Grades trickled out earlier this week, and we finally just got all the end-of-year number crunching that adds actual contextual sense to them.

. . . ohmygod. I . . . ohmygod.

So, uh. Anyone who has had significant contact with my dog in the past week (extensive petting, snuggling, licking) be advised that the cultures just came back and the "we're just being careful, because it's probably not this highly drug resistant and communicable infection" is what my furry little over-achiever picked up. It doesn't spread like wildfire to humans, and you probably can't give it to your pets, but keep an eye out for flu-like symptoms and lethargy.

This brings a whole new meaning to "catching the con crud." I know there were an awful lot of people in and out of the hotel room when I left her there on tie-down, and I have no idea who you all were.

Mind you, I haven't caught it yet, knock on wood.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go pick up round two of antibiotics, since the first batch got its ass handed to it by the cultures. Round two: super duper strong, and we swear it won't make her barf too much. Oh, and it's a bit expensive.

Nota bien: When a vet says something is kind of expensive, start worrying.

Because it is a matter of historical record that I suck at con reports, am doing something a bit different. Things I learned at Con.txt ’08.

• Cons are more fun when you aren’t accompanied by a dog whose exquisitely poorly timed bacterial infection has reached the pus stage.

• If I drink ouzo on top of Baileys on top of jinn and tonic on top of cranberry vodka on top of rum and coke on top of whiskey and coke on top of various fruit liqueurs on top of peach vodka in my breakfast orange juice, I will not get sick. No, seriously.

I will, however, volunteer for things like, you know, collecting a list of every story in the fandom at the Vorkosigan panel. Oops?

• My friends have awesome friends. E.g. synecdochic, celli.

• If you want people to follow you into your panel without knowing what it’s about, have your co-mod dress you in vinyl, cuff you, and lead you down the hall on a leash improvised from her con-com sash. It works remarkably well.

• I totally have time to be working on both the OTW archive and Dreamwidth. What? What?

• There is never enough time at a con.

• I should be writing right now. Something not this, I mean.

Ohmygod I am having this fuckawful week, I can’t even – ARGH. Because what I really want to do 24 hours before the con is go to the hospital. (I’m fine, , don’t ask, except if you ever want to watch a blind person come completely fucking unspooled, take away one of her ears. Or, you know, don’t).

Um, the con! Where I will be! With, uh, a lot of alcohol. I think uschickens and I are going up tomorrow evening, so I should be at the bar party.

celli and I are modding a Vorkosigan panel on Friday at 1 (we’re going to squee a bit, and then talk about taking over the world, and I will probably be sober). And then there will be lots of con, then on Sunday at 2 treewishes and I will be co-modding a panel whose name I can’t currently recall, but it requires dressing up in fetish gear. Not sure what we’re actually talking about, but I have awesome boots. It is highly unlikely that I will be sober.

I’m rooming with giddygeek and bayleaf and ancientsavvy, and I suspect there shall be a room party at some point. If I am sober for that, check my pulse.

Normally at this point I’d say, “come find me! I’m the one with the dog!” Which is true, but trixiesfic will also have a dog, and it is also true to say, “come find me! I’ll be in the red PVC!”

Scrolling down the attending members list for Con.txt, I see quite a few names of people who have sent emails and comments which generally start with some variation of, "I was completely disturbed by Miles/Gregor, but you totally convinced me!"

Any of you crazy kids interested in a Vorkosigan panel? We can talk about sexualizing canonically kinda homophobic characters! Or dissect the appeal of medeival patriarchy in space! Or plot the overthrow of large fandoms! Or go "OMG, I love them all!" Or something.

If there's more than two of us there I'm calling it a panel, so speak up.

*

Haven't been posting because honestly, it would basically just be some iteration of 'see lightgetsin study fourteen hours a day.' 'See lightgetsin plan a conference.' 'See lightgetsin sleep an average of three hours a night.' 'See lightgetsin poke at the OTW programmers to watch them twitch.'

See, as of a week ago, I had a day off scheduled for May 13. It was going to be awesome -- I was going to sleep in until 9 and slump around the house in my underwear all day and do nothing but read perezhilton.com and pet the dog.

Now on May 13 I shall be frantically packing up the last three years of my life, so on May 15 I can move.* In with uschickens mind you, in righteous housing with walk-in closets and things in the neighborhood other than, you know, construction cranes and doublewide trailers. And then on the 16th we start the write-on competition for law review**, and the day that finishes I start my summer job. The very thought of working 40 hours a week has my mouth watering with the sheer decadent luxury of it.

