law ferment

Day two of 25 year-olds dressed like maitre'd's milling about a lobby rehearsing conversations with their clones. Firms are giving me desires I didn't even know I had. I didn't realize there was a schwag-shaped hole in me until I found schwag with which to fill it, and now my cup runneth over with mini-flashlights on mini-carabiners (the most irrelevant item), mints (which could thinly veil a semester's worth of coffee or copraphagic breath), gift certificates to nearby coffee houses, oversized plastic slinkys (the least useful), USB drives (the most useful), etc. If the origin of suffering is desire, baby, I'm sufferin' something bad. Because though I know that I do not need another fistful of mints, or another one of those endearing little boxes they come in, my fingers are swift and I pocket everything in sight. A tan Allen Overy baseball cap with a velcro closure? Cha-ching! There's a pyramid of booty in the middle of my bed, which I have not slept in for two nights, and when I come home in the afternoons I handle each item to make sure it's still there.

I think I am mostly kidding. But there sure is a lot of furtive taking on my behalf here. Most nourishing were the two halves of eggplant sandwiches I nabbed and ate with bad posture while misanthropically ticking away at a computer terminal while my cohort compared notes about interviewers behind me. The appropriate gesture for their activity can be performed as follows: bunch together your finger tips, then move your thumb toward and away from them a couple of times. I took my lunch break to avoid the instructive session on callbacks, which probably would have been a good idea since now I have a couple callbacks but no one to answer the question, "Would it be impolite to take a shit in the office bathroom, if I needed to go?", and ran for three miserly miles on the Coles treadmill before expiring of heat exhaustion. It was a poor decision on my part because though I allotted myself 20 minutes to get back for the interview I forgot to allot any time for my face to de-rouge and de-sweat. So at my next interviewer I started things off by saying, "Sorry I'm sweating like a peasant!" The interviewer kindly offered to turn on the AC, which I refused, then offered again five minutes later, which I refused, then finally turned around halfway through the interview and turned it on unprompted. My nose sweat made a spot on my shirt...but I got a callback, so I guess things went just fine.

The best part of my day, though, was pushing the Soba Sensation Sauce out of the way with my chopsticks to get at the hot hijiki on my appetizer plate at Angelica's Kitchen, where I took dear sweet demanding (happy now?) Stephanie for her 2700th birthday - she had the Reuben sandwich, which smelled just like an August asscrack. We, or really just I, came up with a new system of pronouns to signify the insignificance of gender that is at the extreme end of continuing efforts to disrupt the gender binary: every time a gendered word needs to be used, substitute a nonsensical word. E.g., "She combs her hair" becomes "Chandelier combs corkboard hair." This is not to say that "she" = "chandelier" - it shouldn't be consistent. "She" can be chandelier, gently, bog, Memorial Church, a fine gust of windy warm, etc. Stephanie distanced herself from this idea and claimed, implicitly, that I was transphobic, or disrespectful, or maybe just backward, but I didn't take offense, since there was only one subject position at the table occupied by a queer (I mean LGBTSTGNC) feminist academic who secretly makes fun of the pinched pitch of Caeden's singing voice, among other racist, transphobic, xenophobic, anti-Seventh Day Adventist, counterrevolutionary targets for her/hir/hairy derision. Baby, you're the bestest. Happy birthday!