Begging the Question

Serious blogging

2010-05-05T16:13:00.001-07:00

Oh look. I've designed and am editing a serious, legitimate blog about the entertainment industry now!

Check out Law Law Land.

Or follow us on Twitter.

Carry on, then.

Official postmortem

2009-08-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

On the advice of a couple friends, I decided to post an official straight-from-the-horse's-mouth postportem on the WWTBAM message board after my historic million-dollar miss. I thought it might be interesting/helpful to share it here (slightly edited to translate message board slang to plain English):

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Hi! My name is Ken. You might know me as the guy who lost $475,000 in just over three minutes. I thought you might want to hear about that experience from me.

I could come up with a narrative about everything that happened for my show's taping, but it's all been discussed in great detail by the numerous people who were at the taping, as well as those who watched it tonight. So it might be more interesting to address a few things that have cropped up on the board tonight.

First, my answer on the million dollar question ("MDQ") was not a blind guess or a 25% chance stab at a million. I had eliminated A&W and V8 off the bat. I had a strong inclination toward Yoo Hoo before asking the audience, and only later did I realize why: there's a photo of LBJ meeting the Beatles in which he's drinking a Yoo Hoo (I have not been able to find it online since, but someone else has confirmed remembering this). Ask-the-Audience ("ATA") is notoriously unreliable in the third tier, yes, but I had a rather unusual audience...tons of former contestants and future contestants in the stands. That the unusually distinguished audience had the same inclination that I had gave me a lot of extra confidence. As I saw it at the time, I had about a 75% shot at getting it right. To me, that was good enough to go for it. Do I regret it? I sure as hell regret getting it wrong. But I don't regret the way I played the game. It wasn't a guess, it wasn't arrogance, it was a calculated risk, and it didn't pan out. In real life, most people have to risk bankruptcy to take their shot at a million dollars, and all I had to do was make a calculated wager with found money. If I was put in the same position again, I can't say I would play it differently.

I do admit to one strategic error: I should have used ATA on the Gremlins question instead of Double Dip ("DD"). I was iffy about using ATA (precisely because I was in the third tier, but it was pop culture, and I clearly had a strong feeling about what was right, so ATA would have been appropriate). Had I used ATA there instead of DD, I may have had DD available to me on the MDQ, and Fresca definitely would have been my second guess. Then again, I might have used DD for insurance on the $500k question and still wouldn't have it on the MDQ. I recognize my strategic error but I can't be 100% sure that it changed the outcome of the game. Being willing to take risks is what got me to the MDQ at all, so I can't say it was lunacy just because it didn't work for me every single time.

I've seen some speculation about my Phone-a-Friend ("PAF") choices. I play trivia with Jerome and Alan regularly; Dan is married to a law school friend of mine. Let's be clear, not all Jeopardy champions are created equal; Jerome is a film editor and writer, Alan is a playwright, and Dan is a political aide (who happens to be 20 years younger than the other two). They have very different areas of expertise. And talking to them afterward vindicated my decision to go with Jerome on the "Grace Kelly" question...it was tangentially film-related, he was old enough to remember it, and it wasn't readily Googleable. I have nothing but great things to say about all 3 of my PAFs, and I so appreciate their clearing out their days to help me.

Re: the "now give me the million dollars" comment. I honestly didn't realize I said it, even after watching the show tonight, until someone noted it on the board here. I actually had to go back to my DVR to rewatch to see if it was true, and was very surprised to learn that it was. Whoever characterized it as saying "Big Money" on Wheel of Fortune/Press Your Luck/etc. was dead on...it's just one of those things you say when you need to pump yourself up, I guess. I had no sense then or now that I was entitled to the million dollars (though boy would I have liked to get it).

To all those who complain that I had an easy stack: WWTBAM Executive Producer Michael Davies did advise us that some of the last stacks had been lightened for the last episodes of the show. As he described it, the questions were essentially shifted one over: something that would be $8k was $16k, something that would be $50k was $100k, etc. Didn't stop them from laying quite a trap on the MDQ with the Yoo Hoo option. I recognize that my road to the MDQ was easier than some, but in Millionaire, as in all other trivia contexts, the questions are always easy when you know the answer. There are plenty of people who wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as I did on the same stack. There are some who would have gone all the way. I most certainly did not have the easiest MDQ ever, nor, perhaps, did I have the hardest (I think the plane codes question was crazy obscure, and the audience got that right). I don't apologize for the questions I was dealt, and I still had to get into the hot seat to have a shot at all. If anyone's claiming that "the last 11 or 12 questions" in my stack were equivalent to $4k questions in the syndicated version of Millionaire, I can only laugh at the sour grapes. Have fun when you get onto the show, kids.

I do want to note that, by and large, the people I dealt with were great. The other contestants for my episode were fun, lively individuals, and I hope they kicked maximum ass on their Millionaire runs. We wanted someone from our group to make it rain (confetti), and I hope one of them did. Michael Davies called me to the control room after the episode and thanked me for the show and gave me a great postmortem pep-talk (for the record, there was no conspiracy about getting a million dollar run in the finale...sometimes the powers that be just get that lucky). One former million-dollar winner in the audience and her daughter were immensely positive both immediately after the show and when I ran into them the next day. Another former million-dollar winner (and several others) sent very nice personal messages. The only exception is the wife of one of the other contestants, who I heard (secondhand) claimed that she knew the answer to the MDQ and intentionally voted incorrectly to sabotage me. That, I think, is the most pointlessly spiteful thing I've ever heard of (certainly the most pointlessly spiteful thing I've ever been personally exposed to).

Oh, and if anyone's curious; Pam knew the right answer on the MDQ and voted for it. But that's why she's the real trivia whiz in our relationship.

Minor celebrities I love

2009-08-22T00:04:00.000-07:00

While having a cup of coffee earlier this week at the Coffee Bean by Creative Artists Agency (down the street from my office), I found myself sitting at the table next to Alan Cumming. I really wish I'd asked him if his coffee tasted earthy...really earthy...

"I always feel like...somebody's watching meeeeeeeeee...."

2009-08-21T14:32:00.001-07:00

Hello, my new friends! You seem to have found my "strange, trying-to-be-funny blog!" I'm not surprised...putting my real name and picture up isn't very stealthy, I admit (perhaps you're now wondering how my double-fisting of cocktails will affect the show?).

I briefly considered taking my blog down for the next three days/week/ever, but if it was good enough for public consumption when nobody knew or cared who I was, it's good enough for public consumption now that a small but vocal subculture of trivia nerds (I'm not judging, I count myself among you) knows and cares who I am.

So go forth! Dissect, analyze, judge. But most of all, enjoy the show on Sunday. It'll be a ride.

Next target: Neptune. I'm watching you, Neptune.

2009-07-14T12:23:00.000-07:00

Many people have now remarked that, for several weeks now (4 or 5 weeks, if memory serves), my gchat status has stated that Ken Basin "is still consumptive." They assume that this is either an oversight (i.e., that there's no way I'm still consumptive), or that I must be on the verge of death.

Well, folks, more than six weeks after I began, I'm still coughing. But the strange thing is that I'm only consumptive at night (and perhaps just a little in the morning). In the middle of the day, I am consistently fine...healthy...strapping, really. For a while, I theorized that I must be allergic to something in my house: my dog, some solvent my cleaning lady uses, something. But recently I've noticed that I still start coughing at night, even when I'm out of the house. A few people keep begging me to go to the doctor's already, but I think that's unnecessary, as the cause of my ailment is now abundantly clear:

Evidently, I am allergic to the moon, and now it must be destroyed.

Legal advice

2009-05-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

This is, I suppose, a post about being a lawyer, and about being a Basin. I received the following email from my mother today. All spelling, punctuation, and capitalization is original and unedited:

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Dear Kenny,

It came to my attention that Mr. Fitzgerald AKA John Fitzpatrick spreading rumors in open forum on website known as Face book calling me" Babushka", [Ed. Note: John Fitzpatrick is my cousin's husband. When my mother is angry or annoyed at him, she calls him John Fitzgerald. It's never been clear why this is so, it's just the way of the world, and we've all come to accept it.]
I am not a law expert, but I think I have case against him for deformation of the character and spreading rumors.
Do I look and act like Babushka? I do not think so and majority of the people will agree with me.
So please, I will need your advice and support and let me know if we have a case against him.
If we will win money, then I can cut you a 30%.

Love, you beautiful and young looking Ada .

This legal brief brought to you by the fine folks at the Coca-Cola Company of America

2009-02-12T17:04:00.001-08:00

Going into the kitchen on my floor at work at 6 pm and looking at the bin for aluminum recyclables is mildly terrifying. You non-lawyers have no idea how much caffeine goes into making your legal system function (and the can bin doesn't even account for the tea and coffee).

Small consolation

2009-02-09T16:02:00.001-08:00

Last week was pretty hectic work-wise, and I churned out 3 fairly substantial research projects in the course of the week, all of which were passed on to the client as I finished them. Spending a week working late doing nothing but research memos is undoubtedly a drag. But there is something oddly gratifying about seeing one's work in PDF format. It has such a sense of finality and officiality to it.

Christian Bale will destroy you

2009-02-03T14:03:00.000-08:00

On the radio today, I learned that Christian Bale apparently does not have patience for directors of photography who distract him by walking in the background while he is filming a scene. Hence, this tirade from the set of Terminator: Salvation. Amusingly, Bale -- who normally stays in character during a shoot -- is so angry that his American John Connor accent is blending with his natural Welsh accent into a geographically indistinct mishmash of absolute rage. Lesson: if you cross Christian Bale he will destroy you (and, subsequently, his own reputation, on the Internet...and this is not the first time that's happened).

Effective advertising

2009-02-03T12:15:00.000-08:00

Apparently PETA's proposed Super Bowl ad was too hot for NBC (which also rejected an ad from the comically absurd Ashley Madison married personals website). So I had to see for myself:

I'm not convinced enough to become a vegetarian. But I do hate PETA slightly less than I did before.

Save me

2009-02-03T11:58:00.000-08:00

My office officially sounds like the sick ward of a prisoner of war camp. The sounds of wet, hacking coughs and gut-busting sneezes and tissue-rending nose blows seem to emerge from the ethers on all sides. There are moans that make me think someone has had a leg amputated. And closing my door is an exercise in futility, because all the air from the vents is recirculated anyhow.

If I don't make it, tell my family I... *hack*

Shout out

2009-01-30T00:34:00.001-08:00

My friends and acquaintances are frickin' hilarious.

The law geek in me is enthused

2009-01-30T00:20:00.001-08:00

And the consequences of said real lawyerdom

2009-01-29T00:50:00.000-08:00

Today was a long day at work (by my standards...I know I don't work New York hours, and that is no freaking accident, suckers), which got me thinking. I really don't mind working long hours...as long as the work is interesting enough, I feel like I'm accomplishing and learning something, so it's fine. What kills me is going home, having something to eat, looking at the clock, and thinking, "Yup, time for bed in an hour or two." Ugh. I could survive billing the extra few hours a day if someone would just make the damn day 27 hours long...and give me the energy to get through it.

Of course, I'm too committed to having some useless dallying time to myself. Which explains while I'm still awake at 12:55 am. Blogging.

Yeah, time for bed.

Oh, by the way

2009-01-24T01:29:00.000-08:00

I'm a real life lawyer now. I know, believe me, I find it weirder than you do.

Done done done done done done

2008-07-31T18:06:00.000-07:00

And for historic Post #333 on my blog...

DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE.

Done.

There, now the word doesn't even have any meaning anymore.

But I'm done with the California Bar. And, I strongly suspect, forever.

More complete account of the 3-day ordeal forthcoming. More pressing, however, is the need for alcohol consumption. Laters.

How evil should I be?

2008-07-28T10:55:00.000-07:00

In discussing the Bar exam with Kevin, a fellow USC (and Edison High School) alum, we got on the topic of stressed-out test-takers, and the many ways to screw with them.

We recalled, with some derision, the people in college who would be huddled in the hallway immediately before an exam, studying until the last possible second, and Kevin recounted playing mind games with them to make them even more nervous. He would bring up a topic that was only spoken about once for the entire year, but that he knew just enough about to make them uncomfortable. Or he would choose a topic that had been covered briefly in the class, but was so complicated that it was implicitly understood by all that it wouldn't be tested on, and then quiz the other students about it before the test (under the guise of being helpful in team-studying).

This, of course, inspired in me all kinds of fiendish thoughts. I could walk out the door after the morning essay session, which, perhaps, involved an establishment clause-based Con Law question, and ask a friend -- loudly, conspicuously -- "So, did you catch that [nonexistent] Equal Protection issue on the Con Law essay?" And I have no doubt that everyone in earshot, no matter how confident they may have been in their performances, would immediately freak and start going over the fact pattern in their minds, hunting desperately for the phantom Equal Protection issue they apparently botched.

There are about a million possible variations on this plan.

But is it too cruel? Certainly I wouldn't do it to friends or people I knew, they'd be in on the joke. But would this make me a bad person, or just a minor-but-amusing ass? You have about 12 hours to offer your advice if you want me to see it by Day 1.

Only time will tell

2008-07-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

While I'm glad to have stayed safely ensconced in my panic-free boredom cocoon, the side-effect has been a growing inability to work. I went to a bonfire (with drinks) Friday night, a quinceanera-themed house party (with drinks) on Saturday night, and out to dinner last night (after spending about 2 to 3 hours working during the day). I haven't started working yet today, and while I plan to, I also plan to call it a day by 5 pm and relax the rest of the way.

I earned a lot of street cred from the '07 law school grads at the party on Saturday for showing up and staying late, but the fact, as I've told a few people already, is that my little life plan is either genius or lunacy, and I won't have any way of knowing for sure until November 21, 2008 -- the day the exam results come out.

Next phase

2008-07-21T23:22:00.000-07:00

So already I've been through slight nervousness, calmness, well-founded fear, cautious optimism, abject panic, despondency, and general madness (ongoing). But for the last couple days, I've been stable in one emotion vis a vie Bar study: boredom.

I'm just bored of the law.

Luckily, however, my boredom, for a few days now, hasn't been accompanied by any real stress or nervousness about the exam itself, just a feeling of being anxious to put down these Bar books and completely disengage from the law for a while. And lookee here, that's just what I get to do as soon as the Bar ends and I vanish to Europe for a month! And then lounge around the U.S. for another month still!

Basically, if I can just stick with this boredom thing until I get to the Bar itself, I will be golden. Come ooooooon, consistency.

