Got another ding.

Pepperdine, who I haven’t thought twice about for a couple of months now, rejected me. I knew from their stats that they were less forgiving with the low GPA/high LSAT splitters, so this is no real surprise, nor is it of much consequence to me. I’m expecting a similar result from Arizona State, another school that has shown to not be very tolerant of an unimpressive undergrad GPA.

None of this matters, of course. There’s nobody left who could accept me and leave me thinking, “Oh…I could’ve gone there.” Pepperdine is a fine institution, but they’ve long been an afterthought for me in this process.

Tony Bennett gone…

…absolutely devastating. The Cougs have some good young talent, and they’d better make a very good hire for next head coach, or this little run under Tony will be a forgotten footnote in a few years.

Best of luck to Tony in Virginia. Really surprised that UVA is the greener pasture he chose to bolt for after holding out from joining Indiana in the Big Ten last year, but so be it, I don’t hate the guy for moving on. He and his father made us relevant again, if only for a short time. Really disappointed that his time at Wazzu is already over, though.

This is the worst sports news I’ve received since the Sonics’ move to Oklahoma was made official.

That must be how Jerry Seinfeld felt as “Even Steven” in “The Opposite”…

Today, I walk out of my apartment to go check my mailbox. I see a note attached to my door from my landlord. On it, it says that there’s a $65 credit to my rent balance, and that I should pay $65 less on next month’s bill; apparently I’ve been overpaying by $5 a month for a long time. That was kind of nice, pretty much feels like a little bit of found money since I wouldn’t have ever felt that $5 a month difference. Then I got to my mailbox and discovered just one piece of mail…from my dentist, saying that I owe them $58 because the insurance paid them a bit less than expected for a filling I got a few months ago.

Good thing I hadn’t thought of a cool way to spend the $65 or anything…

The answer is “I don’t know.”

One frequent question I’ve gotten since the day I started telling everyone I was pursuing law school is, “What kind of law do you want to practice?” I don’t have an answer for them. I find lots of areas of the law fascinating; I’m not focused toward any one area yet, and I don’t feel the need to be. The first year curriculum is the same for all law students, and after that you get to make a lot more of your own choices to define your path more clearly.

I’ve got a while to figure out specifically what direction I want to go…but I’ll know a lot better once I see what I like best at the nuts and bolts level, once I do some summer legal work after my first year, and once I see where there is demand and where there isn’t. Will the draw of making more money and paying down my student debt more quickly outweigh doing work that I like more right out of the gates? Will I even have the grades to be competitive for the best jobs? All of this remains to be seen, and it’s just nothing that I’m worried about yet. I let the future and big picture drive me crazy at times, but in this case I really just care about doing my best to ace my summer torts class starting on July 6th.

My situation in comparing price tags was probably pretty unique.

I already e-mailed Gonzaga to inform them of my withdrawal, but I got my physical mailing from them today anyway…in it was a scholarship offer for $11K per year. Now that’s an okay scholarship, but the thing is that the schools who have offered me money have all been around that amount. $11K annually from Gonzaga, $5K from Pacific, $7700 from Chapman…and $10K from Indiana? Without any disrespect to these other schools, all fine institutions that I thought enough of to pay the application fee to test the waters there, the only factor they brought to the table that would put them above IU is proximity to Bellingham (a factor that wasn’t that high on my list by the time decision time loomed).

The Office: “Two Weeks”

I thought tonight’s episode was mostly unfunny. I liked the opening with everyone wanting to hear Michael’s quitting story, and especially Oscar’s talking head right after that, but the rest of the episode never elicited more than the occasional slight chuckle out of me. Kind of boring tonight.

Boring, at least, until Pam randomly lost her mind and decided to join Michael’s ridiculous business venture. I’m not surprised that Michael is all the way gone from the company (though you’d certainly have to assume that he’ll be back), but Pam getting up and leaving shocked me. Didn’t seem to fall in line with her character at all, she’s not supposed to be dumb…I realize that she’s long been unhappy with being a receptionist, but there are other ways to look elsewhere. Of course, the look on her face at the end of the episode indicated that she was realizing that too.

I don’t have much good to say for tonight’s episode, no huge laughs and a twist at the end that (while interesting) wasn’t especially to my liking. The show has been really good lately, but they’ve gotten prone to throwing clunkers like this episode in here and there.

Late March thoughts.

So…the commitment has been made, the lease papers are signed, I’ve put in my notice at work. I’m beyond the point of no return, and a move to Bloomington in late June is a certainty.

