Well, it looks like Detroit is going to get its $50,000 Robocop statue. After a week of getting tons of e-mails about it, I'm ready to break my silence: I don't really have much of an opinion. I'm somewhere between the humbugs and the hipsters, I guess. But I am glad I'll be able to take my son to see the statue, if only so he can deliver the hipster equivalent of Sub-Zero's spine rip fatality from Mortal Kombat: Yeah, I was into Robocop when I was two like a year ago, but now that I'm three years old. . .

Last week during all the hubbub, we decided it would be fun to make our own Robocop statue whose prime directive would be to melt before he could cause too much local controversy. Thus, Sno-bocop entered Detroit on Saturday, February 12 and left it a few hours later:

During his brief existence, Sno-bocop may have received a visit from a little crime fighter who was more than happy to put on his costume for the fifth or sixth time since Halloween:

I don't know how much more playing that costume can take: it's starting to look like he's gone a few rounds with Clarence Boddicker and his men. 

As for the real statue, I'm sure he's going to love it. I know it annoys a lot of people and totally understand the reasons, but for this little native-born Detroiter and the thousands of other kids in Detroit, I guess we can only hope that the city they inherit will be better than the one we know and remember. I have that hope, and I have a hard time getting too upset over a silly statue.

It sure was brave of Han Solo to go back out into that blizzard to look for Luke, especially once we learn from R2 that the odds of surviving are 725 to one. But, you know: never tell Han the odds. . .

When I was a kid I never gave any thought to how Han must have had to cuddle up against Luke in that shelter all night. I guess I was so distracted by the idea of warming oneself in stinky, slithering Tauntaun guts that I never thought about what happened a few minutes later when those Tauntaun guts cooled down. I mean, anybody with a modicum of survival training knows that the best way to stay warm in a frigid tent is to cuddle up against somebody. I went on a camping trip in Shenandoah once where this girl started acting like she had hypothermia and this one guy started stripping off all his clothes to jump into a sleeping bag with her. Awkward!

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Han and Luke had some kind of Brokeback moment in that shelter (not that there would be anything wrong with that--- it would still be less weird than a few scenes later when Leia frenches Luke). If anything, the smell of Tauntaun all over Luke like truck stop Drakkar Noir would have precluded any hanky panky. But that's not to say they didn't still share a certain level of intimacy in that tent. I can just picture Luke: shivering, still muttering incoherently about the Dagobah system, spooned ever so gently by Solo's rugged torso and manly thighs while the harsh Hoth winds howl against the thin shell of their standard issue Rebel Alliance emergency shelter. Is that your blaster, Han?

You bet it is, kid. And that had better be your light saber. . .

There I go again, writing homoerotic Star Wars fan fiction. I really ought to keep that hobby to myself. It's just that when they show the shelter the next morning it doesn't look very big. There are no trees nearby and it doesn't look like Han built any kind of fire. Still, the bitterly cold hours spent during that long Hoth night have clearly not chilled Han's trademark sarcasm. "Good morning." he says to the dude in the speeder. "Nice of you guys to drop by. . ." Jeez, has he already made coffee, too? Something kept Han warm that night. I'm going to go with snuggles.

Ever notice how quick Han is to assert his manliness when they get back to Echo base and Luke finally gets out of that diaper in the chamber filled with goo? As soon as Leia enters the room he ramps up the machismo as if to remind Chewy or the droids just how masculine he is despite how many hours he's just spent cuddling a Jedi. "You didn't see us alone in the south passage," he says about Leia, and Luke looks jealous. But who does he really envy?

If I write about this, some nerds are probably going to e-mail me all kinds of malarkey about how Han probably rigged the power cell in Luke's lightsaber for warmth or how Hoth rotates faster than earth, making night last only a few hours. But I prefer to think about Han and Luke awkwardly spooning through an entire night, Han gently taking Luke's core temperature from time to time and keeping him awake with stories of his early days as a cabin boy with the Corellian pirates or his adventures smuggling spice for the Huts. Is this where Luke first learned how Han met Chewbacca, or heard the hilarious story of how he won the Millenium Falcon from Lando? Did Han muss the boy's hair, tell him not to worry, tell him he'd make it to the Dagobah system? The odds of this turning into a lasting friendship are good, Mr. Solo. Sometimes, I guess, the bonds of the warmest friendships are born in the coldest tents.

