Sometimes, it’s hard for me to believe that this college and this group are a part of the same country, let alone front page stories on cnn.com on the same day

Couple that with the cases I’ve been reading on gay rights in preparation for my Con Law exam and it’s hard to avoid the feeling that we’re poised for some dramatic, painful, and important changes in this here country. It’s going to be a hell of a fight.

This is too hillarious not to share.

pseudostoops: [hack hack cough up lung hack hack hack]
beignet: you alright there?
pseudostoops: i am totally going to have to give up my career as an assassin if i can’t kick this thing.

Scene 1:

There are some songs from youth that are so inexorably tied to specific memories that every time I hear them, it’s impossible not to remember. Bonnie Bell Blueberry Lip Smacker smell also has this effect. We all have these songs.

One of the songs that is like this for me is “Tainted Love,” by Soft Cell. Back in high school, when I was even less cool than I am now, my friends and I had a thing for 80s music and oldies and anything that didn’t require us to try to stay current with the music that was then being released. This was wise for several reasons: (A) there was no way we’d ever be current enough to compete with the music hipster set, (B) in the days before napster, new music was pretty expensive, (C) we were able to have a radio show on our local high school station that specialized in oldies music and people (our friends’ parents, mostly,) would actually listen because the music was stuff they knew and liked. Anyway, we liked this song Tainted Love a LOT, and I have very specific memories, which may or may not be clouded by the soft romantic glow of hindsight, in which we danced around on someone’s parents’ couch in our pajamas singing into wooden spoons. Then we all had a pillow fight in our undies.

Okay, I made that last part up, and I may be romanticizing this a bit, but that didn’t make it any less traumatic when, driving home the other day, I turned to the hip hop and r & b station to hear that someone named “Rihanna” has SAMPLED “Tainted Love” for use in a VERY BAD SONG. (If you scroll down and click “play audio,” you can hear the carnage.) And she only sampled like 3 measures which play over and over and over and you never get the feeling of musical resolution that comes from the chorus, and it’s just AWFUL. And I felt old, and a little betrayed.

***********************
Scene 2:

Driving home from somewhere the other day I heard a new song by Garbage that sounded, for all the world, like this song that I have recently learned is called “They” by Jem. “They” seems like a weird name for this song because all it says, over and over again, is “I’m sorry, so sorry.”

Three days before my wedding, my mom booked me an appointment at an incredibly swanky spa place downtown to have my eyebrows plucked. Apparently, this woman who does the plucking is a GENIUS with eyebrow shape, and it will revolutionize the way you look at your face, and she’s been featured in the Chicago Tribune, and you have to book weeks in advance, etcetera. It also costs $100 to have her pluck your eyebrows, which is something that women who are committed to eyebrow topiary do EVERY TWO WEEKS. This price seems astonishingly, achingly, I could feed a small developing nation for a week on this amount of money extravagent, but it was a nice gesture on my mom’s part, and I can see that the “fuzzy caterpillar” approach to eyebrows that I had been sporting was perhaps not going to be quite so hot in wedding pictures, and I hate the idea of hot wax that close to my eyes.

The reality, though, was kind of a nightmare.

I get to the place on time, only to learn that Ms. Eyebrow Shaper to the Stars is going to be late because she is in court. Thus, when she walks in, I, the dippy law student who DOES NOT THINK BEFORE SHE TALKS, GOD, ask cheerfully, “I hear you were in court! I’m a law student! Were you a witness or something? Was it cool?”

“I am going through the most horrific divorce that has ever taken place,” she replies curtly.

Right. Well, now I’m even more excited to have you poking at my sensitive eye region with a sharp implement.

I lay down in the chair, which looks unmistakably like a dentist’s chair, with the little adjustable light on a swivel arm above it and everything, and as I lie down, the piped-in music starts playing. The song? “I’m sorry, so sorry.”

