A Eulogy

It was late September of 2001, and I was a first year associate in a big law firm, living on Beacon Hill with my soon to be ex-boyfriend. We were still trying to find our way through the collective national nightmare and hangover of September 11th. Gabe had started smoking again, and we were both pretty frayed from the stress and anxiety. One of us, I don't even remember which, had the bright idea that what we needed to bring us out of our funk was to get a kitten. We both loved and had grown up with cats, and it seemed like the sort of thing that would bring us a sorely needed dose of happy playfulness.

We went to a pet store in a nearby suburb and signed up for a waiting list with a local shelter they worked with. A few weeks later we got a call that two black and white kittens, brothers from a mama cat that had been hit by a car when they were still just tiny, had come in from the shelter and were available for adoption. We needed to come get one that afternoon or it would be offered to someone else. So, we raced down to the pet store only to discover that one of the two kittens had already been adopted. The one that was left had been named Linus by the shelter, a beautiful little black and white kitten with one black ear and one white ear, a mask of black covering about 3/4 of his face, and along his back with a white belly and feet. His tail was black with a tiny little white tip. I wanted him immediately.

As the pet store was filling out the paperwork and loading us up with all of the gear we would need, we heard how we had just missed the family that had adopted Linus' brother Pigpen. I wondered if they had gotten the "better cat," but as we were leaving with Linus in a carrier and a sack full of food and toys, the family came back with the other kitten because they had forgotten something. Linus' brother was almost entirely white with just a few flecks of black here and there. We had clearly gotten the cuter of the two. We drove home with him in the carrier, and it was only when we exited Storrow Drive at the Esplanade that he meowed for the first time. The first of so many.

We renamed him Claudio, at my ex's urging because he was an obsessive classical music fan and at the time his obsessions were with Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau. (He first wanted to name the cat Ludwig or Wolfgang and I said no, so Claudio seemed like a bargain.) He was almost 12 weeks old when we got him, so not a tiny kitten for very long, but extremely energentic and curious. He made us so happy right away, even as he attacked our feet under the covers in the middle of the night, or bit Gabe on the nipple once when he got out of the shower, or fought a little too hard and drew blood and cries of pain when we play fought with him. Claudio played to win, all the time, every time. And as much as I didn't like the slash marks on my arms, the middle of the night attack dive-bombs as he tried to kill the snore monster in my face, or the finicky way he'd been sweet one second and then nasty the next, I loved the little booger.

He was mean to almost everyone, including sometimes me, because he very much did not like people trespassing in his home. He would howl and hiss at visitors when I had parties, and though I tried to tell them not to pet him, he invariably drew blood from someone who pushed it too far. He defied any attempts to keep him from eating people food, including thefts of meat or fish directly off of my plate on more than one occasion. When caught, he would stare you right in the eye and say "what?" like it was your fault for being dumb enough to turn your back for even a second. Even at the end, when he'd poop on the living room floor, he'd just look at me like shame or guilt were the last things on his mind. He had to go, and that was where he happened to be at the moment the urge hit, and I could just forget about talking him out of it. That's how he was.

But he was also capable of being so incredibly sweet, particularly when I was at home alone and feeling lousy. Claudio knew when to give me a nose-to-nose rub, or curl up with a purring belly at my side when I was sick, or hung over, or crying because yet another guy in my life post-Gabe decided to act like a jackass. Most of my friends and family never saw this side of him, but he brought so much comfort to me through some really tough times. Gabe and I broke up 3 months after we got him, then I got laid off and went through a period of extended unemployment, then I went to work in a job I came to hate, I moved several times, then I quit that job and moved to Georgia, then I moved twice more before settling into my house, and through all of this change and turmoil, Claudio was a source of great comfort and peace to me.

He was ridiculously smart for a cat: in Boston, when still very young he would climb my clothes while hanging in the closet, which as you might imagine was not desirable because of all the pulls and tears it caused. I put child-proofing sliders on the tops of the closet doors that were intended to keep him out of the closet. One day as I sat gape-mouthed in amazement watching, he climbed onto the elliptical trainer, jumped from there to the top of the bookshelf next to the closet, and then reached over and slid the childproofing off the door. He then dismounted and opened the closet. I have never seen anything like that in my life. But he was also stupid, and would do ridiculous things like try to sniff a burning candle and singe off half of his whiskers (this actually happened), or go chasing after a bug head-first into a wall.

He loved coffee and cigarettes, which caused my mother to call him Garfield. I don't drink coffee or own a coffeemaker, but when my parents would come to town while in Boston or as they were building their house in Georgia, they would go out to get coffee, and the cat would just go nuts to get his head in their coffee cups. Somewhere in the nascent days of this blog there was a picture of Claudio with his head stuck in a Starbucks cup, but sadly that photograph is now lost to the ether. He would lick the fingers of any smokers I brought home (of which there were...a few), right on the spot where they held their cigarettes. One night a particular guy left an open pack of smokes on the table while we slept, and Claudio ate a part of a cigarette. He looked pretty sick the next day. He also ate virtually anything I put a piece of on the floor for him, including cake, avocado, tomatoes, mushrooms, biscuits, potatoes, you name it. I think most of the time he was just happy that he didn't have to sneak bites when he thought I wasn't looking, so he was damn sure going to finish it.

The day we got him from that pet store, we purchased a cat toy that is essentially a tiny fishing rod with a string and a piece of denim at the end. He loved this toy. When I would take it out of its hiding place in the table next to my front door, he would start making this eh-eh-eh-eh-eh noise that he also made when he was hunting a bug in the house. We would play with this toy for hours, until his nose was so red that I knew he was wiped. I still have that toy, which is now reduced to a bundle of frayed denim threads at the end of that string. We played with it one day this week, but he was too tired to do too much with it.

As I wrote about a few months ago, Claudio was diagnosed with lymphoma in November just before Thanksgiving. I opted to put him on steroids, which temporarily shrank his tumors and gave me nearly three months with him at almost full speed before he started to rapidly decline last week. On Monday, he had vomited a large amount when I got home from work, and I knew the end was coming. He was better on Tuesday and Wednesday when I worked from home while sick with the flu, but he seemed tired. By Thursday and Friday, he was eating far less than usual. On Saturday I could only get him to eat a little bit of tuna, and by Sunday even tuna and chicken were not enticing him like they usually would. The vet had told me that after the steroids stopped working at the tumors started growing again, that eventually I would know it was time to end his life when he stopped eating. That would be the sign that the tumors were starting to close off his digestive system. So, knowing what was about to happen, yesterday I made an appointment at the vet. He seemed so tired and weak all day on Saturday and Sunday, and I knew I wanted to end it before he was in real pain.

