I am in line at one of the many Starbucks in the Mall of America.
In front of me are two African women. In front of them is a middle aged woman. She’s soaked with sweat.
Of course she turns around and addresses the African women:
Margie McSweaty: “I’m sweating! And it’s not that it is hot. I know that it is not hot, but I get hot. I get so hot that I sweat until I am soaked. Then I cool down, and get cold. Freezing. It’s terrible. This is what you have to look forward to!”
The African women don’t quite know how to react to this menopausal over-share. The awkwardness is delicious.
There are anti-Target posts, profile pictures of crossed-out Target logos, and a boycott.
I think all of the commotion is unwarranted, and this quote from Target’s CEO, Gregg Steinhafel, is why:
“Target has a history of supporting organizations and candidates, on both sides of the aisle, who seek to advance policies aligned with our business objectives, such as job creation and economic growth,” wrote Steinhafel. “It is also important to note that we rarely endorse all advocated positions of organizations or candidates we support, and we do not have a political or social agenda.”
If Target supports a political candidate, I expect it to support a candidate based on his or her economic agenda, and not the candidate’s social agenda.1 Target is a large retailer, not a GLBT advocacy group. Target’s stockholders do not get paid for Target’s GLBT lobbying activities.
Abstaining from political contributions (or at least going through a shell company) is probably a wiser approach from a public relations2 standpoint, but this gay man is not scandalized by Target’s political donations.
Target’s support of Emmer is not an endorsement of his social agenda, but rather his business agenda.3 I think a company’s internal policy towards its “diverse” employees is a greater indication of its social priorities than the company’s political contributions.
And I’m not going to tout a Tea Party sticker or waive a Ron Paul flag around these parts, but I do think the bigger issue here is the lack of a viable pro-business candidate who is not socially conservative. The Tea Party movement is so successful (Sarah Palin fans aside) because there are many people who are passionate about “conservative” or “pro-business” economic issues while being socially liberal or apathetic.
And until the Republican party embraces the more socially moderate candidates (or the democrats change their tune) you can expect more businesses to endorse the socially conservative candidates with the favorable economic positions.4
1I think a corporations’s internal policies towards its employees are even more important than the corporation’s presence at a minority group’s events. The presence of the company at a minority event is usually more economic than social. For example, gays have spending power, which is why a corporation is more likely to have a float at a pride parade instead of opening stores or investing in Indian reservations or inner city neighborhoods.
2Speaking of PR, Target’s twitter responses are underwhelming, impersonal, and inadequate.
3Emmer is not running on a solely anti-gay platform, and frankly he’s a fairly generic Republican candidate.
4And one aside – one notable difference between politics in Minneapolis and Miami is how nasty the liberal discourse is in Minnesota. I suspect it is a lack of empathy for other people’s perspectives. None of my Miami friends have ever unadded me on facebook for respectfully disagreeing with them. Just saying.
Since my last advice post I received a lot of messages from 0Ls trying to choose between schools. Here are three common themes:
1) Prestige.
Unless you are considering a top 5 or top 10 school, focus on what city or region you want to practice law in.
For example, if you want to live in Seattle, then going to Less Prestigious School of Law in downtown Seattle is probably a better idea than going to a “top 40” school in Georgia.
The top 10-40 schools will tout the few alumni who made it in swank, distant cities to oversell their national reputation. Go to the “okay” school in the city you want to practice in, volunteer, build a network of local attorneys and land a job.
2) Employment rates.
Ignore them. The job market sucks unless you go to an elite (top 5) school.
If a school is waiving around a really high employment rate, call up the career office and ask them these questions:
Does your employment percentage represent the entire class or just the students who responded to the survey?
How many students responded to the survey? Did you verify their employment or is it self-reported?
What exactly counts as “employment” in this survey? How many of these students have paid, full-time positions that require a JD?
