WHAT'S HAPPENING, DADDY!

I've been thinking about having kids lately. After blithely coasting through a long period of my life in which I loathed children (for the typical reasons--they're selfish, uninteresting, and unread), I think I'm turning the corner. I'm not sure that this reflects some new found maturity or a willingness to abnegate my needs, priorities, and concerns for those of my child. Although I'd like to think that, of course. Instead, I suspect that my wanting a child is more or less a function of my penchant for acquisition. When I was a kid, I liked to collect stuff. The same holds true today. All the other kids in school--i.e., the senior associates that I work with--have young children and when we're out for lunch and they're zinging the table with cute little stories about their little kids, I feel a little left out. Plus, I think I'm partly driven by my desire to see a living, breathing child-like Claire in the flesh. Claire was a very cute child. She's perfectly fine now, but things have changed (it's not better, or worse, just different). Long story short, I kind of want to have my own little Ba Jr. running around my house, traumatizing her siblings, talking shit, and biting off more watermelon than she can chew.

Nerds and inefficient markets.

There are few things in life that are more frustrating than e-bay users who get into bid wars two fucking hours before an auction is set to end. I'm trying to work here, I've got some brief-writing to attend to. I didn't plan on wasting my time monitoring this situation. There should be some sort of formalized subscriber ethic that everybody waits until the last thirty-seconds of an auction before you fire your best shot. Jeez. I wonder if it reflects poorly on me that I'm all hot and bothered over the same batch of X-men comics that they are. You'd think that nerds would be able to get with the game plan.

More Schiavo fallout.

I don’t have anything new to add to this—outrage among commentators is far-flung—but in any case, John Cornyn followed up Tom Delay’s veiled threats of retribution against the 11? federal and state court judges who ruled against the Schindlers in the Schiavo matter with this comment:

"I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence."

Now this isn’t exactly a call to violence, so in that respect, Cornyn isn’t more of an idiot than Delay. But it does strike me as a particularly insensitive view and could not have been anything but calculated. I’ll cut Delay some slack because I think he’s genuinely stupid. In his past life, he was an exterminator (think Dale, from King of the Hill). Cornyn, on the other hand, is a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a former federal district court judge. How Cornyn could have gotten so far in life without a rudimentary understanding of the separation of powers is incomprehensible. Cornyn is no Delay. I doubt that he slept through con law in law school, so he understands the principle. The truth of the matter is more damning—Cornyn said something that he understood to be indefensibly wrong, but said it anyway for political gain. That’s a novel approach.

Drugs are bad, mmmm-kay?

I was in a meeting the other day on a case that’s in its formative phase. That’s the time when every legal issue that you can possibly think of is tossed back and forth ad nauseam, even those issues that a first-year associate could figure out were bunk inside of an hour. The rationale is that no stone should be left unturned because thoroughness is in the client’s interest. That’s true—sometimes—but it’s certainly no skin off of our back because we bill by the hour. As a result, in larger cases I find myself wasting a lot of time researching crap that, when all is said and done, won’t have made a lick of a difference. In my early-twenties, this would have troubled me on an existential level, but I can’t say that it does now. Keep the paychecks coming.

Anyway. I’m in the middling of daydreaming when I hear the partner in charge of the case say, “Well, if all of the great minds here at this table [something something].” I managed not to snort, but I think I involuntarily smirked. Speak for yourself, pal. I just spent the last five minutes staring at my reflection in that glass wall behind you, trying to decide if I need a haircut. That’s about the highest level of abstract thought that I’ve been able to muster during the long course of this meeting. I miss being smart.