Before we left, I brushed him and blow-dryed his back, which I knew he loved and made him purr for the only time that day. I carried him out to the back deck and let him feel the sun and the wind, see the trees and squirrels and birds out there, and to spend a calm and quiet moment with him before changing things forever. The vet examined him, said the tumors were fairly large and pushing on his stomach which was causing him not to eat, and confirmed there was little they could do to treat him at that point. I couldn't be there at the moment he died, so I signed the paperwork and authorized them to give him a sedative with painkiller, and then a controlled overdose of anesthesia to stop his breathing and heart. He growled the whole time while I cried and petted him, praying for a moment of peace as our last few minutes together. Then, they left with him and I waited and cried.

My baby cat is gone. He was 9 years old, would have been 10 in June. He was beautiful, and crazy, and sweet, and mean, and brazen and brilliant, and defiant, and stupid, and loving. He left scratch marks on the walls, stains on my rugs, scars on my arms, unrelenting white fur on every surface of my house, and I will miss him terribly every single day for a very, very long time.

Live Like You Were Dying

So Martha Coakley lost the Senate seat Ted Kennedy held for 40 years to an unknown Neanderthal, and suddenly the world's gone topsy-turvy for Democrats. Prominent House and Senate members who'd voted for Healthcare reform at the end of last year are suddenly sounding the alarm and wondering if we need to seriously re-evaluate everything just because one special election went the way of the candidate that ran the vastly superior campaign and capitalized on voter unease with Washington's not-at-all-clear plans.

Well, maybe we do need to seriously re-evaluate, but probably not for the reasons that they think. So what if Scott Brown's election signals that every Democrat is vulnerable in 2010 or 2012? They probably are, but this is not a signal that Democrats need to go into every-man-for-himself survival mode and try to figure out if killing HCR will get them more votes than helping to pass it. Who does that serve, other than the ones lucky enough to hold onto their jobs for another term? Nobody.

Instead, I ask every single Democrat in Congress right now to do one simple thing: think about what you would want your political legacy to be if your current term were your last. If you knew you were retiring at the end of this term, what unfinished business would you want to make sure made it through before you were done? Discard considerations about your colleagues' electability, too: imagine that EVERYONE in Congress were retiring at the end of this term. What's on your legislative Bucket List?

Ted Kennedy wanted more than anything in the world to see Healthcare reform come to pass in his lifetime. His legacy may forever be damaged if the current legislation is allowed to wither on the vine or be tinkered with to death. But there were a LOT of things that the folks in Congress told voters in 2006 and 2008 they wanted to get done and would do once we took back a majority, and presumably at least some of it really did matter to them and wasn't just a focus-grouped soundbite. So what would be on that list? What would you do if you could enact anything you wanted free of political considerations?

• Make single payer health insurance available to every American who wants it?
• Ensure every child is insured until age 18 regardless of ability to pay?
• Pass a new Equal Rights Amendment and send it back to the states to be ratified?
• Renew and strengthen the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and add new benchmarks for sustainability and global warming prevention?
• Pass a new Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation?
• Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act?
• Make all healthcare expenses tax deductible?
• Make all tuition at public higher education institutions fully tax deductible and with federally-guaranteed loans for every student admitted?
  
• True immigration reform?
• The expansion of environmentally friendly mass transit outside the big cities through a new federal initiative?
  
• A new New Deal that puts the 10% of Americans in the workforce who are unemployed back to work on public works projects for the federal government?
• Expand Medicare and Medicaid to every uninsured American?

Think big, Democrats. Remember what you believed in when you first thought about running for office, and the sorts of things you wanted to accomplish. Think about what legislation you would forever want to be known as having your name attached to it. And then figure out your own personal agenda of what you're willing to fight for, even if it kills you in your next election. If the answer is "nothing is worth risking my seat for," then you deserve to lose anyway. We want leaders who care about making the lives of the citizens better and fixing our country's problems, not people who only care about extending their own job security. And as we've shown tonight, we are not afraid to tip the election to the other guy if you forget who sends you to Washington and who you should be working for. So make your list, and live like there's no tomorrow. Because there might not be.

Once again, Jon Stewart nails it

It would be pretty funny if it weren't so sad.

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Secret sexism

As voters in Massachusetts head to the polls today to decide who will take over Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, pundits everywhere are casting blame in anticipation of the loss by AG Martha Coakley (D) to state Sen. Scott Brown (R). There is much talk of Coakley's lackluster campaigning skills, a dig she made at Republican former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling as being a Yankee fan, a mailer she sent out accusing Brown of wanting to deny healthcare to rape victims, and comparisons of her meager time spent gladhanding the voters as compared to Brown's. There is also much discussion of how this is really a referendum on Obama, and Democratic control, and healthcare, and can't we see that voters are pissed off?!, etc. But one thing that nobody is talking about, and that may be playing just as much of a role as any of those factors, is the secret sexism of the Massachusetts voter.

Only five women have ever been elected to statewide office in Massachusetts, one of whom is current Attorney General Coakley, who was elected in 2006. 3 different women have been elected Lieutenant Governor, but MA elects a slate rather than individual Gov and Lt Gov votes, so there is not a separate campaign and election for Lt Gov like we have here in Georgia. The first woman independently elected to statewide office in MA was Shannon O'Brien, who was elected State Treasurer in 1999. O'Brien made a run for governor in 2002, but lost to Mitt Romney. Jane Swift was elected Lieutenant Governor along with Paul Cellucci in 1998, and became Governor in 2001 when Cellucci left to become an ambassador, but Swift served less than 2 years and was persuaded not to run for Governor because of her tremendous unpopularity. Mitt Romney's Lieutenant Governor was Kerry Healey, who lost to Deval Patrick in the 2006 gubernatorial election. Massachusetts has elected no female Senators, and only 4 Congresswomen. Prior to Niki Tsongas' election in 2008, it had been 25 years since a woman from Massachusetts had served in Congress. (For what it's worth, Tsongas is the widow of very popular Senator and former Presidential candidate Paul Tsongas. Her husband's legacy undoubtedly assisted her in her candidacy.)