*Yeah, and if anyone is available on the 15th to heave boxes, let me know. That's the problem with moving on a Thursday -- less friend slave labor.

**Yet another in the series of hoops to backflip through which constitute the first year of law school. 'cept this one is on fire.

Unburdening my conscience on this fine evening.

1. I just bought a new laptop, and it was a little bit because it has a fingerprint scanner. Do I need to secure my data with fingerprint authentication? Well . . . no. But it’s totally fucking awesome. We live in the future and the future is shiiiiny.

2. My friend P just did me this favor which doesn’t mean all that much to him, but saves me hours of work that I really didn’t have time for. And when he told me I said, “Ohmygod I could kiss you,” and he said, “well don’t let me stop you,” and I laughed and said, “I don’t do Libertarians,” and ran off about my day. . . . and realized like a bolt from the blue two hours later that he actually meant that and there were seventeen nicer ways to let him down and being a grownup is hard.

3. My entire day was utterly ruined yesterday by the discovery of a typo in an email to a professor. Weeping and tribulation! Copyediting: that marvelous profession that, over a year later, still can leave your entire concept of self hanging tremulously on one misplaced keystroke.

4. Sometime when I wasn’t looking I turned into one of those people who walks, eyes down and conversation silenced, past the homeless people at the metro. This did not used to be true.

5. I occasionally read the journal of someone not on my flist who is, shall we say, completely failing at life through a combination of innate and privilege-induced stupidity. And whenever she says something like, “things just don’t work out for me because I’m disabled,” I laugh.

6. You’d think that GoFugYourself wouldn’t hold any entertainment value for a blind person. You’d be wrong.

Anyone else need to unburden?

But here's my real question: if you had just gotten hold through nefarious means of someone else's credit card and identifying information, would your first dastardly deed be to get a dial-up account with AOL?*

To quote the emminently quotable Toby Ziegler, "there is no one in the world I don't hate right now."

* There is a certain congruity of evil, I suppose.**
** Okay, yes, even this is a little bit funny. But I think pretty much everything is a little bit funny, so pay no attention to me.

I had lunch with blind lawyer friend G today (we're running an organization together, because we've both got so much time for that sort of thing, don't you know). And I was like, "okay, I need you to reality check me on something." And I started to explain for the first time that I've been feeling a bit . . . weird about my job search. And I explained how I'd sent out about 25 resumes, which is pretty modest, and gotten a frankly overwhelming response -- fifteen interviews, if I'm not missing any. And I said, "so I did all these interviews, but after that it's like I don't know--"

And he interrupted me without missing a beat and said, "yeah, they're not calling you back because you're blind." And then proceeded to tell me a string of utterly horrifying stories about the series of blatantly and subliminally discriminatory experiences he had during his big firm job search. One of which I am still gaping over, eight hours later.

I mean, I knew that, right, but I didn't exactly know that. I've never had trouble getting jobs before, but the public interest sector of the law is a different animal entirely -- it doesn't operate on the old boys' club principle, for one thing. Neither does public policy, particularly, or copyediting, or freelance writing, or get out the vote, or any of the other things I've done. If anything, I've always operated under the assumption that I'm memorable in a pool of applicants with indistinguishable credentials.

Mind you, I did get a summer job, in exactly the field and sector I wanted. And G got his big firm job. He also agrees with my instinct that this is an early career problem that will fade quickly as my resume lengthens. And it's not like it can't be done, obviously -- I am rendered irretrievably cranky by the blind people who weep and wail about how they just can't get hired because nondisabled people are just so mean. But I wasn't imagining it -- the standard is palpably higher. Many of my classmates will get hired for being very, very good; I'll get hired for being superlative. Good to know, I guess.

So I had an interview on Thursday, and I went without Azura[1]. It was in a part of town that I know theoretically in the sense that it's largely gridded, but I've never actually been up there on foot. And good holy God, I'd forgotten how weird using a cane is. For one thing all my physical reflexes are dog-centric -- I kept wanting to follow a sort of throughline from my left arm, instead of driving my right hand forward, tap tap. And don't get me started on feet -- your left foot is the sort of dominant anchor foot with a dog so that you almost always step out on the right first, whereas with a cane in the right hand you're going to often swing right, step left to start. And all my verbal ticks are doggy, though at least I only told myself to "halt" once. I kept subvocalizing "steady" and "good gi -- oh fuck."

