midthought

And now I will take a moment to check in.

2012-04-16T00:05:00.000-04:00

Things are highly alarming these days. It's times like these that I turn to my blog and other online outlets and wish I had the resolve to not be like this.

I've applied for a total of one job in my Great Job Hunt, although I at least, smartly, finally put my student loans in forebearance. There's a definite clock on when I have to start being an actual responsible adult.

The good news is that for now, I do have a volunteer position. For a few hours while I'm there, I'm even getting paid a small amount of money, but for only about 8 hours a of the normal 3 days a week I put in. But I'm at least getting experience. Matrimonial and family law, some immigration law as well, but nothing you want to hear about. I think.

The rest of my stress has come directly from the fact that the wedding is fast approaching. I have just about 6 weeks. We settled tux rentals, bridesmaid dresses, guest hotel accommodations, most of the invitations. Still working on wedding favors. Still have not done at all: settled on a place for the rehearsal dinner, a place for me and Marc to stay for the wedding night, groomsmen and bridesmaid gifts, wedding flowers, wedding jewelry, hemming my dress. And I'm doing this all on my own, no maid of honor (or man of honor) or bridesmaids helping with details, planning a shower, all that. Do people even plan their own showers? Fucking hell.

Oh, and the thing that's been killing me since I confirmed this two days ago: I don't fit into the goddamn dress. I need to basically lose a hojillion pounds between now and June second, and I don't really see how this is feasible. I am trying to see how I'm going to diet and exercise my way to fitting in the dress, but I really don't see how I'm going to lose inches around my torso in just 6 weeks. Not without lipo or compromising my internal organs, anyway.

On that front, I settled on a grand diet and exercise regimen. I've been doing strength training for a few days. My glutes have known no worse pain. Last night, I added in push ups and, today, I went on a jog. I also kept to only 700 calories today, 1,000 yesterday, and 820 the day before. You might gape, but I haven't really been starving though. I can chalk that up to one of two reasons though: I'm too stressed, or my stomach's shrunk. Maybe a little from column A and a little from column B. I do actually think that it must be stress, because I've been watching cooking shows and some absolutely fantastic looking dishes have not made me crazy with hunger. I don't feel necessarily like someone on a diet. I feel like there's no way I can fit into that dress in 6 weeks.

But then, that does sound crazy.

Anyway, that's my list of shit I'm doing. I think that's more or less it for the week.

Oh, and there's taxes due Tuesday. Bollocks.

Bloggy blog blog.

2011-10-24T19:20:00.000-04:00

If you counted how many times I've said I was "resurrecting" a blog (across the many I've had), you'd probably start thinking that I was a cult leader. I mean, without context, that is.

To be fair, I've been busy since my last post. I:

took the bar (NY and NJ)
had a horrible time at both, but considerably worse at NJ
got engaged!
traveled to Asia for 5 weeks

And now I'm kind of half assedly dealing with my father's estate, thinking about getting a job, and playing World of Warcraft. I've said it before, but it just seems so apt. I am a first world bum.

And in case you missed it, I got engaged. Marc proposed the day after the bar. So, quite possibly: wedding posts incoming. You've been warned, nonexistent readers!

Things I did today instead of go over New York civil practice. [video]

2011-07-07T20:29:00.001-04:00

Britain's Got Talent won't let me embed this kid's audition video, so click here if you're curious. I think he's most adorable in the audition. The rest of these (or rather, the next two videos) that I could embed are lower quality than the ones you would get from the BGT account, sorry to say.

This (above) is a cover of the song below.

And this is what I did yesterday.

PvZ action starts around :49.

Wherein I infantilize a 29 year old man and nag him like the terrible girlfriend I am.

2011-07-04T13:52:00.000-04:00

I am so frustrated with Marc. He doesn't understand why.

As his contribution to the barbecue he is going to this afternoon, Marc bought a couple bags of corn chips. They were hanging out in a cardboard box (former home to an oscillating stand up fan that's now in the living room) and not prepped to go. That is, they weren't in a bag or anything. I was walking back to the bedroom (where I study when he is on his computer) from the bathroom. As I was walking by the kitchen, I noticed the bags sitting there, so I told him as I was passing him by, "Don't forget the chips."

