Thanks and wishes

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

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.

She's a dream

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

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

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!)