pseudostoops

Um, why did no one tell me that in addition to tracking down every address I’ve ever lived at since I was eighteen (seventeen addresses!  I want some sort of prize!) and finding the name of that sketchy guy who was my supervisor at the now-defunct bar I worked at in college, I also had to get my bar application NOTARIZED?  Because it is due TOMORROW and I don’t know about you but I do not have  a notary hanging around at home.  Sigh.  To Kinkos I go.

If you wake up on a Monday morning and every fiber of your body is telling you to just stay home, you should probably listen, or otherwise you might end up trying your hardest to look nonchalant while you sob at the end of the hallway in the law school after a (different from last time! but equally psycho!) real estate agent threatens to sue you. Good times. So yeah, the charm of looking for a condo has definitely worn off.

My dad works in real estate and loves it.  Loves.  When I was interviewing with law firms for summer jobs, they always wanted to know what kind of law I wanted to practice, and since both “child advocacy” and “public housing” were unlikely to get me called back, I often said “well, my father works in real estate and I’ve always found it fascinating.“  Which, you know, is kind of a lie.

But now that we’re in the process of actually trying to buy a condo (we’ve made an offer!  fingers crossed!) I’m sort of starting to see the human drama side of real estate that’s giving me a whole new perspective.

The condo we are trying to buy is a beautifully rehabbed apartment in a vintage building, which we like a lot.  It has two smallish bedrooms and one bathroom, which makes it smaller than a lot of places on the market.  It has a nice fridge, and a cool den, and the bathroom has a really cool sink in it.  Pro.  It has no parking space.  Con.  It  has a gas range.  Pro.  It is dramatically overpriced for the softening real estate market.  Con.

We went to look at it over the weekend and decided we really liked it.  We poked around the various rooms, whispering furtively to each other where in this place we could put the furniture in our current place, plotting small home improvement projects, sneaking peeks at the other people entering or exiting the building to get a sense of who our neighbors might be.  We went home and talked about it, talked in circles, and decided to go back and look again.

My dad, (who works in real estate, remember,) offered to let us use a guy who works for him who has a residential real estate license as our buyer’s agent.  Excellent!  No need to interview agents!  Swell!  So we called the seller’s agent and told her we’d like to come by and see it again.  She was anxious to have us back.  The house has been on the market for over a month with no offers.  The sellers had recently reduced their price because there were no offers (if we think it’s dramatically overpriced now, it was really overpriced when they were asking $20K more.)  They seem nervous about this whole “no offers” thing.

So we walk back into the apartment for visit number 2, and the seller’s agent says “so welcome back, and I brought some more information for you about the apartment, and also this is going to be a dual agency deal with me representing both sides and I also brought the condo association’s annual report from 2006…”

Um, excuse me?  What was that part you just tried to sneak in there?  This is going to be a dual agency deal with me representing both sides?  Oh no.  I don’t think so.  My almost-lawyer self started to get my back up and I was about to say something really snippy (because, um hello, ETHICAL VIOLATION, there needs to be knowledgeable consent to dual agency oh my god did you seriously think you were just going to sneak that in there you sneaky wench?) when John, rational being that he is, saw me about to blow my top and beat me to it, saying “actually, we’re represented by our own agent.”

“Oh,” she said.  “Well, he’s going to have to contact me about the commission.”

“Of course,” said John.

Can you guess where this is going?  Our agent called her and proposed the standard 50-50 split, which is the default rule in Illinois, and she won’t do it.  Because she claims that between the first time we saw the place and the second time we saw it (a grand total of 22 hours,) she was acting on our behalf as our agent (without our knowledge or consent, BTW,) and so she is entitled to a larger percentage.   And she suggested that maybe she would delay presenting our offer to the seller until she gets her way on the commission.

I would really really really like to see the look on the current owner’s face if we knocked on their door and said “hey!  We want to buy your apartment!  And we put in an offer!  But your agent is quibbling with our agent over a quarter of a percent of the commission, so she isn’t showing you the offer.  Did you know that?”  Because I have a hunch that they are more interested in, I don’t know, selling their condo then in making sure their broker gets the bigger piece of the pie.  Just a guess.

So it turns out I was kind of right- real estate is fascinating- especially when you’re working with crazy people!

Thought #1:

Bai Ling on Lost?  Worst guest star EVER.

Thought #2:

Trying to buy a condo for the first time is complex.  Even for an almost-lawyer.

Thought #3:

When you work with a client who gets released on electronic monitoring and who is so flaky that he tends to get lost on his way home from school, you will worry.  A lot.  This will cause you to become nervous about your ability to have children without dying from all the anxiety.  Maybe you should just get a goldfish.

Can someone explain to me why our Playstation, which plays Grand Theft Auto and Shoot Em Up 7000 and WarWhatever games without objection or incident, demands that I enter a parental authorization code when I try to use it to play a dvd of “Lost”?

If, during a hearing, one takes pity on a police officer who is testifying as a state’s witness and offers him a granola bar when the judge decides to take an hour-long break right in the middle of his testimony, and then after the break this police officer, who took your granola bar so happily, starts making shit up on cross-examination in an effort to bolster the state’s weak case, can you ask him for your granola bar back?