So his response is, for some reason, "Thanks, Caroline, I know." His tone of voice added, "But thanks for taking me for an idiot." And he got that look where he tucks in his chin, glares up at you, and makes resentful eye contact. His look of obvious annoyance. I do not in any way think I am overstating this. I respond, "I was only trying to be helpful, you know." Only, I think he doesn't know that. So here is where the argument starts. I continue, "I don't know why you have to respond like that."

The rest is probably too colored by hormones. Not that it lasted all that long, but lest I be corrected for it later, the rest of this immature little fight can be easily inferred.

Ultimately, he accused me of nagging him for, basically, shit that he would never remind me about because he considers me an adult human being with responsibilities that I'm perfectly capable of meeting on my own.

That's how he sees it anyway. I was trying to remind him to bring the goddamn chips to the picnic so that he doesn't accidentally look like the tool sack who brought nothing to a pot luck. It was my one and only reminder and I only said it because he was about 15 minutes from leaving, hadn't dressed yet, was still in an instance in World of Warcraft, and the chips weren't set aside in one of our many cloth shopping bags.

To leave this stupid exchange, I went back to the bedroom (slamming the door too, because this shit is fucking frustrating to me). He came in after a few minutes (no doubt after he finished the instance in WoW) and we fought some more. At one point, I was flipping through my bar review book, ignoring him, and he taunted me in his best "nanny nanny boo boo" voice, "Turn the page, Caroline." Because I infantilize him when I do things like remind him to do things. Get it?

I will admit that I may be angry right now because of hormones and/or a feeling of impending doom about this bar exam, but the look on Marc's face when he hates something i just said just pushes all the wrong buttons. I was supposed to say nothing, right? Nothing.

Meandering thoughts on weight, body positive, and guilt.

2011-07-01T10:33:00.000-04:00

Through the magic of the internets, I came across the tumblr site, Stop Hating Your Body. And I've come to a decision about my future weight loss plans.

I'm just not going to weigh myself anymore. I'm not dealing with the numbers well. I doubt I've ever dealt with the numbers well. The only gauge I care to keep track of is not measured by weight. The numbers are bullshit in any event. According to my height, my BMI would be "normal" even if I were down to 95 pounds. Well, you know what, BMI chart? Fuck you.

For everything else I'm about to say: honest to god, I know some websites would flag things as "triggering" and divide up the triggers -- self-harm, anorexia, bulimia, all that. To the best of my self-diagnosis abilities, I have never actually suffered from an eating disorder. Maybe some relatively minor anorexic tendencies in my early 20s, some compulsive overeating here and there in times of stress, but I wouldn't call myself a sufferer. I wouldn't normally consider myself to be "triggered" by, well, anything really. Which isn't to say that I'm not at least minorly affected by certain things. But I don't count myself among those so ill as to need counseling, therapy, intervention, etc.

So I'm just going to talk about what I'm going to talk about. I don't know if any of it is triggering. To be honest, a large part of me doesn't want to devote any more brain power to ED rules, so I'm just going to be honest and see where that takes us. If you're the kind of person who can be triggered (I suppose by anything), don't bother reading on.

I found as I was scrolling through SHYB that I was skimming, pausing only for numbers and pictures. 140 pounds and 5'10.5", 178 pounds here, "only 102." I stopped at a nude side shot of someone who was purportedly Adele and stared at her stomach. I thought about what my stomach must look like from the side.

I should say that I'm not very good at skimming, so the numbers were convenient hooks for me to pause on. I don't know if I was scanning specifically for numbers, but at this point, I can't honestly tell you whether I did or didn't. I read some of the submissions and found they were by teenagers. Babes, practically. Fourteen year olds with (already) histories of diagnoses, obvious familiarity with trigger terms and clinical vocabulary, and as much adopted lingo from the pro-ana/mia communities as I ever knew when I lurked within them a few years ago.

Hardly anyone out of their teens. Is that only about one generation removed from me now or two? How old am I again? Most everything was tl;dr. Even when it wasn't. It makes me want to apologize to the authors. And if it didn't have a picture at all, I was skipping right by it. I was making myself uncomfortable by the time I got to the second page of archives. I got to the third and just had to stop. I had wanted to hit the "follow" button on this tumblr, but couldn't.

I'm in a strange little spot. And a lonely one, filled with anxiety. I want to support the body-positive movement, but I am in many ways far too judgmental to be in it. The young woman who runs SHYB posted a video that went viral a few months back. She vlogged in a bra and panties about body acceptance and not needing to be skinny to be happy. She noted her own numbers as one of the first things she says: 5'8.5 and 195 pounds.

