Because I Still Can't Write About What I Want
Being tired of the flubbiness of my body, I finally decided to do something serious about it and signed up for taekwondo classes at a local taekwondo school. This one is won't take me eons to get to and the people are already friendlier than the one I tried last year. My first class is today, which is really a private lesson, which hopefully won't involve some Steve Burns look-alike doing a full split in front of me. Been there, and quite literally, done that.

The weather is glorious out. Almost 70, and I'm wearing a skirt. Yeay!

Because I Can't Write About What I Want
For environmental law today, we read a recent district court decision that went on for five pages about the meaning of the word "any".

Some days, I think I'm pursuing the best profession ever. Sometimes I think I'm pursuing the most futile, unrealistic, disconnected from reality profession ever.

I'm not sure what today was.

Tivo Edit
I'm thinking of taking Desperate Housewives off my Tivo. It's a ridiculous show, and I don't think I really enjoy it. It's just a bunch of people making stupid decisions to melodramtic ends. And you can tell what's coming to the characters b/c they are caricatures of their worst characteristics. Oh, I suppose the word I'm looking for is predictable. Yes, I think I will take it off my Tivo. I've never been a big fan of soap opera like shows.

Perhaps this freed up hour will let me watch every Lost episode 2x, because it's chock full of mysteries!

Dreams
Last night, I dreamt that I very willingly engaged in a threesome. I wonder if that dream had anything to do with the fact that after the "law prom," all the friends I went with went home with boys. And I walked home after a girl I was going to share a cab with yelled at me way more seriously than the situation required. And then on the way home, I saw two men peeing in dark corners. But not so far into dark corners as to prevent me from seeing streams of urine.

My feet are blistery today.

Dreams
Last night, I dreamt that I very willingly engaged in a threesome. I wonder if that dream had anything to do with the fact that after the "law prom," all the friends I went with went home with boys. And I walked home after a girl I was going to share a cab with yelled at me way more seriously than the situation required. And then on the way home, I saw two men peeing in dark corners. But not so far into dark corners as to prevent me from seeing streams of urine.

My feet are blisterly today.

Sweater or Dog?
I was wearing a sweater yesterday that shed like a shaggy dog. It was awful. I would sit in a chair for a moment, get up, and the black chair would be cream colored. Every time I moved, I could see a swirl of sweater fur around me. All day long, I felt like I had something in my eye, and I'm pretty sure if I blew my nose, a furry cream colored ball of snot would come out. The sweater was so annoying that I had to leave the library earlier than planned just so I could come home and take the damn thing off.

It is now in a bag waiting to be taken to goodwill. Stupid sweater.

Quick, Quickie, Quickier
I came, I spoke, I conquered.

Tonight was journal elections. They were far more dramatic than they needed to be (did it really need to take one hour to elect the editor in chief?). But after deciding not to run for any of the top-of-the-masthead positions, I wrote a small, teeny speech for articles editor, gave it in a blur of excitement and nervousness, and I won! Articles editor. Just what I wanted and right up my alley. Yeay!

It's nice to finally win something. (Thanks.)

Then, I was going to lock myself in my study cubby but the new managing editor shook his head at me, no, and I obeyed and I ended up being one of the last to leave the post-election social. And then I had tasty New York style pizza. Time for an episode of Gilmore girls then bed! Have my tutorial at 10:15 am. "Bring anything you have written." Umm, is it ok if what I've written in like FOUR weeks is in bullet points and incomplete sentences?

Tonight, the outgoing ME who is also my former writing TA said my journal writing competition entry was solid. Contrast that with the crap I wrote in college (of which I was sorely reminded over spring break), and it feels good to have come this far. If you knew me then and how anxious writing made me, and now I just go on and on and on, particularly on this here blog ... I really have come a long way. [Excuse the self-congratulatory tone of this post.]

Ok, a drunken good night to you and you and you. But you, you in the back, not you.

Update Part the 48th
Where have I been? Even I don't know.