You’ll find that many schools count any employment towards their numbers. The student with a research position with a professor that ends a month after graduation counts. The student volunteering at a non-profit counts. The barista counts. If you ask how many of a school’s students actually go on to become paid full-time lawyers, you’ll find a lot of trapeze artists.
3) Specific programs.
Law school is a big investment, so you have the right to ask questions before you get into a crushing amount of debt. If you have a passion for a particular area of law, ask the admissions office to put you into contact with a professor that teaches the subject.
If admissions is unhelpful, then you can always look up the professor on the school’s website, and email them yourself. A simple email will do –
“Hello, My name is Jill Smith. I am an accepted student interested in insurance law. Can you tell me more about Whatever Law School’s insurance law program? I am specifically interested in car insurance…”
I know this sounds scary, but you might just find a mentor, and the worst they can do is ignore you, …which is also telling.
“The more time a girl spends with her homosexual friends, the more she will fall under the influence of their habits and mannerisms. She might pick up homosexual fashions and dress mannishly.”
And,
“The homosexual often uses his high degree of promiscuity to gain access to overbooked restaurants (slept with a waiter), private parties (slept with the host’s boyfriend) and expensive clubs (slept with the drummer playing that night). It is an astonishingly incestuous world.
The reason for such incest? The homosexual is like a locust– limber, voracious and without conscience. They consume everything in their path, stripping the purest things bare, leaving them barren and alone in the cold night air. They will rampage through cities and cultures, whether it’s San Francisco or the Brazilians, the hallowed chambers of the Vatican or internet chat boards.
Our straight women in love with gay men don’t seem to comprehend that once they’ve been dropped off for the night at their doorfronts, the homosexual’s adventure is really just beginning.
More bars and clubs, the after-hours establishments, cocaine, crystal meth, sex bathhouses, motel room sex parties, tricking in truckstops, prancing in parks, the true nature of these men is now revealed. The lengths to which the homosexual will go to destroy any scent of propriety and humanity in themselves would shock their early-evening female companions and it begs larger questions about our culture.”
And,
“As these once-hopeful women age, they become far too accustomed to the homosexual male and far too unfamiliar with the heterosexual ones. They have false expectations for every straight man they meet. They demand these men take pleasure in shopping and watching shows like Glee. Instead of football games and grandpa’s cookouts, she’ll opt for spotting celebrities at high-end cocktail bars. No hosting bridal showers and Boca Raton weekends for them, no they’ll demand something more excessive– film noir movie marathons and New Year’s Eve parties at Mexican resorts.”
And the best part EVER:
All this time spent around gay men comes at a cost. When the firm, bass tones of masculinity command such a young woman, she will long for the shrill call of the homosexual.
When asked by a heterosexual male to be the quiet but pleasant companion at business functions or family dinners out, the girl will rebel. This is a litmus test of just how far off course she has gone.
If she is a fully formed “fag hag,” she will abandon her straight mate at these social events and lurch for the bar, ordering up a frizzy cocktail while seeking any hint of homosexuality in the bartender’s eyes.
If she has come this far, she is now fully allergic to the requirements of being a wife and the bartender’s scandalous bits of gossip whispered over margaritas will only worsen the rash of autonomy that she has developed.
Now, the author, obviously has some issues. BUT, a valid point (probably the only one) raised in the article is that some girls use their gay friends as ersatz boyfriends: the stereotype of the attractive gay guy with the overweight ever-single female friend. Everything else in the article is a hot mess.
2. Hot, ghetto-messitude.
Second thing is this video:
Don’t get me wrong – I laughed, and I laughed hard. But then I thought, “Wait, this is actually very disturbing.”
Unlike the leprechauns in the tree video, which was a stupid story to begin with, this is about an alleged rapist. Putting the ghetto brother on air completely undermines the supposed seriousness of the story and turns it into a “look at the silly hood rats” piece.
And although I hate to be “that guy”, I wonder if this station would put the white-country-yokel equivalent on air. And yes, both of those videos are from Alabama.
