Posts Tagged ‘moving’


While I’m Waiting for My Bar Lecture to Load

June 16th, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy

This is a collection of random thoughts. They’re both too short for a real post and too long for Twitter. Some of them might also be too big for me to devote the time to explore them thoroughly, but that would be admitting that I can’t do everything at once.

- The National Bone Marrow Donor Program is having a donor drive. Until June 22nd, they are covering the $100 cost to add new donors to the registry. It’s free, and the life you save could be Waldorf Van Buren’s.

- Suburban Panic supports the brave citizens campaigning for democracy in Iran. There were obviously some serious shenanigans going on with the vote counting. That said, we need to at least be prepared for the possibility that a legitimate recount will end with a numerical victory for Amhedinijad. I’m not saying that the ballots couldn’t have been stuffed as well, just that the issue might not be resolved by simply counting the votes.

- Even in cool weather, the combined body heat of two adults and one dog warms up our bedroom pretty quickly, and we wind up having to turn the air conditioner on at night. Why don’t we just open the windows? Because random people – sometimes gaggles of adolescents, sometimes adults on cellphones – often wander down our street shouting obscenities at odd hours. I am so looking forward to moving.

- The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund put out a call for volunteers during Wizard World Philadelphia. I should spend the weekend studying, but I sent them an email volunteering for Saturday. I haven’t heard from them yet, sadly. Here’s hoping they get back to me. Why no, I hadn’t thought about how awesome it would be for me, a recent law school graduate, to network with a group that assists with legal defense for comic book artists and writers. Why do you ask?

- There is a woman who rides around our neighborhood selling produce from her car. She announces her presence (and her wares) with a megaphone or loudspeaker of some sort. She has various seasonal specials, but she is always selling (in her apathetic, nasal monotone) “red ripe tomatoes, red ripe strawberries, red ripe bananas.” I am sorely tempted to flag her down and buy something, just so I can see what a red, ripe banana looks like. My feeling is that a banana that is one cannot be the other, unless something is very, very wrong, either with the fruit or your color vision.

- Wiley Drake is praying for the death of President Obama. I’ve said it before; Drake sincerely believes that his actions can cause the death of another human being. There’s a strong argument that he should be imprisoned for conspiracy to commit murder.

- My daughter’s pediatrician has been talking about a clicking sound in her left hip since she was born. After her two-month appointment, he sent us for an ultrasound. After the scan, the tech told us that the radiologist said everything was normal. At her four-month appointment, our pediatrician still hadn’t received the ultrasound report from the hospital. When he finally got a copy, it said that there was a minor, but clear, dysplasia in her hip. Isn’t ”dysplasia” intended to be specifically distinct from ”normal”  I do not know in what universe these words are synonyms, but it must be a confusing place, populated by people with elaborate leg braces that they are forbidden to talk about.

- We went to an orthopedist today, who sent us back for another ultrasound. This time, when they used the word “normal,” we were able to follow up with the orthopedist, who presumably knows that dysplasia isn’t. We were assured that all is right with her hip, and given the green light to exhale. A follow-up x-ray will happen at six months, but nothing else is necessary. I suppose now is as good a time as any to admit that, if she had been required to wear a brace, I was planning to brag incessantly about my cyborg baby.

- My video lecture has loaded. Back into the study hole.

EDIT: Holy crap, the woman lecturing on essay writing looks like she’s about 17. Good advice, but MAN I feel ancient.

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More Collected Observations

July 16th, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy

The bar exam looms ever larger, like a long zoom from orbit to the surface of a planet. To help me maintain my increasingly fragile sanity, here is another mishmash of thoughts and musings that have been sloshing around in my brainmeats between attempts at re-reading my Contracts outline.

