No No No Si Si Si

Want to know how to ruin a perfectly good date? Easy! Go to a Mexican restaurant where there are televisions in every corner blaring reggaeton music videos, and allow your eyes to stray back to the gyrating dancers every time your date takes a bite of food.

Want to know how to ruin a perfectly productive morning? Easy! Go to YouTube and look for all the reggaeton videos you saw last night on your date to the Mexican restaurant so you can post links on your blog.

Want to guess who'd rather be perreando than studying? Easy! :)

Back in the saddle

It's been a while.

So, the last substantive post I had I believe I was talking about starting my job search. Haha. I put that on pause immediately after I returned home from the job fair. On the plus side, I really enjoyed spending the weekend with my classmate who came along. She and I had a lot to talk about, and since the second day of the job fair turned out to be a bust, we spent the afternoon exploring the monuments on the National Mall. Ah, to be a tourist again!

We also had some friends come and visit from down south. They brought their two-year old child with them, which was an absolute delight for me, as it seems I cannot get enough babies in my life these days. I'm not gonna lie, I'm running a slight fever. (I can just hear T reading this and cringing/laughing at the word "slight".)

I'm drinking PBR at midnight while I update this blog, which can only mean one thing: It's crunch time! School is taking the front seat again, hence my return to the blog. I'm taking a break from going into the office for my internship, although I'll continue to do research from school and home. I'm doing a kind of exciting memo for my boss on probationary union employees and their right to tort remedies for wrongful employment. I never thought I'd write the words "exciting" and "memo" in the same sentence, much less adjacent to one another. But I talked to a guru of farmworker law today, and he seemed pleased with my analysis of this particular fact pattern and gave me a lot of good starting points for research. I feel thrilled to be around so many attorneys doing so many cool things. (I also organized some law students to volunteer at an AILA event, helping LPRs apply for citizenship, and one of our volunteers got a job! Very cool!)

In other news, I have been marking "x"s on the calendar every day that I remember to take my medication. Which is both helpful (I feel better when I take it every day) and annoying (I also have trouble sleeping, sweat a lot in my sleep, and feel much more hyper... at least at first).

Now, I must go because I have a date with a husband, an episode of Deadwood and the rest of this tallboy. I look forward to re-making your acquaintance, internet.

A Sunday at St. Paul's

Realizing that I haven't updated here in like a million years, for no particularly good reason, I just need to throw out here that I just got back from my first ever Catholic Mass! (Unless you count funerals and weddings.) I know that on my 30 Before 30 list, I had put that I wanted to attend one of the local masses in Spanish or Italian, but instead I went to a full-on Latin Mass. While the ritualism and formulaic nature of the service is definitely not necessarily for me, I definitely see some value in the sense of tradition and the dedication of the parishoners. I'm glad I went. It was an hour and a half of a Sunday well-spent. If nothing else, it's nice to step out of the craziness of life for a little while and take some time to reflect (or space out).

In other 30 Before 30 accomplishments, I'm now almost done with the Gospel of John, which will put me through all 4 of the gospels and a good way through my goal of reading the New Testament! I realize that all my goals seem oriented toward religion, but these happen to be a couple of the easiest of my goals to accomplish. I'm debating whether learning to put mousse in my hair counts as learning a new hairstyle.

And since it's such a beautiful day out, I'm going to saddle up the dog and round up some casebooks and go sit in the park to study. See how that works out.

antisocial

I am getting ready to head back to my parents place for the second weekend in a row. Last weekend we swang by in order to drop off the dog so we could attend a wedding at the bottom of the state. This weekend I'm actually staying the whole weekend with the parents while I attend a job fair in DC. T is staying the night but then moving onward down 95 to attend to his printing press in Richmond. Instead, I will be accompanied by a classmate, a fellow 2L who I somehow never met until a recent dinner party for latin american law students. She's awesome and I'm glad to get to be hanging out with a classmate who is easy to talk to and with whom I seem to have a lot in common (aside from being "brown").

Yet.

I am not looking forward to this trip. Obviously one reason is that it will involve a lot of networking. Considering I don't even have any interviews lined up (not because I was rejected... I simply didn't realize I was supposed to bid...gahh!!), I'm feeling less than inspired. Another obvious reason for my lack of enthusiasm is the fact that it's nearing the end of the semester and I could definitely get a lot more work done by staying put. However, the worst reason I'm not excited is that I feel this sense of dread about hanging out with other people. Why? I have no idea. I have gotten worse and worse at extending myself out of my comfort zone. It's not that I don't enjoy hanging out or that I'm not sociable. It's just that I get exhausted and anxious about it after a short period of time. A whole weekend at my parents house with someone I don't know that well makes me nervous, like I'll screw something up. Like I won't be able to relax. Is that normal? I feel weird just writing that.

