No Duty to Retreat

Final Post

2010-10-12T17:03:00.000-07:00

7.57 pm EST
It's been a fun three years. I started this blog as a place where I could post about law school in a way that wasn't, shall we say, appreciated on Nuts and Boalts. It's been fun writing about law school, but this was never intended to carry past that. I thought about continuing the blog as a lawyer instead of a law student, but I suspect I'll do enough legal writing at work to have my fill.

Instead I'm migrating platforms - and topics. You can find me at Manhattan for Beginners, this California girl's attempt to understand that strange island we call New York.

2010-09-30T14:01:00.000-07:00

4.34pm, EST
It is decidedly autumn. Last week was Indian Summer, green trees and T-shirt weather. This morning I woke up to the wind blowing through the trees and the first scattering of leaves on the ground.

I am, for the indefinite future, in Boston at my parent's house. We flew out to NY the second week in September to find an apartment. We found a place that we loved the first day we looked. It was in the East Village, within spitting distance of the river, in a really cute building with a super who clearly took great care of the place. Plus, it was a true two bed and it had a patio. That was Wednesday, September 8th.

We spent the next three days gathering the 350+ pages of documentation they wanted: bank statements, credit reports, cell phone bills, electricity bills, tax returns, W-2's, pay stubs... The agent at the building told us on Thursday, when we brought in a deposit to take the apartment off the market, that we would know by Friday when we had our interview. At the interview, she told us there was actually another two levels of approval we had to go through (her supervisor and the city) because there was an income cap on the apartment. On Monday, after she'd told our broker that there was no way we wouldn't be approved, as we were driving to the airport to head back to SF, she called and told us were weren't approved because we made too much. Considering that I haven't been employed all year, and A only worked until May, we thought that was ludicrous.

The worst part was that they had all the numbers they needed the very first day, on the application forms. My theory is that they jerked us around for five days in hopes that we would get so frustrated we'd walk away and leave the deposit. The company, by the way, is gonofee.com. In case you're wondering who to stay away from.

I stayed in NJ with his parents another week, and we ended up signing a lease for the first apartment we'd looked at on Friday the 17th, a week after our interview with the place in the East Village.

A called the moving company to get our stuff sent out Monday. It took until Wednesday (9/22) to get insurance requirements straightened out with them. It is now Wednesday again, a week later, and they still haven't put our stuff on the truck. I am, to put it mildly, ticked.

My parents have been reminding me that at least I don't have two small children with me, like my mom did when they moved from Dallas to Boston. This is true. But, having just gotten off the phone with the woman at the moving company who has, by her own admission, no idea when a truck will be there to ship our stuff out and no idea how long it will take to get to New York, it's hard to feel like this could be much worse.

2010-09-02T15:01:00.000-07:00

2.50 pm
I start work in 46 days. It sounds like a long time. It's going to fly. I spent a good part of today going through the rental homes on Long Island we're going to check out. We need some sort of schedule, because people want to know when we'll be there, but it can't be too rigid because I have no idea how long it takes to look at a house when someone's there to show it to you. When my mom and I looked at venues, they were almost all rented out, so all we could do was look from the street. It made the whole business go by very fast.

September must be some sort of cut off, since there were a fair number of people who said they didn't have tenants and would love to meet with us to show the house. There are a few I really like, but for the most part I'm trying not to make up my mind about anything until we 1) see the property and 2) verify that the owner realizes this is for a wedding and 3) make sure it's really in our budget. The "W" word has a strange effect on home owners - either the house is suddenly no longer for rent, or the price goes up exponentially. Understandable, but it makes the search frustrating.

2.57 pm
A and I are going to a cousin's wedding next weekend. Having failed to find seersucker in the Bay Area (we were informed it was acceptable garb for the rehearsal dinner), A did the next best thing and bought linen pants. White linen pants. With an orange shirt. He looks very dashing, but it gives the impression that he ought to be on a beach in Cuba with a mojito in his hand rather than standing on the steps to our apartment modeling.

I'll be wearing my $10 Asby-stolen-goods-market dress, which ended up costing $40 once it had been drycleaned and hemmed. Still not a bad price, considering that it's absolutely gorgeous and fits superbly.

This will be the first wedding A and I have gone to together. Strange, really, since we've been together quite a bit at this point. On the other hand, as someone pointed out to me this morning, who'd have thought five years ago that two kids living in the ghetto in St. Pete would be in Manhattan and getting married five years later.

2010-08-30T16:36:00.000-07:00

4.29 pm
Shortbread crust in the fridge, inexplicably chilling before being baked. Something to do with the consistency of the butter, I'm sure. We're doing dinner for a few people tomorrow night, and it seemed to make sense to get that out of the way before A takes over the kitchen to cook. I'm trying to sell him on the idea of a larger, backyard barbeque type gathering the weekend before I leave. A chance to say goodbye and all that. Also, we'd be remiss if we didn't take full advantage of the gorgeous house we're living in.

4.32 pm
Now that the bar is over, I've transitioned into full-swing wedding planning. The theory is that once I start work, I'll be at the office 12 hours a day with no interest in determining guest lists or seating charts or table linens when I get home.

A and I are slowly starting to figure out what we want and what we can actually afford. We're out in Manhattan and Long Island a little later in the month to take a look at apartments (you'd be surprised what you can't get for $3000 in the city) and wedding venues. A wants to do it in a house, which means renting from someone on the beach, which has turned into probably renting from someone out at the very end of Long Island. The plan is to spend two days and a night out there, and with any luck by the time we fly home we'll know where the wedding will be. If not, it's back to the rental by owner sites, and another mass batch of emails and spreadsheeting.

2010-07-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

9.03 am, PST
On the plane, Albany bound. there's WiFi, but I'm blogging into Evernote with plans to upload later. Less distraction that way.

This is the first flight where I can remember not bringing books or embroidery or something to keep myself occupied on the plane. The goal is to work through my MBE flash cards this flight, then do practice questions on the next. 5 hours to Charlotte, an hour layover, then 2 to Albany. And me a captive audience.

10.20 am
3 down, three to go. An hour and a half of flight left. In the queue: real property, torts, and crim. (Query: why does the spell checker recognize torts, but not the name of the program I'm using?)

The people on either side of me are both reading Stieg Larsson novels. I have 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on my iPod. I feel like such a groupie. I bought it after seeing the novel in the bookstore - in several bookstores actually, when the hype was still in promo mode. The conflict between wanting to read the next two novels and hating to read what everybody else is reading...

11:37 am PST/2:37 EST
At least I am guessing we've crossed into the Eastern time zone, since we're only about 30 minutes out and we're starting to descend. Only real property left, and definitely not a case of saving the best for last.

I go from feeling confident that I know enough to bullshit the rest to feelings of certain and impending doom. Like when it takes me an hour to get through evidence which was, when I started studying in May, the subject I knew best. The terrifying suspicion that there's no way I can contain all the legal niceties in my head - that they will jumble and leak until I am left with nothing but a fleeting memory of res ipsas and in personams.

Gulping Air

2010-07-18T16:24:00.000-07:00

4.18 pm
Ran my first 9 minute mile yesterday. It was also the first mile I ran non-stop. Today, we did about a mile and a quarter non-stop, and then a two-block sprint uphill. Pandora kicked up one of my favorite songs, and it felt incredible to stretch out my legs and fly. Until, of course, I got midway up the hill and began gulping air.

I thought about doing track in high school. The coach for the track team asked me to be on the team in 8th grade. I didn't, because I couldn't stand the thought of all that running. Junior year, a friend informed me that I would be playing lacrosse with her. Probably the best part of high school. The joke was on me though, because we did more running for lacrosse than the track kids ever dreamed of.

4.18 pm
I'm at the point where I just want to take the darn test tomorrow and I want the whole month of August to keep studying.

I am off the paced program. I have been reliably informed that I am crazy for even contemplating sticking to it. I have a pile of index cards, color coded and arranged by subject, and an even bigger pile for all the subjects I haven't made flash cards for yet. Sometimes I am breathing. Mostly I am gulping air.

2010-07-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

8.12 pm
Exactly two weeks until the Bar Exam. Which means that exactly two weeks from now, I will be asleep in a hotel room in Albany after having completed the first day of the test. I should feel excited that I'm going into the home stretch. Instead I feel a numb sort of terror mingled with utter despair.

I stumbled upon this last night, and watched it with the sound on this time. It may become my mantra for the next two weeks.

8.22 pm
I am looking forward to August. Here is my list of things I plan to do after the bar:

Tan the back of my legs (I have the inverse farmer's tan - the fronts are tan and the backs are white as a dead fish)
Read "The Help"
Learn enough French to pronounce menu items without embarrassing myself
The novel

Yes, They're &!*%ing Sweet Potatoes

2010-07-12T21:19:00.000-07:00

9.12
The restaurant I used to work in did not attract the high-caliber, discerning diner. Mostly, we got people who only went out to eat a few times a year, for special occasions, and therefore didn't know what they were talking about when they complained. Like the woman who got mad at me for bringing her a glass of sparkling wine (which, by the way, was what she ordered) because "sparkling wines aren't white wines." Lady, have you looked at a glass of champagne lately? My favorite is the one who wanted to complain to the chef because her sweet potatoes weren't orange. The chef came out, listened to her rant, tried to explain that only yams were orange, and even brought sweet potatoes out of the kitchen to show her the difference. No dice.

All this is to say, BarBri is making me feel a bit like the chef at the moment, standing at the table with sweet potatoes in my hand and hearing MPQ1 tell me "Nuh-huh, those aren't sweet potatoes, and I knows them when I sees them." I mean, really. Isn't there a line between "the bar examiners are going to try to trick you" and "absolutely ridiculous"?

If the bar examiners need to resort to calling a yam a sweet potato, then I think it's fair to question the utility of the whole exercise.

2010-07-11T19:01:00.000-07:00

6.44 pm
A and I drove up to Napa today in search of sunlight and wine. We found both, in ample quantities.

About 15 minutes outside of Napa, we turned off into a Sunday Flea Market. In between the faded DVDs and the table of rusty power tools and the frilly polyester first communion dresses were tables heaped with tamarind and dried chilies. We might have been the only white folk there.

Then up to Sattui, where we discovered that the wine we'd come up for had been discontinued and that the last bottles had been sold about 2 days ago. We consoled ourselves by tasting a few of their whites - none of which came close to the bottle we'd wanted - and buying a Syrah.

We also went by Grgich, which is run by the man who produced the bottle that beat the French reds in the Paris Tasting of 1976. The wines were pricy, and quite frankly, I wasn't that impressed. But the Chardonnay... it was delightful. We bought a bottle and will drink it on a suitably special occasion.

Then back towards the Bay, taking in a car show and the Napa Outlets along the way.

6.58 pm
We are in the fog. I can see wisps blowing through the tops of the trees. It hasn't quite descended yet to brush against my window, but it will.

It was good to take a day off, just the two of us. I suspect that my free time is going to become more and more tight as we get closer to the bar. Next week is the last week of lectures (only 3!) and then it's about 2 weeks of self study. Two weeks which will be a frenzy of memorization and outlines and perhaps even flashcards.

And then it will be over, and it will be August, and if the fog deigns to clear I will finally have my summer.

2010-07-07T16:34:00.000-07:00

3.51pm
After two days, the sun has finally broken through the fog. I can almost see the beams of sunshine fighting to come through the window. I know some people find it easier to study when its gloomy outside, I suppose on the theory that they'd spend the day indoors anyway. I try to do most of my studying out in the garden, though, and that only works when there's sun. (For those of you unfamiliar with Bay Area weather, July is not summer. Note even close. Trust me on this one.)

4.17pm
And it's gone.

I discovered Bar Bri 1.5 today. I guess there is something to be gained from trolling ATL after all. Someone mentioned it to me yesterday, while we were at the break between sections of the simulated MBE.

On which topic, all I have to say is that my brain still feels scrambled. I went through and self-graded, which was something of an exercise in frustration. I haven't read through any of the analysis yet - I'll save that for this weekend, while I'm watching all the lectures. I haven't gone through to see if the questions I thought I knew were the ones I got right or the ones I bombed yet, either. Again, saving it for the weekend. I figure that will be less depressing, since I'll have had a whole week to recuperate.

4.30pm
Small dog is gone for the next bit, back to his family. It was somewhat strange to wake up this morning and not hear his nails clicking on the floor. He was given a bath yesterday so he'd be clean for them, and then got some quality time with the blow dryer because it was so miserable outside that left me covered in dog fur and him still not completely dry. For a small dog, he's got a lot of fur. A swept the house this morning and there was enough dog hair in the pile to stuff a small pillow. Which is amazing, considering that he swept the whole house about 3 days ago, and I did the bedroom day before yesterday. I wouldn't be surprised if dog fur continued to accumulate in his absence.

2010-07-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

10.09 am
I took a day off yesterday. It felt wonderful. Breakfast in bed, afternoon at the beach, evening of doing nothing at all. Today, of course, it's back to the salt mines, and tomorrow is 6 hours of Scantron-bubble-nightmare.

In some ways, I'm in shock that June is over. I feel like the whole month flew by without bothering to wave on its way out. Something tells me July will be much the same. I haven't looked ahead yet to see if there are any more scheduled days off. Somehow I doubt that there are.

10.09 am
I found a meditation chimer online. Several of them actually, but I only downloaded the 15 and 20 minute ones. I've been trying to get down to the meditation group at school Tuesdays, but have only made about 2 in the last month or so. Which leads to the problem of my trying to meditate and having trouble actually meditating. Too many surface thoughts skittering across the surface of my mind that refuse to be swept away. It's amazing how much clutter develops in the head, and even more amazing how persistent it is.

11.29 am
A shower and a phone call with a broker later, and it is more than time to get the day started.

2010-06-26T19:04:00.000-07:00

6.30 pm

Found a great typo in my property notes today:

ANALYSIS OF RAP PROBLEMS
1. Determine which future interest has been created by the conveyance
2. Identify conditions precedent to the vesting of the future interest
3. Find a measuring life
4. As if we will know, with certainty, within 21 years of the death of the measuring life

Which really seemed to sum up real property in a nutshell: as if we could ever know anything about the subject with certainty.

I've found it best to budget a whole day on the weekend for the "cumulative review". Trying to memorize this much material makes my head hurt. Going through the subjects that are related to each other one after another seems to help, as does taking my time. The goal: to get each set of notes down to 5 or 6 pages, which I then print out and attempt to completely memorize. Right now I've got Agency/Partnership, Torts, and Con Law down to size. I'm feeling hopeful that Crim, Corporations, and maybe Contracts will cooperate for next week. It's all a matter of not deleting things from my notes until I'm absolutely sure I can remember them either spontaneously or with only a brief prompter.

7.00 pm
The church bells are ringing 7. Not exactly sure how that happened. Still have 2 and a half subjects to go through. One of which is still in "full" form, meaning that this is the first weekend since the lecture and it hasn't been at all summarized yet. Not that I copy the handouts verbatim, but...

If I can get everything done by the time it gets dark, we're going up to Chabot to look through the telescopes tonight.

2010-06-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

8:35 pm
Crash and burn. I think I finally hit a BarBri wall. Which is a little bit funny, since the "intro" to this morning's lecture was a ten minute discourse on how instead of pushing ourselves too hard to get all the practice essays and MPTs done (because there will be plenty of time to do those in the two weeks we don't have lectures), we should be sleeping with the essay and MPT books on our nightstands so we can read them before bedtime.

WTF?! Mixed messages, much?

At any rate, I put in 12 hours yesterday and 12 hours the day before and was at 10 today when my brain stopped functioning. I stared at Essay # R-32 and couldn't for the life of me figure out what the questions were asking.

So I shut the book and decided I was done for the day, ignoring the voice in the back of my head that said I should go ahead and keep working, just so I would know what it was like to freeze up on the bar exam.

It is June 22. Over a month to go. Plenty of time to practice freezing up and freaking out. For today, I'm done.

