i should probably be studying, but...

so, i set up camp at a local coffee shop this evening at 6:45ish, with the intention of working nonstop until they kicked me out. however, i’m exceptionally good at mismanaging my time, especially when i feel even the slightest bit pulled in more than one direction, as tends to happen this time in the semester. (on a related, yet nonetheless tangential note, my 1L mentee told me this afternoon, when i rather unceremoniously and without asking deposited my backpack and all of my stuff at her table in the lounge, that apparently there’s a time management lecture coming up for the first years… erm, maybe i should attend?)

so anyway, i ended up placing a phone call—well, returning a phone call, if you want to get all technical about it—to someone on the other side of the state. i began the conversation with a disclaimer: i’m at a coffee shop, standing outside, it’s cold, i can’t talk long, but i wanted to call nonetheless… an hour later, i’m still standing in the cold, talking on the phone, having a delightfully charming conversation with someone that i really don’t know if i’ll ever meet… yes – this is shamefully irresponsible of me, yet i don’t have the slightest bit of regret about it. it was, after all, a delightfully charming conversation.

and the boy has a serious dilemma with which to contend – is seeing iron and wine at the electric factory in philly worth it? iron and wine? yes. but the electric factory is quite possibly my least favorite place to see a show EVER. put it this way -- if pavement were to reunite and play only one show and that show were to take place at the electric factory, i’m honestly not sure that i could force myself to go. there would certainly be a balancing test employed – the relative weighing of the benefit of seeing my fave indie rock gods vs the suckitude of the electric factory. i'm afraid that the balance weighs on the side of the suckitude. yes, friends, it’s that bad.

oh, and apparently, throckmorton is very easily googleable. this seems like…a good thing? since that whole rock star fantasy of mine is likely never to materialize, at least i can find fame and notoriety through these silly blog posts.

from america's finest news source...

jesus -- sometimes the onion kills me! this made me laugh out loud:

MythBusters Team Struck Down By Zeus

November 30, 2005 | Issue 41•48

SAN FRANCISCO—MythBusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who dared challenge the sacred explanations of the order of the universe, were destroyed by Zeus Monday. "I soared ascending to the ethereal sky, and by merest nod massed a fearsome storm, and with mine lightnings struck down the naysayers Adam and Jamie," Zeus said in a press conference called to warn all doubters of his thunderous might. The MythBusters producers have issued a statement apologizing to the entire Olympian community and declared that, from now on, the program will focus only on myths unrelated to the Greek, Egyptian, or Norse pantheons.

parappa the rapper!

now, back in the day, when kids was playin' duck hunt and the legend of zelda, i was all about some nintendo. i could video game with the best of 'em. i was a nerdy tomboy with glasses and ponytails who was determined not to be outdone by the neighborhood kids.

but now, i'm pretty much worthless when it comes to video games. i still find some of them entertaining (and i'll admit to wasting an entire summer in college playing a really awesome 007 game where you could run around and shoot the other players), but that part of the brain that makes one really good at video games just never developed to its full potential in me.

however, there's one game that is just plain fantastic. it's a playstation game (as in the first incarnation of playstation -- not the DVD convertible thingy that's out now) about a boy who has to rap and dance his way into the heart of the girl he loves. this game, friends, is parappa the rapper.

it really is a terrible game. the graphics kinda suck, there are only like six levels, it's not really that challenging. but what makes it so brilliant is the songs that parappa has to perform to advance to the next level! here are some of the lyrics from my favorite level, in which parappa is learning to drive from instructor mooselini:

/Moose/  Alright, we're here, just sittin' in the car
        I want you to show me if you can get far
/repeat/ Step on the gas!
        Step on the brakes!
        Step on the gas!
/Moose/  When I say boom boom boom! you say bam bam bam!
        No pause inbetween Come on, let's jam!
/repeat/ Step on the gas!
        Step on the brakes!
        Step on the brakes!
        Step on the gas!
/Moose/  I'm glad you know which way to go,
        but it ain't gonna stop me Here we go!
/repeat/ Check and turn the signals to the right!
        Now turn to the right!
        Check and turn the signals to the left!
        Now turn to the left!
/Moose/  Woh ho ho ho! Stop the car!
        We got an emergency, can't you see?
/repeat/ Do you know why we stopped the car? (Do I know why we stopped the
car?)
        Guess...
        What...
        Do you know why we stopped the car? (Do I know why we stopped the
car?)
        Guess...
        What...
        I forgot to close the door... (You forgot to close the door...)
/Moose/  Now just don't forget,
        this ain't Kung Fu, come on again!
/repeat/ Check and turn the signals to the right!
        Step on the gas, now turn to the right!
        Check and turn the signal to the left!
        Step on the gas, now turn to the left!
        Step on the brakes,
        Do you know why we stopped the car again? (Do I know why we
stopped the car again?)
/Moose/  That's because you just got your license!
        Woo hooo!! Yes!!

ah yes, friends -- powerfully stupid! i LOVE it! and, i've just found a website with cheats for the game! oh, winter break -- you can't possibly get here quickly enough!

there goes my hero...

okay, it's totally lame that i just referenced a foo fighters song in the title of this post. but i've got good reason for doing so, and the reason is this...

the hero of my day is none other than my little brother daniel, who is fantastic and generous and patient and who takes really good care of me. and daniel is a big fan of dave grohl, hence the FF reference.

and the really cool part? he's actually considering moving to pittsburgh! i'm not sure how seriously he's considering it (because he's considered moving to places near where i've lived in the past and that's never actually happened), but he's just broken up with his girlfriend and is at a point in his life where a big change is probably a good idea. i told him that all the folks in the know claim that pittsburgh is one of the worst places to be if you're single, so he wouldn't need to worry about jumping back into a relationship anytime soon if he moved here. although, girls adore my brother, so i doubt that statistic would be too much of a hindrance for him.

(speaking of being single, i had promising interactions today with two cute boys... and cute boys are always worthwhile diversions.)

i just made some coffee. it's 1:00 in the morning and i still have work to do. i HATE this time of the semester. it's zero fun and makes me feel tired all the time.

2 days until dinosaur jr! it's gonna be so rad -- it's the original lineup (j. mascis, murph, and lou barlow)! sacrifices have been made to the guitar gods for such a show. rock!

two things, unrelated...

1) today is november 28, 2005. it's 10:11 p.m. i'm in pittsburgh, pennsylvania. the temperature outside is, erm, 64 degrees. WTF?!?!

2) i think i need to break up with my therapist. today i was telling her something that i thought was particularly insightful regarding some of what's been on my mind lately -- i was trying to take a small incident and stretch it to see how it informed the bigger picture of my life. and i managed to describe it in a way that i thought was particularly articulate and clear. and when i finished i asked her, "do you know what i mean?" and she said, "um, not really."

it's like i talk and she talks and we're talking about the same topic but the subjects are not the same. and i'm not even sure why i'm going to see her. the first five minutes of my session with her today consisted of me sitting there, staring at the piece of electrical tape on my coffee mug, saying that i really didn't know what i wanted to talk about. stammer stammer stammer.

she's one of those therapists that wants me to talk about my heart as if it were independent from my head and i don't really think i can do that. i can't think about my emotions without trying to filter them through some silly intellectualization process. that's just now how my mind works. i'm quite able to recognize patterns and see repeating behaviors. i'm not so good at reorganizing my brain so that i don't keep doing the stupid stuff. i don't care how i feel -- feelings are transient and roller-coaster-y by nature. what i want is to think about things in a better way.

sigh... different. wavelengths. altogether.

what happens when the system fails?

this morning in my capital punishment class, we had a guest speaker. it was a man who was sentenced to death for the murder of a woman in an arizona bar. he spent ten years in prison, was convicted twice in separate trials, did everything the way he was supposed to, and yet it still took ten years and what amounted to a freak occurrence before the system finally recognized that he was innocent.

i was riveted while this man was speaking. he's just a regular guy. he was a mailman before he was wrongfully imprisoned. his only connection to the woman who was murdered was that he played softball for a team that was sponsored by the bar where the woman worked. they were casual acquaintances at best. there was no evidence connecting him with the crime. and yet two separate juries decided he was guilty of her murder.

i'm in law school, i'm entering this profession in part because i believe in the system that it embodies. i have faith that justice will be served. i trust that good will truimph over evil. but the simple fact is that sometimes this just isn't true. so what do i do with this? what do we do with the ray krones? the folks who do NOTHING wrong but who end up spending years in prison, being treated like animals, assumed guilty before they're convicted?

