Nothing to see here, please move along.

I am moving blogs. The new blog is located at http://halfobscurity.blogspot.com.

The new blog is not very different. It has a new template, and a new title. But the general format remains the same.

Really the only big difference is the subject. This blog has been by a law student at NYU. Even before I was at law school, the blog focused heavily on my applications and preparations to attend law school. As law school wore on, and the novelty of the experience diminished, my writing here was still as a law student, where so much of my daily normal was a consequence of my education.

But I'm going back to San Diego now. And frankly, for much of this year that has been where my mind had been at. My natural state is to live in two places, the now and the future. Only with particular effort do I dwell upon the past. In fact, only through this blog and my writing here have I ever really through at any length on the subject of how I have been in the past, and how my past affected the person I am and am choosing to be.

For the first year or so on this blog, I spent a good amount of time and words on the subject of my life in college. College was a formative time for me, and I found myself returning to it here to find out how it affected me. I wanted to understand the experience that I had lived, but not examined.

Because I have written so much of my law school experience down as I lived it, examined it as I lived it, I may not feel the same compulsion to write about law school after it ends. But I'm sure some elements of my experience here are not quite understood to me. And I suspect I will find new old things to think about as the new parts of my life teach me new perspectives and modes of thought.

I've been thinking about moving blogs for a long time. The new blog has had it's adress registered and layout designed for several months. But I was hesitant. I didn't want to leave this space, this name, and that super cool banner I designed over way too many nights.

But I suppose the new blog and the new name are a little more adult. The new blog doesn't have the silly adolescent connotation of this blog's name. But the new blog, bless its heart, doesn't have exactly the same degree of personality to it. It's not named after something in my life, but instead an extrinsic concept that has significance to me at this moment.

Oh, did you want to know how I really came up with this blog's name? After all this time?

A friend of mine once wrote an article about me for my final issue as editor of our college humor newspaper. The article described that I would be leaving the paper, and that I had (this was a fake newspaper now) announced I would be moving on to Neo Tokyo. The joke was basically that in my old age and graduating state, I had sort of gone round the bend and lost touch with reality. And my delusions lead me inevitably to the animated worlds of my youth and recreation. It was a very funny article. It included a stylistic drawing of me by its author that I've included in the next blog.

As I declined in college, much of my senior year consisted of jokes by others, mostly, about putting me out to pasture. Of course it turned out that I had lots of time left to live, but for a while there, the close of a significant part in my life had a certain poignancy. I didn't want it to be over, just as I don't want this part to be over. It doesn't matter that I have something good and worthwhile to replace it. I suppose I wanted to hold on to some of that.

So perhaps the goofy insignificance of a fictional rotting city of the future had a specific relevance to me to the time in my life when I began this blog. Maybe it's a good thing to close off this space and begin again. I have a new life to live, and I don't have to forget this one to live the next.

This will always be here. I mean, I wrote it all down.

I've tried to take my finals at a jogger's pace this semester.

I finish on the 9th. And then by the 21st, I start the BarBri course and a two and a half month long marathon of learning everything about the law of California.

Throughout my law school career, I've always paid special attention to the curriculum's special mentions to the laws of my home state. When a casebook listed a note case explaining a particular doctrine's application in California, I wrote it down and incorporated it into my outlines, even if I didn't expect that would be on the exam.

But one of the things I've worried about going to NYU is that I missed being educated in my home state. I missed the little collateral educational benefits to learning amongst people from California, and in an environment that prefers the laws of that state. My friends in California schools get to take California civil procedure, and their evidence classes talk about the California and the federal rules. They know more about the latent ambiguity rule in contracts than I do. they're just better exposed to these little niceties of our state.

It's interesting to note that I don't think NYU necessarily predisposes us to the laws of New York. Perhaps they're more frequently mentioned. But I think instead the NYU educaiton is more national in scope. We learn a lot of federal standards. And I think we learn a great deal of overarching themes in the nation's laws. I don't think this is just a consequence of a sense that the school should be "meta" or high minded. But a big part of this is the sense and statistics demonstrating that NYU pulls students from around the country and sends them off to practice in a wide variety of markets and jurisdictions. My anecdotal experience with students at other "national" law schools suggests that they do the same.