Although I wouldn't call her my type, I do think she's pretty and that her weight is fine. Her message is a good one and she makes a positive example for a lot of people. If I don't sound super ultra positive about it, it's because I feel slightly like I'm reporting. This isn't my crusade. I have my own issues with body image, ideals, flaws. "Flaws," I should say. But with her, I think she's perfectly fine. I think this, this, this, this, this: all perfectly fine. I didn't have a good idea of what 195 pounds in a 5'8.5" frame looked like, but then I saw it, and I think it's fine.

But -- and I don't know if this is an extension of my own problems -- I have a much harder time trying to say "you're beautiful just as you are" to the morbidly obese. The fact is that I did take a look at her and decide, "I agree with her that her body is perfectly fine." It was her positive attitude really that really makes her seem just fine the way she is. She doesn't have the aura of, "I think she'd be more positive about herself if she just dropped a few pounds." She doesn't give the impression of "My confidence would rise if I were a size 8."

In an idealized world, was I supposed not want to watch the video at all, because, well, who cares what she looks like? How much of me clicked on the video because I wanted to see what a "body positive" person actually looked like?

I don't actually know if the body-positive proponents would extend their mantra of positive thinking and self acceptance to those over, say 400 pounds on a 5'2 frame. To the extent that I do, it's because I think that positive thinking and body acceptance would serve to cut down on compulsive behaviors like binge eating. But I have a much harder time clinging to body-positive imaging when my gut reaction is to infer depression and self-loathing.

I don't know how right or wrong any of that is. But my basic instinct is guilt over the whole messy debate taking place in my head. And the guilt alone points in the direction of "wrong." I struggle with that.

I'm not a very good feminist. I'm not a crusader, warrior, advocate. I'm not very positive about, well, anything. I know I'm more positive about other people than of myself. But I know that that positivity toward other people has its limits too. And it feels like looking at your whole being as a map and seeing that the part of you that's a Good Person just doesn't go on forever.

Celebrity crushes: Hulu edition.

2011-06-25T05:42:00.002-04:00

I may or may not have a serious thing for Clark Kentish types. And Sarah Shahi.

Sarah Shahi, lead of Fairly Legal and Life

Nathan Fillion, co-lead of Castle

Matt Bomer, co-lead of White Collar

Patrick J. Adams, co-lead of Suits

Ron Livingston, co-lead of Standoff

Tina Fey and normative beauty [quote]

2011-06-24T04:42:00.000-04:00

A quote to share with you about gender beauty norms and, possibly, the real implications and message of Sir Mix-a-Lot's 1992 classic, "Baby Got Back."

"But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes."

-Tina Fey, Bossypants

Nabbed from rpg.net forums.

Nostalgia for anime that hits you at night (or morning).

2011-06-23T07:11:00.000-04:00

I was browsing pages through people's links pages and found myself several clicks down the road, and staring at an anime screencap of what looked like Rurouni Kenshin. And I was hit with what I can only describe as a deep pang of nostalgia and pain. The kind you're only supposed to get when an old boyfriend calls up.

I miss that show. I miss many shows, and what's stupid is that those were some of the lonelinest moments of my life...college. I know I'm somewhat putting anime in a bad light here because I'm perpetuating a stereotype of some sort, but I really loved those shows. I got into them because I had a long distance boyfriend and no friends. Because I was unhappy at NYU and I was glad to be immersed in Japanese language escapist craziness. I had so few friends, but there was solace in running to AnimeSuki and looking at newly translated stuff I could delve into and get lost in. Some people in college did it with Jell-O shots and clubhopping in the village; I was an otaku homebody with an IT job.

And people wonder why I'm so sensitive about their fantastic Time of Their Lives college experiences.

I won't leave you hanging with just stupid achey nostalgia for a realistically-terrible-time-of-my-life. Here are the links of some of the fabulously geeky and talent-laden places I wandered to.

Zac Gorman illustrations and blog

my favorite: By Your Side

I Draw Nintendo tumblr
Mare Odomo

in particular, check out Letters to an Absent Father

Chrome's Lady Gaga commercial [video]

2011-06-23T01:35:00.001-04:00

So here's a confession from me to you. I'm a little monster. And this commercial actually made me tear up. You know, by the time that amputee guy* is playing guitar around 1:10? KILLS ME.

