Category Archives: I am a total nerd, out and proud!

Checklist for being a plaintiffs’ lawyer

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The site “Stuff Journalists Like” posted a (so-far) 20-point “Checklist for being a ‘real’ journalist.”  It’s hilarious in and of itself, but some of the items are really part of a longer “checklist for being a word nerd,” for example:

2.  Corrected a loved one’s grammar in a greeting card.

My mother (love ya mom!) really did this once!  My word-nerdiness is clearly genetic and I was doomed from the start, because both of my parents have/had this gene.   Also

8. Can no longer read a newspaper without scanning for typos and errors.

Hell, I can’t read typos and grammatical errors in anything without being deeply disturbed. And I have, within the past week (1) had a serious discussion about whether a comma following a case name was improperly italicized (you know who you are!), (2) pondered the conditions under which the word “id.” at the end of a sentence is preceded by a period and capitalized or preceded by a comma and in lower case; and (3) laughed derisively at the obvious line-spacing errors in my opponent’s brief (before, of course, realizing that the judge would not give a rat’s ass).

Italicized Comma vs. Not Italicized Comma

Here are a couple more that I think apply almost equally to plaintiffs’ lawyers:

3.  Replaced one of the major food groups with coffee.

I never did like fruit, and coffee occupies more of my diet than any food group but pasta and cheese.

5.  Eat in your car more often than you do at a table.

Replace “car” with “desk” and I’ll cop to that.

9.  Learned that being told to “fuck off” and “go to hell” is part of the job.

13.  Found that fine line between harassment and persistence.

Completely applicable to plaintiffs’ lawyers.  Like journalists, we often find ourselves needing to talk to people who don’t really want to talk to us.

10.  Woke in a cold sweat thinking you forgot to change the date on A1.

Just last night I woke up in the middle of the night — Tim can vouch for this — thinking that I never did review the final table of authorities in the brief we submitted on Thursday.  Luckily, our superhuman paralegal was in charge of it, so I slipped right back into a peaceful slumber.

17.  Have conducted a phone interview while completely naked.

Close:  I have often conducted legal research clothed only in a towel.  When you have good ideas in the shower, they really shouldn’t wait until you’re fully dressed to research them.  I have also edited a brief telephonically with co-counsel while walking the dogs and scooping up after them.

I had also previously suggested two “you might be a plaintiffs’ lawyer” conditions:  that your car is older then your paralegal; and when the skirts on the tables supporting the courtroom technology of your opposing counsel are nicer than the skirt you’re wearing.  What else, plaintiffs’ lawyers, should we add to our checklist?

Nerd Fashion

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The hallmark of nerd fashion is practicality.  Not the sort of practicality that thinks, “I’m going to be on my feet most of the day.  I think I’ll wear my Cole Haan flats instead of my Christian Louboutin heels.”  It’s practicality mixed with overthinking.  As in black is elegant + white goes with everything = Amy dresses like the help at her aunt’s fancy dinner party.  It’s often practicality mixed with overthinking mixed with cheapness with results like this:

Amy in a garish yellow fleece over a bright red windbreaker.

It’s early morning.  I’m going rollerblading.   I need the yellow fleece to be visible, but (I think) it’s really cold out this morning so I need a windbreaker.  But the fleece has to be on top for the whole visibility thing.  Of course, I could spend$159 for a warm, high-visibility jacket at REI (and, as a bonus, I could apparently zip things into my armpits):

much better-looking bright yellow cycling jacked from REI

But I’m a nerd!  Why on earth would I spend $159 when I have the ingredients for a perfectly practical solution?

What I’m thankful for (an incomplete list):

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Family who do not measure love by the number of dishes cooked from scratch.

Sam Taylor’s Bar-B-Q, StoveTop stuffing, and Frances Lively, who happened to give us cranberry chutney last week.

My nerd family, where turkey is followed by pie which is followed by laptop time:

The people who make Hot Chillys long underwear, which made it possible to run off at least 42 of the 10,000 calories I consumed today.

The dogs, for making the clean up go so quickly.

All of the people willing to do the hard work so that the rest of us can be safe and free: servicemembers, peace officers, and lawyers who represent the unpopular and the condemned and take crap for it.

Speakers of truth to power.

Writers who make me think.

Co-counsel who laugh at the absurdities of law.

And always and most of all, Tim.

I’ve found my comrades: Right 2 Dry!

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In last week’s episode, I was hoping to start a movement around my random housekeeping activities.  Since I’m a neurotic middle-class white person, I urged the NYT Magazine to devote a trend article to my decision to hang up my laundry.  With binder clips.  Turns out:  it’s already a movement. And I totally love their logo:

I asked WordPress to make the image as large as possible, so you could all see the eagle-eyed eagle firmly grasping a clothesline full of undies.  Their site actually contains this sentence:  “Line-drying is patriotic.”   Comrades!

