Happy Halloween: The Trick's on Me This Year

This year, when I open my door on Halloween night to kids announcing "trick or treat," I'm opting for "trick."

Of course, I won't dare any wayward schoolchildren to play a trick on me, although I'd be interested to see whether any of them had thought through a "Plan B" for this kind of situation. I won't even deny them the handout they sought when the knocked on my door.

Instead, I'm giving out tricks disguised as treats.

Anyone can hand out candy on Halloween. The prudish among us can hand out apples or floss or bags of tea. People who hate children can hand out rocks. Fundamentalists could hand out "tracks" that explain the salvation process, which I'm pretty sure I received a few times growing up in semi-rural Alabama.

But who among us can hand out packets of Splenda?

I mean, besides me.

This has been a dream of mine for a couple of years.

Two years ago, I stocked my house with just enough candy to survive Halloween night. When 8:00 p.m. hit and we were down to seven pieces of candy in the house, I tried desperately to think of a backup plan that didn't involve going out to the store. Walgreens was only 2 blocks away, and I really didn't haven anything else to do, but it was dark outside and I was fighting for Principle. Or possibly just laziness.

But either way, I wasn't going back outside. Instead, I scavenged the house for back-up plans to distribute once my seven pieces of candy disappeared. When the results of my search were 2 apples, an assortment of tea bags and two partially unwanted cats, I got a bit nervous, but I was absolutely committed to the plan.

Thankfully, only five other kids came to my door that night, but the evening taught me a lesson: never again would I risk running out of good candy and having to resort to giving out something ridiculous.

Instead, I would stock up on ridiculous things to start with. This way, if I run out of stuff to hand out, no one will be disappointed.

The only rule of this exercise is that nothing I give out will be so utterly ludicrous that it is self-evidently meant as a joke. There will be no rubber chickens, no pocket-sized New Testaments (with Psalms and Proverbs included, for reasons never properly explained), and no bags of rocks or condoms. Instead, everything I give out will be something that someone, somewhere, might actually think was appropriate.

So, this Halloween, I'll be the old lady handing out bags or tea or muffin mix. I'll be the weirdo handing out Star Wars trading cards and leftover Valentines Day candy or cards with the names still visible. I'll be the cheapskate distributing my unwanted old VHS tapes, including the homemade ones.

I'll save my best stuff for the teenagers to old to be doing this, or the parents with one-year-olds who are clearly looking to score for themselves, because their kids can't even eat solid food yet.  These groups will get yogurt. If the container busts before they get home, that isn't my problem.

So if you need some Mardi Gras beads, come on by. If you're out of long underwear, I have some extra that I don't need. If you need a vacuum cleaner that only sort of works, or that Singing Butler painting that was popular 10 years ago at Bombay Company, you know where to find me.

And thanks to Starbucks, I have both more packets of Splenda and more temporarily trendy CDs from now-faded artists than I know what to do with.

Or actually, I now know exactly what to do with them: give them to you and your bratty little children.

What's more, if you don't have a place to put all these things, I'm pretty sure I have some old, deep, baking dishes left over from my last yard sale.

You're welcome to them all.

It's my treat.

October: Still the Best Month

I'm running behind this week, and don't have time to write. So it's a good thing I haven't gotten around to my annual tradition of re-posting my wildly popular (by my standards, at least) blog from two years ago celebrating the joys of October.

This way, I can do it now and not have to write anything new this week.

Procrastination has its advantages.

October is the best month of the year, and I know many of you agree because this is the most widely read post on this site I've ever written by a couple hundred hits.

So enjoy the beautiful weather, and maybe take your computer outside to read all about it here:

http://andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-october-is-best-month-of-year.html

A Solution to Our Government Shutdown: Name My Cat Dictator

So the government is shut down, and a better one doesn't seem likely to open in its place anytime soon.

But maybe it should.

While Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are locked in a room pretending to negotiate as their respective staffs try fruitlessly to tell them apart, we, as a nation, should collectively tell them "never mind."

Instead, imagine their surprise when they come out of their little room look around and, once they pull their heads out of their respective backsides, discover they've been replaced.

By my cat.

