A new

Semester has begun. I only have half my grades. 3.7 so far. Still waiting on 5 credits' worth. The above is my present petty concern. Below is what matters.

Just got back from New Orleans.

It is still an absolute disaster down there. The 9th ward looks like a war zone. 4 PM. Saturday afternoon. Not a person in the streets. House after boarded-up, sagging, crumbling, water-logged house. Every so often, a FEMA trailer parked on a lawn or in a driveway.

There is construction here and there, but even in the center of town, where there was minimal storm damage, the vacancy rate for businesses is staggering. Movie theaters, souvenir stores, sneaker shops, restaurants, hotels, all closed. If you never leave the french quarter, you might guess that the rebuilding is done and the city is back.

And then there's the Louisianna justice system. What a clusterfuck. I'll just list a few of the practices and let you imagine what kind of Kafakaesque situation has resulted: The Sherrif runs the prisons. The sherrif's dept. gets $35 for every person in prison per night. The court does not keep the court records. Those records are kept by the sherrif. A large part of the public defender's budget comes from a per-case stipend. Public defenders get $20 for every conviction. The courts get a cut of bail bonds, thus encouraging high bonds. It is common to look at a court record and see the notation: "Defendant in custody, did not appear." What that means is the sherrif's dep't tasked with delivering the prisoner for his court date, didn't bother. The official court records include months-long gaps in which it's anyone's guess what happened. After Katrina, during which the prisoners were trapped in their cells with water levels rising, the prisoners were moved all over the state and out of state. It has taken until now for the system, and those working doggedly outside the system, to find these people, and where proper, get them released. Orleans parish jails people for misdemeanors. Although this puts a severe burden on the courts and the overwhelmed public defenders, it puts more $$$ in the sherrif's pocket.

The moral: don't get arrested in New Orleans.

A Roundhouse Kick to the Mind

And that's one down, three to go folks. I took the night off tonight, but I have a lot to do over the weekend. Two finals in 4 days. Barely any time in between. It's going to be a long week. The one day off until the grand-pop of them all: torts.

Every time I think about the test today I get nervous. And it's already over. The pressure leading into that thing was nuts.

And the car broke down on the way to the test (luckily it started again). And a fire alarm went off in the middle of the exam. Both were examples of that phenomenon where your brain attempts to deny reality. Where you actually say to yourself: "This can't be happening." I've had that feeling when I've gotten into a car accident or when I broke a window when I was a kid.

My civ pro prof, when asked about how in-depth any discussion should go, is fond of saying: "don't you want to fire every arrow in your quiver?" (Answer: Yes. Into you.)

I fired every arrow; I just hope I was firing at the right target.

Joon Bee

The first of many tests comes tomorrow, when I take my first final: my karate yellow belt test (yellow belt is the lowest class). What a way to start it off! I have a page of korean tae-kwon-do terminology I'm pretty shaky with, and the combat combinations and forms, which I am pretty good with. I should receive the belt.

Friday is when I face down civil procedure, and I have 3 hours to prove to the professor that I have mastered the course. Three days later: property. Two days after that: contracts. Then, with a nice five day break: torts.

That will leave a nice week and half or so before X-mas to get my resumes out for summer work... Then I fly to New Orleans for relief work.

But I get ahead of myself. Tomorrow is not friday or January or the summer. Tomorrow is tomorrow.

Tomorrow also happens to be the day I take the car to the dealer to have what looks like a major problem diagnosed. I feel strangely calm about it. Maybe the stressors are so insistent and ever-present that one more major stress barely makes a dent. I like to think that it is the result of stress management. After all, I know the law and I am prepared. I will do well on the exams or I won't. I will be able to afford the car repair or I won't.

Ooh, and then ever once in a while a wave of anxiety hits! The secret (for me) is to allow it to be there. To be alright with it, and to form an uneasy truce with it as a fairly natural outgrowth of heavy pressure and a part of my personality. No need to fight it. It's going to happen regardless, and better to be aware of it than repress it I think.

Joon bee means prepare/ready, BTW.

In Sight

It seems like last week that I started classes at this crazy law school place. Now there is one month till finals, and the tension is beginning to mount. Clearly I have some sort of attraction to high-stress living. First theater, now this.

One month to go means reviewing is becoming far more important than the current reading. It means people are beginning to measure themselves against each other. Not in the manner that took place the frst couple weeks: how do I stack up overall. Now it takes place in the much more limited context of: How much do you know. It's a disconcerting place to be in. Because the amount of material is almost endless. And the professors act like you're just fucking around and not even putting forth any effort if you aren't up on every detail. So it's hard not to feel under the gun sometimes. Pretty soon we're going to have to apply what we've taught ourselves in 3-hour essay tests that will determine our grades for the entire semester. Right. Brilliant.

The Havel fest is up and running and I have barely told anyone about it. My classmates keep threatening to show up. I wish they would.

