When I Was Your Age

I just watched the first thirty minutes of a documentary about Manhattan parents working to get their children into preschool.

Preschool.

Apparently, the right preschool is the key to the right private school and the right university.

Just getting the application is extremely competitive. These parents are pouring over applications, whipping out a thesaurus to figure out just the right word to describe their three-year-old, and forking over thousands of dollars just for application consultants. If they get the privilege of having their toddler attend one of these schools, they'll spend about $20,000 in tuition for a year. I imagine that the process will continue for the future admission to other private schools and universities.

I never went to preschool. I went to public schools through high school, and then attended a local, large, public university.

Now I attend a private law school, the first private school I've ever attended, but it is true that most of my friends here attended private schools before they came here.

When did just being a regular child become not good enough? I feel like I did okay for myself without all of that craziness...

I had to turn the documentary off after 30 minutes. Just watching it was stressing me out...I wonder if those cute little toddlers feel any of that stress, too!

Welcome to the 21st Century

At my law school, students have to do their first big legal research assignment in the library.

Without the use of a computer for research.

Using books

LOTS of books.

When you're writing a legal research memo (not to be confused with an office memo, which is short and easy), you have to use statutes and cases that have already been decided. These are contained in about a million books, all by series of publisher and jurisdiction, etc.

For my first legal research memo, I had to use seven different sources. I probably ended up looking at 25-30 sources to find the ones that would best support what I needed to say. For each case, you generally have to look in 2-3 large books to find the necessary case information, and that's only after you've looked in 2-3 other books to discover that you want to find the case at all, and then figure out how to find it! And sometimes, someone in the library has already taken the book you want, and some people keep the books for a long time, perhaps as some sort of table. Who knows...anyway, it can take a while to get what you need.

Really, it's not terrible, and I think it's very useful to know how to do legal research in a library, as many of us will work in jobs where our employers can't afford to use the online legal research systems (they are extraordinarily expensive).

We're in the middle of our second research memo now, and we're allowed to use the two research systems, LexisNexis and Westlaw, to do our research. The process is all the same, but it's so much faster when you don't have to run all around a library to find the different books. Click, click, click!

This new ability to use online research has enabled me to do my legal research from the comfort of my bed. This development is both good and bad: I love being able to snuggle into for a bit of reading on the requirements for administering psychotropic drugs to patients against their will, but how will I get my exercise without having to lug all of those books all over the place?

Should've bought a carton of ice cream at the grocery store that I could do some lifting with.

You've Got Mail!

As we've discussed in previous postings, I love getting mail. I like email quite a bit, but I especially love regular ol' United State Postal Service delivery.

I open the mailbox each day in eager anticipation of what might be inside. 

Some days, it's empty.

Some days, it's full of bills.

And some days, it's full of actual mail addressed to me sent by people who aren't asking for money!

Lately, it has been full of mystery.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a piece of mail for my father. It was addressed to his name, but to my address. It was an actual, legitimate, valuable piece of mail, addressed to him at my address. I was able to make sense of it due to a mutual relationship with the company, but I still thought it was funny.

Yesterday, I got a piece of mail for one of my brothers, with his first and last name and my address. It was junk mail from a bank, urging him to open an account with their institution.

Today, I got another piece of mail for that same brother, this time with his middle initial in his name as well. It's a letter from an expensive gym in the area welcoming him to the neighborhood and offering him a deal. 

My brother has never lived in New York. He definitely doesn't live in my apartment. It's a big apartment, but I'm pretty sure I would have seen him if he had moved in with me. It's not THAT big. In fact, I don't think that this particular brother even has my address, now that I think about it.

And weirdly, he's getting appropriately high-end junk mail. It's way nicer than the junk mail I got when I first got here.

Apparently, anyone who knows me should now just expect their mail to come to my apartment. 

I'll start a box for each of you.

Cold Called

Today, I was cold called.

For an entire class hour.

The professor never called on anyone else.

It was a long class.

People afterward told me what a great job I did. They all said that I did well and was very funny. (Not really my goal in law school, to be funny, but maybe it's just a bonus? Who knows...) 

I felt like there were some awkward parts, some parts where the professor and I weren't using the same words as each other so there was some confusion, but I managed to even it out fairly quickly.

Anyway, I survived.

But at one point, after he asked me to evaluate a hypo he had presented and decide if it was the same as the cases we had been studying, I told him it wasn't. He asked me why, and I went through a quick set of things that I thought made it different, and why it didn't conform with the model we had just established. 

I ended this with words to the effect of, "It's not okay to kill people just because you think they might be about to die."

It's awkwardly stated, but I stand by that rule.

Everyone laughed pretty hard, including the professor. If nothing else, everyone but me really enjoyed that class today.

Crash

Most of the time, walking around NYC is pretty impressive. People are coming and going basically nonstop, all managing to not run into each other. It's almost balletic in its appearance. This is especially true in a subway station. Sure, sometimes a performer or disoriented tourist can throw the dance into chaos, but it quickly resumes as we all quietly slip past each other, each passing hundreds of other people each day.

It takes a while to get into the swing of it, but you just get used to how people move and how to move around them as you all try to get where you're going very quickly.

Today, my train was being held because of a sick passenger, so people were disembarking and trying to get on other trains, or trying to squeeze onto the already crowded train.

Circumstances like today's make the dance less beautiful. People are bumping, jostling, stopping abruptly, making sharp, unexpected turns, and basically throwing the whole thing off.

So, in these circumstances, today I ran into someone.

Literally.

When I say I ran into her, I mean my body ran into her body.

When I say her body, I mean her shoulder.

When I say my body, I mean my cheekbone.

It hurt.

Unsurprisingly, I now have a headache.

I hope it doesn't leave a bruise or anything. That'll be awkward to explain. I feel really bad for the other girl. Her shoulder is probably achy now. I was talking about it with the guy who sits next to me in my first class today, and our teacher was listening and started talking to us as well. The professor asked if I had some pent up childhood anger or something. I told him that I was pretty sure that was it.

In related news, I'm thinking about investing in taller shoes. Or stilts.