The Cat's in the Cradle (no love for movie lawyers)

Atticus Finch? Pah! Below, the movie lawyers who have shaped my understanding of the practice of law and what it does to one's home life:

Robin Williams, "Peter Banning", Hook (1991)
Peter Banning misses his son's baseball game and this contributes directly to his children being abducted in the night. I played little league baseball when I was a kid. I sucked. I was relieved when my family wasn't there to see me, swaying around out in right field where nobody ever hit. (They tell the kids that every position is important and that they need good throwers in the outfield; this is a lie. I couldn't catch or throw, but they had to put me somewhere.) Plenty was traumatic about childhood baseball (and hockey, soccer, basketball and football), but not my father's failing to make it to every game. If anything, I played better without the added pressure. Certainly his absence wouldn't have caused me to repudiate my lineage and take up with a mustachioed amputee.

Emilio Estevez, "Gordon Bombay", The Mighty Ducks (1992)
Gordon deserves mention because he begins the movie speeding in his luxury car whilst under the influence, surely every young lawyer's secret aspiration. Though he has no children of his own, he does his damnedest to screw up a bunch of other people's kids before he sees the error of his ways and commits to coaching wildly unrealistic hockey for at-risk youth with available single moms.

Dan Hedaya, "Mel Horowitz", Clueless (1995)
If Alicia Silverstone's father weren't too busy getting paid $500 to yell at people as the most fearsome litigator in whatever whitebread gated community of California they're supposedly in, he might have been able to stop her from attempting to seduce first an oblivious homosexual boy and then her own step-brother. The girl needs a strong male figure in her life.

Keanu Reeves, "Kevin Lomax", The Devil's Advocate (1997)
Up-and-coming defence attorney Keanu Reeves ("Is this game sexual in nature?!") takes a job at a big-city firm and takes forever to learn what everyone already knows who didn't wander into the movie accidentally: his senior partner is the devil! Get it? He's the actual devil! And advocate is a synonym for lawyer. What other cliche proverbs can they adapt? How about Let's Put Our Thinking Caps On, in theatres everywhere; or Flogging a Dead Horse, on DVD and Blu-Ray. Kevin Lomax's wife Charlize Theron intuits the truth about her husband's boss "John Milton" -- get it?! wait, weak -- and offs herself, only to be brought back from the dead when Neo makes the ultimate sacrifice: declining to impregnate Satan's hot, willing daughter.

Jim Carrey, "Fletcher Reede", Liar Liar (1997)
As with Hook and The Mighty Ducks, it's unclear at the end of the movie what Jim Carrey will do to support his family after he abandons the ugly legal community that led him astray. Something more morally supportable, no doubt. Perhaps he'll invent a device that sits atop the television, reads viewers' minds and beams their desires to a central hub in Gotham City. Perhaps he'll star in a reality show. In any event: after inflicting the most gratuitous PG violence since Home Alone upon himself for the duration of the film, Jim Carrey has the epiphany that lying all the time hurts his relationships. This is a dangerous message for children. [If you liked Liar Liar, you'll love Yes!, in which Jim Carrey returns to the exact same premise after eleven years and with somehow even less dignity.]

Michael Douglas, "Robert Wakefield", Traffic (2000)
O, cruel fate! Michael Douglas is a former judge caught up in the hectic schedule of his new position as Washington drug czar, who fails to defuse the timebomb at home until it's too late: his daughter is addicted to the very smack he's sworn to eradicate -- and what's worse, her virtue has been stolen by anonymous black men! We all must watch this movie again.

Gene Hackman, "Royal Tenenbaum", The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Like so many of my kind, I love this movie. Royal barely scrapes onto the list, because his legal career is not the cause of his familial neglect; on the contrary, both are incidental effects of his narcissism. And he has long since been disbarred by the time he is redeemed by the love of his family. But the damage of childhood neglect is irreversible: his son Richie tries to kill himself and then confesses his love for his adopted sister. This brings our foiled-suicide-attempt count to at least two, and sets off our third pseudo-incest red flag.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

What can we conclude? The children (and wives) of lawyers are vulnerable to juvenile delinquency, drug dependence, sexual precociousness, incest and suicide attempts. For God's sake, get out of the office and start throwing the ball around the backyard with Jimmy! You haven't a moment to lose! There could be a dagger in your door already!

[Let me know whom I have missed.]

grinding my gears today:

American coverage of the Canadian "political crisis" never fails to mention the Governor General's role as representative of "the country's head of state, Queen Elizabeth II", as if we're a quaint imperial outpost rather than the North American democracy that still has a functional banking system. To wit:

• NYTimes.com
• CNN
• TPM

CUPE 3903 strike, day 19

Was my last class on November 5th? Where did that time go? What the fuck have I been doing for the last nineteen days?

I’m including weekends in my Strike Count, because

1. if they were actually at the bargaining table, the disputants would be working through the weekends, and
2. all the days are bleeding together.
   

Of my goals for the strike period, I have accomplished most of the first one and none of the others. I’ve been reading my IP textbook every day for not less than a week and I’ve finished 220 pages. I figure I’m averaging about ten pages an hour. If there were a remedial legal reading class, I would be in the front row. What’s really killing my time is I’m highlighting the shit out of the book: the further I get, the more significant everything seems and the more I highlight. The last two chapters will probably just be wall-to-wall yellow.

I’m only partially to blame for not accomplishing my other strike goals:

• I’m sure my course summaries would be a masterpiece by now, but my puppy ate my laptop power cord -- not his first offence -- so I’ve been biding my time reading and highlighting and stealing other people's computers until a new cord arrives;
• my IPilogue assignment is canceled altogether [Damn you, CUPE 3903, look what your avarice has wrought! that was a 250-wd assignment for god's sake!];
• my seminar on "Termination of the Lawyer-Client Relationship" would have taken place yesterday;
• my apartment’s toilet likely continues to run, but I wouldn’t know because I fled Toronto the day after the strike began;
• likewise the smell in the front hall of my apartment [read: the entire apartment]; and
  
• as for curing heart disease, if the answer lies in sitting around eating my parents’ food, I’m surely close to a breakthrough.
  

Composing this list has been disheartening, and I love bulleted lists. I'm no longer ambivalent about the school stoppage. I can't shake the feeling that nothing I'm doing is enough and everyone is getting ahead of me. Historically, this has in fact been the case. I have wasted two solid weeks of free, no-strings holiday, and while my classmates have no doubt devoted nine hours out of every ten to forging themselves into better, faster, stronger legal automatons, I have spent the day

• making coffee, drinking it, then making more, then taking pills for the headache inevitably induced by the coffee;
  
• reading about Hillary as secretary of state;
• reading about Hugh Jackman;
  
• trying to determine if I have synaesthesia or if I just want to have it;
  
• deleting dormant/unread/annoying blogs from my RSS reader;
• adding things to my girlfriend's reader without her knowledge or consent, despite the fact that she has never used a reader and has explicitly stated that she has no intention to start; and
• making bulleted lists.

That's two bulleted lists and I don't feel any better. I'm going stir crazy. I'm having nightmares that combine conversations with exes, hunting the Most Dangerous Game and high school football into one bizarre transaction. You would think I would be having the dream about having to write an exam for a class I've never been to, but no: it's killing people and football.

I must get out of here. I must get free. Please resume negotiations.

hamster local 293

toothpastefordinner.com

Steeeeerike!

It's 2:00 and I'm in my pajamas, which are stained with coffee because this morning I had a spill while drinking in bed and watching Dexter. And by this morning, I mean noon or so.

My abject sloth today isn't really that much different from any other day, except I don't feel as bad about it this time, thanks to our comrades at CUPE 3903, who as of 7:00 this morning are manning the barricades at Jane, Finch, Keele and Steeles the optimistically rebranded University Heights. Hope they brought their flak jackets! And not just because Schulich is still in session and the business students are going to throw bricks at the picket line. Mostly because of that though.

I don't have a position on the labour dispute. I guess TAs have a right to a living wage. And it's not like my nascent Bay Street career is in jeopardy, like a number of other students. However, my sympathy might evaporate if the strike lasts more than, say, a week or two.

No Canadian law school has ever lost an entire term. After the last long strike, Osgoode gave students the choice of opting out of the grading curve in favour of a pass-fail scheme. I don't know where I stand, should it come to that. On one hand, I feel reasonably confident that I might do well this year, at least the middle of the curve, if not the high side of it. If I choose pass-fail, my transcript won't reflect any improvement over last year. On the other hand, I'm probably deluding myself in thinking there has been any improvement. I am probably a prime candidate for such an opportunity.

But that won't happen unless the strike is quite lengthy. In the mean-time, I have big plans for my time off. I'm going to

• go back and read the IP textbook which I didn't receive from Amazon.ca until late October
• create the greatest summaries Osgoode has ever seen -- even better than my first year summaries which, though comprehensive and impressively bound (such that I fooled some people into believing I was extremely well prepared), did not help me at all since I finished them on average four hours before their exams were to begin
• write a response for IPilogue.ca, even though the assignment is postponed, maybe cancelled
  
• prepare to discuss the "Termination of the Lawyer-Client Relationship", even though my seminar on that topic is also postponed
• read the thirty-odd unread, non-law-related novels (and three Rumpole books) calling to me from my shelf
• figure out why my toilet is always running
• get rid of that fucking death smell in my linen closet
• cure heart disease

The last one is a maybe, but the rest are for sure for sure.

S ... solidarity?

I can't take notes by hand

I just end up drawing my peers.

To wit:
The likeness is poor: in reality he wouldn't have his hand up, he would just speak out of turn.

The Bill Clinton President School (TM)

STUDY

get back to work

the other half undercover

Last night I took the train home and started my Thanksgiving weekend a day early. It's Yom Kippur, so I have no class today -- thanks, York! I decided to make good use of this Day of Atonement by catching up on my many, many neglected Intellectual Property readings. With that in mind, I thought I would pay a visit to the University of Western Ontario Faculty of Law and find out what life might be like if I had chosen a different path.

It's worse than I feared. Western Law makes Osgoode look like U-571: Western's walls are painted in muted, elegant hues; the hallways are filled with natural light; the ceilings are high; the library, though smaller (cosier, more intimate) than Osgoode's, is equipped with grand wooden tables and carrels half again as large as ours. There is a triumph of modernity and timelessness here, compared to which my alma matter is a dated 70s monstrosity (true, at least for two more years) and 905 nouveau riche at the same time.

It took me an hour to walk from my girlfriend's house to here, a little more than the amount of time it takes me to get to Osgoode by subway and bus. It's beautiful outside: the leaves are turning, the sun is shining and there's not a cloud in the sky. Western is in a bubble where it's always sweater-and-skirt weather. It's like the town where the Gilmore Girls lived.

I can only presume that the students here enjoy relationships of scholarly camaraderie, that they help one another without a moment's hesitation to consider how such altruism will affect their positions on the grading curve. They're better looking, too.

They don't get Jewish holidays off though, so it balances out.

There's no emoticon for how I feel when Jose Gonzalez rhymes 'passion' with 'compassion'

Angry face wouldn't do. >:( It's not anger, really. I'm in too fine a mood, drinking my coffee on this overcast morning, and Jose Gonzalez is too wussy.

~

In my ongoing efforts to transform myself into New Model Will (hereafter: NMW), a dynamic young legal scholar whom firms will line up to hire, I'm trying to limit the amount of time I waste online [he wrote in a meandering, aimless post in a blog read by no one -- Ed.]. To that end I have discovered a helpful Firefox add-on: TimeTracker. It's a tiny little clock in the bottom-right of my screen which informs me how long I've been online since getting up this morning. This is helpful for days like today, when I don't want to limit my surfing entirely (in which case I would activate LeechBlock, for people with absolutely no spine or will power, people like Old/Current Model Will) but I don't want to waste the entire weekend.

For instance, TimeTracker tells me I've been online for 52 minutes already this morning. I don't know where that time went. I seem to recall watching some SNL sketches from last night (I'm glad NBC stopped swimming against the current and started uploading all their most popular material immediately after it airs) and reading the same Facebook feed updates I read half a dozen times yesterday. Dangerously un-NMW-like.

~

Unrelated: studying for my one-hour Criminal Procedure test has led me to two conclusions:

1. When I am forced to write notes by hand [the prof enforces a laptop ban in her classes], I just draw pictures of people I don't like;
2. I don't know how to prepare for a one-hour test, as I have not had one since grade twelve or so; and
3. Short numbered lists are the cornerstone of the criminal justice system -- without them, it would be margin-to-margin chaos!
   

~

The dynamic young legal scholar is off to the gym now, because he signed up three days ago, it's a rip-off, and he hasn't used it once yet; because helping the body helps the mind, or some bullshit; and because anything, even physical exertion, is better than reading about Waterfield and Mann again.

good news today

Not good news for me, good Lord no, I'm still hopeless. Good news for the American justice system: it got a do-over!

Martin Scorsese : Academy Award for The Departed :: O.J. Simpson : armed robbery conviction

Juice looks good for a sixty-one-year-old man. I guess thirteen years of being the earthly golf-playing embodiment of all that is wrong with the adversarial system is good for body and soul.

Track and Field Day at Osgoode Hall

This week reminded me of elementary school during track and field finals, when the athletes among my classmates went to another regional school to compete for ribbons. The rest of us (the majority, it turns out, but it didn't seem so at the time) stayed behind for Fun Day, or Play Day, or some bullshit thing. The grade eights would run three-legged-races and limbo contests and egg-related feats of agility. It wasn't fun, partially because the games were invented and administered by thirteen-year-olds, but principally because everyone there knew they were there because they had failed to demonstrate any strength, speed or agility and because the faculty felt they couldn't make some of the kids work while the rest were off jumping over bars and sand pits.

My classes were half empty yesterday. Many of my Osgoode peers are taking part in On-Campus Interviews, which will determine whether they obtain coveted jobs in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver or (dare to hope!) New York in summer 2009. Everybody is dolled up and stressed out, and nobody is in class because at this point their futures are all but assured and they needn't trouble themselves with such minutiae.

Meanwhile, back at Fun Day, it's business as usual, only more excruciating than normal because the students who normally monopolize the discourse are all at OCIs. Those Left Behind put on a brave face, talking about how they chose not to participate in the whole stressful rigmarole (and maybe some of them really did, choose), joking about their bad marks, pretending their futures are truly in doubt, flat out lying that they already have a job locked up back at the Public Prosecutions office where they worked last summer. That last one is me.

At least profs continue to lecture, rather than slap us in the face. If I go to school on Monday and I am asked to negotiate an obstacle course while balancing an egg on a spoon in my mouth, I will do what I should have done in grade eight: drop out.