i'm a moron

it was just pointed out to me that the thursday theme (which i was thinking of not going to) is pre-hysteria.

AND A DINOSAUR IS CLEARLY PREHISTORIC.

shit, i guess i gotta go.

and i gotta come up with something else to wear on friday.

back to square one.

outfitting dilemmas, already

i would like to reiterate that i am very upset the whole feb club calendar is not up yet. as an added problem of the whole figuring out what to wear, now i am worried that i will wear something early that would work out better later on.

for example, tonight's dilemma (feb club eve) is: casual or formal? i have a really cute shirt i wore for NYE this year. it's awesome. BUT i can also wear it all the time to bar review or to any old party. AND i will be toasty warm in jeans. ON THE OTHER HAND, i can wear the dress i wore to my commencement ball for college, a dress which i loved, but thought i would never again be able to wear, for multiple reasons. for starters, it's just not quite exactly right. and for seconders, it's a few sizes too big now, but i figure that's close enough for feb club. and for thirders, if you're going to wear formal dresses, well you want to buy something new. so even tho i will be cold, it can be one last hurrah for this dress.

as a side note, the last dress i had that i loved like this was probably my junior year of high school prom dress, which had it's final farewell the same week as the commencement ball, at the gatsby balll (part of BC's senior week, which was like a week of feb club, but where everyone does everything and there is no down time. god it was awesome.) anyways, that dress, which may be the best dress i will ever own in my life, met it's end the night of the gatsby ball when i decided to play some football in front of my dorm with some boys i vaguely knew while wearing a fitted formal dress. i'll be honest, now that i'm thinking about that, i've kinda got high expectations for tonight. i wasn't planning on drinking that much, but to end the night like that, well i'll have to drink enough to not notice that it's about 20 degrees out there AND enough to decide that playing football is a good idea. HAHA! that last part is a joke b/c i think football is a good idea now and i've only had half a beer. but anyways.

anyways, i think i'm leaning to formal, tho it does leave me with the (1) fear of freezing, and (2) fear of maybe looking a little stupid, (3) deep concern that there will be some better theme for this dress later in the month. tho if this dress is perfect, i've actually probably got another 8 in my closet that are also perfect. formal it is! i am really glad we had that chat. as for the part about feeling stupid and freezing to death, i figure that's just the perfect way to jump start feb club b/c i better get used to it fast.

as for the second costuming dilemma. friday night's party is at cabell, which is where i spend about a third of my drinking evenings, as some of my good friends live there. but that is beside the point. the theme is "welcome to the jungle." well i was a bit stymied. my first thought was shreds of leopard printed fabric and that is a terrible idea. and one i would never execute. and one i'm sure dozens of other girls will. but then i thought, "how close is a dinosaur to a jungle creature?" and that is the dilemma as it now stands. so, i pose the question to you--could i pass as an alligator? (is an alligator even a jungle creature?) could i be a dinosaur in a prehistoric jungle? or would i just be some girl, desperately trying to get more mileage out of what she is firmly convinced was the cutest halloween costume ever, kid in the chicken costume be damned?

as a side note, i thought for sure i would work diligently til going to feb club, as i did in years past. but now i have just screwed around, ever since leaving the LS at 3pm. tho maybe that has nothing to do with the anticipation of feb club, and everything to do with the fact that i pretty much screw around after 3pm every monday and wednesday and after noon every tuesday and thursday. oh yes, now i remember. i'm a 3L.

oh my

yes, i am going to call lexi out for being totally out of touch.

she IMed me a few minutes ago with this link, saying, "this is hilarious. I thought the guy who sang it yesterday made it up. but apparently it's SNL."

ver batim. that was what she said. on january 30, 2007.

now the only reason that i know this makes one HORRIBLY out of touch, like they live in a world separate from the rest of us, is b/c I have known about this for over a month! AND I DON'T KNOW ABOUT JACK SHIT GOING ON IN THE WORLD THE REST OF YOU LIVE IN!

when i expressed how incredulous i was, she insisted, "this is new to me. Why would I have heard this?"

AS THO IT WERE NOT A PHENOMENON THAT HAD BEEN SWEEPING THE NATION FOR A MONTH AND 13 DAYS NOW.

oh my. it's part of why we're friends. i like how lexi makes me feel hip and edgy. i'm so cool.

libel show: try out one, try out all!

so if you are a UVA law student and you do not suck, i would like to encourage you to try out for the libel show. auditions run thru tomorrow, and it is way fun, and an awesome week, and you don't have to be at all talented or skilled, as evidenced by the fact that i have been a part of it the last two years, and you don't have to be prepared. the first year i showed up with a golf club or something and told them i was good at rummaging up props, and then they had me read something, and gave me a part. now, the part they gave me (and lexi, incidentally, before we were friends), SUCKED, and they cut it after the first dress rehearsal. but then they gave us WAY BETTER parts. with LINES! and HUMOR! it was really awesome. anyways, the next year i used that exact same part to audition. my point is, they'll take anything. it's just to see your face and see if you possess any modicum of talent. but neither faces nor lack of talent are dealbreakers. anyways, then the week of the libel show is F-U-N with lots of beer and a party every night and i'm not saying that you have to be drunk to have a good time b/c that is certainly not the case, but i am just saying that this week is a lot of fun that happens to have a lot of beer. anyways, tomorrow (wednesday) is the last day of tryouts. go go go!!

why talk in class, when you can get noticed w/o ever speaking up?

rutherglen [talking about sex discrimination]: people say things like that. "he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch!"

laura reaches over and tousles rob's hair affectionately, clearly conveying the idea that he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch!

rutherglen looks up, makes eye contact, giggles from front of classroom.

it's like the time doran made eye contact with me as i was saying to rob and jen, "are you fucking kidding me?" regarding his explanation of something. well, at least he broke it down the bundles and baskets a little more clearly.

