Law School on the Municipal Dime

September 5, 2008 in How to Get a Job, Personal Reflection
Tags: best, building, burnout, company, connections, degree, easy, famed, fired, for, frugal, highly, infamous, job, kentucky, law, male, network, offender, on, pay, paying, photography, presidency, programs, qualified, satisfied, school, sex, single, sometimes, states, student, study, sweet, taxpayers, tenure, track, union, united, way, work

I’m seriously considering law school. Not because I want to become a lawyer — Ambrose Pierce defined a lawyer as one skilled in the circumvention of the law, and I’d like to keep my soul intact — but more because I find fascinating the balance between tedious paperwork and long-winded decisions founded on purely hypothetical arguments. In other words, I’d like getting a law degree because I’d like the process.

At first, I wasn’t sure how I’m going to pay for it. Student loans are a racket, especially for law school, and the local law school doesn’t have much in the way of scholarships and grants. There are 83 units; each costs $750; the costs continue to increase every year.

Then it hit me: Teach.

Teaching is perfect for some future law student eyeing the five-year law program at the local school. The best part speaks for itself: teaching brings automatic pay raises typically after every 15 graduate units, typically up to a maximum of 60 units or higher. Further reasoning follows:

After just two years, when a teacher gets established and gets a routine going in the classroom, there needn’t be very much prep time spent outside the normal work day. After the same, concurrent two years of at least adequate service, that same teacher becomes tenured — you’d have to have sex with a student to get fired after that, and sometimes not even then.

After tenure and routine set in, more time is available in the weeknights and summers for law classes from that special five-year program. Even before tenure, all summers are wide open for the sake of teaching or taking summer school and, after taking these few units, teachers get yet another automatic pay raise. It’s a lucrative cycle for a young, frugal, single male with custody of zero children. The pay raises won’t completely cover law school, but they’ll make a sizeable dent.

I’m set to snag a position as soon as I’d want, mostly because my school photography company sends me to schools four days a week. On its dime, I can very easily start making connections throughout the better part of three counties, spreading the word with a well-placed business card — one highly qualified social science intern is all too ready for hire.

It’ll be hit and miss, mostly miss. I don’t mind — I need just one hit, one home run, and I’m perfectly satisfied to stick around my company until I make that fluke. Then, I’m set to re-enter the preliminary stage of a profession famed for militant unions and infamous for high burnout.

And why not? I’m not all that tired of teaching. After a year of training in front of a classroom and just as long theoretically learning about teaching as a credential student, I had only just begun to start. I would have continued it, too, if it hadn’t been for my meddling hubris.

I have all the time I need, and I’m in just the right position to make just the right move. My CSET scores are still good for a few more years, and, chances are, my existing units will more-or-less transfer. From here, it’s a matter of timing.

If nothing else, yet one more route to fame, fortune and the presidency of these United States just uncovered itself. Sweet.

After Veeps, I’m Left With a Coin Toss

September 1, 2008 in Reading Response
Tags: 2008, amateur, barack, best, biden, bipartisan, chicago, coin, decades, egotist, evenly, genuine, good, joe, john, matched, mccain, obama, plagiarist, presidential, Senate, sugarcoat, tickey, toss, uncommonly

American non-felons of legal voting age have two uncommonly good tickets to choose from come the Tuesday following this November’s first Monday.

I can distinguish our two nominees apart, for sure — I simply have trouble choosing between two equally if not eminently qualified individuals. Since May, I knew that it was going to come down to their vice presidential pick and, if it didn’t help, a coin toss.

Barack Obama talks real good, however vague he is about it; John McCain ain’t no slouch on thinking for himself, however laughably wooden is his public speaking. Both have proven qualities, and for both, their faults have been speculated about time and again.

Both claim bipartisan credentials and, for what it’s worth, each has a richly mixed background. The negative impact of Obama’s necessary dealings in Chicago politics is undermined by his “son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas” line, and that McCain is a war hero and Republican-in-name-only to boot negates the effect of his multiple houses, houses he can only afford, by the way, because of his second wife.

So what if each is an egotist with a bit of temper, tempered as it is for the camera? So what if each side accuses the press of being favorable toward the other? Both genuinely want — seem to want? — to fix all of America’s problems. Both of them would try, if both were allowed to, and both have a shot at succeeding. I’d wonder whose plan has a better shot, but the only Americans who know that live in the year 2012.