presumption of innocence? not in reality. don't we assume, on some level, that even if you're only in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that's what gets you arrested, there is still something that you've done wrong that warrants the arrest?

ray krone said something in particular that has stuck with me. he was first sentenced to death and spent several years on death row. but he was given a second trial, which resulted in a life sentence. but he said that life in prison is as good as death -- you know you're going to die there. you may have a little less solitary confinement, but you're not getting out. ever. you don't get to look forward to any normal enjoyment of the world. and i guess in this way, maybe the folks who are sentenced to be executed have it easier than those who are thrown in prison for life. maybe it's preferable to make your peace with death, to think of yourself as dead already, than to just wait out your life with nowhere to go.

fucked up. it's so so so backwards. i want to fix it. i want prisoners to be rehabilitated, to whatever extent possible. this out-of-sight-out-of-mind bullshit doesn't do any good for ANYBODY. look what we've got for it -- gang violence in prison, rampant prison racism, ignorant prison guards who use brute force first and ask questions later, and for those who do eventually get out, they're re-entering a world that doesn't want or know what to do with them.
call me a bleeding heart, but it seems that a society that treats its dregs with that much disrespect and that little faith is one that is by definition inhumane, in the lowest-common-denominator sense. if we can't find anything redeemable in the worst of the worst, where does that leave us? what does that say about what we're capable of?

wake up the echoes...

notre dame finished out its season 9-2 with a win on saturday over stanford. as far as the rankings go, we're # 7 in the AP and coaches polls, and the BCS has us at # 8. this means we should be in a BCS bowl (possibly against ohio state -- barf -- or oregon), but the official word on that doesn't come out until next week.

i know i know i know, i've said it a billionty times, but i totally heart college football! hooray!

monday night football...

go colts!

home-schooling, anyone?

on saturday, i got a phone call from a good friend in philadelphia (or, as a certain favorite professor of mine would say, "philadelphweah"). he caught me up on his life and some of the goings-on in the old group, including some rather unsurprising yet nonetheless frustrating news about a certain ex of mine. it had been entirely too long since i had spoken with him and it was really nice to hear his voice.

and since law school is like living in a bubble, he told me about this interesting little bit of small-town pennsylvania news. the story itself is tragic, no doubt. it's about a teenage girl who got in a fight with her parents over a missed curfew, and her boyfriend (the "ludwig" in the below excerpt) came in and shot both of the parents. but here's the really creepy part:

The Bordens, both 50, were apparently shot once each in the head, authorities said. Mike Borden worked for a printing company, and his children were home-schooled, said neighbor Tod Sherman. Sherman said the family knew Ludwig through a home-schooling network.

home schooling! apparently these folks are also fundy-christian types, too. gee willikers, folks! the irony is profound.

turkeys, anniversaries, and other stuff...

i had really lofty goals of getting a ton of work done over this thanksgiving break. unfortunately, that didn't exactly happen.

nonetheless, it's been a lovely few days. thanksgiving itself was fantastic -- i think it's made it into my top five thanksgivings of all time. this year = excellent company, awesome food, good times. and my friends can cook! like, really cook! i'm pretty damn impressed. not surprised, necessarily; but definitely impressed. the only real downer to thanksgiving day was that i lost a hybrid game of regular trivial pursuit/star wars trivial pursuit (sorry, paul!). i blame the alcohol and bad luck...

friday was mom's 10th anniversary. it kinda baffles me how a day on some arbitrary calendar can result in a feeling or a memory or a mood. i woke up feeling fine, but then i kinda got knocked over by this wave of sadness. i called daniel and dad that afternoon while i was in target. they were both at the cemetery visiting mom. there was something about their voices, something about the distance, something about the occasion for the phone call. and leave it to my dad to find the words to say that bring tears to my eyes...in the detergent aisle in target. my original plan was to spend the day by myself. i had thought i needed the quiet and the solitude, but things didn't happen that way and i'm really glad of that. in hindsight i think being by myself, especially knowing that my dad and brother and sister were together, would have ended up leaving me feeling really lonely.

i think i may have figured out a way to get myself home for xmas. it all depends on how my step-sister's end-of-the-semester schedule works out for coming home from school. i'm really hoping it will work, because i like my step-sis a lot and never have any time to just hang out with her. 8 hours in a car should give us plenty of time to catch up. now i just have to figure out how to get back to pittsburgh...

the clouds in the sky this evening were absolutely incredible. they looked all grey and ripply, as if the surface of the ocean had been frozen and turned upside down, and i was looking at it from underneath.

cats are sleeping in a furry pile right beside me, all tangled up. i think it's time i went to sleep, too.

(p.s. pr is the hero of my thanksgiving break. he's a good friend and he doesn't annoy me and he seems to have an amazingly high threshold for my company in extended dosages. and he can make bread and really good cranberry sauce.)

(p.p.s. fugazi's "the argument" album is so brilliant it hurts my eyes.)

leftovers...

sunday night, thanksgiving weekend. dinner consists of leftover turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. fantastic! and speaking of mashed potatoes, i have about seven pounds of it in my fridge, if anyone's interested.

and speaking of if anyone's interested, does anyone else find it rather odd that my saran wrap includes a recipe for shrimp cocktail on the package?

happy thanksgiving!

it's 3:07 on thanksgiving morning. i just took a carrot cake out of the oven and it looks fantastic. this means it's now okay for me to go to bed.

outside it's a glorious snowfest, with the kind of snow that makes perfect snowballs. i know this because i threw a couple of them earlier.

orange...

so, i'm putting this picture up (of me and my friend regina at elizabeth and aubrey's b'day dinner) because it's the first picture i've got that shows the orange hair. it's not the best depiction of the color, but it's better than nothing.

the hair is presently getting a bit rooty, so i imagine sometime soon it's gonna have to be redone. i'll just add that to the list of stuff to get to whenever i can...

life's rich pageant...

the other day, while in the car with a friend, we listened to some old REM. and i've kind of been in that mood for the few days since. so now i've got "life's rich pageant" on the cd player, which i'm gonna turn way up while i clean my kitchen (in anticipation of messing it up something fierce for the thanksgiving day cook-fest).

"i believe in coyotes and time as an abstract explain the change the difference between what you want and what you need, there's the key, your adventure for today, what do you do between the horns of the day?"

moms and dads...

krista's parents got into town this evening for a thanksgiving visit. at krista's invitation, i tagged along for the fetching of the parents from the airport. and then we all went to dinner. this was the first time i had met krista's parents. before we left school, my friend anne asked, "are you nervous? do you think you guys are ready for this step?" the silly thing is that i was a little nervous. not like sweaty-palms nervous, just nervous in the way that i know i sometimes just say stupid things and am particularly good at making an ass of myself in front of people who don't already know that i'm an ass. but apparently the emily brand of interaction went over okay with krista's mom and dad, who are truly fantastic (no surprise -- i doubted that the tree could be far from where the apple had fallen) and i really enjoyed spending some time with them.

and of course, as being with a friend's parents will do, it got me thinking about my own parents and how good they've always been with my friends, about how my dad is totally that dad who is genuinely interested in talking to my friends and who insists that they call him by his first name. about how i always kinda get excited about showing off my friends to my parents and my parents to my friends. and, on a sadder note, how i feel like i have all these truly amazing people in my life right now who will never know or be known by my mom. and she really was terrific. she was beautiful and smart and kind and graceful and funny and patient. yeah, she could be a pain in the ass and was stubborn about some stupid things and had a tendency to get overly critical (talk about the apple not falling far from the tree...sheesh!) but she was just so wonderful.

and i'm currently having one of those i-warned-you-guys-this-would-happen moments where i'm sitting here crying a wee bit wishing my mom could be around for just a little bit longer, because i'll always need her a little, i'll always value her perspective and her wisdom. but the sucky part is that i'll never get to talk to her, to hear her laugh, to get mad at her for being a mom. i'll never get to introduce my friends to her. and while i really want to resist saying that this is totally unfair, because i understand all too well that fairness just doesn't even enter into it, i can't help but feel--just a little--that it just kinda sucks.

between classes today...

1. right after evidence, i ran into my friend tom (my other friend tom, not this one*) in the common/lounge area in the ground floor. tom and his wife had a baby (ben) back in march, and tom has a blogger.com blog where he posts pictures of the little guy. he told me that the other day he was putting up some pictures of ben, then after checking them out he clicked on the "next blog" button from his site and where did that bring him? why, to throckmorton, of course! and from there, tom told me he found (while gesticulating all crazy-like) all of our weird blogs. welcome to the madness, tom!

