149 days until graduation. And counting.

Exam season. Gah! I sat in Panera for 12 hours today – literally – without emailing or surfing or chatting on the phone . . . just me and the Internal Revenue Code. It's startling to remember that I pay *dearly* for the right to be this miserable.

Yes, it's whiny and self-indulgent to piss/moan so much about this whole law school thing. This education has been a privilege - both the opportunity and the experience.

And I'm ready to be done with it. They really do an excellent job of nudging us toward the door. A few short months ago I thought that I'd be digging my claws into the furniture; now I'd happily trade a kidney for the opportunity to wrap things up early.

At the very least, it's lovely comfort to think that at this time a week hence, I'll be raising a glass to hail the passing of the Worst Semester Ever.

Quote from a tax case I'm currently *ahem* reading:

"We cannot say with the Court of Appeals that such a conclusion was "mere suspicion" . . . . To us it appears based in the sort of informed experience with human affairs that fact-finding tribunals should bring to this task."

Full stop. Is Mr. Justice Brennan accusing judges of wielding COMMON SENSE?

I've felt like journaling again lately. And if you think I have fidelity issues with a blog, you should see what kind of commitment-wary wretch I wrap myself into when there's a paper journal at stake. Self-exploration (in the metaphysical, rather than the "Our Bodies, Ourselves" sense) is terrifying, even for someone who spends as much time as I with her head lodged firmly in her own (again, metaphysical) rectum. So it's back to my poor, sparse blog.

I'm sitting here at my kitchen table, allegedly getting some work done at home before I head back to campus, but really just waiting for the effing Fed Ex truck to arrive. I finally caved and ordered RAM for my poor, much-maligned Macbook Pro. The poor thing is so dreadfully slow, and these days it gets hung up trying to do ANYTHING. Load a webpage? hope you don't mind waiting 2 and a half minutes. Lord be with you if you want to open a sizable .pdf or (heaven forfend!) run too many programs at once. Anyway, it finally sunk in that I've been stalling with the whole, "oh, I'm buying a new laptop when X" line of reasoning for over a year now - so many iterations of X have come and gone that I've made a liar and fool of myself ten times over. And memory is cheap (now THERE's a line worth exploring further) and will presumably make a huge difference. It had better! I'm going from 1GB to 2GB, and just to be safe I moved about half of the contents of my hard drive to external storage. Yes, I know that that shouldn't make a difference, but a superstitious gal like myself doesn't like seeing "5MB available" or whatever ridiculous amount I was down to in the clear space department.

But that's not what I came to talk about. I came to talk about the draft.

Hehe

No, really. Fucking Fed Ex. Nevermind that they're viciously non-union. I've sort of lost a lot of my street cred when it comes to that brand of stridency anyway. Here's what's galling me: my fucking RAM arrived in Ann Arbor at 7:30 am on Saturday. SATURDAY! And now it's nearly 3 on Monday and I'm still waiting. Fucking Ann Arbor isn't that big. The U.S. Goddamned Postal Service would have had it here by now, with a smile. Why do they even bother with online package tracking when their service is so shit-ass appalling? I'd be happier if I didn't know that my personal salvation was sitting in some stupid hangar within a 5 square mile radius of my home for the last 60 hours or so. Seriously, when you think about the amount of time I spend wedded to my computer (by necessity, mind you) and then figure out how much more speedy this is going to make everything, Fed Ex has likely cost me a couple of hours off my life this weekend. This is what I get when I pay extra for expedited shipping?

If you're thinking that this is maybe an excessive reaction to one of Life's Little Annoyances, well, then you've anticipated my next move. Which is that I am So. Fucking. Moody these days. Like, for no good reason. And don't even suggest that this is a menstrual cycle thing, a) because you'd be wrong, b) because there are only two people who ever even dream of reading this, and they're both badass women who'd kick your butt for going there, and c) because have I mentioned that I'm moody? and really, I'm as likely to bare my teeth and snarl as look at you anyway.

I don't know what my emotional mega-responses are all about, but they're growing tiresome. I spent the whole weekend past being weepy and lethargic and melancholic and misanthropic. Thank god my dogs don't judge me.

* Okay, really they're just masturbation references, and then only in the negative. Got you reading though, right?!

Whee! There is now an Apple store in the West Village - and it's just a few blocks from our summer home. There is a god!

Anyway, long time no post. Whatevs. Don't say I didn't warn you. I'm actually here now to air my incredulity at how incredibly weird the interwebs can be. Argh.

So, I landed this gig (which in and of itself explains my long journal silence.) I'm, like, in charge of stuff. Queen of an infinitesimal and unimportant domain. It's the kind of post that only an uber-dork would find compelling -- but, you know, if the shoe fits... It makes me happy. It's a lot of work. It's constantly reminding me how small is this little world of ours.

{just as a few for examples, I've already come across 1) a woman who went to high school with two of my best friends, 2) a prof. who works in my field in my old city and knows all of the same people as me, 3) a bunch of other people who know this guy that knows this guys that I know, etc.}

But all of this is a big fat digression from what I really wanted to post about. Which is that one of the profs I'm currently working with at said gig sent me an email yesterday saying, "small world - I hear you know ______. She's one of my favorite students!" (He teaches at her school; he and I have never actually met.) So of course I promptly reported this exchange to our mutual acquaintance, because trust me, we all need constant validation in this strange field of ours.

But then I asked her how on earth he'd made the connection. Cuz, you know, we go to different schools in different parts of the country, and how would he guess that she's dating a friend of mine and that she and I will be working together this summer? And her response was, "You didn't tell him? I have no idea." So we puzzled this out over the past few days and realized that he must have figured it out from Facebook.

He. effing. Googled. me. No other explanation. I don't know why this strikes me as so...peculiar, and vaguely creepy. I'm damn well aware that prospective employers and dates regularly employ the google, but he's neither.

And I'm the only person with my name, or at least the only one with an internet presence, so people can learn a lot about me. Pictures of me engaged in public action from my rabble-rousing days of yore... committee notes from a governance body I sat on a million years ago in college... press releases from my first grown-up job in 2000... race results, grad school links, and on and on.

It's all fairly antiseptic. Nothing that's going to harm my future liscensure prospects or anything. I just -- well, I'm a pretty private person. The whole centerofattention thing is only half the story: I like the limelight when I like it, but then I like to go back to my corner. I'm like the toddler who covers her eyes and thinks she's become invisible. It's always unsettling when I'm fed a reminder that it ain't so. Oh me oh my, this crazy world.

Okay, it just keeps getting better. I just wikipedia'd "legal skepticism" and learned that there was no matching entry, but rest easy, young scholars! Apparently "Legally Blonde" is a 96.6% match.

I would just like to take a moment to reflect upon the fact that I've wrestled with the legal formalists, positivists and realists for five hours and here's what I've learned:

The text that reads "No vehicles in the park" means that there are to be no vehicles in the park.

Who needs a drink?

So it turns out that I'm really, unexpectedly (and inexplicably) excited about this new venture. I can almost promise that it's not going to last - which is what we call a self-fulfilling prophesy. Feh. No matter, it's making me chipper now.

In other news, I'm continuing to sit in anticipation of my motivation kicking in. I figured that eventually one of two things would happen: a) my own internal, self-driven sense of responsibility would spur me to action, or b) failing that, exam panic would inspire me. Now I'm starting to sense that neither will occur. This should be interesting.