dick jr. jr.

Mary Cheney and Heather Poe are having a baby! Hahahaha EEWWW!! Babies with receding hairlines!

Bush on Mary Cheneys Baby - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog:

"Q: Tony, in an interview with People Magazine, the president was asked about Mary Cheney’s pregnancy, and said he’s confident — he believes she’ll be a loving soul to her child. In the past, he said that he believes the ideal is that a child be raised in a married family with a man and a woman. Does he still believe that’s the ideal?

Mr. Snow: Yes, he does, but he also believes that every human life is sacred and that every child that comes into the world deserves love. And he believes that Mary Cheney’s child will, in fact, have loving parents.

Q: Does he believe that children who are raised by gay and lesbian parents are at a disadvantage?

Mr. Snow: He does not make comments on that, and nor will I."

WorldNetDaily: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals

My dad, who is losing his mind - and I am semiserious about this - suggested yesterday, in the middle of a heartwrenching recollection of memories from our first house in Santa Clara, that I had "problems" because I was given milk "made from beans" when I was a baby. Everyone else got formula, he told me, but I got milk from beans.

And yes, it's true. I was a fiend, especially for the sweet soy milk leeched of nutrients that the Chinees like to drink with breakfast. Yes. But what exactly was dad talking about? I had to read this to find out:

WorldNetDaily: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals

debt ellis

I owe NYU $20,926.50. FYI.

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.

bingo

TRINKET, for 90pts.

Sorry for the blogging hiatus, everybody. Nothing is happening except the busyness, the grind, the uneventful lapsing of time. And ATL and I are going to ATL in three days - a 17 hour drive? Through D.C., Richmond, Winston-Salem, Durham? A flight by Dodge Neon!

marathon souvenirs

the bad news: two of the toenails on my left foot are black.

the good news: new pair of toenail-earrings for me!

marathon!

Here's a quick recap of my NYC marathon 2006 experience, and I hope by the end of it you'll all see why every New Yorker should try to run it if he or she is capable.

I left sweet dear Stephanie's house at 5:10 a.m. to shiver on the platform for the J train, which carried me partway to Battery Park City - I had to hitch a ride with some lost Westchesterers down to the bus pick-up location with a nice Columbia med student and a pushy Brooklyn woman who kept saying her goal was to break four hours.
It was about 40 degrees out and I was wearing cast-off clothes I found in the school donation bin because I knew I'd have to be waiting around for a while before the race started - and I was right! The buses ran continuously from Battery Park to our starting point just on the other side of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge in Staten Island, and I arrived at around 6:40, with three and a half hours before the starting gun. I killed time by fighting 40,000 for the murky coffee, had a donut (hooray for corporate sponsorships bringing totally inappropriate things to marathons -- donuts, Coors Light, etc.), but finally ran out of things to fight for and so I poked head- and arm-holes into two plastic bags, layered them under my sweater, and lay on the grass with an official marathon guidebook as my pillow and shivered into not-sleep for an hour. After a bit of that - dozing off only to be awoken by the loud conversation about Dean Karnazes next to me - I pulled myself to the bathroom line, waited 45 minutes to use a port-o-potty, and then hauled my baggage to the UPS trucks lined up in the Fort Wadsworth parking lots.

Of course, I was too miserly to even throw away the free sweater I'd worn expressly for the purpose of throwing away, so I checked that and just piled on a couple more plastic bags to keep out the cold. (This later engendered a lot of Incredible Hulk-esque garment ripping, which made me feel very strong!) But other people were less shy about casting off their belongings...so imagine 40,000 people, each with two articles at least of clothing to shed, throwing sweaters, sweatpants, gloves, hats, fleeces, blankets, sleeping bags, pillows, parkas (!) to the sidewalk where we were lined up! This had the effect of creating a small mountain of clothing that you'd have to climb over just to get into the corral area where runners milled about before advancing to the start. There were grinning volunteers stuffing clothes into plastic bags, so I assume that some of the stuff is salvaged and not just trampled and ruined and completely discarded -- but I still felt the same sense of shame that I felt when I watched the world's tallest sugar skyscraper competition on the Food Network, the chagrin that accompanies profligacy.

