Stranger than Fiction

The readings for Criminal Law are always the most fun, and by that I mean most horrifying.

Well, after reading a number of cases about children being beaten to death, I got one a about an Arabian guru, who came to New York after spending some time in China.

Anyway the guru basically has a cult. They believe in mind over matter. The guru says he has the ability to stop his followers blood flow and the like allowing him to stab them multiple times with no injury. Apparently he has done this before and there was a witness.

Well this time it didn't go too well and and after the guru stabbed one of his followers in the heart and a few other places he died. Oh, he dies. Anyway the gurus defense is pretty much "well it worked last time."

Something I need to do more research on

Stolen from the BBC site:

This is a 750 year old church in Germany being rolled from its old village to another. Fine, people still like stories about buildings being moved because a house on wheels is just a funny [exorbitantly expensive] idea. Fair enough. Excepts this is the only building relocated in the entire village, the rest of it is getting flattened. For a good cause perhaps? At least for an important highway? (Germans love cars right?) Try because they want to mine the brown coal under the village and it would get in the way. I find this really horrible because the people lost a legal village to keep their village (government of Saxony wanted it and you know imminent domain), as in they wanted to keep living there, and this is for brown coal. From what I remember about Brown coal, it is a horrible power source (pollutes more than normal coal) that was used extensively in East Germany because there was a lot of it was locally and that was a big emphasis of their economic development. That had terrible repercussions for East Germany's air quality. No just no. Don't knock down the historic village because you want to get at a power source you should not be doing. This is environmentally conscious Germany? Granted it is Saxony, but really?

Surnames of Jews in New York

I don't really do very much with my German on a day to day basis these days. It does not really both me having more or less just come back after a year in a German speaking country and planning to back to another one in the nearish future (it will be part of what I end up doing with my life so it is fine). What is interesting is that German I do experience crops up in the last names of my Jewish professors and and classmates. Granted they are probably of Yiddish origin, but they are common to both languages and only knowing one of them they register as German for me. It is funny, I subconsciously pronounce them all the German way (replacing 'W's with 'V's and the like). It is a bit odd as most of these people have no connection to Germany or German and many are probably justifiable less than enamored with Germany considering WWII, but that is how German pops up in my day to day life.

Architecture

New York is surprising. I would not say New York is a beautiful city, but it is a city with a lot of beauty in it. New York is gritty and serious in a way that a city where things get done has to be I find Milan, London, and Moscow similar in that respect).

New York, however, will surprise you. Because New York is a vertical city, you can really turn a corner and be amazed by the 19th century street you've fallen into, or the beaux-arts building you "discovered." Many of New York's most impressive buildings are obscured by the construction of the last thirty years or so and as a result you can't see what in the past were considered monumental buildings (City Hall for example, which when it was built was mean to be grand and imposing and is now so dwarfed by the building around it that it seems quaint, and it is).

I have a great respect for the hodgepodge of architecture that is New York City, which cannot blame or accredit the diversity of it architecture to fire or war, but to greed and vision of its own citizens.

I recently discovered that many of my favorite New York City buildings were designed by the same man: Cass Gilbert (pictured above). You can see some of his building here. My personal favorites are the United States Court House, Hamilton Custom House, and the Municipal Building, which Stalin like and copied in Moscow many times. Cass was a very European inspired architect who very much wanted to work in England, but who life brought back to the states. He did, however, design on an American scale and did amazing works (like the Woolworth building, which is essentially a Gothic skyscraper). He also did the Supreme Court build, which is perhaps what he is most famous for.

Work

I am trying to work more. I need to, but I also like how I feel when I have done a lot. Unfortunately, I don't like the feeling when I am just starting. Oh my mighty dilemma.

also,

Went to China Town today for lunch with friends. Despite the rain, it was extremely pleasant. I have not been to China Town in a very long time (I used to have a grudge against China Town having grown up in an Italian-American family the bemoaned China Town's swallowing of little Italy, which got smaller every time we went with my grandfather to his favorite restaurant), but I really enjoyed it today. There are a lot cool little shops, and though people stop and ask you if you want a rolex or a handbag, it doesn't feel too much like a third world country (horrible thing to say? Maybe).

Anyway, good times. I am genuinely very happy to be back in New York. Life isn't always easy, but I like the people I meet and I feel very much at home. It is the right place for me to be right now.

