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November 2009
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November 21st, 2009

Why I rock pink

I don’t understand the point of these University of Minnesota crime alerts. The theme seems to be: “Young-ish black men wearing dark clothes mugged someone. Watchout.”

I’m sure the police are frustrated when the only description they get is “I dunno. It was a black dude. Youngish… dark clothes.” – but passing that unhelpful description on to the student body probably sends one message: “If you see a young black male: be very afraid!”

This is why I rock pink.

Here’s today’s crime alert:

On Thursday, November 19 at approximately 6:30 p.m., a 21-year-old University of Minnesota student was the victim of an armed robbery near Marcy Park, off campus in the Dinkytown neighborhood.

The victim was at the intersection of 7th Street SE and 11th Avenue SE when he was approached by two males. One of the suspects pointed a silver handgun at the victim and ordered him to the ground. While the victim was on the ground, the suspects took his backpack and ran south-bound from 7th Avenue SE in between 10th and 11th Avenue SE. The victim was not injured.

The first suspect is described as a black male between 20 and 30 years of age, approximately six feet, two inches tall with a medium build. The suspect was wearing a baggy black hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and black baggy jeans. The suspect held the sliver handgun in his left hand.

The second suspect is described as a black male between 20 and 30 years of age, approximately five feet, eight inches tall with a medium build. The suspect wore glasses and had short black curly hair, and was wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt and dark pants.

Continue reading Why I rock pink

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November 20th, 2009

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Every time I see the towers of downtown’s Westminster Presbyterian Church, I imagine a giant toddler meandering down the street and hole punching those shapes into the top of the towers.

westminster presbyterian church

Here are some pictures. The thumbnails are linked to larger images.


RSS/Facebook readers: click here if you cannot see the gallery above.

See also:

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November 20th, 2009

Smile for me

I’m trying to teach Harley to smile for the camera. It is obviously not working.

bullmastiff

bullmastiff

bullmastiff

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November 19th, 2009

Shitshow

I was at work when I decided to check my email. It was 1:30pm, and the plan was to work until 6pm and then go home to prep for tomorrow’s oral argument.

I had about six hours of prep time scheduled for tomorrow, but I figured a few more hours tonight couldn’t hurt.1

Thank god I decided to check my email, because I saw an email from my moot court instructor reminding me that my oral argument is TODAY AT 4PM!

Almost shat myself. My weeks are planned to the second, and this entire week’s schedule was built around the (mistaken) assumption that the argument was Friday at 4pm. I must have entered the oral argument date incorrectly three weeks ago and (mis)planned according! Everything was ripe with fail.

I shut down my computer, raced to my car, and started practicing my opening statements on the speed drive home.

I slapped on my suit and then bolted to school with an hour to spare before my argument. I didn’t bother bring my laptop to school because it doesn’t print to the school computers anymore. I would just print from the library computers. No problem right?

Wrong!

I went to the library’s fourth floor computer lab – full.
I went to the downstairs computer lab – full, of a class of LLMs or something…
I went back upstairs, and one of my awesome2 3L friends let me print from her computer.

I then went downstairs to one of the non-printing/public computers to do additional research, but the creepy unemployed man3 sitting next to me kept quizzing me on what I was looking up and extolling the virtues of LexisNexis (I was on Westlaw.)

The hobo started to lecture me on the evils of the criminal justice system so I skipped off to the-then abandoned school cafeteria to finish prepping. The cafe closes around 2pm, so there were only a few stray 1Ls, but no hobos…

20 minutes before the argument I had a weird feeling – I felt prepared!

I had EIGHT hours set aside to prep for this stupid oral argument and I felt PREPARED after a single hour! A single hour which was mostly spent running around like a headless chicken! I felt both empowered and hopelessly stupid at the same time, which is exactly how 2Ls are supposed to feel.

The argument went well, and the mistakes my instructor pointed out in his critique were not things that I would have avoided with more prep time. I’m fairly natural during oral arguments, but I have to be careful not to channel Nancy Grace.4

I left school around 5pm. I no longer had to spend all day Friday prepping for the oral argument, so I felt like I had an inordinate amount of time on my hands.

And now it’s almost 9pm, and I don’t know what just happened to the past four hours…hm.


1 I bought a new suit jacket before work because my old one had a bullet hole in it.
2 Awesome, life saving, super heroic…
3 Before you start cracking jokes this was NOT a law student but a random “might be homeless” dude.
4Which I sort of did when I pleaded with the court not to assist the Senators of Moot in perpetrating a betrayal of the taxpayer’s trust… my moot court instruct was all, “WOAAAAAAAH there skipper!” I wished at that moment that I had a power bob to toss…

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November 18th, 2009

Professor E silences the Beaver

The one thing I love about my Real Estate Law professor is her ability to control the classroom while keeping a smile on her face.

Yesterday, Eager Beaver, a boy who actively participates in class, was particularly eager to answer Professor E’s questions.

Towards the end of class, Jill was visibly annoyed by Beaver’s participation.

Professor E asked another question to the class. Beaver’s hand shot up. Jill muttered dark threats under her breath and was obviously considering how to make it look like an accident…

Professor E caught Jill’s look of sheer hatred, and then turned to Beaver and said, “You’ve been really good about participating today. How about we give someone else give a chance who hasn’t had the opportunity to speak yet? (then turns to the class) Who wants to speak?”


Other Professor E posts:

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November 17th, 2009

The bus I wasn’t officially on

I did not go to school yesterday morning. Instead, I took the dog around lake Calhoun and reexamined my reasons for being in law school.