2. on a walk to the starbucks (or "the bucks" as steph called it -- i can only hope jokingly -- when i saw her on the bus this morning) with george, i was privy to a long rant about how stupid gentiles start the christmas season earlier and earlier every year (george is jewish) and how the most annoying part is that the christmasness seems to abruptly end before christmas day is even over. his family's tradition is to have dinner at a chinese restaurant and go see a movie on christmas day. and he thinks (and i tend to agree) that folks who make a big deal out of christmasness should at least have the stick-to-it-ive-ness to see christmas through to the end of december 25th. so, according to the george theory (and as a general rule, i love george theories), people should have to prove that they did not celebrate christmas before they can be admitted to restaurants or movie theaters or other non-traditionally xmas-y activities on xmas day. the conversation george and i had went like this:
g: so, they should be asked, "do you have a christmas tree?" then no entry. "are you paying with a gift card?" then no way.
e: but what if they're paying with a religiously-neutral gift card, like one with a snowman on it or something?
g: emily. how many jews do you know?
e: i dunno, maybe a dozen?
g: we don't do snowmen.

fantastic!

3. back at the law school, before administrative law, had a conversation with a friend who was relaying some of the inane things that a particular classmate of ours, who truly has no brain-to-mouth filter (not like how i have no brain-to-mouth filter, this kid has like no common sense), said a few days ago. included in this account was this kid's statement that oral sex is preferable to vaginal intercourse, because women pee through their vaginas so it's much dirtier. obviously he's talking about women performing oral sex on men. um, do i even need to explain all the things that are wrong with this theory? no? good.

4. in the classroom right before administrative law, krista tells me that paul (her fantastic boyfriend) decided to give her an early christmas present. she was practically glowing. so i said, naturally, "did you guys get engaged?!?!" and she said, "even better!" and pulls something out of her bag and sets it down next to me. it was, in all it's wonderful apple-tastic glory, an ipod nano!!! i was as excited as i would have been had they actually gotten engaged! paul is now officially the world's bestest boyfriend.

5. there's this first year girl who is extra-specially annoying to me and some of my friends. i found out today that one of my fave 3L girls also finds her extra-specially annoying. does this somehow legitimize my own disgust with this girl? if people can independently detest someone, does that somehow mean that the person is objectively detestable? i think yes. color me justified! oh, and the 1L bra-less wonder is back today -- in full force. boobs all over! what the hell???

6. T minus 1 minute until thanksgiving break!

------------

*this tom asked me to make sure i specified which tom i was discussing, as he wants it made clear that he doesn't want a baby. duly noted. now he's telling me that he doesn't categorically not want a baby -- he'll take one for a couple of days but then he'd like to give it back. again, duly noted.

the perils of housework...

earlier today, in a conversation about celebrating the onset of the long holiday weekend by going to the sharp edge's happy hour tomorrow after class, michael gave the following excuse for not being able to attend:

"um, i have a house to clean and pies to bake!"

brilliant.

where are we going, and why am i in this handbasket?

a brief summation of my evening:

1. "Other students in the class, then, have made sacrifices that you unilaterally decided not to incur for yourself. This is obviously not acceptable."
2. got interrupted from a much-needed nap by a useless phone call. heads (or a specific head, and even though i have no substantial evidence on which to base my suspicion of who is responsible, i've got a really strong hunch) should roll for this. maybe sometimes capital punishment _is_ justified...
3. had to call someone from my past to ask him for the money he owes me. the call went straight to voice mail. the likelihood of a timely returned phone call is slim to none.

there was, however, one very notable upshot... at one point tonight, in the midst of much chaos, my three closest friends were all with me in my living room. that was really nice.

when it rains, it pours...

all i want right now is a xanax and a glass of wine. jesus!

jackie o's bananaseat...

hey schossy?

i got your message on saturday. you guys will be in j-town through new year's eve? okay. i should be back in town before then and nothing would make my year's end better than spending some time with you and nick. so, yeah. i'll call you soon, but if i don't (because we all know i'm not always so good at remembering stuff like calling people), call me. or there's the e-mail. whatever you like. but i really hope i get to see you. because los angeles is a really long way away.

oh, and per the last time we talked (tlaked?) on the phone? the time where you told me about stuff that you said you'd never had a conversation about? well, yeah -- let's just say that i didn't quite go as high-end as you suggested, but i'm quite, erm, satisfied with what i purchased. god, i hope you know what i'm talking about...

xoxo,
emily

i'll be home for christmas...

...or so that's the plan. but it's now november 21st and i have yet to even begin to consider how the hell i'm getting home... plus, i've got these two little furry four-legged guys to consider, and they're not coming with me to mississippi, so i don't want to be away from pittsburgh for too too long...

sometimes i wish i had a car, just so i could come and go as i please... not that my freedom is really that limited by not having a car, of course, and having a car would mean having extra expenses, and since i'm not exactly doing a bang-up job with my expenses as they currently exist, adding more would be a pretty dumb idea...

so, here goes nothing:

dear santa,

for christmas i would like some new glasses. as in spectacles. not like the kind that hold liquid. and could you and your reindeer swing by pittsburgh and drop me off in pascagoula at some point before the big night? that would be very rad.

love,
emily

only one more football weekend before the bowl season...

goddamn it, USC so should have lost last night to fresno state!

...but alas, they did not. but vandy beat tennessee, for some ungodly reason. and auburn beat alabama. but most awesomely, georgia tech beat miami!!!

my beloved irish beat syracuse. no surprises there. the game was 34-10. but we're still not in the top five... the AP and the Coaches Poll have us at #6. the BCS numbers come out tomorrow...

next weekend is the last game of the season. we play stanford in palo alto. i don't mean to get too cocky, but we're pretty much looking at a 9-2 year. not bad a'tall.

long weekend, short week...

ah, glorious thanksgiving week! i have class monday and tuesday, then wednesday, thursday, and friday off for the holiday. goddamn right! seriously, if it weren't for this short week coming up, i might have ended up committing hara-kiri on the steps of the cathedral of learning.

okay, so it's not _that_ bad. it's not even really bad at all, there's just a lot to do and i pretty much took the weekend off. not that the weekend was uneventful. it was actually pretty fun. here are some thoughts from the past couple of days:

1. the new harry potter movie is almost wizard porn. and it has some flawed contract theory in it. but it is, for the most part, bloody entertaining and i still have a crush on the boys who play the weasley twins, even though i have an irrational fear of twins and i don't generally like redheads.

2. girls who aren't "flowery" do not per se look good in clothes with flowers on them. and i don't care what anybody says. but a green wool cardigan sweater with just the right amount of bling is a good idea.

3. directly following a 2 hour ordeal sorting out a fender bender with a trip to the outlet malls on an empty stomach does not make emily a happy camper. it's a damn good thing i was with good company, or else.

4. i'm a total flake. a TOTAL flake. my friends should all bludgeon me for saying i'm gonna show up at stuff and then ending up at Kmart at 11:30 at night and not even calling to apologize. elizabeth -- i'm a total arse.

5. my mentee is an absolute doll.

6. i think that somebody's smartass teenage intern drafted the response to a petition filed in the PA supreme court in 1999 seeking an investigation into the effect of racial bias in philadelphia capital sentencing. because of excerpts like this:

Thus, there is simply no basis upon which a court could conclude that the unpublished Baldus study, which so has not undergone peer review, is even based upon accurate information, or that it was conducted in a scientifically valid manner likely to produce reliable results, as opposed to producing a vehicle for protesting the death penalty. (emphasis added)

or,

Culpability is not a number. Attempting to accurately assign a numerical value to aggravating and mitigating circumstances is a fool's errand. Anyone who claims to have succeeded in doing so is either completely ignorant of the nature of the capital sentenceing process, or a charlatan.

