I can't believe I am giving him this much energy.

Aka Pot meet out of touch kettle.

I have never liked Rush Limbaugh. There are many reasons but I won't get into them. But this week he said something that really upset me, not because I am liberal but because I am a woman who lives in modern America. This week he implied Michelle Obama is fat and unhealthy. Like her or not  agree or not he can go ahead and say what he wants about her she is a public figure. 
This is what he said: 
"The problem is, and dare I say this, it doesn't look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice. ...I'm trying to say that our First Lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue[.]"
Now the part of that statement that upsets me the most is the part that people aren't talking about. It doesn't have anything to do with Michelle Obama, I would like to think I would be just as upset if he had substituted Sarah Palin or Christine O'Donnell . The part that is upsetting is that he implies that healthy women look like the women on the cover of Sports Illustrated. They don't, the average BMI in last years Sports Illustrated swimsuit addition was under 17. (For those of you that don't know that is underweight bordering on dangerously so. So you know the opposite of Mr. Limbaugh.) This is what makes me ill. That men anywhere, especially those with a microphone are that out of touch with reality. Men in fashion who object to having to put *gasp* women with healthy BMI's in their clothes don't claim they are healthy, they claim it is art. Mr Limbaugh is not claiming that these models are beautiful, or that they wear a swimsuit well, he is claiming that they should be held up as a model of health. Living with fifty other women you see what eating disorders do to people and if the image of health is a woman who is starving herself what are we telling girls we are going to continue to do this to generation after generation.
I am frustrated with myself that I am not more articulate, because I feel as if I could write pages about sexism and image and media and the way women see themselves. But I am so upset that some big fat jerk thinks that anyone who doesn't look like a swimsuit model is fat and therefore that I am fat makes me want to scream "shut up lard butt" like some eight year old. I know for him it is just one more thing to get people riled up about. But to me it is the sorority sisters who was addicted to drugs (mostly legal) to stay thin, the friend who planned meals around purging, the women with lung cancer who couldn't quit smoking because they were afraid to gain weight, the girl down the hall who had a heart attack because of anorexia, the sister who defines herself in beauty, the gym addicts and girls who fear food. And me who could never live up to what sports illustrated thought was beautiful so I took it out on myself and those scars won't fade. For us we see a woman with a healthy attitude towards food, who exercises, who has had two children  and who is lauded as beautiful by designers.   
I know Rush probably didn't think about this when he was making these statements. He probably didn't mean to imply that ninety percent of women are unattractive. But that is why he doesn't deserve consideration when it comes to women's beauty or health. I have never been so happy not to have a radio.

Plus I think most women would prefer vogue anyway.

 

Oh and what I wouldn't give for her arms.

   

If cupcakes don't have frosting they're automatically breakfast food.

Breakfast...

Today was one of the best Valentine's days I have ever had. Mostly because no one cared that it was Valentine's day. I got cards and candy from home which made me feel loved and appreciated but that was about the extent of it. (Including a box of see's which has been throughly appreciated, especially by the dog who dragged it off the counter and ate a significant portion of it. She is still in trouble but we were glad it was just toffee and not the dark chocolate foil covered hearts because that might have done real damage. Those she buried in our beds- it was really a thoughtful gift.)The thing about Valentine's Day is that mostly I don't care. Some people love it- probably because they are in a relationship, and some people hate it. It is amazing the passion some people put into hating this day, and the thing is they always come off jealous, like if they were in a relationship they would be in the other camp with hearts and flowers sending cupid grams to people. My feelings about Valentine's day has a lot of similarities to my feelings about the Valentine's bouquets you see at grocery stores: anyone can do it and it takes no thought, it is there out of obligation not real love; but I understand the purpose.

Valentines day in law school
Chocolate is always good
and no worse from Grace's ware

Yesterday I make coco-pink cuplets, which are a family recipe for chocolate cake that isn't too sweet which you then top with nuts and chocolate chips instead of frosting. This makes them faster, easier, better to transport and (in my humble non-frosting liking opinion better) plus as my roommate likes to say without frosting they are just muffins and therefore breakfast food.
So my day dawned with coffee and "muffins" for breakfast. Then I step outside and the sun is shining and it is in the 60's. I laughed with glee at the warmth. I had to call people to share my joy. (Honestly this is what makes east coast winters livable, there is a day in the spring where you feel warm again and you actually appreciate the sun. Living in California  you never really marvel in how wonderful it is to have a sunny day.) Then after class I got empanads and gossiped with Hotlanta. We appreciated that point in the semester where you know what you are doing and what to expect but life hasn't become too crazy.
 Really a wonderful day.        

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)