Law Students

have passport, will travel

Posted on May 29, 2008
Well, I dug my passport out of the family safe. Apparently, it doesn't expire until Jan. 2009! So, should I renew it now, or keep it handy and renew it around December, when I probably won't travel anywhere due to finals and Christmas break?I never had occasion to drag it out before--see, supra, impoverished childhood under strict parents, etc...

now this is TMI

Posted on May 29, 2008
Really, I'm not that bad, folks. At least, not compared to others. We were first introduced to Lena Chen in this article in the NYT, in which Ms. Chen debated sexual morality with the president of the Harvard Anscombe Society, aka chastity club. Amber blogged about it here...

are you sure you want to be a big firm lawyer?

Posted on May 29, 2008
A BIGLAW survivor tells her story in "Private Practice: What Went Wrong?":Law firm culture (at least at the three firms I worked at), regards the assignments you get as an evaluation of your skills and capacities. The useless associate who doesn't get assignments because they're more trouble than they're worth to work with is a familiar character, and that was the pattern of the assignments (or lack of assignments) I got - while I was billing, in some years, half of what a very busy, but not really out-of-the-ordinary associate might bill, I was billing that low because that was all the work I had...

the last word on emily gould and female confessional writers

Posted on May 29, 2008
by Rebecca Traister: What provokes such fury, over Carrie Bradshaw, and -- for a flash -- over Gould (barring a book deal and TV show that will turn her meanderings into cultural furniture) is that in a media landscape in which there are a severely limited number of spaces for women's writing voices, the ones that get tapped become necessarily, and deeply inaccurately, emblematic -- of their gender, their generation, their profession...

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orange county boredom watch

Posted on May 28, 2008
(checking watch) Still bored. Trying to work on an edit of an article when I'm not using my two bachelors and two (and a half) graduate degrees to be a nanny to several children or a receptionist/office manager/secretary of the corporation for my sister's dental office...

oh no you di'n't

Posted on May 27, 2008
Sigh. And yet I did.Because I am an alcoholic working in a bar (i.e., academic), in an attempt to increase non-existent productivity and avoid procrastination, particularly during the unscripted summer hours, I have installed Leechblock.As Jeremy Freese says, this is not for the faint of heart...

Summer Resolutions

Posted on May 27, 2008
I don't really do New Year's resolutions. A new semester isn't as much of a fresh start when you're on an academic calendar. I think of Fall and Summer as being times of potentially great, life improving change.My life has changed in various, mostly positive ways already...

stagefright

Posted on May 27, 2008
I think that it would be an awesomely fun date to go to a karaoke bar and watch people sing. I've never been to a real one--you know, the ones in white people movies, with a proper stage for public humiliation. You know, like in "My Best Friend's Wedding," where the once-attractive Cameron Diaz sang "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" terribly, or in that treacly movie I just saw, "P...

Games

Posted on May 27, 2008
I celebrate summer by throwing dinner parties and showing a movie that everyone has already seen, or a foreign movie with subtitles, so that people can drop in and out of attention to the movie and conversations with others. My parties, they are popular, especially '80s themed ones...

Hooray for LSA!

Posted on May 26, 2008
To all of my friends going off to Montreal for the Law and Society Annual Meeting, I wish you a safe trip! Rock those Powerpoints! Enjoy the camaraderie and academic bon homie of the largest international interdisciplinary conference on law and social science! I wish that I could be there with you all...

Memorial Day thoughts...

Posted on May 26, 2008
A photo from Arlington West in Santa Barbara, as supported by the Veterans for Peace.There are times I really wonder if this war is a part of our national consciousness, or whether it is merely an inconvenience - like a writer's strike, a recession, or an election...

What the pho?

Posted on May 25, 2008
Thoughts upon returning to Orange County on this 24th of May, most of them gastronomical: No one makes pho as good as your mom. Pho restaurants may try very hard, and name themselves annoying slangy names like "Pho Shizzle," or "Pho Good" or "Pho Real" (these are all real and I could tell you the cities), or names like "Pho Kim Long" that inadvertantly invite juvenile and unfortunate jokes from the gringos much in the way "Long Duc Dong" did back in the '80s (and oh yes, this is a potentially real combination of names, as are the lovely Vietnamese names "Bich" and "Phuc")...

Conference Envy

Posted on May 23, 2008
Unfortunately, my travel budget is such that I am unable to travel out of the country for conferences this year, so I won't be seeing you all in Montreal next week. Why? Because my law school doesn't fund me anything (well, a one-time of $100, which I am saving for LSA 2009)...

May it's the hair?

Posted on May 23, 2008
Ending the week on an up note...I always wondered what happened to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - and while they are still around, Jon Spencer has also teamed up with Matt Verta-Ray to form Heavy Trash. I can't seem to stop watching this video. The redhead haunts my dreams...

This is a REALLY AWESOME idea.

