zomg i'm almost finished: a freak out

Today I had the sudden realization that I am going to be finished (FINISHED?!) with law school in a month. I mean, I've known that the end was approaching for quite some time. But this was like an out of body realization. *I* am going to be finished with law school? For real? Didn't I just get here? I still sometimes feel surprised that I ended up being a law student in the first place. I don't *feel* like a law student, much less a lawyer. Yet, as swiftly as it began, it is coming to an end. And I can't shake the feeling that I am getting to resume my life, as if it was on pause for a while or something.

The thought of being a working stiff again sends pleasing shivers down my spine. I remember those joyous, carefree days of putting in a good day's work, coming home to our cozy apartment and sitting on the porch with a PBR and a good book. Or maybe T & I would go out for dinner and watch television at a friend's house. On any given weekend, we'd spontaneously drive out on a scenic back road until we hit the mountains. Wait - am I missing life before law school, or Virginia? I seem to have conflated the two.

The reality is that my post-law school life will probably not look similar to my pre-law school life so much as it will be some other unpredictable permutation of "life over the age of 25" (ha!) or "life from 30 on up" as my blog's sub-title should be renamed soon enough. It's not as if I'll magically relocate to our old apartment with the tilted balcony and temperate winters once I've been handed that sweet, sweet JD. We'll still be in the Big City, at least for now. (Although we will hopefully be out of the firetrap, finally.)

But the scariest part of how different things will be once I have my law degree has nothing to do with my lifestyle, per se, or my housing arrangements or where we live. It has to do with work. What will it look like? Will I screw it up? Being a lawyer is much scarier, it seems like, than being a human resources person or whatever you want to call the kind of professional I was before I left for law school. I mean, just to be allowed to do this job, I have to go digging through my past and confess to every little transgression I may or may not have been caught for. (Hello, six stitches on my chin from a bad night out when I was a junior in college. Come on in, various tickets for expired registration! Long time, no see!) Just today I discovered that I owed my college town a bunch of money in property taxes that I had NO IDEA I even had, for a time when I wasn't even living in the municipality. The joys of LexisNexis Public Records searches and nosy bar examiners. Couldn't I just take the pat down?

Ok, I'm rambling. I mean, I just really want to be a good lawyer, and I really want to do this work. To even get to that point, I need to graduate, successfully complete the APPLICATION for the bar, and then, you know, pass the bar. And then I have the rest of my career as a lawyer to be on my best professional behavior - not procrastinate, not forget a date, not mess up my advice, not commit malpractice. I'm just nervous, ok? I can't believe I got this far. I don't want to screw it up

NaBloPoMo (blackjack edition)

27) Play blackjack in a casino

Sweet!

My bro and I took a bus to Atlantic City yesterday. It was so much fun. And yes, after writing about being depressed, and drinking, and being generally unhealthy, gambling sure does seem like a step in the wrong direction. Haha. But for real, it was something we'd been trying to do all week, and playing a table game at a casino was on my 30 Before 30 list. So there were good, non-self-destructive reasons for going.

And I'm glad we did. Because I started with $20 in my pocket, spent $5 on food, and ended up with $65 in cash on the busride back. My brother and I really just pooled all our money together, a whopping total of $80. But we wound up with nearly $300, which is some pretty good beginner's luck, if you ask me! (Although JC is no beginner.. apparently he played a lot in the casinos around Denver, and got pretty good on one piece of advice about craps - bet on the 6.)

So now I am addicted to craps, feel dangerously confident about my ability to play blackjack, am still amazed that you can order any drink you want and it's free, and will definitely be going back to the AC with T for a date night sometime. (T is in VA this weekend. I stayed behind to catch up on school work.)

Incidentally, I did get my P this morning (TMI or whatever), and I do feel somewhat better today. But I'm also still quite concerned about things I need to change about my lifestyle, and about my mental health in general, and looking forward to having a quiet house again next week, so I can catch up with T and we can make a game plan for improvements in our routine.

NaBloPoMo (depression edition)

Depression creeps up on you. Depression is like someone poisoning your food, a little at a time, so you don't realize you're getting sick, you think you're just having an "off" day. You're tired a lot. Little by little your mind is shutting down. You go numb.

I'm at a point where I don't know and don't care if it's something to do with the medication or my cycle or what. Does it matter why I'm depressed? Is there even a reason? My period could come tomorrow and I might feel completely different about my life. I feel guilty about the fact that I have a loving husband, that I'm healthy, that I have so much, and yet I am unsatisfied. There's another symptom. Guilt. It doesn't really matter. All I know is that I fell asleep in a library chair at school yesterday, after getting 10 hours of sleep the night before because I'd fallen asleep in all my clothes at 10 p.m. And then I remembered.

There was another chair I used to fall asleep in. It was a red chair. It sat in the corner of the room where I used to watch kids at a homeless shelter. That was my first job out of college. I was depressed then. And when the kids had naptime, I would sit in that chair without the energy to do anything else. I would doze to escape my thoughts. Sitting in that library chair yesterday, dozing, not caring what time it was or whether I was late to class, I remembered that I have been here before.

Drinking is one way to ignore depression. To stave it off. There are other ways. Sleeping. Watching TV. Working late. Distractions come in all forms. The thing about drinking is that it's a double edged sword. You can ignore things to a point, and then the floodgates are opened. Once your inhibitions are gone and you start talking, it all comes flooding out. And it's ugly.