The Bar Art Series, Part 15: "Happy Rainbow Day"

2008-07-20T00:04:00.000-07:00

"Happy Rainbow Day"
Jon Cheng
July 16, 2008

Top-to-bottom brilliance, I think this should be the official picture for the actual day of the Bar exam. As always, a high-quality homage. There are just too many ingenious details. The little upside-down cloud dude on the far right. The depressed look on the face of the cloud man curled up into a ball in the front row. The sheer range of emotion that is conveyed on the various faces in the crowd. The "Rainbows" pennant. This is our world. I've come to accept that now.

I am, however, sad to report that, for the time being, our library of Bar Art has been exhausted. If and when anything else worthy of publication is created, it will be given its moment in the spotlight duly. But if this is truly where our art show ends, I hope it has been as entertaining for you as it has been cathartic for us.

More fodder for the pop culture lexicon

2008-07-19T23:51:00.001-07:00

If you see me in the near-future, and say something random and hilarious that you don't recognize, I probably stole it from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. What can I say? I'm a fan of the people involved.

The Bar Art Series, Part 14: "Wills and Trusts Law Is Trying to Kill Me"

2008-07-19T00:06:00.000-07:00

"Wills and Trusts Law Is Trying to Kill Me"
Ken Basin
July 9, 2008

It's fun to watch the art progress. This is a new approach, a sort of split-screen patchwork of notebook doodles created in response to our absolutely maddening 2 days of wills and trust lectures (I still haven't decided if I'm going to try to learn to this area of law, or just write it off as something that hopefully won't appear on the exam, and if it does, try to make up the points elsewhere). But it's also a stylistic successor to Tina's take on California Civil Procedure, by introducing the use of color to convey dramatic effect. Unfortunately, the scanner didn't do justice to the yellow highlighter hue, but luckily, the conversion of the highlighter into grayscale creates an interesting effect on the Wills and Trusts Monster in Panel 1, the exclamation point in Panel 2, and the impact squiggly in Panel 3.

Also, this artistic process has been invaluable in making both Tina and me far more effective in the use of stick figures to convey comedy and emotion. Facial features are way overrated (though I kept them in Panel 1 because I found it extra tragic to have the monster cover one eye)...it's all about the careful positioning of arms, sensitivity to posture, and the strategic incorporation of fingers.

The Bar Art Series, Bonus Entry 3!

2008-07-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

"My Life, In Drawing"
Kimanh Nguyen
July 18, 2008

It turns out consultants hate their lives too. This bonus entry, while not truly related to or even spawned from Bar study, reflects a similar mentality. It comes from a college friend of mine who works at a major consulting firm, and apparently finds herself at constant war with the very tools she relies upon to make her living. Kinda like us lawyers/Bar studiers and our brains. It is helpful to know, though, that there is at least one other class of human beings who understand our despondency, and who share our same sense of conflictedness over totally selling out. I don't count I-Bankers, they are just too gleeful about selling out.

To all my married readers

2008-07-18T00:35:00.000-07:00

THIS IS YOUR* LIFE NOW:

Excerpted from the Achewood comic for July 17, 2008.

* Although sadly, I think it could also sort of describe mine at the moment.

The Bar Art Series, Part 13: "I Taste Like Science!"

2008-07-18T00:07:00.000-07:00

"I Taste Like Science!"
Jon Cheng
July 2, 2008

Strictly speaking, this has very little to do with Bar. But as it is still symptomatic of the madness borne out of the Bar (and was created during a BarBri lecture), I thought it appropriate to include. As with his last venture into the field of Hertzfeldtian art, it is a stunningly faithful adaptation of the source material. Even the captioning sounds like something out of a "Rejected" deleted scene. We had some discussion about what the marks were all over the professor of scientist's body. Did he saw himself? Eventually, we concluded that those were actually just splatters from his sawing work on his companion's head. Now, I understand that there's an argument that this particular piece crosses the line to "mentally disturbed." And I don't know that I could argue strongly to the contrary. But if you were here, you'd probably understand.

Everything about this article is awesome

2008-07-17T23:50:00.001-07:00

The mesh grill. The sheer cartoonishness of it. The use of scissors as the "jaws of life." The fact that a marsupial can apparently contract chlamydia. It's all amazing: "'Lucky' the Koala lives after horror car hit."

As brought to my attention by Tina, who needed me to look it up for her because her Internet had no funtionality except chatting with me on gChat (proof, I submit to you, that to some very limited extent, the universe really does revolve around me).

Clearly I am in one of those post-y moods with the Internet.

Affirmation for Bar takers

2008-07-17T23:28:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Pam, for showing me a website that dares ask the question, am I awesome?

Of course, there's at least one website that already knows, even without asking.

Stop sabotaging me, Google

2008-07-17T01:18:00.001-07:00

I am largely over the minor crisis situation from last night. But Gmail needs to stop giving me context-dependent ads about alternative services for people who fail the bar and are retaking it.

Not cool, Google. I thought we were friends.

The Bar Art Series, Part 12: "WWNPHD?"

2008-07-17T00:03:00.000-07:00

"WWNPHD?"
Ken Basin
June 30, 2008

This was obviously an up day. My mind was wandering as dramatically as ever, and for some reason I decided I wanted to draw a unicorn. Don't know why. Yes I'm straight. And when that was done, I felt like I should probably add a rider. After that, I figured anyone cool enough to ride a unicorn would probably be carrying a sword. And once that was added, I decided to make it pertinent by branding the unicorn with BarBri's name, and using the whole image to evoke my trail to victory. It wasn't until the whole thing was drawn that it was clear to me where the inspiration must have come from all along: Neil Patrick Harris wouldn't fear the Bar, and neither should I. The rainbow was Tina's innovation to complete the effect.

To be fair, this wasn't an entirely original artistic notion:

Worst decision ever

2008-07-16T01:53:00.000-07:00

As I was finishing up my studying for the night tonight, I did a quick Google search to check on one little nuance of law. Basically, I was too lazy to go get my Conviser outline out of the other room, and I knew from experience that there were enough BarBri outlines available through Google that it wasn't worth the effort.

But by some freak coincidence of search terms, I happened upon a website of a guy who's failed that Cal Bar twice and is getting ready to take it a third time...which, in turn, connected me to about a dozen other blogs of Bar repeaters. Some end with little triumphant posts where the blogger celebrates passing after umpteen tries, talks about how they'll never take it for granted, and shares what tips and tricks finally worked for them. Others are still in the thick of it, talking about what they're doing for the July 2008 Bar that's different from what they did in February 2008...and July 2007...and February 2007. Several provide exhaustive reviews of every Bar review source imaginable, stuff I've never even heard of because I'm just doing BarBri and that's it. There are lots of friendly comments, with people offering condolences or cheering one another on. It's apparently a very vibrant and supportive community.

But, you can imagine, this is a community I want nothing to do with.

Throughout this whole process, I've had a very specific view of this period and my feelings of stress about it. Everyone has given me the usual, "Don't worry, you'll pass." And I have replied, very honestly, "I know I'll pass, I just hate all the stuff I have to do to get there." My psychological malady hasn't been anxiety, it's just been straight depression from the fact that this process is so mind-numbingly boring, and that I am so incorrigibly incapable of focus.

But tonight, for the first time, I have that knotted "what if?" feeling in my gut. It doesn't help that, just this week, I heard about an HLS '07 grad who just failed the Bar for the 2nd time (and lost her job as a result). And I know that the feeling will go away, and yes, I know that I will pass. I keep remindig myself that I took the SATs without a formal prep course (I used a $50 computer program and just did practice test after practice test). That I took the LSATs without a formal prep course (same). That after a while, even HLS came easily enough. That it's okay if I'm not studying as hard as other people, because frankly, I never did. That (no arrogance or disrespect meant) demographically, my educational and work experience do not bear much resemblance to the norm of the "vibrant" repeater community. All of this I intellectually understand, and on some level, truly believe.

But for now, for tonight, as I finish up here and head to bed, this sucks.

The Bar Art Series, Part 11: "My Soul Is Dead!"

2008-07-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

"My Soul Is Dead!"
Jon Cheng
July 2, 2008

In time, it was sort of inevitable that Tina and I would drag others into our madness. And thinking about it now, the beginning of July was an eminently appropriate time for it to happen, what with my own long-forgotten promises to myself to hold off until then to indulge the sad drawing instinct. Jon is a friend of Tina's from one of her firms last summer, and we were glad to have him in the fold. Like I had just days earlier, Jon looked to Don Hertzfeldt's little cloud men for inspiration. But my sincerest compliments to Jon, who did a far better job truly capturing them than I did -- an especially impressive feat when you consider that Tina and I had introduced him to Don Hertzfeldt for the first time just days earlier.

Help me make sense of this

2008-07-15T14:44:00.000-07:00

Does anyone fully, truly comprehend the vagaries of rail travel in Europe, particularly vis a vis the Eurail pass? If you do, please teach me. This nonsense got way more complicated since the last time I used one in 2004.

Also if you help me I will give you a cookie okay thanks.

Introduce this into your vocabulary

2008-07-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

Because the process of Bar study has confirmed for Tina and me once and for all that never again will we be able to truly meaningfully interact with non-lawyers again, we have deemed it necessary to adopt a specific term to refer to "non-law people."

That term will be muggles, which would have been appropriate enough even without the reference to this year's HLS Parody.

We expect this to go into widespread use immediately.

The Bar Art Series, Part 10: "At Least It Isn't My Anus"

2008-07-15T00:06:00.000-07:00

"At Least It Isn't My Anus"
Ken Basin
June 25, 2008

If you recognize that little cloud dude, then you know this drawing is far more innocuous than its rather disturbing title would suggest. It's an homage to Don Hertzfeldt's legendary "Rejected" cartoon, the first of a few our group ultimately produced (look for a special guest artist soon). Hertzfeldt's little cloud man ultimately drowned in a flood of blood gushing from his own anus, while his dancing compatriots cheered on. I just wanted to express my annoyance with my own sickly body, which had taken to rather sustained nosebleeds during a few allergy-intensive days that accompanied a heat wave. The day before this was drawn, I had to scrub down our shower to make sure it didn't look like someone had just recreated the shower scene from Psycho there.

I retroactively authorize this act of copyright infringement

2008-07-14T00:13:00.000-07:00

In a Bar procrastination-induced frenzy of Google searching, I decided to re-search my own name, which I had not done for some time. I admit this freely because I know that each and every one of you does it, and so I find no shame in it.

Really, my motivation here was making sure that my reputation on the Interwebs was still relatively intact, something I can't say for some of my Harvard Law cohorts, particularly those associated with the Harvard Law Review. Reason #327,893 I'm glad I never even applied.

Anyhow, I'm fine. Most references to my name that aren't related to the geographical Ken Basin in Africa are based on (1) this blog; (2) my Daily Trojan archives; (3) my Jeopardy appearances; (4) the video Trevor and I wrote for Charles Nesson; and (5) miscellaneous hits from Facebook, Twitter, and comments on other people's blogs.

Every once in a while, I've found bits of my writing misappropriated elsewhere. U-Wire, a national wire of college newspaper stories, picked up several of my DT pieces, but they were specifically authorized to do so. Radiohead and Save Ferris fan sites reposted DT articles I wrote that made reference to each. But I've found my favorite bit of online copyright infringement yet: a blog dedicated to promoting Macau and its hotel and casino development apparently picked up my Blog post about Macau, in which I excoriate the place as a useless lo-fi Vegas wannabe. Personally, I find this hilarious, and therefore grant a post facto license for their republication of the post (they were nice enough to credit me too).

So if anyone else I've ever criticized wants to republish my criticism of them, feel free. That's something I can get behind.

The Bar Art Series, Part 9: "No Pressure"

2008-07-14T00:02:00.000-07:00

"No Pressure"
Ken Basin
June 24, 2008

When you're studying for the Bar, some days are better and some days are worse. Sometimes the day starts out better, and ends up worse. This picture started out as a simple cartoony drawing of a bunny rabbit. I was thinking about playing it conservative and giving him a carrot to eat. Then I thought about being a bit more subversive and having him smoke a cigarette. But as the day's lecture droned on, and my energy and willingness to stay upbeat waned, the bunny slowly, inevitably found his way to the chopping block. But I don't think of this as a wholly negative drawing. It's an incentive. I'll save you, bunny! I vow it!

The Bar Art Series, Part 8: "Effective Notetaking"

2008-07-13T00:12:00.000-07:00

"Effective Notetaking"
Ken Basin
June 19, 2008

Another adaptation from notetaking scrawl, this piece is notable for its faithful recreation of the actual text of the printed page of notes from which it was drawn. Mortgages, which my property class had never covered in law school, was a particularly painful part of my first real property problem set. By the time we reached them in lecture, I was bracing for the worst, as the hero of the drawing would suggest. But actually, this turned out to be a surprisingly painless area of Bar study. Still, I wanted to include this in the art series, if only for the painstaking effort that went into positioning each character of text under the crying man in the right place. In case you're wondering, no, mortages are not the "King of Lending O." That first word is the visible portion of "thinking." As in, the bank is thinking of lending someone money, but they want a security. Hence, the mortgage.

The Bar Art Series, Part 7: "California Civil Procedure"

2008-07-12T00:04:00.000-07:00

"California Civil Procedure"
Tina Rad
July 1, 2008

With "California Civil Procedure," Tina ushered us into a bold new phase in our Bar-related artistic endeavors by introducing the use of color. I think we had both flirted with this for some time; highlighters are a staple of our work, both in class and out. But it took the harrowing experience of learning about the absolutely nonsensical idiosyncrasies of California Civil Procedure -- which, of course, we will be expected to meaningfully compare and contrast with its (admittedly less insane) Federal counterpart -- to finally bring color into the equation. Sure, she could have drawn the vomit in pencil. But I think the sickly green hue of the retch really drives home the despair, don't you?

This drawing also took on special significance a week later when, after a particularly dreadful run through Wills and Trusts, our lecturer advised us to take advantage of the power of visualizing our own success. It was very comprehensive -- imagining ourselves having dinner the night before the Bar, watching a little TV after we eat, sitting on the couch and feeling kinda nervous, driving to the exam the morning of, etc. But because my subconscious had already been infected by this (and a similar drawing I made later, which involved a more tragic cradling of the head and a more colorful pool of vomit), I visualized myself eating dinner the night before the Bar...and vomiting uncontrollably. Watching a little TV on the couch after I ate, feeling nervous...and vomiting uncontrollably. Driving to the Bar exam on the morning of...while vomiting uncontrollably. I broke down in convulsive laughter in the middle of class, and for several minutes after. Thanks, Bar study, for making me look extra crazy in a room full of strangers (you know, in addition to an Internet full of strangers and loved ones).

The Bar Art Series, Bonus Entry 2!

