Double Hoo

A Migraine PSA

2009-08-11T11:31:00.004-04:00

I got a migraine this morning, and now I'm doing fine. I don't know whether I've just been lucky these past couple of times or whether I've finally figured out how to deal with them. But because I get silent migraines most of the time, which are fairly unusual, I thought I'd mention them in case any of you has the same symptoms and is looking for a solution.

A silent migraine is basically a migraine without the headache. Everyone has different migraine symptoms, but mine are always the same: a sort of motion-sickness-like nausea, oversensitivity to light, extreme oversensitivity to smell (it's a dead giveaway when I'm in a place I've visited many times and smell things I've never smelled before), and difficulty processing visual cues. I know that visual symptoms like flashing lights or jagged lines are common with migraines, and I don't get any of those. I can see fine, but I have trouble understanding what I see or responding appropriately to it, which means driving with a migraine takes 100% of my attention. On rare occasions, I've also gotten tingling in my extremities, particularly the toes on my left foot.

Migraines are really, really weird.

Maybe 15 or 20% of the time I get these symptoms, they're followed by a severe headache, of the moany-groany, can't-do-anything, please-kill-me-now variety. The rest of the time, the nausea just gets progressively worse until I can't do anything but lie on my back. Fortunately, I seem to have found a formula that forestalls or stops these serious symptoms most of the time. For a silent migraine, three Tylenol (aspirin works better, but I can't take it) and a glass of water, followed by a small dose of caffeine and at least an hour of quiet "down time" seems to work. For a migraine with headache, Tylenol and water, followed by a nap or at least a couple of hours of lying down in a dark room, and finally a hot shower and another glass of water. I have no idea why the shower helps, but it really does. Also, this may be just superstition, but I never touch alcohol until I'm sure that the migraine is completely gone.

Finally, I'm fortunate that one of the drugs I take occasionally for my stomach, metoclopramide, is also used to treat migraine-related nausea. This drug can, rarely, have nasty side effects, especially in large dosages, so I'm not recommending that you Go Ask Your Doctor necessarily, but it might be something to consider if you have severe nausea with migraines. (I haven't had any side effects from the tiny dosage I take.)

Finally, I would like to complain about how annoying it is that no one knows what causes migraines, or even what they are, physiologically speaking. It's obnoxious to have to treat a disorder by trial and error, without having any idea why certain things work and others don't. If anyone knows anyone who does research on migraines, let me know so I can give that person moral support and brownies.

New Things

2009-08-04T12:48:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I did two things I had never done before: I went to the public library down the street, and I baked bread. I guess technically I had baked bread before, but only in the bread machine on "auto," and usually with a boxed mix. This was a simple recipe, but it involved figuring out what it meant for yeast to be proofed, realizing that 6 cups of flour was not, in fact, enough on an incredibly humid summer day, knowing when each rise was finished, and testing whether the bread was cooked through. It wasn't difficult, but it was all new to me, and I enjoyed it. Plus, now I have a big ol' loaf of white bread in the freezer for later and a gallon bag of dinner rolls on the counter for the next couple of days. And I have conquered Fear of Yeast. It was a good day.

I would like to do some small new thing each weekday over the next few weeks. Trying a new recipe counts, but I'd also like to go new places. I've always been afraid to go to new places alone. I'm not afraid of the place itself, I'm afraid that I won't be able to find it, or that I'll get there but not know which door to go through (this is a huge fear and I've found that a surprising number of people share it), or that I'll somehow sense that I'm not welcome. The thing is, in a few months I'm going to be moving to Pittsburgh, and Shawn isn't going to be coming with me, nor will I have my cadre of law school friends or my family to accompany me on new ventures. So I'm just going to have to get over it, or else I'm going to end up reliving my last stint in Pittsburgh, going only where I've gone before. And that would just be sad.

Anyway, today I think I'm going to try making a tortilla española for dinner. And sour cherry crisp, because my beloved translucent-red sour cherries were at the grocery store yesterday, in big quart boxes. Because I could lie on the couch all day and read things on The Internets, but then I really wouldn't be acquiring any skills. And I'd rather learn skills than facts any day.

Recentering

2009-08-03T09:57:00.002-04:00

I guess I am still getting my calm back after all that tension.

The bar exam is over and please don't ask me how it went. I guess maybe there are people who come out of that exam feeling like they knew the relevant law, wrote coherent essays and picked the best answer choice rather than the second best (or the "sucker choice," as the BarBri instructors like to call it). I am not one of those people. Taking the bar exam showed me in blinding detail just how much I didn't know. Now I just need to hope there were a sufficient number of exam-takers who knew even less.

We spent the weekend on Cape Cod, at Shawn's adviser's summer house. We ate delicious fresh food out on the back deck by the garden, I pored over cookbooks for hours, and I started reading The Secret Life of Bees, which got me so hooked that I'm about to leave for the library so I can finish it. I continue to be amazed at how deeply I'm sleeping. I guess I'm making up for lost peace of mind.

The things I thought I would want to do when I finished the bar were mostly mindless, like watching lots of TV and wandering around the mall. But those are the sorts of things you crave when your mind is totally occupied and taxed. Now, with brain waves to spare, I want to do things that fit in that sweet spot between total attentiveness and meditation: bake bread, sit in the shade and write poems, go for walks with the dog, knit a sweater from a new pattern. I'm going to let my intuition take the lead for a while.

Ten Things I Will Do When the Bar Is Over

2009-07-20T17:45:00.002-04:00

Spend an afternoon window-shopping at a really big mall for no particular reason.
Bake bread.
Knit a sweater.
Watch old episodes of SVU on Netflix (probably in conjunction with (3), above).
Cook nothing but new recipes for a week.
Go running.
Get health insurance before mine runs out.
Do a bunch of car-related junk, like fixing my air conditioning, re-registering my car in MA, and getting my car inspected.
Plan a trip to Germany.
Really, really enjoy shipping my books and iPod back to BarBri and getting my $750 deposit back.

Folk Music Reconsidered, and Self-Image

2009-07-09T14:15:00.002-04:00

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

2009-07-07T16:54:00.002-04:00

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

Whew. I feel slightly better now.

Bar/Brainless

2009-06-19T17:30:00.003-04:00

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

2009-04-13T19:52:00.002-04:00

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

2009-02-25T15:10:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-27T13:08:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-30T18:25:00.002-05:00

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.

Last November

2008-11-24T13:43:00.002-05:00

I know it's not quite that year-in-review time yet; I have another month until then. But I'm thinking back to last year at this time and realizing that I don't actually remember what I did for Thanksgiving last year. I remember being ridiculously overconfident about my fall classes (I guess I couldn't have predicted my catastrophic performance on my Evidence exam), and mostly being frustrated and worried about my health.

It's been about a year and a half now since I started having problems with my stomach. I won't go into details, or recount the long process of getting a diagnosis (which itself may or may not be right, and certainly doesn't explain everything). But my illness, which seems to be much more inconvenient than truly serious, has had a definite impact on my time in law school over the past year and a half. I have to miss classes sometimes, unpredictably. I always have to build in extra time to preparing for everything, just in case I get sick all of a sudden. And I've had to back out of more social obligations than I ever would have imagined. I've also lost about 40 pounds, which I guess is a sort of silver lining, but has also been disorienting and kind of expensive (lots of new clothes).

I've been better recently, overall, than I was a year ago, certainly. I have some medications that help a lot, and I've modified my diet and other behavior in an effort to placate my digestive system. And now I'd say 85 or 90% of the time, it doesn't bother me much, which is a vast improvement over a year ago. But I'm just sick of it. I never expected these problems to go on this long, and there's no way of knowing when or whether they'll resolve. And while I know a little bit about what makes my stomach work better or less well, there's still so much I don't understand. Sometimes I wish I could just have someone tell me what to eat, drink and do all the time, so I wouldn't have to try to figure it out myself.

But I'm so lucky. One of the conditions I've been diagnosed with can be so bad for some people that they can't eat solid food at all, or even drink anything but clear liquids. My doctor says that on a severity scale of 1 to 10 for that condition, I'm a 2 or 3. I feel incredibly lucky that I can go out to dinner with my family, or cook dinner for my friends, even if I have to eat less and be much pickier about what I eat. At least I get to have the experience.

I had a co-worker once at Starbucks, several years ago, who had dietary limitations that would make your head spin. I don't remember all of the specifics, but I know she couldn't have meat, dairy, yeast, wheat, refined sugar, honey... and on and on. And she was one of the sweetest, cheeriest people I've ever met, in a completely genuine way. Her husband was a chef, and she loved to cook. One night she brought in dinner for the rest of the closing team at Starbucks, a dinner she'd cooked for us even though it was full of things she couldn't eat. She just loved to cook and wasn't going to give it up.

So in a way I feel bad for even mentioning that this is going on with me, and especially for feeling frustrated and wishing it would all be over already. But I also feel like I have to explain. It's hard to figure out what to say to people who compliment me on my weight loss. I try the old standby, "Thanks!" But people are usually more persistent than that: they want to know what my trick is, so they can try it too. I haven't figured out a graceful response to that yet.

But in the meantime, I'm still doing all the things I love to do: knitting, crosswords, cooking and baking (mostly for other people, yeah, but also occasionally for myself), reading as much of the New York Times every day as I have time for, spending time with my friends, writing poetry, going out for walks when my stomach's in a good mood. And I'm keeping up with school, and I'm damn well going to get this J.D. and go work for my firm in Pittsburgh, and my stomach is just going to have to deal with it. I'm way too stubborn to do anything else.

Sorting

2008-10-08T18:46:00.003-04:00

More than two years after moving here, I'm finally unpacking. My closet has been a disaster area for a while, mostly because I owned far more clothes than I knew what to do with. So over the past week, I've taken six big bags of clothes to the SPCA Rummage Sale store, and I actually have another bag's worth that ought to go over there (I forgot about the clothes that were hanging up). And once all those clothes were out of there, I had a little bit of room to maneuver, so I started actually organizing. I find it amazing that a generally stuff-phobic, anti-acquisitive person like me can nonetheless accumulate mountains of stuff. The organizing and culling feels awesome. I assembled a wire cube storage unit today that I bought over a year ago.

Two years ago I spent fall break in Ocean City, MD. Last year I spent it in Pittsburgh with James. This year, I'm here in Charlottesville, cleaning my apartment. And I'm happier than ever.

There's something so therapeutic about getting rid of stuff I don't need. It makes me appreciate what I keep even more, because I know that I'm keeping those things for a reason, because they mean something to me. It makes it easier to find things, easier to move around in my apartment (which was pretty neat to begin with, but now it's better). And it just feels good, knowing that I'm never going to have to put that stuff away again, that I'll never have to move it again. And it's extremely rare that I ever end up missing anything I give or throw away.

This has also made me realize that I have enough clothes and shoes for now, so I'm not buying any more this year. And I'm eating out of my pantry a lot, realizing that anything I don't eat, I'm going to have to throw out or move to Pittsburgh with me next summer. Plus, eating things I already own is free.

I'm learning a thing or two as I age.

Settling

2008-09-24T21:25:00.002-04:00

Wallaby Organic yogurt is so delicious. I can't get over it. I think I could eat it every day, and there are very few foods that fit into that category. I've had lemon, maple, strawberry banana and vanilla. I need to start keeping this stuff in stock.

It's been a busy semester so far. I'm starting to wonder when I'm ever not going to be busy. I think I have an uneasy relationship with down time: I crave it until I have it, at which point I find myself at loose ends.

Coffeeshops are proving to be a bit of a compromise for me. Two or three mornings a week, I take a book and a notepad to either Mudhouse or Shenandoah Joe's, and I spend a couple of hours thinking about language and writing. I find these times so rejuvenating. I get my work done for my poetry class, but at the same time I get to relax and be contemplative. It satisfies that part of me that always wanted to be a nun.

Poetry

2008-09-09T09:14:00.002-04:00

So far my plan to go to more concerts this year is working out incredibly well. Ricky Skaggs and Bruce Hornsby played last night at the Paramount, and it was an experience. I laughed, I danced, and at times I just had to close my eyes to take in all of the incredible sound that surrounded me from all sides. I'm a bit of a bluegrass newbie, but after this show, that's going to change.

I picked up a copy of Writing Metrical Poetry the other day, and I've been reading it in dribs and drabs, with my espresso in the morning. I waffle between free verse and metrical verse, but my experience with rhyme is very limited, and I usually stick to iambs. The whole reason I'm taking this poetry class is to experiment with the slightly uncomfortable. To stretch, if you will.

Which is not to say that I'll be posting villanelles, but you never know.

Dream

2008-09-06T10:13:00.002-04:00

In my dream, girls from my middle school were everywhere. Someone had an open house, and people I had last seen when we were all eleven or twelve sprawled on beds, gathered in corridors, leaned against doorframes. Aged fifteen years, they still looked younger than I am, and uniformly beautiful, their hair still long, with no grey. I sat down on a giant bed with three of them, captivated by their loveliness, marveling at how time had rendered our former social strata irrelevant.

One of them, a girl I'd noticed in sixth grade primarily for her amazing hairsprayed bangs, looked up at me and smiled. "Oh, Gwen!" she said, clearly delighted to see me. "This is perfect. Tell us the secrets you wish you'd known about how to survive law school."

Disorientation gripped me. "You're... you're 1Ls?!" She nodded and grinned, showing perfect white teeth, no doubt the result of the braces I remembered her wearing.

What on earth was that dream about?

It woke me early, just after sunrise, and I lay in bed and listened to the rain pour down on the asphalt of the parking lot, and watched the grey-green light sneak around the corners of the curtains.

A 3L September Evening

2008-09-02T20:51:00.002-04:00

My one-sentence review of Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA: If God drinks beer, I'm pretty sure this is the one He drinks. However, at 20% ABV, I can drink about three ounces of it before I start getting tipsy. Fortunately, I'm also pretty sure that God eats bacon cheeseburgers, and He saw fit to put a Five Guys on my street.

Storm

2008-08-30T16:09:00.003-04:00

I've had a lot of blog posts planned out in my mind recently. Most notably, I was going to write a measured and informative tirade about how to drive on highways without being unsafe or inconsiderate. I composed most of this piece on my way from Pittsburgh to Charlottesville, a trip that involves the I-76, I-70 and I-81, three of my least favorite roads.

I just put so much pressure on myself to Say Something in every one of my blog posts, and I think it's squelching my creativity. The pressure to Say Something is predicated on the theory that I have Readers, which I don't think is actually true. Some friends and family members who like to check up on me from time to time, sure, and the occasional wanderer from one of the few places I'm linked. But capital-R Readers, no. If I'm wrong, forgive me. This blog is about to descend into self-referential minutiae, which is sort of what the blog genre started out being, and, while plenty of people find navel-gazing to be worthy of mockery, I actually think it has some value.

I'm trying to write more, see, and I'm trying to care less about the quality of what I write. Isn't that strange? It's the opposite of what I think a lot of people ought to do. For the past few years, I've been writing a very small number of poems, and most of them have been turning out pretty well (with the occasional serious clunker). But now I'm starting to see that writing bad poetry is okay. Some of the bad stuff gets revised into something pretty good. And sometimes a verbal wandering I think is going nowhere takes a surprising turn into the striking and useful.

I went to the farmer's market today and bought another quart of nectarines. I bought one last week at the Falls Church market for $7, and most of them turned out squooshed and overripe. I cut out the bad parts and pureed the rest, then used the puree in a cake. These I hope to eat out of hand. They're my favorite fruit—so perfumey, sticky-sweet yet with a bitter tang of skin and pit. A nectarine to me is like a summer day just as a morning thunderstorm is clearing. Their sharpness is even more exhilarating because their season is so short.

This quart was $3.

3L year so far is lonely. I'm not complaining, it's just strange. I've set myself apart from people in my mind, created a space around me that I feel reluctant to breach, even as I feel the separation acutely. I wonder if it's the temporariness of being here now that's making us tentative. Separation anxiety kicking in early. I do dread the feeling of being scattered.

Unblocked

2008-07-05T09:56:00.002-04:00

I guess it's sheer luck that I've stumbled upon the perfect house. Matt's friends needed a housesitter, I needed a place to stay, so here I am. This is the quietest, most peaceful place I've ever been while still being in a city.

I started writing again. Inspired, I think, by the idea of taking an English class in the fall on top of my law classes (this is my last chance, after all, before I graduate). I got out some old poems and applied a little discipline to them. Revision really is fantastic, especially after a term of years. Working on those old poems again made me realize how much I love being a writer.

Nothing can immerse me like the process of writing. It's such a process of narrowing and broadening: narrowing by choosing a metrical scheme, or even just a topic; broadening by considering the non-obvious. As I write, I pull images in and push distractions out, gradually framing the photograph I want to snap, editing the film footage of my life, cropping, snipping, and finally printing. Sometimes, as with these poems, the process takes ten years.

There's no shame in an unfinished poem. I used to get so frustrated with the ones that wouldn't quite jell. Now I know there's no inspiration like half a sonnet, left off in mid-line.

Funny that it would be a job like this one that would lead me back to writing. Working at the firm is intensely intellectual and exhausting. At the end of the day I feel mentally wrung out, often frustrated with language (legal writing, like poetry writing, seems to be a process of jamming in as much meaning as possible without becoming obscure). I usually feel like I need a drink and an hour of stupid television. But when I look at the work I'm doing, I'm proud of it. And I think that's what I've been missing as a writer all these years: the willingness to hack away at something even when the words don't seem to be coming, to work with a draft until it seems utterly worthless, and to keep on working on it until its worth emerges.

In essence, I'm finding that discipline and art are interdependent rather than mutually exclusive.

And I'm writing, now, just about every day.

Signposts

2008-05-26T21:41:00.002-04:00

So I'm in Pittsburgh for the summer. I got here on Thursday afternoon and am just about settled in, just in time to start work tomorrow.

I notice things about Pittsburgh every time I come back. One thing that I have remarked on often in the past, but which deserves further commentary, is the fact that the highway signs around here, with few exceptions, are intended for people who already know where they're going and just might need a slight reminder. Now, you might think that, having lived here for four years already, I might fall into that category, but you would be wrong. I have no sense of direction. I figure out which way to go by using visual cues (basically I play a movie back in my head of what it looked like the last time I went to the same place, and try to drive the same way).

Case in point: I was driving back from James's mom's place tonight, which is in the North Hills. I'm currently living in Regent Square, which means I take the Edgewood/Swissvale exit off the Parkway. I've taken this exit many times, but always from the opposite direction, driving into town from the east, and I've memorized that the correct direction to go from that off-ramp is right. This time I was coming from town. At the exit I had to choose between Edgewood and Swissvale, and of course I had no idea which one to pick, so I essentially picked one at random. I found out that I was wrong as I drove toward Edgewood and passed, after the point at which the ramp divides, a small sign perched atop the Swissvale sign that read "Regent Square."