Also of note, the "national law schools," as opposed to the "regional law schools," are not stratified necessarily on the basis of their rankings or relative prestige. Some law schools that aren't super high up on the rankings have a very national character. American in D.C. is a good example I think. So is Regent Law School, recently made fun of on The Daily Show and our NYU Law Dems listserv. And I suspect that some of the very good California schools are relatively regional in their approach, especially the public schools, because their students come from a very large jurisdiction, and overwhelmingly practice there.

But back to the topic at hand.

After I graduate, the parents and my grandmother will be in town for about a week. I have a lot of eating, drinking and New Yorking to do with them. And then I fly back to San Diego, where I have a lot of eating, drinking and San Dieging to do with my friends and family back home.

The long and the short of is that I need to make sure that I'm not entirely burnt out by the finals process. I have a long tough fun summer to live through.

I am outlining Evidence (finally).

When I'm making my outlines, or taking reading notes, I try to use the word "wicked" whenever appropriate. Why use a silly little legal synonym like "intent" or "malice" when you can invoke the demons and moral rot lurking in the hearts of men.

I've been giving strong thought to throwing my name up on this (or another) blog.

As I've repeatedly said, it's not a secret blog. I only really wanted to make sure it didn't show up when employers, who knew nothing about me aside from my (stellar) resume, googled me.

I think people are supposed to be allowed private spaces. Or at least they should be allowed spaces free from the view of prospective employers. If an employer asked me about it, I would have told them. But no one ever asked. And I didn't offer.

I've been told that some people consider this blog pretty personal. I suppose it is. I do talk a lot about what's going on just within my head. And I suppose I don't really read a lot of that sort of self-understanding in others' blogs. This is the other main concern I have about attaching my name to the blog.

I'm planning to do a few things around San Diego after my return that might get my name in the paper. I'm a-okay with that. But I'm not entirely sure how much of this internal dialog ought to be placed in the public realm, attached to something so easily google-able as my name.

The easy solution would be to blog under my name, but to blog about adult, professional things, or food, or things other than the internal meanderings of my sense of self. I'm just not sure that's what I want to do with my time, or my blog.

I recently discovered that this has been the best semester of law school.

It wasn't that I had the most fun. Although I did. And I certainly developed a healthy backlog of reading for Evidence and Local Government.

But I did meet and know the most people. And the things I learned in class, especially in my Advanced Constitutional Law class, have had the greatest effect on how I think about the law and my role in it.

Planning the National Law Dems convention meant I met and worked with a whole big bunch of new people. And working with the Law Dems and the ACS this year, both thriving chapters now on campus, introduced me to many more students.

Maybe this is true of everyone, or maybe it's just especially true of me, but I really appreciate knowing people in my community. I experience wildly divergent views of comfort between being new in a place, and in having allies and confidants.

I suppose I know people who seem very comfortable with being alone, or with being a stranger. But I'm not one of them. I'm sure that was one of the most difficult things during my 1L year. I knew people, sure. But I didn't have the time or the attention to get to know them.

During my 1L year I wrote here that a problem with my then experience was a lacked of shared endeavor. Studying, while going on all around me, and by all of my peers and friend, was still a solitary exercise. It wasn't the sort of common collaborative experience that brings people closer to one another. But the work of my 3L year wasn't limited to studying. I created those shared endeavors, and I felt healthier for it.

All this is to say that I'm going to be more upset to leave NYU, and New York City than I had planned so many years ago. I know I'll find life accommodating and wonderful back in San Diego. And there will be fewer barriers to shedding the burdens of being a stranger. But I had just started to feel through my place here, and just in time to leave it.

I finally finally put some new flickr photos up.

I've been spending too much time sharing photos on the facebook(.com). If I less time on that silly site, and more here staring at an empty blogger window, I'm sure I'd produce more.

I really haven't figured out exactly what happened to my need to blog. I suppose a lot of it has to do with a healthy social life supplementing my already busy work-school schedule. I'll think it over a bit. Maybe I'll be better at this whole thing when I'm back burried under the bar exam.

