grumps

I have had this problem sleeping recently where I will get in bed at 2:30, toss and roil in a state of either extreme disorientation or sleep until 4:30, look at my watch, panic and try to remember whether I had been sleeping or just disoriented, and then try to ignore the feeling that my rapid heartbeat is shaking the entire bed. If I don't sleep with earplugs, then the sound of Boo's toenails clicking against the wall as he twitches in his sleep will keep me away; if I wear earplugs, my pulse feels like a timpano. I've introduced a whole slew of chemicals into my bloodstream recently, what with the typhoid medication and the Larium, so maybe that explains it. Larium is supposed to make you hallucinate, but it's not that extreme for me, although I will apparently spend hours half awake in bed thinking of elaborate plots to action/adventure movies starring Leonardo DiCaprio when I am melfloquine-addled and tired.

I can't keep my eyes open. I'm leaving for Vietnam tomorrow, so I probably won't write again until August 6, when I or my body is supposed to return to San Francisco. I have guarded myself against the pestilences of the old world and will be taking a trip to Goodwill today to find fashions inspired by the Google Image search for "typical Vietnamese woman," and I have a little backpack filled with chlorine tabs and secret stashes of American dollars. I bought Paradise of the Blind, a Vietnamese book banned in Vietnam, at my favorite used bookstore three weeks ago but haven't bothered to open it yet, and I worried while packing it that bringing a banned book into a Communist country would win me a lifetime sentence in a rat-packed cell - so instead of not packing it, I spent about ten minutes cutting the author's name and the title of the book off the top of each of the 239 pages, and figured I could read the book on the flight to Taiwan and dump it at Taoyuan airport, or just rip off the cover pages and spine if I have to bring it into Vietnam. Is this stupid?

I feel stupid and unable to move my sluggy arms. I want very much to place silver dollars on my eyelids and feel the steel crenellations of Lady Liberty's hair, curling around her lantern jaw, by the pressure on my eyelashes alone.

I can tell her she's the only one for me and she can whisper kaddish and eventually we will together be e pluribus unum.

I'm losing it!

barbies

The bar exam is tomorrow! All of you will ace the motherfucker, and in three days it will be over! Breathe evenly, relax, eat some spinach, get a massage, and be proud of yourselves for surviving the summer. If I get a chance to see you again, I will take you out for a post-bar beer.

Also, if you didn't study, the answers to the multistate portion are as follows: ABBACADDABA over and over again. Don't thank me yet!

dog altercation

Something unpleasant happened to me this afternoon, so let me disperse my bad feelings by allowing everyone to share in my outrage. I was walking Boo home from the field this afternoon when we passed by two men walking a yellow lab. Boo barked and lunged at the other dog; I restrained him and apologized and kept walking, reprimanding Boo and keeping him tight on the leash.

This is about as much fault as I will admit. Boo has what has been clinically diagnosed (by a smart, intuitive ASPCA trainer) as On-Leash Aggression. I am not making this up. You can Google it if you don't believe me. Basically what it means is that he is sweet and great and playful with other dogs when he is off-leash, say, at the dog run, but when his leash is on he feels less in control of his surroundings and barks at other dogs. He has never bitten another dog (though he has been bitten three times without provocation), nor does it ever escalate into anything more than loud barking. I'm a responsible owner, I've taken him through training school, he's earned his "Canine Good Citizen" certificate, and I keep him on leash on the street.

Okay, so this is what happened. I was a block from my house when Boo barked at another dog. I apologized and progressed onward toward my house. One of the two men started walking after me screaming - yes, already screaming - "That dog is vicious, I'm going to call the cops, we're gonna have that dog put down." I kept walking because this is a Brooklyn-developed strategy for dealing with crazies - ignore them, and they will leave you alone. But this man kept following me, and then he whipped out his cell phone and started threatening to call the cops. At this point, I turned around to see a 6'2", 200 lb. angry white man, shoulders aggressively lowered, stalking toward me, and I said, "Leave me alone, I'm just trying to get on my way." He said, "I'm not going to leave it alone, your dog needs to be put down, and I'm going to call the cops." (Bear in mind that ALL that had transpired at this point was that Boo had barked at another dog. I think it is not absurd to suggest that all dog owners have had another dog bark at their dog. Boo was attacked once by an off-leash Rottweiler and I literally kicked that fat bitch off him, e.g.) I tried to keep walking but at this point both of them, both tall, white, and over 200 lbs., were following and haranguing me down the block, even though I informed them that their behavior was incredibly menacing and much more threatening than whatever my dog had done.

Because, yes, male readers of this blog, if there are any, need to know this. You should not chase a woman half your size down the block while threatening to kill her dog. This is harassment. The two men were incredibly, immediately belligerent and coming at me as if we were about to have a barfight. No one should have to be taught that this is scary behavior. So I ran across the street to where my neighbor was unloading her grocercies and I said, "I'm sorry to bug you but these guys are following me and I just wanted someone to see." My kindly neighbor, interrupted in her suburban workaday, turned around and said to the guys, "Why don't you just leave her alone?" Crazy agitated aggressor said, "I'm going to call the cops on her! That's why!" I was clearly just trying to leave the situation and go home. The dogs were already separated and disinterested in each other, though because there were two aggressive roid ragers bearing down upon me, Boo looked a little disconcerted. Kindly neighbor responded, "She's trying to leave, why don't you just let her go?"

I figured these two men - at this point it became really just one lunatic doing all the shouting - were dangerous because of how quickly they'd gotten angry and I was concerned that all the anger mismanagement would lead to some sort of violence, and I decided that I should just run the block home and they wouldn't be able to find me once I ducked into the garden. So I bolted down the block. They were two balding paunchy guys and I easily could have put enough distance to disappear between myself and them (1) had I not been wearing flip-flops and (2) had I more than the length of one straight block to make my getaway, but you know what? They chased me. Yes, I was sprinting down the block, scared out of my gourd, bawling, and screaming "DAAAAAAADDDDD!!!!!!!" as loudly as I could (I didn't scream "Help!" because the fight-or-flight instinct in me, apparently, only produces the word "Dad!"), and these two men were chasing me. Yes, I live in Brooklyn and when people chase you this is not to be taken lightly. I saw the man in the back speaking into his cell phone while running after me, and I heard him say, "Yes, this vicious dog is running away!" and I decided that I would take my chances, go back to the original spot where the kindly neighbor remained witness, and talk it through with the cops rather than look like I'd done something wrong. I kept my distance from them but returned back the original spot.

They were talking to the 911 dispatcher, and so was I. When the 911 dispatcher asked me, "Wait, what do they look like? Black? Hispanic? White?" and I said, "They are two old white guys." The two old white guys overheard and said, "What? That's fucking RACIST! That's FUCKING RACIST! You're RACIST!" I realized that I had been trying to reason with lunacy and that anyone whose anger had so consumed his mind that a simple and legitimate description of his appearance would send him into a raging hysteria was very dangerous and my instinct to run away was probably a right one. I shouted back at them that the dispatcher had wanted to know their race, and the when the dispatcher asked me how old they looked, I said both of them looked like they were in their late sixties, even though one looked to be about fifty. (Why did I say this? Well, honestly, I just wanted to insult them. I felt no qualms about insulting them, especially when the cops showed up and they pointed a stabbing finger at me and said, "It's that girl!" I am almost 27, but my anger over the condescending "girl" moniker was nicely counterbalanced by the obvious inequality of two grown-ass white men sicking the cops on a girl.)

Four - FOUR! - cop cars showed up instantly, to my great relief. Now, it is true that I am currently suing the NYPD, and worked last year for a place built by suits against the NY Dept. of Corrections, but I think I can both disagree with excessive police force and appreciate when cops do their jobs well, and I have been very lucky that my two run-ins with the Palo Alto PD - the first being when I was chased, yes chased, down a similar block half a mile away by a mentally-incapacitated man who winked at me and followed me off a bus when I was thirteen - have been very positive. So the cops show up, make the two guys stand thirty feet away from me, and then ask us questions. It becomes pretty clear that the cops think the men are insane for (1) calling them, only to report that the reason for the call was that my dog had barked at their dog and (2) charging their 400 lbs. of fat white flesh at a 135 lb. woman and then accusing her dog of being too aggressive. One of these steroid-addled pots calling the demure canine kettle black situations, I think. Later, when I went to drop off flowers at my neighbor's house to thank her for her assistance, she said, "It was obvious that the cops were on your side." I was additionally vindicated when Roid Rager #1 yelled angrily at the cops and gesticulated menacingly at them. I think nothing makes cops believe your story of animal aggression less than when you start acting aggressively at the cops.

While RR #1 was talking to the cops, I turned to look at RR #2, who was standing about 30 feet down the street from me. He was staring off into the distance, probably imagining himself as a stoic George Washington statue on a noble equestrian mount, so I said to him, "You probably think you're right, but I know you're not going to feel good about yourself when you get home. Just think about what it feels like for a woman to be chased by two big men down the street." He didn't acknowledge me but I take solace in knowing that his eternal punishment will be to run from an angry throng of Newark lesbians.

