What inspires me? Well, not a blue wave.

The answer to this question…what is it?  I sure don’t know.  To be sure, lots of things.  Excitement.  Justice.  Adventure.  Some sort of battle of ideals.  Helping people out.  The positive results of hard work.  A good idea.  But how do you answer something like this, coming from an employer who you aren’t even interviewing with (yet)??  This was the question that baffled me at the Equal Justice Works conference and career fair this weekend.

Anyway, on to more pressing matters.

The Sonoma State Rowing unisuits this year are incredible.  If I recall, my brother described them as making the team look like “a Swedish rock band from the 80′s,” and that all they needed was “goofy hair and guitars.”  I suppose the intended message was “we’re fast AND stylish.”  But it seemed to really say “we got puked on by a blue neon alien.” (see below)

The Puking Neon Alien

Oooooooh scary!!!  Other teams must say to themselves, “WHOA!!  I’m intimidated by the fashionable blue wave design!!  They might make us look bad because they’re so fashionable!!  They’re shinning (yes, shinning!) stars of rowing!!!  What do we have?  Tanks?  Plain old unisuits without a cRrRaAaZzYyYy blue wave?!  Let’s just give up now!!!”

Sorry.  I had to comment on that issue.  But seriously children, you can do so much better.  At some point, I really need to get the right to design the uniforms.  And if not me, then Khoua.  I’m not what you’d call the creative type, but seriously…I think I’ve been wanting to design the unisuits since someone out there ordered our men’s team the ugliest women’s unisuits one could have thought up.  I did enjoy the supportive design however.  Very flattering.

 

So anyway…enough of that…I have to actually work on something.  My oh my.  Dee lawz iz vewwy time-conzuming.

This Issue: (Euro) Parties and Me Being Very Unaware

As I sit here in the Star Commons reminiscing on what has proven to be quite the busy couple of weeks, I do recall quite a bit of fun in there.  Among the various tasks I’ve been completing (reading, outlining, E & E hypotheticals, legal writing assignments, and whatever else feels right at the time), I’ve also had a bit of time to go out a little.  Some parties and social events here and there along with my newly rejuvenated (but hardly impressive) exercise plan are more or less keeping me sane.  Never mind the lack of sleep (never stopped me before).

Last weekend, a buddy and I went to two places on the same night.  First, we stopped at some sort of “Homecoming” shindig.  It was  quite the event, with an actual dance in the gym as well as free beer and wine in the building next door.  More or less, we stuck to the free booze and tried to meet people who were hanging out in that area.  Ended up meeting a few nice undergrad students and some folks from the business school, but the girls from the environmental school didn’t seem too interested in chatting.  We also ran into some other law students which was a nice surprise.  Anyway, after putting down a few drinks and enjoying some free appetizers (I don’t pass on free food without a very good reason) we headed over to a party being thrown by the LLM students.

As it turns out, I was one of about four Americans at this party.  The rest of the crowd hailed from a fair portion of the world, seemingly mostly from Europe.  There were a few noticeably different things about the house party too.  For one, it was in an apartment (with such a number of people that we surely belonged in a house).  Upon entering the room to strobe lights and techno-electric-something (and not random hip-hop that I have heard at every bar in the history of the world), I was very thankful that somebody out there had something to play at a party that wasn’t rap or hip-hop.  Novelty for the win.  I also learned that a mob of people jumping up and down and hugging (a) counts as dancing and (b) I can apparently do that dance.  Pimpin.  Finally, the two Irish guys who were singing Journey songs even when the techno was playing were probably the best people I could imagine having at a party.  The fact that Journey actually played a few times later on, upon their repeated requests, made it even better.

So after all of this on that particular weekend, I read a lot.

But I also watched football.  Niners looked good, although Brett Favre’s still got it.  That guy beats us all the time.  $^%#!  Also – did the freaking Bengals just beat the Steelers?

Great call on my part in putting Vernon Davis in the line up this week at Tight End though.  Two touchdowns and about 100 yards receiving?  I’ll take it.  Go Niners.  My record thus far is 2-1 in all three of my fantasy leagues.  Goin strong.

However, going on a tangent here – which I can do because this is my blog and I don’t really care if no one reads it or feels like critiquing my writing style – I’d like to illustrate how unaware I can be when exercising.  For those of you out there who are aware of my habits in the gym, you’ll know that I do not have an iPod or similar music player.  This creates an unfortunate scenario when doing cardio-anything, as I become incredibly bored.  Over the years, I have developed something of a method to cope with such boredom.  I call it “math.”  No really.  I literally make up equations and do calculations in my head with the numbers on the treadmill.  For example, I try to determine exact times when I will get to a particular calorie count or distance.  Nerdy and lame?  You bet, but it kind of works.  At least back when half marathons on the erg were the norm.  So anyway, I’m a few minutes into my run the other day, alone in the gym in my apartment complex, when some girl walks in.  She gets on the elliptical – directly in front of me, probably no more than four or five feet away – and does her thing.  I don’t really think much of this (and continue doing math) until later that evening when I decide to Facebook-message a classmate about a very important topic – sandwiches.  I promise this comes full circle, by the way.  So in the course of our discussion, we have an exchange similar to this:

Me: “Yeah I’d love one of those sandwiches right now.”

Her: “I had salmon after the gym today, it was great.”

Me: “You went to the gym today eh?”

Her: “You were there.  I tried to say hi but you seemed really focused.”

…So basically, I’m extraordinariliy dense.  I’m pretty sure that all I could picture in my head at the time was a picture of Captain Jean-Luc Picard doing the facepalm and shaking his head at me (see picture, below).  Although, on a positive note, my run somehow covered about a tenth of a mile more distance in the same amount of time.  So I guess you win some and lose some.

