Well, John Kerry (our next president?) is coming to the Union tomorrow. It says that doors open at noon, but that probably means he'll talk at something like 1 PM. Then again, maybe it means he'll speak at 2 PM. So the question is whether to risk missing class to see him. Not that he's going to say anything important, but it would be kind of cool to see him just to say that I did. I once saw Clinton on campus from really, really far away. One time I shook hands with Buck Rinehart. Also, one time I took a tour of the old state penitentiary with Greg Lashutka. (Former mayors of Columbus, both.) Also, I walked past Gary Becker's office on numerous occasions.

I took my mom to school for the Parents and Partners Day today. She thought everything was so wonderful. She had thought the building was going to be really dark and dank and dirty and dingy and depressing, but she ended up thinking everything was really bright and shiny and pleasant. I wonder if I make the school sound like something different than it is. It's mostly a very nice building. There are plenty of comfortable places to sit and quiet places to study.

I heard for the first time today that there's going to be a fourth journal at OSU soon. It will have something to do with the Internet and privacy. I wouldn't mind getting in on that action!

Why can't courts of various levels certify questions to legislatures just like, for example, federal courts do to state supreme courts? They could ask something like: "Should 99 U.S.C. 1234 be interpreted to allow cats to rollerskate on federal property?" Then the legislature votes. There could be just an up-or-down yes/no vote, or maybe yes/no/no opinion, or yes/no/stare decisis rules, or something like that. Maybe this would be too taxing on the legislature's time, though.

I almost accidentally wrote "put my best food forward" in a thank you note. Thank goodness for roofreading!

A new Mortiz law blog? About registration of stuff? Scintillating.

No, actually, really, it's useful. Practical.

I do not think it's necessary for me to weigh in on the important issues of the day. My opinion does not count and will not count unless and until:

1. I decide to substantially agree with a group of at least, say, 5 or 10 million other people, I mean, American people.
   
2. I get really famous.
   
3. I get really rich.
   
4. I become extremely morally influential for some reason. Like if I'm the first First Man. Or would it be First Gentleman?

I've had Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" out of the library for two whole months, but I've chickened out of listening to it. It's due back tomorrow.

Here comes another worm...this one is actually hitting me on my school e-mail address, which is unusual. So everybody make sure you don't open any weird attachments!

What's the educational path for someone who wants to be a legal theorist when he or she grows up?

By the way, if you're looking for any Posner books in the library, I have them all.

Why do people buy 12 ounce cans of pop at the cafe for 75 cents? That's about 6 cents per ounce. You can get a 20 ounce pop for a dollar, which is over a penny less per ounce. Do people have that much of a preference for aluminum cans over plastic bottles? If 20 oz. is too much for you, you can share with a friend.

Ewww...look at this creepy guy! Stop trying to steal my name!

Okay, they arrested the guy. Grood. He better change his name now.

In other news, I just purchased three boxes of tofu and numerous cans of vegetables.

This is not me!!! Not me!!!!!! Somebody totally creeped me out saying that there was an Amber Alert out for somebody named Michael Shecket. But I'm the only Michael Shecket on earth! At least in North America for sure. Agggh! Geez! Creep me out! No, not Shecket. Shackett! And I don't have a 2003 Cavalier, luckily. That's a crappy car.

Okay, I made it out of my first interview alive. I have now devolved into business casual for the remainder of the afternoon. I also just chatted with a professor about summer research stuff.

Ack! I'm wearing a suit. Ack! I have an interview. Yikes! I'm nervous.

The hammer is coming down hard on web surfing and playing games in class. It varies by professor, but it seems like some of them might really crack down.

Let's see...how many weeks into the semester am I at this point? What was the equivalent point last semester? What was I writing about then?

This is week 8. Let's see where that would have fallen last semester...aaahhaa! This time last semester was autumn break! In fact, at exactly this time last semester I had just gotten my wisdom teeth pulled! Well, no wonder I'm tired!

The Tough and Lovely are playing at Cafe Bourbon Street tonight. Also, Chris Rock at is the Schott. You know, "The Schott" always makes me think of Marge Schott. Why would they give it that nickname instead of "The 'Stein"?

Oh my goodness! Jessica is all bloggy now! Why didn't you tell me?

Today is my big visit to the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics to think about doing a joint degree. Whether I do another degree or not, I definitely want to take some courses outside the law school just to get some critical perspective.

Correction: zipsix is not, strictly speaking, slow loading. It's slow scrolling. And yes, I like scrolling.

I feel much better now, especially since my paper's done for the time being. Three more classes and then I ease into a relaxing but hopefully slightly productive weekend. Then there's Chris Rock on Monday. Awesome!