[the kids recently discovered a stash of my old Star Wars toys and it has been like, Wampa this, Wampa that for at least two weeks]

I've been thinking a lot about food for weeks (and not just how I ordinarily think about food. . .me want. . .more). Because of the piece I wrote about Detroit grocery stores (and some of the pushback it received), I have had to recognize and confront some of my biases. By all accounts, I definitely seem to view certain food-related choices as a measure of sophistication. Some people say they enjoy experimental jazz or claim they can tell the difference between a $20 and a $200 bottle of wine. I certainly can't, but I sure can get all smug about never buying processed packaged food at Wal-Mart. In fact, I refuse to even set foot in a Wal-Mart. When I see the synthetic orange powder in a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese I emit an effeminate gasp of horror. I would not be caught dead in an Applebees. The clown Ronald McDonald is an anathema in our household. I read food blogs and find myself mildly aroused by their photographs. I may have once even called the smell of fresh arugula "sexy." I like my fruits and vegetables seasonal, local, and preferably organic. And I can't escape the feeling that all of this totally makes me an asshole.

That may be harsh. At the very least, I can't help but feel what it really means is that I'm just another brand of consumer, and that any sense of smug superiority I have is just the product of good marketing. Meanwhile, a secretive cabal of Germans in Monrovia, California are laughing at me and counting all my money.

I guess part of the problem is that I can't fully commit. I may not be able to set food in a Wal-Mart, but I can't go into a Whole Foods either. I don't seem capable of pulling the trigger on a $4 organic apple. And don't get me started about fine dining. The first time I went to a highbrow restaurant I was being recruited by a law firm in Seattle and I found myself staring at the prices on the menu in total disbelief. For the price of one entree I could have paid a family's weekly grocery bill. And I thought that was obscene. It seems I can't accept the full trappings of yuppiedom without a healthy dose of self-loathing. The gentleman opening a grocery store in our neighborhood recently asked our neighbors to e-mail him suggestions for products we'd like to see there that the previous store there did not have, and after I read my response over I just shook my head. "It would be great if you had rBGH-free organic milk, Greek-style yogurt, non-irradiated (local) produce, cage-free eggs, and whole-grain bread that doesn't list high-fructose corn syrup as a major ingredient . . ." Who the fuck have I become?

I guess I have the excuse of wanting to provide healthy food for my children. When most us were growing up, there was no backlash against agribusiness or the big food conglomerates. PepsiCo. Nestle, General Mills, Kellogg Co., and Sara Lee had only begun consolidating every food label in North America. To most of our parents, the biggest choice in the grocery aisle was between a name-brand and a generic. To buy a name-brand product was to show they loved us, and had the money. My working mother did not have the time or the resources to always shop for fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables, so at home we ate a lot of meals that started with frozen or processed ingredients. It's not that she didn't love us, it's that she didn't have tons of time and (unless you were on a commune) there wasn't a whole lot of cultural pressure to do otherwise. 

Growing up, I also ate a fair amount of fast food. Before Fast Food Nation and Carlo Petrini and that guy with the relief-pitcher mustache who made the movie about eating McDonalds for a month ruined it, fast food was an honest pleasure in my life. We usually tried to order from the healthier options, but it never occurred to us that Wendy was evil. . .(I guess I've always had a thing for redheads and orphans). Back then the enemy du jour wasn't pesticides or high-fructose corn syrup or industrial-raised livestock. It was saturated fat. The answer was margarine, always, over butter. No bacon. Skim milk. We bought fat-free mayo. They even made low fat Twinkies that almost tasted like a Twinkie. I knew a girl in college so convinced that fat was her enemy that she ate nothing but Kellogg's Corn Flakes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She may have been following some trendy 1923 diet established by John Harvey Kellogg himself (if she followed his advice for daily yogurt enemas, she kept that to herself). Of course a few years later everything flipped and fat became our lovable, greasy friend while carbohydrates learned what it meant to be scorned by diners everywhere. It felt like only a matter of weeks before I wanted to punch half a dozen people in the face for talking about how much they loved bacon as though that admission made them some kind of rebel. So-called "foodies" popped the collars on their Perfecto jackets and butter was back on the menu, baby. Locally-churned butter, of course. No trans fats.

