Just, y'know, another week at Harvard.

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.

Spring at last

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.

Insanity

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

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

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.

Assorted updates

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!)

Laptops

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/

The inevitable

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Study observations

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

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!

Lazy Sunday

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.

White & early

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.

Crazy as promised

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.

At it again

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!

Precious normal

Wow, I've gone even longer than usual without posting, and now the prospect of updating you on everything that's been going on makes me wish I'd checked in a lot sooner.

First off, of course, Mom has visited since I last wrote. She was here for 12 days attending the Principal's Institute at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, thanks to a grant from a nonprofit for Texas educators. All her expenses were paid—airfare, tuition, a room at the gorgeous Charles Hotel, a lot of awfully nice meals with her grateful daughter…. In other words, Too. Effing. Cool.

Then, on the Sunday before last (which was her only full day off—have I mentioned before that Harvard doesn't kid around?) we took the commuter rail to Concord, home of transcendentalism, revolutionary war history, and the founding of the lovely hippie church Mom attends in Austin.

It was serene, verdant, quaint, and wonderful. I found it bizarre how different the landscape changed from Cambridge and Boston in just that 30-minute train ride. Sure I come from Texas, which has 15 or 20 different ecosystems all in the same state, but they also take 15 or 20 hours to cross.

Anyway, fast forward to three days later, when we were beyond stoked to be together for the July 15 opening night of the new Harry Potter movie. The affection Mom and I share for children's literature, especially by our hero J.K. Rowling, has made these releases a kind of pilgrimage for us in past years. How miraculous it seemed when, despite living 1900 miles apart, we happened to be together for this one as well.

Also miraculous: the dinner she, Russell, and I shared beforehand at a tiny, hip downtown Italian restaurant called Teatro.

But Mom headed home the next day, and life is back to normal now. If plugging quietly away at various legal memos while your boss is in Africa and your summer runs headlong toward Law Review competition results and the start of a new semester at Harvard can be considered normal.

Speaking of Harvard, the results of the electives lottery are finally in. Meaning I finally have a fall schedule—and a full one, too, since the system keeps assigning courses until you hit the maximum of 15 credit hours. Of course, I’m not thrilled about a schedule entirely made up of electives, so I’m still crossing my fingers I’ll get one of the two Evidence courses on whose wait lists I’m ranked pretty high. This leaves a lot in the air, but I’ll be sure to post my schedule once that changes, which will hopefully be soon.

Also big in my life right now: the third season of HBO’s The Wire, courtesy of Widener Library at Harvard (though only after a wait list nearly as long as the ones for Evidence.) Russell and I are completely absorbed and expect to be finished well within the week we’re allotted by the library. Funny, though, how the school impacts my life even during summer break.

Finally, I'd like to point out how much we’ve been cooking out lately. The grill in the courtyard really beckons in the cool, mostly sunny evenings we’ve been having. Most recently, we experimented with tofu and vegetable kebabs in a spicy Asian mustard sauce I based on something I always ordered at a restaurant back in Austin. Russell and I scarfed down 10 between us—I call that success!

Well, I hope all your summers are filled with the same happy, near-normalcy as my last few days. Law school, not to mention some of the unfortunate junk that’s happened since, reminds me of how precious that is. We’ll see how long it sticks around.