New Kid on the Hallway

Blogging about crankiness instead of writing my casenote

(Half of which is due at midnight tonight. I'm doing terribly with writing things expeditiously this semester.)

Anyway, I'm cranky partly because of said casenote, because I don't feel like I've had a break from law school assignments hanging over my head in WEEKS. (My own fault, but still, crankiness-inducing.)

And partly because of the annoying people at the local Whole Paycheck Foods, who are so very very entitled, all the more so because they are wealthy but enlightened--they buy organic! they voted for Obama! they're deeply concerned about their carbon footprints! Which are all admirable things, don't get me wrong, but I wish they'd be a little bit more concerned about their shopping footprints, and not park their carts in the middle of the aisle, completely blocking everyone's path, and maybe move more than a centimeter when someone says "Excuse me" to them. (This one woman did this to me TWICE today. I, of course, was there by myself, with hair in a ball cap, wearing a cheap sweatshirt and jeans, while SHE was there with her precious teenage daughters, all wearing expensive faux-workout gear and expensive haircuts. So I guess I was simply supposed to accommodate myself to her importance.)

And partly because something in my kitchen STINKS, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. It might be the disposal, because we haven't been cooking much lately, so it doesn't get run very often, and the little dribs and drabs of stuff sit and get icky. (Anyone have any brilliant ideas for deodorizing a garbage disposal?) There were some suspicious marks on the floor (which is fairly dark, so stains don't show up easily, lest you despair of my housekeeping), but I've mopped it and the smell doesn't seem to have gone away. Hell, I'm burning vanilla-mint fragrance in an oil burner, and I can still smell whatever it is. I cleaned the cat box, so it can't be that. But I am a little worried, because Middle Cat occasionally has litter box malfunctions and we'll find a little turd sitting in the middle of the floor somewhere. I can't FIND one anywhere, but I kind of worry she may have turfed one under the stove or something... isn't this a charming piece of information??

So, anyway, given that my choices for the moment are writing my casenote or scouring my apartment from top to bottom for the source of the stink, crankiness seems in order.

Let's see how long I can keep this streak going

I'm so glad to see I'm not the only one who likes The Good Wife! (But don't tell me what happened tonight, I DVRed it to watch later!) I only wish I could actually throw a Good Wife viewing party and hang out with the rest of you in person while watching--that would be so much fun.

Anyway. I found out today that two of the other people in the seminar for which I turned in my utterly crappy incomplete draft also turned in drafts that were incomplete (though doubtless less crappy than my own), and only 1 and 2 pp longer than my own incomplete draft, so I feel a little bit better. Not great--I still wish I'd managed to turn in something better, and length-wise, I still think I sit at the bottom of the curve--but at least it's not like everyone else in the class turned in complete papers. (We're also hoping the 3Ls are all so burnt out on school by now that they turned in incomplete drafts, too. Sorry, any 3L readers I may have. We are bad bad people, I realize this.)

The truly sad thing is I've so traumatized myself over this incomplete draft experience that I dread turning back to this paper again--I associate it only with angst and woe. Which will make it harder actually to finish and revise the darn thing. And I had such high hopes! I was all excited to take a seminar because Writing is My Thing, and I would write a brilliant paper and dazzle my prof and be guaranteed a good grade. Well, this semester has been a learning experience in how to get over myself...

Before I toodle off to bed, let me jot down a few things I was thinking about posting about in the future, and if anyone has any opinions about which would be most interesting, feel free to let me know:

• why Biglaw is like the tenure-track job of the legal world
• what it's like interviewing as a "non-trad" student
• my attitude to "networking" (hint: not that great)
• biggest differences between historical writing and legal writing
• why reading legal blogs these days can be like hearing fingernails on a chalkboard (I should note that this doesn't apply to my fellow students' blogs, I'm thinking more of blogs about the profession generally).

(Or if there is anything, you know, NON-law-related that anyone would like to hear about, I'm happy to take suggestions!)

This is not a commitment to joining NaBloPoMo, or whatever it's called

But I feel I've been neglecting this space, so perhaps all the discussion of posting every day in November has been a little inspiring.

