Christmas

My childhood Decembers were spent outside, looking in as my classmates received video game consoles, new bikes, expensive pogs, banana boats, and even “dreaded” grandma-knit sweaters.  My parents never celebrated Christmas.  As Israeli Jews, we rarely bothered even for Hanukah, and the idea of eight presents for eight days was as far from my mother’s thoughts as the notion that children should be raised exclusively on pudding, or sent to Thailand for sensitivity training.  My birthday was present day, my one and only.

Perhaps because of my deprivation, I regarded holiday specials about Christmas’s “true meaning” with the curiosity of a dog looking at a couple making out.  The notion that there was method to the madness perplexed me, even as a little kid.  “If we acknowledge that Christmas is so commercial, then why do we keep celebrating it?  Why don’t we remove the presents entirely?” I thought.  My diction may have been too advanced for a ten-year-old self, but the thought, I swear, was there – lucid, forceful, tiring.  Lying in bed the night before Christmas, I would imagine every single lonesome one of my classmates in their Palatine homes, about to swoop down on their presents, and I would imagine myself as the Grinch, seizing my classmates’ presents and forcing them to reflect.

Older now, I no longer feel this way – at least about Christmas.  I am grateful for what I have here in Hyde Park: a small room filled with legal books, an unfinished bottle of egg nog, oatmeal, friends.  They are simple pleasures, delicate things.  Late this evening, I saw a homeless man on the Midway, and, though we didn’t speak, we looked at one another, and I thought, “I know nothing of your life, and the most I can extract from it is some mawkish insight that I’ll write up on facebook.”  But, sometimes, there is no need for further meaning: we are happy to be here, to be speaking softly, to be sentient, and that, perhaps, is more meaning than any present can convey.

Fialta

Winter in Hyde Park is cold and dull.  Everything is snow-covered: the Midway benches, the undistinguished squares of the law school fountain, a small notepad mislaid on a railing outside Burton-Judson, the back of a Quad squirrel.*  Two blocks from the law school, a parakeet perching on a steeple watches the remaining students do nothing.

Negligence per se troubles me.  I read my notes, but the entire doctrine seems to boil down to two questions: was the conduct breaking the law that the law intended to outlaw?  And was it the harm (i.e., class of persons) the statute intended to prevent?  The doctrine seems to revolve around the idea that breaking the law increases the risk, which indicates breach of care.  I’m not sure what else to do with it.  I can cite the redundant Restatement 288B, or discuss the negligence per se judge-jury tensions vis-à-vis the Holmes excerpt.

I ate cereal for dinner last night.  It’s hard to stay healthy in this weather.  The three blocks to the grocery store become impenetrable when the wind blows, the cars screech, and the shaved trees surge.  I could cook spaghetti tonight, but my cooking always sucks.  The last time I made spaghetti, I added an oatmeal bowl to it and realized, an hour later, that I was still hungry.  Then I drank a glass of wine and forgot about it until the school-sponsored lunch the next day. 

And forgetting sounds good now, when I should be parsing Tingle v. Chicago.

*an extended allusion to Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta,” a favorite short story of mine

Blog > PL

Blogging, like working out or developing musical talent, is best appreciated in retrospect.   I recently read my summer blog posts, and I shouldn’t have stopped.  So much has happened since, so much life has gone unrecorded!

First, I’ll explain why I decided to re-start.  When I arrived at law school, I didn’t know who I wanted to be (stay: I’ll stop my melodrama), but, slowly, surely, I reconstructed my college identity as a hard-working, somewhat moody 1L.  Now, I can comfortably write from that vantage point.  I know that the casebook is useless, that I should outline throughout the semester, and that I can blog without caring how people discuss me.  The remainders of my first quarter hours were wasted on LSD, arguing law, so why not convert those hours into semi-personal blog posts?  Let’s begin.

Against my better judgment, I’m staying in Hyde Park over Christmas.  I love this schedule.  I stay up late, wake up around 9, and spent hours outlining Torts.  The subject is even less interesting than I recall.  The intentional torts are an exercise in  advanced memorization (did intent transfer?  Does this meet the conversion factors?); we beat strict liability vs. negligence to death with concerns about activity levels and location; custom and the reasonable person standard are par for the negligence course; and most of the course is eventually enveloped by duty and breach, which are two of four negligence elements.

The BLL seems amenable to exams.  While working through downward and upward deviations of the reasonable person standard, I thought about how Gersen could, say, write a retarded superhuman and touch two cases.  Or how Gersen could combine trespass notions of a “good dog” with strict liability, hitting the one-bite rule in the process.  I’m keeping my eyes open for how doctrines intersect.  The most salient connection seems to be “reciprocity” in private necessity (see: Ploof v. Putnam, Vincent v. Lake Erie), and “reciprocity” in strict liability cases like Ryland v. Fletcher.  I can see a policy question there.

But I may be wrong.  Any thoughts?