Tonight I went to see Spamalot. Yeay! I love theatre. However, I don't love it when the people sitting next to me are late -- for both acts -- reek of booze and cigarettes and sing along and talk loudly through the entire show. I may like it even less when I'm bitchy to them. The girl actually apologized to me at the end of the show but I just gave her a look like my goodness you are so below me I'm not even going to acknowledge your existence. I'm not sure which one of us was the worse person. I suspect it was me.

I've also decided not to run for any executive positions on my journal. There are other things I'd much rather spend my time doing next year, like rock climbing and socializing and focusing on all those classes I'm taking that are going to be curved -- evidence, corporations, etc. I'll be taking those classes with a lot of 2Ls, and from the looks of this year's 1L class, I'm going to need to study hard to keep my grades up. And again, I'd much rather be rock climbing and socializing than doing busy work I hate, solely for worldly recognition and having my name higher up on the masthead ... I'm so over it all.

Things are busy busy busy. And I am broke broke broke. I wanted to go home next weekend to get away, maybe see some friends, study in a different setting ... and have my parents buy me groceries. But they're off to Asia. Again.

Also, my powerbook battery is acting weirdly. I'm trying to recalibrate the battery to see if it helps, but I'm having a hard time finding enough time to do it correctly. I just ended up taking notes by hand in all three of my classes today. I actually kind of liked it. I think I will do it again tomorrow. Thankfully, I have only one class and it's 55 minutes long.

Number 5
Today, I dropped my iPod down two flights of stairs. Not bouncy-bouncy down the stairs, but straight down through this hole along the side of the stairs. Amazingly, the thing still plays music, but the LCD broke so I can't see what music I'm playing, exactly.

I'm sitting here eating mini cookies, checking email, and one just flew out of my hand, much like my iPod did earlier. Only, the cookie fell on my shirt, not down the stairs. And the cookie wasn't worth almost $200.

And I'm PMSing and had a rough day. Full of insecurities.

I could really use a full night's sleep and an attitude adjustment.

I'll go to the gym instead.

City Living
My bedroom windows open up onto an alley that runs the span of my street. Across the alley is the backside of the apartments on the neighboring street. Noise echoes really efficiently down this alley and I can hear the homeless people sifting through the garbage for recyclables as if they were in my bedroom. And the garbage trucks on garbage day sound like they are playing their hydraulics as my personal alarm system. Too bad I rarely, if ever, need to wake at 6am. Now, catty-corner from me, there is some construction going on the 2nd or 3rd floor of a building. They've connected one of those chutes so they can drop trash in it and the trash falls two stories down into a dumpster parked in the alley. Well, the workers spent the entire morning sliding things down it. The noise resembled the sound of maracas ... but it sounded like they were being played in my brain. Now that it's after 9am, they're dead quiet. I wish they would time their work a little differently. I'm tired.

A Quickie
So the DOJ wants Google search results as part of a study of the Child Online Protection Act. As reported today in this New York Times story, Google will comply because the DOJ has narrowed its request to 50,000 web site results, down from some significantly greater number.

This begs the question ... if this is all the government wants, why don't they just run the searches themselves? The address: http://www.google.com.

There must be something I'm not getting from the article, or that the reporter has not made clear.

Wasted
Oh no, that title doesn't mean what it usually does.

I'm in LA still, housesitting for some friends who are on vacation; I think I've mentioned that before.

I've known this friend since college, and sometimes over the summer breaks, this friend would let me store things at his parents' house while I went home to the opposite coast -- things like boxes of crap I didn't need for the summer and my car. Storing my car at his house was great. I never took very good care of my car, and my friend's father was ashamed to have a dirty car in his driveway, so he would wash it and fix minor things on it to boot.

Anyways, one summer, I stored some boxes at this friend's house, and some other friends' houses. When I returned in the fall, one box of files and papers from my classes was nowhere to be found. I asked around and everyone checked their garages, but the box mysteriously disappeared. It wasn't a big deal because it was just less crap I had to decide to get rid of. Well, this friend I'm housesitting for, his parents moved from LA to Colorado about 6 months ago. And lo and behold, they found this box of papers and files. It's heavy, and was too expensive to ship to me, so here I am, sorting through them, trying to decide what, if anything, I'd like to keep.

