HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Okay, so I know I am late, but not that late if you take into account Chinese New Year, which was only a week ago.

I celebrated each of the New Years as in true Bay Area fashion, while I stuck close to my roots on both occasions the evenings couldn't have been more different.
I was lucky to spend the Georgian New Year with friends in the Marina. While we did spend a little time out dancing and we watched the city's fireworks from the bay most of the evening was spent in preparation for going out. I don't know how we do this, but some how the production of hair, clothes and makeup takes longer than you spend actually dancing; and what is it for your in a dark room with strange lighting, it is probably 100 degrees with the humidity of the tropics. No one looks good five minutes after you walk in the door. In college it made a little more sense, before going out there was usually a parade of photos that were taken, not to mention a less sauna like location for the ubiquitous "pre-gaming." For some reason I still do it, which isn't even the crazy part.
The crazy part is that I like it. Far and away the most fun I had was getting ready and drinking Martini's with the girlfriend I was with. We have been friends since junior high, and while we were always close she was never my dearest friend. But in a strange "isn't it funny how things change" way we are living surrprisingly relatable lives. While she is married (something that still freaks me out to think about- it doesn't feel real to me. Contrary to every father everywhere in my head she and her husband are simply living in sin, this makes much more sense to me.) But other than the fact that she has a husband (and I SO don't) our lives are on similar tracts. She is a PhD student on the east coast, and while her program is only mildly related to law we share a common language. I is a wonderful treat to be able to talk to someone who knows your past but can also get where you are in the moment. It is a rare thing. My family is terribly supportive; thinking I am brilliant and capable. This is great, but when something that is exciting happens they don't understand the significance of it. It feels like "of course you did it because you are amazing!" So it was wonderful to talk to someone who got it. We could both talk about our accomplishments without feeling like we were gloating or competing (which is what it feels like with law school friends) and we still understood the magnitude of what we had been able to accomplish.

Plus it is really great to gossip about High School with a drink in your hand and a Diploma on the wall. 

I had much less fun on Chinese New Year...

My first year of college one of my roommates was Chinese and she still sends me updates every year at the lunar new year telling me how to best prepare myself for the year ahead (you can basically insert a slew of Berkeley stereotypes into the quad I lived in as a freshman- I know, I am sure I have mentioned others, but Berkeley has a stereotype for a reason.) This is the year of the Dragon, and I (along with much of the rest of of my graduating class) was born under the sign of the Dragon. While we are supposed to be the luckiest sign this isn't going to be a great year for us, my friend (through her grandmother) tells me that I need to be behave conservatively (spending another 40 grand on law school, voting for Obama, traveling to South East Asia- I think I have already failed that one.) Guard my head (she wasn't to clear on this one, but suggested with my tendency to fall down I might want to start wearing a helmet all the time.)

Okay so those aren't looking so good, so she advised what she advises every year (and I sometimes follow) to clean. You are supposed to clean you house and remove all of the bad luck from the previous year so that the good luck can flow in. I am not sure if it works, but it is nice to have an excuse to have a sparkly clean house. We actually moved the oven to get the grime out from under and around it. Also, because the entryway is the most important area because that is where luck enters, I was able to get my roommate to move some of her shoes to her bedroom- a major victory. 

So here is to a new year, hopefully eating beans and scrubbing floors will pay off and it will be a good one, (because I would be really pissed if the Mayans were right and the world ends a semester before I finish law school. )

In Between

I love Holidays (in theory and in part) and I love my family, and with exams being over you would think that going home for winter break would be a blissful three weeks. Unfortunately, going home for the holidays isn't easy, so much of it seems to emphasize the things that are difficult about being in my early to mid twenties. It places into sharp focus the fact that I am in limbo. I am some place between the family I grew up with and the family I will create, I am not a child my parents have to raise but I am not one of the grown-ups either. Most of the time it is easy to ignore, I am busy enough living two parallel lives that the places they blur together aren't so noticeable, but when I am home living as a daughter, all of the ways I have changed come into sharp (sometimes comedic ) relief.
This year was better than most, usually my dad and I get along wonderfully for about three days and then we spend the rest of my time at home at each other's throats. Most of this comes from my unwillingness to take (what the Irish and the polite person in me would call) blarney. After many occasions of, mostly good natured, teasing I would remind him that if he wanted a pushover he should have raised one. It used to be that my mom and little sister let him off the hook, so my coming home was the estrogen bomb that sent him running to his man cave. This year my little sister came home first, and she took her turn taking on my father. Which meant I either got to be "the good one" or I had a partner in crime. What I call a win win.

