law school ninja

So I’ve noticed that some of the blogs I read do this thing where they examine their blog statistics and report the results. This seems like a good idea, so I’m going to give it a whirl this month. Oh shuddup. It’ll be fun for me. Which is kindof the point.

Hahaha. Gross.

Top 5 Referrers (thanks for linking to me, guys!)
Twitter
Legal Underground
The Namby Pamby, Attorney-at-Law
Bitter Lawyer
Thanks, But No Thanks

Top 5 Posts (not counting the home page)
free advice for future 1Ls, part 2
free advice for future 1Ls, part 1
ahem. FREE advice for future 1Ls, part 3
how ninja kid got her groove back
what to expect when you’re expecting (a brief)

Finally, we’re going to talk about the search terms that you guys use to find this blog. I mean, really? Some of you may have some serious problems for which you should probably seek medical and/or psychiatric attention. I don’t know for sure, just a hunch. These are in no particular order.

law shool not that hard: It’s not as hard as a lot of people want you to believe. However, you’ll have an easier time if you first learn to spell “school.”

baby come back pics funny: Honestly that doesn’t sound very convincing. I’m not coming back. Sorry.

good grades in law school 1l: Yes. What are good grades in law school? With the curves varying widely from school to school, and with schools retroactively inflating their students’ grades to permit their students to better compete with students from schools with more generous curves, the idea of “good” grades is becoming more and more subjective and hard to nail down. In my opinion, if you’re beating the curve, you’re doing okay because you’re doing better than more than half of your classmates.

terapia hiperbarica: WTF

i got a c on my law school exam (and other variations on this): It’s gonna be okay. I promise. Don’t panic.

girl sitting at a table with a pile of p: I don’t think I want to know how this search led to my blog, actually.

law school slacking: I’m offended that this search would yield this blog. Slacking? WHAT?! Well, okay, maybe that’s fair after all.

girls squishing: Again, I don’t want to know. Sounds gross.

what do entering 1ls wear to law school: Mostly clothes. Check Dennis Jansen here and Huma Rashid here for fashion advice. I’m a casual dresser at school; hardly anybody at my school does business casual on a regular basis.

doctor gangrene doll: The new must-have Christmas gift of 2010? You guys, I don’t like gangrene OR dolls. And only very few doctors. Combine all three and it sounds like a damn horror movie to me.

bahahahahahahahaha: I mean, I hope this blog is entertaining, but at this point I’m beginning to feel a tad paranoid.

legal terms for law school: I think the legal term of art would be along the lines of “ritualized hazing.”

future hair cuts: My next one is scheduled for July 2nd. Thanks for asking.

is the law exciting: YES!! Here’s the thing. Law school isn’t all that exciting. In fact, it can be downright awful. But actually getting to do lawyerly things is really super fun in the nerdiest of nerdy ways. And everybody here knows that I’m a nerdy nerd.

That’s about it. There are others but I’m tired and now bored with this navel gazing exercise. Wasn’t that fun? I had fun. And that’s what it’s all about.

About ten days ago or so, I was in the midst of my daily worries when it occurred to me that I’ll need a new domain name for when I finish ninja-ing law school. I blogged about it, and some of you even voted. Here at Law School Ninja we encourage everyone to vote. The results were kinda close, and what should have been a simple poll turned into quite a ruckus. Here’s the story.

When the runner-up found out how close the vote count was, he demanded a recount. The winner didn’t really think a recount was necessary, but nevertheless, according to the rules, if a recount is requested it must be performed. After all, we want free and fair voting here at Law School Ninja.

So I consulted with my *ahem* esteemed Secretary of State regarding the rules of the recount.

She informed me that each ballot would have to be closely examined for the presence of hanging chads, which signify a voter’s intent that wasn’t fully realized or something like that. In other words, some of you apparently are too wimpy to poke through a piece of paper with a sharp object and now we have to try to decipher your meaning in this manner:

Then, sensing that this controversy would be ripe for a lawsuit, the two parties called in their fancy legal teams.