2008-07-11T19:18:00.000-07:00

The movement is spreading.

The brilliant SMC has gotten on-board with the Bar Art movement, and has introduced her own depiction of "Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress."

Now, in the interest of pickiness (and procrastination), I must take slight issue with SMC's definition of Bar Art. As she defines it, Bar Art is "the result of an odd compulsion to draw out legal theories, usually in stick-man form, in order to vent your feelings of insanity during the Bar studying period."

While I agree that Bar Art often takes the form of the depiction of legal theories, I think it's a sideways definition. I'd say Bar Art is "the use of drawing to vent one's feelings of insanity during the Bar study period, which often takes the form of visual depiction of legal theories." As our own gallery shows (and will continue to show), as often as not, Bar Art (at least as we've pursued it) is merely a depiction of stick figures who are expressing the exasperation and madness they feel in response to the Bar.

But hey, let it be organic. You're all free to do with this what you will, folks.

I have good moral character!

2008-07-11T14:52:00.000-07:00

Or at least that's what the California Bar Association tells me.

Apparently, they never consulted with Google.

The Bar Art Series, Part 6: "This Is Not a Trust"

2008-07-11T00:06:00.000-07:00

"This Is Not a Trust"
Tina Rad and Ken Basin
July 9, 2008

While Tina and I have added elements to each other's works before, this is the first one we'd call a true collaboration. And even though there's still a bunch more to come, we were so proud of this, it had to be sent to the front of the line. I trust you all to get the reference on your own, but if you need a hint, think "turn-of-the-century Belgian surrealist." Take that, Rachel, for saying your friend's art is nerdier.

Perspective

2008-07-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

From an article about Tiger Woods being on pace to become the world's first billionaire athlete by 2010:

But a billion is such an abstract number. Let's break that down. Tiger is on pace to make about $100 million this year between endorsements and winnings, even considering the fact that he won't play in another tourney. $100 million a year equals $273,972 a day. $11,415.53 an hour. $190 a minute. He earns three dollars and seventeen cents per second. That means, hypothetically speaking, if Tiger was walking up the fairway in a tournament and saw a $10 bill lying there, he'd make more money by walking right past it.

Hot damn. The next time one of you lawyers get all big in your britches, think about that.

And I'm too sexy for this website

2008-07-10T01:48:00.000-07:00

The entire Picasa page for the 2008 HLS Parody -- which featured us in all of our scandalous pre-party, afterparty, and often during-party glory -- has been unilaterally removed by Google, because it violates their terms of service. Every last album. Every last picture.

That should be the HLS Drama Society's new motto. The HLS Drama Society: Too Hot for Google Since 2008!

The Bar Art Series, Part 5: "End of a Life Estate"

2008-07-10T00:05:00.000-07:00

"End of a Life Estate"
Ken Basin
June 17, 2008

"End of a Life Estate" is an early notetaking doodle that was adapted to index card form after our art movement began. For the non-lawyers out there, a life estate is a type of property interest that lasts as long as you're alive, and then reverts to the grantor or some third party upon your death. You can sell it, but the other person only gets to keep the property for as long as you're alive, not as long as they're alive. So basically, it's a totally useless kind of estate that only exists in Bar questions, because seriously, who is crazy enough to want one of these? And they tend to lead to Rule Against Perpetuities problems, which you might recall from Part 1 of our series. But useless as they are, they inspired me to commemorate them in stick figure form.

The Bar Art Series, Part 4: "Flock"

2008-07-09T00:02:00.000-07:00

"Flock"
Tina Rad
June 24, 2008

Another homage to Jan Honigsberg's lesson that we should be sheep, not goats, Tina's later adaptation of that advice lends itself to several possible interpretations. Consider the duality between the joyous sheep jumping over the Bar, and the dead sheep on the other side. Are the sheep passing the Bar, only to discover the painful death of law firm billable hours on the other side? Did the dead sheep actually fail to pass the Bar altogether, whereas our current jumper will actually succeed? How the hell is that one dead sheep so perfectly balanced in his vertical orientation? Tina has deliberately decided to leave it to you to answer these questions for yourself. That's the magic of art, I guess: whatever you think, you're probably right.

The Bar Art Series, Part 3: "Richard Conviser Doesn't Teach the Law, Richard Conviser IS the Law!"

2008-07-08T00:55:00.000-07:00

"Richard Conviser Doesn't Teach the Law, Richard Conviser IS the Law!"
Ken Basin
June 20, 2008

Richard Conviser is the man, the myth, the legend. Richard Conviser is the multimillionaire founder of BarBri, a former law professor who discovered just how much recent law grads (and their law firms) were willing to pay for a little help passing the Bar -- and just how much more lucrative the business could be if you just engaged in a little anticompetitive activity to destroy your competition. Did Richard Conviser know he was committing those antitrust violations? Probably. But did he care? Hell no. Richard Conviser is Moses, Chuck Norris, and your daddy all rolled into one. This particular drawing commemorates his lecture on California Remedies, our first and only opportunity to see the man himself in action.

The Bar Art Series, Bonus Entry!

2008-07-07T15:42:00.001-07:00

"The Adventures of Wild Deed and Mutilated Will"
Tammy Chow
Summer 2005

As submitted by the fabulous Rachel, a friend from my firm: "Decidedly less grim but more nerdy than yours....my friend Tammy made this during our summer of the bar. And the red cup ('Barbri parfait') is the breakfast of yogurt, berries and granola that all my friends and I brought in red cups every day of BarBri. Whatever works, I guess."

The Bar Art Series, Part 2: "Sheep Passing the Bar"

2008-07-07T12:49:00.000-07:00

"Sheep Passing the Bar"
Ken Basin
June 23, 2008

As things were getting particularly rough, we all received a breath of fresh air in the form of Jan Honigsberg, BarBri's California Performance Test lecturer, and unofficial arbiter of common sense and cool. Honigsberg lecture was as much Storytime with Uncle Jan as it was a substantive lecturer, and one theme persisted: wacky stuff happens, but people still pass the Bar. Over 6 hours with Jan, we came to know all of his expressions. "Good idea?" he would ask suggestively of seemingly silly courses of action, the answer always being no. "Nobody!" he would shout, to remind us that if we didn't remotely recognize or understand something on the exam, it probably meant that nobody did. And of course, "You don't want to be a goat! You want to be a sheep!" to teach us that the key to success on the Bar was embracing enough simplicity and conformity to keep your grader in a stupor long enough for them to mark your essay as passing.

The Bar Art Series, Part 1: "Voiding Perpetuities"

2008-07-06T23:58:00.000-07:00

"Voiding Perpetuities"
Tina Rad
June 19, 2008

In a very real way, "Voiding Perpetuities" is the drawing that started it all. It was born in a moment of inspiration after watching SNL's brilliant "Dear Sister" digital short. Tina and I noted that Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek" was quite possibly the most depressing and emotionally destructive song ever. As I lay on Tina's bed in the fetal position after a particularly brutal set of real property questions, I suggested (jokingly, people, jokingly) that a few more problem sets like that and I would find myself in a bathtub, putting a dull Bic razor to my wrists and sobbing through the lyrics as I slipped into sweet release. Tina later gave the scene visual expression, I helped captioned in some of the lyrics, and the Bar Art Series was on.

And for you non-lawyers out there, the title is a reference to the dreaded Rule Against Perpetuities in property law. You don't want me to explain it to you. But to give you a sense, there is a California malpractice decision on the books that says that a lawyer did not commit malpractice by drafting a will that violated the Rule Against Perpetuities, thereby causing someone to lose their inheritance, because the RAP is so complex and difficult, a lawyer of reasonable skill and care in the jurisdiction would have made the same mistake. Yes, the rule is tested on the Bar.

The Bar Art Series, Part 0: Introduction

2008-07-06T23:51:00.000-07:00

I made reference in this space to my former roommate's Bar coping mechanisms, which involved haunting and depressed drawings on index cards that depicted the torment of Bar study through the agony of stick figures. At the time, I promised myself I'd make it through June before following suit.

That failed.

So with that in mind, I introduce to you what will be, for the time being (while supplies last), a daily series of artistic interpretations of the Bar study process by myself, and my June roommate/Bar study-partner/general platonic lifemate Tina Rad. Where appropriate, brief explanations will be offered for the non-Bar-study-literate.

Living at home, or, I am a big jerk

2008-07-06T23:35:00.001-07:00

I can't decide anymore how much of my overwhelming panic and discomfort with living at home is related to real concerns, and how much of it is me having categorically, non-negotiably relegated life in the parents' house to the "abjectly terrifying" column. But either way, as soon as I looked out of the window of my plane as it approached John Wayne Airport today, gazing down upon the rows and rows of generic track housing, I raced right back into "oh my god why Orange County" mode. By the time I reached baggage claim, I was seriously contemplating a decidedly socially inappropriate response to a crying 4-year-old in the area.

It was about 2 hours after landing that my mother and I started exchanging thinly-veiled swipes about how very much we enjoyed each other's company when we weren't forced to cohabitate (and at that point, we were still at lunch and hadn't even entered the house yet). It was about 30 more minutes until the first aggravating political conversation. 4 more hours from there for me to flee the house so that I could try to do some Bar work at Starbucks (and so prevent myself from bringing the simmering hostilities to an outright boil by making some bratty or impertinent remark toward my parents).

The funny thing is, I don't really blame them at all at this point. It's certainly true that all of us have spent enough time living apart that we're no longer any good at living together (my mother's various neuroses have graduated into full-blown OCD, and I've developed a rather unhealthy disdain for parental authority). But I was getting all tense and knotted inside long before they did anything to offend me, simply in anticipation of the slights that would inevitably come. Even in the moment I could recognize my feelings as totally immature and counterproductive, but in so recognizing, I wasn't able to fix them...only to remove myself from the situation fast enough to avoid a real conflagration.

And even Starbucks offered little comfort, as I quickly realized that the studious, intellectual environment of the Harvard Law School Starbucks bore little resemblance to the Huntington Beach location, frequented as it is by stunningly loud slacker teens. Tomorrow I'm experimenting with some of the more independent and esoteric coffee house locations in the area.

In making it through Day 1 without openly fighting with my parents, I've already improved upon my last extended stay. But I'm still ridiculous - literally, worthy of ridicule. Before he went to bed today, my dad asked if I needed him to make sure I was up for class or if he could make me coffee or breakfast or a mid-class snack in the morning, and I felt equal parts gratitude for his generosity and resentment for his involvement. I had no problems accepting my parents' kindnesses, in the form of pre-cooked food and freshly-laundered clothes, while I was inhabiting a physically separate building. But put me under the same roof, and apparently, I'm instantly an ungrateful brat. I smiled and tried to sound as wholly appreciative as I could, because he really has the purest intentions in offering to help (in no way did I or do I think it's some play for influence or control on his part).

But I wish that not being a jerk wasn't apparently such a struggle.

Official update

2008-06-17T19:42:00.000-07:00

This whole Bar study period has proved more distracting than even I anticipated or hoped, so the updates haven't been coming as hard and fast as I'd hoped. Let's divide things by topic or theme.

Cat of Doom

The cat is gone. In fact, the cat has been gone for about a week now. After another day of awkward coexistence - involving, among other interactions, the cat deciding to share a bed with me without regard for my allergies - I successfully convinced my parents to adopt her for as long as Tina and I are living in my sister's place.

At first, we were jubilant. Hooray! We were free of the feline scourge! We spontaneously cheered our good fortune over and over again as we spent our last evening with the cat, eying her disdainfully and intoning, "Soon, little one, soon you will be gone."

But Tina and I are inherently good people, and soon our consciences caught up with us. Our joy was soon tainted with subtle, bubbling undertones of guilt. Who are we, we asked ourselves, to kick this creature out of its home for our own convenience? Perhaps we should try to find a way to peacefully coexist with her? And that cat, as if sensing the softening of our hearts with her keen feline senses, began to ingratiate herself with us. She let us be as we worked. She quietly approached and rubbed her head gently against our legs. She sat patiently, docilely, as we pet her. She purred affectionately as we responded to her siren's call, as if to say to us, "I'll be good! I swear! Just give me another chance!" She even started doing extra cute things, like drinking water from the faucet:

Then she bit Tina again, and as the blood flowed, the reconciliation ended. Good riddance, Demon Cat.

With the cat gone, we considered our displaced, if not defeated, foe. We decided that she was like the Boo Ghost from the old Mario games. When you're looking at her, she's still, safe, placid. But turn your back, and she'll chase you down, fangs out.

General Misfortunes

Our life has, aside from the huge misery of Bar review, also been a cavalcade of minor miseries. We decided to go to the brand new-looking Quiznos down the street from our house, only to discover that it was already shut down (sure is a fancy-looking sign, though). We tried to go to the Ralph's down the street (identified to us by both my mother and by the Internet), only to discover that it had recently been converted into a sketchy Korean specialty supermarket...which was across the street from another sketchy Korean specialty supermarket. As we departed from the (first) Korean supermarket in failure, Tina inserted the key into her rental car and turned...and turned...and turned...except it didn't move. Why didn't it move? No explanation. We removed the key from the ignition, opened the door, exited the car, closed the doors, opened the doors, got back in, reinserted the key, and started the car. There was no evidence that what happened wasn't merely in our minds except that both of us experienced it.

Speaking of Experiences of the Mind...

Bar study is not good for one's mental health. As early as last week, I spent a few minutes curled up in a ball on the floor of our kitchen, laughing till I cried, and insisting to myself that the laughter was the only reason for the tears. I remember watching my roommate last summer go through the Bar study process, and observing quietly as he slowly unraveled. By the end of June, he was drawing vaguely disturbing, highly emo images depiction his suffering and his projected failure of the Bar. It wasn't until this year that I realized the irony of making the drawings on index cards (or as I now think of them, blank flash cards). And the only reason I haven't followed suit yet is because I've specifically barred myself from sad drawings until June is over.

Lola Lolcat

2008-06-14T18:36:00.000-07:00

And the winner of the Lolcat caption competition is Drew McLelland:

Also, unrelatedly, read this, and be sure to look at the photo of the letter up close. My favorite line would be, "How I long to see you again back in Kentucky, waiting to meet me at the unexploded train station that isn't covered in human entrails."

Demon Cat and the Apartment of Doom

2008-06-10T19:20:00.001-07:00

"Demon Cat and the Apartment of Doom."

That's the name of the photo albums that Tina and I have created in documenting our newly wretched existence here. Apparently, we are not the only people with such problems. Did I mention that Tina and I are also both heinously allergic to cats (although our allergies do better when we're filled with furious rage...maybe the adrenaline in action).

