Every morning I take a few* minutes to read and comment on a couple of interesting blogs. Then I take the dogs for their morning stroll. Recently, it occurred to me how similar these processes were:
Reading
Commenting
Reading
Reading
Reading and commenting
Reading
all the
Angles
Reading and Commenting Simultaneously
Aaaaaand commenting
* The actual amount of time is directly proportional to the quantity and urgency of the piles of work on my desk.
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?
Saguaro rescues the fleece sheep from its ignominious flattening under Tim’s wheelchair.
Sam Bagenstos has written a thoughtful post on the use of the word “retard” in movies and our response as a community. He was responding to this post, which was reacting, in turn, to the use of the word “retard” in the Alexander Payne/George Clooney movie, The Descendents. I tend to agree — on general free expression and artistic license grounds — that we should not be in the business of telling writers what to write. But I’m hoping for the day when the casual use of the word “retard” carries the weight that the casual use “nigger” or “cunt” would. (For example, I’m predicting it was pretty jarring to read those words in my blog. Was it equally jarring to read the word “retard”?)
Given the intersection of language nerdery and disability rights, this is a subject that interests me and that I’ve written about a couple of times. Sam’s blog post makes excellent points, including that
People use the r-word in real life, just like they use slurs against other groups (and just like they do other harmful and wrongful things), and it would be wrong to say that movies and literature can’t depict that. (And I think it’s a cheat to say that the use of the word can be depicted but only if the character who uses it “learns the lesson” that it’s wrong or is otherwise shown to be a bad and unsympathetic character. That’s not any different than requiring purely idealized depictions of people.)
Very true. In fact, if the word were restricted to movies, books, or tv shows in which lessons were learned, we’d only hear it in after-school specials, where the bully turns out to have problems of his own, reforms, and everyone has a group hug in the end. No, rather than requiring lessons be learned or the word avoided, I’m hoping the movie-going public evolves to the point where the writer knows that putting that word in a character’s mouth will communicate something deeply negative about that character. Right now, the choice to have a white character use the word “nigger,” without the quotes, directed to or about an African-American, communicates something very specific and negative: the speaker is a racist asshole. Same with “cunt”: sexist bastard, or denizen of frontier Deadwood, South Dakota.
The truth is, I find it incredibly jarring and disappointing when a character in a movie with whom I sympathize (or perceive that I’m supposed to sympathize) uses the word “retard” as a casual epithet. It’s similar to the phenomenon that Ta-Nehisi Coates has called “the John Mayer Rule,” and which I called “drinking with white people”: that moment when someone you thought was cool says something bigoted . . . and the concomitant urge to avoid situations (in my case, drinking with acquaintances who don’t get disability rights) where this might happen. There are good reasons why George Clooney would not say a long list of offensive epithets in a movie of the type I understand The Descendants to be. I’m hoping for the day when writers and actors will think that way about the word “retard” and use it accordingly.
One final thought: a laser-focus on one word misses is the many ways movies and TV can be demeaning to people with disabilities while remaining pristine in language use. One of my favorite examples is Law & Order, which has presented a long string of pathetic and/or criminal people with disabilities, without once (that I can recall) showing, say, an attorney, detective, forensic professional, or random witness in a wheelchair. Two episodes stick in my mind. In one, a mother is accused of killing her son, a quadriplegic. The son is presented as unable to get out of bed and as a result we are asked to sympathize with the homicidal mother. Scenery-chewing DA Jack McCoy tells the jury — as a fact, I promise, not as a negative comment on the mother’s narrow world view — “she knew he’d never grow up to be a doctor or lawyer.” Seriously – how hard would it have been for the writers to figure out that there are all sorts of quad doctors and lawyers and other professionals? The other episode I recall was where the hunt for the killer led toward the brother who was paralyzed and as a result bitter and murderous. While I can’t recall others off the top of my head, I don’t recall any portrayals of people who use wheelchairs straying beyond vegetative and/or embittered. I’d take 100 George Clooney “retard” utterances over this. Although we keep watching the damn show,* we know to turn it off the instant there is mention of a character with a disability. We know, to a 100% certainty, that L&O will screw it up.
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* L&O occupies the very small overlapping area of Tim and my taste in television:
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:
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):
But I’m a nerd! Why on earth would I spend $159 when I have the ingredients for a perfectly practical solution?
The New Yorker recently published an article on premature birth that inspired this thoroughly appalling letter:
So let me get this straight: Instead of ensuring that our educational system teaches all of our children, we should “accept death,” lest we be excessively sentimental to the detriment of . . . the special education students to whom we so desperately — but apparently inappropriately? — want to cling. What does Linda Bonin of Kirkland Washington think we should do instead? Administer the PSAT prenatally? What really frosts my shorts is that Ms. Bonin was almost certainly regarded as a good person — someone who liked to help people — possibly even by the parents of the special education students whose very existence she regretted, unsentimentally.
Who the hell is Ms. Bonin to decide that her students didn’t deserve to live. Who are any of us?
Tim and I have a mixed marriage.
Not really religion : even though we’re technically of two different faith traditions, we’ve found we often have more in common with each other than either of us has with most of the rest of our respective tribes.
Not sports teams: I converted.
And of course, we’re both lawyers. I have *no* idea how mixed marriages between lawyers and non-lawyers work. What on Earth do they talk about?