There were protests in the streets. Lots of people thought the blog might not survive the crisis. But those doubters clearly had forgotten the rich history of this blog. From the time we split from Blogger in the revolution, through the civil war over whether to buy a domain name and try a self-hosted blog instead of the free WordPress blog, this blog has stood strong and proud. This crisis would not be any different.

Finally, the fancy legal teams had to present their arguments before the Ninja Supreme Court, which has but one Justice.

Chief Justice Ninja Dog heard the arguments of both sides and ruled that the recount had to be stopped. Although not everybody was happy with the ruling, it did produce a winner, which just so happens to be the domain name that Chief Justice Ninja Dog and I had favored, so for us it worked out well.

So, ladies and gentleman, slackers and gunners, the winner is:

www.ninjaatlaw.com

And if you click the link, you can see the cute thing I did to hold its place until I need it. I’m so clever, you guys.

Now if any of you media types are interested in conducting your own, independent recount just so you can try to prove Chief Justice Ninja Dog wrong, here are the final poll results.

Ginormous thanks to @kristahiner for suggesting the winning name! If I had anything of value, I’d give her a prize.

Ninja Mimi’s husband of almost eleven years is in the hospital. He’s in his mid to late 70s and several years older than my mom, who is 62. He’s been in gradually declining health for several months now, but in the last few weeks it’s become more and more difficult for him to get out of the house. What he thought was arthritis pain in his left neck and shoulder finally got so bad that he agreed to see the doctor last Monday.

The doctor orders a chest x-ray, which shows a 13-cm something in his left upper lung; the doctor says it’s either a huge pneumonia or a huge mass.

He’s been a heavy smoker for most of his life. Nobody really thinks this is pneumonia.

The doctor needs to admit him, do more tests, make a plan of action. He knows it’s going to be a long wait for them in the emergency room. He does an EKG and finds a slightly abnormal heart rhythm, thus giving him the justification he needs to send Mr. Ninja Mimi to the hospital via ambulance for admission, hoping this will expedite the process.

My mother and her husband get placed in an ER room to wait for his regular room to open up, at which time he’ll be moved upstairs. While in the emergency room, my mother learns all about the health problems of the people next to them, as they are only separated by a curtain. So much for healthcare privacy concerns.

The elderly lady next door has had a stroke, and she keeps repeating herself over and over to her husband. Nobody can decipher her meaning; it sounds as if she’s saying “words of wisdom” again and again and again. The  husband is so patient and tender with his afflicted wife that it nearly brings my mother to tears, having no way to keep from overhearing what should have been his intimate and confidential words of reassurance.

Later, my mom leaves to get some food for her husband while they wait for his room to open up. She brings him back a sausage and egg croissant from Sonic. She hears a voice from the other side of the curtain: “Ma’am? Ma’am? You, on the other side of the curtain. Can you come here?” My mother looks around the curtain to find a lady in a hospital bed. “Do you happen to have any more food with you?” the lady asks. My mother explains that she only brought in enough food for her husband. A few minutes later, a nurse comes in the room and impatiently explains to the lady next door that her blood sugar has come down some, but since it’s still 465 she’ll need to stay in the emergency room for a while longer (normal blood sugar is less than 100). The nurse tells the patient that she most certainly is not allowed to have anything to eat until her blood sugar is back under control. My mother is mortified to think that she could have potentially contributed to this woman’s health problems by giving her food, if she’d had any to give her. The patient next door later asks my mother if she can spare a few dollars, but mom doesn’t have any cash on her.

