Hometown

My hometown is sort of boring. At times, there can be nothing interesting to do. For example, the burrito store was open while the liquor store was closed. Who does that? I was lulled into a false sense of boredom, so Monday night I decided to go to the (only) local bar. Huge mistake since I had no desire to run into acquaintances from high school. I went with Ron and eventually met up with Ryan and Morgan. But in the process, I made awkward eye contact with a few people who had been happily forgotten since high school. Like Becca with the trashy clothes. And what's-her-name with the name that escapes memory. Luckily no conversation was initiated, but it was awkward enough.
It got me prepared a bit for my 10 year high school reunion. (I skipped the 5 year and apparently missed a girl fight.) I think I'll be "successful" at my 10 year reunion. If all goes according to plan and I don't fail out this semester, I'll be a lawyer. And I will have moved out of my hometown. That makes me successful. What else can you hope for at a high school reunion? It seems like the point is to show off how awesome you are now so everyone who didn't like you can reflect on how wrong they were and how much of a jerk that makes them. High school reunions are a big F-U opportunity, or am I missing something? I guess there is the possibility of reigniting long-lost friendship. But given my high school, that seems unlikely.

Speaking of high school people - last night was the traditional elementary school reunion that occurs each year for Rebecca's birthday. Every year Rebecca, Vanessa, Jessica, and I go out to dinner and drinks in Boston to celebrate Rebecca's birthday. We have known each other since kindergarten - except Vanessa who arrived in 2nd grade. Rebecca was one of two people in my elementary school class who was younger than me. Sucka.
We went to a Chinese hot pot restaurant in (shockingly) Chinatown and for drinks at a bar called Scholars. It was all well and good. Two med students, a law student, and a soon to be business student. Pushed to succeed much?

I just heard a commercial that began "Attention women with a muffin top." It was about weight loss - but I don't think it's the most delicate method of reaching the target audience.
"Attention people who love muffin tops. Come to Will's Bakery." Much better.

I just found some of my old Star Wars action figures in my closet. I seriously considered bringing them back down to DC. Maybe just Han Solo and Darth Vader...and the X-Wing? That would look cool in my apartment...no?

Frack

Alright blog, here we go.

Finals being over was clutch. I spent a few days in DC without any real responsibility. Lots of laundry, groceries, and general responsibilities aside, I did little. I have to say, the best night was that Wednesday. I went with my roommate to pub trivia and a whiskey bar, and then we watched "A New Hope." It's really all I've ever wanted in an evening. The only other evening of note was Damien's Christmas Party. Thanks to Dan and Rachel, that night turned into a haze. Dan instigated many many shots of Scandinavian schnapps, one of the few liquors that gets worse with each shot. I just got annoyingly drunk (sorry everyone I was around!). The next morning there was a lovely group text:
Dan: Sorry about that everyone. Thanks for drinking with me
Me: My head...
Rachel: I'm still drunk
Dan: I ended my streak of not puking in DC
Rachel: I ended my streak of not blacking out at dinner parties.
For the record, Rachel's streak only dates back to Damien's Passover dinner party by my count. Whelp, that was DC Christmas.

DC Hanukkah was more of a sober event. It consisted of Ed and me cooking for Alena and Kerry while watching Tim Tebow lose to the Patriots. What up.

Then it was back to Boston, where I currently am. Boston has been, well, rather dull. I've seen some people and that has been nice. Christmas was very traditional: BDP's for Christmas Eve, family friend's for dinner, and Emma's for evening activities. It's as regular as Santa's mad dash around the world. Once again, Santa did not show up for me - even though I have a chimney. How does he know which children are Christian? Does he just go by last name and make all sorts of dangerous assumptions? I mean, Dave Goldberg we can probably cross off the list, but there are tons of ambiguities.
Does anyone actually get coal? That would be awesome. I'd be way more behind the idea of Santa if people actually got coal when they were naughty that year. What a superior system of child discipline. Do rich kids who have been naughty get coal derivatives from a futures market? Was any fracking involved in that coal extraction?

Fracking as a great word. It sounds way better than what it is: a method of extracting coal and natural gas from rock.