Depression thoughts are ugly, as a rule, and I hate them. I hate to look at them. But once you let them out, you have to look at them. Once you share them with someone, they're hard to ignore. And then all you can do is muddle through it. If you're going through hell, keep on moving, right? This isn't hell. But it's an unpleasant place to be.

Protruding stomach

I have a protruding stomach. When I sit down, my stomach hangs out and it looks like I have a big ol' gut like my dad's. I don't necessarily hate it. I've gotten used to it in a lot of ways. I do hate that the bottom half of me is wider than the top half. That much I do hate. But what I hate the most is the way T reacts to it. He tries to play it cool, and a lot of the time he does. But I can tell that he doesn't prefer my fatty fat round belly. And of course I don't blame him. I was pretty thin when we met. I'm expanding and it's hard to stop it. He deserves a wife that tends to her appearance. And considering he likes me better without make-up, tans and fancy clothes, it's not the hardest thing in the world for me to make an effort on this one front. The more I think about it, the worse I feel. And that's the cold hard truth.

On the one hand, I want to get in shape and take better care of myself because it seems like a good way to care for myself and show myself some love. On the other hand, I feel obligated to do it faster! quicker! better! because it's what my husband deserves. And to not do it is to be a bad wife, a lazy wife, a fat slob. This is real. When I feel that way about myself, all I want to do is crawl into a hole and give up. I start to make excuses about how when you start encroaching on 30 your metabolism slows down, it gets harder to keep off the weight. And that's true. I am mad that it's so much more work for me now than it ever was. I'm mad that I have to bust my butt to do what happens to T naturally. And I'm mad at myself for not being a natural at it.

If I were motivated from a healthy place, I would probably get a lot more done. This summer I stopped drinking beer because it seemed to be a major culprit of empty extra calories. But then the school year started. I've fallen off that wagon. It's hard to feel empowered and focused on the positive when there's a million deadlines hanging over your head and it feels like your future depends on each of them. I can't focus on more than one thing at a time: school reading, fellowship deadlines, keeping fit. These all require a lot of effort and I'm not in the habit of making any of them second nature. Right now, fellowship deadlines are #1. But after that? It'll probably be replaced by other job-searching efforts. And an endless litany of excuses for carrying around an extra 15 pounds will be sure to follow.

So instead of being motivated by feeling really on top of my game and wanting to take care of myself, I'm motivated by lingering glances and minute gestures that indicate my belly has not gone unnoticed. I'm motivated by shame and self-hate. And these are not very motivating factors in my experience. For some people they are extremely motivating: some people turn shame and self-hate into a militaristic regimine of dieting and brutal exercise that works wonders. That's really what I wish I could do. Turn my negative emotions into something productive. In moderation, it's probably a good thing. Better, at least, than wallowing, which is what I see myself as doing. Wallowing with the occasional fitful attempt at getting off the couch. But like a half-finished course of antibiotics, partial attempts at exercise inevitably make the malaise harder to beat. Sure, you're up and running one night, or even one week. But eventually you stop. And the next time you want to get up and try again, you remember how you failed the last time, which once again raises the volume of that little voice in your head saying, "What's the point? You always give up eventually." Until eventually that little voice is the only thing you can hear, and it's all but insurmountable.

I think I need a support network.

Unpacking my baggage

I don't share much about myself. Not just on this blog, but in life in general. A conversation with T this weekend got me thinking about that.

We were standing on a street corner waiting for a bus on Saturday night. I was in a rotten mood, stemming from some news I had received earlier in the day that triggered some difficult emotions. I've been struggling with this one particular problem (yes I am being purposefully vague again) for a while now, but I don't feel like I can talk to anyone about it. Which is what I said to T.

"The worst part is I can't talk to anybody about it." T nodded his head in supportive silence for a moment. But then I guess he thought about it. Because his next words were, "Have you talked about it with your mom?"

That was an easy question. "No!" I scoffed without missing a beat. "Of course not."

Apparently the answer wasn't so obvious to T, because he asked me why not, and wouldn't I feel better if I did.

And that's when I reconnected with an old issue. "No way," I said to him. "Anytime I really open up with her, I feel like I have a bad hangover the next day. Like I drank too much and embarassed myself the night before."

So there it was in all its warped beauty. My Baggage. I've been thinking about it today. Why I feel like I can't talk to people about the things that truly weigh on my mind. It's a problem, a road block to intimacy, if you'll pardon the cheesy self-help speak. Of course I do not count T in this equation. I've felt comfortable opening up to him for as long as I've known him. And my best friend since middle school is also excluded. But, see, that's all part of why I have these questions in my head.

Why can I talk about my problems to my BFF but not any other people I consider friends? And why did it take me so long, and do I continue to avoid, talking even to her about this issue? More to the point, I wonder: What am I afraid of?

I have a gutteral reaction to feeling like my emotions are on display. I'm far, far better at analyzing my feelings than displaying them. One of my strongest memories of this tendency is from when I was a teenager, feeling very hurt or upset by something my mom had done, and yelling at her when she came to talk to me about it: "Of course I feel sad. Who wouldn't feel upset about XYZ?! You did XYZ!" Not exactly opening up emotionally. I would just kind of describe the emotions and the reasons for it in a very detatched way, at the same time being very angry that I had to spell it out (and be vulnerable).

