summertime rolls...

i'm going to be summering in my old stomping grounds. i'll be back in philadelphia for three and a half months. ever since last fall i've wanted to be in philadelphia this summer. now i've got a job there, a room in an apartment to sublet, i've put out the word to my philly friends... but why do i feel so...lonely?

huh. how odd. i've never been particularly good with these transitional phases. i look around my apartment these days and all i see are things that need to be boxed up, books that i might want to take with me, music that i'll be sad to leave behind, clothes that will go up in the attic for summer storage.

this is what i want, though, right? of course it is. of course i'm looking forward to being back in philadelphia for the summer. i've got a great internship lined up, i have amazing friendships to revisit that i've sorely missed. but, oh, the transience...

...because, while my life used to exist entirely in philadelphia, while i have very strong friendships with incredible people there, i can't help but wonder if it's going to be, to some degree, like revisiting your high school after you've graduated and gone off to college -- that horrible, hollow awareness that things go on without you and nobody is really any worse off for your absence.

it's going to take a while to get back into the groove. my friends there have all gone on with their lives. i have, too. we've just been in different spaces. in my mind, i want my time in philly to be night after night with a different friend, all good times and laughs, but the reality is that i'm going to have to integrate myself back into those friends' lives little by little. sure, they'll be happy to take me back, but they've got their own routines, their own patterns. i'm not a part of that anymore. i've been gone for two years.

maybe this is what i need -- maybe it will do me some good to be on my own in philadelphia. i won't be on my own, i know that. but i gotta admit, i'm a little nervous. what if i've changed? i'm happier about a lot of things since i went back to school. i'm doing what i want to do, learning things that challenge and inspire me. but what if the changes somehow have made it so that i don't fit where i used to -- like a puzzle piece that gets waterlogged or chewed up by a pet? it looks like it should fit, the relative shape is all there, but the seams aren't so neat and the spaces don't meet up exactly.

and the other part of the story is that i'm going to miss my life in pittsburgh. i'm going to miss my friends. i'll miss having a little space on the roof outside my windows where i can grow vegetables. i'll miss my apartment. i'll miss my plants.

ugh. i'm being quite maudlin and morbid right now. is this what happens when a girl spends her weekend with conflict of laws?

i'm going to bed. three finals down, two to go... and then? then i can think about this stuff all i want.

look out!

two things...

first of all, why is the theme song to the old spider-man cartoon haunting me?

on monday, cupcakes were brought into school to celebrate greg's and stefanie's birthdays, and some of the cupcakes had spider-man rings on top of them. i got one of the cupcakes with king kong. and despite the allegations of some, it was NOT chewbacca! duh, friends -- chewbacca is BROWN! so anyway, spider-man... sitting next to tom in our last conflicts class, i wrote him a note. the note was this:

spider-man spider-man
does whatever a spider can
spins a web any size
catches thieves just like flies
look out!
here comes the spider-man!

now, everybody loves spider-man. i love spider-man. i can find you at least three instances in my notes for class where i've written "lesson for today: with great power comes great responsibility". how can you not love uber-nerd-qua-superhero peter parker?

but, here's the weird thing... this morning at the crazy mocha in bloomfield, i'm sitting at the table in the back working on my jurisprudence paper, there are three other patrons in the whole joint, NPR is providing the soundtrack, and suddenly the guy who's working behind the counter starts singing...

spider-man spider-man
does whatever a spider can...

wha??? so when the guy walked past my table as he was taking out the trash, i said, "hey, were you singing the spider-man song?" apparently, NPR had played some sort of orchestrated version of the tune earlier in the day, which had successfully lodged the song in his head, hence the singing. huh.

if this song pops up somewhere else in my week, i'll know that something strange is afoot.

but at least i can count on krista's teeth! which leads me to thing the second...

krista and i got cheap chinese food for lunch today, and our fortune cookies yielded much weirdness. mine said, "you cannot love life until you live the life you love." um, does anybody else sense a little circular logic here? so, according to this fortune, i can't love life until i'm living the life i love, eh? shouldn't a couple of words be transposed or something? erm...

but krista's fortune is BY FAR the BEST. FORTUNE. EVER! it was, inexplicably and marvellously:

"Wow! A secret message from your teeth!"

i kid you not. she's got the little piece of fortune cookie paper to prove it.