An officer then came over to me and explained to me that there was no violation, my dog was leashed and had only barked at, but not bitten, the other dog, there was not even anything to report, and that I was free to go. I dried my wet face on my wet shirt and walked down the block. Even as I left, RR #1 was angrily gesticulating with his meaty hands in the air above a small woman cop, who stepped away from him and held her hands up in a Whoa! gesture. I went home, pretended like nothing happened, and then drove to Ruth's house so I could cry to her about getting chased by two ugly men.

The younger one looked like the guy on That 70's Show:

only even more unattractive, if that can be believed.

I really suspect that race had something to do with this, or at least that if my neighbor had not been Asian, and the cop responding had not been Asian, then I would have been hassled for a lot longer than I actually was. I told my parents the story after I got home from hanging out with Ruth and Olivia and it set off a three-hour conversation about how they have experienced 31 years of chairs ergonomically curved for white people's girths, white cashiers serving the people in line behind them while totally not seeing them, white people not making room for them on the sidewalk, white people manipulating the law and the police to their advantage. We talked about TB Andy (Andy Speaker, that asshole who took his rare strain of TB on a transatlantic flight despite his quarantine) and how an Asian person would have been too scared to scoff at the law, and I explained to my dad how short hair was a choice and how I could wear a suit all the time and get respect, and we agreed that I need to make a lot of money and/or develop survival skills so that when the U.S. and China go to war, we can flee to Canada. All the U.S./China war stuff is hyperbole, of course, but it only stands as a proxy to my family's very legitimate, and daily affirmed belief that white people run and rule this country and we will never win fights against them. This, folks, is part of the reason why I'm a lawyer - so I can protect my family from native English speakers.

Anyway, the race politics of this blog are as always in a state of evolution, and new and old readers who aren't down may never understand. I hope some of this makes sense. Upon my parents' urgings, I have to go eat some good luck noodles and enjoy their company at the dinner table now.

revision

I just reread that last blogpost, which took me about 2 hours to write, and realized that everytime I write I write about the same fucking thing. Apologies, dear leaders, I will think of something better to blog about next time. But what can I say? I am very sensitive and strongly affected by my environment. When I move to the rain forest I will become a moist-skinned gecko.

The Publicly Interested Law Students' Guide to Surviving Your Law Firm Experience

I think this needs to be written, and I'm going to start writing it. If anyone else wants to make a contribution, please comment or email me and I will post it. Without further ado, here are some tips and tricks for surviving the descent of thousands of malnourished leeches upon your willing young flesh. The most important principles to remember are that you should spend as little time and effort as possible on the firm's behalf that you can without getting fired, and you should protect yourself from the brainwashing. (And obviously, pinch your pennies, but if you are a public interest person you don't need to be told that.)

(1) IMPORTANT: If you must blog (and I must! I must!) take your name off your blog and stop linking to it from your Friendster profile. Pretend that this makes you safe from scrutiny, and ignore the fact that anyone who wants to identify you in your blog could easily do so by looking a the pictures of your ugly mug or piecing together your identity from the fact that you identify yourself as a queer asiatique who went to a particular college is about to start her 3L year at a particular law school.

(2) Spend very little time and no money on EIW. Everyone gets a job, and all the firms are exactly the same, so it doesn't matter where you get one. You can apply for firms that sponsor splits with public interest places, like I did, but you can't let yourself be sorely disappointed when you don't get one, because sometimes it just doesn't happen. Don't spend the hours you have between interviews talking with other chipper kids about your interviews, because you will only be dismayed at how eager everyone is to work for a firm. Law students start aping law firm lawyers as soon as the prospect of $3,050/week salaries appear on the horizon, which means they become (or have always been) really chummy and boring. The chummy bores that populate law firms are discussed in greater detail below. So anyway, to survive EIW, get the hell out of there early and often, and bring The Great Gatsby to remind yourself that all the money in the world won't pull you alive out of a swimming pool filled with pink water that you're floating face down in.

When I say don't spend time on EIW, that means that you should not spend more than two hours selecting firms (don't research - they are ALL THE SAME), and you should not prepare for your interviews. They will all ask you the same questions: 1 - what did you do this summer? 2 - what was your favorite class? 3 - why did you choose this law firm? The correct answers are 1 - I rid myself of crabs, 2 - whatever class you got your highest grade in, and 3 - because I am very impressed by your litigation/credit/m&a/tax/real estate/IP practice/congeniality, no "yellers" here/schwag/dedication to quality, commitment, and dedication.

(3) Minimize callbacks. No one tells you about this, but your face will hurt after each callback because you will have spent 3-4 hours smiling and talking with strangers who you want to show your conviviality to, and smiling while talking hurts your face. It's also not exciting or fun to go sit in a cold office with people who look like they want to cry or run away.

(4) Alternatively, maximize callbacks in San Francisco. You can visit your family for free and have them get really excited by the sight of you in a suit, because for years they have dogged you and accused you of attempting to look like (1) a fat man or (2) a fat black man or (3) just a man because of your mannish, boxy build and attire and freshman (through senior) fifteen and your misguided attempt at developing dreds. Your mother will look on with pride and plot ways to tell Jason Lin's mother all about how her daughter will be filthy rich while Jason is a mere thumbprint on the window of the skyscraper of personal wealth, and your dad will encourage you to think about doing what you love while also secretly taking pleasure in knowing that his daughter will make enough money to buy her freedom should the war between the U.S. and China send us all into internment camps in New Mexico.

(5) Don't do the lunches or the dinners or the special "after you've been extended an offer" events they offer to you. Nothing tastes better than keeping your surly personality just the way it is. If you go to these events, you'll be terrified into to smiling and pressing flesh and meeting and impressing people. Cf. (3), above, smiling hurts your face. I say "terrified" because you will have already invested a lot of time into getting your $3,050/week job, and you will have heard lots of stories from OCS or your forebears about how to behave well so that you can keep that lucrative job, so you will be afraid to express the slightest bit of personality for fear that it will bring the house down. So even if the sashimi you are eating costs as much as a week's worth of groceries and is carved from the last tuna on earth, it will not taste good because you will worry that you are putting it in your face in too uncouth of a way and that a "partner" is watching to see if any of the tender tendons get spread out in an inextricable fan across your front teeth. In addition, food that costs a lot of money does not actually taste good. You can see my post of July 11, 2007, below, for a longer discussion on why expensive food doesn't taste good.

Also, the dinners are a waste of time and you would be better off spending those hours phonebanking for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

(6) Choose a firm that is reputed to make their summers work very little. Obviously.

(7) Choose a very large firm that hires more than 50 summer associates. The reason for this is that the more people there are, the less you will be noticed, so you can duck out of summer events and sequester yourself in your office and no one will care.

(8) Related to (7), and mostly for the ladies: wear extremely neutral colors and very boring styles. In other words, wear the same clothes every day. I have successfully worn black pants, a black sweater, and a black shirt every single day of the last two weeks. I'm not even exaggerating - the same black pants, shirt, and sweater. I change my underwear when I remember, but not my socks. Why can I do this? Because of (7): no one notices me. Also because you are not trying to impress anybody, so who cares? It helps if you are Asian, because I bike to work and back every day and therefore spend about half an hour a day sweating into the clothes, but because I create no body odors my clothes remain unaffected. But I can't imagine that if you weren't lucky enough to have been born Asian, that a couple squirts of Lysol, or whatever it is that you people use, into your pits couldn't take your stench away. Not changing your clothes also saves you a lot of money, especially if the one set of clothes you do wear was purchased by your mom for you at Mervyn's and was tailored by a Chinese lady in Sunnyvale who will do it for free.

(9) Again, avoid summer lunches and events and dinners and bar nights and whatever. You might want to see Shakepeare in the Park without making your lovely genderqueer lover wait in line starting at 7 a.m., but just remember: things that you ordinarily like doing are unbearable when you do them with people you don't like. We'll get to why you won't like your fellow summer associates in a minute, but remember that principle. So once again, delectable foods sour in your mouth when you have to endure conversations about people getting airplanes as graduation gifts, investment strategies, and Zagat's, and interesting cultural events turn into chores. You are better off scouring http://www.nonsensenyc.com/ for free weird bike jousts rather than going along with the other summers to the fancy things. One thing that helps is to take typhoid medication, or at least tell people you are taking typhoid medication, so you can tell recruiting that you don't do summer events because you cannot drink while on medication. Claiming religious reasons for teetotaling probably works too.

An additional reason for avoiding firm events is that you should avoid all associations that you cannot maintain. They want you to develop a taste for fanciness, and to become friends with people who live in excess, so that your standard of living will rise to a level that can only be maintained so long as you continue to work for a law firm. This is a trap. Avoid it.