Your class-note organization needs will differ whether you take notes on a laptop or hand-write. I hand-write for some classes but I invariably lose my notes to coffee or car trunk gnomes if I do not transcribe the notes quickly.
UMN law forces us to buy school laptops, but possibly the one good thing about my spastic school laptop is that it came with Microsoft OneNote, which is amazing.
OneNote is sort of like MS Word, but it looks like a binder. It has tabs, and auto-saves whatever you type. You can“print” PDFs and powerpoints into OneNote, so your folder for a class will contain everything you need come finals time. OneNote even lets you highlight the PDFs, and share your folders online if you’re feeling generous.
As far as binders and such… I would hold off buying anything other than maybe pens, one legal pad, and a bag (and please no rolly bags!) until you get the syllabi for your classes. Most of the stuff the bookstore scares you into buying (before you know what you actually need) will just collect dust under your futon.
Study Aids, Dictionaries:
And please don’t buy and supplements or study aids yet. My friends and I wasted so much money on crap we didn’t need.
Westlaw and Lexis are the two online legal research systems that your school will probably give you passwords to during orientation. Lexis has course outlines, and Westlaw has black’s law dictionary, treatises, summaries of law, and topical digests. All of it is online for free. And even if you buy the print version you’ll probably find yourself using the online version anyway because of the convenience.
And, if you cannot resist wasting money, then just get a very small pocket law dictionary. But again, everything is online, for free. If find that you desperately need a print-form-something-or-other during the semester then your school bookstore will still have it.
Time Management:
Scheduling was a little crazy for me during my 1L year because my school had Lexis training, Westlaw training, special 1L seminars, club meetings, etc. and was not very good about communicating exactly when things were.
I recommend Windows Calendar if you have a PC. Windows Calendar is a free program that comes with Vista, and it is similar to Apple’s free calendar program and Google Calendar. What I like about Windows Calendar is that it lets me set alarms, so my computer will flash, buzz, and do the chacha to remind me of an appointment.
If you have a SmartPhone, you can also use that to remind you things.
Also keep a print version of your class schedule. All of us forgot were our classes were during the first few weeks, and because no one knows where they are going, it isn’t uncommon to have a pack of 1Ls waiting in the wrong room because they saw “someone” go into it. Don’t be that person.
One more time management tip! Make “no” your default answer to things that you aren’t super-passionate about. An easy way to decline these invitations (to club meetings, bar night, canasta, etc.) is to say, “I have to decline because I think I have something scheduled for that time/day, but if anything changes I’ll let you know.”
Then, once you get in front of your calendar and reading assignment list, you can figure out if you really DO want to attend whatever you just declined.
And, although I am not sure if this fits really into the organization category, or just a time management/health thing, but, my friends and I noticed ourselves eating out a lot during 1L year.
It is far easier to suck it up and go to the grocery store once a week and take an hour on Sunday to cook basics – plain meat, rice, pasta, etc. and to throw in tupperware for the week.
Then everyday you can just pull out your tubs of pre-prepared basics, do different combinations, dress them up with whatever fresh sides (fruit, etc.) or seasonings, and then have a quick meal original meal.
It sounds like a lot of work , but this is much quicker and cheaper than waiting in line at Chipotle.
It is like a crying toddler who stops throwing a fit when he sees another toddler having an even-more-dramatic meltdown at grocery store. It’s like, “Woah. Nevermind. I thought I was having a fit. I was mistaken.”
So I knew things were out of hand when Harley looked at me, hunched over, and spewed diarrhea all over my living room.
This was the week of shit. The dogs kept breaking into my 3-tiered plastic food shelf, gorging themselves, and then crapping everywhere.
I would come home to find a chocolate rendition of the Bavarian Alps in my living room, and the dogs passed out in the kitchen. The dogs also figured out how to open the toilet lid and drink the blue-water, so they had the runs most of the time.