three...two...one...

here we go! tomorrow is the official beginning of the finals period. my 1L friends have civil procedure, my upperclassmen friends have evidence and elder law. i have to finish this goddamn jurisprudence paper. good luck to all!

best. AmEx ad. ever.

i love wes anderson. with a caveat--his hair is a little too hipster for me, but what can you do?

wes anderson... i wonder if he's single. of course, he may be a bit of a prick, but he's funny as hell. and if things didn't work out between us, he could introduce me to jason schwartzmann.

good ideas gone astray...

the brilliant idea i had when i got home today was that i should take a little nap, because i was feeling kinda weary. i figured if i rested for a bit, i would wake up all ready to work. but no. i've woken up all ready to freak the fuck out. my goal for these next two weeks is to outrun the anxiety, stay one step ahead of the stress. but i think the stress may have caught up with me while i slept.

the lesson here? taking a nap = bad idea jeans.

and it seems that my sis and i are have managed to either place ourselves on our dad's bad side or he's taking out his bad attitude on us. he's ignoring us both. this doesn't exactly make me feel any less stressed out.

the lesson here? dad = bad idea jeans.

is it totally irresponsible if i have a glass of wine to try and calm my nerves while i work on jurisprudence? i'm literally all tensed up and overwhelmed. i think i might try this. what the hell, right? regular intake of alcohol has seemed to keep andrew and tom in a great mood over the past couple of weeks....

the lesson here? wine = possibly bad idea jeans. this is yet to be determined.

12 days left...

i just made a really unsatisfying dinner, i really need a shower, and my overcaffeinated head is full of legal realism. there's really only one thing i think i can handle doing right now, so i'm gonna go do that...

if anybody needs me in the next 15 minutes or so, i'm going to be sitting on my couch staring at the wall. possibly drooling.

home stretch...

file this post under: NGAS

i woke up this morning feeling top-notch, A+, ready and rarin' to go! something magical happened in my bedroom last night, erm, so to speak. here's what it was -- all the conditions for a perfectly restful night were satisfied. the windows were open, it was raining outside, there was a nice breeze and the perfect sleeping temperature in the apartment. i had the right amount of blankets and pillows. i slept like a baby! and the really cute part? little kenobi fell asleep with me, all curled up in the bend of my elbow. (well, until milo started fucking shit up in the living room and she had to get up to investigate.)

and now? i'm all rested and psyched to have a great day full of...studying. boooooo! but the objective for the next two weeks: outrun the anxiety, stay one step ahead of the stress. if i have to use the avoidance of a panic attack as my motivation to fully immerse myself in my school work, so be it. in two weeks i can again sleep it all away!

eye of the tiger! time to eat lightning and crap thunder! in the academic sense, of course.

fun with sublet listings...

i've been obsessively checking the craigslist philly sublet listings lately in search of a suitable dwelling for milo, kenobi, and me for the summer. some of the places seem good. others not so good. here are some quotes from some of the ads:

"You would have to be vacant by September 1st at the latest."

"Multiple rooms are available in this apartment, but each room is $600 each and prices are extremely FLEXIBLE."

"BE VERY CAREFUL OF THIS LADY CALLED LINDA. SHE WANTS TO RENT HER ROOM OUT BUT SHE IS A MANIAC AND HYSTERICAL AND SHE IS CRAZY. SHE IS DESPISED BY EVERYBODY IN HER LOCALITY AND SHE IS A HOOKER TOO AS PER THE LATEST INFORMATION. I JUST WANT TO CAUTION EVERYBODY. IN CASE U HAVE BEEN CONTACTED BY HER, I WOULD ADVISE NOT TO RENT ANY ROOM IN HER HOUSE OTHERWISE U WILL FEEL "SORRY" FOR YOURSELF. STAY AWAY FROM HER AS FAR AS POSSIBLE OTHERWISE U MIGHT PUT YOURSELF IN A VERY BIG TROUBLE."

"Across the street is a shopping center with everything you would ever need!"

"Its large, fully furnished and has a very welcoming and homely feel to it.Ideal for anybody."

"I share my room with a roomate of mine and we live in the larger room with an attached bath. The other room is occupied by a single girl . Also there is another occupant in the living room."

"The room is extremely large (of all the room's I have seen in this area, this is the largest one)."