(10) Law firm lawyers are unbearable people. Why? Because, once again, once you get a high-paying job, you get terrified of losing it. It's like omerta because there's no way to get out of the family once you're in it and so you really have to watch your back. Conversations must be centered on innocuous and inane subjects, controversy and fringe elements are to be avoided, and you certainly should not tell your fellow summers that you like to imagine yourself as a giant who can leave crater-sized footprints and eat deer by the fistful when you look upon forest landscapes. "I can put up with inanity!" you say, but you have to remember that what other people think are innocuous topics of conversation you will find to be incredibly offensive. E.g., an Indian man, the only POC besides me in the van yesterday, gets in the back of the van and says "I feel like Rosa Parks!" All the long-haired white ladies titter in the front. Why is this offensive? Because this is his way of saying, "Hey, I'm a very dark-skinned South Asian man, but I'm cool, I'm down with it, I can neutralize any potential friction the fact of my skin tone might engender by beating everyone to the punch - now it's okay to make jokes about race relations, okay?" It is doubly offensive because he thinks it's an innocuous topic of conversation. Also, when the white guys at the table say that "people are so stupid they wouldn't know to breathe if it weren't automatic," when they are at a Polynesian-outpost themed restaurant where every customer is white and every service person is a short, squat Mexican man or an East Asian man with a fobby accent, it is not innocuous cynicism but actually a manifestation of colonialism. People reading this who do not share my politics will roll their eyes, but the simulacra of the British East India Company was too close to home in that restaurant and the whines of the white man's burden was too thinly-veiled for me to ignore. Also, when that same white guy then asks you - and only you, the only Asian person at the table - to identify the beans in his soup, which he doesn't like eating, and you say, in a flat voice, "Mung bean sprouts," everyone else will continue merrily eating and not notice that anything offensive has transpired, but you will want to tap on his face with a spoon and crack it like a creme brulee.

The moral of (10) is that if you're a mean judgmental bitch like me and put great care into surrounding yourself with people who inspire you, then you will be really disappointed when you find yourself unable to quality control your boring-ass colleagues.

Okay, I'm too lazy to continue this list and also sure that I have violated cardinal rule #1 and will be fired for writing this. I also just got a bill from NYU's bursar telling me that I owe $22,038 for the fall semester. So the final tip I have for everyone is...

(11) Don't think that you're going to laugh all the way to the bank. That's NYU's job. Your job is to sob all the way home from the bank when you realize that the summer you thought you made enough to pay off your tuition will not, in fact, pay for even half of one semester's tuition. I scrimped and saved, folks, and I wore the same outfit every single day. I moved home with my parents and sublet my apartment. I swam at Rinconada Pool instead of paying for a gym. I waited until 2pm to eat the free leftovers in the cafeteria every day instead of spending $5.5o on lunch. Still I did not save enough to pay for one semester of Criminal Procedure and Evidence.

The real moral of the story, kids, is to prepare better for your scholarship interviews and to say more cutting things about Larry Summers. Real world experience, straight from the horse's law-talking mouth.

portions of an email to deepa

In lieu of writing about my boring life, here is part of an email in which I wrote to my friend about my boring life:

i am becoming verrrrrry good at being resourceful and creative in order not to be bored, because i am, to answer another question and kill two birds with one stone, currently working in a "law firm" where my main task appears to be to spend as much time in the fitness room watching "the dog whisperer" and a show in the discovery channel where a guy who looks/acts like mark kirby pretends to be an exterminator or one who shods horses or a pig farmer, or something like that, while jogging at a slow, anaerobic clip on the treadmill. to pass the time i have taken up crafts. i also make a lot of money at this boondoggle of a job, so every day i plot how i can spend about $5/night on craft materials. so i bought some solar garden lights at a hardware store recently - cheap! like me! $2 per - and ripped them open and decided to learn how to make LED sculptures and solar rechargable lights and give them to my friends. also i learned how to fold a wallet out of 8.5x11" pieces of tyvek. i realize now why my mom fills the house with crappy drugstore tschotchkes like the dewy-eyed ceramic easter bunny ornaments that say "HAPPY EASTER" on them or the chocolate santa clauses in ice cream cones that remain in their dusty unopened packages - she buys them because she gets out of work every day at 5pm and there is nothing else to do in palo alto (because my dad works til 8pm) except drive to crappy stores, browse the aisles, and buy things you don't need. also i've started drawing at work, which passes the time.

okay!!!! enough about my boring life. i am making myself fall asleep! there i go, i'm sleeping, now i just involuntarily passed gas because my muscles relaxed. i have this problem where i treat my office like it's totally a private space, so i do things like fart discreetly and quietly all day long, and then my co-workers come into my office unexpectedly to give me assignments or say hello and then i just wait and hope that the wind generated by the opening of my office door is enough to disperse all of the offending particulates into the upper atmosphere. WTF, deepa, THIS IS MY LIFE!!!!

Five minutes of television at 12:57 a.m.

- A man with a Russian accent speaking to mustachioed man about CIS and Boeing.

- Andrea Throndson, an early 40-something supernerd with a mouse-colored bowl cut and awful bangs, wearing a red, blue, yellow, and dark blue vertically striped rugby shirt, kneeling on a yoga pad with five people kneeling on pads around her, telling you in a very slow voice, "Naamaaaasteee." Hands are pilgrims. She wears thick, round glasses.

- Time lapse photography of some sort of "infrared" convection oven raising cinnabuns into bubbly fat blocks in seconds.

- Tim Allen and that fat bearded friend whose name I forget talking about a dead psychic. "That would explain the tardiness then, wouldn't it?" Laughter from the laugh track.

- Cheap graphics on QVC, followed by the ungrammatical commercial urgings of a white woman whose voice appears off camera. I know she's white because of the way she says, "But what a fantastic shoe." "Gorgeous and right on trend is the theme of what we have tonight." Oh, she's on screen now. She's a 30-something brunette in a scoop-neck aquamarine blouse made of rayon or nylon. She has a diamond that probably resulted in the deaths of 2,230 Sierra Leoneans on her ring finger. Now she's manipulating the textured rubber outsole of a "Markon Water Resistant Wedge Heel Suede Pumps," which is on sale at today's special value for $35.82. "Sometimes you have to save suede for that special occasion, and you pray that you won't get water on them?"

- A meathead with a British accent trying to cook an "18th century meal." The first step is to light a fire by hitting fire-starting rocks together. Now here is a shot of a bunch of white people in peasant garb, also speaking in British accents, watching the meathead attempting to milk a cow. This is a show that challenges British people to cook things under difficult circumstances. He is now learning how to spin meat on a mechanical rotisserie.

- John Leguizamo and Donnie (DONNIE??? My favorite NKOTB!) Wahlberg starring in some TV show being advertised on this channel.

- The first black man appears. He is in a gym, surrounded by basketballs.

- The next black man. It's "The Best Sports Period" - I think the real name is longer but I can only see those words on the sign they have posted in front of the panel of commentators. Is this show about menarche? They are doing a special outdoor beach episode and there are two blonde girls behind each of the four men. Their jobs are to stand around in bikinis looking better baked than Sunday roasts. "Coby Karl, Former Sonics Ball Bay" is the guest commentator, but he has some sort of giant bandaid covering the lower half of his chin. They are Hooters Girls, it has just been announced.

- Man: Getting ready for my test.
Inquisitive Child: What subject?
Man: Cholesterol! [flash to shot of Cheerios box]

- Rugged, Eric Roberts/Bana-esque tall scary man in a forest staring down a young white man who hands a book to him, and a very light-skinned black or possibly Latino woman with very, very plentiful gazongas.

- Bam Margera and Johnny Knoxville driving a golf cart at high speeds around a golf course. Now it has flipped over and Johnny Knoxville has narrowly missed breaking his neck. Now a big white guy has tore off tearaway pants and is dancing around Japanese people in a Japanese department store. The man blows his whistle. Now it's time to laugh at the small yellow people tolerating this funny, freedom-loving scofflaw. A tiny alligator bites Johnny Knoxville's nipples. I think I've seen this one before.

blah blah blah

I guess I'm posting just to keep my blogging chops up, because nothing has really happened for me to post about, except the fact that I got stung by a wasp, but anyway that happened yesterday and I already posted a whiny post about it. My mom freaked out when I told her about it and she said that I should rush to the hospital, even though the only symptoms I was experiencing was a mild pain/bruise on the back of my neck and copious amounts of self-pity. Then my mom and dad fought later in the evening about how much of a failure I am, because they think I won't get a job offer because I won't socialize with my peers, which I don't do because I would rather spend my evenings alone, going from one big box store to another looking for a pair of oven mitts to give to my mom but which she has already packed away into storage ("If I use them, they'll just get dirty - so why should I use them?"), or ripping open solar-powered garden lights and making camp candles with them.

