ATL

Dear sweet ATL, thank you so much. You're one of so few people who don't make me feel like an ATLien, and that's just about the highest compliment I can give to anyone right now.

I wish I had the time or energy to blog, write in my journal, write narrative hip hop operas, or any of the other things I used to do to keep my brain thinking about itself and polished like a smoove white pearl inside this carbuncled oyster I call my head, but things just aren't as they used to be. I'm going to trial with two teammates for my clinic in March, and that means my life is just about dedicated at all times to a little room in Furman Hall that somehow manages to feel like family.

Which is to say, there is so much I wish I had time to write about, especially about my amazing Thanksgiving vacation and the people who make me at home, but I don't have much time to spare. I will say that Stephanie and I drove a total of 34.5 hours - 18 on the way there with an overnight in a $66 motel in First Royal, Virginia, with us trying to hush Boo so he wouldn't bark and wake up the proprietor, and 16.5 on the way back with us taking turns sitting in Interstate 81 traffic - in a silver PT Cruiser, which we used to port us from our home base in her lesbian aunt's home in Suwanee, Georgia to various suburban Atlanta locales where Chino-Taiwanese-Americans congregated. I met about ten of her family members, a sort of nerve-wracking experience since we had to stay closeted for the sake of the grandparents, and worked for two half days in their frantic and cramped shao bing you tiao stall at the neighborhood food court, burning my elbow on the shao bing oven but learning to make a mean sticky rice roll. Piano was played, Harvard was spoken of approvingly, Thanksgiving dinner was a pesco-vegetarian hot pot, and .03 gel pens were bought at the Korean cute stationary mart. Boo frolicked in the backyard but not before getting two puncture wounds and an inch-long tear in his tail from a mean akita bitch. I was warned to expect the South, but what I got - barring those anxious moments in a North Carolina gas station when I nervously watched Stephanie queue up for the bathroom and prayed to Chinese Jesus that we would not be gender-policed and called little Chinese boys - instead was a tour of a vibrant Chinese community in the 'burbs. It was enough to take my mind off law school, mercy mercy, and make me wake up on Monday morning with the delicious aftertaste of glorious endogamy and a slight reluctance to drag myself out of bed.

But the next post will be all about how, within a day, law school made me renew my hatred for the world. What? NYU allows NYPD to use the law school buildings as surveillance posts for undercover cops spying on drug deals in the park? I smell an organizing campaign, ladies and gentlemen, and I think I've found the sad sucker who's gonna spend her next few weeks dealing with this one. Oops.