You know, it's depressing and makes me feel as if I've wasted my college education. (Thus, the title of this post.) First of all, I was a horrible student. I was very inconsistent, getting everything from A's to D's in my French class. No wonder my professor called me lazy. I took a philosophy of law class, and my only recollection is going to class and falling asleep. Oh, and learning of this thing called the slippery slope. Going over my notes/exams/handouts, there are lots of familiar terms and names. Posner, Model Penal Code, retributive theory of punishment, equal protection, Bakke, etc. Even in my physics classes, which was my major, I barely scraped by, and if it weren't for the generous curve and extra credit projects and research papers (which I was kind of good at), I would have failed every single class.

I'm kind of depressed, but I have to put this in perspective. I haven't used much, if any, of that physics knowledge in the last five years. How many people remember the things they learned almost 10 years ago? And my English papers were ok, if somewhat forcefully cynical. I know my college experience was about much more than learning facts to store in my brain; it was more about learning to socialize, to function in the world, to learn about the world, to broaden my horizons. All the time I spent not studying was spent learning about people, making friends, making connections, learning about myself, and learning about God. So I shouldn't beat myself up so much. Even if I did get better grades, would I necessarily be in a better place? Sure, I don't go to the top law school in the country, but I don't need to. I'm also generally happy with the person I am today -- I'm happy with the choices I've made, with the experiences I've had, and with the people I've met.

That being said, I think I'm done going through the yellowed reminders of all the things I should have learned and didn't, or did learn and forgot. Time for bed. I'm going to meet up with an old college friend tomorrow.

Furry Lobster Study Break
Here I am in LA, in Santa Monica specifically, trying to get some homework done, but really just playing around with free wifi. And I happen onto a story about a furry blonde lobster. So unique, scientists created a new genus and species. No joke:



I want spring break to go on forever. Oh, I suppose that's called retirement.

Surpise!
So I haven't been able to write fully about my spring break plans because they were a surprise. Saturday was my friend's surprise party and his boyfriend invited me to the party. So for the last six weeks or so, this has been the plan. The suprisee kind of got suspicious a few weeks ago, but then was thrown off the track by concerted efforts to throw him off the track.

But here I am in LA, jetlagged and relaxed. My friends are leaving for Argentina on Wednesday and I will housesit for them and do lots of homework and relax in this change of scenery. Many coffee shops to explore!! If only I could get my act together. I've been sleeping for 10 hours and i feel dead.

Convoluted
Booze makes it hard to tell the truth from the not truth. But I just had a final today, from 3-5:30, so I deserved the beer, cheap, nasty and lukewarm as it was.

But I just got wonderful e-news. So wonderful, my heart is melting, and I feel tears welling up in my eyes. Have I been so lonely that this news is just that joyous?

Meantime, spring break is upon us, even though the temps are so cold. It's a good thing there's no school tomorrow because I am quite literally out of clean underwear.

Plans
Spring break is next week. Yeah, it's hard to tell b/c I've been quite buys. have an exam in 12 hours or so. Oh, when I put it that way, I don't have as much time as I thought. Hmm. Anyways, briefly, here are my plans for next week:

* Work out.
* Mop my floor.
* Do all the work I've been neglecting because of this exam and general apathy.
* Pay Bills.
* Catch up on sleep and get rid of this fatigue.
* Work out.
* Work on my note.
* Do research for prof. summer research.
* Drink copious amounts of wine.

I guess this isn't all that ambitious, eh? I'm not good with goals. I often don't meet them.

Because It's Cold, My Eyeballs are Frozen, I Have an Exam on Friday





Oh, and despite everything, I watched Lost tonight. Do you watch it? If so, did you notice that the vial of medicine they were injecting Claire with had THE numbers on the label. Oh jeez, this show, I love it. I love things that intermix and twist and tie together. It somehow fulfills my OCD complex just a little. I'm not sure why.