Trolls

I'm starting a paper on internet trolls. Thank you South Park for letting me know this is a problem in our larger culture that people care about, and not just me in my head.

Here's what I've got so far in ways of thought process:

While  “Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority” indisputably, a troll is not any anonymous critic on the internet striving to save themselves from a tyrannous government.

To whit: the first amendment protects the Ku Klux Klan member for his speech -- be it in published or unpublished, written or oral -- but not from the actions he may take based on those words.  

The difference between the speech of a critic and the “speech” of a troll is that the critic is using the forum of the internet to anonymously criticize something. They are a part of a larger conversation. 

The troll is acting out in order to specifically get a negative reaction out of the receiver of that “speech”. It is not in an attempt to start a conversation with the larger culture, it is to create some feeling of power in themselves by reducing another person’s ego. Often trolls do this repeatedly to the same person. If this were physical life, we would call it harassment. 

Remedies would likely include injunctions and damages. But internet trolls claim freedom of speech. Not only does this let them get away with it in the short term, but it besmirches this sacred American right in the long term. 

I hope some trolls will get on my comments and give me something to quote. 

SOL

Lawyers love a good acronym. Like any profession with jargon, it just starts washing through you. Over the last three years one of my favorite semantic delights has been finding out that other legalese users make up the same sorts of short hand for terms of art as I do. When I’m typing notes for 5 hours straight (backup career as stenographer) I automatically shorten Probable Cause to PCause Supreme Court of the United States to SCOTUS, etc. And then I realized loads of other ppl are shortening the same things in the same ways.

As fascinating as that may be for Linguist Me, or Neurologist Me, or Sociologist Me, what it really is best for is Comedian Me.

I was minding my own business, reading a legal blog, trying to figure out why so many acts that get passed have 180 day limitations. Seriously, it's like a nervous tick. Why 180 days? It's also the federally mandated number of days in a school year.  I want to know where this comes from, and why. It's so arbitrary seeming. Is it week days? working days? Is that how many days Ben Franklin could hold onto a bender? I didn't learn, last night, the answer to this quandry. 

Instead, what I noticed – how great! – is that everyone else shortens Statute of Limitations to SOL in their notes and heads -- just like me.

A Statute of Limitations is the time limit put on the ability for plaintiffs (complainers) to make claims for a particular cause of action (the thing they’re complaining about). I was reading about the Lily Ledbetter Act, which extends the length of time a person may complain about inequal pay for equal work. Like all the nervous tick acts, it had been 180 days, then a SCOTUS case shortened that time period, and then this 2009 Act held the limit back to 180 days. IE. whoever finds out they've been short shrifted pay for arbitrary reasons has 180 days to file their complaint for the last received inequal paycheck. 

That is, there is a 180 day Statute of Limitations (SOL) on making your complaint about this particular injustice.

Reasoning for this is to a) make sure the offending party doesn’t live unjustly in fear their whole lives for possibly a small slight, and b) incentivize complainers to be prompt – the US Courts are full of bitchin and if you got the gall stones, you better have the gumption to carry that full term.

Which reasoning, luckily, also means there’s a pleasant scale for how long SOLs are in accordance to the injustice committed. EG. Inequal pay has this particularly short one, tax evasion has 6 years to be found out, and terrorism has no SOL.

Meaning, the worse a thing you do to another human being, the more Shit Outta Luck you are in being safe from the law.  

First Day of the Last of the Law School Life

My Facebook wall this week is studded with the emotional shout outs of my student colleagues confronting their last year of law school.

It's an odd series of sensations, which seem to encapsulate a microcosm of the whole first semester. Big difference is that I'm now inflicting them upon myself rather than experiencing them as reactions against a series of professors and Bar Review dates....

It's reassuring that both my friends from University of Baltimore and my friends from American University express the same series of emotions...

Jubilant.
Such hard! So Pride! Very Work! Wow!

Terrified. 
 Did those credits transfer? Will I graduate?? Who will hire me??? LOANS???? but, seriously, I have to do this again?


























Exhausted. 
Day 1: super excited, hugging all my friends and repeating "how was your summer" with more cheer than leader in conversation. Day 2: Like dust is in my veins, all over again. Like "summer" were just a figment of imagination.












Zen.
Tend the mind garden; tend the knowledge trees; what's reaped will bloom.











As well as a healthy patina of disbelief that any of the above is true.....

Big Research Paper

I'm taking two senior writing seminars this semester. Each requires a 35 page paper. Considering how much shit I did for my junior writing assignments, with very poor results, I am changing my strategy here.

