Some people run 26 miles; I quit Facebook for a week. Sure, the running thing takes a lot of training and dedication, but you have to keep in mind that these are people who ENJOY running in the first place. I bet that gets you through the first ten miles, at least.

Here’s the thing: I have little to no self-discipline. It’s appalling. Most of the decisions I make on a daily basis are driven by instant gratification. If life were fair, I would weigh 300 pounds.

(more…)

Did anybody else have a Trapper Keeper back in the day? I remember mine—it had overlapping red, yellow, blue, and green rectangles under a plastic cover.

In second or third grade, my elementary school banned Trapper Keepers. Apparently the velcro was so noisy that it disrupted class. This would have been about 1992. I get the feeling they banned something else that year, too, but I can’t remember what it was.

Later, in maybe fifth grade, I had a green fabric-covered binder that zipped all the way around. I guess clipping papers into the holes was too much trouble sometimes.

Nothing profound to say here, just remembering.

I interrupt this hiatus in my blog posting to let you know that I’ll likely be posting even LESS often for the next two weeks. My appellate brief, worth eighty percent of my Legal Research and Writing grade, is due next Thursday*, and all I have so far is a sketch of an outline and a list of cases to read more closely.

I have a conference with my professor tomorrow afternoon, so I figure today is a fantastic time to start putting some serious effort into this thing. With only one weekend between now and the due date and 20 pages to conjure up out of this thick stack of cases, I’ll barely have time to eat, sleep, read blogs, check Facebook, keep up with my YouTube subscriptions, and update my Twitter feed.

I’ve just removed Solitaire from my computer, so who knows, maybe I’ll post MORE here for lack of a more absorbing way to procrastinate. It’s a crazy world.

———
* The actual due date is the Monday after next, but that weekend I’ll be on a taiko road trip (squee!) to perform at the Nashville Cherry Blossom Festival. What better reward for finishing a brief, eh?

The women’s bathroom nearest my study carrel at school, it smells. Not of human waste, but of various fragrances which might be pleasant if they weren’t so overpowering. It has one of those wall-mounted dispensers that releases a squirt of pungent oil into the air every few minutes. Judging by the strength of the scent, it seems the dispenser was designed for a much larger area.

I wonder who picks the scents. Is it someone at the university’s actual job to make that decision, or does the pungent oil warehouse just send out their leftovers? Last semester it was cupcakes. This semester we started out with generic disinfectant, then recently swapped to floral explosion. Keeps you guessing, that bathroom.

(more…)

It flew by this year. John and I spent two nights at a friend’s place in Austin and took a day trip to Enchanted Rock nearby. Big granite formation, fun to clamber up. We had to wait forty-five minutes to get into the park, but it was worth it.

Yesterday we were all over town running errands and visiting people. I picked up my old bike from my parents’ house and, wonder of wonders, it needs only cosmetic repairs after sitting unused in the garage for nearly a decade. I’m looking forward to riding it on short errands and around the trails by the bayou.

The weather has been lovely and spring-ish this week. Seventy degrees, crisp clean air, sunshine, yum yum. If I could wear a tank top and a swingy skirt every day of my life, I would.

But alas, school starts again tomorrow, and while I’ve been enjoying the outdoors my homework has piled up undone. Back to work.

Is the semester half over already? It seems hard to believe, but by Tuesday I’ll have had midterms in all but two of my classes. All of my professors this time around have opted for the midterm-final exam schedule, which I guess is a vague sort of preparation for the your-final-is-your-grade plan I’ll be on in law school.

I’m keeping up with my classes for the most part. I haven’t been quite keeping up with my lab reports, but then again there is a good deal of historical precedent for this. Which, you know, doesn’t excuse me, but knowing that I will never ever do lab research again is not the best motivator for slogging through long, tedious reports for one piddly credit hour. I write the reports well, with all the pretty plots that take hours to debug, but they’re usually two days late.

(more…)

There’s a dog in my apartment complex who looks a lot like Samson, but with shorter hair and a slimmer body. Her name is Phoenix.

———

John got me flowers the other day, and at first I didn’t realize they were sunflowers because half of them were red with purple leaves. The dye in them turns the water purple, but since they’re in a green vase it just looks brown, which is a shame. They almost exactly match the flowers in the painting above my sofa.

(more…)

Since my life lately has been all SCHOOL SCHOOL law school apps SCHOOL boyfriend SCHOOL SCHOOL food sleep SCHOOL*, let’s run through my new classes, shall we?

Intermediate Electricity and Magnetism II. Continuation of a course from last semester. Same book, same professor, different room. E&M and I have never gotten along, which is a shame.

(more…)

Vacation’s been fun, but I’m ready to get back to warmer climes. As fun as it is to pile on four layers of clothes to get to the grocery store, it’ll be nice to prepare myself for the brutal mid-winter weather by maybe throwing on a light jacket.

We’re flying out tomorrow behind that giant storm that’s on its way from California, so I’m glad there’s lots of football* on tonight that I can watch to keep myself distracted. The biggest challenge will probably be getting from up in the mountains, where all the weather is, to Denver, where the daily high is usually above freezing.

(more…)

So classes are over, and I find myself with a full load of work to do and a week of unstructured time; there’s a recipe for success, eh?

I spent a good chunk of today drawing up a beautiful spreadsheet of all the grad programs we’re applying to and their deadlines, fees, number of rec letters, extra materials, etc. I bet “making a spreadsheet about it” is one of the top ten ways to make yourself feel productive without actually accomplishing anything useful, right between “writing a to-do list” and “printing labels for all your file folders.”

(more…)