Thunder Snow

Beautiful or a death trap?

It is a real thing, I swear. I didn't know it but you can have a thunder storm with snow. Winter weather this year has not approached the craziness of last year and what people who were in DC call "snowmageddon" but it has been a little stressful for little ole coastal me.
Last Tuesday, the day before our big job fair, we had an ice storm and while taking the garbage out I slipped on our front steps and landed on my right arm. I scared the dog with my scream and spent a few hours wondering if I should go to the hospital. Thankfully I am a south paw, although we lefties use our right hands much more than the average right-y uses their left. (for example because of a lack of left handed scissors at my public elementary school I cut with my right hand, even with knives which is weird.) Also importantly for a job fair, we shake hands with our right. (I nearly cried every time someone shook my hand too tight.) Also my lack of range of motion made it really difficult to dress myself. Something that played out as a bit of a comedy of errors as my roommate and I tried to decided what to wear for the job fair.

Our back yard.

My injuries led a friend from home to observe that I may want to choose where I live based on how likely I am to get hurt, given my general klutziness.   
This weeks weather was less dangerous, but more mystifying. Wednesday brought us the previously mentioned "thunder-snow" a whopping seven and half inches of it, and nearly twenty-four hours without power. The loss of power was difficult to deal with. I could read my books as long as the sun was out but once it got to dark there wasn't much I could do. It is do difficult to balance a twenty-five pound law book and take notes by flash light, plus the reading is just not lively enough to keep me engaged in the dark (well except for criminal law, but no one wants to be reading about rape and murder in a cold house with the lights out.) So I caught up on sleep and read a bit of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" which is way too good. Honestly law school is getting in the way of my real reading.
So now I sit trying to focus, you can see how well that is going, knowing that all of the school we missed in the last couple of weeks will have to be made up, and thinking snow days must be a lot more fun when you are a kid, but I wouldn't know because where I grew up it is currently seventy two degrees and sunny as my father likes to remind me... I am not jealous at all.

Grace doing a better job braving the snow than I did

How quickly everything stays the same.

I am back at school, back around my friends, and it is really good. I like my classes this semester. Mostly I am astonished at how quickly we all fall back into the same routines we had before break. How the time away falls away and everything is the same. In some ways it is refreshing. A semester in I know what I am doing, or at least I can fake it and not make a fool of myself. It is hard to believe I am just over a sixth of the way through law school. On the one hand I know it is going to fly by. I know one day I will look back and think, jeez that was a blink. At the same time there are moments where the amount of time it will take to do this feels impossible to span. Moments when the sheer volume of what I have to get through is drowning.
Those are the moments when I go running. I feel very embodied when I run, like I exist only in that moment and the rest doesn't matter. Or I run away. Like this weekend when I ran away to Virgina, to exist apart for reality, and just escape. Moments where nothing mattered except feeling loved and supported around people who leave me feeling confident in myself and the future.

And when reality strikes again, well then I just remember what my dad taught me- there is only one way to eat a whale, one bite at a time. 