For my birthday, Shaked got my How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) Seasons 4 and 5, but I promised not to watch them until the end of finals. That was a good choice since I would have spent lots more time watching HIMYM than studying. But since finals ended, I have been in a HIMYM marathon. I'm just about at the end of season 5. It's like crack! Even though it's going steadily downhill and slowly consuming my life. Hey, it really is like crack.

So Happy Holidays everyone.

Final Final

Tomorrow is my last final. In 15 hours, I will be done with my penultimate semester of law school. All that stands in my way is Professional Responsibility. (I hope someone ironically gets thrown out of the exam for cheating.) I cannot wait to be done with over two weeks of constant studying or feeling like I should be studying. Not to mention being done with this crappy semester. Next semester I get to take classes I am interested in with good professors. This semester not so much.
Tomorrow afternoon there is a planned brunch at the bar closest to school. Then a much-deserved nap. The nap isn't group planned.

The Model Rules of Professional Responsibility can be summed up in one sentence: don't be a douchebag. Then it's just variations - don't be a d-bag to your client, don't be a d-bag to former clients, don't be a d-bag to opposing counsel, and so on. But I have a feeling that writing all that on the test will not earn me high marks.

Holy smokes, it's almost the holidays and I haven't done really any holiday shopping! I should probably just give everyone a Santa hat and act really offended if they don't like it or act confused. Rejecting a Santa hat in late December is like hating America. Right Rick Perry?

I have plans to have the nerdiest law school party ever. It will be called the "Ex Parte" (that's a law joke...yeah). And it will only go downhill from there. We can serve an apple tort(e). There will be Federal Rules of Party Procedure. And so on. I'll think of more awful law jokes later.
FYI: this is why law school's law revue shows are not funny. Law jokes are uniformly terribly.

My annual birthday gathering at the Big Hunt was this Saturday. A decent amount of people came out given that it was mid-finals. Despite having a server who hated me for ordering a drink from the bar (when she took ten minutes to come by the table), it went pretty well. I saw some peeps I have not seen in a while, and there was general merriment. And Sunday I was able to combat the hangover enough to get some actual work done. For the win!

Of Birthdays and Finals, Hopefully Not Final Birthday

Let's recap. My birthday and finals have both happened, generally in an intertwining narrative.
Friday night was probably the highlight of the weekend. Kerry took me to a cocktail bar called the Columbia Room. It is a ten seat bar, framed as a speakeasy - unmarked in the back of another bar. They have real bartenders. Not "I can make a rum and coke" bar tenders. They use high quality ingredients and top notch techniques. Usually they do a flight of three cocktails. Two are chosen by the house, the third is based on your preferences. The house choices were Prohibition-era style cocktails. We got the history of them and everything. It was interesting and the drinks were good. For my third cocktail I asked for "something with whiskey...or gin." and the bartender made me her favorite martini. It's was a dry martini with Plymouth Gin and a fancy dry vermouth in equal parts, with a twist of lemon. It was good - though not my favorite thing ever. Kerry had a neat ginger cocktail. And someone else at the bar got a vesper martini - the original James Bond drink. Pretty cool. We also got an extra drink (cause how often do you get the opportunity to sit at that type of bar). For that I asked for something spicy. I got a drink called a Sun Burn. It involved whiskey, bitters, ginger liqueur, tobasco, and an egg white. It was pretty incredible.
Apparently this bar is on GQ's list of top 25 cocktail bars. Well it's right up my alley. Huge fan.

Sunday was my actual birthday. As is tradition, I listened to "December 4th" by Jay-Z. We have the same birthday. No big deal. I'm practically him, right? I got the nice deluge of facebook posts, which was an appreciated distraction. But I spent most of the day studying Evidence. 'Tis the life of a December-born student. But this is the last time my birthday will ever interfere with finals! Alena and Kerry made dinner and baked a cake, respectively. It was delicious, and clearly the highlight of a study day. And I still lost at Settler of Catan. Great.