(On the latter: I figured out yesterday how to turn a 5 oz. dog food can, a solar garden light, silicone chaulk, black foam, a screw, a key ring and a carabiner into a "candle" that you can clip to the outside of your backpack, so that it charges up in the daytime while you're walking and provides a pretty decent amber LED glow at night. I made a prototype yesterday. It works but it looks like trash because I only had a Swiss army knife to make it with, because I was sneaking around the garage after midnight trying not to alert my dad to the fact that I was playing with photovoltaic cells. Anyway, after the dog-shaped dog duffel, this will be the product that provides me with my early retirement.)

So yes, I have problems playing with my peers because I prefer playing with my pliers. Blah, blah, blah, I'm such a big ol' lezzie and I even have the Norcal hippie highwater pants (see below) to show off the legs that would be hairy if I weren't Chinese and so pathologically leg hair-free. Navneet pointed out that I have succumbed to the fashion of the region, and she's right. In fact, I found myself coveting my friends' fleece hoodies recently, which is as we all know just a gateway to wearing tie-dyed dancing bear shirts

and Chaco sandals with multi-colored toe socks. I have not yet weaned myself from my longstanding, New England-affirmed belief that hiking clothes constitute cool clothes, even though during my one aborted attempt to jog in the South Bronx, at 10 p.m. on December 1, 2001, conducted in a polypropylene zip-neck and cargo shorts, I was laughed at by two hordes of school girls who laughed the laughter of hyenas presiding over a slaughter. This was also the run, if I remember correctly, where a boy yelled at me from across the street "You're gonna get ROBBBED!" and I saw a medicine ball-sized clump of trash and plastic bags roll just like tumbleweed against the shut metal grates of the $.99 stores of the Hub. Anyway, that should have been enough to kick my terrible fashion habits, but I was undeterred and to this day wear that zip-neck and think it's not too uncool.

All of this, of course, is just a way to bide time until I can afford to dress the way I really want to dress:

stung

I was stung by one of the yellow jackets that live in the bike racks at work. I always see them coming out of the homes when I park my bike, and in fact, seconds before I got stung I wondered, "Where are the wasps today?" And in my peripheral vision I saw something yellow "bee-line" - yes, that's where that idiom came from! - for my head. It stung me on the back of the neck and I'm about to start crying. I'm feeling shooting pains up my skull. Is that normal?

I feel like getting stung on the back of the neck by a wasp has just ruined my day. Stung in the neck by a wasp!!!!!!! You hateful little fuckers, that totally sucked.

NYU really needs to improve on its clerkship support

I stayed up until 1:45 a.m. yesterday clicking boxes on NYU's user-unfriendly clerkship database website, and didn't manage to floss the moss off my teeth until 2:30, and didn't manage to fall asleep until 3:45. (I have always had insomnia problems, e.g., it is too quiet for me to sleep in Palo Alto so I wear earplugs to drown out the silence. I really do.)

When I finally fell asleep, this is what I dreamt: I had forgotten to apply to clerk for the 10th Supreme Court Justice, the neoconservative Diarmuid O'Scannlain, but managed to secure an interview - not with J. O'Scannlain, but with an OCS counselatrix who advised me that O'Scannlain's chambers were actually in a city in southeast Indiana called "Indiana," and every day the Justice and his (or her, the gender of a Celtic name is as unknowable as a peat bog is turbid) clerks arise from their shared bunks in Indiana, Indiana and board O'Scannlain's 1990 Daihatsu Charade at 4:45 a.m. and drive seven hours to Washington, D.C. There and back again: after oral arguments in the afternoon they make the drive back, which takes only six hours because the wind is with you when you go west. I was chagrined that I had not applied to Justice O'Scannlain, but relieved that I would not have to make the commute. I woke up with one earplug in one ear and the other one in the waistband of my pants.

This was the dream that I had this morning after one harried day of - following two months of procrastinating to avoid - metaphorically leafing through the biographies of the federal judiciary and selecting at random 60-250 people to whom I will send seven-page, marginless 7.5 point Garamond resume-cum-writing-samples/letters of self-recommendation. This dream taught me several things: (1) I exaggerate, because I can't actually remember the make of Justice O'Scannlain's car; (2) I should have given myself more time to do this; (3) NYU's administration has proven itself, once again, to be entirely incompetent.

Though I have not complained about (3) on this blog, except to curse Debt Ellis and wonder why there continues to be a 30-person queue to get into the library every weekday between 10:55 a.m. and 11:05 a.m., in the shadow puppetry that is my law school experience the anonymous organizers of NYU Law are a sinuous twist of ferrum that projects as Nosferatu all the way to the ceiling. My writing makes no sense, even to me, so let me help you with an illustration:

is what NYU looks like in my imagination. I have no personal animosity for the generally kind and well-meaning people at my school, but for god's sake, ORGANIZE YOURSELVES! Why are there three different manuals and innumerable downloadables and conflicting or redundant or tardy emails to tell us how to do one thing? Why do some forms go here and other forms go there? Instead of requiring us to watch/attend a meeting at which 440 nervous 25 year-olds think ominously about their futures, why not just spend some cash on a graphic designer who will make any one of the three manuals legible - ONE IS WRITTEN IN 10 pt. CENTURY GOTHIC!!!!!? Why does the checklist not actually have all the things we need to do? Is Diarmiud O'Scannlian a man or a woman or genderqueer or two-spirit or just a genderless shadow cast on the wall?

So, because like Albert Gore III I believe that those who are privileged with information must publish it for the hoi polloi, let me now publish my manual for applying to clerkships, i.e., the process that it would have been helpful to know about from the beginning...

Chapter 1: Selecting Your Judges

"I have chthonic, not "stellar," grades; an editorial position on a #193, not #4, -ranked journal; and whooping, not order of the, coif. Because of this I am told I have a sporting chance at landing a clerkship in the chambers of the traffic courts of Guam, and should focus on polishing the barnacled antikythera that is my ICWA brief and/or highlighting the summer I spent scooping lemonade slushies at the Vans Warped Tour on my resume to make myself seem like a more interesting candidate."

Does this sound like you? Well, let me step away from my not-at-all autobiographical hypothetical above and just tell you what I did in order to select a hundred or so judges from the 2,559 robed mages that comprise the federal judiciary. Because if you are at this point, you have received little guidance other than a thirty-page PDF that tells you to both apply widely and narrowly, focusing on either a type of court or a geographic area or a type of court in a geographic area or perhaps on 10th Justice of the SCOTUS Diarmuid O'Scannlain alone, and you could use some practical advice. I had to sieve the federal judiciary through progressively finer filters in order to arrive at my haphazard list, and this is what I did.

(1) I looked through the NYU book listing the members of the federal judiciary and circled places I wouldn't mind living. The problem with this is that I am unable to express a preference. This explains why it took me two hours tonight to decide which pair of quick-drying capri pants to buy at REI before settling, as I knew I would, on the most ill-fitting but wallet-saving pair. See, supra, Exhibit 1:

Note undesirable taupe color and extra fabric at crotch, allowing room for...growth? NB also chiseled musclature.

Anyway, the point of this digression is that I cannot decide worth shit, and found myself after filter 1 with a list of what is essentially all of the cities in which there are federal courts, except Hagatna, GU and St. Louis, MO. As this summer has demonstrated, I find the merely tolerable to be just fine!

(2) So, I filtered again. This time, I asked friends for their lists. Thank you, Tsedeye, Rose, and the two other people whose lists were forwarded to me but who never knew it. These lists totalled approx. 300 different judges, so it still wasn't too helpful.

(3) Then I decided to go through the letters A-Z of NYU's alumni clerkship evaluation archives. Here is where NYU can invest some money so that instead of posting 23 PDF files of 6 to 219 pages without searchable text, they can get an undergraduate computer science major to create a very simple text-entry searchable web database so that one could actually find someone rather than scrolling through 200 pages of a PDF, which would also save NYU the trouble of mailing out and PDF'ing all of those paper evaluations. Anyway, I went through all of these PDFs and compiled a spreadsheet of judges who (a) did not have sepulchral chambers and (b) who got positive reviews. This took two days and narrowed the list down to about 250, but doing this meant that I was ignoring the other 2,200 judges that NYU students had never clerked for. Also, my criteria for entering them into the spreadsheet were totally inconsistent - on some occasions, I would bypass district court clerkships in Newark because I feared that I wasn't good enough of a candidate, and on other occasions, I would contemplate applying to 10th Justice Diarmuid O'Scannlain. There was no possible way to keep track of all the reasons for filtering out the judges that I filtered, so this process seemed essentially like random selection.

(4) I didn't even bother to look at the SDNY and EDNY judges and instead just put down the 25 SDNY/EDNY judges that Tsedeye chose to apply to. I figured I shouldn't bother doing research on such a well-researched body of judges.

(5) I added judges based on the Social Change list, also more or less at random. One comment was enough to turn me off forever from a judge, so this was not so much deciding at random as it was deciding based on gossip.

