I am large, I contain multitudes

Re: The Most Immediate Post from 2007, Before I Ceased Blogging

2011-06-24T17:39:00.003-05:00

The case that I pulled an all-nighter for was eventually tried to conclusion. We sort of lost and sort of won. It's odd to think of it now. My firm has changed quite a bit since; the principal difference is that I'm now nominally a partner.

Claire and I expect to have a baby girl come September. In anticipation of her delivery, Claire purchased me two books as a pre-emptive Father's day gift. I have read the first sixth of one, and I haven't yet read the other; both are written by women physicians, and both are directed to the relationship between a daughter and her father. I can honestly say that the book that I am currently reading is lame. I don't want to sound like a douche, but lady pediatricians who write books about fathers and daughters are, from my admittedly limited sample size of one, on the shrill and solipsitic side. Topic sentence (repeated throughout first sixty pages of book on frequent basis): YOUR DAUGHTER IS GOING TO BE A WHORE (unless you do your job)!

Not instructive and not pleasant to read.

It worked!

2011-06-14T20:40:00.002-05:00

I don't understand how the internet knew that it was me, but I was not required to log in or provide two forms of identification as a precondition to posting. Neat.

I thought I would check in.

2011-06-14T20:39:00.001-05:00

It's been more than four years. Some things have changed.

Eh.

2007-02-15T03:41:00.000-06:00

I’m in the midst of an all-nighter at work. My first, surprisingly. I've come close, but I do believe that tonight's the night I finally make it happen. My brain is functioning, from a cognitive standpoint, at a less than optimal level. For some reason, I’m also feeling very whimsical. If the right (or wrong, depending on one’s perspective) song pops up on my ipod in the next five minutes, I just might feel pumped up enough to tear my diplomas off of my office wall, shatter their frames on my desk, and wipe my ass with them.

Cafe Martinique.

2007-02-10T02:26:00.000-06:00

So I haven’t posted in awhile. This is partially because I’m beginning to doubt the practicality of having a blog that’s available to, oh, everyone that has an internet connection. But I do like memorializing my progress through life. Why a diary wouldn’t suffice, I’m not entirely sure. It’s easy to chalk it up to egotism, but I’m not certain that the mere act of publication to the masses is a sufficient explanation. Maybe it’s because diaries are totally gay (and not in the hate-crime sense, but more in the, “I’m fucking old, so in accordance with the ancient vernacular that thirty-year-old relics are wont to employ, gay = lame, but not because I don’t respect the same-sex anal” sense).

My job has been murdering me. I often think about killing myself. Claire hates it when I say that, but I think she should cut me some slack because I’m too stupid to articulate the sentiment any other way. Suicide is no laughing matter, and when I say I want to kill myself, it’s not with the same desperation that motivated my use of the phrase eight years ago. Because back then, I think I actually did want to kill myself. Now, it’s a bit more light-hearted. I basically mean that I wouldn’t mind taking a nap for a month or eighteen years. Because I’m tired dude. Boss be sweatin’ me.

On that note, I’m happy to say that being betrothed is treating me well. I was concerned that I’d freak the fuck out, but it’s been quite settling. I need to exhaustively write about the trip at some point, but for now, I will offer the following advice: don’t stay in Nassau if you want to propose to your lady as the sun sets over the atlantic. The sun doesn’t set over the ocean when you’re on the east side of an island. Waiting another day to see how things work out doesn’t help because, as I’m told, the sun will move from east to west every fucking day of your life. There apparently aren’t any exceptions to this general rule.

We sealed the deal at a restaurant on paradise island. It sounds cheesier than it actually was. Everyone asks me if I got the staff involved in the proposal. I didn't, because I have class. So I asked and Claire accepted. She was happy enough to cry. I think. Happiness and mortification aren't exactly the same thing, but it's hard to be discerning when you're emotionally ignorant. Shortly thereafter, our waiter walked over with our dessert. I was moved as well, but not crying--like Claire--because I have no soul, and in any event, I'm not exactly a pussy. As the waiter asked us if we needed anything else for the evening, I couldn't help but worry that he had surveyed our table, noted Claire's tears, and concluded that I was beating my lady's ass on a regular basis (he hadn't seen the earlier proposal or noted the ring). Which was kind of funny to me when I thought about it later.

Love is so short and oblivion so long.

2006-10-11T11:47:00.000-05:00

In keeping with my series of "blog for the nostalgia" posts, this is a poem that I fell in love with nearly ten years ago. I hadn’t thought about it in a long while, but when asked by a friend to choose which, among three poems, she should read at a wedding, I went with the Neruda. Which led me back to this. The sentiment expressed is more or less foreign to me at this juncture in my life. I’m apparently in a very good place. But I’d rather not forget that I once read this poem and was moved enough to cry like a little bitch. So in memoriam of my former self:

Saddest Poem

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.

Because Eddy asked.

2006-09-14T23:44:00.002-05:00

I downloaded Pat Benatar's "We Belong" recently. It's quite possibly my all-time favorite pop song. I listen to it on my walk to work; it gears me up for a full day of lawyering. The tune reminds me of when I was passionate about life, or as I like to say, fucking crazy. I don't think I've ever told anyone this--aside from Claire--but the night that one of my ex-girlfriends broke up with me, I jimmyed my way into her building with a credit card, in the hope that my persistence would lead to some sort of reconciliation. It didn't, imagine that. Which, as it turns out, was fine. Because had we reconciled, I'd likely be less than two years away from paying my first child-support payment. But in any case, I miss my former self, if only because he had the capacity for great emotion.

I've been much more ambivalent about my life's calling lately. For the past year, I'd been operating on the presumption that I was going to make partner and practice the law for the next two or three decades. I don't know what happened exactly, and I don't think it was the expiration of my twenties, but I've been considering, more and more seriously, a hasty departure from the law. My closest friend at work is probably a bad influence. He's someone who's never felt the sense of desperation that comes with leaving behind a good paying job for the unknown. It's not that I'm fearful of washing out. At this point, partnership is more a matter of wanting it to a greater degree than the competition, and being willing to make the sacrifices that are expected of you. But kids, apparently, enjoy the human touch. That, and I don't like the stress. It kills me that I'm required to worry so much about stupid fucking bullshit that, from an objective standpoint, doesn't mean jack shit to the client. The devil is ostensibly in the details, which should make sense, but guess what--it doesn't. When your client's defending 200 depositions for a lawsuit and 80% of the deponents are fucking nobodies, the thirty hours in two days that you killed yourself to bill while preparing one of those nobody's deposition outline isn't going to make a lick's difference when, 30 months from now, the case gets settled before trial.

On the other hand, I consider my friend to be a little spoiled by life. No workplace is perfect, that's why it's fucking work. And there are a lot of shittier things to do for a boatload of money than lawyering. It's funny how we only remember certain random things about our lives; how we let specific and otherwise nondistinct events define us. I had this conversation a long time ago with a law firm associate who was more junior than I am now, when I was a law office monkey. I was bitching about bates-labeling and how it was beneath me. The attorney had been a friend of mine and his reaction was not expected. He reamed me out. In his opinion, I was being a whiny little bitch--nobody was making me work this job and while I was here, I might as well be grateful and do a good job of it. I was doing better than the poor bastards working the lunch shift at the lake forest burger king, and those dudes had families to care for. He told me to ball up and shut my yap. Which stays with me to this day. So who knows. If years from now, I'm able to co-own a yacht with any of you, know that 50% of your luxury vessel was underwritten by my soul's demise.

Turning thirty.

2006-07-21T11:59:00.000-05:00

On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, my firm had a Cubs outing for its summer associates. Although I had a brief that I had to turn around that morning, I managed to catch the last third of the game because of a rain delay. The game itself was lame—Maddux gave his typical post-Braves era quality start (6 IP; 4 ER), and the Cubs lost without so much of a peep in the later innings. This summer has lacked the hedonism of last, mostly because last year's interns were all burgeoning alcoholics, and best of all, promiscuous. So the after-party in Wrigleyville wasn't much of an after-party, and I bailed around 6:30. The year before, by contrast, I rambled around until 10:00, ate a burrito in the hope of sobering up, hopped in a cab home, puked my burrito, showered, and drove to the airport to pick up Claire. So this year was a bit more sedate.

During my walk home, I decided to swing by the comic book store adjacent to Shiroi Hana. They've been marketing a 125 issue lot of X-Factor for the last year. Not surprisingly, no one's bought it because: (1) most little kids don't have the money, or the vested interest, to buy a bunch of comics which likely pre-date their birth; and (2) most adults have self-respect. I, on the other hand, don't give a shit, particularly when I'm drunk. Even the hipster with the buddy holly glasses manning the counter gave me a funny look; I shot him a look back which hopefully conveyed—"what the fuck's your problem; I'm not the foolio that works here."

The issues that I bought were published from 1986 to 1996, which was nine to nineteen for me. X-Factor was the first real comic that I followed religiously. The first issue that I ever bought was #4, on a post-church Sunday afternoon at "Catfish Town," Baton Rouge's ill-conceived circa-1985 main street rejuvenation project. We had gone to café du monde and I was flush with a sugar rush from several beignets. I think my parents were reluctant to buy it for me because there was a (somewhat) scantily-clad hei ren in leather on the cover. But they did, and the rest is history. Ten years of comics turned out to be heavier than I thought it would be. After triple-bagging them, I struggled home on the el, stopping along the way to pick up Claire in the loop (who incidentally gave me the same look that comic book store guy did).

Reading them again was odd. I hadn't remembered how obsessive I was as a kid, when I read and re-read a single issue dozens of times during the thirty or so days between one month's offering and the next. Jonathan Franzen wrote an essay once about his father's alzheimer's disease, and the physiological basis for human memory. I don't remember exactly what he said, but I do remember that it was neat and that he used the science as post-modern allegory. Long story short, you'd be surprised to learn the extent of the stupid shit that you remember, or at least think you remember. As I sit here today, I'd have to look up the rule on the number of interrogatories you can serve in federal court, even though the issue has routinely come up in the four years that I've been a practicing attorney. But I still have vivid memories of certain comic book panels which I haven't set sight on in fifteen years. What the fuck. It wasn't so much the actual memory of those images which stirred me, but the sentiment that they evoked. I can't really articulate it well, but if pressed, I suppose I'd call it something trite. They just made me really fucking happy in a way that's alien to whatever satisfaction it is I derive from life now, as an adult.

The pub crawl the next day was a bit of a letdown. I didn't hit as many bars as I intended to, and the endeavor wasn't nearly as nostalgic as I imagined it would be. Most of this was due to the number of people that tagged along. In ten years, I'll likely streamline the group so that we can more realistically comport with my one bar, one drink, one hour schedule. Claire and our first-born child will suffice. By the time 10:30 rolled around, I wasn't particularly drunk, but I had a massive headache and needed a nap. On Sunday, Claire surprised us with a sailing charter. It rocked. I later went online to check out lessons, but there's apparently some unspoken exclusive rich white people mafia when it comes to sailing. The cheapest I found were around three grand for 20 hours of instruction, which is not reasonable.

After less than a week, I can't say that being thirty or being back on the wagon is particularly fun. I've been plagued by an immature compulsion to throw off the bourgeois chains of my current life, quit my job, and do something that makes me really happy. Which is just about the stupidest shit I've ever thought in my entire life. As for sobriety, watching other people drink makes me really nervous. I don't know if that's some sort of dt precursor, but it's weird.

Aargh.

2006-05-12T08:28:00.000-05:00

As the child of Chinese immigrants, I’ve always bought into hierarchy more than most. It’s a little perverse. I’ve confessed to Claire that I have a habit of mistreating underlings, while being overly solicitous towards my superiors. As a mid-level, I now get to abuse licensed attorneys. I’m friends with many of my colleagues, but there’s one particular guy that really chaps my ass. He’s an incredibly nice person and I’ve concluded that his personal graciousness is genuine, rather than some professional tool. But the kid is dumb as rocks and it drives me fucking crazy. My secretary has an excuse. He doesn’t, because he’s getting paid a buck fifty a year to be a dumb ass.

Do you like my car, Dirk?

2006-04-30T13:22:00.000-05:00

I have a nine-year-old cousin in San Diego, who I’ve always mistaken for a dullard because of his unfortunate habit of mouth-breathing. I recently learned that he’s not. P.J. and Christine are twins who were born to my uncle later in his life and have been predictably coddled. Historically, my interaction with the twins has been limited to ignoring the gibberish that they seem to mistake for English, while they hit me for no good reason. But at one point during a trip which Claire and I recently made to San Diego, P.J. inexplicably broke into a long, coherent, and measured dissertation on the Harry Potter movies. According to Claire, it wasn’t so much the content of what he said but the seriousness with which he took up the topic that was so striking. So he’s not an idiot, apparently. My mom later told me that P.J. is a perfectionist when it comes to his schoolwork and becomes so agitated by his mistakes that he hits himself in the head. Unprompted, of course.

I shared that feeling yesterday. I have a jury trial in a week which I’ve been working on for the last month. I pulled a Lumberg and had a couple of paralegals meet me bright and early on Saturday morning. I was in good spirits because at that point in the day, the sun was out. That mood abruptly ended when I discovered that the paralegals, and myself, had made two separate mistakes. Once I figured this out, I quite literally wanted to punch the paralegal in the face and smash my desk to pieces. The paralegal, by the way, is a woman with two small children. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The paralegal’s goof, however, paled in comparison to mine. I’ve fixed it, more or less, but it lingers. In Boogie Nights, Phillip Seymour Hoffman has a scene where he makes a homosexual pass at Dirk Diggler which Dirk brushes off. During the aftermath, Scotty sits alone in his faux-Dirk Digglermobile and smacks himself in the head while bawling, “I’m an idiot . . . a fucking idiot.” My cousin, Scotty, and I need to form a support group. If this were a six-month trial, I’d surely kill myself.

I like my job. I also like getting trial experience. But I was eating dinner last night with my family and I felt like throwing up. I’ve also had to fend off a daily compulsion to self-medicate through beer the second I get home each night. I am totally doing jack shit in June. I think my secretary’s sufficiently servile to turn on my lights and computer in the morning, put my suit coat on my chair, and spread some papers around my desk in a workmanlike fashion with no questions asked.

The Guitreau.