The doctor tried to circumvent what he feared would be a six-hour wait in the emergency room by sending Mr. Ninja Mimi over in an ambulance with an abnormal EKG and a giant lung mass and an oxygen saturation below 90% and a shoulder that was dislocated either by the mass itself or by intense coughing. But they didn’t wait six hours in the emergency room. They didn’t even wait eight hours in the emergency room. Somewhere between eleven and twelve hours after Mr. Ninja Mimi’s arrival in the emergency room, he got moved to a real hospital bed in a real room. Eleven or twelve hours on a gurney in a room with sick people all around, separated by thin sheets of cloth, where everyone can hear everything that’s said by everyone else. And he got moved at that point only because his son threw a fit. Turns out, another patient erroneously got moved into Mr. Ninja Mimi’s room. Charge nurses had to be called; janitors had to be summoned; mounds and mounds of paperwork had to be filled out. Who knows how long he would have laid on that gurney if someone hadn’t been there with him in the ER.

It seems like there isn’t as much “care” involved in healthcare as there ought to be. Lots of workers in an assembly line pushing people in, pushing them out, telling them the doctor will be right with them, handing out pills, checking the monitors, doing their jobs, punching a time card. There are exceptions, but they are too few. If you have a loved one in the hospital, there really needs to be someone there to look out for the patient’s interests, to check whether the medication being given is what was ordered by the doctor, to make sure the patient–your loved one–actually gets a room instead of lying in the ER for twelve hours or longer. It’s not enough to trust that your loved one will be properly cared for in an institution where their business is supposed to be caring for the sick. I say this not only based upon this one incident, but it is illustrative. Our healthcare system is broken.

(part 1 located here and part 2 located here, both also FREE)

So the other day I started writing this post, the third in my series, and then this thing happened, and then I had to rename part 3 into part 4 because now part 3 has to be about this thing that happened.

Here’s what happened. I was doing a whole bunch of things at once, a practice we innovators call multitasking, and one of those tasks I was multi-ing was watching my Twitter stream. I follow between 450-500 people on Twitter at any given time. I follow all sorts of people: reporters, people who blog about politics from the left and the right, people whom I just find to be entertaining for some reason, and even a few celebrities. But mostly I follow law students and lawyers. I mean, it’s what I am and what I aim to be. This isn’t rocket science. If it was, I’d follow rocket scientists.

Anyway, there I was, multitasking like a champ, and this comes across my Twitter stream:

Anyone who tells you to take the summer off before law school instead of preparing, either made “B”s or has a very short memory.

Now y’all. There is so much wrong with this statement I hardly know where to begin.

For starters, since when is a B such a bad thing? You’ll recall (because I know you read part 2 of this series, in which I explained in so many words that B is the first letter in BFF) that the orientation gurus will tell you over and over that a C is a good grade in law school. To hear this guy talk, though, a B is the Mark of the Law School Flunkie. Wrong. There is nothing in the world wrong with a B, especially if you go to a school that curves to a C+ or even lower. And considering how many law schools are starting to either inflate their students’ grades or drop the grading system altogether in favor of a modified pass/fail system, grades are becoming more and more meaningless anyway.

Also, WTF Captain Generalization? This guy makes all kinds of assumptions about people’s grades and their memories based on the advice they give regarding what to do the summer before you start law school. Does that make any sense? Does that seem responsible? Of course it doesn’t. I mean, this guy wasn’t directing his comment at me specifically, but as someone who has most certainly advised you to take the summer off before law school, it ruffled my feathers a bit.

But really, the thing that just made my outrage-ometer soar off the charts is this: the guy who tweeted the above statement? He’s an author. Oh hey and guess what kind of book he’s selling? Oh wow, that’s weird. This guy sells a book that’s all about how to spend the summer before you start law school PREPARING FOR LAW SCHOOL.

Huh.

So wait. You’re saying there’s this guy who sells a book (and presumably makes a profit of some sort) that professes to tell you how to prepare for law school, and that same guy also says that anyone who disagrees with him either must have gotten B’s or has a short memory?

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

So, being the snarky bitch that I am, I tweeted this in response:

Anyone who sells books about preparing for law school either couldn’t hack it as a lawyer or has a very short memory.

