Chasing your dreams…as long as your dream isn’t wealth

I recently found myself reading a popular blog with many commenters which asserted that in order to have any hope of making a worthwhile living as an attorney, a law student had better attend a top 14 school, edit for the law review and finish in the top 20% of their class.   Obviously this is utterly preposterous.   Even a cursory survey of any mid-size to large jurisdiction reveals plenty of attorneys who attended “lesser” schools and yet somehow manage to cobble together a respectable high-five to low-six figure income.   In fact, a review of jurisdictions in Arizona reveals a distinct absence of correlation between success and attending a top 14 school.   The vast majority of successful attorneys in Arizona attended one of the two state law schools.   Where they finished is unknown, but that many of them are now sole practitioners or partners in small firm, it seems unlikely that their law school placement had the slightest impact on their long-term success.

But the assertions in that blog, unfounded and ignorant as they may have been, were not what left me unsettled.  Rather, what struck me, were the several commenters who fearfully and desperately cried out to the author for help, trembling with terror at the prospect that they may have made some greivious mistake in deciding to attend law school.   This unnerves me because it makes evident the fact that this one, insecure, blogger was not the only misguided individual who followed the law school path with the naieve and foolish belief that traversing that well-worn road would lead him to fame and fortune.   It troubles me deeply to think that people are 1.) stupid enough to think this was the case and 2.) so motivated by greed that they would pursue a career they had no interest in.

The reality is that a law degree is not a ticket to high society.  Many lawyers are poor.  Many lawyers starve.  In fact, far more lawyers struggle to pay their bills than become filthy rich.   However individuals who are committed to their profession, devote extensive time and hard work and genuinely enjoy their work tend to excel.    But even this isn’t enough.   You have to have some aptitude for the practice of law.  Simply getting into law school and surviving the courses does not magically imbue with the ability to perform as a lawyer absent any natural affinity for the activity.  Yet some people seem to think it does.

What do you tell those people? ….Get an M.B.A.????

 

Nothing “Cool” About It….

Tucson’s “The Cool Church”, has brought its anti-homosexual rherotic to startling levels of stupidity in claiming that scientific data proves that homosexuals live as much as 30 years less than their heterosexual counterparts.   The scariest part of all is that there actually are studies to suggest this.  To be fair, they’re positively stupid studies based on a ridiculous statistical methodology that is fundamentally flawed.   But what remains terrifying is the fact that someone actually co-opted science in order to confirm their ridiculous homophobia.   That, my friends, is what we call “fuzzy math.”

I am not gay.  I am not sure if I even have any gay friends at the moment.   Though I certainly have called several gay folks friend, I must admit that I’ve never really been an advocate for gay rights or a big supporter of the LGBT community.  It isn’t that I’m trepidatious or that I don’t like homosexuality, it’s more a product of my general apathy toward the plight of most marginalized groups.  Unlike latinos, it is highly unlikely that gays will be the majority at any point in the forseeable future, no matter how seductive emo’s pull.   As a result I probably should care more about their problems and those of others but I suffer from CWMD, Contented White Male Disease.   Symptoms of this disorder include flag waiving on holidays, watching of cable news during crises, muttering “that just aint right” at opportune moments whilst otherwise doing absolutely dick to better my world. 

As a CWMD patient in the disease’s advanced stages,  I periodically manifest annoyance at one or another injustice.  This time it is with respect to stupid people co-opting science and God in their quest to deny their own homosexual urges and broad sexual insecurities (thankfully I managed to avoid the Darfur craze all together).   So now, as I find myself looking over The Cool Church’s website, I cannot help but recall some long forgotten lessons from Catholic Sunday school.   I may me misrepresenting the bible here as I was a notoriously poor Sunday student but I seem to remember there being a part where Jesus teaches love and tolerance.  It seems like these were premised on a notion of forgiveness and a philosophy of non-judgment;  After all, Jesus was a guy whose best friends were political dissidents, lepers, whores and thieves.  Jesus rolled with a crew that would’ve made 50 Cent proud (the reality of his own suburban, pampered upbringing notwithstanding).  Of course, fans of this policy of mindless intolerance will point to specific sections in the bible where it conclusively proves that Jesus (God?  Synonym?  That part always confuses me…the Bible is sooo post-modern) disapproves of homosexuality.   Undoubtedly they will point to this section with bobbing finger and smug grin.

The problem is that the Bible also frowns upon sodomy (that includes oral sex for you Arkansan politicians), stealing and prostitution.   Yet, miraculously, Jesus found it perfectly alright to keep the company of folk who did just that.   The problem though is that they were all reformed sinners (if we believe that Jesus really was the miracle maker the Bible portrays him to be and not just a clever and charismatic cult leader) who followed Jesus following their renunciation of their sinful ways.   Renouncing your behavior is pretty easy when you’re a hooker or thief;  No one loves being a hooker (if you do, call me) and most people will give up stealing if you give them the things they need (like fish…..c’mon Jesus).  But giving up your sexual and social identity is slightly more taxing.   It asks a bit more of a person to deny who they are and the feelings they have and that makes it difficult to require renunciation of prior bad homo-acts slightly more troublesome.

Of course, the natural logical progression leads us to conclude that prejudicing ourselves against homosexuals on the basis of Bible alone is just plain nasty.  So instead, assholes like this Bart-Simpson hair’d, protein shake swilling, moron pastor turn to science to provide practical justification for their bigotry.  I hope that more people than just me realize that throwing numbers around doesn’t make you any less bigoted.

After all, would it bother you if I said that a study of newspaper crime articles showed that black men were three times as likely to rape white women as white men?   If it wouldn’t, it should.  

 

A Triscuit, a casket, a twinkie for fat ass

Letting your child become clinically obese should be treated as felony child abuse.   This is the notion that I have been unable to shake since yesterday when my mother-in-law played this episode of Dr. Phil off their DVR.    At eight years old this boy was allowed to weight 185lbs.   That is 8 fewer pounds than me and I am a heavier than average, 5’10 man.    When asked how this happened, his mother exclaimed “I just gave him a cookie.”   Unless it was one of those birthday cake cookies in the mall, and by one you mean 50, then somehow I doubt it.

The reality is that this child’s mother gorged him on food as a mean of coping with her own unhappiness and feelings of inadequacy.   By over-providing and consistently letting the child eat whatever, whenever and however much he wanted, she enabled his obesity.   I cannot fathom what that poor boy’s cardi-vascular system must have endured during his prolonged period of training for sumo.   Though not a doctor, I can only imagine that if permitted to have a few more “cookies” his heart would have just given out from exhaustion and he would have flopped, jello like, dead onto the kitchen floor.   I’m half kidding, but at the very least the child was seriously at risk for the development of heart disease, diabetes, gout and a slew of other illnesses causally linked to obesity.  

At eight years old a child is like a dog;  He is completely dependent on his caregiver for survival.  Eight year olds cannot work, they cannot by and prepare food with an understanding of proper nutrition.  Like a dog, that eight year old child is going to eat candy until he pukes or goes into sugar shock if you let him.  Unabated, children will consume anything that pleases them until it stops pleasing them.  Like the dog that eats an entire turkey off the table at Thanksgiving, the child will gorge himself without concern for any of the repurcussions.  In this regard children depend on their parents. 

Just as we expect parents to meet their needs of their children’s dependencies with regard to housing and medical care, so too should we expect them to meet the nutritional needs of their offspring.   If a Mother injected her child with a deadly virus we would most certainly find her criminally liable for his death.   There exists no practical difference between the sudden injection of a virulent toxin into his system and the  systematic introduction of twinkies into his fat ass until he’s so obese he looks like a wax statue of Napolean after a fire.  

 

Stack ‘em High!

This is meant to be a law school blog . If other law school blogs are to offer any guidance, that means it is supposed to be filled with topical musings and rants on supreme court justices, foreign policy, domestic injustice and my professor’s hair-pieces. If I were you, I wouldn’t count on finding that here. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a strong possibility I may talk about someone’s hair-piece and Scalia is my profile picture so I may even wax angry bastard about he robed ones. But by and large, I expect that I’ll focus on the things which amaze, frustrate and inspire me. Since I’ll be in law school, I’m hoping that those things will often be the law. But I’ve ever been an ass man and amazement comes in many forms so don’t hold your breath hoping for top shelf pedantics.  There will be moments, I assure you, where I just let go and talk about every day life and its oddities.

Oddities like this.

 

Speed stacking is a new phenomenon sweeping the elementary and middle school world.   Go on, check out the website; This isn’t a joke.  The point of this activity really is to stack approximately 6-9 cups in varying patterns, unstack and then restack them.   Whichever mental midget can stack and unstack the fastest wins.    The best part of all of this is that this “stacking” is actually marketed to schools as physical education.  

Call me old fashioned, but didn’t P.E. used to be about climbing the rope and having erstwhile friends bean you with brightly colored balls?  Wasn’t it where the fat kid felt like a target and the geeky or gothic kid felt even more ostacized?  Didn’t P.E. used to inspire fear with its presidential physical fitness challenge, mandatory pull-ups and other geeks-bane activities?   Who in all the smoldering levels of hell actually had the balls to pitch this as exercise. 

…..You’re stacking CUPS!   Admittedly, you’re stacking cups fast, but how the fuck is this teaching kids anything useful? There’s no way that anyone’s heartrare is topping 60 during this frantic organizing and they certainly aren’t learning anything academically useful.  Oh no, wait, they’re learning a trade.  I remember stacking cups when I worked at Carl’s Jr., or frequently having to stack tumblers when they came out of the wash at TGI Fridays.  Those were high-end jobs with profound career opportunities and if only I had superior stacking skills, I may have advanced up the burger, errr career ladder.  

This is just proof that people are getting stupider.   That a parent will pay money for all this gear rather than buying their children books and real athletic supplies foretells the demise of our culture far more clearly than even two terms of Bush has.   

Whatever, maybe I just missed the boat.  I’m gonna go do the dishes and practice my mad speed stacking skills.   Peace out.