*I don't actually know what's up with that guy, whether he's an amputee or what, but he definitely is missing half his right arm.

Oh, and just to add: I love Edge of Glory. Really.

Game of Thrones "spinoff" -- One and a Half Man [video]

2011-06-21T00:19:00.000-04:00

I shared this over Twitter from my phone, but it shared the link formatted for mobile phones. Anyway, so I thought I'd cover my bases here and share with you the best thing on the internet I've seen all day. Seriously, I would watch a Tyrion-Bronn buddy show in a heartbeat. Or anything else Tyrion features in.

And if you haven't watched or read the (more?) serious Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, you're doing yourself a disservice. Fantasy's never been so awesome.

Death and other belated thoughts on Father's Day

2011-06-20T23:32:00.000-04:00

For maybe the first time in my life, I wonder if my father knew me any better than I knew him.

My father died last month, as you may already know. We didn't have a good relationship. We barely had any relationship, considering that I lived under the same roof as he did for all but 2 of my juvenile years. My whole eulogy was about how we weren't very close and how I was comforted that he managed to build such a big extended family in the big wide world, even if the one at home was just as distant.

I spent a good deal of my adolescent years hating him and the city in which we lived. It was during this time I turned to the internet for solace and company. This was how I came to type over 100 words per minute as a middle schooler and had my first boyfriend online in eighth grade. Eventually, things settled a bit more. My mom, who had left us for part of middle school, came back and I became better adjusted. I was still embarrassed by him, angry at him, but my emotions cooled if only because we basically just didn't speak beyond immediate school concerns, food, and plans for using the car.

Things marginally got better, but by that I really mean that we stopped having one-on-one confrontations after my mom was squarely in charge of raising me again. This continued...more or less permanently. After I moved away for college, we lived a thousand miles apart and spoke on the phone approximately once or twice a year. When I would invariably come back for the holidays, he would invite himself along to a few shared meals, usually in the company of a bunch of other family friends. We wouldn't talk to each other during the meals or at the Christmas parties. We'd just be two people there, among 10 or 15 or 30 others.

What that means is that I feel awkward when people offer their condolences to me. I feel regret and sadness, but I saw this coming for years prior. I knew it would be sad and awkward; I just didn't know when it would happen. I didn't guess it would be this soon. And I know I sound awful, but my honest reasoning was that I didn't think much could be changed. He wasn't that kind of guy. Maybe I'm not that kind of daughter.

Father's Day came and went this year, and I had some minor pent up dread about it. But then the day came, and I forgot about it until I was reminded late in the evening, just past 11. This is when I reminded Marc that he should probably call his own father. In that brief moment, I felt only guilt that I hadn't called my own dad. It's a feeling I'm familiar with from years past, until I called and had a stilted 2-minute conversation and we both went on with our days. Funny enough, I'd thought of this moment beforehand, and wondered if I'd really forget that he had died. I did have that moment, just briefly, and then it passed, and then came the moment I didn't contemplate. I didn't know what I'd feel after forgetting. I would have guessed that what comes next is regret. But I only felt guilt.

My dad was supposed to come up for my graduation earlier this month. He didn't get to, and I feel more terrible about that than maybe anything else. It was beyond rare that I felt that I was being a good daughter, and it just seems he and I were both robbed of a moment, a day, that he could really be proud of me one last time. I feel like he would've been happy to see me in my robes. He'd be awkward and hug me, kiss me on my cheek as he always did, and he'd probably cry. For all his fatherly stoicism, he was quite the bawler when it came down to certain things, from housewarmings to birthdays. I wondered if he only grew that way in his fifties and sixties, if it was the divorce, or if he'd always been that way.

Wish you were here.

"Read more >>>"

2011-06-18T05:01:00.000-04:00

Just to drop a quick note -- I felt I was writing too many tl;dr posts (despite comments!) and the blog was looking too long and skinny, so I went back and chopped some of the posts off after a few lines. So now if you see posts, make sure to check if there's a "Read more" link, because there should be another 4,000 more words hiding behind that. No changes to RSS feeds; those are full-article, if that's your bag.

