so, when i first saw ads for the the swan, i was horrified. in fact, i am still horrified. but i thought that perhaps my morbid curiousity would drive me to watch at least an episode or two. i happened to catch a couple minutes of it last night, but i had to change the channel because i couldn't deal with the close ups of the scarring and surgery. ugh!
i just went onto the website and was looking around, and the weird thing is that not all of the women are all that unattractive. and not all of them look that great afterward either. it would suck to go through a shitload of pain and surgery and have people perhaps not recognize you afterward because you've gotten a bunch of fat sucked out and your face completely reshaped, and then not even be all that hot.
anyway, i'm all creeped out. my co-worker thinks that the natural next step for reality tv is a game show where people are paid to do things like hack off a little pinky or something (you know, the standard "how much would you have to be paid to..." game). another co-workers said that last year, when they were in the cafeteria, they asked one of the girls how much she would have to be paid in order to sleep with any random guy there -- so she didn't know if it would be the hottest or way ugliest. this is a 3L at a good law school with a nice firm job lined up. and we know what law students look like. she looked around the room, thought for a good long pause, and then said, "i don't know... 400 bucks?"
the other day my secretary came into my office with a disbursement form for me to approve and sign. when i very politely pointed out that both my and opposing counsel's names were mispelled, she looked at it and said, "oh, did she do that?" ostensibly this was meant to indicate to me that she had someone else do it, and this other person fucked the whole thing up.
what is it with people who refuse to ever admit that they made a mistake? i have noticed people suspiciously turning to the third person tense when they describe how, "apparently the original discovery requests were sent out instead of the copies..." my secretary will come into my office and ask me if i happen to have the signed copies of things, when she knows as well as i do that once i signed them, they went to her and she handled the mailing out and delivering of a copy to the file.
another secretary, after interfering with my e-mailed directions to my own secretary (while i was at lunch, she told my secretary that by "please print these documents" i meant "please create these documents" so that when i came back they were all in a frenzy screwing things up and i had to explain that, in fact, i had stayed late the night before creating the twenty or so damn documents), her response was, "oh, well your e-mail was VERY UNCLEAR. i really couldn't tell what you meant because it was VERY UNCLEAR." meanwhile, my secretary responded by saying, "yeah, i didn't know what she meant, your e-mail didn't say anything about creating documents but i just did what she told me to." i decided not to make a thing of it (i was as polite as i could possibly manage during the fiasco, but it was a stressful day), so when i ran into the interfering secretary later, i apologized if i seemed short because it was just a stressful day. her response was, "oh, you weren't short at all, don't worry about it, it was just that your e-mail was so VERY UNCLEAR." (i went back and read it. several times. i still don't think it was unclear, but i am learning.)
am i the only person who thinks it's a good thing to just own up when you fuck up? i don't like to make mistakes either, but when i do i push myself to say, "i'm very sorry, i did [insert fuck-up], what should i do now?"
i'm trying to mellow on this. i very much admire the guy in the office next to me, he is a zen master. when his secretary took something off his desk because she assumed (assumed!) it was ready to be served and in fact it was not (it turned out to be okay because he noticed before it went out the door, but it had been packaged and put in envelopes and all that), and as a result kept going on about how she didn't know that it wasn't ready to go because it was sitting there and looked (looked!) ready to go, he just apologized, saying, "i'm sorry, [insert secretary name here], i should have been more clear." he is my hero.
**note: i really, really like my secretary. i just find all this a little strange.
last night i went to the santa monica playhouse to see the sight unseen theatre group's production of "one flea spare." mitch's friend clark produced the show and was one of the main characters. it was very, very good. serious stuff though, so make sure you're in the right frame of mind if you go -- it's about a group of people quarantined in a home in london during the great plague.
go see it. it's thur-fri-sat through next weekend, well worth the $15.
we took one of our fellow 1st years to nick and stef's for his birthday today. i had never been there, but word on the street is that they have great steaks. seemed like a nice place, we all ordered steaks and whatnot.
after we'd been talking a while, we looked at our watches and it was already 1:15 (we got there at 12:30), and our entrees had not come yet. so the waitress comes by and says it will be two more minutes. 10 minutes later, the manager came to apologize and said it would be 2 more minutes. by this point it was past 1:30, and we were all getting a little concerned because we had work to do (we were, nonetheless, extraordinarily polite). then, the waitress came back, said our order would be coming out next, apologized profusely and told us that everything would be on the house. we all thought that was pretty classy, since this restaurant was in the business district and it's actually pretty consequential if you add another hour to people's lunches.