Meet Lola, a.k.a. Demon Cat. See how she and I regard each other with mutual fear, disdain, and contempt.

See my way of expressing my fear, disdain, and contempt: locking Demon Cat in the fridge for a brief period of time. Don't worry, she's fine. Unfortunately.

New Blog challenge! Come up for LOLCAT caption for this. Possible starting place: "IM IN UR FRIJ......"

The brother-in-law's computer, which I so believed had to be a busted old shell, that I assumed a shredder was actually the computer instead.

Who the hell uses a trackball mouse in this day and age? I will go to Fry's and spend $4 buying them a new optical mouse. Seriously.

Yes, that's Tina's essay open in WordPad, what with the lack of Microsoft Word on either computer in the house and all. Really, how do they function in contemporary society?

The worst desktop ever. We really hoping that the Desktop Cleanup Wizard would open while we were on the computer. And then crash. If you're curious, the "awebutt011" file I referred to in the previous post is down around the black tip of the dog's tail.

Cat Watch 2008 begins

2008-06-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

(Note: This post adapted from a frustrated email sent at 2:24 a.m. last night/this morning.)

Today was officially the most comically frustrating day ever. I swear to you, this must be what purgatory is like; it isn't affirmatively awful enough that you feel like you really have a right to complain (I'm still living here for free, right?), but I can't imagine more little things going wrong.

First, after Bar class, Tina (who is living in the extra room here for this month) went to In 'n Out, where we discovered that, due to the current salmonella scare, there are no tomatoes. Bollocks. Then we came to the condo, where we found (1) a note from the post office that Tina's package had arrived and would be waiting at the post office, and (2) that I didn't have the right key to the condo. I took the leopard print key from the extra ring at home, because that's the condo key. Actually, I took the wrong leopard print key. There were more than one. That's my sister in action...neither my dad nor I knew what the other one was for, but basically, we had to wait 25 minutes for my dad to make his second trip to the condo today (he dropped by in the morning to leave some of my stuff here for me, which was nice), so we could get in the door. In the meantime, we went to the post office to pick up the package, but learned that the mailman had left the note today because we weren't there to accept delivery, and that the package wouldn't be available till tomorrow morning. Boo.

Then, for some bad karma, on the drive there Tina made a joke that openly disdained poor people, and at the post office itself, I made a joke about homeless people (my friend had previously text messaged me asking, "Is Santa Ana Spanish for 'homeless?'"), in front of two people who I immediately thereafter realized appeared to be homeless. In line at the Post Office! Why would I predict that? Also, Tina made a comment about how Santa Ana is like Mexico rather than America, just as the woman in front of us in line went up to the desk clerk and conducted her whole transaction entirely in Spanish. Nice.

So we finally got in, started acquainting ourselves with the cat, and I showed Tina around the condo. All was well. Until it was revealed that this cat is possessed, a demon in furry flesh, an absolute holy fucking terror. We played with the cat for a while, with great success (Tina said it appeared to be her favorite cat ever to date), and then went about our business, when out of nowhere it just ran up behind Tina, grabbed her leg with its claws and bit her with its evil little demon teeth. It drew blood in 6 distinct places (finding a bandage was also a prolonged and only marginally successful ordeal). Then Tina and I went on Google, searched for "cat allergy and bite," and discovered an encyclopedia of data about abjectly terrifying diseases, infections, and reactions to cat attacks. We stopped when the Google results preview of one of the hits ended "can often lead to septic..." We didn't want to see the end of the sentence.

Then a few hours later, while I was sitting on the couch eating dinner and watching Top Chef, the cat randomly lunged at my wrist and bit me. What the fuck? Admittedly, I was petting its paws, but I'd been petting it before! It liked the petting! Why the biting? My startled jerk scared the cat off the couch, and then, understandably furious, I flung 2 pillows at the cat's face, one after the other. Rather amusingly, the cat looked directly at the oncoming pillows as they rocketed forward, hurtling inexorably toward her face, and made no attempt to dodge either whatsoever. Rather disoriented from the two direct pillow-to-face blows, the cat fled upstairs to plot its vengeance. The whole process led to a number of discussions between Tina and I about tort liability for this. We determined that, because a possessor of property (me) need only inform a licensee (Tina) of known artificial dangers (including domestic pets), and I had no idea that this cat was a fucking sociopath, I could not be held liable. The same could not be said about some people.

Shortly thereafter, I fielded a call from my mother. When I recounted the cat's antics, she basically replied, "Yeah, that happens." My parents aren't much for sympathy, or for effective warnings. I went on a multiple-expletive-laden rant about the cat (when my mom called it fearless, I retorted that, "She isn't so fucking fearless when you hurl two pillows at her face. That puts the fear of motherfucking God in her right goddamn quick."). She suggested we use my sister's laser pointer to tucker the cat out enough to abate the danger, which worked for about a minute, until the only possible instrument of our salvation ran out of batteries. Wail. Tina has officially predicted that she's going to wake up from a nightmare-ridden, fitful sleep tonight (behind her closed bedroom door) to discover the cat is sitting on her face and that the door is still mysteriously, inexplicably closed. She asks that if she doesn't make it out alive, we tell her parents she loves them.

Eventually, it was time to print Tina's practice Bar essay, since she finished well before me. First, we emailed it to ourselves so we could get it from my sister's computer and print it there. She didn't have Word. Then we got a trial version open and printed, but the printer jammed over and over. So we tried Scott's computer, once we figured out what was the computer -- the decrepit looking tower with multiple gaping holes in it (yes), or the shiny black monolith that appeared to have few if any buttons or ports (actually a shredder, which I suspect would have made for a better computer system at this point). It took like 7 minutes to boot up, involved about 8 error messages, demanded a password prompt for which the right response was pressing enter with no password, and featured a desktop that had literally every single possible space covered with some useless shortcut or mp3 or video or something (we tried to play one promising looking AVI called "awebutt011," but he didn't have a working codec for the file that was on the fucking desktop). Then we opened email and opened the essay, and it wasn't until it opened in WordPad that we realized that he, too, did not have Office. It is unclear how these two participate meaningfully in society.

All of this was intermingled with Bar study for today, Bar study for what we missed last week, background cat allergies of unpredictable and wavering intensity for both of us, and episode after episode of absolutely hysterical laughing fits in which we were literally reduced to tears and unable to function at all for extended periods of time. We've decided that this is like the movie 1408 (not that I've seen it), except instead of having an evil, possessed hotel room, it's actually this entire condo. If I climb out the window and into the window of the unit next door, I'll discover that I'm back in the same condo, and the cat will be sitting there in the middle of the living room floor, staring directly at me as its pupils widen (the crazy eyes being surefire sign that it's got the demon jitters again and it's about to do something dangerous and unstable).

So if anyone wants to bring me something to make me feel better, at this particular moment, the answer is, "Cat poison." I'll try to think of something else that won't constitute a criminal offense or lead to a major family incident.

Inspiration!

2008-06-10T18:48:00.000-07:00

I've been looking for something to get me interested in writing again, but I haven't been able to find it. The soul-crushing, ego-destroying force of Bar study? Nope. My ongoing flirtations with and transitions into adult life? Nah. But now, at long last, I've discovered my muse:

The most evil cat in the world.

I'm currently living in my sister's condo -- it's a rent-free option that doesn't involve living with the parents, but lets me be close enough to steal food from them. It's a good situation. The catch is that I'm not only housesitting, I'm catsitting. And this cat, Lola, is the spawn of Satan.

Read on.

Martha's Vineyard photo travelogue

2008-05-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

Martha's Vineyard is host to "Flying Horses," the oldest working merry go-round in America. I've heard the phrase "reach for the brass ring" used to refer to making partner at law firm so many times that I forgot it actually referred to reaching for a real brass ring on a merry go-round. That is, until I actually got the real brass ring! I wonder if this means I can't make partner...

The gingerbread houses of the town of Oak Bluff. Yes, these were built by actual adults. I wonder how that's possible too.

It's hard to tell from this angle, and we never got a better shot, but this old man is wearing a shirt that reads, "I choked Linda Lovelace." Nice, old dude.

Here's the secret to making new friends, in two words: Smart Car. For one brief, glorious day, we rented a bright yellow Smart Car. Every time we got out of the car, someone asked us a question about it. Every time we returned to it we found somebody inspecting it or taking a picture. Smart Cars: bringing people together since 2008 (1998 for Europe)!

Don't recognize this scenic locale? That's Dike's Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, site of a certain incident involving Ted Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne, and (probably) a whole lot of beer. And hey, just because Kennedy was hospitalized for a brain tumor-induced seizure the day before this picture was taken doesn't mean it was in bad taste, right?

Okay, fine, it was totally in bad taste. But we probably realized that at the time, since we waited for a group of very Massachusetts-looking fishermen to clear the area before starting our photo shoot.

When we happened upon a Japanese garden with a nice little bridge, I decided to do something silly and cool...

...till Pam decided to go and one-up me. Damn dancers.

Smart Car + favorite picture pose = double awesome!

That's right, this Smart Car is off-roading. Booya.

Pam scolding the dastardly rock that led us astray. Doesn't this look like it marks some kind of significant trail? Actually, it marks a trail from a parking lot to some guy's backyard. I guess that's cool too...

Seated in front of the majestic clay cliffs of Gay's Head. But I'm too mature to make a joke out of the name of that location. Yes... Entirely too mature... Tee hee...

New York photo travelogue

2008-05-23T20:02:00.000-07:00

Oh my God it's real! And it's only, like, 10 years out of date!

Through a rather random connection that is not worth explaining (but involves this little project of mine), I got us backstage at Colbert. Stephen Colbert high-fived me! Vigorously! And then he shook my hand and told Tina here that he loves her mom too. The show was awesome enough, but the experience is also memorable for being the only time someone has ever told me that I made them as happy as they had ever been in their lives (you're welcome, Tina).

A bag of bunnies in the Theatre District. If I had a bag of bunnies, I know that's what I'd do: sit with them on the sidewalk of 43rd St. and wait for passers-by to fawn.

Apparently, this "OMFG" ad campaign has been going for some time now. But I'm new to the Gossip Girls thing, and I think it's freaking awesome.

FAO Schwartz: where awesome stuffed animal pictures happen.

Who would buy this? Who would give this to their child? It's disturbing! This product must be made for people who secretly hate and resent their children. If I hated my child, I would buy this enormous spider, and set it up right next to their face while they slept, and shut the door just loudly enough as I exited to wake them. Then I'd stand in the hallway and wait for the screams.

What's that you say? This picture of me hitting on Lego Hermione isn't seedy and disturbing enough for you? Then look closer, I say.

Yeah, that's my open fly. It's okay, Hermione. Touch it! Love it! Liebe mein abschmenkee!

I mean, sure, it's a nice enough picture. But it's just not salacious enough compared to the other one, even if Harry is looking a bit...puckered.

Best amateur Big piano performance ever!

"And I do my little turn on the catwalk..."

Nobody has ever quite buttered my corn like Pam here...

...which explains why Brian couldn't help but reach for a bite.

Oh Rice to Riches, the only thing I love more than your saucy slogans and incisive observations is your ridiculously delicious rice pudding.

Thanks again, New York! You're always there for a good time...or just some good advice.

What the hell, California?

2008-05-23T19:55:00.000-07:00

Two days of rain in a row? Thunderstorms? And to top it off, visible sun on the horizon to taunt me along the way?

Not cool. Not cool.

Thoughts on being home

2008-05-22T18:03:00.003-07:00

- I live here now. Like, actually live here. Wow.

- Could I have spent two hours at home without getting into some serious discussion with my parents? Obviously not.

- It's raining. Why am I here if it's raining? Not raining is the point of here.

- I am apparently not allowed a whole closet. Everyone else's stuff has invaded it, and it doesn't want to leave.

- First California meal, same as it always is after I've been away for a while: In 'n Out cheeseburger, animal style, no lettuce, and an order of fries.

- It's not as seamless as I'd hoped.

Check this box if you expect to graduate this term

2008-05-08T06:53:00.002-07:00

At precisely 4:20 pm, on Thursday, May 8, 2008, with my left hand, I turned in the last piece of schoolwork I will ever know. And at that same moment, with my right hand, I cracked open my first beer as a free man.

Who knew that freedom would taste like this:

Remember when you used to do things?

2008-05-01T18:58:00.002-07:00

I think the thing I miss most about college is the way I used my free time. It wasn't about sitting on my ass, watching YouTube and reading ESPN.com. It was about making silly comic books and getting drunk and doing the t-shirt ninja thing, and taking on random arts and crafts projects because they seemed like cool things to do. That's what I feel like I've lost.

Things like this:

MIT students are weird

2008-04-29T08:55:00.003-07:00

Over the weekend, I attended a student production of The Full Monty at MIT. This alone is weird enough. MIT students not only doing musical theater, but actually removing all of their clothes in front of a live audience. I would have needed some time to digest this by itself.

But as we were walking through the MIT campus toward the theater, it became immediately clear that MIT kids are way weirder that.

Why did a man build a robot body (with functional claw hand) for himself? I don't know. Why did he decide to model it around the MIT campus? I don't know. Why did he decide to assume the character of a robot creature from another planet? I don't know. But could I have passed by this without getting a picture with him? Absolutely not.

The last lesson

2008-04-25T10:22:00.002-07:00

Today, I had my final classroom session as a student...well, ever. And it ended with these words from my Legal Profession professor, David Wilkins, who was dressed in a goofy tie with hearts and peace signs on it.

"Every year, for the last class, I wear this tie. Because this is what I wish for you, this is the best I can wish for you: peace, love, and because I believe in identity, [raising his fist] soul."

If the whole law thing doesn't work out...

2008-04-24T14:32:00.003-07:00

...it seems that Trevor and I have a future penning poker-themed political satire animated via Second Life. Thanks, Charles Nesson.

I have personally heard an audio recording of Salvatore DiMasi watching this video and loving it. I also need to take credit for Trevor and me, as writers, for all the musical and editing cues, because they are a point of pride. The Stephen Colbert and presidential candidates thing...well, that's all Nesson.

Episode 2 is fully written and currently in production. With an Episode 3 to follow...

Ooh, he touches my tra la la

2008-04-24T14:08:00.004-07:00

Yesterday proved to be an amazing experience, as Tina and I went down to the College, on a beautifully sunny day, to meet Günther, a.k.a. the Pleasureman, and the Sunshine Girls. Tragically, his agent cut off the flow of autographs and photographs before I could get him to pose with me and sign my empty Ding Dong box. And he didn't actually perform. And he arrived 20 minutes late. And he left 20 minutes early. And mostly repeated the same 3 sentences over and over again. Okay, so it wasn't that amazing of an experience.