Copy-Editing

My next door neighbor is an LLM student from Belgium.  Three doors down, a former Coca-Cola employee studies business.  Someone on the second floor graduated from Cornell Law School, worked at a big firm, and then returned to Chicago for graduate school.  Our residence buzzes with unusual thoughts and boiling noodles.

Yesterday, I met a few 1Ls at Regents, where we discussed writing.  We started the round-table with a copy of a Becker-Posner blog article, and then passed around celery and carrots; it was a stereotypical tableau for my school.  The article dealt with will, incentives, and the mortgage crisis.  Midway through the discussion, I finally spoke.  My voice sounded reedy and hesitant from months of workforce disuse, but I stammered out an incoherent thought about implied analytical frameworks.  (I’m not sure what I meant, either.)  I said, “Both authors acknowledge that they’re analyzing the crisis in terms of incentives and trying to modify ARM . . . .”  People nodded.  That was my cue to stop speaking.  But I had spoken!

Soon, my true nature came out: my next comment was about subject-verb agreement and a common because/since usage error — since is temporal, while because introduces reasons.  I wanted to keep going, but I felt that would be costly.  Although copy-editors are useful, I didn’t want a detail-fixated reputation.  I’ve already explained the difference between a felt and three-pointed hat at a party.  Nobody wants to befriend the taxman.

Part of me refuses to admit it, but I’m enjoying myself.  To modify a Charles Simic quote, laughter is in the air of comedies in the making.

Water

After reading a few student blogs, I expected an alienating experience, but, thus far, I’ve been as social as I was as an undergraduate.  The students are friendly, discussions are everywhere, and it’s easy to find bar crawl participants.  Last night, I could have found the Regents partygoers at 630 Bloomington, my undergraduate haunt.

Older students told me that, by mid-year, a cultural chasm emerges between my dorm and those apartments.  The ruthless Chicago winter elongates the eight blocks between us, and the isolation promotes different cultures.  My dorm becomes the “striver dorm,” a haven for pasty nerds who describe their mood using jurisdictional terms, while Regents has a saner student culture.  When I think about how I won’t be further than two blocks from school all year, the cultural divide makes sense.  Both mentally and physically, I’ll be within a bubble.

I saw a dog drinking from a water fountain on the Plaisance.  As its owner pressed down the water button, her dog shamelessly licked up a jet of cool water.  The dog’s tongue encircled the water, lapped it, fell to the basin bottom before beginning again.  When the animal finished, it leaped down on its haunches and eyed a nearby truck.  I’m never drinking from an outside public fountain again.

Fly Me to the Moon

My plane row surveyed the scope of American white-collar ambition.  On my left, a stout University of Chicago undergraduate studied a real-estatement investment (or “REIT”) hand-out; on my right, a Kellogg student highlighted a UPS case study for a shipping and distribution seminar; and I sat near the aisle, doddling horsies and daydreaming of rain.  O brave new school that has such students in it!

Midway through the flight, I briefly conversed with the Chicago student.  Assuming that I was a freshman, he reluctantly answered my questions with a mixture of boredom and charity.  With my athletic sweatshirt, Nunn Bush shoes, and brown belt, I probably radiated a story as cliche as a Mark Twain quotation.  I was a nerdy high school senior whose parents had dressed him for the flight, fussed over his hair, and remarked, while he stood in the doorway, that their “little scholar had grown up.”  (The father crying, the mother smoking a corn pipe, the sibling role-reversing.)  Do I look that young, I later wondered? Perhaps I seemed too eager, too bushy-tied to be of drinking age.

Later, he inquired about my major.  “Undecided,” I answered, sighing.  Sadly, that might be true.

My graduate dorm is delightful.  All three of my windows face the Midway park and the university’s Gothic exterior, and I love its promixity to school.  At night, a solitary lamppost emits a timid yellow glow into my room, as if to say, “Don’t mind me.  I’m simply doing my job.”  Because my neighborhood is so cozy, the light warms my inside like a cinnamon roll; I pull the cover over my head and don’t need to count sheep.

Corrections

They bought a pear tart.  Next to it, a card said: “You can leave, but know that the others who left weren’t around to defend themselves when we mocked them.”  Nervous laughter, a shuffling of paper plates, and we ate.

 

Friday felt like someone was mocking me.  Feeling overwhelmed by logistics, I took a nap.   And I read Averno, a poetry book by Louise Gluck.  When I woke up, I realized that I hadn’t solved anything.  A suitcase lay spread-eagled on the cold linoleum floor.  Shadows appeared on the wall.

 

Dealing with insurance companies becomes tougher every time.  Because of “IRS regulations,” they refused my initial letter and said that I needed verification of full-time student status.  I politely explained that my program doesn’t accept part-time students.  Suddenly, I was being uncooperative.  A compromise is that I solicit another letter from the registrar.

 

Supplements’ value may be questionable, but first years will discuss chapter 10 on Duty in the Torts Examples and Explanations series.  I won’t mention names, dates, or places, but I’ll write it up in a few days.