How could that sign possibly be of use to anybody? Why was it not signed 500 feet earlier? Because the signs in this town are designed for people who already know where they are going. And this entire experience is just one more bit of proof that I am not one of those people.

Another thing I always notice when I come back to Pittsburgh is how quickly I pick up certain speech patterns when I'm here. I drop my "to be"s: the dishes need washed, this room needs picked up, and so on. Not all the time, but enough that I notice. I change my inflexion on some questions, so that when I'm asking a question to which I think I already know the answer, my pitch drops at the end instead of rising. I've heard this is a mannerism that came from the Pennsylvania Dutch, but I have no idea whether that's true. I just know that I do it. And of course, "ain't" becomes part of my vocabulary, "y'all" drops out (though, no, I don't say "yinz"), and my subject/verb agreement gets to be rather inexact ("there's lots of things to do here"). I've always changed my speech slightly to match that of the people around me, but here I feel really comfortable with it. I guess that just comes with time spent living here.

I'm excited, and nervous, about starting work in the morning. I guess first days are always like that. But mostly I just feel really glad to be back. Charlottesville feels like home, but so does Pittsburgh. The two-hometowns dilemma is an awfully good one to have.

One Nice Thing

2008-05-01T20:57:00.002-04:00

For a long time, on and off, I've had dreams about running. In my typical running dream, I feel myself getting tired after just a few blocks (they're all about running in the city, for some reason), and I find myself wondering how long I'll be able to go on before I run out of breath. Then I feel my strides begin to shorten and I know I'm about to have to stop, and then I wake up, often with a gasp. Anxiety, obviously. Usually about nothing. These happen once every month or two.

Last night, for the first time ever, I had a dream in which I ran for miles without even feeling close to needing to stop. It felt fantastic. In the dream, I remember thinking, "I accomplished this for myself. It's because I've finally figured my life out that I can do this all of a sudden."

Exhausted

2008-04-30T10:13:00.002-04:00

I'm taking my first exam of the semester today.

I've been trying to understand corporate tax for the past five days or so. Basically all of my brainwaves have been dedicated to it. It's just not working very well. I don't understand why... I went to class, I paid attention, I did the reading, and I'm certainly studying. It just isn't coming together. I'm taking a different exam today in an attempt to get my slate cleared, and I'm planning on taking corporate tax on Saturday morning now.

This is incredibly frustrating.

I need to clean my apartment. It's what I do when things start feeling out of control.

I need to eat more. Without the structure of classes, I get out of the habit of eating regularly.

I need exams to be over.

Tricksy

2008-04-06T09:08:00.002-04:00

I need to spend a very large amount of time today working. While I haven't exactly fallen behind in any of my classes (which I suppose is an achievement in itself given how full this semester feels), I'm not entirely on top of them either, and I need to get there. Not because I think my grade is going to depend on whether I feel totally secure in my knowledge of any of these subjects right now, with three weeks of classes still left, but because I can't study effectively when I'm anxious.

The problem is that I'm already anxious, which makes it hard to study effectively. I don't know how my colleagues manage to focus so sharply on their work. I can't do that trick where everything in the world disappears except for the one thing I'm working on. I'm lucky if I can grab ten good minutes of focus here and there.

So I guess my tactic is to throw some books in a bag, bring my knitting, and walk to C'ville Coffee. It's a short walk, but long enough to get me to relax. Then I can read a book on the table with my knitting in my lap (it's mindless and I don't have to look at it), and use the promise of coffee and food as a reward for getting through a certain number of pages, or understanding a certain concept.

When we're kids, our parents play games with us to try to get us to do the things we need to do. Once we grow up, we have to play games with ourselves. I find this much more challenging.

More Scattered Thoughts

2008-03-27T21:05:00.002-04:00

I apologize for not being more coherent, but the combination of trying to catch up on schoolwork I missed because I was sick and my recent frenzy of good-mood-inspired socializing and outgoingness has left me too exhausted to really string words together very well. In case that mess of a sentence didn't prove my point. Res ipsa loquitur.

Today for the first time I tried on a swimsuit and liked the way I looked in it. I never imagined that would happen.

Driving through central Grounds today on the way to Anna's Pizza #5, I noticed how alive Alderman Road always seems. There are always people out walking, running, moving in giant first-year-style herds, laughing, talking. North Grounds is substantially more somber. We work too much. I think law students as a cohort lead ill-balanced lives.

Shopping is really exhausting when you do it for six hours in one day. But it's good exercise. And I am now confident that I own all the clothes and shoes I'll need for the whole summer. And as of this moment, my credit card is going to be in gas-and-groceries-only mode for a good long while.

The reformulated Sudafed (phenylephrine rather than pseudoephedrine) works nearly as well for congestion and doesn't give me shaky hands or chills like the old stuff did. But it still causes insomnia. I realized this at 1:40 a.m. today, after having gone to bed around 11:30. Today I curtailed my Sudafed use at 11 a.m. I feel like I will have no trouble sleeping tonight.

I need to figure out how to get my corporate finance professor (who is visiting this year) hired here permanently. This is a completely selfish desire: I just want to take more classes with him.

Two-thirds of a semester of studying the federal estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer taxes has taught me that said taxes are inconsistent and annoying. I feel roughly the same way about corporate tax. No wonder people are so hostile toward the IRS (although, if you ask me, the problem is that Congress makes the rules but doesn't have to implement them... but what do I know).

The current season of Top Chef is sub-par.

I really need to go to bed early tonight.

Thoughts on Sick Days

2008-03-25T09:05:00.002-04:00

I realize I'm in the minority here, but when I'm sick, I stay home. Sure, there are exceptions for once-in-a-lifetime, unmissable events (or I'm sure there would be if I ever had any of those), but in the interest in getting well faster and getting as few other people as possible sick, I don't go out when I'm, say, coughing or sneezing uncontrollably, or running a fever.

I just have a cold, but I've been home the past couple days, and I've noticed a few things.

Constant Comment tea is still delicious. This amuses me because I've done my best to become a tea snob over the past year or so. I used to be an occasional tea drinker, and now I'm an almost-every-day tea drinker, and I order loose tea from Upton and make it in a French press. Generally speaking, no teabag-originating tea can come close to the richness and mouthfeel of a good tea brewed from loose leaves, though my parents have a big box of Trader Joe's Irish Breakfast, and that stuff is pretty potent. But since I'm sick, I'm drinking tea with honey, and only Constant Comment really works that way for me. It's just black tea with cinnamon and orange rind, but it's so delicious. I leave my almost-empty teacup sitting on the coffee table all day long and it's like having a bowl of potpourri out. It makes me want to fix cinnamon rolls or something. But I won't, because that's exertion, and I'm sick.

Which leads me to my next point: being sick makes me want to eat pastry. This is generally not a problem I have. Maybe the same overpowering sweetness that turns me off most of the time is one of the few flavors that can get to my congestion-dulled taste buds. However, I don't keep that stuff in the house, and going out while sick is strictly curtailed, so no pastry for me. I could always eat raisin-date-walnut instant oatmeal with a little cinnamon sugar on top.

Daytime television is nowhere near as bad as it used to be, at least if you're like me and have a nearly infinite tolerance for crime dramas of various descriptions.

Sick days are a knitter's best justification for having a yarn stash. I've knitted through most of mine. Don't ask me how many sweaters a girl honestly needs: fewer than I've got, probably, but I'm not stopping anytime soon.

Time for some tea.

Some Small Things

2008-03-22T21:13:00.002-04:00

I quit watching CSI and CSI: Miami. I've seen all of them at least twice now, which means that I usually remember them well enough that watching them again isn't that enjoyable. I've moved on to Law and Order and all of its variants. I've seen very few of them, and there are just so many episodes.

Don't tell me that none of these shows is any good. I know that. But they're always on, and they're high-profile enough to get some top-notch guest stars, and playing Hey! It's That Guy! is pretty fun. The other day I saw an episode of SVU guest-starring Stephen Colbert in a completely non-comedic role. The episode that's on right now has Frankie Faison in it, from The Wire.

I've been knitting a lot. It's actually pretty amazing how much I've knitted in the past year. I count ten sweaters just off the top of my head. Eleven. Probably more.

I think my stomach is getting better. But then, I've been thinking it was getting better for almost a year now. I just hope I'm right this time.

I'm surprising myself by loving my corporate finance class. I liked accounting, too. Maybe a JD/MBA program wouldn't have been so bad after all.

I've spent some time over the past few months with my friends from college, and it's just made me want to see them more. Of course, this involves my calling or emailing them, and I've never been good at that. I get so much joy out of other people's company that you'd think I'd be better at pursuing it.

Some of my law school friends are having a couple of potluck dinners in the next week or so, which gives me an excuse to cook. I've really missed it. Much as cooking for one is usually a little challenging, cooking for one who eats very little is even more annoying. James assures me that I can cook all summer long and he'll eat all the leftovers.

I'm really excited to start work this summer. Still about two months before that starts, and I have a lot to do in that time, such as learning corporate tax (it's really hard!), taking five exams, and, well, moving to Pittsburgh. It's neat that, although my schoolwork definitely feels like work, it's not onerous. I guess that's what happens when you study what you love.

Empathy

2008-02-02T08:14:00.000-05:00

My downstairs neighbor, who is either usually silent or else usually out of town, is home with a terrible, terrible cough. He sounds like he's hacking up a lung, and it goes on and on and on. I would be annoyed if I didn't feel so sorry for him. I'd go ask him if he needs anything, except that I heard him on the phone the other night saying he was just fine and didn't need anything, he was just going to stay home and rest up and wait it out. Many neighbor-sounds are bothersome: alarms that go off for hours, yowling lonely cats, vacuuming on Saturday mornings, and so on. But I'm able to tune them out eventually, for the most part. The coughing, I can't tune out, because I just feel so darn sorry for him.

I guess this gives me an excuse to head out to a coffee shop for my Saturday workathon rather than trying to do it from my living room couch. Oooh, Shenandoah Joe's is open. (Usually Sunday is workathon-day, and they're closed, so I go to C'ville Coffee, which has excellent coffee but dreadful espresso.)

The sick neighbor is now taking a hot shower. I hope that helps him out. I wish I knew some of the people who live here. The next place I live, I'm going to meet my neighbors if it kills me.

Rationalizing

2008-01-27T20:56:00.000-05:00

I have a new hobby: watching movies on TV. It's one of my less useful hobbies, way behind cooking and knitting, and probably even behind crossword puzzles. But I love the fact that I end up watching movies I would never pick out for myself, even though some of them are kind of not that great. (Ahem, Center Stage.) But Moonstruck holds up even the zillionth time, and Beetlejuice is charming and funnier than I thought. And it's not like I wouldn't otherwise be watching the same episodes of CSI I've already seen at least twice.

I really love Moonstruck a lot.

Tastebuds

2008-01-21T19:46:00.000-05:00

My doctor is making me drink Slim-Fast to fill in the gaps when I don't feel good enough to eat anything. I just tried it for the first time. I popped open the can, took a sip, and thought, man, what does that taste like? Chocolate soy milk? Brown rice syrup? Scalded milk?

Close, but no cigar. Then it came to me. What it tastes like is the milk left over from a bowl of Cocoa Puffs.

I think this is moderately disgusting, but I'll drink the darn stuff. Doctor's orders and all that.

Spring semester started today. The two classes I had today were fantastic. I'm a big nerd, but I'm sure that comes as no surprise to anyone.

Jiggety Jog

2008-01-13T19:59:00.000-05:00

I had a good break. I did a lot of stuff: I knitted three sweaters, played a lot of Final Fantasy XII, spent time with my family and with James, had a tooth pulled, read some books, baked two cakes and a pan of brownies, and slept a whole lot, among other things. I also could practically feel myself relaxing, not so much physically as emotionally. I don't know how to extend my vacation mental state into the semester. I have a feeling that I'm going to have to carefully choose which friendships to put energy into maintaining, because I think a lot of my emotional energy goes into relationships that maybe don't give me as much as I put into them.

I'm exhausted from the drive, but it's really nice to be home. Surprisingly nice. I'd forgotten how much I love this apartment, and this city.

Brisk

2008-01-02T10:34:00.000-05:00

While I'm here, one more thing I love about Pittsburgh: people actually pull over to the side of the road when an emergency vehicle flips on its siren. Maybe this should go instead in the category of Things I Hate About Charlottesville.

I just got back from running a few errands. I had to go out to my car and fetch my coat (it's 19 degrees outside and windy), mail my rent, deposit some checks and pick up a few things at the grocery store. Doing all of these things took me maybe forty minutes, in the snow. This includes the time it took to get a price check on a can of sweetened condensed milk (who knew that stuff cost $3.19!) and to chat about the weather with the crossing guard at Murray and Beacon.

I may not ever want to move back to Squirrel Hill, but man, this place sure is efficiently laid out. And I love not having to get in my car for every little thing.

19 degrees is cold, though, when you're not used to it. I think I like it, though. I just have to get back in the rhythm of winter again.

Resolution

2007-12-31T12:20:00.001-05:00

Back in Pittsburgh for some good, serious vacationing. My watch battery died about two months ago and I never got it replaced. I don't even know where my watch is these days. I still manage to be on time to everything, but I thought I would miss it and I haven't.

It's after noon. I haven't gone outside yet today. Still working on a bottle of Vitamin Water and waiting to see how the pound cake I had for breakfast works things out with my stomach. If things go well, I can go out and explore and visit my old neighborhood, which I surprise myself by missing.

The stomach thing is mysterious and obnoxious. Occasionally it hurts, most of the time it's just all weird and topsy-turvy, and every couple of days it keeps me horizontal for much longer than I'd prefer. I'm told that my symptoms resemble morning sickness, only I'm not pregnant and it's been going on for eight months. It's annoying because it's not that big a deal—I'm not deathly ill—but causes me to cancel plans fairly often, and I really hate canceling plans.

Still, it's good to be in Pittsburgh.

James is at work and I'm in his bedroom, listening to the clock tick off the seconds. This room has always been peaceful, for me. I remember waking up here last November, on an impromptu weekend visit, and listening to the rain spattering on the windows and the city buses going by outside. I remember the first time I was ever in this room. The way the hardwood feels under my feet (dry and dusty, not varnish-sticky like the floor in my apartment). The vague sweet smell of tobacco in the hallways. The cold water gurgling and splashing on the surface of the white bathroom sink.

I tend to see my life in chunks. Phases of less than a year, usually, separated by important events. The year I worked at the bakery, the six months at the yarn shop, year at Starbucks, year at the bank, summer before law school. The time I lived in Seattle before I moved here. Since law school started, I subdivide by semesters, and sometimes further. Sometimes just meeting a new person starts a new phase, and I don't even know it at first. Meeting James was like that.

James doesn't like not knowing what's going to happen in his life. We were talking about this last night. Maybe back to school, or not; maybe a new job, but not sure what; maybe staying here, maybe looking for a new place to live. I don't have to think about those things. I'm halfway through a three-year program. I know where I'm going to be and what I'm going to be doing until May of 2009. I like this. Less wondering means less worrying, and that means more available brain-space to think about more fun things. Go to law school; be a lawyer. That's the plan.

But outside of that, there is no plan, and I don't know much. I like the city (this city, anyway) and the country. I like being alone and I like being around people. I enjoy learning about tax law and think I'd enjoy practicing it, but I also really love to write, and wonder sometimes if maybe that isn't my true vocation. And then there's the whole question of getting married again and having kids. I think I'd probably love it. But I don't know.

It's hard not to let myself regress in certain ways when I come back to Pittsburgh. Things seemed simpler when I lived here. I didn't have so many decisions to make. I didn't have so much freedom.

I'd like to try to stop breaking down my life into those little chunks. To live a life more like a novel and less like a collection of short stories. Chapters that add up into something bigger. I'd like to get some of these big decisions taken care of and make some choices about how to live my life. But I'm not ready to make those decisions yet. It's tempting to just try to make them anyway, just to have things decided, but I'm doing my best to resist.

Well, there's my new year's resolution, then, ironically enough: don't seek resolution for its own sake. Try to cultivate some amount of comfort with the unknown (which, after all, we only ever manage to escape in one way, and not one I'm eager to experience). Oh, and try not to let my stupid stomach keep me home quite so much. I don't want to turn into a recluse.

Happy New Year.

Relief

2007-12-19T14:46:00.001-05:00

Another semester has ended, and as usual, I don't realize how stressed out I am until the pressure eases. The Honor Code officially prevents me from saying how any of my exams went, but I will say that all four of them made me nervous and I'm glad they're over. And not at all anxious to see how I did, which is good, since I'm sure I won't find out for at least a month.

It's been a difficult semester, not because of the classes but because I've had to figure out how to do school while having a lot of health issues. I hope that next semester will be better, and I'm seeing various doctors over the break to try to make sure that it turns out that way.

I don't have anything too profound to say. I'm just taking a couple of hours now to relax and decompress, and it is incredibly nice not to have to stare guiltily at a pile of books while doing so.

Some Things I've Been Doing

2007-11-18T10:33:00.000-05:00

I'm knitting myself an orange sweater. Three years ago I found a little rust-colored cardigan at the Goodwill store on the South Side. It was shetland wool and had adorable embroidered flowers on it. It was exactly the sort of thing no one would ever expect me to wear, and I loved it. Sadly, it got attacked by moths, and I was only a size 4 for about six months anyway, so I had to throw it out. In memory of that sweater I'm knitting myself a new one, in paprika-colored merino. It's almost done.

I made chicken soup from scratch for the first time. It takes a very long time and proportionately little work. You have to simmer the chicken carcass with aromatics for hours, then strain the soup and set aside the chicken meat and let the stock cook over low heat for another hour or so while you periodically skim off the gelatin that's rendered from the chicken bones. Then you chill it so you can lift the fat off. And then you heat it up again, season the heck out of it and add the meat back in along with whatever else you want in there, which in my case is egg noodles, lima beans and corn. I've decided that making soup from scratch is a lot like knitting sweaters. It takes a long time, but it's mostly fun (though occasionally tedious), and while you can buy something cheaper and more quickly, it's just not going to be as good as homemade.

I went and saw Jamie and Emily get married out in Iowa last month. It's the first time I've been in a wedding other than my own (I was the maid of honor). I had a lot of pre-wedding anxiety about such things as being surrounded by the bride's and groom's huge families primarily made up of people I'd never met, flying on little bitty jets between small-town airports, giving a toast, and getting in the way while staying in the bride and groom's guest room, but it turned out that none of that stuff was actually problematic and I had a great time. It was also exciting to be introduced to a whole new region of the country, as this is the first time I've been west of Indiana and east of Arizona. Iowa was not as boring as I'd been led to believe.

This only makes me more inclined to go on a big American road trip when I graduate law school, rather than absconding for Europe as I've heard many people do after taking the bar.