I guess because the way we eat is so inherently tied to our health, and these trends are so fickle and short-lived, I can't help but wonder what's next. When patron saint Anthony Bourdain keels over from a massive local-organic-free-range-grass-fed-pork-belly-induced heart attack, what will the foodies do? Will they cut back on the foie gras and organic duck-fat french fries? I can't help but examine my own history and question whether I will someday look back on these current trends and see that I fell for them hook, line, and sinker like the good little consumer I am.

* * * * *

As someone who grew to a respectable height on non-local, heavily-processed (and often fast) food and who has always been relatively healthy, how did I end up on the side of the food snobs? My parents still eat like they always did. I can almost certainly trace my rebellion to the moment I stepped into my South Indian friend's home for the first time. The spices from hundreds of home-cooked Indian meals had coalesced with the paint on her walls. My father---one of the world's great curmudgeons against ethnic food---would have gagged. As I grew closer to this friend, I began eating there almost daily. This wasn't restaurant Indian food with no peppers and all that extra ghee and cream. It challenged my delicate palate. It burned. And the strange pleasure of it developed into a lifetime of adventurous eating. Today I will eat almost anything. That whole meal at Pankot Palace in Temple of Doom? Yum. 

The more I think about this, the more I think it does have something to do with my dad. The more that man feigned vomiting at any mention of the word sushi, the more I wanted to try it. I'd spent my life in the shadow of his strength, watching him fix cars and build things, and here was one area where he was a major wimp. His idea of Chinese cuisine began and ended with La Choy Chop Suey and take-out Sweet & Sour Pork. Italian was a jar of Prego or the Olive Garden. Mexican was Chi Chi's. Instead of doing drugs, I brought home hummus. A year in Europe upped the ante. I remember sitting at a dirt-cheap restaurant in Crete and ordering a salad. I watched an old woman walk past our table, out into her garden to pick a pepper, a cucumber, a few tomatoes, and a minute later they appeared cut up on my plate with some feta and olive oil. This was a revelation. All you hear about fresh, local food today is really just a recognition of what's ancient. It is nostalgic; anti-modern. When I returned home from Europe and tried to share some of the foods I had been exposed to with my family, instead of getting upset when they mocked me, I secretly enjoyed it. Here was proof that I had left the nest and grown more sophisticated. I might have come from culinary Philistines content to stuff their maws with soylent green, but I was no longer one myself. 

My sister went through the same sort of rebellion, but for some reason she's not nearly the snob I am. She doesn't hide the happy meal toys around her house when we visit. I guess this is why I'm writing today: I am a bit tormented by the hypocrisy of it all. A lot of the "ethnic" food I crave and (frequently enjoy) is the gastronomical equivalent of the fast food I have vilified in my own culture. Someone like me who looks down his nose at KFC or McDonalds will still eat extremely unhealthy meals at a Thai or Dim Sum joint with no regard to whether the food is mostly fried starches. The Burger King is evil, but In & Out Burger is awesome. I have seen the same sort of progressive white hipsters who rend their garments over "food deserts" and the lack of fresh produce in poor areas get in arguments about which trendy Brooklyn restaurant has the best local free-range fried chicken. In the foodie world, it seems, it's tough to be highbrow without the middlebrow to make fun of, or a lowbrow to pity (and slum around in once in awhile). 

After writing the piece about the Detroit grocery stores, I stopped in one of the rougher-looking supermarkets where I would never ordinarily shop just to see if it was as bad as everyone was telling me. It's true that the produce selection was rather limited and some of the fresh offerings unappetizing. When checking out what Michael Symon refers to as the "evil lurking in the center aisles" I did find a decent selection of name-brand processed foods. It all seemed overpriced, and in the end that seemed like a bigger deal to me than how unhealthy it was. It occurred to me that this was the food I grew up on. This was the food that nourished me through childhood. And yet here I am today, almost as bad as one of these out-of-touch 21st-century Marie Antoinettes in Berkeley shouting, "Let them eat kale!" from gilded balconies with platters of local halibut tartare and Belgian endives.  