PANIC!

so yesterday's panic was that people are finishing up their bar applications, and i was not even aware that we were to be working on them, and i am normally so compulsive about such things, but in this instance, i figured that SOMEONE would tell me when i was supposed to start working on it and i am not looking forward to anything that reminds me that i am about to not be a student and to be a lawyer, so i was not compulsive, and well, seeing khang's completed application kinda freaked me out.but those are not due for months.

today's panic is much more imminent.

it is JANUARY 30.

tomorrow is JANUARY 31. january 31 = feb club eve. last year there was a party jan 31, our 1L year there was not. but either way that means that feb club either starts TOMORROW NIGHT or THE NIGHT AFTER THAT. VERY VERY VERY SOON!

and THERE IS NOT YET A SCHEDULE!

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO PLAN OUT ALL OF MY FABULOUSLY RIDICULOUS THEME-Y OUTFITS IF I ONLY HAVE HOURS WORTH OF NOTICE?!?!?

and don't say anything about the fact that i have the fabulously ridiculously hideous clothes to dress for any of about 87 potential feb club themes already hanging in my closet or lurking in my cedar chest. that would diminish how carefully crafted these ensembles are.

mmmmm

according to the 10 day forecast, the high isn't supposed to be out of the 30s or 40s for the foreseeable future! WHAT WHAT!

sweaters for everyone! hats and scarves and gloves for everyone! (if you need any coordinated sets, just let me know!!)

i know some people might think this is wrong (and after my walk to school today, my ears are kinda questioning my judgment), but i'm happy happy happy!

laura: still having brilliant ideas

so despite my general ennui, which i hope is very troublesome to you, i don't want you to worry that i am not the person you have all come to know and love.

no, indeed, i am still doing dreadfully moronic things. AND i am recommending them to you, my friends!

like driving with a glass of wine in your cupholder in your car. see, there was one glass of wine left in a bottle in my fridge, and i was going to have dinner and lexi and aaron's, and it was very cold out so i wanted to drive the 400 yards between our apartments, and i thought that a glass of wine would be lovely, only it seemed silly to drag the whole bottle over there. (in retrospect, this is probably the weak link in the logic chain.) anyways, it was all going swimmingly until i had to make a sharp right turn into a parking spot, at which point things headed south.

BUT, i would like to say that a 2005 california chardonnay can leave a lovely, fruity scent once it has soaked into your car seats and carpets. so not altogether a bad move.

how are we ever going to make it thru?

so you may have noticed that i have not posted in something like 8 days. which is about 7 days, 14 hours, and 43 minutes longer than i generally go w/o posting. so perhaps you have wondered where i have gone. well, i am still here in cville. the problem is that i am suffering from a general inability to care about ANYTHING.

so this initially made sense, when it was just about classes and reading. but that didn't mean it wasn't unsettling. i mean, it's so bad that i DIDN'T EVEN ADD OR DROP CLASSES DURING DROP/ADD! which is about 14 classes less than i add during that period normally. (ok, to be totally honest, i did add a class the day b/f classes began, b/c rob was upset we didn't have any classes t/g and there was one spot open in his TR 10:30, and i figured that sitting next to rob for 3 hours a week wasn't any sillier of a reason to sign up for a class than any of the other reasons i had used.) and then i did drop one class, b/c i was holding on to an extra one, just to see what classes i would prefer. only that class was at 3pm and i wasn't sure i could bring myself to stick around the LS til 3pm to check it out on the first day. which i figured was not a very good sign that i'd be willing to stick around 2 days a week to attend it. out the window it went. but as for the other classes, a couple of which i think will be AWFUL, well i kept them b/c i figured that the other option was to go to the effort of looking for new classes. and as tho that weren't enough of a reason to dissuade me, i kinda figured that past experience had taught me i'd probably wind up in 2 classes that sucked as much as the ones that i had dropped. so stay i did.

but over the past week, i have learned that this general lack of enthusiasm is extending to all sorts of other areas of my life. i can't bring myself to blog. i didn't feel like attending a power hour last thursday. it's been harder to get me to the gym. i don't want to take the time to learn my lines for my libel show audition. i don't want to schedule the 1L oral arguments (you may think this makes sense, only THIS IS THE SORT OF CRAP I LOVE TO DO! ORGANIZE A SCHEDULE! WITH 1LS! IT IS LIKE HEAVEN!!) i don't even feel like sitting around in scott commons and talking with people at lunch! hell, i'm not even watching tv! my netflix selections from pre-christmas are still sitting around, taunting me about the $15 a month i continue to waste. i'm not even accruing lexis and westlaw points! i don't do fact or fiction every day, and i haven't even signed on to westlaw since the semester began AND i even cancelled a training session! sometimes i wonder if this is even still me! really, i have no idea what i'm doing with my 24 hours a day, but my rough estimation is that it involves about 16 hours of sleeping, about 3 complaining to my friends about my general malaise, and approximately 4 days a week it involves another 5 hours of consuming beer.

but it has just reached a level that even i had never anticipated. a level that even i did not think was possible. and i have experienced some senioritis in the past. but this is a new low.

i can't bring myself to make pretty signs. i have markers and posterboard, and i am just WRITING on the posterboard! in BROWN! i made these exact same signs one year ago and there were bright colors and bubble letters and the handwriting screamed out from the white background with joy! you could see the enthusiasm everywhere on the paper. but not this year. it's like times new roman, font size 87. in brown, to make it even more boring.