Blah blah. So I was pushed up to the head of the Verrazano, where we lined up to start. We weren't exactly lined up. I think the more appropriate image is that of stunned heifers in a cattle farm, lowing with confusion and pointing all in the wrong direction. The professional men started just before the open field, so we got to watch the strong and the skinny launch off from our vantage on the upper deck of the Verrazano. This is when I first started crying -- as soon as the gun went off, the speakers started blasting "New York, New York" and everyone started singing along, waving their hands in the air. The volunteers were cheering us and there were some MTA guys sitting on a big truck in the median of the bridge shouting at us to run our hearts out, and I had a big stupid grin on my face that stayed there until mile 10 or so.

What the marathon planners don't tell you about the Verrazano is that it is structurally unsound and will one day collapse from the weight and motion of 80,000 feet pounding on it. It felt like running on a mattress. Every 100 feet or so the bridge would take a big dip, and the whole crowd would go, "Whoaaaaaaaa!!!!" and keep running. I was dodging plastic bags, sweaters, sweatpants -- all of that, people were still casting off on the bridge. I spotted a very expensive pair of Sugoi gloves that I was tempted to pick up and deliver to my sweetly awaiting girlfriend at mile 7 but by the time I thought to take it, a hundred feet had trampled it and I was beyond turning around anyway. Not that I could have -- I'd have been swept away by the pushy-shovey dense crowd.

At mile .75, still on the bridge, there were a bunch of men lined up pissing off the edge of the bridge. Why the fuck would you need to pee 6 minutes into a race?

So we got off the bridge, rounded a corner, and immediately were greeted by cheering fans on 90-something street. At first they were sort of sparse, but as soon as we got on 4th Avenue it was a big party. I ran along the left side giving high-fives to the kids and smiling like an clown, then around 40th Street switched over to the right side to start looking for my friends. Sonia saw me somewhere in Sunset Park and hit an amazingly high note and rattled her tambourine feverishly, and then a couple blocks later I saw AiLun and friend. So the prospect of recognizing people made me stare out into the crowd between miles 2 and 6, and I swear I looked at the ground not a single time - the miles just flew by because I was so distracted by all of the cheering fans. I caught Steph at our first arranged meeting place, St. Marks and 4th Ave, and she handed me a gel packet while I stripped off my sweats and a couple of well-meaning lesbians shouted incomprehensible things at me and Steph - "Take a picture! Do you need balance? Do you need balance? Take a picture!"

I devoured the gel cause my breakfast (donut, bagel, tea, powerbar, gel at mile 2) didn't cut it. It was the second of six gels I ate over the course of the marathon, each one with about 40mg of caffeine. Yesssss, drugs. I think I only made it because of the steady supply of calories and caffeine, and realize now that part of the reason I tanked at mile 16 in the Philly marathon was because I had eaten nothing the day of the race or the day before. Lucky for me, there were delicious, calorie-rich sports drinks at almost every mile, and sweet street booty Steph had planned to plant herself at miles 7, 14, and 20 for gel handouts. (I never bothered to buy one of those fancy gel holders, which are basically elastic belts with loops for you to stuff gel packets into...probably something to buy for the next marathon.) The mile 7 handout went off without a hitch, and then Steph took off for the G train to meet me in Long Island City.

I assumed that the cheering sections would taper off quickly, but it was maniacal after we hit BAM at mile 8 and turned into Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. We ran down Lafayette, I think, and the street was so narrow and both sides were packed with spectators that it felt like the marathoners were suddenly running through this enormous, mile-long, friendly gauntlet. The pace slowed and some runners grumbled but I was just happy to be waving and smiling as if they all loved me, they really, really loved me. The crowds tapered off as we got to south Williamsburg, then picked up again around N. 7th and Bedford, and then there wasn't much (except dear Spear!) until after the Queensboro Bridge.