Me and my Mom, making fun of my Dad at Fort Point
Under the Golden Gate Bridge 

While I had hoped my little sister's active social life and snark while at home would suck up my Dad's attention it seemed to shine it back on me, as if we both needed to be held to an eighteen year-old's level of scrutiny. Although it has been many years since I have allowed him to control my social life, while I am at home I do understand that my parents have a right to know where I am going. This also frequently means I get my dad's commentary about things like skirt length (you're sure you don't want to cover your legs?) tight warmth (with all those holes your legs must get cold, why don't you put on pants?) driving routes (don't take the freeway it will be crazy the frontage road is better.) Not to mention a general proclivity for asking questions he doesn't wan't to know the answer to- trust me dad what you are looking for is not in the pink bag, you DON'T want to go in there. Although much of this impasse was defeated when he realized that I could embarrass him more (with the contents of said pink bag)  than he could embarrass me (because anything that embarrassing I wouldn't bring home).
It was a tougher year for my Mom and I, we are very close and other that a few disagreements, generally about my clothing budget and reluctance to disclose my love life (mostly because it doesn't exist) we get along really well. This year there was an undercurrent of tension between us, I think because we both realize that Holidays at home may be coming to an end and will certainly get shorter. I can't be sure, but the whole year had a sense of change to it. So while I am still in between I don't know if it will be for long or what it will mean on the other side.
It was still a magical Christmas, with weather most people could only dream of. So thank you, Babette for taking the heat off me, Mom for caring enough to worry about change, Dad for my thick skin and unwillingness to take crap, and my whole family for a wonderful holiday season!

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.

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.

At least they have a world series...

Well the California elections weren't a disheartening as the rest of the country. For the first time in years I didn't sit by the TV watching results come in. I worked instead. I am a little disappointed about our new presumed speaker (mostly because of disappointing personal interactions when I worked on the hill.)

 Pelosi may not be Speaker for much longer but at least she has a home town championship.  

Barbra Boxer and Nancy Pelosi at a Giants Game

Hopefully they feel like Gavin Newsom, who when asked about the election responded saying, "Nobody here cares about that, this [referring to the Giants win] puts it all in perspective." 

How the Giants won me a beer, and the World Series

I had a difficult time deciding what to call this post. I thought about referencing masochism again, something about how much joy torture can bring at the end, but I thought that was going a bit far. 

I thought more seriously about referencing the Journey song "Lights." And the line, "So you say your lonely, well I am lonely too. And I want to go home to my city by the bay." Because tonight I am as homesick as I have ever been, being in the midst of what my mentor called the most isolating experience she has ever been through, was nothing compared to this evening. And I wish deeply to be back in my City by the Bay. 

I actually sat an watched the Giant's game this evening. I didn't believe that the Giant's would be able to win until there was one strike left. The whole bottom of the ninth I was screaming at the announcers who acted like game was won already. This is a team that exemplifies the idea that it isn't over till the fat lady sings. They were in a similar situation the last time they were in the series and were able to loose it. Acts of God have interrupted their World Series. Cautious optimism is the name of the game. Then Wilson threw the last pitch and the Giants won.

I  immediately started crying. I was so terribly happy. It was the culmination of years of sitting being tortured by Giant's baseball. And I am so glad that it was this team of freaks and miss-fits that was able to do it. Because the Giants are a team of the underdog. This was the way the win was supposed to go, for a team not a star. The cold nights at candlestick, the hot days in the bleachers, the painful losses, seeing Buster Posey hit a home run in his first game in the majors, the Barry Bonds home runs, my grandfather teaching me to keep score, my teen-aged crush on J.T. Snow, my childhood idolization of Glen Ellen Hill because he grew up in my home town and shared my birthday. It is more than what it means to me, it is what it means to my family, an most especially my dad.

I wouldn't love baseball if it wasn't for my dad. His willingness to bribe me with hot chocolate if it was cold and ice cream if it was hot, because "we aren't dodgers fans, and we stay till the end of the game." His ability to sit through games with wining kids, although I am sure the headphones with Kruke and Kype on the radio helped.  His utter devotion to a team that seemed to always let him down. The Giants won their last world series three weeks before my dad was born . (It was the third longest streak behind the Cubs and the Indians if you are keeping track. I used to joke that he was the Giants' curse, and they would win the series again three weeks after he pasted away.) He was born before Major League Baseball came west of the Mississippi and has a couple hazy memories of the when the Seals played in San Fransisco. This means he picked his team and his league, and while the rest of his family has hazy alliances to the American League and the Oakland A's, my dad is nothing if not a Giants fan. He taught me from a young age why the designated hitter rule was an abomination and that the only prejudice you are allowed to express openly is against Dodger's (and then it is best done in a loud voice.) His stories of being a young fan are the stuff of Americana.

