- Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in Fight Club.
Looking back on the beginning of my first year of law school, it amuses me how eager we all were. We were all so excited to be learning the law, and learning a big impressive legal vocabulary full of words like “writ” and “alternative dispute resolution” and “Constitution”. The fun wore off though as we quickly found that the law permeated our lives outside of school to a degree that was a little uncomfortable. News stories, recreational books, grocery store ads – everywhere we looked, we were slapped in the face by the cold, hard, hand of the law. We tried to joke about it, talk about how law was everywhere we looked and it completely polluted the way we looked at things, but really we were all just grasping at straws trying to find ways to accept the fact that we’d never think like normal people again. Never again would we be able to relax and enjoy life without noticing the legal consequences of all the behavior around us.
During Spring Break of my first year of law school, I made a trip to Galveston to go to my sister’s dance competition. On one of the days she wasn’t performing, we went to see the Titanic exhibit at Moody Gardens. Away from school and away from my books, I assumed I was safe from the influence of the law’s harmful brain-probe (the irony of feeling safe among the flotsam of a 100 year old shipwreck escaped me at the time). At the end of the exhibit, there was a room of photos of a handful of different ship passengers and their respective stories. The last one I went to was a well-dressed woman, clearly a first class passenger, named Lady Lucy Duff-Gordon. Fellow lawyers and law students have at this point stopped, gasped, and shared my horror. To you blissful non-lawyers, let me explain. Lady Duff-Gordon was involved in a very famous breach of contract incident studied by every first year contract student in America. The law had followed me to the bottom of the sea. Well, to Galveston anyway. Here, in the bowels of one of the greatest American tragedies was my own personal tragedy – I’ve been ruined for life, never to escape the labyrinth of the law. I sent a desperate email to my contracts professor, the wily Willy Rice, to share my plight. He was delighted by the way we find parts of our legal education everywhere we look. I could not share his amusement.
Our excitement wore off eventually, and learning fun legal terminology and ways to argue the bejeezus out of other human beings wasn’t as fun as it was at first impression. Sadly enough though, several years later, I’m still going through the same things. I know what you’re thinking – “Jennifer, you’re a fully developed lawyer now. This is literally what you have spent years studying to do for a living, clearly even you had to realize that you’d probably encounter legal stories and ideas on a regular basis.” And sure, fine, I’ll give you that. But I don’t like taking my work home with me. I don’t like it sneaking up on me. I’m currently taking a mass tort litigation class, where we are studying class actions, mass accidents like the DuPont Plaza Hotel fire, and mass product cases like Agent Orange and Bendectin. I’m also taking a class on the regulation of toxic substances, where the last couple of weeks have been spent on FIFRA, the statute that covers the regulation of pesticides. Most of the pesticide cases we have studied involve chlordane, which is a pesticide that was taken off the market years ago. This past Tuesday I tuned in to watch “The Good Wife,” one of my favorite shows to begin with, but which had the added benefit this week of guest starring one Mr. Michael J. Fox P. Keaton. Within the first 3 minutes of the episode, the week's plot was explained to be covering the recruitment of plaintiff members for a class action chlordane case. Yes, I realized it was a legal drama and therefore a pretty sure risk of being exposed to legal nonsense, but it was creepily uncanny the way it was so dead on the nose to what I have been studying lately.
I may have asked for it by watching a legal TV show, but even aside from that, the opportunity to ruin the most normal things can pop out and surprise you when you least expect it like a stranger with candy and a windowless van. Last week I was doing some laundry and doing things around the apartment. Since I don’t like quiet, I put on a movie that I didn’t necessarily need to pay attention to, just so I could have some background noise. That day’s ambiance of choice was The Incredible Hulk. At one point toward the end I caught myself paused amidst a pile of socks, holding a pink one and an orange one, marveling at the damage caused by The Abomination and wondering about the possibilities for a class action lawsuit. Never mind the fact that it appears I have the cinematic tastes of a 12 year old boy, but I needed someone to take one of the socks and slap me Zsa Zsa-style to make me stop destroying perfectly enjoyable awful movies with my legal obsessions.
Like my title suggests, I think I’m a lost cause. It’s a good thing I like law. One, because I have to deal with it everywhere I look now that my mind has been irreversibly altered. And two, because I emptied out (read: finished off) a bottle of wine earlier tonight to try and toss/twirl it around like Tom Cruise in Cocktail, and as it turns out, I definitely suck at bartending.
Sarcasmo
Currently Excited About: By admitting to you that I watched The Incredible Hulk the other day, I have necessarily revealed to you that although I am a grown woman proudly in possession of both X chromosomes, I dig comic book movies. So at the moment I’m pretty jazzed about the trailers circling for Thor and Captain America, the just-released-today trailer for X-Men: First Class (even though it was missing shots of the movie's villian, played by my perma-fave Kevin Bacon), and about Samuel L. Jackson telling Jimmy Fallon the other day that The Avengers is set to start production in April. All three of the aforementioned trailers look like they’re leading up to pretty excellent movies, and I haven’t found the words in the English language, even in my special lawyer vocabulary, to express the almighty excitement I am experiencing over The Avengers. Robert Downey Jr. back as Iron Man (which, let's be honest, RDJ as Iron Man is one of the best ideas Hollywood has ever had), and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (each total badasses in their respective environments, real and comic). Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth are reprising their roles as Captain America and Thor respectively, Mark Ruffalo (who I just love, but I have to admit I think his casting is a bit off) will be The Hulk, and Jeremy Renner will be playing Hawkeye. Come on. Awesome.
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