. . . and what should never be

Tonight, my ears are bleeding. No blunt trauma. No earwigs. No. This was worse. And if you know me at all (and if you don’t know me by now, you will nevernevernever know me ooohoohoohwu) you know this now requires a story. Right, so, I was driving to the hospital (nota bene: ears not bleeding yet) to take Kim some dinner. So far, so good. Then I turn onto the long, picturesque drive that leads up to Children’s and Women’s Hospital, resplendent with tasteful landscaping and whimsical bronze statuary grotesquely appropriate for a hospital that deals with women and the tricycle-motors they periodically squeeze out in fits of bad judgment and poor taste in men. As I’m coasting along, a pain slammed simultaneously into both sides of my head with roughly the force one might expect to be produced by the collision of a moist, smallish planet and a bean burrito the size and shape of Michael Moore’s smug sense of self-importance traveling at exactly the speed of sound. For a sound it was. And by sound, I mean the squall a demon might make who has just inadvertently shut his scrotum up in his car door.

Mothers of small children should promptly usher them from the blog. In fact, mothers of small children have no business reading this particular blog. The child will be able to taste the misanthropy of my blog in her breast-milk for days should she read the sentence after next. You were warned.

My radio, in direct violation of all things good, decent, copasetic, and cool, broadcast Dolly Parton’s cover of “Stairway to Heaven.” Look, if your ears are experiencing sympathy-hemorrhaging, don’t be mad at me, I tried to warn you.
But that wasn’t all. As I’m sure you have already surmised, I was paralyzed by the inequity of what I was hearing. But my foretaste of perdition was not yet perfected. For before me was a Buick being driven by a geriatric masochist with nothing better to do than maliciously drive in front of me. Now, at the time I was behind the Buick, my speedometer was reading 4mph. That wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that I know for a fact that my speedometer is fast by 3.5mph. So there I was, being subjected to aural sodomy, trapped in my car, my flesh, my corporeal prison, behind a septuagenarian succubus, experiencing the sort of time-lapse torment usually experienced only during your required college public speaking class at 2:30PM, Friday afternoon. Oh, sure, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Uh, Mike, why didn’t you just pass her or change the channel, or both?” I pray you never have to understand why those two options were denied me. I dream of a world where men are powerful enough to push car stereo buttons while yet in the presence of the desecration of Led Zeppelin classics. I aspire to own a car that can accelerate, pass a Buick, and slow back down before the next speed bump. But until Dolly Parton repents and I make enough bank to trade my Honda Civic for an Acura NSX, we’re all just gonna have to pray a little harder on the nights I carry a sack of Taco Bell to Kimmy.

Validate Me!!!

I logged onto the internet for the first time in 1995. I was at Beeson Divinity School at Samford U and we had a professor who wanted to force us into the digital age and had us turn in an assignment via email. The temptation for people like me, who have written entire papers on an actual typewriter, is to say that "it was a simpler time." Well, it wasn't. Information came through labor, card catalogues, and the f*&#ing yellow pages. And grades? Well, they came in the mail in a paper envelope. And that sort of thing could be checked ONCE and only once per day. Not so anymore. Back in December, I was largely and blissfully unaware that my Cumberland School of Law grades could be viewed upon submission ONLINE!! That is, until Will "El General" Motlow calls and informs me grades were out.
Now second semester is over and I'm a nervous f*&#ing wreck. I know the key sequence to log onto the school web portal and flip to the "grades" screen so well I have become my own macro. My wife makes fun of me for this, asking me each day, "How many times did you look today?" It is a jibe well founded. I'm a junky, and I need help. It's silly, really. I mean, even if you called RIGHT NOW and told me what all my grades are, what my new GPA is, and where I now stand in the class rankings as a result, it's not like it matters all that much. I made a solemn vow to myself before I started law school that I would not discuss my grades with classmates. As I found out first semester, personal privacy and grades at the Cumberland Rumor Mill don't always mix. And you know, my updated resume won't be worth diddly until like, what, September? So, I should relax, have a(nother) martini, and remember that by worry I can't change the color of a single hair on my head, add a second to my life, or avoid the inevitable reality that soon and very soon, I, too, shall pass.
Oh, and the summer job is going fine, blah, blah, blah.
Grace,
Mike

No Such Thing as the "Real World"

FREEDOM!!!! I feel better now. Exams are so totally done. I’ve already gotten my first grade back (Property). I have even gone to the DMV to change the vanity license plate on my Civic since “1L” is no longer appropriate. My new plates, you ask? “I OBJEKT.” The “k” is a little homage to my honey, “Kim.” By the way, if you spell Kim backwards, you almost get Mike. Close. Close enough to be sickeningly cutesy.
BUT as good as it feels to be done with exams and have a paper license plate on my car, there are a few things that are still congregating uncomfortably in the back of my mind. As it turns out, there are ten of them.

