Okay, posting fail on my end. Because I've been looking for apts for awhile now, I keep saying to myself, "As soon as I make some progress on my apt search, I'll post about it," because otherwise there's not a whole lot to say about my day-to-day.

So progress is made! Today I signed about a zillion papers, forked over too much of my dwindling 08-09 loan funds, and made arrangements to pick up my key next week to my new apartment!! Woohoo! It's in Clinton Hill (Brooklyn), right near a train that'll take me straight to NYU, at the top end of my price range (which is significantly less than my dorm room first year), one-bedroom with a nice-sized bedroom, on the fifth floor of an elevator building, with laundry in the basement... hmmm, I think that's all. I'm really excited! I've never lived in my own place before! And now I cannot spend any unnecessary monies until student loans get in, like woah. The landlord is way nicer than my current landlord - I guess she's a landlady - and she reminds me of a French professor I once had, who was at first intimidating but turned out to be awesome.

But there is other news as well! My mother is coming up in a few days to visit me for my birthday, and I'm scheming things for us to do. I'm very much looking forward to seeing her and spending time in Brooklyn doing fun things. Also for my birthday, sweetie took me to see Wicked July 1st!! I'd read the book awhile back, and I wanted to see it since then (and before, really, having heard a lot about it). It was fantastic, of course. I love the story, changed as it was in the musical version, and I want to get the soundtrack so I can learn the songs.

What else? The life of a research assistant is a good one - make my own hours, search apts and see doctors any time I need, wear whatever to work, work with just a handful people (all of them very pleasant). The pay is a little weak, compared to what my classmates at firms are raking in, but as I've been visiting doctors about my headache situation, I've been glad to have such a flexible job. Headache situation?? It's not as serious as it might sound - for a few years, I've had increasingly frequent but not at all severe headaches. They're more annoying than worrisome, but as often as they are, I figure I should seek treatment for them so they recur at a somewhat more normal rate. I have discovered that generic Aleve works wonders on them.

Well, that's my news. I'm about to go to a birthday party and hope sweetie is willing to buy most of my drinks. Brooklyn represent!

I just caught up on all my friends' journals (but no community ones), sitting here at the NYU liberry because my home internet died when I got back. Alas! But the cable guy is coming tomorrow (I know, a Saturday!) to fix everything.

The big news is, of course, my trip to Disney World with sweetie! You'll be terribly amused to know that the weather was better in NYC than Orlando - we got rain everyday, and during our first two full days there, ALL day. I was blowdrying my shoes every night!

So let's see, what's the easiest way to sum it all up?? First: (  a cut. )

Today... waking up too early. Oof. And then I came back to non-working internet. But in between then, I met sweetie's brother (they don't look much alike but they have some really hilariously similar mannerisms), ate even more food, watched more Lost on DVD aaaaaand... that's about it. This silly laptop needs a system restore like woah, but it gives me an error message when I try. Drat! Now time to head back, think about taking a shower, and sleep for like a zillion hours. Then a weekend, and then my summer job begins, yay!

First, read this post at Language Log. It's fun, believe me! Just reading it made me smile. And then tell me what your favorite/least favorite words are!

I'm not sure if I have any least favorite words; a lot of people seem to hate "moist" and/or "panties," but these seem like perfectly serviceable words to me.

My favorite word ever is "chagrin." Someone in the comments mentioned "lascivious," which is another word I like. Also, "mischievous," which I like both ways I've heard it pronounced. There are others, but of course I can't think of them right now.

I have time to write a Real Post, but I don't know what to write about! Let's see...

I picked up a book from the windowsill in my building that functions like one of those "take a penny, leave a penny" trays, except it's a windowsill instead of a tray, and you take/leave books, magazines, small appliances... whatever fits. I've picked up a few books there, the latest of which is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's pretty engrossing so far; it's this old school English butler reminiscing about butling (buttling?) as he's driving around England. Okay, I know that sounds the opposite of engrossing, but the tone is just perfect. At one point he's addressing his father in the third person and at another he's fretting over the habit of his new American employer of bantering with him because he has no idea how a butler should react to banter. Basically, it makes me want to include a butler in the Ultimate Fantasy Parody Epic. Oh this gives me an idea for the Book of Might Have Beens!

