November...

On the one hand, there's nothing I love more than the onset of wintry weather, the first few snowstorms of each year, and the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas bonanza of festiveness.  In this sense, November means Christmas lights, hot chocolate, and boots/sweaters/scarves.

On the other hand, though, law school has turned November into a month of outlining, paper writing, and not enough sleep.

Normally, the wonderful and the horrible aspects of November offset each other, and it ends up being a perfectly average month.  This year, however... lets just say homework has left me with little patience for any more gray, windy 50° days.


Since I started writing this, November has tried to oblige me with somewhat more exciting weather - Utah might be taunting me with festive snow storms, but I bet it can't boast of a tornado watch right now :)

Go Irish!

Notre Dame might accept students and offer classes, but beyond the trappings of dorms and dining halls, ND is football.  I've seen Rudy, peeked through the fence to glimpse the football team practicing, and watched almost every home game on tv.  I was SO excited that we were finally able to afford tickets this year (for a student and a spouse, tickets to the home games cost $500).  Yesterday was the first game of the season.  Mike and I got to campus early and wandered through the huge crowds of people, who were all dressed from head-to-toe in Notre Dame gear and were taking pictures of everything in sight.  Grown men were acting like children on Christmas morning; it was hard to watch them and not get absurdly excited for the game.

Our seats were right next to the stairwell the players came through, which was really cool.  Our team stayed ahead the entire game, and we ended up beating the Boilermakers by a comfortable margin.  Despite some missed tackles, it was a very promising start to the season. And yet...

It was a mostly-miserable experience.  Perhaps this was partly the product of overly-inflated expectations, but  I couldn't wait for the game to be over, and kept thinking I'd be enjoying it more if I were watching it on TV.  Tailgating, it turns out, is pointless if you're not ingesting large quantities of beer. The ridiculously overpriced hamburger I got before the game was almost entirely raw, and the two bites I had before looking down left my stomach queasy for hours.  The stadium was so packed that we didn't have room to stand facing forward, but were forced to stand twisted sideways (and my shoulders are NOT that wide).  My shoes got drenched in Coca-Cola, and everything smelled like vomit and alcohol.  We had to remain standing on the benches the entire game, and even then a guy in front of me was so tall I could only see half the field.  

Our section, which was supposed to be reserved for law students, was inundated by sophomores who were too drunk to find their real seats (which certainly didn't help the crowding problem).  One of them, who decided to sit on Mike's other side, was constantly throwing his elbows out during cheers and knocking Mike and I down from the bench.  This same fellow yelled a constant stream of filth, not only at the referees and the other team, but at our own players.  His friends found it hilarious.  

Notre Dame students have the tradition, whenever our team scores, of hoisting small-sized females into the air  and throwing them up and down in celebration.  The large, obnoxious sophomore was not paying attention, and thought that we had scored off an incomplete pass.  He grabbed a drunk girl sitting in front of him and threw her up in the air.  The other boys nearby didn't notice, and were busy trying to listen to the referee announce a penalty.  Obnoxious boy couldn't catch the girl on his own, and she crashed down onto the ground, hitting her head on the bleachers.  Blood started pouring down her face.  A few of the boys seemed mildly concerned (i.e. put a worried expression on their faces and quickly asked if she was ok, but continued intently watching the game), but obnoxious boy thought her injuries were even more entertaining than his profanities.  The girl's friends were, perhaps, even worse.  One of them yelled to obnoxious boy "Make her stand up so I can get a good picture."  And so obnoxious boy forced bleeding girl to her feet and held her up while her "friends" pulled out their cameras.

All this stood in sharp contrast to the games I watched last year, sitting on the comfy futon, eating homemade salsa and cookies and getting homework done during the commercial breaks.  I'm all for cheering the Irish on, I'd just rather not do it from the stadium.  As we have season tickets, hopefully yesterday was an anomalous experience, but ... I feel like such a terrible Notre Dame student right now.

The Invention of Propaganda

Last night Mike and I watched The Invention of Lying.  From the trailer, the movie looked very entertaining - I imagined a screenwriter overhearing a child telling a fib and thinking to herself  "What would it be like if we lived in a world where everyone ALWAYS told the truth about everything, and then one man discovered how to lie.  He'd have a lot of fun, but someday it would catch up to him and he'd learn a valuable lesson... hey, this would make a great movie!"

The first part of the film was pretty enjoyable, though peppered with the unnecessary and unappealing vulgarity that Hollywood seems to throw into every PG-13 comedy.  About halfway through, though, during a long and uncomfortably sacrilegious scene, it became evident that the movie was actually born in a conversation by a bunch of Hollywood executives who consider themselves enlightened, creative intellectuals.  "Let's make a movie," one probably said "that forcefully drives home the point that Christianity is a sham and organized religion is a myth that paternalistically exploits people.  Oh, and let's package it as a comedy and get some big name actors, so people will actually watch it."

Such a disappointment...

Ugh

In one hour and thirty minutes, I will be swept up in an epic battle against a business law final. While at the beginning of the semester, I might have had delusions of obtaining victory, my goal now is merely to survive.

As a self-professed nerd, I'm usually a little bit excited to take tests. While I complain about them excessively and have my fair share of exam anxiety, I'm a bit of a junkie for the thrill. There's something strangely exciting about getting the chance to show off how much you've learned from reading that 1400 page casebook and attending class all semester. This test may be the first one in my life that I've honestly dreaded entirely.

Every self respecting law exam is in an essay format, which gives you a lot more room to show off what you do know, without having to focus too much on the things that you don't. Business Associations, however, culminates in a three hour exam of short answer questions - the cruel kind.

Take, for instance, this sample question from an actual final my teacher gave a few years ago:

"John says shareholders should be glad that, in setting executive compensation, directors are not permitted to be wasteful. What do you tell him?"

The correct answer? "He's wrong - salaries are reviewed under the business judgment rule and will be overturned only if they amount to waste"

Double Ugh...