Top Ten Eerie Feelings I Can’t Seem To Shake Since Exams Are Over
10. Sometimes I get this “not-so-fresh” feeling.
9. My life is going way too well for there NOT to be an LLR assignment due on Monday.
8. I’m almost certain that at some point during the second semester I prayed something like, “Oh, dear God, if you’ll just let me not be called on today, I swear that when I get out of law school I’ll . . .” generally followed by something dreadfully unprofitable.
7. I read “One L.” Scott Turow was a whiney little law student who surrounded himself with whiney little law students. I didn’t do that, did I?
6. Corky will have his revenge.
5. I should have paid better attention during the Westlaw and Lexis training sessions, seeing as how I put that stuff on my resume.
4. Shouldn’t I be studying something right now?
3. Shouldn’t I be driving back to Birmingham right now?
2. Wasn’t I supposed to mail something to the Alabama State Bar?
1. Do I really have to go to work in the morning?

Despantalontada

I’m not a first year law student. Not any more. Not now that I’ve finished exams. Which is to say, I may now use the phrase, “Well, when I was a first year law student . . .” and then add whatever mindless verbal flibberdy jibbert I wish to belittle right after that. Allow me to demonstrate:
“Why, I remember back when I was a first year law student, people used to give a flying load of dingo’s kidneys what happened on ‘The O.C.’ but now that California has finally been smote (smoten? Smited? Smitten? Geschmotten? Esmotado? I missed that day in seminary) by the angry God of James Dobson, and Arizona does in fact have ocean front property, I greatly prefer to watch ‘The Scotsdale.’”
Right. So, exams are done, I’m in Mobile, and all is well with the world. My lovely bride bought me a celebratory bottle of 18 year old Scotch with which I am now appropriately acquainted. If Amanda’s blog’s revolve around food and traipsing about pantsless, mine appear to involve booze. It appears that I may be a drinker with a writing problem. C’est la vie. There are worse lots in life. One could be reduced to making a living as an Evidence instructor. God save us all!

Olivejuice

OK, so I had officially gone crosseyed looking at FRE 803(4), and if you don't know what that means, I DEMAND that you go to whatever house of worship causes you the least amount of cognitive disonance and do whatever candlelighting, incense burning, donation making, genuflecting, or whatever makes your deity happy as you praise your conception of ultimate reality for not making you learn the Federal Rules of Evidence as they apply to hearsay exceptions.
Right, so I'm doing that, and watching SNL, and imbibing a dirty martini. Oh, those garlic stuffed olives! Oh, the juniper berry! Once again, I digress. SNL does this Mother's Day sketch in which two sons are with their mother for brunch when their dad shows up in drag (Johnny Knoxville) while in the midst of his sex change transformation. The younger son is being all obsequious. The older brother calls him on it saying: "You're only sucking up to dad because you're flunking out of law school," at which point younger son looks at dad-mom and says, "Tiffany (for that is what dad-mom wishes now to be called), I am a professional video game player trapped in a lawyer's body." I so almost know how that feels. I am a professional student trapped in a lawyer's body. Which sucks, because lawyers have like really short lifespans. Crap.
Happy Mother's Day!
Grace

Mobile, 10 years ago

So I was driving back to Mobile tonight, coming down off the caffeine and M&M high that defines my exam taking aura. I had both windows rolled down, moon roof open. I will unashamedly confess to listening to the “80’s on 8” on XM, although I quickly switch to the 90’s or Braves baseball whenever they play anything by Michael Jackson. Anyway, I took Prof. Bishop’s “Contracts II” exam this afternoon. Ouch. I mean, I didn’t miss a single one of his classes. Few cases did I skip. I read the Law Review notes. I listened to review CD’s. I lit a candle at the Catholic Church down the street. Ok, I just made up that last one. Bust seriously, there was stuff on that exam that would have made Williston, Corbin, and Llewellyn say, in perfect synchronicity, “Where in Vishnu’s trousers did that come from?” I’m paraphrasing, off course. But what’s done is done.
And I digress. I had temporarily forgotten that today is a very special day in my life, kind of. Once this evening when the “80’s on 8” pissed me off by playing some Duran Duran, I switched back to the Braves and heard one of the on-air announcers say, “I thought Cinco de Mayo was always on Friday.” Fortunately, Skip Carey was there to put things back into their Hispano-mathematical alignment, and I realized today is May the 6th.
You know that stupid interview question you sometimes get asked, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” If you had asked me that question exactly 10 years ago today, you would have been asking me at my college graduation. And the correct answer, which I would not have given, would have been, “Using some creative vulgarity to describe the physical sensation of having survived Bishop’s contracts exam, certainly.” And that would have been a very strange thing to hear from a Religion major graduating from the University of Mobile Religion, class of 1995. What a long, strange trip it’s been. And thank you, God, that it isn’t over.

The Holy Roast

So, I'm all sitting here trying to think of some witty, auspicious beginning to my first blog. I decided that idea wreaked of cat flatulance. I am instead now sitting here wondering if I misspelled cat flatulance. Flatulence. Whatever. I hate cats. I have hated them since I was 16 and had just gotten my '77 Nova painted black in the middle of an Alabama summer. That night some miserable cat walked across the top of my car and nearly ruined the finish. And for those of you wondering, NO, I did not buy the car new! I was still in single digits when that car was built. Actually, Reagan was running for his second term before I hit double digits, thank you very much!

Anyway, I used to write this "Dear Friends and Family" letter to keep, well, my friends and family updated. It was an email thing and I think technology may have outstripped the genre. So I'm gonna try this. As soon as I take a nap, recover from that Civil Procedure exam I took this morning, and yell at the dogs a bit. Cheers.