I'm gonna be a CRIMINAL hunter, dammit

09.30.04

As much as I like the professor for Contracts and appreciate his clear teaching style, I really hate the material sometimes. Since a lot of the cases we read are about business contracts, it pulls in all this business-related crap that I have NO idea about. It makes me want to scream, "I DON'T NEED TO KNOW THIS. I'M GONNA GO CATCH CRIMINALS WHEN I GRADUATE."

After reading through addicting Xanga and Live Journal entries written by people who are complete strangers to me, I've decided that I dislike people who spill their emotional guts into online blogs and just direct all the friends there to read it. A) You can browse strangers' journals, and who the hell wants strangers to know your innermost feelings? B) It makes you a cheap friend. Honestly, when your close friends have something that is bothering them or is something important they want to share, do you REALLY just want to read about it online? Or do you want them to call you or email you and make you feel like they personally care about you?

As much as I rant and complain and spill little tidbits of my life on here, I'm certainly never going to say, "I'm so depressed, life sucks, Will pissed me off today and here's the whole story." Nevermind that Will rarely pisses me off, but if I really need to get something off my shoulders, I talk directly to people I care about for advice and sympathy and just an ear to listen.

As comfortable as people are getting with this whole emotional online diary thing, I can see socially mortifying situations occuring like people announcing their engagements, pregnancies, or new boyfriends online before they tell people in real life. Ouch.

Back to the goddamned contracts casebook...

01:41 PM [link]

Driving made me ANGRY

09.29.04

I've come to the conclusion that driving increases peoples' blood pressure and that the entire world should start using public transportation.

Well, except on my bus route. I hate it when I have to stand.

All kidding aside though, I LOVE not having to drive. I never realized how stressed out driving made me until I didn't have to anymore. Especially this summer when I had to drive downtown every day for my internship, I would be so agitated at all the idiot drivers during rush hour. Now I just hop on, get lost in a book, and let the bus driver nagivate the mad traffic. Plus I'm totally not missing having to worry about the gas prices.

I also love how everything is RIGHT HERE...within a mile of me is almost everything I could ever want. While the weather's still good, it's a nice walk, and when it starts getting cold, it's easy to hop on the bus. Yesterday I walked to Express and Best Buy. The only thing I CAN'T find is a used video game store...there are two used book stores and several used CD stores right here, but no used video game store that I can find ANYWHERE, even outside of walking distance. I think I must be overlooking one.

I bought a lightweight grey zip-up hoodie at Express to wear over my summer clothes, and I just noticed that the inside of the hood and the elbows are a shiny silver material. How cool!

11:12 PM [link]

Elevator etiquette

09.28.04

When you're waiting for the elevator, and the light above it dings and the doors open, what do you do?

If you immediately walk into it without waiting for people to get off, then I hate you.

Nothing drives me nuts more than people who don't seem to realize that there are people in the elevator who need to get off. Where do you think the elevator came from? Some magical dimension where it was waiting empty until you pushed the "up" button?

This rant comes from getting knocked in the head today by some idiot girl who started walking into the elevator before the doors were even fully open. I was standing right in the middle of them trying to walk out, and BAM, idiot girl strikes.

This rant also applies to any other sort of enclosure that people might be getting off of while you're trying to get on, such as the bus. It makes perfect sense; people have to empty out to make room for you to get on.

12:23 PM [link]

Don't ask...they wont't tell

09.23.04

In law school, professors don't answer questions. They simply turn it back around and ask you what you think. They also spend most of the time asking students questions about the reading assignments. If you ask me, the students should be the ones getting paid for answering all these questions!

As strange as it sounds, all the questions do a really capable job of guiding the class through what's important. It's just gotten really predictable, when someone is asking a question, I can almost recite along with the professor, "Well, what do YOU think?"

05:13 PM [link]

Cookies

09.20.04

One of the girls in my section who is running for the Student Bar Association gave me a cookie today that was decorated with the words "Vote for Me for SBA." It was a really good cookie and I was really hungry at the time. She doesn't need to know I already planned on voting for her.

05:34 PM [link]

TV news

09.19.04

Although I didn't watch the Emmy broadcast, it's very nice to see that both Arrested Development and Sarah Jessica Parker received much-deserved awards. If you haven't seen Arrested Development, you're missing out. I'm not a big sitcom fan, but this show is beyond hilarious.

In other TV news, THEY SHOT BOSCO, THE BASTARDS!!! And it was the lead singer of Kiss who ordered the shootings. Strange.

10:21 PM [link]

Still weird

09.16.04

Is it strange that, a month and a half after moving here, I'm still weirded out by the fact that I live in Chicago? And that I'm officially living on my own? Does anyone ever get used to changes like that, or does it just slowly become normal?

