Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Where are you calling from?

On we trudge through bar prep. Nothing particularly new on that front. More slogging. More questioning the integrity of barbri as a quality test preparation service.
I called the barbri Boston office to ask a question about one of their answers today. The woman answering the phone asked, "What bar are you taking?" Well, I called the Boston office, what do you think?? I've called twice and they have asked me both times. Why? Next time they ask, I'm going to tell them I'm taking Georgia, but I figured I'd call Boston just to see how the weather is. Then they refused to answer my question, because they only answer substantive questions during particular hours twice a week (read: they are only offering the remote possibility of being helpful during particular hours twice a week, at times when I have class - their class).

SCOTUS is supposed to health care-it-up tomorrow. Predictions? I say Chief Justice Roberts writes the opinion. It'll be either 5-4 striking the Act down or 6-3 upholding it. Chief Justice Roberts votes with Justice Kennedy and assigns the opinion to himself. Though I'm shaky, they could punt it down the road. My only real prediction is that Justice Scalia writes a separate opinion taking the most conservative line possible and belittling anyone who doesn't agree with him. (Not too much of a prediction, he's sort of a one-trick pony.)

Cupid Shuffle!!

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Heat

So there's no way to stop LeBron. Congratulations Heat. Rueful congratulations. And premature - I'm still watching the game, but I don't think you can jinx something you don't really want to have happen.
Speaking of heat, is hit 100 in DC today. I liked it. I was inside most of the day watching a 3:40 Con Law lecture that moved painfully slowly and bracing myself for my nemesis: Torts. I start barbri's lectures on Torts tomorrow. In law school it was probably my least favorite class. Worst grade, worst experience, worst everything. And I'm waaaay behind everyone else since my 1L Torts professor, praised be his name (in his own head), taught us a crazy, biased, law and economics version of torts. Now, learning torts the regular version is totally different. The rules are clearer. We don't do comparative economic analyses, for one thing.

Other people are getting a little taste of the barbri Property lecturer. She is proving to be quite divisive - people love her or hate her. Or both. Most people start out loving her, but by the third day of her singing popular songs with words about Real Property out of key, people tend to turn to the dark side. I can't imagine why. 5 weeks and I'll have something else to talk about.

I'll smack you in the mouth, I'm Neil Diamond.

Kerry and I decided tonight that Jay-Z did not invent swag, as he claims on "Otis." Rather, it was a little known chemist from UCLA, Dr. Charles Swaggerstein who invented swag as a mistake while he was working on the Manhattan Project in 1942.
Jay-Z remains a Criminal Procedure expert, however, knowing his "glove compartment's locked, so is the trunk and the back, and I know my rights, so you gon' need a warrant for that."

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Mini-Tantrums

Today while "condensing" my notes after lecture, I stopped and yelled at my computer: "Oh my god, I don't care!" It was just an irresistible impulse. Like a reflex to studying Evidence. If I think about Evidence for more than six hours a day, apparently I have to yell about it. I'm pretty happy no one else was around me at the time. It was akin to throwing a mini-tantrum. Great stuff.

Inspired by something I read, here is what I have learned so far from bar studying: Record your deed immediately. Do no accept a quitclaim deed, someone is screwing you over. Tumblrs about studying for the bar are more interesting than studying itself. I am capable of giving a crap for over five hours a day, but less than six. Don't go into property law.

Just booked my bar trip to Peru. It's gonna be baller. Machu Pichu, the Amazon, and Lima. I can't wait.


Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Florida

Friday through Sunday I took a (far too brief) vacation to Florida. The trip was prompted by a wedding; one of Kerry's high school friends got married on Marco Island. So I had little choice but to be dragged to the Gulf Coast of Florida. It took a lot of arm twisting. The wedding was on a beach, which I was previously unaware of. That would have been good to know beforehand. So there I sat in a wool suit during the picturesque ceremony. If the picture was of me, it would mostly be of me sweating, since it was about 88 degrees out. But the heat on the beach was temporary - the wedding moved inside for dinner and dancing. My biggest complaint about the wedding was that the DJ played a remix of Journey, which I found completely unacceptable. In other words, the wedding was a lot of fun. The food (filet mignon and pistachio encrusted snapper) was absolutely delicious, really pushing it over the top.

The morning after the wedding, Kerry and I went to the beach on the Gulf. Neither of us packed sunscreen, so we had to keep it brief. Lobster just ain't in the cards in the Gulf. I had never been in the Gulf before. It was warm, beautiful, and totally ridiculous for an ocean. Being a New Englander, I'm used to the Atlantic. If you're lucky it gets to the mid-fifties in there. Even in August, a wet suit is appropriate. The Gulf was otherworldly to me. It's not what salt water is about. But you know, I could get used to it. I liked not coming out of the water shivering. In June!