I must confess, I think the only reason why I mention it is because I am one of those people who overlook "Read more" links when I near the bottom of a blog post and then feel very stupid when I find out days or weeks later that I missed about 75% of the post.

I was going to think about de-friending you anyway.

2011-06-16T19:48:00.002-04:00

This post is going to be self-indulgent and petty, in that way that only Facebook friend politicking can inspire. And beyond that, there's no real lesson to be learned. It's just an exercise in intertubes, social networking, drudges-up-high-school-in-that-bad-way angst. You've been warned.

I had a recent surge in Facebook friends. Partly, it was my dad's passing; a colleague in Singapore and a student in Mississippi friended me, and I thought it would be impolite to let their friend requests languish in my the way that I let certain other people's (mostly friends of friends, and my ex). These were people who knew my dad, and neither of those two were able to come to the funeral, so I thought since I would have cried in front of them and hugged them at that, it wouldn't hurt if I just hit the accept button.

The second surge came from my graduation weekend, which I spent with the childhood friend of a close friend of my mother's. My mom came into town and stayed with them in northern Jersey, and I went with her rather than have her stay in my pigsty of an apartment, and we did touristy things in the city and all that. We had a grand ole time, and we exchanged phone numbers and Facebook contacts.

So I've been noticing my friend count tick up; the highest I saw it was 336. Now, to some that's a lot; others, not at all. For me, it's an all-time high. But tonight, I see that my friend count is now down to ~~332~~ 331. So, yes, to make an initial confession, I do keep track from time to time on that number. I wasn't always so anal retentive about it, but I've actually kept a list since maybe the mid or high 200s. It wasn't always quite like this; I had spent some very stable years at right around 230 and no list. But tonight, because it had been a while since I last updated anyway (319), I went through the whole list and saw that I had lost:

a childhood friend's older brother
a high school frenemy
a law school underclassman
a high school acquaintance
a former supervisor from when I was a student rep for a bar review company

Now, I'm not heartbroken. I want to make that clear. I know childhood friend's older brother has a young family of his own and they all live across the world from me. Our families were close when he was in high school and I was in elementary school, and although I was invited to his youngest sister's wedding last year, our lives are only really ever diverging. I get it.

The law school underclassman and I were never really friends either; we served on the same executive board for a school organization, but we barely had a conversation that wasn't about that or me giving her advice on how to cope with the sheer stress of law school. She seemed to be stressing far too much.

The high school acquaintance was just that, and high school graduation was 10 years ago this year. I think I have a group picture with the two of us in it somewhere from a sad middle school Valentine's Day dance. Every time I think of her, I think of that picture from seventh or eighth grade.

The former supervisor was a Facebook goddess, with well past 800 friends the last I saw. She's gorgeous and photogenic, and she just changed jobs this January. I just looked her up again (evidently I am not blocked) and she has down to 300ish friends. I am not ashamed to be one of the pared in her case.

But the single dumbest part of this whole exercise of finding out who I'd lost in my ~~friends~~ flock of e-sheeples was the high school frenemy. I don't blame the others for defriending me (really and truly), but my reaction to the frenemy was I should have defriended you first. And I have mixed feelings because of this for all manner of reason. Initially, I felt that familiar frustration that I associate with her (or did, anyway, for a few years out of my young adult life), that feeling of I'm the only one playing this game. And it's all the lamer because the game, it appears, is a perverse one of social ~~networking~~ stock market, and I've lost.

Even the whole terming of the word frenemy, for instance, is almost certainly one sided. I have likely always been peripheral to her and her early adopter Starbucks-drinking hipster friends, and it has only been the stubborn hold of hormones that inked my adolescent brain tissue that make me think of her as anything but "some girl I had a lot of classes with." One of my chief memories of her, just to give you an example, is when my then-boyfriend and I were freshly minted as a couple in our senior year of high school, and we bumped into her and her long-term boyfriend at a play. While her boyfriend was away for the moment, she went out of her way to flirt with mine. The arm touching and giggling kind of flirting; the kind of brazen forwardness that leaves me dumbfounded even to this day. We were all classmates and they were acquaintances long before then; the only real difference was that that day he was taken, and I remember just not being able to help myself: I felt she was being malicious for the way she was acting. It felt so high schooly (and still does), it makes me want to gag.

Part of that memory flashes to the forefront of my brain every time I think of this girl. Even if that same memory doesn't come forward when I think of the whole of the relationship I had with that boyfriend (now ex. In fact, now The Ex. Which complicates the whole thing even more, I suppose.).

