Wewease the secwet weapon!!!

Ahhh, callbacks. I have reached the part of the interview season where my firmie friends fly me out to their firm to meet 6 or 7 attorneys and find out if we are a good personality fit for each other. If OCI was like speed dating, this is the like the third date. To quote a friend- who was actually speaking of the callback process- "we aren't ready to sleep together, but I might consider getting handsy on the couch after a glass of wine."

This week I am in Chicago, looking at about 5 firms. Last week I was in another city, which shall remain regionless, when I encountered the following: "Wewease the secwet weapon!!!" Ok, no one I was talking to at the firm actually said that, but they might as well have. One of the women who worked in the department I want had an accent/speech impediment/bizarre vocal tic that made her sound like Gussie Mausheimer from An American Tale. Do you know how difficult it is to ask intelligent questions and get a good sense of what a firm has to offer when you are humming "There are no cats in America?" Role play with a friend. You'll see what I mean.

Must... find... job....

I haven't mentioned that the past three weeks have been spent interviewing for my summer job, and, just to pile on the pressure, THE NEXT TEN YEARS OF MY LIFE!!!! See, the place you work after your second year of law school is most likely the place you will go after you graduate. Most firms don't even interview third year students, because they want 2nd years to spend a summer with them so they can make them permanent offers and retain them forever and ever amen. Everyone is well aware of this, so the summer job hunt at Harvard is a giant production. That starts before you leave for the summer at the end of your 1L year. Firms PAY MONEY to come to Harvard and have 20 min initial interviews with students in Sept. If they like them and have room for them, they ask them back to their offices for callback interviews, a four-hour interviewing extravaganza. Callbacks are nice. They fly you out to their office, put you up in a nice hotel, and reimburse all of your expenses. Usually they take you to lunch or dinner (or both) while you are in town.

To accomodate this process, Harvard cancels school for a week so that we don't miss anything while we are flying all over the country interviewing with the firms we want. It really is a little ridiculous. The office of career services is committed to maintaining their 100% employment upon graduation rate, so they really hype up the second summer and the importance of locking down your future 30 seconds into your second year. Meanwhile, the office of public interest, concerned that everyone will be pushed into firms and not into legal aid or government work, starts a counter-campaign. Their slogans go a little like this:

"Attention 2L's! Do not feel pressured to do OCI (on campus interviewing) and work at a firm this summer. Not everyone is cut out for firm work. Last year, .00000043% of graduating students went into a very fulfilling career in public interest work! And Harvard pays back your $40,958,720,495,872,094,857 dollar loans if you work below the poverty line (which is $50K at Harvard), so don't be sucked into the high-paying, lunch-buying, luxury-hotel-accomodating hype! You have another choice!"

I have one friend who is not interviewing with firms. She has never wanted to work at a firm, so I say good for her. I have always wanted to work at a firm, so I am undaunted by the public interest counter-campaign. Apparently, so are 99% of my classmates.

I have callbacks in two cities, as Patto and I haven't decided where to live after graduation. So for the next two weeks, I will be zipping around Atlanta and Chicago, talking to about 8 firms. I wonder if firms will reimburse my dry cleaning expenses....

Garcon, I'll have the PB&J

So I know I'm all over the place this week (it comes from avoiding my studies with a passion unmatched in these parts), but I just read something in my tax casebook that bears sharing. And trust me, there are not many passages in my tax casebook that fit that description.

The subject matter is business meal deductions. Here ya go: "Suppose a theatrical agent takes his clients out to lunch at the expensive restaurants that the clients demand. Of course he can deduct the expense of their meals, from hich he derives no pleasure or sustenance, but can he also deduct the expense of his own? He can, because he cannot eat more cheaply; he cannot munch surreptitiously on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich brought from home while his client is wolfing down tournedos Rossini followed by the souffle au grand marnier..."

Awesome. Patte, anyone?

Too Cool

This a picture of Caesar, taken by my new MacBook with the "thermal image" effect on. Yes, that is my arm and neck in the background. I am clearly a cold person, with the exception of my delts. clearly.

I have 16 other effects to choose from. Let's see what Caesar looks like in he "comic book" style.

Way to make an impression

Honk if this has happened to you:

You meet someone, maybe at a party or a conference, and have a wonderful, interesting, thought-provoking conversation with them. They are brilliant, they are fun, they are witty-- they think you are brilliant and fun and witty. You think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.

Then you see them the next day, and they smile and wave, and you smile and wave too! And then you realize they were waving at the person behind you, and they didn't even see you. But they see you now, because you are smiling and waving like an idiot and... they can't place you. They tilt their head and furrow their brow as they pass, unable to remember why you look familiar, if indeed you even do.

Ego. Bruised.

Luckily for me, right after this true-story, a guy passed me and smiled and waved! And I had no idea who he was. But I smiled and waved back, and even tossed in a "hey" as I passed. I didn't want him to know the difference, even if I was "heying" at the guy behind him...

Life is... cyclical.

RIP Compaq, Helloooooo Mac

My PC has crashed for the last time. You see, the part of the computer brain that receives signals about the power source seized, and it stopped recognizing that it was receving power from either the battery or the adapter. It has done this twice before. This time it looked like it might be time to make out a will and call the family. Computer experts agreed to fix it for anywhere from $300 to $more than its worth, so Patto and I decided to scrap it and get a new computer. And I wanted a Mac. So a cute little mac I've got.

Now, I am not a paid spokeswoman for Apple, but I love my new MacBook. It has a built in camera so I can video-conference, it does all the nifty creative things I want to do but doesn't do all of the things I will never do, so I don't feel bad about having paid for them. It even has a magnetic power cord, so that if someone trips over it, it disconnects rather than pulling my laptop into the floor and mangling it. Heck, even if it did mangle it, my warranty covers accidental damage too.

Now maybe I'll get around to doing the research I've been putting off because I didn't have a laptop and I don't like sitting at Patto's desktop. Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe I'll take more nifty, distorted pics.

Toes and the sadness that is IRRAR

I take offence to the freakishly long ape-toes comment. I think people with... advanced toe growth should be celebrated and admired for their toe resourcefullness, not mocked and jeered and commented about in their sister's blogs. I think this is a common case of toe jealousy, as we all know long toes rule.

Now that we are all a little more educated, I would like to explore a REAL disability, the inability to reconcile one's reading assignments with reality (IRRAR). Many Harvard Law professors suffer from this terrible and deabilitating disease, and continuously assign 100 pages or so of reading per night, though they can only humanly cover 15 pages or so in class. Therefore, at approximately 5 weeks into the semester, the professor is on page 100, but expects you to have read through page 436 in the text. Knowing you could be called on to answer in-depth questions about 300 pages of text is not comforting. By the time November rolls around, I expect I will be called on and will be responsible for whatever the professor actually covers that day, plus the 900 pages he somehow thought he would get to, and will on that day decide to jump ahead 500 pages in an effort to "get caught up." Sigh.

If you think your professor suffers from IRRAR, ask him or her this simple hypothetical (they love hypotheticals): "Train A leaves Professorville traveling at 5 mph. Train B leaves Studentville traveling at 300 mph. At what point do they meet?" If your professor answers with anything other than "They don't! The Studentville train must stop!" s/he probably suffers from IRRAR. Seek professional help immediately.