So is it vulnerability? I guess that's probably it. I don't like the idea of people knowing that I feel deeply disappointed, for example, about something that I didn't get that I really wanted. (To be honest, this doesn't happen often, though.) I don't want people to tell me why it doesn't matter, or why it'll work out. I don't want people to feel sorry for me, or to treat me as weak, fragile. I don't want people judging my feelings, my fears or my desires. So I keep them all to myself. Which isn't a very healthy way to go, nor does it help in building strong friendships.

I have to learn to let go of other people's reactions to the things I say and do, and see others' reactions as reflections of their experiences, fears, desires, lifeview; not as a reflection of the worthiness of mine, or anything about me. I already know I can't control other people's opinions. But I haven't learned to accept that, and instead try to keep everything cloistered and hid out of sight. And this blog post is a perfect example of everything I've talked about here.

The Five Steps and other shrinky-dink advice

Pardon the self-help speak, but it so happens that I'm a big fan of lay cognitive psychology. Internet and armchair mental health diagnoses have helped me through some tough times when I didn't have access to or didn't think I needed an MH professional.

It was this old bag of tricks that I found myself turning to this afternoon, in a moment of panic and anxiety over an incident that occurred just as I was preparing to leave work and threatened to ruin my entire evening.

Allow me to present to you the Five Steps.* This is a trick that helps during those times when your world feels like it's caving in on you. It helps you to move past overwhelming emotions that threaten to paralyze you. I used to have this problem a LOT more, before I was diagnosed with PMDD and got treatment. But from time to time (i.e. today) it helps to remember ways to get past a tough moment.

So... the scene is this: I'm headed to the back of the office to drop off my case files for the day, when I run into my supervising attorney, signing out for the day. He catches my eye and, with a mouthful of food, says, "JE, come see me tomorrow afternoon so we can talk."

"Sure," I breezily reply. "What's up?"

And then The Very Fleeting Moment. He averts his eyes, pauses midbite and kinds of shrugs. I quickly jump in.. "Oh, okay. Just...stuff, right?" He immediately nods his head. "Yeah, just to talk about a few things."

Now, we just got together yesterday to review all my cases, so I know this isn't about what's going on with my case load. I went into his office to drop off my files, and saw the lastest assignment I'd turned into him, sitting on his desk with scribbles and notes all over it. For a split second, I thought about scanning over it, but his door was open and another attorney would've had a full view of what I was doing.

Nope. I was just going to have to wait. And stew. Thoughts immediately began running through my head, but they were incoherent. They took the form of a dark cloud appeared over my head. I messed up. Hiring me was a big mistake. He's terribly disappointed with the caliber of my work. I spent too much time with the FIFA games streaming on my computer. I'm not dressing appropriately. I shouldn't have called his cell phone (to tell him I was going to be late... I panicked!). I bug him too much. I don't communicate enough. I'm the worst intern they've had in a long time... on and on. You get the picture.

Enter: The Five Steps

Step One: HALT

Am I Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired?

Well... yes, I am kind of tired. Later it turned out that I was hella tired, because I fell asleep for two hours after I got home. But at the time, I mostly just felt weary from a long day at the office. Not hungry, not lonely and not angry. It's possible that my exhaustion was exaccerbating my emotions, but I doubted it...

Step Two: Define the Problem

The problem was that ever since my boss told me that he needed to talk to me tomorrow and I realized that he had reviewed my assignment, I felt really anxious and inadequate because I knew that the product I turned in wasn't in the format he wanted it and it still needed a lot of work, so I was panicking and I was petrified of how I would feel in the meeting tomorrow.

Step Three: Think of (Exactly) Three Courses of Action

Okay... One, I could think through my feelings and then talk back to my twisted thinking (e.g. "I can't do anything right!... Wait, that's not true. I was complimented on my research skills by ED yesterday.") Two, I could wait until T got home and then talk to him about it. Three, I could distract myself and push the thoughts out of my head.

Step Four: Pick One Course of Action

I really wanted to spend more time thinking about what was bothering me. I also wanted to just forget all these uncomfortable feelings altogether, but I suspected that would just make me feel worse in the morning and I'd be cranky all night. So I picked #1, and decided that if I still felt bad, I would also do #2.

Step Five: JUST DO IT!

Well, I was riding on the bus when I was working through these steps, so I couldn't exactly write down my thoughts. But I did go through them silently to myself. I won't bore this blog with the innerworkings of my mind (anymore than I already have), but I will say that after spending some time when I got home identifying my twisted thinking and working to untwist some of my thoughts, I fell into a deep sleep. When I woke up, I felt 95% better! And that's good enough for me.

* I didn't come up with this. Please see this website for more information and tools for panicky, reactionary minds. All the concepts mentioned here come from there.

...it was beautiful.