(6) I added a couple more judges in WDLA because why not?

(7) I added all the judges whose last names were Asian - there were three.

(8) I read a list of cities to Stephanie over the webcam and crossed out places depending on her reaction. Albany got a "Yuck!", as did Kansas City.

(9) This left me with about 200 judges, which I narrowed down to 150 by cutting all the square numbers, factors of 13, and Fibonacci numbers. For good measure, I also cut out all Indiana, North Dakota, Maryland, and New Jersey judges, and all judges named "Jed."

(10) I turned my head to the left and squinted, and all names that were illegible in my peripheral vision were cut. All Scorpios were cut and Leos were moved up in my ranking. Baseball fans and history buffs were out, as were all judges whose names could be anagrammed to "I'm unsocial, and nadir" or "I'd mind a radical nun so." (I'm talking about you, Diarmuid.) I added all judges who lived in cities that were also people's names (Hello, my name is Eugene, Oregon) and cut all cities that topped out Morgan Quitno's survey of America's most dangerous metropolitan centers (sorry, Flint).

(11) I closed my eyes and pounded the keyboard at random until a Gmail window opened with James Nesbitt's email in the "To:" field, and then I attached a JPEG of myself in capri pants and sent it to him.

(12) I then modified my list the day after and sent an updated version, with 20 more PILC judges added.

Good luck, motherfuckers! I'm so glad I don't have to do that again.

(Navneet, this post was for you, since you asked for more reading. Good luck on the bar!)

elephants

Elephants Save Tourists From Tsunami
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=2661

Thai Elephant Orchestra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_Elephant_Orchestra

Elephant Sets Antelope Free
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,6119,2-7-1442_1344710,00.html
("She carefully undid all the latches with her trunk, swung the gate open and stood back with her herd.")

Elephant Shuns Jumbo Treadmill
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/060519_elephant.html

This elephant research binge was started from one of my dad's paranoiac comments, this time about avoiding tsunamis when I am in Vietnam by carefully watching the elephants to see if they are running for higher ground. Are there elephants to be seen in Vietnam? Who knows! But the story about the elephant freeing the antelope makes me cry every time I think about it. She carefully undid the latches!

Free Nat Tan!

My friend Nathaniel Tan, a Malaysian citizen, has been arrested in Kuala Lampur, apparently for posting satirical images on his blog. We went to college together and played guitar duets in our co-op on late nights while avoiding our theses, so his arrest is a lot more shocking and meaningful to me than the hundreds of other free speech lockdowns in other countries that I more or less callously ignore. He is a smart and thoughtful and peaceful guy, so while I don't know the exact details of what happened, I trust that he has only been the target of political oppression and has not actually done anything that would warrant his arrest. He was held incommunicado for a couple of days and is apparently now being "remanded" for four days - don't know what that means in Malaysia, but I think he's still in detention.

Anyway, not sure what it does to post it here. Harvard folks can call (617) 576-6565 and try to get the Crimson to publish something about it, and anyone can send an email to info@cpj.org
and try to get the Committee to Protect Journalists to put something up on their website.

documentary fetish

So I'm obviously someone obsessed with remembering and documenting the recent past, as a lifetime of frantic journaling and several years of blogging will attest to. I'll do it in any medium and genre, but my favorite way to document places and people is to draw bird's-eye blueprints of a specific moment in time in a specific place - usually just an apartment, but sometimes cities and walking paths too.


Anyway, I just spent four days making Stephanie a scrapbook and the final page of it is a blueprint of our apartment as it was on the evening of June 29, 2007. I'm attaching pics here because it took me forever to do and I'm worried that USPS will lose the whole damn thing in transit and all my work will be lost. The jpeg doesn't capture much detail but you get the point of it. If you hunch over enough to cover the whole page and sit with your back to the door, it's also a fantastic way to look busy at work while actually spending the whole day drawing.

Stephanie on bachelor partner millionaires

"We watch internet porn in our humble and modest ways, imagine what he can do with his millions!"

ones and zeroes

This blogpost is more appropriately titled "Things I Like and Things I Don't Like."

Let's start with the thorns, then on with the roses. I do not like wasting money. I am too Chinese to enjoy expensive things. As Oliver Z. so succinctly said today, as we drove home from a perfectly lovely and frugal night of teetotaling and one $4.75 + $1 tip (note I kept the quarter) gin and tonic, for him and for me, respectively, "Five dollar food tastes the same as twenty dollar food." Which is why I found a $22 plate of sashimi to be offensive, no matter how geometrically avant-garde the plate that it came on was, and why I found the mandatory dinner at the partner's bachelor pad to be excessive. People have planes, Fiji Island-hopping vacations, personal chefs, and nannies. I am SO HAPPY to be a cheap fucking bastard who prefers the company of dogs to lawyers because if I wanted any of those things, then I would feel compelled to work my way up the corporate ladder and also to express polite awe at all the nice things that all the people higher up on the hierarchy have, and then I would be stuck for the rest of my life feeling afraid to feel how I truly feel, which is generally inappropriate at all times.

As it is, I just say things like "I am taking a vaccine for typhoid that prevents me from drinking!" (which is not, technically, untrue) and "I unfortunately have plans for the next 725 nights so I cannot make it to Santana Row for an evening of drinking with strangers made progressively less awkward by top-shelf liquor" (which is also not untrue, since I have plans to work on my reclusivity for the next 725, hell, 72,500 nights) - and I have successfully avoided all but one mandatory summer social event, and besides I attended that one with my dear sweet little Stephanie and we hid from the others and watched the otters by ourselves at the Central Park Zoo.

It's not that I think the people are incredibly bland and boring - I mean, I do think they are bland and boring, because one must make oneself that way in order not to rock any boats, but that's not the reason I don't want to hang out. I don't want to hang out because wasting money makes me sick. I'm serious, I feel ill putting a piece of gajillion dollar morsel into my mouth. I don't appreciate fine or fancy things - except you, my dear - I just think about how the value of those fancy things could pay for, say, rent, or a week of modest groceries at Food Bazaar with some produce from Chinatown thrown in for health, or a year of forced piano lessons for a hateful brat I will raise in the future. Anything else, besides fermented shit or thinly sliced shit or decanted shit. When you eat expensively, you are pouring your money down your mouth. Do you know what that is? You are literally turning your money into shit.

I also do not like smiling when conversing with strangers, or craning my head to look into the eyes of tall, blonde-eyebrowed men while having those conversations. The temptation to look at the eyebrow-apparitions is too great to overcome, and it is, I fear, the equivalent of talking at someone's boobs.

Now onto the roses - what I do like. I like, tremendously, being able to select one's social activities. I like that Sonia and Oliver and Connie and Connie's nice friend Sarah offered me an escape from the partner's apartment, which I looked forward to all night. In the bathroom of the partner's apartment, I slapped my face with water and actually did the F.Y.C. motion (Focus Your Chi, closing your fingertips into a bunch at chest level while breathing in) and made myself breathe quietly for a few seconds while thinking, "I can leave soon. I can leave soon. I can leave soon." And then I contorted my mouth into a yellowing smile and returned to scallops and shiraz at a canoe-shaped glass table. At the first moment I could, I bolted and met up with S & O & C & S at a karaoke bar in the Castro, where a nice gay boy patted me on the shoulder and said, "Great job!" after Sonia and I sang a show-stopping or at least just very embarassing version of "Listen to Your Heart" to a disinterested crowd of moderately attractive people. We plotted our MOKA performance, which will remain mostly secret on this blog so as to preserve the surprise factor, but which I will say will include rewriting the APALSA Constitution and/or crooning Teresa Teng songs, possibly with a country-western accent. Sonia, because she makes all other type As look like type Zs, has already committed us to a grueling practice and rehearsal schedule, to be executed without food, water, or stretching. Connie will apparently play the zither, and Oliver's main task will be to hate white people.