But it was worth my while, because of one gem of Güntherian wisdom. Asked by his host to offer some words of advice for a crowd of "undoubtedly sexually frustrated Harvard students," he looked out over the assembled mass from his Evita-like balcony, smirked, and intoned in an allegedly Swedish accent (I'm not convinced it's real): "Champagne. Sex. Love. Respect." Having obviously conveyed all the knowledge we'd ever need, he handed back the microphone, and didn't actually say another word for the rest of his appearance.

In honor of his appearance, I give you the legendary "Ding Dong Song."

Completely tragic

2008-04-24T13:57:00.001-07:00

I've already lamented in this space the failure of the average American to read a bloody book. But apparently, I overlooked to the extent to which the average American can't write a bloody word either.

To all friends and readers who are or plan to become teachers. If one of your students ever includes a smiley or an LOL in one of their assignments, please introduce me to them as one of your "graders" and let me burn their work before their eyes and you stand by and do nothing. Seriously, folks. If this is true, drastic measures must be taken.

Oh look, I'm posting again

2008-04-22T22:40:00.003-07:00

Yeah, funny that. It'll be in fits and starts for now. I realized that, because I had been so completely neglecting all the things I had to write, I wasn't allowing myself to write anything I wanted to write. No long emails, no letters, and no blog posts. But I've made a dent in the intimidating stack 'o work in front of me at last, and I felt it was time to reward myself. And all of you.

I know now what I must do

2008-04-22T22:37:00.003-07:00

If the guy from XKCD can do it, so can I. I'm going to wait until I buy my condo late this year, to avoid having to move the set-up from one house to another. But I really think this is going to happen.

Helpfully, I've discovered that one of the leading manufacturers of crush-proof ball pit balls is actually located in Orange County, so I'd even be able to avoid the often exorbitant shipping costs. I take this as a sign that this is fated to happen for me.

Update: A brilliant add-on idea from Jesse: a slide that leads into the ball pit. Fantastic. Our will be done.

A follow-up on my last post...

2008-04-22T20:36:00.000-07:00

Why is the Wikipedia entry on rickrolling so amazingly complete?

My favorite part is the survey that indicates that, as of April 2008, at least 18 million American adults had been rickrolled.

If you don't like this, I don't want to know you

2008-02-28T09:35:00.002-08:00

Looks like somebody's reading

2008-02-10T21:13:00.000-08:00

I'm always quietly pleased when a friend makes reference to something in my blog in direct conversation, or asks for follow-up or explanation of something I've left (intentionally) vague. The narcissist in me savors the attention, loves to know that someone's reading.

But it's a little freakier when you find that your professors have discovered your account of their course online and posted it to the class Wiki.

Welcome to the modern age, everyone.

If you love me you will buy me this shirt

2008-02-05T07:26:00.000-08:00

From Busted Tees.

Everything old is new again

2008-02-04T13:41:00.001-08:00

I've been back in Cambridge for about a week now (since last I posted, I've been to Bali, Thailand, back home, Chile, and Argentina). My plane landed through a gentle snowstorm, the first time since coming to Boston that I've flown through such conditions, and honestly, rather fitting feeling. But the effect of 8 months' absence was immediately apparent, as I watched the fluttering snowflakes not with dread or despair, but with mild bemusement. "Oh look," I thought to myself, "it's the nice, pretty snow instead of the horrible, wet, blustery kind." I contemplated going outside to frolic for a while.

That kind of (totally uncharacteristic) optimism has been the order of the day since getting back to Cambridge for my final semester of law school. It's like being a 1L again -- all bright eyes and bushy tails and no true concept of the miserable horrors that await you -- except I know tons of people. And they're all inordinately glad to see me! It's been fascinating, really, to see how people react to my return...people I'd expect to be indifferent who are strangely welcoming, people I'd expect to be excited who are strangely apathetic. But it's all been quite refreshing, and my social calendar is delightfully full. I'd highly recommend disappearing for 8 months in the middle of law school to anyone.

School is still school, but I've done a sufficiently good job gaming the system all this time that I've been left with a quite manageable 3L Spring. I'm required to do a 1-unit paper for my study abroad, but I've convinced my advising professor to let me revise and improve a paper I completed in Hong Kong to fulfill that requirement. There was a 2-unit paper I was supposed to do, but I finished it last semester and got the professor to apply the credits to this semester. I'm taking Negotiation Workshop as a pass-fail course, and Professional Responsibility, one of the known patty-cake courses of law school.

But the capstone of my law school education has to be the Freedom seminar with the legendary Charles Nesson (recently on the Colbert Report!). Our first class of the semester started with a round of introductions in which Nesson asked us to identify our names, our hometowns, and our passions. Then he unilaterally admitted all of the students from the waitlist who had come to the class, without realizing that he completely lacked the authority to do so (a misconception the Registrar corrected for him later that week). Then he canceled a third of the classes for the semester, extended the remaining classes by an hour, promised us dinner and refreshments for each, and broke us up into groups of 3 to develop lesson plans for each of those classes, since he had only planned out the first two weeks. Then he vanished for 20 minutes and returned with a case of beer of unknown origin (no one complained). Then we jammed for a while, with Nesson declaring without irony that fear was the single greatest impediment to freedom, and that his wife and co-professor for the course was the person he feared most in the world (she nodded sympathetically). Then he assigned us Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as actual law school reading, and we went home. Ah, life in the Ivy League.

So that, plus a million anticipated hours of rehearsal for this year's Parody (which I am proud to have co-written from Hong Kong, and co-edited from Chile and Argentina), is pretty much where I am right now. I'd catch up more, but that would take too long, so I won't.

Bar Art!

2008-01-12T12:35:00.000-08:00

Part 0: Introduction.

Part 1: "Voiding Perpetuities."

Part 2: "Sheep Passing the Bar."

Bonus 1: "The Adventures of Wild Deed and Mutilated Will."

Part 3: "Richard Conviser Doesn't Teach the Law, Richard Conviser IS the Law!"

Part 4: "Flock."

Part 5: "End of a Life Estate."

Part 6: "This Is Not a Trust."

Bonus 2: "Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress."

Part 7: "California Civil Procedure."

Part 8: "Effective Notetaking."

Part 9: "No Pressure."

Part 10: "At Least It Isn't My Anus."

Part 11: "My Soul Is Dead!"

Part 12: "WWNPHD?"

Part 13: "I Taste Like Science!"

Bonus 3: "My Life, In Drawing"

Part 14: "Wills and Trusts Law Is Trying to Kill Me"

Part 15: "Happy Rainbow Day"

Hong Kong Highlights!

2008-01-12T12:16:00.000-08:00

September 2, 2007: Hong Kong University on local social customs and behaviors.

September 4, 2007: Hong Kong University on good email manners.

September 4, 2007: Life in an HKU dorm.

September 8, 2007: "It's like a cross between a fraternity and jail. And communism."

September 8, 2007: The one photograph that perfectly captures Lan Kwai Fong.

September 13, 2007: Intellectual property law for middle-schoolers.

September 18, 2007: In hunger, unity.

September 18, 2007: If you didn't believe me about the halls.

September 20, 2007: The Three-Week Wall.

September 23, 2007: Hurtling through the looking class: high-table dinner.

October 8, 2007: I hate clubs.

October 9, 2007: Financial security, complete insanity.

October 22, 2007: Happy birthday to me.

October 29, 2007: A tale of ten cities.

November 1, 2007: Hong Kong: more than just a polluted, overcrowded metropolis.

November 7, 2007: Definitely not hot.

November 20, 2007: No longer living a lie.

Several of these posts, and a few others, were also adapted and republished in Harvard Law School's student newspaper, the HL Record.

A statement that brings me joy

2007-12-04T21:29:00.000-08:00

From an email I recently wrote to a law school friend, after discovering that I had gone drinking in Hong Kong with his college roommate from Yale, who now works at a bank here:

"I was out with a Gambian friend from London, who I met at a negotiation competition in Leipzig, Germany in April of this year. He brought his friend from college, a Belgian guy who grew up in the United States, went to school in England, and worked in banking in Tokyo before coming to Hong Kong. And he brought his apartmentmate and coworker at his bank, your former college roommate."

Attention parents of America

2007-12-04T21:27:00.001-08:00

Let your teenagers have some sex. It's good for them.

And everything since has just been epilogue

2007-12-04T06:02:00.000-08:00

I was in a rather bad mood all of yesterday, which I think is a product of the incredible finality of the night before. The "Little Flower" thought experiment and the conversation that followed seemed so definitively conclusory to my time in Hong Kong, it seemed silly to wake up the next morning and still be here.

As the audience slowly dispersed, and only Sebastien, Sam, and I remained, we began to wax philosophical. It's incredibly easy to be unflinchingly honest in that environment, with people who you don't know if you'll ever see again. Sam insists that you meet in everyone in life at least twice, whether you realize it or not. I like the idea, though I'm a little too cynical to buy into it wholesale. One of the more confounding elements of my first study abroad experience was my incredible inability to predict who I would and would not stay in touch with after it was all done. There have been so many surprises in both directions, I haven't even attempted to predict it for this study abroad.

As we puffed on our cigarettes and stared blankly into the distance, Sebastien, who was about to depart on a nearly month-long trip to Tibet and had not decided if he would return to the university at its conclusion, asked us how far ahead we could see our lives.

Two years, I replied, and even that is less than my usual answer...the conclusion of my law school education, and about a year and a half in my law firm. In choosing between my law firms, I explained, I specifically, intentionally chose the unknown commodity. I rejected comfort and predictability for a higher ceiling and a lower floor, and more troublingly, no assurance that I would even want what I got if I succeeded after all.

One year, Sam replied. The conclusion of her college education, and from there, question marks, about what she would do and where she would do it. I recognized it as something that so many people I know have gone through, but that I had spared myself. It was strange to relate to...I was at once envious of the possibilities she enjoyed, and relieved to have my course charted at least a little farther.

But for Sebastien, it was only 15 days. He had things planned out for as long as it would take him to arrive in Tibet. From there - what he would do in Tibet, what he would do when it was done - it was all blank. Sebastien speaks excellent English, though he often complains about his inability to express himself properly with the language. But I think he sort of expresses himself better because of the limitations. I'm confident in my prowess with the English language, and one of the consequences of that prowess is that I can package and obscure a statement any way I please. As someone who tends to appoint a few individuals in every context as confidants and be relatively guarded with all others - this blog is a willful attempt at honesty in a nervewrackingly public forum - I use language to reveal as much about what I'm saying as I please, in measured doses. Sebastien doesn't have that luxury, and so, I found his words to be refreshingly honest in their simplicity.

"I am at an intersection," he began, before stumbling over what noun he wanted instead of intersection. I offered crossroads.

"I am at a crossroads," he started again, "and the roads are very foggy. I cannot see them. And that is very strange."

There was nothing we could say to that, no way for us to help him disperse the fog. Even a generic "I understand" seemed to be an unnecessary abuse of words; our silence sad "I understand" far better than the words ever could. And as I finally ambled back to my room at the end of the talk, my time in Hong Kong was officially complete.

Which is why it feels so strange that I'm still here.

Little international flowers

2007-12-03T07:05:00.000-08:00

Last night, several of us gathered around Sebastien, an exchange student here who has turned all of Hong Kong into his stage, performing unlicensed public jazz improvisations on his saxophone throughout the city. To see off those of us who are leaving Hong Kong this week, to travel or to go home, Sebastien set up shop with his saxophone in front of our residential complex.

The first piece he ever learned on his saxophone - and to this day, his favorite piece - is Sidney Bechet's "Petite Fleur" ("Little Flower"). We resolved that Sebastien would perform an improvised version of the song (which has been interpreted a million different ways on a million different instruments), and each of us would offer the narrative we saw unfolding within our own minds while listening to the song. I recorded the performance:

My first instinct was that "Little Flower" would be a nickname for a woman. But I made an effort to listen to the song literally, and imagined a little flower in a clay pot in the window of a flower shop. Every day, the same beautiful woman walks by the store and looks at the flower in the window, and with each little musical flourish during the slow opening of the song, the flower excitedly watches the woman pass and wishes for her to come in and buy him. This happens time and again, until finally, the woman comes into the store. As the song grows quicker and more intense, the flower's hopes are fulfilled. There is hustle and bustle as he is removed from the window, wrapped up, packed, and sent home with the woman. But as the song slows back down, the flower settles into comfortable obscurity on the woman's dining room table. He is at once lonely and ignored, but grateful to get to be with the beautiful woman in her home every day. He is at once sad and comfortable, until after some time, he finally perishes.

Sebastien, from France, saw a flower struggling against soil and wind to grow. Every musical flourish is a small victory against the soil, some small success in moving toward the surface. As the music rises and intensifies, the flower at long last breaks the soil's surface and blossoms. But inevitably, the music lilts and falls, and so do the flower's petals, until it too succumbs to the elements and age. Interestingly, in the dozens (if not hundreds) of times Sebastien performed this song, it never occurred to him to treat "Little Flower" as a nickname for a woman.

Sam(antha), from Singapore, saw a woman walking down an unknown beach, her flowing dress fluttering in the wind. The woman is anonymous, literally faceless, and represents all of the atrocities in the world. Every musical flourish is a flashback to some abuse, some genocide, some injustice in a distant land. As the music rises, the woman is stricken with emotion and injustice, and when the song comes back down, she is finally overcome, collapsing dead on the beach.

Cayley, from Canada, never crafted a narrative at all, instead contemplating how absurd and amazing it was to have a group of near-strangers, representatives from nearly ever continent sitting quietly in a circle as one of their company played his saxophone to the sky.

Claudia, from Venezuela, lamented her lack of creativity, as she was so taken by the music that she thought of nothing at all.

Christina, from the United States, was clearly deep in her own mind about everything else that had been going on with her that day, and was so overcome by the music that she left without a word as soon as the song was done.

And Sarah, from Australia, tapped into her biologist instincts. She imagined each of us in that circle as a flower from our continents of origin - Sam, an Asian orchid; Claudia, a Latin American bird of paradise; Cayley, a small and delicate mountain flower; herself, an Australian tumbleweed. She pondered which of us could be transplanted into the Hong Kong climate and survive and thrive. Orchid Sam won.

We could have invited 10 more people to listen to the song, and gotten 10 more reactions, each of which would have been as valid as the next.

So if you have 5 minutes, press play, listen to the song, and leave a comment letting me know what story you see unfolding in your own mind. It doesn't have to be a narrative, though I'll say that's what I'm most curious to hear about. And certainly, a video on YouTube is likely to be less emotionally resonant than a quiet, outdoor, 1 am jam session. But I'm utterly infatuated with the diversity of personal reactions that can be derived from ostensibly the same experience. I want to know what everyone in the world thinks when they hear this.