It was seriously a pain, though. I was also a bit dizzy and I could hear nothing out of my right ear[2], so I had a really bad moment down on the train platform, turning right to find the north set of escalators. The train pulled out as I was moving, and the mono-aural rush of sound sort of whumped me in the head and left me standing very still because somehow I hadn't been paying quite the right kind of attention and I'd lost where the edge of the platform was. Because, you know, normally that's only peripherally my problem. And then coming up past the ticket gates and having to stop again, listen for the squeak thump of the next escalators far to the left and around a curve, then a sharp turn.

Up on the street, locate the cardinals, ponder the many ways "the escalators are on the southeast corner" is actually incredibly imprecise. A block of nightmare construction -- cones and cranes and pipes sticking out of the sidewalk, chain-link fence forcing me into the street for a dozen feet. Going very slow, listening hard, submerged in the concentration of fine, vital detail. Feeling, uh, really really blind, actually. A faint clutch of the old fear -- every step could be off a huge drop. Weird, because I worked around that one long before the first dog. Geez, I'm wearing 2.5 inch heels and this cane is still too tall.

Have the creeping suspicion there has been a snafu with directions. Stop. Begin with first principles -- where's the sun? Okay, should any of the streets around here be one way? Which way is the traffic going? Work it through, stop someone to double-check the conclusion, reorient, go. Wider sidewalks, more people. There was a point at which I was actually a good cane user, right? Because really, the whole vague waving thing isn't as effective as the off-foot step tap. Find the right street, turn, walk and consider. How far is too far? Try turning in here -- nope, benches. I could just give Azura a running left right now and she'd pick up the next building entrance. Okay, steps. Up, and walking walking walking. You know, they really could have mentioned this place is thirty feet back from the street and the door is tucked behind a snarl of metal poles. Sighted people, the fuck do they know.

Why is it that a licky furry canine feels like part of the professional package, while the cane is this glaring, uncomfortable thing? Is this my personal comfort, or have I internalized standards of what a competent blind person should look like? When did I start trusting her like that, so that there was a flicker of that panic without her? And how fucked up is that anyway -- I spent sixteen years without a dog, and I'm actually very good at this. And also, her brain is the size of a walnut.

It's just about acclimation. Acclimation and attention -- all my reflexes are dog, so it seems like so much work to stack all the details she manages. This is all mostly illusion -- the dog is a convenience, and becoming accustomed to convenience is a privilege that blind people get, too. The illusion is in perceiving how hard this is today as a signal of self-reliance lost -- it's really not, it's just a different kind. One that gets to walk faster, apparently. I never quite grocked just how fundamental dog/cane is to self-image.

Then again, my cane doesn't have to pee and isn't leaving little white hairs all over my suit. And it doesn't need encouragement, discipline, coddling, kibble. . . . Wish she'd get better.

[1] The good news is she doesn't have a stress fracture. The bad news is she isn't getting better. Oh and that she's going to chew her way straight through the front door after me any day now because she just doesn't understand why she's not allowed to work. Jesus suffering fuck, it's been nine days and she's still limping, but it's not like I can leave her at home for nine or ten hours with no one to relieve her on Monday. Fuck fuck fuck.

[2] Man, I haven't been this sick in years. Day five and I've lost my voice, but at least the fever's finally gone. It was so high early on Wednesday morning that I woke up from a weird dream and spent a confused half hour actually believing that Azura was a goat. I mean, hallucinations I'm kind of okay with, but delusions are pushing the envelope, you know?

Right, so if anyone knows anyone in search of a place to live in DC starting in May or June, please send them my way.

The most important thing is not to be sad, okay? We realize it's a big change and you're scared and worried, but bayleaf and I just want to make sure you all know that the divorce has nothing to do with you. And even though we're not going to be living together any more, we both still love you just as much. Just from, you know, different states.

*

I slipped and fell on the ice a few nights ago, breaking my ice? I don't get what's so scary about ice winter record in spectacular fashion. It was one of those things where I got up right away and checked self over and soothed the alarmed dog and thought oh well, that's all right then. Only to discover a few hours later that I had actually shattered my optical drive and my hip was making these funny clicking noises accompanied by stabs of pain. And then 24 hours later Azura went suddenly and spectacularly lame in her left fore, which pretty much makes us gimp and gimper. We're treating it as a soft tissue injury -- an unhappy tendon, maybe -- That involves doggie narcotics and the hilarious admonition to "keep her off her feet." Which, uh, you try enforcing that on a two-year-old lab, to say nothing of the whole guide dog thing. Now we hope fervently for improvement, because if there's no change in the next few days it's a whole new ball game of unpleasant consequences.

