Ivy Lea(gue)

Commencing, Part Two

2011-08-05T10:52:00.005-04:00

I can't help but think some self-congratulation is in order. Not only did I survive sitting the Texas bar exam last week, but I think I've taken excellent advantage of the eight days since then to relax and have fun. But I guess that's only admirable if you can understand how much it had started to feel like I might never relax or have fun again. So let's start at the beginning.

When Russell and I got back from Cambridge, we had to settle into a mostly empty house for about two weeks while our moving pods were on their way. All we had were some basics I'd needed to live here those three weeks I came home before commencement (dishes, towels, a mattress) plus a few pieces of furniture I'd bought to help fill the bigger space (barstools, a small china cabinet, an armchair). No couch, dining table, TV, desks, nada. This wore on Russell and me somewhat, but our housemate and study buddy for the summer, Robert (the same one with the crazy trek to commencement I mentioned last post) seemed to have the hardest time with it. I kept finding him contorted in odd positions trying to read, which I felt bad about.

Especially since there wasn't much fun going on to distract us. Bar review classes were already underway when we got back from commencement, so we had no time to ease in. Each day we headed to a private conference center in north-central Austin for a lecture lasting from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. or so, and sometimes another from 1:30 to about 4 p.m. Each lecture covered a different topic due to be tested on the bar exam, from Constitutional Law to Wills and Estate Administration.

Of the nine books of study materials we received in advance, many as thick and floppy as phone books, one was a big black book full of worksheets for these lectures. Basically these were outlines of the topics with blanks every so often for us to fill in, which several lecturers admitted were only there to keep us awake. Really advanced, well-proven teaching techniques, don't you think? This lasted four or six days a week (for some reason they alternated between giving us one-day and three-day weekends) for eight weeks. As Russell would put it, BARF.

And of course, that was only the in-class part. Outside of class, the bar review company's website fed us reading and practice assignments daily. Each night we were supposed to re-read the worksheet from that day's lecture, then practice answering multiple-choice or essay questions on it, then review the next day's topic in advance. I did a lot of this stuff - always the reading for the next day, often the practice questions - but it was literally not possible to do it all and have anything resembling a life. Eating dinner with friends, seeing a movie once in a while, or most importantly meeting my mom for her daily radiation treatments all happened at the cost of some bar review task or other. Robert had fewer of these kinds of things going on, and he was a lot more willing to turn down social invitations than me, so he got through a lot more. But I just couldn't bring myself to sacrifice that much for a pass-fail test.

Meanwhile, our moving pods also arrived at long last, and Russell and his dad managed to unload them completely in one morning while we had class. But unpacking everything was left to us, and I was determined to live out of boxes for as short a time as possible, knowing what the clutter and disorder would do to my test-prep focus in the long run. After a few days balancing the minimum necessary studying with a frenzy of unpacking, organizing, furniture-arranging, picture-framing, curtain-hanging, and cleaning, the house was more or less to my satisfaction. I left a few things for later, things I still need to do, but I think it looks pretty great. I'll try to post pictures sometime soon.

So then it was back to the bar review grind, but at least with enough furniture to make us all comfortable this time. I got my balance of (fairly) heavy studying and (some) social life back, even managing three days in Las Vegas with Russell's family in late June and a fantastic housewarming/cookout with about 20 people on July 4th. The next day, just like one of our bar lecturers predicted, I kicked into high gear. We had one week of classes left; they ended two weeks before the exam began on July 26. I made a schedule with the aim of finishing all the work the bar review people had recommended, plus a little more on my weaker subjects, in time for the exam. This would require about 4-5 practice essays or multiple choice sets per day, plus the necessary reading to review for them.

Amazingly, I got it done. Besides about 2/3 of a day to see the final Harry Potter movie with a big group I'd organized and one day to float the Comal River on inner tubes with some friends soon to move out of state, I took virtually no breaks for three weeks. My scores on the practice multiple choice sets fluctuated, but mostly stayed above passing, and the essays I submitted for grading online were getting high enough scores to bolster the rest if need be. Exhausted, I took the bar lecturers' advice and did virtually no studying the last day before the exam. I saw Harry Potter again at the Alamo Drafthouse with my mom, wandered the aisles at Target, had a couple of good arguments with Robert (a Republican, which if it isn't glaringly obvious yet is not my persuasion) and bought enough breakfast tacos to eat on the way out the door each day of the test.

Which went fine. Seriously. So fine, and so much as expected, that I actually had moments of doubt wondering what I was missing. It was held in a big, bare convention space in the city's Palmer Events Center, just across the river from downtown and a little over ten minutes from our house. My assigned seat was at the end (very much my preference) of one of several hundred long, metal tables covered in white paper, with power strips running underneath for the parts of the exam where we could use laptops. I got surprisingly comfortable there over the three days.

The 26th was only a half-day of testing, with the 90-minute Multistate Performance Test (a kind of closed-universe problem-solving thing where you use a made-up case file to write a legal document, in this case a memo persuading members of a state committee that something would be unethical) and the 45-minute Criminal Procedure & Evidence and Civil Procedure & Evidence short-answer tests that day. I was more time-pressured than I had been in practice, so I got to proofread less than usual, but afterward everyone else said the same thing. I was also happy to have remembered (vaguely, but enough to cobble together an answer) an obscure bit of vocabulary that seemed to stump a lot of people on one question. I know because, however much we were told not to, Robert and I and the group we sat with at bar review couldn't resist going over our general impressions afterward.

The 27th was the Multistate Bar Exam, the multiple-choice part I had been a tad more nervous about. In the three-hour morning session, I got hung up on a Contracts question I felt like I should know but didn't, and that shook my confidence for a while. But overall, it felt like most of my practice runs: several questions I was certain about, a few where I had no clue, and a lot I could narrow down to two answer choices but then had to guess. Since a passing score often involves only half to two-thirds correct answers, this seemed all right. After sandwiches at nearby café for lunch, the second half felt different - fewer questions I was certain about, but a lot more where I was more than half sure - but equally fine. Driving home afterward, Robert and I both said we felt like we did what we needed to do: in his case, get a score high enough to balance out a weaker essay section the next day, and in my case, get a score that could be balanced out by better essays.

The 28th was my best day by far; not only were the essays bound to be my strong suit anyway, but I also felt like the examiners didn't throw many of the curve balls they could have. On two different questions, I couldn't remember an important part of the topic being tested, and then the question turned out to skirt that part completely, so I could give a super complete answer without it. On others, I couldn't remember ever learning a particular legal test and had to make one up based on the facts that seemed to be important in the question. But we'd been told this would be necessary on a regular basis and that the examiners would weigh our reasoning and organization much more heavily than our memory for actual law, so that was no cause for concern.

Leaving the exam site that day, shaky with relief, I was so happy to be ending on that high note. After a few hours decompressing at home, Russell took Robert and I to a pub downtown for fried pickles, burgers, and (in my case) too many prickly pear margaritas. We shouted a lot of things about having shown the bar examiners who was boss. It was excellent.

So then the exam was over, and with it my time as a student, the most important role I have played every day of my life so far. Russell and I knew this deserved some commemoration, even though we lacked the budget (and I frankly knew I would lack the energy) for anything so exotic as the trips to Asia, Turkey, Peru, and who knows where else my classmates had planned. So we booked five days at the Hyatt Regency Lost Pines Resort and Spa, which is just outside Bastrop State Park, about an hour drive from Austin. We just got back, and oh my god, the time we had!

The first night we watched the resort's excellent choice of family movie, Mulan, outdoors on the grass with free popcorn. The first full day we went rock climbing and zip lining at the neighboring McKinney Roughs Nature Park, then lounged by the gorgeous pool and floated the "crooked river" tube ride to our hearts' content. The second day, we took advantage of the free bicycle checkout to explore the grounds, including meeting some adolescent alpaca and miniature donkeys in the pasture (too cute to be true.) We threw horseshoes, spent more time by the pool, and then watched another outdoor movie, this time Finding Nemo. The next day was probably the best: after riding bikes again, we took a 3.5-mile kayak trip on the Colorado River, beginning upstream from the resort and winding up on our own doorstep. It was the most beautiful combination of sun, water, trees, and wildlife I'd seen in a long time. And after a little recovery time back in our room, I headed - you guessed it - back to the pool. Followed by a foot treatment at the nearby spa. Followed by room service and a movie with Russell. Followed by our last night of blissful sleep without our feline alarm clock going off every few hours.

It was hard coming home from all that, and I can't recommend the place enough to anyone wanting a vacation in Central Texas. Combining just enough relaxation with just enough adventure, it was the perfect way to celebrate our return to this beautiful state and kick off this next phase in my life. I'll miss so many things about the last phase (not the most recent few months, obviously), but mostly can't wait to get going on the new one.

Commencing, Part One

2011-07-12T23:43:00.006-04:00

The insanity continues! I'm sure my total disappearance has made that obvious, but it bears repeating. If bar review isn't the absolute least pleasant thing I've ever done in my life, it at least gives the full decade of heavy-duty orthodontia I once endured a run for its money.

But I want to look back on commencement a little bit, while some memory of it isn't totally crowded out by oil and gas law or corporate director indemnification, and only then work my way up to where I am now, running this miserable gauntlet that supposedly marks the start of my career and adult life.

I flew back to Cambridge several days before commencement and spent all of them boxing up books, clothes, office supplies, decorations, and all the other odds and ends Russell couldn't get to while still working full time at Harvard. When I looked up and it was suddenly Class Day, the day prior to commencement marked by several law-school-specific festivities, and I needed to meet my mother and her fiancée for brunch, not nearly enough was done. For all my hard work, I looked around our place and still pretty much saw our place, not the mostly empty shell I had pictured us easily transferring into our moving pods the weekend after commencement.

So that caused some panic, but I had to set it aside and soak up the celebration that was coming whether I was ready or not. Class day was fantastic, with a few relatives trickling in throughout the day to hear Alec Baldwin's memorable address to our class - he said if he could go back and take our career path over his, he would do it - and see perhaps my all-time favorite professor accept the teaching award from my graduating class with such humor and poignancy it made me cry. Dinner was pub fare at Cambridge Common, such a beloved law student haunt that I was shocked the family could find a table, but happy to show them where I had spent so many good times over the years.

My dad arrived late that evening, after a tremendous snafu by his airline that he only managed to salvage through a huge expense of time and money that I still feel awful about. (My aunt and uncle, originally set to fly with him, arrived even later because he literally took the last seat on the less delayed of the two remaining flights that day. Just think what that would probably cost, and double it, and you may be in the ballpark.)

Still, when we had to get up before dawn the next day to stop for coffee and pastries (a bit of a father-daughter graduation tradition) before I went to line up at the law school and he went to meet my mom to claim their two seats at the enormous university-wide ceremony, he was positively cheerful. It was hard to leave him and know I would have no contact with them through all the pomp and circumstance that morning.

But it was also great to join my friends in the big march from the law school grounds to the Old Yard, where the graduate students all wait to process to their seats. We joked around, took tons of pictures, and listened to one particular friend, Robert, relate his incredible ordeal getting to Cambridge to walk with us. Like my dad, aunt, and uncle, his flight out of Dallas was cancelled, but only after he had reached Dallas and thus ruled out any other possible routes. After almost a day in both that city's airports, he wound up on a plane to Baltimore, where some nearby relatives picked him up and drove him through the night to meet us literally halfway through our march to the Yard. It was like something out of Home Alone, but there he was, smiling for photos with the rest of us, while the Dean of Students scrambled to find him a gavel to carry and a safety pin to keep the hood on his commencement gown in place.

On reaching our seats, we settled in for over three hours of ceremony, including one address in Latin (mercifully translated in the program) and separate certifications of the graduates from each school. Things got warm as the sun crept over the buildings around the Yard, people were coming and going frequently for water or the restroom by the end, and most of us seated in the sun eventually wriggled out of our heavy gowns as discreetly as possible. After much shouting and tears when we were pronounced "ready to aid in the shaping and application of those wise restraints that make men free," and after the honorary degrees were awarded (including to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and to Placido Domingo, who spontaneously sang for the Justice after hearing she was a big opera fan), we had to rush to get our robes back on to leave. After meeting my enormous family at the tables they'd claimed on Holmes Field, I stripped right back out again. So there are a lot of pictures of me from that day in just a black dress.

The law school ceremony was excellent, much briefer, and surprisingly informal with all the graduates and their families eating lunch at round tables packed onto the field. I, for one, completely chowed down and chatted quietly with my family through most of it. I was so happy to see them, a dozen or so having flown in the night before and not seen me yet, that their faces and kind words are what I remember most from the afternoon. Of course, Justice Ginsburg deciding to drop by and give an impromptu pep talk was also pretty spectacular. The graduates were called by first-year section to line up to receive diplomas, and my section was last, so I got a solid block of time to relax beforehand. Then there was a brief moment of panic when a problem with my robes made me the last person in the section to line up. I arrived with plenty of time, it turned out, but I regret not having longer with my classmates before we each walked across the stage and into our new lives.

That was definitely a surreal experience, up in front of the library with the trees rustling and cameras flashing all around. I don't know if it was appropriate, but I threw my arms around our section's faculty leader as he reached to shake my hand before I stepped off the stage. Other people had said they were going to do it, so I figured why not. On a broad set of steps near where we all picked up our actual diplomas (the thing they hand you on stage is just a cover to put it in), somebody suggested that all the section-mates hang out and take a picture together. We waited for every last person to walk, squeezed in tight, and smiled out at a hundred or so parents and spouses with cameras. In every shot I've seen so far, I'm making some funny face or other. I sure hope to find a good one someday.

So that was it, I had graduated, and the ceremony wound down quickly while I posed for a million more pictures with each family member of mine who had come. I knew that was important, but I was glad when it was over and I could take the robes off again and lead the group on a tour of the campus I love so much. We saw the gorgeous library reading room, one of the classrooms in Austin Hall (where everyone, very understandably, had to play at length with the microphones), and the Ames Courtroom, among other places. Then we ventured into my neighborhood, partly to show my Nana (who is the best cook anyone who meets her has ever met) the house where Julia Child lived and her favorite gourmet grocer where she signed "Bon Appetit!" in the sidewalk outside. Then we stopped for some refreshing sangria at Dali before heading through the Yard to catch the subway to dinner. We had a party space arranged at Tavern in Porter Square, where everyone loved the risotto fritters I hadn't shut up about for three years.

It was perfect.

Three fantastic days touring Boston with the family followed. We hit up the Freedom Trail, the North End, the Samuel Adams Brewery, the Kennedy Library, and who knows what else - my head spins just thinking about it. My feet have never hurt so badly in my life, and I used to dance ballet. But I could not have ended law school (not to mention three years in the dreary Northeast, which of course mustered such gorgeous weather for my relatives' entire visit that none of them believed me about the miserable climate) with a bigger bang.

And then Russell and I, with the help of some friends, neighbors, and one fabulous aunt who stayed for the duration, had to wrangle the rest of our belongings into boxes and load them into two moving pods and board a flight home to Texas.

What has happened since we got there, I think I'd better leave for another day.

Utter insanity

2011-06-20T21:46:00.006-04:00

There's no other way to describe the experience of graduating from Harvard Law School, rushing home to start three-to-eight-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week bar review classes (and reading assignments, practice essays, and multiple choice drills), AND getting three people and a cat moved into a house WHILE two of your friends get married, another is in town from Hawaii, and your mom undergoes radiation therapy.

I've had scarcely enough time to sleep, eat, and shower, much less post updates on graduation and life afterward (to the extent that I get to have one!) But I thought some photos might satiate you for now. Enjoy:

Favorite Thing #8

2011-05-30T10:48:00.007-04:00

I graduated on Thursday, and the grandeur and finality of that experience has still barely sunk in at all. The days in between have been a big blur of entertaining family around Boston, packing our belongings, and saying goodbye to some of the most extraordinary people I'll ever have the good fortune to know. I'm in total awe of the accomplishments of all my friends here and desperately sad to have to leave them tomorrow afternoon.

Anyhow, by Saturday morning when I took off for breakfast with my cousins, things had mostly quieted down on my path from the apartment to the Harvard Square subway stop. Reminders were everywhere of how much I have loved making that walk in the mornings, when the crowds of tourists haven't yet formed and there are glimpses of scenery so quiet and stately that I would hardly be surprised if a horse-drawn buggy appeared from around a corner somewhere.

As I walked, I started taking these pictures with my phone, using Hipstamatic settings on random. I think they capture it pretty well:

Favorite Things #5, 6, and 7

2011-05-19T18:05:00.001-04:00

As the content of every travel guide I've ever read seems to prove, a major part of the experience of any place is the food. I'm moving home to a place with such outstanding, diverse, and crave-worthy food that I've missed that aspect of it almost as much as all the others combined. But there is also food in Cambridge, which isn't even particularly renowned for its dining, that my heart absolutely aches to think of leaving behind. So I want to dedicate a couple of Favorite Things to that.

1. The Veggie Bill Clinton at Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage, the tiny greasy-spoon establishment on Massachusetts Ave. just east of Harvard Square. I'm really struggling to get used to the idea that I may never have a veggie burger this satisfying again in my life. The Bill Clinton, named in gentle mockery of a public figure like all the other "gourmet" menu items at Bartley's, is smothered in barbecue sauce and cheddar cheese. And like every other burger there, you can order it with a veggie patty instead of meat. I'm sure some Bartley's acolytes think this is total sacrilege, but at a place whose offerings are so clearly about the delicious and creative toppings anyway, and for a dish that tastes so meaty and traditional and un-vegetarian without actually violating my chosen diet, I'm happy to tell them all to bite me. At least until I one this great in Austin, and then I can just shut up about my beloved "Veggie Bill," as the waiters call it.

2. The breakfast sandwiches on homemade English muffins at Crema Cafe. This wonderful coffee shop and bakery had just opened when my mother and I made our inaugural visit to Harvard back in May 2008, when I had just been admitted and realized I needed to find an apartment pronto. Because it was the first place we ever ate on that trip, and because we discovered it all by ourselves, we've had some sense of ownership or investment in its success ever since, and we shamelessly plug it to anyone with any opportunity to go. Happily, it is always jam-packed with people today - undoubtably due in part to the english muffins, ridiculous as that sounds. These things are like nothing you've ever tasted, totally incomparable to the store-bought variety. Tangy like a buttermilk biscuit, but more buttery (yes, that's possible) and less dense, they combine with the gooey cheese and peppery, always searing-hot eggs in such a simple yet wonderful way that it's difficult not to go back and order seconds. Maybe the staff will give me the recipe if I explain that I'm leaving forever and may wake up in tears on some future Sunday morning otherwise.

3. Everything on the menu at Dali, the eclectic and always absurdly crowded tapas place three blocks from our apartment. Every time I've been, whether for a friend's birthday, a date on some special occasion, or an end-of-week happy hour courtesy of Russell's boss, I haven't been able to shut up about a single thing on my plate. From the powerful sangria to the spicy potatoes with tart aioli on top, the rich tortilla espanola, the broccoli-cauliflower fritters, and most of all the creamy, sweet fried goat cheese we almost always order twice, I have never had a meal there not worth the high price and long wait (nor has anyone else, I think, based on the unsolicited effusive praise most people offer when they find out I live so close to the place.) I'm so glad we have plans to eat there one more time before moving!

Well, wow - can you tell I've been eating a lot of my own lower-calorie cooking lately in hopes of looking a little slimmer in all the pictures I'll be taking around graduation? I guess I should be careful not to undo all my efforts by scarfing everything in sight from the moment I land at Logan Airport! Maybe a post about the fantastic eating in Austin, just to remind myself not to seize too frantically on all my last opportunities to enjoy these foods, is in order. (:

Favorite Thing #4

2011-05-17T17:31:00.004-04:00

My apologies for the long gap in posts as I wrapped up my final papers and got settled in a new house with no Internet yet! At the moment I'm sitting in the sunshine and 88-degree warmth on the beautiful lakeside patio at Mozart's Coffee Roasters in Austin, taking advantage of the free wireless and trying to get a little tan on my arms and legs so people at graduation will believe I spent three weeks away from Cambridge, where it's 49 degrees today.