THEN, after the food came (which was all excellent, though i am not a steak person so i can't give substantive commentary), the waitress came by and brought one of the guys another filet mignon because she had noticed that his was awfully charred (he'd just been saying to us that it was a bit overcooked).
there are not many places that can screw up timing that badly and still have you leave feeling like they had great service (she offered us dessert too, but by that point it was 2:30 and we had to leave). and the food was very good. we left a nice tip.
i like getting to the office super-early because it's all quiet (not that i do this often, mind you), but then it just makes me more irritable when people start to filter in and talk at the top of their lungs. my secretary is frustrated because she lost a document, and as a result is running through the whole problem very loudly on the phone with a tech support person. she is bitching about how she spent a good 15-20 minutes working on the document and then lost it. she's been on the phone for 10 minutes. does anyone else think that she perhaps could have just redone it? i almost feel like she is talking extra loud so that i can hear her trials and tribulations.
and then i don't want to close my door because i feel like it's rude.
she just came in to tell me it will take a little longer because she has to reformat the document. she asked if i heard what happened. yes, yes i did.
for staff appreciation day (which we make into staff appreciation week), we had breakfast cart day. six associates loaded up carts with oj, muffins, bagels, pastries and fruit, and carted it around to all of staff. we poured the juice and served the food. it was a lot of fun, especially since i don't know all the staff on the other floors that well. plus, it's nice to feel productive even when i haven't done any work yet today. afterward, we scavenged the food and i got a cheese bagel. :)
i almost passed out yesterday. i was sitting at a bar (for an important work meeting, of course), and all of a sudden my heart started pounding really fast and then i started feeling dizzy and far away. this has happened twice before -- the first time was at a tapas bar 1L year. i got up and went to stand outside the bathroom, and then apparently just blacked out and tipped forward, falling flat like a board. the second time was 2L year, when i started to notice that i felt the same way so i went outside and laid down on a bench and was okay. on none of these three occasions was i even remotely drunk. i guess i have to chalk it up to extreme sleep deprivation. i went home last night and took a 2 1/2 hour "nap." hopefully i won't start blacking out while driving or anything.
suck as in "495 this way," and then nothing more on the subject for, like, 10 minutes, so you spend your time wondering, did i miss something? and friendly-seeming police officers give bad directions with imaginary streets. but just for the record for those of you who on many, many occasions seen me get lost within 5-block radiuses, amelia said that i had amazing directional instincts and was totally zen with the driving. hah.
the DC wedding was great. my cousin and his new wife were totally cute -- at one point after dinner he sang a chinese song for her via karaoke (it was an asian gathering, after all), and ad libbed and spoke half the song. it was perhaps the most touching karaoke moment i have ever seen (this, i suppose, is not so hard, because i never really thought of, say, ted warbling norah jones as loudly as possible as particularly "touching." not that it wasn't priceless in its own way. :) ). plus, it was good because when that cousin wasn't in control of the mike, some lady i didn't recognize was into singing chinese songs off key in a rather unpleasant voice at the top of her pain-inducing lungs. all i could do was turn to amelia and say, "wow," over and over and over.
later my dad and his brothers and sisters were all singing and dancing to cantonese songs, some of which my uncle played on his accordian. yes, his accordian. he was actually quite good. very impressive -- i now want an accordian, though i imagine this would be less pleasant for those around me than you can even envision right now. anyway, they were forming chorus lines and kicking their feet in the air and dancing around like joyful little kids.
the next morning we went to my uncle's, where we had vietnamese food for breakfast and homemade dumplings for lunch. it was cool -- the dumplings were completely from scratch, they rolled the dough and made the ground meat filling from whole slabs of meat that my uncle chopped up with a butcher knife. i like to watch my dad and his siblings mill around (there were 7 there yesterday, with a few cousins) and make fun of each other like the smartasses my family is composed of.
i am now entirely unprepared to return to work, which is perhaps why i am sitting here blogging rather than working. i will go do the work thing for a little bit.
i got to d.c. yesterday, on an extraordinarily long flight during which i was seated behind a guy who was very scared and needed to be comforted by running through the same string of questions over and over and over. what is the pilot's name? does the pilot have a mustache? what is the other pilot's name? what color was the tug pulling the plane? whenever he wasn't asking questions he would say how scared he was and start rocking back and forth. though i had no problem holding his hand during take-off, landing, etc., i wasn't terribly enthused to seem him picking his nose and later asking for my hand again.
anyway, i'm at bill and amelia's now. last night amelia and i went through an astrology book that purports to blend eastern and western methodologies, and it told me that gemini/snakes smell good. it was entirely unqualified -- it says that everyone falls in love with me because i am attractive and smell good. it's good to have that settled. it also pointed out that, though i could do anything i put my mind to, i am extraordinarily lazy. really. very, very lazy. laaazy.