2006-03-23T18:47:00.000-06:00

I have a case that’s pending in a Louisiana federal court. I’m the senior associate staffed on the matter, so I have an outside shot of going to Baton Rouge for certain court dates, to take a deposition, or at the very least, watch someone take a deposition while I pick my ass. I was glad to get the case for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that I’m a generally nostalgic person who thinks that it’d be a bang-up good time to stroll the halls of his old high school, or tour the strip mall wasteland from whence he came up. Maybe I’ll find my rosebud. I suspect it’s the Soundwave shoulder cannon which I buried in my back yard in the fourth grade. I think there’s also some sort of written manifesto buried back there that my neighbor Alice and I came up with. After a decade apart, Alice ended up living in the same freshman dorm as me at NU, dating and breaking up with one of my best friends from college, getting married, and pumping two kids out of her vah-jay-jay. Sheesh. I am old.

May it please the Court.

2006-02-26T13:07:00.000-06:00

I recently had my first argument before a federal court of appeals. The merits of our claim are exceedingly weak and the client isn’t one of our paying ones, so the case was a good setting for popping my cherry. My boss held no reasonable expectation of my success and—aside from the remainder of the client’s life being theoretically on the line—no cognizable interest (from the firm’s standpoint) depended on my strong performance. So the argument came and went and I think it generally went well. Two of the appellate judges on the panel had been old-school colleagues of my partner when they were all federal prosecutors for the Northern District. This, combined with the fact that we had been appointed pro bono counsel, gave them ample grounds to cut me some slack. The final member of the panel was Judge Posner, who’s acknowledged as someone that’s smart enough to have been appointed to the Supreme Court, but too much of a political neophyte to have obtained a nomination. Posner is at heart an intellectual, and in today’s day and age of highly-politicized judicial nominations, Posner isn’t as result oriented as Bush and company would have liked (or at least not in the results that social conservatives are interested in). That and he’s written some fairly crazy shit as part of his law and economics scholarship. The New Yorker ran a long profile on Posner back in 2001 which detailed, among other things, Posner's fixation with baboons.

I also think of the article from time to time when I’m exasperated by my Mom, or otherwise doubting whether familial bonds are truly the bonds that tie. Claire is devoted to her parents in a way that I am not. I’m not that troubled by my cold-heartedness, but Posner’s appallingly rational views on the topic have always made me sad because there’s something in the depths of me that may, in the end, reluctantly agree:

When Posner grew more conservative (he thought of himself as a liberal until he was thirty or so), his mother was horrified. "We had terrible fights," he says. "I became really furious at her. See, she was one of these bright fools, my mother-quite a bright person, but very limited. The other thing that annoyed me about her was that I worried about her politics interfering with my career. Every time I got a government job, I always felt obligated to tell the authorities that I had this mother who had probably been a Communist. It was an annoying piece of baggage. Then eventually she became senile and forgot about politics and actually became very benign. Both Charlene and I breathed a sigh of relief." Looking back on his red-diaper childhood, Posner considers his parents hypocrites. "It was just talk," he says of their radicalism. "They wanted me to live the same conventional life that they lived."

Both Posner's parents lived into their nineties. "My mother, in the course of her decline, broke her hip," Posner says. "In the olden days, people broke their hips and died, which was great; now they fix them." After his mother broke her hip, his father found it difficult to take care of her, so his parents moved to assisted-living facilities in Chicago. When his father grew very frail and sick, Posner asked the gerontologist what the point of keeping him alive with all these procedures was; the doctor informed him that termination of care had to be voluntary. "Because my father was more or less compos mentis and wanted treatment, you couldn’t deny it, Posner says. Growing up the way he did, struggling the way he did, the notion of giving up, not fighting to the end, was anathema to him. I hope my generation can be a little more rational about this. I'd like to choose my own time of exit.

"I don't know if this is true of everybody;" Posner says, "but I loved my parents when I was growing up and they were really the sort of parents you should be grateful to-my mother gave me great cultural enrichment, and my father helped me buy our first house, so they were ideal parents. But my thoughts about them are dominated by their old age. I don't make allowances: when I think about them, there's no affection. Charlene thinks I'm a little bit unnatural about my family. But so many people have these decrepit, horrible old parents, and then they're so upset when they die at ninety; and regard it as a medical failure that the doctors didn't do this and didn't do that. My father was even annoyed when my mother died-he thought the doctors hadn't tended her carefully enough-though by the time she died she couldn't speak, she couldn't use her hands, she wasn't human. And it's not as if you had a cute animal with the same mental ability-when you see human beings like that, you don't think, Well, she's on the level of a chipmunk." Asked what he felt when both his parents had died, he looked puzzled, as though the question didn't make sense to him. "I don't have any feeling about it," he said.

Where manslaughter comes from.

2006-02-08T10:18:00.000-06:00

At early common law only those homicides committed in the enforcement of justice were considered justifiable; all others were deemed unlawful and were punished by death. Gradually, however, the severity of the common-law punishment for homicide abated. Between the 13th and 16th centuries the class of justifiable homicides expanded to include, for example, accidental homicides and those committed in self-defense. Concurrently, the widespread use of capital punishment was ameliorated further by extension of the ecclesiastic jurisdiction. Almost any person able to read was eligible for 'benefit of clergy,' a procedural device that effected a transfer from the secular to the ecclesiastic jurisdiction. And under ecclesiastic law a person who committed an unlawful homicide was not executed; instead he received a one-year sentence, had his thumb branded and was required to forfeit has goods. At the turn of the 16th century, English rulers, concerned with the accretion of ecclesiastic jurisdiction at the expense of the secular, enacted a series of statutes eliminating the benefit of clergy in all cases of 'murder of malice prepensed.' Unlawful homicides that were committed without such malice were designated 'manslaughter,' and their perpetrators remained eligible for the benefit of clergy. Even after ecclesiastic jurisdiction was eliminated for all secular offenses the distinction between murder and manslaughter persisted. Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U.S. at 692-93.

Clarence and Alabama.

2005-12-18T13:09:00.000-06:00

I've been wanting to get another tattoo for awhile. In True Romance, comic book shopkeeper Clarence marries Alabama, a hooker hired by his boss to keep him company on his birthday, within a day of meeting her. After getting their license at City Hall, Clarence and Alabama go to a tattoo parlor to get this:

I love the film. It featured Christian Slater at his peak (sounds funny to even write it, but yes, he was a good actor), and the Quentin Tarantino-penned script has most of what I liked about Tarantino's subsequent efforts, without the annoying hipster pop cultural references and the now-standard post-modern narrative. It was earnest, hopeful, and although ultra-violent, affectingly lyrical. Combine that with some very good cameos by Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, James Gandolfini, and Brad Pitt, and you have a fucking good movie. Oh, and there's a Sam Jackson monologue about the merit of eating pussy.

So I'm considering getting a mini-facsimile of Clarence and Alabama's tattoo, except with my name instead of Alabama's. Back in the day, Eddy dubbed Claire "Clarence," and although the nickname hasn't really stuck--mostly because drunken Eddy is now a fond and semi-distant memory--it still calls to mind 2002-2003, when Claire and I first started hanging out. The tattoo's a bit white-trashy, but shrinking it might fix that. Most importantly, I think it'd be amusing to have a man's name tattooed onto my arm. Thoughts?

What a fucking dipshit.

2005-12-17T14:33:00.000-06:00

This dude is keeping cheap bastards like me down.

Taradise.

2005-12-10T20:25:00.000-06:00

My brother is in Hong Kong and Claire is preparing for finals. I went out with Rahul last night, and I'm not in the mood to carouse. But when left to my own devices on a weekend night such as this, I invariably end up drinking by myself, listening to sad pop songs, and debating whether or not to call my ex-girlfriends. Glum nostalgia is fun. I was also planning on having some wine, taking a bath, and weeping while reading Brokeback Mountain. But Proulx's publisher decided to charge 10 bucks for her 60 page short story, so I ended up reading the damn thing last week at Borders, where crying would have been socially inappropriate.

My office party was last night. I met an associate who I can honestly say is borderline retarded. Either that, or she's got the finest Tara Reid impression I've ever seen. She's hot and was, uh, in a particularly accessible mood last night. This girl was working what Claire and I like to call the Pat Markey m.o.--throw everything you can on the wall, and see what sticks. She ended up falling down a couple times and getting kicked out of Lalo's. On an unrelated note, my work husband has run his number of firm conquests to three. This is mindblowing to me, because he has no game whatsoever.

An addendum to my last post. Despite my mild misgivings about her politics, Claire is one of the few people that I've met who doesn't fall into the "impoverished as a noble abstraction" complaint that I lodged against liberals. When she worked on her own piece of public interest litigation, she was her firm's interface with the class plaintiffs. I may well be romanticizing her, as boyfriends are apt to do, but I don't think she ever stopped viewing these women and their families as human beings, rather than some avatar of societal wrong, or the mere means to right that wrong. I love and admire her for this.

Waiting for Gatreaux?

2005-12-08T17:47:00.000-06:00

I attended a fund-raising luncheon for a public interest organization today. One of the attorneys being feted was a litigator who has devoted four decades of his life to remedying racial segregation in public housing. He was spry for an octogenarian, and gave a good speech. But one thing that I’ve always found irritating about these events is that the audience for his comments—which generally castigated American society for the social injustice that comes attendant to being born black and poor—was uniformly white and privileged. This was a fundraiser, and I suppose socio-economic diversity is a small price to pay when you’re raking $100 for each seat at the table. But I’m put off when I see the upper crust of society—with their cuff links, fancy watches, and tailored suits—nodding solemnly along with the choir, as if they understood. I believe that far too often, progressives view blacks as an abstraction, and that any closer examination of who they are as individuals and the messy lives that they have led would unnecessarily complicate our foundational understandings of why we have to stick it to the Man. And I’m certain that this willful obtuseness runs counter to the gross generalizations that many liberals secretly harbor, but cannot admit. Would you still think the integrationist ideal makes good sense if 10% of Winnetka was vouchered out to low-income black families? I don’t think so. I suppose this beats the views that you might find at the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Your career, R.I.P.

2005-12-05T12:13:00.000-06:00

I’ve resolved to take the California bar this summer. Three years ago, I was stunned to learn that I’d actually passed the Illinois bar, and with the certitude of hindsight, I can easily admit that my test prep sucked shit. The California examination is notoriously difficult, and I’ll have to juggle my job with bar review. In addition, I may have to scale back my contribution to the firm’s summer recruiting effort, which Claire should be thankful for. But because I think 80% of your life’s happiness can be secured by the consistent application of diminished expectations, I read something today that brought me some relief. Kathleen Sullivan—a cum laude graduate of HLS, former dean of Stanford Law School, and widely-respected authority on constitutional law—failed the California bar exam last summer. So be reassured, it happens to the best of us. Of course, for soon-to-be law firm associates without Professor Sullivan’s street credibility, failing one’s first attempt at the bar is a near-permanent badge of inferiority. Everyone at your firm will know, and very few of them will forget. So don’t fuck that shit up.

The pot is black.

2005-11-22T18:28:00.000-06:00

I have some pet peeves. One of them is hypocrisy. Another is when people rotely qualify every fucking word that comes out of their mouths, even when it makes absolutely no sense to do so. I pulled off a two-fer today during an oral argument when I said, "Your honor, I would stress that . . ."

I hate that shit.

I stand corrected.

2005-11-12T17:21:00.000-06:00

Praise the Lord I don't have the asian gambling gene.

28-7.

2005-11-12T12:34:00.000-06:00

I stand by my initial prognosis. If Basanez stops sucking, we'll close the gap during what looks to be some extended garbage time.

Pick to click.

2005-11-10T12:18:00.000-06:00

Our first-year associates are being sworn in as members of the bar this afternoon. Three years ago, on a day that was about as gorgeous as today, I received my law license under more desultory circumstances. My dad and I were unemployed, and I wanted to kill myself. Metaphorically, of course. Well. Not so metaphorically if you consider drinking to be a more protracted, but equally effective means of self-immolation. So as a good friend once told me, “When life sucks shit, don’t discount the future.” This is a good philosophy to have. I’d supplement it with, “Things could always be worse—you (or someone you love) could be DEAD,” but I suppose that’s not a very productive mantra to cling to on a day to day basis.

The point spread for the OSU Northwestern game is 18.5. That's a ridiculously easy bet. If anyone's interested, we should all put some money on Northwestern online. If Northwestern loses, at least we'll have our pyhrric victory.

Separate but equal. Please.

2005-11-02T18:38:00.000-06:00

One of the most irritating things about my workplace is the firm's insistence on treating associates and staff equally. For instance, we have the same late night meal and cab policy. If you stay past 8:00, you get a meal and a cab. Sounds generous, right? It's not. For meals, I only get reimbursed up to $10, everything else comes out of my pocket. I don't think there's anyplace in America where $10 buys you a decent meal. Making matters worse is the fact that the firm believes that it's obligated--according to its own suspect interpretation of the tax code--to report cab and meal reimbursement as part of our income. Meaning that it's not really $10 bucks, once state and fed taxes are paid out, we're talking $5.75. I used to work at a firm where the trigger time was 7:00 and the cap was $30 before questions were asked. My solution is this: if the firm honchos are going to insist on being fiscally responsible fuckos, they should just cut the staff's meal and cab reimbursement plan in its entirety, and funnel the cost savings into a brand, spanking new associate reimbursement program with more realistic parameters. I don't think that this is as heartless as it sounds. While we get paid more, the staff doesn't generate revenue; we do. Staff is just a cost that's incident to doing business. Plus, there are far worse things in life than clocking in--most of the time--from 9 to 5 and getting paid $55k a year for it. Granted, you have to put in 15 years before you hit that pay grade, but 9 to 5 isn't so bad when 80% of your time is spent on the internet, fucking around. (Like me.) I'd also like a separate cafeteria, better coffee, and a plasma tv. You can take it out of the steeply reduced bonus you'll be paying me this year because I got conned into spending 300+ hours of my hours on pro bono.

Can you help a brother out?

2005-10-31T10:25:00.000-06:00

On Friday, Rove was spared an indictment; Scooter Libby was hit with five counts for perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statements to a federal investigator. Most media reports I’ve read to date have painted Libby as a sympathetic figure. Even so, it’s difficult for me to muster much pity. It is not so much that I disdain the White House’s hardball political tactics; the Bush administration, at least for me, has lost its capacity to shock. Back in 2000, Rove orchestrated a direct call campaign in advance of the South Carolina Republican primary which accused McCain of having an out-of-wedlock child by a black woman, notwithstanding the fact that it was a matter of public knowledge that McCain’s dark-skinned daughter was a Bangladeshi orphan whom he and his wife had adopted. So no, the Sopranos-style outing of Plame was par de course for these assholes, and not something that I felt all too antagonized about.