When people think of "Northern Virginia" (at least out here on the east coast), they usually think cookie-cutter, faceless developemnts, mini-mansions, strip malls, SUVs, cultureless suburbia... Or maybe that's just what those of us who grew up in NoVa think of Northern Virginia. (Even those of us who have grown up to buy our own SUVs and mini-mansions in suburban developments.) As a child, my neighborhood was all I knew... I dreamt of growing up and living in the Big City, running away to some urban paradise. As a teenager, my mind was fixated on all the changes taking place... the trees being cut down to make way for new housing developments, the houses of childhood friends being sold to new families, with new children. As a college student, I hardly recognized the place that I'd come from... I certainly didn't recognize myself in it.

So imagine my surprise when, one summer day, on just another trip home, just like all the other return trips I'd made since I left for college in 1999... I pulled into the driveway of my parents' house to discover...it was beautiful.

The branches of young saplings, overcome by their own green growth, bowed gracefully before me as I made my way to the front door. Chipmunks, cardinals and rabbits scampered across the backyard upon my approach. White flower petals from the dogwoods were strewn across the lawn as if to welcome me home. And I realized: nothing had changed. It was beautiful and it has always been like this. Or had it?

These days, one of T's & my favorite ways to welcome in the summer is to load the dog into the car, jump on 95 and drive until we pull up the hill and into my parents' driveway. We call it our summer home. We call it E's summer camp. It feels like a getaway. We make pots of coffee, sit on the back porch, watch the blue jays and the woodpeckers cautiously approach the branches above our heads. At night, we play cards, drink beers and watch hockey. Sometimes on Sundays it gets late and we postpone going to our home, we start a fire in the firepit and listen to my dad tell stories about his brother.

This past weekend we were there. We stopped in on a Friday, spent the night and left the dog so we could attend a friend's commitment ceremony near Charlottesville. Saturday night, we danced in the humid Virginia summer air until our clothes were drenched with sweat and the ice we used to cool ourselves down, until our feet no longer supported our legs. Then we drove back, to my parents' and our dog, where we tumbled into the bed, conked out like little children. In the morning, we slept until the dog woke us up, ready to play.

*

I was recalling to my mom how I used to refuse to kiss my Tio goodbye as a child. How I used to be petulant and sulky and stubborn, and how he used to act like his feelings were hurt, and I hated it. How I was probably very difficult.

"You little brat!" my mom said, laughing.

It stung.

When she said those words my face fell in the way it tends to do sometimes, because I get stern with my parents. I always have. She knew I was upset. She rolled her eyes. "I was just joking!" she said. I told her that now, even as an adult, it hurt to hear her say those words. Because we had just been talking about how she called me some names: Brat. Pill. Bitch. Sadist. (As a 10 year old, I thought she meant "satanist," which I took to be a grave insult, since it was coming from my fundamentalist Christian mother). "Fiiiine," she groans. "When you have kids, I won't call them names."

It's ironic. She has often recalled this one incident from when I was little where we were in the car and Iwas sassing her and she just slapped me. I have no recollection of it whatsoever. Not because it was traumatic, but because I was really little, like 4 or 5. Whenever we get to talking about my childhood (read: whenever I start bringing up unpleasantries from my childhood), she remembers the slapping incident and talks about how sorry she is, how bad she felt. She asks, "Did I scar you for life?" And I say, "No, Mom. I don't even remember it!" and I groan like she did. But when she jokingly refers to me as a brat... that's when it hurts.

Kids hear messages about themselves enough and they begin to believe them. Like if you're told you're mean, you're rude, you're too sensitive enough, you start to believe it. If you get angry and your parent always acts disgusted with you for it, you start to believe you are disgusting when you feel angry. But then, I know that one day I'll have my own kids to whom I can be a terrifically imperfect parent. And I'll screw up a lot, and I can only learn and feel and then let go. As my mom says to me, when I remind her of X, Y or Z thing I wish she'd done differently, and as her mother said to her, I'm sure one day I'll be saying to my own kids: "Jeez, did I do anything right?"

*

I'm sitting on the couch at home with T sitting in the little green chair I inherited from my grandparents' apartment, and we are both on our computers, typing, surfing silently. Sometimes I think it's these peaceful interludes, just being together in the same room, that I'm sure I'll remember most vividly. Remembering them from some future house, some future present day, remembering when.

Lightening bug days

Saw the first lightening bug of the summer today! First lightening bug of the summer is always a quietly joyous occasion for me. I smile inside whenever I first catch sight of the glowing green dots, and for a moment I'm transported back to the cul-de-sac of my childhood neighborhood... bikes on kickstands...fireworks, sparklers, a ride around the block in my neighbor's shiny convertible...high school buddies crowded together to celebrate my July birthday... summertime.

Tomorrow, among the various chores I have assigned myself, I am also going to start a running regime. I want to train to run a race, so I can cross another off my list of 30 Before 30. It doesn't hurt, too, that I forced an admission out of T that he would like me to lose some weight. I forced this admission from him because I know I've put on weight, about 15 pounds that have stuck with me since fall of the year I turned 25, to a total of about 20 pounds since college (give or take 5 pounds depending on the day). I want me to lose some of that weight. I want to stay attractive to my husband. And what's more attractive than self-esteem. Of which I've been severly lacking as the months turn into years and my hips and belly continue to expand more rapidly than the rest of me. And it's just hard to snap out of denial and face reality when you've got a husband telling you he loves you no matter what, he doesn't notice, he thinks you look great, etc. All of which may be true. But I still need certain cold, hard truths. Do you wish my stomach wasn't quite so protruding? You do? Ok, good. Now I know. And by the way, so do I. I'll work on that. It's part of the radical honesty that we promised one another when we took our wedding vows. I appreciate that I can count on it when I ask for it.