Weather aside, though, as graduation grows nearer and nearer, I definitely find myself thinking of my favorite parts of living and studying there. A big one came to mind recently when the Dean of Students Office sent its weekly e-mail about graduation logistics. And fortunately, it's one thing about Harvard that I will NOT have to miss: my law school e-mail address.

It may sound minor, but I have to say how much I love that student e-mail addresses at HLS are assigned for life, so I will never have to surrender mine the way I did after finishing my bachelor's at Texas. There is something so great about the fact that, as long as I live, people can contact me by typing in my first initial, last name, and the domain "jd11.law.harvard.edu." And that I can contact my classmates the same way for as long as they live, too.

Harvard will quit storing e-mails sent to this address and instead forward them to another one we provide, so I finally had to set up that Gmail account I'd been avoiding, enjoying the simplicity of having just one e-mail address. But this was obviously for the best, and I know it's the only way Harvard could feasibly allow their alumni to keep their e-mail addresses forever. It still adds to the sense that by going here, I have joined a community with which I'll want to stay connected my whole life. Cheesy, like so much of what I've written here the past three years, but true.

Favorite Thing #3

2011-04-25T09:47:00.005-04:00

I'm in Austin now, finishing papers away from the stressful law school atmosphere and getting settled for the summer and bar review before flying back to Cambridge to graduate and pack up the apartment. I think it's going to be fun doing these Favorite Things from here, where they take on a little extra nostalgia.

This is my favorite building on the law campus, the library, Langdell Hall.

It's so different from most of the other law buildings, and so much the epitome of what I think a law library should be, that it about stopped my heart the first time I rounded a corner on campus and saw the exterior and again when I hit the top of the stairs from the dim lower floors into the gorgeous Reading Room.

A huge portion of the things I'll miss most from Harvard are located in this building. For one thing, there's a table where I know a few members of my 1L section will always be sitting if I need some moral support while studying. Also, a funny assortment of milestones have happened around the printers on the ground floor, because ours at home isn't quite reliable enough for the really important stuff. So my applications to TAP, various "by permission of the professor" courses, and the Texas Bar issued from this building. And the lease for my house in Austin, which begins May 5.

I'm going to miss having access to insanely rare historical documents on demand. A scanner that nobody ever seems to be using when I need it. Reference librarians who work unbelievable hours and will always hand me a spare Bluebook when I leave mine at home. Big containers of staples, paper clips, and binder clips for anybody to take. The DVD library where I got seasons of The West Wing to show Russell. Having somewhere beautiful and nearly silent to work, sleep, or just stare outside whenever I want.

I told you these posts were going to be extra nostalgic.

Favorite Thing #2

2011-04-22T08:00:00.007-04:00

These are my two favorite trees on the whole Harvard campus.

There's another one just like them outside Adolphus Busch Hall on my street, but it can't match the sort of critical mass of gorgeousness of these two together.

Because of the hardiness and waxy texture of the flowers, I was tempted to think they were magnolias. But the pink color (much brighter in person) and the shape of the trees didn't match any magnolia trees we had back home. So I did a little research, and it turns out there are some varieties of magnolia a lot more like these. So I'm pretty certain that's what they are.

It's so nice to have them waiting, in the springtime at least, at the end of a shortcut I take to school between some ugly science buildings. Just when I start to wish I'd taken the longer, more attractive route, there they are.

I've stopped to photograph them so much more than their fair share over the years, I almost wonder if the other trees are getting jealous. But these are the ones I'm really going to miss.

Favorite things

2011-04-21T09:03:00.005-04:00

With so much of my life wrapped up in preparing to leave this place, whether it's frantically writing final papers so I can get my grades and graduate or buying a duffel-shaped carrier and one of those ridiculous cat leashes to get Ramona through security for the flight home, I thought I should expend a little energy remembering the things I've loved here.

So prepare yourself for a series of sappy posts about my favorite things at Harvard and in Cambridge. I'll try to keep the sentimentality from getting too ridiculous, but no promises.

Thing #1 is that Richard J. Lazarus, who was only visiting Harvard when he taught my first-year Torts class and became one of my all-time favorite professors, has finally been recruited to join the faculty permanently. I have no idea what it ultimately took to pull him away from Georgetown and its easy access to the Supreme Court, but I know they tried for years, and this is a big victory.

According to another professor of mine, Jody Freeman, "This hire leaves no doubt that HLS is the go-to place for environmental law." But my mind is on the 1L Torts classes he'll teach with the same, surprisingly rare Harvard magic he brought to ours. I can hardly picture this institution without him, and I'm so glad he's an official part of it now.

Ridiculous luck

2011-04-16T11:22:00.002-04:00

As spring finally comes to New England and the sun is actually starting to shine (which is weird to say today because it's cloudy, but more often than not it's true), I'm baffled not only by how little time I have left in this place, but also how far out of its way the universe seems to be going to remind me what an amazing opportunity it's all been.

For one thing, hard as it is to believe, the lunch with Sonja Sohn I mentioned last post turned out not to be the peak of my celebrity spotting this semester - not by a long shot. A few days later, I got an e-mail from one of the teaching assistants for the same class, proclaiming, "Congratulations! You have been selected to attend the dinner with the cast of The Wire this Tuesday, April 12, 2011!" I was one of ten winners of a lottery that students in the class could enter by writing a paragraph on whether or not we supported drug legalization. Amazingly, my good friend Nancy won as well. So after the cast spoke in our class Tuesday afternoon, and after another event open to the public that evening (where my friends were all ecstatic just to be in the same 300-person courtroom as the cast), the two of us hopped into a van to join Sonja, Donnie Andrews and Fran Boyd, Jim True-Frost, Jamie Hector, Andre Royo, and Michael K. Williams for dinner at one of the undergraduate houses along the Charles River.

Some things about the dinner weren't ideal. Our group of law students was outnumbered by guests of the professor and undergraduates from the house where we were eating, few of whom seemed to know the show like we did or appreciate the magnitude of the opportunity they were getting. Watching some of them sit closer to the cast members and barely speak to them was torture! And sorry for the tangent, but the lack of vegetarian option for the appetizer was just bizarre.

But all was forgiven when people began getting up and mingling, allowing Nancy and I to march up to each cast member in turn, introduce ourselves, and have a real conversation of substance. Without fail, each one of them was warm, funny, and receptive to our questions. Nancy's paper for the class is about the presence and absence of hip-hop music in the show, so she wanted to know which rapper each of them thought was most similar to their character. Meanwhile, I got an enormous hug from Andre Royo after Nancy let slip that I'm always saying I want to hug his character, Bubbles, every time he comes on screen. And I bashfully confessed to Michael Williams about the cat I named after his character, Omar Little. To my great relief, he was unsurprised and actually pleased to hear it!

I wish I had photos or autographs to show you, but Nancy and I decided early on not to join the people badgering the cast for those. My friend Ryan has some great shots from the public appearance, though, if you want proof that they came. And we've gotten a little media attention as well.

However, that wasn't even the only great thing to happen on Tuesday. First of all, I finished a paper for my Law and Social Policy course that was my last official assignment for the academic year. Now I'm free to focus on my final papers, which won't always be fun, but is much better than having them loom in the distance causing added anxiety as I try to get through more urgent, but less important, things.

And second, also on Tuesday, we got a really amazing and long overdue piece of news about life in Austin after graduation. It's the culmination of a really long, dramatic, and mostly miserable story I promise to tell here later, but I can't right now because (a) I can't possibly fit it into this one post, and (b) given the aforementioned long story, I don't want to tempt fate into seizing what tiny opportunity still exists to ruin this for us.

But I will say that it looks a little bit like this:

Cliffhanger enough for you??

Another awesome Harvard opportunity

2011-04-07T20:40:00.005-04:00

On Tuesday, the latest in a long series of guest speakers for my class on The Wire was one of its stars, Sonja Sohn, who played the police officer Kema Greggs on the show. She brought along a major in the Baltimore Police and the woman who works as Program Director for her nonprofit community group, ReWired for Change. They run afterschool programs and give counseling, yoga classes, and urban gardening lessons to kids of different ages in East Baltimore, a pretty cool development from just playing a character on TV.

The best part was that I got to be one of fifteen students allowed to sign up for a pizza lunch ahead of class with Ms. Sohn and her colleagues. We mostly socialized, asked some questions about why she changed to this kind of work after the show, and got some specific tips for working with kids and teens at risk. It turns out acting was a profession she resisted for a long time out of a sense that she was meant to make more of a difference in the world, so the transition was very natural.

My favorite thing she said: "We were all put here to work for the forward movement of humanity, and what you need to do is wake up each morning asking, 'Am I doing that? Every day, in my every act?'"

Pretty inspiring.

I know a place, I'll take you there

2011-03-24T08:59:00.005-04:00

Wow. I'm not really sure how to sum up my Spring Break this year, so I'll just stick to "Wow." Russell and I headed south for a family reunion on my mother's side, which may not sound too "wow"-inducing, but if you had the biggest, loudest, most talented, fun, drunken family in Northern Alabama, you would understand.

Our week started with a couple of quiet days with my amazing Nana, whose 75th birthday was one of the reasons for the reunion, and the trickle of relatives coming into town early like we did. We slept well, ate well, sat around chatting and doing nothing a lot, and spent an afternoon wandering the cute downtown area by ourselves. The weather was absurdly perfect, and it stayed that way as the stream of relatives turned into a rush and the lazy part of the trip came to a close.

On Thursday, more relatives having shown up, we shared a big dinner at the house my aunt and uncle took over from Nana after my grandfather passed away. On Friday, a family friend who runs the incredible Muscle Shoals Sound Studio took Russell for his first tour of the place where everything from "Brown Sugar," "Wild Horses," and "Layla" to "Torn Between Two Lovers" was recorded in the 1970s (and the Black Keys' award-winning "Brothers" was made last year.) Like everyone who goes for the first time, Russell had chills and couldn't quit grinning all day.

That night, our numbers swelled to at least 50 as friends from the area joined in a belated Saint Patrick's Day celebration. The loud singing, joking, fountain of Irish cream (literally), and rounds of shots lasted into the wee hours. But we were at it again the following afternoon, when the grandkids put on a musical revue in Nana's honor, leaving not a dry eye in the giant backyard. Even Russell joined in to sing "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" with my male cousins and cousins-in-law. And as that party stretched into the evening as well, the local police actually showed up to warn us about the noise! I don't know many people who can say the cops were called on their grandmother's 75th birthday party, so I'm pretty proud.

It's back to the daily grind now, and putting the appropriate emphasis on school is even more difficult after such a fun time. (I've been meaning to explain why it's difficult in general, but I should get to work on a paper, so I'll just say that a couple of my classes this semester are less than satisfying. Not necessarily a bad thing, since it will surely help me let go of this otherwise amazing place in just a few short weeks, but it's never fun being disappointed. More details later, I promise.) For now, as I always seem to be saying, I should be able to get by on the memory of having such a blast and the hope of doing it again before long.

The best kind of surprise

2011-03-07T09:17:00.010-05:00

Well, the MPRE is over, which is mostly a relief. But the number of things I put off until afterward and now have to do, plus the many deadlines that have always been looming on the other side and now seem to be coming up impossibly soon, is pretty daunting. I have to make some long-overdue posts to the Law & Mind blog for tonight's seminar. I have to get graduation announcements under control or else my relatives are going to start wondering if I plan to finish law school after all. Spring Break is going to be awesome, but I have to turn in another response paper for my class on The Wire almost the moment I get back, and the final draft of a paper for Law & Social Movements is due a few days later. And I have to start thinking seriously about the big, final papers for three of my classes, or I'm going to look up soon and only have two weeks to finish all 50+ pages of them.

I think I'm inclined to fixate on these things, whether or not I can even do anything about them today, just because they're so much more of a reality all of a sudden. But what I really want to tell you about is Saturday, the actual day of the MPRE, which I had barely expected even to be a good day but which turned out so perfect that just thinking about it helps to offset all these obligations and anxieties really nicely.

I'll start the story on Friday, when I wrapped up some work at TAP around 4 p.m. and headed to our local grocer to shop for a study date with Russell. In exchange for his help preparing for the MPRE, I had promised him a smorgasbord of junk food of his choice, which turned out to be beer, Cheetos, and homemade cookies. I added pizza for dinner on my own behalf, lugged these things home just in time for Russell to arrive from work, and got started baking. He quizzed me out loud for the next few hours while we both pigged out - a good trade, I think.

On Saturday, I was happy to find that at least the logistics of the exam weren't as bad as they could have been. Back when we all registered, a lot of Harvard people found there weren't enough spots at the testing center at our own school, so we had been bumped to Boston University School of Law. I was one of three friends in my neighborhood in this situation, so we agreed to share a cab from a midpoint between our houses - something I rarely do, but BU is about 15 minutes away by cab and more than 45 by public transport. All that went surprisingly smoothly, especially because at 45 degrees and not too wet or windy, the weather more or less obliged. And then the exam was just what I'd been told to expect: pretty difficult, but not worth freaking out over, because the curve is so generous that to pass often requires barely half of your answers to be correct.

Back in Cambridge after the test, we met a large group of friends for brunch at the usual student haunt, Cambridge Common. Several had just finished testing at Harvard, but others had taken the MPRE in November and were just there for support. There was some rehashing of the test, but a lot more totally unrelated, raucous laughter. What a great way to decompress.

Afterward, Russell and I took the subway downtown to run a very important errand. I won't bore you with the details, but I'll say that this turned into one of those really exceptional customer service experiences, the kind that change a task that is mostly a source of anxiety into a cherished memory. Literally, we were so blown away by the humor and forthcomingness of the person helping us, we may never forget what he did for our afternoon.

However, this guy was also incredibly quick at his job, sending us back into the streets of downtown Boston in just a fraction of the time we had allowed ourselves for the errand. It was not yet 3 p.m., and we had nothing to do until our 5 p.m. dinner plans in the North End with a dear friend who is soon moving away. So we wandered around some of the stores in Downtown Crossing, where Russell got a steal on a new brown belt and some undershirts and, stumbling on a hidden cache of the Polish Pottery my mom uses in her kitchen, I bought three things for her at a terrific bargain. Then we started winding our way toward the North End.

First, we passed Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall, where Russell was able to recall a bunch of interesting historical facts I knew nothing about, having been out of town when his parents visited a few months ago and he took them to all the tourist spots. Then we somehow wandered into the New England Holocaust Memorial, which I had no idea even existed, right out on Congress Street across from the bars and fishmongers. Unexpected as it was, it completely took my breath away, and I now consider it unmissable if you're ever in the area. Also, Russell is so great with things like that - he held my hand tightly and took his time reading every plaque, then wanted to talk about it for a while afterward, which I'm sure is the memorial's intent most of all.

Soon after, we reached Haymarket Station, where we were due to meet our friend. We were still early, so we squeezed into the completely chaotic public market to take a look at the shouting vendors offering fish, meat, and produce at rock-bottom prices. The noise and crowds were a bit jarring after the memorial, but it also made me laugh to see life going on in all its vibrancy so close by. I was in a great mood and telling Russell all the latest law school gossip by the time we curved back around to meet our friend.

The three of us wandered through the North End, enjoying the atmosphere at dusk and checking out menus on different restaurant doors, until we picked a place called Piccola Venezia. The food was very traditional, but great - I ate the fluffiest, most melt-in-your-mouth gnocchi of my life in a simple, rustic red sauce while Russell and our friend enjoyed fried calamari and ziti with broccoli and spinach. We shared the latest news about various mutual friends, compared notes on some recent medical drama in our families, and generally had a great going-away meal. Then Russell and I headed home to drop off leftovers before going to campus for the HLS Parody, an annual student-run musical lampoon I insisted on seeing since I had missed it the two previous years.

When we first arrived, I was devastated to see the show already underway, because it turns out I had been mistaken about the start time. But a friend encouraged us to stay, and I'm so glad we did, because there were over two hours of great material still left to see. As I announced on Facebook the next day, the highlight of the evening was definitely "Cambridge Blows," to the tune of Nina Simone's "Feelin' Good," performed as a strip tease where after removing 5-6 layers of clothes the dancers were still in jeans and sweaters. But plenty of other moments were nearly that great. It was the perfect ending to a spectacular Saturday.

Of course, Sunday wasn't too shabby either. I spent nearly the whole day in bed, first watching George Clooney in "The American" on Netflix and eating leftover pizza with Russell, then getting some things done for school. For dinner, we headed to a friend's house for the best Chinese take-out any of us had ever had, and we finally learned to play Settlers of Catan, the game all our nerdiest friends had been (not wrongly, it turns out) raving about for years.

I'm back at school today, and although it's sunny in my window seat at the law library right now, the weather is supposed to suck a lot this week. Not to mention that all those deadlines I'm facing aren't looming any less than if I'd had a rotten weekend. But hopefully, with all this fun to look back on, I can survive all that until the next wonderful surprise comes along.

OKAY, SERIOUSLY.

2011-03-02T15:35:00.005-05:00

ENOUGH OF THIS WINTER CRAP ALREADY. I AM NOT KIDDING.

No, seriously, it's getting really old. Early spring is the worst time for my seasonal issues anyway - there seems to be some cumulative effect after the long winter that the longer days can't reverse all at once - so all the bundling up and trudging through the snow and taking lukewarm showers because the water heater is on overdrive running the radiators is pretty much adding insult to injury. The effort it takes me to do basic things is unreal. I was so proud to have washed dishes, sent a bunch of e-mails, and ordered a passport photo for my admission ticket to the MPRE this morning. Studying for that thing is going to be a whole other story.

SO SERIOUSLY, CAMBRIDGE, KNOCK IT OFF.

In other news, I've managed to make more progress toward my obscenely high paper-writing page count this semester: I wrapped up another five-pager for Law and Social Policy last week and a seven-pager for Law and Social Movements this Monday. It's funny to type out both those class names and be reminded that they're so similar, when the classes themselves couldn't be more different.

Unfortunately, those papers were just two of the many balls in the air for me right now, from a meeting for TAP tonight, another for my journal tomorrow, and this MPRE business on Saturday to planning for graduation, signing for a bar loan, and getting health insurance for this summer. I'm definitely banking on my experience so far in law school that no matter how much it seems like things will never fall into place in time, they usually do.

But in case all this sounds too depressing, I want to highlight a couple of things that are GREAT in my life right now! The first is my upcoming trip to Alabama for a reunion with my mom's fabulous family. Russell is coming along, and it will be his first time seeing the family's home base in a cluster of little towns on the Tennessee River, not to mention meeting my zillions of great-aunts, great-uncles, and second cousins, all as loud and raucous as you could possibly want, who will be converging there. I'm so excited and ready for this break from school and the cold, I can hardly stand it.

The second great thing, which I've been meaning to share here for a long time, is the Law and Mind Blog I've been working on for my Monday night seminar at school. Almost all the assignments for this class are blog posts; each week the professor takes volunteers to post about the reading, connecting the reading to current events or other fields of study, or about any other mind science topic we like. Don't be turned off by the jargon in some of the titles - the result is a pretty cool assortment of silly and serious takes on how our psychology influences our lives and our laws. I really hope you'll check it out - especially the post I wrote about Born This Way, whose creator commented to thank me for my thoughtful discussion!

So it's not all work and crappy weather. Mostly, but not all. (:

Move over, April

2011-02-21T09:01:00.004-05:00

I'm firmly convinced that February is the cruelest month around here.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the way this month jerks you around with the warm weather, then cold weather, dry weather, then wet weather is just evil. Last week we had temperatures in the 50s, most of the snow melted, and I was able to walk to school without a coat on two separate days. This morning, big, fat snowflakes are pouring from the sky like someone is shaking out a giant bag of powdered sugar up there. It's beautiful, as always, but really? I had kind of hoped to be done with some of my winter gear.

Luckily, I didn't hope too hard. I saw this coming, since it happened last February and the February before that. Last week, when even professors were starting to hail the coming of spring, I was making sure to soak up the sun but not to get too used to it. Fool me three times, and I start to look pretty pathetic.

