It's over and done with!

[Thanks to Braam for the totally appropriate pointer.]

The hardest part

It's so goddamn boring.

In other news:
(1) I like snacks.
(2) A federal judge just gave AZ a well-deserved smackdown for denying gay couples state employee health benefits. Fuck you, Jan Brewer.
(3) AscenDance has a great chance of winning America's Got Talent.
(4) If I were at all unsure before about the dangers of sitting in front of a computer day-in and day-out, my current unfortunate back and shoulder pain has me convinced. Really, it's probably healthier to be a construction worker than a lawyer at this point.
(5) Would it be a waste at this point to just go be a personal shopper/life coach? That sounds like fun.

Season 1, Episode 4

The moment I finally got "The Wire."

Warning on the French press

"Children and hot fluids should be kept apart."

Bar lecture quote of the day

"The rules might not necessarily make any sense here. But at least they are really clear."

Repurposing Ayn Rand

"Listen, what's the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me--it's being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who's had some disease that's eaten his brain out. You'd have nothing then but your voice--your voice and your thought. You'd scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you'd have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you'd become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you'd see living eyes watching you and you'd know that the thing can't hear you, that it can't be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it's breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That's horror. Well, that's what's hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don't think I'm a coward, but I'm afraid of it. And that's all I know--only that it exists."

What do you think it is?

Dead blogs

There are some blogs--not many, but a few--that I check almost daily even though no content has been posted in, let's just say, a while. Why bother, when there are so many great ones that update content 2, 3, 4 times a day? Today I realized: maybe I do it just so I have a reason to be annoyed. Bar studying is good for accumulating amorphous life-frustration. Dead blogs provide martyrs for targets.

Not the most charitable entry I guess, but can't you tell it's simply a very cranky day?

Working Lunch

Studying for the bar exam is not a creative enterprise. My entire mental world has been reduced to: Read this. Hear this. Memorize this. Write this. And, my favorite, Fill In This Little Circle With A No. 2 Pencil. If there was ever a less creative activity invented than filling in a circle of prescribed and uniform width with a prescribed and uniform writing instrument, I cannot think of it.

But, well, a girl's gotta eat. So my creative outlet has largely become: Making Delicious Things To Eat. (Most of them are delicious, anyway.) This week, for example, I picked up some Chinese eggplant, a vegetable I'd never cooked with before.* I softened the crap out of it in a pan with olive oil and garlic--which requires more oil than I like to think about--then scooped them out onto paper towels and threw some green beans into the pan to heat through. I served it (yes, we serve in this house, even in a meal for one) with some brown rice from the freezer and a homemade Thai chili sauce. That was the easy part: throw some Sriracha, fish sauce, and lime juice in a little bowl, and voila! Salty spicy sour goodness. Leftovers for lunch today made Corporations go down easier.**

*Is it a fruit if it has seeds on the inside?
**Admit I considered making a poison pill joke here. But. Ahem. NO.

Random thoughts: community property lecture

1. This woman talks like a character on Daria. It's the intonation. And the way she pronounces her S's. And the little giggle-tremor that occasionally creeps in. See here at 1:45, Principal Lee. Oh, yeah. Dead ringer.

2. Community property makes me want to watch Under the Tuscan Sun! Do you think I could get away with calling that "studying"?