It’s the Small Things

There’s been a lot of hatin’ and negativity on this blog lately. So, because I am in a vapid, airy mood, I’d like to give a completely random and idiosyncratic list of enjoyable things:

1. Church’s Chicken. They must batter their chicken in endorphins.

2. Cowboy boots. After 15 years of  Texas residency, I now own a pair. Why I don’t own 100 pairs, all in various kinds of exotic animal skins, is beyond me. I would buy dolphin skinned boots given the chance. I’d also eat a dolphin, but that’s a story for a different blog.

3. People watching at Wal-Mart. Well before www.peopleofwalmart.com, I conducted miniature sociological expeditions at the Bellmead Wal-mart at different times of the day. Best time to go is on Sunday afternoon for maximum diversity.

4. Waco. Wait, whaaaaat?!! Waco does suck, but it doesn’t suck so bad it hurts. It’s a perfectly livable place. It ain’t Rio de Janeiro, but you get homey feeling  after a year. Others will disagree, but that’s because they don’t know how to accept what is in life.

5. Ken Burns. This elfin man has produced beautiful documentaries that have kept me sane and curious. I recommend Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, and Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio.

Therefore, I suggest you go to the Bellmead Wal-Mart in your dolphin-skin boots, buy one of these documentaries, return home to a mound of Church’s Chicken, enjoy a glass of Maker’s Mark and have yourself a good evening.

Bartleby the 2L

In my undergraduate days of yore, fuzzy days and weeks framed in my memory with neon and tinsel, I read literature for class and for fun. There are some stories that stick out in my mind for what they meant to me at the time. Others for what they portended.

It was my senior year and I had just finished taking the LSAT (has it already been three years since that spiritual onslaught?). It was the late afternoon and I was back home in my apartment, soothing my nerves with a mug of 5-Star Vodka. There I sat, no shoes, no shirt, no pants, sunk into a leather recliner, flanked by my hounds, wondering what the hell housemates receiving different kinds of mail at different times in the day in different kinds of envelopes in different shaped rooms had to do with law school. To wash that experience from my mind, I decided to read for class, a class dealing with modern American short fiction. It was aptly titled Modern American Short Fiction

The short story assigned: Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville, of Moby Dick fame.

Political defeat, but more importantly – dude, where’s my parking space?

Well, I lost. Congrats to the student who won. He actually campaigned and introduced himself to his new 1L constituents and thus deserves kudos for taking a vastly more proactive attitude towards a political endeavor than printing out pieces of paper that read in big block letters “VOTE FOR WK”. It should also be noted that this student is also my criminal ‘client’ in a class exercise – we’ll see how plea negotiations go next week!

Just kidding. I am relieved someone else was elected though. Sounds like sore loser speak WK! Well, the winner faces an increasingly disenchanted student body and an administration that continues to rub the BLS student zeitgeist the wrong way. Now I can speak freely without risking potential repercussions for SBA.

What happened now, you ask?

COMMENCE EPIC AND MEANDERING POST!

Vote

I forgot to mention that I’m running for student government executive president. Apparently I’m down in the “polls” because I have done zero campaigning in the past 48 hours (i.e., passing out confections tethered to fliers listing unlikely goals). I’ve been told I have no name recognition among the first quarters. That’s probably going to be an issue. I’ve been really busy the past few days! Really! These moot court briefs ain’t going to grade themselves, motions needed to be won (I think I won? And I was not eaten), and so on.

Well, tomorrow is probably my last day on student government unless something like this happens:

So with that note of pessimism, I give you my Official SBA Manifesto: Why WK

I viewed student government not as a kind of “political” platform where the goal is maximum name recognition or resume padding. Instead, I came to view it as a quasi-administrative gig. At BLS, student government is a very workmanlike organization with extremely limited powers due to the fact that Baylor is a private and restrictive organization. There’s just not a lot that can be done unilaterally without official approval. It’s extremely frustrating.

Now, part of the reason I’ve thrown my hat into the ring is because, if elected, my goal would be to expand student government’s role at the school beyond mere social planning. That’s a much taller order than what it sounds like because at any step of the way, student government can be told NO and that will be that. There is no board of appeals, there is no alternative route. But I would like to at least try to restructure the student government with the main focus being on creating an active committee, a single point of contact, one that continuously and regularly addresses various issues with administration as part of its job responsibilities.

There is, and probably always will be, a simmering discontent in the student body. I think this is par for the course. It’s difficult to be in the same building 12 hours a day and not start to hate the place. But at BLS, there’s no real valve to release that discontent. As a result, students are often misinformed on why administration has done something; folks then feel powerless because there’s no legitimate avenue to provide even minimal input or feedback. That sounds like candyassed whining, but there is, at the very least, a kernel of legitimacy in that. We do pay a lot (what’s tuition now? $35k a year?). I mean, many of us really are selling ourselves into a modern form of indentured servitude, at least let us have gently risque t-shirts for God’s sake. I digress. Professors/admin, while obviously our superiors, are still rendering a service to us. Within that relationship is a certain reciprocity that is tough to see sometimes because of an atmosphere of submission in many quadrants of life at BLS. You know what that breeds? This comment: “I really wish I hadn’t come to BLS. It’s not worth the suffering.” But “That’s always been the way it is and not everyone feels that way,” is the counterargument. That might have been true, but no longer in the age of the internet, where prospective students get their information about law schools. See e.g. this blog, which gets a ton of hits from Google searches that read “BAYLOR LAW SCHOOL +BLOGS.” Glossy law school mass mailing advertisements may be cool to look at, but I know what was determinative for me when choosing a school was what students thought, not the official marketing campaign. It’s in the best interest of everyone associated with BLS that student morale is monitored and maintained.

I’ve always pictured the role of student government to be the official interface for students and administration. To me, it’s not just about party planning and buying new microwaves for the lounge (although that is an important job). In my view, student government should be union reps for students.

Well, I guess we’ll see about tomorrow.