leftovers for dinner...

ick. re-heated general tso's. this stuff looks so gross i can barely eat it. yeah, i'm giving up. this is completely unappetizing.

today is my brother's 25th birthday. my little brother is a quarter of a century old. and although i will always think of my brother as my "little" brother, most of my friends in law school are right around his age, a good number of them younger. i called my brother after midnight my time but before midnight his time to wish him a happy birthday from the future. he asked how his 25th was looking from the future. i told him it was so awesome all i could do to keep myself from exploding with joy was to sit on my couch with milo and read administrative law. woo-eee.

still waiting to hear back from my landlord about this adopting-a-kitten situation. milo definitely knows something's up, though. he's been really clingy lately. last night he was running around in look-at-me-i-am-as-cute-and-playful-as-a-kitten mode. nice try, but he and i both know he wants someone other than me to play with. i'm boring and am always surrounded by my computer and my books. nobody likes that. nobody.

remember the girl in my capital punishment class who claims that you assume the risk of being sentenced to death when you commit a crime? well, today in class she was advocating for the rights and wants of the murder victim's family, in the sense that statutory aggravating and mitigating factors should take account of the victim's family's wishes. what the?! i seriously cannot deal with her. and it's only a matter of time before my utter bafflement at this girl's existence is well-known because i have no poker face. at all. so when somebody says something totally ridiculous in class, my facial expression reveals that i think the person is totally ridiculous. in constitutional law last semester, folks would tell me that they would look to me when people would say stupid things because they got a kick out of my reactions. great. way to play it close to the chest (or is it vest?), mcnally. way to go.

today i had a meeting with professors d and s to talk about my seminar paper. i have so much swimming around in my head right now i hardly know where to start. i've now got a few pages full of notes and all i want to do is research for this thing. it could easily be 50 pages long, which is both exhilarating and overwhelming.

one of the issues i brought up to them (and i've got a draft post that goes into this more in detail) is my own personal struggle with how to write about race when i'm a white woman. i really want to be taken seriously and i want to be able to write something compelling and provocative. but i can't escape that my voice is white, middle-class, reasonably well-educated. i don't want to apologize for that, i don't think there's a need to apologize for that. at the same time, however, i don't want to pretend to know what it's like to be poor or black. because i don't, i can't, i never will. i don't yet know what to do with all of this in my head, not sure how to situate it in what i want to be doing. these struggles take time, i know... unfortunately, though, i'm terrible at being patient.

oh, more fun! briefs for moot court are due october 14th! that's only 3 weeks away. what the hell am i thinking? how about if i just have a nervous breakdown now, to save myself the trouble of doing it later?

i love law school i love law school i love law school i love law school i love law school i love law school i love law school i love law school i love law school and i'll say it over and over until i'm convinced of it beyond a reasonable doubt...