I mean, two can play at this game.

But really, this whole episode got me to thinking. Who are the people who advise you to do all this preparatory work the summer before you start law school?

Almost invariably, they are people selling you the (best) means by which you are to prepare.  (I say “almost invariably” because I do know anecdotally of one current law student who recommended a specific pre-law-school prep program to an incoming 1L.) If you search for “law school” on amazon.com, you get 28,972 results (at the time of this writing). The book written by Captain Generalization above is somewhere on the first page of the search results, along with however many other bazillion books that claim to have the secret to law school success. But did you ever wonder whether all those books have the same secret? I mean, there can’t be that many different secrets to law school success, right? Weird.

No matter how you slice it, there are a bunch of people out there making a shit-ton of money preying upon the insecurities of future 1Ls. An entire industry has grown up around the concept that law school is this dark, scary, mysterious place where gunners stealthily deploy biological weapons against unsuspecting classmates and professors randomly behead students who can’t withstand the Socratic scrutiny. Now, all I can speak about with any authority is my own law school experience. And in my experience, this is simply not the case.

Now I know you guys already know this because you read part 2 of my series, in which I told you in so many words the dirty little secret: law school just isn’t as hard as some would have you believe. I’m not being glib here. It’s new, and different, and challenging for sure. And it definitely is difficult. It may even be the most difficult challenge you’ve encountered to this point in your life. But y’all. It’s not like climbing Mount Everest. You don’t have to train for months and months just to make your first attempt at it, only to reach the third base camp and get frostbite and get sent back down the mountain to try again in another year or two. Thousands of people graduate from law school every year. Most of those people do so without having spent a fortune preparing for law school before they started. Some of the people who graduate from law school will do so still not knowing that it’s “would have been” and not “would of been.” This makes my toenails curl up, but it’s the truth.

Honestly, I couldn’t care less whether you take my advice or leave it. That’s why it’s free. I have no personal stake in your success or lack thereof in law school. Odds are, you don’t go to my school, you don’t live in my city or even my state, and we’ll never even meet, so whether you do well or not has no effect on me personally. Unlike Captain Generalization, I do not profit based on whether I can scare you into taking my advice.

But for god’s sake, you’re going to law school. Use your brain. It’s time to employ your critical thinking skills. Think about what motivates people, especially people who are trying to convince you that you can’t fully succeed without buying their snake oil. If you really and truly believe in your heart of hearts that you need to spend over a thousand dollars on a law prep class and/or hundreds of dollars on law prep books, do that. But if it gives you pause to think of spending a thousand dollars preparing for the education that’s going to cost you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, don’t worry that you’ll be behind in some way or at a disadvantage. You won’t.

I don’t really know if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but there are some things in life that I’m never satisfied with. Like shampoo. No matter how many different kinds of shampoo I buy, and no matter how much I may like the one I just bought, chances are good that I won’t buy that same brand of shampoo very many times. I’m always on the search for the perfect shampoo. What if there’s one that smells better? What if there’s one that adds volume AND protects the color at the same time?? It’s a never-ending quest.

Same goes for blog themes. In case you haven’t noticed, I like to change stuff around here fairly often. I’m always on the search for the perfect blog theme. What if there’s one that combines the perfect layout with the perfect font and the perfect color scheme? What if there’s one that contains everything I’ve ever wanted in a WordPress theme?? Again, it’s a never-ending quest.

So I have this same obsession with recipes. I try new recipes all the time, and I very rarely make the same recipe twice. There are exceptions, such as the Newcastle Pot Roast I made last Christmas, and two Christmases before that, and a few times in between. But for the most part, I’m always on the search for the perfect recipe. What if there’s one that calls for a secret ingredient that makes all the difference? What if there’s a recipe out there that combines all my favorite foods–avocados, cheese, bacon, and snickerdoodles??? Okay actually that sounds kinda gross.

Anyway.