Good Times

One of the more eccentric teachers here forgot to turn on his microphone this morning. It took fifteen minutes of the people in the back of the class coughing and trying to get his attention, which did not work because he lectured for the first ten minutes with his eyes closed, before one of the people is the back yelled that his mike was not on. He responded that he had not put his mike on because there was a sickness being transmitted among the professors by the mikes that they all had to share. He then admitted that was a lie and put his mike on.

That goes up there with his mimed reenactment of one of the murders we read about as my favorite class moment.

Another professor told us about how he had defended a client who had previously been convicted of having sex with a dead bird. Apparently in the unrelated case his working in the judges were very curious and asked about the type and size of the bird among other questions.

See, law school is fun, if deranged.

?

I don't know how to network. Really. I mean, I have always known this is an important thing, but before I had no skills and my only prospect so my prospect of employment looked out upon the exciting world of janitorial work, and really do janitors need to network? I certainly did not think so. Well apparently the greater world of law is networkapalooza, where you try and ride high on the nepotism beast instead of clinging to its moldy underbelly (really I feel like we should revolt and kill the nepotism beast so we can all live on top, but I guess nobody likes a dead nepotism beast). This all mainly coming out of the international law career panel I wen to today at the New York Star Bar (wow, the have a beautiful building). All the panelist emphasized networking as the most important thing you can do. I generally felt their description was lacking a step, observe: 1. Always talk to everyone, network down, up, horizontally (there may have been other directions), give people your card, send out holiday updates to your entire network 2. -not mentioned- 3. Networking gets you a great job that no one else has ever heard of. Yeah networking! I think the one thing they convinced me is that I should get business cards, as they made me picture one of the panelists giving me his card and me giving him a shred of paper sloppily bearing that would certainly not disintegrate in his wallet.

Coincidence?

Is it just me or have there been way more disasters natural and otherwise under Bush than under any other president in at least the past fifty years? Is he like a magnet for trouble?

Familiarity

So you know sometimes you know a genre of something so well that you can predict what happens next? Like how in bad teen movies if you see a girl with glasses and her hair up who is supposabley nerdy you know at some point someone will giver her a makeover that consisted of letting down her hair and taking off her glasses and everyone will be shocked and she will end up with the football star/class president/most popular guy in school. Or how in action movies (excluding James Bond) if someone speak with a very British accent British accent they will be the villain. Well, in our criminal law book, at least in the cases on murder, there is an equivalent: when in doubt, someone will be stabbed multiple times in the throat. Yes, Hollywood like you to believe the torso, but no, apparently the throat. So you will be reading a story about a guy trying to make up with his ex and you will be thinking "Oh, she's going to get stabbed in the throat isn't she." And then the guy puts aside the presents, and pulls out a steak knife and does the deed. And then despite it being horrible, you think" not very creative saw that coming, we've had at least three other throat stabbing cases this week." This is how law school ruins your soul, or makes you into a creative murder.

Pictures Stolen

Pictures from various newspapers websites that entertain me:

Three-year-old British boy's birthday. He was running around the playground and decided to plop this traffic cone his head and play "Harry Potter." Then he went to show his parents. They couldn't get it off. They called the fire department. It took them half and hour to get it off. His mother, relishing the future black mail potential of the picture, said "He looks quite sorry for himself in the photo and he's not going to thank me when he sees that in the future."

I know she is in the Middle East promoting Breast Cancer awareness, but this picture really freaks me out. Not sure if it is the pink/black contrast or the tilt of her head.

Alumni reunion on College walk! Oh no, Serbian veterins. Sorry.

Algiers. Do you recognize the fancy outfit the little boy wearing? I do. I saw them being sold in Istanbul. They look like little prince costumes, but they are to celebrate circumcision! That little boy looks pretty happy now, but something tells me he won't be in a minute!

KKK

So I am supposes to blog about how they taught us about the the Klu Klux Klan in middle school. I don't actually find this story all that remarkable, but Alexia said it was worth blogging about (versus most of my stuff and my perma-whine about law school, don't worry that will come at the end of this entry anyway).

So when I was in middle school we learned about the Klu Klux Klan. Not in a way even romtely suggesting they were okay, but we learned about their beliefs. At one point during class when when one teacher was lecturing another teacher entered wearing a Klan robe and hood. This was probably only even remotely okay because there were no black kids in the class. Anywho, he was trying to scare us (basically impress upon us that the Klan existed in New York too and we could not just write it off as a southern thing). Someone had found the robe when they bought a new house and donated it to the school. The teacher wearing it actually looked pretty funny as he was tall and the robe was made for a smaller man, so it was about a foot too short.

