So a friend of mine sent along a great site for procrastination: http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/

And this just made me bust out laughing: http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/2007/10/24/they-were-shivering-not-danc...

So this post comes courtesy of one of my siblings, who are a more connected crew than I manage to be.  First, the t-shirt that got me to write this:

So now that I've thrown up the cute graphic, you can't have one of these shirts and neither can I.  The shirt comes from shirt.woot.com, which is a website dedicated to selling one kind of shirt a day and one for one day at a time, so if you miss that day, no shirt for you.  In addition to shirt.woot, there's also woot.com (for electronic gadgets) and wine.woot.com (for wine, but that runs for a week).  Things get sold cheaply, but you have to move pretty fast.  All in all, it's a neat business with at least one good shirt.

Basically checking online news the last couple of days to get an idea of what's going on in the world, I've seen Jesse Jackson making comments about Obama (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-et-jackson11-2008jul11,0,1647..., one of McCain's campaign staff complaining about the country (http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/10/mccain.gramm/?iref=mpstoryview) and then follow-up upon follow-up on both.  Time has created a section called the history of the gaffe (http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1821563_1821568,00...).  I suspect this is a plot to make me hide from the internet.

I should never be allowed near a computer late at night.  I just get maudlin and thoughtful, which I imagine is how I should be after a few glasses of wine (but that just makes me gleeful or drowsy, and occasionally vomit-y).

Bar-studying continues at a crippled "my-give-a-damn-is-busted" pace - it's been a day filled with mopping up messes and moderate panic, so it's been hard to wrap my brain around a bunch of law that I don't really give a damn about.  So instead, now I'm looking up various poets I haven't read in awhile and thinking to myself about what an idiot I used to be and marvelling at how I'm a completely different kind of idiot now.  Hooray for me.  On the one hand, I wonder when my life became so vapid - but on the other hand, I look at what I used to think and wonder if I was really all that simplistic.  Or is it just that I'm too lazy and jaded to bother myself these days?  And so the spiral continues and I just continue to hemorrhage emo on the nets (which obviously needs more emo).

Of course, the usual (stereotyped and superficial) thought is that I need a drink.  But I always had this vague idea that I was supposed to get over this bullshit adolescent vacillation.  How the hell did I become an adult, exactly?

So Kate and I have been trying to deal with insurance for a little while now.  The idea is that between employment, we'd like temporary coverage in case something catastrophic happens, but nothing too expensive.  Here's the trajectory thus far:

1) We send in our application with credit card information for our first payment.  All is well and we are happy!

2) We get insurance cards (that we can presumably show at hospitals to prove we aren't deadbeats).  Life is good.

3) We get a letter saying we never paid for our insurance and we should give the insurance company some money.  Panic ensues.

4) We call the insurance company and tell them we'd like to fix the problem.  They ask us to fax them some information.  We fax the information.  Problem solved!

5) We call the insurance company to confirm.  It takes them 24 hours to find the fax, so no luck yet!

6) We call the insurance company to confirm.  Still no fax.  Turns out sometimes it takes 48 hours for the faxes to make their way through the system.

7) We call the insurance company to confirm.  Turns out July 3 is a holiday!  So is July 4.  We should try again after the holiday.  Life is starting to suck.

8) We call the insurance company to confirm.  Yet again, no fax has turned up.  Sometimes, it takes a business week to find faxes.  On the other hand, it turns out that this particular person can help us out by taking the necessary information over the phone.  Things are looking up!

9) Insurance company calls us.  The fax is still missing, and it turns out that taking our information over the phone has triggered the realization at the insurance company would like a new application to go with the money - so even if the fax turns up, it's too late to overcome the giant "FUCK YOU" stamp the insurance company has now put on our insurance folder.

10) We send in our application, with credit card information for our first (and hopefully last) payment.

This makes me feel a lot less assured if anything actually does happen.  I suspect that our coverage will be for absolutely nothing except impalement by rabid walrus or something equally useless.

So the laptop I'm using has this picky shift key that only works some of the time - if my writing comes out any less articulate than usual, I'm blaming the freaking keyboard.