For all of the discussion of how "liberal" Massachusetts is, in reality the electorate is politically quite moderate. Catholic voters make up a sizeable voting bloc, and those voters are socially more conservative (particularly on abortion) than the rest of the Democratic electorate. In fact, numerous Massachusetts House Speakers in recent years have been anti-abortion. In addition, union workers make up a sizeable chunk of the electorate, and even though union workers do tend to vote Democratic on the whole, they tend to be more politically moderate as well, particularly on social issues. They also don't tend to vote for female candidates.

Yet, despite the acknowledged difficulties female candidates have faced in past statewide elections in MA, virtually nobody is mentioning it as a potential factor in a Coakley defeat today. Why are the many political pundits, all of whom have been dissecting this race for weeks and loudly declaring why Coakely might lose even before a single vote has been counted, completely silent on the potential role that sexism might be playing in Coakley's lukewarm response in MA? You would think that after the landmark year that was 2008, when female candidates and the unique challenges they face were front and center in both the primary and the general Presidential election, that reporters wouldn't be afraid to mention the fact that one candidate is a girl running in a state that traditional doesn't like electing girls very much.

But if in the past 3 weeks you have watched any political news program, read political blogs, or read the newspapers with their Coakley pre-mortems, you'll find that virtually nobody is mentioning the gender of the candidate as a factor. Maybe they're assuming to the point of hoping that we are suddenly post-gender and that being a girl no longer matters, but that would be a foolish assumption to make. It obviously still matters, in some places more than others. So why the silence on this fairly obvious contributing factor to Coakley's struggles? I find it completely perplexing.

Why I Support Martha Coakley

From 1997-2005, I lived in Boston and slowly learned the ways of the strange political world that is Massachusetts. It is unlike anything we have seen down here in Georgia or anything I had seen growing up in Florida. The state is known for being intensely Democratic, and yet they had 16 years of Republican governors. Granted, many of these "Republican" governors would be considered too liberal to be elected in the South, but they still managed to defeat some Democratic stalwarts to win their seats. Meanwhile, the entire state Congressional delegation was Democratic, and there was little movement into or out of that delegation. Congressional seats were almost never seriously contested, and when they were it was generally in the primary. But still, Massachusetts was not a terribly liberal place. The bulk of the Democrats in the state were old line labor-driven Democrats, many Catholic and staunchly anti-abortion, very resistant to change. Ted Kennedy held his Senate seat for 4 decades not because people loved his views or his votes, but because he was Teddy Kennedy and it would be strange not to vote for him.

But now, Teddy is gone. And running to replace him Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who is in the throes of a potentially disastrous campaign in which she might actually lose the seat to a Republican state senator. I have watched and admired Martha Coakley for years, and always found her to be intelligent, reasonable, not prone to grandstanding or the easy political play. She made her name as the Middlesex County DA, prosecuting several high profile cases and using that to vault into the AG position. She has been considered by many to be "biding her time" in that seat while waiting for a higher office to open up (MA having a very strange seniority system where the powerbrokers decide who has earned the right to run for an open seat when the rare situation arises), and I predicted last July that she was itching to run for Teddy's seat. Of course, I was hoping Teddy would be able to serve out his term and retire, but within a few months of my post he was gone, and the battle for his seat began. Coakley emerged from the scrum as the anointed one, and nobody really paid any attention until the whole healthcare reform movement came down to having 60 safe votes for passage, and then suddenly Massachusetts had itself a horserace.

Coakley has run a bad campaign, and I'm certainly not excusing her failings as a campaigner. But she is squeaky clean as a politician and public servant, and has taken some very progressive and intellectually risky positions in her time as AG. For starters, she filed the lawsuit against the federal government that sought to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which she asserts violates traditional separation of powers between the federal government and the states by prohibiting MA residents in legal gay marriages from receiving federal marital benefits. That lawsuit could be the strongest gay rights challenge of the various legal maneuvers the gay rights folks are working through the courts right now, but it has gotten little attention in this election. It is perfectly emblematic of the sort of outside-the-box thinking Coakley has exhibited in her position as AG, and why the people of Massachusetts should support her now. There are many such reasons, but that is mine.

I trust and wholeheartedly endorse Martha Coakley for Senate and hope the good people of Massachusetts return to their senses and send her there.

The Lion Is Gone

For eight years, Ted Kennedy was my Senator. And today he is dead.

I am so sad today. For all of his mistakes, and he made plenty and some were terrible, Teddy spent 47 years in the Senate making sure that the good he put into the world far outweighed the bad.

Perhaps because of the weight of being the sole remaining torchbearer of the three sons, perhaps because he felt the need to atone for those personal mistakes, perhaps because he was Senator in a state that would re-elect him in perpetuity no matter what happened, Ted Kennedy worked harder than anyone to bring a better life to everyone.

I honestly can't imagine that we'll ever see a career like that again, someone so completely unbridled by political concerns that he never had to ask if he would be re-elected, never had to balance his conscience against political realities. He never had to take a poll or worry about how his constituents might respond to something before he took a position on a critical issue. He just did what he thought was right, and the people of Massachusetts trusted him to watch out for them. He always did.

John McCain said on This Week this past Sunday that healthcare reform would have been much farther along if Teddy had been there to bring people from both sides together and to champion the cause of ensuring access to healthcare for all. I think he's right. I hope that in his memory and in respect of his tremendous service, Congress will make a renewed push to get it done. For Teddy.

Cheaters Sometimes Win

As a diehard Red Sox fan, I was crushed to read yesterday that both Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz tested positive for banned substances in 2003. Manny wasn't all that surprising given his suspension this season, but Big Papi was a huge blow. Ortiz was the heart and soul of that 2004 team that broke the curse, and now everyone would assume it was fueled by the juice.

Jmac at Beyond the Trestle argues today that it's not really cheating if everyone's doing it. While I get the point he is trying to make, I still think it's despicable and worthy of punishment. I also think that trying to defend this behavior as "well, everyone was doing it" will only make Red Sox fans look like idiots willing to break that curse at any cost. It reminds me of this great Bill Simmons column that he wrote after Manny's bust back in May.

