I suck at NateJournals!  My threat of NateJournals nonstop is coming to naught.

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So when you arrive at law school they flash a bunch of student organizations and intramural sheets all up in your face and tell you to join some.  For this reason my career as a basketballer was briefly revived, but like all things resurrected after a long death it was a mere shambling husk of its former unglory, and was put to rest permanently last week following our 2nd round play-off loss.  The new tombstone reads "one time I jumped and my arm went numb."

This is also how I have found myself preparing a report for a local non-profit with a group from Pro Bono Students Canada.  Maybe you would not like legal advice from someone who has had nine weeks of contract law but non-profit organizations will take what they can get!  Even if it is nothing!  Nothing was about what I figured I'd be able to give them, but then I met with the Associate Dean.  The Associate Dean knows much more about labour law than I have learned in nine weeks of contracts.

This particular meeting was also my first experience with recruitment.  I guess the Associate Dean doesn't always have first years come to his office to ask about common law issues in employment contracts?  I suppose you don't get to be the Associate Dean by ignoring opportunities like that when they present themselves.  So today at law school I learned about how volunteer work can make you look smart to the Associate Dean--who told me about how knowing about employment law can make you look smart to important business directors.

I also learned about seller's liens under the Sale of Goods Act.  They protect you from detinue!  Nobody likes detinue.

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They were selling CDs under the student centre today.  I bought a remix compilation of Death From Above 1979's You're a Woman, I'm a Machine, instead of the actual copy of You're a Woman, I'm a Machine which was sitting right next to it.  This was an unfortunate oversight.  Would anyone like four remixes of Black History Month?  ...and then another four of Romantic Rights?

The weather is getting colder and wetter.  I know from history that these changes put stress on my mutant old-man spine and that the end result is the application of a pathetic cost-benefit analysis which ranks the priority of my various obligations.  There is the statutory interpretation assignment to complete this week, for instance, and I must read at least some things that have also been assigned so that I know what is happening in different classes.  Regular attendance of those classes, in contradistinction, ranks somewhere below the allegorical arm-wrestle required to lull my mutant old-man spine into allowing for six or seven hours of sleep per sun-cycle.

History teaches that these things must be done in the order of their priority or else I will be incapable of doing any of them.  Nevertheless it remains troublesome to me that I am so busy because my health requires that I not allow myself to be too busy.  Mostly because it is difficult to produce a practical distinction between being tremendously busy trying not to be too busy and simply being lazy.  Particularly now that I am surrounded by motivated and intelligent people whom I like but with whom I generally cannot keep up.  The balancing act was easier to maintain in my undergraduate career because I was not taking classes with anyone who made for compelling conversation.

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In Constitutional Law yesterday we learned about parliament's criminal law-making power.  This has not yet been super-interesting because it is just an instance of the division of powers between federal and provincial governments which we have been talking about for weeks already.  Also because the cases which best illustrate this are not strictly criminal cases at all.  The leading case is RJR-MacDonald v. Canada, which is about the promotion of tobacco products.  This lacks the pizazz of your average case in an actual criminal law class, perhaps.  Where are all the manslaughters at?

Usually on Mondays there is no class until 1:30, but TODAY we had a makeup class for Contracts at 11:30.  Lame!  Except I actually have to get up for a meeting at 11:30 with my Pro Bono volunteer group on Mondays anyway, so this did not effect my regular morning schedule at all.  Well, except that I went to Contracts instead of the meeting.  But the meeting was cancelled anyway. So actually this make-up class was an exceptional inconvenience.

( EAT IT NATE. )

In the future "EAT IT NATE" will replace "Read more" as the default value for lj-cut text.

I have written two nearly complete entries about why this entire Olympic fiasco is ridiculous, and then I have deleted them because they are too long and I have been out drinking too long.  I will now try to be succinct.