Four down, eighty-plus to go

2011-02-08T14:58:00.004-05:00

I just turned in my first response paper for the Law and Social Policy Workshop I'm taking, and I feel pretty good about it. The reading assigned for it was interesting, a forthcoming tax law article claiming that government programs received by everybody, instead of targeted at poor people like welfare, can actually redistribute more wealth in the end because they have more popular support to help them last longer and give more generously.

It's nice to be done, and what reading I have for tomorrow can be done in the morning, so I plan to relax tonight and finish the second season of Deadwood with Russell. However, it just hit me that the four pages I just wrote were only the first of dozens and dozens I have to get done this semester. With about 90 days left and almost that many pages still to write, I'm realizing that the push I had to make to finish this first paper in time is what much of my next few months are going to look like.

Awesome.

At least one of my classes involves writing of a more enjoyable kind: most of the assignments for my Law & Mind Sciences Seminar are posts to the class blog! I'm planning to get the professor's permission to link to that from here (I'm sure he'll say yes, but it's good to ask), but in the meantime, I want to point you to an awesome website I posted about recently: Born Gay, Born This Way! Who knew little kids could be so fabulous!

Well, I had better run. I have a meeting to discuss my paper topic with the professor for Race and Justice: The Wire. He's a pretty busy guy, maybe the biggest celebrity professor I've had so far (in fact, I was interviewed by the local NPR affiliate about his class recently, and I'll be sure to let you know if I make it on the radio) so I had better not be late. Crazy how a paper that isn't due until the end of those 90 days I mentioned could be dominating my afternoon now. I guess I had better get used to it.

Update fail!

2011-01-28T18:26:00.016-05:00

Hey, remember me? That friend/relative of yours who's in the middle of what's supposed to be the easiest year of law school? Yeah, about that...

I can't believe I'm saying this, but the past few weeks have been some of the craziest of my life! Not because anything incredibly major has happened, but because of the incredibly relentless stream of minor things that just keep cropping up. Once I realized I was three days away from going a whole month without posting here, I knew I had better clue y'all in on some of the hubbub. So here goes:

Winter term success. The extra three weeks in Austin this winter were amazing, and not only because I got to accompany my mom to both her latest MRI scan and the visit where her doctor announced there had been no growth in her tumor since surgery. No, the work was also fantastic - being back at my summer employer felt like starting right where I left off, even though the issue I worked on was different from before, and I got to help out with incredibly fun things like co-hosting a roundtable discussion with Elizabeth Warren and Holly Petraeus in San Antonio. I was ready to be back at Harvard with Russell and my cat by the end, but I couldn't have picked a better way to spend the term.

Snow like whoa. This is easily the snowiest winter since I came to law school - it's actually the most snow Cambridge has had in something like 15 years. At least a foot covers all the front yards, huge icicles are hanging off the buildings, and there are enormous person- and even two-person-high drifts in some of the places where the big, industrial snowblowers have cleared the sidewalks and driveways at Harvard. I think it's beautiful and mostly have no complaints - what an extravagant send-off for someone headed to Texas! But it is a little treacherous how it can hide ice on the ground. No real wipeouts yet, though - keep your fingers crossed.

Bar application blues. The postmark deadline for the Texas bar was today, so several friends and I have been scrambling to get our employers, character references, birth certificates, applications to law school, and everything else in line this week. It's exhausting and tense, so much more than it probably needs to be, because the instructions are as vague as possible and the website is positively archaic (truly, check it out yourself.) But we are finally done and can breathe a sigh of relief, at least until the fingerprinting cards come.

Last first week. Although the start of spring semester is never quite as exciting as fall, I'm so psyched about my classes that it still feels like the start of something momentous and special. It occurs to me that I never did post my schedule, so here it is now:

Monday

1-2:30 Race & Justice: The Wire with Charles Ogletree

5-7 Law & Mind Sciences with Jon Hanson

Tuesday

1-2:30 Race & Justice: The Wire

Wednesday

1:30-3 Law & Social Movements with Lani Guinier

5-7 Workshop on Law & Social Policy with Anne Alstott & Ben Sachs

7-9 Judicial Process in the Community Courts with Judge John Cratsley

Thursday

1:30-3 Law & Social Movements

Friday

1:30-2:30 Law & Social Movements

Of course, all that involves A LOT of reading, and even though I found all the assignments interesting, it was difficult not to fall behind the very first week! Add in the 15-page paper I had to write for my winter clinical - which was literally impossible to squeeze in with working full time during the term, so it all got done in the last week before the deadline, today - and I was about ready to start pulling my hair out.

Graduation around the corner. Did I mention this is my LAST year of law school, meaning I am going to GRADUATE in just a few short months??? I spent a good chunk of time in Austin, and a little more since I've been back here (with much more to come, I'm sure), juggling the travel and lodging plans of at least a dozen excited relatives I can't wait to see in May. This has been fun and, with some welcome help from my mom, pretty manageable. But between this and the bar application, the future is quickly becoming all too real.

Back in the fold. Well, hopefully just enough of all that is behind me now. The excitement of winter term and the craziness of this past week are over, I have an amazing semester of classes ahead, and life with Russell and the cat is lowering my blood pressure by the minute (and will do so even more once I clean up the disaster zone I made of the apartment while I was so busy). Granted, there is the usual ramp-up of responsibilities for Tenant Advocacy and my journal. But that's the regular (for Harvard Law School) amount of stress I feel confident I can handle, so I look forward to getting back to it very much.

Obligatory finals post

2010-12-31T10:23:00.002-05:00

So it seems like I should report back on finals while it's still the same year I took them, right? I apologize for taking so long already, but as you can imagine, I really needed a break. They were pretty brutal, since I hadn't taken so many in so short a time since 1L year.

The first one was Taxation, preparing for which could have been much worse, since our professor released model answers for several of her past exams to help check our work. I also had a friend in the class to meet and go over one of them. So the difficult part was balancing that with Environmental Law, which I had to study at the same time because the exam was only a day later.

The Tax exam was fair and not too long to complete in time, which is always my biggest fear with the three-hour, in-class format. I did have a minor heart attack when one of the questions centered around a term I didn't even remotely recognize. But after I skipped it and came back at the end, I was lucky enough to find it in the index of the case book, so I could quickly read up and write what I think was an adequate answer. It's hard to be sure, but I didn't feel too panicked as I submitted my exam and headed out to lunch with some classmates.

Environmental Law was a lot tougher, mostly because it lasted eight hours, every minute of which was needed to work out the answers and then cut them back to fit the extremely tight word limit. The professor hadn't released model answers, but to go over each past exam, I met with the most outrageously brilliant study group you could ever want: three members of this year's winning Ames Moot Court team and two Law Review editors, one of them the President. I went into the exam fairly confident, partly because I'd more or less held my own among those geniuses and partly because I'd learned so much each time they'd caught things I hadn't. The real challenge was just to keep going the whole time at enough of a pace to cover everything important.

I had two days off after that, and I made sure to spend the first one relaxing to avoid burnout. I did some Christmas shopping, watched some TV shows I had missed while studying, and tried to catch up on sleep and healthy food. Then I got started studying for Administrative Law.

That exam took three hours on a Friday morning, and I felt about as ready as I could be, although I never quite know how to prepare for that professor's exams. I think he makes the questions vague on purpose, which I can respect, since it must lead to more varied answers and less tedious grading. But between that and not having model answers, I couldn't be entirely sure what he'd want, so I just had to do my best and take my chances.

That was probably a good last exam to have, since it dialed down the intensity of my studying a little toward the end, and I was able just to write for three hours and walk away without much to dissect. I had a long lunch at Cambridge Common with friends, headed home to watch the original Tron online in preparation for a Tron Legacy showing downtown that night, and pretty much called it a semester.

Now, I don't want to jinx anything, but I'm hoping those were the last exams I'll ever take in law school. There might be one more, depending on my spring classes - all but one of which are currently seminars and obscure electives with paper assignments instead of exams - and how much finagling I'm willing to do to change that last one to match the rest. Either way, the prospect that this was my last jam-packed and stressful finals season is pretty incredible. Even at my most fearful about leaving school and entering the real world once and for all, that's one part I think I can happily do without.

Go west, young girl

2010-12-30T12:23:00.005-05:00

I'm in El Paso at the moment, getting ready for a family visit to the historic village of Old Mesilla, New Mexico, and wondering at what a difference six months makes. My sister has changed from a toddler into a full-fledged little kid since I last saw her, which sadly was all the way back in June, around her second birthday, since all the time and money I've had for travel since then has gone into trips to Austin for job interviews and my mom's surgery.

She's still about as contrary, mischievous, and temperamental as anybody under age three, so of course I look forward to this phase being over. But I also can't believe how much is going on in terms of her cognition and verbal skills right now. She can sound out basic words with just a little help, and she recognizes some of her favorites, like the D-O-R-A of Dora the Explorer, on sight.

She's also downright conversational. Pointing at different parts of a toy bracelet she got for Christmas, she'll tell me, "I like the butterfly, I like the pink, and I like that, because that is light blue." Watching a TV show on her favorite channel, Sprout: "Did you see his girlfriend walking there? He has a girlfriend." Later, when the characters arrive at daycare: "They're gonna take a nap." Then again, her favorite words are "I don't want to," which I think we all wish we could go back and make sure she never learned.

It's crazy, as everyone in the family asks for updates about school and congratulates me on my upcoming graduation, to think that all this development in Mirella has happened since my first visit to Cambridge to pick out an apartment for law school. I once heard J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, refer to one of her books as her daughter's "ink-and-paper twin" because it was largely written during her pregnancy. I feel kind of the same way about my legal career and my sister, which were both in their infancy at the same time.

On a side note, Christmas was great, especially all the presents from my mom designed to help me develop a professional wardrobe. There's a particular ochre-colored top from J. Crew that I hope I have the restraint to keep in nice shape until my clerkship.

For now, I'm off to New Mexico, but I promise to post again soon with the promised updates about exams, classes, et cetera. Happy New Year, everyone!

Freedom!!!

2010-12-19T15:05:00.006-05:00

There were times when I literally thought this would never happen, but it finally has: I am 100% FINISHED with final exams and free to enjoy TWO FULL WEEKS with almost no responsibilities whatsoever!!

The first two days since exams wrapped up have been surprisingly busy, since I put off several things for my journal until I'd finished testing, plus needed to get out and Christmas shop for anyone whose gift I wanted to buy before leaving Cambridge. We're also lending our apartment to some friends upstairs whose parents will be visiting while we're in Austin, so that requires some cleaning. They've asked us over for wine and egg nog tonight in gratitude (although I don't know why - they're looking after Ramona in this process, which is such a relief for us), so predictably I'm baking. Wish me luck getting the sugar crackle on top of my turnover recipe to turn red and green for the season.

I promise to post soon with a report on exams, my incredibly exciting, far-too-jam-packed, how-will-I-ever-decide-what-to-drop course schedule for next semester, and more. Right now, I have got to start packing for our flight tomorrow evening. Packing for a month-long trip the same day as the flight does not seem advisable, and since I ACTUALLY HAVE TIME TO DO OTHERWISE, I plan to take advantage!

Correction

2010-12-02T14:04:00.010-05:00

"Crunch" doesn't even begin to cover it.

The entirety of my free time in the past week has consisted of:

Watching the first 45 minutes of "The Lives of Others," our latest DVD from Netflix, while eating dinner Monday night. (I still haven't managed to watch the rest of it.)
Letting The Biggest Loser play in the background while folding laundry and booking holiday travel on Tuesday night.
Joining friends for trivia at a local pub for two whole hours last night.

I've spent literally every other moment of every day either in class or some other school function, reading or otherwise preparing for class or final exams, trying to wrap up TAP cases for the semester, or proofreading articles for my journal (by far the most time consuming of all.)

I guess I'm grateful to be getting enough sleep, but I also think it says something about the energy-intensiveness (and/or tediousness) of these tasks that I absolutely cannot drag myself out of bed before 8 a.m. or keep my eyes open past 1 a.m. each day.

I can't remember any other time quite like this, even during 1L year. Last night I couldn't shut up about how tired I am, not caring whether I bored my friends. I considered it a huge relief to take an hour out of yesterday afternoon and wash the dishes I'd been letting pile up in our sink all week. The dishes! My least favorite chore in the universe! I set my computer to play the most recent episode of "Glee" and barely noticed whether it was any good, my brain zoned out so completely.

I guess this is the deep, deep hole I dug for myself by taking charge of the technical editing department of a law journal, fully aware of my own extreme perfectionist tendencies. Doing it in the same semester when I'd need to take a week off school to tend to family didn't help, either.

So I apologize if my blogging suffers as I trudge through this. After I die of exhaustion, I promise to post more from beyond the grave.

Crunch 'n munch

2010-11-27T14:50:00.004-05:00

Whew, what a crazy couple of weeks. On top of the usual academic struggles, a growing case load at TAP, and the beginning of the busiest time of the semester for my department at my journal, I had to get ready for two visits from relatives really deserving of a fun time in Cambridge.

Last week it was my cousin Marcella, a freshman with a ridiculously difficult major at a prestigious college that barely lets her out of the science lab. She came just in time for the premiere of the new Harry Potter movie and the Harvard-Yale football game, so we joined some friends for both of those, then checked out the Harvard Museum of Natural History, walked Boston Common and the historic Beacon Hill neighborhood, and window-shopped on Newbury Street before sending her home.

Three days later, we welcomed Russell's cousin Becca, who has the thankless job of teaching special education at an elementary school back in Texas. After bringing her to one of my law school classes and giving her the grand tour of Harvard, we took her to the Common and Newbury Street too (although we shopped a lot more than just windows.) Then she joined us for Thanksgiving dinner with friends, several culinary firsts from Mr. Bartley's hamburgers to tapas and Vietnamese coffee, and finally a tour of Fenway Park that we all agreed was downright magical.

Unfortunately, with the exception of a few delicious leftovers, the fun is pretty much over now. It's high time I buckled down and started preparing for exams, even though there is still plenty to distract me, from my journal (did I mention it's our busiest time of semester?) to my classes for next spring (for the 4+ available hours in my schedule, I can't for the life of me decide which combination of "Capital Punishment in America," "Law and Mind Sciences: Seminar," "Workshop on Law and Social Policy," and "Class Actions and Other Aggregate Litigation" to take!)

Luckily, my independent winter clinical proposal has been approved, so that hassle is finished as soon as I drop by the Clinicals office to sign some paperwork. But whether it's enough to make room for all the finals studying I need to do, we'll just have to see. Wish me luck, and happy belated Thanksgiving!

Nobody said it was easy

2010-11-09T19:51:00.002-05:00

Last week was surprisingly okay, considering I didn't spend my weekend preparing for it. I got through my Monday classes just fine, and after more classes and a trip to the voting booth on Tuesday, I made time for another little break to watch election returns with Russell and the comfort of homemade margaritas. These are the times when it's especially great to have your own blender.

Wednesday and Thursday were a blur of Admin Law, Taxation, and training the 1L's at my journal for their technical edit or "subcite" of the articles we'll publish this semester. If the 1L's do good work, the job of my Technical Department is much easier down the line. So I've been training a lot of them myself, an investment I sure hope will pay off.

All this was made extra-busy by the fact that I decided, at the last minute and way past the official deadline, to apply to do an "independent winter clinical" this January. It's one of the ways to get academic credit between the fall and spring semesters each year, which is required for every HLS student. And since I could do it from Austin while helping my mom continue to recover from her surgery, it recently took on a new appeal.

Which is why, with typical Harvard generosity, the Clinicals office is letting me apply so late. I'll need a project I can't do at any of the existing clinics, a licensed attorney to supervise me, and a faculty member to supervise the paper I'll be writing in conjunction. I'm planning a project back at one of my awesome summer employers, so I'm pretty excited, but I'm also getting my butt kicked a little by working out the rest at a speed I think is considerate.

And that's fine, because a different part of my life got much easier this week, even if it did take a really difficult decision to make it happen. I'm talking about my Political Economy for Modern Capitalism class, which for weeks I've been feeling frustrated about.

I know I haven't really let on here, but it has been such a struggle trying to catch up with my fellow students' lengthy backgrounds on the topic, to develop any remotely decent ideas for the very long paper looming at the end of the year, and to square it all with my towering stress levels in other areas of life. So this class was seeming less and less worth the two credits it would earn me, and I was feeling less and less worth the professors' time.

Hating that feeling, I had started to wonder about withdrawing from the course. It seemed like such a terrible idea, but was it more terrible than staying in all year? On Friday I visited the Dean of Students Office for some advice, and as usual, they made the whole thing crystal clear within minutes. Because of my mom - because people just cannot pass up any chance to make things easier around my mom, and it is so sweet - the class is coming off my transcript without even the "WD" notation that would usually indicate it had ever been there.

It felt like crap to tell my professor, but with that done, I feel so incredibly relieved. I have plenty of credits without the class, and everything else I'm doing seems so much more manageable without it tacked on. Most importantly, I've spent the first part of this week wrapping up that clinical application - both my faculty and attorney supervisors just fell into place today - so with any luck I'll be approved soon for three great weeks in Austin.

This is a tough time to do it, maybe the toughest, but I'm starting to feel like I've struck the right balance between school and family. Which, as everyone at school keeps graciously, wonderfully telling me, is the most important thing of all.

Killer weekend

2010-10-31T17:54:00.006-04:00

It's early evening on Sunday, and I haven't done one thing to prepare for Admin or Environmental Law tomorrow morning. What's more, I have no real intention of doing so with what's left of this evening. Instead, I've been doing things a whole lot more conducive to my general well-being than studying, like baking things from scratch and getting the apartment ready for some friends to come over for Halloween.

Are you asking what happened to the Type A personality that got me to Harvard in the first place? Do I have to turn in my credentials as The Girl Who Freaked Out More About Possible Academic Consequences of a Recent Family Emergency Than the Actual Emergency? Do you feel like my aunt, who commented on my Facebook post about all the baking I was doing, "Aren't you supposed to be studying?"

I guess the answer is that everyone needs a break sometimes. I was an absolute zombie this past week, no pun intended, and it was clearly because I didn't use last weekend to decompress after the intensity of catching up at school. And I'd rather be a bit unprepared tomorrow than let that happen again.

So the weekend looked like this: Russell and I went to Target on Friday evening, partly to stock up for Halloween and partly to wander the aisles looking at bedding, winter boots, and Legos. (Can you guess which one of us cared about which?) On Saturday, we bundled up and walked down to the Square for lunch at Clover, a new vegetarian food-truck-turned-cafe, before buying some groceries for all the cooking I had planned.

First, as dinner for myself, Russell, and a friend we invited over, there was my first-ever batch of homemade pasta (an enormous hassle I won't repeat until we have a Cuisinart mixer and pasta machine, but pretty awesome to have successfully made) with butternut squash filling and brussels sprouts. Then I helped our friend with the crust for a pumpkin pie he wanted to make for our party.

The whole evening was a lovely prelude to today, when we used the party as pretext to give every square inch of the apartment the thorough cleaning it desperately needed. We always grumble a lot while doing this, but when the place feels amazing afterward and won't need it again for weeks or months, we know it was completely worth it. We also decorated a little, brushed the cat several times in hopes of helping an allergic friend enjoy the party, and baked almost four dozen of my favorite chocolate chip cookies in the world.

Now it's almost time for our guests to start showing up, and I can hardly wait to carve pumpkins, play video games, drink beer and eat baked goods, and ultimately gather around the premiere of the new zombie TV drama The Walking Dead with them. As one friend of ours (who is coming tonight despite an 8 a.m. midterm tomorrow) puts it, sometimes bad life choices are the best.

Pretty rotten

2010-10-22T11:46:00.008-04:00

Okay, time for a break from the seriousness of last post!

I was looking through some old photos recently, and I noticed that I had a whole lot of photos of our former cat, Omar, but only a few of Ramona, our current one. Partly this must be due to the novelty of cat ownership in general wearing off with time. But partly it's funny, because Ramona is just about the most beautiful and photogenic cat in the history of, well, cats.