Pause. Really take a moment to look at this terrible loop of resentment, insecurity, and angst that I'm putting myself through.

So.

So this is it. No grand thesis. No epiphany. This is me just struggling with a semi-masochistic (semi?) relationship with Facebook -- or just my masochistic relationship with high school 10 years down the line. My solace, such as it is, is that nobody else on Facebook (or from high school) really drudges up this embarrassing resentmentinsecurityangst loop like this girl. And now that's gone. It wasn't my pushing away that did it, but I don't live in chick lit. And it's okay. It better be okay. I get to say goodbye too, to her place in my life, to the memory, and maybe to the loop.

Dear Photograph [plug]

2011-06-16T00:54:00.004-04:00

dearphotograph.com

I love this site and hope it gets tons and tons of submissions. I mean, look at the TREES and how they've grown!

Wake up, fuck up.

2011-06-15T20:55:00.003-04:00

Often, there is no way around it; I fuck up. I fuck up but good. I think of all those people who seem to have it together: career, marriage, babies, all packaged together in a nice Facebook package.

I have a very basic problem, an extremely rudimentary flaw. It's a source of anxiety and shame, for the very reason that it's something that very few people get. And for good reason. It's a problem I shouldn't have.

I'm late. All the time. To everything.

I remember being around 5 years old and not being able to get to bed. I remember watching so much Nick at Nite. This was back in the day when Nick at Nite showed all black and white shows: The Donna Reed Show, The Patty Duke Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, My Three Sons, Bewitched (pre-color, first Darren). I was late to elementary school everyday, which was always a bit odd only because I was always dropped off by a parent. I was late to middle school, high school. Generally by no more than 5 minutes.

Was I late to college? I must have been, although I have very little recollection of it.

I was late to every law school class. Most frequently late to the classes I had first in the day, whether they were at 9 a.m. or 6 p.m. Usually by no more than 5 minutes.

So the feeling of waking up, seeing the time, and going into immediate panic mode over my lateness is not new to me. It's all too familiar. The whole routine is very old: wake up and think to myself, "Hmm, I just woke up on my own. No alarm? Is this cause for alarm? Do I feel rested enough? Because I probably shouldn't feel rested. I'm rested. Fuck. FUCK." Then I fly out of bed and, after possibly wasting more time on something random, I fly out of the house...and then walk to the subway station at a relatively brisk fashion, but not too quickly or else I immediately get shin splints. I feel and am a fuck up for the next hour, minimum.

Today, I did a slight variation. I woke up and thought, "Well, it's already the afternoon. Day's already somewhat fucked for bar review." And I rolled over and grabbed my phone. I saw a headline from a law school staffer, "Final Chance to Attend Fellowship Protocol Meeting Today" and I panic. I was accepted for a postgraduate public service fellowship a couple weeks back and I remember reading an email from a week or two back about the orientation meetings being necessary to attend. The first email they had sent out outlined that three meetings were scheduled but the third date hadn't been picked yet. The first two were close in time though, maybe a day or two apart. Today was apparently the third date. God knows when I got the email that said that today was the day that was picked. And I didn't go. The email said it was today at 4 p.m. though, so I breathed a sigh of relief. Good, I thought. I can just get dressed now and make it. I look at the clock. It's 3:40.

It's a 45 minute commute to school, where the meeting is.

I'm fucked.

Why does this happen?

Because I'm a fuck up.

I called a cab company to see if I could pay my way into not missing the whole meeting. Turns out no, it would take me just as long to take the subway. I called the two staffers in charge of the public service program; no luck. Of course not, they're probably already at the meeting. I hit 0 on the voicemail and try to find the main number. The phone system transfers me to the registrar or some other office and I wind up speaking with a staffer who has no earthly idea what I'm talking about or who I want to speak to. I get transferred to career services and the line goes dead. Great. Failtransfer. I look up the career services number online (why don't I already have it in my phone book? why is my phone freezing and being stupid today?) and give them a call. Guy who answers the phone doesn't know what I'm talking about either. Great. He asks me who my assigned counselor is. I tell him. I look back at the website in front of me; man, she got promoted to director of career services, so I hope that's good news for me.