I am . . . increasingly worn. Last weekend was not so much one -- the day I wasn't writing my brief was Saturday, when I got up at 6 to go have 9 job interviews. I mean I was totally fine and awake and interactive all day, right up to the point I got home and sat down on the couch and realized that, huh, I probably wasn't going to be able to get back up again. I've felt like that more and more recently. It's not precisely that I'm doing too much -- I mean there's, you know, law school, and I'm running a conference in August, and working part-time, and starting a campus group, and looking for a summer job, and soon we'll be adding OTW work. I like all of those things, and I like doing them. But it's been over six months since I could sit down and write about the people in my head and lose my mind to story. And not getting that is taking a slow but noticeable toll. There are things I can do about that -- working myself to the bone this week so I'd have time to write this weekend is one. But I worry, you know? I want my stories back.

buymeaclue asked me about the whole dog thing a few weeks ago, and I said something long-winded about the ups and downs of the process and hope and exasperation. Which reminded me to write about it; I spent so many words talking about the dog school part of training and I've said very little about things since, even though the important stuff is happening now.

( I'm on ur bed, drooling on ur pillow )

The thing about it is, and I can't believe I'm saying this. Okay. Someone in a pack of GDB promotional materials said something like, "my dog made me a better person." And I rolled my eyes, because honestly. But it's true. I'm, you know, just good at things I do. There just aren't that many things I've seriously tried that I didn't get very good at very quickly (with the possible exceptions of curling and physics, the first of which I had to drop and the second of which was a long slow grind punctuated by shocking leaps). But working a dog isn't like that, because it's so reciprocal. It's not about how good at this I can be, it's about how good at this I can help her to be. And that is an entirely different muscle; it is slower and more self-conscious and empathic. And it's the sort of work that can make even me sleep well at night.

Things I wanted for my birthday, and actually got

• Straight A's*


• The opportunity to bitch about having too many job interviews


• Cake


• My goddamn kitchen reassembled so I no longer have to ride herd on my dog to keep her from chewing on pieces of plumbing


• To once again share a birthday party with the marvelous sanj -- let's make it a tradition, yeah?


• Continued composure in the midst of a process that makes me wonder how the carbon feels as it is turned into diamond

Things I didn't know I wanted for my birthday, but I'm definitely glad I got them

• A spa day


• Exotic chocolate


• A book I've been eyeing for months**

Things I wanted for my birthday, and totally didn't get

• A week of vacation


• Spring


• An assurance that my reassembled kitchen will remain, you know, functional


• My eye to stop aching


• Time to write -- so! close! to the end! of the story!


• My alarm clock not to go off at 7 A.M.

Am I supposed to have angst about entering my mid-twenties? Because I don't, in the slightest. Then again, the only time I've ever had an issue with my age was when it was mildly inconvenient to still be a minor while living on my own. Then then again I suspect it's not that I'm so dynamically comfortable in my own changing skin, but that I've actually been in my early thirties in my head since I was like sixteen.

* If you can really call the two actual letter grades I got for the fall "straight."
** Robert Charles Wilson's Axis, thanks to the kind and generous meri_oddities. And I have a little left over on the gift card, so what book do I need to read? Any book -- seriously, I read everything -- that I've just got to get?

I just scheduled nine job interviews in one day.

. . . maybe I can stop sending resumes out now?

So about thirty seconds into The Last of the Time Lords I was like “oh, right, it’s a reset episode.” Because they’ve been doing this all along -- the whole rewind/reset thing.

It’s the TARDIS’s solution in Boomtown -- turn Margaret back into an egg, let her have another try. It’s the Doctor’s joy when everyone is restored at the end of The Doctor Dances. It’s the shows unwillingness to divert too far from our own world, so the people of London repeatedly fail to believe what they’ve just seen. Torchwood does it too -- Retcon, anybody?

There’s a lot of replay, too. That’s what Rose gets to do in Father’s Day, try the moment over and over again in hopes of somehow getting it right. It’s all of what the Doctor does. I mean, this might be my fanon talking, but I’ve always thought the end of the Time War meant a redo on everything, millions of years of history, so it’s not just that the Time Lords and the Daleks are gone, they never were. Except changing history can’t change myth. And obviously, you know, nobody told the Daleks. Except then again nobody told the Doctor either, so.