This is what I feel like every time I go directly from doing something I can barely stand to doing something I like doing: desperate love for the people who make the latter possible. The IRCers found this very amusing after I started my firm job because I suddenly began expressing eternal devotion, but all of it is sincere, friends. You put edges on otherwise dull days, and because of that I will always be grateful for your company. Thank you for not being boring-ass people!

omg muscular whippet

http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/story.html?id=67f15c17-2717-4022-bb76-1b982456e793&k=94653

Thanks for the link, Raj. And any of you out there reading this, please send any and all pictures of dogs - weird, cute, or otherwise - and any and all pictures of any baby animals, especially lambs or puppies. No baby sloths, please - they still look like ass even as babies.

stepho

My girlfriend is so fly and I miss the pants off her and I want her to come here without pants on. Her task is to reform the spoiled Youth of America and teach them to cabin their idiocy so that they are no longer an electoral menace, which she does through the medium of Lolita, and also by forcing white boys to read Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" and writing tenderly excoriating comments on their papers when they say the stupid shit they inevitably say. It is an unenviable task because people don't take her seriously even though if the same thing came out of the mouth of a person whose name was "Harold Bloom" and whose face looked like that of a old white sow like Harold Bloom's, they would write it all down, nodding their heads. I miss her sorely and wish that those fucking brats would just educate themselves so sweet dear Bao could come to California and dissertate at an outdoor desk with birch bark falling into her morning coffee. But I know that her big, beautiful brain, housed as it is in her big, beautiful head (not so large as the figurative twin of mine!), must impart itself upon a summer seminar of sixteen, and I will have to wait until the end of her class before I can smell her only slightly-malodorous six-haired armpits and make shadow puppets with her and angrily fight about congestion pricing and allow her to clutch my love handles. Our little hiatus in corpore makes me appreciate how good I've got it. I've learned my lesson! I'm sorry, I'll never leave again!

activities

Gentlest readers, if not for the fact that my boo (not Boo) is not here, California would be paradise. Once upon a time, I disavowed it. It is too complacent and I hate cars, I said. Harsh weather encourages the intellect, I said. It's not that hard to be active on the east coast, I said. Why did I say these things? Sour grapes. Now that I am back here and I am old and have no self-confidence and all my youthful ambitions have deflated into all I want out of life is a short commute by bicycle in the sun to a job that will leave my weekends free for hikes with my boos, California here I come! Right back where I started from! Where bowers of flowers bloom in the sun! Each morning, at dawning, birds are singing! Sun-kissed miss says don't be late! That's why I can hardly wait! Open up your golden gate! California! Here! I! Come!

[This would be the part of the song where I kickline with four Chinese-American girls named Wendy Lu, Cindy Wu, Sherry Chu, and Sandy Yu to stage left, where we disappear into elaborately staged chapparal simulacra and a shower of silicon semiconductors drown out the applause of a hundred thousand fleece-vest wearing engineers/mountain bike enthusiasts.]

Some observations about the Bay Area:

(1) Radio is more clearly designed for white people. Although I appreciate that on 99.7 FM I can hear Sheila E. and En Vogue hits fifteen years after they were en vogue, the rest of the tuner is dominated by alternative rock hits, also from fifteen years ago (it's not unusual to hear "All Apologies" followed by "Basketcase"), new butt rock (double bass drummed screamy metal with loud guitars on chorus effects) that sounds suspiciously like how butt rock sounded fifteen years ago, and old hip hop ("In da Club" is still on rotation). Since I am 5-15 years behind on musical trends, I guiltily like this retrogressive feature of this part of the country. Plus one can drive down Highway 1 singing along with noted homophobe/my secret celebrity crush Marky Mark, the less ugly Wahlberg brother, as he thuggishly commands you, in his Saugus-inflected accent, to "Feel the vibration! Feel it, feel it!" Yes, sir! How can you not like this?

(2) The fact that radio is tailored to white people, a little sleuthing will reveal, results from the fact that the Bay Area is comprised of a lot of white people and Asian-American people who have been assimilated into white tastes. There are also a lot of people who are not white or assimilated, but they have been covered by chapparal and/or live in East Palo Alto, or Oakland, or the backward facing seats on the Pittsburg/Bay Point-Daly City BART line, and only emerge to spray pesticide on the weeds in the spaces in the concrete between Priuses in the driveways of law firm partners who live in Portola Valley. Or at least, that's what it seems like.

(3) Richard, my brother, thinks it's funny that I have been blogging a lot about white people and race. Well ha ha fucking ha, Richard, it's still not as funny as the fact that you left 35 copies of BEAVER magazine from 1972-1979 stuffed in shoeboxes in the closet for me to discover when you left for college - what's funnier? Who's laughing now? Ha ha ha, pervert!

(4) You really can be much more active here. And I've stopped resenting it, and have fully accepted that perfect weather for 9-11 months of the year makes me much happier than the five months of frostbite, four months of inadvertantly erect nipples and damp toes, two months of unbearable humidity, two weeks of flash-floods, one week of snowblindness, four days of sunburn, two days of Coney Island, and one day of perfect weather that allows you to take a nice trip to Dia:Beacon with your awesome girlfriend if you guys don't miss the Metro-North and/or get arrested by NYPD for wearing yellow and black on the wrong day, that comes with living in New York. I'd rather just throw a little yellow ball for my little black dog on a big field fringed by the shadows of redwoods. Today I hiked through chapparal and intermittent Jurassic fog with my NYU pal Sonia, who never seemed to get cold or tired or whiny, even though I shivered and complained for 7.1 of the 7.2 miles we walked. And then we went and drank beers as we bobbed in a swimming pool in Redwood City ("Like Melrose Place, but we're much less attractive!" said Kathy) and got sick on Coke floats. I look at a map of the bay and there are a thousand spots to explore with Boo. Why? Why? Why would I not live here?

(5) I wish things were open later and the pizza here wasn't disgusting.

(6) I like living with mom and dad, especially when they look over my shoulder as I am Google chatting my lover and they look over my shoulder and say "What's that word? And that one?" I like that when I buy mason jars from Goodwill to convert into solar lights, my dad says that they could have been filled with poison because they were second-hand and forces me to bring them to the backyard and place them on the lawn and retreat fifteen feet and then aim the hose at high pressure into the jars. I'm not even being sarcastic - I find something very endearing about all of this. Today I said I was going to Vietnam in three weeks and my dad shook his head and said I should not go, then said I should not go unless I knew its history of resentment against Han Chinese people, and then said that he would teach me the history of Vietnam's resentment of Han Chinese people, who in fact might be Vietnamese people anyway. In the course of this education, he drew this map of East Asia:



I can make out the words "Afhan" and "Altaic" and "Nomad" and "Viet," lots of Chinese, some attempts at Korean, and then an amazing tangle of blue penstrokes that represent the movement of nomads and conquerors and war crimes across East and Southeast Asia. I am finding that I don't have to consciously conjure any patience for this, because it comes naturally, and I actually like hearing my dad tell me all of the history he has gleaned from watching South Korean soap operas.

I just took a break to give my dog a half hour massage. Most recent Google searches are "how to give a dog a massage," "dog massaging," and "Pacific Crest trail with dogs." Effleurage and Shasta, Google answers all of my questions.

I wish Stephanie were here because I would like to make out for five days and then go to Seattle. Wouldn't that be nice, darling? I'm sorry you are watching gunfights from our window in Brooklyn instead. Most likely they were not gunfights, but just loud reports that might have come from any variety of sources, like trash cans hitting security grates, or riot cops launching bean bags at protesters, or a .45 Magnum thrown (not discharged) at someone's head - so chin up, trooper! I will see you soon and I wish you were here so we can make out/express our love through More Than Words, which is just a song about making out.

Goodbye for now! I have to turn mason jars into solar lights now!

palo alto what a mystery

I'm back. I say that as if returning from somewhere other than my home, when what I am actually doing is staying still in this town for more than a few days for the first time since I left for good. I spent a month here in April 2002 to unsuccessfully rehabilitate my posture, and several weeks on either end of my Taiwan trip in 1999 getting fired from temp jobs for stealing, at the age of 18, microbrews from company fridges. (This included a phone call from a nosy wench at Adecco telling me that "Not only is that stealing, it's also illegal" (I think she meant I was underage) and rudely informing me that I would never be hired out to another Veritas Software or Washington Mutual or Shoreline Amphitheatre for a temp job from Adecco again.)

My return flight is a red-eye on August 23, so I'll be here for about seven weeks, with the exception of a week in Vietnam traveling and getting typhoid with Bernie Han. In my haste to get to the airport, which had been fouled by foiled terrorists in London and Glasgow, I left my little jigger of anti-typhoid antibodies in a ziploc baggie in the fridge - which is where I also left Boo's dish of frozen water and forced him to endure eight thirsty hours in the belly of a Boeing 767. As is customary, I woke late and David rushed me, Stephanie, and Boo in a Honda Civic crammed with my crap to an airport at ORANGE ALERT and I barely made it through check-in, the security, and the gate before we lifted off. I put a ear up to see if I could hear Boo crying underneath, but there was nothing but the deafening roar of airplane engines carrying a dog 30,000 feet up to his unpressurized, temperature-unregulated doggy death. Boo came out on the other end of our flight decently, if a little parched and stir-crazy, and my parents promptly whisked us away to the San Mateo Chinese supermarket we always go to on the way home from SFO and they fed Boo pounds of Chinese junk food as he lay expectantly panting on the backseat.

I'm back and I'm in a little office of a big firm. I'm seeing Palo Alto with new eyes. Longstanding questions have been answered, questions like How do the businesses on California Avenue survive? and Who drives around in the middle of the day? (Lunch business and business lunchers, respectively.) I also learned, on my way to one of those lunches on California Avenue, that my favorite bookstore ever and the repository of my self-education in science fiction/fantasy, Know Knew Books, is going out of business and that the kindly, portly bearded guy who patiently rung up my 10% student discounts on books that were only worth $1 will be closing down his business and selling off all of his stock of Piers Anthony and Ursula LeGuin. Why do these things happen? The pretty associates drive me around a Palo Alto buzzing with unknowable commerce and I see the bank terrace where I fitfully made out with my boyfriend late one night in 1996, I see a park where Josie and I plotted our escape via Caltrain from Palo Alto, a fountain (still foaming) that high school jokers would fill with detergent from time to time. It's weird, but at least the office atmosphere is very slow compared with New York and I can have one smiling conversation after another about how great the weather is in California, always and forever.

I'll bike to work for the rest of the summer and pass by all of these places every day. I'll take Boo out to my old middle school before work every morning, where he will dutifully shit on the same baseball diamond where my dad took me to play catch. I threw a ball around for Boo this morning and it only took two throws for him to slip and go flailing around on the sprinkler-slicked grass and give me this doleful look, like he'd never chase a ball again. Stephanie is angry that I'm here so we distract each other with puppet shows via webcam until 3 a.m. her time, so that through exhaustion we avoid confronting the fact of this distance until the following day.

But darling, even when I'm gone I'm still in Palo Alto!

i'm going back to cali, cali, cali

Post-wine brain making it hard to stay awake today. Also I think air-conditioning is killing me. I'm very, very, very excited that it is my last day of New York law firm life. I am so woozy. I just got passport photos and I have perfected the art of the downward-turning smile. I can't keep my eyes open! Who should I sue if air-conditioning kills me?

rube's cube

I'm two blocks away from solving a Rubik's Cube. It's just a bunch of algorithms that someone else figured out and that I apply on autopilot. For example: DLdldfDF solves the middle faces. THIS IS WHAT I'M DOING WITH MY LIFE.

so so shy does 4 non blondes

Just a sample of our show - I'm really distracted by fondness now.



I'm leaving whenceforth I came in four days, for the rest of the summer. I'm sure my dad is frantically applying the wet-vac to the carpet in what was once my room, to make sure that my dog has a clean patch of 30 year-old carpet to soil with his black dander, and my mom is being forced by him to buy cereals and fruit that I will never eat. I haven't packed my room up but I've sublet it to a nice boy who just graduated from Bard College who wants to be a bike messenger or a journalist or a freegan, he isn't sure which. I remember feeling like that, like one had options, so I chose him over the anti-union NYU grad (20 years old and going to law school? NO!) and the nice but unfortunately too-tall (for such a small space) graphic designer, because Bard boy's face was kind and open and he seemed not too disturbed by the fact that I have one thousand earthworms eating rotting apple cores in a box outside my door. I am dallying in my day job, which for most of the summer has consisted of surfing the Internet and occasionally reading linguistics reports about locative phrases, and dreaming of my ideal night job, which of course would be playing music with So So Shy.

I guess it's the end of the summer, Part I, so it's time to be melancholic and reflective in my blog, or just facetious about nostalgia. But really I feel fantastic, strong, healthy, and happy. The way that I've always visualized my happiness and health is that I feel like I can jump really high, lifting my legs up to my chest like a skateboarder doing an ollie, fast and flexible. I feel like that now, and it's wonderful to finally emerge from an incredibly taxing year and a half of alternating depression and exhaustion, from feeling desperately insecure about my friends, my housing situation, my career, my long-term financial solvency, my lover, my ability to provide enough exercise to my border collie mutt, my brain, my grades, etc. - to emerge from that feeling like I could jump up and over a tall cyclone fence if I needed to. Like leaping and border-crossing all at once! Unbeatable! I'm bobbing like a saltwater buoy!

I'm also glad to have ended the New York portion of the summer with a blowout weekend that left me so so tired but exhilarated. For this I have Stephanie, Raj, David, John, Will, Mustafa, Naomi, Will, Amy, Andre, Andrew, and especially my dear sweet cousin and new friend Jennifer to thank. I'm feeling a bit like what I imagine my subletter must feel like, filled up with a sense of possibility and a blind trust that the creativity of the people around me will keep me, us, everyone interesting and interested. What is this frothy goo I'm writing? I must still be on drugs.

so so shy

We had our first and last So So Shy concert on Friday. I'm a little at loss for words, but I will say that I'm very grateful for all of the good friends who came out to support us. Also, Will Dao is an amazing performer and I hope I'll get to play my crappy guitar solos* behind him in the future.



(*Crappy guitar solos = no rhythm + limited ability to play anything that doesn't sound like 1970s rock. A friend at the performance said that I was very "metal." That's all fine and good but our set was R&B and pop. After I played a particularly fuzzed-out guitar solo last week, David told me that we had just played "what white people hear when they listen to Beyonce.")

I was momentarily pissed off at the party when a buttload of mean-girl hipsters showed up, as friends of friends of friends who were never really friends at all, corralled themselves into a corner and refused to share beer or conversation, and then gave me the evil eye - this in my own house! I felt belittled and weak and crawled under the bed and hugged Boo, telling him that nobody understood us and we had no one but each other. But other than this half hour or so of intense self-pity and hatred, the party was fantastic fun and I saw people I haven't seen in years. And Friday night parties are the best, I think, because they leave you the entire weekend to recover from and reinitiate your benders, and to see the sideshow at Coney Island, bake magic cookies and stumble your way through a mesmerizing pride parade and two infinitely long and sensational and nauseating meals in the Village.

Part of yesterday's experience inspired me to write a poem:

Pride parade; mesh thongs.
Ladies and gentlemen, no!
For they hide nothing.

gaze in the miltry

Because my Property professor did not allow laptops in the classroom, during the second to last class I covered a blank sheet of white paper with the words "GAZE IN THE MILTRY" and then cut a square hole in the paper and made a trompe l'oeil window onto a drawing of a wide-open mouth. I have a pile of papers on my desk that beg for my attention but for some reason I can't do anything but think of the words GAZE IN THE MILTRY.

Also, a fun website I've discovered is www.instructables.com. I'm planning to make the Tobias Wong-esque sun jar tonight, because $60 is too much to pay at the MoMA design store for something that costs $8 to make. Next: LED throwies. http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=6

lord of the onion rings

Becca's uncle, unwittingly wearing a "Buttweiser" t-shirt, is refused entry at Disneyland unless he agrees to buy a pricey Disney t-shirt in the gift shop. It is a family establishment and one cannot wear a Buttweiser shirt even if one does not know what it means.

freudester

I just wasted fifteen minutes looking up people of yore on Friendster. The trend is that people who were ugly, skinny, and shunned then are now healthy post-dot-commers working on various IT-related things in the Silicon Valley who post pictures of themselves hiking and having fun with friends, whereas people who were attractive and well-dressed in high school are now overweight gum-smilers who work in various IT-related things in the Silicon Valley and also post pictures of themselves having fun with friends. The takeaway from today's lesson is that we all end up vermicompost, no matter where we come from.

inside one's toilet is

asbestosis dream

Slender golden fibers coming through the holes in my t-shirt and entering my brain and killing me slowly, even as I try to protect Boo and Stephanie from the cloud.

No more reinsurance work for me.

vermipost

The vermicomposting adventures continue. The Chrises did not attempt to wiggle to their seche deaths last night because I returned them from the dark of the apartment foyer to the perpetual fluorescent day of the hallway corridor. I don't care that they think the sun never sets, so long as they stop trying to crawl out onto the floor. I also roughed up the bedding a bit - ostensibly to introduce more air pockets into their asphyxi-bin, but most likely I only disoriented them and made them gay. I did a little bit of Google-hunting yesterday and read other people's worm testimonials, and an alarming many of them said things like, "Worms? Your first batch always die on you!" Other internet sages tell stories of dead worms smelling like fish. As much as I would prefer not to wake to a house covered in red wigglers, I would almost prefer that to waking to a tupperware bin with one pound of fish-smelling dead worms. Yesterday I peered into the bin for a good long minute trying to decide if the stiff, dark brown cappellinis I saw were worms or apple stems, and then I realized that I had not put apples into the bin.



So apparently I continue to feed my worms, blithely unaware that they're drying and dying. Or are they drowning and dying? Worms die when they are too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too choked, too aerated, too starved, and too fed. How am I supposed to know what to do?

In other news, I think I must be pregnant because of all of my recent hormone disequilibrium. Also, I realize I love a lot more people than this blog might make apparent; there is a picture of a unicorn on my desk with the word "plaintiff" written above it three times; I went to the Bronx Family Court recently and returned thinking only that Communist China offers comparable amenities for its municipal bureaucracies, and that it was such an awful, inhumane place to have the fate of your child determined; the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Long Island Care v. Coke that in essence domestic workers will be protected under federal minimum wage and overtime laws only upon the whim of the President and his DOL cronies; and I would like to take my parents on vacation somewhere.

gratuitous cute pictures of boo

my worms are trying to escape

Last week Stephanie bought a pound of red wiggler worms from the Union Square farmers' market and we drilled the word "CHRISES"

in Greek (for ventilation holes + to spite our neighbor, whose name is Chris) into a five gallon tupperware container, tore up newspapers, and dumped the worms with a fistful of brussels sprouts ends into their new home.