Libby brought this on himself. I haven’t personally read the indictment because that shit is boring; I’ve relied on the integrity of our media to give me the straight dope. Based on those reports—and leaving aside the fact that the indictment is only the government’s side of the story—Libby is a monumental idiot. Testifying before a grand jury is some serious shit. If you’re going to perjure yourself, you need to think these things through if you plan on getting away with it. Instead, Libby gave a version of events that was plainly contradicted by Russert, Miller, Novak, and probably Karl Rove. It was amateurish, and completely inconsistent with Libby’s reputation for pain-staking meticulousness. The only possible explanation would be Libby’s misguided belief that the reporters were never going to testify before a federal grand jury, but even that’s moronic. Federal law doesn’t recognize a reporter’s privilege—Miller argued the issue all the way to the Supreme Court and was rebuffed at every juncture. Well, what should he have done? He could have done what Rove probably did—“Yes, I leaked; no, I didn’t know that doing so would be a violation of the espionage act.” Libby would have lost his job, but he wouldn’t be facing a year in prison and a seven-figure legal bill.

If you're interested, I believe some of his friends are starting a charitable fund for his impending legal costs. Which reminds me of a sentiment that often comes to mind when I see certain kinds of panhandlers in Argyle. A white, establishment power-broker looking for a hand-out? That's not the way the good Lord meant for things to be.

"I would never join a club that would have me as a member."

2005-10-25T14:53:00.000-05:00

Claire and I went to Everest on Friday. I had never been, and I thought that "dinner jacket preferred" meant suit coat, pink shirt, and jeans. Claire wore her law skool clothes. After arriving, we discovered that every douchebag in the dining room was wearing either a dinner dress or a bonfire of the vanities blazer/suit pant ensemble. Hah. We were shunted off to a less distinguished table and it took me 10-15 minutes to get a bourbon, but not before I was carded. Lovely.

I am obsessed with this woman.

2005-10-19T21:15:00.000-05:00

I don't know if I owe this to my hatred for Bush or my elitist streak, but I can't stop bitching about her. Miers can't write for shit. Some excerpts from her monthly Texas Bar Journal columns in the 90's:

''We have to understand and appreciate that achieving justice for all is in jeopardy before a call to arms to assist in obtaining support for the justice system will be effective. Achieving the necessary understanding and appreciation of why the challenge is so important, we can then turn to the task of providing the much needed support.''

''An organization must also implement programs to fulfill strategies established through its goals and mission. Methods for evaluation of these strategies are a necessity. With the framework of mission, goals, strategies, programs, and methods for evaluation in place, a meaningful budgeting process can begin.''

''When consensus of diverse leadership can be achieved on issues of importance, the greatest impact can be achieved."

Waterville, Me. Where dreams of Harvard go to die.

2005-10-13T10:59:00.000-05:00

I’ve wasted an hour or so of my time debating whether or not to respond to this, so I might as well. My productivity, or lack thereof, pains me but I cannot resist. My prior post suggested in jest that I may as well be next in line for a Supreme Court slot. This joke is an old one, at least in the blogosphere. In truth, Miers is much more qualified than me. Although I win the clash of the law degrees by a wide margin, she is 60 and I am 29 so it should not be a surprise that her professional track record is heftier than mine. Brushing aside the fact that: (1) Miers went to a second-rate school; (2) Miers manned a firm that while large, is not a national player; and (3) I have a constitutional philosophy (though inchoate) and Miers apparently has none at all, Miers vs. Me is a rout. We all understand that, that’s why the post was intended to be a joke. Wayne and Claire reliably comment because I suspect they’re the only nerdos I know that actually give two shits about the issue. I respond. The comments are snarky, and concern academia, politics, and business’s selective application of the term, underrepresented minority. Meaning Asians are shit out of luck. Then, an anonymous poster states the following:

“you are wrong. the definition of URM is the white man who has to settle for colby because his spot at harvard was taken by black people.”

I didn’t appreciate the initial declarative. I try to keep this under wraps, but much of the terribly arrogant fifth grader that I was managed to survive my adolescence and young adulthood. When it comes to certain things in life, I consider myself rarely, if ever, wrong. But I am an adult and after my instinctive reaction passed, my resolve to privately declare the poster a dumbass and leave it at that waned. The truth is, I sympathize with the thrust of the poster’s statement, if not the exact way in which it was articulated.

I think we can all agree that this is a galling thing to say, particularly if said by a white person. Perhaps galling isn’t the right word. How about, inappropriate for a professional setting, or for that matter, any circumstance in which a modicum of political correctness is required. I personally hate that shit. The fact is, white indignation over affirmative action is a widely-held sentiment, and honest discourse on the topic requires that it not only be expressed, but addressed. It’s too easy to retort, “fuck you and the six centuries you’ve spent oppressing us, whitey.” That sort of casual racism towards whites isn’t any less deplorable because it’s being leveled by the nominally oppressed.

A little aside on political correctness: we’ve been recruiting for our summer program over the last month and the recruiting committee meets weekly to vet candidates. It’s a large committee and since it’s populated by lawyers, the meetings aren’t short of blunt appraisals of candidate worth. But nearly all of these attorneys turn into willy-nilly pussies when it comes to matters of race. We had an international student from China who expressed an interest in litigation. He doesn’t go to an elite school, but his school’s not so shitty that we’re beyond his reach. Being a Chinese international student, his spoken English was crap. Nobody said this, but it was easily inferred. His interviewers opined that he “wasn’t a good fit for the firm,” “may take a lot of work,” and “would probably be better served by a firm with a more developed international transactional practice.” This irked me, so I cut to the chase and asked, “Does he speak English well?” This sparked a second round of hemming and hawing: “Well, it’s not ideal but he’s certainly fluent,” or “He has an accent, but that’s not what I meant by a good fit.” Finally, a lit associate a year above me point blank said, “Given his accent and less than ideal command of the language, I don’t think he’ll be as good as other candidates with similar qualifications, but without those same limitations. That’s why I recommended that we deny him an offer.” Hallelujah. I concurred, thus signaling that the only asian in the room had given his assent that there wasn’t anything racially untoward about dinging this guy based on a fair and realistic appraisal of how he would fare at our firm. The Man (and his liberal sensibilities) could rest easy tonight. Imagine that. Not speaking English so good isn’t a desired trait in a litigator.

I need to work. I’ll finish this later. Hopefully, I’ll actually get to my point.

Weak.

2005-10-11T08:59:00.000-05:00

This morning, in the NYT:

Documents Show Supreme Court Nominee's Close Ties to Bush

Harriet E. Miers found him "cool," said he and his wife were "the greatest!" and told him: "You are the best governor ever."

I wonder if it's too late for me to get on the gravy train. I’m an underrepresented minority on the Supreme Court. I went to law school. I’ve practiced at a large firm. I only lack Miers’ long and distinguished paper trail of junior high school fan mail.

The passivity myth?

2005-09-23T16:23:00.000-05:00

From Adrienne's:

"The Ann Arbor Police Department has issued warrants for two University students for allegedly yelling obscenities and urinating on two students in a racially motivated act. The incident began when one of the suspects, a 21-year-old, allegedly urinated from a second-floor balcony on two Asian students walking down the 600 block of South Forest Avenue Thursday night. After the couple asked why they were being urinated on, the suspect and another student reportedly began to use racial slurs disparaging the couple’s Asian heritage."

Jesus H Christ. "Why are you urinating on me?" What the fuck. How about, "I'm going to FUCKING KILL YOU."

I said it the last time, but this is the last time.

2005-09-18T11:26:00.000-05:00

I've represented to my mom that I'll quit drinking upon turning thirty. She apparently took me seriously, as she brings it up everytime we speak on the phone. I meant it, in my own way.

I like drinking. It turns me into a loud, obnoxious asshole, which for a shy asian kid like me, is a surprisingly satisfying mode of expression. Drinking is FUN.

But on the other hand, I'm feeling very much over it. There are a lot of things that I just don't like about the process any more. Initially, during the eight or so years that I've been off the wagon, drunk me has slowly evolved into a raving lunatic. 95% of the times in my life that I've said, "WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU CRYING?!," I was inebriated. I have absolutely no patience while I'm drunk, I'm quick to anger, and all the dickhead things that I do are fueled by an unchecked sense of entitlement. Given my character, I'm rolling the dice that one of these days: (1) my girlfriend will break up with me; (2) I'll wreck my car; or (3) a lot of huge guys will kick my ass after I've inexplicably picked a fight with them.

Second, it's becoming a fucking crutch. I need to drink when I'm having a decent meal, I need to drink when I'm shooting the shit with partners, and I need to drink on a weekday night if I'm bored and there's nothing remotely entertaining on tv. I don't appreciate the mild, but not insignificant, physical addiction that's attendant in the process.

Third, I no longer get good results. I get hung-over. I get bored and sleepy. I can't talk so good anymore. That's lame. If all I want is to relax and be a functional retard, I'd rather smoke. And I hate to belabor the point, but as far as altering your consciousness goes, drinking sucks shit compared to all the other drugs that you could do.

Fourth, I get the asian flush now. I never did before, but now I do. I'm not a doctor, but I think it's reasonable to infer that something about my liver is different now. Realizing that one of your organs no longer functions as well because of something as trivial as what you like to do on the weekends was pretty jarring, at least for me.

So fuck drinking. I have about ten months left in me. I know none of you believe me, but do me a favor and call me on it.

Be sober, be vigilant.

2005-09-04T22:53:00.000-05:00

I've been making a half-hearted attempt to decide on a religious sect recently. It has to be some vein of Christianity; otherwise, my Mom won't be placated and I'll stand no chance of spending time with her in the afterlife. I say half-hearted because I haven't really thought of any options aside from evangelical protestantism and catholicism. I don't fancy chinese church; been there, done that. Claire is irreparably catholic and it may be advantageous to follow suit so as to present our children with a unified front. Catholicism, in many respects, does have a personal appeal--catholics are very reticent about public displays of their faith, they have less of a tendency to ground their beliefs in emotion, and I like the structure of ritual. From what I've heard, mass does not often exceed an hour, which is important to me because my time is valuable. On the other hand, many of the Catholics I've met view Christianity as more of a sense of decorum and tradition rather than the centerpiece of a well-lived life. In that case, what's really the point?

It's always bothered me that girls that I've fucked in the past have professed to be serious Christians. They failed to apprehend the internal inconsistency, at least not in any way that was demonstrable to me. I generally don't have chaste, lights-off sex. I perpetrate my filth on others, and having done so, I never understood how they could get up, wipe themselves off, and go to church the next morning. I spent eight years of my life in a futile effort to keep myself from spanking off four times a day--it reduces your life expectancy by a day at a time, as the old adage goes--and it peeved me that my significant others didn't feel constrained by the same sense of guilt. In hindsight, my approach was reductio ad absurdum--I didn't want to be a hypocrite so I decided to be an unrepentant asshole. Stupid.

Katrina and New Orleans have not resonated with me emotionally, at least not to the extent that they should. I spent nearly all of my childhood and adolescence in the area, and it's indisputably a tragedy of the first magnitude. Claire said that it reminded her of Saramago's book, Blindness. I think that's apt. But even so, I don't feel the things that you would hope a reasonably empathetic person to emote in response to these events. It may have to do with some unacknowledged, but substantial racial animus. Or as Wayne alluded to, the solipsism with which the privileged lead their day to day lives. But I think it's more laziness--I didn't want to see film coverage, even though Claire explained that it would bring things home; I didn't want to read print coverage beyond the daily headlines; and lastly, I didn't want to even think about the misery, in any concrete sense, that people were going through while I sat on my couch watching the real world. I understood what was going on, but did not want to confront it in any meaningful way. Which leads me to believe that immorality isn't the product of our inherent propensity for sin; rather, it's the end result of our moral lethargy. I think each and every one of us possesses a reasonably well-tuned moral compass--right and wrong are not the most difficult values to divine. The problem with humanity is its failure to execute.

Leviticus 18:22.

2005-09-02T20:47:00.000-05:00

One of the partners that I work extensively for has often called in from outside of the office, explaining that he was in "Dore County," and that X had to be done by Y because of his travel schedule. For the first three months that I worked for Dore County Partner, I was under the misapprehension that "Dore County" was a judicial county somewhere in southern Illinois. I had never heard of it before, but there are many back water judicial courthouses in the non-Chicago parts of this state, too many for me to keep track of. I learned a couple of weeks ago that "Dore County" is actually where the partner's vacation home is located. That revelation really chapped my ass, because I distinctly recall having frequently said, "good luck" to him in the past on the presumption that he was on his way to litigate something--thus accepting his tightened deadlines because hey, he's busy too. But he wasn't. He was vacationing. Grrrr.

I left work early today because the staff had left at 3, and because I am lazy. Dore County Partner calls me at home, and we have a two hour conference on a motion to dismiss that I've written. When I write things, I tend to believe they are perfect as written--it takes me a long time to write, because I take great care with my first draft. I don't believe in seconds. But Dore County Partner is notorious for multiple re-writes, and this case was no different. So instead of chilling out, surfing the internet for porno, and listening to my Kanye West cd, I spent the remainder of my afternoon and early evening going back and forth with him on why my first draft is perfectly acceptable. I now have until noon tomorrow to produce a draft which incorporates his input.

Sometimes I wonder what Pat Robertson's internal monologue is like. Do you think he really buys into all of the crazy shit he says? Are there moments of solitary contemplation where he thinks, "Hey, I can spew the most putrid, hateful, invective I can think of in the name of God and millions of evangelical Christians will reflexively yelp an 'Amen!' in return. Neat."

My parents are moving back to Singapore, where my Dad has accepted a position as director of fundraising for an international missionary organization. In many ways, this is heartening news to me because my Dad is too young to be retired, and in any case, he lacks the mental constitution for repose. He gets bored easily and is a very goal-oriented person. Goals are hard to come by if you're involuntarily retired. So this is good. He gets to schmooze with the uber-rich, in the hope that they will hedge their bets for the afterlife by turning over a small portion of their wordly wealth for the Lord's work. On the other hand, it feels strange to be--in a loose sense of the term--a missionary's son. After college, I discarded most of my faith. It was very psychologically liberating. I had a problem with guilt as an adolescent. Embracing, among other things, my sexual perversion, lack of empathy for others, and substance abuse was a relief. I no longer cared if I fell short of conventional standards of morality. This made me a saner human being. It also had the unfortunate side-effect of turning me into 47% asshole. At the time, I rationalized that there would be a point in my life where I turned things around. That point would ideally coincide with my final transition into adulthood because I did not want my children to be raised by a 47% asshole. I take my dad's new calling in life as a signal that now's the time to begin a gradual reduction of my asshole quotient, while concurrently increasing my man of God factor. If I hate gays a year from now, we'll all know I've made substantial progress.