6. are hara-kiri and seppuku the same thing?

iron city...

kenobi just knocked the beer bottlecap off of my coffee table and is chasing it all around the apartment. she's currently halfway under my bookshelf, on her back, with her hind legs in the air, trying to get at the bottlecap. what an idiot! i'd better to remember to fetch it from her before i go to bed or i'll be kept awake all night by the tinny sound of dancing metal-on-hardwood-on-catclaws.

most likely to...

just had dinner with andrew. okay, the truth is that i invited myself over to andrew's house for dinner. so, thanks for dinner, andrew! you're a fantastic cook!

anyway, as we were leaving so he could drive my freeloading ass home, i absentmindedly walked past the burning candles in his kitchen. as he followed behind me, he commented on how he didn't want to leave open flames unattended. and i was all, "huh?"

to which he said, "mcnally--i'm voting you most likely to die by candle fire."

yeah. that sounds about right.

pablo honey...

jesus! remember radiohead's first album? way back before anybody suspected what they'd become? well, i'm listening to that album now. and it's doing something to me...

something like putting me back to where i was when i was a teenager ("pablo honey" came out in 1993). something like reminding me that i'm still very much a work-in-progress. something like tugging on my sleeve to direct my attention to the feeling that i really do _love_ rock & roll. hell yeah.

i have this weird pack-ratty, magpie-like collector's obsession with music. i am well aware that i am in the era of the ipod and that actually owning cds is almost wasteful, but here's the thing...

when i was a teenager, one of the single most self-indulgently pleasurable ways to pass my time was going through my parents' records and playing them on the family stereo -- with the volume waaaaaaaaay up -- when nobody was home but me. in those records was a connection to my parents' youth, to chris and mary anne when they weren't yet grown-ups, when they were struggling and frustrated and operating out of some imposed sense of duty, you know, when they were adolescents.

and i had a profound sense of pride in the titles represented in my parents' record collections -- bob dylan, joni mitchell, simon & garfunkel, willie nelson, the beatles -- all contemporary, indicative of the time in which my parents grew up. yet, still representing a truth that my parents recognized or at least were in search of something real and poetic and ideal.

it worked this way for books, too. in my high school days i hoarded so many of my dad's books from his college days -- salinger, cheever, merton, emerson, joyce, shakespeare...

and so, incorporating this into my adulthood, i almost feel a responsibility to own all the albums that seem to be important or culturally significant (jesus, let's not even begin to count up the money i've spent on albums that i never listen to but own because i feel that i should own them!), in the time-capsule-of-my-life sort of way... i may never have any money or land to bequeath to my future interests (why are all the technical legal terms that i learned in property last year totally slipping my mind at the moment?), but goddamn i'll have some fantastic music for them to lose themselves in!

crazy cat lady comment of the day:
the little cat is intently staring at something out the window right now. the other morning she was mesmerized by her first sighting of snowflakes. she is truly her owner's animal -- crazy, entertaining, observant, easily distracted.

thoughts upon waking...

i woke up this morning (after nine hours of glorious sleep!) with an overwheming desire for orange juice! it was as if the orange juice monster had crawled into my soul while i was dreaming and decided that it should use my body for the sole purpose of consuming as much orange juice as possible.

alas, i have no orange juice in the house. okay, that's a lie -- i have some frozen concentrate in the freezer, but i'm not much in the mood for reconstitution right now. so i'm having to make due with cranberry apple juice.

more importantly...

to michael, steph, and andrew --

you guys are incredible friends and i love you dearly.

xo,
me

the angela chase in me strikes again...

you know, orange juice might just be the most fantastic beverage ever.

had occasion to go for a little walk this morning, and interspersed with the conviction that sting's son, singer for fiction plane, sounds undeniably like sting, and that despite the proclamation on its coffee cups, crazy mocha does not in fact serve "pittsburgh's best coffee" (i'd give that title to tazza d'oro in highland park), here's what i was thinking...

i'm a smart girl who puts herself in stupid situations. as much as i can't stand lies or betrayal or games or deceit, and as much as i won't tolerate that crap from my friends, the really cruel irony is that i constantly betray myself. i can justify my way out of a paper bag. wait--that's not how that saying goes. but the point is that out of curiosity or masochism or for sheer thrills, i really do let myself get into situations that aren't really all that good for me. and i truly truly know better. almost always. and almost always from the onset. ugh. perhaps this is wholly consistent with the weird schizophrenic dichotomy that i've been perfecting for 29 years?

i wonder, though, if we take as truth that we make our beds (or our friends' beds, from time to time) and in those beds we lie, is it better sometimes just to actually have a place to sleep? or, perhaps "better" isn't what i mean... perhaps i should ask whether it's enough.

yet, i can't truthfully answer that question with anything other than the lawyerly "it depends." right now it may be enough. tomorrow? eh.

speaking of sleep, there's been surprisingly little of that going around for me of late. here's my goal for tonight -- a full 8 hours, in my bed, while the moon is up and the sun is down.

but before i get that full night's sleep, tonight is harry potter and the goblet of fire! see you at the movies, fellow potterphiles!

goddamn it...

you know what blows? when you start a single load of laundry, and you know that the single load is all you need to tide you over for a few days, and then you come back upstairs into your apartment and find, clinging to the leg of your dresser, a single dirty sock, whose partner is downstairs in the regular cycle.

grrrrrr...

"B" is for balanced...

that was my mantra first year -- B is for balanced. B is also for the retention of scholarship funds. at this moment, 6:06 a.m., B is for a-okay. if i get a B on this damn international law final, i'm a happy camper.

i realized about 45 minutes ago that i've been writing about the wrong thing... i'm an idiot. i won't go into what i've been doing wrong, and honestly, the work i've done is easily fixed, but it's all about me not reading the question closely enough. or often enough. or failing to inscribe it in sharpie on my hands so i have no excuse to forget what it says.

the cats are driving me, erm, batty. i'm currently surrounded by piles of paper and every couple of minutes, on the cross-apartment circuit, one of the furry bastards comes running through the mess, scattering my beloved (dreaded?) cases all about. milo is like three times kenobi's size. i'm sure she could fit in his belly. part of me wishes he'd just swallow her whole sometimes...

i'm tired. i just went to the loo to wash my face in an attempt at revival. i'm that kind of tired where the bathroom light clings to every imperfection, every line, every dark circle in my skin. ugh. i looked so... old? worn? grey? bloodshot? yuck.

but the good news--well, sorta--is that i haven't been alone. krista was up until 4:02 (the timestamp from her last e-mail) working on her law and science paper. michael is still up, upstairs in his apartment, working on his international law final. my mentee, whose legal writing memo is due friday, e-mailed me a copy of her draft at 5:27. she had asked me to look over it for her.

so odd, all of us little night owls scattered across the city, dutifully carrying out our tasks in last-minute fashion... all of us facing bleary-eyed daylight hours.

i'm definitely a daydreamer, i don't think that admission will surprise anyone. but i'm by no means a fan of the times when the daydreams are all about sleeping... and that's what i have to look forward to today...

sigh... back to work for me. almost done...

on point...

a friend of mine describes kittens as being "pointy", a term that is both remarkably accurate and a little endearing. this term has come to mind a lot lately, as my little pointy one likes to use me as a jungle gym and climb all over my shoulders while i'm sitting on the couch in front of my computer trying to get work done. it's cute and all, until she gets too crazy and draws blood. like she just did. jerk.

here i go again on my own...

time is now 10:22 p.m. i'm in my pajamas, kitten in my lap, surrounded by international law cases. i'm on the verge of making a truly brilliant argument that 28 U.S.C. 1331 should confer jurisdiction in federal court over rachel corrie's claim against caterpillar. this, friends, is my international law final. and man, am i screwed...

the worst of it is that i'm really tired. i fell asleep in one of the carrels on the 3d floor of the library today. and i took a 45 minute nap this evening before going to a coffee shop with andrew to study. my body is totally thrown off. i need to restore some semblance of routine to my sleeping/waking cycles. and soon, because the semester isn't going to get any easier until it's over.

t minus six days until thanksgiving break...

time to make some coffee...

apologia...

do you ever get this thing where you get all anxious and upset and you really really want your good friends to notice on their own and to offer to be there to help you out, but you just can't bring yourself to actually say to your friends that you need them, because somehow acknowledging that you need people makes the fact that you need people all dumb. and so then you get angry at your friends because they weren't able to read your mind and so you sit and stew and let that anger contribute to the big mess of anxiety that you already feel?

and yet, you know, on a totally rational and practical level, that the anger and the neediness is totally silly, because (a) people do in fact need each other from time to time and there is no shame in that, and (b) nobody can read someone else's mind, regardless of how close the friendship is.

well, i did this yesterday, and i know it isn't fair. because the friend that i'm thinking about in particular has only ever been brilliant to me. and this friend doesn't even know that i went through this whole stupid why-can't-you-read-my-mind fit, so this post (which i'm sure this friend will read) is possibly of no consequence.

but i'm posting it nonetheless, because i know that i'm not a perfect friend, either. and i know that my own inability to tell someone that i need a shoulder to freak out on is nobody's fault but my own. and never have i ever felt totally abandoned or underappreciated by those who are close to me, and that's really lucky. so knowing this is true despite the fact that i occasionally turn into a bit of a basketcase is really a testament to the extraordinary friendships i've got and for that i'm really grateful.

so, long story short, to the person who earlier i told "i love you -- remind me to tell you why at lunch" and who responded, "no, i'm hungry." see the above. and you're fantastic.

deep.
breath.

