V.

11:16 am: I have a compulsive shopping problem
I just put a $500 deposit down on the hybrid version of this car.  http://www.aptera.com/

Well, at least it's fully refundable at any time.

10:29 am: Step 1:
I think I have an online shopping problem.  Despite my recent unpleasant spat with an eBay seller, I am still not off the horse.

Last night, right before going to bed, www.steepandcheap.com put up this shirt: http://www.rei.com/product/732908?preferredSku=7329080803&cm_mmc=cse_froogle-_-datafeed-_-product-_-na&mr:trackingCode=6B33EE6C-1A58-DD11-98CA-001422107090&mr:referralID=NA

I already own it in a pale green, but I looooove it.  At 28.xx after shipping, it was a steal.  I couldn't help myself!  I bought it.

I blame this brand of compulsiveness on my father, however.  My dad is a small, Asian man.  It is hard for him to find clothes that fit.  When he does, he purchases them in multiple colors then squirrels the extras away for when the one in use becomes ragged. 

10:46 pm: diet really does work!
I've had high cholesterol -- well above two hundred -- since at least middle school. I've never made a serious attempt to do anything about it, but Brad finally got ahold of my test results in November and freaked out. We went on a heart healthy diet: oatmeal or whole grain cereal every morning for breakfast, regular lunch, almost never red meat unless we're out, and almonds for snacks. I just re-tested, and for the first time in years, my LDL is at 130 and my total cholesterol is 195. My HDL has dropped a bit (probably because I've stopped exercising), but I'm amazed at such a dramatic change in just 6 months. I can't find my November report, but I found my August 2007 report which was the same, or better, and at that time, I tested at 239 total and 151 HDL. My triglycerides have increased sharply, but are still well within acceptable range. I got a "Wow!" from my doctor on the test results and "keep up the good work." I am actually fatter now than I was probably a year ago, but heart healthier. Yay!

10:24 pm: pork!
Pork festival tomorrow! Yay!

http://www.vaporkfestival.com/

The most awesome part of this: they auction off all uneaten food at the end of the festival. For some reason, no one else seems as excited about this as I am.

03:16 pm: A brief legal primer
My mother just called because her friend's son just got picked up by the police and booked on a minor assault charge. First, I don't know anything about the actual practice of most law. Second, it reminded me that all of my non-law friends could use a basic primer on criminal defense 101.

Do NOT consent to a search of your vehicle or property. If they have probable cause and warrant or other legal right to search, they will do so without your consent.

Do NOT say anything. Resist the urge to blather out your defense, defensible or not. Just keep your mouth zipped until you get a lawyer. Then tell your lawyer what happened completely and truthfully so that she can adequately defend you, which she cannot do if you lied.

Got it? No consent, no blathering.

02:22 pm: devastation
I am so sad.

We found this deal on McCann's oatmeal products on amazon and promptly bought a 6-pack of instant irish oatmeal and a 4-pack of the steel cut oats for ~ 20 total.

We ate the steel cut oats for the first time on Saturday and they were *amazing*. I went back to amazon to order more of the steel cut oats... and they're completely out. Boo hoo!!!

http://www.amazon.com/McCanns-Steel-Oatmeal-Traditional-28-Ounce/dp/B000FH19D0

02:07 pm: legacy
I'm now in Richmond, VA, clerking for The Honorable Senior Judge Robert E. Payne of the Eastern District of Virginia.

Something I do that some people might find -- uh -- odd is that, on occasion, I e-mail my ex-coworkers at the firm to hug another co-worker. It's a bit complicated to explain, and would involve me making a statement against interest in a hopefully-never-pending sexual harassment suit. But basically, I force people to hug.

Don't you all want to be part of my benevolent dictatorship?

11:33 pm: recap
It's been kind of an amazing month or so. I took a trip to Eastern Europe after I took the bar, and that was great. But I almost think that the stuff I've done in the last month and a half has been just as memorable.