The downside of empathy.

2005-08-31T13:05:00.000-05:00

Merck was hit by a $235 million dollar judgment in the first Vioxx case tried to a jury verdict. While Texas has caps and that judgment will be reduced on appeal to roughly $25 million, Merck's stock price took a big hit because this was only the first of over 4,000 similar lawsuits in the pipeline. Moreover, Merck hand-picked this case to set the tone for future litigation because it was perceived as winnable, in light of the defects in the plaintiff's evidence on causation, as well as the relatively minimal compensatory damages involved--the decedent was already 59 years old, and of the working class. This excerpt features selective quotations by the wsj, but it makes a very strong case for why our products liability tort system fails to maximize economic utility by institutionalizing jury trial procedures that are susceptible to massively aberrant results:

"Merck argued that Vioxx couldn't have caused Mr. Ernst's death because, according to his death certificate, he died of an arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat, not a heart attack. While scientific evidence suggests Vioxx can promote blood clots leading to a heart attack, no data have linked the drug with arrhythmias.

Jurors who voted against Merck said much of the science sailed right over their heads. 'Whenever Merck was up there, it was like wah, wah, wah,' said juror John Ostrom, imitating the sounds Charlie Brown's teacher makes in the television cartoon. 'We didn't know what the heck they were talking about.'"

I hate to be an elitist, but this is just wrong. Causation is a required element of every personal injury lawsuit; I could pound a man's skull flat with a baseball bat, but if he was already dead before I laid my hands on him, I'm not legally responsible for his death. It's not that complicated. Moving on to one of the more substantive potential reasons for the jury's verdict:

"One juror, Ms. Blas, had written in her questionnaire that she loves the Oprah Winfrey show and tapes it. 'This jury believes they're going to get on Oprah,' Ms. Blue told Mr. Lanier. 'They only get on Oprah if they vote for the plaintiff.'

Two days later, facing the jury with his final argument, Mr. Lanier ... hammered home the point that they would be sending a message that would be heard widely. 'I can't promise Oprah,' he said, but 'there are going to be a lot of people who'll want to know how you had the courage to do it.'

As he made the Oprah reference, Mr. Lanier looked at Ms. Blas in the eye. She says she broke out into laughter and liked the lawyer's attention to her. 'That told me he read those profiles and tried to assess each and every one of us,' Ms. Blas said."

Pathetic. I'm not advocating that every drug which makes it through the FDA approval process should have an absolute defense to products liability. I also think that Merck was ill-advised to pimp out Vioxx with a full-on marketing blitz if it had, in fact, conducted internal studies that raised issues as to product safety. There may well be a lawsuit out there where $235 million in damages is legally justifiable. But it wasn't this one. This was a shitty plaintiff's case, and one that Merck most certainly would have won had the case been tried to a judge, rather than a jury.

Sweet Caroline.

2005-08-23T18:00:00.000-05:00

From a personal standpoint, I love my secretary. I really do. She’s a fantastic lady—sweet, hard-working, and congenial towards everyone. Most significantly, she’s never taken issue with respecting my authority. If I were her, having a boss half my age would be a hard pill to swallow. Having said all of these things, she’s really starting to bug me.

First off, she fucks stuff up. I’m not your ideal stone-caster: at best, I can be acceptably thorough; at worst, excessively sloppy. So attention to the finest detail is not my strong suit. But in addition to that, I routinely have to fix shit that, for whatever reason, my secretary doesn’t do properly. I have a hard enough time reining in my own incompetence, having to audit her work product should not be first on my list of things to do. For instance, today she typed up one of my letters on someone else’s letterhead. I almost missed it. Had it gone out, the client would have learned—correctly, as it were—that I’m a doofus.

Second, she’s very sensitive. Not sensitive in a bad way, meaning that she isn’t easily embittered by real or imagined slights. Rather, sensitive in that she really, really just wants to do a good job. I am a fairly mellow person and usually non-plussed by screw-ups. But I was pissed with her yesterday, the day that my federal appeals brief was due. She farmed out my table of contents and table of legal authorities to word-processing. I fault myself for not seeing the oncoming shit-storm, word-processing is a collection of nit-wits. Their final product was pretty crappy and my secretary, who isn’t really down with the automatic TOC/TOA generating software, couldn’t fix it. I eventually hijacked someone else’s assistant and she got it done. Throughout this whole process, my secretary felt chastened because she cares about what she does, but had to watch someone else finish her job off. Today she came into my office and tried to discuss. I was not particularly interested in hashing things out with her because: (1) it’s done with and I had no hard feelings; and (2) I lacked the patience to hold her hand, or in the alternative, the assertiveness to take the opposite route and tell her how I had really felt.

Third, she doesn’t knock on my door before coming into my office; this is inconvenient at times, particularly when I’m having phone sex with strangers.

Thanks, we'll be in touch.

2005-08-19T12:10:00.000-05:00

I did on-campus interviews at my alma mater the other day. The level of incompetence on display was striking, and brought back memories of my own piss-poor interviewee skills. One applicant refused to turn over his transcript, but offered to do so if he was extended a call-back interview. Another freely admitted to being interested in four different cities, although Chicago had definitely made that list. Personal details are nice, but medical conditions are not; it shouldn’t be all that difficult to draw the distinction. The process was more grueling than I expected. Sixteen candidates in, I made it through the first ten minutes of an interview without saying anything at all. Once I realized this, I mumbled a few “Why is that?” and “Based on what?” interjections to keep things flowing.

I found that what I was most impressed with were people that were unlike myself. My partner took the contrary approach. She is brunette and decidedly non-standard, college jocks and blondies did not fare well with her.

What I found myself telling candidates over and over is that an aura of confidence will always do wonders. No one knows how to do shit when they step off the elevator on their first day as an associate. But with time, you’ll reach an epiphany: “Hey. I’m a marginally useful cog in the machine. Neat.” I try to tell that to myself when I fuck shit up. On the other hand, I also have a tendency to pleasure myself with thoughts of how well-regarded I am in my workplace, so screwing the pooch nicely evens things out. You’re only as good as your last review. It’s tough to strike a balance between acting like you shit gold—which is important and professionally useful—and actually buying into it.

"Equal protection of the laws."

2005-08-18T17:16:00.000-05:00

This is a joke:

"A federal judge today sentenced Scott D. Sullivan, who acknowledged his leading role in Worldcom's $11 billion accounting fraud, to five years in prison - a fifth of what sentencing guidelines suggested and a striking example of the benefits of working with government prosecutors."

This, despite the judge's conclusion that Sullivan had indeed been the "architect" of the largest accounting fraud in U.S. history. Under those same federal sentencing guidelines, a five-year sentence is "suggested" for dealing between four and five grams of crack. I have no idea what the precise street value of 5 grams of crack is, but I can confidently say that it's a fraction--and an exceedingly small one at that--of the $11 billion in shareholder losses occasioned by Sullivan's malfeasance. Hilarious. Ebbers, Sullivan's boss, went to trial and got hit with 25 years.

Knowing this, we would all be well-advised to get down on our knees post-haste and suck the cock of every federal prosecutor that comes knocking on our door, should we get caught with our hands in an $11 billion cookie-jar. Don't hesitate to sell out your boss, that's why he makes the big bucks. Oh. And don't deal crack, stick with the powder cocaine (or at least large-scale corporate fraud).

The Sullivan case brought to mind the three consecutive twenty-year sentences that a rapist once received for what most would consider one rape--he got hit with multiple counts for switching positions and ejaculating more than once. So, moral of the story part three: if you absolutely need to rape someone, stick with what works best for you.

I accept that this is in very poor taste, and considered deleting it. But to thine own self be true.

Troxel v. Granville. Or, "Come Softly To Me."

2005-08-03T17:08:00.000-05:00

Marie Claire made law review. She gets to be on the masthead of an academic journal, something that is much cooler than it sounds. I, on the other hand, now have to weather the psychological torment of having been surpassed by my little man. Much like the episode of Family Guy where Peter learns that Chris has a donkey dick and spends the remainder of the show compensating by way of passive-aggression. I kid, I kid.

But Claire’s new academic distinction did bring me back to my law school days, and why I never did a journal even though I attended a school with 4 of them (meaning that if you wanted to do it, you could do it). Just to clarify: law review is better than all the other journals, so although there are enough of them out there for most to participate should they so choose, participation in the lesser journals doesn’t make you as pimp as Claire. For instance, U of I’s Journal of Elder Law—what the fuck is that?—is nothing to toot your horn about. But anyway. After finishing my last exam of 1L year, I diligently picked up my journal competition packet. Our submissions were due only six days after finals. We were asked to write a note about how the freedom of association guaranteed by the Constitution impacts grandparent visitation rights. There was a pending Supreme Court decision on the issue, and our assignment was to gather the precedent that the Court was currently considering, and infer what it would do. I think. This was over five years ago and my memory is not good.

Completing my submission would not have been too difficult, but my initial review of the materials confirmed that the assignment would be tedious. Most things in life are tedious to me; that is the cross you must bear if you’re lazy. I decided to put it off until the weekend before it was due. That weekend happened to be Dillo Day and, me being me, I decided on Dillo Day itself that I could party during the day, and slap some shit together through the night. I don’t remember what the break down was in terms of grades vs. writing competition, but I recall feeling confident that any old piece of shit submission would do, because my first semester grades had been good (this was a faulty assumption; I later learned I had bombed second semester). After a long night of drinking, I tried, in vain, to write something serviceable from 2:30 AM to 9:00 AM. I am a fucking idiot. You don’t draft a journal competition submission over the course of one night; not even a steaming pile of shit submission that you’d normally be embarrassed to call your own. On the other hand, I did get drunk with Rahul for the first time ever. That night, I also learned that: (1) Guinness is not exactly the beer of champions when served in a plastic cup; (2) plex lounges have locks; and (3) the first liter of a $12 Vendange cab tastes like shit, but the second does not.

It was not worth it. I now have to deal with the ignominy of having the equivalent of “LAZY” tattooed to my forehead, a method which conveys the point almost as directly as a resume with good grades and no journal. So the moral of the story is Claire’s a hard-working little fucker. And if you don’t do a journal, you’ll be LAME (like me).

"That's the wrong hole."

2005-07-22T08:44:00.000-05:00

I forgot to blog on the ten year anniversary of the loss of my virginity. It was the Chicago heatwave summer and my sublet had a western exposure. My first time was, not surprisingly, very sweaty. It was also a debacle. Not so easy to get your rocks off when you're unable to ignore the fact that you're inflicting pain. So as further support for my theory that life only gets better with age, at least now I know where the appropriate hole is (appropriate depending on the circumstances, of course).

I don't miss you, Michele Cho.

2005-07-14T17:56:00.000-05:00

Since I'm merciless when it comes to ladies and their advancing age, I'm surprised that more of you don't take pot shots at me for being an old piece of shit. To be honest, I don't like getting older, mostly because it means that I'm this much closer to dying. But as for the psychological trauma of leaving my twenties behind, I had a recent conversation with Mark that led me to realize that I no longer give a shit. For real. Don't get me wrong, 21 to 29 has felt exceedingly brief. I can't believe that it's been over 10 years that I showed up on campus, or that it's been four years since my girlfriend ran off with an old-ass (uh, I guess he was around my present age) college professor. Time flies. In the end, though, there isn't any phase of my life that I'd rather retreat to, if it meant giving up the life I lead now. High school sucked. I didn't know how much it sucked at the time, but being just north of 100 pounds and a compulsive reader of comic books isn't all that fun. Sure, I got to date the coolest nerd chick in school, but that's akin to driving a brand new Ford Focus, leatherette interior edition. Plus, it was very, very weird. Korean christians (CRAZY, just CRAZY), teenage hormones, and a deeply rooted guilt complex don't mix. So I'd rather not be in high school. College was fun, but I don't miss being an emotional moron, i.e., "I fucking love you, bitch! Why are you doing this to me!? At LEAST let me keep your panties!" Most of law school was a blast because it coincided with the early courtship phase of my long love affair with booze. Back then, I never got hung over. Alcohol actually made my mind whip-smart. Imagine that. My girlfriend was an alcoholic, too. But during law school, I had no money, and that kind of sucks. The final alternative would be my pre-pubescent childhood. This is actually tempting. I didn't have to take care of myself, my parents were infallible, and I knew that they would always protect me. I miss that. But not enough to give up being the master of my domain. Getting drunk is better than cartoons, and being a fancy lawyer is more fulfilling than kicking ass in the fifth grade. I have nothing to fear. When I hit thirty-five, I'll probably being saying shit like, "Wow. Being married and having a brown-ass kid that likes tacos is way better than being a callow, self-satisfied twenty-something!"

P.S. My brown-ass kid will like tacos because Claire is going to have a long-term affair with Pablo, our pool boy. That's an inside joke. Well. Not anymore.

"O'Connor Urged to Reconsider Retirement."

2005-07-14T17:28:00.000-05:00

This is retarded. A bunch of lady legislators are pleading with O'Connor to come back if and when Rehnquist, who's been recently hospitalized, finally decides to rest on his laurels. Jeez man. Fuck off, will ya? The asserted quid pro quo--which isn't even theirs to give--is that O'Connor gets to be Chief. Well whoop-dee-fucking do. Being Chief is 90% administerial, the only thing that's politically significant about being Chief is that you get to assign opinions if you're voting with the majority. Last time I checked, it was still one Justice, one vote. O'Connor has a life outside of the Court--she won't shrivel up and die inside of six months, i.e., Blackmun, Marshall, etc. Plus, her husband's ailing and although I don't personally know what that's like, I imagine if you're pushing 80 and your husband of five decades is sick, it would be nice to enjoy what remains of the life you share together.

