The Reluctant Grownup

Three down, one to go.  For one exam, my professor lifted a problem from a contracts casebook virtually word for word - which another professor had done on HIS exam in 1995.  The other professor posted this problem and the answer online in his old exam file, to which we all have access.  Half my classmates read it and half didn't.  Besides the fact that this is incredibly lazy on both professors' parts, now half the class had a huge advantage on exam day.  The other half, the half into which I fall, did not.  Studying old exams is part and parcel of prep for finals, but this one was from 1995 and I just didn't get back to 14 years previously on every single professor.  These things take three hours each to go through, and I don't have 3 hours * 14 years * 6 professors, however many hours that is.  It was luck of the draw who got there and who didn't.

Man, law professors have it made.  They have two classes per term, maybe three.  The only thing they have to grade all year is the final - it's the only test they have to write.  And now it turns out they lift the damn things from casebooks.  Some of my profs are really interested in what they're doing, really prepared every day, and know right where we are and what we're doing.  They do intensive exam prep with us, help us with outlines, and are available at any time.  They post old exams and exam model answers, and frequently encourage us to check them and check ourselves so we are fully prepared, both for exams AND to be lawyers.  And others . . . just want the paycheck.  Such is life, but you can bet I've written admin about this and also reflected my displeasure in my evaluation (which went out prior to exams, but I was already displeased with this prof.)  This is just further proof that he's getting out of as much work as possible.  How hard is it to write a three page test?  All you have to do is make up fact patterns!  Seriously, non-law people out there - it's really simple.  Here's an example of a single Torts problem, which I will compose for you in three minutes or less:

Torts, 2009, Professor Gillian
Danny had just bought a brand new Ford, and was driving his girlfriend Priscilla through downtown Cityville to show it off.  They came to a red light, and Danny pushed on the brakes, which did not respond.  As a result, he plowed into the back of the car in front of him, which was driven by Sally, who had her three children in the back, none in carseats or seatbelts.  Sally happened to be Priscilla's sister, and the children in the car were thus Priscilla's nieces and nephews.  The rear end pushed Sally's car into the intersection, where she was struck from the side by a Lights Plus delivery van, driven by Jason, who was heading towards McDonald's to get a drive through lunch between deliveries.  Jason had been bending down to fish a lost CD from under the passenger seat, and so did not even attempt a stop.

Danny and Priscilla were not physically injured, but Danny's car was totaled.  Sally and her children suffered major injuries, the children's exacerbated by the fact that they were unrestrained and thrown from the car on impact.  When Priscilla saw the injuries of her sister and nieces and nephews, she became hysterical.  In the months since the accident, she lost considerable weight, was unable to sleep, and suffered an eating disorder, haunted by the scene of the children and her sister laying on the street injured.  Jason also suffered injuries to his face and chest from the impact of his airbag.  Further, when Jason was taken by ambulance to the Cityville Hospital, the ambulance driver had been drinking and crashed the ambulance into a tree, causing further injury to Jason which rendered him a paraplegic and no longer able to drive.  As a result, Jason lost his delivery job.  The ambulance driver had been off duty but on call, and Cityville Hospital called him in to work when another ambulance driver called in sick.  They had no policy for off-duty, on-call employee behavior.  In his fiver year career at CH, the ambulance driver had never previously been called in when on-call, and was celebrating his sister's wedding when they called on this day.

Explore the possibilities of suits for negligence against Ford, Jason, Lights Plus, Cityville Hospital, the ambulance driver, and anyone else that applies.  Explore the heads of damage for Danny, Priscilla, Sally, Sally's children, and Jason.

Voila.  Took me, ok, five minutes.

Thanks for letting me prove that to you all.  And now, I'm off to study for my Crim exam.

Guess who figured out how to open doors today?

Dear, dear, dear.

Last night we met another young family at Celebration in the Oaks - a Christmas carnival set up in City Park of New Orleans.  Jack and his little friend Alden were both thrilled - they ran all over the park, from light display to light display, pointing and gabbling in their baby words.  The park is large, and there were laser light shows and booths and carnival rides and things all over it.  In one grassy, hedged in area, Christmas carols played loudly and twinkle lights "danced" to the tune.  The beat took over my son's body, and all forward progress ceased.  Feet planted in that spot, he bounced and wiggled and jiggled and jounced, brow furrowed, hands waving.  He can't control himself around a good rhythm, he's just gotta dance.  He kept reaching up to hold the other mother's hand - she was his favorite dance partner.  Patrick and I caught one another's eyes and laughed, and I thought briefly of the joy of being a two-parent household - there is always one other person who I know will find our child's shenanigans as delightful and impressive as I do.  To other people, he was just a silly little boy wiggling his bootie - to us, he is the height of entertainment.  People joke that one day he'll be a football player because of his size, but I can't help but wonder if he'll be in a Stomp-type musical, or a drum line, or even ballet (big lumbering toddlers can grow into graceful ballet dancers, I'm sure of it!)

