I’ve gone a little nuts with the Ebay thing.

My auction insanity has deepened along two separate vectors: the madness of buying and a deep addiction to selling. Both activities keep me consistently logged in to the service, checking and rechecking MyEbay for any action, any infinitesimal shift in the bidding price of items.

The buying is easy to explain. There are any number of great deals you can finagle if you sweep in to the right auction at the right time, but there is more at work than mere frugality. The strength of Ebay lies in man’s greed and avarice. There is something tremendously satisfying of feeling like you are taking advantage of some poor sap who put his treasure out into the stream of commerce without a reserve and with free shipping. I enjoy the notion that I am swindling some sucker from Palookaville out of his hard-earned trade paperbacks. At the same time, the nature of the auction format ensures that I nearly always end up paying just slightly more than I wanted to but still less than the items would retail for. I work hard to restrain my competitive impulses and for the most part I am successful. But not always.

And the selling aspect of my addiction funnels into the buying. The items that I sell (primarily my comic books) go for less than I paid for them, but the income feels like found money. When a buyer pays me, the money sits in my paypal account. The convenience of using those funds to  pay for my next purchase is too tempting to ignore. The proceeds of my sales rarely make the transfer to my bank account.

Selling my possessions feels good. There is something liberating about shedding the barnacles that attach as I age and getting rid of my worldly goods. The feeling is addictive. The more I think about the unlikelihood of rereading my Eternal Champion novels, replaying Doom 3, or rewatching my Sopranos dvds the greater the pointlessness in leaving them sitting on my shelf. I have been a student for far too long to amass any serious material wealth but my geekier tendencies has filled my bookshelves with all manner of books, comics, games, and knickknacks. All of which I have enjoyed, none of which will ever serve me again in the future. So I commit them to the internet, letting Ebay find them an appropriate home. It feels better than simply dropping them off in a box at Goodwill, and offers some monetary compensation for my years of rampant consumerism.

I wouldn’t say this urge to purge has reached the level of compulsion, but it could progress that far. As it is, I now frequently buy book lots, read them, and then almost immediately post them for resale. Generally, I break even or lose money on the deal. I just chalk it up to the pleasure of reading the books and consider it a rental fee, which is a bargain for the hours of entertainment I get. Occasionally I  make a profit.

But I’m not accruing anything, no tangible objects of my culture. In my younger days I would look at my sprawling stacks of comics and books with a sense of pride. I would even sort of show them off when people came in my room. Although, I did make an effort to hide my comics when I thought I might be bringing a ladyfriend back to the boudoir. Ah, the insecurity of youth. At any rate, even as I enjoy clearing space and ensuring that my next move will involve carrying fewer boxes I feel a tinge of regret, an inescable shudder of loss. It makes me think about the nature of media, and how it is changing. It also makes me want a Kindle, under the theory that if I am not keeping the physical objects I might as well not even bother buying them and make the shift to digital media. But that feels like something that smarter men than I are already thinking about. But that is a post for another day. For now, I need to check on my auctions to see if there’s been any action since I last refreshed ten minutes ago.

Is anybody else out there watching Kings?

After an abortive stab at latching on to the television viewer’s consciousness in the spring, NBC declined to pick up the show and moved its remaining episodes into the graveyard of summer saturdays. The move bummed me out because I think the show is all kinds of awesome.

It’s a retelling of the Book of Kings from the Bible, set in a kind of modern day alternate reality. In the pilot episode a young farmboy-turned-soldier named David singlehandedly destroys a Goliath tank, rescuing the King’s son and setting off a chain of events that insinuates him with the royal family. I have a soft spot for anything that remixes, re-imagines, and updates a familiar story in a novel setting. MacBeth as a gangland crime saga or a dark comedy set in a fast food burger joint? I’m in. Emma, as experienced by high-fashion Beverly Hills teenager? Yes, please. I’ll even see a version of Othello that takes place on basketball team. I’m not sure why, but any kind of alternate take on a familiar story intrigues me. I once unsuccessfully tried to write a screenplay that was The Tempest set on a strange planet before losing interest the way I always do.