On another note, the Washington state chapter of NARAL is throwing a "Screw Abstinence" party. I'm a closet pro-lifer, so I have an inherent bias. But if I were NARAL, I don't think I'd throw events that blur the lines between a constitutional right to the integrity of one's body, and a constitutional right to be sexually permissive. Although both privileges, in my mind, are part and parcel of our plethora of substantive due process rights; one is politically savvy and the other is not. The last thing NARAL needs is for middle America to perceive them as a bunch of libertine whores (and man sluts--are there men in NARAL?). When I read about this, I got the Cartman on Jerry Springer voice stuck in my head: "I DO WHAT I WANT! I FUCK WHO I WANT! I SCREW ABSTINENCE IF I WANT!" Lame, lame, lame.

THIS MEANS YOU, JODY!

2005-07-12T14:27:00.000-05:00

Don’t marry lawyers. From a general health and well-being perspective, most, if not nearly all, are severely compromised. This is because lawyers like to drink. A lot. I can’t hang with these people, and with my thirties within striking distance, I don’t even want to. Our last happy hour stretched from 5:00 to 2:30 in the morning; most notably, Very Important Partner slogged his way to the bitter end. As a general matter, it’s not possible to drink your paycheck in one sitting, but if you have a dozen or so of your best work buddies with you, anything’s possible (especially if it’s not actually your paycheck, but the firm’s summer recruitment fund). As things were winding down, Very Important Partner tried to order one for the road, but was too impaired to speak. I’m astounded that he made it home safely. The incident definitely calls to mind a friend. Perhaps we can organize an inaugural one-on-one DUI Chicago—Distant Suburb drag race one of these days.

Good luck with that.

2005-07-06T11:57:00.000-05:00

"That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age. "

If you’re vain and have tied your self-regard to the way you’re perceived by the opposite sex, a woman’s mid to late twenties must be a soul-crushing experience. There’s a lady in my building who works for another firm, but went to my law school. I met her in 1999, when she was probably 22. She had a tight ass. It was one of my favorite things about 1L year. Fast forward to 2005, and I can safely say that she is not keeping her shit together. At all. It’s as if someone took her, stuck her in a dimly lit crawl-space, force fed her nothing but restaurant food and liquor, and bent her over for a (metaphorical) work-schedule butt raping for the last three years. Think fat and pasty. Ha. When I met her, she was twice as hot as me. How far the mighty have fallen. And she’s not married, either. So to all of my female friends on the cusp of the latter half of their twenties—cheers!

Uh. Okay.

2005-07-01T13:42:00.000-05:00

I went out last night. Since I'm cheap, I took the el and as I headed out, the post-Taste of Chicago crowd was out and about. On my way to the train, I was waiting for the light to change at Wabash and Roosevelt when a car made a right turn in front of me. I had glanced at it a couple seconds earlier and inadvertently made eye contact with one of the passengers in its rear seat. As the car made its turn, the passenger rolled down the window, stuck half of his body out of the car and yelled, "I'M GONNA SUCK YOUR COCK!" I glared at him but didn't say anything because: (1) I wasn't that drunk yet; and (2) I didn't want to beef with a car full of fifty cents, especially after the post-Taste shooting at Jackson and Wells last week. But after they drove off and I had some time to reflect, I realized that "I'M GONNA SUCK YOUR COCK!" is certainly a strange ass thing to say when you're hanging out the passenger's side of your best friend's ride trying to holla at me.

I don't think it was a come on. This was actually the second time someone has told me that they're going to suck my cock (roughly) while driving by in a car. The first instance was materially different--it was boy's town and the perpetrator was a buffed and waxed (I assume) Chelsea boy. This guy wasn't exactly a sissy. But if he was trying to insult me, wouldn't: (1) "YOU SUCK COCK!"; or (2) "YOU'RE GOING TO SUCK MY COCK!" make more sense?

Don't touch me.

2005-06-30T15:44:00.000-05:00

I have attention span issues. It’s hard for me to work efficiently unless I’m under the gun; otherwise, my mind can’t help but wander. Sometimes, that process leads to absurd results. I often get very angry about trivial, but nonetheless unresolved, things that have happened to me in the past. For instance, I just thought of how my last three girlfriends have all punched me in their sleep. Their excuse was that they had dreamed that I was perpetrating some sort of emotional indignity on them, and physical violence was appropriate. That really pissed me off just now. First, I didn’t actually do shit. I’m not responsible for your subconscious ideas of who I actually am. Second, it’s not fun to get hit when you’re sound asleep. It’s startling, and I don’t like it. Third, I hate it that women generally think they can get away with punching their boyfriends. Don’t fucking hit me. If you lay your hands on me again, I will jack you in the face. Stupid girls.

Kickboxing...sport of the future.

2005-06-26T15:27:00.000-05:00

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed... or buy anything sold or processed... or process anything sold, bought or processed... or repair anything sold, bought or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."

At some point last month, my copy of High Fidelity migrated to my toilet and since then, I’ve been picking it up to read assorted passages while I do my business. I also got drunk and watched Cusack’s movie adaptation of the book a couple of weeks ago. As a result, I’ve been revisiting my circa-1997 to 1999 affection for Lloyd Dobler, Martin Blank, and Rob Gordon, characters who are too precious/unabashedly idealistic/complicated to live your standard-issue life of compromise. One of my most disheartening personal changes over the latter half of my twenties has been my loss of idealism. Early on in our relationship, I pulled out my old school ASB t-shirt to go to bed in and Claire was surprised that I had ever gone, probably because she’s only known me as a craven and heartless social striver. I was offended—yes, I used to care about poor people (purely in the abstract, of course), why would that surprise you? But in the end, her reaction was certainly appropriate. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt obligated to make someone else’s life better.

As a lawyer, I have a professional responsibility to devote some of my time and energy towards pro bono work. Positive pr externalities aside, I don’t know why lawyers, of all people, should have to do shit for free. You don’t see contractors building homes for free, or doctors administering chemotherapy for free. Yet we’re the ones that are held in low esteem by society. If you couldn’t tell, I really hate doctors, despite the fact that I’m friends with a number of them. Last month, I was staffed on a pro bono case when one of my colleagues left the firm. I had earlier agreed to “help her out.” She had designs on a new job (which she neglected to tell me), and when her plans came to fruition, I got a big, fat federal criminal appeals case dumped on my lap. Since then, I’ve probably devoted 80% of my time to this case. If we were charging for my work, our bill would be upwards of thirty grand. But we’re not, and since we’re not, this case is seriously affecting my bottom line. My annual bonus is billable hours based.

I originally agreed to help out because the case is somewhat sexy. The client was convicted during a high profile federal prosecution in the 90’s. Although it scares me to death, the chance at arguing a case before the 7th Circuit would bolster my resume. My initial impressions weren’t wrong, but this has really become a bitch of a case. The client is difficult. What’s more, he’s no Rolando Cruz. In other words, my client’s no angel.

I’ve never really been a crime and punishment kind of guy. As a younger man, I strongly believed in the procedural integrity of the criminal process—meaning that leaving actual culpability aside, no one should be convicted of a crime unless the government dots all of its i’s and crosses each and every one of its t’s. I drove four hours to visit my guy at his home in federal penitentiary on Friday. He was polite enough. Our meeting went well and although we disagreed on some points, he didn’t threaten my life or anything like that. Even so, I’m becoming more and more troubled by the social utility of my work. I understand that our drug laws are fucked up—you get the same jail time for selling a minimal amount of crack that you would get for dealing 100 times as much powder cocaine. That’s racist. But at the end of the day, if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in prison on five concurrent life sentences, don’t participate in a large-scale conspiracy to distribute drugs. Whether or not you’ve been unconstitutionally sentenced under a procedural technicality occasioned by a new Supreme Court case doesn’t change the truth of that.

This bothers me. With each and every passing day, I find myself becoming more of a pitiless cynic. The only reason I took this case was to burnish my credentials and, in the miniscule chance that we’re successful, find my way into the trade papers. I’d be hard-pressed to credibly explain that I did it out of some notion of justice, or for the good of society.

What the hell is your problem? Why don't you grow!

2005-06-19T12:34:00.000-05:00

On Friday, I attended my brother's commencement. Earlier that morning, I was pleased to learn that John McCain was giving the commencement address. McCain delivered as advertised, and gave a decent speech about the necessity for a human rights oriented foreign policy, both as a justification for Iraq and as a plea for intervention in Darfur. While I disagree with foreign policy idealism--in short, it's not practical or even workable--McCain's speech was pretty neat. I later figured out, however, that McCain had given the identical address one month earlier at the University of Arizona's graduation. That's a little chintzy.

I also sat behind a fairly annoying group of white people. They were loud, bejeweled, and unnaturally orange. The woman immediately in front of me kept flipping her hair back onto my program, which was gross because it was dry and overly dyed. An hour into the ceremony, I realized that she was really, really, short. She was a little big for a dwarf, but certainly close enough. Having made this realization, her physicality started to freak me out. I couldn't stop looking at her grubby little hands and when she looked back, I was unsettled by her small, down syndrome-ish face. At that point, I started to feel bad because I suspected that she was retarded. But I later figured that she wasn't, because she was responding appropriately, etc., with her family. I suppose I now understand why tall people unaccountably loathe short people. I've dated a lot of short girls, which is nice, because you can throw them around in the sack. But since I'm never around people that are substantially shorter than me, my experience with pseudo-dwarf woman was unnerving.

Nickel and Dimed.

2005-06-17T10:29:00.000-05:00

Our firm aspires to be a top-notch national practice. Leaving aside the fact that we lack offices in at least two major markets, the clearest proof that we’re not is the way our summer associate program has been administered. One word. Cheap. I hate getting calls from our recruiting coordinator about entertainment expenses, and I don’t think there would be the same hullabaloo if I were at Kirkland, or Sidley, or whatever. There’s no real point to it—she bitches a bit, I mumble something in my defense, and they end up reimbursing me for the bill all the same. There’s actually a “no shots” policy. Ridiculous. A handful of weeks ago, one of the junior associates got a little out of hand at Rockit and ordered three rounds of Patron for our sizeable group. He did that because he “knew” our waitress, and she was smoking hot. To top it all off, this associate left a $250 tip. Now we can’t expense shots. Dumbass. Which begs the following question: How are we supposed to have sex with the interns—I use the pronoun “we” loosely, this is actually not a personal concern—if we have no carte blanche authority to buy them lots of alcohol and fancy food? Isn’t that the whole point of the summer?

Charlie! you fucking BITCH-let's work it out!

2005-06-08T21:49:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite movie lines.

Think of all the exes you have who have some emotional significance to you. Do you still know them? I don't. I wouldn't even know how to find them. I wish I had the option of showing up unannounced: "Hey. No hard feelings. Let's hug it out, bitch.". That would be nice.

KUBLACON!

2005-05-31T16:59:00.000-05:00

I was in San Francisco last weekend, visiting Claire. Since the move-in/move-out situation at Mengting’s apartment was still in flux, we stayed at an airport hotel on Friday night. To my delight, the Hyatt that Claire chose was hosting a Kublacon Convention that same weekend. For those unfamiliar with the concept—which I presume is nearly all of you—Kublacon is a way for nerds to get together and play role-playing games, board games, and trading card games over the course of a weekend. You literally could not walk five feet without bumping into someone toting Warhammer figurines, twenty-sided die (in a dozen different varietals), or Magic cards. It was one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen, principally because there were so many of them. And they all looked like some variation of the Comic Book Shop Guy from the Simpsons. The meek had inherited the earth, or at least the SFO Hyatt.

I used to want to own a comic book shop. I told my parents this when I was 14, and they were chagrined. It seemed very logical to me at the time—the comic book shop guys were cool people and all they had to do on a weekday was go to their store, read comics, play video games, and eat fast food. Somewhere along the line, however, I kicked my D&D habit and found better things than comics to spend money on. While I still have a passing interest in superhero exploits (on a whim, I recently bought two subscriptions and dropped some dough on a five-year X-Men run on ebay), I was sad to find the same men and women working at my old Singapore and San Diego comic book stores, thirteen years later. Some of them recognized me, some did not. It’s strange to revisit your adolescence and discover that the guys that you thought were neat at thirteen were still personable and witty people, but unmistakably diminished by their place in life, an element that had once been part of their charm. They were pathetic. I couldn’t help but think that. Which was an absolutely stupid fucking thing for me to think.

Since I got off trial, I’ve been kicking around the office in 2nd gear. I’ve been going home for lunch to work out, and catching a movie or two on the sly. This is going to end relatively soon, because I’m starting to fritter away all of the excess billable hours that I salted away in March and April. But in my spare time, I’ve been trying to identify what motivates me in my career. It isn’t the money, per se, because if I wanted to be a really heavy-hitter, I should have been a banker. While I enjoy the intellectual rigor of my job, in all honesty, it’s not brain surgery. Not even close. I don’t do it to survive, or to put food on my family, because I don’t have a family and moreover, I was fine three years ago with less than a third of what I earn now. Despite what Claire thinks, I can still live in shit-hole apartments if it comes down to it.

So I came to conclusion that what motivates me in my professional life is the fact that in raising me, my parents built your prototypical Asian status-whore. Now that’s pathetic. It’s not that I want the extra dough that Associate A (who left the firm to go to a NY shop) makes—it’s just that I need to be better than Associate A. It’s not that Northwestern is a bad school—it’s just that I’m constantly aggrieved by the fact that HLS grads have the UPPER HAND. It’s all very, very stupid. My parents instilled in me a strange dichotomy—they were effusive with the compliments (which led to an oversized ego), but never really laid a solid foundation for that high self-regard because everything they told me was dependent on my substantiating their opinion through some sort of actual accomplishment (grades, etc.) So now here I am, twenty-odd years later, flourishing, but knowing that it’s never going to be enough.

I’m a pretty big douche-bag to think that someone who’s smart, cool, and happy doing what they do is a pathetic human being. Sorry, comic book guys.

In defense of earnestness.

2005-05-31T16:05:00.000-05:00

I have to give Jody credit. Out of all of the blogs that I’ve found on the internet, hers is far and away the most earnest. I admire that, as well as the length to which her posts expose her vulnerabilities. Very nicely done. I wish I could say the same for myself. By habit, I say a lot of things that I truly mean, but in terms so outrageous that the possibility of irony is always present. For example, my post about children. I meant that, but it’s not entirely clear that I did. So anyway. If you had any doubt, I most certainly meant what I said about the big nipples. Definitely non-negotiable.

Someone that looks like Miss December 2004.

