Sometimes People Ask Me What It Is Like To Be A Lawyer

It is pretty much like this:

The Steve McQueen of the Uniform Commercial Code

Three years of law school, thirty some odd exams, untold thousands of dollars, immeasurable vats of hate, and it is only now that I realize I should have been digging a tunnel out of here all along.

Now I must escape an exam or two and then my (ill-fated) motorcycle jump over the fence.

I’ll be damned if those fuckers are gonna take me alive (or in a gown and tam).

So screw graduation.

I’m going to go sit in my room, throw a baseball against the Goddamned wall, and prepare a series of mnemonic devices to help me remember the remedies available to a seller involved with a breaching buyer in a sale of goods when both parties are merchants specializing (or holding themselves out as experts) in the field of said goods.

Cue the fucking theme music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYjnMfgzgcM

From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee!

The Chase - Day Five

Call me Lazy-as-Shit.

It has been nearly a week and still no sign of the paper I’m supposed to complete by Tuesday. Morale runs low and even the distractions are wearing thin. Today, while ostensibly preparing a gloss on the Scylla and Charybdis named Nollan and Dolan, I drifted magnetically to the pile of magazines on the sofaback table.

After half of an article (about frogs), I grew so faint and insubstantial that it became necessary to take a thirty-five minute shower - though my hair was clean. Only Starbuck remains to give faith in my enterprise, and he at exorbitant prices and somewhat middling quality. I think he uses too much sugar in his mochas.

Internet internet everywhere, but ne’er a drop of research.

Spied an albatross dancing in the currents spun off by my desk here in the loft. Looked a bit like an outline, sketched on a yellowpad. Shot it.

Spent an hour or so composing monkey-grams to my friends. May have been a bit hasty with the albatross.

To Queequeg, in the guise of my wife: hell is an idea first born of a required essay due during finals week and repeated by the act of watching reality television.

To produce a mighty essay, you must choose a mighty theme. I have - unfortunately - chosen "art exactions in Culver City."

There, nailed to the mast, glinting in the sun, is the coin I would spend. Let us call this coin “Studying for my Comparative Legal Systems exam on Wednesday” and let us imagine that winning this coin (by filling the white paper marked “Local Goverment Essay” with six, double-spaced pages of text) is something I would like.

But the coin is nailed to the mast like Ulysses before the sirens, and I, working the oars but futilely above the slapping waves, have stuffed my ears with video games and Tivo and Springsteen albums.

(Here let us imagine an entire chapter about chowder)

But lo! A cry from the crow’s nest! A spouting, fragrant, introductory paragraph! Deploy the boats before he sounds!

Toward thee I roll, Great, Breeching, Snow-White Paper, scarred only superficially with the scrawlings of essays begun and deleted by others.

And I go down with the Leviathan, to the watery hell he keeps called “Westlaw” and “Lexis” and for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at Law School.

Like Satan, this paper will not sink until it has dragged a living part of my week along with it and helmeted itself with it. And even should I succeed in the coming days and hours by extruding something thick and oily like a paper onto the printed page and lashing it to my boat, it’ll probably only be eaten by the red-tipped, correctionist sharks that savage exams on the way back to grades.

God help me if the devious-cruising Rachel of Alcohol doesn’t pick up this surviving orphan and bring him back to Port.

Property Law is for the Birds

I am supposed to be reading for Property. Chiara came upstairs and seemed very suspicious.

I am banking on her still imperfect English to have made her rapid identification of pornography hidden on a tab at the bottom of a computer screen (and masked by an overlaid CNN.com) all but impossible.

To distract her I did a kind of a dance in my chair. I threw small objects at her playfully and told her to leave me alone so I could finish my studying. I told her if she would leave me alone I would finish my reading and then we could watch The Birds, which I rented today.

Later, while Tippi is in the phone booth, I will confess all of this and laugh and laugh.

I learned that from you, Eric.