After another full study day yesterday, my first final came today. Evidence. It began in curious manner. I got to the exam room an hour in advance. Jon and I plugged in our computers and after a couple of minutes a socket down the row began smoking and making popping sounds. Umm that's cool. Someone called facilities about that, and it turns out that the school flooded last night (it's basically built on a swamp...like this city). So our basement classroom had been flooded, causing electrical problems. And making the carpet throughout the lecture hall damp and mildew scented. The first two rows of seats were roped off, and despite the smell and general sense of dampness that hung over the room, we all took the exam. Not what you'd call optimal test conditions.
I hope it went well. I'm nervous. I left the exam 20 minutes early. I had already read over my answers twice. Now that I am out of the test, I know that I got one answer wrong. But I just didn't know it, so those 20 minutes wouldn't have helped. Some crap about the Confrontation Clause changing in 2003. But aside from that question I feel pretty good about it. I think? I hope! At least it's over. Face towards the future. Towards tomorrow. Towards an Antitrust exam at 9:30 in the morning.

I'm not sure how this is going to go over with the professor but I made a little joke on the exam. The problem had to do with a prosecution for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. I wrote: "The potential for prejudice is high (no pun intended)." I hope my professor likes puns. Specifically bad ones!

Oh, I passed the MPRE. I am more than minimally ethical in all U.S. jurisdictions. I should hope so from a philosophy major!
I wonder if like...Jack Abramoff took that test? It's clearly a really good screening tool. Better we should have ethics shock treatment.

I remember that two years ago during finals it was freezing. It was so cold I was wearing two pairs of socks to school. Today it was mid-60s and raining. What is going on here? Why is DC now a tropical rainforest? It's December! Get with it. I want some snow. I want another snowpocalypse. I want classes cancelled, snowball fights, and hot toddies.

Shaked got me the next two seasons of How I Met Your Mother. All I want to do is watch them! But I promised I won't until the end of finals. An exercise in self-control.

Tupac says "It's hard to be legit and still pay the rent." That depends in large part on what your rent is. If you live in a mansion, yeah. If you live at your momma's house, like Snoop Dogg (Gin and Juice), it's not hard at all. If you "raise the roof" of your house, that would cost a lot. And there's always the threat of that roof being on fire and someone "let[ting] the motherf***** burn."

Actual Last Day Of Classes/Time Warp

Today was the "official" last day of classes. Goodbye and good riddance this semester. Can we get Green Day in here to play a song? No? Alright.
Well it is officially finals period. I felt like a huge waste of time today although I did lots of studying. The problem is that I could take Evidence or Antitrust tomorrow and feel adequately prepared. I can definitely get better with the material, but it's a much slower learning curve now and as such it is more frustrating to continue slogging through the material. I'm basically fighting for every inch of ground in terms of preparation. It's World War I up in here.

It's getting to be that time of year where I grow a year older one day. Yeah, my birthday. Eh, I'm not thrilled about it. I've never been a huge fan. My mom already got me my birthday present. It was a Mark Bittman cookbook. Thanks mom, that will be helpful for recipes since cooking is a pursuit that I enjoy! But at the same time I'm not thrilled about it. You see, I mentioned at least two times that I don't like Mark Bittman very much. I think he's a food nazi. And this is sort of what I hate about my birthday. I got a "thanks, but" present. I feel like that happens a lot. And it sounds crappy of me to say, but I hate it. I hate the disingenuous gratitude. I hate feeling like someone close to me basically ignored my express preferences. There is nothing (or very few things, at least) that I really want. As cliche as it may be to say it, I don't care that much about what material possession I have. But I appreciate the thought. I do not appreciate the thought behind giving me a book that I said I don't want.
But, all in all, I like having the book. So after thinking/typing it out, I am in the odd position of more or less liking the gift, but disliking its thoughtfulness. Now I sound like a jerk. Nothing too new.

Today I was studying at the tables outside the library. Talking is permitted at the tables. But there are two dozen people studying around you, so the proper social etiquette is to keep conversations short and quiet. It definitely violates the social rules to have a twenty minute conversation (right next to me) about why you chose to be a chemistry major and professional hockey. Guess what? No one cares! I care more about improper propensity inferences in Evidence law than I do about you. And I don't care about propensity inferences basically at all. So stop talking about the Pittsburgh Penguins or I'm going to poison your Diet Coke.
Can there be some sort of social etiquette where it's totally alright to scream at people who are blatantly violating other social norms?

When the going gets tough, the tough are happy they aren't 1Ls about to take their first finals ever.