Also, I feel like a terrible 2L because not only did I not do write-on or get accepted for some sort of legal sports team (i.e. trial team), but I haven't even applied for a single OCI. This weekend is supposed to be my big opportunity to find a job, but I don't have an interview. Instead, I'll mark it as the beginning of my great Job Search. If I'm gonna run off a few resumes, might as well make it a hundred. Might as well get a bunch of envelopes and start drafting cover letters. Might as well flood the mailboxes of legal eagles all over Virginia, where I hope to practice after I graduate, and all over Big City, where there's a plausible chance I'll end up for a while after I get the JD.

Every. Little. Bit. Counts.

Holy crap, I just did a lot of work. And by "work", I mean all that not-reading work that accompanies the long death march toward finals. You know. Outlines.

Today I finally paid attention to that neat little gadget called Google Docs that seems to be all the rage about the law school. And I discovered that I can work on the same outline from home, from school, from a library computer, from a rental laptop and even from outer space*!

So I worked on my Trust & Estate outline for like 30 minutes at school, found out my night class was cancelled, came home, cooked for like an hour and a half (stuffed acorn squash AND avocado & cilantro deviled eggs? for real...), ate dinner with T, engaged in some late-semester arguing about my less-than-sunny demeanor and settled back in at the computer. Where I just completed the first quarter of my T&E outline! With a month to go!

Word of advice to any 1Ls reading this blog out there... Outlining is daunting. And if you wait to start (like I do) you will find yourself scrambling to assemble a semi-comprehensible guide to an entire semester of legal principles (x 4 or 5, depending on your course load) in less than four weeks. That's okay! Outlining is daunting. If you're like me, you will put it off because of the sheer immensity of the task. That's NOT okay. Every. Little. Bit. Counts. If you only outline half a class lecture, you will be crying tears of gratitude at a later date for those five fewer cases you'll have to reconstruct from your crappy notes and half-assed briefs.

Actually, I think that's just a word of advice to myself. Disguised as "wisdom" for someone else, it's actually me just reminding myself to keep up the good work!


*probably, assuming there's wifi up there.

What a pear!

My new favorite food is the Bosc pear. Fry it up in some butter, toss in some walnuts and sprinkle dried cranberries on top. Crumble some cheese over the whole thing. Yum YUM! (Or should I say, "Scromph!") One day, I won't live a block and a half from Whole Foods. That will be a sad day for my diet.

I got my blood levels tested the other day on account of some issues with my "lady parts" as my mom so disgustingly delicately put it. Supposedly all is normal. But I am starting to worry that I am pre-diabetic. Wow, this blog is a crazy outlet for my hypochondria! I can't help but think it's doing T a great service. (Now I have the poor unsuspecting internet to listen to my various ailments and suspicions!)

And in other news, T & I went to a dance party wedding this weekend where, for the first time in our entire relationship (i.e. 7 years on Saturday), he kept dragging me onto the dance floor. I'm still not sure what got into him, but after trying to get him to dance at so many weddings, I'm not gonna complain! Even if I did have to hide in the bathroom a couple of times just to get away from him and catch my breath. Even if I did come out of the bathroom once to find all the guys at our table rushing at me saying, "Did you see what T did?! He got some guy crowd surfing!" Even if he literally made me dance my way out to the coffee nook and dance my way back to the table. And even if we did almost knock over the photographer not once, not twice but three times.

T has two theories for his sudden love of dancing. His first is that now that we've tied the knot, he feels like he can kick back and enjoy everyone else's without stressing out about whether we're going to have to do that at our wedding. His second theory is that it's because of something I've told him over and over (at every wedding reception, I'm sure) about how I don't care what he looks like when he dances, I just love to see him having fun. He said it's because of me. Obviously, I like theory #2 better. But they're both pretty good.

And since the wedding was in the deep south of Virginia, I got my good fill of the life I miss here in the Big City. We stopped at a fruit co-op and bought jars of red raspberry preserves and kickles ("pickles with a kick!"). We heard all about how the hotel receptionist's daddy declared on the day of her birth that she would be known as "Mary Cathreen" and how her grandbaby has the same name, so there are now two people on the face of this earth with the name Cathreen. We spotted a headless deer and a vulture (and possibly a deer head in the mouth of a vulture). And at the wedding, we ate mashed potatoes, green beans, lots of gravy and watched the bride and her mom dance to good ol' Rocky Top.

born (hispanic) in the usa

I'm vaguely embarassed about my last post. Specifically, I hope I didn't come off as whiny. I really was poking fun at myself by trotting out all these childhood stories to explain my messiness. In actuality, I think it's just part habit and part gene, as Cee said.

Anyway, on to other news. Today I went to our local Hispanic Bar Association reception for scholarship recipients. Although I did not receive a scholarship, I did receive a free invitation to schmooze, partake in free drinks, eat a gazillion arepas and other deliciosos, and interact with my boss, classmates and some local judges on a more personal level. The best part (for me) was when the honoree of the evening, top brass in the legal department at a large corporation, mentioned Luis Eduardo Ramirez in his call for Latinos to be vigilant about the tone of debate on immigration in the upcoming year, as new legislation will take the forefront and hate crimes are already on the rise. Just to hear someone mention his name in person, to acknowledge that horrific crime, brought tears to my eyes.

I've been feeling sensitive lately. Can you tell?