Not sure if you can see my icon.  Obviously we are experiencing technical difficulties.  rest assured I’m KF Li.

Checking in. Just studying for the CA bar.  Currently the plan is to pass the CA bar (which if you recall doesn’t require a JD) and then in Feb sit for the NJ bar using my CA law license in lieu of a JD.  I figure the chances of both the CA and NJ folks showing borderline competence at the same time and thereby discovering my ruse are pretty slim.  Then yeah, hang out in law school while searching for that lottery client who can get me verdict I need to clear my debts, invest the remainder and live off the interest.  I have nothing by the way of infrastructure to actually litigate a case, so it’s going to have to be one heck of a demand letter.

I wonder why more folk don’t do this.  It seems the only sensible way to go about the attempted practice of law.  But it’s unorthodox and it’s unsafe and that means that most people have something to lose.  Despite what Benito said, surely someone who does everything right and gets screwed gets at least one iota of sympathy not afforded to someone like me who the conventional wisdom states is doing things ass-backwards.

But I’ve been the shut-in with no credit living on his mother’s couch and I am prepared to back there if need be.  If it all goes to hell it’s been one heck of a party.  And if I am successful someday I’ll buy toilet paper made from strips of Harvard degrees awarded to the chronicly unemployed.  I’ll make one exception for a degree of sligtly lower pedigree in Benito’s case.  I’ll even pay him the going price.

The year too. And I have to tell you, morale is at an all time low. Except for me. I am having a good time, a much better time than I had in college, and it certainly beats my mother’s couch. I spend money like the Federal Government – I just raise my debt ceiling. The only real decisions I have to make is 1) whether to transfer to a better law school and 2) should I stop sleeping with classmates and undergrads and learn how to approach real women. Mike Triforce is in favor of both.

First let’s talk transfer. I got a lousy LSAT score and it took me seven years to graduate from college which I eventually did with a very mediocre GPA. Listening to Triforce I am officially 3rd in my class, and if a certain someone should lose her battle with bulemia and another drops out due to (my) alleged honor code violations I could be first. But I didn’t stay in college 7 years because I embrace change.

I am also for the first time in my life getting laid consistently. But a year’s worth of sex does not wash away the previous 10 years worth of constant rejection. In fact, but for my virginity I probably never could have stayed celibate that long without gigabytes and gigabytes of hardcore porn. Plus, in my book if you take up a greater challenge you should get a greater reward. What’s my reward for bagging an older more successful woman? Is she hotter? No. It just means I don’t have to have sex on a plastic mattress. Or maybe it’s not having to feel so shady. SO past that.

Triforce says that I should transfer since it’s not like my TTT isn’t just as expensive as an Ivy. He also says attractive women our age are better at sex than their 19 year-old counterparts. Hmmmmm…verdict is still out on this one.

Hello, my name is KF Li.  I am Asian and I didnt go to Harvard or Yale.  I did trade losing my virginity at a reasonable age for years of music study designed to impress people that no longer exist.  My mother’s weather-beaten soul bears many callouses of shame.  It is impossible for me to view this “Tiger Mother/Cub” phenomenon with anything remotely passing for objectivity.  But I’m the only Asian on the blog.

I suppose I should congratulate Sophia on her admittance.  It’s not every day a wealthy legacy student gets admitted to Harvard or Yale.  After all, those letters only come out in April, and to a lesser extent in December.  I would also like to congratulate Bristol Palin for being admitted to Bastard Factory U.  But returning to Sophia, I feel sorry for her.  Sadly, the time between highschool and college will be the best of her life – sit back and bask in the kudos and for the first time the very conditional love of your parents. Soon the pressure will begin all over again in college, then again in grad school, then again as the job AND if you do find time to mate from the very beginning with your own children then grandchildren inevitably dying the day before your grandchild is re-elected becoming the first Asian two-term President of the United States. 

So enjoy that and the abortion in Mexico because at 29 you still don’t know how to put a condom on a schlong and then got too busy to notice you were pregnant until it was too late to handle your business stateside. 

My advice to you Sophia would be to remember that most people who look like us die illiterate in the rice fields of poverty, just like every other race (except maybe white people – no wait, yes white people too, I forgot about Russia and the American South). Finally, to answer your question, like everyone else in my generation I just figure you’re like that character in the Joy Luck Club. The one who mortifies everyone by dating a white guy…or not getting pregnant by the 11 year-old…or the chess player.  Also, don’t think your biracialness or Obama means you can go dating a black guy.