Do I have any buyer’s remorse? No, thankfully not. I’m much more excited than I am scared/worried/whatever. I did have a moment right after committing that I thought, “How the heck did all of this actually happen? I just signed myself up to move 2300 miles away?” As a guy who wouldn’t generally be described as adventurous at all, this whole thing is quite a departure for me.

Waitlisted at Seattle U.

Mildly surprised I wasn’t accepted here, but like Gonzaga, this wasn’t a likely destination. As far as northwest schools go, I’m pretty sure I would’ve chosen Idaho over the other two unless Seattle had offered me significant scholarship money.

That’s six acceptances, two rejections, four waitlists. Six schools still pending, none of which could do much of anything to make me second-guess my already made commitment. Not much point in any of this, just posting it in case anyone was curious.

In at Gonzaga.

Nothing to see here really. 6th acceptance, I’ll withdraw immediately. I was always pretty unlikely to go there. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s six acceptances, two rejections, three waitlists.

Cool coincidence.

One of my favorite classes back at WSU was PoliSci 404 (I think that was the class number), The Judicial Process. That, along with a class about the Constitution, are probably the only classes on my academic resume that would be considered pre-law. I found my professor for the judicial process course to be fascinating; I felt like I learned a lot in that class, and thought he was one of the more memorable teachers I ran across. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two other professors who were as interesting as Dr. Pickerill while making my way through the upper-level polisci curriculum. I don’t know if I earned a great grade from him, he was a notoriously tough grader and I just didn’t really earn a lot of great grades in general back in the day. However, he was at least one who I bothered to visit a couple of times in his office hours, and never found boring in class. I would highly recommend him to any polisci major at WSU.

I remembered that he had earned a law degree at some point along the way, and today just felt curious enough to look up his CV on the WSU website to see where he went to law school. You can see where this is headed…I had no idea of this previously to today, but he’s an alum of IU-Bloomington School of Law. Kind of a cool coincidence, I thought. My future plans at this point don’t really involve teaching political science at WSU, but I guess you never know.

Much more fun than planning to move my stuff…

…is planning to move myself. Once I can get all of my stuff into transit toward Bloomington, all I’ll have to do is pack several days’ worth of clothing and a few other accessories like my laptop, and I can head east and enjoy the road for a while.

It’s one of my goals to see all 50 states before I keel over (and connecting in an airport doesn’t count as “seeing the state,” in my opinion). My recent visit to Indiana puts me at 18. This total should reach 22 as I road trip over. Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are nothing new to me (though I really like each of them), but once I cross into South Dakota it’ll all be new terrain until I arrive in Indiana.

Arizona liked me, but only as a friend.

For the first time in over a month, I got notified on a decision by a school…Arizona waitlisted me. I obviously let them know right away that they could withdraw my name from consideration. They were the only one that I was willing to listen to of my pending applications before committing to Indiana…but I was never going to wait around on anyone’s waitlist for long, not with the IU option on the table.

The remaining pending apps (ASU, Pepperdine, San Diego, Santa Clara, Wyoming, Gonzaga, Seattle, UNLV) have been irrelevant for a couple of months now. Obviously it’s turned out that I went a little overboard with my applications, it’s like I bought the super duper insurance package or something when I didn’t have to. And to think…Indiana’s application fee was the cheapest of the whole lot, aside from the two schools that gave me fee waivers.

I definitely feel lucky with how the timing of the application cycle worked out, I know there are tons of applicants out there who are stressing out about where they’re headed in the fall (and will be stressing out about that for a while)…I got accepted by two really good schools early on, settled the decision between the two relatively quickly, and to be able to kick back and not worry about anything but a few moving details in the middle of March is a blessing. I was choosing and ordering a cable TV package for my Bloomington apartment today, which is way ahead of where I would’ve expected to be by this point. This has all gone really well.

The Office: “New Boss”

“I quit”?? Wow.

First, though, I have to say that I loved the new boss. Loved his character, loved his chemistry with Michael…their scenes were better than anything we saw with Michael and Ryan last season. I hope that he’s an active part of the show the same way David Wallace has been this year. Tons of great cringe-worthy moments on Michael’s part when dealing with the new boss.

Jim wearing the tux all day was a great running joke, building on that hilarious opening sequence where he was pushing “classy” and Dwight finally blew up. His interactions with the new boss were awkward and great too.