All this focus on the crowds is to say, of course, that I wasn't thinking at all about running, at least not until mile 14 or so. I would stare into the crowds for miles at a time, and then realize with a start that I was going on much slower than I was capable of going, and would start moving my feet faster, and then would lapse into distracted, open-mouthed staring at the crowds again. I got stuck behind the world's hairiest person somewhere in Queens - we ended up finishing the race at almost the same time, but his hairy back kept bobbing in and out of my vision - really, this person's back hair was as thick as the hair on many people's heads. AMAZING. He was sort of a carrot. I'd get a glimpse of the back hair and then feel compelled to reach it, to touch it, to be fanned by the breeze that first passed through it, and I'd pick up the pace and approach him.

Of course, it was much harder to see him on the Queensboro, miles 15-17. There were no spectators, and around this point people started walking. The incline wasn't so steep but present enough to remind you that this was a marathon, goddamit. I took it slow and focused on my right third toe, which was bumping up uncomfortably against the end of my too-new shoes. Also at this point the shooting pains started in my shins, but that gave way to shooting pains in my toes by mile 18-19. Which accompanied the throbbing pains in my ankles (miles 11-14) which I recognized were a result of running on one side of the sloped street versus another, which catalyzed some zig-zagging across the street on my part to stretch out the opposite sides of my ankles.

The pain was not unbearable, clearly, but it did kind of suck. I was distracted from it on First Avenue because the crowds were so thick and the street so wide that I felt compelled to perform - it was like a slow, agonized gay pride parade and you just have go right down the middle of the street smiling and doing your thing even though your thigh-high platform boots are killing you and yesterday night's santorum is still drying on your hemerrhoids because everyone is watching you and expecting you to be here, queer, and sweaty. But on Fifth Ave between miles 21 and 26, holy fucking shit. I wanted to walk but I don't think I could have, because I felt that if I stopped for even a second, I wouldn't be able to motivate my legs to keep moving. The problem with not training for a marathon and running it anyway - well, there are lots of problems associated with that - but the major problem was that while my heart and lungs felt just fine with the exertion, my muscles just felt like 99 deflated luftballons, pulled pork, cappellini, baleens, bricks. And then there was mile 24, in the park, when all of sudden my left hamstring and my right calf were seized with tetanus and I just felt the entirety of my being was just a head and brain and my onerous mission was to haul around the remaining 125 pounds of my leaden body by telekinesis. My brain directed my hands to slap my thighs in a frantic attempt to get them to work, and then I had to repeat inspirational mantras to myself in order to continue. Most of them were along the lines of "Relax! Just relax!" or "Huff huff huff DO IT huff huff huff!" but other were more like "Brains! Brains! Brains! (on every step)" and the chorus to Erasure songs.

Finally there was the turn at Columbus Circle back into the park, throngs of people, bleacher seats, and mile markers that read "400 more yards!" and "300 more yards!" At 200 yards I broke out into a hobbling sprint and crossed the finish line, nearly crying, at 3:59.04. I raised my arms weakly, noticed that no one noticed or cared, and then lowered them back to my sides and listed over to the myriad post-race stations that the marathon planners had so deviously concocted - foil blanket receipt, medal receipt, photo station, chip return, water, bagel, baggage pick up. I finished at 2:10pm but then didn't actually exit the park until 2:50, nearly hypothermic, gnawing on a plain bagel like a hound on a leather shoe. It took 45 more minutes for poor Steph to make her way across the park to find me, and then we booked it home on the L train for a feast of ramen, brussel sprouts, and fatty fat fat. Another little known secret: the best part of a marathon is the post-race gorging, which I feel entitled to continue at least through mid-December.

And then there are the fun post-race facts that no one tells you about, like being unable to bend your knees for days, and not being about to round corners. If I had a nickel for every time I've run into a wall because I overestimated my ability to turn, I'd have at least $2.85!