"seeking an open-minded female to share my room,bed in exchange for free rent in a beautiful apt-fully furnished, food, drink, pool, cable, internet "

perhaps needless to say, i didn't respond to any of these posts.

important lessons...

1. be nice to the registrar's office and the registrar's office will be nice to you. i've got an ugly finals schedule, consisting of a 48 hour take home exam that has to be completed in the first five days of the exam period, and three in-class finals that all occur during the first five days of the exam period (thus, no available 48 hour period in which to do the take-home test). but the registrar's office is my hero and kindly helped me move around some finals.

2. finding jobs truly is all about whom you know, not what you know. or, less euphemistically, career services is a joke.

3. it is a bad bad idea to have a lot of coffee and then go talk to the professor under whose supervision you want to write an independent study paper. just take my word on this one.

getting better all the time...

ta da! emily has a summer job! i'm going to be helping out poor old people in philadelphia this summer, and i couldn't be more thrilled!

and now, i just need to take care of that whole living situation thing... but that will be easy -- it was the whole employment question that had me losing my mind.

hooray for do-gooder law!

final answer...

okay, i've thought about it, and i'm not changing a goddamn thing about this blog. no way, jose. this is my blog, i say nothing of which i'm ashamed, and if, as the rumor mill suggests, there really are law school employees out there who want to read and forward posts along to faculty members, well, i don't like it, but what can i do about it?*

but i've had an idea for a summer project, which might involve taking parts of throckmorton offline for a while. it's very top secret right now -- only m.n. and k.s. know about this, and somehow they both think it's a good idea. good thing, too, since i'm planning on enlisting their help in certain aspects of this little project!


*in what may go down in history as the most passive aggressive footnote ever written, i want to say that although i'm no idiot and i understand that the internet is public, blah blah blah, there's something a little depersonalizing, in the show-and-tell object of office gossip sort of way, about keeping a blog that you consider to be pretty important and personal and hearing rumors from various sources that posts of yours and your friends/fellow bloggers are being passed along various faculty/administrative chains. is it true? i have no idea. the truth is that the rumor exists, and so all of the ways that the rumor can be construed and internalized comprises part of the circumstantial truth. there. i've said it. and i'm not allowing comments on this post because i'm ranting a bit and i don't want to hear it from my dissenters. xoxoxoxoxox, emily

ready, set, go!

today is an important day. one of my absolute favorite events ever happens today, something that's got folks in boston calling out of work, or if they're fortunate enough to work someplace that gives them the day off for patriots' day, taking the day off so they can find a good spectator spot somewhere along the route starting in hopkinton, going through newton, down into allston/brighton, and finally to the finish line in copley square.

today is the boston marathon!!!

the run starts at 11:00. where will i be at 11:00? in my first amendment class. not really the same. but my heart is with the runners.

my old roommate christina and i, back when we lived in boston, drunkenly pledged one night that we would run boston before we turned 30. well, considering that she turns 30 in june and i turn 30 in september, looks like we blew it with that one. ah, best laid plans...

the boston athletic association marathon site is here.

oh, and happy 30th b'day today to my dear fantastic friend paula!

number 4 freddie bynum? dude, sorry...

wanna know the best and most entertaining trio of fellas with whom to see a baseball game? i'll tell you -- tom, oliver, and greg. last night was a brilliant night at PNC park. and the real treat? the bucs actually won!

my sincerest apologies to cubs right fielder #4 freddie bynum, who got mercilessly heckled by my dear friends for much of the game. freddie -- you didn't do shit in the game, but you didn't tell us to fuck off, either. you're a trooper. good game.

you know how they shoot hot dogs into the stands sometimes between innings? well, this was all fine and good until i paid attention to the song that they blast from the scoreboard/jumbotron announcing this little ritual. it goes like this:

it's time to shoot some hot dogs
it's time to shoot some hot dogs
it's time to shoot some hot dogs
so you can catch some meat.

um, what? "catch some meat"? gross.

oh, and the girl pierogie, jalapeno hannah, actually won the pierogie race last night! i've never seen this before! score one for the chicks!

but the true high point of the night, the horrifying holy saturday defining moment, was driving back through oakland after the game and stopping at a traffic light alongside a car full of nuns. now, we're in tom's jeep, music blaring, greg and oliver are standing up through the sunroof-thing, and what song is on the radio? it's that eminem/nate dogg song "shake that", which rather un-romantically says "shake that ass for me" in the chorus. and the chorus was what was playing while we were next to the nuns. so, long story short? the nuns got serenaded.