It's my first vermicompost effort, so I'm running up against a couple of problems that I don't know how to solve. Namely, my worms seem unhappy. I keep them in the hallway between my apartment building and aforementioned neighbor's, but there is a dim light on in the hallway at all times, so I worry that I am torturing my worms with perpetual day. The bedding seems to dry up so I mist the box with water once every two days. The worms should be able to eat a pound of food every day but they still haven't finished the meager handful of brussels sprouts ends from last week! And kale stems and carrot shavings are piling up all around them. Last night, in an effort to reduce their torture, I dragged them into the house at night so they could have full darkness - but when I checked on them this morning, a clump of a dozen or so worms had found their way to the top of the bin and were on the verge of pushing out! It was kind of disgusting to see a bunch of worms wriggling up and out the box and along my walls, so I hurriedly poked them all back in with a stick and slammed the lid shut on one of them, who was bruised but not killed, and then spent five minutes gingerly lifting up and accidentally dropping the butt end of a stray worm that had found its way onto the floor.

I am not the right person to be doing vermicompost because I am disgusted by worms. Cf. the picture to the left - that's what the ugly little fuckers looked like. They tumbled out all at once from the milk quart carton that the Lower East Side Ecology Center had packed them into. If you can believe it, it was even grosser than it looked, and I'm still not convinced that the ecological/curiosity-satisfying benefits of keeping the worms around outweighs my fear that I will wake up one day with little pink lines criss-crossing every surface of my apartment.

go back to canada

I'm at a point in my life now where I'm getting drunk and getting into arguments about immigration. I think if I were raised by less prudent parents I would be losing my shit and getting 40 days in a L.A. County jail for DUI, but as such my parents are loving and generous people and I am only feeling mildly ruined by my newly intemperate personality and accompanying willingness to tell closeted Republican Cubans that I'm planning to fuck them in the ass. I'm touchy and unforgiving - a long distance from the hippie boddhisattva that came out, hive-ridden and thinner, from my people of color meditation retreat two years ago where I learned to stop worrying and love my lot in life. The new me: black-suited Spiderman, just as ugly, just the same, except with a frond of emo hair and a new bad attitude.

Anyway, blah blah. What this means is that I got into an argument, four or five cups, not glasses, of wine into an 8-hour rooftop party, with a woman who works occasionally for a bakery at the Grand Army Plaza farmer's market. She was a Canadian student getting a Ph.D. at the New School. I said, "What do you think of Bread Alone?" She said, "They're great, but I don't know where the monks come from. [The monks who bake the bread alone.] I bet they're all illegals." Looks between two angry Asian girls were exchanged. "I mean, is there like some monk exception to the law?" Angry Asian girls arched eyebrows. One left. One stupidly stayed to duke it out with halfway chagrined Canadian, who sputtered through a bevy of excuses without ever apologizing. She said things like, "You know I'm illegal too because I'm not supposed to be working!" She said things like, "Your friend seemed really mad at me, but I just wanted you to know that I know what's up, I understand it! I totally understand all the arguments!" One should not talk about white privilege with Canadians when drunk, because one spews platitudes about whiteness. In fact, one should never talk about white privilege, because it all seems platitudinous to white people, it seems like just another case of someone playing a whole fucking deck of race cards, it seems like crying wolf, and they never, never, never understand it. It seems like crazy non-white people are jealous and saying mean things about people based on race, and it makes me seem like a crazy non-white person. And I have to say, "Wait, wait! You're not listening! You don't get it!" and then they respond, "No, I'm cool, I get it, I'm illegal too!" and then you wring your hands and think that you're being treated like the protagonist in Gaslight. No one believes you, everyone thinks you're crazy, Cassie, and then you drink more wine and throw up collard greens between your green shoes by the AC ducts on the backside of the roof.

Which is to say, go back to Canada, you maple-sucking monarchist. Arrrgghhhh!!

me llamo no habla espanol

Things that are happening:

(1) As pop flies are flying backward and becoming foul balls, I almost pop a good friend in the face for suggesting that I have lost myself because I am working for a law firm. Why am I working for a law firm? Because it costs me a hell of a lot more money to start and secure a family than it does a white heterosexual girl, that's why! Because I have a different sense of security than my white friends, that's why! Because I am the only member of my family born in America, that's why!

(2) And related to (1), I've had this perhaps irrational hatred of white people recently, which I nurture every morning when I spend about half a billable hour talking to my officemate, a half-Japanese/half-Chinese nice guy who I berate for being a banana and for thinking the model minority myth is a good thing. Most recently, I got him to admit that he too hates white people, or, at the very least, that that big douchebag who recently exposed two continents to his drug-resistent form of TB and then excused himself by saying "I'm a well-educated, successful, intelligent man" who can decide better than public health experts when quarantine is necessary made the doucheheaded decision he made in part because he is a good-looking young white Georgian man, possibly descended from slaveowners, who has gotten away with shit his entire life.

(3) (2) has been reinforced by a recent exchange that I had with another article selection editor on my law journal, whose increasing petulance/intransigence over the course of an email exchange drove me to distraction for nearly two days and made me want to resign my post. I mean, if we in the most progressive journal in a progressive law school can't recognize that calling undocumented people "illegals" is highly offensive, if I need to convince my colleagues that English-only policies hurt not only Spanish speakers but all kinds of non-English speakers, if I need to explain why it's sexist and so pre-2nd wave feminist for someone to say offensively naive things about race but then claim that his responses are "intellectual debate" but mine are "upset" - what can I do? I said some mean things that I don't regret; I told him that he made me want to vomit. Why is that a mean, uncalled-for response? It was honest! His naivete (followed closely by his insistence that I educate him out of his naivete) made me want to hurl.

(3.5) And (2) makes me feel like a born-again angry Asian woman, and it makes me wonder why so many of my white activisty friends don't talk about racism, but anyway if they did it would be a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't because sometimes I feel that there's nothing more pathetic than roomfuls of white anti-racists who can't understand why their ranks remain entirely white. Anyway, this reawakening is the result of a long chain of events, the most immediate of which was hearing Harry Bubbins race by me on bike on the Manhattan bridge at 10pm as I walked across it sucking down a warm Yuengling with a friend. Harry saw me from about a hundred feet away and yelled "Heeyyyyyyyyy!!!!" as he rode by, his face lit with genuine pleasure. I recognized him only after he passed, and smiled and shouted "Heeyyy!!" in return because I've always felt that he was completely guileless and good as a result. But seeing him like that, on a bike in the night, made me think that because I was no longer dating a white person, I didn't have access to all these forms of activism that white people engage in - well, I shouldn't say activism so much as lifestyle choices, and for one small example take hitchhiking, which I never would have done unless I did it with a white person first. It makes me think differently about what it means that I am with a Chinese genderqueer from Georgia rather than a white woman from the northeast, not because we can make yellowbrown babies for the race revolution, but because there are so many things we can't do or that are much harder to do.

This is a babble now, but it'll become a manifesto when I finally get my head around why I'm so angry and then I'm going to sell it to you dear.

(4) I've seen lots of movies. I'm just going to list them:
- Crazy Love. I thought this movie wasn't worth the $10 but would have been worth a netflick. Pretty girl is blinded by crazy suitor, pretty girl then becomes not-so-pretty near-blind maturing lonely woman, ex-pretty girl then feels no choice but to marry her crazy suitor after he spends 12 years in prison. What do I see in this movie? Schlock, but then I see that the Filipina woman who also accuses the crazy suitor of sexual harassment is almost completely invisible. Back to (2)!
- Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. Like Kids, only with more sweat, personality, and death. I watched all the deleted scenes too. I'm glad the director decided not to do more of that meta writing-about-writing stuff. Is it possible treat a film depiction of a "reading" seriously? With Robert Downey Jr. in combat boots and beret?
- A Day Without a Mexican. After having the DVD out from NetFlix for nearly 11 months, Stephanie and I ended approximately 330 days without A Day Without a Mexican and watched it. It was so well-pitched - a silly satire with serious message that made me want to disembowel John Cornyn.
- Shopping for Fangs. I'm only halfway through this but I think it's already infinitely better than Better Luck Tomorrow.

I'm also incredibly simple of mind and after I saw Pirates of the Caribbean, I went home and thought about piracy for hours.

(5) Art. Richard Serra at Dia:Beacon made me forget everything else there. Except that everything else there seemed to be there just because the space was there, which I'm not complaining about, because it just means that I got to sprint from end to end of the deionized rooms without running into other people.

What else is there? Lethargy. This summer is rolling along nicely. It's taken me 38 minutes to write/be distracted from writing this, and that brings me 38 more minutes closer to the glorious close of the work day.

not billable

This time is not billable.