2010-06-21T18:03:00.000-07:00

4.31 pm
Week 5 of BarBri, and I started out behind. Only an hour or so, but it wasn't the way I wanted to go into the week. The problem was that I didn't do as much as I should have Saturday, because I had reached the point where repeatedly banging my head into a brick wall was sounding preferable (and more productive) than studying any more. That left Sunday to catch up, which would have worked had we not gone out to dinner with A's mom and then left my purse at his sister's house and had to go back for it. C'est la vie. I finished up at 10.00 last night with everything but one MPT outline done.

4.43 pm
I am blogging as I type up my notes, which I really shouldn't be doing, but this outline is driving me crazy and I need something as a form of distraction. Most of the lecturers have been alright so far - some have even been really good. Today's just didn't work for me. I'm sure she organized her lecture handout, but it's not a form of organization that makes any sense to me.

Small dog is curled up on the floor asleep. He didn't get his walk this morning, so he's spent most of the day bounding around, running back and forth and up and down the stairs. He's several feet away, which is nice. Usually when he lays down on the floor near me, he's either under my desk at my feet or right behind my chair. It's sweet, but it makes it difficult to move without running over him.

6.02 pm
Small dog has moved closer to my feet. Done with outlining my notes for today. My reward? A short walk with small dog, and then another 4.5 hours or so of work. A is making roasted bell pepper stuffed with lentils, curried cauliflower and sausage, ginger, and lemon-grass for dinner. Small pleasures.

In the Peloton

2010-06-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

12.43
Could it be that studying for the bar exam is actually making me less neurotic? As strange as that sounds, I'm thinking it might be the case.

Let me explain. I'm definitely what you would call a "Type-A" personality. A card-holding member of the "if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself" school of thought. And while I don't consider myself an overachiever per se (I stuck with 2 extracurriculars in law school per year, thank you!), I firmly believe that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing perfectly the first time around.

This is the kind of mentality that sets you up for disaster when studying for the bar. Because let's face it, unless you've got a photographic memory or are willing to go without sleep for three months straight, there's no way you can learn everything that's going to be tested. After all, if they made it easy, there wouldn't be any bell curve.

This is where the less-neurotic part comes in.

For the first three weeks of class, I was banging my head against the wall, frustrated that I was missing issues or rules or tiny little points that hadn't even been in the CMR or the lecture. Going over the answer for the first essay we turned in for grading was definitely a low point. Although I was pretty sure I'd get a third of a point or two for IRAC'ing, that was about all I thought I'd get.

This week - I've been letting things go a little bit more. Instead of trying to grade my essay outlines, I've been focusing on reading the fact pattern, sitting back and looking for the big picture, and then concentrating on making sure I hit the issues in the answer.

But most importantly, I've adopted a peloton mentality. You can't ride in front the entire race, not even if you're Lance Armstrong. The middle of the pack is a pretty good place to be.

2010-06-15T15:25:00.000-07:00

3.04 pm
Somehow I have reached 3 in the afternoon with only an hour left of work. It's a nice feeling, especially since I got a late start today. The dog wanted walking, and ignoring his whining for two and a half hours while I listened to my lecture seemed rather cruel. So we went up and down the hills, and then up again, enough to tire him out enough that he's spent the rest of the morning alternating between napping and weaving around my feet like a kitty cat. We might take him to the farmer's market this afternoon, too. I'm pretty sure they don't allow dogs near the food, but I think they're ok on the periphery.

3.10 pm
I've adopted a new approach to BarBri.

I've started listening to the lectures in the morning. Before, I was doing them in the afternoon or at night, and generally was too exhausted and brain dead when I finished to tackle the "after class" assignments. This was great the first day of the week, but then I would end up feeling like I was behind a day all week - until the weekend, where I would spend all weekend working to catch up. Leaving myself a) exhausted and b) frustrated and continuously feeling "behind". Since the lectures are up by 8 am Pacific, I've been doing them first thing in the morning (after breakfast and a quick read of the newspaper). It's only Tuesday, but it seems to be working.

I've also started going over my outlines - just a quick refresher - before doing practice essays or MPQs. I know, I know, you can't use the outline on the test. But - if reading it before I do the essay gets me that much closer to getting the rules in my head, I figure I'm in a better place. It doesn't do me any good to look at the book thinking, "I know that rule" (or even worse, "I don't even know what they're asking"). Because reading the rule in the model answer is helpful, but typing it myself is even better.

2010-06-13T15:57:00.000-07:00

4.50 pm
Sunday afternoon on a gorgeous summer weekend, and I've spent almost all of it inside studying. Which, at this point anyway, is beginning to seem like a futile endeavor. I wouldn't mind my entire summer being consumed by Conviser and NYT and really bad puns if I felt like I was making any progress. But the fact is, three weeks into Bar Bri, I feel stupider than ever. I've gone from being able to spot the issues on essay questions with reasonable proficiency to not even having a clue what's being tested. I've been told to use common sense when answering the MBE questions if I come across an unfamiliar point of law - but my common sense seems to have no relation to the bar examiner's common sense.

The frustrating part, is I've never had this much trouble studying before. Once I figured out that the key to law school exams was to do a bunch of practice problems, I did fine. Sure, I made outlines, but I rarely used them during exams - the process of doing practice essays was what made me memorize the law. Here? I feel like I'm running a marathon. Through the woods. Off trail. blindfolded. No matter how much I study, no matter how many obscure points of law I think I'm memorizing - there's another five that I don't know.

On the upside, at least I'm not trying to take care of last minute wedding details, too!

2010-06-03T09:03:00.000-07:00

8.45 am
We lost a fish in the earthquake Saturday night. When I got up Sunday and fed them, Picasso wasn't looking too good. All huddled in on himself, not moving, not eating. He looked all beat up - fins ragged, great big spots on his scales like someone had been beating him up. It looked like every blood vessel in his tail had exploded. By the time A came home he was in bad shape, so he took the fish out of the water and sent him off to the great fishtank in the sky. It was kind of sad.

We think the rocks shifted around during the quake, and Picasso was just in the wrong place. Could be he got beat up by the other fish - but he was hurt so badly that I don't think the other guys did it. For all that they're mean, nasty fish, they play pretty nice with each other.

8.53 am
In happier news, I'm trying once again to get an herb garden growing this summer. Last year we had the herbs inside, and it was so darn hot they just up and wilted. Year before that we were house sitting in Berkeley and put the planter outside, where a friendly squirrel came and dug up all the seeds.

This year I've got oregano (I think - I either planted oregano or watercress, but I'm pretty sure it was the oregano), basil, rosemary, sage, coriander, and tomatoes. The last one isn't exactly an herb, but home grown tomatoes are definitely a goodness.

Here's the seeds when they first started popping their heads up. This was about five or six days after I planted them.

It helps to put them in plastic, especially since it's still a little chilly.

This morning, I realized that as soon as the seed casings fell off, I wouldn't have a clue what was what until they'd grown a bit more. Which is alright for the most part, aside from the fact that planting tomatoes in a small pot with the basil would be a bad idea and that sort of thing.

2010-05-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

9.26 am
We had a little earthquake last night. Only about a 4.0, but it was two or three miles up the road. I was in bed, half asleep, when there was a jolt. Well, I sleep next to a 30-gallon fish tank, and the first shake was hard enough that I wasn't going to wait around for more. I was out of bed, over the couch, and almost at the doorway in about half a second. At which point it was clear that this was not, in fact, the big one, leaving me slightly embarrassed and more than a little impressed at managing to get out of bed that quickly without having caught an ankle in the sheets.

9.33 am
BarBri started last week. It's a little surreal. We go into a room in a convention center in Oakland to watch a four hour DVD, all of us pretty much writing down verbatim the entire lecture. I got up at one point to throw something away, and as I walked back to my seat, I only saw one internet window open.

The lectures are all available online, so we've been losing people. The first day I think 30 or 35 showed up. The next day it was about 25. 20 or so the next. And there was a kerfluffel with the DVD (BarBri said they mailed it, the building said they didn't have it) last class, so I suspect Tuesday will be even slimmer pickings.

I'm still trying to decide whether it's worth going out to the class or if I can do it at home. I was really hoping to get a small group together, but it seems like people would rather do it on their own schedules. Understandable - but I think in about two weeks it would really help to have some moral support.

9.38 am
We move to Berkeley in a week. The living room is almost entirely boxes. The closets are almost empty. There are four pots that we are taking to Berkeley, a few spatulas, a whisk, and the dishes we'll be getting rid of in the kitchen. The bookshelves are almost bare. It's amazing how much accumulates when you live in one place awhile. Even more amazing is how you can use something twice in five years, pack it, and then discover, once it's boxed in and taped shut, that you now need it.

2010-05-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

3.32 pm
The boy and I ran our first ten minute mile on Monday. More like 9 minutes and 58 seconds, but who's counting? By Tuesday we were back to eleven minutes miles. I don't even want to talk about this morning's run.

Monday morning I also had a piece of carrot cake before we went out running. Just a small piece - enough to keep me reasonably not hungry until we had gone running and showered and washed the mountain of dishes in the sink and made real breakfast.

I suspect there may be a connection, but I'll have to make more carrot cake in order to test the validity of my theory.

4.11 pm
I am almost done with law school. My last final is finished (and with any luck, won't be graded until after Commencement), and my final paper is about done with the research stage and ready to be outlined and sent off to the professor for comments over the weekend. I will start writing Sunday or Monday, and with any luck be finished by the time the family shows up next week. If not, I will send them all off to Alcatraz for the day while I frantically finish the darn thing.

I am using almost my entire allotment of graduation tickets. This amazes me. I don't want to sit in the sun for three hours listening to people I don't know tell my graduating class how awesome we are and how much we're going to need that awesomeness in the shrinking-by-the-minute legal market. (I skipped my undergrad graduation for this reason and maybe missed hearing Eckerd's only famous graduate speak - but that's neither here nor there.) It amazes me that friends and family actually want to come to this thing. Of course, I did promise them all beer at Triple Rock afterward...

2010-04-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

11.10 am
It is the last week of classes. I have one final, one paper, and one course evaluation to turn in before I am done with law school. This is very surreal. Three years of my life cannot have gone by that quickly... can they? When I finished undergrad, it was with a huge sigh of relief that I was done with that place. Graduating law school is different. I chose this school, I fought tooth and nail to get in, and I fought even harder to keep up and do well. Nothing about law school has been easy.

11.39 am
Law school has, however, been safe. We get our loans every semester, we go to classes, and we are generally, if not completely, sheltered from the rampant unemployment. I'm moving across the country again, this time to New York. And as ready as I am to be finished with school and back to doing something that matters (or seems to, at any rate), there's something appealing about the student lifestyle that makes me a little reluctant to let go.

"Thou shalt remember the Eleventh Commandment and keep it Wholly."

2010-02-20T16:41:00.000-08:00

3.18 pm

I had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance yesterday. Disturbing enough that I seriously considered whether it would be best to let it go rather than blogging about it. My sheer amazement at what was said, coupled with my own (someone naive) disbelief that these kinds of sentiments were alive and well in Berkeley caused me to sit down and examine some of my own base assumptions about the people I interact with on a daily basis.

We were talking about taking full advantage of the school's health insurance before we graduate and join the ranks of the uninsured. I mentioned that I needed to make sure that my birth control prescription would cover the time from graduation until my job starts in the fall.

My acquaintance turned to me with a strange look. "You take birth control?"

"Yes," I said. I was a little puzzled at this question, but after all the torts case we read the first year about birth control and other feminine medications (think DPS) I could see why someone wouldn't want to go near the stuff.

"You're having sex?" my acquaintance asked.

"Yes."

"But... That's just wrong!"

I'm pretty sure that my face reflected the complete and utter shock that I felt.

"Oh my gosh, I've offended you," my acquaintance said, backpedalling to assure me it had been just a joke.

I wasn't offended. I certainly wasn't upset. I knew that this person had spoken without realizing that what they said might be something which I wouldn't agree with. In some ways, I think my acquaintance was more startled than I was by what had been said and by my reaction to it.

What made me react the way I did I was my incredulity in having someone tell me that an action I had taken - something which had no bearing on that person and did not affect their life in any way - was morally wrong. I'm pretty sure that was the implication. The shock came because I thought I had left that mentality behind when I left Florida.

On reflection, it's pretty clear to me that the "my morality is right and your morality is wrong" frame of mind is alive and well here on the West Coast. It comes in a different flavor, however, which was why I didn't recognize the similarities at first. It only takes one orange-jumpsuited John Yoo protest to make you realize that there's a significant chunk of the town convinced that they have the full backing of a higher authority. They just call it by a different name.

4.14 pm

Here's what I would have said to you if I hadn't been so caught up in my own assumptions about how people should behave.

I don't consider myself religious. I don't have any disagreement with religion, and for the most part I think religions give people a much needed way to shape their lives and beliefs. Some people have ten commandments. I have one: "Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily."

4.36 pm - A sort of postscript

I was fairly certain this came from Stranger in a Strange Land, but after much fruitless thumbing through my own copy I am forced to conclude that it is, in fact, from the notebooks of Lazarus Long. Even so, I highly recommend Stranger to anyone with questions about morality, religion and the strange customs of Earth. Even now, almost ten years after reading the book for the first time, it gives me a strange sort of happiness to hear someone say grok.

Thou art God.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day

2010-02-18T09:51:00.000-08:00

9.05 am

I did not wake up with gum in my hair. I did, however, wake up an hour before my alarm went off with the realization that I hadn’t heard my partner’s alarm go off. Which meant that he had about ten minutes to get up and ready for work or he was going to be late. Miraculously, we got him out of the door on time. When I say “we” I really mean “he got himself” because my contribution consisted of sitting at my desk blinking at him and wondering if it was at all possible for me to go back to bed.

I then spent the next forty minutes hitting back or refresh on my web browser trying to get tickets to hear Bill Clinton speak at Berkeley. I had this vague thought that if he did any sort of book signing or meet and greet (remote, but not entirely impossible) I might have been able to say I met both Clintons. Which would be almost as cool as getting to meet Obama.

It was not to be, however, and all I got were a series of messages informing me that the website was at full capacity. I was actually rather impressed by the number of different messages I got – some from Google, some from Drupal, some from Cal itself. (My favorite was “Bad Gateway!” Very bad Gateway! Never do that again!) It was like a #neilfail on an even grander scale.

My obsession with hitting the back button every five minutes to try to get these tickets, combined with the incredibly not-smart idea that this morning was a good time to change out the music on my ipod, resulted in my leaving the house about 2 minutes after I meant to. Which led to me seeing the train sitting at the platform from the traffic light at the BART entrance and realizing there was no way I was going to make the train and therefore running full out toward the station entrance.

Naturally, the train slid away before I was even close, leaving me out of breath and feeling rather foolish.

9.12 am
I also failed to win fountain pen this morning. I failed to even get a mention as having a nice journal or impressive work. The journal I can understand – I’ve definitely gone for function over form. They’re my journals, after all. Who’s going to read them but me. And I can see why a middle-aged man would be unimpressed by the decorating skills of my teenage self.

For a moment I was kind of bummed out over not having been at all recognized. Trying to balance being a law student and still having a creative side is difficult. The technical requirements of legal writing have a tendency to suck out creativity or to ensure that it is expressed in strangely melodramatic ways (Cardoza, I’m looking in your direction). A nod from an established Creative Person would be an affirmation, a hint from the universe that I’ve not been lawyerized yet.

For a moment I allowed myself to feel terribly disappointed. Then I read his picks and discovered that I was not at all impressed with any of them. It wasn’t that it was bad writing; it was that it wasn’t my kind of writing. There are, after all, thousands of ways to tell the exact same story (didn’t someone say once that there are only 100 or so stories in the world?).

9.28 am
I will continue to tell my story. I will tell it in my words, and I will tell it the way I want. I will remember that I write not because I want other people to read my work (although it is always nice to know that what I’m writing resonates with someone) or to make money or even a living (again, it would be nice, but I’m aware of how unrealistic that is) but because I can’t imagine not writing.