go bucs! and happy easter to all!

blackberry, blackberry, blackberry...

donny just reminded me of robert hass. so i went over to my bookshelf and grabbed my four hass books and thumbed through them, reading my silly undergrad margin notes, smiling at the marked pages. i miss reading things that are beautiful. and i truly think that hass's writings are wonderful. simple, sensual, natural, heartbreaking.

when mark was here a few months ago, he directed me to this one poem called "a story about the body". it breaks my heart. it's from a collection called _human wishes_, which came out in 1989, and is a lot more prose-y than a lot of hass's other stuff. it's amazing nonetheless. here it is:

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity -- like music -- withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl -- she must have swept them from the corners of her studio -- was full of dead bees.

ah, all the new thinking is about loss, indeed. in this it resembles all the old thinking...

morning commute daydream...

in my ever-increasing tendency to think beyond where i am, on the bus this morning, i was definitely the weird girl listening to her headphones and grinning like a fool. why? because in my head, all i could think about was summer vacation and lying on a sunny patch of grass in rittenhouse square reading a book.

sigh... gotta get through the next few weeks first...

fine. i get it.

i'm currently on day four of a really annoying and painful sore throat and an average of 12 hours of sleep per night and finally i'm accepting that i might be sick. i went to student health today, thinking that i might have to wait a bit, but surely somebody would be able to take a look at me today. however, i was wrong. they don't take walk-ins. AYFKM? so i made an appointment for tomorrow after class and trudged out of there, feeling all dejected.

my throat hurts. i have a few little white thingies on my tonsils. the glands in my neck are a little swollen and tender. and i feel really tired. but it's strange -- every other time i've had throat-sick, i've also had sinus-y chest-congested-y head-ache-y-ness, too. is it possible to have the sick totally focused in one place?

maybe i have the throat cancer. maybe my throat is possessed by demons. maybe it's my vocal chords! how will i realize my dreams of becoming the princess of podcasting if i have to have my vocal chords removed because of the throat sick!?!?

alas, i'm being dramatic. i think i'll go to sleep now. krista just brought me a bottle of something called "magic swizzle", which, frankly, scares the hell out of me. it's a prescription medicine that literally says "magic swizzle" on the label. what, did snoop dogg name this stuff? allegedly it will make my throat numb. this isn't magic, it's called an analgesic. and "swizzle"? makes me think swizzle stick, which i don't really care to plunge at my swollen throat.

magic swizzle. sounds totally made up. like micronesia. or rule against perpetuities. i'm supposed to shake well before using. and keep out of reach of children. this is some weird shit.

here goes nothing...

KABOOM!

...says the thunder!

uncertainties...

text message conversation with my brother today:

e: my neurologist basically took away my MS diagnosis yesterday. awesome, yes?
d: that's really good?!
e: it's definitely good news.
d: i know, it's just kinda weird.
e: yeah. i honestly can't get too excited about it because all of this has been so uncertain.
d: exactly.

it's not that my brother isn't pleased at this news. and it's not that i'm not, either, but you've got to admit, being undiagnosed or having a diagnosis revoked isn't really something that makes a lot of sense. or at least, it's not a common occurrence. or, the brain doesn't quite know what to do with this sort of news. or, my brain doesn't.

the label has been removed. i went from all-systems-normal to check-engine to hey-it-fixed-itself? okay, so it didn't really go like that, but it sorta did. i don't want to be sick. i don't want to have a degenerative disease. and i understand that the human body is a wonky system and it can go through weird, flukey things that don't always make sense in the textbook manner of comprehension. but this isn't like a remission. this isn't like a skinned knee that healed. i do have a scar -- a little line that shows up in the MRI scans where the needle went in my left occipital lobe during the biopsy. and you can see the tiny spot where the inflammation occurred. scars. but is that it? am i left with a mark, a wound from battle? jesus, was it ever a battle!