2005-05-16T19:06:00.000-05:00

I am really fucking bored. We closed our evidence on Friday, and I spent the weekend working on some papers. We filed those briefs with the court this morning, but got a call from opposing counsel later in the day, informing us that the judge was postponing closing arguments until Wednesday. I'm not doing the closing and my partner and I have already gone back and forth on his argument to the point that we're both sick of each other. He still wants me in the courtroom though, so I'll be hanging in Cambridge for another two days. I have half a mind to take a cab to a liquor store, buy a bottle of red, and drink it by myself because I have nothing to get up for tomorrow. It's times like this that I wish I was single. As things stand now, I don't think it'd be acceptable for me to have a whore keep me company. I probably should go to Boston, but I'm incapable of doing things solo, since I prefer having people show me around.

I've been meaning to post this for awhile, since there's been all this wedding talk in the air. I'm probably getting married within the next two years. Someone needs to step up and manage my bachelor party. It's not a job for the faint of heart. I have a very limited number of requirements, but there is one thing that's set in stone: I want a hotel suite and some strippers. Two strippers. One will be white, with black hair and blue eyes. The other one will be asian, and brown. Large nipples are also non-negotiable. Let's make it happen.

Do you remember when we first met?

2005-05-13T21:42:00.000-05:00

I now have trial experience. This is regarded as valuable, as most litigation associates in large firms don't sniff the inside of a courtroom for many years. I intend to add my trial work to my website bio, if only to attract more headhunters. But from a practical standpoint, it's not that big of a deal. Our trial was a week-and-a-half bench trial. Since only two live witnesses were offered into the evidence, I was not asked to do any of the examinations. Instead, I spent my days handing stuff to the partner running the case, and doing my best to make sure that he understood what was going on with the factual minutiae. For instance:

Law firm partner: "Where's-uh-where's the org chart exhibit?"

Me: "It's 88."

Five minutes later...

Law firm partner: "I....can't find the org chart exhibit."

Me: "88."

Next day...

Law firm partner: "Hey--we need the org chart exhibit. Where is it?"

Me: "Still 88."

Or,

Law firm partner: "Hey-who was the Vice President of Finance?"

Me: "Pochinksy."

Law firm partner: "Popinsky?"

Me: "No, Pochinsky."

[Unspoken internal commentary: IT WAS POCHINSKY WHEN WE FIRST ASKED OUR CLIENT ABOUT IT, IT WAS POCHINSKY THE 100 TIMES THAT SHE WAS MENTIONED DURING DEPOSITIONS, AND IT WAS POCHINSKY THE LAST TWO DOZEN TIMES HER NAME CAME UP DURING THIS TRIAL.]

And so on. As with life, trial work is 90% preparation.

I am a hamster.

2005-05-07T13:31:00.000-05:00

Whoever gave our management committee the bright idea of posting monthly excel spreadsheets on our intranet which keep a running count of everyone's billable hours is an evil fucking genius. I check those damn things more assiduously than sports scores now. Now when I walk by someone in the hallway, I can smugly think to myself that they're the worthless chump that billed less than two hundred hours last month, and I'm not. I bet the management committee is out on a yacht somewhere, drinking cristal while being fellated by well-endowed brown people, and laughing their asses off about how easy it is to punk out all the psychotic junior associates who take friendly competition a little too seriously.

WHAT'S HAPPENING, DADDY!

2005-04-24T17:50:00.000-05:00

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.

2005-04-24T16:18:00.000-05:00

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.

2005-04-06T10:02:00.000-05:00

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?

2005-04-01T14:55:00.000-06:00

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.

John Kass is a moron.

2005-03-11T13:07:00.000-06:00

There, I said it. Kass is nothing but a third-rate Maureen Dowd and it's not like Dowd has much to brag about. You suck. The fact that you have a popular column in a major metropolitan market reflects poorly on us all. Idiot.

Without qualification.

2005-03-02T13:07:00.000-06:00

If I ever find myself in the enviable position of law firm partner, I am going to take my underlings to task for not giving me direct answers. I know that this is part and parcel of being a lawyer—seeing the angles, prefacing answers, qualifying conclusions, and being careful. But seriously. There are some people here that say, “I would” before every fucking conclusion they reach. It’s non-sensical. You would agree in what event? My question wasn’t conditioned on anything. It wasn’t impliedly conditioned on anything. You set no express conditions in your answer. So why don’t you just fucking agree? But because in most cases I am the underling, I bury my rage and instead nod eagerly with a, “I would agree too,” of my own.

Things could always be worse.

2005-02-27T13:07:00.001-06:00

I got an NU alumni magazine in the mail yesterday. My morbid curiosity led me to the “Deaths” section. I wondered if anyone my year had died. I was surprised to find that a woman from my law school section passed away last summer. This made me feel very weird, because she was my age, if not younger. If any of you mother-fuckers die before I stop being friends with you, I am going to be pissed. Take care of yourselves.

21 and zesty.

2005-02-25T14:58:00.000-06:00

I just heard that the trophy wife formula is half your age plus seven years. That puts me at 21. Claire's looking a little stale. Time for me to start hanging around plex again.

Yeah? Well I'm old enough to beat your ass. Suck that.

2005-02-25T09:06:00.000-06:00

I argued my first dispositive motion yesterday. It went well, although I didn’t get everything that I wanted. I was stressed, but well-prepared. I was also pleased to find that the judge—who I had not met before—was relatively foxy, as far as early-forties white ladies go. The adversarial context made me a little loco, though. I think it was my nervousness, the spike in adrenaline, and the man-on-man confrontation with opposing counsel. As things progressed, I found myself on the verge of animal-style yelling which does not, as a general matter, suit me. After the judge ruled, opposing counsel took a jab at how young I looked. Fucker. That’s going to look real great on the transcript.

My little man.

2005-02-04T18:02:00.000-06:00

What follows was inspired by Wayne’s post, which was a nice discussion on why dating for kicks is untenable, at least for some. That would include me. I’m a serial monogamist. In nearly every relationship I’ve had, the topic of marriage was broached fairly early on. In retrospect, many of these conversations were out and out ludicrous, and the others were fatally flawed from the start. But at the time, of course, it seemed like a sensible thing to do. I think this had a lot to do with my formative views on sex; i.e., if you’re going to fuck someone, it’d be nice if that person was someone that you intend to marry. This vein of thought is hard to reconcile with the, “I’ve bought you dinner a couple of times and it’s obvious that we’re into each other—so let’s remove our pants,” culture of permissiveness that we’ve come of age in. In the end, I’ve spent my twenties wanting to marry a series of women, all of whom did not work out. What a waste of time. I’m going to marry Claire though, whether she likes it or not. I’m planning on spending the next year and a half figuring out the most obtuse way to ask her to marry me, and then I’m going to do it. When backed into a corner, Claire will probably respond with a mealy-mouthed, “I guess,” and then I’ll laugh my ass off at how emotionally uncomfortable I’ve just made her feel because she’s a commitment-phobic little man at heart. Then I’ll put the ring on her finger and laugh some more. Good times. This all depends, however, on Claire and her west-coast study buddy having a falling out between now and then. We will see.

Why my time is more valuable than Claire's.

2005-02-02T18:36:00.000-06:00

Note: I don’t like having to edit myself. Most of the stuff that I have bouncing around in my brain is work-related. Please remove my given-name from your links to me, I’d rather not be fired for the stupid shit that I write about on this site. Or better yet, remove the link in its entirety. I don’t write this thing to get famous, you know.

It’s been over five years since I embarked on my present career path, six if you count my time spent as an administrative minion. During those six years, my bouts with career ennui have been few and far between. This isn’t to say that I haven’t ever experienced job dissatisfaction—I’m talking about career angst. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer for a long time. It was never high on my list of my priorities, but the mild commitment that I had made to that life pursuit was unwavering. To be honest, it did not require much introspection. You get prestige, a decent salary, and job security (in theory) at a relatively young age. As far as the actual mechanics of legal practice go, I had some vague idea that there would be a lot of writing—which I could do—as well as a fair amount of oral persuasion—which I could learn. I got to law school and took to it. I was good at going to law school. Reading cases was fun and taking law school exams was easy. Sadly, I wasn’t as good at finding a job. But I eventually found my way, and my career is now more than I could have asked for or even deigned to dream of six years ago, when I was a college senior on the cusp of graduating with a sub-3.0 gpa. But in the past week, I’ve really started to question why I do this for a living.

This, not incidentally, coincided with an up-tick in the amount of time that I’ve been spending at work. My firm isn’t a sweatshop. On most days, I punch in at 8:30 and punch out at 6:30, hours that are pretty fucking pathetic relative to those that sweat-monkeys working at big, prestigious Manhattan firms labor under. Nor do I have family commitments, or a girlfriend that’s even close to a time-sink. Claire studies more than I work, if you can imagine that. Of course, I’m a high-priced lawyer and she’s a 1.5L, so my time is valuable and hers is not. But I digress. So I was working hard and running up against deadline after deadline over the past three weeks. Most of these crises were self-imposed because I’m an inveterate procrastinator. But that didn’t make them any less stressful. Which is the crux of the problem. I hate being stressed. I also hate to be challenged. Before I go any further, I want you to know that I’m not a pussy. I can handle stress. I can handle hard work. I also understand that although I’m being asked to do a lot of things that I’ve never done before without the benefit of someone holding my hand, but with the constant fear that I’m about to screw the pooch, the experience is still valuable in the sense that it’s an expeditious way to learn how to do something. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t hate having to go through it. It’s not pleasant.

Case in point, I’m handling a lot of matters for the head of our litigation department. One of our cases was handed off to me by a 6th year associate, who left the firm in December. If you ever took the time to sit us both down and substantively quiz us on how to be a litigator, you’d quickly realize that there’s a huge gap in ability between that associate and me. To put it delicately, I’m a moron who’s never done anything, and he’s not. But in any case, I was charged with the responsibility of becoming Departed Associate v.2.0. The partner that I’m working with is notoriously hands-off. Which is great, obviously, if you know what you’re doing. Not so great for me. Either I’m very good at projecting the veneer of confidence, or Head of Litigation Department really doesn’t give a shit what happens in this case, something that I can’t accept because the dollar amounts at issue aren’t insignificant. I cover my ass and give him full disclosure—listen, I’ve never run my own case before, I haven’t taken a single deposition, I haven’t even second-chaired a trial; but by the way, I can definitely do this and I appreciate your faith in me. The only portion of that speech that Head of Litigation Department apparently hears is the part that’s completely bullshit. What the hell. Large firms aren’t supposed to be this way. I intended to spend my first three years out of law school doing nothing more substantive than bitch-ass document review after bitch-ass document review.

So I’m off to Iowa to meet with our client’s CEO. Head of Litigation Department flakes out on me a day before our scheduled trip and I’m flying solo. Before I leave, he lathers me with a barrage of false compliments, as well as one decent piece of advice: “Just bullshit them. Make a big production out of everything. They just want to know that we’re working hard and doing a lot of smart lawyer shit on their behalf.” This will be hard to do. The client is peeved because even though we’ve won summary judgment on liability, litigation on damages has dragged on for over two years now. That’s the difference between plaintiff’s work and defense work. Defense is easy: delay, delay, and more delay. It’s weird. Defense clients would much rather pay law firms boatloads of money to essentially say, “fuck-off” again and again to the other side instead of pony up the money for a fair settlement, even if a quick settlement would cost less than years of our legal fees. Plaintiffs, on the other hand, are constantly bugging you about when they’re going to get their money. But barring settlement, getting money means going to trial and I’ve never litigated a case. At the Iowa meeting, I try my best to be aggressive, hard-nosed litigator. Lots of, “we’re going to put their fucking feet to the fire,” and “this case is going to trial within the next year come hell or high water.” In other words, I talk up a storm of fucking bullshit that I hope never happens. It better have worked, since it pained me to say it. I guess that’s what being a young lawyer is all about—constantly pretending to be something that you’re not. It’s starting to wear a little thin.

From one office monkey to another--You suck.

2004-12-22T11:39:00.000-06:00

I hate my word-processing department. What’s the point of dictating something if the time that you spend fixing it exceeds the time that it would have taken to type it out on your own? Okay. I’ll admit that: (1) I tend to drone, so listening to my tapes may not be anyone’s idea of fun; (2) I’m inconsistent with my punctuation—sometimes I say “question mark,” other times I imply it through the lilt in my voice; and (3) I only spell surnames out once, if at all. But even with all these considerations in mind, the memo that word-processing dropped into my mailbox today made me want to puke. When I say “Brennan,” I don’t mean “Bagman.” When I say “Buvinger,” I don’t mean “Governor.” When I say “site visit,” I don’t mean “decide it.” When I say “procurement,” I don’t mean prochurement. “Prochurement” isn’t even a word. I apparently stopped saying “period” or “new paragraph,” so the word-processing monkey decided to type out a 2 page run-on sentence. Jesus Christ. Exercise some fucking independent discretion, for once. I used to be an office monkey. They paid me $22k a year, but I still did my best to avoid looking like an idiot. It's not that hard to take pride in your work, whatever it may be.

Punch, kick, or kiss.

2004-11-15T18:10:00.000-06:00

Although I agree with Wayne—a blow-by-blow account of my life isn’t what I endeavor to do with this thing—I’ll also recap the weekend. My flight was delayed on Friday night, so I didn’t get to Newark until 12:30 in the morning. This was ok by me. In all honesty, I wasn’t feeling all that pumped about getting trashed on Friday night because that’s essentially what I did on Thursday night. Two nights in a row are a rarity for me now. I pin this on Claire, who has sapped my will to live my life as the 25-ish alcoholic that I was when she first met me. So I was not psyched. In addition, I hate flying alone. Flying is tedious. Flying is also a somber experience for me because I’m very paranoid about meeting my untimely demise in the company of strangers. But the delay, in combination with the 2 hour flight, gave me the opportunity to read the bulk of War Trash, which I strongly recommend.

I arrive at Newark and check my voicemail. Mark, who’s rapidly becoming my favorite boozehound for reasons that will follow later, left a voicemail: “Hey . . . Gary. Where the fuck are you? I’m . . . so wasted.” Much laughing in the background, and I immediately knew that Friday night would be a “let’s shorten our life expectancy” kind of night. I’m not in the mood to figure out the NJ transit, so I take a cab. This was a bad move on my part, and it never amazes me how quickly cabbies can discern that I’m habitually guilty of massively overpaying their fraudulent asses. But that is ok because I’m rich.