Collard

This isn’t a personal blog.  I’m waiting to jump into cases, hypotheticals, Socratic discussions.

 

I trained my replacement today.  She wore a floral print beige shirt with a cowl collar, red Capris, a brown fun belt, and shoes.  Before showing her around the workstation, I mentioned the cowl collar, but I must have said “cow collard,” because she looked confused.  “What?” she asked.  “Oh, nothing,” I replied.  An hour of data-entry and system work ended that conversation.

 

I admired her fashion sense.  Original formality is tough to attain.  Too often, workers fall into two-piece gray suits with a solid blue tie, unmemorable pants suits or pencil skirts.  Wearing these items is ultimately muse-draining, as is ironing them and possibly looking at them.  She tip-toed attire lines on her first day, yet nobody said anything.

 

Before lunch, I trained her on the phones.  I impersonated potential clients with difficult names and phoned in requests.  She handled them well.  The first was “Don Knotts,” a worried middle-aged man.  I said that I had an interview in ten minutes, but the train station was “too crowded to board.”  Then I became a volcano insurance salesman, and a rushed client who was “losing both time and money.”  As the calls continued, I ran out of ideas.  I was a Russian twice.

 

After lunch, I tried conversing, but her one sentence answers prevented conversation.  She asked me solely where to put the stapler.  “Where should we put the stapler?” I asked, turning its placement into policy.  “Should we put it by the window, where the heat might warp it?  Or in the bottom drawer, where no one will find it?”  I enjoyed thinking about it, so I continued.  We left it in the top drawer.

 

Afternoon hung around.  I worked diligently in the heat, leaving my track suit on.  (I love track suits.)  She interrupted me with company questions, though I felt obsolete and numbered.  When I looked up from my desk, I felt that the place owed me nothing, that I owed her nothing, that our accounts were balanced.  I hadn’t felt that way since the last college days, when I lived alone.  The feeling that something of past importance no longer exerts control over you is an odd one.  Suddenly, you are faced with its contrivance, its triviality.  You see old coaches, teachers, situations, workplaces for what they are, and their irrelevance surprises you.  Shelley described this feeling when the narrator of his poem, “Ozymandias,” finds the wreckage of an emperor’s statue in the desert, but there is nothing but its inscription:

 

“`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

At the day’s end, she walked out of the room, stopped, and then walked back in.  “I won’t see you here any more, will I?”  “No,” I answered.  “Well, good luck at school.”  She didn’t even ask which one.

Changes

The bus driver noticed.  Although I used to pre-buy tickets, I hand him a few folded bills and three quarters these days.  He asked me why I insisted on holding up everyone and I mumbled something about forgetting to buy tickets.  My behavior hasn’t made me many friends.  I’ve noticed dirty looks from the passengers shuffling behind me, looking for seats.

 

Someone stopped watering our soft office fern.  It’s been collecting dust.  I lobbied on its behalf, but the brass assured me that ferns don’t need water.  They washed it off with a paper towel.  See?  It’s fine, they said.  Its leaves slid out from under it, weighted down by a few droplets’ strength.

 

I train my replacement on Wednesday.  At work, I write elaborate diagrams to explain whatever it is I do.  I love numbering the sections, the arrows, the times; I feel like a code author.  There are too many details for economic language.  Administrators like me live on the office margins, assigning themselves.

 

As I lay awake at night, I can’t forget the words of my freshman year debate student coach: “Before your hernia spills over onto the floor . . . [pause for laughter/ovation] . . . please sit down.”  She was a funny girl, and, sometimes, I wonder if she went to law school.  In another week, I will be in Chicago.  Life is what it is.  There is some hope, much wonder. 

Tart

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.*  A storm moved up the coast and pounded New York with rain torrents so thick it almost looked like it was flurrying.  Occasionally, I relished the outside blue-black color scheme, which made the gardens and sky and cars look like Picasso’s “Old Man with Guitar.”  I paced in and out of empty rooms all afternoon, enjoying the rainy pitter-patter and debating whether I should get my bosses a present.

 

When employees left on good notice or accomplished something, our office celebrated with Peach Tart.  Because of indeterminate allergies – I never figured out whose – we couldn’t order tasty items like Pumpkin Pie, Peppermint Oreo cheesecake, or chocolate soufflé.  Instead, we settled for a sloppy, canned Peach Tart that was covered in gelatin you might find on dentures.  I couldn’t turn it down in front of everyone, so I would take a bite, smile, and converse in a way that wouldn’t make my tart avoidance seem suspicious.

 

This time, I’ll preempt my bosses, or the secretary that orders the Tart, by bringing something (preferably food) that says, “I’m happy.  Thank you for helping me transition from college student to entry-level employee.  Please don’t order another Peach Tart.”  I can’t handle another Peach Tart, especially now when my co-workers will be staring at me.  I would sooner perform data-entry.

 

* the first line of a British novel