3:59.04

is how long it took me to run the NYC marathon yesterday. Almost no training! I'm happy about the time. I'll write a blow-by-blow later, but suffice it to say, for now, that my thighs are so sore that I can neither ascend nor descend stairs and my kneecaps feel like they are shattered icebergs. Yow!

mom's lian oh recipe

here's to using one's blog to remember recipes!

lotus root
bamboo
mu-er
shredded carrots
garlic
soy sauce
japanese white wine
broad bean chili paste
sesame seed oil
sesame seeds roasted
white pepper
rice vineagar

chop and pan-fry/steam and mix.

one lost favorite photo

in palo alto

For the third time in as many months. Before the car even pulled out of SFO, my dad managed to warn me of the perils of kidney theft in China. Ah, home.

best birthday gift ever

wow, i just got the best birthday gift ever from the best friends ever! and the best girlfriend ever initiated it!! see below.

**Subject: Fw: URGENT: [Bananarchist]'s Beautiful Corpse/Birthday gift**

you know [bananarchist] loves word games. on the occasion of her
birthday, this friday, we're presenting her with an experiment
in collective story-writing. (this game is actually called "dark and
stormy night," but "beautiful corpse" was more likely to get your
attention, and they're kind of the same thing minus the surrealistic
drawing...or maybe just minus the drawing.)

in addition to being an experiment, this is also a surprise. so,
please quickly ADD 1-2 SENTENCES TO THE STORY BELOW, following the
format given (Your Name: blah blah blah...), and then immediately SEND
THIS EMAIL TO ANOTHER ONE OF MANDY'S FRIENDS. please try to avoid
expired emails or junk mail accounts and try to make contact with
another reliable storyteller, since we have roughly 96 hours to
complete our tale. in order to avoid rampant free-ridership, please
just forward the story to a single person, and check the list of
contributors to avoid duplicates. (if you're stuck and only if you're
stuck, please send this back to NAME_REDACTED@gmail.com .)

on friday 9/29 at 8pm, whoever is in possession of this email should
conclude the story and forward it one final time to
bananarchist@banana.com. here's hoping this works! thanks for playing.

_________________________________________

S. Hsu: "On the morning of her twenty-sixth birthday, Mandy awoke with
a strange sensation in her chest and the distinct impression that
something was different."

R. Kottamasu: "She cast a glance toward her feet but found her sight
line unexpectedly blocked by a pair of hilly protrusions in the
bedsheets."

I. Brito: "She poked one of them gently, gasped and all of a sudden a
second pair of protrusions sprouted from the sheets."

A. Offner: "She clamped her eyes shut and tried to remember: had
there been any inbreeding in her family?"

M. McOwen: "No, she thought, her relatives disliked each other too
savagely to permit any clan tango."

N. Legnani: "Daring to open her eyes once again, Mandy raised the
covers ever so gently, so as not to disturb the perplexing
protuberances which seemed to have a life of their own, and was
mesmerized by the source-- now revealed-- of
her matutinal anxiety."

J. Ryoo: "Indeed, these perturbing protuberances were fuzzy,
gelatinous, green-and-pink-polka-dotted,
rose-laced-with-patchouli-like-a-retired-hippie-smelling,
my-little-pony-theme-song-singing, girating, giddy ANTENNAE sprouting
ever so gracefully from her knee caps. And, yes, they really were
singing (at the top of their high-pitched pipes) the song that
disturbingly goes like this: 'My little pony! / Pretty pony... / Love
to play with her beautiful hair!'..."

DSR Maru: "After groggily wiping her eyeballs, mandy looked a bit
closer at the strange beings that seemed to be emanating directly from
her prepatellar bursa. It was then that she realized that they were
merely lip-singing; the actual perpetrator of the aweful cacophony was
none other than David Bowie, cowering over her bed as if he were
Jareth the Goblin King."

SSR Maru:"'Bowie!' Mandy exclaimed as she fumbled with her bed clothes
startled to be seranaded by her one-time hero. 'Stop that god-awful
noise. What happened to you?' She grabbed the gelatinous antennae and
held them out like flowers to Bowie as a peace offering.
'Uh...s-s-s-sorry...I l-l-l-l-ove you.'"

B. Han: "He quieted. Coolly elegant, David Bowie sat down in the
battered chair next to Mandy's bed. Crossing his legs, he checked his
eye-liner in a small Italian-made pocket mirror and lit a cigarette.
His lighter then lit Mandy's proffered antennae, as an exhalation of
smoke washed over her face."