And if you know French, then listen to this lyrical rendition and translate it for me.

(Dis)pleasing (a)symmetry

2007-11-30T02:55:00.000-08:00

One of the first places I visited upon arriving in Hong Kong, even before I'd really explored the central part of the city, was Stanley, a village-like expatriate haven on the southern coast of Hong Kong island that I embraced for its proliferation of charming pubs and climbable rocks. Stanley was also where Babyccino and the Hot Perfections - the band name adopted by some of the first people I met from my exchange program - was born. It's one of my first memories from Hong Kong, and set a tone for the early weeks of my stay here. Today, having entered my last week in Hong Kong, I returned to Stanley. Comparing and contrasting the two visits offered me an interesting perspective on how my time here has gone...and how it's sort of gone off the rails.

Today's trip to Stanley was made not with the Hot Perfections, but with two other cohorts from the exchange program, Matt and Vic. While I still interact with each of the Hot Perfections individually, the band essentially broke up under the stress of our trip to Cambodia at the end of September. You might call it creative differences. You might also call it massive personality conflicts and semi-open hostility. I would call it the latter.

September's trip to Stanley took about an hour and a half, and involved taking a bus into Central, then changing to another bus that went around the far side of the island to make it to Stanley in the south. But we've become far more savvy since then, and learned that a bus that passes directly in front of our dorm - going around the island in the opposite direction - goes to Stanley directly in about 40 minutes.

My first excursion to Stanley was a trip of exploration and discovery...seeing and learning more about Hong Kong, immersing myself in the fact that I was in Asia, visiting my first ever Buddhist shrine, getting to know my fellow exchange students. Today's trip was made because we received word that an expatriate bar called "Main Street, U.S.A." was showing the big Cowboys-Packers game live by satellite.

The first time down there, the trip seemed charmed. Everything was interesting, everything was fun, everything was successful. The seemingly simple Nautical Museum was bizarrely fascinating. The food tasted great. The people were nice. Today, it seemed like nothing could go right. The satellite feed for the game was going in and out, and even when it was working, the international carrier had commercials cutting off the first couple of plays of every drive. The breakfast was delightfully cheap...and that's about all I can say in its defense. For everything that didn't go right at the bar, the guy running the place had a distinctly not-my-problem attitude, which was highlighted by his continual explicit assertions that things were "not our problem."

I took advantage of the touristy Stanley Market to purchase a necessity...a hokey Hong Kong shot glass for my travel shot glass collection (I get one from every city I visit, if I can). But even that had lost its charm, as I found myself staring depressedly at a ridiculous, bedazzled American flag pin, wondering, "Who would buy this?" before a lady with a distinctly southern U.S. accent started eying the thing interestedly. All of us more or less allowed ourselves to be fleeced on the souvenirs we purchased, too exhausted from months of bargaining to put up a fight to save $2.

To be fair, all in all, I mostly had fun. The game was interesting, the company was good, and even if the food didn't taste great, grease and coffee made for a lovely hangover cure. But still, I am clearly viewing Hong Kong through different eyes now than I was in September. Annoyed, deeply embittered eyes. Less than a week to go.

Chinese rumor mill

2007-11-24T11:23:00.001-08:00

When Planning Your Next Trip to Beijing... Beijing is known for having god-awful pollution, but the whole time I was there, it was remarkably clear and fresh out. It was a massive upgrade from Hong Kong's air at the time (Hong Kong has improved a bit as the weather has cooled), and I couldn't understand what the usual fuss was about. I just chalked it up to good luck. But about a week after I returned to Hong Kong, I discussed this with Aaron, who was in Beijing shortly after I left. He, too, had great luck with the air for the first 3 days of his visit (and loved the city as a result), but he woke up on the fourth day to find the city so overrun with smog that he couldn't see all the way across Tiananmen Square. The next two days, he lamented, were almost totally spoiled. What had changed? Aaron brought a report from the locals: the People's Congress had been in session during the time I had been in Beijing, and for the first few days of Aaron's visit. When the People's Congress is in session, the Chinese authorities allegedly turn off all of the factors in the region (I have a potent mental image of an enormous lever that controls every factory at once, being switched into the down position), and as soon as the congressmen all leave, the factories come back online (same mental image plays in reverse, plus some cackling by the man pushing the lever). The assumption is that the factories will all be turned off during the Olympics, and for a few weeks on either side while the tourism rush is on. If you're visiting Beijing and don't have dates planned, though, I suggest you research when the People's Congress is in session next.

I Wonder How Much It Costs When You Break It Down Per Musical Note. Another report comes from Kathleen, a friend from high school and college and a well-placed source in Beijing. One of the ongoing storylines in Beijing is the construction of the National Theatre Dome, and within it, the New Beijing Concert Hall. The complex is destined to become the new cultural center of China, a sumptuously luxurious and completely cutting-edge shrine to the arts. The project is sort of an enormous boondoggle, though, and rumblings suggest that, when it's completed, the cost per seat in the new Concert Hall will be equal to the cost of building an entire school in one of the rural areas.

Maybe There's a Little Counterfeit Version of Me Running Around There Somewhere? If the amount of intelligence and ingenuity that the Chinese put into knocking things off went into actually creating new products, the American economy would be doomed once and for all. There are all kinds of cultural reasons I could blather about to explain why they've chosen to be the best copyists in the world rather than the best innovators - Confucian traditions about interaction with the past, and the like - but instead, I will just marvel at some of the amazing things they've been able to copy at lower cost. For example: eggs. Eggs are one of the cheapest staple foods to produce, and somehow, the Chinese have succeeded in synthesizing them artificially for even less than it would cost, in China, to get the real ones. Also, vodka. Have you ever seen the Mythbusters where they put cheap plastic-bottle vodka (they call it "rotka," but that is a ridiculous word) through a Brita filter 13 times, effectively purifying it to the quality of good vodka? This works, but in the U.S., it doesn't make any sense: purifying an entire bottle of vodka 13 times costs more in Brita filters than the difference in price between cheap vodka and good vodka. In China, though, they've perfected and cheapened the process, so they import cheap wine, purify it for pennies on the bottle, and reseal into empty Stolichnaya bottles. This explains why I was able to go to a club in Shanghai, pay 120 yuan (about $15), and get open bar service of Stoli vodka all night long (still not sure how they fake the Jameson whisky so well). Of course, it's not all so harmless as eggs and vodka. Latin America is always dealing with counterfeit medicines made in China. One story I heard involves a cough medicine in which the Chinese manufacturer switched out the glucose syrup for some industrial solvent of comparable consistency. A few dead Latin American kids later...

Kids Who Date-Rape Themselves! For all the talk about lead-contaminated kids toys coming from China, my favorite story is this one. Some toy manufacturer was selling little metal toys that were supposed to be coated in a (non-toxic) chemical that, when wet, magnetized the metal. The idea was that the pieces were just plain and inert, until a kid got them wet, and then they would stick together. The Chinese manufacturer discovered, though, that the non-toxic chemical used to magnetize the metal could be replaced with a cheaper alternative that just so happened to create GHB (a popular date-rape drug) as a by-product when combined with water. Unfortunately, the children's preferred method of wetting the toys was sticking them in their mouths. Which basically led to a series of kids putting their toys in their mouth, drugging themselves, and mysteriously passing out.

Are all of these stories true? Some I've seen verified in the news (date-rape toys), some are just conjecture (People's Congress and pollution). Personally, I believe all of them. But in a way, what does it matter? The fact that these absurd stories about China are even considered plausible tells you all you need to know.

Anthropology

2007-11-22T22:40:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it feels like I'm still learning how it is that adults interact with each other. Every time I reach a new life-stage - high school, college, graduate school, soon graduating from graduate school - I feel like I'm just a kid playing a role. I still remember watching episodes of Saved by the Bell when I was in elementary school and thinking, "Wow, high schoolers! They're so grown up!" And the actors were even mostly age-appropriate, unlike Gabrielle Carteris on Beverly Hills 90210, who was practically on Social Security by the time that series ended.

I was sitting in my office yesterday, a.k.a. my beloved Brunch Club, when I started eavesdropping on a group of people talking beside me. I described the scene in an email to a friend as it was happening: "I'm sitting in Brunch Club listening to a Canadian-German-South African artist-model-photographer-actor-designer discuss web design and art direction work with a girl who just started a Hong Kong-dedicated website, having recently sold her last self-made website for an undisclosed sum. The web girl was previously talking to a fresh-faced USD grad, who just moved to Hong Kong last week to look for publishing work and excitement, about the newcomer contributing stories to the website. The new arrival is now talking to a lifetime Hong Konger who lived in the United States and Japan before returning to Hong Kong to live a life that, as far as I can tell, involves wearing absurdly funky clothes, working a desk job, and surrounding herself with creative people in an effort to feel creative herself (she probably has no talent of her own). And the faux-creative is friends with the C-G-SA artist because they previously met at Brunch Club. I'm 'reading' the Economist but I'm just listening to their conversations. It's fascinating."

Then I had a Thanksgiving dinner that I believe represents my ideal vision of life five years from now. We had a dinner party for six, two men and women from our exchange program (myself included), and a lovely couple from the United States that I know through one of my friends at school, and who moved to Hong Kong about 4 months ago.

An aside: this couple, Jeff and Jennifer, are about the cutest thing I've ever seen. They're both business school grads from the midwest who met in college. They've lived and worked in New York and London, and he's now doing banking in HK while she experiments with not working and taking arts and craft classes, language classes, etc. They have the only non-boring "how we got together" story I've ever heard, which is a testament both to their storytelling skills and their relationship. They've been married for 7 years, have no kids, and a fantastic lifestyle. I've gone to a bar with Jeff while the missus was out of town, and while he was totally in guy mode, there was no seething sense of suffocation there, no sighs of "this is my day out while the wife is away." It's got to be the healthiest relationship I've ever observed, other than my own parents. Just as this Thanksgiving dinner represents what I want my life to look like in a few years, I think that is my model for my ideal eventual relationship situation.

Anyhow. It was a total collection of yuppies, who I am increasingly come to recognize as my people: two business school grads, three law school 3Ls, and one JD/MBA joint degree guy. Everyone was dressed nicely, but not too nicely. Cocktail dresses, collared shirts with nice jeans. I wore my preppy sweater from Express that always gets compliments when worn anywhere outside of New England (and did again). The apartment was great, and decorated in a style that was very consistent with my own design sense...light-wash hardwood floors, track lighting, lots of reds and blacks, contemporary, a little bit sparse, but a clean look. We drank large quantities of not-too-expensive-but-still-kinda-expensive wines from specialty stores, and ended up working our way through a well-constructed progression: apertif champagne, white, rosé, lighter red, darker red, and after-dinner sparkling white. The spread came to one bottle per person, which was just the right amount of wine for the right kind of buzz. The conversation was flowing and loud and well-integrated, and seemed to cover every imaginable topic. Everyone took turns telling stories, everyone responded to everyone else's stories, and the only moment of silence came right as we hit our eating stride in the middle of the meal...and even that was interrupted by the well-received observation that it was totally that Thanksgiving mid-meal moment of silence. At one point, the three men walked to the bedroom to look at our host's suits and watches, and to discuss men's luxury items in general. The women stayed behind at the table and talked about I don't know what, but I can only assume that it was gender-appropriate in that moment.

After dinner, we played Charades, which is a game I have an inordinate amount of affection for. Like Halloween, Charades was cool when you were a kid, then stopped being cool when you became a disaffected adolescent, and then became cool again when you were old enough to drink, make well-placed obscene gestures, and stop worrying about looking cool. Naturally, the game was organized into men vs. women, and there were various moments where one spouse would get an incredibly obscure clue easily because he or she recognized it as something the other would come up with. And when the game ended, the party did too, cleanly, without feeling dragged out or hitting an awkward low at the end. I went home and, still just wine-soaked enough, fell asleep immediately (around 1 am) and had one of my best nights of sleep in weeks.

Thinking about it now, it again feels, retroactively, like I was playing a role...in this case, slightly pretentious, effete coastal intellectual, with a dash of social consciousness from a comfortable distance. But at the time, it didn't feel like a role. It felt totally natural. So go ahead and mock me, for I see now what I want life to look like. And it's a little bit shallow, and it's totally worthy of your mockery, but it looks so very good to me.

Fuel for Facebook paranoia

2007-11-22T22:32:00.000-08:00

On the way to Shenzhen, I stopped in a 7-11 for supplies, and noticed a tabloid-looking magazine whose cover sported a picture of two early-twenties Asian girls kissing, a bunch of Chinese characters I couldn't read, and the word "FACEBOOK" splayed across it all. I looked to the Chinese-fluent Wilson for an explanation.

Like personal space, privacy isn't really a recognized concept here. Hong Kong tabloids are as ruthless as those in the United Kingdom, but even more invasive, and not as constrained by the strong defamation laws that control in the UK. The girl being featured on the magazine cover was not even a celebrity, but the daughter of a local television star. She's attending college in the United States (University of Colorado-Boulder, I think, which is a lovely little party school), and she's acting, well, like someone who's attending college in the United States. The magazine editors simply went on her Facebook profile, started downloading pictures, and printed them (apparently, they respect copyright about as much as they respect privacy).

As Wilson explained all this to me, I thought about all the people I know who removed or sanitized their Facebook profiles before going through OCI (I stubbornly refused to do so, reasoning that any firm that wouldn't have me because of the content of my Facebook profile was not a firm I wanted to work at). I also thought about the roughly 700 drunken pictures of me available on Facebook. It's a good thing I'm not a celebrity...or related to one, evidently.

But can you imagine the phone call that girl got from her irked mother in Hong Kong yesterday? Awesome.

Over the hills and through the woods to Shenzhen we go

2007-11-21T03:25:00.000-08:00

When I got my visa to go to China in October, I requested a double-entry visa, planning to visit Yunnan province in southern China as part of my December travels. Yunnan is considered one of the most beautiful natural areas of China, and is said to be the location of the legendary Shangri-La. But when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, though, I decided to trade culture, nature, and history in Shangri-La for bargain basement shopping in Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is a Special Economic Region, and provides mainland China's border with peninsular Hong Kong. Certain nationalities (but not Americans) can obtain 24-hour shopping visas for short-term visits, and if Hong Kong is a city that evolved into a mall, Shenzhen was simply built to be a mall all along. The border crossing from Hong Kong to Shenzhen opens directly into a 6-story mega-mall, which is more or less the only real tourist attraction in the whole area. I didn't even bring my camera, and was never made to regret it.