I ran a 5k this past sunday. My legs are still sore. I looked back through this blog's archives and found that my time on sunday was almost identical to what I ran months ago in the Lincoln Tunnel Challenge. The difference is that the latest race, in Van Cortland Park was on amuch tougher, more hilly course. It felt good to get out there and do it. I've agreed to participate in a team race in a couple weeks. Maybe by then I won't be sore anymore.

Oh. I got a grade. Sort of. On my memorandum of law, which in final form is worth 40% of the grade, I got a 39 out of 40. So I think I have a decent grade locked up in Legal Writing, but there's no way to tell for sure what will come of it because the numbers are forced into a curve.

Poker tomorrow night. It'll be good for me to get my mind off things and focus on the bigger picture, like coming to terms with uncertainty and the gravity of avarice.

Havel Heaven

One would think Havel Heaven would be in the Czech Republic, but, in fact, it's right here in NYC, at the Ohio Theater and Brick Theater, in SoHo and Williamsburg, respectively.

Even Kathleen Turner's doing a performance for the fest. I have no idea what it is or if it's good, but she's famous, ergo, it's awesome.

In some seriousness, I was at the opening of Largo Desolato last night, and it is wicked clever and every second has been invested with meaning. The play was written by Havel after an imprisonment and long bout of writer's block. When the dam burst, Largo came bursting forth. The translation is from Tom Stoppard, arguably the greatest living English-language playwright. Havel and Stoppard are a great match, and big ideas vie for control of the stage with patent absurdity.

I swear I would be this geeked about it even if I weren't part of the creative team. But I am and I am damned proud of this one. If you are in the area, you should come see it. If you are not in the area, well, I suppose you'll have to make do as best you can.

Largo Desolato at Untitled Theater Co. #61's Havel Festival.

Suck on that Noam.

Bottomlessness, endlessness.

The things that most frighten me are also things I badly want. No choice is ever the final choice.

Time Out

I have become that dreaded person who leaves his blog fallow for month-long stretches. It feels like it hasn't been too long since last I posted, but I'm sure it has.

Update: legal writing is a real ass-kicker. Take everything you've ever learned about writing and forget it. Pretend you're writing again for the first time. Accept the rigidity and simplification. 1-2-3, a-b-c. That's all. Too much byzantine thought and language flops onto the page when I write, so it's a real struggle. 'Salright; I 'm starting to get it right, and I think I'll end up ahead of the curve in the class. (Gotta keep that scholarship!)

Then there are the rest of my classes. Hard to believe that so much time has passed already. Similarly hard to believe there's still so much time left in this semester, year, school.

Football fans may be excited that they can watch football now. Yankee fans should likewise be excited about being able to watch football.

Being the natural athletes that we all are, my classmates and I have started a running football game every friday, after that maze of subject matter jurisdiction, the erie doctrine and permissive cross-claims that is called civil procedure. Thank God it's only 1 semester. The class, not the games. We're actually improving as players, managing to execute some plays successfully. In week 2 I had 2 TD catches and last week I had 1. Sweet. Still waiting on my first INT, but I'll try to report on it here ASAP. After the first two games, I was sore for days afterwards, but after game 3, I barely felt it the next day. So my muscles must be adjusting.

Rutgers football is undefeated, BTW, ranked 19th in the nation. WTF?

Oh, yeah, and I'm taking karate w/ the school's karate club. It just happens to fit my sked. Kyah!

smarter, but

this law school gig is making me smarter, fo sho, but it's also making me a whole lot more tense. and tired. i am consistently punchy. as in, i am very tired and not thinking as clearly as i would like, and i also want to punch things.

this post is a prime example: you can attribute my failure to capitalize any letters two ways. 1. holding down the shift key is just too much effort. 2. it is an act of passive aggression; i suspect most people get slightly annoyed when they read text that is completely capsless. or maybe that's just me. and that leads to a third possibility: that it is an act of sado masochism.

i would venture all three have some validity.

elder rage

Whence this anti-elderly aggression? Today, an elderly man pulls up beside me, zooming up behind the stopped car next to me, then jamming on his brakes. He powers down his window, and waits eagerly as I fiddle for the controls. I don't know what he's going to say, but I know I won't like it.

He tells me: "Turn on your lights. It's raining." He is a bit agitated. I roll my eyes and turn the lights on. He says: "It's the law!" I say "okay. Then, as he's rolling up his window, I blurt "Thanks, you old coot." His window is almost all the way up, and he waves me off, as if to say "No need to thank me. I'm just doing my job."

If he heard me, he pretended he didn't. At least part of me had hoped to provoke him further.

Good Fences Make What Again?

That defender of our nation's values, the House of Representatives, voted overwhelmingly today to construct a wall between the US and Mexico. They call it a fence. That should stop the terrorists from coming to America. I mean, that's how the 9/11 plotters got into the country, right? Maybe the "fence" will look something like the above. Maybe, in a hundred years, people will marvel at it, like other great and successful walls, like the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China.