the daily snivel

  Am I still a loser if I win?

It's 1:00 am on the last Saturday morning of "Spring Break" here at the University of Ottawa, and I am stuck alone inside the Community Legal Clinic working on my upcoming trial. I'm such a loser. Across the street, in view of my office window, is the Royal Oak, one of Ottawa's (and Laurier Avenue's) many pubs. I can hear loud university students whooping it up and engaging in all manner of drunken merriment, no doubt before stumbling home to have themselves some dry, fuzzy, drunk people sex.

And I'm still looking up case law.

My trial is in just over a week. It may or may not even happen on the 9th, because the Crown hasn't yet produced "disclosure" (of its evidence against my client), and among the many possible strategies we're preparing is seeking an adjournment. But I'm going to be ready. And whatever happens, I'm going to win.

Am I still a loser if I win?

Incidentally, since we're on the topic of me not wanting to be a loser anymore, I went to the gym with a colleague at the Clinic for the second time this week. My project for the year is to put on some more muscle and lose some of the other stuff. For me, the hardest part about going to a gym was just familiarizing myself. I hate jumping into something without knowing as much as possible what to do. I feel awkward and so much like an outsider that I just want to run screaming away. Gyms in particular are so full of super fit people who know exactly what they're doing that I find them very intimidating, and prefer to exercise outdoors on my bicycle, which I'm far more adept at.

Anyway, I've now overcome the mental obstacle of actually entering the gym and getting to know all the equipment and what to do with it. I've also taken the plunge and desensitized myself to the to the sweaty, cologne-infused, dangling-penis "Hey-look-at-me-I'm-walking-around-naked" man-fest that is a gym changing room. Not counting that weird, curious, uncertain adolescent period (ahem), I've never felt more stubbornly heterosexual than I do now when I look at so very many naked, naked men.

But aside from that, I'm now well acquainted with a variety of exercises, and discovered I can bench the modest but encouraging mass of 120 pounds with enough comfort to do a full set and several reps (I can certainly lift more than that, but it's the repeating that's hard). I can run on a treadmill for fifteen minutes straight without wanting to die, and I can use the stationary bikes infinitely longer (because it's what I do outdoors each and every day when the weather's less frosty).

They'll have to love me when I'm beautiful, right? 

 

I was pleasantly surprised to find that all my grades had finally been posted today.

Evidence Law -- B+

Selected Issues in Feminist Law -- A-

Taxx Law^* -- A-

I feel these are quite excellent law school grades, especially as I'm also juggling my casework in the legal clinic (which I don't have a grade for becausae it's a pass/fail course), and a part-time job. I hope I can keep this kind of achievement up in my winter term classes (advanced criminal procedure, family law, and constititional law II).

* -- the extra 'x' in Taxx law added as a tribute to the excellent Beck song, Sexx Laws.
 

 

Although it is reading week at the University of Ottawa (in other words, and despite this being January, it is our "Spring Break"), I am quite ridiculously busy these days as I am generally huddled in the attic of the legal clinic preparing for my first trial. It's coming up on February 9, and I'm terribly excited (and nervous) about it. Now, I think the law is on my side. Surprisingly, I also think the facts are on my side (which should conjure up a recollection of the old law chestnut that the other side -- the Crown -- must be pounding on the table). In the process of all my legal research, I got to do some sleuthing around -- essentially, I got to make a phone call or two in my incognito capacity as a Member of The Public^TM to find out where property lines for the scene of an incident really lie, and thus undermine the argument that the security guards who arrested my client had the authority to do so. I'm warmed by the fact that I can do something positive for my client, and hopefully contribute to the message that there really are people -- law students though they may be -- who care about legal rights and making sure that people who belong to disadvantaged groups aren't being unduly targeted by aggressive security guards. Today's security guards are tomorrow's police officers, and while neither has an easy job, it's my job to make sure that those to whom we entrust our safety (and orderly shopping experiences and teenager-free food courts) truly respect the law.

Still, it's nice to take a break from the many hours of research and put in some time at the Canadian Breast Cancer Network. A friend of my sister remarked (over pints) yesterday that she'd decoded the male thought process, and it basically read like this: "Boobies! I like boobies!" Which I suppose isn't so far from the truth. Still, my job puts me in an environment where there are literally breasts everywhere. There are pictures of breasts on the walls. Our breast-awareness-raising office calendars feature a big, tasteful photograph of someone's breasts each month of the year. I use the word "breasts" in polite office conversation. I read articles about breasts. I read websites about breasts (no, not those websites). Everything we do is all about breasts. So in some sense a little of the boobie magic has probably worn off for me. In any event, I love my job. It's fun, it's in a pleasant environment, they pay me to be there, and there's absolutely no homework.

Tonight my job was to engage in some troubleshooting. First of all, we just bought a couple of laser printers since they were on sale for an insanely good price (about $199 Canadian), and have been gradually installing them throughout the office. Unfortunately, the laser printer destined for our accountant has been up to no good since it was first plugged in, and refused to print more than a flimsy test page despite the best efforts of a lot of people who know a lot about a lot of things. Secondly, we've been trying to reprogram our collection of Nortel Norstar programmable phones, which has produced only a calamity of follies that I now understand has been cleverly engineered into such phone systems so as to insure a long and profitable line of service visits. Naturally, I was drafted, on the assumption that anyone as single as me must be good with computers -- [pause for laughter at my expense].

Still, I like solving problems. I tend to think of stubborn technical and conceptual problems as a personal mission -- a quest, if you will. So, I spent half an hour on the printer, and five hours on the phones. The former is now printing perfectly. The latter nearly killed me. In the end, I worked out that an old mailbox, which was hidden from the phones' internal company directory by a past administrator, still had an extension assigned to it that conflicted with the mailbox of that extension's current owner. It meant that you couldn't access her name from the company directory when you called in, and you couldn't transfer calls from the front desk. But since the mailbox was named by the admin technician who originally installed the phones, its name and very existence was impossible to guess, and since it was hidden, it was invisible from the directory. After hours of trial and error, I figured out that some assigning of extensions was conflicting with transferring the call to the mailbox properly, because I could delete the mailbox and still transfer calls to the assigned phone. I ultimately came across a fleeting reference to box 100 in a list of the assigned extensions in a "flash programming record" left behind with our phones' documentation, and worked out the conflict. I know, this is dull, technical, and ponderous (and in no way makes the world a better place to live), but I still felt like freaking MacGuyver when I finally figured it all out.

Rob Fairchld: solver of problems and friend of breasts.