"It's Mostly the Same Color Red... Mostly"

This is a story about an event that took place my first year in law school. But first, some background on law school. Unlike other degrees, law degrees come front-loaded. The first year is when students are the most obsessed, when grades matter the most, when competition is at its highest, and when the world outside law school seems the most distant. First year law students are bona fide crazies. They spend so much time thinking about law that it's tough to remember how to engage in a "normal" conversation with friends and family. Some of you with other degrees may think you went through the same thing, and maybe that's true, but I doubt it. While you were shooting paintball guns--law students were at war. Was your class rank a specific number, rather than a percentage? Did everyone know your number? Paintball, my friends. Paintball. (Incidentally, this isn't true for every law school. Top-tier schools are generally a little friendlier, "everyone's a winner.") Here's a video that conveys the idea nicely:

At my particular school, all of the first-year courses fell into this special kind of competitive we've discussed, with one exception: legal research. Legal research wasn't even a full class, it was a portion of the "Legal Research and Writing," class. Whereas the writing portion was graded on a curve, the research portion was pass-fail, so it was cake. And whereas the writing portion was taught by a full-blown professor, the research portion was taught by a librarian, a guy named "Dwayne." (Not actually his name, but I'm not out to embarrass anybody.) The whole thing was like a "welcome to the library" class, like something you'd take in elementary school, an island in an otherwise big-fish-eat-little-fish class schedule. It was a place where you could turn in an assignment scribbled on the back of a napkin, instead of stressing about whether the watermarked high-quality bond paper was sufficiently acid-free. (Don't even get me started on the proper way to staple. I could write a treatise on the subject, a treatise large enough that it'd have to be held together by a dovetail saddle-stitch staple.) Each week, Dwayne would give us a little research assignment. We'd have to locate some documents in the library and write the citations down. Most people handwrote their assignments, and most people plagiarized off others in the class. Not me though. I'm a nerd who was going through an Adobe Garamond phase at the time. (These days I lean toward Sylfaen.) So that's our setting--me arriving at class early, about to turn in a polished research assignment to Dwayne, the librarian. And right before I turned it in, I realized I made a small error. I had typed the year for a citation as "2000," that should have read, "1998." I don't remember exactly how I realized this or what had caused my error. I believe it had something to do with confusing the year of enactment of a statute with the year of the supplement in which the statute could be found. So, I took out my trusty bic four-colored pen, crossed out the year 2000, and wrote in the year 1998, directly above it. Lets pause for a moment to reflect on four-colored pens. I love these pens. For a lot of people, they bring back memories of elementary school, but I only discovered them after college. At the click of a color-coded button, the pen offers a choice of black (for general use), blue (signatures), green (comments), and red (revisions). They're refillable and available in both a medium and fine brass point with a tungsten carbide ball. Personally, I prefer the medium point (which comes in the blue barrel), but I like to keep a few orange-barreled fine-points for some diversity. I chose the color red for crossing out "2000" and writing in "1998." Red denotes error. If you were in that situation, even if you didn't have a deeply ingrained, near-pathological obsession with proper use of four-color bics, you might have chosen the color red, right? As it turned out, however, that decision (red) would lead to a great deal of confusion, soul-searching, and perhaps even the departure of Dwayne from the law school. Here's how it went down. Next week, I arrive early for class, and Dwayne hands me the assignment back. I scored a 48 out of 50. Yes, I understood these scores were meaningless--It was all pass / fail. But still, I wanted to know what my mistake had been. The only marks on the page, other than the 48 score at the top, was a "-2" written beside my hand-written 2000-to-1998 edit. There were two possibilities. Either I had been wrong to doubt myself, and the correct answer was 2000, in which case I could learn a valuable lesson in trusting my instincts. Alternatively, it might be that 1998 was the correct answer, but by manually correcting it, I had made a sloppy presentation, in which case, I could learn a valuable lesson about the importance of style and form. Which was it? I asked Dwayne, "What was the correct year for question three?" "1998." "I see." So it was the sloppiness. True, I had written "1998," but I had only hand-written it. It was messy. I sympathized with the grading. I didn't like turning in mixed media, handwriting and typed in the first place. But still, you had to wonder if it was fair to lose points for handwriting, when most people in the class handwrote their assignments. So I pushed it a little further. "I lost two points because I handwrote the 1998 here? Instead of typing it in the original document?" His answer surprised me: "No Cameron. I wrote that." That was confusing. I said, "well, no. You wrote the minus two. But I wrote the 1998 and crossed out the 2000." "No Cameron. I wrote 1998. You had 2000 on there." Now it made sense. He had made a simple mistake about who had made the edit. In fact, I deserved a perfect score. Things were right in the universe. I just had to show him. "Listen," I said. "I know you probably graded a bunch of these, and so when you were doing this one, you probably got there and didn't notice--just assumed that you had crossed out the wrong answer and written in the right one. But really, that was me. I wrote that, right before I turned it in." That's when I learned Dwayne was nuts. Apparently other people knew this about him already, but I didn't. Dwayne's flavor of crazy I would learn had something to do with hostility toward obsessive students. Or maybe just grading. Or maybe handwriting on typed pages. Who knows. Anyway, it was the first time I witnessed (triggered?) a nervous breakdown. Here are the highlights. I was no longer "Cameron." I was part of "you people." Us people were liars. Us people had no souls. Us people were prepared to do or say anything for a measly two points. Why would us people insult his intelligence over a mere two points in a pass-fail class? Did us people really believe we could talk him into not remembering his own actions? Us people sickened him. By his tone, I sensed that us people couldn't hear very well unless shouted at. People were starting to arrive, a little frightened by the scene, and that shook him out of it. Dwayne handed me the paper back, and I took my seat without saying a word. He was back to his dull self, ready to engage in a lecture about the importance of italicizing the period in "id." or some other fascinating aspect of legal research and citation, a lullaby for most of the class. As he lectured, I wondered if there was something I could say to him at the end of class. I thought about trying to make peace. But, then I noticed something important. In the course of his lecture, he had written 8 on the board three times. Each time, he wrote it in the same way, one stroke, like an infinity symbol, starting at the top, ending at the top, never completely closed. That's basically the same way I draw mine, except my eights are open at the bottom. And there it was on the page in front of me, "1998," with my style of eight. After class, I planned to point this out. I did, in fact, have an immortal soul, and my immortal soul was owed two points. But that would have to wait until the end of class. In the meantime, I just admired my 8. Sitting there, I noticed something else about them--maybe something even better than the handwriting. If you looked carefully, the "1998" that I had written was not the same shade of red as the "-2" he had written beside it. I didn't think his "-2" was from a four-color bic. It was more saturated, a little brighter, and a little thicker. Hell, it didn't even look like a ballpoint, more like a roller grip, or maybe even a gel pen. When class ended, I approached and said, "There's something I want to show you. I'm not interested in points, but I would like to show you that I wasn't lying about--" "You are unbelievable!" That was how the speech began. I had misjudged, thinking I could sneak in my evidence before this would happen. This breakdown speech was soon louder than the first. Were were standing just outside the classroom, which happens to be a computer lab in the library. People were watching. And I couldn't get a word in. The speech covered many bases, it wasn't just about the paper. He was unhappy teaching. He was unhappy with his life. And it was the fault of us people. Us people, who bring him every stupid argument in the world for scraps of points and don't care about others. Us people who are prepared to argue that we have exactly the same handwriting-- "It's not the same handwriting." I sneaked the line in, but he ignored it and went on about the odds that both of us would just "happen" to have the same handwriting and just "happen" to have the same color pen-- "It's not the same color." That stopped him briefly, and he parroted it back to me, stressing every syllable like a schoolyard bully, "it's not the same co-lor red." It wasn't a question, but I said, "No actually. It's not the same color. If you'd just look at it..." He snatched it from my hand, and held it up to the light. I knew it didn't take long to see the difference in the colors. It was obvious. But the moment lasted. He stared at the page, and I stared at him. I remember him breaking first. He eyed the room around him, a computer lab of law students who had stopped to watch him yell. But things weren't going well--he wasn't getting redder, angrier. Or was he tearing up? He slammed the paper down on a desk and yelled, "That is mostly the same color red!" Then he ran out of the room. The next day, I ran into him on campus. He was calm. A changed Dwayne. He told me something akin to an apology: He explained that he looked at his books and noticed that other students who got the year wrong were only deducted one point, so he credited back a point. (I considered telling him he had missed the point (sorry), but he was trying, so I just thanked him.) We talked. He told me he had decided to leave the school. He wasn't happy here. He'd try to find himself a job at another library and had lined up an interview somewhere in San Diego. A new beginning. I wished him luck. * * * Mostly is an interesting word. It can be ominous, like when the little girl in Aliens warned that "they mostly come at night... mostly." Or ironic, like the entry for Earth in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "Mostly harmless." Sometimes, it's a no in yes's clothing. Like when the copilot asks if you remembered to lower the landing gear? "Mostly." Miracle Max put it well, when he said, "there's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive." For me, mostly is Dwayne's breakdown story. It's about how he was at fault, and I was in the right. How he lost his temper, when I remained calm. How he acted childishly, when I stayed mature. And yes, it's all true. He should have handled himself better. That's the story. And while I readily admit that things are different now, and those events took place during the emotional intensity of first-year law school, a time when I couldn't be more singularly self-absorbed, it still happens to be true, I was in the right, the one who crossed out 2000 and wrote 1998. At the very least, of that fact, I am sure. Well... mostly.