Now, we know the picks. Obama has Joe Biden, a loudmouth amateur plagiarist with decades of experience in the Senate, a man who admirably forgets to sugarcoat hard truths — in the tradition of McCain, only less so. McCain has Sarah Palin, an up-and-coming political newbie with record low unfavorability ratings and an impressive, if short, record — in the tradition of Barack Obama, only more so.

Find me a dime. I’ll call it in the air.

No Dwarves, No Elves, No Orcs

August 24, 2008 in Reading Response
Tags: about, awesome, baxter book reviews, best, book, books, brooks, clarke, decade, dwarves, elves, eragon, fae, faeries, fairy, fantasy, gaiman, greatest, harry, jonathan, literature, lord, modern, new, novels, orcs, potter, precedent, review, rings, sorcery, strange, sucks, susanna, swords, time, tolkien, wheel, worthwhile

Fantasy kinda sucks. As a longtime fan of the genre, I’ve somewhat earned some right to say that.

While “Harry Potter” is fun to read — excepting the fifth book — its colorful characters and whimsical settings are bogged down by weak writing.

“His Dark Materials” has similar strengths and flaws, and was worsened even further by the author’s tendency to proselytize.

“The Wheel of Time” cribs liberally from Tolkien — an author who wrote his books solely because he liked making up languages.

The worst of all of them is that “Eragon” series; it reads like it was written by a 19-year-old homeschooler from Montana. In part because it was.

Whatever Neil Gaiman writes, he tends to exhibit the same self-indulgent fascination with multi-pantheon crossovers, leaving Terry Brooks alone among living fantasists for being above reproach. After all, Brooks is the only one who doesn’t take his fantasy settings seriously.

It’s become a rule, therefore, that fantasy as a whole is a thin, shallow genre of fiction with especially egregious pretensions that it has meaningful depth and that it’s romanticism profound rather than transparent. Science fiction, unfortunately, is much of the same.

Fortunately, because the overall crappiness of fantastic literature is a rule, there are going to be exceptions. I just spent the better part of two days — almost spilling over into three — reading one of the most important and, dare I say, literary exceptions in recent memory.

“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” had interested me ever since I first saw it on the discount bookshelves and bestseller lists, but I decided against bothering with it. I didn’t have the money to buy it, and it was too contemporary to be in the school library, besides. Having recently graduated to the local library, I saw it Thursday last and, on a whim, checked it out.

Though buying this book in its native Britain would set me back a good 7 pounds, I’d call it an even trade: the hardcover weighs almost that much. There are nearly 800 pages in the hardcover version I spent a weekend reading — that makes it roughly the size of a King James Bible after a begat-ectomy.

Despite that it reads like Jane Austen and the humanity of its title characters are straight out of Dickens — if you’re sure I exaggerate, you’ll appreciate this book more than I did — I enjoyed every moment.

I shouldn’t make my admiration seem so unlikely — I was bound to like “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” from the very start. It has the flair of a finely researched history, and more footnotes per page than “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” a history in which the author, for whatever reason, apologizes for including as many footnotes as he does.

It’s no criticism of the novel to say that these footnotes were my favorite part of the 7-pound blunt object that is “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” and I suppose quite a few readers came to the same conclusion. Indeed, the footnotes were enjoyable enough, and added so much to the world of the novel, that when the author decided to make her second book an anthology of stories, at least a few of these stores were inspired by her first novel’s footnotes.

There’s a lot of story in the book, and it would be difficult to summarize it without unbecoming spoilers and lengthy exposition, but, given fantasy these days, that depth is one of the great charms of “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.” Suffice it to say that the whole of it focuses on the careers of two British magicians of the Regency period, and is full of charmingly fleshed-out characters.

The early 19th century is the such a refreshing setting for fantasy. Rather than a world where dwarves and elves and orcs are the face of the fantastic, one of the great squabbles between the two title characters is over the status and usefulness of fairies, creatures that had once encompassed the whole of British fantasy before Tolkien injected high fantasy with his mish-mash blending of Old Norse mythology and Anglo-Saxon epic. However well-written “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” is, and however well it stands on its own merits, that it ignores the 50-year-old precedent of swords and sorcery, a subgenre that might as well be mimeographed from the worst parts of “The Lord of the Rings,” is one of the greatest strengths that author Susanna Clarke chose for her world of British magic.

After reading so much of dwarves and elves and orcs, a reprieve was due; we needed a reprieve into densely imagined real literature from dense-minded pulp literature, even if that it lasts only a weekend.

But what a weekend.