Anyway, back to things.

Today I finished my final final of the 08-09 school year! I still have a paper to finish, but at this point it's just citations and maybe four paragraphs total of information to add. I have two days to do this, one of which will be spent at the Tea Spot, wiling away the hours with yet a new flavor of delicious tea and possibly a turkey pesto sandwich. My Friday final was cursed: first it was open book and I couldn't (and still cant'!) find the casebook and THEN my exam software refused to work, for the first time since I've been taking finals here. Eep! When school is out, I think my computer shall require a system restore (it's been acting a little funny).

Hmm, this all pretty boring. I was feeling guilty about not updating LJ about anything happening in my life, but all I got is finals and some uptight English fellow!

Let's see, what's going on in the larger scheme? I've had poison ivy for the last three weeks, and just today I got a stronger prescription of steroid goo than the one I got a week ago, so I hope it'll start disappearing sometime soon. Sunday I'm jetting off to Florida with the sweetie to visit Disney for the first time (first time for ME, that is), and when I get back, I'll be starting my summer job as a research assistant for a professor at the law school. Hooray! It'll be just like last summer, where on the one hand I have to wake up early (boo!) but on the other, I'll have no homework (yay!).

As always, I'm wracked with indecision over something! This time it's what clinic (a law school class where you actually do actual legal things) to take next year; I was accepted into both a tax clinic and a public policy one. The tax one probably sounds more boring, but it would give me actual legal experience with stuff like briefs and court and law-y research, which I'd really like to have before I graduate - and crazy as it sounds, I really did enjoy my tax class last semester. On the other hand, the public policy one would be more like what I did last summer, which I really enjoyed. Decisions, decisions!

So things are good. I'm wearing something of my sister's several times a week, and just yesterday I saw a movie (Anvil: The Story of Anvil) that I think Adrian would have really enjoyed. I think about them all the time, and though it's still a shock, the shock is becoming part of my daily life. I'm hoping I'll be able to either be home or have (at least one of) my parents in NYC over Amie's birthday this summer.

Um, on a cheerful note, things are going really well with school and sweetie, and now I am departing to make some sort of exotic tea. Exotic tea, yay!

If you know a thing or two about politics, you probably know that conservatives tend to lean toward federalist outcomes of court cases while liberals tend to lead to a strong version of judicial review - or at least that's the situation these days. The hallmark example of this is the great abortion debate: should it be a matter of what a state chooses, or should judges strike down the laws to protect those hard-to-define rights in the penumbra of the Bill of Rights? The opposite was true during the pre-New Deal Lochner era, by the way.

Anyway (and yes, I'm using these political terms in the broadest, not to mention American, sense of the words).

In some areas of the law, though, the usual situation is reversed. One of these is drug policy: liberals tend to want states (like California) to be able to say what drugs are and aren't okay, while conservatives tend to support the federal government's ban on drugs. And one of them is government takings of property: liberals tend to want to support the decision of states to exercise eminent domain to acquire and develop land, while conservatives want to find a core of property rights that states cannot infringe upon. Tyranny of the majority, stealin' our land!

Did I have a point? Oh yeah. I've said this before: whining about "activist judges" is bullshit unless you always support the right of the state to decide how to govern its people - and then seriously, I'm sorry. Marbury v. Madison, get over it. And it amuses me so bad when people support the thing they usually vilify. Is that Scalia saying that we should ignore the decision of a state legislature?? *faints*

PS - you think this was nerdy? I gave a 30 minute presentation on fan fiction (and other types of fan-generated content) today. It was awesome. I played YouTube videos.

Win does not come in the forms I would expect.