the day when laura has paper and markers at her disposal and she is not the happiest girl in the world....well it is a sad day for all mankind. if you do not see me in class tomorrow, it is b/c i am mourning the death of everything i once thought true about myself. alas cruel world!

typical laura

so what i've realized is that by the end of this paper, i want you to feel bad for pedophiles. (the paper is on child porn, if you didn't know.) it's not working in this paper b/c it is a terrible paper and i probably don't even have the phrase "grappling with pedophilia" in there once and well, the whole thing is awful.

but the point is that it reminds me of the paper i wrote in college where i kept talking about the "persecution of the Nazis." and my prof kept circling and writing "prosecution." only the thing was that i knew what i was saying! i meant persecution! wasn't she reading my paper, and hadn't she read the book we were supposed to be responding to! they weren't all bad guys and i was trying to make a point and that was centered around the "persecution of the nazis" after WWII. so i guess that clearly it didn't work in that case either. oh well, too late to go back and try to conclude that we should stomp out virtual child porn.

also, i am not a terrible human being. i swear.

sweet, i can hardly wait to see what this does for my hits for "little lexi barely legal."

friends with the winning tip

those who alerted me to the fact that on some windows systems, 1.25 inches is the default margins on the left and the right! that brought me so much closer to 25 pages.

tho it turns out that it is very hard to motivate when you've got 24 hours and only about 5 pages you need to write. of course, it'll take about 10 to have it make any sense. but i'm not really going for that.

but just think, by the next time you hear from me, you'll have a happier free-er from the weight of a paper laura. OH IT WILL BE SO GLORIOUS!

it's finally winter!

look how happy laura is!!

soooooo happy.

other than the paper. and snow doesn't make you want to write a paper! laura is about to learn a lesson about coping with Cs, she thinks.

ugh

so i have just read my prof's comments on my draft and realized that i am turning in about exactly what he did not want. b/c it was crap the first time around and i'm not changing it. for example, about 4/5 of my paper is the crap he told me i should get rid of, and approximately 1/2 of that is something that i just realized is pretty much irrelevant b/c it isn't part of the new law, but i'm going to talk about it anyways b/c I DON'T THINK THAT CHILD PORN MAKES PEOPLE MOLEST CHILDREN. and since that's all i've got, that's what i'm going to say. not very clearly, not very coherently, but with a lot of footnotes, and a lot of wordy phrases that clutter up the page!

but based on the IM conversations i keep having with my classmates, it's my sincere hope that their papers really are as bad as they say, and we're all just lowering the bar for a B+.

now i remember!

wordiness! that's laura's favorite way to move ever-closer to a page limit! why use three words when you can use three really long phrases? i mean, it might be annoying as shit to read, and it might not say anything, and it might be the sort of thing that your professors tell you not to do, but then again, i'm not the one who made the page limit twice what i would have to say on this topic!

trouble

so here i am, 10am on a saturday before classes start, in the library. i am supposed to be writing my paper. i'm sure you can imagine how this is going. but it is not my fault! well, not entirely.

first of all, i decided that i would get bodo's this morning and i went and was unable to ascertain what i felt like getting, and what i finally decided on is totally unsatisfying and that is not going to propel me thru my day of paper writing! it is just sitting here, getting cold and gross and making me sad. how can i possibly write a paper with this bagel staring at me like that!

and secondly, i have just realized that i do not have my external mouse! and i don't know where i would have lost it b/t leaving the library yesterday and returning today, but this is very distressing, b/c not only is the external mouse crucial for quickly scrolling thru all the pages of your paper, which are far less numerous than they should be, but also, they make your study break games of solitaire and freecell go much quicker and now my entire groove is thrown off and oh i do not know what to do!

and finally, somehow, and i do not know how this is possible, i am going to wind up turning 10 pages of single-spaced notes into a 15 page double-spaced paper. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?!!? oh, and the requirement is 25 pages. so i'm screwed. here are the tips i've received so far--increase the margins, double-space the footnotes, and increase the spacing between letters. anything else that might make a 15 page paper into 25? and i've got to stay in times new roman 12, so none of that arial crap.

best, or at least most appropriate, farewell ever

after i had told the nice bookstore lady that i hadn't yet finished the paper--"have a decent weekend."

nothing like screwy logic

and it seems like my screwy logic wears off on my friends.

so i am supposed to be writing a paper. and i figured that i would give myself the weekend off after trial ad. i mean, that wasn't the initial plan, but that was easily justifiable.

then someone reminded me that yesterday was martin luther king day and most people had it off. well, i didn't plan on doing that either, but b/t that and the fact that i had been up so late cleaning the SBA fridges, well it seemed ok.

so today i agreed to give someone a ride over to the LS at 9am. i figured this would be great, b/c i don't back out of commitments, so i would be in the library by 9:10. and i was! it was great! only i then decided that just b/c you're in the library doesn't mean that you have to work on your paper. obviously. in the end, i decided that this morning's step in the right direction would just be getting to the library, and a later step in the right direction would be starting to work on the paper.

well, i left the libs about 1, figuring i would go home and work on it from the comfort of my couch. only instead of doing that, i put all the pictures i recently had printed from first and second year into an album. hard copies of photos! it's crazy!

but here's where you see that my crazy justification of things is a skill you can teach others--it was pointed out to me that since a picture is worth a thousand words, and i put a couple hundred pictures in order in a book, well that is way more words than i would have ever put in order if i had written a paper!

unfortunately, i'm not sure TH will buy that and give me a passing grade for it. tho maybe he would if he saw all the witty feb club captions i came up with.