Michael quitting, though, was really unexpected. Of course he’s not leaving the show or anything, but they’ve built this storyline pretty well with him growing increasingly dissatisfied with Wallace and the company ever since Holly was transferred away from him. While the show has been a lot more funny and entertaining lately, it has really lacked a distinctive main storyline. I think that most Office fans would agree that season two was the best in series history; a big reason for why was that the Jim-Pam storyline was so well-written and gave something for fans to keep tuning back in for week after week. They kept that up through season three, which was still good, but not quite at the season two level. Once they got together, though, the writers have been a bit directionless in developing really good running plots to fuel the show. They kept trying to build up little office romance subplots, but it got a little bit tiresome. While Jim and Pam haven’t been as entertaining in general as usual this year, I think it’s easily been Michael’s best season to date (and Steve Carell’s best acting on this show as well). Michael’s immaturity is frustrating, but when he shows his more human side he’s a very sympathetic character.

I was caught way off-guard by the “I quit” at the end; I don’t really know where they’re headed next with that. I definitely look forward to the next episode though, so the writers certainly did their job. Really good episode tonight.

Yikes, President Obama.

The first appearance by a sitting president on “The Tonight Show” may well end up being the last.

President Obama, in his taping with Jay Leno Thursday afternoon, attempted to yuk it up with the funnyman, and ended up insulting the disabled.

Towards the end of his approximately 40-minute appearance, the president talked about how he’s gotten better at bowling and has been practicing in the White House bowling alley.

He bowled a 129, the president said.

“That’s very good, Mr. President,” Leno said sarcastically.

It’s “like the Special Olympics or something,” the president said.

When asked about the remark, the White House said the president did not intend to offend.

I don’t get offended easily, and this didn’t offend me either, but…seriously, that seems like a pretty big faux pas. When National Review pundit Yuval Levin says, “He’s very lucky he’s not a Republican,” he’s right. There would’ve been a feeding frenzy. Stick to making fun of people clinging to guns and religion, Mr. President…that seems to go over better for you.

EDIT: Great follow-up by Mark Hemingway of NRO: “Sounds like Joe Biden’s been writing Obama’s material!” Spot-on; now that Hemingway mentions it, this is definitely reminiscent of a Biden gaffe.

By the way, I really do think that this is a non-issue…in this era of 24/7 news coverage, dumb words are going to be spoken at some point by every prominent politician. As opposed to things like the “clinging to guns and religion” snipe during the election year, which I think really did point to Obama’s caustic inner thoughts toward certain members of the American population, this Special Olympics reference was just an attempt at self-deprecating humor that went awry for him. No matter how stupid of a line it was, there wasn’t anything actually malicious about it even underneath the surface, at least as far as I can see.

I don’t care about the tourney.

I’ve always loved the NCAA Basketball Tournament. It’s the best non-football thing to happen in sports all year long, the excitement and drama is just fantastic. For years, my WSU Cougars were completely irrelevant, not even sniffing a winning season, let alone a tournament bid.

These last couple of years have obviously gone much better. To make the second round of the tourney two years ago, and the Sweet Sixteen last year…well, I got spoiled. This season wasn’t a bad one for WSU hoops, it was a somewhat expected down year as Coach Bennett had to play lots of youngsters; I’m confident that things are going to get better again in a hurry. Regardless, in just two years’ time, I got used to this “Cougs in the NCAA tournament” thing. Without them, I just don’t find myself caring. It makes it even worse that the Huskies are in the mix and entirely relevant; hopefully today will turn out to be their only win of the tournament. I sort of support the Zags in the tourney, but recent years have intensified the WSU-Gonzaga rivalry, and my venom for them increases with each passing matchup against them. I wish them well I guess, but I used to cheer for them much more before WSU became a relevant basketball school again.

I followed WSU all year, but their relative lack of success had me doing less scoreboard watching around the nation and even the conference, so I know less about the college basketball landscape than I’d like to. Part of that is all the time I’ve been spending prepping to move off to school, but if it was the NFL I’d be making time for it…with college hoops it hasn’t happened this year. I didn’t even bother to fill out a bracket, which is unheard of for me. That makes the whole thing less fun too. I didn’t have anyone offer to compete against me or anything, and I didn’t seek anyone out.

Oh well, no big deal, just surprised to feel total apathy toward a tournament I’ve often looked forward to in previous years.

Figured out the moving stuff, by the way.

My dad read my blog and thought I was needlessly worrying about a non-issue, but as it turns out I really did hit a dead end and had to find another way to do things…so I’m glad I worried about it a few months in advance. Moving is still going to be a terribly inconvenient thing, but at least I’ve figured out how I’ll get things done and I don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Moving away to law school.