1) As I think I posted, my Spring Break was a gazillion parts horrific, half a gazillion parts horrifically busy, half a gazillion parts family bonding, and no parts productive. I had a rough draft of a 30-35 page paper due two days after Spring Break ended, which I wrote in about three days. When I got it back, my professor wrote that she LOVED it and that I should try to publish it. Holy damn, guys. I was panicking that it was utter crap, and she said it was a great read even in its unpolished state.

2) Tonight I dined at the lovely Craft, of Tom Colicchio/Top Chef fame, with rov, which was win in itself. I ate things I'd never eaten before: quail, sweetbreads, ramps, and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, and it was all wonderful, and in what I'm coming to recognize as the tradition among Really Fancy Places, they bombarded us with free food.

But the best part must have been when a waiter - not our server, some other guy - came over to our table with two drinks and said that a diner who wished to remain anonymous had sent these to us. To fully understand the awesome of this, you should have an idea of the set-up here. We were seated at one end of the restaurant, so I was facing outward while rov was facing the wall. I suggested that maybe our mysterious benefactor had found the back of his head incredibly striking, but this idea was struck down. Hmph.

3) Actually not win, just bizarre. I looked over to my left about fifteen minutes ago to discover a little purple hockey figure atop the box of cereal I may have left in my room after breakfast. WTF?

4) This weekend was pretty win-ful. Six month anniversary with sweetie (with a penguin card and a voucher for "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!!!!"), sweetie's cousin's wedding reception/sort-of-wedding-ceremony (open bar! dancing! more compliments!), and my first race ever, also with sweetie. It was four miles, which isn't quite the limit of my running tolerance but is getting there. I got a blister and ran a little slower than I expected, but it was enormously cool despite starting at 8 am. A race! Which I ran!

These #4 things actually have been expected for some time, so they're not win-in-unexpected-forms, but hugely welcome nonetheless.

Well. Now it's time for bed, to sleep off a zillion Craftastic calories.

Ooh, and #5 - Iowa's filthy activist judges say gay marriage is a constitutional right. Even better, these were judges appointed by our former Republican governor! And now Vermont! And DC!

That, every day until my room is decent for public viewing, I shall do something to clean it up.

Oddly enough, this was prompted by losing my checkbook, which shouldn't be lost no matter how messy my room is because I keep it in its own little drawer. Sadly, the drawer contains my checkbook holder and my register, but not the checks themselves. And my room is small enough that I should be able to find it in a matter of minutes, but alas. I realize that I have good excuses for not having kept my room up to my usual barely-tolerable standards, but it's pretty terrible.

And now to bed. My bed is a whole other issue, but at least that one isn't my fault. Stupid cheap wooden Ikea frame.

Also I had a totes shitty day but a pleasant weekend before it. I did a tiny bit of cleaning Sunday; let's see how long it takes to get my room up to my pretty lax standards.

My brain is quickly turning into mush as I rack up as many footnotes as possible to boost my page count. So far I've gone through a pretty small fraction of my Binder O' Notes and already racked up three pages of pure citation goodness; I only need six more to hit the page minimum for this rough draft. Fortunately, I'm absolutely certain I'll surpass the minimum page requirement. Unfortunately, this means that tomorrow will be a day of hellacious footnoting.

But I thought I could spare a neuron or two for an LJ post. Lucky you guys.

This past week has been indescribable, so I won't even attempt to put it all into words, especially not with my brain in its current oozy state. Catching up with family and friends was great; catching up under the circumstances was tragic. Similarly, going through my sister's extremely eclectic collection of stuff was kinda fun, and I came away with some beautiful things of hers, but the whole time I felt vaguely like a graverobber or a scavenger.

I'm glad that my sweetie was able to meet my family and get a glimpse of my Midwestern roots, and I'm glad that I watched Pride and Prejudice with a friend of mine I haven't spoken with since early in my college career (we watched in simultaneously in different parts of the country because it was a thing we shared with my sister - I had to spend that time reading notes for my paper, but it was a lot of fun). I'm glad I was able to speak in public with no concern for how my audience perceived me. I'm glad I made a ridiculously rich chocolate cake to share and brought the recipe book back to NYC with me. I'm glad my stepmother was nice to me and my friends and family. I'm glad I hugged so many people. I'm glad I petted and chattered at my cat, Tinker. I'm even glad I stopped by Adrian's gravesite and saw that someone had recently left a purple flower.

