Hmmmm...

Okay, I'll admit it: I'm a bottled-water junkie. Even filtered water retains a kind of funny smell that honest-to-God, I can detect. I think I have a pretty sensitive nose -- I can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi (or could, back when I drank the nasty stuff) by smell alone.

Anyway, I walked downstairs to the convenience store for a large bottled water a short while ago (as part of my recent concerted effort to lose weight, I'm aiming to drink about a half a gallon of water a day -- I buy the 1.5L bottles, which are almost half a gallon). The display price is $1.99 and it always rings up as $2.07. This is actually pretty reasonable as far as LA tax is concerned -- I think it works out to about half of regular sales tax. As I'm putting my money away a guy walks up next to me and purchases a bag of chips that are marked $.99. They ring up as $.99.

Excuse me?

So apparently the government has, in its vast wisdom, decided that it is a better idea to tax WATER consumption than to tax JUNK FOOD consumption.

How did this become smart policy? How does this make any sense??? We encourage eating junk food over water??? This is just wrong, wrong, wrong. How frustrating that the junk food manufacturers have SUCH a strong hold on our legislative bodies. I'm officially disgusted.

Tom, what up?

The Function that you are currently trying to use is disabled and will be back shortly.We are making some minor changes to this section please bear with us until we can get this back online. Please do NOT email me about this. Just wait it out.
//

7/28/2006 -Tom

The "function" in question is my attempt to log in. Damn you, Tom! You're like the heroin dealer who suddenly and inexplicably, "through no fault of his own," guts my supply just as I'm crashing. DAMN YOU!!!

I KNEW myspace was trouble.

Fun with FedEx

So my mom ordered me a bunch of gifts for my birthday. Being good with dates, etc., she ordered them well in advance -- a couple weeks before my birthday. Of course, they didn't all arrive in time.

Two packages, from the Smithsonian Institute, I have yet to receive (my birthday was over a week ago now). This in spite of the fact that she paid for expedited shipping. They finally shipped a day or two after my birthday, and for the past few days I've been finding door tags telling me FedEx was here with my packages, but couldn't deliver them because I wasn't here to sign for them. (Incidentally, I don't get why it doesn't occur to them to start an after-hours delivery service, since so many people work during the day and either live alone or have no one at home to take the packages for them).

I don't mind going to pick up my packages -- except that these are being held at a FedEx all the way down in Marina Del Rey. With traffic, it could take me like an hour to get there, and they close at 8. Bottom line is, I have better things to do around 6-7 o'clock than drive down to Marina Del Rey to pick up a package, and then drive back (like... er... blog...).

So I called FedEx to ask if they could store the packages at a facility closer to me. One person said I just needed to call back in the morning and request it. So I did, only to find out that for some reason, I'm supposed to have the shipper contact them and tell them to move it to a different facility.

Huh???

After about a half an hour of trying to get the FedEx employee to explain to me *just how* this makes sense, I finally gave up and called my mom to ask her to call the Smithsonian Institute. She did, and they assured her they would contact FedEx and request a more reasonable location. Tonight I called FedEx again and they had no record of any such request.

Motherf*ckers!

To top things off, if I don't pick up these packages within the next 2-5 days (they couldn't be any more specific than that), they go back to Smithsonian to sit in the warehouse while Smithsonian fails to get its shit together. I can't go tomorrow night because I have dinner plans that have already been rescheduled twice, and I can't break them. I can't go Friday night or this weekend because I'm driving to Bakersfield to visit my elderly grandmother, who for all I know could die any day now, so it's probably a good idea not to change my plans just to go pick up a package.

FedEx, you are not earning yourself a fan in me. For that matter, neither are you, Smithsonian.

Okay, this makes me nervous

It's bad enough I don't have an air conditioner -- now there's a chance even my fans and refrigerator won't work?

And still people drive to work in their irresponsible, gas-guzzling, dangerous and ugly SUVs, without a thought for the rapidly melting ice in Greenland. Maybe we really do deserve what we get.

GOOD LUCK!!!!!!

Just wanted to remind everyone who's not taking the bar (and, heck, those who are, but you don't need the reminding :)) to send prayers/good thoughts/passing vibes/good voodoo/whatever out to all the former law students taking the bar exam this week!!

Good luck to all of you!!!

I hate bigotry in any form

I hate religious bigotry, and I hate anti-religious bigotry.

I just wish that more people than me and the religious right got worked up about the latter. Because, frankly, they're not my favorite company to keep these days.

I'd post more but I'm just too pissed off after reading the illogical, high-minded drivel that is Professor Stone's latest post. I usually agree with him on a lot of things, so it's disappointing to see him take such an immoral and unconstitutional position.

I just wish that supposedly intelligent, educated people would learn to think for themselves rather than swallowing the anti-religious party line.

Today's pet peeve

It's grammar-related. I'm sure almost everyone remembers being a little kid and having Teacher say "don't say 'Bobby and me are going out.' Say 'Bobby and I.'" Teacher was correct, but I am sad to say, s/he is also responsible for a generation of people sounding like idiots. Why? Because they overcorrect. In fact, almost all of you do it. Probably 75% of my friends do it, and I am not friends with dumb people, period. So you have all these smart, talented, successful people who don't know how to speak English properly.

What am I going on about?

I'll tell you what I'm going on about: the very KEY distinction between subjects on the one hand ("I") and objects on the other ("me"). A subject acts on an object. A subject will, for example, talk to an object. A subject will never talk to Bobby and I. A subject might, however, talk to Bobby and me.