The steamer and cleaning spray barely kept up. I spent most of my week flustered and disgusted. Ick.
So I was horrified when my landlord left me a voicemail: “I showed your apartment today. It’s trashed. I’m also showing it tomorrow. Can you clean it, you filthy slob of a man?”
I ran upstairs and cleaned my old apartment. It took about three hours. The old apartment looked absolutely crazy because all of my random trash and non-essential stuff was strewn about – dog hair, papers, old plant pots…
And of course the fridge had nothing left in it besides beer, condiments, and foul asparagus. The freezer had vodka and a turkey. My fridge in my new apartment looks like I robbed the farmer’s market: fruits, veggies, lactose-free milk, organic cold cuts, etc. But the remnants in my old fridge looked like Maury’s playing in the double-wide. Fail.
The bedroom had even more dog hair. Underbritches in the middle of the floor… What a lurid dig…
And to think that the landlord showed a prospective tenant that room! My landlord probably thinks I’m some sort dirty hillbilly prostitute and a complete caretaker fail. Ugh.
The apartment is clean now. My standing with the landlord? Eh. Probably irreparable. We’ll see if I get an eviction notice tomorrow. I really want to take him to my new apartment and prove that I’m not a slob, and that my apartment is actually cute and sanitary despite the occasional shit puddle…
Besides leaving a filthy apartment for unwary tenants and cleaning up dog shit, I spent the week fielding phone calls from crazies, changing my work schedule for apartment showings that never materialized, and finishing my Physical Evidence class.
The last class was pretty amazing because Cristina, (one of my classmates who is awesome) brought a sandwich bar for her presentation. Another student brought booze. I think booze should be a requirement for any student presentation over 10 minutes. It was glorious and put me in a good mood until about 20 minutes after class when I had to shovel shit from my living room.
Hopefully this coming week will involve less fecal matter.
One of the first things I noticed about my new apartment was the fruit flies. The apartment was clean, and there was no exposed food in the kitchen, but the fruit flies were everywhere.
There were even fruit flies in my bedroom closet! I don’t even want to think about why…
So I turned to my blackberry, googled fruit-fly trap concoctions, and set my trap.
The fruit-fly trap was a glass of pear juice with a plastic cover (with holes) stretched over it.
A few days later Alesus was over, and I told him about my trap. He noted that there were no fruit-flies in the kitchen, but there were also no flies in the trap. Hm.
I didn’t figure out what was going on until today:
Normally, a massive spider web in my kitchen would horrify me, but I left it alone. Fruit flies are unsanitary. Spraying pesticide in the kitchen is equally disgusting, but this spider web thing works.
So the kitchen spider stays. His name is Freddie. I have another spider named Bartholomew in my studio. He does a thorough job as well.
One lady left three voicemail messages within 10 minutes. Another thought that she could – possibly – have a serious eviction, and wondered if that might be a problem. Maybe girl. Maybe.
These craziesprospective tenants usually want showings in the middle-of-the-day, which means my work schedule resembles that of an overnight gas station clerk without the threat of robberies or free soda.
I only do showings on Sunday now because the prospective tenants like to cancel on me 10 minutes before our odd-middle-of-the-day appointments which I rescheduled my life around. No longer! They can see the open apartment on Sunday or move into the crack motel down the street. I’m taking a stand, damn it! Hear my roar.
Another kink my workweek was my Physical Evidence class, which finally ended. I still need to write a paper for it, but I no longer have to work around that bizarre 4:30pm-7pm time slot.
The lack of internet in my apartment is also horrid. Bethenny got married and I MISSED IT! During the past few weeks I had to sneak to Dunn Brothers or Spyhouse to blog, which involves dealing with more wilting Madonnas than I have the energy for.
I have an appointment with my internet provider after tomorrow’s dog training class, so I should be online tomorrow afternoon? Maybe? We’ll see. If not, I’ll ask my trainer how to train Harley to leave an expression of my gratitude in front of their offices.
