Revolutionary

I must be bored with my life because lately I have been stirring up trouble.

Last week Condoleezza Rice came to speak at BYU. My friend and I went early to the Marriott Center so we could get good seats. As we walked down the aisle we were excited to see so many open seats, but then to our disappointed we were told by numerous individuals that they were saving seats for their friends. It's one thing to save a seat or two within a large group of people, but when you run out of backpacks and coats to set on the chairs you know you're saving too many. Some of these people were saving entire rows. One woman even brought tape to mark off a couple rows. Not cool. I am very opposed to seat saving at all. I flat out refuse to do it. For this very event a girl at school asked if we could save two seats and I said no. (Actually, due to my inability to say no I said "OK" but then didn't.) We found decent seats, but were still bugged that so many people coming later would have better seats than us. People kept making the walk down to the front, only to turn around and head back up the stairs in disappointment. My friend and I started picking out feisty looking ones, called them over, and encouraged them to go sit in whichever seats they wanted because they came early and deserved good seats. We promised to back them up if arguments ensued and slowly took down the seat savers one by one. It was so gratifying, and much more interesting than the textbook I brought along to pass the time. One guy we encouraged to sit in a saved seat started getting other people to do it. But if you teach someone how to fish...

Many people may have heard about the Provo Tabernacle burning down. While most people in the community mourned the loss of that historic treasure, at the law school we were mostly concerned with where our graduation would now take place. Last week I discovered that on the academic calendar the law school commencement was scheduled in the Wilk ballroom. Am I supposed to take my law school graduation pictures in front of the Taco Bell in the Cougareat next door? I don't think so. I told a couple friends about my discovery and the next day a guy came up to me and exclaimed "There's the face of the revolution!" Apparently I was the first person to see the new plan, but once word got out it spread like wildfire. So many students complained, obviously, that the law school sent out an email reassuring us that they are working on finding a better locale. I certainly hope so.

I also had to quell a mutiny last week. I am in charge of editing articles for one of BYU's law journals. This semester we have more articles than last, but as a whole they are in better shape and our editors have become more efficent (or they should have) so I thought the workload would still be manageable. Before even starting on the articles the editors under me freaked out over the workload and many threatened to quit. I did what I could to calm them down and changed some things around to lighten the workload. In the end we lost only one.