Stay of Execution

All Request Day: Take Home Exams

It makes me feel so young and hip to get asked advice about taking exams.  I've been out of the game for a while, and am not sure I was ever in a position to give much advice.  I know what definitely doesn't work.

One of the professors I learned the most from at law school is a guy named Mel Zarr.  He made me think in a new and useful way about the law.  In many ways, he taught me to think for myself.  I took four classes from him, and all of them had twenty-four hour take home exams.  I don't think I had any other take homes.  The first one was a debacle, described in the post linked above.  The other three I did well on, although one of them I postponed working on all day, and finally woke up at 4:30 in the morning, went to the office of the venture capital firm I was working at at the time, and sat in their kitchen in the dull fluorescent lights, writing my answer in a blind, rushed panic before turning it in at 8:30.  I got a really good grade on that one.  It doesn't make any sense to me. 

Here's what you need to face with a take-home exam: preparation and procrastination.  You need to be adequately prepared, but if you've prepared too well you may be lackadaisical about the exam itself.  And no matter how well you've prepared, if there's too much time allocated for the exam you need to face your own tendency to procrastinate.  Mine was rather extreme as a law student.  I needed to get quite close to panic before I could overcome the desire to fritter my time away on pointless things.   It's not really an ideal way to work. 

Make sure your printer works -- enough ink, paper, cables, nothing funny.  It's no fun to battle with printers when you're in a blind panic and running late.  Make sure you have snacks and caffeine.  Otherwise don't worry too much about it.   Get your notes in order, and think about the themes of the course -- what's it all about, anyway?  But don't overstudy.  You'll do a better job figuring out what you need to think about when you have the question in front of you. 

With a take home exam you have a little bit of time to let the question open up for you.  I used to read the question and think, good heavens, I have no idea what this is even asking for.  And then I'd wait a little while and see something in there.  And I'd wait a little longer and understand more.  And then I'd start writing and I'd start to feel like maybe I knew what the question was about, and maybe had a few things to say about it.  And then I'd go back and reread notes and materials and the question again and I'd see a bunch of stuff I'd missed the first couple of times around and by then I'd start to have an idea of what the professor really wanted and what I wanted to say about it, and it would get to be kind of fun.  That gradual process wasn't something the three-hour in-class exam really permitted.  So it may sound perverse, but enjoy the take home, if you can. 

All Request Day: Bankruptcy

SLA wants to know why I am interested in bankruptcy law, and WAB wonders why I don't like the new bankruptcy legislation.

I've written before about why I like bankruptcy.  Those reasons are still true -- the tension between justice and mercy that's inherent in the idea of paying some of your debts and then walking away with a fresh start, and the particular characteristics of a bankruptcy practice.  Thinking about it recently, I can boil it down to something even simpler.  I like people who are changing their lives.  I think that is brave, and interesting, and fundamentally worth doing.  I like people who have had their dreams fall apart and are trying to start over.  I want to help them do it.   

People who file for bankruptcy are facing something that hasn't worked.  Sometimes they're admitting colossal failure after pretending to hold it together for years.  Filing for bankruptcy is saying, "I can't do this anymore.  I need help.  I've got to fix this."  That's admirable to me.  I like to believe that this country is a place where people can bounce back, where people who admit their mistakes and face them have the hope to become something better.  If we're going to be a country of capitalism, which I believe in fundamentally, we've got to have a system for dealing with failure and for picking up the pieces of bad risks and ruined dreams.  That's what bankruptcy is. 

This Is Not The Post You Were Hoping For

All this post says is that I'm heading off to Chicago, where I'll be lurking about the ABA Techshow, trying to learn things, and scurrying about trying to finish organizing LexThink, and hanging out with Jeremy and Dennis and Matt and Ernie and meeting Sua Sponte and Tom and Jim and Rob and Chan and Carolyn and Arnie and about forty other smart and interesting thinkers.  I'll be reading, writing, thinking, and schmoozing.  There's wifi everywhere, so I don't expect blogging to be much diminished, although who knows, really?

The post you were hoping for?  That's coming tomorrow, on All Request Thursday.  Be sure to ask for it, though, or I might not know to write it. 

Opportunity Knocks

A friend stopped in for dinner last night.  He's unhappy in his job, and as we cooked and chopped we explored possible alternative careers for him.  These got progressively more outlandish and funny.  We learned that the following urls are still available: www.pastfads.com, www.fastpads.com, www.fraufinder.com, www.whatkindoflout.com, www.fraudulentnotary.com, www.avoidintimacy.com. Huge business opportunities with each one, clearly.  Who says the domain name land grab has passed us all by? 