I've been teaching yet more of my friends to play bridge. I played poker for the first time, and while I lost quickly, it was only $5 and I'm willing to go back for more. I've been studying, shopping, working on my first cite check for the Tax Review, and generally getting enough sleep. There were Christmas carols playing at the mall in Short Pump yesterday. The semester is winding down.

Peace

2007-10-22T17:25:00.000-04:00

After weeks and weeks, it finally rained here in Charlottesville. It woke me up right at 6:00 in the morning on Friday. At first, I thought, "What is that sound?" It sounded like television static, or like my upstairs neighbor was running his dishwasher. Then as I shook off the sleep-fog, I realized it was the sound of a downpour. I got up and went over to the window and just stood there for a minute, watching the rain fall in the dim pre-dawn light and feeling the wind on my face.

The air has that feeling again tonight: it feels soft somehow, and there's a breeze that's just a little too vigorous to be friendly.

I've been craving quiet lately, and enjoying spending time alone. I used to find it lonely in the evenings with no roommates to keep me company. Last year I would stay up long after I was tired enough to sleep, just to talk to people online whom I was going to see the next day at school anyway. I haven't figured out what's different now. Life just feels less urgent, I guess.

It's a good feeling. I hope I can hang onto it for a while.

Some Things I Miss

2007-10-13T14:50:00.000-04:00

I'm in Pittsburgh, again, or still. Fall break was this past week, and I haven't gone back home yet (though tomorrow's the day). I love law school—I'm even through what I think is the most stressful part now—but I've stayed away long enough this time that I remember what my life was like before, and what I miss now that I'm in Virginia.

I miss quittin' time. You know, that time of day, on a weekday, when you can call anyone you want and not worry about interrupting them, because you know they're at the grocery store, watching bad TV, having a beer in a noisy bar, or doing something other than working. We don't really have that in law school, and I gather that much of the legal profession doesn't either. But yesterday, James called me at 5:00 when he was done with work and asked me if I wanted to go meet some friends of his for a beer, and we did, and it was great. And the day before that, he picked me up after he was done with work (I had spent the whole day studying) and we went and got dinner at a Filipino place and then went home and lay around watching Doctor Who. I just... miss that. Maybe what that means is I need to impose a dinner-hour "quittin' time" for myself, but I have a feeling it won't be the same, because most of my friends either get their best work done in the evenings or go home then and have dinner with their spouses. And I wouldn't want to interfere with that.

I miss the crazy bigness of this place. It's not the biggest city I've called home—both Seattle and DC are about half again as big, population-wise—but it's probably the one where I've done the most exploring, and certainly the one where I've been the most mobile. The other night, in deciding where to go for an after-work drink, we first had to pick a neighborhood. Neighborhoods are everything around here. They all feel so different from one another. We picked Regent Square, and went and drank East End Brewing Company beers on draught at the Map Room, and walked in the dusk and drizzle. Living here is like living in twenty different cities at once.

I've missed the view of the Birmingham Bridge over the Mon from the Boulevard of the Allies, driving east out of town. Some days it's more magnificent than others, but it's always remarkable. Sometimes it's the hugeness of the overcast sky that gets me; other times it's the brilliance of the sunlight shining on the face of the river. Every once in a while it's the fact that I can see so many different lanes of traffic, all going different places at different speeds. It's an arresting view, and I miss it.

And of course, I miss James. I mean, I'm going to see him in a couple of hours, but of course what I mean is that I miss having him with me day-to-day. He's not perfect, and neither am I, but together we are darn close to it. He pushes me to be my best self without even trying, because I want so much to be good to him that I resist my tendencies to be lazy, and selfish, and uncommunicative. We work well together. We live well together. And I'm still learning more about him, and more about how to get along with him. Three years now we've known each other. We've learned to be patient, to give each other the benefit of the doubt, to express ourselves better. It's nice, and I miss him.

So I'm moving back here. Not now, of course, but I'll be here for the summer, and I'll move back after law school. No sense in being cryptic anymore since I've accepted the job offer. I'm thinking about neighborhoods now, and where I want to settle down, at least for a few years.

It's good to have settled on a home.

Hectic

2007-10-02T07:23:00.001-04:00

So apparently the beginning of 2L year means I don't blog for almost a month, as well as all sorts of other chaos. For example, my car air conditioning is kaput again. I guess that means I do have a leak, since I just got it charged in May. Fortunately, the weather is now cool enough that I can put off taking it in to be fixed. Also, the other day I was doing laundry and my bottle of detergent fell off the top of the dryer and its lid shattered. Half a bottle of detergent gushed all over my laundry room floor. That was pretty obnoxious.

In my spare time, I seem to have entered the moot court competition (though I don't know yet whether I've the first round cut), tried out for and made the Tax Review, and gotten a job. I'll refrain from babbling too much about the job, because I haven't actually accepted it yet, but it was my first choice going into OGI, and I'll be accepting it as soon as I get the details in the mail. I'm so happy to be going back to Pittsburgh.

I really want things to slow down now. Please. I spent all of this past weekend being antisocial and doing such things as going to bed before 10 and watching football alone because I just needed some down time.

Next week is fall break. James is going to come down for a visit and I'm just so excited. I think we've planned more meals than humans can eat in the allotted amount of time, so we'll have to save some for future visits, but I have to make sure to take James for gelato. Apparently Splendora's is better than the gelato at the chocolate shop in the Strip. Fall break should be nice. It's been a long semester already.

Cheery

2007-09-08T09:13:00.000-04:00

Evidence that I am really, truly unhooked from caffeine: yesterday I got bouncing-off-the-walls hyper from a cup each of green tea and hot chocolate over the course of about three hours. Wasn't even on an empty stomach either.

This is shaping up to be a bizarre weekend. There is an overabundance of interesting football to be watched. I also have a ton of work to do—not work that I have to do for Monday, but work that I actually want to do that is not due within 24 hours. Shocking. Also, the school routine seems to have set in. I can tell because I woke up at 7:30 this morning without an alarm.

This is definitely the best semester I've had so far. Awesome classes, tons to do, but I don't feel stressed out by it (yet).

My neighbor is playing loud dance music at 9 a.m. on a Saturday and I don't even mind...

Headaches Make Me Slow

2007-08-12T19:50:00.001-04:00

I get headaches. Maybe a migraine every month or two and a less horrible, headache every couple of weeks. I've gotten headaches since I was eleven or twelve, and I always took Advil for them even though Advil didn't really work. When Aleve hit the market, I tried that, and it very occasionally worked. Then I discovered Excedrin, which worked so well for me that it could even kill a migraine in less than an hour.

So I've been ill for a while (stomach issues) and I've had to give up coffee. I used to drink quite a bit of coffee, so this was a pretty major adjustment, and if I'd used Excedrin to fend off the headaches that ensued, I would never get over my addiction to caffeine. So for the first week or so sans coffee, whenever I got a headache I'd just lie down for a while and hope it wore off, and eventually it did.

Then I got a headache in Pittsburgh, and James gave me aspirin. It worked. Finally I bought some of my own. It's gotten rid of every headache I've had since then in less than half an hour.

Why did it not occur to me to try aspirin when it's one of the three ingredients in Excedrin?

Saturday at the Law School

2007-08-11T15:39:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to think whether I ever came in on a Saturday last year, other than the one time I took a Saturday morning exam. I don't think I did. I'd come in on Sunday afternoons sometimes, after church, and spend a few hours reading in the quiet study room off of Scott Commons, and on my way in on those days I'd always notice how beautiful the landscaping is around the school, and how nice a building it is.

I'm here today because I had a bit of summer work that I actually physically needed to be in the library to do (a rare occurrence) and I put it off until the last possible moment (unfortunately not so rare). I've now gotten that bit of work done, and I've also noticed some things.

There are people here in the library on Saturdays for unknown reasons and doing unknown things. Okay, there's the guy with the Greenberry's travel mug who always inhabits the back corner table in the main reference room, but there are others. A teenage boy with a four- or five-year-old girl in tow: she runs up the stairs giggling and he chases her, making futile hushing sounds. A very tall, thin man in perfectly matched clothing: his pants, jacket and driving cap are all the same shade of khaki, and he pops in and out of the reference room, shuffling some papers around and walking very fast. What are these people doing here? I don't mind, of course—they're not bothering me, and the University's libraries are open to the public—I'm just curious. Why would you go to the law library on a Saturday afternoon if you didn't have work to do?

Although actually, it's quite nice. During the school year, I avoid the library. Too many people. On the other hand, I gravitate toward Scott Commons, where the population density is higher, so maybe that's not the issue; maybe it's too many people working. I thought of myself as a fairly diligent student last year. I did all my reading (except for one day's assignment in Contracts II that I missed because I was sick and then forgot about until I was cruelly reminded on exam day), I rarely missed a class, I read the recommended study aids and answered practice exam questions. But I did it all at breakneck speed and with only half my mind, since the other half was busy worrying about whether the work I was doing was good enough, and anything else it could think of that might provoke worry.

So the sight of other people being productive—say, opening a casebook, slowly turning pages, and then, maybe an hour later, closing the casebook and getting out another one—made me terribly nervous. Things weren't sinking in for me. I would read an assignment and then put the book away, whether or not I remembered what I had read. I was used to understanding things the first time, and I figured that if I didn't understand well enough, I would find that out from the class discussion. Oh, I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I just wasn't reading the right way.

Strange, perhaps, that I've learned this over the summer, when I didn't have to read much of anything, but I started practicing reading the way I always intended to read, but never managed before. I reread one of my favorite novels, Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. Normally, I would read a book like this in a day; possibly in a sitting, if I didn't get hungry or otherwise interrupted. I remember reading Nick Hornby's About a Boy when I lived in Seattle: I started in late afternoon, and closed the book several hours later to find that I was sitting in near-complete darkness. I don't even know how I managed to make out the words toward the end.

Anyway, this time around with Prodigal Summer, I read the first chapter, and then I put the book down. Twenty-three pages, and I managed to take half an hour to read it. I was kind of proud. I thought back over what I had read, telling myself the story again in my head. When I couldn't remember how the story went, I went back and checked. The next day, I read another similarly sized chunk of the book. I couldn't quite keep up my slow pace, but I made the book last a week. I'm on my third week now of Sophie's Choice.

My point is that I should be reading like this for school, yes, but it's also about focus, deliberateness, concentration. I'm more of the breakneck-speed type. I'm reminded of a scheme that my seventh-grade English teacher had in which we would get a certain number of extra credit points for each page of creative writing we turned in. I asked whether a poem counted as a page, and she said yes. I handed in one hundred poems that quarter; I probably wrote them all in a couple of weeks. The extra credit policy changed after that.

I haven't been able to focus very well for a couple of years. Sometimes I wonder whether it has to do with the conversational style I developed with James, which is meandering and impulsive and which, when it veers off track, almost never finds its way back anytime soon. But really I think it has more to do with the constant what-if narrative I get going in my head. What if this reading takes me forever and I have to stay up late to finish it and I sleep through my alarm? (For reference, I have never once slept through a properly functioning alarm.) What if my memo is terrible and unconvincing and I hate my work so much I can hardly stand to turn it in? (Hmm. Welcome to 1L year.) And so forth. In essence, they all boil down to something like: what if I somehow humiliate myself?

So, turns out, humility is a good thing. Turns out I'm good at some things (editing) and bad at others (memorizing). I am not the greatest student ever in the history of Virginia Law. [cough] Not by a long shot.

Thus humbled, I'm ready to start another year of school. One in which I intend to do less and do it better. One in which I hope to focus on the things I do, and not the things I think I should be doing.

The view from the library is beautiful, by the way, which is what I set out to say a good half an hour ago. Out the window I see a row of locust trees, mottled with yellow leaves and the occasional burst of orange; a giant monarch butterfly circles nearby, repeatedly slamming into the window before moving on to less difficult environs. In the garden, the fountain bubbles, soon to be surrounded by crowds of new students lining up for barbecue and cole slaw. Sun reflects off of the roof of Caplin Pavilion. It is so bright I can't look at it directly.

An Abundance of Riches

2007-08-01T14:41:00.000-04:00

I went up to Pittsburgh last weekend, on a trip that was planned at 10:30 on Thursday night and began at noon on Friday. Normally I'm not much of a seat-of-my-pants kind of person, but James pointed out that sometimes the seat of your pants is the only thing you can really count on. So to speak.

I had a funeral and a graduation party to attend, both in one day, which was a little surreal but not bad (several hours intervened), and took me to two parts of Allegheny County I'd never seen before (Moon Township and McKees Rocks). I also got to spend some time with James, though he had to work on Saturday, and see his family, and I stopped and spent the night at my parents' place on my way back to Charlottesville, which was great. Well worth the many hours in the car, even with an hour of mostly sitting still in a cloud of exhaust because a car broke down in the middle of I-66 right after road work had caused four lanes to merge into two.

It's funny how many of the things I feel about Pittsburgh resemble my first impressions of Charlottesville when I started coming down here to visit Jeff in 1997. Both cities are much more than they appear to be: full of hidden treasures, impossible to explore thoroughly, and beautiful in disarming ways. Both have a plethora of restaurants worth visiting, and places to buy cheap, fresh food. I especially love Pittsburgh for its unpretentiousness (which makes the isolated pockets of high-society snobbery more amusing than alienating), which most of Charlottesville does still have, despite the influx of yuppies after having been named America's #1 City a few years ago.

Both cities have bizarre and unpredictable weather. My first January in Charlottesville, there was a week of ice storms. It was unseasonably cold, and everything just froze solid. Then the temperature rose over thirty degrees in a matter of hours, and as we drove on the back roads in Ivy, I could see the ice and snow sublimating, and great clouds of steam rose from the asphalt. There followed a week of sixty-degree days, when even with most of the students gone for break, the Corner was absolutely packed, and people were picnicking on the grass everywhere I looked. And I recently read a line about Pittsburgh's weather that brought it all back to me: a blogger mentioned that on a typical day in February, she would leave the house in a coat, hat, gloves, scarf and sunglasses. Pittsburgh is where I learned that if the temperature is below ten degrees, you can tell because your nose hair freezes. I also learned to clear a windshield of snow and ice in less than a minute (most of the time). The summers are usually stiflingly hot, and they stay that way into the night because of the way the city hangs onto the heat. But Pittsburgh also has long, glorious autumns. And, truth be told, I miss the cold down here.

Interview season is coming up, and I'll have to make some decisions about where I'd like to work next summer, as well as where I'd like to settle after law school. This is really hard. On the one hand, I'm kind of afraid to go to a new city—what if I fall in love with it, too, and have to add another entry to my list of places I miss when I'm not there? But on the other hand, what great town might be out there, perfect for me, just waiting for me to discover it?

As I narrow down the choices, I'll have fall classes to think about, friends returning from their summer jobs all over the place, and (woohoo!) the beginning of football season, which will find me, I'm sure, drinking Yuengling in a Charlottesville bar and rooting for the Steelers.

Breaking the Pattern

2007-07-22T13:15:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of things I think of writing that I don't post here (or anywhere else). Not because they're shocking, or private, or boring, but because they don't fit the mold of my blog. They don't have that calm, pastoral quality and/or I can't think of a concluding insightful comment with which to end the post.

All this results in me not blogging very often. Have I mentioned that I'm kind of obsessive about systems? When I was applying for firms, I developed this system: start going through the list of firms interviewing on grounds in alphabetical order. For each firm, check to see if it's just IP/patent stuff they're interviewing for; if not, check the Vault "best firms in [whatever city]" guide and read the blurb if it's there; if it isn't, go to the firm's website and read its "careers" section; if I'm still interested, check the law school's GPA spreadsheet to see if I have a chance of getting an interview; if so, apply; if not, move on. Because I had this system in place, deciding what firms to apply for took me an entire weekend. Even after I realized that maybe I didn't need to be quite so rigorous about my choices, I couldn't stop until I'd gone through the whole list using my system.

Sometimes this obsessiveness is a really bad thing. I used to keep an online journal, six or seven years ago, in which I wrote very nearly every day for over a year. It was a great outlet for me. Then I quit writing every day, and was so upset with myself for breaking my streak that I never started up again.

At church today we got a great homily about how perfectionism is destructive. Our priest (whom I just love) shuffled over to the lectern, put on his reading glasses, got out the Bible and turned to Genesis. "If this doesn't cure your perfectionism," he said, "nothing ever will. We have this whole story about the six days of creation" (forgive me—I'm paraphrasing) "where God creates everything: the sky, the earth, the plants and animals, and finally, he creates mankind. And then we come to the part at the end of the sixth day, and it says, 'God looked at all that he had made, and he saw that it was very good.' Not perfect, mind you—good! And that's why our weather isn't perfect, it's why our plants and animals aren't perfect, it's why we're not perfect. In our lives, we must not strive for perfection: we must strive for goodness."

Anyway, if things seem a little more frivolous and less capital-D Deep around these parts, that's why.

Drift

2007-07-16T11:33:00.000-04:00

I decided I needed a change of scenery today, so I headed to C'ville Coffee, which I've been meaning to check out. It's a bad sign when I order a double espresso ristretto and the barista says, "A double espresso what?" But sometimes they just call it "short," so I stuck with it. The second bad sign is the question, "For here?" The third is when the barista pulls shots into a pitcher rather than directly into a cup. And the fourth is when the store doesn't even own demitasses, and you get your espresso in a mug.

The espresso doesn't really taste like anything. I was worried it'd be sour and harsh, like bad espresso so often is, but it's actually just bland. Drinkable, but disappointing.

Anyway. The summer is going really well. This past weekend was a little stressful because the Powers that Be at the law school decided to make the deadlines for the first round of course registration and the first round of firm interview applications coincide. So I spent several days in a row glued to my computer, growing glassy-eyed as I clicked "Request Interview" over and over and pondered the relative importance of pro bono policies, dress codes, billable hour requirements, office locations and practice areas. Now, thankfully, all that is over, but I didn't really have a weekend.

On the other hand, I did have about a week and a half of vacation, including a weekend with my parents celebrating my dad's birthday and a week in Pittsburgh visiting James. It was all very nice and it's been incredibly hard getting back into the swing of things at home. With six weeks left now until school starts up again, I'm trying my best not to sleep away the rest of the summer.

Chill

2007-06-23T21:08:00.000-04:00

My car has air conditioning again!

I put off having it fixed for so long that I've kind of gotten used to driving everywhere with the windows down, and will probably continue to do so when it's not 90-some degrees out. But boy, is it nice to have an alternative.

This is the first time I've ever voluntarily taken my car in for service—usually something forces me to, like it needs its annual state inspection, or all my turn signals suddenly stop working at once. But no, I called them up and I said, "Fix the a/c and change the oil, please," and now, all of a sudden, I feel like a grown-up.

Hovering

2007-06-16T19:01:00.000-04:00

There is a rainbow-colored hot air balloon flying over the projects just south of where I live. A large group of people has congregated on the grass to watch the balloon fly overhead.