Something wasn’t working and it was time to figure it out.

In hokey legal format, here are my findings of fact:

  1. My primary career goals since high school have involved my creative work.
  2. The purpose of college (now law school) was to satisfy my intellectual curiosity and to put something on my resume besides “starving artist, see portfolio.”
  3. Because I wanted to do “well” in college (and now law school) I’ve placed my creative work on the backburner for the past six years.
  4. The result is a constant, pervading sense of guilt and failure because I am not working towards primary goals and I am noncommittal to my “backup plan” because it is, well, a backup plan.1

I felt liberated. But before I could celebrate, the dog snapped me back to reality by dragging me six feet to chase a flock of geese. Chaos ensued. The geese were not amused.

To say that I am noncommittal to law school is unfair. I felt noncommittal because I carried this vague2 notion that in law school there is a top prize – one that I did not want to pursue because I knew it would be disastrous3 for me.

To say that law school is a backup plan is also unfair. This isn’t a situation of “if the creative stuff doesn’t work out I can become a lawyer.” The purpose of law school for me to satisfy my intellectual curiosity4 and make me eligible for a career that will support my creative work.5

Law school is meeting those expectations and this vague sense of dread about not doing what I don’t want to do anyway is counter-productive. I decided yesterday to dismount the hamster wheel and spent the first half of the day on creative work and went to the Walter library to study around 3pm.

The reading was much easier once I reminded myself why I was doing it.

After a few hours at the library I went onto facebook. I saw the name of a high school friend in the “upcoming birthdays” list. She was a year younger than me, had a crazy laugh, and was one of the few people from my high school that went to college.

I hadn’t spoken to Karen in a while, so I clicked on her profile. I was horrified when I saw that the posts her wall were all variations of “I miss you, rest in peace.” She died earlier this year. If there was anything to solidify my “life goals reaffirmation” kick, that was it.


1 So we have a self-sabotaging situation going on because (subconsciously) I feel like if I do too well in law school, that I would neglect my goals for three years just to end up in a 90-hour a week situation where I wouldn’t have time to do any creative work. Like Tim Ferris, I’m not interested in being the bitter fat man with Benz, or like the attorney who told us that she spent years in a miserable job just because “it was one of the many carrots that are dangled before you in law school.”
2…and completely ridiculous.
3 The mindset that there’s Skadden and then hippie-law. Nothing else.
4 Sort of like a finishing school. If I went out into the world with just by UMiami degree I would have felt grossly undereducated. If one learns nothing else in law school, it’s how to work hard.
5 …instead of extinguishing it. And it doesn’t matter if this means practicing at a small/med firm, legal research company, or managing a Starbucks.

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November 16th, 2009

Best Week Ever 11: Reboot

It feels like fall, it feels like finals.

The leaves lasted for (what feels like) two weeks. Some trees dropped their leaves immediately, whereas others went out in style:

fall leaves

That’s over now. Almost all of the trees are bare. The neighborhood feels both naked and urban because the buildings are no longer hidden by the trees.

The darkness is as glaring as the bare trees. It is pitch black by 5:30pm, so the evening commute feels like 30 days of night with potholes.

But I was warned. When I first came to law school the 2Ls warned me:

Scary 2L: “Finals are bleak. It will be dark when you go to school and dark when you come home.”

Insert a Dr. Evil cackle, and you have your typical doomsday-prophesizing 2L…coming to a cover of an Enquirer near you!

The darkness is why I spend as little time in the law school as possible. The classrooms are in the basement, so students who don’t make an effort to leave for lunch end up as pale as vampires.1

Besides avoiding vampires, my aim this coming week is to take better care of myself. The past few weeks were disastrous for my health – it’s as if I said, “Hey! Finals are coming up! How about I get as little sleep as possible, eat shitty food, stop working out, and then pump up the caffeine – surely they make caffeine IVs – and then I can have a nice Michael Moore chin to keep me warm and cushy for finals.”

Sexy.

The turkey is the only thing that needs to be festively plump this month.2 The marathon training begins in earnest tomorrow. Now excuse me while I get some of that much-needed sleep.


1 These are the same students who can be found hissing at whisperers in the library… I think they are trying to keep with the theme.
2 And the only thing that needs a turkey neck, mmkay?

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November 15th, 2009

Fall leaves in Minneapolis

Cliché but required. It’s not fall without pictures of the leaves:


RSS/Facebook readers: click here if you cannot see the gallery. The thumbnails link to larger files.

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November 14th, 2009

The body double

I returned to the bedroom to find that I had been replaced, but decided not to interrupt the lovefest:

bullmastiff

Continue reading The body double

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November 13th, 2009

Mayhem

Harley is a little sick – he has an upset stomach – so I knew that I had a problem when I returned from my job to an apartment that smelled like dog-McFlurry.

I let Harley out of his kennel and he was caked in it. Gross.

He shakes himself off and scampers to the kitchen, leaving a trial of shit prints all over the floor! I shout for him to stop so of course he RUNS TO MY BEDROOM AND JUMPS ON MY BED!

Violence ensued. But now I have a fierce pair of bullmastiff gloves and a scarf for winter!

I’m kidding. I only considered killing him.

I tackled this 100lb dog, tied him up in the bathtub, mopped and disinfected the floors, and threw my sheets in the wash.

Then Mr. Shit-prints got a bath:

bathing bullmastiff

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