No, Tim and I are a mixed marriage with respect to time. I’m analog. He’s digital.
For example, I don’t believe that the time of day comes in chunks smaller than five minutes. So I would no more say “it’s 12:37” than I’d say “it’s 12:37:42.03.” It’s either 12:35 or 12:40. And truthfully, I’m much more likely to see this
and say “twelve thirty” or “quarter of one.” Because really, who needs to know that it’s “twenty-five of one?” In fact, I’m likely to see this:
and say “twelve thirty” or “quarter of one.” This, of course, drives Tim up the wall.
When we first met, my watch looked like this:
That’s right — no numbers whatsoever.* Do you really need them? Look at that watch face. You know all you need to know about the time: it’s that time of the afternoon when you should start thinking more seriously about what you are going to eat for dinner.
I’m also generally late. This is based on (1) my refusal to remember the digits to the right of the colon in the start time of any event and (2) the fact that when that time rolls around, I view it as my signal to start getting ready to go. Thus, if I were in charge of getting us on a 12:37 flight, I would internalize it as “12 something,” and at 12 something, start to think about packing for the trip. This is why I am *never* in charge of getting us to the airport on time. Occasionally, on a lark, I take charge of some lesser event, say, dinner reservations at a steak joint where they know us, we’re not meeting anyone, and if I totally screw it up, we can eat in the bar. I can usually get us there within 20 minutes one side or the other of when we’re supposed to be there.
Where it really gets interesting, however, is where Tim is forced reassert control over the time situation. This is when we discovered his time-bending abilities. For example, if we’re supposed to be at his parents’ house at noon…. Pause to explain that in the Fox family, the time gene follows the paternal line. This was clearly not so in our family, where my father had more or less my attitude and aptitude toward time and my mother and brother share Tim’s precision. But when we’re set to meet the Foxes at, say, noon, we generally get a call at 11:55 asking our ETA. (Love you, Denver!)
Back to time-bending. If I’ve managed to make us late — say, just as a hypothetical, by waiting for the actual necessary departure time to begin a long list of pre-departure tasks (change clothes, brush teeth, gather miscellaneous items that belong in my purse, put the dogs out, wait several minutes for Saguaro to select the optimum location to pee, bring the dogs in, locate my coat, etc.) — Tim will reassert control over time. This is not an adversarial process. It’s not “Dammmit, we need to get going.” It’s the fact that once Tim is in the car with me, a trip that — based on the speed limit, the physical capabilities of the van, and the theory of relativity as I understand it — takes 30 minutes will in fact take 10 minutes. I have no idea how he does it. We call it “Timmifying time” and it has to be used judiciously, as randomly Timmifying any given trip has the risk of getting you to your destination very early, leaving you as, say, the first two people to arrive at a heinously boring bar dinner. In those situations, we retroactively Amify the time by stopping at the actual bar and preparing ourselves, chemically AND chronologically, for the event.
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* My watch would still look like this if I could find one for under $25. I bought this for a couple of bucks in Hong Kong in about 1984 and it long ago gave up the ghost. Unfortunately, I don’t buy nice watches for the same reason I don’t buy nice pens: I lose them. I long ago figured out that this wasn’t going to change, and that rather than freaking out over losing an expensive watch, I would simply buy Timexes or Swatches and replace them as needed.
Remember just the other day I was ridiculing some over-caffeinated opposing counsel for accusing CCDC of defamation for posting, on its website, pleadings in case alleging that his client violated the ADA. Highlight:
My position is that you and your clients have been defaming my clients by raising false allegations of discrimination . . .
On Wednesday, we got the judge’s decision on our motion for summary judgment. Here’s page 3 — the key portion:
That’s right, Ladies and Gentlemen, summary judgment granted to plaintiffs! Big thanks for the excellent legal work of Team CCDC: Kevin Williams, Andrew Montoya, and Briana McCarten.
Breaking News! Did you know that the mayor of a major American city said that treating African-Americans equally was an “inconvenience” that was “unfair to average people” because it made them “uncomfortable”? You didn’t!? What a scandal – how did the media miss this?
Oh, right, sorry — it was just the civil rights of people with disabilities. Silly media consumers — you know that’s not the same thing. So no reason to expect 24/7 handwringing, apologies, and navel-gazing talk shows about the state of civil rights in response to the MAYOR OF OUR LARGEST CITY SAYING THAT RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF HIS MINORITY-GROUP CONSTITUENTS IS INCONVENIENT AND UNFAIR TO “AVERAGE” PEOPLE.
In fact, I have to cut the intrepid reporters on the civil rights beat some slack on this because they were busy pursuing a much more important story.
Yes, leading liberal website ThinkProgress was far too busy tracking the astonishing news that beauty queen got drunk and used a bad word. In fact, the website was so on top of this story that they got an …
That’s right, an EXCLUSIVE. You won’t read this important story ANYWHERE ELSE! And in fact, ThinkProgress has the crucial details, too. Miss Virginia’s roommate told the reporter that she was “extremely intoxicated” that night and seemed upset that she did not have the full house to herself, so she “downgraded people based on their physical appearance and economic status.” Now this is indeed breaking civil rights news: college girl gets drunk, says something stupid and hurtful.
How on earth did ThinkProgress beat out The Onion to this important scoop?
Thought Snax 