either way, now we're down to today's good thing being the fact that lexi and i are headed back to the gym after a month and a half hiatus. my muscles already hate me.

thumbs up to laura for cleaning the SBA fridges

yes, the SBA fridges, those bastions of long-forgotten baby carrots, half-eaten sandwiches, and never-consumed individual yogurts, are slightly more clean (and significantly less disgusting), thanks to yours truly.

my more-than-just-slightly compulsive nature was triggered at the bar tonight when one of the barbacks was picking up empty glasses from all around the room. eli could see it in my eyes. i don't know how he kept me from helping her out.

and on the way home, i decided it was time--the SBA fridges needed to be cleaned. we had received warnings they would do so over break, but i was there this week and i can tell you, those were not fridges that had had anything removed from them in about 5 months. and people are starting to return to class tomorrow. i mean, if there is a time to do it, it was tonight.

initially, i thought i would feel slightly guilty. i'm a girl that has lost 1 hour old general tso's chicken to an SBA-fridge cleaning (first year, when they did this more than once a year) and it hurt a lot. but i figured i could overcome that by listing all of the justifications for doing it tonight:

1. we had received an email warning us the fridges would be cleaned over break.
2. school has been out for a month.
3. it is 2 am monday morning, meaning that even people who used the fridge just this past week have left things in the fridge over the weekend.

there really was no more ideal time to do it. so off i went to the law school, armed with a bottle of antibacterial lemon-scented 409 spray, a roll of paper towels, and a few kitchen trash bags. [in the end, after seeing the things i cleaned out of there, i decided to feel no guilt b/c it was quite clear that any damage i may have done to legitimate food items was FAR outweighed by the vast array ridiculously disgusting things with long-ago expiration dates that i threw out.]

well, a few garbage bags seemed not to have been forward-thinking enough. fortunately, a quick convo with my favorite janitor remedied both that problem and the problem of lugging all of the bags out to a dumpster. good thing he left me with one of the rolling dumpsters, since i wound up clearing out about 8 full-sized garbage bags of trash. [shout out to my janitor friend. WHAT WHAT.]

if it was a can or bottle that could be recycled, i emptied it and recycled it; if it was a gladware whose owner forgot he/she put it in the fridge months ago, too bad, i threw it away; if it was a tasty-looking lean cuisine, i somehow managed to resist the temptation to move it to my own freezer at home; and if it was an exploded can of something that had stained the walls of the fridge, i sprayed the bejeezus out of it with my 409. all in all, a very solid effort.

as a matter of fact, i think someone (ahem, lexi/aaron), should use their PILA-purchased ANG thumbs up to give me a shout out in the upcoming edition of the law weekly. it is wrong to use my own on me, but it also seems wrong that the world's citizens not know of this good i have done for them. and when i say "the world's citizens," i mean "law weekly readers."

good deed

so a little bird told me that people were upset that i hadn't posted in like 3 days and i was on my way home from having a drink with some friends of a friend and i decided that i would post about the one thing i have waiting to be written about, when it dawned on me what i should do at 1:30am this sunday night/monday morning.

so rather than post, i am about to go do what might be the best thing i have ever done in my life. i will tell you all about it when i return. i am really excited about this project. when i tell you what i have done, you will see why this is so sad. ttyl!!

big lots is like heaven

terrible, cheaply-priced, full of random crap, heaven.

i decided that i would go to try to see if i could find something i loved more than what i already bought for the $5 gift for lexi's party, which i probably wouldn't have bought except it was $3.25 and pretty awful, tho i am doubting that it is truly terribly awful enough. of course, last year i brought the best terrible gift ever, as well as a pretty damned good backup, and that is a lot of pressure to follow up on.

anyways, i had called rob the other week to ask where big lots was b/c that is where he got his gift last year, and i had never seen it. well, let's just say that for as many times as i drive up and down 29, it is still a mystery to me. so i get all the way up 29, and i wind up in the wrong strip mall. so i call rob. i am in the totally wrong place. he gives me a landmark. i don't know where that is. he gives me another landmark. i don't know where that is either. in the end, i wound up driving with rob on the phone, so that i could just shout out things and he would tell me when to turn. so finally i found it.

well, what awaited me inside is probably something i should have never discovered. at first, i was a bit worried that my friends were going to have to stage an intervention at some point in the future. i mean, i could just imagine it. i'd be telling them i was just running to the law school to pick up a book and i'd sneak off to big lots to look at things that would only cost me $2 to buy! they'd try to stop me, but oooooh, i'm just not sure i could quit!

recognizing the hold that cheap crap has on me, i decided to just walk thru once, scoping out the scene, before going thru again to whittle the potential purchases down and pick up the winners. best idea i'd ever had. b/c while cheap held much sway over me the first time thru (seriously, the first time thru i probably spent 10 minutes digging thru a bin of children's gloves, priced between $0.70 and $1.30, comparing the pairs of pink that said "pretty princess" all over them and the turquoises and the black with the little neon polka dots all over them with a special grippy palm. AS THO I NEED PINK GLOVES MADE FOR 6 YEAR OLDS! and at least 20 minutes debating what in the toy aisles i should purchase, despite the fact that i clearly do not need any of the 18 varieties of pirate paraphernalia they had. literally, i have never seen such a smorgasbord of pirate toys. i don't know how i ever resisted.), somehow by the time you've walked thru 30 aisles of really cheap crap, it holds less power over you.