I'd do that if it weren't $200. To fly in the balloon, that is, not to watch it go by.

Secession

2007-06-16T18:12:00.000-04:00

A portion of my posts are leaving the Union and heading over to my new food blog, The Intuitive Cook. That means that incoming 1Ls looking for inside dirt on what it's like to go to UVa Law won't be bothered with my rambling about my farmer's market finds or my latest variety of cupcake. Unless they want to be, that is.

Confession

2007-06-15T23:53:00.000-04:00

It's June 15th, and I've just now filed my FAFSA.

On the one hand, I'm a huge slacker for doing it so late. On the other hand, at least I did it of my own accord and didn't wait for the University to send me a tuition bill...

Quiet

2007-06-14T10:50:00.000-04:00

It's a cool, gray day today, and pardon me if I sound crazy when I say that getting one of those here in Charlottesville in the middle of June is a real gift. Days like this make it easier for me to think, to write, to be alone at home and not get restless. They're part of the reason I'm contemplating a move back to Seattle when I graduate in two years. Seattle has a lot of these days.

It's been a really good summer so far. Trip to Pittsburgh, tons of cooking, game nights with friends, a visit from my high school buddy Matt, hiking in Shenandoah, swimming in the Ivy Gardens pool, yoga classes, and, of course, time at the law school with the profs and the other research assistants. My apartment is still a mess and I still haven't gotten my car air conditioning fixed, but nothing's ever perfect.

I can see mountains out of my apartment windows. I didn't even notice that when I rented the place.

Everything in my little herb garden is still alive, so far. One month and counting.

We've had four straight days of thunderstorms. Let's see if today turns into number five.

Balance

2007-05-31T09:46:00.000-04:00

I don't want to work. I just want to... um... cook... and clean... all day. And knit, and drink coffee, and go for a walk maybe.

Actually, my work is pretty cool. I'm working for my Legal Research and Writing professor this summer, producing some new materials for next year's 1Ls. I get to create a new federal statutory memo assignment! Which probably excites exactly one person. You guessed it.

Anyway, I do actually want to work, but I don't want to end up with the same headache today that I had yesterday, which I'm guessing was the product of too many hours staring at a computer screen. Paper doesn't make my head hurt. I may have to go into school and read some things on paper. Or else I could stay here and intersperse my screen-staring with cooking, cleaning, etc.

I made risotto the other night of which I am perhaps inordinately proud, but cooking things I dream up without recipes just makes me so happy. I call it Stuffed Grape Leaf Risotto, although it involves no grape leaves, because I based it on grape leaf filling, which is one of the only rice-based things I actually like. I started by melting some butter together with some olive oil (though you could use just olive oil to make it taste more mediterranean or to make it vegan) and throwing in a finely chopped scallion and a whole clove of garlic. I stirred those around over medium high heat for about two minutes. Then I stirred in a cup of arborio rice and cooked that for about a minute before starting to add, in roughly half-cup increments, about three cups of vegetable broth (I used Penzeys vegetable soup base) mixed with half a cup of lemon juice. You have to wait till each batch of liquid is absorbed before adding the next batch, and never stop stirring. (This is basic risotto-craft, but I'd never made risotto before, so it was new to me.) I also threw in a little kosher salt and a good bit of cracked black pepper. Altogether, it took about twenty minutes to add all of the liquid. Finally, I fished out the garlic clove and added about a quarter cup of golden raisins that I'd soaked in boiling water while making the risotto. The contrast between the savory, lemony rice and the sweet raisins really makes the dish. I'll be making this again for sure, perhaps with more raisins and maybe some pine nuts, if I feel like springing for them.

Today's dish, I think, is loubieh bi zayt, green beans stewed with tomatoes, olive oil, onions and garlic. My parents and I used to get this from the Lebanese Taverna when I was little, and although none of the recipes I've seen for it mentions this, the version I remember includes ground cloves, and the Lebanese Taverna menu confirms it. So I add cloves. There's something very powerful about the memories of the things we eat when we're young.

Learning to cook, and especially learning to cook without recipes, is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. Kind of like law school, actually. It involves a considerable investment of time and money, preoccupies me at weird times like when I'm in the shower or when I'm trying to sleep, occasionally impresses people, and makes other people think I'm crazy or wasting my time. And... it's fun.

Alien

2007-05-27T10:31:00.001-04:00

A quick follow-up to my last entry:

I'm in Pittsburgh for a week, relaxing, enjoying being with all the people I've missed over the past year. Last night, James and I went out for dinner with two of his good friends. I ordered the "Light Steak Salad," that is, a green salad with strips of steak on top. A normal steak salad around here comes with cheese and french fries in it.

The waitress, who was acting pretty flustered, came back about five minutes later looking concerned. "What kind of cheese did you want in your salad?" she asked me.

"Oh, I didn't want cheese, thanks."

The lightbulb went on. "Oh right, you ordered the Light."

After she left the table, James turned to me and said, "And that's why you're not allowed to 'Stand Up and Tell 'Em You're From Pittsburgh.' A steak salad comes with cheese and fries. That's what makes it a steak salad."

"I can't get my salad the way I want it?"

"Oh, you can," he says, "it just makes you not From Pittsburgh."

"Wisdom"

2007-05-13T22:23:00.000-04:00

Now that 1L year is over, it seems appropriate for me to do a bit of reflection. Yes, I know this entire blog is me reflecting. What I mean is that it seems appropriate for me to write something that could conceivably be applicable to other people. Therefore, I give you:

Ten Things I Learned During 1L Year

The answer to every question beginning with "Should I?" is either "it depends," "it doesn't matter," or "whatever works for you." Should I do journal tryout? It depends. Should I go to Dandelion, Foxfields, the PILA Auction, Feb Club parties, Barrister's, or bar review? It doesn't matter. Should I print out my outline or read it off of my laptop — or should I outline at all? Whatever works for you.
The Supreme Court is just making stuff up. This is because, being the highest court in the country, the Supreme Court doesn't have any precedent to bind it. Whatever the lower courts have said, it can ignore; whatever the Supreme Court itself has said, it can overrule.
There is no 1L class so horrible that you cannot learn the material well enough to pass the exam. I had two classes this year — one in the fall and one in the spring — in which I felt completely helpless for most of the semester. In both classes, I found myself some helpful supplements, buckled down during reading period, and learned the material well enough to take the exams without having any "what the heck is this question supposed to mean?" moments. You are not going to fail unless you give up completely.
Grades, journals, interviews, and all the rest of it: nothing about law school is more important than retaining your sanity. Get enough sleep. Eat like a human being. Go outside every day. Have conversations, play games, go out to movies, be silly. Have fun, for crying out loud. We're all here in part because we have incredibly high standards for ourselves, so it's not easy for us to relax and let go, but we have to. Better to graduate with a soul than a killer résumé.
Insecurity is the most dangerous trap into which you can fall. Insecurity can lead you to sign up for activities you have no interest in, waste days reformatting an outline you already have memorized, run yourself ragged trying to get a firm job 1L summer when you really want to work for a professor, and so on. You probably have a good head on your shoulders and a good sense of when you're doing something that makes sense and when you're expending a lot of energy on nothing much. Pay attention to that nagging feeling that you're wasting your time. You are good enough. One of my peer advisors repeated to me what one of his peer advisors told him last year: "Never let someone else's dream become your own." That sums up this point nicely.
Staying out of the gossip mill is extremely difficult, but worth the trouble. What is it about law students that makes us so infernally nosy? For some reason, drama seems to fill every spare moment, as well as many that aren't spare, especially during exams. Rehearse the following phrases, out of which you will get a lot of mileage:
- "I don't know."
- "You should probably ask him that yourself."
- "I don't know her all that well, but she seems nice."
- "It's really got nothing to do with me."
- "I don't give it a whole lot of thought."
Also, pick a very patient friend in another city who's willing to listen to you babble about all the personal stuff you don't want entering the rumor mill.
Cold calls are not to be feared. What's the worst that can happen? You look like an idiot in front of your classmates and your professor. That's likely to happen at least once during 1L year no matter how prepared you are, so it's no crisis. Don't freak out, just listen carefully to the professor and he or she will often lead you where you're meant to go.
Understanding the question gets you halfway to the answer. This is true on exams and in class. Make sure you know what you're being asked. The firehose approach to question-answering is not popular in law school: it wastes everyone's time, and if it answers the question, it does so only by accident. Answer what you're being asked.
Reading, taking notes and paying attention in class are not ends in themselves, but rather ways of preparing for the exam. Once you've been called on in a 90-student class, it's easy to justify skipping the reading for the next few weeks... after all, you're not going to get called on again, at least for a while. But after a couple of classes for which you haven't read, you end up zoning out, and by the end of the semester, you have nothing to go on but an email inbox full of your classmates' forwarded notes, a vague recollection of some class discussion that didn't make much sense, and a page of the syllabus on which none of the case names even rings a bell. Keeping up is easier than catching up.
Get to know your professors. They're excited about getting to know you. They know a lot, and what they don't know, they can help you find out. There was more than one time in the past year when it was a professor who helped me get through a rough patch. And taking them out to lunch is fun.

I should note that I learned all of these things by screwing them up. And to be honest, I expect that most of next year's 1Ls will screw most of them up too. We all seem to fall into the same traps — I guess it's the nature of the beast, or maybe just the nature of the way the beast is marketed to us. So I guess the biggest tip of all is: ignore pretty much everything you're told about law school. There's nothing mystical about it. It's a job. You go in every day, do your work, sometimes feel inadequate, sometimes feel like the champion of the world, get sick, get tired, get bored, get frustrated, and count down the days till you're on vacation. But for me, and for many of my friends, this is a really great job. It's helpful to try to remember that.

And one other thing, apropos of nothing. Y'all have to watch this video: it's "Stand Up and Tell 'Em You're From Pittsburgh," a little motivational song that Pittsburgh's NBC affiliate, WPXI, runs during commercial breaks sometimes. It's so corny that I can't help but laugh when I watch it, but it still gets me a little choked up. The bridges! The stadiums! The parks! The architecture! The nighttime shots of downtown! I don't actually have to technically be from Pittsburgh to be allowed to "stand up and tell 'em" that I am, right?

Note to self: interview with Pittsburgh firms for next summer.

Euphoria

2007-05-12T10:47:00.000-04:00

So, the misery that was finals season is over and I have now entered the next phase of my life: the one where I wake up feeling good, spend time doing things I enjoy, and am obnoxiously cheerful.

Yesterday after taking my con law exam, I walked through the Withers-Brown hallway standing up straighter, I think, than I have in months. "We Are the Champions" played in my head. I went to Scott Commons and hugged a lot of people. Then I went out to Chili's with Cathy, where I undoubtedly irritated other patrons with my too-loud, sleep-deprived babble, and downed more sugar than I have in a long time in the form of two Blackberry Lemonades. Next I went home and took a nap, which I haven't been able to do since... oh, sometime in September. Then I talked on the phone with James for four hours, made myself a grilled cheese sandwich, watched five episodes of the Real World, and slept the sleep of the dead.

This morning I awoke with two thoughts in my head. One, I haven't slept like that in ages. And two, it's a Saturday morning between April and October, and that means it's City Market time.

I am lucky enough to live about three blocks from the parking lot where City Market is staged. So I threw on some clothes, stopped by the Mudhouse for a quick espresso, and headed on over. I bought a basil plant to add to my windowsill herb garden, as well as a quart of locally-grown strawberries, a head of lettuce that smells better than I thought lettuce could smell, a baking-powder biscuit with country ham, a jar of habañero jelly, and a cinnamon-sugar cake donut that the vendor cooked right before my eyes. I also saw no fewer than five vendors selling fresh-from-the-farm eggs, as well as a couple selling chickens and pork butts out of the back of their van. The City Market is no less than a delight.

Now that con law is over, I kind of like it. Is that wrong? All credit to Erwin Chemerinsky, whose book not only taught me con law, but was really interesting. Not that I ever intend to take another con law class, mind you. There's way too much other stuff I want to take, and I only have two years left.

Oh! Yeah. I guess I'm a 2L now. Getting through 1L year was not the hardest thing I've ever done, but it was the most protracted hard thing I've ever done. Most of it was fun. I'm incredibly glad it's over.

Progress

2007-05-04T18:06:00.000-04:00

People deal with stress in all different ways.

Today I took a long walk. On the way I stopped at the Mudhouse. I walked up to the counter and ordered a double espresso ristretto. The barista worked on it for about five minutes, apologizing, saying the shots were pulling long today, but he wanted to get it right. Finally he handed me my little demitasse cup, filled with two ounces of espresso, beautiful speckled crema, miniature spoon alongside. I poured a line of sugar across the top and stirred it in, then drank it: five sips. Perfect.

Yesterday before I went to take my property exam I cleaned my bathroom. I planned this. I built in time to my morning so that I would be able to leave for my property exam with a clean bathroom. What can I say? It helped.

There have been a lot of those times in the past few days, times when I've had a feeling that I needed to do something very particular to feel okay. My anxiety has been bad. I've always worried a lot, but this isn't the same thing as worrying. It's a physical thing. And while long walks and perfect espresso and clean bathrooms help, they don't fix it. So next week I'm going to take a break from studying for con law and go find myself someone to talk to about fixing the problem. I'm willing to work at it. It's just figuring out how to work at it — what, specifically, to do — that's exhausting. And then I don't have the energy for doing the stuff other than the stuff I'm trying to do to help the anxiety. And that stuff — the stuff I don't have the energy for — is the stuff I like.

I went clothes shopping today too. I bought, among other things, silver flip-flops. I don't know how anyone wears flip-flops, but I thought I'd give it a shot and see if they still hurt my toes just as much as they used to. And now I'm going to do something else that, historically speaking, I hate: go on an epic grocery shopping trip. Because I need to have enough food in the house so that I can eat when I get hungry without having to be creative all the time.

I've taken two exams now, and I'm taking my third tomorrow morning, leaving just one (yes, of course, con law) for next week. I've actually handled this exam thing very well, both in terms of planning and of execution.

All right. Grocery shopping can be forestalled no longer, or it won't happen at all and I'll be eating Nutella out of the jar again. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Drive

2007-05-02T01:16:00.000-04:00

I went for a drive tonight. I think that's the first time I've ever done that, just gone out and gotten in my car with no particular destination in mind. That's a dangerous proposition for me — well, not literally dangerous, but somewhat daring, considering that I have no sense of direction whatsoever. But I was sitting in my living room, having failed at studying for Property, feeling restless and not having any luck at finding people to blow off studying with me. So I figured that going out for a drive would be better than sitting on my couch being angry with myself for not being able to concentrate, and so I got up and went.

Initially I planned to drive south on 29, because I remember 29 South being very pretty. Two things dissuaded me: one, I couldn't remember how to get on 29 South without driving down the irritating part of Emmet Street (yes, I figured it out eventually); and two, I haven't been down there in a long time and I was craving something a little more familiar. So I decided to drive west on 250 into Ivy.

I must have made that trip a hundred times at least, from Jeff's mom's old house in Ivy into town and back, but always as a passenger. Jeff always drove, either his little red Civic hatchback, or, before that, the big yellow station wagon that his sister inherited when he graduated. There are a few landmarks that I remembered — the Ivy Nursery, the Boar's Head, the Volvo dealership — but the road didn't feel nearly as familiar as I expected it to. I got tailgated into Ivy because it just doesn't feel right to me to drive 55 on a winding two-lane road. Then I took a right on Owensville and went to visit Jeff's old house.

I didn't actually drive up to the house, because people I don't know live there now. It's been almost ten years now since the first night I spent in Jeff's mom's sewing room. That house was always a comfortable, happy place for me, and it was nice to visit.

I kept driving out Owensville Road, until it dead-ended, then turned onto Garth and headed back toward town. I passed horses, cows, thousands of azalea blossoms in full bloom, and some of the greenest grass I've ever seen. I saw the sun set and the moon rise, full, low on the horizon, yellow and shrouded in mist. I had my windows down and my music up, singing along sometimes, sometimes not, breathing deeply so as not to miss the smells of sweet hay and onion grass or the brown-sugary scent of wood mulch. It's too early yet for crickets or cicadas, but they'll be along, I'm sure.

It turns out that Garth Road turns into Barracks Road as it heads back into town. Thus, I was dumped off of the comforting, quasi-rural two-lane highway just a few blocks from the Law School. I wasn't quite ready to go home, so I headed over to school to see whether I could find anyone there who didn't feel like studying either.

I parked around back by Scott Commons and went in and walked the halls a bit. This is the sort of thing I do when I get in moods like this. Here and there I spotted people I knew, mostly hard at work. I sat and chatted with a couple of my Property classmates about the exam, which we're all planning on taking in the next few days, and one of them explained a couple of cases to me that I hadn't been able to understand. Then I ended up chatting with various other people until almost one in the morning.

Very little studying got done today, it's true. But the drive truly did me good, and so did the chatting. The law school during exam time really isn't so bad. I've been staying away because I always thought I'd find it stressful, but really, it's kind of comforting. Maybe I'll try studying there for a change.

And this part of Virginia is just so beautiful. I've felt somewhat disenchanted with Charlottesville recently, possibly because the parts of it that law students frequent are not the most charming ones, and possibly because I've just been having kind of a rough year. But the things you can see in an hour-long round-trip drive without ever leaving Albemarle County... well, I found myself a little breathless more than once.

I need to do that more. I'm told Earlysville Road is another lovely route. I'm sure I'll find out before finals are over.

When my Grandma Rosie died a few years ago, she left me the money that I used, in part, to buy my car. It's the first car I've ever bought for myself, nothing fancy, but I love it. And I know for sure that if Grandma Rosie could see me tonight, she'd be absolutely thrilled that, because of her, I was able to go out and drive around in the woods when I needed to.

There's one story I always find myself telling about Grandma Rosie because, to me, it so clearly represents who she was. When I was about seven, Grandma took me out to see the movie Willow. We went into the big, dark theater and sat down with our popcorn, and Grandma gave me a Tic-Tac out of her purse. Then the movie started. About ten minutes in, as I remember it, there was a scene in which a baby threw up. That absolutely terrified me, as my younger brother had had a string of stomach viruses that year, and I thought vomiting was the world's scariest thing. Grandma could tell I was upset, and when she asked if I wanted to leave, I said yes with much relief.

Outside it was sunny and warm. We walked home by way of the bookstore, and Grandma bought me a book and a bottle of orange juice. About halfway home, as we were crossing the street, I said, "I'm sorry I wasted your money, Grandma."

She looked down at me and smiled, and said, "The only way that would have been a waste of my money is if you'd sat through the rest of the movie and not enjoyed it." Then we walked the rest of the way home, and I wouldn't be surprised if she never even told the rest of the family that we hadn't stayed for the whole thing.

Grandma never said she was proud of me for anything I did. I didn't have to get straight As or be the best at anything. Grandma was proud of me for existing. And that day, she was proud of me for knowing what I needed to do, and for doing it.