I started out in mid-September doing some interviews for clerkships. I started in Richmond, VA (where I'm going to be next year starting the end of August), went to DC. Then the fun began. I was scheduled to go down to Austin, TX to see a senior judge who had agreed to meet with me on Saturday. In the midst of making my last minute flight plans (yay for Southwest vouchers), I emailed a friend's cousin who lives in Austin whom I'd previously met in Vail. He informed me that it was Austin City Limits festival. I then grovelled for a place to stay and a host to show me around, and he was nice enough to comply. I show up Friday for the first night of the festival, and he's gotten us VIP passes for the festival as well as segways for transportation. I see Gnarls Barkley, Cat Power, and Thievery Corporation. Saturday, I have an interview, but Saturday night I see Massive Attack. Sunday, it gets even better. He's got tickets to ACL tapings, which are AMAZING. The venue seats maybe 250 people, which is small. We're maybe three rows up from the performers, which is as close as I've ever been -- even when I was taken to a Coldplay concert with tickets in the pit. The Raconteurs and Sufjan Stevens. Monday night, I have the chance to go to a Cat Power taping, but I have breakfast in the morning with a professor from law school who invites me to dinner at his house in the evening. I show up to dinner, and I'm easily the youngest person there by 8-10 years. The next youngest person is the professor's cousin. Sitting across from me at the table is a Noble Laureate in physics. Two chairs down from me is someone who has just been appointed Dean of Students or something of that type at U.T. Also, the dinner is this weird post-talk affair, so the second course is accompanied by mandatory questioning of the speaker. We went around in a circle and each person had to ask a question. Not knowing this in advance, I hadn't been analyzing the talk critically. So I fell back to my default: a question about the internet.

Next day, I leave Austin to visit a friend in Houston for a couple days, as long as I'm in Texas.

Return to San Francisco. Go on a work whitewater rafting trip. Fun, but next time, I'm going to do a trip with more Class 4 rapids. I think our route had 3 or 4, but that's the only stuff that's fun. The middle hour or two was basically just floating. After the rafting trip, we have "rookie school in LA."

Week after, I start work. Work so far has been pretty good. I've only had to work one weekend and I've gotten to do some pretty interesting stuff. I've had to do a half week or so of document review (the bane of all young attorneys at law firms), but we're on a small team, so it hasn't been terrible. I'm doing white collar work on this stock option backdating stuff, and it's kind of cool to be working on the latest scandal in the financial world. For my first assignment, the partner (who interrupted our conversation to take a call from Al Gore) told me that I should probably start out by reading the Wall Street Journal.

This weekend, I went skydiving (yesterday) and furnished my house (today). Skydiving was scary. I think if I'd done research or had any idea what was going to happen, I wouldn't have gone. Freefalling is not natural. House furnishing was surprisingly eventful. My roommate found all the furniture and did a pretty awesome job at it. IKEA rug: 150. Coffee table: 100. Couches: Free. Dining table set: 250. Moving: 140. So it all should have been pretty easy, but the entrance to our house is up this very narrow staircase and the area between the staircase and the living room includes a very tight turn. We'd hired some guys off Craigslist to do the move. They end up being unable to take the larger couch up the stairs, so want to put it through the window. One of the guys ends up climbing the (not-too-sturdy) tree outside our house to hoist the couch up via rope. Of course, the first window they try doesn't even open all the way, so then they have to drop the couch and take it back up. I was pretty convinced the whole time that the guy was going to fall out of the tree and we were going to have to suffer the serious injury of an illegal immigrant on our consciences for the petty cause of getting a free couch into our house. But fortunately for everyone involved, all the furniture got into the house in one piece and no one broke any bones.

I haven't done a terribly descriptive job of anything, but for anyone who's been wondering, that's what I've been up to. I'm sorry for not calling while I was in LA. I broke my phone en route to Austin, so I a) didn't have any phone numbers and b) was scheduled up to the hilt with work stuff as well as c) coping with a ridiculous family crisis spawned by my mother reading some emails on my computer.

12:11 am: happy happy
I've had a pretty good couple of days, maybe even week. I've gotten to see some good friends, I got an apartment in San Francisco, I've eaten a lot of good food, etc. etc. But perhaps the happiest moment of them all just happened: I managed to get networked printing set up at home.