Ramona is so beautiful (and yet so comically chubby, grouchy, spoiled, uncoordinated, and loud at the exact same time) that Russell and I find ourselves singing a pretty specific song to her almost every day. I was definitely humming it during a little photo shoot we had the other afternoon, in hopes of putting a dent in that photo deficit I noticed.

So here it is, my ode to our cat:

Looking 'round the room

I can tell that you

Are the most beautiful girl

In the... room

In the whole wide room

And when you're on the street

Depending on the street

I bet that you are definitely in the top three

Good-looking girls on the street

Depending on the street...

You're so beautiful

You could be a waitress

You're so beautiful

You could be an air hostess in the 60's

You're so beautiful

Like a tree

Like some ceramics or something...

You're so beautiful

You could be a part-time model

But you'd probably have to keep your normal job

A part time model

You could spend part of your time modeling

and part of your time

next to meeee...

- Flight of the Conchords, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room"

Hiatus

2010-10-19T19:35:00.005-04:00

Yet again, I've gone quite a while without writing anything here. What is it John Lennon says about life being what happens while you're busy making other plans?

I want to tell you why, because it's not only this blog where I've been missing over the last week-plus. But I've spent so much time going over all the details by phone, e-mail, and text message, to so many loved ones near and far, that I'm not sure I have the energy to do it again here.

I'll just say that a very sudden, very scary and serious medical emergency happened to my mom at the end of the week before last, and to see her through surgery I left Cambridge and my classes from last Monday until Sunday night. You can read about her condition in general terms here: http://www.mayfieldclinic.com/PE-MENI.htm.

Several family members joined us in Austin, and we were blown away by everything about my mother's care. Not only do I recommend St. David's, and in particular the NeuroTexas Institute, with all my heart if you ever have the choice, but by the wonders of modern medicine she is already recovering at home with a full head of hair and only a black eye to show for the whole ordeal. There is a very long road ahead, but that is a pretty incredible start.

Meanwhile I'm back at Harvard, in a sort of recovery process of my own. Missing a whole week of all my classes was exactly as rough as you'd think: after three days of hospital duty, spending large parts of my time sleeping but never feeling like I'd slept, the double dose of class work required to be prepared each day is taking everything I have.

In every sense, though, it can only get better from here. At first I was afraid my whole semester, or obviously much, much more, would completely get away from me because of this. But with every kind word or gesture from family or friends - and there have been so many - I feel a little closer to normalcy. Even if it isn't the same normalcy I had before.

As Floyd Skloot writes in a beautiful essay I like to read in times like these and just recommended to my mom today, "But no, I am not going to be the man I was. In this, I am hardly alone."

Old enough to know better

2010-10-04T18:15:00.008-04:00

Well, here I am, almost two full weeks into getting to focus my energy on school, work, and friends now that my post-graduation job search is over. Or I would be, if I had any energy or could seem to focus at all.

This started with the pretty terrible cold I developed soon after getting back from Austin, which I tried to deny for a few days because the symptoms were so much like extreme allergies, but eventually had to acknowledge when my usual antihistamine quit even making a dent. I switched to a regimen of Dayquil and Nyquil so extreme that attending class and preparing for class basically became an either/or proposition, and I mostly chose to attend class in hopes that copious note-taking would compensate for spending every spare moment asleep or close to it.

That was the start of my lethargy and my saying really dumb things, but it definitely wasn't the end. My cold is long over, and I still find myself coming home from school so incredibly tired that I literally can't bring myself to do schoolwork - or even cook, which is my usual favorite way to avoid schoolwork I don't want to do. I find myself getting grumpy over pretty much anything that requires me to lift my arms, making long to-do lists instead of taking care of little things at my usual clip. And I find myself, just like when I was on Dayquil but with much less excuse, drifting around in a fog that somehow obscures my self-censor so I wind up volunteering the most wandering, badly put, or just plain incorrect information in my classes and group meetings ALL THE TIME. All the time.

I'm so grateful for patient and generous professors, like the ones in my Modern Capitalism class who breezed past my inexplicable, crucial mistake of a famous author's identity like it was understandable when it absolutely wasn't. But I'm also still embarrassed enough to consider this a wake-up call. I know the symptoms of seasonal depression when I see them, and confusion is a big one I just haven't happened to experience before. Fatigue and irritability, meanwhile, are a pair about as familiar to me as the gray, rainy skies we've had outside all week.

So I'm calling a stop. I'm committing myself to do whatever it takes to keep this from happening. This is my third and final year at law school, and if I can't enjoy it - and be good at it, which I had really started to feel like I was - I'll never have another chance. I'm not certain what it's going to take, because I've used my phototherapy lamp nearly every day for the past two weeks and this backslide obviously still happened. But I know this much: if I can't pull myself out of this by sheer force of will in the next few days, my mental health care provider is getting a visit. I know that at Harvard, we don't mess around.

I've got a golden ticket

2010-09-25T22:34:00.001-04:00

It’s funny, I had planned to write a whole post about how horrible last week was, but I never got around to doing it. And while last week really was awful—I still can’t sugar-coat it—not only have things gotten much, much better since then, but it also turned out to be pretty lucky that I didn’t post just to complain.

To sum it up, last Monday was the first day when judges could call clerkship applicants to offer them interviews under the federal hiring plan. Of course, the calls immediately flooded in for all my most brilliant classmates, while I sat staring at a silent phone. It didn’t mean I would never get any interviews, since various judges have their reasons not to start calling right away, and that seemed even more likely in the less competitive locations where I applied. But people tended to forget this fact, and those who didn’t ignore me completely were a bit too sympathetic, like this whole career path had already closed for me forever.

I’m sure other people were also struggling with the feeling that everyone had gotten calls except them. But like me, they didn’t exactly advertise it. So I sat alone when I could, slinked straight home after class every day, and stayed there. It was the loneliest, most alienating time I’ve ever spent at Harvard.

But enough of that, because things changed a lot very soon. I was in Tax class on Friday morning when my former boss left me a voicemail saying she had been at a function with one of the judges I’d applied to, and she’d taken care to recommend me at length. She suggested, though, that I call chambers to make sure they had my application, because the judge hadn’t recognized my name.

In a class break, I got the message and called the judge, trying to sound calm and casual in a voicemail requesting confirmation, out of an abundance of caution, that they had received my materials. I guess this was just pushy enough, because soon after I got home that afternoon (and was thanking my lucky stars just to have survived the week), I got a call from the judge saying they had indeed pulled out my application, had been impressed, and would love to interview me.

I had to laugh at this point, because of course the call had come on Friday afternoon before a week-long school break when I would hardly have anyone to tell about it. It was like the cosmos wanted me to be successful, just not in time to disrupt the test it was putting me through socially. Thanks a lot.

Anyway, the judge gave me the weekend to schedule a flight to Austin, and when I called back on Monday, we set the interview for Thursday afternoon. Then she mentioned that her clerks had discovered my blog and thought it was “very well-written”—high praise, but you see why it was a good thing I never managed to post my long tirade about the injustices of last week! A nice big pity party about the lack of attention you’re getting from employers, full of bitterness toward peers who are doing better, is just not the first thing you want a judge to see when she has the good sense to probe your online identity.

(By the way, I’ve often questioned whether I’ll want to continue this blog after graduation, and I think my answer came when the judge said, “By the way, there will be no more of that if you come work for me.” I couldn’t help but joke, “What, good writing?” And she laughed, but she also made it clear what she meant: “Blogging!”)

Well, after a shopping trip for a terrific new suit, several hours of interview prep, and a hellish couple of flights to Austin (are you noticing a trend? Don’t all my flights to Austin lately seem to be hellish?) I was in the judge’s chambers for my interview. I won’t go into detail, but there were some tough questions, a lot of great information about the job, and a really encouraging amount of laughter. So I left feeling pretty good.

And that turned out to be justified, because I was stopped in traffic, not even home yet from the interview, when she called to offer me the clerkship!! She didn’t want me to answer right away and said I should call her next week, but I couldn’t wait and accepted first thing on Friday. We exchanged a couple of voicemails that day, in one of which she invited me to a party at her home over the holidays. What people say about the best judges making their clerks feel like family already looks to be true.

I’m exhausted now, having spent the rest of the Austin trip celebrating with every friend I could get my hands on, but I have enough work to do for classes Monday that I can’t relax completely. I think it’s going to be a little tough concentrating, but I have to power through—my work ethic dropped WAY below normal while I was so bummed last week, and I had better catch up.

However, I am beyond relieved to think how much attention I can give school, TAP, the journal, my friends, and everything else I should be savoring about Harvard now that my job search is over. Most of the great things about this clerkship haven’t quite sunk in for me yet, but that’s one blessing I’m very aware I have. I think I earned it, but if I ever take it for granted, please somebody remind me about last week.

First and last

2010-09-09T13:13:00.001-04:00

I can't really believe it, but my first full week of school is nearly over, and I've had all of my classes but one (a seminar that only meets every other week) at least once now.

All in all, it's going well. The first couple of days were rough, because I had trouble getting organized and finishing readings in time for class, and I was desperate to get off on the right foot and make sure that scattered feeling didn't linger on all semester. It didn't help that the temperature spiked for a few days there, so without air conditioning I was feeling much too sluggish to do any of the things that would have made me feel better. Luckily, that wrapped up around the end of last week - the weather is gorgeous now, and I somewhat have my act together.

Which is a very good thing, because this week the meetings for my various organizations started up, meaning all kinds of new responsibilities just for me. At TAP, I'm the chairperson of the Intake Committee now, so I run the meetings and train the new members instead of just bringing in cases to discuss (although I'll have those, too.) And at HLPR I'm a member of the new reigning Masthead, responsible for making actual decisions instead of just listening in and learning while others call the shots. Which makes it a little bit harder to use those meetings to eat lunch.

Classes are great, though. My Taxation and Administrative Law professors are old favorites, like my Modern Capitalism seminar professor will be, but my Environmental Law professor is about as new and exciting as they come. Fresh from a stint at the White House, funny and friendly but aggressively Socratic, she is pretty much my new hero. If my head doesn't explode from picking apart the extremely technical statutes she's already fond of assigning, it should be an excellent semester.

Meanwhile, a little bit of nostalgia has been attaching itself to everything I do these days. I sit down to start a post, and soon I'm thinking about my decision to start writing this blog two years ago. I remember being pretty nervous and uncertain about airing my experiences for the whole Internet to read, thinking this was some giant undertaking I might regret or not be able to maintain. Instead, of course, it has been such a welcome way to document this time, organize my thinking about it, and get just enough feedback to know I'm not crazy. Most things are like that these days - completely changed from how I knew or imagined them then.

Part of me misses that summer, when this whole adventure was still ahead of me and the questions weighing on my mind were mostly "Will my financial aid application get finished before I leave for Europe?" and "Will the registrar's website lock me out for mis-typing my student ID number one more time?"

That's probably an overstatement, because "Will people like me?" was a big one as well. (Hopefully, a couple of rousing successes at pub trivia lately signify the answer to that one.) But the biggest one now is "Will people hire me?" And it's the most anxiety-producing of all. Under the federal clerkship hiring timeline, my applications were released to judges this Tuesday, and they can begin calling to grant interviews next Monday, September 13th. Of course, enough of them are known for jumping the gun that there's already reason to be nervous if the phone isn't ringing. And of course, mine isn't yet. The universe would never make it so easy!

Faced with that, even my readings from the Internal Revenue Code are looking like a pretty attractive distraction. I guess it's a good thing I'm still a law student, if only for now.

Into the swing

2010-08-31T09:25:00.003-04:00

It's finally here: the first week of my last year of law school. Classes start Wednesday, but to pick up textbooks, course packets, and a check from financial aid, I went up to campus yesterday for the first time since May.

Langdell Hall was decked out in crimson banners for 1L Orientation, and the trees on Holmes Field were impossibly huge and green compared with the crunchy dryness of Texas plant life this time of year. It was wonderful to be back and totally bizarre to think it would only last eight more months. I was literally looking forward to the reunions already.

Of course, not every part of my day went smoothly. I got to Financial Services only to realize I had never filled out some necessary Web form and would need to do so, then wait two hours for them to process it, before I could pick up my check. Luckily, I ran into a friend who also needed to go textbook shopping, so we did that in the meantime. I was happy to see that my Administrative Law class uses the same book I already bought for 1L Legislation and Regulation, but less pleased when the "abridged" version of the Internal Revenue Code I needed for Taxation was still thicker than my fist. In hindsight, I guess I was naive for expecting otherwise.

On the bright side, my new schoolbag proved itself worthy by carrying half my haul back to campus very comfortably. But I was still pretty hot and sweaty when I got back to Financial Services, where my check wasn't quite ready yet. Unlike heating in winter, air conditioning in summer isn't something folks in Cambridge always get right. So I continued to sweat while waiting and catching up with several classmates who were doing the same.

To clarify, this check contains the balance on my student loans and grants after tuition, student health insurance, and some other fees are paid. Harvard takes what it's owed and gives you the remainder, in my case around $10,800, for living expenses (which are an acceptable purpose for education loans - who knew? This was all Greek to me when I started at Harvard, since my parents were able to pay for undergrad at my relatively cheap state school with no help from financial aid. But by now it's old hat.)

Once the check was finally ready and I deposited it at my credit union in the Square, I couldn't help but lug all my books to the new Anthropologie on Brattle Street to shop. It felt SO GOOD to have money again after my incredibly cash-strapped summer. I didn't buy anything, but being able to try on several things in earnest was a breath of fresh air on a hot, sticky day.

I also wanted to pick out a good notebook, since laptops won't be allowed in 2-3 of my classes this semester, but for once my favorite stationery store let me down. There are other good places to try, like the enormous school-supply floor of the COOP, but I decided to go back when I didn't have half my weight in case books in tow. So I headed home to cool off, watch some Buffy, make tofu with couscous and generally enjoy one of these last lazy nights with Russell.

With that stuff out of the way, today should be a little more fun. Some friends are having a picnic on Cambridge Common in a few hours, so I'm about to get cleaned up and put together a lunch to bring to that. And tonight I have a shopping date with Anush at a classy little mall we like near MIT, which should take care of the last of my back-to-school needs. I may just be ready to start this last year of law school out right.... Gulp.

School bag perfection

2010-08-22T00:41:00.013-04:00

I mentioned before that one of my important back-to-school rituals is finding the right bag to carry to class all year. I think it's funny what an evolved and complicated process this has become, so I thought I might share.

It all started the first week of 1L year, when I realized just how much I would need to haul up and down the street every day for nine months. I'd assumed that some existing purse of mine would work - they were all pretty huge since I'd refused to carry a separate laptop bag throughout undergrad - but now my thinnest textbooks were twice as thick as my computer and could only fit in a couple of the most gigantic bags I owned.

Unfortunately, all of these happened to be in bright printed fabrics that clashed badly and obviously with a lot of my clothing (partly because I'm a vegetarian and try not to buy leather, and such is the style of many bags that aren't.) So I spent the first week of school only using them when I could find clothes that somewhat matched, and otherwise I showed up to class with numb arms and a distinct junior-high appearance from carrying a stack of books outside my too-small purse. I also repeatedly forgot things in the switch, leaving my highlighter or Bluebook or Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the wrong bag just in time to need them.

Needless to say, I put a stop to this the first chance I got. Aware that other students with this same problem had decided a backpack was the only solution, I strongly considered one of those. But every time I tried on a friend's, I felt like an idiot. Other people didn't seem to look like preteen geeks or wannabe hikers in them, but I couldn't quit feeling that way myself. Also, they made it kind of difficult to breathe. Maybe my years of using purses for my laptop had trained my body to want to haul weight on just one side.

So I marched into my favorite stationery store in the Square, where I'd seen great big tote bags hanging from the ceiling. I picked out a shiny apple-green one in quilted vinyl, happy that it was vegan and reasoning that unlike black or brown, it wouldn't cause a mismatch when I wore one or the other. I was in love after just a few days of class, and even for socializing I barely used any other bag all year.

However, come May I was pretty happy to retire it. The thing was threadbare, and anyway I had developed just a couple of complaints I hoped to eliminate for the coming year. With a similarly picky friend, I came up with a list of criteria for my 2L year schoolbag. Carrying over from the first year were:

Enormous
Not leather
Two handles, so I can get into it while carrying it
Solid color besides black or brown

But I added for this next time around:

Structured enough not to flop around while I put things in it
Lining not slippery, so if it falls over all my things won't slide out (say, across the ladies' room floor, because yes this did happen)
Looks sharp enough to carry into job interviews if need be

If you think that sounds like a pretty tall order, you're right. It took a few weeks of keeping an eye out on my own, then a few days of intensive searching with my good friend Bella in New York, before I found my perfect bag at the colossal designer discount store Century 21. Made by vegan and earth-friendly designers Matt & Nat and originally priced at something like $325, it cost me $120 and looked like this:

It was worth every penny. It probably would have been if I'd paid full price. It rose to every challenge of a long and tiring school year, and when I took a hard look at it this May, I was very sad to conclude that it had gotten too shabby to carry for another year. But it had served me so well that I couldn't think of a single thing I would change. So I set out shopping with the same list as last year in mind.

And I'm happy to announce that it went much more quickly this time: just one day in Harvard Square (where the best candidates, I was surprised to find, were at Urban Outfitters) and one day in downtown Boston did the trick. My new bag came from DSW, cost $66 with tax, and should hopefully meet every need I have:

There's a song I heard recently - playing over a scene in the Dennis Quaid movie The Rookie, actually, which Russell and I watched the other day over a game of Scrabble and really enjoyed - that made me smile to think of this ridiculous quest I've been on. According to Google, the song is Stuff that Works by Guy Clark, and I recommend it if you understand my pleasure in hard-sought things that work just right.

I know, or at least I hope, that we all have things we're this picky about. Maybe you can use some of my insights if you're headed to law school or some other activity involving very heavy things. Otherwise, I hope you can just share my satisfaction in being picky and having it pay off - again!

Jiggity jig

2010-08-21T08:52:00.004-04:00

It's weird to think of myself as having come home, when that's the same feeling I overwhelmingly had about returning to Austin to start work back in May. But a lot of this week has felt like a homecoming, too, because some parts of living in Austin did NOT feel like home.

For one thing, I was subletting an apartment, which feels a little like living in someone else's dirt for three months. I doubt I'm actually a cleaner person than the regular tenants, but it can feel that way when someone hasn't prioritized cleaning the things you would never tolerate being dirty (and has probably left spotless some things you don't even notice because you don't care if they're clean.) Before long, I was desperate to get back to my painted countertops, shiny white bathtub, and easily swept and mopped wood floors in Cambridge.

Of course, living without Russell also made Austin feel like another planet. He's so fun and silly that I find it much easier to get bored living alone, or at least to feel unproductive and lazy for taking what he'd probably help me recognize as well-deserved breaks. Plus, it is so much harder to finish groceries before they spoil without him, and there's no way to divide labor so that I'm spared my least favorite household chores while doubling up on the ones he hates but I don't mind. We're such a good match in this sense that he's officially the best roommate I've ever had, and I've had some good ones. It's so great to be living with him again.

And Ramona! Smart kitty, she recognized me from the moment I walked through the door (which we weren't really sure she would) and ever since has been every bit the fun companion I remembered. Russell is right that she mellowed a little over the summer, which the vet did say would start happening on the other side of two years old. So she's been more affectionate and tolerant than when I left her, which is great, but she still has distinct bad moods when she wanders the apartment literally grumbling and whining. Hilarious, but it's best to stay a few feet away when it's happening.

So I'm settling in, and I've already checked off some important back-to-school duties like finding a weekly planner and a school bag for this year. Russell and I joined a classmate for brunch this morning, then helped him find a place in Harvard Square that sold water guns so he could stock up for a city-wide water fight this afternoon on Boston Common - I can't wait to ask him how it went. Russell and I were a little more practical and went grocery shopping, which was desperately necessary since he left the kitchen mostly empty (and yet surprisingly messy) before coming to get me in Austin. (I can't blame him, though. Just like my poor record with taking out my trash this summer, I think stocking the fridge was something he had grown accustomed to letting his roommate do.)