That's right. In the new system I hereby propose, there will be no more parties who care more about getting elected than about governing, and who refuse to negotiate because they know the other party will get blamed for the shutdown. There will be no extremists who dispute that accepting a validly enacted piece of legislation they don't happen to like is the price of living in a democracy. 

Instead of dysfunctional mess in which we currently find ourselves, I propose our nation cede all its governing power over to one source: Trouble, my housecat. 

The benefits of this idea barely fit onto this page.

TroubleCat wastes no time deliberating. She knows what she wants, and she goes after it.  For example, if she wants foreign aid, she scratches my leg and meows incessantly until I give in and give her some of my chicken.

Vladamir Putin would be no match for this negotiating tactic.

In our current government, beneficial legislation gets derailed because neither party wants the other to get credit for passing it.  What little does eventually get passed is so corrupted by special interests who fund our legislator's re-election campaigns that it no longer benefits the population at large.

These problems would end if Trouble were in charge. Give her a piece of legislation that stinks and she will poop on it.

Give her a piece of good legislation and she will possibly still poop on it, but she will at least riffle through it and scratch it up first. And if you focus a laser pointer on its relevant points, she will give it her undivided attention, at least until a bug flies by.

This is progress over what we have now.

The advantages don't end there. Trouble would hold no press conferences and would never appear on cable talk shows to refuse to answer the hosts' questions directly. She would not waste time on dumb proposals that have no chance of passing just to appease her political base. While she couldn't find Iraq on a map, at least that means she wouldn't go to war with it.

Her health care plan consists of lots of naps. And no matter what struggles she might face, she will always land on her feet.

Most importantly, the constant and exhausting stalemates between two political parties who can't work together would cease if we just named Trouble our Cat Dictator for Life.

For all nine lives, for that matter.

Trouble would get things done. For example, she would personally increase our nation's paper bag and laundry basket inspection programs, which would in turn dramatically decrease the number of bag-and-basket-related deaths, assuming she could ever find her way out to sign the bill.

Also, she would have to learn to learn how to hold a pen in her mouth and sign things.  But this seems more likely than Republicans and Democrats ever working together.

Of course, I realize that this plan is not without drawbacks.

Some might be alarmed at the idea of Trouble having her finger over our nuclear arsenal. Fortunately, she doesn't have opposable thumbs so this is not a significant concern.

Some might fear she could easily be bought off for a mere can of Fancy Feast. But I can assure anyone concerned that the moment she finishes her treat, she will be back to the same self-centered creature she always was, having no concern or loyalty to anyone but herself.

Others might contend that a cat with a below-average IQ, even for cats, is not the most qualified candidate to have dictatorial control over the free world. But this argument overlooks that fact that she is the only cat who has volunteered, through her master's proxy, to serve.

Detractors might argue that Trouble would probably not realize she was leading the free world, even if she was put in charge.

Some might even go so far as to contend that she doesn't actually care about anyone who lives outside her house, and any positive actions she took for our country would probably be completely accidental.

But this hardly differentiates her from our politicians, and at least she is fluffy and cute.

A Day in the Life of a Lawyer

It's late on a Tuesday night, I'm in a different time zone and probably should be sleeping.  It's already after 11 and I need to be up at 7 in the morning for court. But with the change in time zone, I'm neither sleepy nor fully prepared. I can barely focus my nervous energy.

God help me.

I have something called an oral argument tomorrow. It's first thing in the morning, before the appellate court one level below the U.S. Supreme Court.

It will either provide me a unique opportunity to demonstrate the mastery of my appellate advocacy, and validate me against all my childhood critics, or it will be a Chinese water torture in which I demonstrate to the court and a room full of observing lawyers that I've wasted my life by choosing a profession the demands of which are hopelessly beyond my abilities.

It's pretty much one or the other.

Oral argument is the most intense adrenaline rush a lawyer can ever endure.  All eyes of the court focus on the lawyer, as he or she gets a specified time to make their case before a panel of appellate judges, who can--and do--interrupt at any time with questions. And anything is fair game.

