So, a whole lot has happened.  So much in fact that it’s hard to decide exactly what to write about.  First there is this

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/business/law-school-economics-job-market-weakens-tuition-rises.html?_r=1

And if you’re here on this site you are aware of everything in the story linked to above.  What makes it newsworthy is that it’s in the New York Times.  I suppose I should be happy that one of the most widely read newspapers in the world has taken note of my specific plight.  But instead all I did was crack a beer.  Then I cracked another, and another and then I got REAL mad.  Is this how people who see parents murder their children all the time felt when the media found Casey Anthony? And now thanks to the NYT article…well, my life’s still over.  I’ve got this blog, I do my part to help the next generation.  All I am left with his emptiness.

But there’s more.  How about this

http://abovethelaw.com/2011/07/suing-law-schools-potpourri-tidings-from-law-schools-named-after-a-thomas/thomas-cooley-lawsuit-cl/

That’s right.  Kids like me are rising up and suing their law schools.  Read on to hear what I think about that.

Sure.  If you went to a third rate law school nobody has heard of with few if any successful alumni and you can find a job doing something else or whatever the hell else you did before you went to law school than sure, more power to you.  It’s not like you can’t find a lawyer these days to take virtually any case on contingency.

Me, I went to an Ivy League school.  Sure, they hiked up tuition.  Sure, they lied about employment statistics (though not nearly as brashly) but they have A LOT of powerful alumni who in theory could stand to lose a lot if the name of their dear old alma mater was besmirched.  You see, my law school COULD use its own to defend a lawsuit I would bring against it with some freshly minted Cooley graduate.  Plus I did technically (however very briefly) have a job upon graduation so according to all of this I should be dancing in the street.  Because apparently I didn’t go to law school for a career in law I went to have to have a six-figure job for a couple of months.

So I really don’t know what to write about.  I mean none of this effects me.  None of this effects the people who have been derailed for YEARS.  I don’t this is progress either.  These are just the things that happen as a scam matures.  Everyone knows the pitfalls of playing the lottery or selling knives door-to-door.  Everyone knows that Taco Bell doesn’t have real meat in their tacos.  Everyone knows that Disney World is just paying a ton of money to spend your only free week of the year waiting in lines in 100+ degree heat.  BUT PEOPLE STILL DO IT.  And they probably always will.

Ugh.  Nothing changes.

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.

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.

This isn’t exactly the season for embracing reality, especially for people of all ages who have but to ask in order to receive. So it’s particularly unremarkable that so many kids are in denial about 1) the size of their debt 2) the ability to earn a paycheck with the skills and degrees acquired with said debt and 3) the ability to earn a large enough paycheck over a large enough period of time to justify said debt taking into account opportunity costs, work/life balance considerations and other life goals. Obviously if our readers fell into this category they wouldn’t be reading our blog. The question is how does this ignorance effect you?

There are several categories to consider when evaluating what a pampered, over-educated and underskilled workforce -what it means for your own job prospects, the country, and your relationships.

What you probably care about most is your own ability to find gainful employment generally and in the field you studied. The net effect is poor. First the glut of these individuals allows employers to be choosy. If there is a younger version of you, you’re out of luck, if there is an unexplained gap in your resume you’re out of luck and regardless of your actual circumstances (injuries, sick or dying family, victim of crime) the assumption will be you were laid off for being the least valuable person in an organization. And this is AFTER you stop looking in vain for a job worthy of your degrees. This is Starbucks/Subway territory.

As a country this is bad. Educational debt has exceeded credit card debt. It will be the basis for a new cast system, and the chief cause for our national economic power being eroded by Europe and Asia.

Most surprisingly, this continued ignorance will wreak havoc on any relationship you have for the next 20 years. Now most of you are broke, single and childless. You have more pressing problems than relationships, the biggest two of which (marriage and children) seem forever out of grasp. But hear me out.

Our situation is like that of an unmarried gay couple who breaks up or has a death after 20 years. People aren’t sympathetic and there is a lack of vocabulary for what we’ve been through. I regularly have successful people with no debt remark that they wish they could live on their parent’s couch and blog all day.

Think about it. You can’t date someone who just went to school, got the job of their dreams and spends most of their free time trying to figure out how to link the surround sound from their home theater complete with blu-ray to the satellite HD MP3 radio in their leased Audi. Suppose you have a kid? Statistically speaking they too will want to remain ignorant of what you know and say the child’s other parent had a different experience? Who are they going to believe? Smiling success or doom and gloom?

Finally, the crippling burden of debt permanently warps your relationship with your parents. Regardless of future success they will always worry about you more and you will always be more touchy around them. Just as it is tragic to outlive a child so to is the knowledge or even fear that your child will have a much less secure, less financially stable, less fulfilling life.