Now I have just over a week to enjoy Cambridge and Boston before classes start again, and I plan on milking it. The weather these days rarely tops 80 degrees and is mostly sunny, although we're in for rain tomorrow night. So I'm planning a lot of walks and meals outside, and I may even hit up the beach a time or two - with an Environmental Law or Federal Income Taxation textbook in tow, of course, because it won't be long before those first reading assignments are due. Wish me luck and enjoy the end of your summer!

Respite

2010-08-08T11:17:00.004-04:00

It's Sunday morning here in Austin, making it my second completely free day since the end of both my summer internships. I don't know if this will really sink in until tomorrow, though, since I would have had the weekend off anyway.

Things ended well - a few good going-away lunches, some cases closed, others transferred. I was frustrated that unresponsive clients kept me from finishing a few things in the time I was at legal aid, but I know that happens sometimes with clients whose struggle to make ends meet can be even more pressing than their legal situation. C'est la vie.

I also wrapped up a big round of judicial clerkship applications this week - the ones for judges who want paper rather than online applications. They're due to Harvard for mass mailing tomorrow, but I mailed them last Wednesday to be safe and already got delivery confirmation that they arrived. This is a huge load off - for fully half the judges I'm applying to, things are entirely in someone else's hands now. In the coming month, I'll need to upload all the same materials to the online database most federal judges use, but that's a little easier (and less permanent) than the printing, stuffing, and mailing part.

In the meantime, I need to gear up for my good friend's wedding a week from today and the move back to Cambridge two days after that. But I'm feeling a little sluggish: the other bridesmaids and I threw a damn successful bachelorette party Friday night, with so much eating, dancing, hairspray, high heels, and loud karaoke singing involved that even as designated driver I needed a full day to recover.

Today I have a movie date with my mom and one of her friends, and I'm weighing whether I should spend the time beforehand cleaning and doing laundry and making my life feel more in order, or getting out and soaking up some sun. Whichever I don't pick, there will be plenty of time to do tomorrow, which is a nice change of pace from the last ten weeks!

How time flies

2010-07-20T22:52:00.009-04:00

It's hard to believe how much of my summer has gone by already. It's even harder to write about it, because that kind of reflection only reminds me of all the things I still have to do, and before long I'm pretty much panicked. But I'll try to stay calm enough to give a good update on what's happening with me.

For starters, in the past week or so I've seen the first few conclusions to some of my projects at work. In one of the first cases I worked on at legal aid, the opponents have agreed to a settlement that couldn't be better for our client: she gets an apartment with them, and they revise their policies to be fairer to applicants like her. I got to write the actual settlement agreement they'll sign and submit to the judge, which was satisfying and a much better resolution than we expected back when I was researching contingencies in case they got us thrown out of federal court.

In another case, we seem to have succeeded at helping a tenant pull enough money together to pay all her back rent and convincing her landlord to quit trying to evict her in exchange. This client is very young and formerly homeless, but truly seems to have her life on track now and just had a rough adjustment to a pay cut and new childcare costs for her son, whom she's very cool when talking about. So it will be really gratifying if we're able to save her tenancy.

Meanwhile, at my policy job, we just submitted an enormous research product on health and life insurance law to the international NGO that commissioned it from my boss. She's actually out this week presenting it, but at least it's finally out of our (the interns') hands, to our great relief. I'm also relieved to have finished a more individual project to revise, introduce, and do some ancillary research for a proposal we want to make to the Treasury Department.

So those things are going well, although there are twice as many things just like them still lined up to get done. And predictably, a whole new round of things for Harvard and career planning have presented themselves. We're into the add-drop season for fall classes, which is pretty important since this will be my last year, and so far I have:

Monday

10:45-11:45 Administrative Law, Rakoff

1-3 Environmental Law, Freeman

5-7 Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, Desan

Tuesday

10:45-11:45 Administrative Law, Rakoff

1-3 Environmental Law, Freeman

Wednesday

10:45-11:45 Administrative Law, Rakoff

Thursday

10-12 Taxation, Alstott

Friday

10-12 Taxation, Alstott

That Modern Capitalism class is a big dilemma, because it really interests me, and I may need it to keep my fall credit hours from being unimpressively few. But it also extends into the spring, when a lot of other classes interest me even more, and I'm so worried it will crowd one of them out of my schedule when it comes time for spring registration that I'm considering dropping it entirely. Like a lot of Harvard students facing the ridiculous abundance of good classes, I'm not sure which gamble to take: that it will be wonderful and totally worth the sacrifice, or that something even better will come along? I've got time to consult some fellow students, so I'll probably mull it over for a while and be sure to let you know once I decide.

Finally, a whole host of deadlines in the judicial clerkship application process is approaching fast. I just had my resume reviewed by the folks at Career Services, and it looks like a fair amount of changes are needed. Plus, I have to finalize my list of judges to give to my recommenders by next Monday, July 26, then gather everything including their letters to submit for Harvard's centralized mailing by August 9. All this seems absurdly soon, but luckily I seem to have cleared what I once thought of as my biggest hurdle: getting Russell on board with the idea that some of the really excellent clerkships to which I really can't justify not applying are in Houston, so I might need to spend a year there before coming home to Austin.

Speaking of which, it may sound like it's been all work and no play around here lately, but that couldn't be less true. Monday was the last day of a fun, busy, incredible four-ish day visit from Russell that involved at least four margaritas, seven breakfast tacos, two movies, one visit to Toy Joy, and one amazing day at Schlitterbahn. We're both totally exhausted and bummed to be back at work. But we get to look forward to a repeat performance in just under a month, when Russell will come back to attend a friend's wedding and help me move back North.

In entertainment news, seeing Inception at the Alamo Drafthouse was definitely one of the weekend's highlights, and I sincerely recommend it (even if you live in a city without an Alamo Drafthouse.) It's smart, exciting, surprisingly emotional, and creative like nothing I've seen before. Which, come to think of it, is also a decent description of my new pop culture obsession, Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

I know, everyone and their sister has seen this show already, and I'm way behind the times with this. But can I just take a moment to say how great it is? Not just the show, but the experience of discovering it for the first time (which I always knew I'd get around to doing eventually, but had finally put off a bit too long) with the knowledge that there are 7+ whole seasons to go through and enjoy. I'm trying to savor it, but my coworker keeps lending me his DVDs.

Well, I think that last bit kept me from panicking completely as I try to sum up all the activity in my life right now. And I may be able to avoid complete nervous collapse if I make good use of this coming weekend. Wish me luck, and in the meantime, go see Inception!

Under the weather

2010-07-10T23:48:00.006-04:00

Summer is chugging along, and I'm definitely keeping busy. We had a hefty research memo come in from some pro bono partners at my policy job this Wednesday, so my boss there asked if I could front-load my time at the other employer this week, then spend a few solid days helping package this thing for some important presentations beginning next Monday. Now I know a lot more about Texas and New York insurance law than I ever expect to need again, but I guess you can never be sure.

Before that, I spent a long weekend with my dad's family in El Paso, especially enjoying the time with my little sister who just turned two. She's more physically manageable than the last time I saw her, when she had just learned to walk and was seriously lacking the motor skills to avoid catastrophe on her constant, single-minded quest to get her hands on everything in sight. Now she's more coordinated and smarter, almost astonishingly so, but unfortunately she also came down with some sort of bug the night I arrived and spent a lot of the weekend grumpy and feverish.

I definitely assumed this was something minor that was just being exaggerated by the Terrible Two's, but I definitely ate my words late this week when I realized I had caught the thing from her. And oh! My god! The sore throat, body aches, and relentless headache that no drug in the house could cure!

At first, I thought my body might just be reacting to the days and days of rain we've had around here. Central Texas tends to get the fringes of whatever goes on in the Gulf, in this case a hurricane with a tropical storm chaser. I learned in Cambridge (which, ironically, had sun and temperatures over 100 most of the week) that rainy weather can make me feel pretty sluggish and sore. But when the throat stuff set in, I had to admit that I might really be sick.

I've been dog-sitting for my mom, so luckily I had her comfortable couch, full kitchen, and HBO On Demand to help me rest and feel sorry for myself. However, I was also in charge of a pooping, barking, feeble, deaf old dog who pushed me right over the edge a few times just by existing. In other words, having ONLY thrown the few tantrums I saw last weekend makes my sister an absolute angel.

I'm feeling better today, and I even put in a little work at the yoga studio and hung out with friends all afternoon and evening. On the way home I talked to my dad, who said my stepmom also got sick from my sister and saw a doctor who told her it's a herpes virus (like chicken pox, cold sores, and mono) that likes to wreak havoc at daycare centers and rarely infects adults unless they have little kids. (Awesome time to visit, Lea.) There's not much I can do, but she says it should end suddenly after a couple days.

I'll be taking it easy tomorrow, but back at work on Monday, trying not to need any time off so I can guiltlessly take a day when Russell visits in ONE WEEK. We have so little planned, just one dinner and a possible trip to Schlitterbahn, but I'm so ready I can hardly stand it.

In other news, I received my financial aid offer from Harvard this week. The grant portion keeps getting more generous, but the cost of living keeps climbing, so I'll be borrowing about the same as last year. The difference is, early this year I'll have the option to commit to five years of public interest work after graduation in exchange for the tuition part of that debt being waived completely. With all my interests in the public sector anyway, this is the ideal bargain for me. Especially in the year when, according to a friend of mine, the cost of attending Harvard has risen above the average income for an entire American family.

Moral of the story: thank goodness for financial aid, not so much for toddlers. (Just kidding, I already can't wait to see her again.)

Long-awaited

2010-06-27T19:47:00.006-04:00

Wow, two full weeks without posting - you'd think I didn't love you guys or something! In fact, I love you so much that I'm using what little battery I have left after leaving my laptop charger at work over the weekend (I know, I'm an idiot) to write this post.

To be frank, though, I'm not sure what I have to add to the things I've already written about work and life in Austin. Things at both offices are going smoothly. After working full-time for a few days at one (because the other hadn't started yet) and then nearly two weeks at the other (because of a death in the family of my boss at the first) I'm just now hitting a rhythm with splitting my time between the two.

It is a little awkward paring down my portfolio at both places to reflect my part-time schedule, since I got my hands in so many interesting things when I was there every day. For instance, a client I've been interviewing for legal aid finally got her eviction notice on Friday, with a court date set for next Wednesday. But I won't be back at the office until next Tuesday, so I may miss most of the preparation for a case I've been pretty involved with until now.

I think my boss actually wants a postponement for other reasons, so it may all work out, and even if I had to bow out of this case it'd be okay since there are so many other interesting ones. But that's an example of the funny consequences of splitting.

Fortunately, the benefits far outweigh the costs. It's almost bizarre how well my work at these places dovetails - like when, after a week talking about how immigrants should create powers of attorney for their relatives in case of deportation at one job, I wound up drafting (albeit for completely different purposes) a power of attorney at the other. Most of all, being involved in poverty law both on the ground and at the policy level is suiting me so well that I worry about having to choose one or the other after graduation.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to take full advantage of Austin in summertime with lots of time by the water and warm nights outside with drinks and friends. Tomorrow evening I may be hammering out a work trade arrangement with my yoga studio to help squeeze more classes into my tiny student budget. And Russell will be here to visit in less than three weeks, thank goodness.

I think that's all the news that's fit to print, but I'll try to be more diligent with the updates from now on. Take care, dear readers, and thanks for listening.

Read my list

2010-06-13T11:27:00.004-04:00

As usual when I get a break from law school, I have been tearing through every piece of literature I can get my hands on lately. Having just finished another great book, and realizing I could recommend everything I've read so far this summer to one type of person or another, I thought I should probably try to make all this benefit other people. Then the outrageous mounting page count will seem less crazy, right?

So here are my summer picks, beach books every one:

Jane Eyre, 1847, by Charlotte Brontë

I'll probably be nursing this one all summer, disappointed that it isn't the same page-turner I remember reading as a kid, but still happy to pick it up between other books. The "red room" scene, harsh boarding school, and troubled Rochester family are haunting icons everyone should discover if they haven't yet.

The Little Stranger, 2009, by Sarah Waters

This author is famous for setting racy lesbian romances in the Victorian age, but departs here with a thriller set in postwar England. It's partly a good old-fashioned ghost story, partly unique for its reluctance to come down on the side of either haunting or hysteria, with plenty to say about things more important than either.

The Terror, 2007, by Dan Simmons

Also scary and another departure for an author, in this case a suspense novelist writing historical fiction. Explorers on a doomed Arctic mission meet with something much worse than frostbite. Their losing battle lasts 766 unrelenting pages - not everyone's cup of tea, but great if you want to feel 10 degrees cooler than the people in the pool you're reading beside.

The Devil in the White City, 2003, by Erik Larson

Are history and violence the themes this summer, or what? This non-fiction book, which reads like the most readable of novels, tells how the 1893 World's Fair and America's first serial killer hit Chicago at the same time. Esquire says it best: "So good, you find yourself asking how you could not know this already."

Daughter of Fortune, 1999, by Isabel Allende

I couldn't get through House of the Spirits in high school, but Allende had me hooked with this one. I recommend it to fans of The Shadow of the Wind, which it resembles a lot, except that the setting is Chile and San Francisco and the main character female.

I'll try to do this again for the next half-dozen books I inevitably go through. In the meantime, enjoy!

Hardly working

2010-06-12T16:50:00.009-04:00

I've been waiting to post about my internships until I logged some time at both, which took a while because the second one started a week later than the first, after I got back from a long weekend in Florida. It was a great trip:

But even more exciting is the way my summer work is panning out. The two places I'm interning couldn't be more different, but I'm eating them both right up.

The first one, for instance, is a policy organization working to open financial institutions to immigrants and the poor. I share two rooms of a lovely downtown suite with one other intern and a fabulous female boss whose positivity, intellect, and rolodex are best described as superhuman. Her overriding concern is to provide me with a good experience (imagine that) so the four or five projects I've got going on any given day are varied, creative, and chosen to match my interests. And lunch dates with all manner of good Austin contacts are already in the works.

At the other place, a direct legal services office, I get a nice mix of legal research and client contact with reassuringly close supervision by a really acclaimed housing lawyer. If his sheer kinetic energy wasn't enough to keep me busy, working in a large bullpen with ten or so other interns would be. It's great to meet law students from all over, hear about their schools and projects with different teams around the office, and always have someone to commiserate about sad client stories or unproductive phone calls.

Were it not for getting up at the same time each day and having to drive at rush hour, this would barely feel like work at all. It's Saturday evening now, about mid-way through the weekend, and I'm actually a little bored. Looking forward to eight more weeks like this, I hope all you readers out there have the good luck to feel the same way.

A beginning

2010-05-31T22:33:00.004-04:00

I start work at my first of two summer internships tomorrow! I just got back from having frozen yogurt at the shop down the street as a "last night of freedom" treat for myself. Now I plan to turn in early, read a little of my book, and try to make my early wake-up call tomorrow a bit easier. Having taken a few early yoga classes lately should also help, but I'm trying not to overestimate how much.

To give you an idea of what I'll be doing at work, here is my last post of the school year to Harvard's admissions blog:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2010/05/26/summertime-lea-downey/

Wish me luck!

Better late...

2010-05-25T10:40:00.007-04:00

Folks, I am so sorry not to have updated you on my big move and new life in Austin sooner! It's been delightfully eventful ever since finals slowly tapered off - not that I've been too busy to write, more that I've been just busy enough to want to spend my spend free time doing things that demand less mental energy than writing.

Like catching up on EVERY GOOD SHOW EVER on Hulu, because I have Internet but no TV here.

I also wanted to wait until the little apartment I'm subleasing here was ready for pictures! It came furnished, but sparsely, and luckily I've had the time to pour some serious energy into making it look cute without spending serious cash.

But first, a little something I put together to show you what an absolute nightmare it was getting from Boston to Austin this time around. Think mechanical delay, followed by cancellation, then a failed standby attempt, re-checking 115 pounds of luggage by myself, and almost six hours in the Boston airport:

Those are all the documents I was given in the course of trying to get here. Since you probably can't read them, they are: boarding passes from Boston to Dallas to Austin; luggage stickers and charge receipt for Boston to Dallas to Austin; an itinerary for Boston to Chicago to Austin; "priority verification" slips (whatever those are) and new luggage stickers for Boston to Chicago to Austin; and finally boarding passes for Boston to Chicago to Austin.

Hard to believe all that happened in one day - my mom says it wouldn't have if I hadn't cried.

Anyway, that's all behind me now, and here is the new place. The living room:

Kitchen area:

Bedroom, seen from the kitchen:

Back patio, seen from the bedroom:

And some touches I got cheap at Big Lots and Hobby Lobby to make the place feel a bit less naked:

I'm excited about spending three months here, and I'll certainly update you as things develop and my summer work begins!

Big news

2010-05-10T09:10:00.005-04:00

I apologize for not posting in so long! I'm in the middle of a long and drawn-out Housing Law and Policy paper that's sucking up every bit of my will to write.

However, I just had to make a quick update about some incredibly exciting news for the Harvard community. President Obama is naming our former Dean, Elena Kagan, to the Supreme Court today!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10kagan.html?hp

Dean Kagan was still around for my first semester at Harvard, making her the person who welcomed my class to the school during Orientation, poked fun at my professors at that gorgeous dinner in the rare books room at Langdell, and always shot big, warm smiles at me in the hallways during those first difficult months.

"Beloved" would be an understatement of her popularity at school, so I know I'm not alone in my joy seeing this fabulous woman achieve her biggest dream. I literally cannot wait for her to be confirmed and start bringing all her wonderful qualities to the Court.

The competition is over, and Elena won!

Just, y'know, another week at Harvard.

2010-04-18T20:54:00.016-04:00

This was the last week of classes, that time of year when students' exam stresses officially kick in and professors, done trying to cram whatever last material they had planned into their lectures, dispense all their best humor and most poignant advice about law and life.

But I've written about all that here before, and what I'm really itching to tell you about is a few opportunities I've had lately - opportunities of the special, extra-ridiculously-great variety that could only happen at Harvard.

First, there was an event last Friday that Russell heard about through work and knew I'd be overjoyed to see. The Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard was awarding its Lifetime Achievement in Cultural Humanism prize, and the recipients were… drumroll please… THE MYTHBUSTERS.

For any of you unfortunate enough not to know, these are two guys named Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman whose show on the Discovery Channel employs lots of robotics, crash-test dummies, and of course explosions in the name of testing things like whether duck quacks echo or if pennies on railroad tracks derail trains.

Basically, these guys are huge celebrities in the nerd community and the objects of one of my bigger TV crushes of all time. Apparently they're also both atheists, and they were being honored for the way they’ve promoted the scientific method and made skepticism more mainstream. There was standing room only in the gorgeous Memorial Church (oh, the irony) as they made surprisingly eloquent remarks on this topic, then fielded a long question-and-answer session about the show.

The entire thing was just freakishly awesome - even better than I imagined when I rushed out and nabbed some of the last advance tickets for the unreal student price of $8. But I particularly loved finding out how much their favorite episodes to make differed from my favorites to watch - how can they prefer Lead Balloon and Exploding Water Heater to Explosive Decompression and Alcatraz Escape??

The bottom line here is, when your day job is shooting frozen chickens out of homemade cannons and trying to wear through prison bars with salsa - in sunny California - what besides Harvard could possibly entice you to the cold, wet north to spend your Friday night sitting in an old church answering questions about that job?

At this point, I'm actually reluctant to go on about my next great opportunity this week. But it involves that project with the Boston teenagers I've been dying to tell you about, so the opportunity to catch you up is just too perfect.

I'll start from the beginning: my Community Action class requires an outside community-based project, and this year the Robert F. Kennedy Children's Action Corps was scouting for one. They'd been in touch with two former Community Action students whose project was a workshop series with some Cambridge middle-schoolers, and they wanted to do something similar for a group of kids they were supervising as an alternative to detention out of juvenile court.