Yesterday and the Success of Friends.

Yesterday I went to go see a presentation at the NYU Center on Law and Security.

As soon as I saw the email announcement go out a few weeks ago, I knew I’d be there. I don’t usually attend their events. They all sound very interesting, but I have to pick and choose how to spend my time and for what interesting events I’ll attend. Generally speaking, I won’t go to a lecture on the internal political turmoil in Iran. Eventually I’m going to become better acquainted with that sort of policy area. But right now it’s not anything with which I’m well versed.

But this email announcement listed a classmate of mine as the speaker. It listed him right there as a J.D. candidate and as someone who had been working with the Center. I had known he was working at the Center, but, well, I guess I just thought he was a research assistant doing student employee sorts of things.

I knew he had been doing interesting things in his past and current job. Once or twice he’d casually beg off on some social engagement, explaining “Oh, this weekend I have to go to this country and do this sensitive international diplomacy thing.” “Oh. Um, well good luck with that,” was usually our collective response.

But there he was, on campus, giving a very convincing lecture on the internal dynamics of the revolutionary government of Iran, taking questions, and cracking jokes. It was pretty amazing. I was again reminded why I am going to NYU. How I got in, I’ll never know, but I chose this place to be among brilliant people. And often enough that choice is validated for just those reasons.

Later that night, I went out for drinks with other friends. While catching up, I discovered that one of them, a friend from college, here attending NYU’s Wager School of public policy, is running $5 million micro-lending program in Moscow next year. Yeah. $5 Million dollars. Or $5-10 million. I think But whatever. Either is a very large amount of money.

I am not going to be running a social entrepreneurship project to help develop the middle class and foster democracy in the capitol of the former Soviet Union.

You know what’s funny about all this? It isn’t that people I know are going off to do amazing things. I always assumed that the people around me were committed and ambitious and beyond able. But I wasn’t entirely sure when it was going to happen. And it’s happening now.

I am often in a little bit of awe over Christiana, the Phoblographer, whenever she mentions another close friend of hers who gets appointed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, or who is running for state assembly somewhere. And I sometimes feared that perhaps I wasn’t developing the kinds of relationships or working in the right places to meet people who were going to do big impressive things with their lives. The biographies of accomplished people are littered with old friends who took parallel tracks, and whose own ambitions encouraged their peers to meet their own.

But perhaps as I get older, and as my old friends strike out into success in the world, those fears are quickly melting away.

Top [Number] Worst Names for a Facebook.com Photo Album

• Car accidents I’ve engineered
• Girls Restroom, 3^rd Floor, Tioga Hall
• Maps of the world, circa 1632
• Photos of my thesis
• Underarm hair
• Pictures of people I’ve slept with
• Pictures of objects with which I’ve slept

Sometimes I am very satisfied with how I live my life.

Well I had an eventful Friday and Saturday.

I could blog on and on about it. I might. But as I thought about what to write, I quickly realized I had a full bunch of things to say. It was a weekend well-spent, despite the desperately unproductive Sunday I’m wrapping up after movies and endless episodes of Soprano’s.

Here are the possible post-titles I came up with:

• My Dinner with George Lakoff
• New Haven and Back on 15 Minutes of Sleep
• My First New York Night Till Dawn
• A hamburger from Louie’s Lunch, the world’s oldest restaurant to serve hamburgers, from 110 year old ovens, which claims to be the birthplace of the revered sandwich
• The American Constitution Society’s Progressive Family Values Conference: A Retrospective

So it was a good weekend. I met a lot of great people, learned a whole lot, experienced much of what we’re young to experience, and reaffirmed the reasons I came to NYU.

And as I mention all so often on this blog, the American Constitution Society is a thing with which all you progressive law students must must get involved. They will hook you up.

Friday Night Till Dawn

On Friday night I met up with a friend of mine who I met through the California Young Democrats. The guy’s a political consultant and fundraiser, and he is surely a now and future force in California and national politics. Plus he’s very eager for a good time.

I went with the intention of having a couple of drinks and ditching out early. But after our bar shut down, the bartender offered us free drinks, when his boss left for home. We took them.