Here’s a recipe that Ninja Kid and I cooked up the other night. I don’t know if it’s one that will get repeated, just because it didn’t blow my socks off and because I have so many other untried chicken recipes on deck. That said, it’s quick and super easy, and it tastes really good.

Chicken and Asparagus in White Wine Sauce
adapted slightly from Cooking Light, October 2007

• 1-1/2 lbs. skinless, boneless chicken breast tenders (or 4 breast halves)
• 2 T butter
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 white wine (I used Clos du Bois chardonnay)
• 1/2 chicken broth
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 bunch asparagus, trimmed
• 2 T chopped fresh parsley
• 1 T fresh lemon juice
• salt and pepper

Place each chicken breast half between two sheets of wax paper and pound to approximately 1/4 inch thickness. (NOTE: if you are using the breast tenders, which are cut into smaller pieces, you can probably skip this step.) Sprinkle chicken breasts with salt and freshly ground pepper.

Melt the butter in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.

Place flour in a shallow dish, and dredge the chicken in the flour. Cook chicken until done, about 3 minutes on each side.

Remove the chicken from the pan and keep warm. Next, add the wine, broth, and garlic to the pan and cook for 2 minutes, scraping to remove the browned bits from the bottom of the skillet. Browned bits. Yes, I said it.

Add asparagus and cover with a lid. Cook for about 3-4 minutes or until asparagus is crisp-tender. Whatever that means.

Remove the asparagus from the heat and add the parsley and the lemon juice. Serve asparagus and sauce with chicken.

Yes, that is a cloud of fluffy mashed potatoes you see in the background there.

Everybody knows that I make the best mashed potatoes in the history of the world. These are facts that are well documented. However, making the world’s greatest mashed potatoes takes time and planning. The world’s greatest mashed potatoes cannot be made on a whim, people. And every once in a while, necessity calls, and you find yourself desperately needing mashed potatoes but lacking the time to prepare them from scratch. This is a huge problem.

I can fix it, if you’re desperate.

In a pinch, you can buy some of those ready-made mashed potatoes in the refrigerated section. We used Country Crock, and it was the first time we tried this, and they turned out fine. Anyway, you prepare the mashed potatoes according to the package directions, and then you add in a WHOLE bunch of shredded Parmesan cheese. The key is not to really look at the mashed potatoes until after you’ve cooked them and added the cheese (and some salt and pepper) and stirred them around a bit. If you look at them too much before this point, you’re likely to gross yourself completely out. If you can hire someone to do this step for you, all the better.

Now back to work, all of you. I have to get back to my quests. So many quests.

Oh, you guys. Sometimes I like to sit around and worry about important things. I think it’s good for you; it keeps you from thinking things are going well. For example, every day I make it a point to spend some time worrying about whether the world is going to end in 2012 when the Mayan calendar runs out. This is important because if the world ends in 2012, it will erase my student debt. Which means I should borrow as much as I possibly can right now, then get a six-month deferment on my loan repayments while I bomb pass the bar and find a fast-food lawyering job, making my first repayment due in approximately November of 2012. Then I will accidentally forget to make that payment, and by the time they figure it out and come to take me away to debtor’s prison, the world will have asploded into fiery bits. These sorts of things are important.

So, a recap.

This

is preferable to this

Now that we have that all cleared up, I’ll tell you what I spent some time worrying about earlier today. It’s tricky, so I’ll need your undivided attention.

In two years or so, you guys, I better will be out of law school. And then, see, I won’t want to call myself Law School Ninja any longer. Because, see, I won’t be in law school any more. This is complicated, I know. Feel free to re-read this paragraph however many times it takes before you begin to feel my unparalleled anxiety.

So, rather than cleaning house, or doing some grocery shopping, or paying bills, or working on my research project about whether it’s okay for a defense attorney to approach an alleged victim with an affidavit of nonprosecution–a question for which I’m having a heck of a time finding a definitive answer–rather than messing with any of that, I decided that the issue of what to call myself after law school was Numero Uno Compelling Problem to be Solved for Today.

