught her on a bad day, and she was drunk and maudlin, feeling unappreciated? Would that calm, valium-coated calm crack? What if we took the opposite route from the one she patiently outlined? Would she swear at us, or pout quietly? Would she take her revenge by luring us somewhere completely out of our way?

Not having many friends wealthy or bourgeois enough for SUVs, let alone with navigation systems, GF and I marvelled at Dolly, and the lesbians who used her so callously. We patted the creamy leather seats and laughed at all their jokes. Later that afternoon, we marvelled at the big bed and breakfast on Buzzard's Bay where we had luxurious rooms paid for by my friend, who wanted us to come and knew we couldn't otherwise. You could see the ocean from the windows at the headboard of our king-sized bed. Lesbians with money. How dreamy it felt to be swept into the soft rush of comfort, where material things were mostly taken care of and people were free to focus on their emotions, their friendships, their families. How nice to escape our apartment where bored cats clamored constantly for attention, and the toddler upstairs regularly erupted in a lengthy, head-splitting trot up and down the entire length of the apartment.

GF always seems to look nice, and has a decent wardrobe of teaching clothes and snappy outfits she pulls together on a shoestring. I have one suit and a bunch of polo shirts, but that suit jacket and a brief trip to Dress Barn Woman resulted in some passable ensembles for the dress reheasal dinner and the wedding day itself. The couple who drove us and another couple we knew were staying in the B & B with us. We all drank champagne and chatted in our underwear as we changed for dinner. Suddenly, it was festive.

The dinner was at one of the brides' family house. We all showed up in our suits and drank up their liquor and ate and ate. We made my friend getting married sing Vikki Carr--something she used to love to do 20 years ago. She pretended to protest, then sailed off on "It Must Be Him," accompanied by the rest of us in a rousing chorus. It was a brief, but very welcome camp moment, a female impersonation of female impersonation that offered a respite from the lovely soft normativity of it all. I kept looking around and pinching myself. "It's a gay wedding, " I wanted to say out loud, to the various people I didn't know but tried to chat with. It didn't feel any diffeent from any family event, any wedding I had been to. But it was.

Later that evening, all of us rather drunk, our group sat alone with the brides and talked about relationships. I couldn't believe they were actually going to be able to be legally married in the morning. It felt like something that happened to other people, people on the inside. Not to people you knew well. I found myself looking at them speculatively. I felt like they were different from us, would always be different from us now. They had turned their backs on the sexual revolution, on the "We don't need no piece of paper from the City Hall keeping us tied and true" era of Joni and Janis. They were moving away from the radical sexual politics of the 90s. They were taking vows to be monogamous, to join their stuff together.

They were matter of fact about it, but I wondered whether we would do it too if we could, and how it would feel. I thought about what it feels like to be defined by a lack of options, and tried to imagine the choices I would make if I had them. I gave up because I just couldn't imagine what it would actually feel like. if I could imagine such a thing, would I be a lesbian any more? Or something else?

I became acutely aware of my own guardedness. I am always guarded around straight people--the more normative they are, the more guarded I am. I suppose this is something like the way people of color feel in crowds of white people, though with differences. Some straight people are cooler than others, but few of them get how it feels to be a freak on an everyday basis. Accomodating while being fiercely ourselves is the balancing act of our queer lives. Don't worry, boss, we're really ok EVEN THOUGH we are gay. Don't worry Dad, we won't embarrass you, and you might be surprised how much you like hanging out with us. Don't worry, student of mine, I am your out professor but I really am thinking about World War One poetry right now. It's ok, girl who sits next to me in my law school classes, my body space won't take up too much of yours.

Gay people live like this all the time. We get on a train, and people stare at us, and we pretend not to notice, or care. We get gas in a rural area and leap back into the car as fast as we can. We smile, or don't smile. We try not to seem too comfortable. We rarely say hello to people's children, even when they say hello to us.

At the wedding we were surrounded by lots of heterosexual family, in this case the local family of one of the brides. Family usually means high guardedness mode for me. These were not artists or intellectuals, either, so there were no real bohemian queerish exceptions. They were resolutely normal, married, with kids and houses and jobs. BUT they were there for a lesbian wedding. The secret was not only out of the bag, as it usually is, but it was the subject of the event. The subject.