But even if Kings didn’t have its biblical pedigree, the show would still rock. Perennial badass and Deadwood alumni Ian McShane stars as the current King and serves up his usual dose of awesomeness. The dialogue is an odd mixture of modern-sounding plain English mixed with a grandiose and poetic style, tinged with just a hint of faux-King James Shakespearian flourish.

The rest of the cast does an able job, even the slightly bland lead who plays David but this was the kind of dialogue McShane was born to deliver. The plot is grand and sweeping, with royal intrigues taking place alongside romantic subplots bolstered with the occasional action scene. The cinematography and set design are top-notch. Every shot is both beautiful and lived in.

The alternate history of the world of Kings is doled out slowly. It is a modern world with skyscrapers, cell phones, tanks, and television. Most of the action takes place in Shiloh, the capital city of Gilboa and obvious stand in for New York. It is the power base for King Silas, from which he plans his war with a neighboring country called Gath. Silas is a King, and rules by divine right although he has an array of ministers and advisors to help him keep public opinion up. There is an element of the supernatural at work, as God apparently takes an active hand in affairs of state, usually by sending dreams and omens. Its understated and highlights the source material even as it adds a dimension of grand fate to the story. And I am no theologian, so many of the biblical allusions go over my head but the show still works even without them.

The characters are engaging, from the Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern like palace guards who comment on the action around them to the semi-creepy industrialist borther-in-law who makes life hard for King Silas every background character is well-drawn. The leads are pitch-perfect. Silas is conflicted but assured, while the potential upstart David is innocent, but not too innocent. He gets in a tabloid sex scandal at one point. The King’s son Jack is a closeted and power-hungry villain, while the Queen is both mysterious and capable. Dimensions, people.

But it all adds up to naught because I seem to be the only person in America who even knows this show exists. When the show first premiered people stayed away in droves and it seemed to exist just under the radar of the zeitgeist. That’s a shame. I haven’t really been upset at the loss of a show since the underappreciated Carnivale went off the air. For the last few years, the shows such as Heroes and Lost that I have liked have stuck around and I have been indifferent at best to shows like the Sarah Connor Chronicles and Journeyman that have been canceled. But Kings was different. While I am enjoying the remaining episodes, I do so with a certain melancholy, intensified by the reality show dross that encrusts our television screens while great scripted dramas go ignored. Plotlines will dangle for all time, and I will never get resolution to any of the stories. It’s no fate for a King.

In a move that is sure to do wonders for my productivity here at Semantic Drift, I have decided to join the team over at Legal Geekery. You’ll never see a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, if by “scum and villainy” you mean “law students and writing” and by “wretched hive” you mean “awesome blog”. I’ll be inflicting my more law-related writing on the unsuspecting public over there. That should free up more of my headspace here to talk about what I ate for breakfast and which movie I saw over the weekend. Lucky you!

Anyway, my first post over there is a listing of the Most Evil Lawyers from film and television. When I found out that maybe people don’t like lawyers and there were unflattering portrayals of them in pop culture, I was shocked, shocked I say!

Go check it out.

Semantic Drift is a personal blog in the sense that it is just one guy (infrequently) writing about whatever’s on his mind. I operate it largely as a hobby; it this blog started as a way to keep myself writing even when I don’t have to do so in the service of my academic pursuits. At least that was the idea. I have no hopes of monetizing it and don’t give a great deal of thought to the traffic it draws. I check the numbers more out of curiosity than anything, and over its lifetime Semantic Drift has chartered a steady course of low but consistent readers.

One problem that I’ve encountered is that the blog isn’t nearly niche enough in that it doesn’t cover one area especially well. The best blogs tend to carve themselves a specialty. It gives readers a good idea what to expect when they fire up their browsers. Boing Boing is all over steampunk/tech/copyright news. Kottke covers the odd bits of coolness that pop on the liminal edges of the internet. They might stray from time and talk about other areas of interest, but for the most part you know that reading them is reading about the things in their wheelhouse.