the first 45 minutes or so are new and fun and oh the things! but at about an hour, you start to realize that it is all just crap you do not need. laura, you don't need these sets of plastic fruits created for children to play with in their toy kitchens. no, it does not matter that they are only $3. laura, you don't need to buy some outdoor gnome figurine. (seriously, if you want a gnome figurine, get your ass to big lots.) or a ceramic rabbit. laura, you don't need any of those pirate ships. no, not that pirate ship either, laura. walk away from the pirate ships. don't stop at the toy sheep whose head you can make spit out playdough, just like it's hair. you don't need to buy any of those easter baskets, even if they are just 97 cents. or those solo cups, just b/c there are solo cups and you figure you can find someone to use them. or all those bags of chips that are just so cheap! seriously, how are the chips and cereals so cheap? i could go on and on and on.

i emerged 75 minutes later for just under $25--one $4 tacky gift for rob to take to the party, a $1 pair of bunny rabbit ears (feb club is right around the corner, you never know when you might need rabbit ears) (tho i did resist the urge to get lexi a matching pair), two $4 puzzles b/c i have decided that everyone loves puzzles, a $6 charger for my ipod (ok, this is when you start to convince me that maybe this store could serve a worthwhile place in my life), toothpaste, and one pair of gloves for running in winter (not me running in winter, don't be stupid.)

anyways, my point is that if you can manage to find it amongst all the strip malls loitering 29, i'd recommend stopping in and marvelling at the world that awaits you.

today's lesson

today's lesson is that cases aren't won on your skills as an advocate, or on the facts of the case, but on crazy juror bias. but sometimes, they're the kind of crazy that hands you the case. i mean, it's always good to know that justice was done.

today we did our trial ad trial, in a case involving a man who was either involved in a drunk driving accident or who committed suicide; if it was an accident, his widow and four children get the proceeds of his insurance policy; if it was suicide, they live the rest of their lives both destitute and w/o their husband/father. but here's are the facts: (1) five years ago, after he was passed over for a promotion at work, he finished his wife's bottle of valium, at least 12 pills. oh, and after this incident, when he talked about it, he said that he would not kill himself while his wife and kids were in the house. (2) he had been "severely depressed" and refused treatment ever since. (3) the day of his death he was fired from work. (4) right after being fired, he told his friend, with whom he had discussed his insurance policy in the past, that he was worth more dead than alive. oh, and he was a forklift driver with a shitload of insurance. (5) he went out to drink with his friend. he drank a lot. his BAC was .13. (6) the last thing he said before he left the bar, indeed the last words he was ever heard to say were, "say goodbye to the fellas at work for me," even tho his termination was not effective for another 2 weeks. (7) then he speeds up and plows into a tree and dies immediately.

from the very start, i have been ALL ABOUT THE INSURANCE COMPANY'S CASE. it somehow happened that i was assigned to give an opening statement for them, and every time we were assigned a direct or cross of a witness in class, it happeend that i was on the side that would be the insurance company. i mean, THE GUY KILLED HIMSELF! everything says so! it's not completely that i'm one of those people who isn't really swayed by emotion, but by facts, but in this case yes. i mean, ALL THE FACTS SAY THE GUY KILLED HIMSELF! and the widow hyde never spoke to me. not that i think she was a money-grubbing woman who was just out to take the insurance company for everything she could, but somehow, maybe b/c she was completely fictional, i just didn't see her as really sympathetic. of course, the fact that frank hyde was completely fictional didn't keep me from thinking that he was real and getting all worked up about him. i can't explain it.

anyways, when we get paired up for trial and are asked to represent a side, my partner wants to be the widow. and i figure that's fine. for starters, i just back down on things like this. and for seconders, i did know it would be good for me. since i am going to be a terrible lawyer b/c i am no good at arguing the thing i don't believe. seriously, i pick one side and then it is right and that is it. i didn't used to be this way, and the funny thing is that all of the problems they have given us in law school are specifically designed to be 50/50, so that no one side is actually right. and yet, i have always decided that one side is absolutely completely totally unquestionably correct and the other side is morons.

(tho today i was thinking about it and even tho i totally think the insurance company should win, i started to realize that i'm not actually sure they should. that doesn't make any sense, but it's just a preponderance of the evidence and i can't bring myself to think a lot of the things they say which just don't ring at all true to me (like that he had dreamed this whole "accident" scheme up to leave his insurance money to the family) and even tho i think he WOULD kill himself, and even tho i don't really think he was too drunk to drive, or at least not so drunk to explain the scene of the accident, i also don't think that 1.4 seconds really is enough time to do anything when you're plowing into a tree and i couldn't be convinced that there was no way that this wasn't an accident and that this IS him killing himself. so i suppose that i would actually have to find for the plaintiff. even tho the plaintiff's whole case just kills me.)

so today we do our trial and i pretty much sucked and it was painful and their key witness basically tore me apart on cross-examination, tho i would like to say that is not my fault, but it happened and it sucked. AND ALL OF THE FACTS SAY THIS WAS A GUY WHO WOULD KILL HIMSELF! and so on and so forth. so the jury returns a verdict for the widow. among the reasons they listed were the following:

1. cops lie. even unbiased cops. all cops always lie. (ok, so maybe that's an overstatement, but i can't recall what degree she said, and it was clearly overdone.)
2. people with three month old kids don't commit suicide. (i would like to give credit to the girl who pointed out that you don't think that people could kill their 3-month old children either, but they do.)
3. drunk people can't commit suicide.
4. a whole bunch of thoughts on whether or not this guy was drunk, which is exactly what you were supposed to wonder about, only our jurors were high school students, and while i know that high school students drink, many of the things they were talking about were clearly not based on what we had said but on their own thoughts, only their own thoughts were all over the board as to whether or not he was drunk.
5. that even tho you tried to commit suicide five years ago (which most of them agreed to), people change. now, this is all fine and dandy, except that all of the evidence was that this guy had only gotten worse since 5 years ago. and that the blow he had suffered at work the final day was even worse than the one that had caused him to take all the valium.