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 probably noticed with the sporadic posts I’ve had a number of breakdowns of a mental nature over the past two weeks.  One of the many straws upon this poor camel’s back is the fact that KF Li is actually doing pretty well considering he hasn’t earned a single grade or repaid a single dollar of his loans and that leads to no small amount of “I told you so”s.  ANYWAY a pioneer named David Kazzie has been good enough to animate one poor sap’s journey through law school.  I have watched the first two episodes and in my humble opinion it is dead on accurate.  I am putting a link to his site in this post below and you can find the link with the others in the coming days.

http://wahoocorner.blogspot.com/

While I am on the subject, if you read KF Li’s posts you can’t help but realize that his approach to law school is the product of the fact that in-fighting aside, he really has listened to alot of what all of us on this blog have had to say.  In fact, he initially started as a sub-in for Mike Triforce because he noticed KF Li was a sponge for everything he said.  The biggest joke in “So You Want to Go to Law School” is that the protagonist is obviously not listening to anything she is being told.  It’s popularity comes not from it’s teaching utility but from it’s entertainment value in the niche audience of people who have already been duped by the system.

This is significant folks.  This isn’t the type of Youtube sensation that makes anyone sweat, nor is it the stuff of revolution.  It’s brilliant, but in it’s brilliance it has basically as much effect as the cute animal videos with millions of hits apiece.  That isn’t David’s fault, and it might not even be student’s fault.  It really could be simply the product of reality changing at much too fast a pace for conventional wisdom to keep up.  We tend to think of teenagers, particularly college students, to be young, impulsive and rebellious but at the end of the day they are people and people are very convervative when it comes to making important decisions.  That’s why people feed their kids hormone-ladened milk, vote the incumbent and trust conventional wisdom over the advice of faceless bloggers.

Anyway, thank you David.  You have amused many, and saved a few.  Congrats on your mention on ATL and here’s hoping you become a regular contributor.

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.

I know Mike Triforce doesn’t really go to work ever but I couldn’t help but notice that he spent all day yesterday commenting on ATL, instructing random commenters on everything from how to get a hand job in public to how to cheat on the LSAT. I was somewhat flattered to be honest- obviously Mike Triforce needs a new receptacle for the bullshit he generates on a daily basis. But I need to address the cheating thing.

But first a law school update. It’s going great! This is the best part of first year. It’s way too early to be concerned with outlining but most of the initial fear has worn off. Everyone has been called on and life is just one endless giant mug of beer.

But back to Triforce. On ATL he claims to have cheated on the LSAT by faking an illness and then switching his test out with a smart kid’s test under the guise of cancelling his score. I know that’s not true because Triforce confided in me on how he ACTUALLY cheated on the LSAT… He did fake an illness, well more of a condition. He faked a learning disability to get more time on the test. Less clever and more morally reprehensible. That’s Mike Triforce.

Oh, by the way Triforce, I see the Princess around campus all the time. She’s gotten kinda fat. Maybe she went back to school because she couldn’t reel in the tips like she used to?

 am a god here.  No seriously. I am a get-down-on-your-knees seek my favor or fear my wrath god of the old world. And I demand sacrifice. Here are my law school commandments:

1) Remove your name from the seating chart in every class.

They can’t use the Socratic on you if you have no name on their precious, precious seating chart.

2) Get a mod job done on your student ID

My student ID has unlimited access and unlimited funds. An undergrad did this for $200 and Ive already spent at least a grand.

3) Go to each class only once a week

If you’ve ever read a legal blog you know nobody teaches you shit in law school. You need to seem like a rebel by skipping class but you also need to avoid the slacker label. Once a week for any given class works. No more and no less.

4) Go Out Every Night

Especially Sunday. Law School is a crapshoot. Most will fail and some will succeed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. You want to have a few beers with the latter and the only way to do that is to have a few beers with everyone. Specifically be cool with the Jews, women, Asians and I guess given Obama…

5) Never read

Cases that is. I mean how can you read when you’re going out every night and why would you read when you can’t ever be called on? Rely on commercial outlines and articles written by your professors even if those articles have little to do with the 1L course they are teaching. Ass kissing > accuracy any day of the week.

6) Visit the Library every day at 9 pm.

These are the law review kids people. Drink with them twice a week. Join their study group. An outline they produce is worth it’s weight in gold.

7) Play Intramural Sports

Yeah none of these kids are making law review but they will get jobs because they are attractive and well connected. Moonlight in one of their study groups but don’t share any of the golden outlines.

Break the Women and Underrepresented Minorities

There are several of these individuals wjonwould do well/make law review save one sexual harassment incident or one several racially charged remarks. Not only will you eliminate competition by doing this but you will gain respect in the eyes of the entrenched power structure. This goes double if you happen to be a woman or underrepresented minority. Ahem, Sarah Palin and Clarence Thomas. Need I say more?

9) Cheat

It’s obvious on the one hand, but in a world of open book tests you might be wondering how. Also remember it is just as important to help others cheat as it is to cheat yourself. You want people to be indebted to you.

Always be on instant messenger. Someone gets called on and someone else messages you the answer connect the dots for them. Always bring in your professor’s old tests complete with answers. Even if the question isn’t verbatim the same sometimes it’s written to have the same answer key. Professors are lazy and closet conservatives down to a person. On that note, avoid actual practitioners as professors. They tend to teach and test knowledge as opposed to agreement with their pet theories.

10) Always Look for that next angle

Mike Triforce is the past and very soon I will be too. I am always looking for that next advantage. Maybe I can cheat the writing competition by making friends with an upoerclassmen on law review. Maybe I can hack a professor’s account who knows? I won’t unless I try and the fresher my idea is the less likely I get caught.

So there you have it. I own this place. The NY market better crack $200k by the time I am out.