As one of my friends put it tonight, as we sat amid the remains of Chinese takeout at a table in the low light of Scott Commons at midnight, this is the best job ever. We come in every day and spend our time learning interesting things from brilliant people while being surrounded by folks who are as nerdy as we are. It's a privilege to spend three years this way, and no three- or four-hour exam can invalidate that.

So drives in the country, and similar things, are the order of the day, every day, from now on. There's no virtue in misery for its own sake. Sad that it's taken me twenty years to learn that.

Orbit

2007-04-25T18:39:00.000-04:00

I was talking to a friend the other night who has just been through a traumatic experience, one that made her feel afraid to be alone, unsafe in her own home and uncomfortable with her thoughts. I guess most people probably go through this kind of trouble a few times in their lives. Some go through it over and over. Others seem to live their whole lives in a state like the one my friend found herself in.

Then there are the people who never seem to freak out, no matter what. I bet there are far more people like that than I've ever imagined there were, and I'm guessing that that's because they keep quiet about their problems. Maybe they don't even construe them as "problems" so much as "situations" or even "facts." Things happen. It's true.

I interact with the world around me in a particular way which is very consistent. I observe things carefully, especially interactions between people, and most especially interactions between other people and me. I do a lot of pushing and pulling in the course of my daily life. I push away the vast majority of people and things that surround me, and pull on a very few people very hard.

I do my best to control the ways in which I interact with particular friends. There's a woman in my section whom I really like a lot. Last semester, we walked over to get coffee together before Torts a few times, and I enjoyed chatting with her then. I always say hi to her when we pass each other in the hallway. From my interactions with her, you'd think we were barely acquainted. The truth is, I feel a genuine connection with this woman. There have been moments in our conversations when I've thought, I really want this person as a friend. But for some reason, I never think to call her and make plans, or even seek her out to eat lunch with. I have friends who fill those niches for me. I don't shift people's roles in my life unless something forces me to do so.

There are areas of the law school where I don't go. I don't have any good reason for avoiding those places except that I always have. I've never once studied in the library or in the Fishbowl. I don't like walking down to the parking lot past the JAG school, even though I've been told it's the shorter route, because that's not the route I took to get there at the beginning of the year. I don't even like adding new people to my AIM buddy list. It unnerves me to see a new name on there, messing up the order of my list, to which I've gotten so accustomed. And there are people on there I know I'll never initiate conversations with, but I don't remove them because their names belong there.

It's not just about what comes into my life, either: I want to control what I transmit, as well. I guess most people care about the images others have of them, so it's nothing special about me that I try to show people certain aspects of my personality and hide others. Still, I don't like what it does to me or my relationships with my friends. I feel like I've invested all this energy into projecting a version of myself who is infinitely strong, self-sufficient, patient and emotionally stable. When I have to let someone see that I don't always have those attributes, I feel like I've let that person down. That person thought he or she had a friend who was just terrific in these ways, and the truth is, I'm not so terrific. What a letdown the real me must be. How badly I've disappointed my friend.

I'm sick of this battle, and it's a losing one anyway. Nobody really has those illusions about me, and anyone who did would probably resent me for being inhuman. It's a lie I tell myself more effectively than I tell it to other people, and the person I'm letting down so severely is nobody but me.

It's exhausting, this constant pushing and pulling, this continuous effort to control my life so tightly, clinging to routines I don't even enjoy and passing up opportunities I wish I could take. It's human nature to be insecure, I'm told, but I'm not sure I believe that. Competitive, sure. Guarded, cautious, jealous, I believe. But insecure? Isn't my insecurity really just the fear that everyone is better than I am, or rather, that somebody is better than I am? And then, isn't it really just a perverse form of arrogance?

Here are some things about me I am afraid to admit. I get lonely easily. I don't work as hard as I should because I always want to reserve the ability to work harder in case my current efforts don't produce a product that meets my standards. I apologize to and thank people excessively because I want, but am never quite able to accept, their forgiveness for having imposed on them. I want people to see me as the kind of person I would want for a friend: wise, loving, socially appropriate, quick-witted, generous. But a lot of the time I am none of those things. Oh, and honest. I do my best, but sometimes even I lie, and not always about the most innocuous things, either.

The thing is, I confess these things to myself all the time, and every time I say to myself that I'm going to change them. But I'm not going to change them. I am not, ever, no matter what, going to be all of that good stuff all of the time. There are always going to be people who don't like me or who are indifferent to me, and some of them are going to be people whom I like very much. These aren't things I can fix. They're life. They're how things work, not just for me, but for everybody.

The other day I was behind a car whose license plate read JSTLTGO.

Just let go.

The things I've been clinging to aren't any good anyway.

Equilibrium

2007-04-16T23:53:00.000-04:00

I've been feeling pretty crummy lately, for no good reason, and since there's no real problem, that's pretty hard to fix. As a last resort, I find it always helps to poke fun at myself. Last night I asked James, "Any idea how to deal with the crippling pain of daily existence?"

First he laughed at me, which was what I was going for; but then he actually answered. "Well," he said, "I find it helpful to think of the big picture."

"And what exactly is the big picture?"

"Well, we're living relatively comfortable lives in the richest country in the world. In the scheme of things, we're doing pretty well."

I paused and considered that for a moment. "Yeah," I finally admitted, "I guess I did just eat Nutella straight from the jar with my finger."

All this to say: poor me. I'm fine. Everything's going well (except, as always, con law... always, always the exception for con law). Or at least, everything's going as it usually does. My upstairs neighbor is watching third-string reality shows and arena football, loudly. (Okay, he's just upgraded (?!) to Pimp My Ride.) I've been staying up too late and waking up too early. The weather is insane, which is fairly typical for Charlottesville at any time of year, and especially in the spring. Windstorms are fascinating to watch.

I'm pulling out all the stops to combat this melancholy. I even got my guitar out tonight for the first time since I moved here. My usual stress-relief tactic is cooking, and I've done a fair amount of that: pot roast for dinner last night, and the most delicious pancakes I've had in a long time the night before that. I've tried knitting, going for walks, calling and emailing friends with whom I've fallen out of touch. I wrote my first short story in five years. Still, the inexorable feeling of encroaching doom.

I guess the final tactic to be tried is waiting. That one pretty much always works.

On a different and undoubtedly more interesting topic, a friend asked me at dinner the other night, if I could demolish one structure that's been built in Charlottesville in the past ten years, what it would be. I asked for some parameters: could I, for example, pick the entire Old Lynchburg Road development corridor? No, he said, that would be too big. First I said Target, but then he reminded me that Target is way the heck up 29 where no one has to look at it who doesn't want to. In the end, I couldn't really think of anything. I picked JPJ, but not because I think UHall was any good, or because I have anything against JPJ itself; I just hate what it does to the traffic flow on event days. I do wish the Best Buy were still an Aunt Sarah's Pancake House, but for purely sentimental reasons: I never ate at Aunt Sarah's, but I remember I used to find it so charming when the sign out front advertised their fried chicken and waffles special. Oh, and if I could make the Cingular store just north of Barracks on 29 a Dunkin Donuts again, I'd be terribly pleased. It's hard to be sad when you're eating a blueberry cake donut.

What am I missing? There's got to be some deplorable building that I hate and have just forgotten about.

I want to go lie in a cornfield in Earlysville and go stargazing like I did when I was in undergrad. Bowling at Wayne Lanes, barbecue at the Blue Ridge Pig, hiking in Shenandoah. Too much of my life happens within a three-mile radius these days. I think I need to get a look at the big picture.

Breeze

2007-03-14T19:49:00.000-04:00

This warm weather is getting to me. It smells like summer outside, especially at night. I have all the windows open, and the sheers are blowing in the breeze. I can smell rain coming, though it's still hours away. It reminds me of all the nights James and I spent in the house up on the hill in Greenfield, sitting on the floor eating dinner off the coffee table in front of the TV, with the windows and the front door open, listening through the screen door to the neighbors talking about nothing. I miss that time.

It's funny how every city has its own smell when it gets warm. I've spent four summers in Charlottesville now and they've all smelled the same, and I haven't quite figured out what it is. Boxwoods, honeysuckle, sweet hay and wet dirt — that's the closest I can get. Arlington smells more like grass and lilies. Pittsburgh doesn't have boxwoods, but does have arbor vitae, which smells similar enough to fool me sometimes, and something else that grows down in the Run that smells like honeysuckle, but incredibly pungent and sneeze-inducing. Seattle smells like spruce needles and wood mulch, in the spring, Bradford pears, which (go ahead, tell me I'm nuts) smell like corn tortillas to me.

I sleep so much better with the windows open that it's like a totally different activity than sleeping with the windows closed. I wake up more easily, too. I wonder if it's that the temperature change and the ambient noise clue my body in to the fact that it's morning before I actually wake up. In any case, I've got a brief due tomorrow that's going to need some early-morning revision, so I hope that the aforementioned rule holds true and I sleep well and awaken easily.

Idle

2007-03-10T22:57:00.000-05:00

I locked my keys in my car today. With it running.

Okay, so I was at Pentagon City Mall and not out in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road, and I have AAA, and my mom was with me, and the weather was relatively nice, and the locksmith came in less than two hours and got me into my car without damaging anything. But still, boy do I feel stupid.

When we got home, my dad went online and bought me an extra door-opening keyfob thing. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it to make sure that I don't lock it in my car along with the original set of keys. I'm going to have to come up with something.

Anyway, this has been spring break week, which sadly ends tomorrow. I'm somewhat irritated that the daylight savings switch happens during the break, but also somewhat happy because that extra hour of daylight in the evening is going to be very nice. And it won't make much of a difference that it'll get light later in the mornings, because I now (finally!) have put curtains up in my bedroom. Or rather, one of my friends put them up for me. I shouldn't take the credit for that.

My dad and I have spent much of the past two days doing my taxes. I get money back from the federal government — yay! — but not that much — also yay! (because it means I didn't loan the government money interest-free) — but owe both Pennsylvania and Virginia taxes as well as Pittsburgh city taxes. Now, I worked for a bank that was located in Pittsburgh, and correctly printed my Pittsburgh address on my paychecks. Pittsburgh city tax is a flat 3%. Yet the bank deducted 1% instead. So I'm going to end up taking pretty much all of my federal refund and distributing it to various state and city governments. Fine, okay, I'm glad I don't owe. But it's a little irritating to have to go through all this paperwork to end up with nothing. Although it's better than last year, when I had to pay the city of Pittsburgh $348.50. The only reason I don't totally resent it is that I know how badly they need the money.

I've had a good break overall. I haven't accomplished much, which has been nice. I've cooked and baked some (pasta carbonara, some sort of Italian breaded chicken, pineapple upside down cake, blondies, tofu pitas with homemade tzatziki), watched a bunch of movies (can't remember what most of them were, but I finally saw The Shawshank Redemption), played Dance Dance Revolution twice, went hiking in Shenandoah National Park, and spent some time with my family. And yeah, I got some reading done. But altogether, it's been relaxing, probably largely because I haven't thought about con law for a good week.

Surfacing

2007-02-16T09:29:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the silence — I'm not dead or anything. Second semester just started off with more of a bang than a whimper. I've cleared a lot of space in my life recently and have been filling it (somewhat surprisingly) with school.

I guess a lot of people change their approaches to law school after getting first-semester grades back. I think the changes I've made have been less a reaction to my grades and more an attempt to avoid repeating the hellish experience of cramming for exams. Thus, I'm studying more, and especially studying more at school rather than at home (the very fact that I hate doing work there makes me much more likely to plow through it so I can get home, plus I don't have to lug books back and forth). Also, I think I'm finally starting to get over my shock at how many things we have to try out for here. You can't just sign up for stuff; everything's competitive. So I tried out to be a Dillard Fellow, and should hear back about that sometime next month, I guess. And I'm sacrificing the first three days of spring break to journal tryout. Between those two things and the brief we're working on for legal research, I'm becoming extremely friendly with the Bluebook.

I've also been cooking a lot more, which is great for a lot of reasons, and also occasionally comical. For some reason, I almost exclusively make dishes that I have never cooked before. Because I'm still pretty new at this, there are many such dishes. Wednesday night, for example, I decided to make chicken enchiladas. I had a package of boneless chicken thighs, which were on sale at Harris Teeter, and which I'd never worked with before at all. I stood around and pondered for about ten minutes how I should cook them, given that I was ultimately going to be shredding them, and decided to brown them over high heat in peanut oil, and then pour boiling water over them to cover so they could braise. (Is braise the right word? I don't know much about cooking terminology...) Anyway, the happy result of this technique was that after half an hour or so of braising, the chicken was both browned and tender enough to shred, and the boiling water had turned into chicken broth, which I then added back in to the shredded chicken along with taco seasoning. Then I had to address the fact that the only corn tortillas I'd been able to find were taco-sized ones. I ended up with a sort of enchilada casserole, with layers of chicken and sauce-soaked tortillas in a casserole dish, topped with cheese and sour cream. It came out pretty good, but from start to finish, with all the pondering and experimentation, it probably took about two hours. Somehow I always end up with the most time-consuming hobbies. At least this one feeds me.

Oh, if anyone knows how to make Con Law less painful, leave me a comment... I haven't thrown the casebook through a window yet, but I think that's mostly because it's 1600 pages long, and thus heavy.

Signs of Life

2007-01-10T10:28:00.001-05:00

I live in an apartment building that was not built to be an apartment building. It's beautiful, unique, conveniently situated and incredibly well-converted, with one exception: the floors. The floors are, they say, the original warehouse floors, which I don't buy at all because they're way too pretty, but the official word is that there's no soundproofing between floors because they wanted to retain authenticity. This is occasionally irritating and sometimes downright infuriating, such as when, on election night, my downstairs neighbor came knocking on my door to chide me, in the most condescending way I could imagine, for having a party. I apologized profusely, saying I understood the problem, because I got to hear the every move of my own upstairs neighbors, and promised to quiet everyone down immediately. But this was not good enough for her, and she kept scolding me. I hate to reinforce her behavior, but she did effectively keep me from having any more loud parties. But only because I don't want to have to try to find a polite way to shut the door in her face again.

The reason I found her so irritating, besides the fact that her tone of voice insinuated that I was a child and she (no older than me, I'm sure) was an adult, was that I've also found myself in the position of needing to go upstairs and ask the neighbors to quiet down. But I don't resent the upstairs neighbors for having people over and having a good time; these are great apartments, perfectly laid out for parties, with open floorplans and plenty of space, and it would be a shame not to put them to good use. The intensity of her anger also frustrated me because, even though I know what I can hear through my ceiling, I don't know how loud those upstairs neighbors are actually being, and so I don't know how quiet I have to be to avoid causing my downstairs neighbor pain. I try to be considerate, but on the other hand, sometimes I need to turn the TV up a little louder than normal so I can hear it 15 feet away as I fry bacon. I wouldn't hold it against my upstairs neighbor if he did the same, so I figure I'm within my rights.

The interesting thing is that, although my friends often comment on the clarity of the noises we can hear through my ceiling—and it is remarkable—they rarely bother me. In fact, it's bizarrely reassuring to hear other people going about their lives. More than once I've been lulled to sleep by the sound of my upstairs neighbor's clothes dryer or gently awakened by the sound of his shower. I guess it's probably a couple that lives up there, because I also sometimes hear a woman calling to her cat as the cat food clatters into the bowl. Late on weekend mornings, I get to hear the guy's morning-after phone calls to his buddies, which almost always start, "Yo, man, didja make it home last night?" or some variation on that theme. It's a little weird, and yes, I'm aware that this is not the most private place I've ever lived, and if I'm telling secrets I need to tell them quietly. The noise from upstairs can be irritating: do I need to know how much you hate USC and how sure you are that UCLA is going to kill them in today's football game? And what do you keep dropping on the floor that sounds like a sack of marbles? I can't begin to guess. Still, I like the feeling that I share this building with other humans, many about my age, all just trying to get through each day. And I like the little snippets of my neighbors' lives that I get through those supposedly-original floorboards.

Refocusing

2007-01-05T13:06:00.000-05:00

I thought about not blogging over the break, but I think I need the practice with words. After six weeks or so of continual foot-in-mouth incidents at the beginning of the semester, I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and I ought to clam up if I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to say. Now the pendulum has swung back too far in the opposite direction, and I keep finding myself surprised that people don't know what I think or how I feel about something, and then realizing that I haven't actually vocalized any of my thoughts on that subject.

To sum up: I need to talk.

I'm in Pittsburgh now, through the end of the week. This is such a simple city, a city that rarely asks more from you than you are willing to give it. It's very easy to live here when distracted, tired, or not feeling well. It's so cheap to live here that you can be out of work for a while, or work part-time pretty much indefinitely, and not have to worry about making ends meet. You don't have to leave your own neighborhood for much of anything. On the other hand, if you're feeling claustrophobic, there are zillions more places to go that have little in common with wherever you live. It's less a city than fifty or so small towns all pressed shoulder-to-shoulder against each other, plus downtown, which is its own animal.

The up side of Pittsburgh is also its down side: it doesn't challenge you. You can live here for years and spend the whole time treading water. You can also do incredible work here, if your motivation comes from within you, because the city presents so few obstacles.

If I move back here after finishing law school, I'll be making a real, definite choice to live here, a choice with a purpose behind it. I didn't do that when I moved here for the first time in 2002. Then, I came here because my fiancé wanted to come here and wanted me to come with him. I hated this place for the first two years I was here: I resented it for being something I hadn't chosen for myself, and felt like a timid houseguest everywhere I went, afraid to do anything other than put everything back just where I left it, afraid to claim any space for myself. Then for the next two years I largely ignored it: it was simply the backdrop for a more important drama that was unfolding, one that involved finding out what kind of work I wanted to do as well as finding out who I was all over again, post-marriage. If I move back here, this city will not be an adversary or a backdrop. I'll be moving here to interact directly with the city of Pittsburgh, doing what I can to shape and improve the landscape while helping the neighborhoods retain their character. I hope that I'll be doing that no matter where I end up.

It's exciting to see the city through that kind of lens now. And it gives my work in law school a focus, a purpose, other than just learning about the law because it's interesting, or proving to myself that I can still study and learn. Pittsburgh is so far from being perfect that it's often frustrating. But it's so full of character, so different from the sanitized, strip-mall-filled cities that I find dehumanizing, so potentially exciting.

This isn't what I expected to find here. I came here to see a collection of friends that I had missed over the few months I've been away. I've been doing that, and it's been great. But I thought this was going to be an escapist retreat from law school, and it hasn't been that at all.

It's good not to find what I expect to find—not easy, but good. I need to stop looking so hard for the answers that are easy, and looking instead for the answers that are right.