Bar study continues at a slower pace, mostly because I'm becoming allergic to the whole process.  Hopefully, BarBri recycles these books after I use them, because I just keep sneezing on the freaking things.  Or I could just have a cold.

Kate and I still don't have any of our stuff, which means we're leading this oddly sparse existence in a house with pretty hardwood floors, pretty walls, and pretty much no furniture.  I'd take pictures, but the digital camera is also en route along with the rest of our stuff.  The cats seem to have taken to hiding in various corners of the house among the cabinets and what-not.  Hopefully, when this is all over, we'll be able to adapt to having a social life again.

Or we'll just be lawyers.  Whichever.

Just went and watched Wall-E with Kate as a bar break.  It's ridiculously cute, just a little schmaltzy, incredibly well animated and basically a lot of fun.  If you haven't seen it, go out and see it, and if you did, wasn't it a lot of fun?

Being a total geek, I went and looked it up on Wikipedia afterwards, and it looks like there's a fair number of reviewers who feel it's leftist propaganda, an indictment of American society, and so on and so forth.  Is it really possible to get a job bashing kid's movies as sinister conspiracies?  I wonder what the vicious plot behind "Land Before Time" was....

So Kate and I are settling okay into Houston - we like our neighborhood, the house is looking good, and we've dealt with the various issues raised by our neighbors caused as a result of our moving in.  So, on to the bad stuff, since no one is amused by the good stuff.

Number one, the bar sucks.  Anyone who's taken this understands, of course, but just to sketch out the outlines of why the bar sucks - basically, the exam covers all kinds of law that no one person will ever ever use except in the most theoretical cocktail party sense.  For instance, I will almost certainly never be put in charge of a criminal litigation, but if I am, thanks to the bar...I will have a vague sense that swhatever I do, I'm doing it wrong.

Number two, the moving company appears to have lost the driver for the truck that has all of our furniture.  They still have the truck, but the driver's gone missing.  No, I don't understand either.  But it means we're going to be sitting on floors for awhile longer.

Number three, our short-term health insurance provider tells us we never gave them any money.  So Kate and I are technically uninsured, which is just a little nerve-wracking.  Hopefully, we can sort it out soon (we thought we could sort it out yesterday, but apparently, July 3 is also a holiday for our insurance company.  Hooray!).

Numbers four through six...read the previous three over again and with exclamation points.

Seriously, though, things are okay.  But just okay.  The bar really sucks, and everything else is just icing on the cake.

Man - I like Obama as a candidate.  But I gotta admit, I'd really like to pay less in taxes than I do now, and it looks like McCain is the way to go for that.  Maybe it's time to give in to the dark side.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/candidates_taxproposals_tpc/index.htm?postversion=2008061115

(Yeah, I know that McCain's tax reforms won't take effect for years and years, and might never materialize.  And I know that McCain's unlikely to be able to push through his agenda with a Democratic congress in place.  But that still means I'm less likely to pay more in taxes than if Obama is president, right?  Okay, I admit it, I'm a sell-out.)

So writing a blog strikes me as a weird, weird experience.  On the one hand, it's neat that friends can find on what's going on with a quick check online (still cleaning up stuff around the house, still trying to figure out how to get oil stains out of a driveway but a neat product seems to be "Pour n' restore", slowly descending into panic about the bar exam which this isn't helping most likely).  On the other hand, so much of the stuff I stumble across on the net makes me want to beat my head against a keyboard that it leaves me wondering if what I put up here makes other people want to do the same.

So the latest source of dismay is a "conservative" encyclopedia which apparently feels that evolution is more or less fake and has some misconceptions about what libel law means.  "Hey, there are crazy people on the net" is a pretty futile rallying cry, I know, but there are times when I wonder if it's possible to jam some sort of "not a nut job" testing element into the public school curriculum.  Of course, that probably just breeds new, more sophisticated breeds of nut jobs - which takes us back to evolution again, albeit not the usual kind.

Eh.  I guess it's not something terrifying until crazies start reproducing over the net...