Then I acquiesced to an invitation down to the Bowery Hotel for drinks there with a fundraiser and his bundled givers. It was fun. We shut that place down too.

The management kicked us out really. An hour after the bar closed a guy who we’d been talking with got a little out of hand. Security told us it was time to go. It was.

But instead of leaving to bed, I escorted our visitor and his friend to a diner for food and a step toward sobriety. I walked back home as the sun was rising. I hit my head to the pillow for 15 minutes, no more than five of which were sleep.

My alarm went off to alert me that in 30 minutes, I was going to meet up with three members of the NYU ACS chapter, who were coming up to New Haven for the day with me to attend the Yale ACS’s Progressive Family Values Conference..

I did manage to sleep on the train for a while, and remain chipper and conversant through the day. But boy oh boy. I managed to pay attention to the conference mostly by grit and determination. And the coffee generously left remaining by the other participants. I took notes too, pretty careful ones. Keeping my mind active, transcribing ideas heard into those expressed by my own efforts kept me involved in the discussion. And well, frankly, these people were so brilliant and thoughtful that even with my deprivation, it would have been difficult to tune them out.

Finals! (Final Finals!!!)

Well, I have my next three weeks pretty clearly scheduled out. Up at 7, gym at 8, Library by 11, Lunch at 1, back to the library from 3 to 9. Then an hour to make my way back to sleep to start it all again.

For a work schedule it's not that rough. 7 hours of studying a day? I want to make sure I have lots of time to sleep. I have scheduled in 9 hours a night. I can't get sick any more. I need to take this finals period in moderation. I'll only have a week and a half between it and the Bar. If I make it back to the gym at my planned schedule, I'll want the extra hour.

I'll break once for a final. And I'm having a going away party. And on Tuesday, my last day of classes ever in my whole entire life, I'm going out.

And hell's bells, I'm going to go see Spiderman, because I'm a human being and I can't possibly miss it. But I'm going to be in bed immediately afterward.

I had the flu on Sunday, and it lasted through Wednesday. And I'm still not back at where I should be. I'm taking the next few days, until Sunday, to take it simple and easy. I only have two finals, but my Note is going to get wrapped up in the next three weeks along with these finals. So it's not a small amount of work. And I think I got stressed out. I never think stress, but it gets expressed by my inability to fight off disease. It's not a good thing. Maybe I should learn how to wig out or something.

I'm looking forward to my old life.

I'm looking forward to that plain available coffee I used to buy from that ever-present fungible supermarket everywhere in San Diego. Foglifter, it was called, with hints of vanilla and sunshine and lucidity swilling through those saucers I left at that old house we used to rent.

Those saucers made up exactly three cups of coffee per pot I'd brew. I've brewed the same amount of coffee since I’ve drank the stuff. But the right sized cup made sure I drank at the optimal rate. Two were not enough, but the third was an indulgence. It was like a prize, to send me off to success for the rest of my day.

I measured my mornings by those cups.

Even while I lived there, I knew it was a home I hadn’t had yet. It was a place of peers, a belonging, a life chosen.

It wasn’t that I could control that life. There were four others there with us. I couldn’t tell them what to do. But it was a life I could understand. It wasn’t this mess of a life in this metropolis. It wasn’t a heap of everything combined into a faceless nothing. It was a confined space, a place to understand the circumstance. I learned about where I was, with who I was. There were limits and spaces, places to delve, and I liked it. I had a base and a background.

My purpose is ever-present, it stays with me now. It is within me; it needs no support. What I do, my fallible self, the vehicle for my purpose, is not without need of rest and distraction. A house of friends, a city of camaraderie is a willing cushion. I want that again, and I am set to have it.

I’m looking forward to it. I will return to it. Thank goodness.

Flu Season

Saturday was just as I planned. I got up, went to the gym for a punishing 2 hours and studied for the rest of the day. I was in bed early enough to be awake for a repeat of the same. Only instead of lunch, I was going to have brunch with friends.

