That would be frustration seeping out of my pores

So the internet at home is still dead, and this weekend there were at least 47 times when I was reminded just how much I have come to rely on this here network of wires and bytes and information zipping along at light speed. Sunday morning, the low point, found me and John on the floor of the gym in our building, laptops on laps, shamelessly freeloading off of some nearby resident's wireless that we were unable to freeload off from our own apartment. Because we're classy like that.

So THAT'S how you get a toy out of one of those vending machine thingies....

Though the part about the three year old using a screwdriver to facilitate his escape is pretty good, I think I would have liked this story even better if the rescue effort had involved a roll of quarters and a twelve-year-old arcade prodigy trying to grap the kid at just the right angle to pluck him out of the pile of toys.

Insult to injury

So in addition to possibly causing disastrous health problems, the mold has gone and STOLEN MY INTERNET. Seems "cutting out the mold" also involves "cutting out the internet wires." Sniffle.

Dying a slow, damp, death

For a while I was living in California in a beautiful old house rented to me and four other teachers by a very very stupid man who hadn't quite thought through what "five adult renters" was going to mean for his lovingly-restored home. The landlord's mother had lived in the house, and when she died he restored it, doing much of the work himself to save money. "Charming!" we thought. "An old restored house! Our landlord knows how to restore houses! That means he will know how to fix anything that goes wrong! Perfect!" Um, wrong. The handy landlord had decided that one of the best ways to save money on the restoration was to do all the plumbing himself. I'm no expert, but when categorizing do-it-yourself home improvement jobs, I'd place plumbing squarely in the "very advanced" category. Our landlord fell more into the "weekend dabbler" category, and as a result of this inexperience he botched the plumbing. Badly. So it was that my roommate Heidi moved her bookcase to vacuum one day¹ to discover MUSHROOMS growing out of the carpet. Turns out some valve in my shower had been installed backwards, and had released water into the wall in Heidi's room, which had soaked into the floor, which had caused actual, real live toadstools to grow out of the carpet. Sweet. We also once got a water bill for $500 because of a toilet that ran constantly that our landlord refused to fix. Let me tell you- THAT was a fun bill to try to divide among the housemates. So you can imagine that I was kind of relieved to move out of that house and leave all the plumbing disasters behind me. (You can see where this is going, can't you. I'm no good at suspense. Sigh.) Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Exhibit A: our spare room: Yes, that nasty-ass black stuff is mold. Yes, it is growing two feet up the wall. And yes, it is caused by a fucking leak in the fucking plumbing behind the fucking wall. Gross, isn't it? It is matched by a lovely slow leak through the bathroom wall and floor, which is forming a slowly-growing puddle on the floor and around the toilet. And I just went to unload the dishwasher and discovered a pool of water under there, too. If I were a fan of horror movies, it would be at around this point that I would become convinced that the water was going to come in at ever-increasing speeds all night, eventually drowning me in my sleep. Or, you know, the mold may be toxic and I may asphyxiate. Which may actually be a better fate than waiting all day today for the building engineer to come in and (I'm quoting here) "cut that whole chunk of wall out and try to get back there and see what's up." AWESOME. If you don't hear from me in a few days, you can assume that the apartment got the best of me. ¹ (Let's not even go into the whole "move the bookcase to vacuum behind it" thing. I could write volumes about the cleaning idiosyncrasies of that house. Volumes.)

Did you know that in the myth, the original Marathon runner DIED AT THE END?

A friend of mine from college is a Very Fast Runner, the kind who travels hither and yon for races, and so even though she is a doctor in California she is here in Chicago today running the marathon. I decided that it would be good exercise for me to walk the two blocks from my apartment to the 25 mile point of the racecourse to cheer her on as she finished, so I carefully calculated 2 hours and 10 minutes past race start time (did I mention? Very Fast Runner?) and walked the 5 minutes over there, and sure enough, I timed it almost exactly right and within 5 minutes of my arrival she whizzed by me and I got to shout "GO MELISSA!" and then walk home again and in that 20 minutes of excruciating exertion I think I managed to get frostbite because it is, like 34 degrees outside. How she and 40,000 others are running 26.2 miles in this wind is beyond me. How she's doing it in two and a half hours seems superhuman. Me? I'm so proud of myself for "working out" (20 Minute Jaunt in the Cold must burn more calories than Watching Tivo for Hours on End, right?) that I think I'm going to draw myself a hot bath. Hey, we all measure accomplishment in different ways.