I jumped on this project literally the moment my professor mentioned it, and soon I had a partner and we were arranging two "get to know you" meetings at the Dorchester community center where the group was based.

We found the teens pretty sullen and withdrawn, but before long were learning interesting things about them anyway - like how most felt less safe inside school than outside in their neighborhoods, and some didn't think they made a positive contribution to their school, but most still thought they could go to law school someday. The key was first giving them a non-verbal way to weigh in, like voting in a show of hands or walking to a placard marked "Agree," "Disagree," "Strongly Agree," or "Strongly Disagree," before asking them to explain why.

Then, this semester, we channeled what we'd learned about them and their interests into some more formal workshops with topics like blame and responsibility, justice, authority, and power. Each week the group would start with the same standoffishness, but eventually open up into lively and profound discussion about their lives and opinions - and it was astonishing to see this happening faster and lasting longer with each passing week.

In the end, we shot and produced a video to share their thoughts with other Harvard students who, we assured them, stood to learn just as much from them as we had. This actually took a lot of persuading, because the group makeup had gradually changed enough that not many of the teens who originally proposed a video were around by the end. To convince the new, more skeptical majority, I wound up making a short example video with some friends asking the teens for their views. After we played it for them, we got a unanimous vote to make one of their own.

It took two sessions to get the footage: one last regular weekly meeting, when to occupy whoever wasn't filming, we brought in a fellow student who works with the Criminal Justice Institute to answer their questions about the courts - he was just awesome with them and they loved him - and one Saturday "crunch session" to brainstorm the last of the content and get it shot.

So that's what I did last Wednesday night: I screened the 15-minute video I'd edited for a group of about 25 Community Action classmates, friends involved with the example video, RFK staff members, and the teens themselves. We used a big, beautiful room in Austin Hall and had questions, discussion, and mingling over cheese and fruit and desserts. I think it went well, but it went by in a total blur I can't entirely assess. In any case, I did what I set out to do and couldn't be prouder.

The last opportunity I want to mention concerns my brilliant, off-the-wall Corporations professor - and yeah, I guess it falls into the inspirational last-week-of-class category I figured I would avoid. It's the opportunity to hear him read this amazing poem by Naomi Shihab Nye at the close of Friday's class:

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and is not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

This is the same guy who, I recently learned, wrote this incredible blog post every woman should read, and whose class made me laugh harder and more often than all my other classes in my whole education combined while, yes, teaching me a fair amount about corporations too. At the risk of letting this post get absolutely barf-inducingly gushy about Harvard - if it wasn't already - I just feel so privileged to have had this semester with him. I'm going to miss it so much!

Me, miss Corporations? Talk about things that could only happen at Harvard.

Out there

2010-04-14T22:33:00.005-04:00

When I sat down on Jarvis Field today, in a spot carefully chosen to put myself in the sunshine and my laptop screen in the shade, I expected to spend the two hours and change between classes getting started on the video I'm making with the at-risk teens from my Community Action project. Instead, I got completely wrapped up in something I barely knew existed before: the law student blogosphere.

As you may have learned from the comment on my last post, a site called ClearAdmit has nominated me for their Best of Blogging competition this year. Of course I'm really flattered, because while I'd never heard of the site before, who knows how many other people have. And because ClearAdmit has apparently been mentioning me for months in their Fridays from the Frontline feature, who knows how many of them have gone on to visit this site. (Welcome, guys!)

Since nominees (and only nominees, sorry fans) are invited to vote in this thing, I decided to glance through the other nominated blogs and try to make some semblance of an informed decision. This quickly turned into more than a glance, because the more I read and realized that these were real people who might really appreciate the recognition, the more I cared.

It was crazy to discover this whole community whose edges I've apparently skirted for months. What better reminder that there are people everywhere, not just at Harvard, going through the same things I am than posts like this one from IDWSJ, expressing exactly the same feelings I had about friendships my 1L year? But I was also startled to see myself on the "blogroll" of a couple of the sites. Are real Internet strangers out there reading this thing???

And if so, should that mean something for my conception of this blog? On the one hand, not really. If somebody else thinks the content is good, I'm thrilled, but my first priority is still to keep family and close friends up to date on the parts of my life they would care about. On the other hand, this does change a thing or two. Realizing how many people might actually read this, for example, I should probably think carefully about whose names and pictures I use here.

I've drawn no real conclusions yet, especially with finals looming and a huge video project to undertake and plenty left to wrap up with TAP and my journal. But I'm definitely setting up a Google Alert on myself, and I should probably look into a hit counter.... Suggestions?

Spring at last

2010-04-12T11:57:00.007-04:00

I've said it before, but spring in Cambridge is glorious. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, the flowering trees are flowering. And my friends Jen and Albert recently won their election to be president and vice-president of our student body after spending a week campaigning outside the Hark. Outside!

I'm trying to use this time to refresh and recharge before the big crunch at year's end. With two weeks left of class, this means staying on top of my readings, getting ahead on some research for my Housing Law and Policy paper, and tying up loose ends with things like my journal and incredible Community Action project with those Boston teens. But it also means taking care of myself: getting some sun, taking a hot bath, finishing The Girl Who Played With Fire - highly recommended - and making a long-overdue haircut appointment at my luxurious new favorite salon on Newbury Street. Can. Not. Wait.

Around this time last semester, Russell and I both restricted our diets to the very healthiest tier of things we usually eat. This was supposed to keep Thanksgiving and Christmas from rolling together into one endless stretch of indigestion and weight gain, but the unexpected result was a huge improvement in my focus and well-being over past exam seasons (when I'd always justified scarfing whatever processed junk was around as "comforting" or "rewarding" myself, without realizing the effect on my energy level.)

So we've decided to do the same this semester - to spend some time together cooking when I might otherwise be too busy to talk, hopefully lose a little weight gained at our various birthday celebrations, and generally not let the hell of final exams make our bodies feel like hell, too.

I really do want to update you on that project for Community Action, so stay tuned for another post soon. In the meantime, wish me luck approaching it all in the most Zen-like state possible.

Summer jobs and clerkships

2010-04-08T19:57:00.004-04:00

I'm pretty glad I can re-post these things from Admissions instead of re-hashing them here. Excited as I'm getting about both, the process has been (or is about to get) a bit long and daunting, not the kind of story I'm dying to retell. But as you'll see, the news is mostly good:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2010/04/02/private-sectorocs-week-lea-downey/

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2010/04/08/public-interest-week-lea-downey/

Thanks and wishes

2010-03-29T20:48:00.003-04:00

Don't worry, you haven't stumbled onto the wrong website! This is the 100th post I've made to this blog, and in celebration I've done a big redesign that I really hope you like.

I got the idea in late January, during my flurry of creative energy after Omar's passing, and soon realized I would need to learn a little HTML and revive a few basic design skills to do it right. That took a couple of weeks and only a little help from my generous darling Anush, and since then I've just been tweaking and waiting for this occasion to unveil it.

It's a fun time to be making this change, with school being so brutal but my upcoming birthday being pretty exciting. In honor of each, I thought I'd do two things with this post:

First, I want to thank everyone reading this for the support you've sent my way over the past year and a half. This has been the most fun and exciting, but also by far the most difficult, time I have ever experienced, and I might never have survived it this long without the kind thoughts you've shared in comments, by e-mail or telephone, in prayers, or in person each day. For that and so much more, I'm sincerely grateful.

Second, on a less sappy note, I thought I'd share my wish list for this upcoming birthday. Not so that you'll buy me these things (or please, at least consult with each other before you do) but because they might be a fun window into what I have going on right now:

Tickets to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Spa treatments at nearby Pyara or Inman Oasis
Classic Controller for Nintendo Wii
A blender (this nice or nicer, so it won't break like everyone's seems to.)
Da Bird and Go Cat Go toys
A Big Love Season 3 Pass on iTunes

Okay, I'll stop before I get out of control. But since none of those was a Constitutional Law reading assignment, can you guess why I might want to keep going?

But I guess all things, even this landmark day for the blog, must come to an end. Thanks again to all those who've stuck with me so far, and here's to the next 100 being even better.

Insanity

2010-03-28T17:19:00.004-04:00

I can't believe the week I just had, or at least I can't believe I made it through without a nervous breakdown.

On Thursday morning, as I got ready to be at school past 10 p.m. for the second day in a row and past dinnertime for the fourth, it occurred to me that I might actually go all week without sitting down to a meal that wasn't also a class or meeting. I've joked before that you know you're a 2L in public interest when you think of class as a good opportunity to have lunch, but I didn't know just how true that was until now.

Some of what happened is complicated and some confidential, but I'll give you the highlights:

Catching up on Constitutional Law readings only to have to do the same for Housing Law and Corporations
Scrambling to plan another workshop for my at-risk Boston teens
Having to leave actually leading that workshop to my partner because our ride to Dorchester was half an hour late, and if I correspondingly got back to Cambridge late I would miss seeing dear friends compete in the Ames Moot Court semifinals
Seeing those friends demolish the competition and become Ames finalists, a huge deal at Harvard, but then doing a lot of congratulatory socializing I really had no time to do
Giving up lunchtimes to my Community Action partner, TAP Intake Committee, and mandatory (though admittedly great) movie screenings for Corporations class
Training a team of 1Ls on technical editing for my journal... at 9 p.m., because it was the only time they all had free
And last, but most definitely not least, dropping everything to work late into the night on a court complaint I was wildly under-qualified to write, for a client who spent the last week calling our office to complain about me, but whom no one else would help because of a 24-hour-away filing deadline my supervisor had failed to mention a week earlier, when some (qualified) legal services office could probably still have helped. Seriously.

I'm done being angry over some of these things that really screwed me, but it's taken a lot of opportunities to blow off steam. Like our friend Ryan's birthday party late Friday night over tapas and too much sangria, then breakfast with Anush Saturday morning, followed by a moving and funny conference in honor of my beloved, very sick, 1L Criminal Law professor. Then there were the three hours of shopping and another (more fun, because it was also with Anush) technical edit training for my journal, then the lovely Spring Progressive Formal at Harvard's Peabody Museum to round out the night.

Thank god. Because if this is the storm I referred to last post, then the calm was a lot shorter than I expected. And if it isn't, then I am not looking forward to finding out what is.

Before the storm

2010-03-21T19:07:00.007-04:00

I know this post is a long time coming. But preparing for, then taking, and now recovering from a whirlwind Spring Break trip to Austin and El Paso has really stolen any time I would've had to sit down and write.

Fortunately, I've been getting all sorts of other important things done in the meantime. Most critically, while I left Cambridge with quite a lingering case of the New England Februaries, a week in the incomparable Texas sunshine has me feeling much more energized and ready to do what I need to in the last weeks of this semester.

Which is a lot. I fell behind in the readings for my Constitutional Law course leading up to the break (however entertaining the lectures were), so this weekend I've had to catch up in addition to reading for tomorrow's class. I can't let that happen again, or I'll wind up wasting time that I should spend studying for the exam just catching up. I also need to get started planning my final paper for Housing Law, but luckily I have an interesting topic in mind.

More immediately, this Tuesday will be my third workshop with the Boston teenagers I'm meeting through the RFK Children's Action Corps and my Community Action class. This is the single most exhausting thing I've got going this semester, but it's also the most fulfilling, so I hope to write a whole post about it sometime. For now, I'll just say that getting young people whose whole existence is so punitive just thinking and talking about ideas like justice can truly take your breath away, even if it's also a little like pulling teeth.

There's also work for TAP, which is steady and productive if sometimes disappointing. I'm ready to move on from a long-shot case that I recently assigned myself entirely out of sympathy for the delightful Haitian tenant, but (predictably, but no less regrettably) got word over the break that I'd lost. Lousy, but as in every case, I learned a lot and made someone feel supported in a difficult time, so I'm eager to try again.

Of course, all this - plus Corporations, my journal, and the first round of preparations to apply for judicial clerkships in the fall - has to wrap up in just over six weeks now! Luckily, in Austin I took care of one other big thing that was weighing on my mind: I found an apartment for the ten weeks I'll be there doing internships this summer. It's a kind of breezy one-bedroom in a cool neighborhood off North Lamar Boulevard, and it's making me long for summer even more (as if a dear friend's August wedding, in which I'll be a bridesmaid for the first time ever, weren't enough!)

Luckily, I think I have just enough steam to get there. Even with rain in the forecast through Wednesday.

Supreme Court Storytime

2010-03-09T14:23:00.004-05:00

It’s a gorgeous week in Cambridge, with sunshine and temperatures over fifty degrees for several days now. This made it much easier to drag myself out of bed Monday morning no matter how exhausted and sore I was from an amazing ski weekend in Maine with friends!

But once I get to class each day, I'm reminded of another reason to be glad I got up: my Constitutional Law class has just reached the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which our professor sees as a great opportunity to give us a sense of the rich social and historical context and personal dynamics between the Justices affecting such a major decision.

So we get to hear about Justice Jackson’s lifelong hatred of Justice Black, partly based on the suspicion that Black personally visited President Truman to threaten to resign if Jackson were made Chief Justice. Jackson retaliated by sending a telegram to Congress and the press calling Black irresponsible for failing to recuse himself in a case argued by a former law partner. (There were calls for both Justices to resign at this point because of the embarrassment they’d caused the Court, but both stuck around.)

We've heard about the bitter dislike between Justice Frankfurter and Justice Douglas, who became a leading expert at taunting Frankfurter during their years together on the court. During oral arguments, he loved to pass Frankfurter snide notes saying lawyers who were floundering under the Court’s questioning must have been Frankfurter’s star pupils when he was a professor. Douglas would also begin his comments in conference, which he made right after Frankfurter due to seniority, by saying he’d arrived expecting to vote the same way as Frankfurter but had just been persuaded otherwise.

My professor also notes that even the Justices most at odds with each other were united in their dislike for Chief Justice Vinson. Apparently, Justice Frankfurter once referred to Vinson’s death as the only evidence he’d ever seen for the existence of God.

Apart from the hilarity of seeing Supreme Court justices call each other “vegetable” and "son of a bitch" left and right, it's amazing to learn how one of the most famous unanimous opinions in Supreme Court history arose from such discord. It strikes me as lucky—or perhaps genius—that the professor hits this section of the syllabus just as spring fever hits the student body. Even with this lovely weather and the upcoming break to distract us, there’s still a very good reason to show up and listen.

She's a dream

2010-02-22T18:41:00.004-05:00

We are enjoying our new cat, Ramona, so much.

When I first brought her home from the shelter, she walked around purring at the top of her lungs and rubbing her face on every surface she encountered, especially us. It was like she recognized her new home for what it was and could never express her gratitude if she took even a moment to breathe. We started calling her Love Machine because she wanted to be touched every waking second.

We also called her our little motorboat, because all the purring sounded almost like an engine propelling her around the place.

We're out of that honeymoon phase now, and her personality is becoming a bit more balanced and cat-like. She purrs less often, but now she meows all the time instead, and it's an adorable scratchy little meow we never get tired of hearing. Unfortunately, as she recovers from being spayed, we find her channeling excess energy into some pretty rough play. Our fingers and feet are suffering a little as we learn how to use toys to keep her worn out! But responding the first time she cries for attention, instead of making her wait and resort to other measures, has helped too.

Ramona's big social debut will be this Friday, when we're having a bunch of friends over to celebrate Russell's birthday and play with the new Wii I bought him. We think everyone will notice quite a difference from Omar! And we look forward to many more years with this funny, spoiled girl, during which I'm sure you'll hear plenty more about her.

Not snow much

2010-02-21T23:01:00.003-05:00

In a recent admissions blog post, I commented on our weirdly dry weather as the "snowpocalypse" hit elsewhere on the East Coast the other week:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2010/02/19/not-snow-much/

It got me thinking how much less snowy this winter has been than last year. I remember a lot more white on the ground, a lot more of the time, the first time around. It's been nice to avoid how dingy the snow gets when it sticks around too long, but the beauty of a fresh coat is something you start to miss. So the couple days of heavy snowfall we did get after I wrote that post were pretty welcome.

Of course, we're moving into the annual craziness that is February, so most of that has melted by now. It's been getting warmer, with a peak in the mid-forties today that I celebrated with a long, sunny walk to lunch in the Square. It was important to take advantage because (did I mention it's February?) we're due for at least ten days of snow, sleet, and the dreaded wintry mix starting tomorrow.

At least this year I know what to expect!

Assorted updates

2010-02-16T14:59:00.002-05:00

Life up here has been good lately - crazy, but manageably so. I feel like I'm getting into a swing with spring semester courses, extracurriculars, and life around the house, although I haven't had much time to bring you up to speed about them until now.

For one thing, my involvement with Intake at the Tenant Advocacy Project has hit a pretty good rhythm. After a few easy decisions, some others requiring a bit more investigation, and one fairly complicated one that should wrap up tomorrow, I can sense my judgment in whether or not to take a case developing. What they say about Intake Committee - that it shows you much more of the variety of housing issues out there than working individual cases - is definitely true. And I'm finding it easy to balance with my schedule of classes and other projects, since the work comes in relatively discrete, short chunks.

Things are also going nicely at the journal. In my capacity as Senior Article Editor this semester, I'm actually the direct supervisor of my dear friend Anush, who was special enough to be made an Article Editor in charge of three other 1L's already. Until later in the semester, when my duties with the Tech Department will ramp up, my main responsibility is keeping her on schedule and checking her work to be passed up the chain. As the future head of Tech, I'm also sitting in on weekly meetings of the current leadership, learning a lot more about how the journal works - all fun and easy so far.

Also doable have been classes: Constitutional Law is serious but manageable, Housing Law engaging and a great affirmation that I could work in that area for life. The high point of my week is weirdly Corporations, with its unconventional, hilarious professor and illuminating material. And in Community Action, we're working to schedule weekly meetings with our inner-city youth and planning lessons we can't wait to bring them.

In personal news, it's been three weeks since we lost Omar, and I think we're moving on well. That feeling of grief, which to me is so much like having your guts pulled out and replaced with lead, is receding pretty quickly now and my usual energy (well, usual for winter) is returning. But the place still feels a bit empty without an animal, so Russell and I began wondering last week or so whether it was time to adopt a new kitty. Once I started browsing the websites of some local animal shelters, our wondering turned into impatience.

So we got to talking about timing, and with a weekend trip to Maine coming up and Spring Break a week after that, realized we would either need to act soon or wait until late March. That suddenly seemed so far away that we were out the door and on the subway to MSPCA Boston before we knew it.

The result is Ramona, a two-year-old female calico who caught my eye the moment we walked into the surprisingly cheery cat enclosure. She was sound asleep and not attracting much attention from other visitors, though, so we actually made a full round of the room before deciding to reach in and try to wake her up. Pretty soon after doing so, we were sold on her sweet, lazy personality, great face, and taste for being picked up.

We really didn't expect to have another cat by now. But "Chica," as the shelter was calling her (we didn't like the name, but decided to stick with the Latina flair, picking Ramona from among many lists of Spanish girls' names online), comes home tonight after staying the weekend to be spayed. We're anxious and excited, but mostly confident that now is the right time and we are more than equipped to handle anything she throws at us. Which I doubt will be much, but the self-assurance is nice.

So wish me luck getting to the shelter in the snow we're finally having. Luckily, an amazing friend with a Zipcar account has offered to chauffeur since Russell will still be at work. And of course, as both school and the kitty situation develop, I'll be sure to post more updates (and/or pictures!)

Honorable mentions

2010-02-13T23:18:00.005-05:00

I thought I’d wait a while to bombard you with another part of our Best of the Decade list. But inspired by The Onion’s AV Club, which posted a separate list of films each of its editors would have liked to see make the cut, we allowed ourselves a few “honorable mentions” outside the set fifty. They are:

Lea:

American Gangster (2007)

I think this was the great, complex urban crime saga of the past decade and would have put it in at least the top 25. But it really didn’t do it for Russell for some reason, and he kept letting it slip down the list to ranks I was sad to see. So rather than fight, we made a trade—see his list below.

Hustle & Flow (2005)*

Like the others here with asterisks, this is one Russell somehow hasn’t seen. I plan to rectify this ASAP, but in the meantime we found these difficult to rank with him unable to give input. So I agreed to make honorable mentions of the best few, like this incredible, gritty underdog story with Terrence Howard at his best and rap music I actually like!