* * *

in other news, this is a rough week. i woke up this morning with my fists already clenched and feeling tired. i suspect i was grinding my teeth in my sleep because my jaw is really sore. and yesterday, before i had the good sense to get the hell out of the law school building for a while, i had that oh-so-familiar feeling that an elephant was standing on my chest. stean, being by nature more calm and patient than i am, was always really good at diffusing my anxiety, but he's not around anymore, and i know that i'm capable of handing my moments of chaos on my own. because i know that they will pass. all things pass... all things keep moving...

caterpillar v. corrie...

the following is an excerpt of the litany of sounds on a continuous loop in my head:

dolly filartiga
jus cogens
dolly filartiga
jus cogens
dolly filartiga
jus cogens

i wonder if there's a way to safely mainline caffeine?

mish mash...

just got one of those e-greeting cards in my inbox. it was a sent-to-a-billion-people thing from a high school classmate of mine. why is it that things like this, although meant to be nothing other than a really nice gesture, always make me feel so... sad?

blogger is being weird today. i've lost two attempted posts, neither of which was of any particular importance... so no big deal.

having trouble focusing on the task at hand. i've got two major things to accomplish this evening: peer review for three of my seminar classmates' papers and to get a sizeable chunk of my international law final completed. i think i'll start with the seminar papers. that way i'll have no excuses not to focus on the international law stuff as the night goes on.

glimpse of what's to come...

right before administrative law i ran into a 3L friend of mine who is a TA for the legal writing classes. all the 1Ls have their first memos due at the end of this week, and pretty much every time i've seen this friend of mine she's been surrounded by folks trying to get last minute revision and structural help on their writing assignments.

so, i'm a 2L legal writing TA-in-training. this time next year i'll be in her shoes, reading and re-reading memos, trying to meet with students, double-checking paradigm structure and bluebook cites, pulling my hair out. and all for the really measly pittance that this school pays its TAs.

wow.

i couldn't be more excited.

really.

but i do enjoy that kind of stuff, and although i'm sure i'll bitch about it when the time comes, it will be good for laughs, at least... right? and at least i've got friends who will also be TAs, and you gotta love the commiseration factor.

"teh rule"...

so, michael is totally rad. even though he proclaimed on his blog last week that he is better than me (which is quite obviously completely delusional), he's still way cool. we were just having an e-mail conversation about how some people in at school seem to be incapable of doing very simple tasks. this particular task was one that was clearly explained and pretty much painless. and yet there have been some silly complications. after a bit of a rant, michael said the following:

They are teh suck. You are teh rule.

awesome! i think that's the best compliment i've gotten in, like, ever!

michael, you, too are teh rule.

gridlock...

something that i never noticed last year but that has been kind of an issue this year is that there seems to be a fair amount of doorway confusion in the law school building.

all of the stairwells have two doors on each floor, one for going in and one for going out. at least four times a week i encounter somebody going the wrong direction through one of the doors. people -- it works like driving: you stay to the right! it's really not that complicated.

at the beginning of the semester i thought it was just the influx of new students still learning their way around, but it's NOVEMBER now and i'm still practically getting hit in the nose on a daily basis by somebody who doesn't know where s/he's going...

but you wanna know the really annoying part? EVERY SINGLE TIME this happens to me (and it's almost daily), i immediately hear in my head that one line from prince's _raspberry beret_: "she walks in through the out door (out door)." and in my head it stays, until some other crap song takes its place... sigh...

justice blackmun...

in my capital punishment class today we discussed McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987), the opinion by justice powell in which the statistical results of the Baldus study showing significant racial disparity among black and white defendants with respect to the way the death penalty is sought were not found to be grounds to overturn a death penalty conviction of a black defendant.

the notes in the casebook mentioned that justice powell later said that mccleskey was a case that he wished he had decided otherwise. and that got me thinking about my favorite opinion in a capital punishment case...

it's justice blackmun's dissent from the Court's denial of certiorari in Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141 (1994). his words give me chills, break my heart, make me forget to breathe...

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored -- indeed, I have struggled -- along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. The basic question -- does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants "deserve" to die? -- cannot be answered in the affirmative. It is not simply that this Court has allowed vague aggravating circumstances to be employed, relevant mitigating evidence to be disregarded, and vital judicial review to be blocked. The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.

i think that just about says all there is to say.

number nine...

BCS week five is out. good things come to those who wait. notre dame is ranked ninth. could it be that we may actually end up in a legitimate bowl game this year?

the nerdy mathlete in me loves the BCS rankings. i miss the strength-of-schedule factor, though (i think i may have a prior post somewhere about this), but that shows my notre dame bias because we generally have a tough schedule.

here's how the BCS describes (in somewhat abbreviated form) what it does best:

EXPLANATION:
To derive a team'’s poll percentages in the Harris Interactive and USA Today polls, each team’s point total is divided by a maximum 2825 possible points in the Harris Interactive Poll and 1550 possible points in the USA Today Poll.

Teams are assigned an inverse point total (25 for #1, 24 for #2, etc.) for each of their respective computer poll rankings to determine the overall computer component. The highest and lowest ranking for each team is dropped, and the sum total of the remaining four rankings is divided by 100 (the maximum possible points). This figure produces a Computer Rankings Percentage. The six computer ranking providers are Anderson & Hester, Richard Billingsley, Colley Matrix, Kenneth Massey, Jeff Sagarin and Peter Wolfe. Each computer ranking accounts for schedule strength within its formula.

The BCS Average is calculated by averaging the percent totals of the Harris Interactive and USA Today Polls, and Computer rankings. The highest BCS Average receives the #1 ranking, the second highest receives #2, and so forth.

see? the NFL ain't got nothin' on the NCAA!

idiomatic idiosyncratic...

my administrative law professor says "exaray" instead of "x-ray". he also says "always" like "ALL-wuz".

my international law professor (former con law prof) says "problematical". and he pronounces "philadelphia" like "philadelph-we-ah".

my property professor last semester said "defend-ANT".

my torts prof last year said "rother" instead of "rather".

. . .

this is what i'm thinking about right now, as i'm waiting for 2:30, when the BCS week five rankings will be released.

i'm feeling a little overwhelmed by school at the moment. after class (yes, i'm in class right now), i have to go to the computer lab and print out the following:
1. the corrie v. caterpillar amended complaint for my international law final
2. the complaint in the new class action suit against FEMA for the hurricane katrina debacle
3. three 25-page papers for the peer review component of my seminar

and the worst part is that aubrey's birthday is today and a bunch of folks are going out to dinner to celebrate. i absolutely adore aubrey -- she's truly one of the most fantastic women i know. but i don't know if i should participate in the festivities because i've done a fair amount of time mismanagement of late (for which i have only myself to blame) and i need to lock myself to a desk and work for many many hours tonight.

thanksgiving break truly cannot get here quickly enough.

p.s. dinosaur jr will be at mr. smalls on december 1st! this is rather exciting.

curiouser and curiouser...

why is it that i get a teensy bit nervous when sharing this blog with people i've only recently met, and yet i have no problem with its general existence on the internets or with its usual consumption by my good friends?

hmmm... maybe it's... personal? but that's so nonsensical, when you think about it. of _course_ it's personal. it's mine, i write it, it's undoubtedly in my voice and is comprised of my thoughts. duh. and there's really nothing on this blog that i wouldn't say out loud to someone in conversation.

and yet...

maybe it's the cumulative effect of a year and a half of stuff in these posts? because when you put them all together, you can probably get a pretty comprehensive idea of what's going on.

i am, according to throckmorton...

