[F]EASTER

Exams are quickly approaching but my roommate and I decided that Easter is not a holiday we can overlook. While we could have been observant and gone to church we decided to recognize the holiday the way we recognize most things, we cooked. I wasn't too excited about it at first, I knew the time involved with this kind of meal and I am starting to feel the exam pressure. But we did it anyway and the results were amazing (if comically large.)

First we had to buy a ham. The smallest we could find bone in was ten pounds. There are two of us (and Grace) but we decided to get what they had and figured the bone was a good portion of the weight. (Why is it that meat can't be found in reasonable quantities?) I think that the people at the supermarket thought we were crazy, our bodies half in the freezer hoping to find one that weighed an ounce less.

 Notice the ham, with a glaze homemade by my roommate. (Oh and did I mention that on Thursday we had a whole chicken so while we were making the feast I was also making chicken stock?)

 My asparagus with a lemon rue, and my first attempt ever carving. Neither, my roommate and I, who both have extensive cooking experience, had carved and we find it funny that it is such a "man's task."

Notice the yams, and the mashed potatoes and the homemade bread. Also not pictured the mini-cheesecakes we had for dessert. (Guess whose house is not carb free?) 

Grace waited patiently hoping ham would fall.

And yes that is a croque minsieur,
which I will be consuming throughout exams.
We still have 9.8 Lbs of ham to consume

I had a better time without you.

Samuel Beam aka "Iron and Wine" at the 9:30 club

I have had tickets to see Iron and Wine at the 9:30 Club last Friday since some time in January. On Thursday the people I planned to go with told me that they had sold their tickets weeks earlier. I was pissed, I couldn't believe how inconsiderate it was, especially because I don't think they would have told me at all if I hadn't asked them about meeting up. I don't know how people get away with being so inconsiderate and still have friends. (It wasn't that they canceled but that they didn't offer the tickets to me to see if I could find someone to use them, or tell me early enough that I could sell mine.)

I tried to sell my ticket and, predictably, was unable to find a buyer. So rather than let the ticket go to waste I went to the show alone. My mom wasn't happy about it. (I think she expects me to run into Sid Vicious and end up dead in the Hotel Chelsea anytime I go to a concert. This means that I often wait to tell her about them until after the fact.

It avoids conversations like this:

Mom: but why do you want to go?

Me: Because they are awesome and the lead singer is cute. [Or I listened to them every day for a month when I was hating being abroad. Or because all my friends are going. (But that just brings up the bridge conversation.)] 

Mom: But it is expensive.

Me: How would wasting the tickets saving me money?

Mom: I just don't want you to get hurt. 

Me: Mom it just Outside Lands [or the Catalyst, or the Greek, or the 9:30 club]  and I have the cheap tickets, I am not going to meet some ne'er do well musician who tempts me with his words and move into his bus.

Mom: Well things happen. (She finishes in such a way that I can see her eye brows raise and her head tilt through the phone so she may as well be screaming "YOU SHOULDN'T GO.") Okay so that isn't exactly fair, but my Mom's distaste for heat, crowded spaces, and loud noise come out any time going to a show comes up.)

I disregarded her advice and went and I was really glad. In part because there is something really empowering about doing a "couple-y" thing on your own. I would have been upset if I had let the ticket go to waste, and while I could have blamed it on my friends ultimately I had control over the use of my ticket. While I was an anomaly, most people don't go to concerts alone, people were friendly, the beer was good and the music was better.  I generally have a head on most of the waifish hipster girls so I was ten feet back from the stage and could see everything perfectly. The whole set was amazing, and because I was alone I could sing along and enjoy the music without idol chit-chat. As an encore he did an a cappella version of "Flightless Bird American Mouth" that brought tears to my eyes. While it would have been nice to share it with someone who appreciated the music, obviously the people who bailed on me were not those people. 

  

Failure is not an option...

When I was about nine or ten my dad brought back a t-shirt from a business trip in Florida. It is a quote from Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director on Apollo 13. While it is exactly what I would want to hear from a flight director if I was an astronaut, I think as a child I would have been better served by the words of Edison "I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don't work."