But that’s what he’s doing, to my mind. He’s walking around in a universe that violently skipped and jumped tracks -- he gets the biggest rewind-replay of them all. I think Ten has enough distance to admit that he is managing to enjoy that, whereas Nine was still in too much pain.

This is, by the way, why I think eventually, a few seasons down the line, will get the arc where the Doctor’s rewind gets rewound and we get to see Gallifrey and the universe that never was, at least temporarily.

But here’s the thing: I know a lot of people are sick of the rewind, at least when it comes to Earth. I am too, sometimes, because it really is that cheap a trick. (I suspect RTD's a bit sick of it, too, actually, because Astrid didn't get her rewind). But I do think it’s a bit more complicated -- neither purely cheap trick, nor flatly cheerful platitude about everyone getting a second chance.

Because Martha’s family remembered. Everyone there did. And that doesn’t make sense, but it seems so necessary. I mean, they were tortured for a year, and there would be something obscene in just erasing that. Easier, yeah, cleaner. But I mean, they lived that, and they’ve just got to keep it. Because PTSD is a Pandora’s box -- you open it up and you get the fear and you get the paranoia and you get the flashbacks, and then at the very bottom you get a little note from the universe that says, hey, guess what, you’re a survivor. Good job. Keep doing that. And how could that possibly be taken away?

So the Doctor’s still walking around grieving, with all of Gallifrey locked up in his head. So Rose got her moment with her father, only it was holding his hand wile he died. (So Margaret gets another chance, but she has to go through puberty again.)

It’s like okay, yes, you get the rewind, this grace. But the only way it matters is if it matters, if you carry everything that was -- or that wasn’t, actually. Which is a pretty good motif, come to think of it, for a show with a forty year run resurrected after a long silence.

Er. All of which was intended to say that I don’t hate Last of the Time Lords as much as I did six months ago.

ETA: Speaking of, you guys have seen the chart laying out the idiological bent of DW against British political tides, right?

The 72 books I read in 2007, roughly categorized and linked to my reviews at lightreads.

Key:
* - Dude. Read this book.
\/ - Read this book. No, wait, don't. No, actually, read it. No, hold on . . .
- Don't waste your time.
No signal -- it could be good, it could be bad, it really depends on who you are

Fantasy, urban fantasy, etc.
Charlaine Harris: Dead Until Dark, Living Dead in Dallas, Club Dead, Dead to the World
Terry Pratchett, Jingo, The Fifth Elephant
\/ Vicki Pettersson, Scent of Shadows
* Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
- Fiona McIntosh, Odalisque
Keith Donohue, The Stolen Child
Tanya Huff, Blood Price, Blood Trail, Bloodlines, Blood Pact, Blood Debt
Kim Harrison, For a Few Demons More
Jim Butcher, White Night
Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora
Elizabeth Bear, Blood and Iron
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Patricia McKillip, Odd Magic
Neil Gaiman, Stardust
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Legacy
Susanna Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories
Terry Pratchett, Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music

Science Fiction
* Peter Watts, Blindsight
- Paul Levinson, Borrowed Tides
Robert Charles Wilson, The Chronoliths
Lois McMaster Bujold, Falling Free

Horror
* Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
\/ Cherie Priest, Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Humor
Janet Evanovich, Visions of Sugar Plums, Plum Lovin'
Janet Evanovich, Lean Mean Thirteen

Mystery
* Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, A Letter of Mary
- John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Broken Wings
\/ Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
* Dana Stabenow, Play With Fire, Blood Will Tell, Breakup, Killing Grounds
Anne Perry, The Cater Street Hangman, Callander Square, Paragon Walk
- Kathy Reichs, Death du Jour, Deadly Decisions, Fatal Voyage
J. D. Robb, Rapture in Death, Ceremony in Death, Vengeance in Death

Romance
\/ A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance

Memoir
Torey Hayden, Just Another Kid, Twilight Children, Somebody Else's Kids

Historical
* Dorothy Dunnett, Niccolo Rising, Spring of the Ram, Race of Scorpions, Scales of Gold

Nonfiction
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain and How It Changed the World
* Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
John Douglas, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives
Paul Begg, Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History
* Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Robert Graysmith, Zodiac
* Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
Tom Wheeler, Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War
Ann Rule, Green River, Running Red

You know how sometimes you’re grooving right along in the world, and then you look up and go, “hm, I’m sitting around naked with four men I just met yesterday. Alrighty then.”?