Home

Well I am back in DC, technically Maryland, but well you get the point. I meant to write some during vacation but that, along with a slough of other things, didn't happen. This Christmas will certainly be remembered, but for all the wrong reasons.
Thomas Wofle was right, you can't go home again. The vestiges of your former self, which live in foggy memories and haunt the walls of your childhood home are phantoms, reaching out to you with a hope they cannot fulfill. They leave you lost, lonely, and mean; searching dusty tomes for an artifact to reassure you in your future or stabilize the foundation from which you grew. Ultimately you are left unfulfilled, having unearthed more weaknesses then you care to acknowledge. And still it pulls on you calling for you to stay, to hold onto that fuzzy version of your past self that never really existed.
I thought about running away, frequently, over the break. Getting in a car or on a plane and leaving it behind, the debt, the responsibility. It is a silly dream I know, leaving would make things infinitely more complicated. It is the spirit of American wanderlust in me, I guess, but I know it isn't a viable option. (Just as much as I know the price of the cheapest one way ticket from IAD to De Gaulle on most days.) If I were living in a Russian novel Paris would be my Moscow. I love stories about the post-war expat community in the city about artists and poets and the family they formed there. I have been to modern Paris and I know that Montmartre doesn't look like it did fifty years ago. That the place I imagine doesn't exist and probably never did, it is probably the musings of the romantic in me I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to kill for far to long. I still love the city though, every time I am there I understand why it is the French have such an aversion to work. It would be a lovely life, sitting by the Seine writing, painting, drinking wine and eating cheese. The piece of me that loves Pacific avenue and local bands and feels guilty for not becoming the type of lawyer that defends indigenousness peoples from huge multinational corporations and the ill will of their government wants to run away, to live that life. I am not that person, I don't wander, I plan. I will have my Juris Doctorate mere months after my twenty-fifth birthday.  At least here I know what my role is. Law school is terribly isolating, piercingly difficult and at times painful in the myriad of ways it makes me feel like an idiot but I know who I am and what I am supposed to do. I know I am capable, and that I have the wonderful support I need to do it. Just because you can't go home again doesn't mean it's not there waiting, changed, rough around the edges but there none the less.

There is a reason people don't leave California.

It is Christmas Eve, and today I went for my run, I ran barefoot on the beach, in shorts and a t-shirt. Just when the craziness of the holidays, and being home was starting to get to me I remembered how amazing it is that I actually live in a place as fabulous as the Monterey Bay. I hope I can hold on to how blessed I am to be home.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Okay so I kinda love exams...

Well only sorta...

First off I know that this puts me at odds with most of the world.

And it doesn't mean that if, given the choice to not have to take them or not have them count for a grade I wouldn't jump at the chance.

What I mean is, accepting the reality that this is something I have to do I will accept it and see the good in them:
I like the idea that I have four hours to sit down and prove myself. It is kind of exciting, like I am in some sort of epic, albeit nerdy, battle with my professors where I have to save my self from a death of drowning in debt or sodium poisoning from over consumption of ramen. Okay, so it isn't really all that epic but the idea of sitting down and proving yourself does have a certain appeal.
The other thing I like is that they bring with them this weird other worldliness where you are both EXTREMELY crazy busy and stressed and at the same time have no plans and quite a bit of freedom. I loved winter exams at Cal especially, because there was a general sense of batting down the hatches and all focusing together; everything would get really quiet. You would walk by a frat house on a Friday night coming back from the library and it would be silent.
Law school it is a little different, in part because I am no longer surrounded by students, and Grace could care less, she just cares that we aren't giving her nearly the level of attention she expects for when we are at home. Honnestly at one point I was sure out lack of attention had "broken the dog," when I was cooking eggs and bacon and she stayed looking sad on the guest bed. (Don't worry she recovered.) Also because my roommate and I are both stress eaters, this time involves a lot of supplemental baking, I am pretty sure the peanut butter cookies are what revived Grace. In all it has been a good thing for our relationship as roommates (which is not always the case with exams.) We both take the same approach to exams: getting through what we can and trying to preserve sanity, trying not to deviate into extreme behavior (of either the distraction or focus type.) We spent the better part of an hour laughing over our favorite blogs.* It is one of my best memories for the semester even if it did give me another thing to waste my time with.

Grace "helping" bake cookies

All and all it is kind of nice. You don't have many times in your life where a period of time is set aside so that you can organize your life and get your head sorted out. Which is really what I try to think of this as. Because the alternative, three weeks where you do everything you can to keep yourself from becoming a smarmy plaintiffs lawyer who gets shot by a deranged client, after alienating everyone in your life close to you, is just too depressing to think about. (True albeit slightly altered story.)

