...9...

Week two done.

Plans begin for our very exciting Class Production of King Lear. Yes I was one of the lucky "first volunteers" who gets to participate for a middling share of extra "participation points" (something theoretically related to 10% of our grade the relevancy of which hovers between the relationship of credit to the gold standard and the relation of farmville credits to... uh the twinkies you eat while playing farmville).

Aside from loving the play in its unadulterated form, I'm looking forward to doing something kind of silly with the fellow law students I ordinarily shun as I flee the hallowed halls of Will H. Gates Hall on my way to "anywhere but here"  I don't feel quite the same level of smouldering hellish burnout that you'd find in a 1L in the tail end of her spring quarter, but I do tend to feel resolutely done once the work and class parts of the day are  through. That and I rarely drink, which really cuts down on socializing, let me tell ya. While I have a number of classmates whose company and chatter I very much enjoy, they tend to be the people with whom I interact with WHEN we're in class, clinic or other similar activities together - I kind of consider them circumstantially contextual friends, although I may occasionally also "like" something on their Facebook.

Talk has been bandied of doing a Jersey Shore themed version of Lear, although some people think that is *soooo two years ago*. I've actually never experienced Jersey Shore although the gossip rags have made it clear it involves something called a Snookie and some other dude who is marginally famous now for being shirtless maybe? Regardless of the theme, apparently there will be much cussing drowned out by a horn. This will be the best performance of Lear, ever.

In our actual class we continue to cover the basic questions of what happens after we die??? Very metaphysical, I assure you. From my experience so far, a lot of family members express their grief by getting fairly petty and trying to screw each other over for life insurance money and prosecuting you for baseless torts claims and misdemeanors while citing fairly fascinating technicalities. Also, occasionally my mom's ex-husband's brother turns out to be the lawyer (cases mentioned in the article weren't the one we read)! The moral of this class so far has been (1) leave a valid will for god's sake, (2) don't ingest tylenol laced with cyanide or let your mentally disturbed brother in law live with you in a house with unsecured guns and (3) you should probably get married if you have any real amount of money or expect somebody might die in a way that begs for wrongful death suits (unless you're same sex partners and then DOMA kind of screws you for the money part). Oh and we're not entirely sure what it means to be "dead" in a legal sense - see I told you it was metaphysical!

As for my pursuits to become a better employment discriminator, I'm making progress. There are different approached to teaching in law school. Some teachers want us to know the rules, the theories etc. well enough to write really fantastic law review articles. Some want us to question what the law is and what it should be and struggle with issues of justice and equity and our role in "the system." Some just want us to be able to do the job that a lawyer in the field would be doing 90% of the time. And then there are those who really want us to be the Dr. Houses of whatever field of law we're studying. Unsurprisingly, our frequent-attorney-at-SCOTUS professor is the latter. It can definitely add up to a game-show atmosphere as we guess what bizarre conflagration of circumstances would allow a person can claim discrimination when it seems all but legally impossible or an defendant can raise a defense where it seems blatantly clear there's discrimination. We ended our class this week with him announcing that he needed to make a note that he wanted to talk about "bitch", because it's a really interesting topic. There was a light in his eyes. I assume he is referring to whether an employer's use of the word may be admissible direct or circumstantial evidence in a gender discrimination case, but you can never know for sure with him.

I am very far from my pursuits to become a white collar criminal (as I still don't have much of that there money and I don't seem to have any control or participation in either the mafia or any corporation), but I take comfort in the assurance that when I join a law partnership, the partnership will be liable for criminal acts of partners that I had no idea about and that in some cases should I ever become in-house consel, I could even be personally criminally liable for the failures of some member of my corporation (a new and exciting trend, I assure you!).

We are entering into the 3rd week, which is where things are officially at full speed, but not quite insane yet. It feels simultaneously shorter and longer than 1/3(ish) through the quarter. We are also and more importantly entering into the weekend and I turn my regularly scheduled countdown to the weekend countdown... 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1... I'm outta here!