The reason it’s a movement is the source of deep regret for me, however.  Turns out many homeowners associations don’t permit line-drying, providing further evidence that HOAs are not only cleverly disguised agents of Satan, but unpatriotic to boot.*  My regret is that my laundry hangs incognito in my basement, without the ability to piss off anyone, much less an HOA.  Perhaps I should take photos of it and hang them up around my yard. . . .

*If I’m ever involved in litigation with an HOA and opposing counsel tries to admit this statement into evidence, remember:  it’s called “hyperbole.”  Even if it were admissible, it would only be admissible for the proposition that opposing counsel has no sense of humor.

Cryopastavore

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So it turns out “femivore” is neither a misogynistic zombie movie nor lesbian porn. No – just another example of middle class white people doing random things and calling it a movement.

As the New York Times Magazine article explained, femivores are “are stay-at-home moms, highly educated women who left the work force to care for kith and kin.”* Apparently bereft of things to obsess about at work — and finding ordinary shopping and cooking too mundane — femivores raise their own fruits, vegetables, and livestock, make their own soap, and otherwise imitate our frontier foremothers, only with “a green political agenda” rather than a desperate need to feed and clothe the family before winter comes to the plains.

The movement “has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a way for women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper.”** In other words, you quit your professional job because your husband makes enough money, but you don’t want to feel like your mother, so you overthink the role of housewife and decide to raise and kill your own chickens. Then, just to be certain no one confuses you with Mrs. Brady — or with women who actually work, and have to work, on actual farms — you slap a name on it: Femivore.

Now, it’s true that my friend Carrie — who emphatically does *not* fall into the navel-gazing demographic at the focus of the NYT Magazine article — also started raising chickens and ducks. But I’m convinced she did this primarily for the opportunity to name them “Sesame,” “Soup” and “Enchilada.” The opportunity to appear in Chicken Court to defend her fowl was also, I think, appealing. It was, alas, unsuccessful, as the learned judge in Windsor, Colorado had evidently not kept up with the latest trends in the Times Mag.

Being a femivore is the next step after becoming a locavore — the movement designed to persuade us to buy things grown locally at farmer’s markets (good) and to make us feel guilty about buying yummy or convenient things that were transported to our favorite chain grocery store in plastic and on trucks (bad). But if I didn’t eat yummy convenient things that the nice people at Safeway truck to me in plastic, I’d starve. And because I’m a highly educated middle class white person who can overthink with the best of them, I’d like the NYT Magazine to turn my food habits into a movement, complete with a name. Herewith a couple of suggestions.

Cryopastavore. Mostly what I eat is frozen pasta. You’d be amazed the different things you can do with tortellini. Although God knows they’re not paying for advertising, I can seriously say that this blog is made possible by the Buitoni company. And Equal Exchange (I’m also a “cafavore”). And New Belgium (Locabev? It’s a Colorado brewery, get it? No? OK, never mind.)

Extradomavore: That was my attempt at a Latin-derived term for “orders out all the damn time.” I know how to cook approximately three things besides frozen pasta, and all of my friends have had all three dishes multiple times. My mother’s advice was, it’s easier to get new friends than to learn to cook new dishes. Rather than ditching my friends, I’ve been lucky enough to hang with folks who like eating out, carrying out, and — bless them! — taking over my kitchen and making awesome things from utensils I didn’t even know I had. So maybe I’m an . . .

Amicavore: Eating the cooking of my amazingly talented friends. You know who you are. Come back. Soon. I promise to buy new utensils.

None of these movements lets me feel holier than anyone, though, as femivores clearly feel holier than cryopastavores. There is only one thing I do around the house that makes me feel holier than anyone else: I hang up my laundry. (I have to ask my paralegal for the Latin term for that.) It’s really a perfect movement for klutzes like me: it requires no talent or special equipment. I guess I should have checked to see if Restoration Hardware had the perfect matched set of clothespins, but being primarily a law nerd (we need a movement too!), I have been hanging up my socks with … binder clips!

Now I just have to get the NYT Mag to write about it. Hey! Over here! A white person doing something totally mundane! Call the story editor!

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*Does the NYT Magazine have some sort of cliche guidelines? Where do they get prose like that?

** Seriously, where?

I try to dress up; hilarity ensues.

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Never, ever, think about what you’re wearing.

As anyone who knows me knows, my wardrobe is the demon spawn of LL Bean and Eddie Bauer.  The theory behind this is that when I think too hard about how I’m dressed, that’s when things really go wrong.  My solution:  a grown-up Garanimals system in which I can randomly pair the bottom half (denim or khaki) with the top (monochrome cotton) and produce a predictably non-ridiculous outfit.