Shenzhen's factories are the source of (1) most of the pollution in Hong Kong, and (2) basically every counterfeit product sold in Asia, if not the world. Counterfeiting in Shenzhen isn't a business, it's the business, and it's 100% conspicuous. Nobody even maintains the fiction that they're selling authentic goods, but they extol the quality of their wares by referencing how close they are to the originals. If anything, I found the easy availability of Dunhill, Armani, and the surprisingly-popular Paul Smith to be a detriment rather than a draw. There were plenty of perfectly good, well-priced products that I rather liked, but declined to buy because they so prominently featured these luxury logos. It made them overly ostentatious, and begged for trouble from people who could spot the fakes (or who are smart enough to realize that debt-ridden middle-class law students probably aren't rocking the real Guccis).

The Chinese view of luxury products is distinctly nouveau riche. They strongly favor the designs that splay famous brands as conspicuously as possible...cufflinks shaped like the Mont Blanc star, for example, or ties with the Louis Vuitton "LV" as the focal point of the pattern. Sadly, these are often reproductions of real designs, but these tend to be the cheapest, entry-level designs under those brands. If their pricing scheme is any indication, the luxury brands agree with me that true luxury, class, and refinement means buying the versions of those products that are only recognizable as such to people who know.

Fakes aside, Shenzhen is also known for reasonable-quality, high-value tailoring, and that was the mission on this trip. In the end, I purchased 6 tailored shirts - 4 for suits, and 2 for casual wear - in pretty good fabrics, for a total of about $120. I probably could have knocked at least $20 off the total cost with a little bargaining, but both my shopping partner (Wilson) and I were shockingly docile with the tailor, particularly in light of how aggressively we bargained with the other vendors for the rest of the day. This may or may not have been related to our hangovers, which lingered until we ate lunch, immediately after our tailoring order was placed.

It's amazing to me how immediately palpable the difference is between mainland China and Hong Kong. All we did was take a 40-minute train ride and cross through an immigration checkpoint, but there was no mistaking the change. The slightly different physical features of the locals, the drab collective fashion sense, the extra-hazy sky of indeterminate color, the immediate chaos of the sales environment. It was far more Beijing's Silk Alley than Hong Kong's Mong Kok.

And like the rest of mainland China, especially shopping in mainland China, it is completely bloody exhausting. The only thing that stopped me from falling asleep on the train back was talking with Wilson. And when he and I parted ways, and I was on the bus alone, I immediately fell into that most blessed state which has so evaded me over the last few weeks, sleep.

Thanks, Internet

2007-11-20T06:10:00.000-08:00

My tile rack in 0ne of my Scrabbulous games (Scrabble on Facebook) just came up, "IMSADOK." I didn't order the tiles that way, that's just how they came.

No longer living a lie

2007-11-20T02:33:00.000-08:00

Alright, for some time now, I've been living a lie. I've been telling people I'm one way when I'm really another. I've let certain people in on it. I've tried to casually drop hints of it here and there, even on this blog. But the lie is exhausting to maintain all the time and I don't want to anymore, so here I go. I am going to use the comfortable distance of the Internet to say things that I'd probably never be comfortable saying to someone face-to-face.

I hate Hong Kong.

I hate Hong Kong because it is the shallowest, most superficial and culturally immature metropolis in the world. For a city of its size, it is remarkably devoid of art, culture, and music, or any awareness of the fact that it is lacking art, culture, or music. The cultural scenes here range from nonexistent (music) to embarrassingly immature (art). The best museum exhibition in town, by orders of magnitude, is a loan of items from the British Museum. The city is, as I have said time and again, a giant shopping mall. Every MTR station, every bus depot, every office building, and I suspect most personal homes, are malls. If you want to shop, no matter where you are or what time it is, and never tire of that, Hong Kong just may be the place for you. I have to assume that Internet merchants do very little business with Hong Kong, because if they did, the residents here would apparently have no reason left to go outside. It's such wasted potential. People here are so unaware of their remarkable place in the world, in history, so politically and intellectually inert. Yes, I hold Hong Kong to a high standard. Because Hong Kong wants to put itself in the same sentence as Los Angeles, New York, and London (with Boston, the cities where I have spent the most time), and if it wants to compare itself to those cities, then it cannot complain when I inevitably find it wanting. Hong Kong may still be a so-called "world city," but it is a world city of the past. As far as I'm concerned, the city has done nothing to demonstrate itself worthy of the future.

I hate Hong Kong because of the lack of social variety. Why do I complain so much about Lan Kwai Fong? Because there is so little else to complain about. I am trying, I really am. Salsa night, the occasional jazz show that I can find. These are activities that would probably be considered "niche" anywhere in the world, but here, the very desire to seek any of them out is apparently considered "niche." Every bar and club seems to be a minute variation on the same theme. I like some better than others, but I'm utterly exhausted with the one theme. And the theme was never for me in the first place. The generically cool room full of status-obsessed drones who seem to be concerned about everything but having fun. I said back in October, "I'll know I've truly reached maturity with living in Hong Kong when somebody says, 'Hey, Ken, we're going to Lan Kwai Fong, wanna come?' and I finally say no." And I have reached that point. But that just means that more often than not, I just go home early. I've embraced the islands and rural areas - which, in all fairness, must be considered part of the total Hong Kong equation - as my primary means of staying sane, but by themselves, they just haven't been enough.

I hate Hong Kong because of my own living situation here. I have discussed this at length (and even that selection of links is woefully incomplete). I realize that the university and the halls are not synonymous with Hong Kong, but at the very least they are cultural indicators, and they are so very central to my experience. This was in large part my fault...I chose to be cheap and stay in halls rather than seeking out the costly comfort and privacy of my own accommodations. I regret this and take full responsibility. But I still blame the pollution for my bout with bronchitis, the first time I've even gotten the disease.

I hate Hong Kong because of the people. With locals (whatever that means), I just don't feel comfortable. I feel like I have next to nothing in common with the local students, no shared experience or sense of joint understanding. The way I feel with other Jewish people, where we all seems to draw on the same bank of neurosis? It's the exact opposite of that. We just don't see eye to eye. And as far as cultural differences go, I am a cultural relativist in the sense that I don't think that my culture should be imposed on other people, but I am a cultural objectivist in the sense that I don't think that all cultures are equally good, at least not for me. And I find the local culture to be inscrutable and rude (important note: I don't think American culture to be perfect or even best, but I find much more in British, continental European, and Latin American culture to be admired than I do here). Sorry, political correctness. Marie has eloquently noted the frustrating conundrum of being a white person in a non-white culture: that no matter how deftly we internalize and apply the cultural idiosyncrasies of our host country, we will aways be distinctly, obviously, physically foreign. I share this frustration, but I really don't feel particularly compelled to embrace this culture, so it isn't as strong for me. And as for the ever-dominating expatriate community, my friend (who shall remain nameless, lest this person appear as judgmental and curmudgeonly as I) and I have a theory that Hong Kong appeals most to people who can't quite cut it in their home country. Whether they be successful but just short of the pinnacle in their industries or careers, or somehow socially or personally lacking such that it would just be easier to buy coolness with foreignness and whiteness, the people who seem to be the real HK diehards are not people that I would surround myself with at home. I typically find them at best mildly bemusing, and at worst actively off-putting.

But most of all, I hate Hong Kong because of how it makes me feel. As I've said, I don't truly know if my recent mental state has been a product of my Hong Kong experience or a cause, and I suspect it's both. And the same question would exist if I were overwhelmingly happy too. London is perhaps my favorite city in the world, and my time there was one of the happiest periods of my life. This is probably not a coincidence. But does it even matter what the mechanism is? When I came back to London, 3 years later and in a totally different period in my life, the city was so firmly entrenched in my psyche as synonymous with happiness that I was walking around with a moronic grin on my face for the entire week, contemplating life plans that would let me call it home again. When I'm here, I feel anxious and stressed and yes, depressed, actually depressed, constantly depressed, clinically depressed, in a way I don't feel in other places and have never felt before. My trip home for my sister's wedding was supposed to recharge my batteries for the stretch run, but all it did was remind me what it feels like to be happy, to feel like myself, and bring into stark relief how often I am not happy here and how much I don't feel like myself.

I hate Hong Kong for making me think like this during a period of time that should be a celebration, of my exploitation of Harvard, of my own internationalism, of the end of everything in my life that comes before becoming a working adult. I hate Hong Kong because in the end, it doesn't matter if people disagree with me or if any of the things I said above are even true, because they feel so true to me. I hate Hong Kong because even the faint optimism of posts past rang false to me at the time it was written, and there is no doubt on my mind that this is the defining journal entry of my time here. And that is a tragedy.

Law nerd interlude

2007-11-20T01:27:00.000-08:00

From the moment I first heard about Showtime's David Duchovny vehicle, Californication, I have been waiting for the Red Hot Chili Peppers to file a lawsuit. And, at long last, the legal shoe has dropped. I am the least surprised person in the world.

My 1-minute legal analysis? The unfair competition claim is dead in the water, the unjust enrichment claim is redundant and is just there because claiming it is easy, and the dilution claim has just enough merit that this will inevitably end with Showtime paying the Red Hot Chili Peppers an undisclosed sum of money and including a mostly inconspicuous disclaimer somewhere in the Californication credits. And that's assuming that the case settles out before the series is canceled after one or two more seasons.

A deafening castrophony of silence

2007-11-19T07:59:00.000-08:00

This quote simultaneously captures what my insomnia has felt like over the last three to four weeks, and why I haven't discussed it in greater detail here:

"All good nights of sleep are alike. Each miserable night of sleep is miserable in its own way. You either close your eyes and, many hours later, open them, or you endure an idiosyncratic epic of waiting, trying, failing, irritation, self-sabotage and despair, then stand up at sunrise racked with war stories you don’t have the energy to tell."

From the New York Times Magazine.

And a gold star to Olga, my de facto sleep counselor, for showing me the article, and predicting in advance that I would love that quote.

Picture overload!

2007-11-18T02:28:00.001-08:00

If you're someone who looks at - or downloads - pictures from my Picasa page, be aware that I'm coming up on my 1 gig storage limit, and I'm already going to have to remove some old albums to make room for the long-overdue Shanghai photos. Now's the time to get the things from the early parts of the trip, while supplies last!

That's one big freaking Buddha

2007-11-18T00:51:00.000-08:00

Continuing my furious flurry through the islands of Hong Kong, I spent yesterday with some close HKU exchange allies on Lantau Island. As my critiques of Hong Kong have grown ever louder and more vociferous, I've been advised that one cannot truly consider Hong Kong Island and the hyperurban parts of the city in isolation. Rather, Hong Kong must be viewed as a whole, with the easy accessibility of all of the islands taken into full account. And I have to admit, when I consider the islands, I have to think a bit better of Hong Kong.

Like basically all of the islands I've visited around here, Lantau is primarily fishing-based. But it has its own bits of character. It's the largest island other than Hong Kong Island itself, and features, alongside its fishing villages, some tastes of its big brother. It's the only other island accessible by metro rail and houses both Hong Kong International Airport and Disneyland Resort. The fishing villages themselves feel a bit older and more wooden, yet more urban, than their cousins on Lamma and Cheung Chau.

This is Tai O, a bustling little town that's known for the 19th-century stilt houses still used by the locals who live in town (though many of these homes were destroyed by fire in 1997). In addition to being a bit bigger and busier than the similar fishing villages on the other islands, it feels more like a real place where people actually live. Especially on Cheung Chau, it seems like the village exists largely in service of the people who are visiting the island on day trips. Other than tourist shops and seafood restaurants, it's hard to identify how the community actually sustains itself. Tai O, on the other hand, feels more like a real village that has opened itself up to curious visitors than a village that has been put on for the benefit of foreign eyes and wallets.

When we first arrived, we walked in the alley behind one of the seafood markets rather than through the market itself. In so doing, we discovered just how a fish goes from something an clearly-identifiable living creature to the foul-smelling dried-up pile of meatwads that fills the bins in the seafood markets: clothesline. I am not yet certain how this affects my Basin Theory on Perceived Social Prosperity, which is based primarily on the visibility of clothing on clothing lines. A fish-based corollary may be in order. Still, unlike most things in Hong Kong, the conspicuously-drying fish smack more of culture than of class and commerce. I can appreciate that.

The main attraction on Lantau Island is Tian Tan, the Big Buddha. He is, as you might guess, a very big Buddha on the top of a hill. He is, in fact, the largest outdoor freestanding bronze Buddha in the world. You'll recall that one of my first observations about Hong Kongers - and really, all of China - was about their love of superlatives, however many qualifiers are necessary to achieve that biggest/longest/oldest status. I'm sure I included more adjectives about Big Buddha than were necessary, but I trust he'll forgive me. I mean, he's Buddha, right? As my companions and I stood and gawked at the imposing Buddha, one of them remarked, "I wonder how he got up there..."

"With a big crane, 15 years ago," I answered, with not too much bitterness in my voice. One of my most consistent experiences in Asia has been seeing things that look really old, but are in fact totally new (remember the Batu Caves in Malaysia?). Era confusion aside, he's still pretty impressive, and we were lucky enough to have a pretty clear day for visiting him. I've heard that, on a badly polluted day, you can't even see the top of his head from the base of the hill on which he sits.

Also of note is the pavilion upon which he sits, which features an exhibition about the life of Buddha and about the circumstances of Tian Tan's construction. Among the pieces of history from the unveiling ceremony is the text of a speech given by a mainland Chinese official. In hailing the spirit of cooperation between Hong Kong and the mainland that made this project possible, the official extolled without a hint of irony China's history of religious freedom and tolerance. I scoffed as loudly as possible.

It was another welcome side-trip, though I'll admit that I did allow some solemnness to invade my mood, even on this island haven. I don't know if Hong Kong puts me in a bad mental state, or if I'm in a bad mental state that just happens to coincide with my time in Hong Kong. Probably some mutually-reinforcing combination of both, a perfect little case study for an ambitious amateur psychologist. Still, sitting lazily on a bench at the top of the hill, looking out on the view over a wide expanse of Lantau, listening to some distinctly California-sounding Phantom Planet on my iPod (no, I was not listening to "California"), I felt pretty good. I just need some more of that.

As my new desktop background, I've adopted this macro photo of incense burning at Po Lin Monastery, which sits at the foot of Big Buddha's hill. In the Buddhist tradition that dominates around here, you light incense to send your thoughts, prayers, and messages to the heavens in a wisp of smoke, where your ancestors can hear them. Even without being a remotely religious person in any tradition, let alone southern Chinese Buddhist, I usually like to light a few sticks whenever I pass through. To a good rest of my trip:

Best day in Hong Kong in...ever?