Anyway so I get home and for some reason calculate my loans to date: $277,451. Wow. 300k is on the horizon. It would have been worth it if I had been tagging ass like I am now for the past 8 years. Everytime I have a night like last night I think about what a waste 7 years was at a state school not getting any. Oh well.

The current plan is still to sit for the CA bar in July and then practice law my last two years in law school. During that time I need to find the perfect class action, file it, settle it for pennies on the dollar and get paid. I don’t really want to meet with clients so hopefully I can do this with some kind of cyber tort, something along the lines of Privacy. Cash out, do the whole adjunct professor thing while keeping an eye out for other lottery tickets while bagging a steady stream of nickels and the occasional dime. Even if I have to pay for it.

If not there is always my mother’s couch. I sort of have a plan B involving my own shingle and living completely off company money but I get tired just thinking about it.

The sad thing is the size of my debt has literally no bearing on my life. It will either be a single payment will equal an insurmountable sum or the entire amount will be a weekend in Vegas. It’s all so meaningless.

I don’t plan to ever pay my student loans unless I have an eight figure bank account. Before you say that’s ridiculous, say I get $1 million tommorrow. After Taxes that’s 600k. If I were to pay off my current loans and the ones I plan to take out I’d have what? A buck eighty for my troubles? That’s a first year associate’s salary plus bonus. What the hell I am I supposed to do with that? Certainly not start my own practice or business.

But say I had 7 million. Am I paying off my loans? No. I’d just leave the country for a tropical paradise and live off the interest of my stock portfolio- avoid taxes AND loans. While this is mostly a commentary on the perverse incentive structure student loans create don’t count me out. It’s called a class action settlement.

Student loans aren’t just a problem for the “unsuccessful” i.e. the unemployed, underemployed or budgetarily challenged.  Student loans also cripple the “successful” i.e.the fully employed, the small business owner who turns a profit, and the young family with two expensively educated professionals.
I mean look at Mike Triforce’s behavior. That kis is not special or unique. He’s just a pure self-interested rational actor without any cultural or moral barriers to doind what’s best for him in the moment.

I however, want to focus on the entrepreneur. Student Loans are the antithesis of the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s an investment in the non-tangible based on antiquated conventional wisdom whereas the entrepreneur invests in the tangible often going AGAINST conventional wisdom.

The loan structures are also from opposite schools of thought. Venture capatilists try and find winners. Sallie Mae is in the business of bulk. Venture Capitalists get nothing if they pick losers. Sallie Mae bleeds people into bankruptcy, the grave and beyond.

Now obviously if you’re readin this you’ve made your choice for the student loans. Now here’s the kicker. You can’t go back.

Ever wonder how rich people have such screwed up lives? Particularly rich kids? I mean all you have to do is keep your head down, follow a pre-set plan, maintain the fortune built for you and spend the rest of your time at leisure. Also don’t have kids. But somewhere one gets the idea that one should be successful in one’s one right, to do it one’s one way to get some sort of satisfaction outside of material comfort. Foolish definitely – but quite prevalent. Of course in so doing not only do the rich kids fail at their new endeavor but squander what’s been given to them.

So I got straight As and made Law Review. Yeah. If you recall I drank the semester away, used psychological warfare on fellow classmates and wrote tests ignoring the questions posed but simply regurgitated journal articles they’ve written blended with answers from old tests. Some questions were exactly the same. Now I am in a bit of a quandry. Do I continue with the Debtors Prison inspired plan or do I do my own thing and try and make a traditional go at this whole law school thing?

According to the Debtors Prison inspired plan I start studying for the Cali bar now because you can sit for it without a JD. Then, as an officially licensed lawyer I have two more years of loan money to set myself up by finding a money class action that will settle for eight figures. Then I take my cut, pay my loans or don’t, and live off the investment income for life free of my mother’s basement forever. But if I do this I will have to acknowledge Debtors Prison as basically the rich Uncle that made it all possible. This will be particularly awkward since Benito is dirt poor. I’d almost be obligated to pay his loans. If you recall how I was treated when I first started blogging you’d see how this is unacceptable. Yet it is the only way.

