crunchtime

This morning, I received a list of all the sample sales in LA this weekend. Even though I did no prep for my finals over Thanksgiving, I started to plan which ones to attend. Just then, one of our janitors came into the room and told me how he watched Harry Potter over the weekend. "There's dragons and wizards and all these great special effects!" he said. "You should really watch it -- but only after finals are over. You can't watch it now." Then he left, and I pouted, closing my email and opening my con law book.

"ummm... your lsat score?"

A couple of days ago, my Con Law professor started her lecture on freedom of speech, and she asked us whether there were such things as unutterable truths.

After class, I had my staff review, during which an editor told me that he scored a 178 on his LSAT.

I wish those two events had been in reverse. I just might have said it.

what brings you

It's funny to look at the referral websites for this blog. Today, someone came here by googling (on altavista.com) "secretarial spread." I am very amused. This is pretty amusing too.

the all-nighter: why do we do it?

I'm an early riser, so I usually come to school around 8:30 in the morning, stopping first at the law review office to check for assignments. At least twice a week, I find some poor soul knocked out on the less-comfortable-than-Plex-furniture couch with his or her papers strewn across the floor. Sometimes, a few people manage not to succumb to sleepiness, but their blood-shot eyes betray their exhaustion. It's become so common now that sometimes I wonder if I should be equally hardcore, but then I realize that (1) I'm not a first year anymore that needs to follow the crowd, (2) all-nighters are a bad habit, and (3) my mommy won't let me.

Leaving aside reason #1 & #3, I would prefer if I had never been introduced to the concept of the all-nighter. In high school and during my freshman year of college, I was very diligent about working on papers. I started well in advance, collecting notes, making outlines, writing rough drafts. I even handwrote my papers to give a tactile element to the process.

Then came winter 2000, or as I think of it, the turning point of my academic career. I had three papers all due on the same Monday; on the preceding Friday, I had none done. I don't remember the exact cause of my procrastination at that time. I might have been too busy doing nothing at 1835. In any case, I felt a deep panic because Friday turned into Saturday which turned into Sunday morning. Knowing that a report card chockful of Cs were coming my way, I locked myself up in the Kresge computer lab for 14 straight hours and hammered out three long long papers.

You know what comes next: I get my As and, as a consequence, lose my fear of time. I came to embrace the pressure, the sounds of Evanston birds at 4am, the rush that comes with running to turn in your barely-finished, newly-printed, miserably-written paper.

The problem is that this afflicion has followed me to law school, where documents should not be written so last minute. Try as I might, I can't bring myself to finish a paper well before the deadline. I could attribute this to my workload, but really, it's just because I like watching TV.

I think all-nighters also makes people feel like they're working really hard, like they're really dedicated to the task at hand. This is true in some respect: the girls who flyered the campus all through the night for Mr. PanAsia 2001 definitely wanted people to see the performance of the raver's version of "My Heart Will Go On." But, for me, it's more because I get lazy and therefore not really as dedicated as the all-nighter might suggest. I want desparately to stop doing it. Maybe if my mommy tells to stop, I will.

my first ticket

My nine-and-a-half-year streak ended last night when a CHP officer gave me my first ticket.

The time was 8:30pm, and I had had a very long day at school. I also had just found out that contrary to my visions of Gary lying dead in a gutter, he had been drinking with his work buddies (who, I might add, are dancing perilously close to the blackhole of girlfriend disapproval). Adding to my pissiness were these two jackholes who wouldn't let me merge onto my freeway. See, after my on-ramp, I immediately have to cross two lanes to get onto my freeway. If I don't, I end up on a totally different freeway. This merge, therefore, is critical. Most drivers understand this. They usually slow down, let cars with a blinking lefthand light go in front of them, and go on their merry way. The two cars last night, however, plowed on through, causing me to shout unladylike obscenities into my cellphone and, consequently, into Gary's ear.

Determined not to miss my freeway, I straddle the painted triangular area you find at most freeway forks. I wait for one, two, three cars to pass, and then I merge. Only the last car isn't really a car so much as it's a motorcycle with a freakin' CHP on it. "Maybe he'll keep going, oh please, let him keep doing," I hoped. But then the lights start to flash, and I know I'm in trouble.

There are some things you should know before I continue, things to give you a sense of why I don't trust police. First, my ex-boyfriend really hated the police. He had some shady past before we started going out, and I absorbed these feelings in the course of five years. Second, all semester long, I've been doing a project about racial profiling, which involves "clients" who have been called racial epithets, handcuffed to the point where their circulation cuts off, and thrown to the ground. Lastly, I saw Crash. Obviously, I have an overactive imagination, and some of my fears may not be grounded in reality, but they are fears nonetheless.

Back to the freeway. I didn't want to pull over on the freeway because that's dangerous for me and the cop, and I didn't want to pull over in a dark corner where the cop can frisk my ass. So I wandered for a little while, trying to find a nice lighted area with people around. If I was black, the local news probably would have started their live car chase coverage, but since I have a deceptively harmless demeanor, he let me wander. I felt like a dumbass, still hoping that he'd let me off with a warning yet knowing that that's so not going to happen.

My conversation with the officer is not really worth noting, except for one comment. He told me, "Even if you think you might get lost, you really shouldn't cross the divider like that because it creates an extremely dangerous situation for everyone. You put other cars in danger, and you could have killed me." That made me feel so guilty. Gary asked me later why I didn't try to fight it. I just felt so bad that I wanted to get my ticket and get the hell out of there (plus Lost was on in less than fifteen minutes). I hate driving to school so much because it makes me tired and because law school makes you acutely aware of the dangers you face when you get behind the wheel everyday. So when he suggested that I could be the cause of something that bad, it made me sad and not want to drive. The problem was that I still had twenty-five miles left before I could go home and snuggle in front of my massive TV.

Plus, this whole situation took little chips out of my driving confidence. Like I said, before last night, I had never gotten a ticket, but I had never gotten to an accident before either. I always thought that I could spot a cop way before he got me. So now that I did get a ticket, I started to think about how I could get into an accident, and that freaks me out even more.

This seems like way too melodramatic of a reaction to a simple ticket, but I guess that I'm just that kind of girl.

ipods are great but ...

LA has its share of bad things: traffic, no place to walk, Lohan-wannabes. But radio here is the best. Some of Chicago's hip-hop stations are good (but definitely not B... whatever that station is), but most of the songs blend together with the same pop feel, whatever genre they fall into. And San Francisco -- don't even get me started. Trance is so 1999, yet thump-thump-thump fills the streets. Some of this has to do with the Castro population, but that's no excuse. Even when DJ Sammy isn't playing, the playlists are still a few years behind their time. I mean, do you really think it's appropriate to still be playing Nelly and Tim McGraw??

Down here in SoCal, though, I get to listen to great little ditties to make my morning commutes much more enjoyable. AND I get to listen to Kevin & Bean, who (I've realized) represent my inappropriate, insensitive, smartass id. I LOVE them. Even KIIS-FM with annoying Ryan Seacrest in the morning plays some good new songs.

Anyway, there's a reason why I wanted to sing praise to LA radio this morning. There's a great reggae song that KROQ's been playing lately, and I wanted to buy the album as my November CD (a personal rationing system that I'll explain at another time). I looked up the group, and it turns out that the band is Hasidic Jew. It's a freakin' Hasidic Jew reggae band. Their name is Matisyahu, and their current single is "King of the Crown." Check it out.