I turned in my memo draft last night. Yay! I'm free and clear, just like Willy Loman. Well...not that bad. At least until two weeks from now when I have to turn in the real one.

Okay, I'm complaining. It's cold in here and I have a long way to go on my memo and I didn't get any matches from speed dating. At least the prof didn't set a minimum number of pages. Even if I had been more diligent, there's only so much you can write in two weeks when you have four other classes.

Maybe I'm just not cut out for dating. Maybe I need to get matchmade, like in the shtetl.

Ugh...so miserable. I looked at the sample office memo in the back of our Legal Writing book, and I just want to puke. That's what I'm supposed to knock off in the next 19 hours? Cripes!

It's getting to be that low middle part of the semester where my concentration really flags. Hopefully it will come back once I get past this paper.

It's going to be a long night hashing out this office memo draft. In theory, I could work on it at home, but I'm going to stay here at school instead so I don't get as distracted.

If you're out there and haven't done so before, please leave me a guestbook note. I always look forward to new messages there and there haven't been any in a while. So post away!

Well, I know a lot more about Connecticut employment law than I did, but I don't think I've written a single word that will end up in my final memo or even my draft. At some point, I need to stop just highlighting Westlaw printouts and actually write stuff.

So how is life in Shecketland? Eh, nothing too exciting. Some other people got their Speed Dating matches. I hope they didn't get sent out all at once because I haven't heard anything yet.

We have a really long (unedited) Con Law case today.

Professor Braunstein is welcome to put his Powerpoint slides on my website if he wants. He'll probably put them on TWEN instead.

Please don't let me do my office memo draft at the last minute. I need to stick around and get it up and running and not play solitaire. It's just not even important enough for the stress that would result from procrastination.

We don't have a heck of a lot more of Contracts to go. We're getting to page 600 today, and our book only goes up to 940. There's a chance that this is all I'll ever know about the subject. I kind of wish I could have the chance to check out the whole law firm experience before I have to decide on my classes for next year. Do they have "Secured Transactions for Poets"? How about "Complex Litigation for Jocks"?

I think more people read this than I sometimes realize. My e-mails, guestbook entries, and references on other blogs have gradually died down, but I get more of people coming up to me at school and saying stuff like: "So...you're doing speed dating!" That's pretty cool.

I wonder if the 2 and 3Ls here are not so interested in me anymore because I don't tend to talk about politics very much. I'm pretty agnostic about most things political. I'll support what I think is right at the time, but I'm not terribly surprised if it turns out later that I got everything totally backwards. I guess I think that preaching to the choir is boring. Plus, I don't really have a choir. Also, I think trying to talk someone over from the Dark Side by force of intellectual persuasion is much less effective than most people think. So that doesn't really leave an audience for my political speculations.

I also don't talk about law as much as I might. It's really easy to lose perspective while being totally immersed in a subject that acts like it's so self-contained and complete. There's no subject I've studied that is so ripe for a critical perspective. This is a subject where I can appreciate someone jumping up and down and saying: "Don't forget! This is just a piece of paper that some people wrote a long time ago! It's not a logical inevitability!"

Learning about law also makes me want to learn more about law enforcement. Law doesn't really act at the stroke of a pen. Nothing would ever really happen if it weren't for guns and money.

A few thoughts about speed dating: I was surprised, but I enjoyed it for itself. I was really happy by the end, and I went home all giddy. Sometimes I think of my social life as a sort of battery that I have to recharge when it runs down completely. Last night, I sort of had a feeling as if I'd actually recharged all the way to full, where usually I settle for halfway.

I'm trying to think what else to say here. I would figure that if I ended up goin' out with any of the women I met last night, they would probably look at this website eventually. I guess I'll just say that there are a lot of intelligent, attractive, interesting women at this university and I'm quite impressed.

I wasn't as nervous as I thought I would be. I just had regular conversations with people and it was interesting. It's a little hard to picture how that leads to serious relationships. I wonder if the other men were more sort of flirty.

The bottom line is that I would recommend it to other people as a good time in itself and maybe a springboard to new relationships. The food was good too.

I'm totally selling out my slackitude! I'm here in the library at 6:45 PM! Then again, I did spend maybe half an hour of that time chatting with the lovely Miss V. But now I have to figure out what to do or not do with the rest of my evening. I think maybe I need a haircut, but there's only so many places you can go at this time of night for that, and they ain't cheap.

Eh, I've done enough law school stuff today. Time to do some "me" stuff.

Well, it looks like I'm speed dating tomorrow. If anyone has ever done this before and has suggestions, please e-mail me.