The other day I was reading an article on Yahoo about Chicago creating the country's largest network of cameras in public areas that can be scanned for criminal behavior and used by 911 dispatchers to zoom in on target areas (it's about time someone in the US did this, and amazingly, the ACLU says it doesn't mind since the cameras are in public areas), and all of a sudden I thought, "I LIVE there."

In some ways, I often wonder if I've become immune to it too fast. Every weekday I walk to the Sears Tower to catch the bus home. It strikes me as odd when I get run over by tourists walking backwards trying to get the entire Sears Tower in their camera's viewfinder. It's just become normal for me to stand next to it every day, yet here someone is trying to memorialize it, and quite possibly won't visit it again in their lifetime.

So in some ways I think it's crazy I live here and haven't gotten used to it yet, and in some ways I'm way TOO used to it. I still haven't gone shopping on Michigan Avenue yet, despite taking the bus down it quite frequently; I'm waiting until Amy comes to visit in October. Sigma Kappa shopping time!

I also think it's weird that I'm actually in law school. After all the preparation, after all the test taking and the applying and the deciding and the worrying and the stressing, I'm there. And it's not as hard or as scary as I imagined (although the idea of my entire grade resting on one final exam is pretty damn scary), thanks to the professors who are really capable. Well, except for my Torts prof, who infamously has his own way of looking at torts. He's spectacularly brilliant, is rumored to only sleep every other night, and is working on the Third Restatement of Torts, but he's not the best at engaging the class.

Now I must go and replay the last 2 1/2 hours of my life; here's a public service announcement: don't forget to save your video games before you get killed by crazy warrior monks.

11:00 PM [link]

Airhead

09.09.04

I cannot concentrate for the life of me. I keep sneezing and my head's all stuffy. I thought my cold/sinus problems/whatever it was disappeared a few days ago, but apparently not. I also chose the worst place to study; someone told me the 10th floor of the library was a really nice place to read, but it's not. The quiestest sounds are amplified and there are way too many people here. I prefer my secluded 7th floor.

Anyone want to finish my Contracts reading for me?

01:35 PM [link]

Weirdo

09.08.04

There's this girl in one of my classes at school who is weird. At first I thought she was nice, but now I've amended that to be, "Nice, but just plain weird." During class, she hammers away at her laptop writing pages and pages of notes. They're not class notes, however. She writes really weird poetry (one today was about asking someone whose dog they are) and does things like type the Constitution's Preamble over and over. Or we'll be talking about trespass of personal property as it relates to spam email, and she'll be typing about some "invalid" waking up "in terror" because his toes are going numb. She also has an obsession with alphabet poetry - she'll try to come up with some poem where the subject of each sentence starts with a different letter of the alphabet.

I hope she doesn't know I'm reading her screen, but it's so distracting when she's pounding away while the professor is talking. I can't imagine how she keeps up in class; sure, it's a BORING class (my least favorite of the four I have), but come on. Peoples' work ethics have really baffled me already; we're in law school for crying out loud, I don't want to hear that you don't think you need to read for class anymore because you take notes from the lecture! Whatever, I shouldn't complain, it'll just translate to me having a higher rank later on.

04:25 PM [link]

We're not the only ones...

09.03.04

One thing that annoys me: Americans believing that our terrorist problems are a lot worse than other countries, or even just being ignorant of the fact that terrorists DO attack other countries. Case in point: the current Russian school hostage situation. Two years ago there was the Russian theater hostage situation, of which none of the Americans I talked to had any clue about. The two planes that were just recently hijacked in Russia didn't receive anywhere near the amount of attention that 9/11 did. Sure, it was missing the hitting-tall-buildings element, but it was still a bunch of crazies simultaneously hijacking planes with innocent people aboard.

Americans don't even have to deal with repeated assaults spread out over years like Russians and Israelis do. The Russians have the crazy fuckers from Chechnya taking hostages, and the Israelis have the crazy Palestinian militant fuckers blowing them up (although it makes me laugh, in a morbid, sad way, when you hear that Palestinian suicide bombers didn't kill any Israelis but DID manage to kill other Palestinians).

This isn't discounting 9/11 in any way; it just makes me feel more compassionate when I hear about terrorist attacks in Russia and Israel. It was so traumatic going through one event here in the U.S. that I couldn't even imagine having repeated assaults on innocent people and never knowing when they're going to strike next, but being sure that it's inevitable. I do wish for other Americans to feel more compassionate too; now that we've been through an attack by crazy militant fuckers, we should do more than just watch the new reports and figure, "That's in Russia, oh well."

12:32 PM [link]