  • There is a charter high school between the bus stop and work. There are two flags hanging in its front window, reminiscent of the championship banners professional sports teams hang in their stadiums. They tout the fact (and I wish I were making this up) that the school achieved “Adequate Yearly Progress” in 2007 and 2008. Huzzah for mediocrity! Seriously, if that’s the standard for big ass banners these days, then I need to get to the big ass banner store ASAP.
  • I once had the idea to start a line of “Big Ass” merchandise, selling oversized versions of everyday objects. It started during that period in the 90s when people were wearing those jeans with legs so wide you could smuggle farm animals in them. I was going to sell “Big Ass” jeans, and move on to t-shirts, powertools, truck tires, and anything else that was amenable to gross oversizing. Once again, the lack of start-up capital proved to be my undoing.
  • At work, I just added a title to our inventory called The Facesitter From Ipanema. Aside from being an awkward jape on the title of the bossa nova classic “The Girl From Ipanema, ” it raises an obvious question. If a woman is straddling your face, coercing you to perform cunnilingus by the threat of asphyxiating you with her buttocks and thighs, does it really matter what town she’s from?
  • Speaking of adequate progress, I spelled “asphyxiating” right on the first try. Hello, big ass banner store? Yes, I need to add something to my order.
  • How much dust has to accrete on a mug left in an office kitchen before it is considered abandoned and available for common use? I use visible discoloration as a guideline. If the dust alters or obscures the color of the mug, then, if I clean it, I feel entitled to use it.
  • Sadly, I forgot the second “c” in “accrete.” Cancel my big ass banner order.
  • Getting used to where the light switches are may be the most prickly, annoying thing about getting adjusted to a new apartment. If I turn on the light in the hall closet instead of turning out the light in the living room one more frickin’ time, I’m going to puke on someone.
  • I am putting together a project for after the bar exam is over. It is, by virtue of its size, a necessarily collaborative venture. I will have to lock my inner control freak in the closet for awhile.
  • I always have the best ideas when I’m far too busy to possibly develop them adequately.
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(So Many More) Collected Observations

July 22nd, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy

These little interstitials are about the only thing keeping me from hijacking a bus and driving it through the front window of a dynamite factory, so you’re going to have to put up with them, at least for the next week or so. After that, I’ll either have time to put together a proper post, or I’ll be curled up in a ball somewhere trying to figure out how I’m going to pay my student loans by begging for change at the bus stop.

  • I think I’ve discovered a heretofore unrecognized pattern in my behavior. Stress makes me apathetic. The more tense I get about something, the harder it is to give a rat’s ass about it. I think my brain has a built in “who gives a fuck?” valve, to prevent me going apeshit.
  • There is no easy or convenient way to move from one house to another, short of setting all your accumulated stuff on fire and starting over. And replacing it all gets expensive.
  • Things law school has taken away from me, #703: the ability to skip a software license agreement without feeling guilty. Nobody actually slogs through the entire End User License Agreement after downloading the newest version of iTunes. It borders on the physically impossible; by the time you’ve finished reading the last EULA, a new version of the software will be ready to download. But after three years of law school, I can’t help feeling a little ashamed of myself when I skip the text and click on the button to (falsely) indicate that I have read and agreed to abide by the onerous terms.
  • It’s amazing what a difference 20 minutes can make re: the density of assholes and elbows on a morning bus. When I take the 7:30 bus, it’s packed all the way into Center City. This morning, I dragged my swiftly sagging ass out of bed earlier, and made it onto the 7:10. There were half a dozen of us. I was able to read my outline without holding my bag on my lap, or worrying about socking somone in the kidney when I turned a page.
  • I had a dream the other night that consisted entirely of reading emails from a Twitter friend with whom I’ve never actually exchanged email correspondence. They were entirely mundane and unexciting, and yet the whole thing was the emails on the screen. I neither looked away from the monitor, nor switched to another task. Which is how I know it was a dream; IRL, I’m switching between windows like a hummingbird with a meth habit.
  • At the urging of dispensary owners, the city of Oakland is planning to tax medical marijuana. Hopefully this will vindicate the claim that taxing marijuana sales would provide a significant boost to government budgets. Not that this would be enough to get this country to abandon its insane prohibitionary fervor, but it might be a start.
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