La Vie En Rose (2007)*

Hands down the best female performance—possibly the best performance, period—of the decade and a tear-jerking, beautifully musical story to boot.

Billy Elliot (2000)*

This quirky, tenderly acted story of one weird kid’s single-minded triumph over ignorance is one I could watch time and again and look forward to sharing with Russell.

Whale Rider (2002)*

An underdog like so many of my favorites, this small, beautiful movie from a remote location mixes girl power and the supernatural in ways I would have loved to honor.

The Matador (2005)*

Another major sleeper, this features Pierce Brosnan as a washed-up assassin and Greg Kinnear as his unwilling sidekick—top roles by far for them both. Between surprisingly touching reflections on age, talent, and purpose, it made me fall down laughing repeatedly. I couldn’t recommend it more.

Harry Potter films

These hold up increasingly well to one of the greatest series of books, and certainly one of the largest phenomena, of the decade. No Lord of the Rings by any means, but they have something special I would have honored given more space.

Russell:

There Will Be Blood (2007)

I recognize that this is a good movie, but can’t understand why everyone is so crazy about it. The pacing is totally bipolar and the last half hour could have been completely cut. I kept doing to this movie, which Russell adored, what he kept doing to American Gangster. So we agreed to remove them both and battle it out in honorable mentions!

Friday Night Lights (2004)

I’m so glad Russell listed this, since it’s kind of an honorable mention for me also.

Moon (2009)

Some of my favorite acting of the decade, but facing hard choices I had to decide that didn’t cut it, and Russell agreed to move it here.

Rescue Dawn (2006)

Eastern Promises (2007)

District 9 (2009)

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these as much as we enjoyed assembling them. Back to law school, Cambridge, and—gasp—kitty news next time!

The decade's best

2010-02-10T23:45:00.004-05:00

Inspired by friends and reviewers who made “best of the decade” lists toward the end of last year, and despite running a bit behind the trend (blame Omar), Russell and I have had a blast (and a couple of fights) over the past several days putting together a list of our top fifty movies of the 2000’s.

I posted them in a note on Facebook last night, but kept the commentary to a minimum and thought (especially since this final list results from a big last-minute reorganization I did by myself and only tweaked slightly where Russell took issue) it might be fun to say a bit more here.

So this is what we came up with:

50 Night Watch (2004)

We loved this wildly creative Eastern European vampire epic, and I fought hard to keep it among these other amazing films.

49 Bowling for Columbine (2002)

An ambitious, unexpectedly personal documentary from a controversial filmmaker we thought deserved a nod.

48 The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)

In the particular kind of loud, colorful, lewd comedy that got so popular last decade, this was our favorite. Knocked Up also nearly made this list, and The Hangover was almost one of Russell’s honorable mentions.

47 Almost Famous (2000)

Well-made, cult-followed, and full of classic millennial nostalgia.

46 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

When this came out, it made us roar with laughter and looked like nothing we’d ever seen before. Judged apart from its sequels, it’s exactly the kind of icon that belongs on this list.

45 Love Actually (2003)

A decade of bad romantic comedies basically tried to be this perfect one.

44 Kill Bill Volume 2 (2004)

This was our favorite of the crazy, classically Tarantino flicks in this modern martial arts-revenge saga, so we used it to represent them both.

43 Ocean's Eleven (2001)

This one made the list mostly for its staying power. It’s still incredibly slick, appealing, and watchable today.

42 Gangs of New York (2002)

I have a particular soft spot for this sweeping urban epic with its jaw-dropping performance by Daniel Day Lewis. Go figure…

41 Moulin Rouge! (2001)

Another one with fantastic staying power, this was a leader in the great revival of musicals last decade, but stands out from most others in sheer creativity.

40 Iron Man (2008)

The best-reviewed superhero movie until The Dark Knight, this one resurrected Robert Downey Jr. and has a serious kick-ass factor.

39 Wall-E (2008)

We could probably have every Pixar movie on this list, but to be fair we let this revolutionary, beautiful, moving love story stand in for a few.

38 The Bourne Identity (2002)

The best, smartest action franchise of the decade.

37 Walk the Line (2005)

To represent the ever-present biopic (of which we aren’t always fans), we chose this great story with fine acting and even better music.

36 Frost/Nixon (2008)

I like small, low-budget movies about the small, low-budget moments at the heart of history. This is one of the best (but several more are still to come.)

35 City of God (2002)

This one’s a favorite of Russell and many of our cinephile friends. My sense that Slumdog Millionaire does a bit better at something similar kept this low-ish on the list, but I still loved it (besides, this one’s actually true.)

34 The Incredibles (2004)

Our other favorite Pixar release, this joined in the superhero fun without a moment of cliché.

33 Super Size Me (2004)

I love documentaries, and this one is so personal, fun (yet gross), and relevant to everyday life that I had to see it included.

32 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Russell only saw this recently, and I’m so glad he agrees that it’s the best acted, most beautiful, and generally greatest export of a certain kind of martial arts film to America.

31 Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Outstripping its also excellent companion Flags of our Fathers by a mile, this evocative and beautifully-acted story shows the grimness this past decade brought to the war movie.

30 Michael Clayton (2007)

An outstanding twist on the otherwise tired business law genre.

29 Lost in Translation (2003)

We love this one’s atmosphere and quiet comedy, and between the themes of aging, disconnectedness, and indecision, it’s as 2000’s as they come.

28 The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Its ensemble cast, family dysfunction, and Wes Anderson aesthetic captured the decade’s taste for quirk and paved the way for many other classics.

27 Spirited Away (2001)

I kept ranking this Miyazaki favorite higher and higher for its singular beauty, creativity, and representation of a decade that saw us all fall back in love with animation.

26 Children of Men (2006)

The subject and scope of this dystopian thriller couldn’t be more representative of the decade. I adored it (go figure) and would have ranked it higher, but Russell only let it climb this high due to its rave reviews.

25 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

This ranks near or at the top of many people’s lists of movies. We buy that memory and forgetting are among the decade’s most important themes, but think there is too much noteworthy filmmaking elsewhere for this to win.

24 Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

Possibly the most fun I had at the movies all decade! I must have watched this five times with different groups of rapturous friends. And its repertoire of 90’s and 00’s influences is magnificent.

23 The Wrestler (2008)

A searing, heartbreaking little movie, one of the most anticipated ever in our household. On a list of best performances of the decade, this would shoot straight to the top.

22 The Hurt Locker (2009)

The decade finally brings us a film worthy of the futility and life-changing brutality of the wars that dominated it.

21 Gran Torino (2008)

Though understandably controversial, this movie stays near to our hearts by reminding us of real men we’ve reluctantly held in them.

20 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

Part raunchy, catchy drag-rock spectacle, part unexpectedly personal journey of identity and love: where has this been all our lives?

19 Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

We loved this sprawling third-world epic combining harsh reality with gleeful childhood resilience and goofiness with genuine magic.

18 Star Trek (2009)

In a decade of series reboots, the most improbable, ambitious, and anticipated turned out the very best. I would rank this much higher; Russell says time will tell.

17 Amelie (2001)

Treating events in 1990’s Europe with the playfulness of perspective, this unconventional love story combining cutesiness with naughtiness still begs to be watched.

16 Memento (2000)

Another movie about forgetting, this time combined with a murder mystery (as only the 2000’s could) and filmed unforgettably (as no one had before, has since, or will again.)

15 Stranger than Fiction (2006)

Apart from bringing us the sexiest female character of the decade, this seriously underrated literary comedy has some of the greatest smarts, self-awareness, and genre-busting acting the 2000’s had to offer.

14 O Brother Where Art Thou (2000)

Also underrated and still peerless in comedy, creativity, appearance, and soundtrack.

13 Crash (2004)

Tackles race issues head on and makes us cry and cry.

12 Million Dollar Baby (2004)

Offers so many of our favorite things: sports, girl power, controversy, and Clint Eastwood.

11 Milk (2008)

Incredibly timely and unbelievably acted, a joyous, fearless film that packs an emotional punch in terms of both characters past and politics present.

10 An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

A lot of what happens to our planet, big and small, in this decade and the next will be traced back to this movie.

9 Good Night and Good Luck (2005)

Another small movie with a big lesson for us all. I loved the messages, characters, and rhythms of this one and luckily didn’t have to fight hard to give it this ranking.

8 The Dark Knight (2008)

In terms of scale and popularity alone, this would have been this decade’s Titanic. Happily, in other areas—like acting by icon Heath Ledger—it blew Titanic out of the water, so to speak. This represents the 2000’s in so many ways: it’s a superhero movie that changes our expectations of superheroes, recognizes that action doesn’t negate expectations for good acting and writing anymore, and engages with deep questions of what exactly are good and evil.

7 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

Another big-budget, high-tech crowd pleaser. Except in this case, the crowd included legions of die-hard fans of the beloved literary series. Peter Jackson exceeds all their expectations with this gorgeous, thrilling middle film we’ve chosen to represent the trilogy.

6 Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

I would have ranked this “little comedy that could” within the top five: its emphatic stance that dysfunctional families are some of the best ones makes it a quintessential 2000’s story for me. Blonder heads prevailed, but we did agree that the superb ensemble cast, hysterical script, and underdog story (both within plot and without, in critical success) make this a winner.

5 Brokeback Mountain (2005)

This powerful and timely romance definitely wins tearjerker of the decade. The soundtrack alone had me spontaneously breaking down for weeks. Nevertheless (or therefore?), we consider it the true American love story: a love that outlasts but can’t overcome great adversity. We also wish we knew how to quit Heath Ledger.

4 28 Days Later (2002)

We may have ranked this higher than anyone else on the planet would, but I stand by it. Turning every weakness of our beloved zombie genre on its head, the film creates a nightmarish apocalyptic vision still scary after years and years. Add to that a relentless pace, brilliant acting (who among us can forget the scene after Frank looks up at the dead bird?) and timely yet timeless political undertones, and you get something surprisingly watchable time after time.

3 Traffic (2000)

An ambitious, heart-wrenching treatise on the drug wars that had almost flawless reviews and should totally have won the Best Picture Oscar over Gladiator (conspicuously missing from this list, we know.) We hadn’t seen it in years, but found there were multiple scenes we would never forget. I’ve wanted to watch it again since seeing it near the top of others’ lists of favorites, though I expect to be depressed by how little things off-screen have changed since it was made.

2 No Country for Old Men (2007)

This movie does something I would never have guessed possible outside Cormac McCarthy’s prose: it tells an ugly story, set in an ugly place, signaling ugly changes in the ways of the world—yet does it with impossible beauty. Javier Bardem brings the fright, Josh Brolin the tenacity, and Tommy Lee Jones the poetry of one of my favorite authors’ works to the screen. I can’t say enough about the Coen Brothers’ masterful adaptation of this stark, masculine, yet eerily tender drama; I’m so glad Russell agrees.

1 The Departed (2006)

This was a no-brainer for me, and Russell was quickly convinced. This movie combines a half-dozen spectacular performances across two generations of great actors with a razor-sharp screenplay and a powerful sense of place (a place especially relevant to us.) It runs wild with some of the decade’s favorite themes, from identity and deception to aging and obsolescence, and cunningly pairs classic gangster tropes with a healthy dose of today. It also pulls off some of the decade’s best, make-you-miss-whole-lines-of-dialogue laughs. Altogether, it’s one we could watch over and over (and have, and will again.)

Laptops

2010-02-08T08:28:00.002-05:00

This week I told the admits about an interesting little bit of Harvard Law logistics.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2010/02/05/the-lowdown-on-laptops/

As promised

2010-02-01T14:19:00.001-05:00

Three things to cheer us all up from last week's funk.

Outrageous Pictionary: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2010/01/27/a-new-use-for-dry-erase/

Adorable Super Bowl trash talk between two art museums: http://www.artsjournal.com/man/2010/01/art_museum_director_super_bowl.html

And in an unconscionable case involving Halliburton (http://www.slate.com/id/2242792), the hilariously apt name of their lead attorney: http://www.velaw.com/lawyers/lawyer_detail_fb.aspx?id=3166. Note, the "Texas Super Lawyers" feature mentioned under "Professional Recognition" is a paid advertisement!

The inevitable

2010-01-29T09:26:00.008-05:00

Now is as good a time as any - and probably a bit late - to tell you some really lousy news we've been doing our best to cope with this week. On Wednesday morning, after one last, long, loving night with our amazing cat Omar, we had to take him in to be put to sleep.

We took a lot of pictures toward the end. This is Russell's absolute favorite.

We'd been preparing for this inevitability since September, when we first found out he had kidney failure, but never expected the end to come so soon. The vet's words at our appointment Tuesday afternoon were crushing. But in the following hours, Omar became so clearly ready for relief that the next step felt like our most important one yet in his care. Russell and I are doing really well now. But the apartment does seem so empty with him gone.

On the bright side, something else inevitable happened this week: the release of fall semester grades. It's my policy not to post them specifically here, but I'll say this: things went well. Really well. Ask me about it, and I'll be extremely happy to tell you.

It's only a small consolation, but the support and kindness of friends and family have been a big one. If this had to happen, I cannot possibly think of a more caring, solicitous group of people to have in my life at the time. Thanks everybody. And less depressing news next time, I promise.

Promotions

2010-01-24T16:00:00.001-05:00

Hooray! As spring semester begins tomorrow, it'll be with a few upgrades in my activities at Harvard. Each one has seemed a bit minor to mention before now, but together I think they'll give you a good sense of how things are progressing:

At the Tenant Advocacy Project (TAP), where I work with low-income housing residents, I've been accepted to the Intake Committee to help decide which calls from tenants will be accepted as cases for our advocates. My swanky-sounding title is Intake Director, and my job will be contacting tenants to get our first sense of their circumstances and attending meetings to gauge the collective case load. I'm so ready for this new role, partly because I got to leave my last one with a bang - we just got word that my last big case, a hearing to reinstate a family's housing subsidy, came back a win!

At my journal, the Harvard Law and Policy Review (HLPR), there was also just a round of promotions. I've been made a Senior Student Article Editor (the position of my direct supervisor last semester) for spring and the Executive Tech Editor for next school year.

That's me near the top!

The history here is this: my first semester at Harvard, I was a 1L Editor (see the bottom right); the next semester, I was a 1L Editor and Tech Editor (a member of the team that does a second pass over all articles for typos.) This past semester, I was a Student Article Editor (supervising a team of 1Ls on a student article) and Senior Tech Editor (a slightly higher ranking member of the tech team.) Now, in the coming semester, I'll be supervising several Student Article Editors, and next year I'll run the entire tech team. I'm nervous about the responsibility, but it has definitely been fun to rise through the ranks and see what it takes to bring a real legal publication to print.

Finally, I've just gotten approval to claim clinical credit along with the Community Action course I'll be continuing with in spring. Law clinics are programs giving real-world practice experience to students, either through in-house outfits like the Legal Aid Bureau or Legal Services Center or through faculty-sponsored externships paired with workshops. The Community Action clinic is like the latter, though with an outside project already required for the class, it's really more of a way to claim credit for big projects involving a bit more work than the two-hour course would indicate. That's definitely how my project working with Boston youth is shaping up - something I'm hoping to blog all about very soon - so I'm glad to be giving it a place on my schedule (and my transcript!)

Well, that's about it - hopefully it won't all prove impossible to balance. Sometimes I think Harvard is one big case of, as C.S. Lewis put it, "if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one." I guess we'll know once class begins this week - wish me luck!

Talk amongst yourselves

2010-01-19T15:42:00.004-05:00

With my last paper for winter term finished last night, I'm feeling a brief, merciful lull before the start of spring semester. So I thought I would go back and corral a few Admissions Blog posts I'd so far neglected to re-post here. It seemed wrong to ignore them, since they're actually pretty interesting:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/12/06/more-community-action-fellow-student-albert-wu/

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/12/15/community-action-concluded-professor-lucie-white/

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2010/01/15/faculty-profile-visiting-professor-richard-lazarus/

That last one is pretty heavily redacted from my notes of the interview, which had pages and pages of in-jokes from my section's Torts class last year. It was amazing to catch up with such a memorable professor, and I stayed in his office until nearly 5 p.m. with another student, just reminiscing. I wish more of it could be easily explained in an Admissions post, because those experiences would sell Harvard like no other. But why am I telling you this? You know.

What you may not know (because it's pretty darned random) is that my blog is coming up on its 100th post very soon! What exciting thing should I do to commemorate that? I welcome your ideas. In the meantime, I think I'll go back to enjoying my lull.

Look down at your hoodie

2010-01-14T11:22:00.003-05:00

I have been so swamped this week. I blame the fact that a three-week winter term only has two weekends, but my professor wants three response papers on three different days of our choosing. So one has to get written on a weeknight, every minute of which is usually taken up just by the hundred-page readings we still take home every day. Ugh.

It's lucky the material is interesting - incredibly lucky - but that alone can't keep the water below my head. Especially when responsibilities are ramping up for TAP, the admissions blog, and my journal all at the same time. So I've been on a pretty aggressive campaign of taking good care of myself: cooking favorite healthy meals, keeping caffeine intake reasonable, getting to bed early when I can, and letting Russell take over some of the household chores like cleaning the litter box and dishes.

It reminds me of something my friend Jen said around finals our first year. She caught a lot of flack from some of our fellow study group members at the time, but it made absolute sense to me. She said that when things got really crazy and she could feel herself starting to panic and not have fun, she would make a point to study in her Harvard gear so she could look down, any time she wanted, at her hoodie and remember where she was and why all the hard work was worth it.

So it's cheesy, but this Tuesday as I sat down to a particularly long and dry Low-Income Workers reading, I pulled on my own Harvard hoodie to see if Jen's trick would work. I didn't find myself physically looking down very often, but I realized my survival strategy at times like these is essentially the same: staying conscious of the exciting thing I'm doing and what a waste it would be to go through it unhappy.

I need to go grab lunch before a TAP Intake Committee meeting, but I just wanted to drop you all a line to say it was working. Thanks for your support as I've fought against the odds to strike this balance.

Sports & admissions

2010-01-04T19:37:00.003-05:00

My first post of the new year, capturing my life for the past few days surprisingly well:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2010/01/03/suddenly-sports-fan/

Winter and Spring

2010-01-02T00:41:00.004-05:00

Happy new decade, folks! I'm back in Cambridge after a wonderful winter break, but just a hair too exhausted to tell you all about it yet. So, with the January term here at Harvard approaching fast, I thought my course schedules for the coming semesters might be a good way to hold you over:

Winter 2010

Mon, Tues, Wed, Thu, Fri: 9-11 Low Income Workers, Alstott

Spring 2010

Mon: 10:20-11:40 Constitutional Law, Fourteenth Amendment, Klarman; 5-7 Housing Law and Policy, Grossman

Tues: 10:20-11:40 Constitutional Law, Klarman

Wed: 10:20-11:40 Constitutional Law, Klarman; 1-2:20 Corporations, Hanson; 5-7 Community Action, White

Thu: 1-2:20 Corporations, Hanson

Fri: 1-2:20 Corporations, Hanson

It's a lot, and I expect to be pretty overwhelmed, but I'm really looking forward to it all. Until next time, I hope each and every one of you has plenty to look forward to in the coming year, too!

Three of my favorite things

2009-12-21T01:04:00.003-05:00

Dad, baby, and big Texas sky.

Study observations

2009-12-06T17:20:00.001-05:00

Exam time is nearly upon us, and for those of us who had multiple papers due throughout the last week of class, the accompanying stress level settled in long ago. The things I'm eager to blog about have slimmed down from long-winded stories to quick observations, and since these rarely seem worthy of their own post, I thought I'd compile a few:

I've noticed that the more tired I become, the more my thoughts format themselves as Facebook status updates. For instance, "Lea Downey is infuriated that weather.com promised her 'breezy' today when it is clearly windy," or "Lea Downey once was lost, but now am blogging in bed with the cat."