Can you dig it? That means even the thinnest layer of genteel closet that stubbornly sticks to the social relations around any event not dominated by gay people was GONE. I'm talking about decorum, about social logic, about the truth of relationships. The center was gay, you see. No one could be erased. The species in the center defined other parts of it. We were not aggregate particles, but the main event. And that, my friends, was mind-blowing. That was was made everything lurch slightly out of its normal perspective into something shaded differently. Gay people were not a majority of the attendees by any means. But we were not a minority, or outsiders, because the rules defining us as those things were not possible given the nature of the event.

When the violinist started playing and the flower girls sullenly tossed their petals, I felt like my whole body was being squeezed. My throat closed with emotion. My friend came down the aisle to stand in front of me, escorted by two burly gay men. I blinked back the tears that welled up immediatley with the first strains of music. I looked around, and everyone was blinking back tears. Then her lover came in, and walked down slowly, with a sideways smile. Friends came forward and spoke about the two of them, and about love. I was supposed to speak about evolution in relationships, but having consulted with GF, decided Pater's exhortation to live each moment today was better than talking about measuring a relationship by its pastness. Burn with today, I told them. Let today pulse through you.

Then it was time. We gave them the rings and they said their vows. "Now you will shelter each other," we told the two women getting married that day. "Now you will not feel the rain." Everyone held their breath.

The woman co-officiating with me then tried to say "By the power invested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts" but her voice broke at "Commonwealth." Everyone let out a sigh. Sobbing, she squeezed out "I now pronounce you married!" They kissed, and all you could hear was sniffling in the room.

And then, a loud, long cheer.

google book search and irony

Is it weird to you that the school that didn't tenure me bought my book for its library? Just wondering.

Sweet

Property was cancelled today. That meant that my entire section--60 people, or 1/3 of the Class of 2009-- got out of school at 11am instead of 2:45pm. I haven't see such hilarity in years. I actually heard one guy tell his friends he was getting drunk before noon. I don't think he was kidding.

Sometimes the sections are broken into half sections for smaller classes. My half section--A1--went out to lunch together to celebrate our good luck. We sat at long table in an Italian restaurant and ate pasta and chatted.

It felt so nice to actually talk to people. One girl said we should try doing this once a month.

Sweet.

remote control

Getting my first paper back is a good occasion to blog about what it feels like to be a student again. I look at the short, loopy cursive messages tracing the borders of my Legal Writing assignment, a "single case analysis" that examines a situation in light of a precedent case, and hypothesizes how that situation should turn out. "Good that you use a direct quotation here!" it applauds on the first page. "Clarify," it commands, elsewhere.

Going to law school is a schizophrenic experience. The first half of the week, I hate it; Thursday and Friday, I like it very much. I find the reading fascinating; I'm not so wild about wandering the halls as a student. I like getting lost in the material; I hate how in order to do it I have to drive away from gf, both of us inevitably in tears.

So my ups and downs have a lot to do with leaving home and getting ready to return; with tough material and material I feel less alienated from, and from the simple material effect of scheduling and endurance issues. Still, I spend a lot of time thinking about being a student across the divide from the teacher. I think about what it means to have the norm be 23 years old, and how that might make some teachers feel as if they are talking to children, or building knowledge up in a person with nothing for a foundation. I suppose I am talking about infantilization, but I am also reaching for something about the powerful effect it can have on students when they feel constructed by their teachers. Constructed as tedious morons, or as remarkable young people, or as an odious task to get out of the way so that research can be done, or as sensitive, lovely thinkers.

How do you think about your students? Do you think they know?

I have Contracts on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings from 9 to 9:50, and again Monday afternoon from 4 to 4:50. Property is also on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, from 1:30 to 2:45. When I come back from seeing gf for an all-too-brief weekend, I face a dreary first part of the week. Contracts is taught by a renowned expert in his sixties who flees the room as soon as class is over. Today it was my turn to be called on, and I did the best job I could presenting the case, in which a man read a newspaper ad for mink stoles on sale for a dollar at Abraham and Strauss on a first-come, first-served basis, presented himself, was told the sale was for women only, and sued. I successfully contrasted it to the Nebraska Seed Company case, pointing out that the mink stole advertisement was clear, and for a stipulated item at a specific price and quantity (unlike the Seed Company case, where the company got off the hook when it couldn't fill a customer order because the amount of seed it offered for general sale was not specified). When Professor Contracts asked me what the point of the first-come, first-served stipulation was, I had already answered the question (a specific amount of goods) so I thought he was asking something else, maybe about performance. When I attempted to explain this, (the customer presented himself, which satisfied the requirements for performance on his part) I was told with some disgust that we all knew the definition of first-come, first-served.