Yes, many of us who prayed we would see the curse broken in our lifetimes would probably gladly say, just like Bill's dad, "I'd do it again!"...even dirty. But we should hate ourselves for thinking that way. Really, does it matter that we "broke" the curse if we had to do it on the backs of guys who had career years under mysterious circumstances and who we now know were potentially still playing on the residue of 2003 juicing? If we found out that the entire team was playing with corked bats for the 2004 season, would we be OK with that too? Even though I love the New England Patriots and don't really believe they only won three Super Bowls because they taped other teams' signals, I still recognize that I can't defend that behavior to the rest of the league's fans. Similarly, I am not about to try and defend a juicer even if he happens to be my favorite current Red Sox player.

And as for the others who will now assert that the two Red Sox titles in this decade are now tainted, all Sox fans can do now is hope that enough information about other users comes out that EVERY title in the steriods era ends up tainted. Then, we can hopefully get baseball and its fans to recognize that we either have to accept that performance enhancing drugs are part of the game and have changed it forever, or get them to commit to cleaning up the game at any cost and start testing players religiously throughout the season. This crisis threatens to ruin not just the relief of Sox fans, but all of baseball if it continues on its present path.

Jobs I've Had Part IX: Law School Jobs

During law school, I worked for two different small plaintiffs' firms in my second and then third year. The first was a job I acquired midway through the first semester of my second year, when I decided that I really needed some extra money because Boston was so damned expensive. I worked for a two man firm that did a little of everything, though personal injury was sort of the filler in between the cracks of their other cases. I worked 20 hours per week answering phones, drafting legal documents, doing legal research, and basically helping them out on whatever they needed done.

I remember working on documents for the arbitration of a post-divorce case all about stock options. The former husband had been quite high up at a technology company and had acquired millions of dollars' worth of stock options, and a portion of those options had been granted to the former wife in their divorce settlement, with the catch that she only obtained the rights to the stock options once they'd been both vested and exercised. The ex-wife claimed that the ex-husband had been deliberately NOT exercising his options in order to keep them from her. The ex-husband claimed that as a company executive his ability to exercise options was restricted for much of the year due to blackout provisions for stock transactions on company executives who might have foreknowledge of information that could affect stock prices. We represented the ex-husband in the case. I worked there for nearly 6 months and the arbitration still wasn't even completely over by the time I left, so you can imagine I came away from it with a dim view of how well arbitration provides a faster, less expensive alternative to traditional litigation.

One of the two lawyers was also in-house counsel part-time for a technology company, and that company had a patent litigation action that involved most of the other big firms in the city. I don't remember many details, beyond feeling like the poor guy representing them was a little outmatched given the firepower on all the other sides.

Another law student who actually looked enough like me that she could have been my sister shared my schedule there, and we occasionally overlapped enough that we could hang out and talk for a few minutes. I've long since forgotten how it came about, but one of us somehow discovered that we could search the cache of the computer at our desk and see what the 2 lawyers were viewing on the internet when we weren't around. We found URLS to beastiality sites in that computer, and were quite scandalized by trying to figure out who was responsible for it. I don't think we ever figured it out, though we had our suspicions. (One of the attorneys had a teenage son who occasionally came with him to the office on Saturdays.)

I left that job to serve as a summer associate at a big firm in Boston, which I would later join as a first year associate fresh out of law school. It was a cushy gig, since I was paid $1800 a week to do research projects, go to lunch with attorneys, go to cocktail parties and dinners all paid for by the firm, and even take a weekend trip sponsored by the firm to the Vermont mountains. Of course the firm was NOTHING like this when I returned as a real employee, but it was still lovely while it lasted. We had a big class of 30 law students from various schools, and there were several romances and scandals that summer. At the end of the summer I got an offer for full time employment, so I knew I could relax my third year of law school rather than sweating it through another interview process.

Third year I again needed to earn a bit of extra money, so I went to work part time for a solo practitioner. While I don't really want to put her name here because I'd prefer not to have her find this blog through a Google search, let's just say that her first name was the name of a famous main character from a Shakespeare play about star-crossed lovers, while her last name was the last name of the rival family. It was her married name, and she'd long since divorced Mr. M, but she kept the name because people found it distinctive. Also, she was crazy.

She had won a few huge cases in the years before I joined her practice, and I think she still fancied herself as a legal badass. The problem was that the money had started to wear a little thin, and the only cases that we had were not quite the moneymakers she hoped. I worked on a personal injury suit against a large Atlanta-based building supply chain (again, do the math) that really exposed me for the first time to the downfalls of dealing with plaintiffs. It's the reason I will never do that work again: plaintiffs lie, and they're almost all crazy.

I also worked on my first employment litigation case at that firm, a woman who had worked for a large banking organization and had been demoted after refusing her boss's sexual advances. It was a great case for us for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which was that the woman had kept copies of all sorts of emails from the boss saying how qualified she was for this new job, as well as a diary of all the things he tried to get into her pants. Ultimately we settled that case for nearly two years' pay, which is about as good as a sexual harassment case can turn out. (It had some warts, too, but we managed to keep those under wraps.) I had essentially been allowed to bring in and run that case entirely on my own, so I was very proud to get that result.

The lawyer I worked for was constantly trying to expand her repertoire, but sometimes before she really knew enough to take on a new type of work. She was called by a former personal injury client who has arrested for bank robbery, and decided that she could learn how to do criminal defense work. I recall frantically trying to research what I needed to put into a motion to suppress that she had decided we needed to file, and feeling stressed to the end of my rope out of fear that we were flying TOO blind in the case. Thankfully, that case was before a judge who was notoriously lenient on criminal defendants (to the point that she later was the subject of a campaign to kick her off the bench), and my boss managed to secure a deal for 6 months probation and a drug treatment program for the guy. I was amazed, because our client had signed a confession! (While high as a kite on Vicodin, but still...)

I worked there for the second half of my third year of law school, and while I studied for the bar exam. I left that office about a week before I started at my "real" firm, and when I left she asked if there was any way she could convince me to stay. Given what big firms were paying starting lawyers, I told her that I had to take the other deal. Honestly, she was such a strange bird--her depositions were excruciating to read because she liked to do weird things like stand on her chair to intimidate witnesses--that I really didn't think I could in good conscience keep working for her any longer.