1.  Americans do not get what it is that the international community does not like about Americans.

A Not Terribly Original Analogy That I Have Adapted To My Own Purposes:
America is the pretty girl at the school dance that just will not shut the fuck up.  The IOC is the chaperone.

The IOC does not care how pretty you are, or who will vouch for the fact that you are of age; it will not sleep with you.  That would be gross.


2. On what planet is it a good idea for the president to lobby for a bid for the Olympics?

A planet that is named America, maybe.  The problem is that this planet is named Earth.

I've had it from various sources that keeping my "integrity" through law school will be difficult.  Different meanings of the word were probably intended by different people.  My philosophy professors likely meant something like "intellectual honesty", which struck me as rather disingenuous since you can go a long way in philosophy before anyone will challenge you to defend the sort of things you might actually believe.  More generally, I think the received view in the public is that training to be a lawyer is something like training to be a mercenary, only worse (a mercenary, at least, is liable to be killed someday).  Speaking literally, though, one's integrity is usually related to one's soundness or completeness, so to some extent I read this as a charge that legal education is a process of deconstructing individuals who would be otherwise whole.

That is patently absurd, of course.  But the thread of the common wisdom is that law school changes people, and there is usually something behind the ideas in the collective unconscious.  The Dean recommended to our class that we write a letter to ourselves which expounded our world view, so that we could open it three years from now and evaluate.  So, in 2012, everyone remember I wrote this!  I expect to have changed so much I no longer know how to type by then.

( At some point it ran off the rails, but by then I'd changed so much I didn't care. )

So I am typing this from new digs, in a new city.  This morning I started a new course of study at a new school with nothing but new people.  To my right there is new scotch--10 years old is relatively new for scotch, anyway.  This is an appropriate time for retrospect.

Summer does not seem like it lasted very long.  While my final semester at McMaster seems like it was ages ago, it doesn't seem like it was that long ago Geoff and I packed into his ancient Subaru to drive down to Baltimore again, and as though I played host to my American visitors myself only last week.  I was so busy, all the time, but it does not seem as though I got that much done.  I have adequately prepared myself for law school, certainly, and I believe I moved several entrenched files forward at the office, but for all this I suppose I don't have very much to show.  Except, that is, for new digs, new city, new school, and the new scotch paid out of the pockets that I managed to thinly line with new money.

For being so busy, and for all the uncertainty surrounding what exactly I'd be doing with myself in the fall, it was not an anxious summer.  I was never worried about getting into law school.  After four rejection letters and eight months it is true that I had begun to despair of being accepted, but it was not the same thing.  There was a backup plan if I didn't get in, and it wasn't even the worst thing ever.  In fact I was much more anxious after I had been admitted, knowing that what came next was not the non-terrible Plan B, and (by late July) being well-settled into life at home and at the office.  Anxious to get on with it.  Especially since making this move required no small amount of preparation, but very little explanation as to what I could expect.

We had bad weather; I worked too much and saw people too seldom; I didn't do anything interesting that I don't make a point of doing every year anyway.

Important things happened this summer, of course.  People went to Europe, and some of them may not be coming back.  I lost touch with some old friends and reconnected with others.  I also made a new friend and then she promptly left for Korea.  People got engaged.  People bought houses.  People got jobs.  Some people finished their course of study and some people started a new one.  Interesting things are happening to everyone all the time.

Seasons bleed into one another, and summer is a thing that is bleeding out.  I wrote nine entries all season, all of which were uninformative in the same way, and it's possible that that is all that really needs to be said--it's certainly all I found the time to say.  The leave of absence has (demonstrably, possibly) damaged my ability to stay on a thought.  I promise no remedy of this in the future.  A livejournal promise is worth the paper it's printed on.  But law school is starting and that is sort of exciting; it's possible I may want to say some things about it.

