Here's a piece of unsolicited and thus free legal advice: if it is at all within your power, stay the hell away from lawsuits, lawyers, courts... you get the drift. Because even if you successfully avert the pitfalls of a meritless case, an incompetent lawyer, a bill twice your monthly income, your hope of vindication may nevertheless be crushed beneath the heels of some senile, half-asleep, good ol' boy who you must address as "your honor."
I'm at the half-way point of a two-week trial, which would have been a fun (albeit exhausting) experience but for the fact that the judge is whack. He nods off but wakes just long enough to assist the other side with cutting our gnads off. Dude, are you the judge or a lawyer for the other party? Figure it out.
The more seasoned attorneys who I work with manage to stay calm (or at least look it) and persist in articulate and reasoned advocacy. It's all I can do to keep myself from screaming "SUCK ON IT!" while flipping the old dude off. The only thing separating him from my wrath is a thin, black, polyester robe that empowers him to throw me in jail for contempt. Oh, to have the powers of Carrie, to fling him against the wall with my bulging, sleep-deprived eyes!
TV lawyering is like a young, passionate couple. When things are good, they're really good; even when things are bad, the makeup sex is really good. Real life lawyering is like an old, embittered couple. You sneer and snap because that's all you can do; you're already in it too deep, for too long to get out. The only thing that keeps you going is the promise of "til death do us part."
13 October 2006
05 October 2006
Esquire 1; Glamour 0
My dad is a magazine-aholic. He can't seem to turn down "special offers" for magazines at "50%!" off the cover price. At last count, he has subscriptions to 7 magazines: Time, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek and Esquire. Plus the Sunday Times. It's not like he's shooting up or anything. It's just that neither of my parents really read English. That's why they get the Chinese newspaper everyday.
According to him, the subscriptions are justified because: (1) they're only __ cents an issue!; and (2) they're really for me. At the end of every visit, my parents pack me a big ol' pile of food and a big ol' stack of magazines.
The most recent addition to the collection is Esquire, which I've been reading through this week. I gotta say, it's a good rag. It's so... wonderfully and refreshingly different from magazines directed at women or at a mixed audience. Virtually everybody is fully clothed - the fashion section, the feature stories, even the ads. ("Virtually" excludes women, of course; the women featured are practically naked and usually in naughty poses.) The clothes featured are things I actually see people wear in public: shirts, suits, pants. No feather boas or puffy sleeves or mini kilts that would get any non-circus employee some serious reprimand. The writing is acerbic, unsentimental, crisp. Four-letter words are casually used and spelled out in full: shit is not crap and fuck is not f**k.
Now don't get me wrong. I love women's magazines. I subscribe to women's magazines. (Ok, fine. I subscribe to one.) But I've never really read men's magazines before. Sure, I'll pick up GQ if Clive Owen is on the cover; but when I do, I get in and get out. Reading Esquire the way I read Glamour was very eye-opening. They're like (or unlike) network and cable television. For all their rah-rah, woman-power hoo-ha, women's magazine treat women like little girls. Coddling our insecurities, encouraging us to obsess about the wrong things, talking down to us by censoring rough language. No wonder male attorneys still apologize to me when they curse in meetings - hell, my own magazines do it! WTF? I mean, what the fucking fuck?!
I'm not going to go all Al Bundy or anything. But I'm definitely going to get some mileage out of my dad's subscription and rethink my own. If anything, I certainly prefer a magazine full of good-looking, sharply-dressed men over one full of anorexic, bizarrely-clad women, even if, every once in a while, I indulge in the lie that men really do prefer women with big thighs and frizzy hair.
According to him, the subscriptions are justified because: (1) they're only __ cents an issue!; and (2) they're really for me. At the end of every visit, my parents pack me a big ol' pile of food and a big ol' stack of magazines.
The most recent addition to the collection is Esquire, which I've been reading through this week. I gotta say, it's a good rag. It's so... wonderfully and refreshingly different from magazines directed at women or at a mixed audience. Virtually everybody is fully clothed - the fashion section, the feature stories, even the ads. ("Virtually" excludes women, of course; the women featured are practically naked and usually in naughty poses.) The clothes featured are things I actually see people wear in public: shirts, suits, pants. No feather boas or puffy sleeves or mini kilts that would get any non-circus employee some serious reprimand. The writing is acerbic, unsentimental, crisp. Four-letter words are casually used and spelled out in full: shit is not crap and fuck is not f**k.
Now don't get me wrong. I love women's magazines. I subscribe to women's magazines. (Ok, fine. I subscribe to one.) But I've never really read men's magazines before. Sure, I'll pick up GQ if Clive Owen is on the cover; but when I do, I get in and get out. Reading Esquire the way I read Glamour was very eye-opening. They're like (or unlike) network and cable television. For all their rah-rah, woman-power hoo-ha, women's magazine treat women like little girls. Coddling our insecurities, encouraging us to obsess about the wrong things, talking down to us by censoring rough language. No wonder male attorneys still apologize to me when they curse in meetings - hell, my own magazines do it! WTF? I mean, what the fucking fuck?!
I'm not going to go all Al Bundy or anything. But I'm definitely going to get some mileage out of my dad's subscription and rethink my own. If anything, I certainly prefer a magazine full of good-looking, sharply-dressed men over one full of anorexic, bizarrely-clad women, even if, every once in a while, I indulge in the lie that men really do prefer women with big thighs and frizzy hair.
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