Posted on May 23, 2008
Debategraph -- a wiki dedicated to gathering the arguments. Period. From the site description: Our goal is to make the best arguments on all sides of any debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.In pursuit of this goal, Debategraph is:(1) A wiki debate visualization tool that lets you: * present the strongest case on any debate that matters to you; * openly engage the opposing arguments; * create and reshape debates, make new points, rate and filter the arguments; * monitor the evolution of debates via RSS feeds; and, * share and reuse the debates on and offline;(2) A web-based, creative commons project to increase the transparency and rigor of public debate everywhere?by making the collective insight and intelligence of the global community freely available to all...

Here's who all of the fuss is about...

Posted on May 23, 2008
Emily Gould on CNN's Larry King Live (hosted by Jimmy Kimmel).I'm believe she referenced this appearance in the NYT piece, but, frankly, I only skimmed it. And apparently Belle's Carrie Bradshaw reference wasn't coincidental.One of the major issues I have with her is her total distortion of the term "citizen journalism"...

Media Economics as Stochastic Process, OR: Perhaps Richard Posner Was Right About Something After All...

Posted on May 22, 2008
One of everyone's least favorite Posner screeds is his critique of the media, published (where else) in the King of All Media, a.k.a., the New York Times. The article prompted so much annoyance that Bill Keller was moved to write, and then print, a letter to himself in response...

stuff that bothers the hell out of me

Posted on May 22, 2008
This is rehashing every race essentialist/race betrayal argument I have ever heard throughout high school, college, and law school by white and Asians alike. It is a subject that turns family dinners into shouting matches. It also reminds me of that awful movie, Something New...

If everything is culture, what isn't?

Posted on May 22, 2008
So, by now everyone knows about the structure-agency debate in organizatoins. You don't? Wikipedia to the rescue. Although I trust Brayden King of OrgTheory on this more, for obvious reasons.But I've been reading lots about culture, and can't figure out if culture is epiphenomenal or if it derives from structure, and whether agency does anything to define culture...

Augh!

Posted on May 22, 2008
Read this. Although I'm nowhere near as bad. But, wow. I thought it was bad enough blogging about work/life balance and my assimilationist immigrant childhood in the suburbs. But, whoa, people do dish about their personal adult lives in ways far more than "working late sucks" and "I celebrated the end of an oral exam by getting the flu and cutting my hair...

Wednesday Poet: Richard Siken (Part II)

Posted on May 21, 2008
Here is the first post on Richard Siken, with my favorite--Scheherezade.Saying Your NamesChemical names, bird names, names of fireand flight and snow, baby names, paint names,delicate names like bones in the body,Rumplestiltskin names that are always changing,names that no one?s ever able to figure out...

everyday superheroes

Posted on May 20, 2008
Thanks to Bully, who runs a cool blog and helped me reboot my iPod! Bully saves the day!!Image: they will never know who i really am, from exploding dog.

Bourdieu is Funny

Posted on May 20, 2008
Or, at least the way Tim Hallet describes him in "Symbolic Power and Organiztional Culture":The habitus plays an important role in interaction because it is so unconscious. Upon presenting a certain self, it is too difficult for the actor to monitor every movement he or she performs, even a highly conscious, manipulative actor...

Grrrr.

Posted on May 20, 2008
The 80GB iPod I bought just last Christmas is not turning on. I am hoping that it's just because it is drained of battery. I can't imagine that it would be so since it's usually docked in my Athena iPod player, but hmmm, let's hope that's the reason...

Speaking of Jeff Buckley...

Posted on May 19, 2008
Since Belle mentioned Jeff Buckley, allow me to follow up with an artist that should be right up Belle's musical alley. Jeff Buckley's girlfriend at the time of his accidental (not suicidal, as popularly rumored) death was a woman named Joan Wasser - who is a musical powerhouse in her own right...

Hey, Jealousy

Posted on May 19, 2008
(I wish that I could embed this video.)It takes all of 10 minutes to assemble an all-Jersey playlist for a mix CD for a friend who is a proud son of The Garden State from the music I already have in my library--Springsteen, Sinatra, Whitney Houston, Regina Spektor, Steely Dan, Fountains of Wayne, Isley Brothers, Fugees...

Gerard Depardieu!

Posted on May 18, 2008
Thanks to The Journalist for the recommendation. This is a shout out to The Idealist.Admit it, whether you're a francophone or francophobe, this is hi-larious. And I usually hate musicals!

Sunday Poet: Yusef Komunyakaa

Posted on May 18, 2008
Believing in Iron The hills my brothers & I createdNever balanced, & it took yearsTo discover how the world worked.We could look at a tree of blackbirds& tell you how many were there,But with the scrap dealerOur math was always off...

Six Sevens

Posted on May 18, 2008
It's summer. This is not that serious a blog. Why the hell not.This is an old meme, but when I avoid work I read through Amber's archives, and she did one, so why not me? Incidentally, I stole some of hers.Also, I have no idea why numbers and bullets turn into flowers on my blog...

Chris Uggen Has a Blog?!

Posted on May 17, 2008
Chris Uggen has a blog!! It is totally awesome!! If I didn't have to work, I'd want to read all of his archives. Once I get done with this last push, I'll probably start with his "longer and vibier posts" on the right hand sidebar.I feel abashed, because he linked to me without me noticing, and I only recently discovered his three year old blog by looking through the blogrolls on the sociology blogs I read...

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