I can tell I'm out of practice blogging, though, because while I do semi-note things of semi-interest that might make up a blog post as I'm going about my day, by the end of the day when I have a free moment, they have all vanished from my head entirely. So I'm quite sure there was something this morning about which I thought, Yes! I'll blog about that! And now? Couldn't tell you what it was to save my life.

So I'll leave you with two random observations from my day:

First, you'd think that a guy driving a big-ass (doubtless American-made) pickup truck, encrusted with umpteen stickers about being a Vietnam vet and being in the Marines and so on, would feel secure enough in his masculinity not to need to hang a fake set of balls from the ball hitch on the back of said truck.

Second, I really like The Good Wife. But I'm not sure whether I like it because it's especially excellent T.V., or if I like it because I have to like any show that's about a close-to-middle-aged woman going back to work as junior associate at a law firm, surrounded by people fifteen years younger than she is. (For the record, Julianna Margulies is older than I am. But I'm not going to say by how much...)

Yeah, so I'm kind of overextended right now

I came home yesterday about 4:30 (after being at my externship, in class, or in meetings all day), determined that I was going to work like a fiend all evening. I was going to read for 2 of my 3 classes today, and THEN I would research my moot court brief! Really, I would!

Okay, I would read for 2 classes so I could get a lot of work done on my brief today!!

Well, I would read for one class and go to bed early so I could get up early and get tons done today, TONS!!

In the end? I read for one class (checking Facebook after every page) and got to bed no earlier than I ever do, and got up no earlier either (though admittedly, it was a decent night's sleep, which I appreciate).

(And what is with my prof adding a 40 pp. opinion and a 37 pp law review article on top of our casebook assignment???)

At the moment I am a crappy wife, a crappy friend, and a not-especially-great student. Which is my own fault for choosing to do all the stuff I'm (supposed to be) doing, but it's funny how the "I can't say no to anything!" feeling of being on the tenure-track translates quite easily to the "what do I have to do to get a job???" context of law school.

Anyway, I am going to be a sucky blogger for a while (or, depending on your perspective, a suckier blogger). Maybe I can surface a bit around the end of October.

________________________

(Also, thank you, everyone who commented on my metablogging post below! I really wasn't posting to try to get people to tell me this blog isn't self-absorbed, because yeah, it is kind of self-absorbed. But you were all very kind to comment thusly anyway. :-D)

This week is going to be fun

Because despite only being four days long (and honestly, for me, three, because I don't have class on Friday), there are a ZILLION things I have to do this week:

• write a topic proposal for my law review casenote/comment. The weirdest thing about this is the feeling that we're supposed to pick a topic before we know anything about...anything. We found out that the topic proposal is due this week in the third week of August; last year we took only doctrinal courses (the basic building blocks that everyone takes) and by now we've had two whole weeks of class in the topics we finally got to choose. After spending a lot of time in a career where you might take literally years to figure out a topic (unless it was just me who took that long?), I find the whole thing kind of incomprehensible (although I know exactly why they're making us turn something in and completely agree with the logic). I mean, whatever I end up writing will be fine (or no worse than what anyone else does), but I have dangerously elevated standards of how much you should know about a topic before you attempt to write something publishable in it, and what I do know (or what I can learn in a semester) isn't anywhere near what I think I should know.
    
  Clearly, I will have to get over this.
    
  (I ended up talking to a couple of my professors and asking them what they thought would be good topics. Traditionally, I suck terribly when given a topic - if I don't formulate it myself, I can't work out what to do with it - but I really like one of the suggestions, which seems nicely manageable in scope and actually involves some material I was thinking about already.)
      