From a research study cited in a journal article I'm editing, I just learned that 84.2% of responding tenth-graders believed there was a serious risk of harm in taking heroin occasionally without a needle. Meaning 15.8% believed there was NO serious risk IN SNORTING HEROIN. Meaning I may need to adopt 15.8% of all tenth-graders.

The more Russell and I miss Austin, the more enthusiastically we dive into any activity that helps us feel more connected to Texas - however much we may have shunned that same activity in the past. Last night I found myself unable to watch as Russell stood up and shouted at the television in the last second of the horrible, mistake-laden, comeback-taunting, heart-stopping, INFURIATING, but ultimately winning Big 12 Conference Championship football game against Nebraska. How did this happen? Did I actually come to Harvard and wind up LESS nerdy???

Well, that's it for now - if the fifty short-answer questions on my Evidence exam this coming Monday have anything to say about it. More soon, maybe about the lovely snow we got this weekend! In the meantime, hope all is well!

CASER Closed

2009-12-02T10:19:00.002-05:00

If you can't otherwise tell it's finals time, the fact that I have barely had time to blog for Admissions, much less here, is a pretty good sign!

However, here's a post that describes much of last week - the last week of any real obligations for my Community Action for Social and Economic Rights, or CASER, class. Unfortunately, the visit from my teens predicted at the end of the post didn't happen - extenuating circumstances were going to keep multiple group members from coming, and it seemed better to reschedule. If there's one thing I've learned from working with at-risk teenagers, it's to expect everything to happen an hour late, at half-speed, or on the second try at scheduling it. So no big deal.

Anyway, here it is: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/12/02/a-community-action-week/

More updates on finals and the end of this crazy semester soon, I hope!

The library

2009-11-19T20:48:00.002-05:00

I actually think this sums up my day today pretty well:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/11/19/the-library/

More from admissions

2009-11-12T13:28:00.005-05:00

Two posts I've made on the admissions blog lately:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/11/02/sibling-support/

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/11/10/called-on-not-called-out/

Neither is much of an update on recent life, but I like how they've forced me consider what might interest people about HLS, and sometimes it's stuff I haven't explained in much detail here before.

Lazy Sunday

2009-11-09T10:22:00.004-05:00

Views from where I spent the afternoon reading, basking in the sun, and enjoying some of our last 60-degree weather of the year:

Today might be more of the same, because thanks to the end of my Sex Equality class, weekends now last until about Tuesday evening. There's usually homework and sometimes some TAP work to be done, but generally it's exactly the reprieve I expected from an intensive class ending in October.

Russell, who's still at work with Disability Services as we speak, is so jealous he can hardly stand me.

Ch- ch- changes

2009-11-07T10:52:00.010-05:00

So I pretty much hate this time of year: the time change just pushed sunset forward an hour, and a good portion of each day seems suddenly plunged into darkness. It's messing with everyone, but for obvious reasons, it's especially messing with me. I wake up easily enough with sunrise also an hour early, but by noon it feels like late afternoon, and by four o'clock it feels like nighttime.

Luckily, while it's been a busy week, it hasn't been too busy for either a quick nap after lunch or a couple of hours watching TV with Omar most afternoons. These chances to recharge may be the only reason I don't collapse prior to 8 p.m. every day - I am seriously dragging fanny! So forgive me if this post isn't the most comprehensive update on my life.

Right now Russell is out getting a haircut, and I'm hanging out in bed with Omar, which is a perfect opportunity to blog except that I don't feel like writing very much. So maybe a few cute pictures from the past week or so will suffice?

Some shots of Omar I've been taking in the afternoons

Results of our pumpkin carving party

Monsters I carved (hard to see because they go all the way around)

Skull Russell carved

Anush's scary robot

Albert's very impressive HLS shield

Aftermath

In love with Omar yesterday

Well, readers, that's all I've got in me. Hope you're satisfied for now!

Sappy, yes.

2009-10-28T23:05:00.002-04:00

Excuse to cut and paste the majority of my post in a week with two different papers due, definitely.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/10/26/1l-retrospective/

Weather overview

2009-10-23T16:47:00.004-04:00

Another post for the admissions blog - a tad controversial, perhaps, as you can tell from the editor's note afterward!

I think I was fair and encouraging, but you tell me:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/10/20/braving-the-elements/

White & early

2009-10-19T11:02:00.007-04:00

You'll never believe what went on outside my window yesterday afternoon (unless you tuned into a national weather forecast around then, I suppose.)

I bounced back and forth like a pinball between being tickled and outraged by this, considering it waited until December to snow last year and no one wants the four-month New England winter to be more like six. I also had to walk to a meeting for my Community Action for Social and Economic Rights class in it, which was charming on the way out but not so much on the way home in the dark.

Either way, it didn't stick, so this morning the sun is shining and the ground is dry. And the forecast tells me our temperatures will be back in the sixties later this week, so maybe this was the pleasant fluke we all hope it was.

So maybe you'll want to visit

2009-10-15T10:01:00.004-04:00

This newest post to the admissions blog doesn't strike me as super interesting to anyone besides future HLS students. But who knows - maybe you'll be super jealous of our cool little town and decide to come visit us!

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/10/15/free-time-hassle-free/

Crazy as promised

2009-10-10T20:55:00.007-04:00

Yes, it really is high time you heard the story of my crazy week.

It actually began the Thursday before last, when my work for the Tenant Advocacy Project ramped up suddenly and immensely. I'd had a horrible time getting in touch with the client in my new case, leaving multiple messages over a two week stretch, and we were even considering rescinding our offer to represent her when I finally heard back.

This gave me exactly five days to prepare for her hearing, since asking for a postponement would only have left her without housing assistance longer. So with classes and career planning phone calls and blogging for admissions and meetings for my journal going on just like normal, preparations to save this lady's housing also went into overdrive.

Plus, on Friday I had a paper due for Sex Equality. For my topic I chose Supreme Court Justice Scalia's infamous dissent to the United States v. Virginia decision admitting women to the ultra-masculine Virginia Military Institute in 1996. I knew I hated that dissent, but had no idea how much or for how many reasons until I started writing. So I had to balance my TAP work with a paper that was growing longer and more important to me by the minute.

After my morning classes Friday and a quick visit to the TAP office for some phone calls, I spent several hours in the library finishing my paper. At 4:30 when I slipped it under my professor's assistant's door, I was positively braindead and bound to be useless at any work for the rest of the day. So, magically, Russell and I found two hours to see Zombieland at the theater in Harvard Square. It may have been my exhaustion talking, but I absolutely loved its funny and unexpectedly tender take on the zombie genre, and I can't recommend it enough (to anyone who can stomach a little gore... strangely similar to my feelings about law school.)

After that brief refresher, I spent most of Saturday writing a letter related to my tenant's case and preparing questions for her hearing. It was around this time that Betty, the administrative assistant at TAP, utterly saved my life by finding a volunteer to help with some of my legal research. Joe, a JD/MBA who joined TAP as a 1L and had recently been asking for work with them again, was a total godsend. As I told him many times, I probably could have handled this case myself, I just wouldn't have had time to eat.

In fact, because he stepped in I was able to spend Saturday night seeing Whip It with Russell and Anush. Yet another movie I recommend with all my heart, partly because it's set in Austin, which I wasn't expecting and which bolstered my mood through many of the tough days ahead.

Sunday, for instance, was a bad one because just as I was leaving home to meet my TAP client for the first time and co-chair the first meeting of my article team for my journal, I got an e-mail from my supervisor full of harsh criticism for those questions I'd spent most of Saturday preparing.

But Monday was a bit better, strangely enough. There was class to balance with about a million last-minute phone calls and faxes, but as things started to fall into place for the hearing and the remaining tasks became smaller and more discrete, I reached that place of artificial confidence and calm that comes with running on pure adrenaline. Sure, I had never done a housing hearing before and a whole family's finances would depend on my performance, and sure I had a runny nose and sore throat that allergy medicine didn't seem to fix anymore, but it would all be over soon.

Which is exactly what happened. The next morning, in a small meeting room in an office building very near where I worked all summer, I met my client and supervisor, a very supportive Joe, and a couple of people from the agency for the hearing. My client's leasing officer read the case against her from a prepared packet. I coaxed the important answers out of my client, then made our legal argument to the hearing officer, who seemed receptive. It all seemed painfully slow and awkward, but somehow it was over within an hour and a half.

Tense, but uneventful - that's how everyone who knows tells me these things always are. And you can never be sure until those 30 business days are up and the decision arrives, but over coffee afterward to debrief, my supervisor seemed fairly hopeful. For all her harshness, she had hardly any criticism to give, thank God.

So Tuesday morning was gone in a blur, and Tuesday afternoon was a blissful six hours alone in the apartment playing catch-up on sleep, Omar time, and some cleaning and decorating I'd been desperate to do since the move. That evening in my Community Action class, my study group had to give a half-hour presentation, but we'd prepared a week in advance so it was a breeze. Or maybe it just felt that way compared with that morning.

Things were quieter Wednesday and Thursday. I had a doctor's appointment and another couple of meetings for my journal, but these were a manageable, typical kind of hectic unlike what I'd been through the prior few days. The only problem, and one I should have seen coming a mile away, was that the nose drip and sore throat I mentioned earlier spiraled into a full-blown head cold as soon as I slowed down. In windy, chilly weather with a cough I couldn't control and either a sinus headache or a serious buzz from DayQuil at all times, I was almost as grouchy as if that hearing were still days away.

But it's Saturday now, and that too is wearing off. Especially since we have Columbus Day off school, making this a three-day weekend, making Saturday the perfect time for me (and Russell, who obviously caught this thing and is just at the peak of it now) to take a full sick day complete with crepes for breakfast and lots of television, napping, reading, playing board games, and watching Texas football on the folded-out futon. In our giant living room. With our awesome, grouchy cat.

A sick day! If that's not proof my crazy week is finally over, I don't know what is.

Journal & neglect

2009-10-07T10:26:00.005-04:00

You know, it really is my plan to do the HLS Admissions blog in addition to posting here, not instead of it.

But did I mention it's been a crazy week? Crazy. Seriously. So I think I have an excuse or two for neglecting you lately, not the least of which is my trip downtown yesterday for the hearing that was the culmination of my recent TAP case.

Now that that's over, I'm starting to get back in a rhythm that will accommodate all the blogging I want to do, not just what I'm paid to do. Expect results soon. And in the meantime:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/10/07/joining-a-journal/

Proof of life

2009-10-02T17:10:00.006-04:00

For anyone wondering, I did in fact survive the big move!

This week of school may be another story, but for now, here's some proof that I'm alive and kicking:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/2009/10/02/a-week-in-my-life/

That's my very first post to the HLS Admissions Blog. A few weeks ago I responded to an ad on the Harvard website saying they needed student perspectives, and now I'm one of their contributors!

I owe them a post a week, which I hope won't cut down on the amount I find time to write here. I'll be sure to give links as my entries are posted, or maybe re-post them entirely here if Harvard doesn't mind.

Wish me luck, and I'll try for a more thorough post about this CRAZY INSANE WEEK I am having before long.

Brilliant or stupid

2009-09-25T20:53:00.005-04:00

I write to you, ladies and gentlemen, from the calm before the storm.

Starting tomorrow morning, Russell and I are doing something crazy, something we're bound to regret, although hopefully just for a few days:

We're moving.

I know, right?

Well, the story is, for several weeks the two-bedroom apartment across the hall from our one-bedroom has been sitting vacant. We've been peering in, admiring the size, and picturing our stuff in it for a while, but until recently we assumed it belonged to some new tenant who just hadn't arrived yet.

But then I got the idea to look up our building on Craigslist, and what do you know? The place was still listed, and for cheap! Russell and I had always agreed to find a bigger place my third year, when I hopefully wouldn't be paying tuition because of the Public Service Initiative. But we knew we might never see a price like this again, and the landlords seemed to be having a hard time moving the place. So we agreed to make them an even lower offer and see what happened.

And they met us halfway! They said we'd have to move THIS WEEKEND, which we knew was totally crazy, but they also offered a price neither I nor any classmates I've asked have ever seen on a two-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, ever.

So we're gathering some friends, who are surprisingly easy to sway with promises of pizza and beer, and moving everything we own across the hall this weekend.

It's either incredibly stupid or incredibly brilliant... or probably both, in that order. Either way, wish me luck - and I'll let you know how it goes.

Fleeting perfection

2009-09-21T09:31:00.008-04:00

My second anniversary with Russell is today, but we celebrated over the weekend with possibly the most flawless 24-hour period of my life.

We had been throwing around ideas for fun ways to celebrate, but didn't settle on anything until last Thursday, when we decided to book a hotel room and escape our tiny cat-dominated apartment for a night of room service, pay-per-view, and general luxury. Short of travel or some large piece of furniture (both a joke to anyone who's seen our home or my schedule), this might be the most expensive thing we could have chosen. But it couldn't possibly have been more worthwhile.

With fall in full and gorgeous swing here in Cambridge, even the walk to our chosen hotel - the lovely Sheraton Commander across Cambridge Common from my school - was too picturesque to be true. The people in sweaters playing soccer and frisbee, the handful of trees changing color too early, even the spectacular view from what turned out to be our top-floor room all seemed to be celebrating our two years of adorable couplehood.

So we ate an extravagant meal in our pajamas, spread out on the king-sized white comforter while the sunset blazed outside. We rented "Caprica," the feature-length prequel to our beloved Battlestar Galactica, then caught the last three quarters of the Texas football game with more enthusiasm than we could never have mustered otherwise. And slept nearly 10 hours without one interruption from Omar. And took long showers in a bathroom about twice the size, with about five times the water pressure, of our own. We were as sad to leave in the morning as if we'd stayed for six weeks.

After a quick, free breakfast in the hotel restaurant, we headed home to drop off our things and check on the cat. But the weather was so gorgeous we headed straight back out for frozen yogurt and a chess lesson in Harvard Yard. I humored Russell as long as I could, but really have no patience for chess. So we moved on to window shopping in the Square until a matinee showing of the glorious new Star Trek at the Brattle Theater, which screens "recent raves" a few months after they leave other cinemas.

We had been excited about Star Trek (you'd have to be, to see something a third time) but we honestly forgot just how much we both loved it. From the moment that booming, exuberant music of the opening scene started up, we enjoyed it as much as the very first time. It was like a metaphor for the entire weekend... barf, I know.

Anyhow, after so much activity, I wrapped up Sunday as quietly as possible: a long study date with Anush, fresh corn from the farmer's market for dinner, and an extra-dramatic Mad Men episode I spent curled up with Omar. It was the perfect way to wind down from the last long break before the real bulk of my semester.

Still, I expect it's too much to ask for an easy transition from this fleeting perfection into the daily grind of school. If I don't get too swamped, I'll write again soon and let you know how it goes.

At it again

2009-09-06T09:13:00.019-04:00

This gate on the undergraduate campus is a regular source of mushy, inspirational Harvard moments for me. With the school year finally starting and life kicking into full, brutal, can't-believe-I-forgot-how-hard-this-is gear, I find myself wishing education were always as dignified as these words!

I'd assumed my adjustment to school would be smoother the second year, but it hasn't exactly. Some things, like my speed getting through reading assignments, didn't come right back like I expected. Other things I figured would come later on the calendar, like the search for my next summer internship, have instead been pushed straight into these first few weeks.

So my 2L year so far has been insane! One appointment, meeting, errand, class, or study session after another, then another, then another. For a while I even attended two different Evidence courses because of some scheduling uncertainties that also prevented me from sharing my schedule with you until now. But those have been resolved (in a decision I might occasionally regret, an entertaining professor won out over having Fridays off) so here it finally is:

Monday:

9-12 Sex Equality with Catharine MacKinnon

Tuesday:

9-12 Sex Equality with MacKinnon

7-10 p.m. Community Action for Social and Economic Rights with Lucie White

Wednesday:

10:20-12 Sex Equality with MacKinnon

Thursday:

9:50-11:20 a.m. Evidence with Alex Whiting

5-7 p.m. The Art of Social Change: Education, Child Welfare, and Juvenile Justice with Elizabeth Bartholet

Friday:

9:50-11:20 a.m. Evidence with Whiting

It's downright gentle compared with last year, but with everything else added, there's nearly as much to stress and overwhelm me this time around. And if I weren't careful, there would be a lot less excitement to counterbalance all that. Luckily, there's a certain excitement in having a friend in her first year - it's part commiseration, part vicarious glee over famous professors and first cold-calls, and part gratitude I'm not in her place any longer!

So I'm sorry for all I've left out of this post, from career advising and all my incredible professors, to video chats with Mom and my incredible, TALKING baby sister, to our lovely Labor Day in the grass on campus and the gorgeous cool weather we're having. But I'm so insanely busy, and there's only more to come: new TAP cases, new duties at my journal, the public interest career fair I'm set to attend...

Maybe I'll manage to post it all during my visit to Austin next week? Because I already CANNOT WAIT for the free time. Until then, dear readers, take care. I hope all is well with you!

Then again

2009-08-29T15:32:00.004-04:00

He can also be the sweetest creature alive!

Tyrant

2009-08-26T20:28:00.008-04:00

This little dude brought a recent card game between Russell, Anush, and me to a screeching halt no less than three times by lying down right on top of the cards.

He is increasingly social and affectionate, but still reacts badly if anyone tries to move him when he picks an inconvenient spot. We were pretty much forced to wait him out.

Anush, who loves to milk his resemblance to a certain German dictator, kept us entertained with a stream of comments like, “You know, Hitler had expansionist policies, too.”

Dodging the bullet (by opting for hard time)

2009-08-24T09:31:00.006-04:00

Since this blog is supposed to be about Harvard Law, and right now so many of my classmates’ time and energy is devoted to one particular HLS institution, it seems time to clue y’all in. I’m talking about the Early Interview Program, or EIP.

EIP is how the majority of students—those wanting to work for private law firms or a few public interest employers like the IRS—are hired for the summer after their 2L year. Harvard invites firms from all over the country to interview here in Cambridge for their “summer associate” programs, on which students “bid” ahead of time by submitting résumés and transcripts online. Then they all spend several days at the Charles Hotel for a gauntlet of back-to-back interviews.

This process occurs right now, in late summer, although it used to be much later in the year as part of On-Campus Interviewing, or OCI (which now exists only for 1Ls, who can’t exactly interview for the summer before they’ve even started classes—right?) In this economy, I think Career Services wants to slim the chances we’ll be beaten to the best positions by other schools—although EIP also jives better with the university-wide academic calendar the law school has decided to follow from this year onward.

So, later in the semester, we upper-level students have a short break called Fly-Out Week that allows firms a school-sanctioned time to call back their favorite applicants for interviews on site. It’s a lot of logistics, apparently justified by the fact that the 2L summer is a crucial time in firm culture: if successful, it can end in permanent job offers, sewing up students’ career plans before they even begin 3L year.

Right now, you’re probably thinking this is all incredibly dry and doesn’t make for the greatest blog post. I know! Which, in a way, is why I’m not participating: the mechanical nature of the firm system, its structure and hierarchy, the way it can make my school feel like a machine churning out generic legal careers, is part of what makes it unappealing to me. That and, y’know, my tree-hugging yellow-bellied pinko bleeding heart.

So while many of my peers are suiting up for a long week at the Charles, I’m experiencing the calm before the storm. I meet Anush for long lunches and outings to my favorite Boston-area highlights, enjoying her presence even more than expected. I see movies with Russell, line up doctors’ appointments I won’t want to juggle with school later, come home for lots of bonding time with Omar.

Of course, dodging the EIP bullet doesn’t mean I’m actually spared. Without it, the job hunt is stretched throughout the school year, basically guaranteed to conflict with classes and weather in the worst possible ways. The public sector’s lack of a set timeline can also cause awkward timing problems (like how I was forced to decline a prized interview with the state Attorney General’s office last spring because I just couldn’t wait any longer to answer two offers I already had.)

So don’t count me too lucky, readers—there’s a long way still to go. And after Fly-Out Week, when these EIP participants have summer job offers and I’m still fighting for that perfect interview, they can all blog about how lucky they feel.