I can't believe I'm now getting more MyDoom messages than spam! That sure is a disappointingly successful worm. Today I even got evangelism spam! That's a new one on me.

Why is the sequel to "Ocean's Eleven" called "Ocean's Twelve"? I think if you're going to be cute about it, you would definitely want to go with "Ocean's Twenty-Two".

Thanks to a certain coffee-savvy mysterious blonde bombshell, I have discovered the wonders of espresso. Whoooaaaa! Hee hee hee hee whooo! What am I going to do with all this energy? A nap sounds pretty good right now.

By the way, I'm so far out of elementary school that I actually had to look up how to spell "nyah".

There are all these annoying posters everywhere from a certain annoying company saying: "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah! We told you IRAC doesn't work! You must buy our products and/or services!" That's a load of...hooey! IRAC doesn't work, and it doesn't not work either. It's one way to look at cases that might work or might not work depending on how you use it. It helps to have a system, but there's no one right system. And if you're smart enough to get into law school, I think you're smart enough to come up with a system that works for you.

Also, I thought about doing one of those summer pre-law programs last summer. I'm kind of glad I didn't do it. I don't think it would have helped me much. It might be right for some people, but it's pretty expensive. I haven't run into anyone here that did it.

Contrary to my fears, the whole "gunner" thing hasn't really been a problem. Maybe it just has to do with who I hang out with at school, but people don't seem to sit around and complain about other students who annoy them. A lot of people are still reluctant to volunteer to talk in class, but maybe it's just because they're nervous. I think there are some cliques, though they are generally not really very overt. But people are still generally pretty decent to each other. There haven't been any fistfights, which was one thing that was rumored to happen in law school before I started.

I don't keep one of those blog lists, but here are the ones I read regularly:

• The New Kid on the Block
  
• Best Chicago Maroon Columnist Ever
  
• The Notorious C.H.O.
  
• Cat Tales
  
• Even Newer Kid on the Block
  
• Saucy sauce sauce
  
• Smartest Person Ever
  
• Judge Funny Ha-Ha
  
• Slowest-Loading Page in History
  
• I Really, Really Don't Know Who This Is
  
• Hopefully My Future Boss
  
• More Years than I Got
  
• People I Lived in a Dorm With

I sure hope I don't end up on call in two classes in the same week.

Do you ever feel like not only: "I don't feel like reading this stuff today", but "I don't really feel like thinking about stuff today"? Ugh...thinking...too much effort.

And oh yeah...Friday afternoon I visited the cats. That might have been the first time I had been since before school.

The Grammys? More like the Crappys! Wait, hold up, I take it back...that guy with the pedal steel guitar was like the greatest thing I've ever seen. That dude is awesome.

So just what have I done this weekend?

• I played XBox. I actually found a game that I seemed to be good at. It was some kind of Star Wars driving game where the key seemed to be to find the other players and then throw as many missiles at them as you can. I wasn't so good at the game where you had to walk around shooting people and avoid falling off a ledge into outer space.
  
• I watched a depressing movie. I'm not necessarily down on depressing movies. I like "A Clockwork Orange" and other downer Kubrick flicks a lot. But those movies are very stylish, and not based on true stories.
  
• I went to a potluck. I provided the starch portion of the meal. I think the lady at La Chatelaine might have been flirting with me when I went to buy the bread. How do I know, do you ask? Well, she gave me all these packets of marmalade and honey and butter and jelly for free. Plus she sliced the bread at no extra cost. Hmmm...
  
• I went dancing for the first time in probably four years. My swing skills are somewhat degraded, but I still have a grip on the basics. But the place we went started playing other weird kinds of music. I can't do all 16 dances! I can only swing, swing, swing!
  
• I chatted with the graduate program advisor of the department for my potential joint degree. If I'm going to do this, I have to figure out whether I'll go full-time other department next year or half-that and half-law.

Okay, I have to do away with comments until I can fix them.

Meanwhile...I want to think of what I have to say to future 1Ls now that I've been here a semester and a little bit. I imagined that would be my audience, by and large. I've probably said some of these things before, but I think I'll gather them in one place:

• Highlighters are good. Use a lot of colors and come up with your own system.
  
• Buy your books online to save money if you can.
  
• Make time for a social life, including getting to know your classmates.
  
• Make time for other stuff like exercising and recreational reading.
  
• You don't have to be in a study group if you don't want to be.
  
• It's not fatal if you don't start your outline until two weeks before the exam. In fact, it may not be fatal if you don't outline at all per se. Contrary to popular belief, there's no one right way to study for class or exams.
  