  (The other dilemma the casenote presents: do I try to do something that combines my previous knowledge with my new career? Both the profs I talked to asked me about this. On the one hand, it would make sense to build on my strengths; but on the other hand, I'm inclined to dive into something purely legal, and modern, both to show that I can, and because if I'm going to change careers, I kinda need to leave all the previous stuff behind. I like to cut ties. Kinda like how I'm not friends with any of my old boyfriends - I know people who are, and that's cool, but it's not how I roll. Besides, I think that writing on something medieval would just make me look weird, and writing on a legal history topic that's not medieval would require more research and more work than just doing the traditional casenote, because I'd be all convinced I'd have to go do archival research and learn the entire scholarly literature and basically try to write a dissertation.)
    
  In any case, whatever I do, I'm supposed to have a plan for it by the end of the day on Wednesday. At the moment? I have nothing.
     
  
• go to the first real day of my externship. Which meets MW mornings, but last W I had a conflict (scheduled before I got the externship arranged), and then today is a holiday (and actually my supervisor was working today, but I decided that I was not going to work on Labor Day. I will be uberdedicated and focused and all that from now on, but this is my only holiday until Thanksgiving!). Of course, on Wednesdays I go to my externship, eat lunch in my car while driving up to campus, then sit in class from 1-2:20 and 2:30-4:20. Which is, you know, fine - my choice and all that - but it means that I won't have much (any?) time during the day Wednesday to write an insightful topic proposal, let alone do my reading for the three classes I have on Thursday (thankfully I spent the weekend finishing the reading for two of those classes). Honestly, I don't think the proposal is all that formal - I think they want a paragraph. But still.
       
• attend the first of my externship class meetings. This is so I can get credit for the externship. There are only 4 class meetings total, so it's not like it's a huge burden, but because I didn't sign up for externship credit till last week I didn't know the class schedule till then. And I have to write up an assignment for the first two classes. This is due the day after the proposal. Hooray for P/F grading!
  
• be on-call for one class. On Thursday. This is the class I haven't read for yet. Being on-call really isn't a big deal - it requires doing the reading, which I would do anyway - but you know, when you know you're going to be called on you tend to read a little more carefully than you might otherwise. I will probably have time to do this before class on Thursday, but I will have less time since the externship class meeting cuts into it. (And tomorrow I have three classes and will have to finish reading for my Wednesday classes.)

Okay, it's not a zillion things, it's four. So I exaggerate. All will be fine, it just feels like I will have to take advantage of every minute of every day between now and Friday to get it all done, and I will, but then I will be unlikely to make it out of my pyjamas on Friday much before noon. I should just plan for that now.

What good and/or bad and/or taxing things do you have lined up for your short week? (And is it just me, or do short weeks almost always turn out more exhausting than the regular kind??)

Some unresolved anxiety?

After the first week of class, my schedule SHOULD be settled. I've attended each class twice; we're well into the material. Also, I finally got my internship plans worked out, and I start tomorrow.

But last night (actually, early this morning) I dreamed that to fulfill my science requirement (yes, IN LAW SCHOOL), I had registered for a physics class. I already had missed the first day, and in my dream, I hadn't had time to do the reading for the second day. So I was dithering about whether or not I could go to the second class meeting, not having done the reading and all, and if I missed the second day, shouldn't I really drop the class? But then how would I fulfill my science requirement??

It was quite a relief to wake up and realize that no, THERE IS NO SCIENCE REQUIREMENT IN LAW SCHOOL. (Knew there was a reason why I liked it!)*

On a happier note, I also dreamed that my aunt gave me and NLLDH a beautiful apartment in London to live in. (Yes, while I'm in law school. A bit worse of a commute than I have now, but it made sense in the dream!)

   

*Which is not intended to knock science - I wish I did know more about it. But since the last time I took physics was sophomore year of college, and even then it was "Physics for Poets," I don't think it would be wise for my future career to rely on it in any way!

Weekend!

My week finally ended today about 3:30, in that I finally had no pressing appointments, no places to go and people to see and spiels to perform about how much I want to work for [fill in employer's name here]. (It's not that I had SO MANY interviews that it was overwhelming, they were just spread out over the entire week so they took up a lot of mental space.)

My brother-in-law and niece are coming into town this weekend, so that will be cool. I had grand plans of cleaning up this place so we can bring them in without shame. 