somehow, though, thinking of this whole neurological nightmare in the past tense doesn't seem right. the one thing in the world with which i'm least able to deal is uncertainty. and here i've been given the closest thing to certainty i could hope for in this situation. what dr. b. told me yesterday is the best news possible! it's almost like a little miracle. yet, it doesn't make sense. somehow i had figured out a way to let go of my need to know what was happening in my brain. i had made peace with that uncertainty. now i have to make peace with a clean bill of health. it shouldn't be difficult, but it is. i can't really articulate why.

it's raining outside. earlier i sat in my windowsill and watched the lightning. nothing is certain, not really. was this whole ordeal just fate's way of, erm, drilling that into my head? maybe... but i don't believe that life works that way. that whole things-happen-for-a-reason bullshit? that's not for me.

yet, here i am. this is my truth, my reality, my present tense. i should be grateful. i am grateful. but i'm also skeptical. i suppose it's all part of the mystery.

the rain is really coming down now. my windows are open and it smells like rain in my apartment. the thunder just scared the hell out of the cats, and now the air feels electric. moment by moment. all is uncertain. that can be kind of a relief.

pre-existing conditions be damned!

i had a check-up appointment with my neurologist this afternoon. despite having to wait well over an hour before finally being put in an examination room, i got some very very good news. remember that MRI i had back in january? remember how the results showed no change since the last time i had my brain scanned? well, dr. b. and i talked about this today and the end result is that i basically got undiagnosed! dr. b. says that he thinks it's very likely that the inflammation in my head that caused my seizures two years ago could have been some sort of weird viral fluke. i've got no other symptoms, and nothing else has happened since the initial episode. therefore, no multiple and no sclerosis. which means all signs point to emily not having MS.

sounds good to me!

and big giant thanks to krista for keeping me company in the waiting room. and for being an amazing friend!

JURIST is up for a Webby!!!

ta da! everybody's favorite legal news site, pitt law's own jurist, has been nominated for a webby award! everyone must go here and vote!

here's some info about the webby awards. VOTE NOW!

redaction action...

a good friend and fellow blogger got called out today for a post he put up about real life folks in the law school. no harm was done. it seems that those involved recognized that all was meant in a good-hearted way. but i gotta tell you, friends, it's all got me re-thinking the two-plus years of posts i've got on this site.

so, i think i'm going to take a couple of days off and figure out what i want to do. here are my options:

1. i could go through over 500 posts and redact all the information that could somehow identify me, but that would involve a serious time commitment and i just can't take on that type of project until the semester is over
2. i could bid throckmorton farewell and resume somewhere else, somewhere none of you will be able to find me
3. i could leave all as-is and go on with things blisfully unaware (or, wilfully blind)
4. i could delete the blog

my initial thoughts...

option 4 is completely out of the question. shut down throckmorton? it's been my online equivalent of a security blanket for a long time. and some of these posts are downright funny.

if i'm really really bored after finals, i could go for option 1, preserving the content but removing the particulars. but that seems so, erm, diluting.

option 2 would of course only be a temporary situation. blogs get discovered. isn't that what's got us here in the first place?

and option 3? i vote option 3 most likely to succeed.

big brother...

don't know if any of my schoolmates ever read the career services office's weekly newsletter or not. i don't. but in light of one of the conversation topics at dinner friday night with certain faculty members and 3 of my fantastic brunette client counseling colleagues, i was directed to this week's edition because of the following:

As you are probably aware, recently there have been numerous news reports regarding privacy in the era of blogging and e-mailing. Who is not familiar with the now infamous exchange between the recent Suffolk Law School graduate and a potential employer at a Boston firm? That newly-minted lawyer's "bla bla bla" e-mail made her the source of humor from Boston to Berlin.

That e-mail exchange, as well as the blogging explosion, prompted the CSO to explore this important topic. Many of the articles we have read relate to blogs and the potentially negative effect they may have on employers' hiring decisions. Employers are now quite savvy in their research of potential candidates, and you should operate under the assumption that anything on the web written by or about you will be discovered by a potential employer (this includes information posted on websites such as Friendster, MySpace.com, and Facebook). More specifically, a student whose MySpace Favorite Phrase is "Party with your pants off!" (no, we didn’t make that up) may short-circuit her job search with traditional employers.

Now, blogging has a flip side too: blogs can add to the "portfolio" of students who are outside of the upper echelons of the class. But these blogs should demonstrate that the writer is a great, interesting, motivated emerging lawyer. Here’s the bottom line: You are find-able on the web--and you have a choice whether it is for "good," or not.