It's time to go do some reading, if my preggo self doesn't fall asleep on the keyboard.  Early afternoon = my sleepy time.

Early this morning I had a dream that woke me thoroughly enough that I got up, got a bowl of cereal, and turned on the computer to spill this out.

The Dream

In my very odd dream, a large group of people was touring London.  The group included Patrick and I (no Jack), Patrick's sister Erin and her daughter (no husband), MY parents, the pastor of the church we attend here, and a handful of strangers.  It involved various strange dream-moments, including Erin insisting that we buy a wall hand dryer for her friend's bathroom as a souvenir (it had to be from LONDON), and all of us taking off our shoes to splash in puddles in the street.  At the very end, someone in a tourist shop shouted Tea Party!  Tea Party! and then handed our pastor (who was holding my niece at the time) an old fashioned black phone - one of those kinds with a separate earpiece that you hold to your ear.  He listened a moment, got off the phone, consulted with my parents, and then it came out somehow that my parents wanted to take us all on a five hour cruise in the Thames with the American Tea Party movement.  I refused, my mother stomped her foot, and I was so deeply annoyed with her that I woke up angry and had to blink and wrinkle my forehead a number of times before I fully understood that I was home in bed.

This Morning

So, I wonder a bit what that was about?  I have no idea, but what it did is got me thinking about sending my kid to his grandparents' house for a week, which is what we're about to do (helps with exam week.)  My parents have often joked, though not recently, that if they ever get Jack to themselves he'll be watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh all day that they have him, so that he comes back to us a staunch Republican.  They're (mostly) kidding, and I know what lies underneath it is a disappointment that their eldest child (and only their eldest, as far as I know) is a turncoat lib Dem.  I started thinking about that this morning, and wondering how I would feel if Jack grew up a Republican.  It certainly doesn't bother me in the slightest if he gets exposure to Republican ideals, though I wish it was the more elevated discourse of men-of-old like William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, or William Safire, instead of that harping entertainer Limbaugh and those of his ilk on Fox, whose sole purpose seems to be to demonize, divide, and thereby get ratings.  But that's different from him becoming a conservative Republican as an adult.  How would I feel?

I came to this conclusion, and it's one I stand by, even though this is years in the future.  If Jack becomes a Republican conservative when he grows up, I will not mind.  But I want him to be the type of Republican who talks about economic policy, about government size and spending, about taxes and how they affect the financial health of our nation.  I want him to have an open, questioning, critical mind, and I want him to know he can argue with me and will get a good, non-emotional argument back (well, maybe he'd better argue with his dad, who's better at talking about this sort of thing).  I will be disappointed in myself if I raise a kid who talks about (the future analogies of) Obama's birth certificate, the fact that he's a Muslim, a socialist, a communist, as bad as Hitler, his wife's a racist, his policies will destroy America.  If he rants that abortion doctors should be murdered, that gays are disgusting and don't belong in our society, and that poor (black) people in projects are a totally useless drain on our resources (without giving any kind of constructive argument on what to do with them all), I will be disappointed indeed.

I really don't like what the Republican party stands for these days.  I don't like the xenophobia, the exclusive claims on patriotism and family values and love of God, the aligning of the religious right with the political right, the support of torture in the name of "freedom", and the suspicion of the highly educated in favor of "rogues" who barely finished college and don't read or think or express ideas (even if she looks cute when she winks).  I have a great deal of respect for the Republican ideals of small government, laissez faire economic policy, low taxes and trickle down economics, even if I don't think some of that stuff works.  I understand why they oppose public healthcare (though I would have hoped that this recession and the number of "hard-working", "deserving" people without jobs or healthcare due to those "lazy" "welfare queens" who "bought houses they couldn't afford" [let's not forget, with rich and greedy people's help] and killed the economy would even soften my staunchly conservative parents' hearts.  Note, parents, that without health care reform, if Jack gets cancer right now and it costs more than $250,000 to fix [our lifetime cap], he will die.  Pooling our family's resources all together, we still couldn't possibly come up with the hundreds of thousands of dollars for his treatment.  That is the truth, and I want it to bother you.)  It distresses me that the faces and mouthpieces of the Republican party are not talking about ideas anymore.  I don't have any respect for most of them, and I don't want to listen to any of them, because what they say seems to be all about injecting confusion and fear rather than challenging policies for the sake of America's economic and social health.