I have some stuff to fill out and then put in the mailbox (like financial aid forms, eek).

I was determined to stop at the grocery store, since our apartment is truly void of food.

And I wanted to take advantage of the gorgeous day and free time and get outside to get some exercise.

But I got home and was sucked into the gravitational pull of the sofa. And here I am, 2 1/2 hours later, and I HAVE NOT MOVED. I think my brain turned off. It certainly hasn't provided any exciting ideas about dinner.

The upside is that only going to classes next week will feel like a relief. Probably.

Gender and sports

Have you seen the current debate about Caster Semenya? CBS has a brief article here, and Jezebel has something a bit more in-depth and interesting here. In short, Semenya is a South African track athlete who is currently undergoing testing to determine whether she is, in fact, a woman, and whether, therefore, she is legitimately competing in women's sports.

NLLDH and I watched the world track and field championships (held in Berlin) the other night, and we saw her utterly blow away the field en route to winning the 800-meter race. She won by 2.45 seconds, which is a huge lead in such a race. She was truly impressive.

And as much as I hate to admit it, I couldn't help but look at her and think, Wow, she looks like a man.

The CBS article points out that officials do not suspect her of cheating by having had a sex change; I don't think anyone is suggesting that Semenya is a man who has consciously decided to pass as a woman. Instead, they're concerned that she has a "medical condition."

It's hard, given Semenya's appearance (and some of the statements in the Jezebel piece), not to look at her and wonder if she is perhaps intersex. But if she is - what then? There are "concerns" about her competing as a woman if she isn't "fully" female - whatever that means.

I'm kind of uncomfortable with the idea of declaring someone "fully" female or "fully" male. It raises too many echoes of past systems of categorizing someone by race, wherein if a person had even "one drop" of African blood, s/he was held to be black. It sounds like if Semenya has "one drop" of male genes (chromosomes/hormones/whatever), that will be enough to deem her male, or at least, not female, regardless of how she identifies herself.

Myself, I support the right of an individual to declare for hirself what hir gender identity is. So I was surprised at my own initial resistance to Semenya's success - like it's "not fair" for her to compete if she has some kind of genetic issue (which, indeed, she may not at all). Which made me realize how much athletic competition reinscribes gender divisions, even at the same time that it purports to provide an equal playing field and to allow women to showcase strength, agility, determination, courage, and competitive spirit - things not always traditionally held to be feminine. Maybe the problem with Semenya is that she goes beyond what women are supposed to be able to do? Women athletes are great, as long as they don't actually challenge what men can do? Women athletes who surpass their peers have, after all, often been accused of being overly masculine and unfeminine (Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova come to mind for me, but that's because I've followed tennis since I was a kid - I'm sure you can come up with other examples from other sports.) Is the controversy over Semenya just an extension of this discomfort with women's achievements?

As someone of conventionally unambiguous gender, I present no social problem. People don't have to worry about how to treat me or where to place me in the categories in their heads. But I have had students who got beat up and arrested for using the "wrong" bathroom, where the bathroom they chose didn't match up with the labels people around them wanted to place upon them. Semenya appears to unsettle people in a similar way - which is not, I should add, intended to act as if she is therefore the problem. Her case just made me realize how many ways there are to bump up against and be limited by the gender labels that we place on certain bodies.

What's your reaction to the controversy over Semenya's success? Do you think she should retain her world medal? Is it "unfair" for someone who identifies as a woman but who has some "male" physiology to compete against women of conventional physiology? And if so, what should Semenya do - compete with men, despite being a woman? Be barred from competing at all because she can't play within society's gender rules?

Sunday night ramblings

Two more weeks till classes start... two weeks from tonight I'll be trying to go to bed early, which I probably won't manage, and I'll be sleeping badly knowing that again I have to get up to an alarm and BE somewhere by a specific time. (It's amazing how quickly I get out of the habit of getting up to an alarm, even though I've only been done with work for a week!)

