I have officially survived a full week(ish) of school. Ordinarily I'd wait to call it a week until - oh I don't know - six a.m. Friday after my third kegstand... no, no really I would call it a weekend after Friday was done, but since my Friday class has been cancelled in order to enable my professor to testify at a legislative hearing of some sort, it's officially one week down and nine to go. No, no, calm down, nine and then a week off and then six weeks of compressed quarter hell and then two months of bar prep ___(no word suffices)... but one ordeal (er, educational opportunity) at a time.
Being back at school full(ish) time is a bit surreal, all said. Perhaps this is because I was stricken ill with a head-muddling case of sniffles going into the whole thing. More likely, though, it's the oddity of going to just *one place* all day, not walking downtown, not taking a bus in the middle of the day, not getting home after seven, not having to put some attention to my dress, not hiding all day in my own safe little office... Well, I do have something akin to an office, since I work at the clinics and have taken to hiding things there during classes, but it's not exactly a personal office.
This quarter I'm taking three classes that mesh amusingly well together for my future representing rich white dudes with flexible morals and confusing family ties: White Collar Crime, Employment Discrimination, and Transmission of Wealth. So basically, I will help my future clients to embezzle the money saved by denying accomodations to handicapped multi-ethnic wiccan women, and then put the embezzled funds into trusts for their fifth trophy-wife's second son's girlfiend, who is incidentally my client's third favorite mistress. Now *this* is why I got into law.
My transmission of wealth professor is kind of adorable. She speaks with a bit of a North Dakota lilt and wide, tamarind eyes. On our first day of class, she wore a houndstooth sort of jacket with sleeves slightly flaired and a sleek foldless collar with what appeared to be pink lining.Every year, she has the class put on a forty five minute version of King Lear, which she claims is the ULTIMATE wills and estates play. Last year, the students did it with Michael Jackson as King Lear. I'm told not to be fooled by her warm demeanor - her tests are apparently tricky as all hell, but whatever: she tells a good story. Did you hear about the one where the lawyer met a guy in ballroom dance class (of course), started handling his divorce until his wife committed suicide and then started "channelling of the ghost of his ex-wife" and began an affair with him as his dead ex-wife while handling the disbursement of her estate? Well I have.
My White Collar Crime prof has a resonant voice and extraordinarily white teeth that flash with fantastic frequency. He's that sort of professional "nerdy" that Hollywood casts leading men into for their occasional Oscar runs. He's intimidating and incisive in his socratic interrogations, but his voice at least is soothing. I suppose that inevitably I will do a mediocre job in this class, because for some reason I always score on the lower end of my grades in criminal classes, but it's also fairly entertaining. He used to work as a tax-attorney working for a number of colorful individuals, so the anecdotes about clients paying off their $50,000 tax debts with an enormous bag of cash they dug up from under their cousin's shed keep it lively.
And then there's employment discriminations with The Schnap, whom ardent followers will remember as my rockstar civ pro prof, who talks chummily about "Tony" (in reference to Justice Scalia) and is clearly just slightly too brilliant to make exact sense, but is perpetually entertaining. To continue my wardrobe analysis, he appears in a blue sweater, white blouse, khakis and blue and white sneakers. He just made half class move so that we're all seated on the left side of the room (kind of too bad, since I actually evaded cold-calling for almost an entire 1L year by sitting in what appeared to be his blindspot - front row and to the right). Next class we'll have to sit on the other side, because he has realized his podium is now situated on the wrong side of the room. His voice reminds me of Kryton's (the mannerly robot from Red Dwarf) and his glasses have a grandfatherly quality that clashes only slightly with the Schnap spryness.
Between classes, I (wo)man (whoa man, whoaaaaaaa man) the mediation clinic. Same sort of scheduling and empathicaphantasmicasming and phone answering as last quarter, although far busier, as this is the quarter the fall-winter students are actively mediating the hell out of conflicted Seattle and the winter-spring students are warming up to do their own mediation magic. We have about ten EEOC cases in addition to a surprising influx of attorney-referred cases. It's kind of fun. Julia has suggested that I might be able to handle some mediations myself if I can work my schedule into an appropriate froth. We'll see if that's in the cards, but it would tickle my fancy.
At any rate, one week down... time for some ... oh right, homework.
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