* * * * *

As I look back at the paragraphs above, I'm struggling with whether or not to publish this. What is my point? What do I want you to glean from this rambling post? We all have our own histories and experiences that form how we think about food. Whatever those experiences might be, I personally am going to work harder at not passing judgment on the tastes and choices of others (even fellow snobs). I'm going to try to just enjoy what I enjoy and stop worrying what it says about me. And try to eat healthier across the board. I must remember that as elitist as current trends might be, as they become more and more widespread there are positive effects that will have benefits on local economies and the health of all consumers, as stores like Wal-Mart have begun to stock organic and local produce that beat the offerings at Whole Foods in blind tests. And I even think I've finally convinced my mom to use olive oil (and she started her own garden last year). 

But convincing my dad to try sushi? Yeah, that's never going to happen. It's more likely that I'd start listening to experimental jazz.

A bunch of artists recently came to Detroit through Juxtapoz Magazine and stayed for a month or so with the Powerhouse Folks to transform a bunch of abandoned/unoccupied houses on a block of Moran Street to the tune of a hundred Hamtramck ice cream trucks. It was definitely one of the more interesting things to happen around Detroit lately [and here is a great article/interview about it]. I got to see a little bit of the work going on and a couple of the artists contacted me about exploring abandoned buildings (I've been trying to shed my reputation as someone who still does that, without much luck). I didn't end up showing anyone around, probably because my e-mails responses all said, "Yeah, I think they're filming a movie in that building right now. . . and Matthew Barney drove his Trans Am around inside that other one a few months ago. . . and that big one is cool but, you know, it's been on the cover of Time Magazine. . ." We may have finally reached the point where exploring Detroit's abandoned buildings is totally passé, even for out-of-town hipsters. 

One of the Juxtapoz visitors was New York-based street artist Callie Curry (a/k/a Swoon), whose work I've always enjoyed a lot more than some of her more-famous contemporaries. I saw a bunch of her wheatpastes all over Braddock, Pa. a few years back and she also hit the Cass Corridor in Detroit about four years ago. Here's a link to a short talk she recently gave for Tedx Brooklyn. On Moran street, she put up a bunch of wheatpastes in an abandoned house and that interesting process was documented in this short video (and there are quite a few pictures here). But. . . she also went out and put up a few surreptitious wheatpaste drawings around Detroit and Highland Park that she said were inspired by some of the Bangladeshi kids in the Powerhouse neighborhood, and I haven't seen them in Juxtapoz or on flickr or anywhere else. On a cold winter afternoon the kids and I recently drove around to see how many were still up. This was our favorite:

 

Too bad it was pasted on a garage door in gang territory, because some kid already marked it up with a GD pitchfork: 

 

Just around the corner we spotted these kids:

 

This next one may not be long for the world: an old man pasted on a burnt-out house with a demolition notice stuck to his shoulder.

 

This one is probably safe: it's in the alley next to a successful organic bakery in one of the city's nicest areas: 

I might have missed a few, but that's all we could find. There are still a couple installations up from her earlier trip to Detroit, and these two are my favorite:

On this site, the idea that Detroit does have grocery stores and outlets for fresh produce (despite a national and local media repeatedly stating otherwise) is kind of a dead horse. Well, today I am kicking the shit out of that dead horse over at Aaron M. Renn's excellent Urbanophile blog. Aaron's blog consistently has a fresh and interesting take on urban affairs and policy that's neither too fussy or academic (nor focused on easy answers like the corporate media). It's always a worthwhile read and I'm honored that Aaron asked me to write on a topic of my choice, in this case finally putting to rest the myth that Detroit has no supermarkets.

The heart of my argument is this, and if you're at all interested be sure to follow the link:

The myth of a city without supermarkets is hard to kill, even faced with [overwhelming evidence that Detroit has them]. Ultimately, the myth perseveres because the mainstream media and its audience are steeped in a suburban mentality where the only grocery stores that really seem to count are those large, big-box chain stores that are the only option in so many communities these days, largely because they have put locally-owned and independent stores like the ones you find in Detroit out of business. It is true that the big chain stores have forsaken or ignored Detroit, for any number of understandable (and sometimes despicable) reasons. But in their absence, a diverse system of food options has risen to take their place, and the tired old narrative that Detroit has nowhere to shop for groceries needs to be replaced by a more complex truth: with a diversity of options ranging from the dismal to the sublime, Detroit may be one of the most interesting places in America to shop for food.