So I tweeted about it, and I got a bunch of really great suggestions, which I sat and worried about for a while, and now I can’t decide. Well, I think I’ve decided, but I’m sometimes very indecisive, so I wanted to give you all an opportunity to vote. Yes, we’re voting here at Law School Ninja. Today it’s about a domain name, but tomorrow it just might be about whether I should have fish or chicken for dinner. In fact, now that I’ve discovered the wonder of polls, I’ll probably turn over all kinds of important decisions to you guys. And, just to refresh your memory, voting is not only your right, it’s your patriotic duty. You are no less than a pinko communist scumbag if you don’t vote in my poll. And it gets worse. If you don’t vote, the terrorists win. You don’t want that on your conscience.

Maybe you planned carefully for it. Maybe you got caught completely off guard by it. Maybe you were secretly wishing for it but you didn’t dare tell anyone. Regardless, it’s happened. You’re going to have a baby write an appellate brief. A brief! A real, live brief that eats, poops, cries, and sleeps. Congratulations!!

Now what?

First of all, don’t panic. You have about nine days to write this brief. Nine days is plenty of time.

The first three days are generally spent just getting used to the idea that you’re going to be writing a brief. It’s possible that you won’t even fully realize you’re writing the brief until the first three days are almost over. You may experience some nausea and fatigue during this time. If you feel like sleeping, go ahead and take a nap! Your brain will thank you later. You may also have some strong cravings for things like peanut butter cookies, pickles and ice cream, and beer. You are likely to find yourself doing some window shopping in the office supply store, gazing longingly at the different colors of cardstock from which to choose the cover of your brief. By the end of the first three days, your brief will be about the size of an index card.

The second three days are marked by rapid growth in the size of your brief to approximately 7-10 sheets of paper. Because of your food cravings, you may have some trouble getting your pre-brief pants buttoned. If that’s the case, rest assured that this is completely normal. You just have to change into the brief-writing pants with the elastic waist. By now, your nausea should be starting to get a little better, although your fatigue may be getting worse. Go ahead and continue to indulge when you feel like sleeping. At this point you’re going to need to start thinking about how to arrange your brief’s words so it will have a comfortable place to rest when it arrives. You’ll probably want to start shopping for and stocking up on supplies such as energy drinks, ink cartridges for your printer, and paper. Take advantage of your energy during this three-day period, because the next three days are going to be much less comfortable.

In the final three days of your brief-hatching, your brief will grow to its final size of about 15-20 sheets of paper. If you feel like your brief is extra large or extra small, don’t be concerned. Brief size is dependent on many variables, including your nutritional intake, genetics, and page limit restrictions. As long as your briefcare professional isn’t concerned, you’re probably fine. The last three days are increasingly less comfortable physically, as well. You may feel as though this brief growing inside your brain is completely taking over. You feel this way because that’s exactly what’s happening. Your brief is consuming a LOT of your time and energy at this point. You should also know that at this stage the other people in your life are going to want to be around you less and less. You’re going to be pretty miserable with this huge brief kicking you and moving around all the time and generally just BEING THERE, and the tendency will be for you to do some heavy-duty whining. It’s okay to whine. You’re writing a brief. Just don’t be surprised if others are less sympathetic. Especially those who’ve never written a brief before. They just don’t understand.

Finally, after nine long days of preparation, the big day has arrived. Today is your due date! You’re birthing a brief! Can you believe it’s finally come to this?!

Make sure you’ve packed your bag with all your supplies in it, and then head off to the brief-writing facility. Your briefcare professional will meet you there and get you settled in and comfortable. If you’re lucky, maybe some people will come see you in your room and bring you flowers and candy. And gifts! Soft blankies and cute clothes and sweet-smelling shampoo and bubble bath.