This weekend was a semi-success in moderation. An old friend visited for the night on Saturday, which also happened to be the night a new friend had rented a local church bowling alley for his annual Beers & Bowling party. Come on, that's awesome, right? Bowling in a church with a keg of Lionshead and tables upon tables of air hockey and foosball for the conquering. So, Saturday night, I went a little big. But considering I spent the entire day just watching the scenery at Big City's Biggest Block Party, where street vendors were serving vodka-spiked popsicles and every man, woman and child grandparent in the city was toting around a plastic cup of PBR, I'd say that a few beers after the sun goes down made for a pretty quiet Saturday. Aside from that, I mostly played Bananagrams on Facebook (my new obsession), enjoyed the weather and ate lots and lots of pizza while trying to understand the rules to a game that involves a bunch of grown men knocking a strange ball into the neighbors' windows with sticks. Oh, and T and I started Big Love. So psyched!

All play and no work...

Well I can now cross accordion lessons off my list.

Take accordion lessons.

That felt good! Of course, yesterday's lesson was only the first lesson in what I hope will blossom into a long and glorious tutelage under the fine instructor at my local accordion shop. I can now proudly declare (and plan to do so on a regular basis for at least the next seven days) that I am capable of playing "Row, row, row your boat" on the accordion in the key of C Major. Sweet!

Seriously, this is awesome. One day, I hope to be able to play this. But for now, it's still this...

In other news, my life is not all roses and sunshine, despite all the roses honeysuckles and sunshine spilling forth from the streets of the Big City. I'm concerned about and working to improve the balance in my life between career productivity, relaxation and personal/emotional development. I think I spend farrrrr too much time in the middle category of relaxation, to the point where perhaps I'm not doing enough reflecting and wasting a lot of time that I could be growing and maturing.

At my last day of my internship on Wednesday, my boss sat me down and told me she wanted to have a "frank" talk with me about some things before I moved on. She'd got word that an application I'd submitted for a scholarship a while back was missing several items and generally sloppily put-together. (I'm sure this is true, since I threw it together at the last possible minute.) We talked for a bit about how my work is really good in the office, but that I can sometimes send out hasty communications and procrastinate in other areas to the point where it reflects poorly on my capabilities. This was only slightly embarassing to hear; mostly I was happy that she took the time to be straight with me and not just give me fluffy feedback. There's no greater skill in a mentor than the ability to give useful and valid criticism in a gentle and caring manner.

Sometimes I feel like I've drifted too far off course. Before we came to Big City, before I enrolled in law school, there were things that I sensed were missing from my life. A sense of direction. A meaningful career. Certain experiences that are just missing from small southern towns. Our decision to move to Big City and to have me pursue this education has paid off in spades, and not just in the ways I anticipated. T found that he can thrive in a career working for an employer (i.e. not self-employed), that there are some benefits to an office full of colleagues. He loves being able to provide for his family (i.e. me and Elvis and our future). I'm reaping the benefits of attending a diverse school, living in an old immigrant neighborhood, walking everywhere, reacquainting myself with people my age after a relatively solitary period in my life. We've developed closer relationships with T's brother, perhaps the most rewarding surprise to come from the whole experience. In so many ways, it's been awesome.

And then there are the things we gave up. Some of them we knew we'd be leaving behind. It was two hours south to see T's parents, two hours north to see mine. Any time we wanted to get away, we could hop in the car and be back in old familiar territory in time for a homecooked meal (or, you know, pizza from Ledo's). Rent was cheaper. Almost all of our friends were closer and a visit was never hard to arrange. T had a truly fulfilling business that, if not always thriving, was always challenging and rewarding. We knew we were giving some of that up. It was a hard decision to make, our decision to forego my attending law school in the same place we'd been living and maintain the status quo. We didn't know anything for certain, but we were pretty sure that we'd be glad we'd taken the risk.

I am glad. T is glad. But there are so many things I couldn't have anticipated. Things that are just a part of change, I guess. Like how many more days we spend hanging out at bars, rather than sitting on porches. It was boring to feel confined to a porch sometimes; but it's also boring to feel confined to a bar stool. Life is busier... there are fewer days where we sit around looking at each other and wondering what to do with our afternoons. We are tired from working so much, so we nap a lot. We have friends and acquaintances to catch up with, lots of invitations to meet up (at bars), so we stay up too late, spending money and drinking. We can get almost anywhere we need to be on foot, so we rarely find ourselves on car rides singing along to the radio. When school is in session, I have studying to do pretty much round the clock, so I spent lots of time shutting out distractions so I can read, or procrastinating on the internet. T has to entertain himself so he works late, or works in his home office, or goes out with friends. Life sometimes feels like a flurry of activity and then I start to miss the slow pace of Virginia. We used to love to grocery shop. (Okay...I did. But I also loved dragging T with me to do it.) Now it's a chore I can barely squeeze in, and we walk the two blocks to pick up little things here and there instead of making it a whole excursion.

