Folk Music Reconsidered, and Self-Image

Now that I've left Charlottesville, I've been slowly collecting songs and albums that I loved when I was a DJ at WNRN. My latest purchase is Songs from My Funeral by Snakefarm. It is a very strange record. It's a collection of sort of electro-folk, sample-heavy, rhythmic renditions of old American folk songs (e.g. "Laredo", "St. James", "Frankie and Johnny"), with processed female vocals. I can't stop listening to it. The lyrics are all sad and most of the songs are violent, but the arrangements are so bizarre and energetic that it's mesmerizing, kind of like how Nick Drake's songs are all sunshine and suicide. I'm finding it to be great studying music.

This reminds me that I need to buy Nick Drake's entire catalog. It seems like good summer music.

It's funny how mental fatigue works. I find that if I've been studying intently for several hours, I don't feel like doing anything even mildly cerebral when it's time to take a break, but I also can't really unwind enough to focus on something passive like TV. I end up doing a lot of online window-shopping and not buying anything. Collaterally, I sometimes read blogs about shopping and fashion. It blows my mind that people my age spend many thousands of dollars a year, every year, on clothes. Maybe that's because I expect to be throwing much of my discretionary income at my student loans for the next several years.

I also find it particularly mesmerizing to read the "fashion" blogs of people who seem to have no idea which clothes are flattering on them. One person whose blog I find objectively useful (because she posts a lot of real-life pictures of J. Crew clothes that I normally only see in highly-retouched website pictures on size 0 models) often posts dressing-room pictures of herself wearing clothes that look terrific on her and then immediately says that she disliked x or y about the fit and decided not to buy the outfit. Then in the next post she's fawning over some shapeless thing that isn't at all flattering and saying that she bought it in three colors.

It just gets me thinking about body image. Having lost about 40 pounds in the last three years, I'm now what I consider normal-sized—not skinny, but squarely within a normal weight range for my height. The variety of styles of clothes that I can now wear is huge compared to what I used to feel comfortable in. Still, it took me a couple of years to get used to this. I used to feel very uncomfortable showing my legs at all, so I wore jeans all summer long and my only skirts were full and past the knee. The first time one of my friends told me that miniskirts were comfortable, I laughed at her. Turns out she's actually right. They also look kinda cute on me, whereas mid-calf-length skirts just make me look shorter than I am and make my legs look wider (since the hem cuts me right at the widest part of my calves). Still, it took a lot of very carefully scrutinizing myself in dressing-room mirrors before I was willing to buy my first short skirt, which I think was on sale at Ann Taylor Loft for less than $20 (probably why I was willing to take the risk).

I wonder if other people whose bodies have changed are still clinging to outdated notions of what flatters them.

Getting over these outdated perceptions is a really fun process. I will now try on pretty much anything that appeals to me even a little bit, because I know I can't depend on my preconceptions to tell me what will look good. This is how I ended up, last summer, buying a strapless, white, form-fitting dress with huge pink and yellow flowers splashed across the midsection. (Also at Ann Taylor Loft for about $20.) I couldn't believe it at first, but I look great in that dress, and I feel great in it because it's so different from the other things in my closet.

Just a few thoughts about, well, not fashion per se. Dressing oneself, I guess. My old friend Rebecca from high school once told me her secret for always looking great. "I only buy things that make me look and feel fantastic," she said. "I never settle. That way I can pick anything out of my closet and feel awesome all day long."

Things With Which I Have Had It

1. The rain. Basically three solid weeks of rain, with maybe one or two sunny days thrown in.
2. Property BarBri questions. I feel like I have no hope of ever getting good at them.
3. Zits. I am 28 years old now. Come ON.
4. The craving for fried fish that I have had for three days now.

Whew. I feel slightly better now.

Bar/Brainless

I've decided that I'm going to blog more because it's fun and it offers me a sort of outlet, without the responsibility of having to carry on a conversation with an actual person. It's like text-based navel-gazing: totally self-indulgent. I always admire bloggers who have altruistic purposes, like raising money for worthy causes or providing intelligent commentary on various issues in the news. Me, I just want to be able to collect minutiae.

So, since I last wrote, I've packed up all my stuff, had movers put most of it in storage in Pittsburgh, and moved the rest to a lovely little suburb of Boston, where I'm staying with Shawn until it's time to move to Pittsburgh to start work in January. It's really, really nice here. My one and only complaint about our little town is that it's not on the T (or, rather, technically it might be, but it involves a bus to a train... does that count?). It's cute and quiet and there are tons of places to walk to, including a plethora of restaurants, a grocery store a block away, a Starbucks, and even a Penzeys (for all my spice needs). Most of all, finally getting to spend time with Shawn is really great. We joined Netflix and have been watching several movies a week, trading off selections. I've been cooking a fair amount, but we've also been exploring some of the restaurants around here, as well as trying not to get takeout from the really great Thai place around the corner too terribly often. Sometimes we play poker with some guys at MIT, and once a month we get together with Shawn's roommates from freshman year and play board games. (Last week: Agricola. It took hours and I actually liked it.)

During the day I study for the bar. This mainly involves listening to long lectures on my iPod while filling in blanks in the handouts Bar/Bri provides. Which is to say that, after I spent many thousands of dollars on law school, my firm is now spending several thousand more dollars to help me "review" for the bar. Much of what I'm "reviewing" is stuff I never learned in the first place, so it's a little intimidating. It's also mind-numbing. The actual content of the material is often interesting, but the process of learning it is not, at all. By the time each lecture is over, all I want to do is read some cooking blogs or watch poker on TV or do something that involves casual learning without pressure to remember anything.