Since LiveJournal and I have reached an equilibrium in which my life is too boring to write about and I do not have very much time to use writing about it in any case, I have been forced to find other leisure activities.  A couple of times I have attempted to read The Talisman, but on each attempt I am forced to concede that it is a novel of tremendous length for a story of only moderate appeal.  I am only 150 pages from the end now, though, and it seems a shame not to (someday) endure the remaining narrative as it grinds to its inevitable conclusion.

At some point I decided that reading was perhaps just TOO HARD and so I started to listen to the Ender books-on-tape-on-iPod instead.  This is a project I have enjoyed almost thoroughly, being a philosophy-minded adult who was once a kid who wished he was an astronaut.  In the past I have been accused of prejudicing myself against certain literary travesties by listening to them instead of reading them, but I tell you that in this case the opposite is true!  I think I probably would have made it through Speaker for the Dead if I had it in pulped-tree format, but I am positive that Xenocide would have lost me with the narrative complications at its conclusion if not much earlier--like, at the halfway point where the novel becomes one long conversation as the characters determine that the only solution to their political conflict is to figure out how the entire universe works.  Having it read at me was quite nice, however!  It was very much like being in a philosophy lecture, which you can mostly tune out until you pick up on a point that interests you.

I have digested the Shadow books in a similar fashion.  The comparison of Ender to philosophy invites a comparison of the Shadow novels to political science--but only if everything you know about political science you learned from playing Risk.  And watching people play Risk would certainly prepare you for the story in the Shadow books.  Aside from being hungry for more, mainly I listened to them so that I'd be up on all the haps whenever the last Ender book is released. Except that now, having made it to the other end of the Shadow saga and knowing the circumstances at the end of Children of the Mind, it seems likely that the final novel will be more Shadow-y than Ender-y, which to me seems to its detriment.

This concludes my patience for the written word this evening.

Things recently are good.  So good I have not written about them.  Here are some things.

1.  Found a place to live next year.  For liberal values of "found," anyway.  I found a representative listing on the Internet.  The reports I got on the place are favourable and it is right near the school--which is the only landmark I have by which to gauge favourable locations--so the lease is signed.  8 months, too, leaving questions of where I will live next summer UNANSWERED.

2.  I went down to McMaster and graduated this week.  Suddenly I have a B.A. (...in November).  I have no remarks to make about this that are not snide observations concerning the seven years it has been between the end of high school and my acquisition of my three year degree.  In Philosophy.  BUT it is still good to join the ranks of university graduates.

3.  CanadaCon 2 was loads of fun, Corbo-inflicted van-maladies and all.  I trust that everyone enjoyed themselves and enjoyed not suffering a fiery death somewhere in the middle of the QEW.  I sure did!

I am enjoying leftover scotch at this very minute.  This scotch is good scotch.

Monday morning I was accepted to the law program at the University of Western Ontario, and my various message inboxes are now overflowing with congratulations and well-wishing.  Stupid process took forever, but in the end Western is definitely in the top two schools I wanted to attend.  Things have worked themselves out.

Funny story:  A little later Monday I got an email from McMaster telling me they'd opened a seat for me in the two courses I need to graduate.  When I get my head strapped on a little more straight I'll have to email thank them but let them know it won't be necessary.  Alsoooo need to change my degree program and then register to graduate in it.

This is shit that would inevitably happen while I am stuck in Oakville doing rich kid camp for a week.  No real time to look at the material they've sent me.  (Apparently I have a pre-semester reading list.)  Meanwhile I must begin the apartment hunt in London.  This actually works out well, since after finding out I'd been waitlisted for these schools I was operating under the assumption that I'd have about only two weeks to pack up my life and find a place to install it in Kingston or London, if at all.

So...  yeah.  Things are coming together.

edit (10:39 AM): Woke up this morning to find an offer of admission from Queens in my gmail inbox as well. Queens is funny because it was just a week ago they emailed to tell me they were creating a wait list, and that if I were admitted at all it would be in late August.

kwasek's girlfriend comments on his journal a lot more now that she isn't his girlfriend anymore.