Upon my arrival, I’m greeted with a situation that’s a rarity for me—everyone seems to be very drunk, except for me. Wayne immediately hugs me. Shots are poured. Having subconsciously selected the big boy shot glass as my weapon of choice and because Christine is an appropriately zealous shot-pourer, I find myself realizing within a half-hour of my arrival that I’m really, really drunk. This sensation is one of my favorite things. At first, you’re coasting along. Things are nice, warm, and fuzzy. You smile a lot, most of the time for a good reason, but sometimes just because. That’s a Level 1 buzz. Then comes the realization that you’re senselessly drunk and have somehow leap-frogged your way to Level gazillion. Your id has seized control of your life and has no immediate plans to relinquish its authority to what remains of your reason. Whenever this happens, I like to play a mental game with myself that I call punch, kick, or kiss. I look at my male friends and decide whether it would be appropriate to punch, kick, or kiss them. If I’m drunk enough, all three options appear to be not only plausible, but also equally pleasurable. This makes me happy because then I know that I’m ready to go carpe diem on the world.

The rest of the night is very fun. I like to drink. I like to dance. I wake up with a pretty bad headache, but it subsides after a shower. After a Friday night of punch, kick, or kiss dimensions, Saturday is a pretty big let down. The highlight of the night was Mark, who is the new king of drinking because he’s ridiculously funny when he’s buzzed. Mark and friends go to a DVD store next to the bar that we’re at, because some of the DVDs have boobies in them. When Mark returns, he says to me, “They have some really fucked up shit in there. I mean, literally. Fucked up shit. Really fucked up shit. Literally fucked up shit.” I figure out that there’s a cleveland steamer section of the dvd library. Mark continues: “Man. That shit made me nauseous. Fucked up shit. I almost puked on myself.” This, of course, was funnier in person. I now know what to get Mark for his birthday. Mark went on that night to take us down in a poker tournament, where he experienced much success with his new, “I re-raise you all in, bitch” style of play. Sunday is spent flying and recuperating. Not a bad weekend.

I hate you Jeb. But please, go ahead and vote.

2004-10-29T13:11:00.000-05:00

Many of you have weighed in on how American voters are typically uninformed. The implication is that if you’re a moron, you’re less entitled to exercise your right to participate in the democratic process. I agree. I have nothing but disdain for semi-literate 18-year olds who vote without any reasoned basis (excluding those semi-literate 18-year olds who have been shipped off to Iraq to be killed or maimed, of course). Lest you think my opinion is entirely the product of my contemptuous personality, consider this—I take the time to read the newspaper, I spent a year of law school taking civics for lawyers, i.e., constitutional law, and I certainly pay a butt-load more than you do in personal income taxes. I’m entitled. But let’s be honest. My stature as an “informed” citizen is really beside the point. It’s not self-governance and it’s not democracy unless everyone has the right to vote. And there’s no sense in bemoaning the poor decision-making of everyone else (if that’s indeed what it is—I often confuse “stupid” people with people that simply don’t agree with me). Our vote can’t be qualified in any way—it used to be, for rather transparent reasons: you have to be literate (i.e., not black); you have to be a man (i.e., not a woman); you have to be a land-owner (i.e., not poor). These limitations were thankfully done away with because the right to vote is an inalienable, fundamental right and not because blacks, women, or the poor were all of a sudden deemed capable of making “intelligent” decisions. So who the fuck cares if Jeb, the high-school drop-out is voting for Bush because Bush is full of Christ-love. His reasons are every bit as valid as mine because America isn’t just my country, it’s Jeb’s country too.

Please speak plainly.

2004-10-21T18:12:00.000-05:00

One of my biggest pet peeves are people that refuse to speak or write directly and efficiently. Context matters, of course, and I understand that if you’re trying to be persuasive, you may have good reason to doll your stuff up a bit. But I really hate it when I’m having a conversation with someone and they’re bludgeoning me to death with four different versions—all wordy—of the same damn idea. Listen. I get it. Don’t waste my time. If you like the sound of your voice that much, you really don’t need me do you? For instance, I called a client today intending to get three discrete pieces of information. When did your company first transact with the defendant? What dates were your invoices unpaid? Do you have tangible copies of those unpaid invoices? Five minute conversation, tops. My contact at the client company managed to turn the phone call into a twenty-five minute exercise in tedium. For whatever reason, this guy decided to regale me with his thoughts on: accounting software, the saga of the Dubuque records-keeping system, roll-over payments and when/how/why they should or should not be recorded as accounts receivable, and lastly, the excellent job that my firm was doing on behalf of the client. That’s great, buddy. But I really . . . don’t . . . care. I just want to get off the phone and eat my sandwich. The irony is that if this man knew that he was talking to a small, childish-looking Chinese man who can’t grow a beard, I don’t think he would have wasted so much time licking my balls.

Davenport, Iowa.

2004-10-18T13:17:00.000-05:00

Funny. A new client is a dairy that's located in--surprise, surprise--Davenport, Iowa. If I end up going out there for discovery, perhaps I will solicit some opposing viewpoints. For all I know, Bush probably is ordained by God.

Jesus walks with Bush.

2004-10-13T13:03:00.000-05:00

From the Washington Post:

"In a breakfast gathering in Davenport, Iowa, Cheney spoke to about 60 local Republicans. He took four questions from the audience that turned out to be testimonials praising the work of Bush. "Next to Jesus Christ, he probably took the greatest load on his shoulder of any individual," one attendee said. "

This is a magnificent country that we live in. Where people, from all walks of life, can agree to disagree. Who wants to come w/on my vacation to Davenport?

I quit, motherfucker!

2004-10-08T09:51:00.000-05:00

One of the best things about quitting your job is getting paid for all of the vacation time that you never bothered to use. What would you rather have--fun times with friends and family, or a decent tv? This is, of course, all beside the point because I’m too fucking cheap to spend that much money on a television.

I like Steve Kerr.

2004-09-25T19:51:00.000-05:00

If you have not heard, I've received an offer to work for another firm and I'll be accepting it. This is yet another example of why I find life so confounding (good word Wayne, I used it in a brief). At the new firm, I'll be working on "better" cases, paid more, and provided with--I assume--a nicer office on a higher floor with a more scenic view. But this is not something that I actively sought out, nor do I feel as if I deserve it, at least in the sense that one should expend a lot of effort to obtain an advantageous result. Contrast this with the six months I spent on my butt between law school graduation and my first job with the state court which, in my more indulgent moments, I bemoaned as kafkaesque. There was no reason for why I could not get a good job then, and there is no reason for why I've landed an even better job now. But I'll certainly take it.

Who hasn't spent a month or two of their life making random ass purchases on ebay? Mine was in law school, when I had ample time to putz around and collect mlb showdown baseball cards. Very neat stuff--like magic, dice, and baseball cards all rolled into one! Well, not so neat in retrospect and certainly not worth the couple hundred bucks I blew on them. This was before I understood the value of a dollar (70% of the cost of kfc mashed potatoes, which I used to reserve for special occasions back when I was on my government employee budget). I also own a piece of parquet flooring with Steve Kerr's autograph on it. There has to be an after-market for that. In one of Sam Smith's books on the Jordan-era Bulls, he recounted an incident in 1995 during Jordan's first return from retirement. Jordan had a reputation for haranguing his teammates and being generally difficult towards those who had not earned his respect. Kerr had not played with Jordan in the 1991-93 title run. During practice one day, Jordan and Kerr were scuffling under the basket for a rebound and things got testy (why was Kerr even in the key?). Kerr did not back down and Jordan ended up punching him in the face. After that, Jordan--in a prime example of the irrationality of locker room machismo--warmed up to Kerr, who went on to hit a title-clinching jumper in 1997. Kerr's father was also a professor at American University in Beirut during the 1980's. Malcom Kerr was shot in the back of the head by an islamic militant during Steve Kerr's sophomore year at Arizona. To make a long story short, I've always liked Steve Kerr who, whether accurate or not, has always conveyed a strong sense of decency during his playing days and his present job as a color commentator for the NBA. Getting back to ebay, I just bought an hk film called Infernal Affairs. I haven't seen this movie or read any reviews, but it was apparently very well-received and as an added bonus for Claire, Andy Lau is an attractive man.

Unenforceable for lack of consideration.

2004-09-20T18:37:00.000-05:00

One of my recurring mistakes in life is making the assumption that I have reached an age at which there is nothing left to be learned about how to live life because I’ve “seen it all.” This, quite obviously, is a very naïve thing to think. But the notion persists and I don’t really know why. In any case, my current ethos on life is that happiness is an affirmative act, rather than something that must be obtained. Or, put another way, we can choose to be happy. This sits well with me, because it remedies something that’s always been my biggest sticking point about life--there are things about life that we cannot change, and many of those things are bad, or hurtful, or tragic. Call it anti-objectivism if you want, but I’ve never been convinced that the careful application of reason and an unbending will are sufficient to shape the world into whatever you may want it to be. But this is not a problem if you can accept the bad along with the good, and upon final consideration, decide that the good is enough to be joyful about. With that in mind, my past week was plagued by a faint, but relentlessly nagging feeling of shittiness. I don’t understand this. By any objective measure, it was a profitable week. I saw friends. I saw family. I played poker. I celebrated a marriage. I interviewed well. But it was not enough, so a word of caution: choosing happiness may be easier said than done.

I love you.

2004-09-03T16:02:00.000-05:00

Ecstasy has recently been on my mind. I haven’t given it much thought over the past two years. Nor have I tried to impose the experience on others; I found no takers and after awhile, this stopped bothering me. Lastly, with time and the objectivity of hindsight, I now understand that it probably was not a good idea for me to use it as much as I did. But in any case, ecstasy remains the most emotionally consequential component of a long course of substance abuse that I like to call my twenties. Although many of you have heard this pitch before and may not understand why (1) I felt the need to tell people about it in the first place; and (2) persisted in telling people about it even when it became clear that no one was interested in it, bear with me--for whatever reason, this means something to me.

But first, a few caveats. Ecstasy is a controlled substance and violation of federal and state law is an unavoidable consequence of its use. While unlikely, getting arrested for possession is not personally or professionally beneficial. Second, it’s bad for you. For those of you who have seen Eternal Sunshine, I believe the line goes: “Are there any side-effects?” “Well, yes. It’s technically brain damage, you know.” This is subject to dispute, a recent study suggests that claims of irreversible damage to memory and concentration are overblown. But from my experience, it does do subtle things to your thought process; for instance, it’s harder for me to type now. Ecstasy is also mildly habit-forming. Lastly, just to make things clear--do not read this as a pharmaceutical circular, I am not advocating that you use this drug. I could never in good faith let my brother, my girlfriend, or anyone else in my family use ecstasy. Should you decide that this is worth trying, that is your own personal decision, a decision that you should make after weighing what could be a severe array of consequences.

In spite of all these drawbacks, I remain thankful that a friend persisted in getting me to try it, and that I eventually capitulated. I have never felt as alive as I did when I was under the influence of mdma. It was transcendent. I simply cannot accurately convey this feeling of euphoria to you because it’s so physically unnatural--nothing in your life would have produced the serotonin levels that mdma achieves and as a result, it’s unlike anything you’ve felt before. And I don’t mean to cheapen life, because life is full of things that make you happy. But for me, happiness is something pleasant, or fun, or relieving. Unadulterated bliss is much rarer, and ecstasy basically takes that feeling and pushes it to a level well beyond what God intended. I often thought that if heaven is anything close to what e is like, it may be time to mend my ways. It’s just qualitatively different.

Euphoria probably is a bad word to describe it, because the sensation isn’t overwhelming, or even exciting (unless external factors make it so). Many enjoy rolling in clubs, but I hated it. It’s too much--I feel like it deadens the experience. Again, I can’t describe the sense of tranquility that I once felt, lying shirtless on my lawn while staring at a starless sky. It certainly wasn’t a pretty view--I was in a city and the clouds were ugly and red. But I was cognizant of every single blade of grass on my back, the breeze on my chest, a drip of sweat running down my forehead, the glint of street light reflecting off our metal gate, and other minutiae that I would not otherwise notice. Everything was still, precise, and for lack of a better word, correct. It was as if an inconceivable number of natural and historical events, each contingent on what came before them, had united to produce that one inexorable moment, a moment in which everything was exactly the way it was meant to be, but which so easily could have been unimaginably different. I have never felt so glad to simply exist.

If you’ve seen movies that play e for laughs, many of them have scenes in which characters indiscriminately express their affection for others while under the influence. This is fairly accurate. But I think it depends on the user. I tended to be selective with who I lavished attention on while rolling, and generally limited myself to close friends and significant others. There have been a couple notable exceptions, one being a friend of a friend who was a newbie when we rolled together. I don’t know exactly what it was about this guy, but I just liked him. It may be because he understood that rolling was much more satisfying if you made it an introverted process. Some people talk a lot of stupid shit when they roll. The guys that I most enjoyed rolling with were those that, like everyone else, talked a lot of stupid shit (we were on drugs, this should not be unexpected), but at least tried to convey something meaningful while doing so.

Anyway, I was rolling with a relative stranger (nice guy, but no history on which to base a friendship), and since it was his first time, my buddy and I were trying to nurture him through the process. We decided to do this while straight, but once the mdma kicked in, what was originally an act of courtesy snowballed into something much more profound. Don’t laugh--three hours later I came to the realization that at that moment, I loved this person. I really did. And it wasn’t even the kind of love that I’ve employed in my romantic relationships (i.e., WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY?); instead, it was selfless. Nothing meant more to me than this guy’s happiness. You’d think that this would be a disconcerting feeling to have as a heterosexual male, but it was not. Although I understood the inauthenticity of the situation and knew full well that this feeling would soon pass, for the first time in my entire fucking life, I felt like a good person instead of some closeted asshole who only did nice things so that nice things would happen to him.

Well. That's why I loved it so much. I can’t say that I miss it. Nor can I say that you should try it, because it may not be worth your while. But that’s my story.

My two dads.

2004-09-01T18:22:00.000-05:00

Under the federal constitution’s full faith and credit clause, legal relationships formed in one state must be acknowledged in all others. This is useful because, for instance, contracts are a matter of state law and most would expect that a contract formed in Illinois remains enforceable even after a party to that contract leaves the state. Likewise, when a deadbeat dad moves from Missouri to California, child support orders entered by a Missouri court must be recognized and enforced by California courts. If that were not the case, a mother would have to go through the whole judicial process again in the father’s new state of residency, with no guarantee that the father wouldn’t just pick up and move a second time. But marriage happens to be a legal relationship, hence the growing national debate on same-sex marriage.