1)
2)
3)

all and none of the above?

or maybe secretly i'm not writing this at all. maybe throckmorton is authored by a crazy ninja assassin graffiti artist who lives in cheyenne, wyoming? maybe throckmorton is authored by a used car salesman with a receding hairline and false teeth? maybe throckmorton is authored by a genius undergrad in a fiction writing class intent on creating an alter-ego.

alas, throckmorton is authored by a silly 29 year old law student with a head full of stuff and a convoluted way of organizing it all. and with that said, throckmorton's author is tired and she's going to get in bed and read for a while...

adieu.

ignorant bliss...

man, could i be any giddier right now? i'm a little cracked-out on coffee, sitting in my living room with a purring kitten perched on my shoulder, listening to the silver jews. ...and the name of the song is "sometimes a pony gets depressed".

kittens + ponies + caffeine + indie rock = damn near perfection

weekly ND football post...

notre dame beat navy this weekend, 42-21. good stuff. not sure what the BCS will do with that victory, but since alabama lost to LSU, notre dame has moved up to #6 in the AP rankings and has stayed at #7 in the USA Today Coaches Poll.

i heart notre dame football!

milestones...

today is my dad and step-mom's anniversary. i have consistently forgotten to call them to wish them a happy anniversary every year since they got married. how odd that some dates fail to stick in my head...

...while others never leave it.

next friday, november 25th, is the 10th anniversary of mom's death. november is her month. i think about her a lot. the way i've thought about her has evolved in the past decade, but the degree to which she's on my mind has not.

so, she died on november 25, 1995. exactly one year later i had to turn in a paper for a literature/philosophy class i was taking with prof. f., one of my top two favorite professors at notre dame (the other being valerie, who i pretty much want to be when i grow up). the paper was an autobiography assignment, and at that point in my young life, i thought that all things had meaning and connectedness and that having to write a paper-about-my-life with the seemingly arbitrary due date of one year after my mother had passed meant something big and important and was supposed to be some sort of marker of what had become of me in the year of being a half-orphan.

yeah. or something like that. because maybe things haven't really changed that much in the silly way i look for connections and meaning in stuff that really happens pretty much haphazardly. (i mean, jesus -- i still wish on the first star i see every night and i trust in the wisdom of fortune cookies!)

the point is that those first few anniversaries of mom's deathday were always really sad. they were full of reminders of how she had been sick, how horribly draining and overwhelming it was when she died, how empty and confused i felt trying to situate my life in a way that made good use of the void that was created when she was gone. but as the years have accumulated, what has been important to remember has not been the sadness, but the relevance of that point of my life in the grand scheme of my life. and it's been a nice excuse to just remember my mother, who truly was a fantastic and adored-by-all kinda person.

...but now it's coming up on 10 years. and that's kind of momentous. i suppose i've successfully completed all those textbook stages of the grieving process, but sometimes i miss her like it's my job... right now i miss her like it's my job.

and yet, i'm so lucky. i've said this before and i'll maintain it until the day i die: none of us is entitled to anything. so what if i don't have my mother around to call so i can get a decent recipe for sweet potatoes for an upcoming thanksgiving dinner with friends? you know what i do have? i have nineteen years of memories, her bad sense of humor, and a pretty damn good sense of what it means to love somebody. not too shabby.

i dunno... i suppose i'll end this for now. but there's almost certainly going to be another post (maybe more than one?) about this in the next couple of weeks. because i pretty much dump everything that's on my mind on this little blog, and my mom is on my mind a lot these days...

the way sundays should be...

the theme for today seems to have been pretend-you're-not-a-law-student. because i had one of those sundays where i slept in (after a nice late saturday night), got up and went to breakfast, then came back and crawled back in bed for a while for a nap with some good music on in the background. you know, how nature intended sundays to be for people who exist in normal society.

meanwhile, i've got an unfinished seminar paper sitting around collecting dust and an international law final assignment (due on thursday!) just begging for my attention.

but maybe i needed to have a pretend-you're-not-a-law-student day? i'm gonna just consider it one of those mental-health thingies that folks in the real world use as justification for calling out of work. yeah, that's it.

technical difficulties... or, teh suck...

crisis averted, yet headaches ensue...

i managed to do something to my template which obliterated my blog. and i, of course, feeling like an amputee without my beloved repository of brainshed, freaked out. so i called michael, figuring that since he uses a source independent from blogger for frightenedmonkey, he _must_ know more about this stuff than i do. but despite his attempts to help, we couldn't restore throckmorton to its prior, unharmed form.

so i found the template code for the layout i use here and i've cut-and-pasted. and now it's time to rebuild. i've lost my counter, my links, my visitor tracking stuff, but at least i still have my posts. jesus. how the hell do you back up a blog anyway?

is god subject to retention elections, too?

tuesday was election day. in dover, pennsylvania, locus extraordinaire of the ACLU's intelligent design trial, eight of the members of the dover school board who voted to include an intelligent design disclaimer in the high school biology curriculum, were voted out of office. i love when the democratic process actually works!

but according to pat robertson, god feels really scorned. here's the article. and here are some of my fave parts:

Robertson made the comment after Lee Webb of CBN News delivered a report on how residents in Dover voted in eight new Democratic board members, replacing current members who had voted for a policy that required students in ninth-grade biology classes to hear a statement on intelligent design before hearing lessons on evolution.

Webb then asked Robertson what he thought about the vote.

Here was Robertson's response.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected him from your city. And don't wonder why he hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for his help because he might not be there."

In a subsequent e-mail, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network said, "If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them."

so lookout, dover! you've sealed your fate -- it's only a matter of time before the powers that be smite your women and children, divest your property, and uphold the constitution!

episode III..."unlimited power"...

am currently watching pr's DVD of "star wars episode III: revenge of the sith". it's the part where mace windu is having a lightsaber duel with emperor palpatine, and anakin has just run in and has to choose whether he will pursue the dark side and thus the prospect of saving padme from death, or whether he will uphold the principles of the jedi order. well, we all know what he chooses. damn. i hate when stuff like this happens.

for those not in the know, i'm a HUGE star wars nerd. like, i should probably be embarrassed by the amount of stuff i know about the series. what can i say? i'm a sucker for stories about disorganized bunches of do-gooders who are willing to fight the good fight for truth and justice. yes. there's a word for people like me. that word: sucker.

the admin law "power row" is running on fumes...

right now, thursday afternoon, 2:39, here's the status of me and my friends in administrative law, in order of how we sit:

michael: skipped class
krista: looking at a photoblog from canada
emily: hi throckmorton!
tom: writing an e-mail to his softball team
carrie: solitaire
oliver: practically falling asleep
chris: hard to tell from here, but from the hand movements on the computer, looks like solitaire
laura: also hard to tell, but looks like same as chris

goddamn sad, friends. goddamn sad. but at least we'll all get this part of the final wrong together.

"only happens once a year"...

another thought from administrative law:
why does the court in AHA v. Bowen find that the RFP was not a legislative rule?

oh wait, that's not what i wanted to write about! silly me... so, i went to starbucks after lunch today to get my usual afternoon coffee. apparently, now that it's the beginning of november, it's appropriate for starbucks to christmasize everything. they've made the switch to red cups, the barristas all had red holiday shirts on (one of them was even wearing reindeer antler-y things), the store is all decorated. even the cardboard protect-your-hands-from-the-hot-coffee sleeves are decked out. alongside the starbucks mermaid are printed in red letters: "{only happens once a year}" yes. the { and } are part of the text.

krista said about this once-a-year-ness, "yeah, for FOUR MONTHS!"

totally.

and.................. i totally missed the point about the RFP in Bowen not being a legislative rule.

WTF?!?!

tom, currently seated to my right as we listen to our administrative law prof talk about nonlegislative and legislative rules, just pointed out this article. Here's the gist:

Frist told reporters Thursday that while he believed illegal activity should not take place at detention centers, he believes the leak itself poses a greater threat to national security and is "not concerned about what goes on" behind the prison walls.

"My concern is with leaks of information that jeopardize your safety and security -- period," Frist said. "That is a legitimate concern."