In which one attempts to prove herself an author

2010-02-12T19:21:00.000-08:00

6.57 pm
Kyle Cassidy is doing a fountain pen give-away to would be writers. In order to show that one is a) a would be writer and b) the type of person who would actually make use of fountain pens, he's asked that people post pictures of their handwritten journals as well as a writing sample. It's rather like the college admissions process, but one actually has the chance of getting something useful at the end of it.

And since I have been ruminating on how it might not be a bad thing and let slip to any fellow lawyers and would-be lawyers who know me that I write for fun...

And since I have been ruminating on how slowly killing all those parts of yourself that are human in the cause of professionalism might be a rather strange way to go about living...

And since I have been ruminating on exactly what sort of lawyer I wish to be when I grow up...

I am posting here my "entry" to the fountain pen contest.

First, we have the journals. I've been keeping a journal since August 22, 1997. I had just come home from overnight camp, and there were so many things that I wanted to hold on to in my memory forever, and I knew that if I didn't write them down they would slowly start to fade away.

The open pages are bits of poetry, some of it still unfinished.

A page from one of the journals. I took another photo after I realized this one had blurred, but I rather liked the blurred edges better. Since you can't read it, I'll tell you that it's a timeline for a short story/novella that I wrote as my senior thesis in college. It is, by the way, a great story. One that I really should take out of the drawer, dust off, and finish one of these days.

Here's that writing sample part. The left page is me trying to work out the poem. The right page is the pretty much completed poem. I wrote it in the Berkshires, while I was on a vacation with my family, about a boy I knew in Florida. There were things that I wanted to get into the poem but didn't quite fit in. Like how he called me "beautiful," as in "Hi, beautiful," causing me to wonder if he was being complimentary or covering up the fact that he never knew my name.

6.57 pm
I tend not to write stories long hand, although there are a few pieces in the backs of my journals, some from airplane rides when I didn't yet have my laptop, some because the story needed to be written instead of typed to continue telling itself to me, and some simply because I had a pen in my hand and the notebook was there. Mostly, though, I write out poetry.

Stories flow through and from my fingertips, the words appearing without much directed thought on my part. Occasionally I will delete an adjective, insert a verb, wipe out an entire paragraph that refuses to cooperate. More often, I will simply keep typing, knowing that I write best when I don't think about it.

Poetry is different. It demands that each word be weighed, be rolled around the mouth and tongue before committing it to the page. I find that the simple act of writing the words helps me better understand their relationship to one another, the meter of the whole piece.

A fountain pen would make lovely poetry.

Pretty the World

2010-02-09T22:43:00.000-08:00

10.06 pm
The pre-Symposium dinner at the Prof.'s house was tonight, and driving home I felt like I'd been pulled back into a strange sort of time warp. It started with the road through the Berkeley hills, sinuous and twisting back on itself so close I couldn't help but wonder why it doesn't bite its own tail. (A lifetime ago, it seems, I rode through those hills on the back of a motorcycle, the bay spread out below us like Elliot's evening.) Then onto the highway - 580, moving strangely slowly tonight, only 60 instead of its usual 85 - and music playing instead of the usual lineup of news/cultural/historical podcasts. (Once, I drove up the highway after work - 880, probably going too fast, sometimes headed to the dive in Jack London, sometimes to a bar on San Pablo instead, usually with a boy in a Lexis who didn't love me following close behind - with the music loud enough to drown out the night.)

10.14 pm
Sometimes I miss waiting tables. Lazy mornings writing in a rose garden, the sun soaking my shoulders and putting honey colored highlights in my hair. Getting to work early enough to polish my silverware and my stemware. Nights when the kitchen didn't go down in flames, when the kitchen plated my food and slid it into the window the instant before I walked into the back. Taking the elastics from my braids at the end of the night and letting them unravel. (Do you know what I love about your hair?" he asked. "I love the way its perfume leaves trails through the restaurant.") Staying at the bar until last call and then a little later, watching the boys play pool on battered and tilted tables.

10.23 pm
Sometimes I think the poetry has left me.

A few years ago, I was bitten by a spider that got stuck under my shirt and left bites all along the path it had taken to get out. I wrote: "The bites along my ribcage are like a constellation. I look in the mirror, from this angle and that, trying to read a pattern from the random scattering." Someone told me that it was such a beautiful way to describe it - like poetry. I wasn't trying. The words just came, sliding out from beneath my fingertips the way all my best work does. Law school, though, with its emphasis on reason, with its careful writing techniques designed to strip the humanity, to strip the poetry from the words...

10.30 pm
Sometimes I think I am the one who has done the leaving.

Celebrity Crush

2010-01-16T10:22:00.000-08:00

9.58 am
Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are getting married. They announced it to the world last night. With snoggage.

This makes me inexplicably sad, and even a bit jealous. You see... well it's sort of been like... not that it really means anything... but I've had a celebrity crush on Neil Gaiman for a while. Really, how can a lit chick not have a thing for a certain tousle-haired, dog-loving, always-wears-black-and-blogs-about-not-being-able-to-fit-into-his-skinny-jeans-author? The simple truth of the matter is that Gaiman is like kryptonite for the literary minded girl.

9.58 am
I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but I even had a celebrity fantasy to go along with my celebrity crush. It went something like this:

I would be at a signing. I would slide my book across the table. He would take it, open it to one of the blank pages near the front, and look up to ask me my name. At that point, our eyes would meet. Violins might even start playing in the background. I'm pretty sure there would, coincidentally and spontaneously, be fireworks in the background.

Anyone who has ever been to a Gaiman signing knows this is complete and utter nonsense. Most of the time, he doesn't even do signings. Instead he'll sign a whole pile of books beforehand, which you can purchase at the venue. This, I have been informed by bored event-workers, is because if he were to sign for all the people who show up to see him in the Berkeley area, he would be here for several weeks.

When he does an actual signing, there are line-minders who go up and down the line with index cards or sticky-notes who take your name, spell it properly upon the index card or sticky-note, and insert it in the page that he has indicated beforehand he will be signing. When you actually get to the table, you put down the book, he opens it to the marked page, signs his name and maybe even scribbles you a little doodle, says thanks for coming, and then you're done.

Notice the lack of any chance for him to look up and meet the eyes of an infatuated fan at any point during this process. Pat Robertson will praise gay marriage before my celebrity fantasy ever occurs.

10.16 am
Congratulations to Mr. Neil and AFP. May your years together be filled with laughter. And snoggage.

2010-01-15T18:28:00.000-08:00

6.17 pm

The post-workout-high abruptly departed somewhere around 150th Street. I decided to start going to the gym not so much as a New Year's Resolution but more of as a "You know, I really feel better when I spend some time moving around instead of sitting in front of a law book or the computer all day." I got my RSF membership last semester, but then only ended up going about twice because i always had too many things to do. With any luck, that will not happen this semester.

This afternoon was a bit intense. I did my 30 minutes on the elliptical and was almost done with my 30 minutes on the bike when one of my journal buddies walked by. Which was odd, because I'd just been thinking that I wanted to ask him about a good workout using weights, which I know nothing about.

"Come get me when you're done," he said.

I looked down at the timer and told him I was just finishing. Which wasn't really a lie, since I only had about 30 seconds left. He told me he didn't actually use weights, but instead did exercises that uses the body's own weight. Which is all the better, since that's the reason I like Yoga. It's more difficult (but still possible) to hurt yourself that way.

So he has me do pull ups, and dips, and something I don't have a name for that involved being underneath a metal bar, with my feet on the ground, my butt in the air, and my hands on the bar, and puling myself up. Then there were handstands and pushups.

I finish all this. My legs are already hurting. My arms now have that lovely burning sensation. My heart is pounding. Breathing is not painful, but I have the feeling that it might be soon.

My gym buddy looks up at me and grins. "Now you do this four or five more times," he says.

2009-11-01T11:37:00.000-08:00

10.55 am
The bedroom looks like Halloween exploded into it at some point in the wee hours of the morning. Costumes scattered across the couch at the foot of the bed, keys and ID's and credit cards and makeup scattered across my desk. As the boy put it, I stayed out way past my bedtime last night. I'll blame some of that on BART (running one train an hour isn't really all-night service - have you people ever been to New York) but mostly it was because we were having a good time.

He bought tickets to an event at the Glas Kat, but we never made it that far. Instead we met up with friend, and friends of friend, and a random airport security agent ("I don't care about the drugs you're carrying. I'm looking for the person who wants to die today." Nice to know our government has its priorities straight.) who spent the night on a bar stool warming our coats. Sometime after midnight the boy and I ended up at a little taqueria, where I got nachos that probably wouldn't have been as fantastic if I had been sober.

10.55 am
Finished with my read through of the morning paper and ready to start the day. I'm torn between whether I should consider the paper a necessity or a luxury. Necessity because knowing what's going on in the world - whether you world consists of the small rural town you live in or the affairs of political leaders across the globe - is an essential part of being a citizen. A luxury, partly because I must confess that at times I'm more likely to read 'human interest' stories than hard news and partly because my days always flash by much too quickly.

Today I shall mostly spend writing, I think. Having finished a first draft of my writing requirement, I've been rewarded with suggestions for the next draft an an imperative to get that next draft done quickly. I shall also, if I can convince myself it won't take to long, go down to the new library and, for the first time in over a month, get new books!

3.58 pm
Back from new library, which is rather spiffy. There's an automatic book return - you put your book in the slot, barcode facing up, and it goes onto a conveyor belt that then deposits the book in the right bin. The librarians love this because it takes away most of the hassle of returns. I love this becuase I am naturally suspicious and paranoid and can now get a receipt verifying that I did, in fact, return my books on time.

The downside of getting new books is, of course, that I would rather be reading than doing homework. So instead I shall procrastinate by blogging. A happy solution for all.

2009-10-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

10.30 am
Curled up on the futon with my blanket wrapped around me and the front door wide open. A delicate compromise between warmth and fresh air. On the agenda today we have corporations (it would be rather nice, for once, to have an actual reading assignment rather than guessing), reading through precis' for my writing seminar (although I claim hall pass on reading them if they come it at 9 pm on Sunday night again) and reading for my development seminar (which, because I am writing a paper, I view as somewhat optional). Then there's the MPRE, and I will know whether or not I should be worried about it after I do some practice questions this afternoon.

10.53 am
(I began a long diatribe on the CA bar charging outrageous fees, but it ended up on Nuts & Boalts instead)

Having now spent 23 minutes typing instead of reading, I shall now be a good sheeple and go do my homework.

2009-10-24T09:12:00.000-07:00

9.08 am

When the phone rings before 9 am, it's usually because one of the boy's cooks has failed to show. He was tugging on his chef's pants and stuffing clothes for tonight in his bag almost before he had hung up the phone, then rushing out the door. I somewhat like when he leaves early because it gives me more time to get work done during the day, but the house is rather empty when it's only me here all day.

2009-10-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

10.43 am

I am armed with a cup of green tea and ready to face the day. The boy left at 9 am this morning to go to work. It has taken me nearly two hours of newspaper reading, email and facebook checking, and showering to accept the fact that it is morning and I am awake.

On the to do list for today:

Homework. About 65 pages of reading for crim pro - we're doing Miranda this week. Plus the articles for my international development and law class, which I pretty much skim through anyway. And papers/precis for the writing workshop. Ditto on the skimming.
Webpage editing. The boalt.org server is finally cooperating. Agenda for today is getting the articles archive straightened out and putting up blurbs about the articles for the next edition.
Brower. I didn't realize how much work was going to go into editing that thing. At this rate, I'll still be working on it next year. Which is bad, because it probably needs to be ready for the printer by December. Eeek!
An hour of noveling. This is a must. Nathan Bransford's Stupendously Ultimate First paragraph Challenge had caused me to realize that: 1) there's no point in winning an agent critique if you don't have a manuscript ready and 2) manuscripts don't write themselves while they're stuck in the proverbial desk drawer. Although they may get up to other sorts of mischief, which is neither here nor there.
I'm sure there's something else I'm forgetting. There usually is.

2009-10-16T11:56:00.001-07:00

11.55 am

A word cloud of the blog, powered by wordle.net

2009-10-09T17:13:00.000-07:00

5.13 pm

The alarm went off at 3 am this morning and boy rolled out of bed and turned on the computer. I stayed in bed for about half an hour before giving in to the inevitable and moving to the couch, where I wrapped myself in a blanket and dozed off to the sound of NASA geeks. One of them, after informing us that the bombing of the moon was dedicated to Walter Cronkite, said he hoped that this mission would inspire a new generation of kids to grow up excited about exploring space.

Seems to me that people landing on the moon is a somewhat more exciting than a rocket detonation that fails to produce the expected "cloud." On the other hand, perhaps we're getting that much closer to Luna Colony. Cue catapults, lunies, and Revolt in 2100. I've already told my parents that when they become aged, I'm shipping them off to the moon. One sixth gravity makes it a lot easier to get around with those hip replacements and bad knees.

liveblogging my corporations reading

2009-10-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

4.28 pm

Home from a nice bike ride up Redwood (hills are friends, not food) and showered, so that I am no longer a sweaty, grimy mess. My reward: settling in to read Corporations. Joy.

4.34 pm

I am currently feeling a bit like Emma: if I were to make time for all the things I ought to do, I would be quite accomplished by now. Sadly, learning Spanish and writing a novel and working my way through cookbooks seem to be somewhat incompatible with law school. Bike riding is easier for some reason. Perhaps it's because conjugating Spanish verbs doesn't quite give the same adrenaline rush that racing down a hill at way too fast does.

5.37 pm

I've closed the front door - too much wind and not enough sunshine coming in. Curled up under the boy's Snoopy blanket and wishing we had a fireplace. Homework reads quicker when there's fire nearby.

5.57 pm

So far, the most exciting case was from the 1930s and involved night games at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

6.19 pm

Seven pages to go. If I put dinner in the oven now, will it be ready when I'm finished? Ah, the existential thoughts of a hungry law student.

6.48 pm

Dinner: three cheese tortellini with truffle salt, oregano, and parmesan. Desert: editing.

Peter at 32

2009-09-02T20:02:00.000-07:00

2 am – the after
after party – and he’s down
in the Village
with a smile
and a corporate expense account, still dressed
in standard office-wear:
trousers and a Eurotrash
button-down;

“Darling!”
he says
to a girl in a
mini-skirt, air kisses
above
her cheeks, putting
a hand on her ass
and guiding her out to
a cab. He blanks on the directions to his loft
a moment – third

street to the left? – but the cabbie
has a GPS on the dash.
She will leave before
he wakes up,
and he, head pounding, will lie
back against the pillows
and clap.

2009-06-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

11.02 pm

Opera high is quite unlike any other. It puts you in a quieter sort of place. Not the wild bursts of energy that come from the staying up too late high, or the sustaining, could do this for miles that comes with runner's high. The mellow, contented feeling from sushi high comes close, but it doesn't quite get there.

Jodi wears a hat although it hasn't rained for six days. She says a girl needs a gun these days, hey, on account of those rattlesnakes.

I walked home past the Somerset House, which I've glanced at in passing a few times, and realized that what I thought was the entrance was really a giant courtyard that leads down to the Embankment. I saw water splashing around inside and went for a closer look. One of those fountains set into the cobblestones of the courtyard, a square of about 7 jets on either side. Each had its own, different coloured light at the bottom, and the size of the jets changed heights. I briefly considered dropping my bag and playing tag with the fountain, but the water never quite went all the way down entirely. Most likely to keep people from myself from doing silly things.

She looks like Eve Marie Saint in on the waterfront. She reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance.

I think the thing about the opera - really, the thing about any kind of performance - is that it allows you to step into that state known in the creative writing universe as the willing suspension of disbelief. That is, for the span of a three hour performance, we all agree to pretend that what is happening on the stage is real. Perhaps you take this as a given. Isn't that the point of going to shows, to escape reality for a bit?

Sure. But this collective ability to ignore the real world takes on a different sort of meaning when you're sitting in Trefalgar Square in a crowd of about 10,000 people, and you've all agreed to share the same collective fantasy.