so maybe i suppose i could say there was something positive about our advocacy b/c i think that we spun some of those things pretty well, but mostly they were voting based on what they would have thought anyways.

but the whole thing was a really good experience and now i've decided i should keep going to school and be a jury consultant b/c i think that would be fun and i would also like to say that these kids really did do a great job of being jurors. they paid way more attention then i would have ever expected and they got really into it and i can't fault them for listening to my tear-inducing closing statement and being swayed. (ok, so my closing kinda blew and the kids actually told us they weren't crazy about how we argued a case.)

at least it's over!

oh, except that now that it's over, it's time for me to start writing my paper. which i am looking even less forward to than my week of 9 hours of class a day and having to stand in front of a room of my peers and try to make intelligent statements.

grrrrr: personal rants

well i had one personal rant, warning all people in charlottesville not to be behind a certain blue jetta in a drive-thru line, VA license plates KBE 8931, b/c it was the most frustrating experience of my entire life. well, maybe not. but i was debating getting something, was driving by, saw that there was only one person pulling in in front of me and no line, so why not? how long could that take? well, when the person PARKS in the drive-thru lane, close enough to the ordering machine that you can't pull around her, but not close enough to actually order, and then proceeds to spend about, and i am not making this up, 5 minutes, talking on the phone and changing her order with whatever group of people she has on the phone, and then telling the window person to wait while she THINKS ABOUT THAT ORDER OF CHICKEN MCNUGGETS and so on and so on and so on, well you can see that it might take a while. anyways, blue jetta KBE 8931 sucks.

second rant is about the guy who was leading our trial ad college group for the last two days. so, he has said some kinda ridiculous things over the last couple of days, many of which we were willing to let slide. hell, i was willing to just forgive him for being a bit old when he made 30 minutes of remarks on the topic of people that are not white men which pretty much gave away the fact that he was an old white man who really thought that those who weren't old white men weren't really quite as good as him. oh, and it's great that women have made it into the workplace! i mean, i hope that 25% of you make it back there after you leave to have your babies. i'm not sure we even need 25% of you back, but we'll let you all go have your babies.

but all of that aside, the one case we are dealing with this week is a question of a man who was diagnosed as "severely clinically depressed" by his family phsyician. and the instructor starts talking about how everyone has been depressed. "you're depressed when you don't get a job or when you don't do well on a test or when you get in a fight with your friend," he says. that doesn't mean you kill yourself.

NO! YOU ARE UPSET WHEN THOSE THINGS HAPPENED! YOU DO NOT HAVE A VERY SEVERE MEDICAL CONDITION THAT SHOULD BE TREATED! TOTALLY DIFFERENT!

so i try to make this point and say something about the incidence of suicide among those who are clinically depressed. i don't know the stats, but i do know that they are staggering for manic depression, and i just can't believe that they aren't at least a blip on the radar for severe clinical depression.

to which he replies that (1) less than 1% of depressed people commit suicide and that (2) just about no one kills themselves.

well, i am pretty f'in sure that this is wrong. but i don't have my computer. i can't get real facts. so i just sit there thinking there is no way in hell this can be right. so i have just looked up real facts.

turns out more than 15% of people who are clinically depressed kill themselves and it is the 8th leading cause of death in the united states, accounting for 1 in 100 deaths. and there are even further statistics, relevant to our case, that make exactly the point i was trying to make!

GRRRRR!!! i am just very frustrated b/c this guy said any number of things over the last couple of days which were kind of ridiculous opinions, but this was a preposterously created fact with clearly no basis in reality and i am just frustrated that he is now gone back to new jersey and i have no way (short of being petty enough to email him) to yell out with all the frustration i was feeling earlier and tell him that he is ignorant and wrong!!!!

anyways, i'm sorry that this is a downer of a post and that i am trying to sell you on how often people commit suicide, but he was one of those very frustrating people for me and grrrr!

anyways. i hope everyone is having a good day! also, i am pretty excited about the fact that it is being cold lately! yay for that!

just me and the stilton

so i promised i would report back and report back i shall. turns out that the blueberry stilton mostly just tastes like blueberry, which is probably an intentional effort to quash the taste of the stilton, which i will give enough benefit of the doubt to continue eating when it tastes like blueberry, but not enough benefit of the doubt to firmly believe it is not gross when it is not made to taste like blueberry. also, it is a very crumbly cheese and i now have blueberry stilton in every nook and cranny of my couch. and still i continue to eat right through it. mmmmm, smelly cheese disguised with fruit! happy laura....

today's fun game

well, as much fun as cross-examining a witness is (actually, it was), that was not today's fun game. no, today's fun game was much more dangerous.

so i don't like basketball really at all. it's just that i never became a basketball person and i'm kind of of the opinion that either it's only the last 2 minutes that matter or that it's such a blowout that none of it really matters. but today a lot of people were heading over after trial ad to watch the uva vs. stanford game and i figured that i should go, as i never go to basketball games and there were still plenty of tickets and what else was i going to do other than prepare for tomorrow or get some much-needed rest.

well, i arrived about 30 minutes before the game started. two of us to save seats for like 7 people. as a side note, i would like to tell you to never have me save seats. the man says we are not to save seats, i say ok. fortunately, jared held his ground, and the other people were very nice. i cowered in the corner, avoiding eye contact with anyone.

but during that time, the stanford team was practicing on the half of the court immediately in front of us. well these boys were cute! and they were smart! and they were wearing black and red! and they were shooting some nice baskets! and they were the team whom i watched for 30 minutes while they shot and stretched and generally made me love them for the fact that they were just so damned tall.