I have to have the discipline not to try. It is tempting SO tempting because I have never gotten straight As before, I have never been part of an inner circle before, I have never been good at something.  Wouldn’t it be grand do land a real job at a marque firm and be a real professional instead of the beneficiary of some scam turned on itself?

Yes. But that’s a dream and my dreams died a long time ago. This is still a TTT school. The job market is still terrible. A Supreme Court clerkship for Clarence Thomas is still untenable. No matter what I still will likely end up back in my mother’s basement. The question is whether it will be after three years of drinking and debauchery or after one year of drinking and debauchery and two of trying to be something I am not and truthfully may not even exist anymore. Maybe this is just a lottery with slightly better odds and an expensive as hell ticket.

I didn’t get much out of the other responses.  Erin is kind of a bitch, Alpha Man is a downer, Icarus is a drunk with less lyrical skills than your average rapper whose claim to fame is being shot and Simon’s Girlfriend is extremely self-absorbed.  I did get the message however that they are at best indifferent to Benito and Triforce’s call to arms.

First, I am not sure if Benito is being serious or if this is, as I first took it, simply an attempt to change the subject of the discourse of this blog from identifying the problem to what can be done.  Ok, you’ve borrowed a ton and now are precariously, under or unemployed.  Now what?  If this is a call to answer the MUCH MUCH harder “now what?” I’d be happy to see that, and even suggest dividing the “now what?” into long-term what should be lobbied for and how to change as a society and a what to do personally in the short-term. I think that’s a laudable goal – particularly considering the point that Alpha Man once made and Simon’s Girlfriend almost made before her dripping superficiality leaked out – the real debt we have is to each other and that can be serviced by helping people like us.

Now if Benito means he literally wants to be pay off all his student loans in 2011, well admittedly that’s a tall order but heck, I say go for it.  Look, Triforce has managed to scam his firm out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  He also pulled a major insurance fraud scam nobody even knows about that makes his billable hours trickery look like child’s play.  I can’t go into specifics, but imagine Triforce as even lazier, aka not even willing to go into his office for a few hours every other week or even bother with timesheets.  Also think a much more sympathetic, though indirect, class of victims.  Getting Triforce to admit to what I expected was a classic “A Few Good Men” moment by the way.

Benito is not without his achievements.  There is his education of course, which would have been an achievement in and of itself a dozen years ago.  This blog is still up and running.  Benito has also beaten alot of old-school video games.  Has anyone here beat Zelda II or the Second Quest of the original Legend of Zelda?

But here is the real reason folks.  Benito and Triforce will have some good ideas but they’ll make mistakes.  Then all I have to do is swoop-in, correct those mistakes and cash in.  It will be alot like…like…well, law school.  And so far that one is working out for me.  Grades in two weeks people!!!!!

So I haven’t written in awhile at Benito’s behest. He said I should be focusing on my exams. I will fill you in on those momentarily but first a quick recap:

I decided to borrow heavily to go to a third-rate law school with a terrible track record at placing grads in jobs after taking seven years and $200,000 to graduate from my state college despite my affiliation with this blog.

Why? Well suppose you were in prison for life and someone said you could be out for three years to drink and whore on someone else’s dime so long as you came back afterward? Why not?

So basically this led to a dynamic almost like that of a trustfund kid- I wasn’t risking anything and this has sort of allowed me to do whatever I want whenever I want and now for the first time in my life I am popular and well-known. All because I know how the party ends and have accepted that.

In my last post however I began to notice a tiny part of me beginning to forget. If I forget for one second the mildew-mold scent of my mother’s plastic covered couch I will throw myself into the pursuit of futility only to return a failure and be mocked.

So back to exams. I had to decide whether to play the game straight up or cheat. In one bag I had four binders each containing the outline for every class that was the product of various study groups and my law books. That was the straight up bag.  In the other bag I had four binders with articles the professors had written, a list of key phrases I would suspect they would want parroted back, old exams with answer keys, and profiles based on google searches. Last but not least was the pre-exam Ipod loaded with every possible irritating or distracting noise/song possible and a list of key disinformation to disseminate right before the exam to throw classmates off their game. That’s the cheat binder and the binder I had planned on using since day 1.

In the end I went with the straight up bag. I got to the test early and realized the bitch assigned to sit next to me was the same loose whore who almost started a rumor about my, er endowment, calling it the most Asian part of me.