The other days, we hung out in Naples. It's a nice, albeit silly, place. There are three types of people there: regular people, retirees (who we can call older regular people), and super rich vacation homers. The super rich vacation people have these absolutely crazy homes. Like 20 bedroom, multimillion mansions with backyards on the Gulf to provide easy access to their yachts. Yachts, plural. And these are just vacation homes. It is hilarious yet sickening.
Besides these mansions, Naples had nice beaches, shopping and restaurants.I had some of the best sushi of my life (in Florida, surprising, right?). And went to a fun pub, concisely named "The Pub," that had a good vibe and lots of great beers. Much of yesterday was spent contemplating dropping this whole law thing and just being a bartender at The Pub. Silly you think? Well they get to wear kilts to work. How silly does that sound now?! I think it's just how I get after being somewhere pleasant, then returning to something as...unpleasant...as barbri. Unpleasant = me being polite.

Now I'm back to barbri, which is what I'm gonna go ahead and blame for my failure to update on. It really is time consuming! Especially when you spend days catching up because you take a trip to Florida. (Who is irresponsible enough to do that?)
I had a tussle with them, but I'll talk about that later. Too much effort.

Saturday night in Florida I got to check something off my list: make fun of a Heat fan. Me, to a guy in a Heat jersey: "Oh, you're a Heat fan. Nice to see that. I didn't think you were a real thing. Like a unicorn." Of course it came back to bite me. I ended up watching Game 7 in the home of Heat fans. But I don't really want to talk about that - it's too raw.
Instead, I'll talk about another first that happened that evening: I used a beer koozie. (Yes, I remain a New England elitist.) It was so exciting; my beer stayed cold for so long. Do they look ridiculous? Yes. But they serve a purpose. Count me in. I am so cosmopolitan now.

Monday, June 4, 2012

What Else Are We Missing?

Bar class has been plugging along. Not fun, but not awful. My routine is to go to school in the morning, do the assignments and review my notes, eat lunch, go to the Barbri lecture in the afternoon, come back and do the homework. It is unexciting, but necessary. But today, I had two back to back experiences that are really shaking my faith in Barbri.
This morning I was working on my first essay question of the entire course. I hadn't seen the form of the questions or the form of the model answers. The model answers, we are told, are truly model because they are written by attorneys with unlimited time and resources, whereas we are time pressured and have only our memories. The essay question was about corporations, a topic I took in law school and reviewed last week in Barbri's class. I wrote out my answer and identified three main issues: duty of loyalty, duty of care, and requirements for a derivative suit (I promise it doesn't matter what those mean right now). Then I flipped to the model answer, and it had only two issues: duty of loyalty and the derivative suit. What happened to the duty of care issue? I flipped back and looked at the question again, and I really thought I saw a care issue. Either I'm crazy and was spotting an issue that didn't exist, or Barbri's model answer - their model answer - was missing a huge part. I asked a friend or two whether they thought there should be a care issue. They both agreed with me, as did a girl in my lecture who also had done the problem. So are these model answers good answers or aren't they? Later in the day, I actually called Barbri to ask what was going on. They told me to call back tomorrow for some reason or another (probably because it was the end of the workday and they didn't want to deal with me - legit given how much their course costs?).
My second problem with Barbri is somehow more disturbing. Today's lecture was the second day of Real Property. I took the class in school, I've been reading, reviewing, and generally doing my work. So I was shocked when the lecturer missed one of the elements of adverse possession. There are five requirements, and she only listed four of them, excluding the requirement that possession be exclusive. This element was a question that came up on Barbri's own AMP software and on a practice question, so I was shocked that she could just leave it off. And it wasn't by mistake - the handout that we got excluded the element from the otherwise complete list. I couldn't believe it; I looked it up in Barbri's own provided materials just to make sure I was correct. And sure enough, she just blew it. (Then again, she also claimed her father invented penne alla vodka, so I don't know why I'm surprised.) While I'm happy that I caught the mistake, it is disturbing. I took property in law school and have a decent familiarity with it - what about the classes I didn't take? What about secured transactions, family law, and all the others? Are they omitting important details there too? It's just very unsettling, and I don't really know what to do about it. I can't exactly ask the lecturer what the deal was - she's just a video, recorded live last week in Boston. Ummmm, this seems like the beginning of something ominous. If I can't trust the lecturers, and I can't trust the model answers, who can I trust? I am the Jason Bourne of Barbri.