so the game starts, and i am kinda miserable. my friends were late, and i am in an i hate basketball mood and i am just not feeling it.

only then i figured it out--i wasn't feeling UVA.

but there was no denying my inner cardinal. ooooooh, how i loved them. so i began to learn all of their first names, waiting for fouls and shots, jotting them down on a sheet of paper, so that i could learn everyone's first name and i could then cheer for them by first name when they made shots and blocked shots and took free throws, etc. anthony, fred, landry, mitch, brook, robin, lawrence. i loved them all. and oh! how they played as i yelled for them by name! (i have decided that the real joy of basketball as opposed to football is that you can convince yourself that the players can hear you over all the other noise, and you feel like you really can make a difference, even if you have to bide your time.) (as a side note, it turns out that they are all freshmen and sophomores! i can love this team for a few years to come!)

well, i suppose that none of this would have been so bad, were it not for the fact that when JR reynolds went to shoot his freethrows for the lead with something like 9.6 seconds left, i yelled out laura's very powerful "f$#! it up!" cheer. ok, so it's not so much a cheer as the fact that i yell that and sometimes it works. (not audibly, so that the player hears me. just loud enough to put the vibe out there and will it to happen.) well it worked today. and then lawrence made a shot and won the game for stanford, by one point, in the last 0.9 seconds!!!

and the thing is, i was SO HAPPY! i really meant it. what an ending! in the course of 2 hours, i had really come to WANT that team to win. they truly had become my team. and it was an exhilerating ending! the kind that makes you think that basketball really IS great! and that that was EXACTLY what you wanted to happen! only i was obviously in the minority on that sentiment. oops.

the kinda funny thing is that at about exactly the time i discovered my inner cardinal and decided i was going to be a stanford fan, UVA's coach took a timeout to yell at his players about something. i joked that this was b/c he knew that they had lost laura and that that was it. and i'm still going to contend that that is exactly what happened. don't mess with laura or you may lose a sporting event!

trial ad college: i’ve got some good news, and some bad news

so part of the way the whole thing works is that we get put into small groups of 8 or so, which they say are selected to put you in a group with a similar level of trial experience. so my big question before today was whether that meant that we students would be put in groups together, or if we would all be divvied out amongst the other groups. i thought the latter way would be a good way for us to learn from one another, but it also intimidated the hell out of me.

so the good news is that our groups are all students. and the even better news is that even the students in my group don’t scare me!

the bad news is that our groups are all students. see, molly and i had concluded that this might be another husband-meeting opportunity. she pointed out that these probably wouldn’t be all old men, but would be a number of young, good-looking attorneys who are sent here by their firm for some CLE. and, i would like to say that molly was right. (of course, this is another example of how i find attractive to be something totally different than most women, since rada, jana, and court were all talking about how there were no good-looking young attorneys, whereas i thought caplin auditorium was swimming in cuties.) (if you would like further examples, the boy i thought to be the best looking boy in the c/o 2001 at BC was called “dying seaweed boy” by my roommates, b/c they said that he looked like the mermen in the little mermaid after ursula sucked their souls out of them and they shriveled up into seaweed. there is an even better example in who i think is the cutest boy in the c/o 2007 at the LS but i am not posting that on my blog, but ask me and i may tell you, but you would have to be hush-hush about it.) anyways, the thing is that i will not be able to wrap my tentacles around any of these young hot lawyer types in the next week b/c i will be with a group of 7 people i already know. which is also fine.

other tidbits from the day: coconut cookies are delicious! i could not for the life of me tell what they were and so i had all the other trial ad participants taste pieces of the cookie, so as to determine what this “generic” cookie was. coconut was the consensus and i would recommend it highly. if you are in charge of some law school event in the future, GET COCONUT COOKIES! then invite me.

and eli and i went grocery shopping briefly at the new kroger. not only did i point out to him the princess and pirate cakes, but i also succumbed and bought the blueberry stilton. i am not sure i would recommend blueberry stilton, but if i could manage to get the plastic off of it further, i imagine it might be one of those tastes that is offensive at first, but which i will soon grow to love, and within minutes there will be no more blueberry stilton. i’ll keep you posted on all forthcoming developments regarding my taste for blueberry stilton.

finally, the pizza at darden sucks. glad i could help.

brilliant

so khang sent me a link to some webpage with all sorts of piddly little stupid quizzes (you know, b/c i need more things to distract me, since i'm already not doing my opening statements.) the thing is i'm not good at filling out these things b/c i never think any of the answers are right for me, so i just give up. but that doesn't stop me from flipping thru to check out all the inane quizzes you can take.

what flavor lip gloss are you?

what girl group should you join?

what type of bikini are you?

what's your favorite john cusack movie?

are you pregnant?

yes, that's a great idea. determine if you're pregnant by answering 7 questions online which start with, "have you had unprotected sex since your last period?" and concludes with, "have you had a positive pregnancy test recently?" it's foolproof really.

awesome.

the scoop in c'ville

some things haven't changed since you left cville:

1. the traffic still sucks
2. it's still 70 frickin' degrees out there (and i'm still bitter about it)
3. laura is still buying random tacky crap at the target simply b/c it is 75% off and it can be used to dispense alcoholic beverages

some things, however, are different:

THE KROGER AT BARRACK'S HAS RE-OPENED!!!