today (i have to comment in order to milk guilt), amelia went to a yard sale before i woke up and purchased three large bookcases and a table, such that a good chunk of my initial waking hours were spent driving back and forth, moving heavy furniture. after lunch, we then moved the bookcases upstairs and i watched her organize books onto them. it was a blast. in the course of the day we also ate, walked around, and played chez geek (during which i had an unusually high amount of nookie -- movie theatre nookie, power outage nookie, rpg nookie, nookie at jimmy's -- go me).
i have to sleep now.
i'm sitting here trying not to look hungover. though really, i might not be hungover, i may just be extremely tired. i'm going to have to figure out a balance between going out on school nights and working the next day. i think my balance will be coming in at noon.
last night i went to oasis, the new-ish lesbian night on tuesdays. people kept saying that it's what here used to be (here is the thursday lesbian night bar), and that here has gotten ghetto, but i still like here. oasis was not bad, but there is not as much movement in the crowd. that chick from the l-word (the one who went on dates with the bi girl who dumped her fiance) was there, though this is not really news because she is at every lesbian gathering in the city, it seems. some chick randomly took a picture of me and told me it will be on the wax bush 2004 website in a couple weeks (i was wearing one of their shirts). woo hoo.
my friends started clearing out around midnight, so i headed across town to del's in wla where a bunch of coworkers were. we drank a bunch of beer and people got into debates about tax cuts, whether men hold attractive women to a harsher standard when judging whether they pander to old partners hitting on them, and whether it's offensive that fratty boys are not generally welcome at lesbian nights. afterward we went to a diner and ate and talked smack about people.
i guess i should go do some work. i feel like it's friday. i want to go home.
so perhaps i have developed a sleeping disorder. i tried to go to bed early last night, which means that i think i finally fell asleep around 1, so i woke up at 6 am. what the fuck is that about? i tried, but i couldn't get to sleep, so finally i just got up and came to work. it's 7 fucking 20 am, and i'm in the office. this from the girl who usually rolls in between 9:30 and 10. and i don't even have that much to do, so i'm just wasting my awake time and am going to pass out around 10 or something tonight when i'm supposed to be at a bar. i am highly annoyed...
...is the onion aftertaste. ugh. thank god for gum carriers who are susceptible to mooching.
my lack of motivation last week sadly does not seem to have dissipated through the weekend. it's because of this damn lack of SPRING BREAK. I WANT MY SPRING BREAK! argh!!!! i'm told it will take a few years before the depression that comes around during summer break, winter break, and spring break eases up in its cyclical occurrences.
man. i just want to close my door and take a nap or read a book or something. this is very bad because i'm supposed to present a research memo to someone in an hour. okay. bye.
i went to revolver to watch the l word again tonight. so much for last weekend's comment about there being fewer gratuitous sex scenes. i do have to say that it does make the group audience more fun though. everyone was whooping and hollering (especially any time shane was onscreen). this was also the most commentary i've seen. a very drunk girl was outragedly yelling out how the show was making bisexuals look bad and that that's not how they are. people started hissing at the character she was talking about whenever the woman was on. it was a good end to the season.
on friday i went to see eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. i /loved/ it and am now in love with kate winslet. and jim carrey did not make one obnoxious jim carrey face, which, even if you like jim carrey, would not have belonged in this movie. it was fabulous. go see it.
last night i went to temple bar in santa monica and saw lili haydn and halou. they were both good. halou sounds very similar to portishead, though a couple of the people i was with were emphatic that they did not think that the lead singer had the looks or stage presence necessary for the group to hit mtv. this is probably fair, but i enjoyed their performance. lili haydn was awesome. i'm not sure what genre it was (rolling stone calls it an "impassioned mix of classical, punk, funk, jazz and pop"), but she plays a violin throughout. she captivated the audience and packed the room more tightly than the other two performances, which led me to almost pass out from the heat so that i had to leave for a little bit. this, however, should not be held against her.
on a side note, i seem to have developed an annoying inability to sleep past 9am, regardless what time i go to sleep. i had built up a bunch of sleep debt over the week and was exhausted by friday, so i was a little annoyed when i went to sleep at 2:30 am and woke up at 9 am. i laid in bed for another hour but could not get to sleep. i was more annoyed when i was up until 5:30 am last night and woke up at 9 am. this time i refused to leave my bed until i finally fell back asleep an hour later and woke up around 11:30 am. when i was younger i never had these adherances to sleep schedules. growing up sucks.
i found out last night that one of my favorite people at work is leaving. this is depressing. she thought she had already told me, so she mentioned it rather flippantly at dinner, at which point i freaked out and we proceeded to have a breakup conversation, wherein i asked her how long she had known, what she was going to do, if there was any chance she would stay, etc etc. this is bad because she plays a key part in the chill and friendly atmosphere at our office. she is senior enough and respected enough to effectively speak up when people come in from other firms and it feels like the culture is shifting. and it is bad in general because we all love her and will be sad when she is gone.
the only saving grace of the evening was that there was a lot of alcohol to be had. at some point some random gay guy insisted on buying me a shot. it's nice when someone buys you a drink to know that there will be no quid pro quo involved (except, i suppose, when he asked if he could touch my nipple, at which juncture i pointed out that he already was so there was not much i could do about it).
anyway, they had a special table set up at our regular thursday bar selling wax bush t-shirts. i like it.
(and on a side note, thanks to brian for putting the logo back up!)
First-year students at Medical School were receiving their first anatomy class with a real dead human body. They all gathered around the surgery table with the body covered with a white sheet. The professor started the class by telling them, "In medicine, it is necessary to have two important qualities as a doctor. The first is that you will not be disgusted by anything involving the human body."
As an example, the professor pulled back the sheet, stuck his finger in the anal cavity of the corpse, withdrew it and stuck it in his mouth. "Go ahead and do the same thing,” he told his students. The students freaked out, hesitated for several minutes, but eventually took turns sticking a finger in the bottom of the dead body and sucking on it.
When everyone finished, the professor looked at the students and told them, "The second most important quality is observation. I stuck in my middle finger and sucked on my index finger. Now learn to pay attention.”
i need to pay better attention. i have my iPod playing in my office, and it's on the shuffle setting with almost all of my music collection on it. i wasn't paying attention, and then all of a sudden tenacious d was halfway through crooning "fuck her gently."
i swear it was chilly yesterday. enough that i got cold in my apartment last night and sort of considered turning on the heater. so i didn't really think about it when i put on a sweater this morning. now it's like 80 degrees out, totally sunny, and i am about to pass out or get a rash from my ill-chosen turtleneck cashmere sweater.
argh...
well, for the first time i've drafted and a filed a motion without a single other person on my case having read it first. this being because they are ALL OUT OF TOWN, including our co-counsel at the ACLU. i suppose this is a good thing, and it was kind of exciting, but it was a little stressful for a while trying to figure out what we were arguing, what sort of motion it had to be, and what the damn thing should look like. i am grateful that one of the senior associates here was nice enough to give direction (and lots of it).
not much else is new. yesterday i went to a friend's and watched the l-word in a quiet sitting where i could actually hear and understand the dialogue. it is a good show. and there was not one randomly placed sex scene, if you don't count the double-masturbation prison scene where the women were inexplicably put in form-fitting "inmate" uniforms that looked like jammies and the two with lots of sexual tension were sectioned off into their own cell (something to do with being high risk or something -- clearly a normal categorization of a museum curator and employee). and i am less experienced in this, but for those of you who have been thrown in jail for partial days -- they don't make you change, right?
and i went to utah this weekend for the first time. it was a lot of fun. my sister and paul have a beautiful new house, and the weather was gorgeous. my sister and i went furniture shopping on saturday, and on sunday we drove to park city to walk around a bit before i had to go home. i think i'm turning into betty crocker or something, but i've noticed that increasingly whenever i see people's new homes, what i am mainly jealous of is the kitchen. i can't wait to have a nice big kitchen with a stand-alone island in the middle and lots and lots of counter space. mmm... counter space.
man. i just don't feel like working today. i'm all groggy and out of it. i would like to attribute this to jet lag, but minnesota is 2 hours ahead of los angeles, so i guess it's just laziness or something.
i defended my first two depos (third-party) this week. it was kind of fun, but i got totally nervous beforehand. one of them was a full day in irvine and the other a short one in minnesota. they went fine, though one of the witnesses cried all the way through. i felt bad -- tried to make her feel better on the breaks, and i was going to buy her lunch but then i realized that i didn't know if i could. i remember some weird thing from barbri about not being able to give anything to someone, even a quarter, but i have no idea if that was to a client or what. should have paid attention more in professional responsibility, i guess.
it was my first time in minneapolis, for all i saw of it. i did have a good sushi dinner with a co-worker who was there for another case, and i saw some construction. that was about it.
do most airlines offer long island iced teas? sun country does. and margaritas and hard lemonade. and the minneapolis airport is big into alcohol -- i walked past both a "tequilaria" and a chili's margarita bar. i'd never before noticed such an emphasis on alcohol in airport settings. perhaps it was because i'd already gotten tipsy at dinner and felt like another drink.
anyway. i don't suppose i can excuse my lack of work much further. ciao.