She's less than sure if her heart has come to stay in San Jose, and her neverborn child haunts her now, as she speeds down the freeway. As she tries her luck with the traffic police, out of boredom more than spite, she never finds no trouble, she tries too hard, she's oblivious despite herself.

The Royal Opera House had run a contest for amateur opera singers, the grand prize being the privilege of singing in Trafalgar Square during the intermission. They looked so young, both of them, and the expressions on their faces as they finished singing and heard the crowd begin to applaud were a combination of shock and amazement and pure joy.

Jodi never sleeps 'cause there are always needles in the hay. She says a girl needs a gun these days on account of those rattlesnakes.
Opera high is restlessness. It is wanting to walk the streets of London until the sun rises. It is wanting to sit down at the piano by St. Paul's and play Beethoven's moonlight sonata under the stars. It is wanting to hold onto that feeling of being completely alive.

2009-06-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

4.00 pm

I could be in any park, in any country. The open stretch of lawn is surrounded by trees, their broad leaves providing a welcome canopy of shade. I hear half a dozen languages around me. Italian. French. Indian, I think, and something that might be Russian. I’m not in any park, in some far off and exotic country. I’m in London, in England, sitting in St. James Park with a laptop, a guidebook for London, and a book I bought this morning by an up and coming young novelist.

The reason I am in the park, instead of out in Brighton or Oxford or pub-crawling with my mates from the office is that I’m starting to realize that I am losing myself working at this law firm. One of the others summers told me the other day that I don’t really seem like a Berkeley person. That I don’t really seem like a hippie. I can understand why he would get that idea, of course. I come into the office in a suit most days. Largely because if I don’t wear a jacket, I sit and shiver in the extreme air conditioned refrigerator that is my office. I work mostly with the arbitration and litigation teams, defending corporations facing white collar crime investigations and the big energy and oil companies investing in foreign countries.

There was an incident at the office yesterday involving a very, very unhappy woman who had worked there about five years ago. It was clear that she was rather upset, and while I won’t presume to know what was going on with her, I’m fairly sure that it wasn’t just working at the office that had gotten her so ticked off. Still, it’s things like that which make you question your own choices. Will I end up that miserable in five years? I certainly hope not.

4.10 pm

Rather depressing thoughts for what is, on the whole, a glorious Saturday afternoon. I think I shall go find an ice cream stand and see if I can get through the whole thing without dripping on myself. I fear the chances of that actually happening are rather slim, though.

6.29 pm

Went on for a walk in the park. Saw a girl in a gold-coloured polyester princess dress and a tiara, which made me smile. And a creep who tried to hit on me, which didn’t. Then I ambled over to Hyde park, where I caught the opening bit of what I think was the Neil Young concert before the sky began to make threatening rumbles.

I made it to the Tube station before the rain and found myself in a sweaty mass of over-stimulated tourists. Transferred to another line immediately. Reached St. Paul’s as the sky really began to open. Big, fat drops of rain that left splotches the size of quarters on the pavement. Am now sitting in my living room with the windows wide open, letting the fresh rain scent blow in.

7.46 pm

And, I should add, a hauntingly beautiful tribute to Michael Jackson in black sharpie on a wall of the National Gallery.

2009-06-26T12:47:00.001-07:00

8.47 pm

I've been debating whether or not to post this. After all, some of you might go see the movie, and I wouldn't want to ruin it or anything. On the other hand, very rarely do I have a book experience that leaves me feeling so incredibly used.

I went into the bookstore the other night on my way to yoga, and picked up a book. It was a rather innocuous looking paperback, and I flipped through it and read a bit. It seemed interesting, largely because the bits I'd read made it seem as though the substance of the book revolved around some pretty thorny ethical dilemmas. The owning-the-rights-to-your-own-body-kind, and the when-do-parents-stop-having-the-ability-to-make-good-decisions-for-their-children kind. So I downloaded the audio version to take with me on the plane.

It started out great. It was the kind of book you can't put down. In fact, after I got off the plane Saturday, I kept listening. I put my headphones in when I walked around the city Sunday. I probably walked more than I would have otherwise. I raced home to finish listening to it Monday. Then, Tuesday morning I think it was, I read a review in the New York Times about this particular book. Which was being made into a movie. Which was not, as I was beginning to suspect, about thorny ethical issues at all. Instead, it was simply one in a line of books by the same author all dealing with the same exact subject: dying children.

I kept reading the book, mostly wanting to prove the Times article (which took a rather dim view of both the author, the genre, and the novel) wrong. A book this good couldn't be that bad, could it? Oh yes. Those wonderfully tricky questions about morals and ethics and black and white lines got lost in the melodrama and pathos of the novel's end. It's not very often that I finish a book and wish I could take those 13 hours of my life back.

2009-06-19T17:05:00.000-07:00

8.05 pm

Right. It's not yet ten o'clock in the evening and already I've had too much to drink. I blame the litigators. If the one hadn't sent out the email saying that we were congregating in the pub downstairs to celebrate a day without rain (which really, given the week we've had, is a remarkable achievement) and then the other buying me drinks in said pub ... well, I would have been home, and sober, and packing for London several hours ago. On the other hand, it was rather nice to hear the one say, in puppy dog sort of tones, "It's fine, go to London, I'll just work on this chart without you, and I won't miss you at all" and the other say "But if you're in London who's going to deflate my ego with sarcastic and cruel remarks?"

I hadn't quite realized how well I was fitting in with the litigators until it struck me that several of them were rather going to miss me. Somewhat strange, because I'd thought of myself as an arbitration sort of girl. And I've gotten along famously with the arbitrators I've had a chance to work with, but it's been mostly litigation assignments.

8.26 pm

Pizza in the oven and clothes in the laundry. Now I need to figure out a) what I'm packing to take to London and b) what suitcase(s) I'm putting it in. Did I mention I'm leaving for London at about 5 am tomorrow? The idea was to leave work early, around 5ish, because my assignments have dried up over the past week and I didn't have anything urgent to take care of, and pack. Then I would go to bed early, and get in a good night of sleep before getting on a plane to fly across several thousand mile of ocean. And because I have really not had enough to drink that the idea of packing suits with hand covered in pizza sauce sounds like a good idea, I'm queuing up Dexter on Netflix to watch while I eat. Because nothing is better with a few beers and pizza than a serial killer who uses his power for good. Mostly.

2009-06-13T19:03:00.000-07:00

10.03 pm

Munchkin runs up the stairs from the basement, for all the world like there's an army of ghouls behind him, shouting "Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow there's an ANIMAL in the washer." I'm in the guest room (because both of the bedrooms I occupied in this house have since been taken over by various brothers) changing, so I put my jeans back on because if there is some sort of large animal I'll feel much better prepared to deal with it if I am wearing jeans and not pink tiger striped pajama pants.

The animal turns out to be a mouse. I learn this from my mother, who is having trouble talking because she's laughing so hard. My father, it seems, has gone down to the basement to deal with said mouse, Munchkin being incapable of doing so at the moment. Dad comes up the stairs and starts lecturing Munchkin on why you don't run up the stairs as though there were an army of ghouls behind you yelling "ow ow ow ow ow" if your only problem is a mouse in the washer. As my father talks, he waves his hands around. He doesn't appear to notice that one of the hands is holding a plastic container, like the kind you get at the deli when you order a pasta salad, with a very wet, small mouse in it.

"Is that the mouse?" I ask. "Is it dead?"

My father shakes the container a few times. The mouse moves. "No," he says. "It's rather wet and unhappy though."

And really, this is a fairly typical evening in my parents house.

2009-06-07T12:18:00.000-07:00

3.18 pm

I have gone to five yoga classes in the past eleven days. Two in the past two days. I don't yet have that "hurting in muscles I didn't even knew existed" feeling that I did when I first started yoga a few years ago, but it's close. The kind of weird thing is that I actually enjoy that sort of pain. I used to feel like this after really good dance classes or really hard lacrosse workouts. I'm also starting to feel less painfully stiff and sore in the morning, which is a definite bonus. Part of that is the fact that I'm sleeping on a pull-out sofa in which, until I put a foam eggshell thing down a few days ago, I could feel every mattress spring when I lay down. Most of it is that I'm totally losing the flexibility I had when I was younger.

The other night I was at a bar with one of the girls from work, and we got onto the topic of dance and acro and all that, and she mentioned that there's adult gymnastics at the Chelsea pier. It sounds like you pay your $20 and they let you at all the equipment for a few hours on a Friday night. I'm wicked excited to go do it, but I'm also wondering if a) my body will still remember what to do and b) if my body will actually move and bend that way again. I know what it feels like to do a back handspring. You have to bend your knees and jump, straight up, while bending your head back and trusting that your arms will catch you. That's the hard part. After your arms hit the ground your feet will follow, at which point you have to stay on them and not wobble around as you stand up. What I wonder, though, is if my arms will support me, if my back will arch the way it needs to, if I can still jump straight up into the air as though I were never planning on coming back down.

All of which is to say that I find myself upping the personal ante for my yoga classes. I signed up because I knew I'd be eating ridiculous lunches all summer and I wanted something to keep off the "summer fifteen". And because after watching the contortionists at Cirque, I really wanted to be able to bend down and touch my toes again. Now, my goal is to be able to get flexible enough to do a back handspring this summer.

On keys, and why I shouldn't leave the house without them

2009-05-31T14:35:00.000-07:00

5.36 pm

You would think that after the incident in The Hague where I locked myself out of the building at 1 am and had to wake up my next door neighbor to actually get in, I would be absolutely fanatical about making sure I had my keys with me whenever I left my apartment. You would be wrong.

In my defense, when I left the apartment I was with my roommate who did have keys. We were going downstairs to put my suitcase in the storage unit. I failed to realize, however, that the fact that she was leaving to go to the gym right away meant she would not be coming upstairs with me. So I asked the doorman if she could let me in, at which point she told me she didn't have keys, and in any case the super couldn't open the apartment without permission from Christine. Whose phone number I did not have.

I shrugged and went upstairs, figuring that at worst I would be waiting in the hall for about two hours and maybe that would teach me to bring my keys everywhere. Then I realized I had pasta cooking in the oven and that if I waited two or more hours for Christine to come home it would burn to a crisp, possibly taking the apartment with it. I jiggled the door handle for a bit, and when that didn't work I went back downstairs and explained to the doorman that even if the super couldn't let me in maybe he could go in himself and turn off the oven and that really would be better than things burning and setting off smoke alarms and so forth.

The moral of the story, therefore, is not "don't leave home without your keys" but rather, "if you do leave home without your keys, leave the oven on."

2009-05-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

5.51 pm

Right. I've survived the first two weeks in New York. I have not yet been mugged, nor threatened, nor even looked at in a hostile manner. My apartment might be in East Harlem, but it is definitely not the worst neighborhood I've lived in. Nobody seems to believe me though, when I tell them that it's really ok for me to walk from the subway to my building in the evening. Don't get me wrong - if it's midnight, I'll be taking a cab home. But there are a ton of people still out and walking around, and regular patrols of both the actual police and the church brothers up the block. Oddly enough, I feel safer around the church guys.

You probably want to know if the law firm is wining and dining us extensively. Not so much. That's not to say that they haven't taken care of us. We went to Cirque d'Soleil the first week (it was totally fabulous) and had cocktails and hors d'hourves at the SoHo Grand this week. Plus there was a wine tasting at a partner's house and lunch with our office mates. But that's pretty much it for the official events. The theme around the office seems to be that if associates want to take summers out for lunch, they should. But I'm rather glad to find that I can bring food into the office or grab a quick bit to eat at one of the restaurants downstairs.

Everyone at the office is super friendly so far. A bunch of us went out for drinks and then dinner last night to say goodbye to two of the summers who will be in the Hong Kong office the next ten weeks. The associates got word that we were all going to be hanging out after work and invited us to Papillion. Papillion, so far as I can tell, is a French restaurant run by a couple Irish guys. They've got Leffe beer on tap, along with a ton of other imports, but there's a full wine list as well. It was packed Friday night, mostly with the law firm/midtown types.

6.10 pm
I'm trying to motivate myself to do a few hours of reading. I don't know that I really have to - certainly nobody will be giving me a pop quiz on Monday morning. If I get through it all, however, that will make my life the rest of next week that much easier, since I'll be able to go straight into the research. And while I suspect this case will take up most of my week, I'd really like to get time in on the two pro bono cases I have, both of which are absolutely great cases.

2009-05-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

3.02 pm

New York! Strangely enough, it seems like any other major American city. Worlds away from The Hague, of course. For one thing, the streets here are paved, not cobblestone or brick. For another, as I walk around the city I hear English and Spanish, not Dutch and English. My new apartment is 30-40 minutes from work. Probably closer to the 30 side once I actually know where I'm going and have the subway route down. The room I'm in has a desk and a pull-out sofa to sleep on, and once the sofa is pulled out it becomes rather small. Still, I've got full access to the kitchen and living room, and really, I'd be plain silly to expect a large room in this city.

3.18 pm

Done arranging furniture for the nonce. The couch is now turned 90 degrees so that I can pull the bed out all the way and still sit down at the desk to type. Because I think that making the bed into a couch every day and/or having to scramble over the bed to get to the other side of the room would get old rather quickly.

Work starts tomorrow at 9:30 am with breakfast, followed by orientation-type stuff I think, lunch with my new office mate, and then afternoon "meet the firm" drinks. I'm rather excited to be starting work again. I spend much too much money when I have days off. Besides, you can only sit around doing nothing for so many afternoons before it starts to get old.

2009-05-10T09:47:00.000-07:00

9.47 am

We went out for breakfast this morning, to one of our favorite little places in town. We call it the "pirate place" because the old menus had something vaguely pirate-like about them. Not the best food in town, but friendly service, and quick, and the hot chocolate always comes with a mountain of whipped cream and chocolate syrup on top. We got there around 7:15ish - well ahead of the Mother's Day rush - found a table, and then sat and watched the two waitresses make eye contact with us multiple times as they washed their hands, brought a coffee pot around for refills, and chatted with the manager. In short, they did just a about everything they could to kill time without actually taking our order.

We were so frustrated that we walked out. I'm not sure if it even registered to the waitstaff that we were leaving because they hadn't even bothered to say hello. It's one thing if the restaurant is busy. We both understand how that goes, and we've got a ton more patience than most diners, I'd imagine. But to sit at a table, while the waitresses are finding things to do because they're not busy, while they seem to be deliberately ignoring us was a bit much. So we went over to Doug's, which is fantastic, where our favorite waiter was over in less than a minute.

9.53 am

The task for the day: to make a cake with an oven that tends to shut off in the middle of the bake cycle and refuses to turn back on. It will be a yellow cake, with slices of strawberries in it, with vanilla butter cream frosting with chocolate covered strawberries on top. If I can get it to cook, it should be a great cake.

1.55 pm

Cake baked. In a friend's oven. Strawberries simmering on the stove with a bit of Madeira and sugar, to make a strawberry-jammy-type filling. Butter on the counter getting soft for use in butter cream frosting. Strawberries dipped in chocolate and cooling. I'd forgotten how much fun baking is.

If it's Saturday, I must be in SF

2009-05-09T05:30:00.000-07:00

5.30 am

After four months in the Netherlands and two weeks of city-hopping through France and Spain, I finally get the "If it's Tuesday, it must be Belgium" thing. We had a most wonderful trip - I'll be posting pictures on facebook once I get them downloaded from the cameras. Not too jet lagged (although I am up at 5 am, but that's mostly because I fell asleep around 5 pm last night)

A few highlights from the trip:

-- The catacombs in Paris, where the bones are stacked to make patterns in the wall - thigh bones resting on each other make the basic background, and skulls are used to make hearts, crosses, and other interesting shapes.

-- Opera in Lyon - Lulu - a story in which, if I understood correctly, everyone ends up dead except the lesbian, who vows to study the law so that she can work for women's rights.

-- Watching the Arsenal/Manchester United soccer match at the only British pub in Alocossebre, a little tourist/retirement town about 2 and a half hours south of Barcelona.