WTF?!?! see? i got all caught up in the smoke and mirrors of frist's stem cell position, and i forgot that he's a crazy bastard.

when in the hell is this country going to get its priorities straight? this should offend every citizen. i know it offends me.

proof that capitalism is stupid...

n.b. in the sidebar of this blog, under the "current posts" and the "archives", there now appears a box that tells me and my readers exactly how much this little blog is worth.

what does this mean? honestly? it means nothing. come on, we all know that blogs are worthless!

color me exhausted...

it's not been a good few days for getting enough sleep. it's totally my own fault. right now i'm feeling tired and scratchy-throated and i really want to go to bed, but i still have work to get done. but i think what i'm going to do is go ahead and go to sleep, and finish up my work in the morning before international law. right now my body is telling me to get rest, and i'd be silly not to listen to that.

also, i had a weird panic attack thingy this afternoon, i'm sure because of overtiredness. i pretty much freaked out and felt really claustrophobic (even though i was in an open space) and so i rather abruptly walked away from my friends to sit in one of the bathroom stalls and catch my breath.

had dinner tonight with a couple of new 1L friends, one of whom is very much a libertarian. now, i can't say i embrace strict libertarianism. nor can i really say i find some of it valid, but this kid really impressed me because not only could he back up his political arguments, but he knew when to back off and when to admit when he didn't know something. because if there's one thing i can't stand (and that seems to run rampant in environments such as, erm, law school) it's when people get overconfident and think they know things that they clearly don't. it's refreshing to hear people simply admit that they can't address a certain subject because they don't know anything about it.

also, with respect to my other dining companion this evening, i've found myself being way more honest and direct than maybe i should be, but it seems to have worked out to get me what looks like it's going to be a valuable friendship. i'm always a little too open about things, and i wonder how i don't manage to sabotage every friendship i have by saying just about everything that comes into my head. somehow, though, i keep lucking out and finding people who not only find some amusement in my inability to censor myself, but who also appreciate it.

got a wheat penny in the change from my coffee purchase today. that means mom is saying hello. silly me and my little fantasy world...

oh, and p.s., kenobi (the little cat) is totally a voyeur. and a weirdo.

and on the eleventh day...

there was light!

finally.

oh my darlin' clementine...

twice now i've been told that my hair is like kate winslet's in _eternal sunshine of the spotless mind_!

i think that's just effing fantastic.

sunday blustery sunday...

the wind and rain is incredibly marvelous today! i love it!

so, several things have happened in the past couple of days that have got me thinking...

first of all, i've decided to keep the orange hair, at least for a while. it's received generally good reviews, and i don't really feel like going through the annoyance of dyeing it back right now anyway.

second of all, went to the symphony last night with a group of folks to celebrate george's birthday. it's really nice to get dressed up every once in a while. the performance was okay. there were four pieces on the program. i didn't care for the first or the third, the second was mozart's 24th (and you can't really argue with that), but the last was this fantastic, loud, emotionally insane piece that pretty much knocked my socks off.

i hadn't really eaten all day and it seemed like a good idea to have a whiskey sour at intermission. so for the duration of the show, i was pretty much tanked. and i got shushed by a woman sitting behind andrew and me. and andrew deliberately papercut my hand! what a bastard. i've GOT to get nicer friends. and then there was punch and pie. you can't go wrong with punch and pie.

-------------

now it's monday... i'm resuming this post. not only because it was unfinished, but because george specifically got on my case about not blogging about his b'day evening. so, hi george -- sorry for being so selfish with my blog? is that what i say at this point?

so much expectation! it's hard for a girl to keep her public satisfied sometimes.

anyway, so it's monday. george's b'day seemed to have been enjoyed by all involved, including george. we ended up at dee's in the south side after the symphony. we were all fantastically overdressed. there were lotsa cute boys (in my opinion, that is. andrew begged to differ.) and it really made me want to have a cigarette (because really nothing beats a cigarette on a fall evening in a dirty dive bar), but i didn't (i'm seven weeks strong, now!). i sent a drunken e-mail when i got home, and woke up to find a drunken voice mail left for me, which was kinda funny, and in some way justified the sending of the drunken e-mail.

and the other thing i was going to write about in this post? well, i'm gonna hold off on it for now, for reasons not to be disclosed. the short version is that people make really arbitrary decisions sometimes that totally preclude what could otherwise be good opportunities.

so there. i've gotta get some stuff done in this library so i can get the hell outta dodge.

but, because it wouldn't be an end-of-the-weekend post without this, i have to throw in that notre dame triumphed over tennessee on saturday, 41-21 (even though the game was tied at the 3d quarter). the AP and the coaches poll both have us ranked at #7 now! i missed the game because i was attempting to get some work done, so i can't offer any commentary, but i'm damn proud of the irish! damn proud!

and the BCS standings are out! with ND at number 11. not bad, considering. not bad at all.

what a difference a day makes...

good news! i'm online right now with my computer! the bad news, however, is that i'm online the old-fashioned way -- with an ethernet cable. tonight just may be the night when i call dell and, while thanking them kindly for the new motherboard, very sternly express my dissatisfaction with their inability to repair my wireless connection. it looks like this little computer may be taking another trip in the mails sometime soon. shite.

had a kinda interesting unexpected journey to ikea yesterday (a journey which cost me only $5, and which got me a new ficus plant, because god knows i need more plants).

this has been a good few weeks for making new friends and that's always nice. too bad it hasn't been a good few weeks for school work because i'm about 75 pages behind in international law and about 50 pages behind in administrative law. and jesus, i haven't done a full reading for reproduction, sexuality, & the law in like, forever.

these goddamn online quizzes...

this time, sandy's to blame...

and again, i don't think anybody's gonna be surprised at the results...

my high school stereotype is as follows:

You scored as Punk/Rebel. Punk/Rebel 81% Geek 56% Loner 44% Goth 38% Drama nerd 31% Ghetto gangsta 25% Stoner 19% Prep/Jock/Cheerleader 13%

think i'll get it done yesterday...

am listening right now to ben folds five. in my experience, people either hate ben folds five or love them. i fall into the latter category. i'm an absolute sucker for good harmonies and the piano, and they are southerners, after all, and the drummer is hella cute. and ben folds' solo stuff pales in comparison to the stuff he did in his younger, more carefree, BF5 days.

so, i'm listening to BF5's last album, which always reminds me of when i lived in boston. that was the most gloriously solitary time in my life. i worked in the john hancock tower, 38th floor, right near boston commons. on my lunch breaks when it was nice outside, i would wander around, listening to cds on my headphones (ah, those silly days before ipods!), totally consumed in my own world. i would wander through the commons, or the public gardens, or down to the charles, or to downtown crossing (if i felt like people watching). and sometimes i would take the T to the aquarium and visit the little blue penguins...

memories...

on hardwood floors and having cats...

so, despite my attempts at expatriation, i'm still very much a southerner about some things. like, i'm very polite. just ask andrew. and i hate to wear shoes. as soon as i get home, my shoes are off.

this poses a problem when you live in an apartment with hardwood floors and have insane pets. because stuff gets tracked all over the place. like, cat litter. yeah. it's fucking gross. i get it stuck to my feet when i walk around. and it's just repulsive. oh, and there are clumps of white cat fur all over everything. god. i hate cats. okay, so i don't hate them, i actually find them quite amusing and stupid. kinda like boys -- i like them to be cute, a little dirty, and entertaining. oh, and like pets, i want them to totally adore me. because they should. without reservation. i'll get to that in a subsequent post...

another thing about the stupid cats, not only does the little one pirouette all over my bed while i'm trying to sleep, but the big one has lost his voice. steph's theory is that it's like when a kid gets a little brother or sister. it's all fun and games until it starts to sink in that the baby isn't going back. and that's when the injustice sets in. so milo, who is the talkingest cat ever, is a little depressed these days and can't meow. it's kinda endearing, really.

right now, of course, they are very cute sitting in the windowsill watching the trees blow around in the wind. goddamn cute stuff. seriously, all it takes to keep my attention is something furry or shiny. what the hell?

you win some, you lose some...

this is an update on the tried-to-turn-my-hair-blonde thing...

it's morning now, and i can see my hair in the light of day. there's one thing that's definitely true about it -- it now corresponds with my personality. my hair is distracted, unsure of itself at times, multi-faceted, always entertaining.

i don't hate it, but i don't love it. i think i need an objective opinion...

blondes have more fun...

friends, it's friday night and i'm sitting on my couch with my hair full of dye. and not just any dye, bleach. on a whim, andrew and i decided to go blonde for our night at the symphony tomorrow for george's birthday. and then i chickened out, so andrew threatened me with his friendship if i didn't dye my hair. and since i'm about a self-esteem crisis away from an unhealthy codependence with andrew, i took the threat to heart and am now quite certain that my poor hair, which has been dyed and re-dyed and highlighted and dyed so many times, is going to turn brittle and break out of my scalp.