If you can’t click on the link to hear this song, which is possible because I am a technological nitwit, suffice it to say that it is a repetatitive, trance-like tune that says over and over that she is sorry, so sorry, and for whatever reason, the piped-in music in the eyebrow torture chamber had this song stuck on repeat, so for the entire 25 minutes that I was sitting in the dentist’s chair having the woman who I’ve just pissed off with talk of her divorce poke and yank at my eyebrows with the world’s most surgical looking pair of tweezers, all I could hear was “I’m sorry, so sorry.”

Yeah, you have no idea how sorry I was. My eyebrows did look great, though.

************
Scene 3:

Yesterday, a group of roughly 42 went to the world’s loudest restaurant to celebrate a dear friend’s birthday. This restaurant is terrific in the sense that it is festive, serves huge margaritas, and because it’s usually gringo-free, you can kind of pretend you are on vacation. The restaurant has a major drawback, though, especially for groups of 42: it is louder than any place I have ever been before, including the time I went to a Jet concert in a club the size of a broom closet and my ears rang for 3 days. So, it’s kind of hard to have a conversation with anyone except the person sitting immediately next to you.

The reason it is so loud is that there are several rotating musical acts that stroll through the restaurant and serenade diners. There are at least two mariachi bands, some trumpeters, and a woman who carries a portable microphone and dances around and looks an awful lot like she could fill in as the hostess of a Mexican tv variety show without even needing to go into hair and makeup because she’s already all gussied up.

I must REALLY love this friend whose birthday we were celebrating, because somehow, by some horrible coincidence, the person I ended up sitting directly next to is a woman I used to be good friends with who told me three years ago that she doesn’t want to be friends with me anymore, called me a slut, and continues to badmouth me to mutual friends behind my back. Needless to say, we don’t get along. And she just got engaged, and I’ve known her now-fiancee since preschool, and the whole thing is just kind of unpleasant.

But because this was a birthday party and we are grownups, and when you are a grownup it is less cool to hijack a friend’s birthday party with your own silly drama than it was when we were teenagers, we sucked it up and played nice and had strained conversation over the loud loud loud mariachi music for THREE HOURS. And then, just as it was looking like the ties of civility were straining and our efforts at mutual kindness might crack, the Mexican tv lady saved the day: she started singing something that sounded so familiar, and yet so different, that we all stopped and looked thoughtfully at her, trying to figure out why we knew this song, we knew we knew this song, how did we know this song?

Then it hit us: she was singing “Achy Breaky Heart.” In Spanish. And there were dozens of people dancing. At those moments, there is nothing left to do but laugh. And order another margarita, because this is going to be a long night.

So my friend Doughbri told me the other day about a study that some smart statistician folks did about everyone’s favorite Chicago road: Lake Shore Drive. (Side note: for those of you who don’t live in Chicago, this road is such an integral part of the city that there is a radio station named after it. Take that, Park Avenue!) Apparently, this study found that 90% of cars traveling on the Drive violate some sort of traffic law. Mostly, they speed. For whatever reason, the Drive has a speed limit of 45 miles per hour, despite it’s wide open lanes, gentle curves, lack of stoplights, and sweeping views of Lake Michigan which all just beg for speed. Average speed is, I’d say, around 64. So most cars are speeding. Occasionally someone drifts over a lane dividing line, or drifts over the fog line (did you know that’s what that line on the right side of the road is called? Me neither!), or talks on a cell phone without a handsfree device. You know, real criminal stuff.

Pseudostoops, you say, this is boring as hell! Get to the point!

Okay, fine. Doughbri and I were teaching our Streetlaw class when this 90% figure came up. We were teaching our kids about searches and seizures, and they wanted to know when the cops have the right to search your car. We told them: any time there’s a violation, they can place you under arrest (put you in those attractive handcuffs and sit your ass on the curb) while they search your trunk for drugs. Travel a few miles per hour over the limit? They can search you. Fog line violation? Just say search. Cell phone handsfree device scofflaw? Prepare to turn over the weed under the front seat, brother.

One kid, who catches on faster than most, said “I bet if the cops want to search your car, they’ll jsut pull you over for something stupid and then use that as an excuse to search your car.”

Well, in a word: yes.