Rewards

2006-12-21T18:12:00.000-05:00

My first semester of law school is over. To celebrate, I'm drinking a gin fizz (just one... I'm not a big fan of excess), working Kakuro puzzles, and otherwise sitting around doing nothing. Tomorrow I clean my apartment and relegate all the law-related stuff back to its one shelf where it belongs, as opposed to all over every available surface where it's migrated over the past few weeks. Then on Saturday I drive home for some much-needed time with my family.

They say this is the toughest semester, and I hope that's true. I made it through mostly unscathed. I feel like, even if school doesn't get easier per se, knowing what I know now, I can make it through, and that's a pretty good feeling. Though I have to admit that eating food that I actually cooked myself for once is a pretty good feeling too.

Frustration of Purpose

2006-12-17T12:00:00.000-05:00

Again, I am two letters away from solving the NYT crossword puzzle.

Why does this always happen to me? Why are there always exactly two letters I can't figure out?

Proof positive that there is something more frustrating than trying to teach myself Civil Procedure, perhaps?

Digging In

2006-12-16T12:37:00.000-05:00

Since my Contracts exam on Thursday, I have done many things. Very few of them have involved studying for the Civ Pro and Torts exams I still have to take. Yesterday I baked a batch of chocolate cupcakes and frosted them with mocha buttercream. They are delicious and almost too rich to eat. I've also done two loads of laundry and two loads of dishes, and this morning I swept my kitchen floor for the first time in weeks. I've gotten within two letters of solving both yesterday's and today's New York Times crossword, and I completely solved a Sunday Times crossword, none of which would have been impressive a couple of years ago when I was a crossword-solving madwoman, but all of which are encouraging to me now since I've let my skills lapse recently. I made a to-do list, which does not contain any Torts- or Civ-Pro-related items. I tried to psych myself up for next semester by reading the past course evaluations of the professors I'm going to have. I listened for the first time to the copy of The Juliet Letters that I bought in a fit of Elvis Costello craving last month (My Aim Is True, on the other hand, has been in my car CD player approximately 90% of the time since I bought it), and also bought albums by Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt and Ben Folds Five from iTunes. I went through many of my books of knitting patterns and decided which sweater to start next (I finished two while studying for Contracts). I considered writing a treatise on how to brew great coffee at home. I figured out how to update the firmware for my old, crummy wireless router, but then chickened out when it came time to actually do it because I thought about how hard it would be to study for exams with no internet if I messed it up. I concocted a grand plan for avoiding this kind of pain next semester (though something tells me that nearly all law students concoct such grand plans every semester). Finally, I bit the bullet and started rereading the Emanuel outline keyed to my Civ Pro casebook, and after I post this, procrastination possibilities practically exhausted, I'm going to outline.

Let me just say that, while not having anything due all semester was nice while it lasted, having my grade for an entire course rest on my performance on a single three- to four-hour exam is not nice. Especially not when central Virginia has been graced with a week of 60-ish-degree days and perfect blue skies, and I'm pondering the vagaries of personal jurisdiction over corporations. It's times like this when I have to remind myself that alternatively, I could be back at the bank, wearing heels and filling out forms all day in a stuffy, yet simultaneously freezing cold building where the windows don't open. And there's no Elvis Costello. Or chocolate cupcakes.

Crash

2006-12-11T22:29:00.000-05:00

Today I took my first law school exam, and plainly, I survived.

I think I'm through panic, remorse, anger and bargaining, and on to numbness. Which is good, because I have three exams left to study for and take, and no time for silly things like emotions.

This semester did not go according to plan in any way, except in that I did in fact do the reading for and attend the vast majority of my classes. I thought I'd have school and sleep as my main activities, perhaps with small amounts of time set aside for church and for some sort of extracurricular activity (just one, of course). I wanted to read between classes and have weekends free. Of course, that was when I thought I'd be living with someone and wanted to have lots of time to spend with him doing non-school stuff. That's not how it happened. I spent Sundays reading, poured a huge amount of time into a political campaign, missed school twice to go to political events, lost my grandmother, went to church a grand total of five times all semester, stayed up until 3 a.m. working on a memo, went weeks on end without grocery shopping, and cried a lot. With the possible exception of the political involvement, I don't want to do any of that again next semester. Well, the Sundays reading weren't so bad, but really, if I can avoid that I will.

This is not to say that it was a bad semester, or that I don't like law school. I'm actually looking forward to doing all of this again in the spring. It's just that I could really use a break, preferably one involving several 12-hour nights of sleep. And although I still don't, and have no intention of starting, I now understand why law students drink so much.

Careful

2006-12-02T09:51:00.000-05:00

My friend Caitlin, at the bank where I used to work in Pittsburgh, once told me I was "entirely too functional." I've been called Martha Stewart, which anyone who's ever lived with me can tell you isn't a very apt analogy, and I've been told that I talk like a self-help book. I realized the other day that I've never said "I hate you" to anyone, even if that's how I felt at the time. I'm just... careful. I care about being emotionally healthy and I care about other people being emotionally healthy. And here in law school, I feel a lot of pressure to stop doing that.

Exams are coming very soon. Our first one is in nine days, and I have a lot of work to do to be prepared for it. Anxiety, for me, is nearly a binary condition: either I have it or I don't. If I do, it's pretty debilitating, but most of the time I don't. Accordingly, my goal for these exams is to make absolutely sure that I'm not anxious going into them.

To be calm on the big day, I have to be prepared: that's a given. But I also have to be relaxed in a larger sense. My life has to be in order as much as it can be. That means, as exams approach, I'm not going to give up sleep, or laundry, or showering, or washing dishes. I'm not going to live in the library. I have to do the things that make me feel like me, and if that means less time spent studying, that's fine with me.

I knew all along that this would be the approach I'd have to take to preparing for exams, and I knew it would be difficult. I hate walking through the halls at school and hearing everyone talking about how late they were up last night outlining. It kind of makes me miss the attitude that infuriated me so much when I was an undergrad: then, we all did work, but we all pretended that we didn't. I have to learn not to let other people worry me so much.

The take-home lesson here for me is: yes, I'm entirely too functional, and I'm fine with that. And after exams are over, and when I get my grades in the spring, I'll still be functional. That knowledge—not any desire to beat my classmates to the best grade—is what's going to get me through the next few weeks.

Things I Miss About Pittsburgh

2006-11-17T20:42:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to Pittsburgh. I didn't do much there that would be notable to anyone but me, but it was a great visit, and it reminded me of a number of things I really miss about that town:

The way people talk. There's nothing more charming, or less reproducible in print, than the way a Pittsburgher tells you, "I ain't even kiddin'." Hint: there are barely more than three syllables in the whole sentence. Check out this site for audio samples of local speech. The recording of "Bob G." sounds the most like what I think of as a Pittsburgh accent, but they are all typical in their own ways.
Football. From the Steelers (or "Stillers") to high school football, everyone knows who's good this year and all the big games are on TV. On Sundays when there's a 1:00 game, Father Joe keeps his homily nice and brief so we can all get home and changed in time for kickoff.
Church. Here in Charlottesville I have my choice of three Catholic churches, all of which I like to some degree, and one of which is very close to where I live, so I'm not complaining. But Pittsburgh has so many more. You have to really try hard to miss Sunday Mass. I especially miss the 7:45 p.m. Mass at Sacred Heart in Shadyside: it's a beautiful, old-fashioned church with a great mix of people, and I've never heard a homily there that hasn't hit home.
Max's. It's so good and cheap and friendly. The service there goes way beyond good: these people seriously love you like you're family from the moment you sit down till you walk out the door. James and I have ended up there so many times, when we didn't feel like cooking or couldn't think of what to do for dinner, or when some other place had disappointed us enough for us to walk out. I've never once left Max's in a bad mood.

There are plenty more things I miss, and I'm not even going to mention the people, because the list would get too long.

People here have pointed out how much I seem to love Pittsburgh, and they're right. I'm not from there, and I only lived there for four years, but they were very important years. Pittsburgh saw me through my marriage and my divorce, many different jobs and apartments, my conversion to Catholicism, and my decision to come to law school.

For the first two years or so that I lived there, I wanted to be somewhere else. We had moved there against my will from Seattle, which I loved and where I wanted to stay. I had trouble getting a job that suited me, because in Pittsburgh you have to know people: if your grandpa didn't work in the steel mill with the father of the guy who's interviewing you, well, that's one strike against you. Our first winter there was the coldest one I've ever experienced by far. I learned then that I could tell if it was below 10 degrees outside because my nose hairs would freeze when I walked out the door. It probably didn't help that I was working at a bakery and had to walk to work at 5:15 a.m., right at the coldest time of the day. Pittsburgh seemed awkward and ugly and unfriendly, and in some ways, it is.

But I remember the moment I first saw the beauty of the city. My friend Jeremy was going out to Carnegie to cut his parents' grass, and he took me with him because I was having a rough time of it and needed the company. We were driving on the Parkway where it runs alongside the river, by Duquesne University. Jeremy pointed out the window and I looked up to see three golden bridges lined up one after the other, arching over a river that reflected a brilliant blue sky. As we rounded a curve, the sun struck the surface of the water just right and it shone blindingly bright. I felt tears gather behind my eyes and I said, "I think I'm gonna stay for a while."

"See how beautiful my city is?" Jeremy asked me, and I did.

Wealth

2006-11-16T23:06:00.000-05:00

Apparently it's easier for me to turn out a 17-page legal memo than a 300-word blog entry. Everything with a deadline takes precedence over everything without a deadline, which is perhaps not as it should be, but I have to say that at the very least I'm getting better at meeting deadlines.

It's that time of the semester. The quiet study room is full on Thursday afternoons. You get out the syllabus to look up tomorrow's reading and cringe at how few classes are left before exams. It's dark when you get up and dark when you leave school, and too cold to study outside, so you don't see too much daylight. We're all still smiling at each other in the hallways, though, so we can't be too miserable yet.

It's times likes this when I'm glad I came here alone. I don't envy my friends who are married, or those whose boyfriends or girlfriends moved here with them. I love always knowing that I can get up at six in the morning to finish that Torts reading if I need to, or do laundry (oh wait, that reminds me!) in the middle of the night, without disturbing anybody, and I'm relieved that no one feels neglected if I need to retreat into my shell for a few hours, or even days.

I wish I could remember better what I thought law school was going to be like. When I start feeling overwhelmed, I think of what my best days were like at my previous jobs. I found plenty to like wherever I was: at Starbucks I loved tasting different coffees and training new partners; at the bank I loved learning about retirement savings and helping the other tellers find what was throwing them out of balance. Here, though, nearly everything I do is interesting. It's often also frustrating, repetitive, and hard to concentrate on, but it's interesting. For the first time in my life, I have way too much to think about and way too many opportunities. It is a wonderful problem to have.

Forward

2006-10-18T09:23:00.000-04:00

I have a midterm this afternoon in Contracts. This has forced me to confront the fact that I really don't know how to study. I have no idea how prepared I am for this exam. My gut feeling is that rereading my notes yet again isn't going to help me, because I'll have those available during the test, and I feel like I must be in relatively good shape since every time one of my fellow students asks me a question, I have at least a halfway decent answer for it. Still, I don't feel like I can prepare for this the same way I prepared for tests in undergrad. It makes me miss the hours I spent studying Latin vocabulary and singing declensions to myself while waiting for the bus.

I also realized this morning that, aside from the LSAT, this is the first exam I've taken since December of 2001. I hope wisdom will compensate for rustiness.

To psych myself up for the exam, I put an extra packet of sugar in my coffee, and it's delicious. As long as I'm still appreciating the finer things in life, I guess I can't possibly be too stressed out.

Outside the law school bubble, life moves on: one of my friends just had a baby, and another just found out she's pregnant. Election Day is in less than three weeks now. Thanksgiving is in five. In just over two months, I'll be done with exams, visiting my family. Somehow I find all this comforting.

Clear Skies

2006-10-14T23:43:00.000-04:00

I have a headache that's keeping me from really thinking straight, but I'm beginning to realize that I'm pretty much always going to have some reason not to blog (my thoughts are too serious, my thoughts are too frivolous, I need to study, apartment is on fire, etc.) and I just have to do it anyway. So I'm going to keep it brief.

Fall break has come and gone, and I'm happy to say that mine was wonderful. I spent a couple of days with my family, and then a few more up in Ocean City with friends from the law school. Both portions of the trip were great in different ways. I always wish I had more time with my parents. My dad and I triumphed over a car stereo that really did not want to be installed, which was our great victory of the visit. And the beach was relaxing. We ate crab, drank beer, and lay out in the sun in two different states (we drove up to Rehoboth for a day and visited the Dogfish Head brewery), and for a few minutes at a time, I forgot I was in law school. I got very little work done, but I successfully hit the stress reset button, and that's really what I was going for.

Now we're back, and fall is setting in in earnest. It's going down almost to freezing tonight, and yesterday morning I went outside to find frost on my windshield for the first time. The leaves are just starting to turn. We've had a series of glorious days, with deep blue, cloudless skies. What a beautiful October this is shaping up to be.

Advice

2006-10-02T07:51:00.000-04:00

I'd love to be able to write one of those posts about How to Succeed in Law School. Sadly, I don't know what to tell you. I don't know whether I'm succeeding or not — at least not by any measure that other people are likely to care about — and I probably won't know until grades come out early next year. But I am learning some things about how to survive law school without having a meltdown. Of course, it goes without saying that what works for me might not work for others.

Learning to get less sleep has been key. I've been an eight-hours-a-night girl for a few years now, and since being here I've whittled that down to about six and a half or seven. I've tried less and not been able to focus at all, and more doesn't seem to be an option. I also get up at the same time every morning during the week, no matter whether or not I have an early class. I think that helps me be more alert. Similarly, it's been important for me to figure out what time of day I can do what sort of work. I can read in the afternoons, but I can really only write in the morning (good to know when memo time rolls around).

Finding friends who don't gossip has also been extremely helpful. I have a couple of friends with whom I only talk about my own business and theirs, and I know that no topic is off-limits and what we say goes absolutely nowhere. I never would have imagined that there would be anywhere near this much gossip here. I've had things I said repeated back to me after being passed down a chain of three or four people. Definitely worse than high school. And I've learned, whenever possible, to keep my nose out of other people's business. Sure, there's some amount of mediating we have to do to keep the peace (considering everyone's sky-high stress levels), but other than that, it pays to keep to myself. I'm still working on actually doing that.

Also, I need to spend time outside every day. Walking to and from the car does not qualify. Even if that means walking in the rain, or studying out in the garden, I need to do it. I'm lucky to live in a place when the weather is almost never too bad to be outside, and I need to take advantage of that. The law school building is very nice, with wide hallways and high ceilings, but fluorescent light and recycled air get to be a drag very quickly — like, within a few hours.

One tactic that I've hit on that's surprised me is that it works better for me to do a week's reading at a time for each class, whenever possible. Four days' worth of civ pro may take hours to get through, but I focus on the material better and it makes more sense in context. Also, then I get the psychological boost of not having any civ pro to read for the rest of the week. The tricky bit is setting aside a large enough block of time to do this, but I think it's worth it for me.

The last, and most important, thing I've learned here is this: life is much better when I manage to relax. If something isn't working, I should try something else, but it doesn't make sense to stick to a regime that's making me miserable, or try to make a whole bunch of radical changes all at once. It also doesn't help when I start worrying about all the things I need to do today. If I just take the first step and accomplish one thing, usually the rest falls into place.

I swear the next thing I post will be light-hearted and irreverent. Next week is fall break, and the closer I get to that, the clearer my head should be.

Facing It

2006-09-25T07:31:00.000-04:00

Hard work, fear, grief, ambiguity and joy: that's my life right now. Once again I realize that I have it pretty good.

Jeff and I had dinner at Cafe Europa the other night. It's one of our old haunts — we used to meet there for lunch on Fridays when I was a student here and he was driving buses. (Of course, now I'm a student again and he's driving buses again. But a lot has changed in the interim.) I got my old favorite meal, tomato basil soup with a chunk of bread and Greek salad. I talked a mile a minute for most of the hour or so that we were there. Jeff got to hear my argument on why, as a religious person, I believe that separation of church and state is essential to preserve the significance of religious observance, as well as the rights of those whose beliefs differ from those of the majority. He also got to hear about the Webb for Senate campaign, in which I've been pretty involved. And he got to hear a lot about my personal life, which is confusing, scary, and yet, a lot of fun.

I got married in November of 2003 and divorced in April of 2005. Out of respect for my ex-husband and his friends and family, I won't share any details about the marriage, but I think it's my place to say that I shouldn't have entered into it. I'm still struggling with that decision. It's easy for me to brush it off as something I did because I was young and foolish, or because I wasn't as socially well-adjusted as I am now, or because I was depressed. All of those things are true, but they don't help me figure out how not to make a decision like that again. And so I tend, now, to get scared when I let people too far into my life. I assume that everyone to whom I give the power to hurt me will use it. It takes me a long time to learn to trust people.

In the intense social atmosphere of the law school, everything happens at warp speed. I met most of my best friends here on August 16th or 17th, and let them into my life completely within a couple of weeks. Part of that, I think, is that the workload is heavy, and the material is sometimes difficult, and there's almost a complete lack of feedback from our professors. So, we gravitate towards each other for reassurance. We want to be part of a team. I have a team here, and I love them. But in my darker moments, I wonder how I can trust people so fully whom I've only known for a few weeks. On the other hand, there's no way I could get through this alone.

James and I met and started dating immediately after my ex-husband and I split up. I was more than a little bit skittish, but I knew I wanted to give being with James a shot. One afternoon in October, he was driving us through Schenley Park, where the leaves were turning and the sky was a brilliant blue. He turned to me and said, "I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?" I asked, my stomach tightening, worried that he'd done something awful and this was the beginning of a confession.

"I'm apologizing now because I know that eventually I'm going to hurt you. It's impossible not to hurt people you love, and I'm not very good at relationships, so I'm sure I'll hurt you somehow. And when it happens, I want you to know that it's not on purpose."

I'm pretty sure I laughed, and of course I accepted his apology-in-advance. I thought it was silly at the time, but now I don't. James and I dated for two years or so, and it was wonderful — certainly the most comfortable relationship that I've ever had — but he did hurt me at times, and I hurt him too.

Maybe it's learning to write legal proofs that's leading me to think about feelings this way, but I feel like since pain is always a possibility when entering into close relationships, there's almost no point in worrying about it. To borrow terminology from Torts, I've been thinking of relationships as operating under a strict liability regime. If something bad happens, I'm liable. So I might as well just not get close with anyone, since the pain that might result will then be my fault. But as we've seen in Torts, strict liability only makes sense in particular circumstances. I'm going to try to operate in more of a negligence world instead. If I get close to you, and you hurt me, I'll only hold you liable if you fail to take the care that a reasonably prudent person would take under the circumstances, or if you intend to hurt me. Some pain is inevitable. It's one of the costs of participating in the system, like the fact that if I drive my brand new car, after a little while it's not going to look so brand new anymore. But if all I do is keep it in the garage and gaze at it, what's the point of having it?