J. Hoffman: "When the smoke cleared Bowie was gone. All that remained
in the chair was an eyeliner pen and his still-lit cigarette
smoldering through the faded grey velvet. And she looked down at her
knees, and she found that her antennae had shrivelled up from the heat
and that they had turned into wings, broad insect wings like the wings
of a dragonfly, and when those wings started to unfurl she felt
herself carried up and up out of bed and through the window of her
bedroom into the sky..."

D. Ranganathan: "`Strange,' she thought. `I feel so free, so
weightless, despite my advancing years.' `You said it,' said Freddie
Mercury, who was reclining on a velvet couch held aloft by invisible
ribbons anchored to stars billions of light years away. Freddie
yawned and then sang a note so high that glasses across the universe
shattered, disrupting countless dinner parties. `Go ahead, try it,'
he said encouragingly.

E. MacLean: And Mandy couldn't resist. With David and Freddy as inspiration, she too intruded on every dinner party, blind date, and child's birthday party with her serendading voice, and her backup-singing knee-antennae. And her birthday-morning feeling was right: the world would never again be the same.

mexico photos, finally

cuius est solem eius usque ad coelum et ad inferos

"Whoever owns the soil owns also to the sky and to the depths."

earplugs

I woke up this morning at 5:30 with two earplugs in my mouth. Apparently I fell asleep with them in my hand and then had a dream that I was holding two delicious hard candies that had to be eaten.

fields medal

As always, Amy O. has put me back in my place. At a $4 per head dinner yesterday, she gave me the verbal equivalent of an exasperated slap to the back of the head by telling me that the only reason my blog is so self-loathing is so I can justify doing the things I feel so bad about doing. Why don't I just stop doing them? she said.

Touché! My mea culpa, my dear, and oh how me culpa. I am honestly conflicted about working for a firm but more or less committed to doing it for a couple of years after graduation. The reasons for this are many, but most of them start with the letter $. It's not that I want five houses on the islands; I just want my parents to retire.

Anyway, excessive explaining, as AO noticed, is tiresome. Besides, my week of 27 identical interviews is over, and now my mind is working on higher ground, or something. All I am doing, after a long day of mostly dull but nicely populated journal training, is reading about the Poincaré conjecture and eating roasted cashews. I bingoed last night in a Scrabble game - sPROUTs for 84 - but was beaten nonetheless, fair and square, by Raj's 90-something point bingo, *TARPULIN. I'm going to walk my dog later, when the rain is coming down, and then maybe work up some vague interest in the first couple pages of my property textbook. I'm saving for another blogpost, or perhaps the privacy of my real journal, the story about giving a stool sample this afternoon. I'm pretty sure whatever it is that is making my abdomen feel stomped on is an ulcer. Oh, boo.

firmiculture

I didn't write yesterday because I was too busy doing laundry at west Bushwick's favorite laundromat/post office/internet stand/Cristina studio to get any "face time" with my computer. ("Face time" is a new phrase I learned from this week. Usage is: "Aw, man, my firm sucks! They want me to put in all this face time at the office, I haven't gotten home before 1 a.m. since 1999!") The most interesting thing about my Thursday was the following exchange:

Irritating (and apparently irritable) disembodied voice: [squealing of tires, teapots at boil, dolphin songs, and other generic whines] Oh my Friday's gonna suck! I have interviews until 3:30!

Irritating (and apparently irritable) dyspeptic dog: [gnashing of teeth, souring of stomach] [sarcastically] Oh, you poor thing. I feel so bad for you. Poor, poor baby. [puts collegial hand on a plasma patch passing for a shoulder joint]

IDV: [coldly] Why are you being sarcastic?

IDD: Because I feel absolutely no sympathy for you. You could have cancelled your interviews. I don't feel bad for you at all.

IDV: [frosty as the lofty air] Oh...kayyy....