At some point your briefcare professional may ask you whether you’d like a sedative. Listen carefully here. THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IS ALWAYS A RESOUNDING “YES.” Do not–I repeat, do not–attempt to write your brief au naturel. You will be SO sorry if you do, and by the time you realize that you actually do want the sedative it’ll be too late. There’s a narrow window of time during which you can safely receive the sedative without harming your brief. Take advantage of it, for god’s sake. This point simply cannot be overemphasized.

So you labor along in your little room with your soft blankie and your sedative and your papers and your laptop, and your briefcare professional comes into the room, takes a look at you, and says these words: “IT’S TIME.”

“But wait,”  you plead, “wait just a minute! I’m not ready! Can’t I just have one more day? I just need ONE MORE DAY PLEASE GIVE ME ONE MORE DAY I’M NOT READY!”

“Nope, this is it. There’s no turning back now. You’re writing a brief today. Right now, actually.”

And then the horror fun starts. You work and you labor and you toil and you push and you struggle and you gripe and you complain. At any point it is perfectly acceptable (and even encouraged) to look over at the person who assigned you the brief and scream, at the top of your lungs, in your most menacing screech:

“YOU!! YOU DID THIS TO ME!! I HATE YOU!! DON’T YOU EVER COME NEAR ME AGAIN, YOU BASTARD!!”

Finally, after hours and hours of hard labor (but aren’t you glad you got the sedative now? huh? can you imagine writing a brief without it??), you muster up all your strength one last time and push… PRINT.

The next thing you know, your briefcare professional is handing you a brand new brief (a brief!!), all wrapped up in a cardstock blankie, looking perfect in every way. And you unwrap the brief and you count all its pages to make sure they’re all present and numbered correctly. They say that briefs have horrible eyesight when they’re born, but at that moment your brief looks at you with those big eyes, and you know it recognizes you as its writer. There’s a connection. And then you reluctantly hand your brief over to be examined by other briefcare professionals, who all tell you that yours is the best looking brief they’ve ever seen.

And you think, I can’t possibly ever do this again. I can’t ever write another brief like I wrote this one. This is too much. I’m getting my fingers tied. But after a while, you start to forget the bad parts of writing a brief. It wasn’t so bad, was it? Next time I write a brief, though, I’m going to do things differently. Like ask for more sedatives. And before you know it, you’ll be back in your elastic-waist pants again, eating peanut butter cookies and staring at your rapidly growing brief.

Actually, Ninja Kid probably isn’t old enough to have actually ever had a groove, much less to have lost it and gotten it back already. But she wanted the title of this post to have the word “groove” in it, so there you have it. Everybody’s happy.

After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, I was finally able to get all but one of the dance recital videos uploaded to YouTube. Well, they all uploaded, but YouTube disabled the audio on one of them because they’re 100% sure it’s a copyright violation. Whatevs. It wasn’t our favorite dance anyway.

These are videos taken at dress rehearsal, which is really the best way for me to get video, because on recital day I’m backstage IN THE TRENCHES instead of in the audience. So, without further ado, I present the Dancing Ninja Kid.

This first one is a ballet number. Here in Texas, sometimes we do ballet dances to… country music.

Next up is jazz. Ninja Kid liked this one quite a bit and it shows.

Okay, those first two were dances from her regular once-a-week dance class. The next two are the dances we’re taking to national competition in Myrtle Beach in July. For a week. On the beach. Again, people, I’m tired of having to repeat this: MY LIFE IS HARD.

So the company is divided into two subgroups based on seniority: Emerald (newer girls) and Amethyst (veterans). This is Ninja Kid’s first year with the big girls and she was so excited to have gotten promoted. This is the tap number that Amethyst Company will take to summer competition.

Finally, the entire company does a big jazz number at competition.

It’s okay if your eyes got a little bit leaky when you watched those. It happens to me, too. If you didn’t swell up with pride and think “ATTA GIRL!!” at least once, then try watching them again. If you still feel nothing, YOU HAVE NO SOUL.