• Then again, I would strongly recommend preparing by taking practice exams under conditions as close as possible to the real thing. That means get your professor's old exams if you can. If you can't, practice with some of the many exams you can download.
  
• If you are concerned or upset about anything, don't keep it to yourself. This is actually good advice all the time, but the thing is that in law school you're particularly susceptible to thinking that your difficulties are all your own when everyone really feels the same way.
  
• Share your notes! I do. Competition is baloney. Being nice is good.
  

Through the wonder of analog cassette tape, I'm listening to a recording of my paternal grandfather interviewing my great-grandfather (his father-in-law). That grandfather actually died before I was born, and I had never heard his voice before today. Pretty amazing. But apparently the pitch on this tape is way off. So next, through the miracle of digital microprocessor technology, I'm going to digitize and pitch-adjust the tape until it's historically accurate.

There's a little bit of on-campus interviewing coming up that I'm going to check out. The thing I need to do first is get my suit all fixed up and readjusted.

Sara says hi to everybody! Say hi to Sara!

I had a bit of a laundry crisis this morning. I'll spare you the gory details, but the end result was that I came dashing in from the parking garage at 8:55 to plant myself in Property class (almost) just in time. That's probably the fastest I've ever run in my life since the last time I ever ran the fastest I'd even run in my life.

The comments are still a bit screwy. I'll let it try to sort itself out for a while before I give up. But, like, what do you think about things and stuff?

Boy oh boy...I think I really am going to enjoy common law estates!

What is there left to say at this point? Things are rather routine and repetitive until I hear back about my joint degree proposal and until I send out feelers for a summer job. I guess there's the slow, pretty much imperceptible process of getting really immersed into the law. Professor Foley pointed out that the law is a 100% human subject, made by humans, for humans. So everything that now seems fixed, unchanging, and unchangeable was once chosen by someone. But it gets really hard over time to consider the possibility of having everyone wake up one day and decide to agree to do everything differently. Stare decisis starts to seem just as inevitable as the sun rising every morning, even though the latter is radically more certain.

The law is also filled with convenient fictions and conceits. "Constructive" anything is like that by defintion. The assumption that the Supreme Court, for example, is entirely apolitical is another. We act like there is such a thing as "The Court" and that it can "say" stuff, "do" stuff, "believe" stuff.

I want to read some papers about how the common law is related to evolutionary theory. I know they're out there. That's the kind of cool stuff I would like to write about someday.

I added the comment thing because Law Dork made me jealous.

And now there's another one!

So...for the uninitiated (e.g. Mom)...you click on the word "Comments", and then you'll see a box where you can either read comments that are there or add one yourself by filling in the text boxes. It's sort of like a mini-guestbook for every post! Cool, huh?

Okay...we're testing out a new comments feature! Let's see if I can comment on my own post!

The downfall of tabbing up casebooks with those Post-It tabs is that it makes my arm itchy when I'm reading. Maybe if I just used fewer tabs...

I lamed out of going to that show last night. I like that band pretty well, but I think the main reason I would have gone would have been the conceit that they would remember me from Chicago. Plus, if I had gone, they wouldn't have played until probably 12:30 or 1 AM and it would have thrown off my whole week. Plus, I already went to an excellent show Friday night.

In other nudes...I mean news...Mike Vrabel is awesome! Yay Buckeyes! He should have been MVP.

"Unintentional"?! "Wardrobe malfunction"?! Watch the replay, folks.

My brother nailed the identity of the "mystery entertainer" at the Super Bowl. He said just before the halftime show that it had to be Justin Timberlake because everyone else was either already in the show or had been arrested recently.

So he ripped the thing off the thing, and then that was the end of the show? That was truly bizarre. And then the naked guy? Was it the same naked guy from Europe?

Have I been here long enough yet? I have my case all briefed up for Con Law tomorrow, I even listened to the oral arguments. Then there's 20 pages of Contracts, but Clovis never goes that fast, never ever. I wonder if it's still cold out there. Ooh...26! That's balmy! It'll be 36 tomorrow for the high! Oh boy, I'm wearing shorts!

Rumor has it that some of the professors here read my humble blog. Great! I'm hoping to get in touch with some of them about possibly doing research for them this summer. They should know just in case they're reading here that this isn't necessarily indicative of my absolute maximum writing capacity. What I do here is pointedly informal, often silly, and sometimes intentionally grammatically disastrous. Sometimes I'll even use words that don't mean anything: like "flituborous". Or "looptid".

I didn't leave my apartment all day again yesterday. But I had an excuse! It was cold!!! Now I'm at school. I need new topics. If you're out there, e-mail me and tell me what you'd like me to talk about.