dang dreams

Last night I dreamt I was in an abandoned amusement park at night, searching for something I can't remember. I wasn't looking through my eyes, but from an isometric overhead view, like this:







Eventually I found a wide tunnel full of abandoned cars. I guessed that the tunnel led to an underground parking garage. The cars looked ancient, 50 years old at least, all rusty with broken glass and cobwebs spanning their steering wheels. It was a traffic jam. I wondered where the drivers went.



As I entered the tunnel, my vision shifted to the first-person. The tunnel spiraled downward for some length before abruptly opening on a huge, circular indoor lot. My guess was right; it was a parking garage. The place was well-lit and the cars here looked newer than the cars in the mouth of the tunnel. I sensed that I was close to what I was looking for. My intuition led me straight to a black, boxy looking car in the center of the lot. It had an 80s style and was probably the newest thing here, hardly any signs of wear. The door was unlocked-- no surprise-- and I stepped into the driver's seat.



After I closed the door, I felt a sudden shiver of fear and looked at the rear view mirror. Something wasn't right. I adjusted the mirror so I could clearly see the driver's side of the car behind me. Where there had been empty space not a minute ago, I now saw a decayed skeleton, still wearing a fancy suit. Turning around I saw that all the cars were not empty but filled with corpses, some looking like they'd died in terror, clawing at the glass. The windows were no longer broken but whole...



I quickly turned away and tried to open the driver's side door. It was locked. I bashed the glass to no avail. That's when I first noticed the smell inside the car-- and knew I had a passenger.

...at this point I pressed Escape to reach the main menu and reload my game. No, I'm not making this up. This happens to me all the time. Most people wake up from their scary dreams. I have an in-dream mechanism for keeping the fun alive. I selected an old saved game, and soon I was back in the amusement park, earlier in the day. I don't remember the rest-- something to do with wizards.

don't tase me bro

I've settled into a routine over the last couple weeks. My typical school day goes like this:

Morning: class
Lunch: eat with classmates, often discuss cases
Afternoon: classes (Wednesday-Friday), dicking around on the internet (Monday-Tuesday)
Late afternoon: nap, sometimes cut short by meetings and errands
~5PM-11PM: study in the law school library, with dinner thrown in somewhere, usually eaten by myself . I don't always work to 11 every night, and I don't always start at 5.
After studying: come home, study chess for an hour or so, go to bed. Been watching Battlestar Galactica lately, too.

It's a pretty comfortable routine and I hope I don't get too bored. Or boring.

The temperature has dropped sharply over the last week. Starting to get chilly. California lifers glancing sideways at each other like kids looking into a deep dark well. The kind that doesn't echo when you drop a stone into it. Like the one that little Billy fell into last summer, never to be seen again.

Well, maybe not that bad. But with the winter chill will come a social chill as the 1Ls freak out about exams. I'm not looking forward to the quiet weekends, the annoyed "What do you want?"s, the stress under everyone's eyes. They say 1L fall is the worst semester of law school. Why can't people just chill.

RIP Alex

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070911/ap_on_sc/obit_alex_the_parrot
:(

1L: two week review

I've had a little more than two weeks of classes now, and overall it's been pretty fun. The material is more interesting than I thought it'd be. I thought I'd only care about criminal procedure, constitutional law, and IP, none of which I'm taking this semester, but torts, contracts, property, and civil procedure actually keep me engaged. I think this is because we've been looking so closely at particular cases that I haven't had time to step back and evaluate the philosophical underpinnings and find them dull.

Apparently "Coach" Heise, my torts professor, was John Elway's backup quarterback at Stanford. That explains his mannerisms. I usually leave his class feeling like I haven't learned much, though, either about the law or about how to "think like a lawyer." Almost everything I've learned in his class was gleamed from the casebook and not from lecture or in-class questioning of students.

Prof. Summers really hammers the lawyering methodology. Most of his questions in class are directed at criticizing the cases we've read (and the student's briefs of those cases) and encouraging us to read carefully, talk with our classmates outside class, and think creatively. It's fun hearing him tear apart the opinions in our casebook-- casebook that he cowrote with another professor here.

I'd estimate my workload at 3-3.5 H cores equivalent. Homework is 3 hours on average every night, maximum 5.5 on bad days (Tuesday nights). Not too bad. Less work than college. I'm glad I went straight from college to here, because many of the students who took time off seem to have trouble getting back into the academic world. It'll kick up though. 1L is supposed to be the hardest year.

Property

We watched this video in Property today:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pUPsfYJONrU

Later our professor mentioned that Michael Jackson didn't invent the Moonwalk, then performed the dance for 30 seconds in case any of us forgot how it looked. The little "Hoo!" at the end was the clincher. Bear in mind he's a 60-year old balding white man with crazy fashion taste (he usually comes to class wearing a blue-on-white pinstripe suit and pants, pink ruffle-collared shirt, and a loudly colored bowtie. All he needs is a porkpie hat and a cane to twirl).

What an awesome class.

According to Prof. Alexander the Moonwalk was invented by James Brown, but I think I've seen it even earlier. See Cab Calloway's moves here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=HaZOXF83zBg

In other news, my Lawyering professor read everyone's Facebook profile that he could view. =/

today's ingredient

I met a girl who is a human Necker cube. One second she'll look cute, then suddenly she'll look like the host from Iron Chef. I cannot explain this any further.