We also learned about the Klan's plan to divide the country up into sections and have a white part, a black part an Asian part, and probably a latino part as well. I don't remember which was which.

Such was middle school (it was a public school by the way).

Writing a Russian composition at the moment and it will be a while yet before I finish. This week is sort of hell. I was up most of last night writing a memo, writing my Russian comp tonight, and for Monday I have a large and important memo that I have no idea how I will finish in time and do decently.

Did I mention I don't look law school too much?

I always wonder why I am here until I read about US-Russian missile treaties, territorial disputes, or a legal systems of Ukraine and Russia and then I remember that that is the stuff I really want to get to. It will just take a while.

Entrapment

So law school continues. We had a very nice meeting of International Law Society tonight, which I really enjoyed. The people are really interesting, many are multilingual, and well, share many of my interests. Most are more into human rights, which isn't really what I want to go into, but it just a good group of people (they are also organizing language conversation groups for twelve different language, which is pretty cool).

Many of the people there were older than I am. Many of them had spent years abroad. It kind of made me wonder if I should have spent more time abroad before law school perfect my Russian and French (granted French had farther to go) and picking up either Ukrainian or Georgian. I do really like spending time abroad. Still, I know that last year when I was abroad I felt an internal pressure to acquire skills and get on with my life, so it does seem like there will always been an element of "the grass is greener."

My original plan after Vienna had actually been to spend a year in France. By the time that came around though I was no longer so enamored with French, and was also discouraged that in the places the teaching program would send me I would not be able to continue with Russian (bane and joy of my existence). So that was tricky and then it ended up not working with differing.

Still, with a very structured schedule at the moment the appeal of just hanging out in a country that I would like to learn more about is great. For some reason Georgian and Ukraine are really calling me. Don't know if it is because I wrote my big research paper on the two countries political situations last year. I was really happy that when I was in Ukraine this summer I picked up some Ukrainian (my Ukrainian grandmother was pleased). I would really like to learn Ukrainian properly one day. I may have to make it back to Columbia at some point to take their Georgian and Ukrainian language courses.

New! (may be a lie)

This post is a bit older, but when I was ready to post it the internet decide to flip out on me.

Well it looks like posts are going to be a bit more sporadic these days than they were last year.

School is keeping me pretty busy and I am trying to find away to run with that while keeping a life (by extent my sanity) and a sense of fun.

Nothing too crazy is going just that we 1Ls don't speak the same language as the professors. We are not specific enough and are more careless with our words. Still they are the ones stuck with first years for eternity, we presumably only have to be 1Ls once.

A number of things are going well. It has been nice to be closer to my family again. I have had some great moments of catching up with College friends (it is really wonderful to have friends that understand you better than you understand yourself).

I am also pretty happy about the elections in Ukraine. The Orange parties squeaked out a majority in the new parliament. Observers, Ukrainians included, are pretty cynical about the whole business, but the Orange parties seem to be the only ones committed to greater transparency. Tymoshenko despite being a former oligarch herself is likely to give the oligarchs a run for their money and keep them on their toes, which suits me just fine. Still seems like a positive development to me compared to the farce that is Russian politics (specifically Putin not only saying he might run for the presidency again four years after his current term, but that he might take over the position of Prime Minister in the meantime. Basically he'll just do whatever he wants.

Me

Doing law school readings makes me really sleepy and sadly sleeping doesn't get the reading done. I really do often feel like the book is leaching life energy from me, thought that thought probably doesn't help me much in getting the work done (unless the books suck all the life out of me and I become some sort of cool zombie lawyer immune to the books effects, which would be cool, but I digress). So far, I think the most dangerous aspect of law school is just the guilt. The guilt that whatever it is you are doing you should be doing work for law school instead. There is always something you could be doing. It is like being constantly nagged. What is really tricky is even though you think the person doing the nagging is crazy, they could be right so you still have to listen and try and spend as much time with the books and deciphering their arcane meaning.