It is conceivable that, in a differe political climate, I could vote Republican.  I'm actually pretty fiscally conservative, though socially not so much.  Before he listened to his lousy presidential campaign managers and let his campaign devolve into scaremongering and personal attacks on his opponent, I quite liked John McCain and would have considered voting for him.  But the Republicans aren't interested in moderates like me.  To be a moderate Republican is to commit political suicide, and it's because of loudmouths like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck that this is so.  And I wish it wasn't.  I would love to be convinced, swayed by reasonable discourse from the other side.  I loathe being harangued and tricked and emotionally manipulated.  I loathe it enough that I got up at 7am on a Saturday morning even though my kid was still sleeping, and poured this out onto a blog that 6 people read.

So, in fine . . . I am glad Jack is spending time with his grandparents, and I don't mind if they talk to him about what it means to be a Republican.  I would rather he didn't hear Rush and Glenn and Ann and Greta and the rest of them, but it won't kill him.  God knows, it might kill me this Christmas break, as that's usually all that's on my parents' t.v., but we'll all survive.  I have to trust that my parents will be reasonable, and they won't tell him his parents are evil or don't love America.  (OK, I realize he's one year old, but I'm talking now and in the future, right?)  They won't take him to a tea party rally, since they never go to those things themselves.  They'll keep him safe, and play with him, and make him feel loved, and maybe teach him a little about trickle down economics, and that's F-I-N-E fine with me.

And now, speaking of the devil - he's awake.  End harangue.

Exams in just a few days, but I can't muster the energy to freak out.  I'm barely studying.  Check out this first semester 1L!  Didn't take long for the apathy to set in.

OK, not truly apathy.  I'm just a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kind of student.  I studied everything as I went, outlined as I went, and I feel pretty good about what I know.  I started practicing on old exams from the first week of class.  I'm also not burdened by the need to be number one in my class.  I do need that 3.0 to keep the money that my school has generously given me, but I don't find that a stressful GPA to maintain.  Maybe when I get grades, this attitude will change.  Not to sound above all of this, or better than my classmates, but I'm more worried about Jack's lack of vocabulary at 19 months than about impleader, sufficient concurrent causes, mitigation, or the standard of due care (a little representative from each of my first term classes for you!)

Last night, I put Jack to bed.  He is wonderful about bedtime and naptime - we just tell him it's time, read a book or two, and put him in wide awake.  No tears, no fuss, he puts himself to sleep.  It's delightful.  Anyway, a little after I put him down last night, I went into my own room to get on my pajamas.  Our rooms are connected by a door that doesn't shut, there is no doorknob (ahhh, renting).  I was quiet, but he was apparently still awake, because I heard him say, softly and sweetly, Mom, is that you?  What he really said sounded something like "shojjee guzz mmmuh?"  But it was clear to me what he meant.  And that's Jack talking.  He talks to us all day long.  He has phrasing and inflection and clauses.  He pauses for us to answer him.  Most of the time, it's pretty clear to me what he wants.  But none of it is words.  It's like he's spent his babyhood with a bunch of Russians, and now he's speaking Russian to us Americans expecting us to understand him.  He is developed in many other ways that the charts say he should be developed, so he doesn't seem to be cognitively delayed.  He just won't say Mama or Dada or anything but the occasional "dog", "teeth", "fish", or "uh-oh."  I'm hoping before his next appointment he explodes with words, so we don't have to do any kind of early intervention.  But as the days roll by and the words don't come, I'm getting more and more anxious.  We talk to him all the time, with slow, exaggerated mouths - Bear, Jack.  Buh-ayre, bear.  Can you say bear?  Buh buh buh?  Buh-ayre?  And he just looks at us like we're loony and says "Djuh do?  Do mefuh."  "What are you guys doing?  Talk normal."

Sometimes I get a little angry with him, for not getting it.  For not responding to me, for making me feel like a poor teacher.  I don't want to be that mother, the nightmare stage mother who wants her kids to be the best, because they are a reflection of her best self and she doesn't want to look like a failure.  He is a reflection of my best self, and I'm proud of him.  In a few months, he'll probably be talking up a storm, and I'll forget this anxiety.  And if he's not, we'll help him til he is.

Due to a hot water heater malfunction, he went without a bath two nights in a row, so this morning I put him in the shower with me.  He won't stand in the shower on his own, it’s too scary, so I have to hold the slippery little thing.  He clung to me, head on my shoulder, and lay quietly as the water hit his back.  He loves it.  I do, too.  It’s so peaceful and sweet.  I have a delightful son.  I'll take exams in a couple of days, and English will finally click for him in a couple of ----, and everything will march along in the way that it should.

I have a killer cold.  So now - a dilemma.  Go to my last week of classes, which mostly consists of exam review sessions, and expose my fellow students to my illness right before exams?  Or stay home, miss the review, and spare my classmates?

I'm going to go.  But I'll wash my hands a lot.  And sit in the back.  And I promise not to kiss anybody.