I just feel run down and I miss the little world we had in the smaller city. It all felt more mangeable, more healthy. We're just changing, evolving, I know. I know that's normal. But in some ways I think I want to redirect the course of that change a little. Get back a little of the cozier lifestyle where we had to work for our fun, instead of buying it for $2 a can on just about any corner in the city. KWIM?

End of 2L year

Wow. Watched my husband dance shirtless with Best Man. Ate wayyyyyy too many green beans to count. Apparently forgot how the can of green beans got opened. And then started surfing the internet while T walked the dog.

Summer, here I am!

tee hee

T is out with some friends from out of town. I skipped Trial Ad to do research for a paper I have due on Tuesday. It's been a productive day.

My reward? I just went here [nsfw] and bought a fun surprise using a code for 50% off any item that I got from listening to the Savage Love podcast. Don't you love fun surprises?

Tee hee.

So last night...

I went to quizzo with T and some of our friends from the neighborhood. Nobody else showed up to play, so the seven of us split into two teams. We drank while we waited for other teams to show up. We drank while we trash talked each other through six rounds of trivia. And when it was over (my team won! T's team lost!), the bar owner came around with shots of Jim Beam, one for each of us.

Yeah.

Well, I thought I was just drinking regular beer. I picked the Sixpoint Righteous Ale off the draft menu because it sounded good. Then, because it actually was good, I had another (two). Three beers and a shot of whisky is a big night, especially for a Wednesday. But T was matching me drink for drink with his Stella Artois. So why didn't he wake up with a killer headache? Why was I the only one incapable of facing the day until noon?

Turns out, it's because those beers I was drinking? Turned out to be fancy 7.4% ABV (high-alcohol) beers. Whoops.

I'm not gonna lie. I wanted to go big last night. After having it casually dropped in a phone conversation with my parents that my dad had a biopsy done of a recently-discovered lump...meanwhile we're still waiting for that mass they found in my mom to be removed... and then there's the family dog that apparently they expected was going to up and die yesterday, before he made yet another miraculous recovery (at 15 years, he's had quite a few). I mean, at least I was being intentional and all. But I didn't quite intend to go as big as I went. And I paid for it this morning. Ughhhhhh.

And I'm paying for it now, too, as I catch up on all the reading I should've done last night, for the classes I should've gone to today. (Just kidding. I made T help me cook pad thai for dinner, then we took the Myers-Briggs personality test online after the 10-question 2010 census didn't quite live up to T's great survey expectations.)

1/2 way to what?!?

Full disclosure: I am drunk.

I went to our school-sponsored party for 2Ls. It's a celebration of our being halfway done with law school.

Since T went down to VA without me, I figured I would attend the party with one of my girlfriends. On account of my recent chest cold, I decided to cab it up to her place. The cabbie and I discussed my evening plans:

"We're going to Mc....something..."

"McFaddens?"

"No..."

"McGlinchy's?"

"No...."

"Finn McCools?"

"No...."

And on and on... We got into a conversation about drinking and bootlegging in Greece (his home country), and eventually snagged my girlfriend. Then off we went.

Okay. Going out is fun. It's nice to socialize, there's no doubt about it. I like getting to talk to the girls in my old 1L section and gossip and generally get the facetime in. But I missed T. Everyone wanted to know where my "man" was. I only put it it quotes because, literally, everyone used the same word. I liked bragging on him and talking about our wedding with people I've hardly had a conversation with all year.

In the end, however, it was more of the same. I went to another bar with some of my friends. I called T from a restroom stall and asked him to talk to his friend in VA about having kids and what that's like. I am pretty sure I laid all my cards on the table for his buddy, as T repeated back to me my request, apparently in front of his friend. Then I went back to the bar and told my good guy friend V about my faux pax. He said: "So you want to have a baby." And I didn't really care that he put it so bluntly, because just an hour earlier, he had come out of the closet.

And that, my friends, is law school. A whole bunch of self-induced drama, mixed up with some alcohol and black letter law.

chore chart

last monday, T came up with the idea that we should have a chore chart. (okay, so we've both come up with that idea, in various incarnations, thousands of times.) we decided to start small, and anyone who knows T will know that this was a major compromise on his part. our bigger, loftier chore charts have invariably failed, leaving both of us feeling annoyed, inadequate, gross or a combo of all 3.

i should add that i am the messy one.

anyway, we are now on week 2 of the chore chart. and it's going well enough that i feel inspired to write about it.

i spend a lot (pero MUCHO!) of time psychologizing my inability to keep a clean house. T has not unfairly observed that this psychologizing is a fantastically effective way to put off actual efforts to clean (and throw conversations about the problem wayyyyy off-track). among my various theories for my messiness, which i will boldly posit despite their shameless tone of unaccountability:

first, my mom never made me clean. she just did it all herself. sure, she would ask me put my dishes in the dishwasher. she would later downgrade that request to simply getting the dishes in the sink. usually if i ever did anything around the house, it was because mom nagged me into doing it or because she had decided on one occasion or another to actually enforce her demand. ("what did i tell you? you may not go upstairs and play until you have put away your dishes," called up to me from the kitchen as i reluctantly left my brother's bedroom where we had scattered all his micro-machines after dinner.)