Oh, you guys. YOU GUYS. This weekend is Ninja Kid’s dance recital.

I’m not even exaggerating this, either. It’s srs bzns.

Okay so here’s some background. Ninja Kid is actually a really good little dancer. She takes tap, ballet, and jazz at this fabulous dance studio here. She started when she was 3. So once a week she goes to her little dance class and they teach her dance moves like the Running Man and probably also the Twist. Also, this is her third year in the studio’s competitive dance company that–wait for it–TRAVELS. See what I did there? As everybody knows, I love to travel. Again, these are facts that are well documented. It should come as no surprise that Ninja Kid is strongly encouraged to participate in activities that involve TRAVEL. Anyway, each year she auditions for the company (and makes it, of course) and then they also practice once a week (just tap and jazz, no ballet) and they teach her more difficult dance moves such as the Worm and the Moonwalk.

What this means, civilians, is that Ninja Kid is in five different dance numbers. This is great news if your name is PawPaw and you’re traveling to Ninjatown to watch Ninja Kid do the Sprinkler. If your name is Law School Ninja (that’s me), it means TRENCH WARFARE.

While you slackers are watching and applauding and generally being amazed in the cool, cozy auditorium, there’s a BATTLE ROYALE going on backstage. Again, I’m not exaggerating this. All five costumes must be transported with their respective accessories, tights, shoes, feathers, etc., to this room full of musical instruments at the high school where we have the recital every year. Every year, the temperature on recital day ranges between 200 and 225 degrees Fahrenheit, and they never have the air conditioners running. So it’s a little warm back there. And you get your kid all dressed and ready for her first number, and she goes out and dances, and you stay backstage and gossip visit with the other dance moms. Then your kid comes running back to the room full of musical instruments and no air conditioner, and this time she’s all hot and sweaty and her lipstick is smeared and you’ve got approximately 45 seconds to get her completely out of the first costume and into the next one. Oh and also her hair is falling out of the bun you created with 45,648 bobby pins and 23 gallons of hair spray. This goes on for 2-1/2 hours. And that’s just the 10:00 morning show. We turn right around and do it all again starting at 7:00 that SAME NIGHT.

Two shows.

On the same day.

You did read that correctly.

That’s right. My life is hard.

While you’re reading this, I’m at dress rehearsal with Ninja Kid and PawPaw. In fact, I’m probably taking video right this very second. And guess what I’m going to do with that video? Well, I’m going to watch it, and then if it’s any good, I’m going to post it later. And then you can see Ninja Kid dancing and doing her fancy dance moves and then you will be so proud of her just like I am and then maybe your eyes will start to get a little leaky like mine usually do when I watch her dance.

Oh, you guys. I came up with the most brilliant plan of all time the other day. You know how on your first day of school each year each of your teachers will make everybody go around the room and introduce themselves and say what they did last summer? By the time you’ve done that about twice you’re sick and tired of repeating yourself. Plus, there’s always at least one obnoxious girl who did something she thinks was really really cool over the summer like sail around the world in her grandfather’s yacht or walk barefoot from coast to coast for charity. And then when you say, “I set up a lemonade stand in my parents’ front yard and made $10 and I bought a life-sized Scott Baio poster for my bedroom door,” that girl feels REALLY STUPID because obviously your summer was WAY cooler than hers.

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

But this time, I’ll be ready. I have devised a brilliant plan. When it gets to be my turn to introduce myself to the class and say what I did last summer, I’m going to just walk straight up to the chalkboard and write this in big letters:

http://law-school-ninja.com

And then I’m going to look all those people right in the eyes and say, “If you really want to know what I did during my fabulous summer, you’re going to have to read MY AWESOME BLOG.” And then they’re all going to gasp and then they’ll cheer and I will return to my seat to the sound of thunderous applause.

It’s gonna be so great.