gumshoe assignment for vague

i have a visiting prof this semester who is from UC hastings and he looks just like your dad. do all men of a certain age from california look alike? i submit this for your investigation. i expect a full report.

the mood round here needs a little lightening

so i will share a few choice, juicy bits.

first, and this is much funnier if you actually see it, but my dog, the infamous Bella Queen of Hadoggada, apparently doesn't dig high pitched noises. so w was making up a song the other day that included an unbelievably high aria and the dog started freaking out, running around in circles and jumping in his face, yowling along the whole time. she gets all nervous like and hops up and down and spins. priceless.

second, i remembered on of the funny things from my earlier disappeared post. when i was job fairing a few weeks ago, we had just gotten back from vacation. w and i are shamelesss on vacation; our central vacationing philosophy is that if we come home with a single dollar in our pocket, we didn't wring as much fun out of the vay-kay as we possibly could have. knowing this to be true, i made arrangements to have my last paycheck from my summer job waiting for me when we got back, and also for a reimbursement check for some prescriptions i bought to come soon after so we would not be totally high and dry. i mean, i faxed in my payroll sheet A WEEK EARLY and called the insurance company and had the biz-natch walk me through the process of filling out the form, attaching the receipts, where to send it, and i even got her name and extension in case the system broke down. we left the very next day. as soon as we got to a place where i could check my e-mail, i discovered that my faxed payroll sheet had not transmitted and we were not going to be back in time for me to turn in a new one. shit, this is a long story. but the payoff is totally worth it, stick with me. so we blow it out as usual on vacation, and i'm thinking the insurance check is my ace in the hole. i mean, the lady SAT THERE ON THE PHONE WITH ME while i filled the motherfucker out. we got home and in the pile of mail is a DENIAL LETTER FROM THE GODDAM INSURANCE COMPANY. this happened last semester. i secretly think my school uses that insurance compoany from that john grisham book that just automatically denies the claim the first time you try to send it in. so now you have the background. i had to leave three days later--first NYC for a job fair where i was fri., sat., sun., then sun. night i stayed in DC and flew out from there in the morning to dallas, where i job faired and stayed mon. night. i was really frugal in NYC which was easy cause i stayed with my cousin who is a lawyer and he kept me in food and booze while i was there. so i had the bare minimum cash that i could have possibly had leaving NYC and driving to DC. i had to call my parents and ask them to get me a room in DC for the night cause i was that broke. i had an ulterior motive cause i knew that wouldn't let me stay in some fleabag. the dallas job fair was crazy, i barely made it there and then i had enough cash for two small meals and the shuttle trip to and from the airport. all the firms that interview there give cool swag, and i got 3 tins of mints, a small tin of jelly bellies, two pots of lip balm, and a baby stapler, all conspicuously emblazoned with the names of law firms. i got together with a fellow student for lunch and had a cheap deli sandwich. when it was all over, me and that same fellow student were walking out at the same time and he was like "i need a beer, you wanna go get one?" at that point, i had done 17 screening interviews and was flat broke and exhausted. of course i wanted a fucking beer. so we found an uber cheap happy hour and i used my dinner money to get wasted. it was a strategic decision on my part, as not eating dinner made my money go a lot further. plus, the place we went to had at least 12 new orleans style whirring daquiri machines of death, filled with the cheapest rotgut 150 proof booze and they were dirt cheap on special. so we drank through our respective bankrolls and left. i ate my complimentary jelly bellies for dinner. after spending the day interviewing for six figure jobs. ironical? you bet.

and it all ended well. i was able to finagle a paycheck out of the business office at school, playing the baby-gotta-eat card. i was surprised that they were able to accomodate me. i guess i'm just used to my old low rent public undergrad university, where i surely would have been shit out of luck. and i called my "friend" at the insurance company and impressed upon her the fact that i had been expecting, nay counting on a check being in my mailbox. i think i scared her, because she said she would take care of it and when she called me back later in the week, she had not only cut me a check for the most recent drugs i had to buy, but she went back and had them reimburse me for the ones they screwed me on first semester. surely i told you about that, internets...when i spent upwards of $300 on asthma medicine that i was assured would be covered by insurance inly to have them tell me it was a preexisting condition and thus not covered for the first six months? well, i was totally shocked, but grateful for the windfall. she must have figured out that i was interviewing with that law firm that got that guy's family so much money in that john grisham book. damn right.

it's the end of the world as we know it

sorry for the protracted silence. i wrote a great long rambling post, the contentt of which i don't even remember now, that slipped into the ether before i could publish it. i didn't have the heart to rewrite it, and it seems silly now anyway.

i am beginning to get word from my shell-shocked friends from nola, thank god. d & d, the homeowners who are getting married soon, fled to her parents plantation in a place in LA out of harm's way. while they are certainly worried about their place, they are well insured and the flooding where they are doesn't appear to be too terrible. they are slightly worried that someone might have looted or set up camo in their house, but will not be able to find anything out likely for months so are not letting it get them down.

our friend j had just put a deposit down on a new apartment and bought a car from a friend. he was supposed to pick up the title on monday, but they got out of dodge on saturday. he reports that the cops who have pulled him over thus far have been pretty sympathetic. but he and our other friend (also a j) who left together are both service industry types and not really sure what they'll do. they are currently in memphis, where a local bar is having a benefit and letting them bartend to make some cash. they're talking about bugging out to cali. more power to you guys.

our friend n and his girlfriend e (a loyola law student) are safe in gainesville with their families. e is going to be going to school there to finish out her 3L year. many law schools around the country are taking in displaced students, including mine. most are only taking 2Ls and 3Ls, so i guess the poor 1Ls are automatically deferred at this point. they had a harrowing, 40 hour journey over the course of the last week, going first through texas and around the long way to FL.

s was in lake charles and apparently avoided the worst of it. i have e-mailed my friend coco, and she is the one i remain most worried about. her family is in tuscaloosa, which also got hit pretty hard, i think. she has no cell, and the home phone number i have for her is obviously no longer any good. i worry becuase she doesn't have a car, but from what d said, people really banded together to make sure all got safely out.

one crazy friend stayed behind and was there for four days. d says they sat on the front porch with shotguns, eventually siphoning gas to run their generator to keep some power and internet. they were evacuated to baton rouge, and d was going to pick him up when i called this morning. i imagine it's cluster fuck there...i mean, it's only about an hour out of the city and is the logical place to try to go if you only had a limited amount of gas coming out of the city.

no word yet from my lame ex or his friends, though i am concerned about them. he too is carless, but has a strong network of friends who would not let him float away.

i am awash in a feeling of utter powerlessness. i haven't been back to the city since we moved here from there, a year and some change ago. honestly, i have been so absorbed in all my own drama (preparing for 2 moot court competitions simultaneously, arranging callbacks, and trying to fit in my research and going to class) that i was a few days behind on the whole thing. i heard some vague rumblings about serious weather developing, but i think like many people i was nonplussed. we went through a couple hurricanes while down there and none really amounted to much. we were never evacuated during our tenure in nola, and saw minor flooding and such but nothing major. the levees breaking was always sort of a doomsday joke, and we would all say how screwed we'd be if it happened fairly secure in the feeling that it never would. that was when my ears pricked up, when i heard that more than one levee broke. i came home that night and w said that law school had saved our lives. we spent the rest of the night glued to cnn.

i don't really know what else to say. my heart is breaking. few people realize the depth of the functional poverty there. and how dependent the economy is on tourism. without that money flowing in, it will be hard to rebuild i imagine.