The attorney must be prepared to know any fact within what is often a several-thousand-page record. (And you get bonus points if you can pinpoint the page of the transcript where that fact can be found). As the attorney, you must be prepared to discuss any similar case within your jurisdiction, and to argue how its facts either help your position or, at worst, are distinguishable from it.

You must not only be prepared to discuss how the law relates to your case, but how your case would turn out if the facts were just a little bit different in one critical regard, because judges like to think about the policy implications of their decisions.

And after you finish answering whatever specific question you face, you must seamlessly transition back into your argument until you get interrupted again, which is generally not long. Often the judges will start arguing with each other, asking you to solve their disagreement, and you must choose how to answer the questions without alienating either. The judges will point out potential flaws in the arguments of both sides and tell each of you why they might rule against you, and it's up to you to allay their fears or change their minds. 

Trials are stressful too, but often the witnesses have as much to do with the outcome as the lawyer. In an appellate oral argument, it's just two attorneys pushing down on the scales of justice, arguing whether or not the trial court got it right.

It is a high wire act, but there's no better feeling in law than pulling it off.

This particular case is harder than usual. It's full of complex medical terminology that is hard to understand. A different attorney handled it at the trial level, and even wrote the brief whose merits I was pressed into arguing when he left. I would not have approached it the way he did, and I as try to comprehend his complex procedural argument as to why the convicted defendant's ineffective assistance of counsel claim was not properly preserved for review, a sobering reality strikes me:

I'm one early morning brain fart away from enabling a guilty man go free through my sheer incompetence.

I try to look at the bright side. Maybe if I screw up, it will just mean that the defendant gets a new trial. In that case, it's not so bad. It just means that I'm one brain fart away from forcing some distant district attorney to have to re-call a long list of witnesses and panel a new jury and probably pay a new set of experts to come testify, and make any potential victim re-live their trauma.

Sometimes, that result is inescapable. If that's what justice demands, then so be it. But the idea that it might happen because I failed to think of the winning response to what should have been an answerable question is enough to drive one to drink.

Or at least it would be, if I didn't have court in just a few hours.

The work is never done in preparing for one of those things. There's always some other hypothetical question the judges might ask, some other fact from the record they might want to know. There's always some snappier way to deliver one of your lines. And you can never practice your presentation too many times.

This is especially challenging for me. Oral argument has always been my best skill as an attorney, but I'm consistently horrible when there's no audience in front of me, so I never really know how prepared I actually am.

Somewhere long after midnight, I recognize that my argument is as good as its ever going to be and settle into my hotel bedroom, setting two alarms and a wake-up call, just in case.

As I practice my delivery in the shower the next morning, I think of other questions about the factual record. I need to look through the trial transcript again, but my stomach is so torn up from the stress that I can't stay out of the bathroom for more than 3 minutes at a time to look at my computer.

After a few minutes too long, I find what I'm looking for (I mean, besides the bathroom), and race to court to check in for my argument a few minutes later than I would like. The clerk gives me a look, and I narrowly decide against explaining that my near-the-deadline arrival time was due entirely to the fire in my bowels.

Thankfully, I have just enough time to go back to the bathroom before court starts. This is already as bad as that colonoscopy I had last year, and I haven't even been examined by the judges yet.

Any lawyer is capable of getting inescapably confused by unexpected phrasing of a question or suddenly forgetting the name of their client at an inopportune time (which happens more often than you'd think).  Like a gymnast or figure skater, once you lose your rhythm and routine it's nearly impossible to get it back. No amount of preparation can fully guard against that, but one's ability to think outside the script at least improves with experience.

But weirdly, my butterflies always go away once I face my first question. I won't get the Court's opinion for weeks, but for now, at least, I'm happy with how I did.

I don't have the strength to celebrate when it's finally over. My mind goes numb (even more so than usual, that is) for awhile, but it eventually occurs to me how I could have better answered certain questions in the perfect world.

I know I can't make the world perfect, though. Instead, as I grab some coffee to sustain me for the long drive home, I just hope that I haven't made it worse by anything that I forgot.

What an odd profession I chose. Mechanics see a problem and fix it with their hands. Doctors see a problem and treat it with medicine. Lawyers see an issue and argue about whether it was a problem.

I just really hope I didn't leave anything out of that argument.