While "failure is not an option" works reasonably well as a stance for the parents of a bright (if sometimes lazy) child living in a town where teachers were told not to use red pens, everyone had to be given valentines, birthday party invitations and end of the year trophies, at some point we will all fail. Success isn't about never failing, it is about learning to fail well. This has been the toughest lesson of law school. One of the secrets of the law, which is actually painfully obvious, is that you are going to lose half of the time, and if you define winning as getting exactly what you client wants well then that number is considerably lower. So law school is the excruciating experience of failing a lot, of breaking you down to very small painful parts and building you back up in a way that makes failure less personal so you can learn from losing, so that even the worst sort of day isn't really a failure.

This isn't compatible with "failure is not an option" and it has isolated me. I have created an infallible facade in front of a very human girl. When I am less than perfect there is no one to share that with because it doesn't fit with who I was created to be. There is nothing to success if it wasn't fought for and in exposing our wounds we are allowed to learn from them rather than letting them fester in the dark.

     

An amazon in a hipster bar

A couple weeks ago I went out for one of my friend's birthday. I had a good time, but I was also reminded why I don't go out all that often. My friend picked a great place, with a good DJ and without a cover, although I could tell immediately it wasn't my scene. Maybe it is DC, but I always feel overdressed if I put in the smallest effort into getting ready. The staggering number of people in hoodies and sneakers made me feel ridiculous. More so because I was in heels, I could look over the heads of everyone in the crowd. If that wasn't enough one of the girls who can grate on me begins the evening by saying "oh my god you're huge!"
Yes I am tall, but huge? Way to start a girls night off on the right foot. This girl in particular seems to bring out all my childish insecurities. Whenever I am around her I feel like my twelve-year-old self, and our interactions always seem to turn petty.
I was hoping law school would temper my interactions with superficial girls. That once we began our "professional lives" as they like to tell us, that we would all try to act like grown-ups. Boy was I wrong.
As an undergrad I developed a distaste for the subcategory of these girls who acted dumb to get men. I went to school whith some of the most fiercely intelligent women in my generation. Women who spent their days working on cures for blindness and doing research for Nobel laureates (not an exaggeration) and who would then turn around and act like idiots because when they acted like themselves they were ignored by our male counterparts. They were threatening, and boys don't buy drinks for girls who threaten their masculinity. I can't even begin to count the number of times I was told by smart, amazing women that if I just "acted dumb" that I could have a boyfriend.
And it continues, I don't think it will ever end. As long as men (on the whole)are threatened by women and more attracted to women who seem vulnerable, it won't change and the dating scene will continue to be miserable for everyone. (For women because they are changing themselves to be attractive and for men because they are ending up with girls who are either supercritical or insecure in who they are.)
The party was mostly really fun. I was having a great time aside from the occasional comments about how tall I was for most of the evening. One of my friends, not a superficial girl, was spending some quality time with her crush. The rest of us were giggling like gossipy teenagers. The crush, being either a nice guy or a typical guy who sees an opportunity noticed one of our classmates (definately a silly girl-pretty and more than that, adorable, but also willing to say and do the dumbest stuff for attention.) Like drink in obscene quantities. Anyway, crush goes to help her, gets her water encourages her to stop drinking. The bar closes and we are outside waiting for cabs and superfical girl is puking everywhere. Crush is being kind, holding her hair back. Silly girl finishes the exorcist routine, Crush tries to put her in a cab asks he what her address is to give the driver. She stands up, wipes her mouth, says, "I just want to go back to your place" then caresses his chest and it works. I wanted to throw up. My friend is miserable, I give her a "typical" and an eye roll and we go back to her apartment to watch chick flicks and drink more. And I never want to go to bar again. Which is why this week my roommate and I stayed in watched sitcoms and drank boozy smoothies.

Q: So dumb guys go for dumb girls and smart guys go for dumb girls.

Then what do the smart girls get?

A: Cats mostly

-Modern Family on discovering what it means to be a smart girl

The fine gloss a year puts on your undergraduate years

There are a ton of things that are miserable about being in college. ( Not that there are a lot of good things.)  One of the worst things is being told how wonderful and easy it is. (On a side note this is not something you ever hear about law school, people who have finished law school tell you one of two things, law practice is so much better and that they know how you are suffering or get out now it is not worth the miserable suffering.) Being told how easy and fun college is compared to the real world doesn't help anything, It doesn't make a paper write itself or the drama of living with 50 women go away. People who are out of school for a long time forget the misery that comes from being under constant scrutiny, of being judged and maligned at every corner. While there is some of this in the working world the biggest difference is in your job you have time to master your skill, to take charge over your domain. In school everything is new all the time. I think part of the reason you don't hear form lawyers how much better law school is, is that unlike undergraduate education where you put the miserable stuff behind you once you enter the real world (only to take on new and different miseries) the skills you take from law school are much more applicable. Lawyers are given a daily reminder of the ways real practice is better.