2009-04-28T00:14:00.000-07:00

9.14 am

We arrived in Paris under a gray sky threatening rain. The train ride took about 6 hours - 3 on the slow train from Amsterdam to Brussels, and 2 on the super fast train from Brussels to Paris. Looking out through the window on the high speed train is interesting. You see something kind of interesting in the distance - maybe a church or a monastery, maybe a clump of cows/sheep/horses - and by the time you've figured out what it is it's already five minutes behind you. Adam took some video from the train, which we may try to edit and post if it's not all a complete blur.

The metro system in Paris was easy enough to navigate - very well laid out, and everything more or less labeled, with large maps of the whole metro system everywhere. Plus, my wonderful boyfriend had already looked up all the stops we needed, so it was painless. Getting to the hotel, on the other hand... The metro stop where we are lets out into a 6 or 7 street roundabout/intersection. The street signs are little plaques on the sides of buildings that you can't really make out from across the street. Which meant we ended up going in a rather large circle before we figured out where we needed to be.

9.20 am

When we left the hotel for dinner and a bit of evening sightseeing, the threatened rain had arrived. Paris in the rain is not so much fun. It blows every which way, and we only had one umbrella between the two of us. Which means that if he holds it I tend to get wet because it's too high, and if I hold it he can't see because it covers his line of vision. Even so, we both wanted to see the Tour Eiffel at night, so we hopped on the metro and, after a little misstep, found our way easily enough. When we got off the metro though, it wasn't dark enough for the tower to be lit, so we found a little bistro for dinner. It was fantastic. He got this smoked duck breast/goat cheese/poached apple on baguette thing, and I had the French onion soup. By the time we left the tower was all lit and sparkling with disco lights. Kind of like a fairy tower.

9.23 am

It is still gray and threatening rain today, so we've compiled lists of indoor and outdoor things. I am determined not to let a little rain ruin Paris for me. First up, a tour of the catacombs, and we both want to see Sacre Cour. He wants to walk on the cobblestones on the Champs d'Elysses where the Tour de France riders go through, and I want to see all the haute couture fashion shops. With perhaps a museum or two thrown in if the rain starts.

2009-04-27T14:21:00.000-07:00

2.21 pm

Sitting in a food court in Brussels Zuid/Midi, surrounded by piles of luggage. We grabbed the earlier train from Amsterdam, so we’ve got almost an hour before the train for Paris leaves. Which is good, since our train was running 25 minutes late – so if the train we’d meant to take is late as well, we would have missed the connection.

I could have spend another week in Amsterdam. There were a ton of things we wanted to do and didn’t get a chance to – the Van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Amsterdam dungeon. And I would happily have gone back to Kuekenhof to see the flowers a week later, and the windmills at Kinder-something, and the city in a city at Madurodam….

2009-04-25T23:29:00.000-07:00

8.29 am

Adam arrived safe and sound yesterday, although it took him forever to get out of the baggage claim area because the airline didn't post what carousel their baggage would be on. We hopped in a taxi to go to the little Bed and Breakfast, since we weren't entirely sure which tram stop it was on. The B&B turned out to be an apartment in the city - I think these guys probably rent out their second home to guests. Which means that for the same price as a teeny tiny hotel room, we have our own bedroom, kitchen, bath, and garden/patio area (currently not so useful because it's drizzling). Total score!

8.33 am

Off to find breakfast, and then we're planning to go see the Diamond museum, and maybe the Van Gogh if there's time. I wouldn't mind getting to actually see the paintings upstairs - last time I did the "colors of the night" exhibit and that was about all I could handle for an afternoon. There's also the vodka museum, where for the price of a cocktail you get to learn about vodka and get a free drink. And of course Grasshopper, the (in)famous club/restaurant/bar). Then to Den Haag this afternoon, to meet up with some of my coworkers for a drink and maybe some kite time.

2009-04-24T11:40:00.000-07:00

8.41 pm

My last night in Den Haag. Although I am ecstatically happy to be leaving this apartment (and the world's worst shower, and the party-till-6am-and-skip-class-the-next-day-neighbors), I'm not so thrilled about going. The thing is, I'm just starting to get to know the city. It stays light out until 9:30 at night, and all the plazas are filled to bursting with people having a drink or some dinner. Over the past few days, the last of the buds on the trees have unfurled into shiny green leaves. The garden outside my window, winter-bare when I arrived, is now in full bloom, white, pink, purple, and yellow blossoms. It's warm out now, 22 degrees some days, and I can walk home from work without a jacket.

The past few days, I've been finding new little restaurants that I'd like to eat at and remembering that I won't have time. It's strange - when I got here I kept telling myself that it would pass quickly, but the first month dragged. Now, it's not so much that it feels like its flown by as that I never had enough time in the first place.

8.46 pm

And yet I'm also excited to be moving forward. Almost two full weeks of vacation with my duckie - we've never had more than a few days before. Paris and Lyon, a country I've never been too, and then Barcelona and a country I've wanted to go back to since I left it eight years ago. I remember sitting on a bridge in Granada (I think it was Granada, but perhaps it was Seville) looking out over the water and thinking how wonderful it would be to be able to come back when I was all grown up. I remember taking the train through the Spanish countryside, the carriage rocking back and forth on the rickety tracks, looking out the window and wanting to backpack through the hills.

Then to New York, where I plan on seeing my first Broadway show, and eating good sushi again, and getting my hair and my nails done because for once in my life I'll be able to afford it.

2009-04-21T03:58:00.000-07:00

12.58 pm

About to bite into the third of the twelve chocolates I brought home from Belgium. The first was from Neuhaus, where I asked the lady behind the counter to pick four of her favorites. It was a dark chocolate shell with a creamy dark chocolate filling. Absolute divinity. The second was from Pierre Marcolini. I had picked those out - a violet, a cassis, an earl gray, and a something. I ate the something. Much to my disappointment, it wasn't very good - almost sour and sweet at the same time. Not what I look for in a chocolate. This, the third, is another of the Neuhaus. It smells dark, and has Neuhaus imprinted on the top, with a little crown. Here's hoping for another sublime chocolate moment.

2009-04-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

10.17 pm

Just home from a day of sightseeing with the family. The Kuekenhof in the morning - truly gorgeous and worth seeing, but a but much to take in all at once. It's set up so that you wind your way through beds of tulips and narcissus and hyacinths. In the gardens are sculptures made of bronze and glass and steel and even plywood. Then in the afternoon we went back to Amsterdam and did the Anne Frank house. Which, quite frankly, makes me feel angry and upset the way I always do when exposed to any sort of holocaust memorabilia. Not for what happened to the Jews and the others in the death camps. But for the fact that human nature hasn't changed at all in fifty years - that we're torturing people and then telling the torturers that they won't be pardoned, that the right wing hardliners will be in charge of the next Israeli government not because they won the most votes but because they put together the best coalition, and that these people deny the Palestinians a right to exist - even as Hamas works in Palestine to gain legitimacy with the people by giving them food and healthcare and guns in order to claim that Israel has no right to exist. I wonder sometimes if we've learned anything at all since coming down out of the trees.

10.23 pm

I plan to spend tomorrow packing. The idea is for my parents to take two of my suitcases back to the States with them, and then mom will come down to New York or at least send the suitcase with all my work clothes. Which means, I suppose, that I'm going to be sans blow-dryer, and keyboard, and all the other things that won't fit into my itty bitty carry on suitcase.

I'm of mixed minds about leaving. On the one hand, I love this internship. Even the days when it drags are still more exciting than days of listening to lecture and taking notes on readings. On the other hand, I want to be back in a country where I understand the culture and I understand the language. Where I know all the little social cues. And where I can buy Annie's mac and cheese in the grocery store.

2009-04-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

2.37 pm

My office is a cozy 26 degrees, according to the thermometer in here. What that translates into is that between the heat and the brilliant sunshiney day outside, I’m having difficulty getting off vacation mode and into work mode. Waking up this morning hurt, even though my alarm didn’t go off that much earlier that I was waking up over the long weekend. It’s something about having to get up and get ready, rather than choosing to do so.

2.42 pm

Thank god for Google. I’m currently looking through a UNC handout on the passive voice, since I’m rather certain that most of the sentences my boss has flagged in my current project as “passive” aren’t. Still, my mother always says that discretion is the better part of valor, which I will take in this case to mean that I should be sure about my grammar before I leap. Or something to that effect, anyway.

3.20 pm

Microsoft Word, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways…

The thing that really gets me is that even when I know exactly what I want to do, Word is sure it knows better. Especially when what I want to do is in any way remotely connected to pagination or section breaks. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a PIBCAK issue…

2009-04-13T07:03:00.000-07:00

4.03 pm

Back from my whirl-wind, not quite 48 hour tour of Brussels. All in all, I'm glad that I went - but at the same time, I'm absurdly glad to be back home.

The trip got off to a rather rocky start when the conductor on the train to Brussels informed me that my ticket was no good for the train I was on and I would have to pay her 80 euros. I was furious, mostly because the website I'd bought the ticket from had been mostly in Dutch and the ticket itself said it was good for travel on any train. It didn't help the conductor didn't speak very good English and I don't speak any French. In the end, she only charged me 18 euros - and I still didn't know what was wrong with my ticket!

The train station in Brussels was ridiculously confusing. I had expected to arrive in Brussels Central and ended up in Brussels Zuid, possibly because I had, in fact, been on the wrong train. The guy at the information desk helped with the ticket situation - apparantly, even though I'd bought the ticket through what looked like a Thalys website, it was only good on intercity (IC) trains. He wasn't so good with getting me to Central. He told me to go buy a ticket at the window, so I waited in a room packed with sweaty, smelly people for about 20 minutes - only to learn that the ticket I had used to get to Brussels was good for travel between the train stations too, and I just needed to go upstairs and hop on the next train.

The best part about the whole thing is that they didn't even check my ticket on the way home!

4.25 pm

The city herself more than made up for my travel difficulties. Although I spend the better part of the two days with my head in the guidebook, trying to figure out exactly where I was, I did manage to figure out the layout of the city by the time I left. My directional sense being what it is, I didn't realize that all the mini maps in my guidebook were oriented in different directions, which made for some interesting times.

I did not try either the mussels or the fries. I did, however, have a Belgium waffle (hot off the grill, with little bits of caramel in the dough and powdered sugar on top, like a little bit of heaven on a paper plate) and lobster (with champagne and truffle sauce, although I was reminded that lobster ends up being a great deal of work for very little meat). I'm not a big beer drinker, but I did have a raspberry lambic (delicious!) and Jupiler (went well with my fried scrimps, but not my favorite).

I also have chocolates from three gourmet chocolatiers (Pierre Marcolini, Neuhaus, and Wittamer) that I intend to savor slowly over the next two weeks.

2009-04-05T04:45:00.001-07:00

1.45 pm

I'm sitting in the square outside my apartment building, the one with all the bars and restaurants that's filled with tables in the middle, sitting at a table in this square, looking through the Brussels guidebook I just bought, eating a sandwich and drinking a glass of white wine, when it hits me: I'm in Europe. And I realize how quickly indeed places become familiar, so that this is no longer Den Haag, in The Netherlands, thousands of miles from where I live. This is home.

2009-04-05T02:37:00.001-07:00

11.37 am

Still waiting on the wind. Windfinder says it's blowing about 5 knots right now on the beach. I am pondering whether tossing a nickel into the water would encourage the wind gods to produce a stiff breeze.

It's been a remarkably good weekend. Friday I had the day off, so I rode my bike up to the beach with my kite. There wasn't any wind when I got there, so I settled for a beer and a chicken sandwich, then sat on the sand and listened to my ipod speak French at me. Friday night I saw "The Reader" - excellent film, although rather cynical in a thought-provoking sort of way. I'm still not sure if I liked it. And last night was dormapalooza, which was simply much too much fun, especially after we started roasting marshmallows over tiki-torches.

11.49 am

My shopping list for today: strippenkarten, guidebook for Brussels, something for breakfast for the next few days, kleenex, and garbage bags. I'm at that strange not here for very much longer but still need food and other stuff in the house point. Which means, I suspect, that once I cook most of the food in my fridge I'll either be living on pasta and cheese and sandwich meat or getting lots of take-out.

11.58

Blow, wind, blow.

2009-03-31T11:47:00.000-07:00

8.48 pm

So exhausted I can barely keep my eyes open and so wired I can barely sit still. I feel as though I haven't stopped moving since Tuesday? Wednesday? last week when I got pulled to be on the team working the Secretary of State's visit. This past week has been a frantic rush to check out the site of the Afghanistan conference, hammer out the details, and get all that info back to Washington. Not an easy task. Every step of every movement needs to be discussed, walked through, written up, in triplicate, sent to the processing department, lost in the mail, resent, and rubber stamped. The upside about 12 or 13 or 14 hour days is that if you're busy enough to be working that much, you're busy enough that it flies by.

And fly it does. Here I am on a Tuesday night, a week after we began to pull the visit together, and I can say that I witnessed diplomacy in action, took notes for the Secretary, and had a chance to shake her hand. I am keeping my fingers and toes crossed that our official photographer got a wide angle shot of the meeting where I took notes, so that there's a photo with me and the Secretary at the same table. Perhaps a little silly or celebrity struck - but you already know that I'm a geek like that.

*edit* There is such a picture, although I found it on the Hillary Clinton Blog. All credit to the anonymous photographer.

2009-03-23T10:33:00.001-07:00

2:00 pm

I have a theory that the Dutch are always cheerful and good-natured because they spend so little time in their cars. Think about it. It’s a Saturday afternoon, warm out, so you load up the car for a trip to the beach. Of course, once you get on the road you realize that everyone else had the same idea . You end up sitting in traffic for an hour, the beach a ten minute walk away, all the while getting angrier and angrier that you’re in your car instead of on the sand. The Dutch neatly avoid this problem by bicycling or using public transportation to get everywhere.

This theory occurred to me as I was bicycling home from the beach yesterday afternoon. I went down to fly my kite (because truly, nothing gives you wings like watching that frail nylon bird sailing across the sky) on a beach that wasn’t quite jam packed but was still pretty crowded. By the time I left, almost everyone else was leaving for the day. I zipped out of there in five minutes, as the line of cars waiting to exit got longer and longer. I rode home with the wind at my back, enjoying the fresh air and the feeling of being alive!, aside from one brief bit across the cobblestones that rattled all my bones against each other.

Try it, if you don’t believe me. The next time you plan on taking a little trip, see if you can ride your bike or take the BART. And tell me if you don’t have a much nicer time without the hassle of road stress and idiot drivers.

2009-03-17T14:41:00.000-07:00

10.18 am

A hazy sky spread outside the office window, sun fighting its way through the clouds and losing. The light filters through the two small glass jars with water on my desk. One holds an avocado seed, propped up with toothpicks. There is a small protrusion in the bottom that was not there yesterday. The other holds a hyacinth, inherited from the former inhabitant of this office. The water in this jar is cloudy, almost obscuring the white roots that look like the arms of a sea anemone. The hyacinth has been taking its time in the blooming. When I came into the office yesterday, the tight green leaves had opened a little further, almost enough to reveal the tightly concealed flower.

4.32 pm

A whirlwind day of Court hearings and briefing papers, interspersed with discussions of legal nuances. I’m happiest when I’m struggling to understand what these Courts have decided and why. It’s more than simply the intellectual exercise. These courts are so new, their jurisprudence still so unsettled, that there’s much more room for legitimate disagreement than with the U.S. courts. The Supreme Court has to stick with the precedent it created 200 years ago. These courts struggle to find a balance between following good precedent and disregarding bad. It’s the struggle that makes it so interesting.

2009-03-10T16:07:00.000-07:00

9.38 am
The rain streaking down my windows has turned the outside world into an Escher-like blur of mis-matched corners and impossible angles. I sit in front of the glowing monitor, hands cupped around a steaming mug of tea, watching the raindrops hurl themselves violently against the glass. Days like this it is almost impossible to believe in the crocuses and daffodils pushing up out of the soft spring soil.