As such, our office urges you to use common sense when blogging, posting personal information on the web, and even e-mailing. If there is information about you on the web, and you are concerned about the manner in which a potential employer may view this material, please do not hesitate to discuss the matter with a CSO Counselor.

so there you go, friends, right from CSO's mouth. i've got seriously mixed feelings about this, but given that this blog started as a chronicle of a whole bunch of health-related stuff, i can't say i'm not concerned. i don't ever write anything here that i'm ashamed of or that i would consider to be incriminating. but if potential employers are out there lurking on the internet like the human resources equivalents of online pedophiles, i can't say that makes me feel at all at ease. and this isn't even me wanting to declare my free speech rights -- it's more me wanting to say, "jesus, people! it's just a stupid blog!"

i dunno. i've got tracking code in this blog that tells me the IP addresses and city/state of who reads these posts. i'm not about to stop writing at this point. maybe if i start to get a bunch of visits from ISPs at places where i'm sending my resume, i'll rethink that strategy. but for now, well, jesus, people! it's just a stupid blog!

xo.

on behalf of AML...from one of the "first responders"...

andrew is taking a temporary blog hiatus because some lowlife crack addict broke into his car and stole his computer. so, if any of you who are in his classes would care to send him notes, he would greatly appreciate it.

this is seriously crap-tastic. not only were his computer, his ipod nano, and his credit cards stolen, but all of his research for his seminar paper was in his bag in his car! i say we round up the troops and do some vigilante street justice in shadyside! who's with me?

andrew, you know i love you. my notes are your notes.

xo

second thoughts...

do you ever come up with a great idea that you think, if effectuated, and combined with a few drinks, will totally help you regain some feeling of control over your pathetic life, and so then you try to make this idea come to fruition and then you realize that not only was it not a great idea, but it wasn't even a good idea? that really, it was kind of a lame idea? and that maybe you can blame it on those few drinks which might have been more than a few and chalk it all up to the makings of a funny story? but then, upon further reflection, ultimately, you come to the honest and humbling conclusion that you are, in fact, a dumbass?

yep. welcome to my life.

it runs in the family...

so, just so nobody thinks i'm some sort of freak of nature, i'm on the phone with my sister right now. she said, "my van smells like a head shop." and i said, "at least it doesn't smell like mice." and she said, "that's why it smells like a head shop -- to cover up the petting zoo smell!"

let me explain. my sis has a pet snake. yeah. a pet snake. named basil. so, basil eats mice. a couple of weeks ago caitlin and her boyfriend went to the pet store to get a couple of mice-meals for basil. on the way home, the mice chewed through the paper bag they were in and got loose in her van. and despite her better efforts, caitlin has yet to find them and get them out of the van. she did see one of them in the ashtray one day, with its little white tail sticking out. but she couldn't grab a hold of him. silly mouse.

while i've never had mice running around loose in a vehicle of mine, that's definitely the kind of story that would be consistent with emily-ville. like sister, like sister, i suppose. god, i love that kid!

doldrums...

...and for no good reason, either. maybe it's the impending end of the semester. maybe it's that so many things right now seem so uncertain. maybe it's that i have this vision of what i want my life to look like, my summer to look like, my end of the semester to look like.

maybe i shouldn't say there's no good reason... there are certainly reasons. several of them. some that i have some control over, some that i don't. why is it that the ones i can't control seem to be the scariest? shouldn't i just learn to let them be simply because there's nothing i can do to control them?

you know how when you're a kid and grown-ups ask you what your dreams are and you tell them you want to be a marine biologist or an astronaut or a supreme court justice? and they tell you in response that you can be whatever you want to be? that the sky's the limit? well, maybe if you let yourself believe that for too long, somehow you infuse that belief with something that resembles truth. but the real truth, the competing truth, is that you really can't make something happen just because you want it to. you can't just will things into reality. it's probably for the best, really -- we wouldn't want people to be able to have things just because they have the desire. not to say that desire is wrong, but it certainly can be extremely frustrating. and one thing's for sure -- desire is not the path of the buddha.

and so, here's my big confession... i bailed on my therapist appointment this week. i just didn't show up. why? because i'm stressed out. seems like a good time to go to the therapist, doesn't it? but instead, i couldn't deal with having to talk for an hour about how stressed out i feel. so i just didn't go. and i feel like a real chickenshit about it.

