This time, gmail for sure.

I'll start off talking about gmail so that I don't forget.

I got a GMail account last week. Google is giving them out to people who post regularly on blogger, and I guess I've been posting regularly enough to get the invite. I feel so special. If you don't know about this, gmail is gonna be google's answer to Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. The difference being google's willingness to give you a gigabyte of space. But they don't guarantee that they'll really delete your mail (they call it "archiving" instead), and they scan your mail to be able to provide you with advertisements. So I started up an account there, the interface is extremely slick, and the site is also currently unbelievably fast, since there are virtually (no pun intended) no users.

Property exam was today. 3 hours of my life that I'll never get back, 3 hours during which I probably proved that I had at best a "B" knowledge of the subject. Though last semester taught me that law school grades don't measure anything about knowledge of the subject. Unfortunately, that's the only thing last semester taught me, so I didn't really know how to do things better this semester. But at least it's over. It's the least bullshit-able of the classes that we have this semester.

The end of this semester heralds the end of my time in B section, class of 2006. Next year, my section is scattered to the winds to the classes of their choosing. We haven't really had to make new friends all year, because we've gone from class to class together. Next year we have to meet some of the rest of our class.

Provided I can afford to return next year. :)

Gmail and more.

Last night, S and I went to the Rasputina concert together. Murder by Death opened for them, and they also have a cellist, though they're a little harder than Rasputina. They were ok, they showed some promise. But there's nothing that makes me want an album less than someone saying "This next song is about zombies." I thought the music was pretty good, but the vocals weren't mixed very well. That's the life of an opening band, though, I guess.

Rasputina came out and played for about an hour and a half. It's always surprising to go to a concert where the vocalist can sound as good as or better than on the studio album. But Melora sounded that way.

The audience was quite amusing. Take all of the people from high school who were uncomfortable at social events add all of the people who might have been labeled as "trenchcoat mafia," age some of them 5-15 years, and that's what the audience was. It's also not really a band you can dance to, in any way, though that's not to say some people didn't try. Well, one person, anyway. You know the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine dances? That's what this lady looked like dancing sometimes. She got really into the one song, and pretty soon legs and thumbs were flying everywhere. S laughed for a long time when I pointed out the similarity.

At one point in the show, Melora said, "We like it here, so depressing and forgotten." That pretty much sums up that part of Pittsburgh, and probably a lot of Pittsburgh, for that matter. The show was at Mr Smalls, in Millvale, this rinky-dink area of Pittsburgh North of the North side that really is depressing and forgotten.

Finals are upon me again, but that hasn't stopped me from going to a Pirates game two nights ago, and then the Rasputina concert last night. I've got jobs to apply for, mountains of Property to study, and I can't concentrate on doing those things. Other things, I've been pretty good about. School/Law related things, not so good.

Which probably means I'll be posting a lot here this weekend. :)

Disturbing trends

Last semester, there were a few people that I hung out with extensively. At my house, out for bar review, wherever. This semester, they've been gone pretty much every weekend, so there's been no hanging out. None. Which means that my "going out" time has dropped to virtually nothing as well.

So the first trend is: friends I had, I've been losing. Or it feels that way since we're not doing as much anymore.

Then there's also my friend acquisition trend. The only friends I've made this semester have been people that I talk to online (who are from school), but that I don't really do anything with in real life.

I'm not sure which trend is more disturbing, but they're both unsettling. In spite of all efforts to be pretty good about acquiring friends, I've become worse at doing that. And even if I do acquire a real life friend, I can't seem to keep them.

A great day for the Constitution

I've written before about my Constitutional Law class. Worst class ever. Worst professor ever.

Today we were talking about obscenity and pornography. Gave me a chance to inject some fun into the class. The first case that we were talking about was the case where a guy went into a courthouse (circa 1970) wearing a jacket that said "Fuck the draft" on it. In the opinion, the Supreme Court wrote that "one man's vulgarity is another man's lyric," and said that it was ok that he wore the jacket.

Not so for pornography. The Court said that it had no social value, yadda yadda yadda.

Prof: "So how do we reconcile these two cases."

Me: (raising my hand and getting called on....mine was the only hand up) "Well, I'm not sure that you can. It seems like the Court is making a content-based judgment on the material. 'One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric'....while I might not like bukkake videos, there's obviously a market for them, and others should be able to watch them."

Stifled laughs all around. Including mine. I like to laugh, I've been laughing about this whole scene ever since this afternoon. Mostly because I don't think the prof (a strong women's rights advocate) knew what bukkake is.