Finally, I get her on the phone and I preface this with, "I'm really sorry, I'm in a panic right now." I picture the other times in her career she's had to deal with idiot students like me who are in a panic. I feel pathetic. I explain to her the fellowship and the required meetings, the last one being today, how I missed everything. Her office doesn't run that program directly, she says. I know, I say. But I couldn't get a hold of the two people I knew who were running it, because they're probably at the meeting right now. This is now the third time I'm explaining this.

Eventually, she asks if I was in the fellowship program. I mean, what? She asks if I applied back in May. I say yes. She asks if I got in. I say yes. She says don't worry then, that's what's important, not the meeting. I'll take care of it, she says.

Really?

Really?

So I'm a fuck up but a lucky one? A fuck up because I rolled into the street before oncoming traffic, but I managed to roll away from the big ass semi? Could I be so lucky?

I guess the answer is yes. But I'm still a fuck up.

Conan O'Brien's commencement address at Dartmouth [video]

2011-06-14T21:18:00.001-04:00

This is the best graduation-related thing I've ever seen. Well worth watching.

Humor is easily the sexiest thing in a man.

(via Roger Ebert's Journal)

Post zero, for the umpteenth time.

2011-06-14T20:52:00.001-04:00

The thing about "starting over" with the whole blog thing is that you, my random internet audience, probably don't know anything about it. My prior starts, I mean. And sadly, if you did know, you'd know that my blogging/website activity over the past few years started out as angsty Livejournal account-jumping (let's forget entirely about the old old old angsty/Sailor Moon fanpage Geocities and Tripod days, shall we?) and has slowly but surely dropped off as, well, angst decreased and quarter life crisis began manifesting itself as paralysis and then a three year hiatus into law school. What an expensive foray into Wanting to Make Your Life into Something that was.

Not that I don't want to practice law. I do. But I want to practice a very specific sort of law; I only went to law school so that I could have access to and do something that I love. Something with a sense of purpose. And there's hardly anything better than to get paid to work in the fight for justice, is there? We can't all be independently wealthy and do so (*cough* Batman *cough*). If I can't do that, I'm not sure what I'll do, but it will have been an expensive three years I just spent.

But, you know, back to the whole starting over thing. Part of this quarter life crisis thing is that I feel I've lost my sense of time. And livejournaling back in the day was the way I kept track of a lot of the things that mattered to me. Even if it did turn out that the things that mattered to me were terrible boy issues and being lonely at college and my semi-paranoid theory that sunglasses were a prerequisite to being cool and happy. It was good to have that to look back on. But since that waned, I've lost a good deal of my 20s to the swiss cheese holes of my mind. And my early 20s in particular were dominated by two things that daisychained together: a bad breakup and obsessive playing of World of Warcraft. But let's save that for another time, shall we?

So this blog is here now, to plug the holes. The swiss cheese holes, that is, in my swiss cheese mind. My memory is quite for shit, or, to be more kind, it's quirky and rarely nonlinear. I worry about losing grasp on things that are actually important to me, and, if you're Facebook friends with me, you realize that I cameraphone my way into being That Girl Who Documents Things as a way of feeling awkward at social situations. And also to help me remember that I was there. That things happened. Because for all the friends I made during my terrible no good rotten very bad early 20s, I have no real memories of it except for the depressed bits of my ex trying to get back into my life, my job sucking, quitting and being a depressed bum, and other depressing gerunds and so on.

My father just died. Last month. He had a brain bleed and fell into a coma in April of my last semester of law school and he didn't come out of it. He passed away in hospice care less than five weeks later on May 11, and I've barely talked to anyone about it. I barely passed law school. I took my exams late, turned in papers late, wasn't sure I was going to graduate between flying back home and trying to stay focused on school. Trying not to be a bad daughter, even though he wasn't a good father. Trying to keep it together, stay sensitive, ethical, sane. Already I feel some memories fading away, and I'm conflicted about whether they should.

So maybe this is just an exercise in mortality. I'd like to feel that my day-to-day will be around, if not for other people, for me. Because today will otherwise sift through my fingers as another day in 2011, a year I will, one day, remember as the year that I graduated law school, the year my father passed away, and nothing else. And I feel like there are other things worth having around, other thoughts, other moments.

Of course, I'm no doubt going to ruin all this philosophical shit with a follow-up post of crochet penis or a rant about Battlestar Galactica's two-year-old series finale.