What is irritating is that grades are really the measure of all things in law school. Basically firm only look at the top 10% of students from non-top ten schools (and if you want to transfer they are looking for people in the top 10%). The problem is no one tells you how to get these "grades." The professors can't because becoming a professor is also based on how you do in law school so pretty much by their very nature law professors never had trouble getting good grades. So at this point I am working on not failing.

Also, my mom, the source of encouragement that she is, sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal that prominently featured a graduate of Columbia who had gone on to Brooklyn Law only to graduate with pretty bad job prospects and paying 60% of his income for his student loans alone. Don't think that will be me, but still not encouraging.

Anyway, I have to go tomorrow and have my first memo ripped to shreds. The year so far is just a bit like being told again and again that you know nothing about the law, I tend to agree with them which they don't like toj much, but so far I have nothing to put in the blank space of the response they really want: No, I do...[some brilliant insight about the law].

Hang Man

My sleep schedule is very messed up. For a couple days this week I have slept about three hours the entire day, and on other days I haven't been unable to sleep for more than an hour at night, but am ready to pass out by my last class. I am sure there is any easy way to fix this, like making myself stay up until it is a normal time to go to sleep, but sometimes that involves staying awake for another twenty hours when I am already ready to pass out so it is a bit tricky.

So law school, yes. Pretty much everyone here will freely acknowledge that they know nothing. We are well aware that we pale in comparison to the professors' knowledge, yet as a result of the fabled Socratic method we are the ones that have to answer questions when we go into class. Most of my professors don't lecture, they mainly just ask questions about the readings expressing dissatisfaction with the many attempts at answers frightened 1Ls attempt to offer them as sacrifices of appeasement. To be honest, I don't really mind that the professors don't like our answers, mainly because well, we don't know what we are talking about. What I mind is that they never answer the questions, so all we have at the end are the various shards of answers that failed to please.

It is perhaps the most frustrating in my civil law class where the professor usually tells us she is looking for one specific word and proceeds to call on people for the next ten minutes or so to get words that are completely different. These are moments when I think a game of hang man would be much more efficient. We would guess letters and even if they were wrong we would have the spectrum narrowed by multiple possibilities. Eventually we would figure out the word and with each guess we would be a little bit closer. At some point though in the real world we give up, which does not really matter though since guessing does not have to be voluntary. Then the guesses become really interesting. The fun thing is by then we are all pretty much convinced that the word must be pretty advanced legalese or at least in latin, and then it ends up being something like "status." By guessing, we have actually become dumber apparently. Sometimes though we never get the actual word and after being told there is one the professor lowers his or her standards and accepts a rambling paragraph which if anything is comparatively less wrong as opposed to right. Fun.

Here are some picture from this morning when I couldn't sleep and decided to go for a walk:

Who cares about Iran?

Iranian President Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia this week. This week is the world leaders forum, when Columbia tries to net visiting dignitaries while they were in New York. They tried to get Ahmadinejad last year, but he confirmed too late and they couldn't set up the security. Well they got him this year. The whole event was a huge controversy as Ahmadinejad is fond of making comment, no international conferences dedicated to, thing like the holocaust not having happened (oh sorry, "needing more research"). Loads of protests (from both sides of the political spectrum). Anyway, after weeks of defending inviting Ahmadinejad and his right to free speech, Columbia's president introduced him as a "petty and cruel dictator." Ahmadinejad didn't quite agree and went on to make some choice remarks about their being no homosexuals in Iran (hint: there are).

The whole event got a lot of media coverage and Bollinger was mentioned on the cover of every paper I saw the next day. The whole event has also greatly boosted Bollinger's popularity, who to my knowledge has never been popular among either students or faculty. Eh. Not quite sure how I feel about the whole event. It certainly was not particularly nice to invite Ahmadinejad and then insult him before speaking. I think more than anything I don't really see the point. Ahmadinejad has some fairly cracked out views about Jews, homosexuals, women, well most topics really (my favorite involves his days as Mayor of Tehran when he had billboards of David Beckham shaving banned and encouraged/required people to grow beards), but there are also a lot of people in Iran that agree with his crazy positions. Perhaps it is worth challenging him on those positions, but it won't change his stances, it only makes the Americans who probably would not like any Iranian president feel like he got what he deserved. Also, and I am no expert on Iranian politics, it seems to me that the President of Iran does not have anywhere near as much power as we give him credit for. There is a whole conservative layer of government above the president (let us not forget the ayatollah). Still the more sensationalist American newspapers had a field day with the whole thing playing on some populist issues, which is rather ironic as Ahmadinejad has always been a pretty populist politician...in Iran.

