Tuckdogg's Journal: Ahh...the power of INSOMNIA

As I sit here at 3:30 in the morning, I begin to reflect on the overwhelming power of insomnia. I shouldn't be awake right now. Hell, I shouldn't be functional at all. Last night, I fell asleep at...well, let me start over, because that sentence isn't going to be accurate. I fell asleep at 9:00am yesterday morning, woke up at 1:00pm. Four whole hours of sleep. Yet, here I sit wide awake, hammering away at the keyboard, listening to Counting Crows and waxing philosophic on Slashdot.

I've also noticed that I tend to become more productive when I can't sleep. Maybe I'm looking for something to keep my mind off of whatever it is that's keeping me up. But today I've been very productive in getting to things that I keep putting off forever. Like designing that web site for my school that I've been telling them since September that I'd do.

Since I don't have anything particularly enlightening to offer further, I think I'm just gonna throw out some random thoughts/frustrations/whatever to close out the journal.

1. Law School
Five semesters into law school and I've come to the realization that studying and knowledge are completely irrelevant to passing your classes. Don't get me wrong, I get by, but my grades just aren't reflective of what I actually know. For someone (like myself) who doesn't normally give a shit what his grades are, this shouldn't bother me, even though it really grates the hell out of me. That, of course, annoys me even more.

When I was an undergrad, I got my share of C's. Even a couple of D's, and one class that I should have failed outright but managed to squeak by with a D-. They never really bothered me because, for the most part, they were in classes that I didn't care about anyway. I'm not really interested in Calculus, Accounting, or any of the other pointless classes I refused to care about. So when that report card came back with a substandard (by my standards) grade, it didn't bug me. At least then I got the low grade because I didn't care enough to try to learn it.

It's just not the same anymore. I love the law. Like Mozart loved his piano and the morons in my fraternity loved racking up rape charges, I absolutely love the law. I read random court opinions in my spare time, keep abreast of legal issues that have nothing to do with my classes, and other wholly nerdly things that force my wife to constantly roll her eyes at me. So when I take a class that interests me, I find it slightly annoying to get my grades and discover a low B or a C on the chart.

It would be one thing if I struggled in the classes. I don't. I usually walk out of the class knowing twice what anyone else in there ever could dream of (yes, I am that arrogant. :) ). I can still recall arcane and obscure doctrines from Contracts and Constitutional law from my first year, but I didn't get the high grades in those classes. Don't get me started on the C I was handed in First Amendment. Not "earned", but "was handed." This for the person who served the school at the Vanderbilt First Amendment Advocacy competition last year, coached three 3L's through competitons involving the First Amendment, and donated my time to help other competition teams craft First Amendment arguments.

I don't just get low grades, though. I'll walk into other classes and ace them with minimal effort. Usually, I take the finals and think I did poorly. Then the grades come back and I'll have an A. Grades are so utterly subjective here (and, I suspect, in every other law school) that it baffles me why firms and judges put so much stock in them. No, I'm not bitter that I can't find a job, why do you ask?

2. Iraq
Okay, George, let me break it down real simple like. I'll try to avoid multi-syllabic words because I don't want to induce another pretzel incident when I put you to sleep.

We have precisely zero reasons for going into Iraq with the war machine. Well, let's be fair, you think you have one very good reason, but personally I don't count oil as a good reason to send other people's children to die. You don't have a single bit of intelligence that says Iraq has bio/chem weapons. I know this for one simple reason: You, Don Juan Rumsfeld and John Boy won't show anybody what you supposedly have.

How many times since 9/11 have we heard that the U.S. has "irrefutable" evidence of banned weapons in Iraq? How many times has the U.S. then failed to produce any of this evidence, either to the public or to the rest of the world at large? Is this how you're going to prove the case against all those "enemy combatants" your administration is holding (or isn't holding, we can't really be sure since you won't tell us anything about them or even if they're being held)? "Well, your Honor, we have tons of evidence that he did it. But we're not going to show it to you. Just trust us. Can we have our guilty verdict now?"

All of this "evidence" is meaningless if nobody else can see it. It's time to put up or shut up. If you've actually got something, let's see it. A few satellite photos showing that the Iraqi's are building a few buildings doesn't cut it. I want something solid. Something concrete. Something we can't deny. You know, something like the UN weapons inspectors might be able to turn up if they're actually allowed to do their job. Until you've got that, please return to your award winning domestic policies that have successfully squandered the massive surplus that Clinton gave you and returned our economy to the vast shithole your Daddy and Reagan were kind enough to give us twelve years of.