Part of the problem is that this blog has come to largely mirror the way my mind works: Scattered, unfocused, lazy, and occasionally pretentious and unjustifiably sure of itself. I suppose it was inevitable.

I am something of a polymath in the sense that my interests run wider than they do deep. I love comic books, movies, and television but I also dabble in law, politics, and literature. That’s not to mention that I love to hear myself talk (see myself write?) about my law school experiences or the occasional bit of travel. My writing is autobiographical. All writing is. But I maintain something of a distance between my personal life as I live it and as I write about it. Despite putting up links to my social networking hotspots, I try to keep a vague anonymity to my stories. I generally obscure or leave out names and the details remain fuzzy. I am of that certain age where I get freaked out by the vulnerability of putting my life into the public space of the internet. I did not grow up tweeting my every activity or communicating with my friends largely through status updates. I was an early adopter of Myspace, but the idea of putting up personal details is unsettling and applications that reveal your real world location via geotags give me the fantods. As a result, I’m hesitant to get truly raw or go into my emotions at any given time. That is, if I actually have any. Does “hungry” count as an emotional state?

I initially entered the blogging fray with the idea that Semantic Drift would operate as a place where I could self-publish essays, sort of like my own personal newspaper column. I never intended to exhaustive descriptions of what I had for lunch or cute pictures of my nephew. I haven’t, but nor have I turned this blog into a modern day Algonquin roundtable where I create thoughtful and incisive pieces of writing into the public consciousness where they interact with the blogosphere intelligentsia and place me within a larger discourse.

No, Semantic Drift has tended to chronicle the movies I saw over the weekend or the amount of stress I go through during finals season. The end result is a blog that has no clear area of interest, full of personal stories that aren’t terribly personal. I’d say I’m still trying to find my voice, but that isn’ exactly true. I have my voice, I’m just trying to decide what to say.

It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.

Of course, I thought it was going to be absolutely horrific so any first day that end with me curled up in a ball under my desk weeping softly to myself as my inbox filled up with research assignments and my phone ringing off the hook with domineering associate attorneys calling to belittle my choice of shoes and incessant typos was bound to be a good one.

It’s intimidating to start a new job. I’ve only recently begun working in a law firm before and my past experience working for a solo practitioner was a whole different kettle of fish than what I’m doing now. I was also a little freaked out because we didn’t have our orientation until a full two and-a-half days after I started the job. That meant that for two and one half days I would be in the deep end of the pool, hopefully swimming but sinking potentially.

Here’s the thing, though. I needn’t have worried. I actually think I lucked out this summer because this seems like a genuinely pleasant place to work. The attorneys I’m working for gave me assignments, but they didn’t pile them on and they made sure that I had good places to start each assignment before I walked out the door to their office. Prior to starting this gig, I had been afraid that assignments would be designed to make me fail but so far they have consistently all come with the tools to succeed, which I am grateful for.

That being said, it hasn’t all been wine and roses. This is a tough job and I find myself having to take a more rubber-meets-the-road approach to some areas of the law that have remained largely academic until now. It’s all well and good to spit out the elements of a tort claim on an exam and quite another to write out a demand letter for a motor vehicle accident. I’ve had the opportunity to see “Civil Procedure In Action!” as I wrote memos evaluating different venue choices for a personal injury case. On the very first day, the Big Man Upstairs (he who signs my paycheck) gave me a little research task. The job wasn’t that hard, but a keen desire not to fuck up on the first day combined with a complete lack of knowledge about the matter to drive my internal pressure sensors up through the roof. While the junior associates took my Fellow Law Clerks out to a leisurely celebratory lunch, I stayed behind toiling in our shared office. I must have read and reread the statutes I found at least eighty times before I even started typing my findings. It paid off the next day when I got the requisite “Nice job” from The Big Man Upstairs. And on to the next assignment.

I felt a little better after we did have our orientation. Since then the pace has been brisk and demanding, but not too overwhelming. It looks there are some interesting cases on the horizon that I will do my best to insinuate myself into. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what type of lawyer I’m going to be and I’m happy to have the opportunity to explore what trial lawyers do.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some medical records to summarize.