But the bar is at the end of July, and after that, I don't have too much planned. Looks like Shawn and I are going to be going to Germany in September, so I'm really excited about that. I'll have to come up with some projects to occupy my time. Otherwise, it'll be all cooking blogs and televised poker all the time.

Whirlwind

I tend not to post when things are really bad (who wants to hear me whine?) or really good (who wants to hear me crow?), which I suppose leaves it unclear which is the case. Things are really, really, really good; they're just going really, really fast.

I have less than two weeks to finish up classes (including, oh holy cow, three short papers, one 8-9 page paper, and one HUGE final project), and then one more week to finish a longer (15-page) paper. Then I get to spend six days in Florida with my favorite person in the world, after which I have a week to pack up everything I own, and then I graduate. Then I move to Boston until the end of the year, at which point I'll be moving to Pittsburgh to start work.

I'm so excited about all of this. I'm just a little overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do in the next couple of weeks. It's actually all interesting work, it's just a test of my endurance. I decided to set up my schedule this semester so I wouldn't have any exams, which is fantastic (and means I get to spend exam time on the beach). The flip side is that nearly everything I need to do is due before exams, so my schedule's that much more compressed. But I think it will be worth it.

And I'm already dreaming of summer in Boston, and fall, and everything that comes after that.

A Confession

I have a truly terrible memory.

Well, sort of. I'm incredibly good at remembering certain kinds of things. I'd call it episodic memory, or maybe writer's memory. I remember things in striking detail when my emotions or my senses are highly engaged. I remember what it felt like to walk home from the Chapel bus stop on a particular night in undergrad, when the fog was just starting to freeze, and the ice crystals in the air felt like tiny diamonds cutting into my skin. I remember what both Shawn and I were wearing the day we met, as well as the color of the carpet we were standing on when we had our first conversation. I remember the particular tank top and pair of shorts I was wearing on the day Jeff broke up with me in March of 2000, and how the cool air and the hot sun felt on my arms, and how the stone steps of the Colonnades felt against my bare legs. That sort of thing. There are moments in my past that I can practically go back and inhabit in my mind. Scenes I can walk around in. It's a wonderful gift.

The flip side of this kind of memory is apparently that I lack the other kind. I remember almost literally nothing of a movie just a few days after watching it. I read lots of novels last summer, and all I can remember about my favorite one was that there was a dysfunctional family with a father who was losing his memory and who fell overboard on a cruise ship. (Someone please tell me what book this is, because I really loved it, and I'd like to read it again.) Sometimes Shawn will explain some aspect of physics to me, and it'll make perfect sense, and I'll ask all kinds of questions until I'm totally clear on the concept, and then a month later he'll bring it up and it's like I've never heard of it before.

I forget names and faces. When I see someone in the hall at the law school whom I've known since 1L year, I tend to smile and nod rather than actually saying hi, for fear I'll call the person by the wrong name. Facebook is a godsend: I can practice the names and faces until I'm sure I know them. I've had some really, really embarrassing moments due to mixing up names of people I've known for years.

I don't think I have some sort of dementia or anything. I've always been this way. But only in the past few years have I realized that most people's memories aren't like mine. And I have to admit, I'm a little afraid of what this sort of deficiency will mean for my efforts to study for the bar.

Haves and Have Nots

Things I do not have:

• The ability to digest lettuce. This is currently being rubbed in my face by the law student sitting across from me chowing down on a wrap sandwich with tons of lettuce. I used to love my sandwiches with tons of lettuce.
• My Federal Income Tax casebook, which I lent to a friend last semester. Said friend returned it, so it's not his fault I don't have it. But he put it in my student mailbox after I had left for break, and when I came back several weeks later it had (rather predictably) been stolen.
• The 1099-DIV I need to be able to file my federal income taxes and get my ridiculous refund. I want to take the money from the refund and put it into a Roth IRA while the market is still crappy. Something tells me I need not hurry as much as I think I have to.
• Any real information about starting work next fall. I don't know when I'm going to start, where I'm going to live, whether the firm will pay for my stuff to be in storage for the summer, whether the firm will cover my taking an iPod bar review course, or how I get reimbursed for the MPRE, which I took back in November. I realize that I don't need to know most of this stuff yet, but as a friend put it the other day, I'm "not at all comfortable with not having a plan."

Things I have:

• The best boyfriend ever.

Sure, these are incomplete lists, but they sum things up pretty well. I think, on the whole, I come out ahead.

Behind and Before

So here we are at the end of 2008. This has been a terrible year for a lot of people, and yet it's been the best year of my life so far. This is the year in which I accomplished, almost by accident, the goal I set when I first decided to go to law school.

I decided on U.Va. because I thought moving back to Charlottesville could help me reconnect with myself—the person I was in high school and at the beginning of college, who didn't let her fear of the unknown or her desire to please other people keep her from doing what she really wanted to do. I had lost track of that person, and I hoped I could find her again.

This is the year in which I realized that playing it safe made me bored (at best) and miserable (at worst), and so I finally quit doing it. And I finally feel like I'm moving forward in my life, with direction, and honesty, and hope.