11.12 am
My days fall into a pattern. I get into the office and spend the first hour checking websites, news articles, correspondence from Washington for anything relevant. A few hours of work and then my hour in the gym. Lunch. A few more hours of work in the afternoon, sometimes broken by a conference call or a meeting. It surprises me how tightly I cling to this pattern, how I feel as though I am unraveling when part of it falls out of place. Mornings especially – days when the computer system is down I am uncertain how to start my day without having first checked the news.

4.07 pm
Tuesdays pass so slowly, the ticking of the second hand scarcely muffled by the documents piled around my desk.

2009-02-15T07:34:00.001-08:00

4.34 pm

I should be doing my research paper. Instead, I am blogging. This is getting to be a theme. As is not blogging during the week (perhaps it would be best if I resigned myself to the fact that this will continue to happen).

I braved the Dutch stores on a Sunday for the first time today. This probably doesn't seem like a big deal. But combine stores that close early every other day of the week with gigantic sales with people speaking a language I don't understand and you get a ton of Dutch people, pushing and shoving and crowding, and all of it incomprehensible. Thus far, I have gone into the drugstore, the grocery store, and the kind of like Ikea but not store, and that only on a need-to-go basis.

Despite everything in the above paragraph, it was pretty much like being in a crowded mall in America on a weekend. The brands were the same - Tommy Hillfiger, Ralph Lauren, that crocodile shirt brand - and the styles really weren't any different. I picked up a long sleeve T for Adam and a sweater for me. I hadn't planned on buying any clothes here, but I'm getting tired of wearing the same things to work every day. Plus, I figure that since there's an APO at work, I can ship home my sweaters and flannel sheets. Which leaves me lots of space in my bags, which means I can buy things.

5.09 pm

In taking the things I bought today out of shopping bags, I discovered that my Turkish pizza (which tastes rather like a quesadilla) had leaked all over the outside of my shopping bag and onto my blanket. Easy fix - there's laundry in the building and it's free. Except that one of the machines appears to not be working, and the other was full of clothing. Very wet clothing that apparently hadn't gone through a spin cycle. I was about to start the machine to spin, when the owner of the clothing appeared, taking it out and putting it straight into the dryer, creating large puddles of water on the floor. And I thought to myself, so this is why this floor is always soaked.

I cannot wait to get out of student housing.

2009-02-08T04:31:00.000-08:00

1.31 pm

So much for updates every day. My only excuse is that it seems like my free time is all but non-existent.

I should be concentrating on researching for my writing requirement, especially since it's going to come due very, very quickly. Even though I tell everyone that it's on the most boring topic ever (the differences between the two major systems of investment arbitration), I actually find it pretty interesting. Even so, I've been hard at work all week, and the sun is trying to break through the clouds, and I'd much rather be walking around the city than in front of my computer. Adam sent me a kite, and I'm dying to find a field where I can fly it. It's a little stunt kite, and it says that it can handle pretty strong winds. Which is good, because it gets very windy here.

1.42 pm

The Dutch have rules about almost everything, but I constantly find myself questioning the point.

Take bicycle rules, for example. It's illegal to ride a bike with a dim headlight or no headlight at all. A policeman will stop you and give you a ticket on the spot if you don't comply. Same for riding the wrong way on a bike lane, or riding on the sidewalk. But there's no law requiring helmets. And I constantly see people sitting on the rear bike rack, precariously hanging onto the rider, while the police look on. It seems to me, ignorant American that I am, that making helmets mandatory and not allowing "passengers" would do a better job of promoting safety than headlights.

Then there's the trash. You have to separate your glass out. If you don't, the garbage collectors will open your trash, go through until they find a reciept with your name and/or address, and send you a steep fine. But there's no recycling for plastic, and paper recycling seems to be sporadic. Quite frankly, this one simply baffles me. Why not just send the fine to the house that the garbage is in front of and leave it at that? For that matter, why not provide people with recycling bins and public places to recycle to make it easier?

Then again, the American bureaucracy is just as bad.

2009-01-31T07:43:00.000-08:00

4.43 pm

I am sitting at my desk with a stack of law review articles in front of me, waiting for the water on the stove to boil so that I can make a cup of tea. I now have twelve weeks in which to research and write a forty page paper suitable for publication in a law review. Despite the fact that I am supposedly writing this under the guidance of a faculty member, the fact that I'm in the Netherlands makes it difficult to have conversations of any sort about the paper. I think I've got the skeletal form worked out - now all I need is to decide what I want to say. The course is two credits, which means about eight hours a week of work, although I'm not sure if that will be enough to actually write the darn thing.

4.52 pm

Work is going smoothly. I'm going to a fair number of trials, and finding that I really enjoy watching and then reporting on them. Perhaps because it contains a bit of story telling. I'm also doing some policy-type work that I find really interesting. I met up with one of the other girls from Boalt last night, and we had a fun dinner at this Italian place in Centrum. They hand you a card when you walk in - like a credit card, or hotel room key. Then you go to the various stations - pizza, salad, pasta, bar, etc - and order your food. The people you order from either make it there or give you a restaurant beeper for when it's ready. You don't pay until right before you leave. It was lots of fun - communal tables, and a bunch of different languages spoken.

As much fun as the kids in my apartment building are, i'm really glad there are other Boalties here this semester. I work in an office with only four people, including myself, and they're all much older than I am, with families. So socializing after work is probably not going to happen. I tried to get some of the girls in the apartment to come out to dinner with me last weekend, but they were all studying for exams or had already eaten. So last night was the first time I've really gone out since I got here, and it was lots of fun.

5.01 pm

Things that I have found in The Hague:

a tailor (who hemmed my pants for a very reasonable price and got them back to me the same day)
stroopwafels
where to buy tram tickets
bad Thai food
really yummy Chinese food

2009-01-27T10:05:00.001-08:00

7.05 pm

The highlight of the last two days has most definitely been going to the Lubanga trial. I promise I won't go into the boring details, for all the non-lawyers reading. The important thing is that this trial is going to set the stage for the future of international criminal trials in many ways. The international community is really still in the baby-steps phase of this whole thing, so it will be interesting to see what lessons from the previous tribunals have (and have not) been learned. Other than that work is going well - they're keeping me on my toes. I'm learning that government lawyers tend to work the same sorts of hours as BigLaw lawyers - long! They're good about letting me keep to an eight hour day. Which is nice, because I need to start working on my writing requirement soon. And of course, I'd like to pretend that I can have a life and be in law school at the same time.

7.11 pm

In non-law news, I went to my second pancake dinner with the kids here. It seems to be the meal of choice - I think because it's easy to make, and sweet. The don't actually make pancakes, it's more like crepes. Tonight the choice of toppings was chocolate, white chocolate, bananas, syrup, and some sort of cherry jelly thing that was gone before I got there. When I got home, there was a note that one of the Spanish boys had slipped under my door, saying that since he always invited me to breakfast and never made it, he was inviting me to a dinner he was making tonight. So I thanked him for the pancakes when I sat down - and everyone started laughing, because one of the girls had made them. His punishment for claiming credit for the dinner? Washing all the dishes.

2009-01-24T09:38:00.000-08:00

6.39 pm

The kids in my building partied hard last night, and set off the smoke detector around three in the morning. Which proceeded to go off about every five minutes for the next hour. When I went next door to ask if they could please put out the cigarettes so at least the smoke alarm would stop going off, they told me that once it triggered, it kept going for the next hour or two.

"But," one of the guys told me, "it goes off, I push this button to stop it. See. How about I make you breakfast tomorrow? Yes? You like strawberries, cream? What's your favorite, I'll make it?"

I asked what the connection was between the alarm going off at three in the morning and breakfast. He shrugged. The girl next to him explained to me that he was Spanish, and the Spanish consider breakfast to be the most important meal of the day. So I went back to my room, and read a book until the alarm finally stopped going off.

Which may explain why, when I got up to go to the bathroom around six in the morning, I didn't really wake up all the way. Which shouldn't have been a problem, except that there is a door between my bedroom and the bathroom, which I keep closed because it cuts down on the noise from the kids next door. I also leave a night light on in the bathroom, so I can tell at a glance if the bedroom door is open or closed. But, as I said, I was still half asleep and rather confused. So when I got up and only saw black in front of me, it didn't immediately register that the door was closed and I needed to open it. Instead, I somehow decided this meant the door was open.

I walked into it full speed and promptly woke all the way up. The intense pain of smashing your nose into the door and the warm feeling of blood running down your face will do that.

Luckily, I had a bag of peas in the fridge (they're now in the freezer, in case of future emergencies) and so my nose is not nearly as bruised and swollen as I thought it would be.

On rain

2009-01-22T10:42:00.000-08:00

7.42 pm

If this cold gets better, it will be despite the weather, not because of it. This morning began with a slow, misting sort of drizzle. The kind of weather where the air feels wet, but you're not quite sure if it's actually raining. From the window in my office I watched it progress to a steady rain with intermittent gusts of wind. By the time I got out of the building, the rain wasn't coming down so hard, but the wind was blowing in just about every direction simultaneously. My cute, red, 2 euro umbrella, which had looked so cheerful this morning, was quickly bent and warped. The wind would be blowing from behind me, then all of a sudden switch so that my umbrella was turned inside out. It seems that a good umbrella here is a must.

7.57 pm

Things that I have been unable to find in The Netherlands, so far:

Mint tea
Dryer sheets
over-the-counter drugs

2009-01-21T13:13:00.000-08:00

10.13 pm

I started work yesterday. It seems like it's going to be a good semester. Everyone in the office is really friendly and helpful - I must have gotten half a dozen "and if you have any questions or need anything, come by anytime"'s from people I met. I'll be working mostly with the international courts - I get to go to the Lubanga trial next week, and report on the first day of trial. When I mentioned that I'll be doing my writing requirement this semester, on UNCITRAL and ICSID, my boss mentioned that they might have some UNCITRAL work I could do. So that would be great.

10.20 pm

I am getting used to the cold. It's the worst right after I go outside. Like being slapped across the face, repeatedly. And it hurts to breathe. Then after I've been walking for about five minutes I can pull my face up from where it's been hunched over my scarf. After about ten to fifteen minutes I'm usually warm enough to undo a button or two. Mornings tend to not be so bad, but for some reason the walk home from work is killer. Maybe it's that it's close to dark, or that there aren't that many people out, or maybe it's just colder. Everyone keeps telling me that this week is much, much warmer. Apparently it was about 6-8F, and all the canals froze over enough for ice-skating. In a way, I'm sorry I missed it. Ice skating is about the one winter sport that I really enjoy, and I don't get a chance to do it near often enough.

2009-01-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

4.24 pm

My internet is back, after a brief hiatus where the modem was on "standby." I kept waiting for it to turn itself back on, tried resetting it a few times, and finally went into the rental company's office this morning to ask them to call for me since I don't have a phone. Turns out I'd accidentally hit the "standby" button on the top of the modem, and that was why my internet was out. Why there would be a standby button on a cable modem is beyond me, but the internet is back up and running again. Which is most wonderful, since that means I don't have to sit on the floor in the hallway to try and find a wireless signal.

I seem to be living in a party house. Meaning that there are loud parties in the common room, which shares a wall with my apartment, every night until 4, 5, 7 in the morning. On the upside, the building is dead quiet between 8am and about 11 pm. I'm rather curious as to how any of them actually manage to attend class. I asked the rental agency if they had any apartments in a quieter building that I could move to, but they said they're booked full and they'll send a letter to the other tenants reminding them that parties are not allowed in the building. I feel rather like Arthur Dent, at the moment the party smacked him in the back. As I recall, that party didn't go away, either. There's always the wear headphones all night and make sure they're connected to something with an alarm solution.

4.31

It is another cold, rainy day. Despite my utter loathing for cold weather, it's not so bad as I thought it would be. I put on three layers of shirts, a coat, a scarf, a hat, and gloves. The cold isn't so bad if I walk fast, and once I warm up a little I stop feeling it so much. The hard part is after I come out of a store - and they turn the heat in the stores way up. It's only a fifteen minute walk to work, and there's a tram line on the way. Although unless the tram comes exactly as I'm passing the stop, it's quicker to go ahead and walk. The really nice thing about the tram is that it goes right by the embassy - so I can't get lost going to work if I follow the tracks. And for a girl who couldn't find her way out of a paper bag if there were glowing neon signs pointing the way, that's quite a relief.

2009-01-17T10:21:00.000-08:00

7.21 pm

When I got dressed today, I put on one of the pairs of knee-high socks that Adam gave me, more because I missed him than anything else. Then I went outside to get some breakfast, and I was ridiculously glad I'd put those socks on after all. Cold, biting cold, with little drops of rain and wind that blew up, down, and sideways all at once. I'd planned on finding my way to work today, but I couldn't stand the thought of walking that far. I'll have to do it tomorrow though.

7.31 pm

Since leaving home, I have lost one stick of deodorant, two socks belonging to different pairs, and a right hand glove. Although I found the glove, so I'm not sure that it really counts as lost. I had taken it off this morning to eat my hand and cheese croissant. The lady at the bakery put it in the oven, and it was hot enough to keep my hand warm. Which is good, because trying to do anything with gloves on is ten times more difficult than it needs to be. So I had my left glove on, my right glove in my pocket, and my breakfast in my right hand.

I went into the same little home goods store as yesterday to pick up a towel and more bottled water (the internet says the tap water here is safe, but I know better than to trust the internet). Took my left glove off to pay, put that in my left pocket, bagged up my purchase, buttoned my coat, took my gloves back out, put the left glove back on, and did... something ...with the right glove. Because I still had half a croissant left, and I couldn't keep my glove on and eat, you see.

I then wandered across the street, to where a girl in the first store had told me there was a supermarket. Went down a flight of stairs to a level of shops below a street, threw out the empty croissant bag, and went into the grocery store. As I was getting ready to come out, I went through the button up the coat/put on my hat/pull my gloves out of my pockets to put them on ritual - except that the right glove was missing!

I checked my coat pockets - nothing. I checked my bags - nothing. I thought briefly about going home and writing an email to my mother, asking her to send several pairs of gloves, then figured it had to be at the first store. At this point, it had gotten decidedly colder and rainer, and my gloveless hand was getting quite cold. And I had another pair of gloves back at the apartment. Still, I figured it would be easy to check out the store, since it was on my way home, so I went in. After much pantomiming (point at hand with glove, point at hand without glove) the clerk figured out that I was missing a glove and they didn't have it.

My next thought was that I must have been holding onto it when I threw out the empty croissant bag and that it had gone into the trash. Yuck. Still, these gloves have seen worse than a little garbage, and I figured it would have to be near the top of the can, since it hadn't been that long. I went back to the grocery store and found the trashcan. I took a deep breath. And another. I'd never actually reached into a trashcan before. Then I stuck my arm in, gingerly, trying not to touch the sides of the can. It was one of the round ones, with a few cut outs near the top for garbage and a closed top, so I couldn't actually see inside. I felt the croissant bag and pulled it out. No glove. I felt around a little more - mostly paper trash - and pulled my hand back out, feeling totally gross.

At this point, I figured the glove was gone for good, and I had better go back home. I crossed the street, looking down to keep my face out of the wind and the rain, and there was my glove. Lying right on the street where I had walked by it twice already.

I'm thinking maybe I need some of those mitten clips that parents use to attach kids gloves to their jackets.

Arrival in Den Haag

2009-01-16T09:34:00.000-08:00

6.41 pm

Mostly settled into my apartment in Den Haag. I'm right in the center of the city, about a fifteen minute walk from work. There's a big shopping area about five minutes from my apartment - everything from little food stands (I had lunch at the falafel place) to discount home good stores to designer clothing stores. I'm in a place with a bunch of other student interns, so even though I don't have a roommate, there will be lots of people around.

7.06 pm

Getting here was an adventure. People in the Netherlands are so, so, so much nicer than they are back home. There is no way I would have made it to my room in one piece if it wasn't for all the people who helped carry my massive suitcases and gave me directions. The next time I see someone wandering around looking confused, I'm going to stop and help them rather than just walking past.