Later I asked a question about the wording of an acceptance and whether it constituted a closing of the deal or merely a preliminary negotiation. I asked it to get back on the horse, but it wasn't satisfying, even though he liked the question.

Property is taught by a corporate gal who makes very detailed lecture notes. She is still unsure of herself, though very interesting to listen to, and very smart. It is clear that she wants the class to like her, but she also wants them to be a little afraid of her. I try to volunteer examples in her class, but I think maybe I'm stating the obvious. Her voice always drops, almost to a whisper, when she reluctantly says my last name. She has never been unkind, but she has a way of making me feel like it is probably better just to keep quiet and continue typing my notes. Mostly, I do.

The second part of the week is much better. Torts is Thursday and Friday mornings from 8:30 to 9:45, and Criminal Law is Thursday and Friday afternoons from 1:30 to 2:45. I like both of these classes a lot, mostly because I like the teachers as well as the reading. Torts is taught by a guy with a fabulous flair for absurdly ridiculous hypotheticals that get more and more outrageous over the course of the class period; Criminal Law, by a precise, very smart prosecutor with faint traces of a Maine accent. Both of these teachers are very kind. There is something engaged about them--a genuine interest in the students they call on. They like what they do, and they like the people they teach. You can tell. Their classrooms are more relaxed, but no less rigorous. Most of the time, people are raising their hands to volunteer answers. When these professors call on you, you feel as if it is your moment to shine, to engage the material. NOT your moment to fail. These professors are comfortable in the classroom, and comfortable with themselves. They are passionate about their material, and not afraid to show it. They like their lives. They like us.

I'm sure it doesn't hurt that both Torts and Criminal Law are concerned with the vagaries of human nature, but this doesn't entirely explain the dread I feel in the beginning of the week, and the happiness I experience on Thursdays and Fridays. What I am trying to say, perhaps not successfully, is that it I can pretty much tell how the teachers in my large lecture classes feel about individual students, about their roles as professors, about their classes. I can tell which professors are enjoying class and which think it is a bother. And this affects how I feel about being there, about myself, about my capabilities and what I know.

Did I mention that some classes make me feel stupid? Worthless? Like a loser? Other classes I feel excited. I am not threatened by what I don't understand; only intrigued. I sit on the edge of my seat, sometimes talking, sometimes not, but always in the fray. I feel lifted up and carried along by someone else's mind, by their expertise. At the end of class I realize I have been flying.

So this is what it feels like. Throw in a Legal Writing class Tuesdays from 3 to 3:50 and Fridays from 10 to 10:50, and a Legal Research class Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 to 10:50, and you have my schedule for the week. These last are gnat-like classes that fly around my head and pester me while I am trying to get the work done for the big classes that will determine my life. These little classes are basically pass-fail. These are the classes that my heart longs to love, since they best resemble what I am used to in academic work, but I cannot love them. They require a stern eye and a cold cheek. Turn away from their voluptuous primary- and secondary-source siren songs, their vixenlike concise arguments, and master the other material that you will be evaluated on at the end of the semester. In one. Single. Exam.

Did I mention that the entire semester hinges on one single exam in each class?

So I don't like being a student, but I do like learning new things. I don't like the pressure, but I do like the accomplishment. I don't like the student-teacher divide, the strange passivity that can be enforced in a classroom, the odd disconnect that happens when you become part of a bullied mass. The solidarity of that mass with each other. The silent compact not to speak under such conditions.

I like being in a classroom where that isn't happening, and oddly enough, when I am in this better classroom, I feel the divide between teacher and students disappear. I know it is gone because I am no longer thinking how much it sucks to have lost my job, to be stuck in a classroom feeling like an idiot. I forget. I marvel at the patient logic of law and its painstaking rules. I get lost in ideas, and contemplate marvelous machines.

When I was teaching, I used to complain about students who seemed to have a "remote-control" attitude, where they got to sit back and watch me dance and perform for them. I felt harried, defensive, judged. Now it is easier to see what kinds of teaching contributes to that, and what breaks it down. Sarcasm, disgust, and condescension build it up. Zany humor, earnest engagement, intellectual and moral passion, self-deprecation, and mutual respect and admiration break it down.

It's what I think I always knew, but from where I sit now, it's just as plain as day.