In other news, today may have been the first day I was on call in class and I made a comment that didn’t sound completely retarded.  I feel quite proud of myself for not sounding like a boob today and wanted to acknowledge myself publicly for such a feat.  Interestingly, we had made it a fair portion of the way through class before the professor realized that one of the people on call was absent.  So he looked for a replacement and found “Mr. Villeggiante.”  I’m actually going to call my stats for the day about on par with “1-for-2 with a single and a stolen base” in baseball.  On my first response, the pitcher broke my bat, picked up the ball, and punched me with it for a tag out.  My second response was probably an opposite-field soft liner.  Vintage me, really.

Speaking of vintage me, and to continue the meandering that seems to be a theme in these posts, I found a picture online the other day that brought back some fond memories.  The internet acronym included on the picture actually is fairly accurate to the memory as well.  I’ll just provide the picture and allow you to fill in the gaps:

IBTL!

Speaking of memories, I was reminiscing the other day about various people I’ve known over the years and had a few smiles thinking about them.  Even the ones I didn’t like – and there aren’t many – made me laugh.  It was a very pleasant moment in my day.  Anyway, once I got done smiling and laughing, I got back to work.  So there’s my one truly sentimental thought for this post.  Tune in some other time for more.

1L, D-0

So, orientation is behind us here at Duke, and the first day of the dreaded 1L year has come to pass without completely flooring me.  Although I am a bit sick.  But hey, I’ll still call it a good start.  Anyway, there have been some interesting occurrences this week, which I shall try to summarize a bit, below.

First, at some point last week, or perhaps the prior weekend, I had dinner at a place called “The Mellow Mushroom” (I know).  While the food was notably delicious in its own right, there was one more astonishing feature of the restaurant that caught my eye – they used the same “fine china” as the Sonoma State cafeteria.  Yes, the red-blue-green-yellow plastic discs of awesomeness.  Those plates.  I guess that I just cannot escape my roots.

Which reminds me of a visit I made this week to (one of?) Duke’s on-campus eating areas.  I am not kidding you, in a former life, this place could have been a medium-sized church.  The style of the interior was definitely cathedral-like.  It had the coat of arms of each Greek organization on the walls.  There were about 7-10 restaurants, ranging from a Chick-Fil-A (while I’m thinking about it – delicious fast food) and Subway to a sushi place and your more traditional Southern fare.  To top it off, they had a crazy ass selection of condiments.  What did it for me was the fresh parmesan.  Not even grated yet.  The grater was sitting next to it.  Like, there were wedges of parmesan cheese for students to grate and sprinkle over their pasta.  Classy right?  My eventual selection was the “Selection of the Second” from the hot dog stand outside.  My hot dog was topped with mustard, pickles, coleslaw, and crushed chips.  This was an oddly yummy meal, as in quite good.  Grade (for food chapel as a whole) = A

On the topic of restaurants, I should mention two more: Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill is also fantastic, if a bit pricey for a student.  The traditional barbecue plate (the “NC Sampler,” I believe it was called) was fantastic, as were the “Shrimp and Grits.”  Highly recommended to any who may visit me.  Grade = A

The other is a breakfast place I recently tried twice, most recently with a visitor from Princeton by the name of Zach.  Good coffee and great chocolate chip scones.  Also, a pretty good breakfast menu.  Reasonable prices.  East campus prettiness.  Nothing more to say about that. Grade = B+

Now onto the people.  Although most of the class is from California, we should discuss the cool people that somehow, by some stroke of chance, are not from this awesome state I call home.  Most of these are off the top of my head, and may or may not be real people, but I tried to remember as well as I could.  There is a beekeeper, a Katrina survivor, a guy going for a JD/MD dual degree (who also was apparently a good football player), someone who drove here from Alaska, a number of LLM students from around the world (I’ll also say that watching a live baseball game with people from around the world is really fun), a guy who was at The Bitter End (San Francisco bar) trivia night when my team won the team name competition (“Russia Pulls Out of Georgia…”), two students who are former rowers, a professor who is a former lightweight rower, some distance runners, and generally awesome people from around the country (I’m sure there are some not-awesome ones that I haven’t found yet, but there can’t possibly be many).  My mentor is from the East Bay and is also a Final Fantasy VII nerd, which pretty much instantly makes her freakin cool, as well.

Let’s see, a few things about class today…well, I guess I’d say that class itself was surprisingly fun.  Oddly I encountered a t-test in my first property reading assignment.  There is a lot of preparation involved, which is really all-consuming (and I imagine it will be more so as time goes on), but I really enjoyed class today and thought that I had a generally good idea of what we were talking about.  One thing I did learn about the Socratic method, though: it’s not always harsh, but it is sometimes salty.  Take today’s class on Civil Procedure.  One girl, unsure of the correctness of her forthcoming response to the professor’s inquiry, prefaced what she was about to say with something along the lines of “Well, I’m not sure if I’m right, but -” and was cut off.  The professor interceded with a statement along the lines of “Look, if you act confident, I’ll play with you, but you can’t preface what you’re going to say with a disclaimer because I will assume you do not know what you are talking about.”  He continued, “If you’re working in a law firm, and a client comes in with a problem, and you say to that client, ‘You know, I’m not really sure what I’m doing, but I’ll give it the old college try!’ then you’re in a lot of trouble aren’t you?”

Awesome.

Also, jokes including puns which use legal terminology have not yet become funny, although I can imagine that shortly, they will.