People get confused because they think, erroneously, that injecting Bobby into the conversation is what shoves me out of the way to make room for I. This is a misperception. Bobby was never the problem; he can stay, he can go -- but Bobby's place in the sentence is irrelevant. In fact, Bobby should just stay over in his yard so that people will stop aggravating me by leaving me out of the conversation and putting I in my place. Shudder.

When Bobby and I are subjects, using I is perfectly fine. Therefore, Bobby and I are going to the store. Bobby and I like ice cream. Bobby and I like people who don't butcher the English language.

Here's the rule of thumb. Before speaking (or typing! The specific thing that caused me to post this was a myspace slideshow that referred to, we'll say, "Mom taking Bobby and I to the park." I almost killed somebody), ask yourself how you would feel if Bobby wasn't in the conversation. Mom is taking I to the store. If you have a question, talk to I. Look! It's I! If your sentence sounds ridiculous without Bobby, it is probably missing something: me.

Now please stop pissing me off.

Uh huh...

Apparently the only people who have seen little Suri Cruise are fellow Scientoligsts -- no outsiders allowed, including the King of Cinema himself, Steven Spielberg. Perhaps the conspiracy theorists among us have been on to something all along? Seems awfully strange to me that a couple whose existence appeared to depend on the paparazzi would suddenly shun it once their supposed biological child popped out. But hey, that's just me, living here in crazy old RealityLand.

Dude, this is just wrong...

Since when is Haley Joel Osment old enough to drive???

God, and I thought I felt old yesterday.

As of today...

I can rent cars hassle-free (FINALLY!!)...

I can run for Congress...

I get a cut in my car insurance...

And my teenage cousins get to tease me that I'm halfway to fifty. See if I buy them any more beer! Ha!

And I thought dating in Los Angeles was tough...

Odderie has tipped me off to the world's cheapest loser, a dude named Darren, whose retardedness is based out of New York.

I still think creepy stalker married guy who I went on one date with (*before* discovering he was married, peeps) is the worst of the bunch -- but he and Darren just may be closely related.

Victory is mine!

So apparently I'm getting the transfer to the office I've wanted since, well, since before they let me know they'd decided to install me elsewhere. Hooray! I'll finally have a commute that takes less than 40 minutes, and I'll get to do work I'm really interested in!!

*So* psyched. As a picture of how rockin' awesome my firm is, when I talked to the practice group leader about transferring, he was incredibly encouraging and said that if that's what made me happy, that was fine with him, because he wants happy associates.

:D

I am *so* feelin' the happy.

Life on crack... berry

I hate my CrackBerry. I never wanted one in the first place, but eventually people started getting frustrated with me for not promptly responding to weekend emails, so I broke down and got one, the most basic model my firm was handing out.

The thing buzzes every time I get an email. Most of the time, it's nothing important. But occasionally it is. Slightly more rarely, it is a bombastic email from a certain partner I work for, inevitably telling me how badly I've screwed up my current project.

Mostly because of the latter of these, I've come to dread that unmistakable "buzz" sound. I hear it and I can literally feel my body tense up and my heart pump slightly faster. I hate that stupid sound. Stupid CrackBerry.

So I'm sitting here and there's a loud-talking associate in the office nearby. He talks and talks and talks, very loudly. A minute ago I heard him make a humming sound (as in, "hmmmm, I will have to talk to the client about that"). I swear to God the man sounds like a BlackBerry buzz.

I feel like I've entered a surreal place. I need to get off this shit. Shiver.

Protein smoothie

I've never been fond of the whole protein-smoothie idea. But I'm really trying to eat healthy/get in shape/lose weight/etc. so I decided to try one today.

It's not too bad. Peaches, pineapple, banana, ice, water and a couple scoops of protein powder. Tastes a little artificial-y but not unbearably so.

So maybe I could get used to it. Now, that super fiber powder stuff I got... eh... I'm not sure. We'll save that experiment for later. Stupid Whole Foods, not having tablets...

Rebuking Satan

Dealing with opposing counsel seriously makes me feel like the Church Lady. My nickname for him is Satan.

In my limited experience, I've found that most litigators understand very basic things about discovery, including the fact that sometimes it is just plain difficult to get clients on board with the very mundane details of litigation. But then there is the occasional asswipe who decides to make a teenage soap opera over every little detail (putting the focus on minor goofs on your part while deftly avoiding charges of blame for doing the exact same thing in sextuplicate) and then threaten to hold you personally responsible.

In boxing, they have a term for this: hitting below the belt.

I'm sorry, but unless you're dealing with, well, Satan on the other side, most lawyers are just doing their jobs. They're trying to be advocates, which means sometimes not laying out your case for you on a silver platter. Hell, if opposing counsel did that for you, you would be out of a job. So why does Satan feel the need to fight dirty?

After I kick his ass in court I am soooo doing a Superior Dance.

Why I'll never be taken seriously as a blogger

Evan Schaeffer has a really interesting post about some snooty law professor (at the noble Florida Coastal Law School, no less) who thinks law student bloggers are irrelevant and immature. See, what I should be doing at this point is reading on and working out an argument in my head about how typical and arrogant her attitude is, thinking that the only things that matter about law school are what person X (here, her) says they are.

And yet, instead, I just can't help thinking about my favorite version of Copa Cabana.

We'll move the law school, law school to Florida
The hottest spot south of Chicago!
We'll move the law school to sunny Florida
Palm trees and beaches, who cares if they teach us at the law school....... IN FLORIDA!!

That would have been the most fucked-up merger in history, 'sall I'm sayin'.

I'm not dead!

I was just on vacation.

It was fun but very tiring. And I have taken ill. Why am I still up blogging instead of trying to get some sleep when I have to be at work in the morning? Lord only knows.