i suppose time will tell...

at any rate, i should have bought two boxes of dye, because not only is my hair pretty long, but it's also really thick, but i did the best i could with what i had. so i'm pretty sure i'm going to be headed to eckerd as soon as it opens in the morning to buy something to fix what is almost certain to be a fashion faux pas, a rookie mistake, an amateur disaster.

yep. just checked on the lightening progress. gonna definitely need to do an emergency recovery re-dye job in the morning. mostly because my roots have taken the bleach so much better than the ends and are much lighter. or...

i could make use of that jar of midnight blue manicpanic that i've had in my bathroom for months...

yes, dear readers -- i hear you loud and clear. i'm not 16 years old and i CANNOT have blue hair. or can't i? i had red hair (as in crayon red, not like auburn) for fall semester finals of last year (as is apparent from the picture of my head on this blog). why can't i go blue for this year?

oh, right. because i'm not 16 years old and sometime soon i'm going to need to start thinking about getting a job for next summer... damn adulthood. things were so much easier when i was a 1L...

oh well. at least i still have andrew.

duh...

per andrew . . . me, too:

You are a Social Liberal (73% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (10% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

right now...

jake gyllenhaal is on "late night with conan o'brien". welcome to swoon city! population: me.

cair paravel...

doing my nightly blogchecking and i see that sandy's got a post about seeing the trailer for the new "the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe" movie. and it got me thinking...

when i was very young, my parents gave me the full set of the chronicles of narnia books. i read them cover to cover, one after the other, as soon as i had received them. i remember reading TLTW&TW for the first time. i was one of those nerdy kids who would hide out under the blankets with a flashlight to keep reading after the parents had called "lights out". it was one of those nights when i got to the part where aslan is killed. i was heartbroken, devastated. i recall leaving my bedroom to find my parents, who were in the living room folding laundry, because i was in tears and was so upset that the white witch could be so horrid as to murder aslan. that was the first time a book ever made me cry. it wasn't the last time that one of the narnia books made me cry.

i was completely enchanted by the stories of the pevensie children, who somehow managed to find the secret entranceways at just the right time so that they could visit narnia. lucy, who was the youngest of the four pevensies, was my favorite. in TLTW&TW, she was given a magic cordial that was made of diamonds and had healing powers. when i was little, i filled an empty glass spice bottle with water and incandescent beads from a mardi gras necklace and pretended that i was lucy and that was my cordial. and i would wander through my neighborhood trying to find a way in to narnia. and if you laugh at me for that, then clearly you have no soul.

and into adulthood, i've continuously done things in search of the portal to narnia. i'll walk through spaces that remotely resemble magic doorways. i'll take alternate paths. i'll look at things that might just possibly be other than they appear. i know full well that this means i'm a little bit delusional and it's symptomatic of my ever-silly optimism, but the anticipation makes my world a better place.

and you really never know, do you?

inter-sectional...

3L --

after evidence this morning (which, rather ironically, was about character evidence used to impeach witnesses), i found out that some 3Ls have discovered our silly little contingent of 2Ls who have taken the blogosphere by storm. we all are, of course, too nerdy for words. but i'm glad to know that others are finding some entertainment value in our colossal wastes of time.

so, to all of the fantastic 3Ls who have been so fortunate (?) as to stumble upon the multifarious world of the crazy 2L bloggers, enjoy! and candace, thanks for saying that my blog is your favorite!

2L --

had a lovely dinner tonight with andrew, michael, and steph. all fantastic folks. i've truly met some incredible people through this little law school experience. and i've also met some not-so incredible ones...folks who aren't really sure yet what or who they want to be, and lately it seems as if they're trying too hard to fit into a mold that doesn't make sense for them. and that's really annoying.

is this the 2L crisis? is this what happens?

1L --

continuing the undoing of the 1L bashing that has taken place lately, or at least furthering the balanced approach to this year's crop of 1Ls...

i keep finding more and more 1Ls that i really like. today michael and i went to get coffee in the hour after administrative law and before reproduction, sexuality and the law. there were these two 1Ls in line behind us, two girls who at the beginning of the semester i'd decided should be friends of mine, because they seem really cool. so the four of us ended up sitting down at a table to have our coffee and we had a nice little impromptu visit. so, hooray! new friends! new friends who remind me of me and where i was this time last year (which may be good or bad for them...). and new friends to remind me that the world is full of unexpected adventures and people with good things to offer.

do the right thing...

today i swallowed my pride and did something i've needed to do for a long time. it involves a friendship that got all kindsa messed over the summer and has been this awkward thing, at least for me, all during the school year so far.

today, the moment felt right, it seemed like as good a time as any to try to make amends. so i did. nothing big, just a "hi. how've you been? i just wanted to see how things are going because it's dumb not to." and it was well-received.

i felt so relieved when the interaction was finished that i nearly cried. because sometimes it takes more energy to stay enemies than it does to be friends.

philanthropy?

here's something i've been thinking about for a few days... i belong to a club at school whose purpose is to raise money to give grants to students who take non-paying public interest law jobs in the summer. the group has a snack table in the student lounge, holds a small fundraising event in the fall semester, and puts on a big auction every february.

after hurricane katrina, the group put a jar at the snack table to collect donations for the red cross recovery/relief effort. it didn't bring in tons of cash, but it did raise a couple hundred dollars.

at a meeting last week, a member suggested that we do the same thing (put out a collection jar) for the victims of the earthquake in south asia. that earthquake was october 8th, so the suggestion was a little delayed, but the group decided to go ahead with the collection.

i have mixed feelings about this. first of all, in my experience, schools and universities can be frighteningly insulated from the outside world, so it's good to have a little reminder of reality to encourage people to help out when they can. secondly, giving to good causes is noble and worthwhile. thirdly, this earthquake was incredibly devastating and those who have suffered losses as a result are absolutely deserving of assistance.

on the other hand, however, i think a not-for-profit group that exists to raise money for it's own good cause has to be careful with what it asks of its contributors. maybe it's my years of catholic grade/high schooling, with its annual carnival ball fundraisers, church collections, bingo games. maybe it's my days of being a grant writer at the philadelphia museum of art, or those several months i spent doing part-time telemarketing for the museum's membership department. maybe it's my own gut reaction to years of telephone and mail solicitation from the university of notre dame trying to cash in on its alumni contingent. regardless, i have some strong feelings about asking people for money. and those feelings pretty much boil down to the belief that you have to be choosy with what you ask for and how often you're asking.

not to say that this group at the law school is in the wrong, but i'm not convinced that it's in its best interest to be a general, all-purpose make-your-charitable-donations-here outlet. the group's purpose is really to support itself and its student members. and at that it's been successful. the fall fundraiser is a fairly new idea (as i understand it), and the auction seems to get better and better every year. but is it possibly hurting the larger self-sustaining fundraising efforts by having these little nickel-and-dime donation diversions?

it's honestly probably not that much of a big deal, and the people who've given money to these disaster relief collections are generally folks buying things from the snack table who, rather than put their change back in their wallets, toss it instead into the jars. and i'm not going to make an issue out of it by bringing it up in the meetings (mostly because i think what would realistically happen is that i would look like a selfish bitch), but i can't shake this theory that efforts like this would be better carried out by groups like the student bar association that have a broader reach and who aren't in the practice of asking students for money.

eh.

another nurse!

my friend tom is competing in the appellate moot court competition (you know, the one i bailed on a coupla weeks ago?) and he enlisted grant, krista, and me to help him practice for his oral arguments. so we got to be the fake judges and drill him with questions about his brief. he did a masterful job and i have no doubt that he's going to sail through the competition.

we used one of the lecture hall classrooms on the first floor. tom stood at the podium; grant, krista and i sat in the middle row. after tom was finished, and once we had given him our feedback, i was staring at the chalkboard and i noticed something marvelous! in the ghost-y erasures on the board, i could barely make out two words in a familiar handwriting. the words? "another nurse"!

fade to one year ago, section B torts, professor ross. the case? ybarra v. spangard, 154 p.2d 687. the good old unconscious plaintiff, res ipsa loquitur, and the vectors of vicarious liability!

i wrote down my favorite quotes from my professor during torts, because he was brilliant but a little nuts. here's the quote i have in my notes from the ybarra days:

"ideas are like babies because they're vulnerable...there isn't a single opinion you can't beat up."

ah, the bronze god.

UPDATE!!!
tom sent me the following image of the ybarra "constellation". enjoy!