In that vein, I am also sharing one of my favorite vintage kid's books over here (even though I just put up the post about the Lutheran Sex Ed Book a few days ago). This one is called Night Markets and shows all the hard work that goes into getting food from farmers and distributors into the stores, restaurants, and homes of a big city (in this case, New York). Detroit's Eastern Market operates much the same way, and it is frequently ignored whenever someone repeats that falsehood about Detroit as a food desert with nowhere to shop for groceries.

I hope to have a new post up here at Sweet Juniper soon.

As a few commentators on the last post and a lot of e-mailers have noted, that is me on page 157 of the February issue of Oprah Magazine. What's some guy who just makes things out of junk doing between a New York lawyer who's devoted her career to helping homeless mothers and. . . Miranda July? A few of the projects and activities we do around here caught the attention of some editors at O and before I knew it I was whittling a 500-word story down to a tight 200 and getting whisked off to a Brooklyn warehouse for a photo shoot with William Abranowicz. I haven't seen the physical magazine yet, but they've put the article on Oprah's website here. I was relieved when I saw the picture today, because my mother-in-law saw it a few days ago and told my wife they'd photoshopped a wizard hat on my head. I must admit that's been gnawing at me a bit.

If you're visiting here for the first time after seeing the article, here are a few links to some of the projects referenced: (1) the dog wagon (and part two); (2) the pizza box pyramids; (3) the improvised ice rink (with part two); (4) the Robocop costume; and (5) the wooden Pegasus. You might also like the Popscycle, the Mies van der Rohe dollhouse, any of my other DIY projects or my wife's amazing crafting. Otherwise, this blog just documents our efforts to make our lives here in the beautiful city of Detroit interesting and fun. Thanks for stopping by and checking it out.

* * * * *

As a reminder that we're participating in the American Cancer Society's More Birthdays campaign, I've written about contributing artist Andrew Bannecker's wonderful illustrations over here.

* * * * *

One more thing: if there are any interested readers in the Atlanta area, I have a few photos in a show opening at the Kiang Gallery tomorrow night, called After the Suburbs (curated by the wonderful Karen Tauches). The show runs through March 19 and there's a special lecture at Georgia Tech on February 2 by Julia Christensen (author of Big Box Reuse) that I wish I could attend (not just to pitch an idea for a follow-up: Pizza Hut Reuse). Be sure to let me know if you go.

We took a field trip to the Michigan state capitol when I was ten, stopping at the Potter Park Zoo in the afternoon. This was what one might consider a major formative experience of my provincial youth. I can distinctly remember staring out at what seemed like the hustle and bustle of downtown Lansing and thinking I am destined for bigger and better things. Just like this. I was listening to Starship's Knee Deep In The Hoopla on my generic walkman, and staring out the schoolbus window at the impressive skyline from I-496 I turned up the volume for "We Built This City" and thought: yes indeed, this city was built on rock and roll.

Ten years later, cue The Verve Pipe. For the life of me, I cannot forget a winter night spent at a house on the Lansing River. My friend was back from graduate school so a bunch of us met up there and drank a few cans of beer and after midnight we decided to take his dogs for a walk. On that walk a few of us crossed the river and hopped the fence at the Potter Park Zoo, where we ran around laughing at the stupid animals at night. Then I noticed my old roommate's brother had jumped over a moat into one of the habitats and found himself staring down an Eastern Black Rhinoceros, wide-awake. Time may have graced this memory with some embellishment, but I can still picture him standing there on a rock, taunting the beast like a bold matador might mock a wounded bull. The next day's headline ticked across my vision: Rhino's Revenge! Local Man Gored at Zoo, and I knew right then I was going to be explaining this incident to potential employers for the rest of my life. You'd think we were drunk or on PCP or something, but the fact that we'd had but a couple beers only shows what kind of total degenerates we actually were.

I knew I didn't want to get arrested better than I knew the guy on the rock, so I made a beeline for the fence. In my peripheral vision, I saw him casually hop back over the moat, laughing, with a can of beer still in his hands. In my haste, the blue jeans I was wearing caught on the barbed wire and when we met back up with the dog walkers I was the one who looked like he got away by the skin of his teeth.

* * * * *

People often ask why we chose to move back to Michigan after "escaping," and I try to give an honest answer. I'm just a Midwestern guy, and I got tired of pretending I wasn't. And truthfully, I have an affection for many of the things I was supposed to want to escape. I like being back here, even if it means occasionally running full-bore into memories that make me wish we'd chosen instead to move somewhere where we had no history. Like Mumbai.