I had to take the hotel shuttle back to the airport, get on a train, transfer at Leiden, then go to Den Haag HS. Traveling with two giant suitcases, one smaller one, and a backpack makes getting on and off trains difficult. I missed my stop the first time around, too. I got myself and all my luggage to the train doors as the train was rolling into the station - and the doors didn't open. There weren't instructions or anything, just two buttons - yellow and blue. I pushed the yellow button and nothing happens. I pushed the blue button and the doors made some noise, and then the train started moving away. Then, at the next station, I had to get all the way to the other end of the platform (luggage and all), down a set of stairs, and up another to get into the right place to catch the train. Luckily, a janitor stopped what he was doing and helped me get everything to the other platform. This time, the train I got into had instructions for opening the door. In pictures!

I made it to the rental office, even though the cab driver didn't really know where it was going. The lady gave me the keys and a map of the city, then told me to get on the tram outside the office to get to the apartment. The tram driver was really nice and told me which stop to get off at. I got directions from a girl in a clothing store. Then when I got to the street, I couldn't find my apartment building. I was looking for 257, and the only apartments were 3a all the way to 3m. After wandering around a minute and trying my key in all the doors, a girl came up to me and asked if she could help. She called the rental agency, but they said it was the right street, and they didn't know where the apartment was. So then we figured out that the street turned 90 degrees and continued, sans street signs, another two blocks. And there, at the very end, was my building. I could have hugged her.

So here I am, in a studio apartment with a bathroom and a tiny kitchen that's about 9 feet by 20 feet, not including the bathroom. And there's laundry machines in the building, no charge. So I figure, even though it's way more than I wanted to pay, it's a nice enough place, and no roommates is a bonus.

7:16 pm

Off to find some dinner, and somewhere I can buy tea. It's a balmy 37F here, warming up to 44F by Sunday. Brrr.

Amsterdam

2009-01-15T11:22:00.000-08:00

8:22 pm, local time

I got into Amsterdam around 2 this afternoon. It's like the "royale with cheese" scene from Pulp Fiction - it really is the little things that are different. For instance, the bed in my hotel room doesn't have a comforter, and the bottom sheet is flat, not fitted. And the shrimp bisque I ordered for dinner tonight was pretty good, but it was not the type of cream based bisque I was expecting. Even so, I don't think it's quite hit me that I'm in another country for the next four months. I start work on Tuesday, since Monday is a holiday, which gives me a long weekend to get settled, figure out how to get to work, and all that.

Duckie and I had a wonderful fun time in Vegas. We didn't really do that much gambling - maybe only an hour or two at some low-stakes craps tables. Instead we spent most of the first day just wandering up and down the strip. The inside of Paris was way cute. I had expected it to be tacky, but the way it was decorated I felt like we were walking around outside instead of in a hotel. And the Bellagio was stunning, of course.

Maybe I've been in California too long, but I kept thinking, the whole time we were there, about the incredible amount of waste that goes into that city. The light on top of the Luxor, the golf courses, even the fountains at the Bellagio. All gorgeous in their own way, but completely unsustainable. Even Adam got a little upset when we went somewhere and the cups were all styrofoam. Methinks, however, that we will most definitely go back - and next time on a Friday/Saturday night trip.

One at a Time

2008-10-11T11:13:00.001-07:00

11.13 am

Mid-semester evaluations for the Human Rights Clinic this week, which meant sitting down with my supervisor to talk about where we are in the project, where we want to be, and whether I'm getting what I thought I would from the whole thing. After establishing that the best time to have that meeting will be two weeks from now, when R and I are frantically writing draft after draft of the handbook, he asked how that whole social justice thing was going.

Social justice? What? I vaguely remembered mentioning something about having gone into law school with the idea of saving the world. Then came OCIP and callbacks and offers - and the truth of the matter is that when you're worrying about whether you're even going to have a job this summer, after you've been counting on said job to help pay for your semester in Europe, you start to forget that there was anything to school besides a mountain of debt and a BigLaw job at the end.

My supervisor said something that was oddly reminiscent of something I'd heard in one of those summer blockbuster disaster movies. "You can't change the world. Nothing that you or I do can change the world. But you can save one person. And for that person's family, it matters."

My East Coast Interview Tour

2008-10-06T10:58:00.000-07:00

10.59 am

After spending a week interviewing in New York and DC, I can definitively say that there are differences between law firms, even in BigLaw. Some of it has to do with size - an office of forty lawyers feels different than an office of two hundred. Some of it has to do with work - one firm I interviewed with did only litigation, while another focused primarily on finance and international arbitrations. What interested me the most was the difference between the people at the firms.

I'd heard some recruiters talk about how firms hired based on "fit" - and I also heard that was a keyword for "we just didn't want to hire you". I'm more inclined to believe the former than the latter now. One of the firms that I was at this week is European based - and it shows. The attorneys I spoke to tended to have a more global view and to look beyond American law when discussing their work. Another firm, this one based in Texas, had more of a West Coast feel - pro bono work counts above the line there, and the attorneys were doing a "wear jeans/donate to breast cancer research" day.

And while I'm trying to sort out which firms are at the top of my list (extremely difficult, given that I only did callbacks at firms I really want to work at), I'm also sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring and reminding myself that it only takes one.

Post-OCIP Bliss

2008-09-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

8.57 am

It's officially over. The two weeks of mind-numbing interviews, of sitting by the phone waiting for the firm to call (although I still haven't heard from 14 of the 25 firms I interviewed with), the 6 am alarm clock and the 2 am bedtime. And since I have gone through OCIP and survived, more or less, I provide a few words of wisdom for those contemplating going through the process in the spring or next fall.

1) Do the initial research, especially if there's a particular area of law you're interested in. The search by category field on b-line is helpful, but only to a point. Then, once you've found a firm practices in that area, check out the practice area by office location part of the website. Often, a firm that specializes in a smaller field, like international law or clean tech, will only do it in one or two offices.

2) Do more research before the interview. Find out something about your interviewers from the firm's website. Then talk to fellow Boalties who worked there last summer. If you go into the interview knowing something different and unique about the firm, it will demonstrate that you're genuinely interested, and not just applying because of the fear factor.

3) Remember to keep turning the interview questions around. If you're asked about your experience working with X, when you really want to be doing Y, explain how X led you to/will help you achieve Y. I had some great interviews where the interviewer and I talked about some of the really interesting parts of my resume - but it didn't have anything to do with the areas of law the firm practiced, and I didn't get callbacks.

Most importantly, relax and try to have a good time. You only have twenty minutes to make an impression, but that's plenty of time to connect with someone and convince them you're a good fit for the firm.

2008-08-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

10.56 am

Interviews have been going well. It's a bit like speed dating - we sit across from each other at a table that's rather small, in uncomfortable chairs that don't quite pull up to the table, gaze into each other's eyes a moment or two, ask some questions, then go home and breathlessly await the ring of the telephone. Despite that, I've been rather impressed by how not-horrible the process has been so far. I'm enjoying the people I talk to - one interviewer and I talked about the horrible season the Red Sox have been having, and a second interviewer and I compared notes about my favorite professor (she had him when he had just started teaching). Two others asked me what I liked to do in my spare time, noting that they didn't want to hire only the brightest and the best - they wanted to hire smart kids who also know how to have fun. Plus, I got a squishy yellow duck. It doesn't get much better than that.

11.01 am

In non-OCIP news, the boy's sister got married this weekend. The wedding was up in Sonoma, and despite a hellish drive that involved sitting in traffic for almost two hours and a flat tire, we had a wonderful weekend. I think the highlight was watching the best man, the groom, and the bride's father all start dabbing at their eyes during the ceremony. I'm still in shock that I have friends and family who are old enough to get married - two cousins and a college roommate last summer, classmates and the boy's sister this summer, and I'm sure a bunch of weddings after 3L year. As Mr. Woodhouse would remark, it is entirely unreasonable that people should grow up and get married.

Feeders

2008-08-11T14:43:00.000-07:00

2.44 pm

The fish tank, which has been sitting in a corner of the room with miscellaneous junk in it for as long as I've been dating the boy, is now set up and going. Last week we went to the hardware store, where he bought some 2 x 4's to make a frame for the tank to rest on. Then we went to the pet store, and spent an insane amount of money on filters and pumps and a heater and so on. Insert gravel, driftwood, some live plants, and the ceramic trees that I made back in college, mix with eco-start and chlorine neutralizer, let sit for a week, then add fish.

I didn't realize setting up a fish tank was so much work. The fish we have in it now are "testers," which means that in a week or so they die and we bring the water into the pet store to see what went wrong. I am resisting the urge to give them names, but they're so cute it's hard. In another week or so, if they're all still alive, we'll pick up some cichlids. The only downside about the fish tank is that it's on top of the dresser right next to my side of the bed. Which mean that a) I don't have a nightstand now and b) if there's a you-know-what in the middle of the night, I'm going to get woken up with thirty gallons of water and some very unhappy fish in bed with me.

2.49

OCIP is coming. It's like that scene in the movie, where you hear the scary music starting up in the background, and you say to the heroine, "don't go down that dark alley all by yourself," and she does and then the monster comes out. Well, maybe not that bad. But the scary theme music is definitely starting to play. I'm narrowing down my list, especially since boy might end up with a job that would require us to be in the Bay another five years or so. Now I'm trying to figure out how much detail to go into in a cover letter, and whether (and how much) to tailor them for the firms I'm really interested in.

And it would be awfully nice to know what my schedule's going to be...

Hills are Fun! (the 5 stages of bicycling)

2008-07-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

11.09 am

Denial: No way am I getting back on that bike.

Anger: %@#! this bike!

Bargaining: Just let me make it up this hill.

Depression: I ride so poorly, what's the poing?

Acceptance: Hills are fun! I wonder if this is like runner's high...

11.24 am

I went for a ride yesterday, after sitting at the desk copy editing for eight hours. The plan was to take a spin around town and start to learn where everything is, so that I don't end up so hopelessly lost every time I leave the house. Instead, I ended up biking along Seven Hill Road and then to Lake Chabot. I discovered that hills are kinda fun, especially if there's a bunch of them in a row. Getting up the first one took work, but after that I could coast downhill and use that speed to get almost all the way to the top of the next hill. It reminded me of that golf-ball room in the Children's Museum in Boston - the one where you climb up the stairs, start your ball on the top of the wooden track, and try to drop it so that it makes it over all the hills into the milk crate at the bottom of the run.

2008-07-01T18:05:00.000-07:00

6.05 pm.

I woke up this morning to an explosion of cilantro. We had started seeds in one of those little greenhouses, then transplanted the basil, thyme, and watercress to a window box and the tomato to a pot of its own. Then we put down more seeds (especially watercress and coriander, since those hadn't done well at all in the greenhouse). The watercress has been shyly poking its head up for the past two days, but the coriander/cilantro was nowhere to be seen until this morning. Overnight, six or seven shoots came up, and more have come up today, growing so fast I could almost hear them. I wasn't sure any were going to survive, as I had placed the window box on the front porch, where a squirrel found it and happily dug up all the seeds.

It has been an interesting summer. I use interesting in the same sense I would use it if you told me you were going to open a "muffin bottom" shop and wanted to know what I thought. Interesting. We leave the Berkeley house on Thursday. I have mixed feelings about that. One the one hand, I'll miss being so close to school, and the house is gorgeous. On the other, I won't miss waking up at 5am every morning to feed the dogs.

Work is going wonderfully, although since I'm not sure exactly what parts of it I can talk about, I won't talk about any of it at all. Suffice it to say that I am working on a wonderfully challenging memo interspersed with more academic types of things like syllabus writing and article editing. I also got a chance to go to a conference in Dallas, where I met a young lawyer from Argentina who knows several languages and runs a small printing press, a few grads from Boalt who lead eerily parallel lives, and a professor who decided to get into teaching because she realized halfway through a litigation that the case, although intellectually fascinating, was going to lead to the bankruptcy of a developing country. Which proves that not all lawyers are sellouts for the big money (something I was beginning to wonder about).

2008-06-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

11.11 am

The assignment has finally arrived. That one. The memo which will consume most of my working hours for the next month, at least. The big one. The one that helps us figure out if we go ahead with the case or not. And I have absolutely no idea how to do it.

This, I think, is the prime example of why force feeding us the information we needed to write the memos/briefs in LRW/WOA is problematic. Sure, I know what the structure should look like. I can CRuPAC with the best of them. Which means I've got a great skeleton outline, set up all pretty with headers that will feed right into a table of contents. (It only took three hours of frustration on the brief assignment to figure that one out.) The problem, I fear, is that I'm not entirely sure what to put in between those headers.

It doesn't help that there really isn't any applicable law. So I've got to write a memo gunning for the law that's most favorable to our client. Not an interpretation of the law. But the actual law itself. Which, theoretically, would make this a breeze - just go through the books and pick the law I want. Not so easy. Because although the law we don't want to use (municipal law) is written down, the law we do want (international law) is not. There isn't even stare decisis in international law, so whatever cases I do find that are favorable to my client are persuasive at best.

It's going to be a wickedly exciting memo to write.

2008-05-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

2.05 pm

The dogwalker arrived an hour an a half ago to take the puppies out, just as I was feeding them. Which meant, of course, that one ate too fast, threw up his lunch, and then resumed eating it. Ah, the life of a dog. I have that same feeling of relief parents must get when they send their children off to playdates. The house is quiet and I can actually get some work done. I sat outside to eat my lunch, and I could actually put my plate on the ground instead of trying to balance both it and the computer in my lap.

I've been busy working on a table showing the differences between the current UNCITRAL Rules and the proposed revisions for a conferences that's coming up in early June. The prof says that he'll put both our names on it when it circulates - my first quasi-published piece of international law work. I'm really hoping to at least get a writing sample out of this summer, if not a piece that could actually be published. Even if it's just my name as a co-author. Despite that fact that I thought LRW/WOA was about as exciting as having teeth pulled, this research fascinates me. I'm not sure if it's because this actually matters (there's a huge difference between having a paper due for school and being told that the prof needs something back asap so he can send it off to the other lawyers on the case) or it it's because this is the area that I want to work in (it's not that I'm not for blind people's rights, but it's not what I want to spend my life researching). It may also be because I'm the one in charge of doing the research, and the stakes are real if I mess it up. There's nothing quite like the rush I get after putting the attachment on the email and hitting send.

2008-05-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

7.09 pm

A quiet day of work and dogs. I packed nine or ten more boxes in the old apartment this morning, and I'll go back and finish the rest either tomorrow evening or Wednesday. Then there's moving everything out, which needs to be done on Thursday (if I want help from the boy) and must be done by Saturday. The amount of junk I've thrown out astounds me. All this trying to be green and carbon neutral and Berkeley-hippie-esque rendered completely redundant with one move.

Then I get to do it all again (maybe) at the end of June, when I leave this house and go live in the Castro Valley apartment. Still undecided whether or not to look for a place closer to school. The idea of spending over an hour a day to get to school makes me less than happy. Neither does the idea of spending more than a grand for rent.

7.18 pm

The boy and I got seeds, and they're starting to grow. The basil is poking up little tendrils of leaves. They unfurl by the hour - every time I look there are more. The watercress and the thyme have put up little shoots too. The coriander and the tomato seeds haven't done anything yet, but boy says the big ones take longer. What I like most of all is the smell that comes off them when I lift the cover up - heavy and earthy, like fresh turned soil.

Time to light the mosquito coils and watch the sun get tangled in the trees on its way down.

2008-05-20T19:00:00.000-07:00

7.00 pm.

Bells ringing at the cathedral. Deep, reverberating, their voices asking me if I can hear it, if I can feel it - that stillness at the center of my heart. I spent today listening to the sound of running water as I worked, the sun gentle on the back of my neck, filtered through the tall evergreens.