so i know that not everyone cares about the kroger, but i have always been a devoted kroger shopper, even when it was dirty and did not carry lettuce. that did not bother me. if you are going to live off of frozen foods and prepackaged goods (plus you have very low standards for cleanliness), then i do not see how the unsightliness of your grocery store can affect your foods. and since kroger sells their lean cuisines for like $1.50 less than the teeter, which is just one of numerous examples of big savings to be had at the kroger, well i am sorry, but you can just call me a kroger devotee. (tho i also have to give props to the teeter. it is a lovely store and i have had some wonderful customer service there (the avocado incident of summer 2005 pre-dates this blog or you would all know what i am talking about) and there are certainly things for which i prefer the teeter.)

anyways, the new kroger is open and ave and i decided that we would go give it a look-see after our farewell dinner at 5 guys. well, i must say that i am very glad i went with someone else. you know how i am about change.

i couldn't even walk in the door initially. it was DIFFERENT! they didn't just make it the same old kroger! they made it AN ALL NEW KROGER! and i was a bit distraught.

but gradually, i made my way in. to the newer, more expansive produce section. to the smorgasbord of cheeses. to the expanded bakery section. TO THE PRETTY PRINCESS CAKE! and the PIRATE SHIP CAKE! (sorry, the cakes were kinda amazing.) to the WALK IN BEER REFRIGERATOR (with quite a selection of 40s, it must be noted. i like that the updated kroger is sticking to their ghetto roots.) and i am sure there are any number of other fabulous new things that i have already forgotten about b/c my memory sucks and b/c i was just trying to remember about the pirate cake. oh, and if you go, see if you notice that there are donuts EVERYWHERE. seriously, i don't know how many places you can put donuts in one grocery store.

so while the initial shock of not my usual kroger was a bit much, i think i am going to quickly settle back in and i am very excited about the fabulous new look of the kroger! (oh, except they have a new font on the front of the store and that disturbed me a lot, b/c isn't that a trademark thing? i mean, i associate a particular font with the kroger, and now i'm worried that this isn't really the kroger i knew and loved but it's really some sort of k (teeny tiny space) roger and they are going to mooch off of the goodwill of the kroger in the area, and that would explain why the inside is so totally different and i didn't check the prices! what if the prices aren't as low and fabulous as they used to be?!?! oh my. i am going to have to investigate this further. unfortunately, that is going to have to wait for a bit b/c it turns out that this class i am taking runs from 8:30 AM TO 9PM FOR THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS!!! does anyone else think that is CRAZY?!?!?! ok, parenthetical multi-pronged rant ending now.)

i am so transparent

so i was IMing a friend and he sent me a number of links to some comics online. before i clicked on the links, i sent the following IMs:

LifeboatLaura: OK, BUT AFTER THIS ONE I REALLY HAVE TO START WORKING ON TRIAL AD INSTITUTE
LifeboatLaura: after i post to my blog
LifeboatLaura: but THEN
LifeboatLaura: THEN I START WORKING

i then opened the first link. this was the comic:


sorry, but i think that's pretty damned funny. also, sad. i am sad.

perhaps the worst fortunes ever

these aren't verbatim b/c even tho i managed not to lose them on new year's even and to drag them home with me from austin, i think my parents threw them away before i woke up this morning. but you should be able to get the gist--

To discover who you are, figure out who everyone else is. You're what's left.

If you live out of your imagination, you live out of your potential.

in molly's and my fortune cookies at the Fire Bowl Cafe, where at least the general tso's chicken contained chicken, even if their fortune cookies contained soul-crushing two-liners.

(ok, so the 800th time i read the second one, it seemed like it might not necessarily be soul-crushing, but since the first 799 times molly and i read it we either had no idea what it was saying or thought it was trying to squash your imagination like a bug, well it’s still going to qualify as not a very uplifting fortune cookie message.)

back in BTR

so i'm back at home, for only a day, but molly and i had an awesome time in austin and i will post a few more things about that, only i am being too lazy to do anything. well, except avoid showering and eat chips. if either of those counted as productivity, my level of productivity would increase exponentially.

the short version is that we bought me a fourth option for a barrister's dress (another laura saga, don’t even get me started), ate more than just a bit of mexican food and drank some margaritas, finally made it out on sixth street, met some of the worst boys ever, walked around the lake in austin, visited a scenic overlook, had general tso's chicken that actually had chicken (amazing!), had dinner with some friends i met when i was 14 and who i get in touch with about once every three or four years (ok, so i'm really bad about keeping in touch), couldn’t get tickets for our 80s concert, spent new year’s at a house party with a bunch of people we didn’t know at all (molly and i only talked to one person the whole night, we thought he was great, but my friend reported that no one else at the party really liked him. oh well. no one ever said i was a good judge of character.), and had brunch at the cutest place ever before dropping me back at the airport. it was a short visit, but totally full of fun and it was great to see molly, and even tho our new year’s plans didn’t pan out like we anticipated, it was still a pretty good time and still better than our backup options of doing nothing with our parents, and we figure that we can hear 80s music any old time really, so yay for having visited austin! it really was a great few days.

i would say that the only downside was the football i missed, most of which did not really matter, but i called my dad immediately after the plane landed in austin to ask him about the BC game, and was told that navy had just fumbled the ball and there were 54 seconds left and we were down by 2. then i stayed on the phone with baited breath as he gave me the play-by-play and our little walk-on kicker won the game and YAY FOR THAT and for BC winning its seventh straight bowl game. oh, and i was back last night, but i turned the boise state/oklahoma game off with like 30 seconds left when it was 3rd and 18 and i figured there was no way it would happen, only to wake up this morning and KICK myself for having turned it off. oh well, at least i can see the replays 100 times today i guess. since i’m not doing anything else. you know, except avoiding showering.

anyways, happy official new year's to everyone!!