I hated that racist whore so much. So much I almost didn’t sleep with her after the exam. I realized that no matter how I did I wanted her to fail. I raced back to my dorm, got the other bag and used it for that and all my exams. If my mother’s couch is my destiny I may as well have company.

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Forward

As you might imagine there isn’t much to occupy my time now that people are going out less and studying more. I found an undergrad who showed me how to scan documents into Word files so I can rip off commercial outlines and distribute them in my study groups. So, with the time on my hands I have come up with some schemes to make myself some cash when the semester ends. I will devote this ones to the legal schemes…get it? Pun intended.

First of course has to do with text books. I found out when and where a set of major exams are occuring at each of the three Universities within easy commuting distance and I am placing a large recepticle outside that says DONATE USED TEXTBOOKS. I will collect them and sell them on E-bay.

Next I am paying some undergrads $50 to store some stuff in their basement, then I am offering storage space to other undergrads in their basement (pricing to be determined).

Another classic is I report tax cheats to the IRS.  Mike Triforce was unimpressed with a few of my recent conquests so I replied that the Princess was so easy if she was a video game character she’d be Glass Joe (Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, the first absurdly easy boxer you fight). We scuffled and settled on a bet (which I just barely lost) about how many slutty bar tenders I could bed. What started out as revenge on the women who scorned me has actually turned into a potential source of real income. You’d be surprised how many businesses pay young, pretty women under the table to save money.

Finally I have a set of keys to a few of the alcoholics cars. I am planning to start a very discreet service where I take underage drunks to the emergency room for $400 a ride and take care of the paperwork for them. I want to be established by next semester when pledging starts.

Higher education is a sink hole. If you’re tired of being the host start being the parasite. Conservative estimates off of just those three spare time schemes have me making double my income for 2009 sporadically working. And that’s with me reporting it to the IRS.

I also get the feeling that this is life. The successful people are either always finding angles or love something enough or are so good at something that they are willing to play the game straight up. As for me I’m not good at shit and I already failed at everything I loved. So if you’re a bar skank and a pudgy Asian kid with unkept hair asks for your number you might want to treat him right if you don’t want to get fired and have your wages garnished when you eventually get a real job after your face goes and your tits sag.

Law School is getting less fun as exams are approaching. Fewer people are going out, they are going out less often, and they are not staying out as long. It’s not a total loss. As the women shed their humanity and feminity they are ending pre-law relationships and sleeping with whatever can drink a 5th of vodka and still maintain an erection. Since nobody else is going out and staying out that, ladies and gentlemen, is usually me.

I know why people are scared. Exams. Nobody who doesn’t crack the top 20% has a shot at a job post graduation. This is scary for people who have never had to live back home and who have never had their lives used as a parable for failure. For me, the worst that can happen is par for the course. What I fear is success.

I have my post bombing exams plan all thought out. Immediately after grades come out I start studying for the Cali bar which I will take over the Summer. Once I pass it, which I should given the 7 months I have to study, I can start looking for temp work and spend two years networking and looking for work while I am still in school. I can take risks  and do all the things a young lawyer can and should do but for not having the money. I can take my shot and if it all goes to hell well I am no stranger to my mother’s couch.

But what if I succeed? What if I crack the top 10%? Then the “traditional” path of law review and clerkship is open to me. While this looks like folly from where I sit now, I mean I am going to apply for the honor of working 60 hour weeks for free in addition to class based on the promise that the credential which in no way translates to marketable legal skills will lead to a job three and four years down the line? That could change if I win the grades lottery.

Truth be told, I have always wanted to feel two things: 1) accepted and 2) special. I imagine it is the opposite of my usual feelings – 1) rejected and 2) inferior. I actually want these things more than money. While I know my California idea, using leverage and angles to move the heavy debt/poverty boulder is better – I might try and do it hitting the thing straight on just to hear someone whisper “you can do it.”  No one has ever said that to me. The closest I have come to hearing that are the writers on this blog who alternatively say “you’re a worthless fat, feces throwing Chimp, but you’re better than the rest of the monkeys in this cage so you might escape.” That would be Mike Triforce. And “You can’t do it. It’s nothing personal, it’s the system. Nobody can do it nowadays.” That would be everyone else.

At the end of the day at least I am getting laid. I just can’t get used to it. I will still probably die pleasuring myself on my mother’s couch.