pretty pathetic

i've been feeling pretty tired and overwhelmed this week. it all got off to a poor start on sunday, when instead of going to bed early as i try to do, i got a paltry five hours of sleep. monday is traditionally a late night because i have class until 7pm and then oodles of reading for tuesday, which i did not complete, which only meant that my reading continues to pile up through the week as i attempt with futility to catch up with my homework. i was feeling particularly low by thursday morning, having once again been deprived of sleep and failed to get to the end of my assigned reading (to be fair, i seem to have had all these non-school activities going on this week, so this is really a predicament of my own making). i woke up on thursday, showered, ate cereal, and turned on the computer, where i found an email from my professor canceling my labor law class--the class for which i have the absolute most homework, which runs from 9:30 to 11:20 on thursdays. i can't even tell you how good that felt. i got back into bed and slept for two and a half hours.

i got into school to do my journal office hours and told a friend what had happened. i told her it felt like the best thing that had ever happened to me, and she said that was pretty sad. which it is. but it really felt good.

hello blogosphere

and by blogosphere, i mean tom. i know, i know, i haven't posted in forever. i would like to say that this marks yet another time in which i will come back and blog more frequently, but that's probably a lie. things are only going to get more hectic. plus it's hard to motivate to write because the only person who really reads my blog is the same person who lives with me and knows everything that's going on in my life. at the same time, i make no effort to publicize my blog or update it regularly, so i know i have no one to blame for that but myself.

here is a list of things that have happened since the last time i wrote on my blog. this list is not comprehensive.
1. i finished my summer job at the us department of education, in the ny office for civil rights. it was awesome.
2. i made law review!! that was pretty exciting and unexpected. however,
3. i had to skip my usual weeklong vacation at pawley's island because of law review orientation, which was kind of tragic. i went down there for one night, but it just wasn't the same. my relaxation quota for the year is, as a result, far, far lower.
4. i interviewed with 28 big new york law firms.
5. i spent probably a hundred hours trying to figure out where to work next summer. i still haven't decided. in order to avoid googling, let's just say i'm picking between firms whose names rhyme with schmebevoise and gimpson hatcher.
6. um, oh yeah, i started school.
7. it was tom's birthday! he got a wii!
8. i got my wisdom teeth out. that really sucked.
9. i made plans to go visit julia in france for thanksgiving!! yaaaaay! i'm probably going to be really stressed out by the end of november as a result, but it will totally be worth it.

all right, that's all i have to say. i'm going to go do homework.

esciquette

my friend erica and i love to make up new words that combine old words to describe a common, as yet un-named...whatever. our most enduring invention is gratiwarding. i think once you hear that word you are forced to admit--it really captures the concept of something that is gratifying and rewarding better than either word had previously captured it.

this weekend i went to d.c. to visit erica. we created a new word: esciquette. esciquette is proper behavior on escalators, i.e. standing on the right side and WALKING on the left. escalators were invented to help you walk faster! not to help you continue to stand on your lazy asses as you are carried upwards at an infuriatingly slow pace. get it together, america! this is a universal rule! a gross violation of esciquette may involve standing on the left side of the escalator with your rolling suitcase. not cool, friends. not cool.

of course, on the way down i saw a rachael ray billboard in which she had combined two words (can't quite remember which) to form a new word to describe food. it really made me concerned that word invention has been co-opted for evil.

entourage

tom and i had a really nice weekend. friday was my 25th birthday, which i celebrated with dinner out and a little bit of dancing. but we had to get up early for jen and chris's wedding, so we didn't stay out too late.

jen and chris's wedding was so much fun! they both looked great and everyone had a wonderful time. it ran very smoothly, and everyone seemed really to be relaxed, which in my recent wedding experience, is unusual. so congraaaatulations to them!

then we drove up to connecticut where this morning we went with my aunt to pastorale for brunch. that place was great. i had an omelette with goat cheese, roasted tomatoes, and corn. it was a foodful weekend overall.

the real inspiration for my post is that tonight tom and i sat down to watch entourage, one of our favorite shows. (only under a half an hour--too short!) shortly before it started a commercial came on for all of hbo's original series (serieses?), and i immediately recognized the music as being the song "here we go" by the group dispatch (formerly known as one fell swoop until a dispute over the name with a country or folk group or some such). i used to LOVE this band. i mean come to think of it i still really like their music, but i used to listen to it all the time. my senior year in high school, i saw them live at the wetlands (man should they bring that venue back!) about seven times. i even made it to boston for their last concert, which was held live out in a public park in boston. there were a ton of people there and it didn't have the same energy as the tiny shows that ran for hours at the wetlands, but still. it was fun. except when the entire crowd started hurling their empty plastic bottles into the air. it was the stupidest thing i have ever seen; those things may look pretty hurling through the air, but they are really annoying to have raining down on you, especially when drunk people start hurling half-full gallon jugs.

i'm not sure the song really worked on the commercial, though. it was still exciting.

belated san diego pictures

i went to san diego for the third summer in a row (i guess it was technically still the spring) a few weeks ago. i was incredibly remiss in taking photos. this is probably because (1) i've been there two well-documented times before, and (2) it was kind of cold and we didn't do the typical beach rotation one (me) expects from san diego.

however, we did make it to the zoo. that was cool. the animals are pretty amazing. they don't seem to miserable, but i may be just revealing my lack of sensitivity to animal happiness in saying that. the panda exhibit was particularly cool. they kept telling us that the pandas were not actually a zoo exhibit--they were on loan from china (not sure where in) to participate in a research project. at least one thing that they learned from that "research project" is that lots of people will come to the zoo in order to see pandas.

i'm sick...i hate sick

not to be whiny, but this is a whiny blogpost. a few weeks ago i received an email from the intern coordinator at my summer job, saying "we checked our calendars, and thought it might be better for you to work from june 4 to august 10 instead of may 28 to august 10." as you can imagine, i was ok with this (it still meets the minimum 10 weeks worked for me to get school public interest funding), and after my very relaxing weekend in the country was psyched for a week of relaxing and errand running. except that monday night we got home and i noticed my throat was scratchy, and it was downhill from there. i'm starting to feel a little better and hoping i will be in tip top shape for the weekend (heading down to pton for a day of reunions on saturday...too poor to attend the rest of it, relatively cheap though it may be)! in my raspy-voiced state i managed to terrify the professor i was meeting with about being a teaching assistant next year, who has a young child at home and politely refused to shake my hand at the end of the meeting for fear of catching the cold. whoops.

weekend getaways

i just got back from spending the long weekend in northwestern connecticut, where my mom's family has long owned a house that sits on a beautiful lake. it was so fabulous--relaxing, warm, sunny. the weather was forecsated to be mixed but there was one 30 second sprinkle of rain and almost continuous sun all weekend. it is one of my favorite places to go in the world. obsessed though i am with nyc, i absolutely adore spending summer days in the country. when i was younger my mom and sister and i would spend months at a time in connecticut, with my dad joining us on weekends. i got really good at doing handstands in the lake, and we went waterskiing almost every day.

does this make me less of a new yorker? or more of a new yorker? or more of a pretentious, overprivileged new yorker? my friend was protesting that if you go away every summer weekend, you never see people in the city. i'm far from going away every weekend, but...i like spending weekends reading books and tanning in a place where cellphones literally do not work and reliable internet connections cost too much to acquire. it's nice.