This win was a big moment for my childhood self and the part of me that is truly my father's daughter. And I couldn't share it with my family. There wasn't anyone around I could hug, who got it. Who knows what an accomplishment it was to get a Croix De Candlestick or the nausea that comes when you discuss 2002 and Ortiz. I was alone in my joy and sometimes that is even harder than being alone in sadness
.
So I cried, big smiling wet tears for my team and my family. When it came time to pay my bill my weighter turned to me and said "your beer is on me. You totally made my night. I am a Red Socks fan so I get it." Maybe I wasn't as alone as I thought I was, but I was still outside of my city missing my people.
Really I just looking for someone to be able to do this with:

Carlos Avila Gonzalez / San Francisco Chronicle

Because that is how I felt.

So thanks dad for spending every summer and a small fortune giving me a passion for baseball and a tolerance for torture. You can let mom know it was worth it. 

(And I promise I will post on this weekend, but it probably will be about this time next week)

It's going to be okay...

One of the buildings on Berkeley's campus, in addition to being maze-like was famous for its bathroom graffiti. Most of the year it would vary from funny to dirty, with lots of complaining and many of the jokes that we have all seen. People would post their thoughts and others would respond. But then some time around finals a single message in a distinctive hand writing would go up all over the stalls in the hall:

Its going to be okay...

I remember before my first final at Cal (History 5 with professor Lacquor, I still remember) running to the bathroom, to be sure I wouldn't have to during the exam, and there was this message. And what was most amazing; in a past time that was as much about snarky remarks belittling the author, the responses showed how venerable and overwhelmed we all were. "Thank you" "this means a lot" "that actually really helps" "I hope you are right," were all scrawled next to it. I carried that with me as often as I could and always looked forward to when the graffiti would appear each December and May.   

Fast forward four years and I hear about operation beautiful, a group that places messages on post-it in womens bathrooms that are inspirational, and uplifting. While they are more focused on young women's body image issues, it reminded me of the finals message on Berkeley's stalls and what unexpected positive messages can do. 

So in a tribute to my Berkeley roots and the desire to put some positivity in the world I have Co-opted my own little project. I have taken the free (or as my mother would say included because you know at $46,000 a year I am paying for them) Post-its they leave for us in the library and posting positive messages in the womens bathrooms. Some are taken from operation beautiful, and I use "its going to be okay" frequently but I am sure I will think of new things. This isn't nearly as hip as the Berkeley bathroom graffiti but I am on the East Coast and I doubt school would appreciate its impeccably clean bathrooms being sullied even by positive words. 

Hopefully I will brighten someone's day. 

Hey I got an A on that History final.   

 

Oh Giants how I love thee...but its a good thing I am a bit of a masochist.

Honestly there is a reason the Folsom Street Fair has such a welcoming audience in San Fransisco; Bay Area residents have been enjoying the torture of Giants baseball for five decades. 

 I love baseball, I was raised on Giants baseball. My father has been a fan since they moved to San Fransisco. I know that if I ever wanted to break my fathers heart (or kill him) all I would have to do is come home in the blue and white of the dreaded dodgers.I don't have a TV and I was going to avoid the pain that is Giants' baseball, just keep track of playoffs on the periphery. I knew it was best to stay away lest it suck me in like an all to tempting drug whose high is not worth the pain as you come down. Then last night's Bar Review (the clever pun for our weekly law school "social" gathering) was at a sports bar... I walk in and I am surrounded by the Giants/Braves game. And Tim Lincecum was doing an amazing job pitching despite the lack of support from the lineup. (14 Strike out, shut out, full game pitched thank you very much. I am a little in love with him, if only he would stop with the chew, gross.) So I watched  the game rather than meet people or be social. I squealed, I pounded on the table I groaned. To which my East Coast gay Best Friend (here after dubbed "hotlanta"- it is a long story mostly based on his being from Atlanta) cheekily pointed at me and said "what is this, who are you, what is going on? I haven't seen this side of you and I don't like it."
Needless to say I was hooked. I wore my jersey today, I searched out a place to watch the game, and awkwardly sat at a prime booth for hours. Only to be let down. We were ahead by four runs and lost it. We had the bases loaded and did nothing with it. And now we have to go to Atlanta tied in the series. But, because there is always hope, I leave with this...

Yep that is Tim Lincecum with his dog Cy...
(we would be getting married if not for his chew habit.)
Photograph © Black Oak French Bulldogs