And the sigh of relief...

So I did it. I will never have my first moment in front of a judge ever again. After waiting FOUR HOURS past our appointed call time, we finally got rolling, and I cross examined my first police officer. He looked young- he probably graduated high school the same year I did- and it looked this was probably his first time testifying in court, so i was kind of an extravaganza of newness up there. As my supervising attorney put it, "you all looked like two different deer in two different sets of headlights." I'm pretty sure that's not a compliment. But anyway, I got everything I needed to know from him, and one surprise bonus tidbit of useful information, and I prevented him from running his mouth and trying to say all sorts of things that would have been damaging to our case, so I'm calling it a qualified success. Even though we had to continue the motion to finish in a few weeks because several of the cops we needed to interview didn't show up, (side note: I now totally see how cases take freaking years to wind their way through the criminal justice system- this is only a motion and it's taken us almost six months to finish the damn thing,) I think we're in pretty good shape and have a good chance of winning our motion. And if we win our motion, it seems pretty likely that the state will have to dismiss its case against Client. And if that happens- well, damn, that means I will have realized a positive result on my very first case ever. I'm getting ahead of myself, I know, but hey- a girl can dream.

Panic time

So I'm back from reunion, and there are some fun reunion stories to tell and also a little rant about how my stupid college football team is perhaps the worst college football team EVER, but I can't really think about all of that right now because tomorrow? Tomorrow I have to make my first arguments on behalf of a real client in front of a real judge. Oh. Dear. God. Might die of panic. Will try not to. Updates forthcoming.

Do you think you can buy gin and tonics in bulk?

I am leaving in about half an hour to go to my five year college reunion. I liked college. I liked where I went to college a whole lot. I even liked most of the people in college. But for some reason, even though I liked college and am looking forward to catching up with people, I'm feeling a little ambivalent about the whole thing. There will need to be gin and tonics. And also maybe some scotch. Despite my ambivalence, the reunion is kind of appealing because it is in California where, unless things are really out of whack, it probably did not snow this morning. This is in contrast to, say, here, where it snowed HARD this morning. October 12. Middle of October. Not yet Halloween. Snow. WTF? I kept wanting to ask the little snowflakes if they were lost and if perhaps they would like directions to someplace that wants them, like Alaska. So anyway, I'm going to a reunion. Wish me luck. Anyone have any good college reunion stories to get me in the mood?