2007-11-17T22:05:00.001-08:00

I'm sitting in the Brunch Club, which is already my favorite little spot in Hong Kong. It's a Western-style café/coffee shop in Soho with an extensive wine collection, free magazines on the walls, and free-and-fast wireless internet. The staff speaks excellent - in some cases, surprisingly unaccented - English, and everyone who comes seems to be a regular.

I'm reading this month's issue of Harper's, which may be an even more self-consciously, self-righteously hyperintellectual publication than my beloved New Yorker. I finish a reprinting of a Hunter S. Thompson piece that appeared in Rolling Stone in 1973 when I peer over the top of my magazine and see a fratty-looking American guy at the table across the way. Apparently he is from South Carolina and is a student/fan of the university therein, because he is wearing a red t-shirt that reads across the chest, in big, bold letters, "COCKS."

As I turn away to chuckle, I find a gorgeous golden retriever behind me. I pet him and talk to the man sitting next to me, a charming English fellow who introduces me to Bonnie, his (male) retriever. This highly cultured dog apparently has a taste for The Economist, licking its the pages of his owner's magazine (I offer the new issue in my backpack for seconds). We discuss briefly how there are two kinds of people in the world, those who like dogs and those who don't, and how there is no room in our lives for the latter, as they have something seriously wrong with their priorities.

At that point, I realize that I am overwhelmingly happy, and that this is already the best day I've had in Hong Kong in probably two months. To memorialize it, my iPod soundtrack for the day. What do you mean, it looks like a mix album from The OC?

Patrick Park - "Life's a Song"
Peter Bjorn & John - "Young Folks"
South - "Paint the Silence"
Eberg - "Inside Your Head"
Death Cab for Cutie - "Blacking Out the Friction"
Electric President - "Metal Fingers"
Feist - "I Feel It All"
Delirium feat. Sarah McLachlan - "Silence"
Incubus - "Dig"
Postal Service - "Sleeping In"

As my friend Daniel just noted, Brunch Club is good food, good prices, nice environment, and slightly slow (let's call it "relaxed") service. And they keep my water glass full for hours, without being asked. In other words, it is Los Angeles. No wonder I love it so.

To close, I have resolved (in consultation with Ben, proprietor of the tragically defunct Hot Girls and Explosions) that I will now blame global warming for everything. "Pacific Ocean is getting super cold, making it hard to surf." Global warming is melting polar ice into the oceans! "Man my breath is terrible." Fucking global warming! "These boxers are riding all up on my junk." DAMN YOU, CARBON EMISSIONS!

Simple solutions to simple problems

2007-11-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

Second to last bathroom stall. Third shower stall from left. Sink on opposite site of divider. Salsa dancing in North Point instead of clubbing in Lan Kwai Fong. Little things, but cumulatively, it helps a bit.

See previous post for context.

It's all been done

2007-11-16T01:56:00.000-08:00

I was preparing to write a post about how I've been in a more-or-less perpetual state of deja vu for about 6 days now, from last Friday night to the present. But as I've thought about it more, deja vu really isn't the right way to describe what's going on. Deja vu implies some kind of irrationality...inherent in deja vu, to me, is the impossibility of having been in a specific situation before. Or at the very least, an inability to trace the precise source of a feeling.

That's a sensation I know well. I've always found that I'm unusually prone to deja vu. It's not uncommon for me to get that feeling multiple times a week, and often times, very intensely. Sometimes, the sensation of having deja vu is part of the deja vu itself. That is, it feels as though I've been in a situation feeling as though I've been in that situation before. But normally, it's all very short-term. It's usually keyed very closely to some part of the environment - a certain smell, a certain song - and, as that passes, so too does the feeling.

What I've been going through, though, is something different. It's the reliving of real experience. It is tangible, identifiable. Every one of these feelings I can trace back to some other I've already had. An incomplete list of moments:

After-dinner drinks with someone I've barely met. Hanging out lazily at someone's apartment. An asinine argument about running late with my stressed-out parents on the morning of the wedding, with my mother passive-aggressively complaining to my father about what a horrible person I am, knowing that I hear it, intending that I hear it. Helping my sister's soon-to-be-husband put on his tuxedo in an isn't-it-weird-how-we're-all-so-calm environment. Driving my sister to the wedding while she had her one and only butterfly. Dancing with a grandma at the wedding. Dancing with someone's cousin at the wedding. A vaguely hung-over brunch the next day. Listening to my dad tell stories about me to my new brother-in-law's step-dad. Every moment of the flight to Hong Kong. That bit of turbulence right after the descent starts. Glaring at a flight attendant behind her back when she makes me bring my seat back to the upright position for landing. Leaving my iPod on as a minor act of rebellion. Being just slightly hunched over as I stand in my row, waiting to exit. Shuffle shuffle shuffle through the airport. Second bathroom stall from the entrance. First shower stall on the left. Furthest sink on the right. Lather rinse repeat.

None of these is remarkable on their own. But I'm just letting my neurotic tendencies run wild lately. My tendency to compare every present experience to a past one has gotten out of hand, to the point where everything I'm doing seems done, and therefore totally unworthwhile. Routine, which is normally comforting and pleasant, is becoming stifling. Then there's the legitimate moments of deja vu throwing me out of sorts to boot. The total effect is one of complete, uncompromising futility. Which is a really horrid feeling to carry you through the day.

Say hi to the newest blog tag, "Cheer Up Emo Kid." I hope to use it sparingly.

Emergency

2007-11-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

I realized yesterday that I haven't gotten a new album since I got to Hong Kong. I suspect this has something to do with my ever-increasing stir craziness.

Help! Suggestions! Samples! Help!

Updates and observations

2007-11-15T02:45:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling very stream-of-consciousness. Here's a series of updates, observations, and thoughts from the last few days, in various levels of detail and coherence. I'll try to put them into vague categories so that things make some level of collective sense.

Visiting Home

- There is no worse immigration process than that involved with entering the United States. I am convinced that we have created criminals simply by treating people like we assume they are. I apologize to every foreigner that has ever had to deal with an American immigration official.

- The goal was to go home to California and come back with two things I didn't have before, a brother-in-law and a commitment to one job. Mission accomplished.

- God, I love California. I love Los Angeles. I know this, and it it is a constant source of joy and comfort.

- My sister's wedding was lovely, thank you for asking. Without exaggerating, it was just the best wedding I've ever been to. She's been planning it actively for over a year, passively since she was 7 years old, and if she was happy, then everyone should be happy. The wedding singer was a former Russian pop star who was the frontwoman of a popular band from Azerbaijan during the Soviet years. Then she moved to the United States and married some guy who my parents say was the Incredible Hulk, but apparently not Bill Bixby or Lou Ferrigno. Kinda cool.

- Best evidence that the wedding was a success: when it was time to do the bouquet and garter toss, my sister looked around, decided that the party was going too well to interrupt with more ceremony, and passed on it.

- I'd been low-level stressing for about a week about my impending wedding toast. I didn't write it on the plane, thought about it throughout my time in LA, and never committed anything to paper until the morning of the wedding. I was called to the stage by the wedding singer with no warning, but just seconds before it happened, I had pulled the printed-out speech out of my jacket pocket and looked at it skeptically. On my way up to the stage, I balled up the paper, banished it to my pocket, and talked off the cuff, using some of the material I had already come up with but reordering everything and mostly improvising. Nevertheless, the speech was well-received, with all of the laughs and "aww"s coming in at all the right times. When I got back to my seat, my already-drunk friend leaned over and said, "Now that is a wedding speech that gets a man laid." Not sure who he was suggesting help with that, but it was a nice sentiment.

- You know, I actually just like weddings. If you like free alcohol and dancing with every woman you see, what's not to like about weddings? Under the right circumstances, even the guy throwing up in the bathroom is charming!

Life

- For the first time in my (generally pretty successful) life, I made a final decision between two options and was immediately confronted with a screaming gut check feeling that I was making a colossal mistake and that, in one to two years, when I was fixing that mistake, I would look back on that moment and think, "I knew." I'm still seeing it through...doing something contrary to what I would normally do was part of the whole point. But damn.

- Odd experience: within an 18-hour period, being told by my father and by a law firm partner with whom I'll be working closely that they're impressed with how well I hold my alcohol. These were in reference to two separate drinking sessions.

- I've basically been in an extended state of deja vu since, oh, last Friday night. I think I will explore this more fully in another post.

- I am forcing myself to memorize the following stanza of poetry and recite it to women as an act of seduction: He bore her away in his arms, / The handsomest young man there, / And his neck and his breast and his arms / Were drowned in her long dim hair. - W.B. Yeats, "The Host of the Air."

Thoughts While Traveling Back to Hong Kong

- Esquire magazine is basically Maxim for guys who think that a joke about boobies is funnier than the word "boobies" itself.

- I am a better writer than the people who write for Esquire (I am looking at you, Tom Chiarella). I am a worse writer than the people who write for the New Yorker. I think that this is an appropriate intellectual balance for the world.

- To buy the New Yorker as an income-less 23-year-old is a willful act of pretension.

- Flying business class has severely damaged by ability to happily fly coach. Luckily, I'm cheaper than I am dainty.

- I've always wanted to be that guy who talked to strangers sitting next to him on airplanes, but for that to happen, I need to start sitting next to people who either look interesting or attractive. I've tried a few times now...my flight to LA worked out alright toward the end, though the guy and I were both sleeping through most of the flight. But I've just never found an airplane neighbor that could command my attention for more than 10 minutes.

- Looking at Hong Kong, at night, from a plane flying overhead, is oddly fascinating. The different parts of the city are so distinctive...you can really pick out every feature, every landmark building, every neighborhood. Playing the "I live there" game is incredibly easy. You can see the way that the city shares space with the uninhabitable wooded hills of Hong Kong Island. You can trace the class distribution across the island so clearly.

There's no place like it

2007-11-07T03:31:00.000-08:00

I depart now on a sorely-needed 5-day trip home to California, where I will attend my sister's wedding (after writing my toast on the plane), sort out my firm situation once and for all, and recharge my severely-drained batteries for the stretch run. Note that I will be departing from Hong Kong at 11:40 pm on Wednesday night, and arriving in Los Angeles at 8:30 pm on that same Wednesday night. Wacky.

A picture I took of my home beach in August 2006:

Crisis averted by vanity

2007-11-07T02:27:00.001-08:00

So I'm preparing for my trip back to the U.S. tonight when I realize I can't find my passport. I always keep it one of three places here: in my top desk drawer, in a certain concealed pocket of my backpack, or in my pocket. Always one of those three places, and it wasn't in any of them.

So I start thinking. When was the last time I used my passport? Easy! Macau.

And what was I wearing? Equally easy! Pink shirt, matching tie, gray slacks.

So I pull out the gray slacks - which have already been packed into my suitcase - and sure enough, in the still-buttoned back pocket, there's my passport.

Crisis averted just by being so vain that I remember exactly what I wore on a given day, because I had picked the outfit specifically for the occasion.

The Basin Theory on Perceived Social Prosperity

2007-11-07T01:48:00.000-08:00

I'm developing a theory that the apparent prosperity of a society is an inverse function of the visibility of clothing drying in public. In short, the widespread proliferation of dryers seems to be the hallmark of a truly prosperous society.

I am not yet sure if and how to reconcile this with the Toilet Paper Theory of Society, which holds that the prosperity of a society is directly proportional to the quality of toilet paper it uses. In Ecuador, for example, the currency was so devalued at one point that it was literally cheaper to wipe one's ass with the money than it was to buy actual TP. But the viability of that theory has been called into question by my trip to China, where three-ply toilet paper abounds.

Also worth noting is an observation that I am certainly not unique in having made, but stand by wholeheartedly: as you travel the world, rich is the same wherever you go. What defines a place more is, how poor is poor?

Definitely not hot

2007-11-07T00:35:00.000-08:00

The last two and a half months have proven to be the most absurdly illness-and-injury-prone period of my life. I started with an ignominiously-sustained sprained ankle. While that was healing, I added an infected mosquito bite. Next was a two-way stomach ailment that I mercifully spared you all any detailed discussion of. More recent has been my bout of bronchitis. And now you may add to the list a scratched cornea.

Like the ankle sprain before it, this injury was sustained in as moronic and unglamorous a fashion as possible. Was I, as Ben suggested, struck in the eye by a stripper's pasties in Macau? Unfortunately, no (I don't even think they have strippers in Macau, party town that it is). Was I masturbating furiously, as Marie postulated, when my hand flew off and poked me in the eye? Thankfully, no. Was I chewing on a straw when I pushed it against my teeth, bent it, and poked myself directly in the eye with the bent point of the straw? Tragically, yes.

My first reaction was a totally reasonable one, I think: a solid 3 minutes of pounding on my cabinet and shouting obscenities into a towel.

Then came a 15-minute phase when I feebly attempted to do something responsible, creating quite a mess while fumbling aimlessly for gauze left over from the mosquito bite surgery, 800-mg ibuprofen (my beloved "man-uprofen"), and single-dose saline solution droppers I conveniently acquired the day before my trip. My effectiveness was hampered severely by the fact that even opening my good eye caused horrendous pain in the injured eye (still better than trying to open the bad eye, which generated stomach-turning volumes of pain).

I re-purposed the blindfold from my overnight Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong into an eye-patch, and then moved into phase 3: 30 minutes of slouching in my desk chair in self-pity. This phase included a darkly funny phone call to my parents inquiring as to the availability of eye-patches, consuming an embarrassing volume of not-quite-as-good-as-I-wished-it-was dark chocolate, and contemplating what my sister's wedding pictures would look like with me appearing as a tuxedoed pirate (as Marie noted, "actually sort of awesome, in a not-happening-to-me way").

Realizing that even trying to look at my computer screen with the good eye was making things immeasurably worse, I moved into the fourth and final phase of the evening: an hour and a half of laying in my bed with the lights off and the blindfold covering both eyes, listening to incredibly masculine Coldplay music on my iPod, worrying about packing for my trip to the United States in less than 24 hours, and tossing and turning in pain-and-caffeine-induced insomnia (not to be confused with the regular ol' insomnia that has been haunting me for much of the last 2 weeks). This phase was also dominated by the incredibly strong and completely unfulfillable desire to be hugged.

I awoke this morning to discover that my eye was capable of opening, but only half-way, giving me a decidedly Paris Hilton-like appearance. It occurred to me that this was actually worse than going around as a pirate. At this point, I'm up to about three-quarter eye openage, and it seems that my eye will be okay, although I will probably have gained about 4 pounds from that not-really-worth-it chocolate binge. I leave you with a nice email I received from Marie this morning: