insomnia's about as cool as anal rape, or so an altar boy told me

i've been trying to sleep for the last hour and a half...no luck whatsoever. not even close. i've got a million and one things rushing thru my mind, and the fact that i fell asleep tonight for a while probably isnt helping either. stuff like unisom doesnt knock me out either, i've tried it before. eventually i fall asleep of course, but i wake up feeling like shit cuz it didnt knock me out so i could get the recommended night's sleep.

so in an attempt to relax and fall asleep i think about such things as the metaphysics of language. but that doesnt work because i'm really interested in it.

these next 7 months will be the most difficult. i know what you're thinking...but what about when i get a job? well, i've pretty much written off the legal field, at least in any traditional sense. law school as taught me little if anything, and i've largely wasted the last 3 years of my life. however, 1 important lesson has come out of it: i dont want to do anything law related.

transactional work might be ok, but i dont want to be surrounded by an office full of douchebags all day. think about it. look around your schools and/or offices. law students who are douchebags become attorneys who are douchebags. i've had enough in 3 years that i dont need anymore. i'm not dumb enough to say all are douchebags, but many many are. and if you dont see this, then you're probably one of them.

after working for a civil litigation firm this past summer, i sure as shit dont want to do that either. they should really be called professionals of procedure. i thought it was boring to sit thru the civil procedure class...turns out that was way more exciting than living it.

besides, the common thread of the common law is that judges decide what they want the outcome to be then use statutory/constitutional interpretation and precedent to justify their conclusion. common law is messy enough where you can almost always find some case law to support your side. if not, statutes are often so ambiguous that you can interpret them in your favor. and if not, then just argue about the placement of a word, the presence of a word, or the lack of a word and there you go, you've now got a legislative intent argument.

why do you think it was such a big deal when roberts and alito got nominated for the supreme court? if there were clear laws and a clear line of cases to follow then it seems that the outcomes of "controversial" cases might be somewhat predictable. of course, there are gaps in the law. but democrats wanted to block the nominations because they were worried that roberts and alito would justify the outcomes they want. if this isnt a real concern, then why all the fuss? judges are human. just like you, me, and everyone except paralyzed handicapped people, they put their own pants on one leg at a time.

so it's now even later, and i'm back where i started, suppressing some thoughts in favor of trying to determine whether language has meaning independent of each individual's subjective understanding of the words or concepts laid forth in the sentence. whether a physical sentence is itself meaningless without notions that we attach to it. or whether two or more people must share in these notions for a sentence to have any meaning. and a whole lot of other crap.

i guess i think about this stuff a lot...and use these ideas everyday, even if subconsciously. i sometimes find myself at odds with the person with whom i'm speaking because i listen to the exact words they use and how they put them together to garner the meaning of what they say. and i think i sometimes just overanalyze the words as if their statement was a statute, and it leads to us being on different pages. of course when speaking, you also have to factor in things like tone, pitch, etc to determine meaning. but now i'm just off on another useless tangent.

sometimes, i just really think goddamn these 3 years. i have no doubt that i'm very lucky to be where i am today, but i sometimes just wonder if i could have made a better choice. of course, then i could be saying the same thing about wishing i had gone to law school. sometimes i wish i didnt know now what i didnt know then. luckily, i've got great friends and family who put up with my shit.

time to try sleep again or tomorrow is just going to turn into monday part 2. i sure dont need that.