I was not happy my last semester in college. The sorority drama seemed especially petty, I wanted to start law school (and despite a lifetime of  being told I was exceptional I knew I wasn't going to Yale) my classes seemed especially esoteric and bogged down in the pedagogy of Ivory Tower academia. My degree, in addition to being in political science, is in Rhetoric and the focus of my degree was narrative as public discourse. It couldn't have gotten much more heady or philosophical. There was a time I lived and breathed the words of dead Russians and longer dead Romans and Greeks. But by my last semester I had very little patience for it. The theory that had once excited me felt too far removed from reality. I just started reading the Idiot by Dostoevsky as my commute book, and I am enjoying it so much. I remember now why I once declared my love for depressing Russian literature. It was nice to discover that the frustrations of undergraduate life didn't squeeze the joy of literature from me.
     
It is easy to look back from the vantage point of twenty years and exclaim how easy everything was and how you wished you had appreciated it more, but that comment is made from the sure footed position of the future. Yes knowing that you passed, graduated and  got a job makes it seem easy, but when you're in school none of that is certain. I am sure there are things I will appreciate more about law school from the vantage point of a job that pays me, and hopefully financial security. I try to recognize that it is a shared experience I have with lawyers across the US and that it shapes our profession and will shape me. It is just hard to remember when you are paying someone to break you down and build you back from the broken pieces.

Beer... it's not just for breakfast anymore.

So I guess it is going to become tradition for me to write about my baking habits on minor holidays and not much else. (I do promise that there are more exciting and interesting law school related bits coming.) But I have actual pictures for this, and it is about something mildly entertaining that isn't reading and writing for hours. 

Anyway coming from a family that recognizes its Irish roots (probably perceives them as stronger than they are, but thats another story) Saint Patrick's Day was a pretty big deal. I can remember getting into a debate with my cousin about the merits of Kelly v. Emerald green as true green and being pinched in the morning for not wearing green pajamas.

This year was pretty boring, because law school has taken up my life, and somewhere along the way I became responsible i didn't even have a drink. But I did make Guinness cupcakes. Which are amazing. I double the beer in mine so they actually taste like stout and they came out so well. Plus it is really fun to give food away. Anyway...   

  

Grace is a fan of all baked goods, beer not so much.

Sisters...

I have really amazing biological sisters, but I am also lucky to have a group of girlfriends who I get to call sisters. I am not really one for the silliness that sororities seem to be associated with, if someone had asked me as a senior in high school if I would join a sorority I probably would have laughed, or rolled my eyes. If I hadn't gone to a school with a "quirky" Greek system (aka what you would expect from Berkeley) I probably wouldn't have rushed. I was assured that it was lower key at Berkeley than anything you see in the movies or have heard from your cousin in Texas. Joining a house was one of the best decisions I made in college, and this week reminded me why.
Through a weird twist of fate one of my sisters who was a senior when I was a pledge was sitting in the back of my Intellectual Property class this week. When I was nineteen she was so cool and together and amazingly unreachable in the way upper class-men always are. Now, four years later we have all this history, an automatic foundation to start with and stories to tell, even if I was far removed from her influence as she was finishing college.
Then I got an email form one of my favorite sisters from my pledge class, that she is thinking about moving to DC and would I have time to get a drink. Yes please. Oh and by the way she might be interested in subleasing from me for the summer, thank you.
And the sister who when I mentioned that I might be in LA for the summer jumped at the ability to hang out, despite the months since talking.
So because of all the positive sorority energy (forgetting the former president who totally ignored my email- not that I am surprised) I called another sister who I should have caught up with ages earlier. We spent the evening on the phone and she seems so happy and together, she reminded me that we are rapidly becoming adults. But then we laughed so hard at a stupid joke I had to sit down and completely forgot about being grown ups.
And then there is Dip Girl, half way around the world and playing phone tag; but ceaselessly there. 
Now I don't claim to be best friends with all of my sisters. There are some who I flat out dislike. But there is this web of amazing women who I know spreading across the globe. Whenever I think about them I am filled with hope that I will get to be a part of their lives for years to come.