Also the new president of Turkmenistan came to visit. Nobody asked him about what he will do with golden statues of Turkmenistan's last dictator or with all of things he renamed after family members an inanimate objects he was fond of (including his autobiography which I am pretty sure has its own month, but at the very least is what the test for university admission is based on).

Also he can't smile.

Birthday Party

After a week all of my birthday hijinx have come and gone after celebrating on Saturday night with friends. It is sort on annoying that after 21 there isn't really anything special you get to do when you get older (except for rent a car in some places, but that really isn't too exciting). it was really nice to see people and I was in full traditional Ukrainian attire. The host thing is a bit weird as you don't really have much time to spend with any one group of people. Fewer people showed up than last year, but I suppose that is to be expected with me having been abroad the past year and me inadvertently competing with the Jewish holidays. Still it was very nice with some people from High School, College, Austria, and Law School so I also felt like most of the key parts of my life were represented.

Other than that I am still figuring law school out. It is a wee bit frustrating that you know you know next to something and really hope the professor will teach you something and most classes turn into giant guessing sessions (honestly I think most of the professors after shooting about twenty students' responses to their questions down lower their standards and will accepts pretty much any old answer). Still I am hoping to make it to Russian arctic law and nuclear law one day.

* The image above is a t-shirt I am going to buy and wear to my Constitutional law final. If you are a little slow like me you not have gotten it at first, which makes it all the more wonderful later: the second amendment is the right to "bear arms." I rather like this interpretation of that right.

Birthday

Another birthday has come and gone. It wasn't even one of the fun ones where you get to legally do things you have long had the opportunity to do if you wanted to anyways. Still for me my birthday stretches pretty much a week from when I celebrated it with my parents a couple of days ago till a week later when I finally have my party with my friends (where the creepy guy told me if I bring enough people I drink for free, huzzah!).

Really not so eventful so far. My parents felt like sharing the story this year about how my mom's water broke when she was pregnant with me and they had to go look for diapers (my mom pointing out that they could just use the other ones for me later anyway). Ah, family bonding.

Not much more to say really than the cake in the picture above is made of foam. Doesn't it still look sort of tasty though?

Back in New York

So I have been back in New York for a few weeks now. It has been really great to see some familiar faces and spend some time with my family, but at the same time there has been so much new stuff going on that it doesn't quite feel like a homecoming. Where after my other stints abroad I always had Columbia to come back to, I am now in a different part of the city, living with different people, and studying something new. A lot of those things are really positive and being closer to down town Manhattan is great, but at the same time it adds to a general feeling of insecurity as I try and figure out where I sit with things. As much as I feel more at home in New York than anywhere else, I have realized over the past several weeks that this is more of a new beginning than a continuation from where I left off last. I still have all of my college friends and am extremely thankful for that, but at the same time I am spending most of my time with an entirely new group of people and don't really run into people from college unless we make plans (though I do run into lots of people from jr. High School apparently). It is sort of the same with my studies, I do have some experience with studying law having taken a number of courses on European and international law while in Vienna, but I have no experience with American law, which is what I will be spending all of this year doing.

So it is a new beginning. Did I mention I don't like beginnings? I like knowing where I stand with people, what I am good at, what I can expect. With languages I always hated the elementary classes. Preschool, however, I remember fondly. Anyway, that's about it so far. Mainly a lot of confusion and bright lights.

Favorite Kiev Pictures

So I am in Moscow and it is a very rainy day. This weekend the whole program is off to St. Petersburg, which should be fun if the weather improves a bit (even if I'll be spending two of the next three night on the train). Anyway now is sort of a time of reflection and with a bit of an Internet connection I wanted to post my favorite pictures from Kiev. What was really great when I was in Kiev was that I got to meet a lot of young Ukrainians. In Kiev I lived in a working class neighborhood in an apartment with Ukrainians more or less my age. For Ukrainians, Kiev is the land of opportunity (better jobs, but also cleaner air than in the east and less corruption). I lived in a working-class neighborhood with some Ukrainians more or less my age. Really nice people, but not simple lives. It was interesting to meet people pretty much my age who already had families and who had more to look forward to in an evening drink than the future.

Anyway, here are my favorite pictures from Kiev: