renegadeRICEcracker

a lifestyle-friendly place.

on the one hand, when you're working on a sunday evening, it's good to see how dead empty the place is and know that you're at a place that will not take all your weekends.

on the other hand, when you're working on a sunday evening, you'd rather be one of the people whose offices are dark and empty because they aren't working on a sunday evening.

if you're getting sick of victoria's secret...

...there's always abercrombie and fitch.

progressive oops.

so what we learned today is that, if you don't have a progressive scan compatible tv, once you set your dvd player to progressive scan, the tv can't read the signal. what this means is that you then can't view the dvd menu to turn the progressive scan /off/.

luckily, this dilemma was quickly resolved with some clever instruction reading and unit resetting. thank god.

oops.

you know you're skimming too fast when it takes you until page 42 to realize that the 4 pages/sheet file you've been reading goes from top-left to top-right and then down, rather than top-left to bottom-left and then over.

lesson of the day.

"what we mean by 'statement of uncontroverted facts' is really 'statement of fucked up and hotly contested issues.'"

movin' on up.

i am the lucky recipient of an invitation to join the beverly hills country club.

"one of the premier westside clubs," the beverly hills country club was established in 1926 by merv griffin's uncle, and was a "'haven of refuge' for executives and personalities involved in the early days of the film and entertainment industries."

"beverly hills country club is not for every one nor every family. if it were, it would not be a privilege to belong. membership to our fine club is /exclusive/, but not /exclusionary/, and is by invitation. as you would expect, membership is limited; it is also much more affordable than you might think. we invite you to get to know us and allow us the same privilege."

excellent. i was just thinking to myself how i've been in need of a haven of refuge.

(i passed)

3.1 hours to go.

we get the results of our bar exam today. this means that everywhere i go, people are asking me how i'm holding up, if i'm a wreck, if i'm worried, if i'm going home to check, if i'm going to go out tonight, if i'll call them and tell them...

you know, i've been doing fine. i haven't been thinking about it that much. i was surprised to learn on wednesday that one of my co-workers has been in high-stress mode. i figured, i probably passed, and if i didn't, well, there's not a whole lot i can do about it now. so i'm fine.

at least, i was fine. i mean, i'm still pretty much fine. but i've been facing incredulous looks at my failure to meltdown today, and people keep telling me how they were nervous, how you never know, and how it's really just the kind of thing where you have to buckle down and study for 8-10 hours a day to feel okay about it. (i mean, did any of us do that? i know that no one i drank with all summer did, anyway.) they keep advising me to take a shot or two before i check, to make sure i'm alone at home, to call them if i need to talk afterward.

anyway. yeah. i'm fine. i'm not going to go home. i'll probably close my door. maybe first i'll walk down the hall and get a beer at happy hour. then i'm going to drive home, change, go out, and get wrecked.

these are my plans. but don't worry - if i freak out or fail because i didn't study all round the clock all summer, i'll be sure to call you. thanks.

and the lawyer thing pays off.

i just received a $25 gift certificate to amazon.com for my lexis use. woo-hoo! it's about time, i never got anything for all those hours i logged in school.

the fog is heavy today. it obscures the bit of ground i can see and the rest is opaque white.

complementary capacities.

courtesy of diane, a quote about why religious folk don't like gays:

"The other moral argument put forward by the world's great faiths is that homosexuality is 'unnatural.' God created man and woman with certain complementary capacities, and not to use them is an insult to the Creator. Sort of like getting a TiVo but not learning how to use the record feature."

what about finding new uses for the complementary capacities? you know, like extra credit.

wow

article and opinion.

don't piss off the chinese.

or this might happen to YOU.

i like very much that they point out that people have been poisoning others since long before socrates. and in case you don't believe them, "think of shakespeare."

back from chicago.

i miss chicago. it was a good if not terribly resting and too short weekend. i lazed around, watched a lot of tv, and on saturday night a bunch of us went to big wig to party it up. there were so many school people, it felt like bar review. the plan was not to get too wasted, but that last round of carbombs just seemed like a really good idea.

i have to go to sleep now.

4 extra hours at LAX = $12

at least, that's what ATA seems to think.

i'm sitting in the illustrious terminal 3 of LAX (you know, the dingy and poorly lit round one whose carpeting doesn't look to have been replaced since the terminal was built). i've been here for 5 hours. a couple hours ago they told us that we could use our boarding passes as $12 vouchers to get food. i used mine on a venti coffee and 3 refrigerated doubleshots.

i am going to pass out or explode from caffeine.

a new commute

i need a new commute. i've been doing la brea to wilshire, wilshire to downtown. that was somewhat satisfactory, but took up to 40 minutes with traffic, and still 15-20 without.

an associate yesterday told me that i can take beverly, which turns out to be faster than wilshire, but i don't know where to switch back over to wilshire (where my building is). i tried vermont today, because the last stretch of wilshire is not bad, but didn't like vermont. tomorrow i will try alvarado. woohoo!

you know, all this would be easier with a FREEWAY.

squiggly black things.

i just killed a bug in my apartment. it was an unnecessarily trying experience. recognizing that it's just a little squiggly thing, i decided to just stand on my bed and go at it with a tissue (it was on my ceiling), but i chickened out, so i ended up spraying raid all over my ceiling (yeah, right over my bed) and then smashing it with a tissue after it fell squirming on my bed.

this is great. now i don't want to be in my apartment.

yes. i have an irrational fear of bugs.

my computer's crapping out.

this makes work and the pressing deadline i have troublesome.

the "anti-smoking bra"

"hmm..."

where are the civil engineers?

gripe #1: i understand that when you drive on streets with traffic lights, the driving is stop and go. however, something seems wrong and inefficient if i somehow get stopped at every other light i pass on supposedly a main thoroughfare on stretches where THERE AREN'T EVEN OTHER CARS.

gripe #2: and why the fuck do there have to be lights every 100 feet, anyway?

gripe #3: for all you people who claim that my attachment to freeways is the irrational result of having lived on the westside, which has easy and plentiful freeway access, and who claim that after living in the great freeway hole of los angeles for a while i will come to love and depend on the surface streets, GO TO HELL. yes, freeways have traffic. yes, you avoid freeways during rush hour. but surface streets are not that much better at rush hour, and at least if you happen to be going late into work and you take the freeway you will not hit huge clumps of inexplicable traffic.

it's not actually all that bad. but i'm sitting here, an hour later into work than normal, my head is fuzzy and my eyes hurt. suffice it to say, the associates-only happy hour at the standard was a success. at first i was told to just go for half an hour because things are busy and i was going to have to work, but when the senior associate i'm working for got up to leave, he insisted that i stay there, not go back, and not do any more work.

you don't really need any more than that.

anyway, 5 or 6 beers later i didn't really notice what time it was until someone pointed out that it was 1:30 and we should probably go home. oops.

i love it.

Cal U Com Code § 1109 (2003)

§ 1109. [No section for this number.]

active soy.

according to the salesman, this is the color of my new pair of pants. i can't help but feel that something in the world has gone vastly askew.

then again, maybe he was just on crack. the website said almond.

single-serving soap.

since my time here last summer, my firm has installed automatic soap dispensers. i don't remember whether the automatic faucets are new too, but i know for a fact that, last summer, there were not automatic soap dispensers.

the idea of automatic soap dispensers confuses me. do people have trouble pressing down on the handle to induce the emission of a dollop of soap? does the automatic dispension of soap really save time, especially considering that you have to leave your hand in front of a sensor for a moment before it registers your presence and delivers the soap? do the rationed portions of soap economize soap usage such that the savings really do offset the cost of these things?

i wonder about the people who design these things, too. how do they know what is the perfect amount of soap? similarly, how do they know precisely how long the hand dryer should operate before turning itself off? do they occupy bathrooms for extended periods of time and take copious notes on bathroom soap and hand dryer usage? do they guess? do they look at their own usage and assume that everyone is the same?

so many questions. where's jkt when i need her?

mocha mix v. 1/2 and 1/2 v. milk

mocha mix in coffee is nasty. when my cousin used it in thai iced tea in their thai restaurant, it was good. i don't understand.

mmm...

i'm very into koo koo roo's rotisserie chicken with their mac 'n cheese and creamed spinach as sides and a diet coke for drink. the well-rounded nature of this meal is probably good, considering that i had pizza bites last night for dinner.

koo koo roo is really good. some people say that boston market has better creamed spinach. they are wrong.

not summer associates anymore...

since when did "why don't you take a look at their research to prepare for our opposition brief" turn into "make an outline of the brief" to "draft the brief by this afternoon"?

gar...

the double-U.

*yawn*

i just got back from training this weekend. they sent us up north because the main office is in san fran, and we all stayed at the W. in the daytimes, we learned informative things about how to make sentences shorter, how to command attention and look confident when presenting, and how to deal with different personality types.

i was a green. the greens supposedly are very social, high-energy, and talkative. talk about being misjudged.

the rest of the time was spent in the hotel bar ('XYZ' - so cheesy), various other bars in the area, and the castro district. i find the W bar interesting because people seem to go there for the scene, and they're all dressed up like funky hipsters with lots of layers and funky hair, which is not a bad look, but they're at the W. something about the look doesn't ring quite true when you're in the bar of a luxury hotel paying $11 for scotch.

we were exhausted after our first day of training friday (thank god for the complimentary coffee - we also got mist-er thingies at one of the breaks - "pillowtalk" - which i thought was interesting), but i wasn't allowed to go home after dinner because it was sean's birthday, so instead we rallied and made our way to castro street. it was a pretty good time, we stopped off a couple times on our way there to do shots, and then we wandered up and down the street looking and the mobs of costumed drunkards.

this year you couldn't drink on the street because last year there was a stabbing, so the bars were all closed and we had to keep going into liquor stores to get booze. it was embarassingly college - toward the end of the night, i had, uh, my forty in a paper bag taken away and emptied on a street by a police officer. "ladies, is that alcohol in those bags?" peers in. "yeesss..." he was very nice about it - he just smiled apologetically and pointed out that the party was ending anyway.

after that we drank in someone's hotel room until 4. needless to say, training was god-awful painful the next day.

anyway, i'm back now and off to dinner. ciao.

oh - by the way, i just received an inquiry and no, my mac.com e-mail doesn't work anymore. same e-mail id, but it's sbcglobal.net now.