I’ll keep this post brief, since I’m guessing that everyone who visits regularly and cares about my life already knows about this news, but I had always kept away from talking about it on this blog as long as I wanted my employer not to know of my plans to leave him (I don’t think anyone I work for knows of this blog, but it’s better to err on the side of caution; it’s not just paranoia/narcissism/whatever, employers and people who matter really do look you up.)

I gave him notice today though, so everything is out in the open. I’m going to be moving to Indiana and attending Indiana-Bloomington School of Law starting in July. I’m very much looking forward to it.

If you want more details and didn’t know about my other blog, here’s the link. That is all.

I told my boss.

Since finalizing my school decision, I’ve struggled with the decision of when to give my boss notice. I’m not one who thinks that every employee should give every company as much notice as possible before quitting. In fact, I’m resentful that employers have such an edge in the court of public opinion when it comes to the ending of professional relationships; it’s improper not to give at least two weeks’ notice if you’re quitting a job, but it’s not improper for companies to fire employees at the drop of a hat, turn their lives upside down, and not give a severance package of any kind?

I’ll save that rant for another time. Plain and simple, while I would try to give two weeks notice whenever possible when quitting (I don’t like the unwritten rules, but it would be short-sighted not to follow them), I think how much notice you give in a situation like this is based entirely on the merit of how you’ve been treated at your workplace. BP has treated me quite well; it’s a very good company. My boss might drive me crazy at times, but he’s a good man and has been good to me, and I wouldn’t want to blindside him with a departure that I’ve premeditated for so long when I could’ve given plenty of notice.

He did mention in January that while our department could probably keep at the same staffing level for this year, we would get re-evaluated and there might be downsizing around year’s end. I didn’t care, obviously…I had this school application cycle in full gear already. Still, it gave me pause about giving notice so early, since I didn’t want to give the company an excuse to lay me off early when I told them I was definitely leaving. I was probably looking for monsters under the bed here, there’s nobody else in my department to put in my job and my boss is busy enough to not want to train someone new unless/until he absolutely has to. I asked a co-worker, who’s on an equal plane with my boss and wrote one of my letters of recommendation for my school application, if he thought I ran any risk by giving notice really early. He said that he really thought I’d be fine, and encouraged me to tell my boss now so he could have plenty of time.

Today, I went ahead and did it. The scene went as follows…I got up, headed toward my boss’ desk, and started talking.

Good words from President Bush.

Former President George W. Bush said on Tuesday that he won’t criticize Obama because the new U.S. president “deserves my silence,” and said he plans to write a book about the 12 toughest decisions he made in office.

Bush declined to critique the Obama administration in his first speech since leaving office in January. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that Obama’s decisions threatened America’s safety.

“I’m not going to spend my time criticizing him. There are plenty of critics in the arena,” Bush said. “He deserves my silence.”

Bush said he wants Obama to succeed and said it’s important that he has that support. Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has said he hoped Obama would fail.

“I love my country a lot more than I love politics,” Bush said. “I think it is essential that he be helped in office.”

1. Are you listening, President Carter? This is how former Presidents are supposed to behave. I’m glad Bush is taking the high road and not acting like Carter, and to a lesser extent President Clinton, have during the past eight years. For what it’s worth, I don’t have any use for the way Cheney spoke recently about President Obama either.

2. The swipe at Rush Limbaugh is intellectually dishonest. Rush said that he hoped that Obama would fail at pushing through his liberal economic policies, not fail at being President. Why the heck would a conservative want a liberal President to succeed in pushing through an agenda that runs contrary to everything those of us on the right believe in on a philosophical level? I’m not the biggest Limbaugh fan in the world, his personality is often tacky and inflammatory, but nonsense like this makes me angry…it’s in a freaking Associated Press report, and will be taken as fact when it’s little more than cheap liberal spin.

Moving is going to be a pain.

The school has been chosen, the lease has been signed, it would seem that all that’s left is to pass the time until classes start in July…unfortunately, one of the biggest inconveniences of all still looms on the horizon: moving. Ugh.

I’ve had my eye on this for a while, had already gotten quotes from a few moving companies and I’ve budgeted to be able to hire one. With that said, I don’t really know how the parking situation is going to work out, either in Bellingham or in Bloomington. It would be easier if I was moving to or from a house, but apartment complexes aren’t especially conducive to this stuff. I’m probably going to use ABF U-Pack at this point, they’re the most reputable from the research I’ve done, and the price is as reasonable as this whole ordeal is going to get.