However, I ended up being very happy she was still around and wanted me back 2 years later when I was laid off from that cushy firm gig. I worked for her part time for 6 months while I interviewed for full time positions at other firms, and strangely enough the same woman who had been the plaintiff in my first sexual harassment case had somehow managed to acquire a NEW sexual harassment case. I managed to settle that one too, though the terms were far less lucrative. By the time I left there a second time, the boss had started to talk about moving up to Vermont to retire, and it was clear her heart wasn't in it anymore. I ran into her in the courthouse a few years later and she was still working (and still crazy)...and told me a story about how she had an ethics complaint filed against her because she shoved opposing counsel at a hearing. She said this with pride.

Jobs I've Had Part VIII: "Attorney at LAW"

I did not work my first year of law school at BU, because it was generally prohibited. During my first year I was so focused on studying and preparing for exams that I did not submit resumes for any of the cushy big firm jobs that were available the summer after my first year. The applications were due just as mid-year exams were beginning, and the only information the firms would have to go on was our undergraduate experience. I figured a degree from FSU was unlikely to win me any interviews, so I did not bother to apply. Then I got shockingly managed to get straight A's my first semester, and kind of wished I had applied after all.

The rest of us who had not scored one of the plum summer associate gigs for our first year summer had to find something else to do. I wanted to stay in Boston, and needed my job to be paid. That ruled out internships for government agencies or judges. I sent resumes and letters begging for summer work out to virtually every small law firm that I could find, but all of my classmates were doing the same thing so competition was fierce. (At the suggestion of a friend of my father's I even sent a resume to a lawyer he knew at a firm where I would end up working 5 years later...a strange coincide.) I considered working as a legal secretary, since that would at least pay my rent for the summer, but then finally I saw an advertisement for a small litigation firm that was looking for a summer law clerk. I applied and was hired.

The firm was run by a diminutive man with a big attitude, and consisted primarily of personal injury litigation. I wrote briefs, answered discovery, and researched legal issues. I also wrote demand letters for injuries as silly as broken fingers and black eyes. It's pretty hard to trump up a black eye into $2000 worth of damages, which at the time was the Massachusetts threshhold for personal injury cases, but I found a way.

The most interesting case the office was handling at the time was the defense of a car dealership that had been sued by the EEOC because the owner was accused of same-sex sexual harassment. The depositions were hilarious and awful at the same time: at sales meetings, he would put his penis on the shoulder of certain salesmen not as a sexual advance, but for humiliation. The case was revolutionary at the time, because it was still unclear if a person could commit same-sex sexual harassment, particularly if there was no evidence that they were sexually attracted to the person they harassed. As we had discussed in law school, the law on sexual harassment is actually premised on discrimination law, meaning that such cases required proof of discriminatory treatment between male and female employees. It was an open question whether a harasser who was equally awful to both men and women was actually committing legally cognizable sexual harassment, because there was no discrimination in such a situation.

The attorney I worked for was like a caricature of the little man who is always over-compensating. He was about 5' 4", and at the time I was already 5' 11". He was always bellowing loudly and yelling into a Nextel phone, and he answered his office telephone with "Thomas J. Cox, Attorney at LAW." (Name changed to protect the not at all innocent.) He hated redheads for some reason I never really understood, and the other employees told me that he had even specifically requested not to get a redheaded baby when he and his wife had adopted a daughter.

He also hated me because he was frequently wrong in his understanding of a legal rule at issue in one of our cases, and when I would point this out to him and show him the correct rule, he would scream at me. For example, he had a client who had been sued in Michigan by a company that had leased him a credit card machine. The leasing contract specifically provided that any lawsuits arising out of the contract would be filed in Michigan, and the client had signed this contract. However, this attorney wanted me to draft an Answer to the Complaint for him to file in Michigan, even though he was not admitted there and had no local counsel. I told him that he would have to either have the client file the Answer pro se, or engage local counsel and get admitted pro hac vice. He insisted I was wrong, and that as our client's Massachusetts lawyer, he could file whatever he wanted anywhere he wanted. I insisted he would be risking ethical proceedings in Michigan, and thankfully I talked him into asking one of his friends at a big firm in Boston what he should do. The friend said the exact same thing I did, and then my boss didn't speak to me for a week. Apparently he didn't like that a first year law student had known the right answer when he did not.

He also was constantly either suing or threatening to sue a host of companies on his own behalf, including the EEOC because a chair had broken from underneath him during a deposition. He claimed this had left him severely injured, even though he only wore the neck brace at certain key moments. If he ate a bad candy bar or got sick after a meal at a restaurant, we'd whip up a claim letter to the company. If he bought a swingset for his daughter that rusted, another claim letter. The secretary and paralegal in the office one day showed me an entire drawer full of his various individual lawsuits and claims, and there must have been at least 50.

It was a shitty job, but it was legal experience for my resume. When the summer was over, I didn't try to stay on part-time for the next school year. I was ready to be done with the Attorney at LAW.

(The sexual harassment case eventually settled without a trial, but I never found out exactly how much the owner of the dealership paid.)

Mood Music -- St. Patrick's Day edition

Driving back from Fayetteville today, I had my radio turned to Sirius where they were playing music by Irish artists. This song came on and I was instantly transported back to drunken nights at the Littlest Bar in Boston. Singer Mike Barrett does a version of this song called "the Lesbian Song," in which the singer wishes he were a lesbian instead of wishing to be a fisherman. Every single week, Mike hopefully dedicated the song to Samantha and I, and every single week we laughed and shook our heads that no, this was not going to be the week his dream came true. I love this song so much.



With light in my head
With you in my arms
(woo hoo hoo)

Um, no.

You are not putting 28 miles of tunnels underneath my 'hood. Sorry.

Need I remind you that the last major tunnel-under-a-big-city project KILLED SOMEONE?

Why is it always the guy from some two stoplight town I've never heard of (in this case Pine Mountain, GA) who proposes to dig up the city of Atlanta to build these deathtrap tunnels?

Update: Rusty has also written about the rampant stupidity of this idea here.

A great political ad

John Kerry's not really at risk in his Senate race this year, but his campaign still has created a fantastic ad. I guarantee you it will hit home with it's audience.

The void that's impossible to fill

The insular world of Massachusetts politics is reeling, along with much of the country, from the news that Senator Ted Kennedy has a brain tumor that is almost certainly terminal. Kennedy is a lion and legend and deserves the utmost gratitude and respect for championing causes that were often unpopular or difficult, with the ferocity that only he could bring to bear. Perhaps knowing that he would never ever be voted out of office no matter what he could possibly do gave Kennedy the luxury of standing on pure principle when others simply could not afford to. But the news now seems very grim, and appears to make it all but certain that we will have a new Senator from Massachusetts in one fashion or another before the decade is out.