The problem, as I mentioned, comes when I overthink what I’m wearing.  Examples are as many as they are embarrassing.  Like the time I accidently dressed like the catering staff at my aunt’s fancy Christmas party.  This was an annual event to which our father took us – I’m convinced – because he did not have a date.  I’m primarily convinced of this in retrospect by the total lack of anyone else within 10 years of our ages.  Because of the extreme fanciness of the party and my extreme nerdiness, my outfit was always a great source of stress, til one year I decided that, dammit, I would rock the place, outfitwise.  I had inherited a gorgeous black silk skirt from my grandmother.  Vintage!  Wasn’t that a concept somehow related to hip fashion?  A concept implemented by people who could walk into Goodwill & emerge looking like Katharine Hepburn?  It’s entirely possible that the skirt was in fact cool – I’ll never know because I thought to myself: top?  what goes with a vintage black skirt?  white goes with everything, right?  Now, non-dorks would have put the outfit together and immediately SEEN the problem:  I looked exactly like The Help.  White shirt; black skirt.  I, however, basked in the fashion-free comfort of my logic.  Vintage!  White goes with everything!  Result:  Awkward!

You do NOT want to know what I wore to the first day of my first summer associate job.

By now I’m guessing you’re breathing a sigh of relief on my behalf for the eventual adoption of my Garanimals system.  And you’re realizing that at least half the reason for this blog is a sort of Computer Therapy:  Humiliation?  No! It’s a blog post!

My most recent bout of overthinking was this weekend attending an off-Broadway play in New York.  Everything would have been fine if I’d just worn the outfit selected for and loaned to me by my friend the fashion savvy law professor and her fashion savvy 8-year-old daughter.  I had brought my friend’s dress with me to New York along with the bracelet her daughter had given me from her “jewelry party” – a bracelet that was cooler than 99% of my jewelry drawer.  Alas, it was all back at the hotel when we decided – at dim sum – to simply spend the hours between 2:00 and 7:30 Sunday walking around SoHo.  My cousins assured me that my khaki skirt, Flax shirt, and sandals would be fine for off-Broadway.  Of course I took that advice, right?

Of course not!  I had the genius idea that I could SHOP in SoHo and assemble a cool outfit as the afternoon progressed.

Step one – shoes – was a resounding success.  Sometime in the past few years, I made the decision that I was tired of being short and that there is technology out there – the high heel – to remedy this situation.  I’ve been on a bit of a heel binge ever since.  Happily, we stumbled into a shoe store in SoHo where I bought the coolest shoes I now own:

Cooler still, the store was having a buy one/get one free sale, which forced me to select a lower priced shoe in my size.  Shoes satisfying both criteria were few, so I ended up with something, um, interesting!  And perfect for my next court appearance!

(OK, YOU try photographing your own foot.)

Giddy with my SoHo shopping success, I forged ahead to … hold on.  Context:  It was at least 95 degrees out and dripping with humidity.  So Tim and I were in the process of devoting five hours to walking/rolling, people-watching, walking/rolling, sweating, searching for air conditioned spaces, drinking in air conditioned spaces, walking/rolling, sweating, etc.  It was actually great fun to absorb an afternoon in lower Manhattan like that, but did I mention the humidity?  So when I finally found a dress I liked, I was – what’s the proper word when applied to a lady? – glowing.  Perspiring.  Sweating like a pig.  The dress is actually objectively great, now that I’ve had the chance to try it on in Denver’s dry air.  But I walked out of the shop in a skin-tight silk dress and 4-inch heels, feeling more or less like I was wearing a Zip-Loc bag, and headed straight to the theater.  The humidity was interfering with the complex relationship between the dress and its lining even before we got to the theater and discovered . . . steps.  Five or six of them.  At the front entrance.  At the only entrance.  The nice people in the box office assured me they had a ramp, and so they did.  Tim proceeded up at a 45% slope* with me pushing a bit – in the dress with the lining and the 4-inch heels – into the un-air-conditioned** breeze-free lobby, where we discovered two things:  (1) the air-conditioned theater would not open for half an hour; and (2) the dress code was variations on linen cropped pants (women), cargo shorts (men), and Birkenstocks (both).  I spent about five minutes with my dear husband reassuring me that I really looked “hot” – it now dawns on me he probably meant the temperature and not the compliment – before I went to the ladies room to change back into the khaki skirt.

I couldn’t part with the shoes, though.  I’m not sure a Flax top has ever been paired with 4-inch heels, but I’m sure – logically – that I rocked that look.  Right?

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* Plus or minus conventional building industry tolerances for field conditions.

** How many dashes is that word supposed to have and where are they supposed to go?