Anthem

Every semester, I fall prey to two things at finals:

1) Junk food
2) Junk music

It's taken me several years to accept it, but I am not only an emotional eater but an emotional listener as well. 1L year, I couldn't stop listening to Mariah Carey. 2L year, Carrie Underwood. This was not the sustenance on which I was raised.

But, nature trumps breeding, and this year, I have Mariah Carey on continuous loop. Again.

Untied States

I wonder if the professor would notice if I didn't correct my typos.

Unwittingly bourgeois

It's the final weekend of my fall semester; I'm down to tackling that never-ending paper about non-immigrant temporary guest-workers.[FN1]

As I've started to collect my citations, I've noticed that all my examples from the popular press come from the The New York Times. This alarms me for two reasons:

1. I complained earlier about less-than-rigorous scholarship in the literature. When I cite only to one newspaper in a forty-five page essay, I contribute to that less-than-rigorous scholarship. (Though I have plenty, plenty of other sources - triple-digit footnotes, here I come.)

2. I really am as bourgeois as I look. Bad.

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FN1. Note the maximization of character count. "Non-immigrant" instead of "nonimmigrant." "Guest-workers" instead of "guestworkers."

Cognitive Dissonance

Over Thanksgiving break, my father remarked to me that he hoped my job offer was still good after the sub-prime mortgage mess. I piped up, "Oh, I do. Remember the San Diego wildfires? My firm represents San Diego's largest insurer, so we'll be defending against all those insurance claims."

This after I cheerily announced that I still believed in the good of humanity, even the good of my firm, even after three years of law school.

Garbage

It's amazing how much garbage gets published. It's just unreadable.

Writing

I aspire to be a good writer. In some ways, I think I already am. But law school, and "legal" writing in general, have confounded me into thinking that there actually is no such thing as good writing. At least, not in this profession.

You might recall that I'm writing a paper on guest-workers (note the hyphen). My research has unearthed pages and pages of bad, bad writing from ostensibly "good" (read: tenured) writers at law schools all over the country. Reading all that garbage has made we wonder if there are any truly bold, new ideas for guest-worker programs and immigration, or if the debate is just a broken record of the same arguments, repeated over and over again.

The 3L in me should embrace the broken record; if legal scholars can't think of anything new, then I certainly shouldn't have to, either. But the honest-L in me yearns to differ.

Vision is overrated

Two weeks ago, I had the unfortunate experience of having two physicians inform me that my body is deficient in two separate ways. First, the sports doctor told me that my patellae are abnormally loose, which makes for painful running.

Second, the eye doctor told me that my eyes are abnormally dry, which makes for no contact lenses. She also intimated that I might need new glasses, but that I should wait until my follow-up to be sure.

Problem is, my (potentially insufficient) glasses already make my head hurt. So this morning I took them off during Evidence, where I sit in the back of the classroom.

Law school isn't nearly as painful when it's blurry.