So I'm going to try to get comfortable with vulnerability again. I was living a very safe life before I started law school. I had a job that I was good at, a boyfriend who was unfailingly nice to me, a cheap place to live, a church where I knew people, places to go to get coffee where the baristas knew how I liked my espresso. Most of the time, I was content. But now I feel like I have a shot at actual happiness. And even though it isn't a safe bet, I have to go for it.

Why Law Students Seem Boring

2006-09-15T18:17:00.000-04:00

Studying the law is like being selectively brain-dead. The more time I spend here, the better I get at the various sorts of work that I need to do. For example, I just transferred my vehicle registration here from Pennsylvania, so I have to mount a front license plate on my car for the first time, and there's no bracket on my car with which to do so. So I found the Code of Virginia and looked up the relevant statute to find out which vehicles are exempt from front plate requirements. Then I checked what sort of violation it is if you don't have one, and how much the fine is. I'm not saying I'm an awesome legal researcher or anything — far from it — but a few weeks ago it wouldn't have occurred to me to do any of that.

On the other hand, I don't have time to go to Advance Auto and buy a license plate bracket for my car during the week, so I have to go do it on Saturday. I clean my apartment on Sunday mornings at 7 because I can't sleep past then anymore. I can figure out why it might make sense for a contractor who decides not to do a job to help the client find someone else to do it on favorable terms, but I can't remember to bring lunch to school. I haven't watched TV in a week, since the Steelers game last Thursday. I only listen to music in my car on the way to and from school.

I'm busy, but more than that, student life is just really different from wage-slave life. It used to be that I'd spend the whole day doing things that didn't make (or even let) me use my brain much, and then come home and be full of creative energy. Now I spend all day thinking, reading and having interesting conversations, and when it's over I feel like having a beer and going to sleep. Besides the inevitable classes and reading, there are also get-togethers featuring a bunch of us law students talking, get-togethers featuring a bunch of us law students talking and playing board games, and get-togethers featuring a bunch of us law students talking and watching movies. In the afternoons, we often gather to talk at meetings or to listen to people talk at panels and symposia, and if we're lucky, there's food, which we gather around and talk. So when, eventually, I get home, I do my reading if I can stay awake long enough (usually it gets postponed until the morning) and then crash. But I don't feel much like talking. Luckily I live alone.

So, for those of you who aren't in this ridiculous little club of ours: if you meet a law student, and she's glassy-eyed and taciturn, you now know why. And if, on the other hand, she's bouncing on the balls of her feet and talking a mile a minute, you know she's just that excited to be talking to a normal human being. Indulge her.

Seriousness

2006-09-11T07:34:00.000-04:00

The Cavalier Daily reports that Stephanie Garrison has been acquitted on appeal. I wish the article were more detailed, but the gist of it is that in order for an honor code violation to occur, three factors must be present: act, intent, and non-triviality (or seriousness, as this article says). The jury found that Garrison's lie was not serious enough to make it an honor code violation.

I applaud this verdict. If there's one thing I've learned in law school so far this semester, it's that you can't convict someone (or hold him or her civilly liable) because you feel like that person's done something wrong and deserves to be punished. If the actual sequence of events doesn't match what the law says is necessary to produce liability, then you find for the defendant. Of course, that doesn't always happen, but I'm very pleased that it has happened here.

How are we to judge non-triviality? The Honor Committee website says the question we should ask is: "Would open toleration of such an act impair the community of trust sufficiently ... to warrant permanent dismissal from the University?" The University Judiciary Committee is empowered to impose sanctions on students, and those sanctions ought to be completed. From the facts as stated by the Cav Daily, it seems to me that Garrison made a good faith effort to complete her sanctions. She didn't go about it in the world's smartest way: it was unwise for her to interpret the sanctions as broadly as she did, and when threatened with suspension for being late with her completion form, she ought to have explained her situation to the UJC rather than just figuring she'd sign the form and everything would be okay. But is this the sort of behavior that, if other people did it, would damage the community of trust here at U.Va.? I have to say I don't think it is.

The Honor Committee website also says that "the Honor System can only act effectively where it is reasonably well-known and understood." They're referring to the reasons for the geographical limitations on the system, but I think their statement applies here too. How many of us, when hearing that Garrison had turned in her sanction completion form believing that she had completed two of the three sanctions, and being scheduled to complete the third soon, would have thought, "Oh, that's an Honor Code violation!" Since the purpose of the Code is to protect the integrity of our community, its implementation should reflect our community values. That means that, at least outside the realm of academic dishonesty (for which the rules are more severe), we should tolerate no arcane implementations and no charges based on technicalities.

Honor Committee tryouts are next week. I'm thinking of going.

Honor

2006-09-08T08:17:00.000-04:00

For those who don't know, U.Va. has an extremely pervasive honor code (you're bound by it at all times within the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, as well as in other places when you're representing yourself as a U.Va. student) with a single sanction. That means that if you're found guilty of an honor code violation, you're asked to leave the University; or, if you've already graduated, your degree is revoked.

This week, the Cavalier Daily has been running a series of articles about a U.Va. undergrad's honor conviction and upcoming appeals trial. After reading them, I'm really concerned about what's going to happen this Sunday at the trial. I tried to get tickets to go see the trial myself, but they were all gone when I called. Serving on the Honor Committee is something I've wanted to do since I was an undergrad here, but I'm not sure how I feel about how things have proceeded in this student's case. The articles are here:

Part one
Part two
Part three
Part four

The single sanction is always controversial, and every few years there's a vote on whether to continue having it as a part of the honor code. To me, the single sanction is entirely fair: we enter this community deliberately; we sign the honor pledge when we enroll; those of us who violate the honor code shouldn't be a part of the community. But the flip side of this severe sanction is that trials need to be carried out extremely carefully. I hope that this Sunday will see that happen.

Location

2006-09-06T09:45:00.000-04:00

Every law student has his or her favorite hideout. Some choose the library; others prefer a study room; some, for reasons beyond my comprehension, choose the "Fishbowl," a large, silent atrium with glass walls. I like the garden on nice days and Scott Commons in the mornings.

The longer I'm here, the more I realize that I have to do what works for me. Friends are wonderful (some of mine here are especially wonderful), but when they go off to study in silence, I'm not following them. Some of them stay up late; I get up early. Pretty much all of them seem to think that my daily NY Times crossword habit is a little nuts, but I'm not giving it up because it helps me get comfortable and focused each morning.

I admire my parents now for going to sleep when they're tired. I need to get better about that. I need to find my rhythm. Ever-increasing quantities of coffee are not going to cut it in the long run. I don't want to feel strung out for the next three months and have to detox over winter break.

Last night I had my red sweater out, the one with a zillion little cables and patterns, the one that took me over a year to finish knitting. I hadn't looked at it in a while and I was surprised to notice that it is a truly amazing object, a testament to the vision of the designer, the versatility of the craft, and my own skill and persistence. I've been knitting seriously for about four years now — not too much longer than the time I'll spend here. In that time, I've become a real craftswoman. But looking back at my first projects, I can find holes, uneven stitches, and evidence of some pretty big errors in judgment. It's easy to see these things looking at a pile of sweaters and socks, because my work is its own record. In a few months, I hope I can remember how tenuous my grasp on this law school beast seemed, and more than that, I hope that in a few months it will have changed.

Fleeting

2006-09-01T19:51:00.000-04:00

This week has flown by. I'm not sure how it got to be Friday, but I'm already enjoying the weekend. I started with a heavy dose of Not Doing Work, which I plan on following up with wine and cheese, bowling, a dinner party, and liberal doses of more Not Doing Work. And also some work. There's just way too much work not to do work on weekends.

Unfortunately, law school amusement doesn't often translate well, so I won't try to bring much of it here. I do need to mention that it has been very cold at the Law School this past week. Apparently the building is cooled by two "chillers," a term I have never heard that I assume refers to some sort of huge compressor. Well, one of them is broken, so the other one is doing all the work, and apparently its thermostat has to be overriden to get it to stay on that much. Let's just say that the bookstore is probably doing record sweatshirt sales. Hey, I caved. Mine's a brown hoodie that says UVA LAW on it. Very comfy and worth every penny of the $25 I spent on it. That's the rough equivalent of three cafeteria lunches. (I've learned to bring lunch.)

Although I love my section and my professors, I think I'm missing out on one thing. My friends in another section have a Contracts professor who likes to make cases into limericks. Apparently they're such excellent mnemonic devices that this professor freely admits he can't remember the facts of cases that don't have limericks. Perhaps I need to employ this as a study method. It would also help me keep my hand in as a poet.

For the Record

2006-08-28T22:04:00.000-04:00

Law school really is just like high school, only there's no mandatory gym, and no curfews.

Strange

2006-08-27T16:42:00.000-04:00

I feel old. Not really super-old, just slightly, eerily not the right age. Most of my friends here either just graduated from college, or have been out for one year, and I've been in the quote real world unquote for five.

That doesn't make me feel superior; it actually makes me feel kind of sad. What have I done with that time, and what have I learned from it? These people three or four years younger than I am can do everything I can do. Well, except they probably can't make quite as good a cappuccino as I can. I did get pretty skilled at that.

Yesterday I woke up feeling somewhat worse for wear. There was a party Friday night, and I had a couple of glasses of wine, and I didn't drink any water before going to bed. Realizing that lying around wasn't going to make me feel better, I forced myself out into the world and went to get coffee. The Mudhouse was way too crowded to hang around, so I got my iced coffee to go and wandered east along the mall. I stopped at a kiosk where I saw some pretty jewelry for sale.

I like semiprecious stones. I'm not sure where this interest came from, but I remember buying a tiger's eye ring at the Maryland Science Center in fifth grade and wearing it until the stone came unglued. I learned about hematite, which looked like solid mercury to me. Then in middle school I got interested in beading, and I bought strings of sodalite and malachite chips to use in necklaces. Every time I went to a natural history museum I headed straight for the gems and minerals exhibit.

So I started talking to the woman working at the kiosk about the jewelry she was selling. She showed me blue moonstone, iolite, ocean jasper, carnelian, citrine. I examined a pair of amethyst earrings that iridesced blue, a turquoise bracelet with a pattern of brown veins that looked like tree branches in winter, a pendant made from a tiny geode. She told me she did crystal healing. I didn't tell her I didn't believe in it; I just listened. I told her how I loved garnet and peridot, but wanted to try something new. She picked me out a pair of tourmaline earrings I never would have chosen for myself, with tiny cascading pink, green and black stones. She asked me if I'd studied gems before; just a hobby, I told her.

After I paid for my earrings, some other customers came by and I saw that the woman was going to be busy, so I thanked her and went to leave. She reached out and hugged me. I realized, walking home, that I've actually learned quite a few things since I was 22. Too many to enumerate, in fact. But it all adds up to me being a much more functional person than I was then, with much better judgment, more social grace, and a lot more courage.

I'm here in C'ville to accomplish two things: get a law degree, and be comfortable in my life again. Sometime later I'll tell more of the story of the five years since I left Charlottesville the first time, but suffice it to say that my reasons for coming back were a lot better than my reasons for leaving. So I may be older than most of my classmates, and that might feel a little weird, but I know I belong here, and that's much more important.

Pride

2006-08-24T07:46:00.000-04:00

I should probably retract my earlier gloat about making out like a bandit at the PILA sale. I seem to have bought the wrong edition of my Torts casebook, which I realized around 8:00 last night when I tried to do my Torts reading. Fortunately my book contained two of the three cases that were assigned, and I have some very generous and helpful section-mates, but I did experience a brief Moment of Terror. Easygoing and chill are not words I would self-apply.

I met up with Jeff for dinner last night here on the mall. We intended to try out Himalayan Fusion, which I still want to check out, but, lured by low prices on the menu posted in the window, ended up at Eppie's instead. For $6, I got baked sweet potatoes, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, steamed broccoli and cornbread, in such portions that I couldn't finish them, and I was really hungry. Everything was delicious. Eppie's is also about two blocks from where I live, which is good because Five Guys is even closer, and I need a tempting alternative to their burgers within easy reach.

The first day of classes yesterday was, dare I say it, fun. You know your Crim class is going to be good when the first comment is, "I think people who kill their children should have the option of choosing sterilization over other forms of punishment," and everybody laughs. And then after class you end up talking about crime and punishment out in the garden, because the class seemed too short.

Living alone is taking some getting used to. It's very quiet. I don't have much of an attention span, so it's remarkably easy for me to get distracted by my thoughts. It's funny: I used to be able to read, or knit, or whatever for hours on end, and now my thoughts are always wandering. I hope that through practice I'll be able to get my focus back.

Victory

2006-08-22T16:43:00.000-04:00

Holding out for the PILA book sale turned out in my favor. I bought all my books for the semester for a mere $246, less than half the bookstore price. Now that I've secured books, I shall commence to hit them.

School starts tomorrow. I'm dying to see who gets cold-called first. My section all put in $1 so that whoever's in the hot seat at least gets a little cash as compensation for the icy hot terror he or she will experience. Although, as one of my peer advisors pointed out, too bad for whoever gets cold-called second.

I also got an email today that said my loan money was on the way, so, financially speaking at least, it's been a good day. And the burgers at the Biltmore are as delicious as I'd remembered.

Content (or lack thereof)

2006-08-21T21:12:00.000-04:00

First day of orientation was good, albeit somewhat overwhelming. My brain is tired. There are a whole lot of people in our incoming class.

And now I'm going out to the Biltmore with everyone else in the known universe. I may be nuts, but at least I'm only a mile or so from home so it's easy to bail.

Later in the week there will be more to report.

It Just Gets Worse

2006-08-18T07:03:00.000-04:00

Last night I dreamed that I was diagnosed with colon cancer, crashed my car twice (once hitting a police car rushing to the scene of an accident and causing it to burst into flames), was banished to a basement infested with cockroaches, and discovered that I had secretly taken a (potentially very dangerous) alien as a pet. This was all in one dream.

On the plus side, in the same dream I got to wander through some very beautiful woods and discovered that I could walk through walls. So I guess it wasn't all bad.

The moral of the story: never, ever eat chicken lo mein just before bed.

Breaking Ground

2006-08-17T16:16:00.000-04:00

One proviso to those who might be considering taking a barista job: the work is fun, the tips can be great, but oh boy do you ever end up addicted to caffeine. I'm lucky enough to be able to wake up just fine without coffee; it's easier with, but if there's none to be found, my central nervous system sort of shrugs and moves on. Hours later, the pounding headache sets in, and getting rid of it is very difficult.

Of course, I know this, so I made sure to have coffee ready to brew no more than 20 feet from my bed. This morning was the Habitat for Humanity event that some of us 1Ls participated in, and I had to be at the law school at 7:45, so I set my alarm for 6:30. Through a series of unfortunate and sadly rather predictable events (I knew this was going to happen!), my alarm did not go off, and I was awakened around 7:15 by a disturbing dream involving needing to remove some gerbils from my bedroom without hurting them and without my parents finding out.

Dreams of Gerbils. Like Dances with Wolves, I guess. I've never had that sort of dream before.

Anyway, consequently, I woke up way too late for coffee, and barely made it to the law school on time. And now it's 4:30 in the afternoon, and I have The Headache. I also have one pair of jeans, one tank top, and one pair of shoes that are covered in red Virginia clay. Most of the job we were needed to do today at the Habitat house consisted of digging ditches into which pipes could be placed to carry rainwater away from the hill on which the house was built, thereby avoiding excessive erosion. Because I have tendonitis in my wrists, I couldn't do too much of the digging, but I did get plenty dirty and have a lot of fun. Then I went to the Cingular store on 29 and spoke very briefly with the world's worst salesman:

Him: Can I help you?
Me: Yes, I need to buy a phone, and I think I've already decided on the plan I need.
Him: Who do you have service with now?
Me: Um, I don't. That's why I'm here. I mean, I do have a prepaid phone, but I don't want to use that long-term.
Him: Well, which plan do you want?
Me: The $39.99 a month one.
Him: And which phone?
Me: The one that was listed on the website as being free... well, one of them. The LG flip phone... it was a camera phone... it was silver...
Him: Hahaha... oh, yes, we don't have that phone here. It's discontinued, that's why you can get it on the website for free. Hahaha.
Me: Ooookay... well, do you have any phones here that are free with a two-year contract?
Him: No.
-- silence --
Me: Okay, then I'm not buying a phone here.

Let's see... first we ask irrelevant questions, then we laugh at the customer's expense, then we tell the customer we don't have what she wants and suggest absolutely no alternatives. Great way to earn a commission!

So I came home and took a nap, and then I woke up, with The Headache, and decided to fix myself some coffee. I use a French press, so that means I have to heat water in a kettle on the stove. I guess I'm not that used to my new stove, because I turned on the front burner instead of the rear burner and didn't notice until the thought crossed my mind that I ought to be hearing whistling by now.

So it's back to the Mudhouse with me. Clearly I'm not competent to prepare coffee.

Fait Accompli

2006-08-15T23:52:00.000-04:00

I'm successfully installed in Charlottesville. I have a bed, a chair, internet access, food in the fridge, etc. James and his family are bringing down the rest of the furniture and assorted belongings on Friday. (It'll be good to have more than three shirts. I could have planned this move a little better.) My mom and my friend Joe helped out tremendously on this end, and of course Dad and James helped out tremendously on the other end. I'm feeling grateful to a lot of people lately. Thanks, guys.

Being back here is going to take some adjusting. I feel like some antisocial misfit. People keep saying hi to me and I panic because I think I must know them since they're being so friendly, but I'm so bad at recognizing faces that I can't be certain. By the time I realize that they're complete strangers just being nice, I've missed my chance to say hi back. The Pittsburgh smile/nod/eye contact/grimace doesn't seem to get the job done around here. Shame, because it's so versatile and requires so little thought. On the other hand, I might actually get to know some people here without having to spend two years doing everything alone.

I had iced coffee at the Mudhouse tonight, on a sojourn for free wireless. It was amazingly good. Still, I've got my bag of Coffee Tree Ethiopia Sidamo here, and my grinder and French press, so I'll be making my own coffee in the morning. Time to rein in my spendthrift ways. I even bought peanut butter and jelly tonight (among other things -- don't worry Mom and Dad -- no starving here).

I've now spent twelve hours here and haven't randomly run into anyone I know. That might be a record.

I'm considering getting a Cingular phone. Right now I have an Alltel prepaid/no-contract thing that's worked well as a stopgap, but I think it's ending up being more expensive than a traditional plan would be. And I'd like to be able to talk to friends and family without worrying about minutes. Any Cingular horror stories? I'm not a fan of the two-year contract, but the price is right -- $40 a month -- and I can get a nice phone for free, so it seems like it would be worth it.