High Up

I'm in my new office (!) looking out the window.  We're way up high here, on the 10th floor.  In this city, there aren't a lot of buildings with more than 10 stories.  This one has a few more floors above us.  Unfortunately there's a tall building right across the street that's blocking a good part of the sky.  To the right of that building is Monument Square, a central gathering place right in the middle of town.  I can look out over the square, down a brick promenade and across the top of buildings to the harbor.  There's a ferry going slowly across the grey water toward Peak's Island, and a barge heading inward from House Island.  Two seagulls are swooping at about eye level over the square.  There are four more sitting along the top rim of One City Center, a building across the way from me.  Wherever you are in Portland, you can look around for a moment or two and see seagulls. 

I can look across the way into the offices of people in the building across the street.  I can't tell from their offices what they do.  A lot of them have blinds down.  I can see a diploma hanging on the wall of one office.  Is it a law school diploma?  I wonder if anyone's looking out from behind their blinds across the way at me, sitting here at the conference room table, looking out the window and dreaming....?

15 Things: I Am A Writer

Since I've been blogging I've learned how much writing matters to me.  I've always liked it and done it.  I've always had people tell me I'm a good writer.  It's one of the few things I can say I'm good at without getting all squirmy and self-deprecating.  I'm a good writer.  I'm a better editor, but I can write.   The feedback I get from you, my readers, has helped me when I doubt this.  Thanks for telling me you like my writing.  It really matters to me.  In fact, I have a secret folder on my computer where I keep the nice things that people have said to me about my writing.  I look there if I forget, and need encouragement, or if I just want to feel like the queen of the world. 

Since I started blogging I've realized how much I need to write.  It helps me figure things out.  It puts me in touch with my thoughts.  It freezes moments and lets me savor them.   I get crabby if I don't write, and fidgety if I don't write for a couple of days.  I'm annoyed if I get interrupted while I'm writing.  Writing makes me notice the world -- I look at something and think about how I would describe it -- is it green? brown? the color of mud? the color of moss? Is it opaque?  I look harder at things, I see them more clearly, because I have the habit of writing.  I like what it does for my outlook.   

I have a fair amount of emotional baggage about writing.  Blogging is an easy way for it to be part of my life.  I feel sheepish and embarrassed about saying that, because of course blogging isn't real writing. 

Squish

You have to really love Maine to love it right now.  It's been raining steadily for a couple of days straight.  Yesterday's rain was a downpour, the kind of rain where you need an umbrella to run from your car into the store, or else you're a drowned rat.  This morning on our walk the rain wasn't that bad, but it was persistent, and cold.  The water pooled in puddles that couldn't go anywhere, blocked by the remnants of the crusty old snowbanks that are lingering around.  My feet were wet by the time I got home. 

The winter's collection of snow is starting to disappear, but there's a lot of it, so it's still mounded about in dingy piles, coated with grey and brown gravel.  The perimeters of the snow piles are melting into crusty ice, and the patches of grass visible around the snow are getting larger and larger.  But the grass is brown and wet and covered with old leaves and the winter's accumulated detritus -- crumbling dog feces and disintegrating Big Gulp cups and more grey-brown sand.  Sand is everywhere this time of year, because in snow storms the plow trucks sprinkle gravel down for traction.  It's all over everyone's tires, and when it snows again it gets plowed into the snowbanks on the side of the road and melts down to cover the sidewalks and the streets and the lawns in dirty brown sand. 

I drove up the coast this weekend and on my way I played a game looking at the landscape: how many colors of brown can you see?  There was the brown of the roadside gravel, the lighter brown of the muddy grass.  There was the brown of the woods -- tree trunks, shadow, beds of pine needles.  There was the brown of the sickly pines right by the side of the road.  The rock salt that gets thrown down on the roads to melt the ice must hurt the white pines, because the ones closest to the highway were reddish brown, while the stands further out in fields or woods were ordinary dusty feathery-green.   The brushy weeds on the side of the road were brown, with the faintest tinge of maroon-red on their tips.  That's the first color of spring around here -- new shoots on bushes and low-lying plants show red before there are buds or any signs of green.

Yard work this time of year is well-rewarded, because a little bit of time with a rake can scrape off the winter's accumulation of gravel and stale leaves and dead grass.  What's underneath is still brown, but a fresher brown -- the brown of dirt.  And you can start to see that there's also the faintest bit of green under there, gathering strength to grow.   

