28.5.06

Bitch-lorette Party

Thursday I went to a local drinking and eating establishment to wish yet another of my former classmates off. While there, our group was accosted by a bachelorette party.

You know the kind; the bride to be and her friends wander through a series of bars together. The bachelorette wears a veil and some type of T-shirt with a nearly clever slogan...

The differences between bachelorette parties and bachelor parties are, I think, somewhat telling as to the differences between the genders themselves. The goal of a bachelor party is generally to spend as much money as humanly possible getting the groom-to-be as close as possible to cheating and liver failure. By contrast, the women, while drunk, attempt to charge fellow bar patrons to engage in only mildly sexual activities, such as biting rings off the bachelorette's candy necklace.

The bachelorette from Thursday night was no different, it seemed. When she approached our party, I obliged and spent a hard earned one dollar bill for a piece of Pez-on-a-rope and a little bit of immortality in the pages of her pre-wedding scrapbook. Only later did I realize that I had been had.

At some point, one of my friends finally thought to point out that niether our grubby bar nor Thursday nights play host to a lot of bachelorette activity. He also noticed that the bachelorette only had one friend. It occurred to us that the two could hit a different bar every Thursday and pay for thier drinks with candy necklace earnings. I was irritated, but not enough to get my dollar back.

Well played, ladies.

19.5.06

Some Things Solve Themselves

The immigration debate has always been tense, but recent demonstrations by illegal immigrants and the casting of the National Anthem in Spanish have increased the stakes. The Senate recently passed a bill paving the way to erect a wall on along a 2,000 mile portion of the US/Mexico border, a project so costly it’s really only feasible if we use illegal Mexican labor. Maybe we could offer those Mexicans guest worker

Thankfully, Mexico has solved the problem by recently legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and heroin. The controversial move is fuelling speculation that this year, every single college sophomore will head south of the border for Spring Break, and that some will decide to stay.

I think this presents us with a perfect solution to our illegal immigration problem. We get rid of our drug addled ne’er-do-wells and free up space for hard-working Mexicans. Think of it as an exchange program. We send everyone interested in lying on white sand beaches high all day down to Mexico; for each American that leaves, we offer amnesty to one hard-working illegal Mexican (no Chinese or Guatemalans until they enact a policy to attract some of our dead weight).

14.5.06

An Alternate Address

After significant number of requests at various graduation parties, I have decided to make available the comedy routine portion of my graduation speech audition. I will not post the more serious portion of the audition because: 1) I deleted the file and can’t be bothered re-writing it and 2) this was really the only part that would have set my speech apart from anyone else’s. Here goes.

Hi!

Well. Here we are. Law school is over. I hope I don’t come across as pushy about religion when I say “Thank Christ.” Now we can all go out into the real world and try to recapture those personalities this institution spent the last three years trying to kill. Can’t wait to start that grace period ticking.

It’s a great privilege to address this graduating class. There are so many people out there with talent, vision and unique perspective. I want to take this moment to thank the vast majority of you for not auditioning against me.

Seriously, though, you guys dodged a bullet. It’s really difficult to come up with a theme to speak on when addressing such a diverse group. As Dean Johnson noted both now and at the beginning of our time here, we come from a lot of different places, and where we’re going is no less varied. Sure, the parents and friends in the audience think we shake the Dean’s hand and magically transform into lawyer-drones, but we recognize that there is a big difference between practicing corporate law and family. Some of us will become public defenders, others in house counsel for large corporations. Plenty of us won’t even practice, we’ll enter business or politics. Some may even join the prestigious ranks of law professors, some may even (gesture to Dean Johnson) become… ummm….ummm…. ninjas. Or pirates. Susan Gainen keeps telling me I can do anything with a law degree. I think I’ll be an astronaut. Maybe study the effect of zero gravity on the Erie Doctrine.

Wherever we go, one thing is certain. Loans. I got to Northrup early to run through the speech, chase away the butterflies. I saw this Sally Mae rep come in with 240 individually labeled stopwatches. She's ready. Soon as you shake the Dean’s hand: Click!

With a name like Sally Mae, you think she’d be all helpful, you know, “y’all just bring that money back whenever ya can, y’hear!” No. She’s a stone cold bitch. Did you know that they are charging is interest on these loans. I know!

Anyway, from there I tried to make some tired points about how getting admitted to law school is a privilege, despite whatever we have overcome, our society has given us an incredible opportunity and we shouldn’t go about repaying our fellow citizens by creating a more complex legal system that benefits the pocketbooks of lawyers rather than the citizens it, and we, are meant to serve. But we’ve heard that a thousand times and repeatedly prove that we aren’t listening.

Congratulations to my classmates, thanks for making three horrible years more bearable.

6.5.06

The Oddessy, Reduex

Since nothing else interesting is really happening, and I get called on never updating all the time, I thought I would take you, dear reader, on a photographic tour of some of the highlights of my now not so recent trip...


Chichicastenango, Guatemala

This kid had a basket of live turkeys. I’m not sure what I would do with a live turkey. Does that make me a gringo?


Antigua, Guatemala

I never go anywhere without my camera strap, so I got a picture of it next to this food cart in Antigua. Thanks for all the memories, man


Lago de Ometepe, Nicaragua

Yeah, I loved the movie, too, but enough to name a boat after it?


Lago de Ometepe, Nicaragua

The boat drivers called this the “Arbol del Huevos” or “Tree of the Testicles.”


Lago de Omotepe, Nicaragua

True Story:

There is an island in Omotepe called Isle of the Monkeys (“Isla de los Monos”) where tour guides always bring groups to take pictures. After trolling around this tiny island for awhile, one girl in our boat asks the guide how all these monkeys survive on so little land. The guide tells her that the guy who owns the house on the adjacent island feeds them. “Wait,” we say, “so how did the monkeys get here?” The guide tells us that the guy from the other house just likes monkeys and brought some to the island. The monkeys aren’t native, and we never would have known. The guides just bring tourists to the island to take monkey pictures and never tell them that the monkeys are essentially fake.



Antigua, Guatemala

Shhhh!