Instead I woke up at around 6 A.M., and I couldn't get back to sleep. I was sore all over, and I thought that was why I couldn't sleep. I hadn't been at full tilt at the gym for over a month, and Saturday was my first attempt at a full schedule, so I expected to be sore as consequence. But soreness never caused me an inability to sleep. In fact, it usually had the opposite effect.

After an hour or so of tossing and turning, I realized what was up, and I spent the rest of the morning with my head in the toilet.

I'm much better today, but not at all well. At least I've been eating. Sunday was just god awful. As my morning wore on, the caffeine headache grew bigger and bigger, until i managed to borrow some of my roommate's milk to help me get some of my coffee down. But the headache never really went away. It did get better though, and once my insides quieted down, and the coffee got in to satisfy my addiction, I strangely enough, went right back to bed for the rest of the morning.

I awoke to a day spent watching movies on my computer. I caught up with a little work, but mostly my head was mixing around in confusion and I couldn't seem to find any of my law books among the piles of work I've been leaving myself for the end of this semester.

The headache was pretty unusual. I don't often have these when I have a flu. Instead they're my demons for other parts of my life. By night's end, I relied on some of Stone's Arrogant Bastard Ale to get me back to sleep. Worked like a charm.

PHEW!

I passed my MPRE. By a fair margin. Phew.

Drama electronic

At NYU Law, we have a campus listserv with an expressed purpose to is to serve as a

resource for current law students and alumni to exchange and sell property and services with each other, to publicize law school related and noncommercial events, and to seek advice and opinions on matters incident to life at the law school.

It's called "Coase's List," which is a play on the Coase Theorem, which posits that property or entitlements will end up in their highest and best use, if transaction costs are nonexistent. The list intends to reduce transaction costs by facilitating communication between students.

But the list is often used for purposes other than those listed by the NYU Law student government's bylaws.

Recently some students have been using Coase's List to remind the campus to vote in a survey at Above the Law, to decide who is the "coolest" law school in the country. The email conversation included suggestions that students at Michigan (NYU's rival in the survey) must be using some computer program to automatically vote for their school.

Someone, whom I've met, made a very unfortunate and regrettable comment.

Well THAT is when it sucks that we don’t have more Asians at NYU. [sic]

Here is a slightly edited (some links were redacted) response I sent to the list:

I’m not sure an explanation of the joke’s intent will help.

It may not come through on coase’s list, but I used to have some idea of funny. For two years, I was paid a small salary at UC San Diego to edit a satire paper there. We tried, and sometimes failed, to make sure that the jokes we were making didn’t rely on malicious stereotypes, or otherwise offend some of our deeper moral and political commitments. It’s not an easy thing to be a progressive comedian, but it’s not impossible. It just takes some work and attention to what you’re doing.

The problem with jokes that rely on stereotypes (besides the obvious fact that they demean persons by denying their individuality) is that they substitute irony with a mere, if implicit, statement about a pervasive opinion.

If we were to take a modification of the comment to coase’s list, and say “too bad we don’t have many computer programmers at NYU,” that wouldn’t be particularly funny. It would just be a lament. Breaking down the joke in this way, we can see that the only alleged humor in the comment actually made was an implication that Asian students would be more likely to be able to program computers.

The conception that “Asian people are good at programming computers” is not funny. There’s nothing ironic or fundamentally humorous about such an alleged relationship. It’s just a stereotype about a wide class of persons. In fact, the only irony about this concept is that smart people might nonetheless believe that an entire race of people were predisposed to a skill-set in something as esoteric as computer programming.

This isn’t to say that jokes that make fun of stereotypes themselves can’t be funny. If I were to bluster about my unmatched ability to grind down on the sweaty mean dance floor, one might counter that I was relying on stereotypes that white men can’t dance. In fact I would be using that stereotype as a baseline, a shared awareness held by the audience of some preconception (they don’t have to believe the stereotype, but they know it exists). However, recognizing that a stereotype is held by some people is different than presuming its truth as a basis for a joke. Instead, describing how fly my moves are would be exploding the preexisting stereotype of white men’s inability to dance, by demonstrating the irony of basing a view of my ability to dance on an untenable premise of unitary dancing ability.