It's so humid here that my windshield fogged up tonight and wouldn't clear unless I was driving at least 35 mph. Not sure what to do about that. Defrost didn't seem to work on any setting, and even opening the windows didn't work. I need to be able to see out of my car. I guess the weather will be changing relatively soon, anyway.

Relief

2006-08-03T19:28:00.000-04:00

The week of high-90s temperatures has finally been broken by a big rainstorm. I have my a/c off for the first time in ages. It feels great to air out the house -- and not to be paying per minute for the luxury of sitting on my couch without breaking a sweat.

Today I worked my last shift at the Coffee Tree. The six weeks I worked there had their share of interesting moments, but altogether it was a mostly stress-free, sometimes fun temp job that paid my rent. Last days at jobs are rarely uneventful, and today featured one of my co-workers oversleeping and coming in two hours late. On the plus side, I learned that the morning rush can indeed be handled with only two people. But it's really, really not fun.

I also realized that, even though my espresso machine doesn't work as well as it used to anymore, I should still be able to use it to make my favorite summer beverage, which is a total ripoff of the Starbucks Doubleshot. Two shots of espresso, two packets of Sugar in the Raw, four ounces of skim milk and a splash of half and half, shaken with ice. It's so good and so easy to drink when it's hot and early and I don't feel like consuming anything at all. I've been drinking these for the past month and a half and have now gotten my friend Jessica hooked on them. I hope they'll be something I can make quickly in the morning and save myself a little money.

Eleven days until moving day. I'm trying to make the most of that time. My friend Greg's coming over tonight and we're ordering pizza from Conicella's, our local place here in Greenfield. They're good people and the pizza's delicious, and of a style that's very common around here but hard to find in C'ville: tons of high-quality cheese; not-too-sweet, slightly acidic sauce, and crust that's thin in the middle and puffy on the edges. Anyone who's got a line on this stuff in C'ville, let me know.

Purging

2006-07-24T17:51:00.000-04:00

I'm forcing myself to do at least one task every day that will get me closer to being ready to move. Today's task was to empty the basement closet of all of my clothes. I packed two boxes full of out-of-season clothes and things that don't fit but will soon (once I start walking to school every day, I'm sure I can drop one size pretty quickly). I filled a gigantic lawn and leaf bag full of clothes to give away.

The scary part is that I still have a laundry basket or two full of clothes in the basement, plus a dresser full of clothes in my bedroom. I think most of those are on their way to St. Vincent de Paul as well.

How did I end up with this many articles of clothing in the first place? I don't even care about clothes, beyond wanting to wear moderately flattering and appropriate things.

In any case, it feels good to let them go. Once the clothes purge is done, the book purge begins. And so on until I run out of purging time and have to move what's left.

James and I are grilling tonight. The grill isn't coming with us, so we have to enjoy it while we can. If that means burgers for dinner, I'm willing to make that sacrifice.

Clerks

2006-07-22T06:40:00.000-04:00

I went and saw Clerks II yesterday with James and Greg. I'd read a couple negative reviews, but I knew before I read them that there was no way I was going to miss seeing this movie.

Jeff was the one who introduced me to Clerks. I remember how much Dante reminded me of him at the time. I loved the movie instantly, which, when you think about it, is kind of weird. Most of the acting in the original is pretty wooden, though the dialogue is brilliant, and of course it's thoroughly obscene, not to mention ludicrous. But it's charming, and so is Clerks II, I think. Though the egregiously offensive moments in this one are even more egregious.

Nerves

2006-07-15T09:51:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday afternoon I thought it would be nifty to try making caramel. Caramel is one of my favorite flavors, especially with nuts, and I've always been intrigued by the idea of making it myself by melting sugar, rather than buying it in a squeeze bottle or, God forbid, unwrapping and melting down a zillion pieces of caramel candy. I am pleased to report that I did, indeed, make delicious caramel, flavored with real vanilla and Irish whiskey rather than that vanillin gunk Big Food likes to put in everything. In fact, my caramel-in-progress looked so inviting that, without thinking, I dipped in a finger to see how it tasted.

Bad idea. Melted sugar is way hotter than boiling water, and it's sticky to boot. So, through a combination of this act of stupidity and a chem-lab accident in 11th grade, I now have substantial dead spots on the pads of both thumbs and both forefingers. Fortunately, they don't hurt or look awful, and I can still type and knit. But I need to not fry parts of my body on superheated things anymore. (The prior incident involved glass heated to the point where it was pliable. Why do I do this crazy stuff to amuse myself?!)

Moving day is in one month. Thanks to the very-part-time job, I just might have enough cash to carry me through until the loans come through. And after that, I'll have very different things to worry about.

Restless

2006-07-06T15:59:00.000-04:00

I just want to hurry up and move already. I love Pittsburgh, so it's not that I'm not happy with where I am, but the stress is really getting to me. I hate working nights: all day long, I'm thinking, "I should do something fun to take advantage of all this free time I have before I have to be at work!" But I can't relax, because I'm worrying about the work I'm going to have to do later. That's how I feel about this impending move.

It's stressful making such a dramatic change in my life after the past several years of holding patterns. I know that many people say that you can treat law school like a full-time job and be successful, and I'm sure that's true, but I don't think it will feel the same for me. Maybe that's because of the kind of full-time jobs I've had: all of them have been customer-service oriented. I'm looking forward to not having to please customers all the time, as well as more obvious things, like learning a ton and acquiring new skills. And outside of school, I'm looking forward to living downtown (which I've wanted to do since I first laid eyes on the Downtown Mall), walking around town, getting involved at a new church, and enjoying the chocolate sorbetto at Splendora's. Here in Pittsburgh, everything I'm enjoying is beginning to be colored by the fact that I'll be leaving soon.

I'm glad that I'll be able to come back here after moving. I often wanted to visit Seattle after moving here, but only managed it once, and then only for a couple of days. James has so much family here that I'm sure we'll be back often.

Sweet

2006-07-01T21:25:00.000-04:00

I decided to visit my parents for a few days. It's only four hours' drive (well, unless there's traffic, which there nearly always is) and I wanted to see my dad on his birthday, which is today. It's been a really nice visit. I've done a lot of sitting around, but nonetheless have managed to get a few things done: my dad and I fixed my car's cranky CD player together (and only had to make one Home Depot run, so that's not bad!), and I did some student loan paperwork and sent off my final deposit check to U.Va. Tomorrow before I leave for the trip home, I'm going to try to get that student loan junk in the mail in hopes that it will be all squared away when U.Va. cuts my tuition bill.

One Fun Fact about my family is that we consider seafood the marker of a celebration. Accordingly, my dad did not have a birthday cake tonight, but rather a dinner at Red Lobster. I personally think the candles-on-a-cake tradition should be abolished in favor of one crab leg per year.

One and a half months now until the move to C'ville. Can't hardly wait.

Care and Feeding

2006-06-21T16:22:00.000-04:00

I changed the oil in my car today. Or rather, I had the oil in my car changed today. I'm not going to pretend I was under there in the rain doing it myself. The Pennzoil near my house advertises a 10-minute oil change, and their sign currently reads:

REALLY
HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN

Well, they got me. I need to take care of myself and my things. I have a very bad habit of letting things go way too long without the care they need. James is the same way, which is too bad because it means that we don't spur each other forward as much as we could. We're both trying to break this habit.

I got a job, sort of. I'll be working a couple of days a week at a coffee place nearby. I like their coffee a lot and I know a couple people there, so it should be a good thing. I look forward to bonding with their beautiful La Marzocco espresso machine.

James's dad died last weekend, which is why things have been quiet around here. James, too, has required a bit of extra care and feeding because of it, and I'm doing my best not to neglect him.

I Have Stuff

2006-06-14T13:29:00.000-04:00

I've never been too much of a coveter. That might come from growing up having everything I needed; I'm not sure. I mean, I will go to yarn shops and pet the same expensive yarn visit after visit, knowing that it's too expensive, and I do splurge on things I really want. But I don't need to have a lot of stuff to be happy, and it's kind of cool to distribute my stuff to various friends and family in preparation for moving.

I had an old Taurus parked in front of my house for about eight months (since I bought my Focus last October). It needed suspension work, more than I was willing to pay for. Yesterday I gave the car to my friend Rob. It feels so good to own 1+ tons less stuff.

Jon and Meredith are taking the charcoal grill. Greg's already got the Starbucks cafe table and chairs. James's aunt Peggy is taking the washer and dryer. (All these things are going out on three-year loan until I'm done with law school.) Still, I have many boxes of books and yarn, not to mention the hundreds of CDs my parents have kindly stored for me for the past five years since I graduated college. And I need to return my mom's knitting machine to her, since I definitely won't have the space or time to use it in law school. Oh, and the clothes. An entire closet full of clothes I haven't worn in a year or more. They're going to the Salvation Army.

I'm not selling all my furniture and moving in my little hatchback -- a truck, or at least a couple of vans, will still be necessary. But after having experienced a knickknack-filled life for several years, it feels great to realize that I don't have to take anything with me that doesn't serve some purpose. Because I'm not really a stuff person.

News Flash: Doing Stuff Is Good

2006-06-06T17:51:00.000-04:00

I usually consider myself an introvert. I have many introvert characteristics: parties tire me out, I almost never get lonely, no one else's approval will suffice if I'm not happy with myself, and so on. But on the other hand, I have to talk things out with other people to get to what I really think about things. I can second-guess myself a lot in my head, but when I've said something out loud and it isn't true, alarm bells sound.

The other day I was talking with my friend Marcy (Marci? Marcie? oh man, I hate when I don't know how to spell someone's name). She is one of the regulars at the Starbucks where I used to work, and we've gotten to know each other pretty well over the past couple of years. We were talking about her son, who is overweight and is very self-conscious about it, to the point where he can't diet or exercise because his self-esteem is so low. I told her that I used to feel that way, too, not about being overweight but about being out of shape. I hated exercising because it showed me just how out of shape I was. Now, I just want to feel better tomorrow than I do today.

She thought that was a really profound statement and she made me say it again so she could write it down. And actually, I'm glad she did.

I have tendonitis in both wrists. It started about eight or nine years ago, and most of the time it doesn't affect my daily life, though it does get bad when I have to write an exam out by hand, or when a storm is coming. Over the years, though, I've hurt my wrists many times by pushing heavy things, gripping things (like stuck jar lids) too tightly, or carrying things with my wrists at an awkward angle. I've dealt with this by avoiding those situations, which means that I pretty much never lift anything heavy anymore, and that means I have very little strength in my hands and arms.

I've read in many places that scheduling time for exercise daily is a great way to succeed in law school, and I've wanted to get in shape for years. I took a weight-training course when I was at Mount Holyoke and I loved it, but at this point I don't feel ready to go to a gym. So I'm trying to get to the point over the summer where I'm ready to do that.

That means lifting two-pound hand weights right now, and going for brisk 40-minute walks. I want to progress past this level, and I'm confident that I can, but I need to remember that it's okay that I'm no athlete. I hear softball is huge at Virginia Law. I want to be able to play.

I also just found out that one of the local bowling alleys has a special on Wednesdays where you can bowl for three hours for $5 including shoes, or Friday for $7. I'll be the one bowling with a 6-pound ball, but not for long.

I Never...

2006-06-05T11:04:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do at U.Va. and in Charlottesville this time around. I may have mentioned that I spent way too much time working as an undergrad. I lived and breathed radio. I never even did homework without doing something else at the same time. And I certainly didn't get involved in the University community at all.

To wit, as an undergrad, I never...

... joined a student organization
... visited Monticello
... went to a frat party
... attended a single activity at my church
... volunteered for anything non-radio-related
... voted in any election
... made a friend in any of my classes that I didn't already know from work, high school, or summer camp

I think there were a number of reasons that I missed out on so much, but none of them apply now, so I'm ready to actually be a student and enjoy it. August can't come soon enough for me.

On the other hand, the idea of leaving Pittsburgh doesn't make me very happy. James and I have spent these past few Sundays visiting with friends and family, and that's been wonderful. I hope we can keep that up when we move. It's a scant 2.5 hours to my parents' place from Charlottesville, so we could drive up for the day any time we want. And I'm sure we'll come back to Pittsburgh from time to time (that's what I keep telling everyone), but it's hard to imagine not being able to walk into Starbucks or church or the bank and see lots of familiar faces. I guess I will get to that point pretty quickly once we move, but there are a lot of people here I'll miss. I'm consoling myself by inviting all of them to come visit me down in VA.

Confirm or Disconfirm

2006-06-02T08:18:00.000-04:00

Okay, I mess around with words to be silly. But someone on Law School Discussion just said "in agreeance" followed by talking about someone "voicing his disagreeance" with a situation.

There's a scene in The Big Lebowski where the Dude, the Big Lebowski and Brandt are all in the Big Lebowski's limo, and Brandt tells the Dude, "We believe you are in a unique situation to confirm or, ahem, disconfirm this theory." It's one of the funniest moments in the movie, because if you were in a limo with a guy who said that, you'd be struggling not to laugh in his face. I'm guessing Mr. Agreeance saw that movie and didn't get that scene.

I'm not a language fascist, and I'm not against new coinages. I just ask that they serve some purpose. A new word that means essentially the same thing as an old word but with slightly different implications is good, because it increases our ability to express ourselves and communicate effectively. A new word that means exactly the same thing as an old word is bad, because it increases the vocabulary of the language (thus making it more difficult to master) for no reason.

Stop the insaneness!

I'm Challenged

2006-05-28T11:16:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite places to eat in Charlottesville when I last lived there was Big Jim's. Big Jim's is a barbecue joint that seems to have a catering contract of some sort with U.Va. Their food is always showing up at various events on Grounds. Their pulled pork barbecue is sticky sweet and delicious, and their cole slaw is pretty good despite the fact that it's way too smooth, like they put it in a food processor. They also have the best baked beans in the universe.

However, my favorite Big Jim's item must not be part of the catering menu. It's the Big Jim Burger. I can't put my finger on what's so special about it, since there are a lot of half-pound hamburgers in the world today, and this one doesn't have any odd toppings or anything (except a huge slice of onion, which is a plus for me). Maybe it's the fact that it's huge and delicious and cheap. Or that I have so many memories of so many Big Jim Burger Platters (with a heap of shoestring fries) eaten around those weird faux-wood tables with Than and Peff and John. Nowadays my appetite is a lot smaller, but when I was 19 I could devour the whole burger and all the fries, along with a crock of beans and a couple of glasses of sweet tea. I'd be lucky to finish the burger now, but I sure would like to try.

I've been back to C'ville many times since I graduated in 2002, but I've never been back to Big Jim's. Because I can't find it. I know it's just off 29N somewhere -- you take a left and then a quick right, and it's right there. I think there might be a Shell station across the street. But 29 is so overwhelming for me now that I can't drive and look for places at the same time, so I haven't managed to find it. Complicating matters is the fact that my townie friends generally took the back way to get there so they didn't have to drive on 29. I have no idea what the back way involved. Have I mentioned that I have no sense of direction?

Upon my triumphant return to C'ville, I'll swallow my pride and consult a map before setting out for Big Jim's. It's worth the struggle.

Adventures in Cell Phones

2006-05-26T16:42:00.000-04:00

So, after two years, my $75-a-month Sprint contract (don't ask) is finally up, and I'm using my new Alltel phone.

I hate talking on the phone. I would rather send an email than make a phone call any day. But I love having a cell phone because it makes everything so easy. If I'm stuck in traffic, I can call for takeout and have it be ready by the time I get there. I can make plans with friends such as, "Let's hang out Wednesday. What time do you get up? Okay, I'll call you at noon and see what you're in the mood for." And so on. (I'm sure I don't need to enumerate all the uses of cell phones.)

My problem is that I almost never use my phone. I could easily go five days without placing or receiving a call. So monthly service plans, which, in C'ville, seem to start at $40, are a huge rip-off for me. I'm going with a prepaid phone. $15 for the phone, $35 activation fee, and 15 cents a minute for all my calls, anytime, anywhere. And no contract, which is nice. If I try this for, say, two months and it's awful, I will have spent less than two months' worth of $40 service with a regular plan, and I can jump ship. I've had no problems with reception so far in Pittsburgh, except in the middle of the furniture section at Target, where I could never get a signal on my old phone, either.

One of my summer-before-law-school activities is catching up on all the "24" I never saw. I watched six episodes of season two today. Why must I always get immersed in shows that demand to be watched marathon-style? I want to go out and get the next couple of DVDs tonight, but I'll try to do something productive. Like maybe that laundry I've been putting off for a week or so.

The "Academical Village"

2006-05-22T16:45:00.000-04:00

From the Virginia Law Forum (students only) comes this link to yesterday's New York Times Magazine article on the trials of redesigning the University's South Lawn. Highlights include a knock or two at U.Va.'s stubbornly archaic terminology (e.g. Grounds, Board of Visitors) and the author calling John Casteen "a solemn, doughfaced man." I love it. My one quibble is that it refers to there being a shortage of student housing in C'ville. With the amount of expansion and new construction that's been going on in the past five years, can that possibly be true? Just how much has the student population grown during that period? True, living off-Grounds meant signing a lease by January if you wanted to move in in August, but my cheapskate housemates and I never had any trouble finding a place to live.

It's hard for me to imagine New Cabell Hall being demolished, although its charms are questionable. Its climate control doesn't work, and its design always confounded me: the bathrooms are in different places on each floor, the staircases are randomly located, and I never got the hang of the room numbering, but then, I'm not good with spacial relationships. I just love that building because of the classes I took there, and I hate to lose it. On the other hand, I know U.Va. has to build new buildings to keep up with other universities, and it sounds like the committee working on the new plans is at least as picky about architecture as I am, so I'm likely to enjoy the new construction if I'm around to see it. And I sincerely hope I will be.

Not Quite Comatose

2006-05-17T11:27:00.000-04:00

I've been a Law School Discussion junkie since the day I discovered the site last October. Now that most everybody knows where they're going to school in the fall, the boards are full of advice for 0Ls and people discussing their summer plans.

One interesting thing about law school is that people start it at different points in their lives. With few exceptions, first-year undergrads are 18 or so, have finished high school a few months before, and are moving out of their parents' houses for the first time. Incoming law students are coming from all sorts of different situations. There are people who are married, with kids, and quitting high-paying jobs to go back to school. There's the straight-from-undergrad crowd, piggybacking student loans on top of each other. There seems to be a huge number of people in roughly my situation: out of college five years, sick of being broke and moving every six months, ready to make a larger commitment.

I'm very lucky to be in the position to take the summer off. From what I've read, this is a good thing to do 0L summer. I'm getting myself as relaxed as possible, while trying to work through some lingering personal stuff that I haven't had the time to process over the past few years. I just spent a week with my parents, which was great. I can't remember the last time I did that. I'm listening to Mark Kozelek, which is hard to do unless you're really relaxed (his pacing tends to be very slow, but there's a great intensity in his songs if you have the patience to wait for it). I've been knitting very simple things. It's good.