15 Things: One More Thing

Here's another thing I've learned in the last 18 months.

14) It's not about being perfect. 

My one-eyed, three-legged dog, with her muzzle going grey, just came up and licked my hand.  She knows. 

A Brief Tangent About Wooden Boats

There's a bit of an invisible rift in the sailing world that has to do with wooden boats.  Maybe "rift" is the wrong word.  But some people are wooden boat people and some people aren't.  There probably aren't "fiberglass people" or "steel people," the same way there are wooden boat people.  There are wooden boat people and then there's everyone else. 

(Of course I'm talking about men.  There are a few women who care deeply about materials, but they're so rare that they can be safely ignored.  As an almost-perfect general rule, the people who care how boats are built and what they're built out of are men.  So when I say wooden boat people I mean wooden boat men.  Which may or may not be important here.)

Although they might not say it out loud, wooden boat people think they're a little bit better than other kinds of boat people.  They are purists, and like purists anywhere, from vegans to macrobiotic types to ultramarathoners, they have a kinship that comes with superiority and specialization and shared difficulty.  Those who aren't wooden boat people tend to think of wooden boat people as harmless but slightly crazy.  You have to be rich or crazy to be a wooden boat person.   Maybe both.

Do wooden boats sail better than those made of other materials?  I've not heard it argued, although I expect someone's tried that rationalization before.  They look better sailing, perhaps, but I don't think performance, comfort, or practicality are attributes that wooden boats exceed in.  No, where wooden boats win is beauty.  There are some ugly boats made out of wood but mostly wooden boats are lovely.  I don't know if it's a by-product of the material or if it's something else.  I have some half-baked theories but they don't much matter here.  There are some beautiful fiberglass boats -- the Etchells, for example -- but if you were choosing a boat for beauty and gracefulness and nothing else you might find yourself tempted more by wooden boats than by fiberglass or steel boats. 

Wooden boats are a ton of work.  Wood swells when it's wet, and shrinks when it dries out.  That has obvious difficulties for something that needs to maintain a particular shape, and that is going to be wet for part of the year and dry for part of the year.  The wood needs to be protected under varnish and paint; variations in the wood and in the application of paint and varnish mean you need to be very vigilant.  Lots of sanding and re-doing the applications.  You can't be lazy and own a wooden boat (unless you're rich -- but even then, you need to make sure the folks you're paying aren't lazy). 

Wooden boats deserve to be treated well, because they are so lovely.  Wooden boats eat men.  Poor men -- carpenters, aspiring boat builders, young men -- strain to buy a decrepit wooden boat to restore her to glory.  They think this will be rewarding.  Most fail.  The boat, with her glorious curves beginning to sag, mocks them from jackstands.  They pour time and money and love into a restoration and can't keep up.  They stand around, admiring her, and are not worthy.  Other wooden boat men encourage them.  Old guys with beards who have themselves restored a beautiful boat tell stories and take the young guys out for sails.  There's a guild of craftsmen in Carharts and ragged chamois shirts who recognize one another and talk about varnish and bronze fittings.  They drive battered cars and work on rich men's boats for $12/hour and dream of gleaming brightwork.  Some of them are true artists who will manage to bring about their vision; most of them are doomed.  All of them are romantics.  They won't cede to practicality.      

I'm not a wooden boat person.  I'm too lazy, and will never be rich enough.  I just want to go sailing.  I don't want to be a slave to my boat.  I have a reluctant admiration for the beauty of some wooden boats, but I am suspicious of the culture that venerates them, that perpetuates the high-maintenance, high-cost, one-sided relationship between a wooden boat man and his boat. 

I think this is where the men thing comes in.  It's hard to ignore, because a wooden boat is almost always a "she."  Wooden boat men fall in love with boats and it's a goofy, earnest love that's all about beauty, lines and curves, grace.  Wooden boat men love with an attention to detail that's fanatic, down to the brushstroke of each coat of paint.  The boat, once designed, does little to earn the devotion and sacrifice and maintenance she requires.  Just for being beautiful, she commands loyalty, respect, commitment.  On the one hand, what woman wouldn't want to be loved like that, with an impractical, heedless devotion, an ardent romantic vision of sails in the sunset?  On the other hand, who would choose a suitor who ignores practicality, who values beauty more than comfort or performance, whose eye for perfection can find the smallest flaw? 

Question

Under what circumstances, if any, is it advisable to get involved in a long-distance relationship?