I'm trying to remind myself of these things, even though it feels like blasphemy to feel gladness about any circumstance related in any way to the death of my sister. And I'm trying to establish a new kind of normal, now that I've stopped running around, making preparations and running errands for my family. That week was insanely busy, which I suppose is preferable to a week of brooding and misery, and now I'm getting back to the routine of my student life. I learned with Adrian all about adjusting the tenses I use to speak of the departed, but typing "the death of my sister" still hits me like a ton of bricks.

Okay. Off to bed, to gather strength for a day of footnotes.

Today I told my sister goodbye for the very last time. ( Amie )

I'll give you guys a real post when I feel up to it. For now, a meme! Look, my blog is manly and verbose!

The Blogalyser reveals...

Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 11.

This suggests that your writing style is conventional
(to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).Your blog has 34 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by verbosity
(writing for the web should be concise).

CHARACTER MATRIX

male		female
self		world
past		future

Your text shows characteristics which are 52% male and 48% female
(for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle. Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the past and lastly the future.
</small>
Find out what your blogging style is like!

You all were incredibly helpful in the Jar of Rage post - I think just writing that and getting everyone's responses helped more than anything! - that I am reaching into the collective f-list brain again. With the warming weather, I am planning to have more adventures, which often means just walking somewhere new and possibly taking pictures. It can mean going somewhere in particular, but one of the key features of adventures is that they can't be expensive. Like, I might indulge in ice cream or tea or something during an adventure, or lunch if I'm feeling decadent.

There are precisely one zillion things in the city and its environs I absolutely must do. So, f-list, what are they?? Even if it's just a generally pretty area, tell me about it. Adventures are more about the experience than the goal, but fun quests are good too.

... all this when I'm not working on my giant IP paper, that is. I'll make time!

Of all the zillion things I'm reading right now, there was a brief passage in one of them that really bothered me. It bothered me to the point that I had a hard time going to sleep, so enraged was I. ENRAGED!! Anyway, I woke up this morning with a headache, starting up again just where I left off the night before, beginning a furious running commentary that threatened to hijack my brain once again.

I put a forcible stop to this by envisioning a giant jar, like the ones my roommate bought to store pasta, and dumping the rage from my brain into this big jar, which I'm carrying around with me on my back. So far it's working, though that's as much a function of having class and trying to pay attention as much as my Jar of Rage.

So my question is: when you guys have obsessively angry or sad or nervous thoughts you can't rationally talk yourself out of, what do you do?? What do you use as Jars of Rage?

The highlight of my day, week... maybe not month, but it's not out of the question... was seeing Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku last night talk about Dollhouse (starting Friday! At 9!). Joss Whedon was a most scruffy-looking fellow, and Eliza Dushku is teeny tiny and lovely. They both had interesting, intelligent things to say, and Joss was very funny. And if I had gone by myself, I definitely would not have stayed around to get something signed (I was actually a little annoyed that we did), but when sweetie and I finally got up there, I was suddenly way excited.

During the Q&A, they had talked about how they were really trying to balance writing a socially responsible treatment of what is essentially human trafficking with writing an enjoyable, entertaining show, and the best question asked that night (apart from, "Joss, why are you so awesome?) had to do with addressing misogyny on the show.

So. I totally monopolized Joss during our turn up there (sorry sweetie). Tsk tsk. A transcript:
Me: I'm really looking forward to the fervor among the feminist blogs when this show comes out.
Joss: *laugh* I... I have mixed feelings about it.
Me: Oh, if I were you, I'd be terrified. But as not-you, I'm looking forward to it.
Joss: There will be different opinions about it, and a lot of them will be right.

Oh, sweetie did have a short exchange with him, come to think of it. I dunno how long we were waiting in line; I was reading Rousseau and thinking about how hungry I was.
Him: You're a saint for putting up with all of us us.
Joss: *laugh* Yeah because you're all such dicks.