This summer may spoil me for office work. A boss who gives me enough projects that I can move from one to the other to the next when I get frustrated or stuck, who doesn't mind giving me a day off in the middle of the week so that my boyfriend-the-chef and I actually have a day together. Who is going to make sure that I meet people from all aspects of the field this summer so that I can start figuring out exactly what it is I want to do.

The only downside I can see is that I'm already covered in mosquito bites - and I've only been here a day.

Slacker!

2008-05-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

3.01 pm

But give the girl a break. She hardly had time to breathe during finals, let alone get in some quality internet time.

I am, at the moment, performing a much needed reinstall on my PC. I'm not sure if there was a virus on the hard drive, or if it was cluttered with too many useless programs. Either way, it was slower than a Windows 3.1 system. I've never actually reinstalled an operating system before. This should be entertaining.

I'm also contemplating how I'm going to have everything in my apartment packed and ready to go for the end of the month while fitting in 40+ hours a week for the professor I'm working with and keeping track of two dogs (one of which is prone to falling in the koi pond and the other which likes to escape).

Back to internatinal finance law. When they said IL was sexy, I'm sure they weren't contemplating 200+ pages of proposed rule revisions.

Library of Dust

2008-04-20T20:09:00.000-07:00

8.09 pm

In a strange place, a "I've just eaten sushi while talking to an older gentleman who said he was best buds with Justice Kennedy and might actually have been telling the truth" sort of place. Which I suppose isn't really so strange after all, given that everybody in the world is only six degrees apart from everyone else. As Gary was telling me about his good buddy Tony, I was trying to think of the sort of famously witty remark that would make its way back to the justice himself, and failing miserably. Which, probably, is a good thing, as witty remarks alway sound better in my head than on my lips.

Finals season and the start of the racing season. Which means that while boy and Dusty are on the boat, I shall be locked in a large classroom trying to disgorge the past three months of classes. I do wish sometimes that I wasn't such an overachiever, because then I could simply show up on exam days with an outline and the book. Instead I shall be studying, and taking practice tests, and doing other sorts of things which don't teach you anything about actual lawyering at all.

Right. Books, now.

On knives and missing dogs

2008-04-13T19:43:00.000-07:00

7.44 pm

My boyfriend bought a new knife Friday night. I've always been somewhat skeptical of $100+ knives. As long as it has a pointy end and an edge it cuts, right? We got home from the knife shop, and he told me, once again, that my knives were scheduled for an appointment with the trash can. I told him that my knives were perfectly good.

He gave me his new knife and told me to cut a very thin slice of tomato. I gave him the "you've got to be kidding" look. He pointed to the cutting board and the knife, so I picked it up and cut a respectably thin slice. Then he handed me my knife and told me to cut another slice. The knife all but bounced off the skin of the tomato.

Global knives, you have a new convert.

7.50 pm

The dog escaped today. I was sitting in the living room, doing homework, the door wide open to get a breeze or two. He was curled up at my feet, pushing his nose into my lap every time every time I stretched out or changed position. I heard some keys jangling outside, and he got up and poked his nose out the door to investigate. I didn't worry because he's such a mellow dog, and he never runs away. Then the rest of him disappeared, and I put on my sandals and grabbed the leash and the keys, figuring he'd be just down the bottom of the steps. By the time I made it outside he was gone.

Did I mention he isn't my dog? I went down to one end of the block, looked around all the corners, and didn't see him. I went down to the other, did the same thing. Still no dog. This is when I started to panic and think that maybe he'd decided to do like the dogs in "Homeward Bound" and find his boy. I was trying to figure out how to explain to my friend that I'd lost his dog because I hadn't been quicker out the door after him when the phone rang.

"Where are you?" my friend asked.

"I'm outside your apartment," I said.

"Someone just called me. They found my dog."

He was more surprised that the dog had gone out than anything else, and the dog hadn't made it more than a few doors down - which was why I hadn't seen him when I'd gone out looking. Moral of the story: when you're watching someone else's dog, keep the door closed or the leash on.

2008-04-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

9.09 pm

They just posted the course offerings for next fall. Now comes the fun part - figuring out what to take and when. The idea of stacking my schedule so I have a three or four day weekend makes me almost giddy with joy. So does the idea of taking classes where the readings are more philosphical than nonsensical. I know there's a limit to how much can fit into the first year - but instead of only hearing "this is the law because it's the way we've done it for hundred's of years" I'd like to be able to ask why. In some ways, I'm upset that I'm only in school for three years. There are so many things that I want to do, I'm not sure how to fit them all in. I'm not particularly thrilled about having to graduate and go into the "real world", either.

9.20 pm
J tells me I'm a born lawyer. I'm not so sure about that. It's words that I get excited about, the possibilities of the blank page. The way my fingertips think faster than I can type sometimes, so that I find my fingers flying over the keyboard, in danger of tangling themselves. The novel is calling for me to come out and play. It wants to know why it's been stuck in a binder on my bookshelf for almost a year. It wants to know why I never spend time with it anymore. The problem is, Knightly may well be right. I'm not sure that lawyering and writing fit well together. Law school and writing don't, at any rate.

Sand in my Shoes

2008-03-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

9.17 am

I won my first case as a lawyer last week. My first case as a law student, at any rate. Our client was granted asylum on Wednesday afternoon, at 1.47 pm. It's a rather heady feeling. Hours of interviews, draft after draft of her declaration revised and revisited, and it all worked out exactly right. I can see why people would pursue litigation. It must be quite the adrenaline rush, those tense moments between when the jury files in and when the verdict is delivered. It's things like this which remind me that law school is worth getting through, that it's not all about casebooks and class ranking.

9.21 am

Spring break, and the boy and I are off to the ocean for a few days. A nice leisurely drive along Highway 1 and then a cottage by the sea. I'm looking forward to watching the ocean pound and crash outside the car window. Looking forward to feeling sand in between my toes again, hot almost to the point of burning. We're bringing his kites, and I'm looking forward to seeing him silhouetted against the sky, his hands tugging at the strings and the kites struggling to take off, to rip right out off his grip and off into a sky of endless possibilities.

Straight on till morning

2008-03-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

11.53 am

I spent all of yesterday with the boy on the boat. It was one of those perfect days, where the wind was blowing steady off the Golden Gate and there were sailboats all out along the water. We even saw two tall ships, both with square sails. One was brightly painted, and the other was all dark and looked like a pirate ship. We sailed out into the bay, past all the piers, under the Bay Bridge, past Treasure Island, and out to Alcatraz. Treasure Island was all vacation homes and brightly painted lighthouses. Alcatraz looked as though someone had packed up and left around 1950 and nobody had ever gone back. The buildings are all falling apart, some of them gutted by fire. Windows are smashed out. Even the trees were brown and dying. The wind died as we rounded Alcatraz and turned back toward the marina. It took a rather long time to get back. Boy said it was because we had forgotten to throw a nickel into the water for the Wind Gods.

Then I opened my email this morning and saw that two men had died in a race out on the Gate Saturday afternoon. Which puts things into perspective - the ocean is beautiful, but she is harsh and she is wild and she will not hesitate to kill.

"A Hope in Hell"

2008-03-02T17:43:00.000-08:00

5.01 pm
It’s that perfect time of day when the shadows stretch out into infinity, but the sun is still warm and golden on my back. The wind from earlier this afternoon has died down, and the palm fronds hang limp. The parents in the playground a few yards away are starting to gather up their children. One last push on the swing, one last swing through the monkeybars, one last cartwheel across the grass.

5.40 pm
Summer is coming. It’s creeping across the trees, tickling them until they bring forth their blossoms. The sidewalks from my bus stop to my house are covered in a pale carpet of small, pink petals. The rain has tucked tail and fled, leaving behind brilliantly green hills. I’ve played leapfrog between the puddles of sunlight, chasing them down until the very last one disappeared into a leafy shade, making it too chilly to stay outside any longer.

5.46 pm
This amused me, endlessly. The text is taken from one of Mr. Neil's early Sandman comics. I hope you shall enjoy it as well.

Spare Key Shennanigans

2008-02-25T21:21:00.000-08:00

9.21 pm

You know you're part of the family when the sister calls you and says, "We locked our keys in the house" and you spend the next two hours helping said sister retrieve spare key from her brother's (your boyfriend's) apartment. Even better that when you called him to ensure that he did, in fact, have said spare key (because the last time he had his sister's keys, he made a copy of the car key but not the house key) he had you on the cell phone on one ear and his sister on the work line on the other ear. The only way in which it could have been better is if he'd been on the line as well.

9.26 pm

I met up with Sheila Friday night for happy hour. It's almost time for summer jazz to start again. I miss our picnics, with fresh berries and home made whipped cream and a cold bottle of rosé. And since it is increasingly looking like I will be in the States this summer, instead of some exotic third world country like Cambodia or Thailand, she and I will be able to go.

Lessons learned from my summer job search:

1) You can't really wait until December, like they say to. Instead, you should spend November researching and writing cover letters, so that your job apps are ready to go out Dec. 1.

2) Networking matters. A lot. Better to start by getting to know professors, other students who interned in the place(s) you want to work and asking for names, emails, and advice.

3) See point two, supra.

9.44 pm

Spring is coming, summer nipping at its heels. I can hardly stand to wait for it.

driving back from walking the dog, tired from a day of doing nothing but homework, ruminating on the possibiity of disapearing into the night

2008-02-24T21:39:00.000-08:00

9.39 pm

I love highways at night. Sinuous ribbons of light and motion. The possibility of driving, eastward, into darkness so deep it becomes sunrise. I took the long way home tonight, so that I could pass by the lake and its hanging fairy lights. It's not beautiful in itself, really. There's too much concrete and broken glass and city grit for that. The attempt to make the heart of the city less sterile is what matters.

I dreamed of T-- last night. Like my own private ghost, hovering round the edges of my consciousness. He was a teenager in this one, or maybe even my own age, but he looked at me with those little boy eyes. It bothers me sometimes, that he still invades my nights. Then I realize how lonely I'd be if he left, and I forgive him all over again.

They say the desert is beautiful because it hides a well.

The Dog Trainer Again

2008-02-19T15:04:00.000-08:00

3.04 pm

Lately, I start out every week feeling as though I'm drowning. This one was worse than most. What should have been an easy day of writing a brief turned into an 8 hour marathon at the ER. "Hurry up and wait" was the dominant theme of the day.

It's not that I'm anal-retentive. Really. It's just that I have so little time that I organize very carefully so as to fit everything in. A girlfriend and I were joking about "penciling in" boyfriend time, but there are days when it really feels as though that's the way it works.

J__ says its good for me to learn to let go. Me, I think that all could be solved if I had more hands.

You can take the girl out of the restaurant...

2008-02-15T14:55:00.000-08:00

2.55pm

It's gorgeous outside. Why am I sitting outside the law school blogging instead of heading down to the marina and getting on a boat?

As I was walking to Zeb with a friend, a woman stopped us and asked where the restroom was. My friend told her it was "that way" and made a vague pointing gesture. I told her to follow me and started walking.

"Is this like at Safeway, where they lead you to the vegetables?" she asked.

"Sorry," I said. "I'm really bad at directions. Besides, I'm used to working in a restaurant where we lead people to the bathrooms."

Even after a semester and a bit at law school, I still identify myself as "industry".

Letter to Knightly

2008-02-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

3.17 pm

It's not that I want to live in Florida again. Really. I don't even like the state. Sinkholes and swamps are the dominant geographical features, fire ants and crocodiles the dominant life forms, and hurricanes the dominant weather pattern. Still, every time I go back I have this strange feeling, as if I'm coming home.

My aunt died at 4am Tuesday morning, Eastern Standard Time, in a hospice in Jacksonville, Florida. We knew she was sick, but we hadn't expected the end to come quite so quickly. My mother called me a few hours later and told me to buy a plane ticket. I stumbled out of bed and to the phone, then went through a whirlwind of a day trying to get everything ready.

We all flew into Jacksonville, then drove to Gainesville, where my mom and her sisters grew up, where their parents are buried. I got in just ahead of a violent thunderstorm, the same system that killed 56 people earlier this week. It threatened and rumbled all night, but waited to break until Thursday, after we'd buried my aunt.

The cemetery she's in is an old Jewish Cemetery, with graves dating back to the 1800's and early 1900's. My mom takes us by every time we're in Florida. People place small stones on the headstones instead of flowers or teddy bears. My aunt's grave is not next to my grandparents' - the space next to them was unusable because of tree roots. The funeral home suggested digging the grave askew and placing the headstone parallel to the others.

3.34 pm

I flew out through Miami. I thought about calling you, but the layover was only two hours. Not long enough to get out and get back through security. Besides, some things are better left undone. I'm not writing, really, but I'm doing well in school. Although I've acquired the reputation of a gunner. You expected that, I think.

Do something for me, will you? The next time you see the wind blow through the palm trees, tucking their heads under their shoulders, think of me.

Sun-dance

2008-01-31T20:01:00.000-08:00

8.04 pm

Another raining, miserable day. Enough gray outside to wash away all the promises of springtime yesterday's sunshine offered.

I came across a wonderful quote from Don DeLillo, in a letter written in 1995.

"The novel is different. ... We die indoors, and alone, and I don't mean to sound overdramatic, but you know what I'm talking about."

He's right, of course, brilliantly so.

This time last year I was in Florida, attempting to make good on my claim that I'd written a novel. Which, over the course of last spring, turned into something that should be publishable. If I can find time in between Property and Contracts and CARC and BJIL and suchforth to properly edit the thing.

In one of those CDO-sponsored mock interviews, the lawyer asked me what she couldn't learn about me from my resume. I told her I was a novelist. Her reaction surprised me. Ed had told me to keep my writing secret from the other lawyers, that they didn't respect novelists. The interviewer was impressed, not dismayed. She suggested it be put on my resume, as something to distinguish me from the crowd.

It's a thought.

March of the Umbrellas

2008-01-25T16:11:00.000-08:00

4.11 pm

Polka-dots: Some things never go out of fashion.

Leopard print: To help you blend into the urban jungle.

HRC: Because if we gave gay and lesbian people equal rights, everyone else would want them too.

Black: It goes with everything. Even rain.

Cherry Blossom:

Like spring in Japan,
along your metal branches
petal-drops falling.

Red: Boy, you really like to make sure you stand out in the crowd, don't you.

Powder-Blue Ruffled Parasol: It doesn't do much to keep the rain off, but at least it matches.

Word of the Day

2008-01-25T11:05:00.000-08:00

11.05 am

Connectile dysfunction: When your computer connects to the network, but can't manage to actually open a web pages. Seems to happen most frequently when you have five minutes before class and really, really need to check your email. Suspected causes: lack of current to the correct circuits, incompetent web techs, or a computer with a truly evil sense of humor.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

2008-01-21T15:55:00.000-08:00

3.56 pm

Found in the reading for my property class:

Chabanakongkomuk - an Indian name for a fishing place near Worcester, MA. It translates, roughly, to "You fish on your side, I fish on my side, nobody fish in the middle - no trouble".

Pastry Dough and Politics

2008-01-20T10:11:00.000-08:00

10.13 am

There's something nice about getting up early in the morning. I like waking up as the sun is just starting to peek through my curtains. If I time my shower right, the whole bathroom is golden with the sunbeams cutting through the steam like spotlights. Plus, there's usually nobody using the laundry machines.

I made scones this morning, cutting the butter in instead of melting it. It's like making play-doh, but better. You coat the pieces of butter in flour, then squeeze and squish until they end up as small, flour covered flakes. The flour starts to get thicker, almost coming together like a dough as you plunge your hands into it and squeeze.

10.20 am

Notes of interest from the morning paper:

Apparently, experience is not, after all, a desired quality in a presidential candidate. The person with the most experience in the executive branch: Cheney. The presidents with the least experience before coming into office: Abe Lincoln and both Roosevelts.

Foreign investors are rapidly buying America. Citibank had been bailed out by Abu Dubai, Singapore, and Kuwait. Perhaps we should ask Japan to invest in Cal in exchange for requiring all students to learn Japanese and eat only with chopsticks.