IDD: [grumbling, looks back down to folio, wanting to stab needles in everyone's eyes]

I thought about this exchange a lot as I killed time between the 11:20 and the 1:40 running loops on the rooftop of Coles Athletic Facility. The predominant thought was "I'm going to bite down on your eyeballs like they're peeled grapes" (this is the third time in two entries I have envisioned a font of aqueous humor blossoming forth from adversarial eyes), but then I also wondered whether IDV's pissiness 1) came in response to my totally out-of-place uncollegial sarcasm or 2) was a sign that she wasn't actually buying into the whole collegiality schtick and was being a real person by responding in kind to my bad humor. I think it's the former, only because I don't want to give her an inch of credit. This is the way I would narrate what happened: IDV was getting used to congeniality, which survives only as long as everyone is blandly nice to one another. Once congeniality is challenged with, say, sarcasm, then congeniality has no choice but to reveal itself for what it is: hatred in a lamb suit, patrician affect among the upper classes.

Anyway, as I write this I get angrier and angrier and want to retreat into a New England winter, snowbound and lonesome. Because highlights from yesterday also included an interviewer giggling about transpeople and other "weird topics," and a woman with the world's fattest diamond on her left hand speaking haughtily about how she didn't want to raise spoiled children like people in a certain Manhattan neighborhood did; and today, catching the last phrases of a monologue, "...and he was telling me he has five houses on the Islands and a place in Manhattan, and he gets them renovated whenever he feels like it...and I was like, 'That sounds pretty fun!'" I don't know what the Islands are. I don't know why it's fun to renovate your mansions whenever you feel like it...is it more fun than bocce, or a rollercoaster? So many interviewers have pointed out my all non-profit resume and told me, with sympathy, that they understood what I was thinking because they all had to put food on the table too. And then I wonder what kind of food $150,000 can afford that $35,000 can't...

The verdict, after a week, is uncertain. I'm conflicted, obviously. I could say it's all part of a journey toward losing my mind/religion that started when I pitched a friend's painting into a Harlem dumpster at the beginning of February, but who knows if that's fair to say, since I've been wringing my hands about breadwinning for years. Well, anyway, it's the weekend, so I'm sipping from a tiny bottle of mezcal and waiting for respite to find me.

the holder of this ticket assumes all risk, danger, and injury

Just as a week ago, a Mexico City metro map with an "Usted estes aqui" arrow spun me into an existential tailspin, the fine print on the flip side of my Mets vs. Cardinals ticket has me feeling pretty grim about the future of my profession and my future role in creating nonsensical phrases that will be printed in 6-point sans serif fonts on the backsides of everything that Americans find pleasure in doing. Kenji wants to know about the relationship between law and utopia? The answer is: antithesis.

I'm not just being grim because I had eight interviews today, and all of them were, one after the other, reasons to fork up $2 at a slapping booth for a swift blow across the cheekbones -- anything to wake up, bring color to the cheeks. We go through these idiotic rituals, which both sides freely admit are meaningless, and feign interest in each other's answers, when all we are doing is judging the amount of mileage, measured in prestige, that a student's As and Order of the Coifs will bring the firm, or the amount of lucre, measured annually in hundreds of thousands, that those hard-fought As and Orders of the Coifs will reap in reward. Why bother with telling me in great detail about your work, or the firm's culture -- and do you want to know about my summer? Or my "interesting" resume? Or my NAMBLA membership? -- when neither of us gives a damn?

I realized as I was walking down West 3rd this mid-morning -- which is something I try to avoid doing since even the slightest activity provokes a sweat deluge -- and sweat was pooling at my wrists where my black wool coat was draped and revealing Rorschachs on my shirt, that there is no dignity in this. Early Interview Week is watching contessas rummaging at a buffet, beads of lamb fat squeezing out from underneath their fingernails. The longer I spend listening to people talk about firms, the longer I think I'll stay...oh, eight years to partner...why not? Why not indeed, when everyone is so fucking collegial? People seem so thrilled to report that they have not been screamed at like a master screams at a slave, or that when strangers pass them in the office they smile and nod hello. And compared to the megafirms, these niceties matter! Of course! But is collegiality all I can ask for from my life? For the rest of my youth?