A question for all those wise lawyer-types out there:

Any suggestions on how I can track down the records of a speeding ticket received somewhere in rural Washington state sometime in the summer of 2001?

Once in your lifetime, you may be lucky enough to land tickets to the SuperBowl when your beloved hometown team is playing. If you are really lucky, that SuperBowl will be in Miami, which is notably warmer than your hometown in February.

You may, in preparation for your trip to Miami, be tempted to go to Mystic Tan to try to look less pasty. You may also fear plantar warts, and decide to wear the booties the Mystic Tan people offer you to avoid the wart risk. As my sister will tell you, this is a bad idea. Booties: bad.

After a few anxious days in Miami, where you are forced to calm your nerves with excessive mojito consumption, it will finally be game day. You will get in the car and start driving to the game.

There will be traffic.

The traffic will be so bad, in fact, that if you started drinking beer at 9am, you may find yourself stuck on the freeway offramp in something of a bathroom emergency. Fortunately, Florida highways feature high reeds on the side of the road, which will help you feel discreet.

Then you will feel better.

You will finally arrive at the stadium. You will marvel at how much turquoise there is. Turquoise signs, turquoise seat cushions, turquoise beer cups. Even the stadim appears to have been wrapped in turquoise plastic wrap. Very, very turquoise.

You will grab beers and find seats just in time to see a very strange Cirque du Soleil show featuring alligator balloons. Confusing.

The team will come out in a blaze of glory. You will cheer wildly. You will try to take pictures of their dramatic entrance, but they will all look like cloudy fogs of smoke. Stupid pyrotechnics. You will give up and take a picture of the JumboTron, because it is not obscured by smoke.

Finally, game time. You will watch, rapt, as the kickoff lofts through the air, Hester catches it, runs, twists, rolls, breaks a tackle holy crap it’s just him and the kicker oh my god he’s broken through run back kickoff for touchdown pandemoneum!

There will be no picture of this because you are lucky to have even survived the insane celebration that ensued.

Sadly, that will be the highlight of the game. Things will slow down. There will be approximately 432 t.v. timeouts, and since those in the stadium don’t get to see the famous commercials, it will give you an opportunity to take faux-artsy pictures with your new camera. Your father will mock you mercilessly for taking faux-arsty pictures at a football game.

.

Then it will be halftime. Prince will come out in a do-rag and swagger and strut his way through an amazing halftime show.

Oddly, he will be backed by a glow in the dark marching band. Not surprisingly, they are also turquoise.

The second half will be too grim to photograph. Losing? It is sad.
But that play? That first play? Will make it all worth it. Because if you’re lucky enough, once in your lifetime, to go see your hometown team play in the SuperBowl in Miami, the trip will definitely be making an appearance on your lifetime highlight reel.

[Editor's note:  there is a photo essay on the SuperBowl in the works, meaning I have to find the doo-hickey to get the pictures from the camera to the computer.  In the meantime please enjoy this little snapshot into why my life  is annoying me these days.]

I am in a seminar at school.  Seminars are usually quite the good deal- same number of units as a regular class, but only meets once a week for a few hours, less reading, open discussions, no Socratic method- good all around.

Every once in a while, though, a seminar sucks so bad it makes you want to cry.  Or scream.  Or, in this case, both.  Remember the avatar sex thing?  (welcome, googlers in search of avatar sex!  Please look elsewhere!)  The same professor is at it again.

For today, I’ve been asked to write a response paper detailing the scientific process behind so-called “partial birth abortion.”  Like describe it in medical terms.  Explain how it’s different from other kinds of abortions.  Maybe talk a little about the ban that the Supreme Court heard arguments on a couple months ago.  But mostly stick to the greusome parts: the fetal tissue the aspiration, the word “forceps.”

Here’s the thing:  I know that intact dilation and extraction (or “IDX,” the medical term for “partial birth abortion,”) is unpleasant.  I know that it’s controversial.  I knew how it worked before I wrote this damned paper.  What I really freaking resent is that the professor (whose politics are different from mine, as you might have guessed,) is asking us to write it at all.  It’s not clear to me what writing a nice book report on how IDX works is going to add to our legal debate of the issue of abortion regulation in class tomorrow.  The only thing I can figure is that he’d like us to all have to confront that it’s not pretty, so we can see it like he does- as infanticide.

Which is pretty freaking inappropriate for a class, if you ask me.

I get it- it’s easy to be cavalier about issues when you’re not confronting the reality of what it looks like, and maybe that’s the point he wants to make.  But to be honest, I get a little queasy when I read about bypass surgery or dialysis or chemotherapy, and I’m pretty sure that my discomfort with some medical procedures isn’t a solid reason to ban them.   I’m pretty sure we don’t make people who are considering an appendectomy watch one on video first just to “make sure” they’re comfortable having that done to their bodies.  And most importantly, no matter where you come down on this issue, using your position as a professor to try to bring students around to your way of thinking using a technique that has nothing to do with what you’re discussing?  That seems pretty lame.

Can someone please find a more charitible explanation for why we might be asked to do this?   Because right now I’m ready to go into class with the gloves off, ready to fight, and that might not be the best idea.

writing a reply motion the morning of the superbowl while your family has cocktails out on the porch to prepare for the afternoon’s festivities?  sucks.