then there was my dad's popular "this house is falling apart" refrain. or: "we don't know how to take care of our things." these two laments were so constantly echoing around the house, loudly proclaimed whenever something did not live up to his own standards of what he had expected grown-up life with a big house and two kids to be. i heard it so regularly that i must have believed it. i mean, what's the point in trying to keep it together if only the failures get recognized, right? negative reinforcement at its finest.

and perhaps he had a point. after all, i lived in a house where a giant pot-shaped circle was seared into the linoleum of our kitchen floor for years, due to a cooking mishap involving a saucepan, my mom and fire. never fixed. i watched water stains grow and take shape on the ceiling of my parents' bedroom. but mostly i don't remember there being a lot of clutter or mess, even though my mom talked about it all the time. i suspect that this lack of memory isn't due to my actually living in a clean house, but due to the fact that when you're a kid what you know is your normal.

so excuse me, mr. clean husband. i grew up thinking that it was perfectly normal to have 3 coffee mugs cluttered around your bedside table, that it makes perfect sense to hang your purse on the back of the bathroom door and just because the sink is full tonight doesn't mean it won't be clean in the morning.

i jest.

obviously i am a grown-up who needs to be a cleaner person. and the only reason i am indulging in this little shoe-gazing, tongue-in-cheek reflection on my days of yore is that today i happily cleaned the kitchen. belting out tim mcgraw. talking incessantly to the dog. scrubbing pots and pans and spraying down the counters and setting up our new programmable coffee maker for tomorrow morning's brew. i cleaned the kitchen. and you know what? it felt damn good. and yes, i may have snapped at T for offering to help me put a plate up on a high cabinet, and may have compared his generous offer to that of a mother following her toddler around the housewares aisle of Macy's. (sorry again, handsome.) but you know why? it's cause i'm groooowing. i'm sensing my independence and i can do it myself thankyouverymuch. this is a good thing. if this routine keeps up, i may even graduate to other parts of the house!

and it burns burns burns

"Congratulations! You have a UTI."

Pretty much sums up my day. Am I the only 2L having a really hard time focusing on school work, by the way?

I remember

I'm only updating because I happened to already be logged on from leaving comments elsewhere. Otherwise I probably wouldn't bother. Why? Oh, I don't know. I just wouldn't.

I have been having some trouble lately. T & I ate dinner on the floor last night (at my insistence) and I confessed to him that I am freaking out lately. (As if he hadn't noticed.) As we were talking, words tumbled from my mouth and it is as if they landed brick-like on my toes, startling me into realizing their full weight. "When I grew up, I was kind of always waiting for everything to completely fall apart." Duh. I really was. I remember standing at the window of my parents' bedroom, watching my mom walk through the snow to her car and drive away after a loud, frightening fight. I remember being afraid, like she was never coming back. I remember sitting in the coat closet with the girls in my 5th grade class, mentioning that my brother and I felt scared of my dad coming home from work. I remember them laughing at me. "Scared?" one girl said. "Of your dad?" They laughed louder. I remember being tucked in by my mom and asking why they couldn't just work it out. I remember telling her that they should just sit in a room and talk about it. She said, I remember, that it was a good idea. That they really should do that. I remember saying to her, "Yeah, and I could help you talk to each other." I really thought I could. I remember she said, "Oh, no, honey." Something about how I couldn't be a part of that conversation. I remember being upset. Why not? They obviously couldn't figure it out without me. It was all so obvious to me. If they could just SEE what I saw, they could get along. It was so stupid, all their anger and tears and sadness. Obviously it was all a big misunderstanding. Logic. That was the key. Sane logic and a 10-year old referee sitting in a chair between them to help them come to an agreement.

Is it any wonder I ended up in law school? Haha. Seriously, I've worked through my stuff for the most part. I love my parents and feel lucky to have had them. Big time. I couldn't feel more loved. Understood, maybe, some of the time. But more loved? Never. However. I certainly had no role model for marriage when I was growing up. What I learned was that family was close, family came first and family felt like living on a fault line: it wasn't quite a disaster zone, but I was never entirely convinced that the earth wasn't about to open up beneath my feet.

So yeah. As I tried to articulate to T why I have felt like an insecure train wreck lately, it occurred to me that maybe I am just working through something. Maybe I am just having trouble believing that I am standing on steady ground, or that this family, this life, is something altogether different from the one I once knew.

my potbelly is not cute

my best friend just posted pictures on facebook from her recent trip to visit me and T here in the Big City. wow. i've noticed for a long time, but i avoid being aware of it as much as possible. i have a mad potbelly. i'm not big all over. i used to be very thin, which i didn't take pride in or really even care about. it was just the way my body was shaped. but now, i am rounding out in a big way, and also in a very particular way. my stomach protrudes. when i stand sideways, i look pregnant. it's not cool.

i finally googled "why does my stomach stick out so much?" and came to the conclusion that i have visceral fat. this is, essentially, fat packed into my stomach between my guts. yummy yummy. and what's weird? it's mostly associated with men and post-menopausal women. the female horemone estrogen causes most women to store fat in their legs, butt and thighs. (i do some of this too.) i am truly starting to suspect that my body's horemones are all messed up. between the stomach fat-packing, the hair falling out in the shower, and the odd cycles, i'm starting to think something in me is very confused.

anyway. i want, but *really* want, to lose this pot. my mom has one. i could write myself off as doomed. but this early on in my marriage i think i need to try a little harder than that. so what does the internet say i should do?