While talking about the "fuck the draft" case, she had been very careful to not say "fuck the draft," so when she called on me again for my participation in the discussion, I said that maybe a distinction between the two was that "fuck the draft" is political speech, whereas porn isn't. That was kind of amusing too, just because she's so politically correct.

I really wanted to say "fisting or bukkake" in class, but I didn't have the balls. I felt that would be too over the top, too blatant that I was trying to be shocking.

The good news is that we didn't finish the pornography discussion. Tuesday I can try to work in "fisting" and "coprophilia."

Scary porn

I can't say that I watch porn. Well, ok, but not a lot. I have one porn DVD to my name and one VHS tape that has 20 minutes of porn on it from years ago, something I taped when I was in junior high school. I got the DVD at a computer show...buy 3 for $20, so my friend and I split it. I took 2 DVDs, he took the other, 6 months later we switched. It's not good porn, obviously, but it's ok cheap porn. Just hacked together sex scenes from other porn movies that may or may not have incorporated more of a plot.

Even without watching much porn (or maybe because I don't), there are things that scare me about it.

For example, on one of the DVDs that we bought, there are two girls who are both on the VHS tape that I have from long ago, doing the um, same sorts of things. How scary is it to recognize people from porn? Along those same lines, at least two of the DVDs have different scenes with the same actors. How scary is it to recognize a porn actor, before seeing his face, by seeing his cock? Or even recognizing his method of jerking off onto the chick's boobs at the end of the scene.

I also hate it when they do just completely out of context things in these movies. Some chick shows up in a skirt, not wearing panties, but wearing rollerblades, and you want to take her rollerblades off and start licking and sucking on her feet? Ugh. Dude, you're nasty, she's nasty, just fuck her already. I'm not here to watch you put up some pretense of having something more than dirty sex with this chick. 5 minutes from now, you're going to be fucking her ass, I think we can skip the foot licking.

Then, the other day, while watching the DVD, I realized that the sheets on the bed in the movie are extremely similar to sheets that I own. Not entirely identical, or at least, if they are, the sheets in the video had faded quite a bit. You know you've gotten bad sheets if you see them in a porno film. Ugly paisley, that's what they are. Guidelines for life: don't buy carpet that you'd see in a hotel, don't buy a comforter you'd see in a hotel, don't buy sheets you'd see in a porno.

The great irony of the sheets, though: my mom bought them.

LSAT fun.

I was talking with someone about my LSAT essay, he suggested typing it up and posting it here, so I am.

LSAT WRITING SAMPLE TOPIC

Susan, an archaeologist, has the opportunity to participate in one of two archaeological digs and must choose between the two. Write an argument for the archaeologist's choosing one option over the other, keeping in mind the following goals:

• The archaeologist wants to achieve prominence in her field.
• The archaeologist wants to have autonomy in her work.

[Insert two descriptions of the two different digs here. ]

My answer:

If Susan must choose to participate in one archaeological dig and she only has two options from which to choose, clearly she must choose one option over the other.

Suppose Susan were to choose both. This cannot happen, however, because she can only choose one.

Likewise, she cannot choose not to go to a dig, as she must go to only one dig.

Therefore, since Susan must choose one of the options and not the other, she will be choosing one option over the other, as there is no other possibility.

Deja vu all over again.

I got an email last night from Reunion.com. For god knows what reason, I punched in my information on classmates.com years ago, and now they send me the monthly update on how many people from Emmaus High School have signed up in the last month. They've been sending it to me for years, I don't really care, it just goes to my Yahoo! Bulk Mail (Spam) folder, and I delete it from there. No big deal.

The mail that they send out is obviously generated by a script. I can already picture the SQL query that it uses to pull the information from their database. Having said that, it should be pretty easy to customize the script a little bit. You'll see what I mean in a minute.

The subject line (the only thing I've seen of the email other than who it's from) is: "2 New Students, 0 People Looking for jdl"

Now, I didn't need to be told that no one from high school is looking for me. I knew that already. When I was in high school, no one was looking for me. 10 years later, they sure as hell aren't looking for me.

But did I need reunion.com to tell me that? Did they really have to go out of their way to tell me that I'm a pathetic loser with no remaining friends from high school? I didn't need them to point that out for me, and I can't say that it has made me any more inclined to use the services on the site.

So what I want to know is why the dipshit programmer didn't think about this when coding the script. Obviously that dipshit programmer should have realized that he also probably falls into that category, the one who gets "0 people looking for you!" emails.

Then again, that dipshit programmer might live in India. Taking a job that might have kept me out of lawschool. Oh nevermind, that makes me feel better.