Insert requisite joke about pronunciation of "haaaahvahd" here

As I mentioned last time, I visited Boston this weekend. My friend Pookie lives in Boston, and I went to visit her in her business school habitat. I felt awfully clever for scheduling my visit to see Pookie at the height of leaf season. The weather was gorgeous. Just look: (Hello solitary skuller! Yes, the weather is quite beautiful!) [Begin very long background story.] One summer, several years ago, I visited Montana to attend a "free market environmentalism" seminar. Turns out, most of the people there really wanted to talk about free market approaches to environmentalism. Me? I was there for the free trip to Montana. And also for the Moose Drool ---------------------------------------------------> So Montana, with its Moose Drool and huge outdoor spaces and its total embracing of the wearing of jeans and t-shirts EVERY DAY, was a very nice place. I was so inspired by the mountains of Montana that instead of being responsible and getting a career- related internship the next summer, I moved to Vail. I worked as a bartender and at a candy store. Underneath the candy store was a bar and club called, appropriately enough, "the Club." Vail is a weird place, populated entirely by rich ski bunnies and the people who serve them. The people who serve them all know each other, and they all work in restaurants and bars and clubs and retail stores, such that by the end of the summer I could pretty much walk into any bar or restaurant in the village and get cheap or free beer or food, since the guys giving it to me knew I would do the same for them when they walked into the bar or the candy store. It was a great deal. This story is getting long. Perhaps a picture of New Hampshire leaves would make it go faster? Let's try that. (Ah. Leaves. So pretty!) Anyway, the Club was a great place to hang out after work because (a) they gave me unlimited coors lights for 25 cents each, and (b) their house "band" was a guy with a guitar who played all the classic folksy, strumming guitar songs. He also was very good about taking requests. I really loved living in Vail. I loved that I was far away from my family and my school and I was just hanging out outside in the mountains a lot and also that no one seemed interested in where I went to school or what I was planning on doing as a career or why I wasn't more motivated to go into consulting. During that summer in Vail, a dream of someday living in a small mountain town really took root. I have this idea that after I get my law degree John and I could move to Bozeman Montana or Bend Oregon and make a nice group of fellow city-refugee friends and we could have a near-perfect life spending time outdoors, raising kids who understand and appreciate nature, and hosting casual but elegant dinner parties out on the porch looking at the hills and the trees and the fireflies in the summer. [End really long back story.] So on Friday, Pookie and I went to a folk show in a little club in Boston. Sitting there, listening to the two earnest, harmonizing singer-songwriters, I wished more than anything that instead of in a basement club in Boston I was at a local bar in Montana, and that when the night was over I'd get to go back to my well-appointed yet rustic cabin and in the morning I'd go for a quick hike then come home to whip up some multigrain pancakes topped with the berries I'd picked on the morning walk. I mean honestly, how could you not want to live near places like this? Anyway, I know, in my heart of hearts, that this vision is kind of, um, unrealistic. As John has pointed out, I might be able to hang out a shingle and have a solitary law practice in this imaginary perfect small town, but he might have a hard time finding gainful employment. Plus, I realize that small town America is not just the charming, quaint, well-educated outdoorsy mecca that I'm imagining, and is in fact often a little repressive and decidedly not supportive of my politics. But I can still dream. When we were driving to New Hampshire to take a hike, Pookie and I came across a small town that was filled with hundreds of scarecrows. It was the Annual Town Scarecrow Festival, and from the looks of things, everyone in town had made a scarecrow. How charming! How small-town wonderful! I MUST MOVE HERE RIGHT NOW. But then, as if to prove my point that small town America is not the peaceful idyll I imagine it to be, we found him: The Bad Seed Scarecrow: Baggy pants? Check. Beanie? Check. Sinister looking hoodie? Check. SPRAY CAN IN HAND? Check! So I guess even in middle of nowhere New Hampshire, you're never safe from gangsters and the scourge of graffiti. Sigh. And that is what I did on my Autumn Vacation to Boston. The end.

Stupid coincidences

Can someone please explain to me why I always, ALWAYS get sick right before I go on a vacation? In Boston til Monday, a trip which I expect will make me want to move to Montana. (Visiting Boston seems to do that to me. Figure THAT one out.)

Could we at least pretend that we think everyone is equal in the eyes of the Constitution?

I've mentioned before that I work with a program that goes into public high school classrooms and teaches kids about law. It's a fun gig- high school kids are goofy and interesting and take no shit- a nice departure from the typical law school crowd. Recently I was sitting at a table collecting names and emails from people who might be interested in joining this high school law teaching extravaganza. A newly-minted 1L - high on his first week of classes and his recent discovery that after 25 years of being the dorkiest guy in the room, at law school he is kind of cool - comes over to my table. He looks at the sign, then announces loudly to his new buddies: "I'm DEFINITELY not signing up for that. They go into the crappy public schools around here and teach those kids about their rights. I don't think that's something we should be doing, because I'm very pro law-enforcement." And then my head exploded.

Notes from a mock trial

- Wear industrial strength deodorant because it might be 97 degrees in your courtroom. - When you're direct examining your star witness about how he has been unable to be intimate with his wife since the accident, one of your jurors might fart. Loudly. Think in advance about how you are going to maintain your composure if that happens. - When you're cross examining the defense's star witness, one of your jurors might start snoring. Loudly. Think in advance of subtle yet effective ways to wake jurors up. Options to explore: loud coughing, scooting a chair across the floor, or shouting of curse words. - If your jury deliberates for 3.3 minutes and comes back with a judgment in exactly half the amount you asked for, it means "holy god this trial was too long and boring and now we just want to go home so we're splitting the difference and calling it a day," and it will feel like a hollow victory.