1. 30 minutes of cardio 6 days a week.
2. stop the alcohol (at least for a couple months, and then keep it down)
3. cut out junk and fast food, and consider going gluten-free

lately, i have slacked off on my previously healthier lifestyle by:
- drinking soda
- eating fast food
- drinking lots of beer
- riding the train to school, rather than walking to work

so, i am going to make an effort to exercise at the school gym on tuesdays, thursdays and fridays, and take a good long (dog-free) walk once a weekend. stop drinking all soda. stop eating all fried food. only drink on weekends. avoid beer.

lets see if i can't slim down that potbelly of mine.

Spring forward, fall back down

I'm catching up. On everything. It feels very productive. It feels great!

I stupidly left my prozac at home when we left for our vacation; and then I couldn't get my new prescription filled in Spain. Here are some side effects of my having fallen off the medication for over a week now:

- While we were at a layover in Madrid on our way home, I was filled with rage over... what? I don't remember. I just remember walking past a vending machine in the airport and thinking, "this is that same rageful feeling I had the last time I was off medication for a while. not good." It might have also had something to do with the not having slept the night before and spending an entire day in airports and on airplanes.

- Last night I had a brief (45 second) temper tantrum over (a) my fingers going numb after I got up from typing at the computer, (b) T noticing a stain on my underwear and (c) having chosen to walk 7 city blocks barefoot and suffering the blistering consequences. I threw myself down on the couch and tried to cry, but couldn't. T simply waited 45 seconds, then we left and had a fun night out with friends.

- I have had a really hard time summoning the motivation to walk the two blocks to the pharmacy to get my prescription filled; summoning the motivation to stay logged in to e-mail to respond to well-wishers; summoning the motivation to brew coffee.

- I'm about to walk out the door to have dinner with T. This thrills me. I am ecstatic. On prozac, I would be merely pleased, content, satisfied. I can't wait to have beans and rice in my belly.

Why do I always write about forgetting to take my medication? It seems that I slip the fact that I'm on prozac into conversation regularly. The reason is that I want to normalize it. For all the talk about how anti-depressants are handed out like candy, there is an awful lot of stigma surrounding medication and mental health. Maybe someone out there is considering medication but still thinks it's "the easy way out" or that they just need to "suck it up." I'm not saying everyone who thinks they could use prozac should get on it; but I want to put my own experiences with it out there. Why not?

Disclaimer: I tend to poke fun at myself on here and be a little self-deprecating because it makes me feel more comfortable writing about this stuff. But I also fear I run the risk of coming across as a real jerk or something. I am not a real jerk or something.

So, anyway... I want to write all about the wedding and the honeymoon and all that. But last night, I sat down at a bar with my friend Best Woman, and let loose with a nice long vent about all the things that stressed me out during the reception, and I felt a lot better afterward, and right now I just don't feel like writing about it. I will, eventually. It'll probably come out in little snippets, etc. But anone who reads this probably doesn't want a long re-cap anyway. So suffice it to say, it was beautiful, I had a TON of fun despite whatever gripes came out of my mouth last night, and I can not WAIT to get the pictures back!

School starts on Monday. I went to campus yesterday because I'm involved with the National Immigration Project of our NLG chapter and I got to do a little representing to the 1Ls. It was pretty fun to see all the now-old/familiar faces running around, all of us acting all big and tough and comfortable in the law building, despite the fact every single one of us fears those first day reading assignments taunting us from our Word document syllabi. I'm one of the "lucky" ones who is not on a journal and not doing OCI -- does that make me dumb? I'm not sure yet. But the flipside of the exciting commencement of a new year and getting to see school friends again is that every single conversation, without fail, involves at least one moment of "WTF -- am I supposed to be doing that?!?!" Seriously. This is what people mean when they say law school is stressful. At least to me. The stress is in the constant feeling like you're not measuring up, like you're not running fast enough, and you're constantly two steps behind. I'm going to do my best to push past that little voice in my head this semester, and just do it my way, and trust myself to get to where I want to be.

Now, I must go because somewhere a few blocks away there is a bean and cheese burrito with my name on it. I wouldn't want to let it down.

Down to Virginia

We are headed down to Virginia in just a few moments. I've stolen away with my cup of coffee to sit here and make a quick little blog post. We're on our way to visit the site where we'll get married, and take care of all those details we've put off to the last minute. (Photographer, I know you're out there somewhere...) In three weeks, more or less, we're getting married. Wow. I'm still having wedding dreams, but they're less and less like nightmares and more and more excitement and happiness.

The dog is hanging around our feet tonight because the sky was rumbling so much earlier. He has no idea we're about to shove him into the trunk of T's hatchback for a long haul south. But once we get there, he'll be glad. There's much more room to run and play, and many more gross and smelly things to roll in. Pretty soon, he's gonna get a weeklong vacation in the country, while dog-mom and dog-dad go to Spain!

Another weird thing: I can't stop burping. It's getting gross. I think burps are more disgusting than farts by a long shot. A few minutes ago, I sat down next to T on the couch, and immediately began a chain reaction of mini-burps. "I'm so glad you chose right here to sit," says T, snarkily. So I got up to write this post instead. Have a good weekend!