I have to print some stuff in the next couple of days because I'm applying to clerkships, which involves a major amount of paperwork and administrative pain. My parents have a desktop at home, so I figured it would be great to set up a home network so I could print remotely without having to attach and detach cables. I spent probably 30 hours in total doing various things: running the network wizard, reading up on network permissions, learning that Windows XP Home is a freaking pain in the ass. The whole time, I was extremely frustrated because this should not have been that hard. It was heartening to discover that other apparently more computer savvy people than I have faced the same hurdles. All the while, I suspected that Windows' attempt to make things more user friendly made it more difficult. There had to be a way to set up a direct connection between the computers by specifying addresses without running that damn wizard. Finally, I found a post that demonstrated how easy it was just to enter the IP address of the networked resource. Then I discovered some credentials problem. I read some new posts. Blah blah blah blah. Lots of hours. Then, amazingly, it connected. I can print! I'm ecstatic. If I weren't such a tech retard, I would figure out a way to put a dancing monkey at the bottom of my screen.

01:14 am: dreams crushed
I finally made it. Refreshed the Woot page at the stroke of 1am to find A BAG OF CRAP staring me in the face. After a couple seconds of shock and amazement that my countless nights of monitoring the website had paid off, I hit "I WANT ONE," checked off three, inputted my credit card security code, and hit enter. Now, it has been sitting at "credit card processing" for 14 minutes, which I think means that I have failed to obtain my bag of crap.

I'm sure there's some life's lesson or metaphor or allegory to be drawn from this, but I am too sad and depressed to go on.

*** update at 1:21am ***
I got an order receipt! Maybe it went through! Oh please oh please.

10:51 am: rowing
we are really out of shape, but rowing also seems tough. brad and i bought a rowing machine from someone on craigslist (a concept 2, model C), and so far i can't do more than 3 minutes at a time before feeling totally out of breath and tired. maybe we should have gotten a treadmill. :-)

04:37 am: the end
i am in the final throes of my final paper of law school, and probably therefore final academic assignment ever. i'm kind of glad to be done. although in my early days of law school, before i took a disastrous turn 2nd semester 1L year, i harbored illusions of being an academic (as does every other high performing law student), i'm now pretty glad my job doesn't consist of spitting this stuff out, one after another. of course, my mortal fear of the phone will probably mean that i hate being in client services as well.

although it is 4:37 and i am still frantically trying to write the last 5-8 pages of my piece, it's been a relatively leisurely time. i've actually had close to full nights sleep every other day this week. i've watched a bit of TV along the way. kept up on gossip blogs. i actually had a full, functional outline as of three weeks ago. i've only had to add 1 section and make 2 other organizational changes. for my senior thesis in college, i probably wrote 30 fresh pages in the last week before it was due and fully reworked another 50. the night it was due, i slept 15 minutes. this was after two or three days of < 3 hours sleep a night and another week of < 6. i came in over 15 minutes late and was frantically writing a concluding chapter as my roommate proofread and printed. so i guess this is what growing up means.

03:06 am: birthday!
my sister threw me a surprise party tonight right at midnight. which was really sweet of her. i think i've secretly wanted a surprise party for ever. i was very surprised and screamed because i thought there were intruders in my house. yesterday, my sister came up to me while i was chatting on the phone and RARRRED me at which point i screamed very loudly and she started laughing hysterically. somehow, despite the abuse i've probably ditched out to my littles over the years, i think we're still pretty close. when i hang out with jacki, we spend a lot of time laughing. mostly over how crazy our family is. but that's something that no one else can really understand, i guess.

i've been kind of a bad friend this year because i've been travelling so much. one of my oldest college friends came tonight -- i haven't seen him since early february. we used to try to get together at least biweekly. i realized over the weekend while i was celebrating brad's birthday with him that i've missed three important birthdays in this month alone.

so seeing my family and closest friends at law school all turn out on a late monday night was really touching. i quite frequently feel grateful for and unworthy of the friends that i have. sometimes i look at the things others do for me and figure that i must not be a half bad person if i have the sort of friends that i have, but then i look at the things i do for others and realize that everyone else is better and my best skill is in picking out good people to be my friends.

when i was in high school, i was best friends with this girl, kelly. at least, she was my best friend. i think in early high school, she was possibly my only friend. i was much more of a loner back then and pretty angsty depressed + insecure the way i suppose many high school kids are. kelly wrapped my locker for my birthday one year. it was one of those dumb things that i kinda wished someone would do for me and she did. i think i resolved to do something extra special for her. on her birthday, or maybe it was just a random day, she was sick, so i decided to hand squeeze some OJ in the morning to bring to her. she stayed home, sick. the next day, i squeezed some more OJ. turns out she was allergic.

