Confessions of a Litigious Mind

The random, irrelevant musings of a law school graduate.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

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.

11 Comments:

At 10/03/2006 10:39 AM, Blogger d$ said...

well, at least you've got bob segar.

 
At 10/03/2006 12:11 PM, Blogger josh said...

huh?

 
At 10/03/2006 12:43 PM, Blogger law monkey said...

have you read wittgenstein? if you're into linguistics, he's pretty much THE premiere language philosopher.

 
At 10/03/2006 1:13 PM, Blogger sadielady said...

my life is a neverending monday.

 
At 10/03/2006 3:33 PM, Blogger LawStudentGuyPerson said...

Hey man, the legal profession needs more people like you, not less. You've obviously got the intelligence, but you also see through the bullshit - can't that be of advantage to you?

 
At 10/03/2006 7:15 PM, Blogger sadielady said...

to follow up on lawstudentguyperson's comment: i agree the legal profession needs more people like you. however, i caution you: stay the fuck out of the motherfucking legal profession. it doesn't deserve people like you, and you don't deserve to have to fucking deal with it.

 
At 10/03/2006 9:25 PM, Blogger sadielady said...

hey, dicta, check your email, por favor. (whatever the fuck that means. i was never very good at spanish. oh, and by the way, remind me please when i'm past the current work-related bullshit i'm dealing with tonight, that i have two things i want to respond to you about regarding the language post.)

 
At 10/04/2006 12:35 AM, Blogger josh said...

thanks everyone, and holmes, i hope you're right. i'm still trying to figure that part out. maybe it could land me a sweet acting role on a legal drama series. sure, evidence is always crucial to those shows, but i didnt fail that class...that was just hearsay.


also, did a worker from the coffee shop breathe on you? it's probably just a contact high.

 
At 10/04/2006 11:40 PM, Blogger sadielady said...

i'm reading the alchemist right now by paulo coelho. it's more of a fable than a novel, is how it's described. it's about a shepherd who is on a quest for a treasure; along the way he meets people who tell him to pay attention to the omens, to the signs, to what they are telling him. he meets a man who wants to be an alchemist, who is searching for a universal language. it's very simply written, this fable; the sentences are short, concise, easy to follow. for some reason i find that it calms me, reading this book; it's soothing. i think one reason for that is that it's nice to not have to think too much about the words themselves, the language, how the story is communicated. i talk too much too often, and my own sentences, whether i write them or speak them, become too convoluted even for myself sometimes. sometimes i see the end of a sentence in my head before i get there, and i think that even though i know where i'm going, therefore i can follow my own sentences and trains of thought, it's unclear to my listener. there are some times though when thoughts can be communicated without words, and it seems easier communicating that way; sometimes the words get in the way and mess up the meaning, and i wish i could just telepathically relate what it is i want to say without having to put it into words. sometimes in my head i think things without using words; sometimes there are insufficient words to describe something. yet it's there, there are thoughts and ideas and feelings that exist in my head, and i fully understand and feel and recognize them in a way that i don't even have to put into words for my own benefit in my head. i wish sometimes that i could speak in some other language, not french or german or spanish, but some other language, some universal language, like this alchemist seems to be searching for. it reminds me of another book i read once long ago, actually, was bleibt (what remains) by christa wolf. that story begins with the thought of searching for a language adequate enough to tell her story; the yearning for another language. i read that story when i was living in berlin years ago, in college; at the time i was trying to become fluent in german, and i had finally gotten to a point where i would dream in german at night, think in german during the day, and understand it, without having to mentally translate it over to english. and i was obsessed with this idea of how words hold their meaning, how thoughts and ideas are exchanged by using a language, where the words themselves have different meanings attached to them, and how the placement of them in a sentence can affect how adequately you can convey to someone else what it is that you yourself are thinking. anyway, i still think about this sometimes at work, sometimes when i get tongue-tied and frustrated at myself; the frustration comes from feeling like i do not possess an adequate language base to communicate exactly what it is i want to say, most often frustration at explaining legal reasoning to a non-legal person, especially when dealing with a person who does not communicate very well themselves, a person who i think is terribly lacking in intelligence and comprehension - sometimes there are sufficient words that i can use that they can understand to try to explain legal issues to them, and legal arguments, and why exactly it is that i am giving them the legal advice or the response to them that I am.

whew, and speaking of language and trying to communicate thoughts, why do i have a feeling that this comment i just wrote is going to make know sense when i go back and read it after i post it? ;)

 
At 10/04/2006 11:47 PM, Blogger sadielady said...

that was supposed to say sometimes there aren't sufficient words that i can use that they can understand to try to explain legal issues to them, etc. see? in my head that was a negative, an insuffiency, but because i left out a word by accident, you would've thought that i had said something completely different. that's why proofreading is so important, too; i should do more of that.

 
At 9/04/2007 9:48 PM, Blogger The Ballerina said...

I did a search under "law school is full of douchebags" and came up with your blog. Thanks for calling 'em like you see 'em. I couldn't agree more-can't wait for third year to be over!

 

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