*(The impetus of this being the author of my favorite blog writing to tell me that she liked the title of my blog. Insert obnoxious fan girl squeeing. -If you don't know what this sound is ask a thirteen year old about Justin Beiber or Edward Cullen. If you do not know who these people are you are a better person than me and obviously have a fulfilling life)  

Festive Winter Time...

I am feeling the holiday spirit. Notice the tree...

...and the advent calender,

Our tree was a gift from my dad, and while it might verge on being a "Charlie Brown Christmas Tree" I kinda love it. It currently has a Santa Clause, a Cinderella, a Package, a Cloisonne bell my mom brought me from china, a Dog that looks like Grace, a San Francisco skyline, and the ever ubiquitous pickle ornament on it. It is sparse but pretty good considering. It makes the house feel festive, like maybe we care about more than exams. Plus it is kind perfect in all of its sad quirkiness.      

In related festive news it snowed! Okay it was only a comically small amount, but it was enough to quiet the world as I ran. I told my self I didn't have to run on days it was snowing, because I am notoriously uncoordinated. But it was light and beautiful and had yet to make the roads icy. So I went out and let my self enjoy the winter. 

See snow, sorta...
it counts if you grew up on the beach

I have actually discovered that I like the winter, with a few all important caveats: I must be able to wear warm dry clothes when I get inside and I must have a good coat. Also I enjoy it a lot more when there aren't "winter sport people" to push me down hills. And who say things like "it isn't that hard" and "oh it is only a double black diamond called 'a devils death" and "oh wasn't Kate's face funny when she ran into the snow patrol." Haha... like I said I enjoy winter, but that doesn't make it easy for those of us who have difficulty staying on two feet.

This is what happens when you go into Whole Foods hungry and depressed...

You come out with twenty dollars worth of chocolate and cheese, and you eat half a loaf of bread before you get home...

My roommate and I frequently eat dinner together. Often it is a sort of "graze-y" meal where we are trying to clear out the fridge. One of our favorite things, (and the meal we brought to the rally to Restore Sanity) is simple sandwiches, just sliced tomatoes on good quality bread with fresh mozzarella, melted. They are supper good, because we use really good ingredients. Anyway our bread from the last week hadn't been refrigerated (my bad) so I volunteered to pick up a new loaf from the Whole Foods that is next to metro. Bad idea, not only was I hungry because it had been a long day, but more importantly I was overwhelmed by a slough of bad information and the pressure of impending finals. As anyone who knows me knows, I deal with stress and sadness by eating and shopping (not necessarily at the same time- not that I would say no), preferably for luxury goods and rich foods (not a good thing for someone who is living on government loans.) So Whole Foods for me is like a crack den for a junkie, lets just say the results were tasty but not good for my wallet. I left excited about my meal but wondering how I had managed to do so much damage and only come out with a single bag? So now I have the existing stress and sadness coupled with guilt over my inability to restrain myself.

What do I do?

I eat half the baguette I bought on the way home.
 (Technically an arrest-able offence on DC metro.)

Also, on a somewhat side note, I find it a little depressing that the cookies that are advertised as "chocolate chewies" are actually crunchie cookies. In the box they look deceptively like my grandmother's "chocolate gooey cookies" but no they are actually crunchy. (The law student in me thinks that this is a breach of the contract they formed. Wait you say, they were just poorly advertised, there wasn't any contract- I say oh no. Quick law school 101 moment: there are three elements for a contract to be formed: Offer, Acceptance and Consideration. Whole foods offered to contract for chewy cookies, (this was a unilateral contract which I could only accept through performance) I accepted when I gave consideration for in the form of money. The offer was for chewy cookies and that was not delivered therefore I am entitled to restitution damages, but only if I want to go through the trouble of taking them back, and I am not sure if I am motivated enough to do that.) The rhetor in me says, why not call them that Chocolate Crunchies- It is still an alliteration, and then they wouldn't be lying. Honestly though none of it matters because I left them on the dining room table and Grace jumped up and ate the whole box, mostly I am relived that I didn't kill my roommate's dog.