While I hesitate to open the speculation on candidates to replace him so soon after Kennedy's diagnosis became clear, I think that this situation may have a direct bearing on the presidential election. You see, Massachusetts has an entirely Democratic congressional delegation, most of whom will now commence to falling over themselves for the chance to run for Kennedy's senate seat. Meanwhile, there is really only one option for the Republicans: Mitt Romney. Romney ran against Kennedy in 1994, and made a respectable showing by limiting Kennedy to his smallest margin of victory in his Senate term. Against anyone not named Kennedy, Romney could very well have won that seat. Eight years later he returned to win the Governorship. While he was hardly a popular governor (his final approval rating was a dismal 43%), Romney still has the political base and name recognition in the state to make a run for the seat, particularly if the Democratic primary will be a bruising clown car race that produces a cash strapped and politically dinged nominee.

The only problem here, of course, is that Romney cannot run for the Senate seat if he is on McCain's ticket as a Vice Presidential candidate. Thus, Romney may very soon be in a position to force McCain's hand and find out if he's really going to be the pick or if he should go ahead and make other plans.

To see Kennedy's seat lost to a Republican would be heartbreaking, and as many of you know I absolutely detest Mitt Romney. But I think he knows how to run a successful statewide campaign in Massachusetts, which is more than you can say for any of the other Congressmen or state legislators who will soon be contemplating jumping to the fray if the seat opens up.

On the Democratic side, there are far too many capable candidates to list. The three who intrigue me the most are, in no particular order: Congresswoman Niki Tsongas (widow of former governor Paul Tsongas), Congressman Barney Frank, and state Attorney General Martha Coakley. Personally, I would love to see Frank become the first openly gay U.S. Senator. There is also the expected talk about keeping the seat "in the family," through either nephew Joseph Kennedy or son Patrick who is currently a Congressman from Rhode Island. Ahem, not that there's ever been a history of Kennedys moving states to run for Senate or anything...

No matter what happens, it will be difficult for anyone to take over the reigns from a living legend. As a former chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party said, "Somebody someday will have his seat, but no one will ever take his place."

Stupid Law Alert

Massachusetts is considering legislation that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of being overweight. Apparently several other towns already have similar bans.

Do I even need to explain why this would make bad law? There may be valid reasons for many employers in particular to avoid hiring seriously overweight employees, not just for jobs that require physical endurance and fitness, but also in positions in which professional appearance and charisma can have an impact on a person's ability to relate with clients and the public effectively. In addition, keeping down health insurance costs is a valid concern for businesses these days, and it is undisputed that the morbidly obese are more prone to a variety of serious health problems than those who are not overweight.

But at its core the more troubling aspect of this sort of legislation is the notion that we can remove any arbitrary or "unfair" factors in how people perceive one another in our daily lives. What will be next--no discrimination against short men, ugly people, people with bad teeth, or the supremely annoying?

If someone is so obese that their condition can qualify as a disability, then discrimination against them is already prohibited to some extent by the ADA. Taking it further, to say that you just can't decide that you'd rather have a thin restaurant hostess than a fat one because you want to present a more pleasing public image for your business, goes too far.

Gay marriage: you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave

Remember back when Massachusetts brought same sex marriage to the U.S. and everyone worried about whether courts in other states were going to be forced through the full faith and credit clause of the US Constitution to recognize these marriages even though they have lots of homophobic language in their state constitutions?

Well, that hasn't so much happened yet. Massachusetts allows gay couples from other states to get married in the Commonwealth, but there has not been a rash of other state courts enforcing the legal effect of those marriages. Instead, when people from other states who married in Massachusetts now try to get a divorce, they're finding that they cannot legally pursue divorce proceedings anywhere but Massachusetts because their states do not allow dissolution of marriages they do not legally recognize. Now, gay couples are finding that they will need to establish residency in Massachusetts--by living there for at least one year--before they will be able to file for divorce in the only state in the country that recognizes gay marriages.

For heterosexual marriages, either spouse can usually file in whatever state they or their spouse presently lives in, since that is most likely where the marital property to be distributed is located. But as an added impediment to the refusal to recognize same sex marriages in other states, the requirement that at least one spouse must live in Massachusetts for a full year before they can file for divorce is a serious roadblock and one that I am guessing many of those couples did not think about or appreciate when they decided to take advantage of the right of legal marriage only afforded in one state.

Of course, if other states actually enforced the full faith and credit clause then they would presumably be able to provide the right of divorce even without providing the right of marriage of same sex couples in their state. I believe that some states that do not recognize common law marriages established within their borders will still provide a mechanism for dissolution of such a marriage if it was legally entered into in a state that does recognize common law marriage. Why should this be any different?

There is some sick irony that the effect of the hard line position of the religious right on fighting gay marriage is to force people to stay in gay marriages that they would love to dissolve. I doubt the fundies will appreciate the irony, however.

Allow me to get a little misty

3 years ago, I had the distinct pleasure of taking my Dad to the Red Sox home opener at Fenway. This was special not just because it was the home opener, but because for the first time in 86 years we got to see the raising of a World Champions banner at Fenway Park. In front of the Yankees. Even though it was a very cold early April day and my poor Floridian father couldn't get warm no matter how many fleeces and sweatshirts he piled on, it was still an amazing day. Seeing all the Sox old-timers come out to be part of the ceremony, particularly the guys like Johnny Pesky who were so beloved but could never get to the highest hurdle, get rings was a truly special moment for me. Most of us cried when Pesky finally got his ring and the entire park erupted in thunderous applause and cheers.

There was one thing missing, though. Absolution for the scapegoats would have put the perfect cap on the nearly 9 decades of wandering through the baseball wilderness wondering what we had ever done to deserve such torture. There was no Bill Buckner at Fenway that day. As the pre-game ceremony began, footgage of all the Sox greats was shown on the big screen over Fenway but Buckner was not there to see it. News stories at the time indicated he was still bitter, hurt and angry that he had been subjected to the scorn and condemnation of all of New England for 17 long years, all for one brief moment in baseball history. Surely Buckner had blamed himself for that error more than anyone else could possibly understand, but he could not forgive the unforgiving harshness of Red Sox Nation. On some level, I understood exactly how he felt.