1. Realize I worry less about law now. ANother full year of studying it has helped. I'm no longer living in a carpartment, that helps. I have a boyfriend who really cares about me, that helps. Mostly, these papers can't ruin me, like they did in 2013. 
2. I will keep track of my extroversion here in this neglected blog.
3. I will start with reading a bunch of things about the topic that have nothing to do with how the law treats it.  
4. I will meet with my professors regularly for their input. 

Moral: No man is an island. 

Time

Many things can be said about how consuming law school is (and hundreds of people to over explain it). There isn't anything I can add to that. I have a black hole of the last three months of my life. The same rhythm looks to repeat 7 more times, if the institutions keep letting me.

Evidence of Time

So far the only posts on here are about the inception of the blog, and reason for it. Since then Kiddo has moved house twice in support of the upcoming, formidable law school experience, and started the formidable law school experience.

The absence of posts is all the evidence you need to discern how formidable that experience has been thus far. 

More Alcoholics

Everywhere I go, I tend to find alcohol. Often are  the wonderments about human life sans fermentation. Simply illegalizing it clearly doesn't work, but what if it did not exist? It's a ponderance for another day. For now, let me sip my Grolsch and expound to exactly no-one just how pervasive and boring alcoholics can be. 

The university hosted a housing fair for incoming students. This is good for all participants for two reasons: 

1. You can find housing

2. You can find people to befriend

Yesterday's fair was almost an exception. Fun, dry activities, in clean, well-lit places, with wholesome, fully dressed people. 

Most of whom were starting, continuing, or finishing their undergrad degrees. And if there's one thing teen pop-culture tells us, it's that alcohol and college ought to go hand in hand, and hopefully there will be sex and dancing on a beach, in a pool, down a hallway, at a friend's house, between the stacks, under some bleachers, on a desk, or wherever you find yourself being 20 years old, without parental supervision, and with money you haven't really earned. 

It's almost beautiful in its completeness. 

And I enjoyed the whole shlemiel. And got bored of it. When your brain's not working a full capacity, you are by definition limiting its capabilities, and by doing this you are not fully interacting with your environment, and therefore holding back the things you could be experiencing. 

For this reason, I got bored of drinking every day. I also now use drinking as a tool for focusing on the one thing I want to get done. When I don't drink, I tend to try and accomplish 14 things at once. There are studies on the ineffectiveness of this approach. I invite you to google them. 

Yesterday's fair showed me lots of places to live, and one may be procured. Goal 1 -- done. Three girls stood out as potential friends or roomates, while none of them worked out as roomates, Goal 2 of befriending some of the populace was accomplished. 

One of the tours threw me in with a gaggle of boys emerging from undergrad to law school over the course of the summer. They quickly butt-buddied up and searched for a three bedroom. Not normally one for finding immense differences between the sexes and discriminating thereon, these darlings were undiscriminating in their choices of who to live with. Me and my little lawyer-hopeful chicklets, however, danced around conversations laced with implications about cleanliness, pets, and sleep patterns. Even at our most direct it was "well, smoking out side is ok, because that doesn't involve me and my hair".

Long story short, I'm getting a studio. 

My gaggle was an average height of 5'8", of average musculature, and listened to me when I spoke. They asked me normal questions about where I live now and what sort of law I want to study. They were all interested in my business inclinations, and befuddled by how to involve international relations with it. They liked the biggest, most expensive apt complex the most. 

While I munched free pizza with them a version of our table was getting super-happy about rooming together. It was three boys, with an average height of 6'1", uneven facial features, and pizza raised aloft in a salute to all the kegs they were going to crush. 

My Peace Corps friend, CMOCK, himself an ex-lawyer, has often expounded on the drink-capades of law students he encountered--always with a mixture of awe, revulsion, and pride, and usually with the caveot of "we worked so hard we had to unwind so hard!"

All of which is fine. 

But when looking for an apartment in which to store my books and body I'd just as soon rent one of those Tokyo sleep pods in the basement of our law school. The Roomate Speed Dating activity assured me very quickly that this fantasy was even more desirable. 

A place to live implies that you're actually going to be living a whole life, to include partying and unwinding so hard. If I'm going to be doing any great drink-capades in the next three years it's likely going to be of the nature a little pamphlet the school gives you warns you not to do: alone. 

Peace Corps necessitated drinking. People who didn't take shots of vodka with their host families were not integrating, and I for sure only spoke Russian when toasted. But all this reading and writing is going to shift this little extrovert's whole focus from holistic, communal development to individual rigor and achievement.

Honing daily activities, and trying to not stack up the loans will mean at least one thing: I will not be going to bars much with these groups of seemingly average people shunting themselves through a system that demands extraordinary character. 

That is, while walking out the door the gaggles shouted invitations to get wasted in celebration of landing a little commune to further their own under-grad experiences by three more years.