Here’s what positively floored me: Doughbri, who is taking criminal procedure (I knew I should have taken that instead of corporations!) then told us that the Supreme Court has held that the police can have probable cause to pull you over and search your car if you are driving TOO CAREFULLY. Seems that in South Dakota, (also known as “a state that people have to drive through to transport drugs from California to Chicago,”) the police keep on the lookout for cars driving “carefully within the speed limit to avoid drawing attention to themselves,” and then pull over those cars to search for drugs.

So, to summarize: the 90% of cars on the Drive that violate some sort of law should be mentally prepared to be pulled over and have their car searched. The 10% of cars that do not violate some sort of law should also take note: all that law-abiding isn’t fooling anyone, missy! You should be ready to be pulled over too.

I am deeply discomforted.

Actual names of actual parties involved in actual cases we have read in my corporations class:

* Zestee
* The Pepper Source
* Sea-Land
* Van Gorkam
* Salmon
* Schlensky
* Allis Chalmers (which sounds an awful lot like Alice Childress, which is sort of becoming a distraction)

No Emily Millers here! I knew I wasn’t cut out for the corporate world!

It is sort of de rigeur in law school blogs, I’ve found, to mock 1Ls, especially at exam time, for their nerdishly studious behavior and the competitive psych out games in which they engage. I have no delusions of coolness and know myself to be a nerd, so lest my friends be given the opportunity to scold me (“pot? Have you met my friend kettle? He is also black!”) I will refrain from openly mocking the nerd tendencies of 1Ls.

Notice I did not say I would refrain from mocking 1Ls entirely. To the contrary. Today, there is something entirely separate about 1Ls about which I would like to complain. And no, it is not their tendency to turn around suddenly in the hallway, taking out anyone within a four foot radius with the huge backpack stuffed full of books. Or the alarming numbers of libertarians in their ranks. No, what bothers me about the 1Ls today is their complete and total lack of manners.

Today, the Public Interest Law Society that I help to run had an event. At this event, a man I used to work for, who is so old that Llewellyn was still teaching when he started law school, came to talk about his four decades working on fair housing issues in Chicago. (He is so cool. Seriously. Forty years of bad salary and wrestling with the Chicago Housing Authority and you’re still an optimist? Cool in my book.)

Because I am a vegetarian, and because I was in charge of ordering the food for this lunch event, we served falafel. (Side note: I realized about 4 minutes before the event started that today is also Ash Wednesday, so if anyone asks, the reason we had no meat at the lunch is out of sensitivity toward the Catholics, because a couple of Catholic students came up and thanked me profusely for being so thoughtful and having a veggie lunch and hey, who am I to correct them?) A full 20 minutes before our event was scheduled to begin, 1Ls started lining up for lunch. At our law school, this is normal: if you want to have an event at lunch time and don’t provide food, good luck getting anyone to attend. It’s like the bagels of entitlement. Law students really like to be fed.

Now, I had heard rumors that this year’s 1L class was a little, ahem, overenthusiastic about free food, and I had seen with my own eyes how they descend like vultures upon any food that happens to be left over at the end of a lunch event. (Heaven help you if you get between a 1L and his free leftover pad thai.) But I was floored (FLOORED!) when a 1L walked around the line, grabbed a falafel WITH HER BARE HANDS, and kept right on walking right out the door of the law school. That’s right: she budged in line, put her germs on our food, and then DIDN’T EVEN COME TO OUR EVENT.

I couldn’t help it. I yelled at her. I’m not proud of it, but come on, lady, where were you born? A BARN? Did you grow up one of 17 children? Or the only girl in a family of 5 hungry football playing brothers? You know, in the kind of household where if you wanted to eat you had to grab food fast, real fast, so fast that even utensils would slow you down too much? Even if you did, here’s a heads up: you’re in law school now! You will likely someday be a lawyer! Lawyers, even the public interest kind, make money! Enough money to enable them to buy food! You’ll never go hungry again! So STOP STEALING MY FLIPPIN’ FALAFELS.

That is all.