Yesterday, Bill Buckner returned to Fenway Park for the Red Sox's second championship ceremony home opener. He threw out the first pitch and received a standing ovation. He was there to see that the curse and all of its remnants were buried forever. He is scapegoat no more. And the moment clearly moved him and all who were present to witness it:






I made a decision last week about baseball. I have been a Red Sox fan since moving to Boston in 1997 and I still love the Sox and always will. But it's time for me to fully commit to the Braves. The Sox don't need my help anymore, they have won two championships in 4 years. I'll still always root for my beloved Red Sox, because once you have known both the pain and the joy that is being a Sox fan it becomes simply impossible to take it out of you. But I think it's time for a Braves resurgence, and I'll be hopefully here to watch it happen. I'm reddedicating the vaunted Sara championship team mojo down south. Y'all can thank me later.

(Yesterday's entire pregame championship ceremony gallery is here.)

It's not just a southern thing

I'm seeing so many wonderful reactions to Obama's historic speech about race in America. In particular, the born and raised Southerners all speak of common experiences of families going through generational change in terms of how people think and talk about race. These are important stories and I'm so happy that Obama's speech is causing people to think and talk about race when the temptation is often to not touch the third rail because we all fear it will become too ugly and emotional. And it still might, but that is not a reason to stop the conversation.

But I'm bothered by the feeling that comes from these stories that they are somehow limited primarily to southern white folks dealing with their ancestors' ugly history and backwards views about race. Unfortunately, I think the problem is far more pervasive than that, and I think even those who did not grow up in the south need a little soul-cleansing in this regard.

My entire family is from Iowa or Minnesota, neither of which has a large black population or a history of pervasive government-sanctioned racial injustice, and yet I can recall numerous instances of hearing my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and even parents say things that I found offensive and wrong. I wish I could say that every time it happened I spoke up to stop them, but sometimes it was not worth it to pick that battle even though I did not agree. My father still says things on occasion that bother me, and even now sometimes I can't stand the thought of taking him to task for it. I should, but I don't.

In a lot of ways, because of the familiarity of living side by side and dealing with racial upheaval in the 60s and 70s, southerners are more comfortable talking about the old wounds and the way they truly feel about race than the rest of us, who simply sit grim-faced when the topic comes up and only reveal their true feelings in the hushed privacy of likeminded company. Since moving to Georgia over 2 years ago I've had so many instances of people presuming that I share their views, as they openly launch into a diatribe about how there are too many black people in this city, or that you should avoid certain neighborhoods as "too ghetto" or certain destinations as too full of a certain clientele, or talking about certain public officials with what they believe will be a shared assumption that they only get elected because it's Atlanta and they're black. It's all on display here, like it or not, but at least it's real and open.

In my experience outside the South, it's the exact opposite. For all of the talk about Boston being progressive or liberal, it's one of the most racially regressed places I've ever been to. The city is incredibly segregated, with each racial or ethnic group retreating to their own small pockets of the city. The white folks don't go to Roxbury, and the black folks don't go to Southie. Many people don't remember that during the desegregation busing eras all over the country, some of the worst fights were in the greater Boston area where white parents fought tooth and nail to avoid having their white children be forced to attend classes, play football games against, or otherwise interact with black children. Before Deval Patrick was elected governor in 2006, I don't think I could name for you a single elected official from Massachusetts who was black. I think my first law firm when I graduated from law school in 2000 had one black partner, even though it had 200 lawyers. (In contrast, my current firm has 5 black partners and even 1 black managing partner in this office--and we're less than half the size.)

But the problem is, in Boston nobody really talks about this sort of thing because polite upstanding progressive white people in the northeast don't talk honestly and openly about race. Much like my family, they keep up appearances to one another and only reveal their true feelings when they are nearly certain they are in likeminded company. You might think from outward appearances that this makes them a more racially forward-thinking area of the country than the South, but you'd be wrong. This is why I think this is a conversation that everyone should be having around dinner tables and lunch tables and bar tables throughout the country. Maybe the South has more to atone for, maybe it has more ugly in its past, but all of us could use a good honest gut check and a little cleansing of the old ideas. All of us have people in our lives, in our families, who say things we disagree with but who we won't disown--be it our father, or neighbor, or our pastor. We try to change minds, but we also try to pick and choose the best parts of the people we care about and leave the rest alone.

Today at lunch, the subject of the speech came up. Many people talked about their impressions of the speech and of the Rev. Wright brouhaha. One of my coworkers said that she hopes it's generational and slowly phasing out. She said that her grandparents are terribly racist, and her parents are somewhat less openly racist, and she hopes that her generation of the family has gotten racial animus out of its system entirely. Interestingly, she is not only not from the South...she is not white. Our ignorant and ugly racist history and ancestry is something we all have to deal with, no matter what we look like or where we grew up.

Against a Mandate

I get a lot of pushback from friends who support universal healthcare when I say that I don't support mandating that people buy into the program or be penalized for choosing not to be insured. But my initial reaction to reading about how the Massachusetts program has been implemented so far was strongly negative, and this is one of the few important policy distinctions between Obama and Clinton, so it's something that I have had occasion to argue with people over and over again even as I did not feel like I had wrapped my brain around it entirely. This article does an excellent job of explaining the anti-mandate position. Check it out if reading policy turns you on instead of boring you to tears.

Atlanta, it's just snow. Don't be afraid.

As a Florida girl transplanted to Boston for law school, I had seen snow only once in my entire life. When I was four, we travelled to Minneapolis for Christmas and as is usually the case there in December, there were many inches of the stuff piled deep on the ground. My parents loved to tell the story of the amazement their little girl showed at being able to go outside and play in the cold white stuff again and again and again, coming in briefly to warm up before running back outside to play some more. Unfortunately, as those who have lived in such climates know, it isn't so much FLUFFY white stuff as melted and refrozen slush/ice by that point. I recall trying to make a snowman and instead having to stack ice chunks of decreasing size on top of each other as poor substitute. I wanted to go sledding but had no sled, so my uncle put me on the plastic top of his garbage can and sent me down the hill, only to see me hit a ragged patch of ice and tear the top clear in two. But from what little I remember of that trip, I know I found it blissful.