Collegiality seemed like a palatable but none too delicious fritter, but it was revealed for a potato in comparison with the vitality of my night's activities. There was a long trip on the 7 to Shea to witness the Mets slaughter (at least through the 7th inning) the Cardinals, then shabu shabu at Minni's in Flushing with Stephanie and Toby (the brilliant placisicist painter) and David (the hilarious archivist), and a long cab ride home with an all-Korean conversation in the front about Saigu (the L.A. riots) and Korean evangelism, and ghost stories and kvetching about Staten Island in the back. This wasn't the stale air of collegiality; it was the breath of life. There's more that I want than just what is barely tolerable, starting with good conversation, interesting people who are committed to the things they are doing, weirdos, pinkos, stories about moon observation, unflinching debates about lowering the age of consent.

Oh, but I complain. And I will work for a firm, providing they don't read blogs. I will have to continue to entertain myself for the next X number of years by imagining the suits in front of me are morphing in paranormal ways, like today, when I imagined one particularly blinky interviewer's wide eyes turning into white balloons and exploding in gore all over my new suit. The inappropriate jokes will have to continue -- today I told an acquaintance who asked me if her collar was in proper place that everything looked fine, except she might want to try to get the bloodstains out (shock, horror, nervious giggle) -- as tomorrow I think I'll tell the next person who asks how an interview went that it went great, I got a callback, twenty minutes is exactly the amount of time one needs to give a decent handjob. Listen for the sucking sound, gentle readers, that's the soul of me at the beginning of a long descent.

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!

feeling not so (law) firm

Day one of the penguin extravaganza, 400 25 year-olds wearing well-tempered black suits with stiff shoulders, each one with some leathery folder and a tin of complimentary Schulte Roth LLP mints in hand. I would trade it all for one 425 year-old wearing a leathery tin of penguin mints. I've only done three interviews and I've exhausted my capacity for entertaining myself by horrifying my classmates with inappropriate jokes about the banality of our evil; the one about cyanide pills in the tin of mints got a startled polite chuckle from a new, similarly-dressed acquaintance whose name is either Annie, Katie, Sarah, Jessica, Prathak, Jamie, or Funes the Memorious - it's hard to keep track of them all when you go into a room to have the same conversation a couple times every day (Q: How do I like law school? A1: Oh, it's really fantastic and intellectually stimulating! A2: I hunger for its touch; when I tup I close my eyes and think of Vanderbilt Hall) only to emerge into the holding pen to delicately nibble at cantaloupe and rehearse the same conversation with one's classmates! Or maybe it's honeydew - I was corrected today by a friend for calling one the other, a great source of continuing shame in my life.

I've been riding elevators up and down D'Agostino Hall. Squeezing into them with 2500 pounds, the maximum allotment, of law student at a time. One guy made the following joke: "Hey, this is like when you get on a subway at the beginning of a long ride, and there's no place to sit down!" It was not an observation, but an attempt at a joke, which qualifies him as the world's most boring person, though perhaps superceded by his female companion, who giggled erratically at a high pitch; perhaps to flirt, but also perhaps because she found him genuinely funny, which is an infinitely more alarming prospect. While these jokes and flirtations were being exchanged, I noted the recently shorn perfect hairline of the 6'4" man with a tight end's built standing with the back of his nice wool suit pressed into my nose, and reminded myself to pray to Jesus to resurrect me like Lazarus following my soon-to-come several-years infirmity. I think my personhood can survive the next three or four years, so long as I continue to imagine that underneath their suits everybody has the texture and appearance of a formless uncooked Italian sausage.

Whew! I think I'm going about this interviewing thing the right way...mincing my words of derision on my very public blog, for example, which is linked to from my very public Friendster profile. I have fifteen more minutes to continue my "firm research," which thus far has consisted of blogging and Gmail chatting friends in Nairobi about renting a house over the winter in western Massachusetts. Just as I think it's idiotic that these poor interviewers should have to feign interest in the procession of preservative-laden cookies who regurgitate OCS lines at perfect pitch, I think it's stupid that I should spend any more time on something that is virtually guaranteed to me, she says, measuring the impressive length of her penis, and that I feel so ambivalently about. Harumph.