In November of 2003, a one-vote majority of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided that any prohibition on gay marriage violates the equal protection clause of the Massachusetts state constitution and gave the Massachusetts legislature 180 days to bring state law into compliance with its holding. In a subsequent advisory opinion, the Court further instructed the state legislature that providing homosexuals with a civil union alternative would not suffice--gay marriage, and nothing less, was mandated by its decision.

With this in mind, if the full faith and credit clause of the federal constitution operates as it was generally intended to mean, the law of Massachusetts on gay marriage (gay marriage, yes!) becomes the law of the land (consensus is gay marriage, no!). Homosexuals would marry in Massachusetts, then take their new legal relationship elsewhere. This result turns majoritarian democracy on its head. Five Massachusetts judges have decided, by judicial fiat, to embrace gay marriage. This is all well and good. Gay people probably should be able to get married. But the point is, five individuals have made a decision which: (1) binds the entire country; and (2) is indisputably disagreed with by a strong majority of the nation. On the other hand, it’s not entirely clear that this has yet happened. In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which purportedly allows a state to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages occurring in other states. I say purportedly because the full faith and credit clause appears in the US Constitution, and DOMA is just a federal law. If the two conflict, the constitution wins out because, by definition, DOMA is unconstitutional. The Bush administration has made a lot of hay with this and I don’t blame them--it’s a good issue from a political standpoint because America just isn’t “ready” for gay marriage. What I take issue with is how Bush has turned “judicial activism” into a perjorative.

It was not so long ago that “rampant judicial activism” ended southern segregation in the face of an unflinching white majority which favored its continuation. No state legislator would have anything to do with the issue because then, as now with same-sex marriage, popular opinion ran contrary to social justice. The same was true of state laws criminalizing interracial marriage--it took an activist judge to do what state legislators (and their constituents) would not. And to bring things home for those of us that aren't gay, black, or into people that are a different color than us: I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that Japanese-American internment during WW2 also enjoyed broad support from the Northern-Pacific community. But on the other hand, I don’t believe in enlightened despots, which is to say that five people elected by a fraction of our citizenry (are justices elected in Mass?) should not be charting a course for the entire nation, no matter how intelligent, well-meaning, and substantively correct they are. You could probably criticize this approach for exalting procedure over substance, but so what. Correctness of procedure is the bedrock of our democratic society. We’re not supposed to cut corners because the constitution won’t allow it.

You may have noticed that I’ve already contradicted myself more than once. I don’t know exactly how I feel about the issue. I nearly shit myself with rage whenever someone from the “Family Research Council” shows up on cable and says that gay marriage is emblematic of the moral decay of American society. Listen--there’s nothing wrong with sticking your dick in someone’s ass. You’ll probably go to hell, but let’s be honest--who among us isn’t? But it does piss me off when people start screwing around with the constitution b/c I’m not entirely persuaded that marriage is a fundamental right, rather than a privilege. This is typical of me, i.e., of course public schools should be equally funded, as long as my property taxes aren’t diverted away from my hypothetical children and spent instead on, God forbid, those poor people schools. But that’s the crux of the issue--it’s complicated. That’s why I hate politics. It’s too easy to kick the shit out of gay marriage and piss on those filthy activist judges who support it. No politician takes the time to educate, or even make an honest fucking argument for why we should agree with them.

Regarding Hillary.

2004-08-30T18:41:00.000-05:00

Hillary Clinton was on the radio with Wolf Blitzer yesterday, making a media round on the eve of the Republican National Convention. For some reason or another, I’ve never taken the time to listen/see/pay attention to a Hillary interview despite the fact that she’s been a national figure for over 12 years now. 3 things struck me. In order of realization—(1) Hillary is very, very sharp; (2) Why does conventional wisdom prop John Kerry up as “the candidate most likely to be elected” but conversely forecast Hillary as “unelectable”; and (3) is mainstream America still so allergic to modern feminism that it could not accept a President with boobs and a penis? God. I feel bad for this woman. It must really yank her chain to see George W. Bush in the oval office. Being the junior senator from NY has its perks, but let’s apply a broader sense of perspective. Hillary has been eating shit for the past thirty years.

First, her husband’s a philanderer. That’s ok, I guess. You win some, you lose some. But this is just the start. Next, Hillary went to Yale law school (Yale!), but somehow ended up in Little Rock, Arkansas for what are supposed to be the best years of your life (late-twenties to menopause). This is not so bad when your husband makes his living as the Attorney General of Arkansas or Governor of Arkansas, and you’re just some stupid bitch that wants to live in the guvnah’s mansion. But alas, Hillary isn’t a stupid fucking bitch and if she wanted a mansion, it’s likely that she could have acquired the means to obtain one on her own. Then, your husband somehow transitions from governor of Arkansas to leader of the free world. I’m sure that this was a very happy occasion for Hillary. But the second she takes the national stage, everyone starts lining up to kick her in the balls for endeavoring to do something more than smile, meet-and-greet, and tell everyone what a great person her husband is. Finally, on the tail end of what will be viewed as a prosperous, but historically unremarkable presidency, your husband gets caught with a fat girl and this sets into motion his impeachment, a 20th century first. And since you don't publicly freak the fuck out, the country concludes that you are a cold, unfeeling bitch. Yes, Hillary is beloved by many Americans. But she’s also reviled by a fair share of us and this is undeserved. I really don’t understand it.

My name is not Roger.

2004-08-23T19:34:00.000-05:00

I saw my ex-girlfriend this past weekend at a club, where the 2-3 degrees of separation that had been maintained between us for the past three years fell apart in a collision of mutual friends/acquaintances. I was surprised, although I shouldn’t have been. We did not speak, and I may have come across as rude. That was not my intent--I wasn’t angry, or even annoyed. I just didn’t think that it would be constructive to speak to her while hammered, because I’m stupid when drunk. I’m also prone to fits of anger (which are rare, but vitriolic) and although I didn’t feel particularly peeved at that moment, there was certainly room for growth. But I mostly didn’t talk to her because there really wasn’t anything to say. Instead, I gamely attempted to dance (briefly) and sit on a couch (more successfully, and for a much longer amount of time). I also provided legal advice on a NJ landlord-tenant dispute. This advice chiefly consisted of, “YEAH! YEAH! THAT’S BULLSHIT MAN! YOUR PARENTS SHOULD GET AN ATTORNEY!” Lastly, I introduced myself to George Ho for the third fucking time--for someone that’s presumably intelligent and always sober when we meet, Mr. Ho has a hard time remembering names. But most of the night was spent in a funk. This was so for three reasons.

First, seeing my ex-girlfriend made me feel very old. Don’t get me wrong. In many respects, I am a young twenty-eight. I don’t have kids, or a wife, which puts me among a shrinking minority among my age-group at my firm. I can also be an infant--if I ever get around to giving someone an angry dragon, I think I would laugh very hard. But seeing this person again lent a different perspective. When I was with her, I was still in school. That’s the stage of your life when you don’t know exactly who you are, but you do know who you would like to be: i.e., doing this, owning that, and with her. Well. I’m a lawyer, I have stuff, and I’m with someone who’s not too shabby. If I had ambition, I would trade those goals for new ones. But I don’t, and as a result, even though I’ve been quite happy recently, that happiness remains foundationally suspect. This was not a problem when I was twenty-four, and still dreaming of greener pastures.

Another thing that I enjoyed about being young is the potential for personal growth. Even if illusory (b/c people don’t change), it’s comforting--whatever personal foibles I have, I’ll outgrow it. But I never did. And at twenty-eight, I’m fairly certain that I am whoever I was meant to be. The factual circumstances will change (wife, kids, professional accomplishment), but whatever it is that’s essentially me will stay the same. This was an unhappy realization--knowing that there will always be some part of me that is godless, avaricious, and selfish--and sort of surreal, given the context surrounding my epiphany (drunk and in the dark, enveloped by sound and surrounded by a horde of similarly intoxicated, oversexed bourgeoisie).

Second, seeing her brought back a lot of bad memories. Not all related to her, of course. But our break-up was acrimonious and presaged the worst year of my life. Initially, drugs and relationship trauma do not mix. Next, I can’t express how worthless one can feel after graduating from a purportedly elite law school with no job in hand and a big fat load of student loans on one’s back. This coincided with the unanticipated end of my father’s career, which bothered me more than my own unemployment. With time, these things rectified themselves. But I don’t like thinking about them because (1) I’m a fatalist; (2) in my experience, happiness is cyclical; and (3) I’ve just enjoyed a long period of happiness which, in light of recent events, shows signs of flagging.

Lastly, love feels cheap when you can be in a room with someone that you formerly loved very much, and realize that you don’t even know them.

Napa addendum.

2004-08-16T19:28:00.000-05:00

Root beer floats and fried chicken are very tasty when it's hot out and you're wasted.

Spit bucket, please.

2004-08-16T18:57:00.000-05:00

After over a year of informally living with my girlfriend, our golden era of co-habitation came to a grinding halt yesterday, when I returned from California and she did not. Today has been strange. I forgot to take my keys in the morning, because I had normally left them for Claire (she and I both lacked the competence or will to find a locksmith capable of making a copy). I worked through lunch, because I wasn't going to be meeting Claire. And I'm still here at work (not working, of course), because I don't really have anything better to do. While I initially found this pathetic, it became less so after I took the time to consider all of the phases of my life that were palpably crappier than the life I live now. Then I felt better.

On a lighter note, I now understand why wineries offer spit buckets as a convenience to their visitors. In Napa, flights come in six ounce denominations. This did not seem like much booze to me. But after four wineries, I was ripped. To make matters worse, Claire and I had gone on a Monday and given the lack of traffic, we had to make one-on-one small talk with the people pouring my wine. This proved difficult at Calistoga, our fourth winery of the day, where I spent most of our visit sporting my concentration grimace--furrowed brow, grinding of teeth--in an attempt to understand the conversational interplay between Claire and winery man.

Fun things you find on Westlaw.

2004-08-05T17:49:00.000-05:00

Williams v. Attorney General of Alabama, 2004 WL 1681149 (11th Cir. 2004)—“Civil liberties group, on behalf of various individual users and vendors of sexual devices, brought action challenging constitutionality of Alabama statute prohibiting commercial distribution of any device primarily used for stimulation of human genitals.” Unfortunately, the ACLU lost. According to the 11th Circuit (covering GA, FLA, ALA, and other purportedly red states), the right to use vibrators, dildos, anal beads, or artificial vaginas is not “one of those fundamental rights and liberties which are, objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition, and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” This is an understatement. But let’s not forget that up until last year, sex between consenting but unmarried adults (straight, gay, group, “sodomy”—bestiality and child rape are excluded by definition) was not a fundamental right accorded by the U.S. Constitution either. Meaning that had your state chose to do so, it could have criminalized all the sex that you have had in your life (none of you are married, so this is a safe presumption). Anyhow. Reasonable minds may differ on whether sexual privacy encompasses the privilege of using sex toys. I'm personally ambivalent. Sex toys have their place in the world, but let's not get carried away here. More significantly, this was a stupid piece of public interest litigation. While I’m no fan of running into federal court and asking a judge to tinker with the Constitution in order to achieve some policy result that the legislative branch would never accept (Bush fondly calls this “legislating from the bench”—he says this so much that you’d think he was trained monkey), I understand why civil libertarians were so heartened by the Lawrence decision. Gay adoption could have eventually piggy-backed that ruling and if I were gay, that would be important to me. But the stupid ACLU injured the cause when it litigated this case and ultimately obtained an adverse ruling by one federal court of appeal which severely restricted the meaning of Lawrence. And for what? Vibrators, dildos, anal beads, or artificial vaginas, that’s what.

Regarding Sex and the City.

2004-08-04T21:18:00.000-05:00

I hate Carrie. I really do. Everytime I see her on Sex and the City--a show that I do enjoy--I suppress my urge to spit. Claire thinks I hate women. That may well be true, if Carrie is even remotely representative of the gender as a whole. But getting to the point. Miranda may be homely, relative to her fictional pals. But give me a man trapped in a woman's body any day. And yes, I apprehend the freudian undertones of that statement.

Ninja, please.

2004-08-04T19:17:00.000-05:00

http://www.realultimatepower.net/

Stupid is as stupid does.

2004-08-03T18:00:00.000-05:00

So I finally made someone look bad. I've been with my present firm for slightly more than 11 months now and throughout that timeframe, I've grown accustomed to being the village idiot of my practice group (of three). Much of that is because I am only two years removed from law school, while the remainder of the group are partners who have practiced for a combined four decades. But I would not be entirely truthful if I did not admit that a small--bordering on insignificant--portion of my village idiot status may be the result of my intellectual deficiencies. I have a shitty memory. I really do. Party trick: tell me something about yourself the next time I see you. Make sure it's uninteresting, because if not, I may rally what brain cells I have around that fact, and actually succeed in remembering it. Otherwise, wait a few hours, then ask me to recount your tidbit--I won't be able to. For more consistent results, add alcohol. This is a common occurrence at work. As a junior associate, my responsibilities in a given case aren't very sexy--I don't do the majority of the brief writing and I certainly won't be handling argument in court. But I am responsible for having a thorough recollection of the record. With thousands of pages of trial testimony in your typical case, my shitty memory and I are especially ill-suited for that task. But in any case, today I made someone look bad. Maxim for the day--no matter how stoopid you think you are, every dummy has his moment in the sun.

A monument to my egotism.

2004-07-21T14:18:00.000-05:00

So it begins. I've always been a late-adopter of social trends. Aside from my circa-1999 MP3 player ($250 for 64 MB, or roughly $3.90/MB; cf. I-Pod's 1/10 of a cent/MB), I generally don't do things when they are still new. New scares me, which is why I remain befuddled by wireless internet access, HDTV, and Blackberrys. Such was the case with blogs. That ordinary people--those who aren't cable news talking heads, celebrities, athletes, or otherwise newsworthy--are blogging at an exponential rate was peculiar to me. But as Dave has pointed out, blogging is a worthy method of keeping in touch with people without actually having to keep in touch with people. Consistent with my path of least resistance ethos and discomfort with talking (friends included) when I’m not drunk, this blog seems appropriate. More and more of you are joining the now six-year long friendship exodus from Chicago, and as I understand it, friendships require some maintenance. So consider this my attempt to stay on your respective radar screens. I’m getting older, and the time for me to drop a ring of obligation on someone draws near. And you don’t get a lot of wedding booty--I’ll need it--if you don’t have friends.