My first year of law school, there were several of us from warm locales who found ourselves in Boston eagerly anticipating our first real snowfall. I still remember the day it finally happened--the forecast called for sleet and I trudged to school through "snow" that sure did hurt when it hit my face and crunch underneath my recently purchased snow boots. When I got there, a student from Texas and I gleefully proclaimed how pretty it was, while the northeastern natives mocked us for not understanding that this was merely sleet--and that real snow neither stung when it hit you nor bounced when it landed. We didn't care. Later that night when it turned directly into snow, I made my boyfriend go outside and play in it with me, and we had a huge snowball fight in the parking lot behind our building. The little girl with boundless energy and a love of the flaky cold white stuff was still in there after all. Every winter for all 8 of my years in Boston, I was always gleeful at the first snow and I always went out and played in it.

The last 2 winters in Atlanta were hard for me because I came to desperately miss the snow. I can recall in February or March of 2006 seeing flurries on a Sunday and being giddy, but last year I don't think we got any at all. This year, while watching bowl games on New Year's Day at Moe's and Joe's, it suddenly started to snow about 9pm and I immediately went running outside again to "play" but twirly excitedly in the snow. While everyone inside laughed at the complete idiot, yes. But I miss running across a fresh field of downy flake and being the first to put deep footsteps in the pristine white. I miss balling it up in mittened hands and nailing a friend with a snowball right in the ass. I miss catching snowflakes on my tongue and walking past snowmen in the park. I even miss knowing when it starts snowing just before bed that I can sleep in the next day because everyone will understand that the commute will be a work in progress.

Which brings me to my ultimate point. Despite being a southern transplant, I know snow. I learned to drive in it, walk on it even after it had refrozen a dozen times, to shovel it and to scrape it off of my car. I learned the color the sky turns just before it starts to fall (there is a tinge of pink) and the smell in the air when snow is on the way. I learned that about half the time the forecasters up north predict a massive snowfall, it ends up being only a few inches. (Witness this week's nor'easter that wasn't!) And I know that a few flurries is not even worth a mention, let alone something to panic about.

Today, a paralegal in our group began lobbying for being allowed to go home at 2pm because she heard snow was on the way and would arrive by 3pm, and she wanted to "beat the rush." In our group we have an attorney who grew up in Maine, me who lived 8 years in Boston, and 2 secretaries who are from upstate New York. We all laughed at her. Shortly thereafter, probably in response to similar inquiries from snow-scared staff, our HR director sent a reminder of the firm's "inclement weather policy" and it was clear that early exit was not going to be granted. Then, as reports of flakes falling in the southern part of the city started to trickle in by phone, the frenzy built to a crescendo. Suddenly, a flake went flying by the window. Secretaries ran to windows to watch the amazing development. Eventually the flurries built to something not quite to the level of "snow showers," and they went out onto the balcony to catch them. And now everyone is griping about how evening traffic is going to be awful.

As I tell people that the snow is not going to stick and that there is nothing to worry about, the refrain is always the same: "but Atlanta doesn't know how to deal with snow and the other drivers are so inexperienced and I'm really just concerned about dealing with them, etc. etc. ad nauseum." And you know, I understand that winter weather is harder to deal with if you're a city or county that doesn't have a well-oiled plowing and salting machine. And I understand that people's stupidity multiplies exponentially when trying to drive in something unfamiliar. I even understand that we all want an excuse to get out of work early.

But seriously. It is not that hard to drive in snow. I never had to do it until I'd been living in Boston for nearly 5 years, and then I learned very quickly that there are 2 rules to remember: 1. go very slow and 2. leave a lot of room between you and everything else in order to stop. (Rarely rule #3 is required: if you do not have all wheel drive and/or snow tires, do not attempt to go up a large snow-covered hill or you will slide down it backwards. This one, I learned during my first blizzard.) Surely even people who see real snowfall once every 5-10 years can figure out these two fundamental principles and manage to avoid a 25 care pileup, right?

None of this is meant to disparage the difficulty of dealing with ice, which is your own special brand of weather hell down here and one that I in no way intend to make light of. My first ice storm upon arrival in Georgia 2 years ago was so miserable that I never want to go through it again, and even I do not pretend to know how to drive on icy roads. If there's ice on them there streets, I will be staying home. But snow--that is a piece of flake.

I'm not even going to try to understand the whole bread/milk phenomenon.

You disgust me, Mike Huckabee.

As part of the anti-Romney attack ad that Mike Huckabee created and then refused to air, but still held a press conference to show reporters, Huckabee attacked Romney for not having executed anyone while he was governor of Massachusetts.

I'm going to ignore for a second how digusting it is to argue that a governor should have killed more people while he was governor, or that having done so has any relation to his ability to be President...even to his ability to be President of a country that tortures, whether we call it that or not. No, I'm going to gloss right past that part, because there's an even bigger problem with this incredibly stupid argument by Huckabee:

MASSACHUSETTS HAS NO DEATH PENALTY, you moron. Thus, there was no opportunity for Romney to sign any death warrants, turn down any requests for clemency, or to personally go flip the switch and fry the bastard. Don't get me wrong--Romney sure as hell tried to bring back the death penalty while he was governor, but when facing a massive Democratic majority in the state legislature that was opposed to the death penalty, there wasn't much he could do. (In the late 90's before Romney became governor there was an even bigger push to bring the death penalty to MA after a brutal child killing, and it came within one vote of passing before a legislator changed his vote in a crisis of conscience.)

I find it truly sick that Huckabee is using the "I'm the only guy in this race who's had to officially kill people" argument to try and win votes. It's a new and disgusting twist on the political ploy by that other governor from Hope, Ark. to fly back to Arkansas just to execute a mentally retarded man: having the balls to kill someone is apparently presumed to make a candidate seem tough and capable of making the hard decisions. Well, screw that. It makes Huckabee look like an idiot who didn't do his homework, in my book.

What's next, we'll see ads that Mitt Romney allowed gay marriage to happen in Massachusetts? Anyone with half a brain who was there knows that he tried everything in his power to force a constitutional amendment or to otherwise get the Supreme Judicial Court to overturn their decision. But hey, those are just details. The important thing is the gaes! They are marrying in Mitt Romney's state! And we can't have that!

Most of all, I hate Huckabee for making me defend Mitt Romney. You know how much that pained me to do. So fuck you for that, too, Huckabee. Now I need a shower.