The humor then would be the irony that people might actually believe that an entire ethnicity were predisposed to some certain skill-set, or lack thereof. So here we’d be making fun of the stereotype itself, not simply building a joke off of the premise that a stereotype were true.

I think the comments are working.

I've been told by a few people that my comment functions weren't working. I just posted a test comment, so they're at least working intermittently.

The up-side of their sometimes failure to function is a flush of fun emails from friends and readers who haven't had another quick way to talk to me about whatever I posted.

My guess is that Haloscan is having trouble. If it continues, I'll switch to using Blogger's internal comment system.

I found a mouse in my bathroom today.

I scooped him up in Tupperware and let him lose outside of my apartment. I'm sure that was a foolish thing to do.

But on my way to dump the first one out, I saw a second, right next to the door. I tried to nudge him out with my foot, but I was too quick, and he was too small. He twitched for a moment, quietly on the hallway Berber.

I didn't like that at all.

I put his frightened companion down next to him and closed the door behind me, so I could hide from my inconsistent deeds of half compassion. I returned a few minutes later with a paper bag to hide and dispose of my faults. I felt bad all day. They were both very small mice.

I suspect that if I endure more frequent contact with mice in my apartment, I will develop less aversion to violence against them.

Silly nerdy high school student of my youth

A friend pointed me toward a Washington Post article. Those readers who were involved with the Boy Scouts will find it interesting. I suspect non-Scouts may enjoy my continued attention toward scouting, as sort of a human wrinkle in my otherwise austere and dignified life story, hopefully without thinking of me as unwilling to grow up from the silly nerdy high school student of my youth.

Either way, I think we can all enjoy the photo from the article, copied below.

Scout Soars Far Beyond Eagle
Chevy Chase Teen Earns Every Badge Possible, a Feat Deemed 'Extremely Rare'


It's not easy making Eagle, the highest honor in Boy Scouts. You need at least 21 merit badges, some required. Only 2 percent of Scouts get that far. A remarkable achievement. So what adjective should be used for James Calderwood, who has attained 121? Scout's honor.

The Chevy Chase teen has every badge available, from American business to woodwork. He even has one they don't give out anymore, so make it 122.

I'm pretty sure I'm dropping tax.

For the last two semesters, I've been taking classes I don't need to graduate, but that I expected would help me in the future. I took tax because I felt like I should know more about basic tax structures, either to help clients, or myself, or just so that I was more versed in a large area of important policy. This is the same rationale I've been using for staying with Advanced Con Law. The class is superfluous on several levels. Supreme Court justices don't need to read the high theory we masticate for two hours each week. Any good lawyer or judge could just plot out their arguments and decisions without any metaphysical inquiry into the meaning of interpretation in a written constitutional legal system.

But if you're going to do something, you should do it right. I am especially concerned about using the tools of governemnt and the Constitution irresponsibly. If I am going to seek out some influence in our society, our larger system, then I want to be able to exercise that influence with integrity and purpose. I want to understand and respect the system under which I'll be operating. I want to have a coherent and functional theory of governemnt and law, so that when I go through life advancing my own normative or policy goals, I can do so without subverting the system through which I'm working.

I don't want to blame law school for my disposition against rules. If anything, it's a reason I decided to go to law school. I have a famous Evidence professor who says "Give me control over the rules, whatever they may be, because with control over the rules, I'll be able to get whatever substantive outcome I want." That's a lot of my natural inclination. Whatever the system is, I can operate under it. But I think that's too simple of an answer. Sure I have the ability to twist and see any rule in its best light, or the best light for my ultimate substantive goal. But that presupposes too little of rules themselves. Certainly some rules have substantive values themselves. It's too rough a tool to disregard the purpose of all rules all the time. Some rules might have more substantive value than others, and some rules therefore might deserve more respect than others. So people should have a coherent theory behind which rules they twist, and which rules they respect for their own sake, regardless of the ultimate policy goal sought under their regulation.

Also, it turns out you have to read and study for classes. Whoops! And I have to finish my note. I really only got back into the note last week, and I'm going to complete a whole new draft of the beast by Sunday.