And we got a picture, hooray!

Also, quotes of the day yesterday.
Sarah Haskins, from "Target Woman: Chocolate": "Chocolate! Orgasms AND childhood!"
Gladys, from "Ellen": "I love Jesus, but I drink a little."
Philosophy prof: "Rousseau says, 'You would think that, wouldn't you??'"

ZOMG it is 59 degrees outside. Joy joy joy.

Oh memes! You save me the trouble of thinking of something to write on my own. Considering that I'm girding up to be flayed in a few hours, I think I'm allowed to be lazy. Not much news to speak of today - I've been curled up in bed lately, wishing for death to come on swift wings. I'm feeling a little better today, and the weather's looking a little warmer, so I'll take these as good omens for the flensing to come!

( Finish The Sentence Survey )

Going to see Avenue Q tomorrow!! This more than makes up for the hideous weather delaying my journey to the laundrette and soaking my poor socks!

And bluechili before the show! And - this just in - going to see Frost/Nixon tonight! Hooray!

*bounces*

I love this city!

I was on my add/remove friends page cos it's the easiest way to get to a specific journal, although now that firefox has that helpful "type in any part of the URL or title of the page" feature, I guess it's no longer true. Anyway, I discovered two more people had added me to their f-list! Hooray! You're added back, mysterious people!

... why aren't I in bed now? Tsk tsk.

dilemma_name, I carried out my scheme tonight, thanks again for your help! But stupid Walmart.com doesn't let you include messages with those things.

Also, I think I have a topic for my Big Law School Paper. It's two completely different poles of nerdery, brought together under the the aegis of intellectual property. I'm stoked.

I am not a well person.

If you've read Sunshine, you may remember a throwaway line about Sunshine's brother studying or thinking of studying Other law. rov and I agree that Other law must be absolutely fascinating. If you haven't read the book, Other law just refers to the laws that concern non-human things like vampires, demons, etc.

Tonight in conversation, I postulated that the best thing ever is the copyright component of Other law. Now, you should know that since 1976, the copyrights on new works last, for the most part, for the life of the author plus seventy years (with the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, or whatever it was called). rov brought up a good point.

What happens when a vampire holds a copyright?

My mind is blown.

PS - I have no idea where the song currently playing on my iTunes came from.

I was reading through my "manage friends" page and realized there were FOUR PEOPLE who had listed me as a friend, whom I had not listed as a friend! Shocking oversight! So if you're all, "Geez, I added this jerk travelintheways as a friend X weeks/months/years (??) ago, and she's NEVER commented!" that may be why.

Or maybe I can think utterly nothing clever to say to you.

Also, I finally got around to seeing the second X-Files movie tonight. Utterly horrific except for the lack of a DAMN BEE. I've rarely seen a movie as bad as that one outside MST3K. I also saw a very silly fantasy movie, and it inspired me for the Ultimate Fantasy Parody Epic!

Hooray weekend! Hooray sleeping in! Hooray frigid cold as excuse for laziness!

And for a dose of awkwardsauce staining the Bad Idea Jeans...

Yesterday Boy and I went to a little get-together of his neighbors, most of whom are twenty (or thirty or more) years older than we are. That's okay, though; they seem like friendly people, and there aren't any durn kids blasting their durn music this way. But these people are a little too happy to see a fresh face in the building. They keep telling me what a nice building it is - and it's nicer than mine by a long shot - and hey! I should just move in with Boy! Ha ha ha, everybody laughs. And then later, they ask if I'm going to "be around for awhile." As in months. Or years, whatever.

Srsly? We've been dating for three months.

But they kept filling up my glass, offering food, and then offering more food. So they're all right in my book.

Before I start with my very first homework assignment of my second half of law school (hoo. ray.), I think I shall post a meme. I was going to post another one as well, but this one took longer than expected!

I was tagged for this meme by ascendant_angel, so here goes!

( 16 Random Things Meme )