Small claims

your honor

I might have to go to small claims court because my ex landlord and I are in a fight. It’s a classic he said she said, he thinks he doesn’t owe me thousands of dollars, and I think he does.

If I have to make an appearance as my own lawyer at small claims court that would be ok, because I just thrifted a very beautiful Escada blazer. But maybe I shouldn’t wear it to court because they could think I’m too stylish and therefore didn’t really need my security deposit back. But then again one doesn’t negate the other, I’m allowed to have both. Women can have it all, as I was once told by the inside of a Luna bar wrapper.

Since I’ve never been to court and my legal experience begins and ends with 2 months of high school mock trial and 4 showings of Legally Blonde, I decided to draft a personal statement to please the court. Since I’m representing myself, I want the Supreme Court to know that my client (I) am deserving of my security deposit back. So I can spend it on Banh Mi and claw clips.

Your honor, I’m very involved sociopolitically, on the grassroots level. I’ve been watching a lot of Veep. Last week I sat next to a college sophomore on the plane as he was asking ChatGPT for advice about his “crazy ex.” I who view every adjacent phone screen as fair game, looked and asked him if he wanted to talk to me about it instead. Over the next 3 hours I learned that his ex isn’t crazy, his ex and I would have been friends in college, and boys need friends. I also learned that the best way to stop AI is to physically replace it with empathetic conversation on a 1.5 hour delayed flight. I could have taken his phone and thrown it into the vortex plane toilet but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to have something like that on my record, your honor.

I’ve also been giving back financially to my community. Just last month I sent a stranger on Facebook marketplace $250 for a credenza that either doesn’t exist, never was going to be mine, or exists but was never for sale. What I learned from a week of communicating with a woman via voice notes from her and unanswered texts from me, is that actually women can be anything, including scammers. I also learned that credenzas are a scam in general because any table is just an excuse to buy more stuff to populate the surface of said table. And I’m trying to buy less stuff lately. Did I mention my ex landlord owes me thousands of dollars?

Finally, may it please the court of Jay Street and Metrotech, I am doing my part to mitigate the rat population in our otherwise perfect city. Just last week I stepped on a dead rat. And while this was not an example of me directly curbing the population, I’d like to think that when I stepped on the dead rat and realized what I did and screamed, that maybe other rats nearby saw that and were reminded of their own mortality and hopped on under the Amtrak to Philly.

For these reasons and also because it’s the second to last day of women’s history month, I would implore you to have the Shine Corp give me my security deposit back. They don’t need the money as much as I do, I need to dry clean this blazer.