Thankfully, my schedule will be a bit nicer this semester than last year: on MW I don't have class until 1 p.m., TTh my first class is at 10:45, and on F, I don't have classes at all. Sadly, I currently go till 5:40 on TTh and 6:40 on W, which means I won't be home till relatively late (especially a bummer since I prefer working out in the late afternoon/early evening). I guess it balances out the later starts.

Of course, that's assuming I keep all my classes. I'm taking a slightly heavy load, and I did put in an application for an internship I couldn't resist (haven't heard anything back yet, but I think they were taking applications until the 31st). If I get the internship, I should drop my MW class, because it would free up the most time in my schedule, and would probably make my life the most manageable (it's 3 credits, there's a final). But the thing is, the class just sounds so INTERESTING. I'd rather drop the 2-credit, 1x/week on Wednesday night class I'm taking, but it won't free up that much time, it's only 2 credits, and it already doesn't have a final exam, so dropping it probably wouldn't really make my life that much easier. (Everything else either fulfills a requirement or isn't going to be offered again while I'm still in school or is in a subject that I went to law school specifically to study, so those are my only two real options for dropping.)

Even if nothing comes of the internship, I'm wondering if I should drop a class. I'm not very good at gauging how much work this courseload will be, because in both my undergrad and grad programs, every course counted the same and everyone took the same number of courses each semester (4 in college, I can't remember if it was 3 or 4 in grad school). Eh. We'll just have to see how it goes (with one eye firmly on the add-drop deadline).

Anyway. I'm looking forward to everything starting up again, just because I do REALLY BADLY without a routine. For instance, I went walk-running for the first time today since my horrific wipeout, two weeks ago last Wednesday (and it was more walking than running this time, although I think partly that was because I'd eaten crap all day so had little decent fuel in my body). That's partly because it was at least 10 days before my left knee stopped being too sore even to think about running (the scrape still hasn't finished healing, and it itches like a bitch), so I had to lay off for a while. But then when it started feeling better, I was done with work, and having nothing to do, I kept thinking, I don't have to go running NOW - I have plenty of time. I'll go later. Such thinking is the kiss of death; I never go later. Conversely, when I get off work at 5 or 6, and I know I want to eat dinner sometime well before 10 pm (I have the eating habits of a midwesterner, not a European), and I know that I don't like working out much later than 7:30 pm? Well, I know that if I want to run, I have to do it when I get home or I won't do it at all. So I suck it up and do it.

(Am not sure exactly how this will play out during the semester, but that's something else, we'll have to see how it goes.)

Okay, maybe I'll go answer the e-mails that I've been ignoring since finishing my job, since, after all, I have plenty of time; I can answer them later.

Lessons learned

• Two small pieces of chocolate cake are not good fuel for intense apartment cleaning.
     
• There is little that is more annoying than completely rearranging the living room furniture and realizing it worked better the way it was originally.
    
• Unless it is breaking your thumbnail about as short as it can go.
      
• If you are going to engage in large scale furniture moving, you might want to a) put your husband's three pairs of shoes somewhere else and b) remove the fluorescent light bulb from the side table that you're carrying around the room. Because you know? Those things break when they fall off the table because you trip over a shoe. Who knew!
      
• On the upside, one way to resolve the problem of the too-big side table that doesn't actually fit beside any of our furniture and so was floating in space by itself disrupting the flow of the room is to stick it in the corner and put the oak file cabinet that was in the corner where the side table was. (The file cabinet is much less obtrusive.)
     
• On the downside again, moving an oak file cabinet just might scratch the hardwood floor. Crap. Don't tell NLLDH.
      
• Ohmigod the Snuggy now comes in ANIMAL PRINTS. Just what you always needed!
      
• When you have no real convenient places to stow crap, said crap collects on every flat surface. I think I need get a bunch of these kinds of things to stow under the coffee table and on the odd bookshelf space I have open.
     
• Dirty cat footprints are amazingly Swiffer-resistant.    

But I have managed to vacuum the bedroom, mop the living room floor (though I may go back over a few little cat footprints...), wash the sofa cushion covers, and clear up at least SOME junk. Am going to head back to it, as soon as I regain some energy...