Fantastic weekend -- it’s all snapshot memories, like a con. Jumping out of the hot tub and standing naked in the open doors to contemplate rolling in the snow while there was no one around to hear me shriek (I didn’t, maybe next time), leaning back and resting my cheek on the floor to feel the drum circle pounding up through the house, tasting the stunningly intense middle-stage in the chocolate-making process, Regretfully turning down a sleep-spot in the ger, stumbling outside first thing in the morning to let Azura pee in a drift and thinking my God, in the wilderness no one can hear you scream it’s awfully quiet, settling Azura off-duty on a cushion at the top of the stairs so the entire party would pet her as they passed, the parade of turkey-callers when they’d finally achieved a beat-box sort of effect with those fucking things, fresh mozzarella cheese in the ‘made it ten minutes ago’ sense.

I’m sleep-deprived, vaguely dehydrated, and I have a few random bruises and scrapes that I can’t remember getting. Happy New Year!

[Mostly written on the afternoon of Dec. 30, while sitting at kassrachel's kitchen table, blinking into the bright snow day while eating fudge and listening to the fascinating process of cheesemaking.]

Have arrived in the Berkshires for what is essentially a three-day New Year’s party. My life, it is so hard.

Voyage of the Damned: Oi, I think the “message” gave me a concussion. Yeesh.

( 2007 in review meme )

Right, well! That’s the first semester of law school gone and done with. Only five more to go! I finished on Thursday morning, and since then I have drunk half my body weight in alcohol, chopped off most of my hair, joined battle with an insurance company (they say they “don’t pay for birth control,” I say they’ll refuckingconsider), and contemplated writing for pleasure for the first time in months.

To that end, the first chunk of a Doctor Who story, posted in the hopes that it will light a fire under me.

Title: This Vesel Is Haunted
Classification: Oh, geez. Jack/Rose/Ten. Martha. Smidges of Nine. Others.
Summary: There are ghosts, and then there are ghosts.

I started brewing this story last season, back when all we had were spoilers and I didn’t know the last three episodes were continuous. So this exists in some happy alternate universe where Jack traveled with Martha and the Doctor for a while.

( This Vessel Is Haunted )

Anyway. The girl and I are off tomorrow to spend Christmas in Connecticut. We may potentially jaunt back down to NYC to see people, and possibly pop over to see bayleaf so she can reintroduce me to her family and say, "this is my wife and her girlfriend," to the poor unsuspecting Seventh Day Adventists. And then it’s up to New Year’s at kassrachel’s where we shall see many of you. All whilst I send out many, many, many resumes . . .

Dude. I just lost my law school cold-call* virginity. In Civil Procedure.

She stayed on me for about twenty-five minutes, and seriously, you guys, I read this material nearly a week ago and I had a mini stroke when she said my name and I totally rocked it. I flubbed one thing (I said involuntary dismissal post defendant's answer was on motion, not sua sponte), but I'm really okay with that.

Thank God. It's finally happened. Seriously, I feel like I just lost twenty pounds.

* The law school thing where a professor picks you whether you have your hand up or not and directs all questions to you for as long as she damn well pleases or until you fuck up so painfully she just has to move on.

ETA: Is anyone else unable to filter entries to a custom filter right now? Sorry for the law school content, everyone who doesn't care.

Text message from lightgetsin to cmshaw, yesterday afternoon:

Time for law school haiku!

Quantum meruit
Doctrine makes my brain implode,
Stabbedy stab stab!

*

But once you start with
Haiku, it’s like a sickness
Life is syllables.

My brain is haiku.
The universe is haiku.
Somebody send help.

Guide dog is cranky,
Who knew there’s puppy emo?
Where’s my kibble, bitch?

Guide dog is happy,
Loves trains and leaves and FRISBEE,
Cuddle time now please?

Cooking is always
An adventure. No clean pots?
. . . No, you can’t bake soup.

Okay, livejournal?
I read porn at thirteen, and
Look how I turned out.

Law school exams are
Brain boot camp, but less fun. The
Curve is my master.

Is it weird that when
I’m stressed out, I read about
Serial killers?

Am I the only
One worried about the new
Doctor Who spoiler?

It could be awesome,
But if it’s just girls hair-pulling,
I’m so out of there.

Back to property.
my outline has stealth haiku.
Too early for rum?