But sometimes those memories are just the spark I need to keep ordinary events interesting. Like taking the kids to the Potter Park Zoo and laughing at that stupid, lazy rhino who didn't gut my friend. Or walking in Ann Arbor past that bar where I literally got kicked out on my face by a bouncer.

Ann Arbor always held an even greater appeal than Lansing to this ambitious hayseed. When I was sixteen, my Coogi-sweater-and-Birkenstock-clad German teacher took our class to Ann Arbor as part of his program to expose us to what actual culture looked like. He let us explore the city for a few hours before meeting up at a dimly-lit German restaurant that was the pretense for the whole trip. If he had let us run freely around Detroit, of course, he would have promptly been fired. But Ann Arbor was safe enough for such adventures. Book stores outside of a shopping mall! Clever panhandlers honest enough to just ask for beer money! Record stores staffed by snooty bass players! Risque t-shirts! Here we discovered actual New Yorkers: PhDs like Roman patricians governing some dreary provincial capitol, with a cadre of shopkeepers, merchants, and artists catering to their elevated tastes and vying for their coin. Look, we whispered in amazement walking down Liberty Street: I think that was an actual Jew!

A few years later, I moved to Ann Arbor for law school and met plenty of actual Jews. And actual coastal WASPs who'd gone to Philips Exeter, and actual Chinese-American cello virtuosos. I encountered a whole host of other fancy people rolled out like Vaudeville stereotypes with bloated resumes and ivy league pedigrees. To my great disappointment, however, most of these people behaved much differently than they do in books or movies. They didn't sit around discussing great literature over cognac. Ann Arbor, I feared, while elevating me to a stratosphere I'd once only dreamed about, was making all these fine people drink watery American lager and watch football in public. Often in sweatpants. Every few weeks, the law school rented out an undergraduate bar where (for $5) you could drink unlimited pitchers of lite beer, and with a Dutchman's respect for the deal I always partook. First let me dispel any notion that this scene was anything like those parties they showed in that Facebook movie, with hand-picked hotties grinding up against brilliant young men from the Michael-Cera-school of nerdiness. It was always much, much sadder than that, with a lot of DMX songs and bad lighting. Second, if you were to tell me that elite parties in Cambridge or New Haven aren't really like the ones in the Facebook movie either I'm putting my fingers in my ears and hollering lest I regret this new plan to spend the next fifteen years raising my children using the ancient techniques of Chinese mothers.

One of those bar nights was held at a tavern with referees etched on the windows and a dozen televisions tuned to multiple iterations of ESPN. It was called Fumbles or Interceptions or something like that. I was standing on these steps inside listening to a Korean girl from San Francisco prattle on about how the food in Ann Arbor is terrible and don't they know about wasabi peas in Michigan? Just as I was probably asking her, So: what's up with kimchi? some barback in a referee shirt was rolling a keg of lite beer by me on a dolly and he bashed my leg HARD and I gave him a look that was the eyebrow-scrunching equivalent of what the fuck, you uncouth motherfucker. A minute later, as this hayseed was digging himself out of a hole for ever questioning the deliciousness of fermented cabbage you have to dig out of a hole, he found himself surrounded by two heavyset gents in referee shirts and the barback he'd just given the stinkeye. "That's him, alright," the latter said, and the two bouncers lifted me by the arms and dragged me to the door. Surely among my colleagues, many of whom had professed a sincere intention to devote their lives to protecting the innocent against the tyranny of the unjust, one of them would come to my aid! I looked to my roommate, who just shrugged and kept talking to the weasel-faced girl he would end up bringing home. And with a quick kick to his ass, this hayseed found himself out on a cold Ann Arbor sidewalk where he'd once walked in awe as a child.

I stood out there waiting for someone to go in so I could ask the bouncers for my coat (with my house keys) that was still inside. They ignored me for several minutes, until inspired by the lager I retreated to that great refuge for scoundrels of my ilk. Shivering, I threatened to sue: You can't throw somebody out for a dirty look, I slurred. That's against the fourteenth amendment. What's your name, pal, I'll need it for my lawsuit. Eventually someone emerged with my coat. As I walked away, I heard one say to the other, "God, I hate law students."