Catblog

(1) How to make my cat the happiest cat on the planet, in 2 easy steps:
Step 1 - go on vacation for a week.
Step 2 - come home.
Apparently, her life was empty and meaningless without me. She is giddy with joy that I have returned. I am once again the center of her universe!

(2) At one point during final exams, I stayed up until 4:30 a.m. working on a take-home exam. The cat, who usually sleeps next to me on my bed, didn't know what to do that night, since I wasn't in the bed for her to sleep next to. So instead, she slept on the kitchen counter next to the microwave. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it was as close as she could get to the electric can opener?

Grades

If there was a course called "Watching TV While You Study", I would have gotten an A this semester. No - an A+! But in all the courses that I really did take, I got Bs. :-(

Mmmmmm, Donuts!

I have an interview tomorrow, and I'm almost too fat to fit into my I-want-to-be-a-lawyer suit. As long as I keep the jacket on, no one will be able to tell that the skirt doesn't zip all the way up. I wish I hadn't had 2 chocolate donuts for breakfast this morning. Those Indian ladies at Dunkin Donuts are trying to make me fat. Tomorrow, I am having salad for breakfast.

Veronica Mars is more fun than a take-home exam!

[Note: I'm still watching Season 1 over and over]

When I saw the character of Aaron Echoll's (Harry Hamlin) wife, I assumed that the show had gone out and gotten the actress with the biggest grossest puffed-up lips and fakest plastic-surgery look that they could find. Then I found out that Lisa Rinna is an actual famous person, is married to Harry Hamlin in real life, and those may be her actual lips, not prosthetics that they glue on for each show. So her role is a parody of a plasticized wife of a movie star... wouldn't that make the real-life plasticized wife of a movie star (sort of) a little uncomfortable with the irony? Maybe I'm wrong, and those are prosthetic lips. I need a subscription to People -- I haven't been keeping up with these things.

What's It Like To Not Be A Law Student?

It's 2:30 a.m. I'm working on a take-home exam. My downstairs neighbors are listening to the radio. They're not law students -- what's their excuse for being awake? They're old and boring -- don't they have to get up in a few hours to go to work? I sure as hell wouldn't be awake right now if I wasn't in law school. (Or college - see below.) Maybe on a weekend. But it's Sunday night! Don't regular people sleep at night? I think they do. Most of my pre-law-school memories have grown fuzzy. But I definitely remember sleeping a lot. A LOT. Damn, I miss sleep.

Study Break

One thing that sucks about living in the 'burbs is that when I get hungry for a study-break snack, about 4 hours from now, it will be 12:30 a.m. and there won't be anyplace good nearby that I can go for a wide variety of satisfying snacks. There's a 24-hour Walgreens, but they don't have slurpies at Walgreens. Somehow, it just isn't a study break without a slurpy. There is a 24-hour diner about 15 minutes away, I guess I could go there - no slurpies, but a lot of pie. The 24-hour Walmart would be perfect, but it's a good 2o minutes away.

And the thing that sucks about being an evening student and only knowing other evening students is that I can't be sure they'll be awake at 1:00 a.m. and willing to chat on the phone if I need a pep talk. I miss that about college - if I wanted to go study at IHOP in the middle of the night, I could always find someone to go with me. Ah, the good old days. I feel old.

Burnout

1st year: Briefed every case; started outlining halfway through the semester; stayed up until 2:00 a.m. on Saturday nights to study.

2nd year: Read every case; started outlining 2 weeks before finals; stayed up until 2:00 a.m. while studying for final exams.

3rd year: Only read about 2/3 of the material; started outlining 2 days before the exam; considering going to bed around 11:00 to be fresh for the exam in the morning.

Which "Alias" Character Are You?

I'm Arvin Sloane.

I've been playing Oblivion instead of studying for the past couple weeks. Two of the attributes that a character gets in the game are "infamy" and "fame". Infamy comes from doing bad things (stealing, killing, etc.) and fame comes from doing good things, basically. If your infamy is higher than your fame, there are certain things you can't do. There was a discussion about this on one of the Oblivion forums that I read - someone asked for advice, and someone else explained that they needed to get their fame score higher than their infamy score -- assuming that that wouldn't be contradictory to the personality of the character that they were playing.

So that got me thinking about the personality of the character that I am playing. I am a vampire, a thief, and an assassin. But my fame is higher than my infamy. Because I spend my days helping people, finding their lost objects, and raising my fame; then at night, I sneak into their houses and steal their stuff and drink their blood. And I thought, "I am just like Arvin Sloane."

Even though Sydney and Jack Bristow are my favorite characters, I don't think I would ever role-play a character like either of them. I think that my next character is going to be a pure mage who does everything with cool spells instead of weapons - like Marshall. :-)