sheesh... there you go. i guess this post is my attempt to embrace my inner fuck-up. now you know. i'm not perfect.

the fellowship of the rings...

there's this group of classmates of ours, all of whom are women, who have been designated "the fellowship of the rings" because they all have these godawful blinding humongous bling-fest engagement rings. (i so wish i had come up with that name, but i didn't. krista and tom h. did.) here's an excerpt from the note that krista and i were just passing back and forth in the library:

k: i can't believe you're sitting there with members of the fellowship. i bet that's what's causing your headache.
e: um, there are two dudes back here, and unless they're hobbits, no fellowship members are around.
k: the girls that were behind you are in the fellowship.
e: oh! they had NO LIBRARY VOICE AT ALL!
k: they can't help it. it's the bling [written with light beam-y lines coming off of it]
e: they're all, "what? i can't hear you -- your bling is too loud."

de minimis...

tonight i made an important discovery. and here it is: cottage cheese is really really gross.

dear sir or madam, please give me a summer job...

if anyone knows of a way to write cover letters that doesn't sound totally contrived and full o' shit, please let me know. it seems that no matter what i do, everything i say in these stupid things is a thinly veiled version of the following:

dear [insert name here]:

i'm a raging lunatic kiss-ass who is desperate for some sort of income. i want to buy something! i'm sick of thinking of lexis nexis points as currency! i'll do whatever you want me to do! i'm way smart -- i promise! please, for the love of pete, give me a chance!

i look forward to hearing from you soon.

regards,
emily

oy...

important lessons from today's ethics class...

it was a banner day in "law and the ethics of lawyering" today! i won't bore anybody with the details, but here's the gist of what we learned:

1. don't have sex with your clients
2. don't have sex with opposing counsel*
3. there are no real professional constraints on class action lawyers
4. government attorneys are analogous to in-house corporate counsel
5. perjury is real and you can lose your license for sitting next to it (or sleeping with it)

here's a quote for those of you who may be taking notes on this stuff:
"the real reason why i think having sex with clients is unprofessional is analogous to the reason why i think sex between teachers and students is unprofessional. because not in every case, but as a general matter, there is a hierarchical dominant relationship that must make suspect the student's or client's acquiescence in that relationship. that should be enough that the lawyer should have as a personal rule that this is not what they do."

there you go. words to live by.


*we didn't discuss what happens if your client has sex with opposing counsel, but i think it's safe to say that we should strongly advise against that.

unconsciously conscious...

so, erm, my estates & trusts professor has this rather embarrassing practice of using celebrities as the characters in her hypothetical fact patterns in class. this will make studying for the final a breeze -- i'm just gonna pick up Us Weekly and People magazine and bone up on my pop culture gossip. in friday's class, the question my professor posed to the class was what if paris hilton gave the contents of her louis vuitton bag to nicole richie?

this, of course, prompted a note-writing fest between krista and me about what the contents of paris hilton's bag would be. we came up with the following:
lip gloss
condoms
lube
dog treats
personal hygiene wipes
sidekick
RU-486

well, it looks like somehow this crept into my unconscious mind, because last night i had a dream that i was in an SNL sketch with amy pohler and tina fey and we were various socialites at paris hilton's bachelorette party. i'd go into details, but i'm a little embarassed by the whole thing, so suffice it to say, i was the character in the sketch who was supposed to be paris hilton. oh my. but it was definitely funny!

omigod, google! I LOVE YOU!!!

google???

how could i ever have doubted you!!! ever??? you are the most brilliant search engine ever of all times!!! i'm so so so the april fool! the april fool for you!!!

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox,
emily

erm, google? we need to talk...

dear google,

you've been important to me for a long time. from the early days, when you were just a fledgling search engine, i've been on board. you've been a true friend, always helping me out when i needed to find something specific, be it that perfect link for a research assignment or vital stats on ex boyfriends. you've been there! and i've been there for you, growing with you, watching you evolve and supporting your new endeavors -- gmail, google maps, google desktop, google earth -- i've been right by your side for all of it. and your cutesy little diversions like google moon? you make me laugh, you inspire me, you bring joy to my life. you're my homepage, google! you're part of my life every day.