12:49 pm: March Madness
I've never been much of a sports person. It didn't make any sense to me; I had no affiliation to any teams. I preferred to play rather than spectate.

But Brad explained to me the whole NCAA bracket thing, I helped him pick some teams, and now I anxiously check ESPN.com for the latest scores. None of our final four teams are left, but it's been pretty exciting. There was that day or so when Duke was out and we were really excited because Brad had oddly put Texas and UConn in the finals, meaning that he had a significantly better bracket than the bulk of his friends who had Duke in the finals (like the majority of the rest of America). Then Texas and UConn lost. I wish I'd watched the UConn game.

Of course, the articles I've read indicate to me that this year's results are a total anomaly, so I fear that my newfound taste for college basketball will dissipate as soon as I realize that most games are pretty boring. Or maybe me watching just tosses things up. The last game I watched before this was Georgetown beating Duke, which Brad made me watch since he and his friends are Georgetown alums. As anyone who knows college basketball knows, that was a huge and unexpected upset.

The lesson to be drawn from all of this: sports fans seeking to convert non sports fans should hand the non-fan a bracket before March Madness and explain how it all works. The seeding makes it pretty easy for any dummy to fill out a bracket, even if you don't know anything about the teams. It really removes the mystique from the whole operation.

10:48 pm: back to california
i finally made my job decision for next year. going back to SF.

03:00 pm: food this week
LJ people in Boston: please post in my comments days that you are free to come help eat food in my apartment!!! if there is a consensus day, we can have a party!

05:13 am: happy new year!
i am freaking insane. i was burned out at the end of finals, so came home and sat on my butt and watched tv for the first 8 days of break. then it was the 29th and i realized that by january 1st i had to research and write a 20 page final paper. i have currently completed 8 pages. i think i have until the end of the 1st to do the rest. i don't know why i put myself through this. i guess i've always been of the mindset that i'd rather swallow the whole pill than eat little bits of bitter tasting powder at a time - except it occurs to me that i'll put myself in the pool a little at a time rather than jump in. i guess i'm a woman of inconsistencies.

late last night, i received a drunk phone call than a drunk im, making my tally of drunk love confessions 2 for the last 2 months. i am pretty sure the originator of the other one will deny the declaration, but i'm not altogether convinced that he didn't mean it. something about wanting what you can't have, eh?

02:06 am: idiocy
probably the single worst thing for a person with my organizational tendencies to do is take notes on looseleaf paper. yet i do. so every year, inevitably, there comes a moment of panic where i think i've lost something. fortunately, i almost never throw anything away, so i usually manage to find it. it's just that i waste a lot of time searching. you would think that after years and years of this trial and error, i would have converted to some bound notebook. but no.

07:32 pm: hair cut deal
Today, I got a hair cut and I am happy.

Some salon in Somerville has a 30% discount for first time customers. http://www.francesrayjulessalon.com/

I saw Marta (I think - she's the only one there on Mondays) who was super nice and gave me a card for 25% off next time.

Today, my haircut was 35 - .25(35) = 24.50

The salon is in a World's Gym (really strange, I know), so I think they're having problems getting enough people.

01:22 am: tormenting family
So my mom has two great (and related) hopes for me:
1) That I will lose weight and
2) That I will find a boyfriend.

For some reason, I insist on being totally perverse and deny having done either of those two things, even when I have.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I realized that the reason why I treat Jacki so much worse than Sabrina is that I think of Jacki more as a peer and Sabrina more as a little sister. Thus, I expect Jacki to act like a 24 year old so when she acts like a 20 year old, I get upset at her stupidity and immaturity. On the other hand, I expect Sabrina to act 14 so when she acts 18, I am thrilled and delighted at her brilliance and maturity.