feeling not so (law) firm

Day one of the penguin extravaganza, 400 25 year-olds wearing well-tempered black suits with stiff shoulders, each one with some leathery folder and a tin of complimentary Schulte Roth LLP mints in hand. I would trade it all for one 425 year-old wearing a leathery tin of penguin mints. I've only done three interviews and I've exhausted my capacity for entertaining myself by horrifying my classmates with inappropriate jokes about the banality of our evil; the one about cyanide pills in the tin of mints got a startled polite chuckle from a new, similarly-dressed acquaintance whose name is either Annie, Katie, Sarah, Jessica, Prathak, Jamie, or Funes the Memorious - it's hard to keep track of them all when you go into a room to have the same conversation a couple times every day (Q: How do I like law school? A1: Oh, it's really fantastic and intellectually stimulating! A2: I hunger for its touch; when I tup I close my eyes and think of Vanderbilt Hall) only to emerge into the holding pen to delicately nibble at cantaloupe and rehearse the same conversation with one's classmates! Or maybe it's honeydew - I was corrected today by a friend for calling one the other, a great source of continuing shame in my life.

I've been riding elevators up and down D'Agostino Hall. Squeezing into them with 2500 pounds, the maximum allotment, of law student at a time. One guy made the following joke: "Hey, this is like when you get on a subway at the beginning of a long ride, and there's no place to sit down!" It was not an observation, but an attempt at a joke, which qualifies him as the world's most boring person, though perhaps superceded by his female companion, who giggled erratically at a high pitch; perhaps to flirt, but also perhaps because she found him genuinely funny, which is an infinitely more alarming prospect. While these jokes and flirtations were being exchanged, I noted the recently shorn perfect hairline of the 6'4" man with a tight end's built standing with the back of his nice wool suit pressed into my nose, and reminded myself to pray to Jesus to resurrect me like Lazarus following my soon-to-come several-years infirmity. I think my personhood can survive the next three or four years, so long as I continue to imagine that underneath their suits everybody has the texture and appearance of a formless uncooked Italian sausage.

Whew! I think I'm going about this interviewing thing the right way...mincing my words of derision on my very public blog, for example, which is linked to from my very public Friendster profile. I have fifteen more minutes to continue my "firm research," which thus far has consisted of blogging and Gmail chatting friends in Nairobi about renting a house over the winter in western Massachusetts. Just as I think it's idiotic that these poor interviewers should have to feign interest in the procession of preservative-laden cookies who regurgitate OCS lines at perfect pitch, I think it's stupid that I should spend any more time on something that is virtually guaranteed to me, she says, measuring the impressive length of her penis, and that I feel so ambivalently about. Harumph.