but i fear that we may have reached a point beyond which i'm afraid i cannot follow. when i first went online today, and saw your happy little blue-red-yellow-blue-green-red letters helpfully gazing at me from my computer screen, i saw that you have a new feature: google romance. google??? say it isn't so! i understand that to some degree you really must keep up with the proverbial joneses -- the yahoos, the MSNs. i know that you need to show the rest of the world that you can do everything they can do, and better! but, google, as much as i love you, as devoted as i've been to you, as marvelous as you are in my life, i'm afraid i'm not letting you into my bedroom. i'm just not willing to make you a part of my dating life.

i know this is difficult to hear. it's even more difficult to say. google? it's not you, it's me. wait, that's not true. this time, it's not me, it's you! you're going too far, and i just can't go there with you.

please know that you're going to continue to be a relevant and essential part of my life on the internet. i've invested too much time and energy to turn away from you now. but google romance just isn't for me. i hope you can understand.

i wish you all the best with your new dating feature. know that i'll be thinking of you and that i wish things were different.

always,
emily

as if things weren't bad enough already...

...krista just sent me this. all of that rage that was bubbling up in my innards because of my last post just got completely dispelled and replaced by...erm, utter amusement and bafflement?

enjoy!

bad apples spoil the bunch...

sometime between now and yesterday afternoon, the law school got vandalized by militant bikers. no, not big ol' hell's angels types -- i'm talking about crazy fools on bicycles. i haven't yet seen this firsthand, but my sources tell me that now appearing in silver spray paint is "bikes not bombs" on the main stairway of the law school, and "bike pgh" in one of the bathrooms. this is so goddamn lame i don't even know what to say.

that's a lie. obviously, i know what to say or i wouldn't have turned this into a blog post.

the whole "bikes not bombs" thing, as i understand it, comes out of efforts in different cities to encourage bicycle use as an alternative to gas-guzzling, resource-exhausting methods of transportation. it's affiliated with a lot of neighborhood groups who recycle and rehab old bikes and put them back on the street. in my opinion, this is overwhelmingly positive.

there are also the critical mass rides in various cities, organized bunches of cyclists who ride together to bring about awareness of different, friendlier modes of getting to and fro. again, this is overwhelmingly positive.

yet, these pro-cycling, pro-environmental movements have managed to breed an anti-establishment faction that is good at making noise and enemies. and that's what i object to.

anybody who rides a bike on a regular basis will attest that cyclists catch a lot of hell on the road from both drivers and pedestrians. drivers want bikes on the sidewalks, pedestrians want them on the street (the law, btw, is that bikes are vehicles and thus belong on the street, riding WITH traffic). most folks on bikes are decent, non-antagonistic types who ride for good reasons. but there's also a whole scenester-y intra-counter-culture (that's so not the term i want to use) in the cycling community these days which is kinda gross. there are a lot of folks out there on bikes who act like jackasses, cut off motorists, ride really irresponsibly, and behave as if they're entitled to this sort of activity.

i.e., the kids who spraypaint "bikes not bombs" in a stairway. um, hello? not only is spraypaint totally not eco-friendly, but what you're doing is (a) vandalizing, (b) illegal, and (c) pissing off people who may otherwise be receptive to the message that bikes not bombs wants to promote. i love the first amendment and all, but i wish people understood that persuading your audience is not about the volume with which you make your statement, it's about the manner in which you convey your ideas.

look, part of the problem is that cyclists and motorists are engaged in this weird competitive, combative struggle for who gets the road. it's the whole entitlement thing. people, people, PEOPLE!!! where in the FUCK did we as a culture go so astray that we're convinced that we get to act like assholes because we think we're entitled to certain things? it's really quite retarded. and it's totally unproductive and inefficient. you know the street signs that say "share the road"? um, duh! it's about SHARING the road. the street isn't for cars only. it's not for bikes only. this is my issue with the critical mass rides -- they end up pissing drivers off because the cyclists act like morons and basically cut off access to the streets to motorists. what does this accomplish? how are we working towards awareness of reasonable alternatives if all we're doing is alienating groups that really have no reason not to co-exist peacefully?

erghhh...

bottom line: you punk-ass BNB kids who are out there trying to spread the word? don't you see that you're totally working against yourselves? be careful, or i'll shove a stick in your spokes. you want vigilante justice? oh, i'll give you vigilante justice! roar!!!