Deployed
Sure. I FINALLY get around to posting after an apparently nearly unforgivable absence (thanks,
Trouble :)), and now I am going to not be posting for awhile again. That "normal people" living from the last post? Screw that.
After Hurricane Katrina, I felt compelled to
do something. So I signed up for a Disaster Relief deployment with the Red Cross. They needed thousands of volunteers to head down to the Gulf and run shelters, bring food to people with no electricity, etc. Now that Rita is hitting, the need is even greater. Yesterday I got a call and tomorrow I am deploying to Texas. I have no idea where I will be or what I will be doing. If Rita hits one way, I may stay in Austin, living in a hotel and working in a shelter. If it hits a different way, I may be sent to Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama and be living in a tent. It's a three week deployment, so I could end up doing some of all of the above.
So this decision seems to be begging a few questions, namely, Citycat... What about work? And don't you go to law school?
Yes. But...
Work: Work is wonderful and amazing sometimes and wants to help. So work worked things out for me and are almost unbelievably supportive. This is one time, I can say, with a complete lack of irony, that I am truly grateful to them.
Law School: Heh. Well, ok. On the one hand, it is definitely not
advisable to take off for three weeks mid semester. On the other hand... life happens. When I weighed the two against each other I realized that in this case, life wins. I'll work my ass off after I get home, and may pay a little in grades, but... It is what it is. The Professors are really supportive and my classmates, especially A, are going to help me a bunch.
So it will be awhile before my next post. Everyone have a great three weeks!
This Must Be How Normal People Live
HI!
(I am hoping maybe if I say hi really enthusiastically no one will notice I haven't posted in FOR-GODDAMN-EVER). Yeah... sorry about that. I really don't want to write posts when at work, but given the fact that I still do not have my computer back, (although YAY! S, he has fixed it, except for the sticky space key which I am SURE has NOTHING to do with the incident involving the champagne. Not a THING), I have finally decided to risk posting at work rather than risk losing all your interest.
The thing is, life has been bouncing along relatively nicely in all areas which I write about here. Work, which unfortunately I can't write about here, has been Pure. Comic. Gold., even if I am the only one who finds it funny. Remember the Judy Bloom book
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing? I need to write
Tales of the Retirement Age Drama Queens. But anyway.
Last week was fun and rather insane as I somehow managed to go out almost every night. I also managed the Best. Law school. Escape. Ever. Law school? SO does not hate me! See, Friday the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan at work, leaving all of us to clean up the proverbial mess. (Possibly while giggling evilly). Anyway, I was exhausted and decided I could get away with not reading my corporations, because 1. I hate corporations, and 2. He only calls on the people "at bat" for that day, and while he tortures THEM, those not at bat might as well not even be there. So really, I could get away with not doing the reading. Right?
Wrong.
Note to self: When deciding upon whether or not to do reading based on the amount you can rely on people "At Bat", be sure to first acertain that YOU are not ONE of those people.
Yeah. So I walk into class Friday and
Freak. The Fuck. Out. Because not only did I not do the reading, the question for the day regarded three types of corporate mergers under three different statutory frameworks and it was NOT something that I could just BS my way through. And have I mentioned that I HATE CORPORATIONS??? NO? WELL I DO. SEE? I HATE IT ENOUGH TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS. SO THERE.
A did his best to keep me calm but all he could really do is feed me cigarettes at break. But y'all? I was fine. Miracles do happen, and Friday's miracle is that the man
ran out of time before he could call on me. He ran out of time, and my law school career is intact.
So the weekend began with me being totally stressed out, but a Katrina Benefit featuring the music of D1 and the drinking ability of kickball quickly put me in a better mood. Then the Peanut showed up, and I hung out with her until she could retrieve the money that the bar was donating (she works for a Very Involved Non Profit) and then we went to McDonalds and came home.
Saturday I went to El Capitan's house for a BBQ, which was fun because I had never been there before. We drank a lot of wine and ate a lot of things with unnatural amounts of garlic in them. It was a nice, normal, fun night in which I did not: 1.
Fall down, 2.
need supervision, or 3.
Scare myself into staying up all night (even though Kate wasn't home). Y'all? I just may be getting boring.
Sunday The Peanut came over and I remembered that she likes the same type of B-rate monster movie I do, so we watched Peter Benchley's
The Beast. Then I went to the mall with her to go to Ann Taylor, where there was much trying on and possibly some weeping because I canNOT buy the $138 dollar dress, no I canNOT. There was also a plan hatched in which we are going to the Delaware outlet malls soonish and spending absurd amounts of money. Yay fall clothes!
Then we went to the grocery store, which was supposed to be a quick stop before the Peanut went home, but turned into a FAR greater adventure than necessary, and I am not sure why. The Peanut and I have a way of having conversations that evolve into plans that in no way make any sense. See, mussels were on sale. The Peanut said she only liked mussels if they were "cooked a certain way", that way being "the way the expensive restaurant she used to work at cooked them." So I decided NOT to buy them, since Kate wouldn't eat them and neither the Peanut nor I had ever cooked them before, and the Peanut needed to get home anyway. Somehow this evolved into a strange deal with the cosmos, in which we would buy mussels and eat them for dinner if we could find sea salt. This
almost makes sense, except that the recipe on the back of the mussels bag, which we would be following since we didn't know any other recipe,
did not contain even an ounce of sea salt. But we found sea salt, and then I lost my mind and sat in front of the white wines for approximately 87 hours having NO IDEA what a "dry" white wine to cook the mussels in would be. Eventually, I literally grabbed something off the shelf labeled "Dry White Wine" and dragged the Peanut out of the store.
So even though she was
supposed to go home hours before, and even though we had clearly decided
not to cook mussels, at 9 o'clock at night we were eating a steaming bowl of mussels and watching Peter Benchley's
Creature.
Hee.
And y'all? I am SO having a dinner party soon, because DAMN can I make some good mussels.
The Stupid Comes Early
Wow. Last year it took until
October for law school to make me stupid. This year? Three days, people.
Three days.
It’s good to be back, in a lot of ways. And the classes don’t seem too bad, except for evidence, which makes me weep. And will continue to do so until the closed book 33 question exam at the end, which will be the sole determination of the value of over 200 hours of my life. Yup. Love law school. Love.
But mostly it’s good, and A and I have the same schedule which means we don’t have to do scary things like walk into class on the first day alone, and we can double check homework and trade notes and BOTH not have the foggiest idea what the professor is talking about when he makes sure everyone picked up the packet. (A and I exchanged looks of complete resignation at that point. Packet? What is this packet of which you speak? Where do we get the packet? Distribution Center? Oh, good, another place of which I have NEVER HEARD OF. Yippee.)
But the Stupid? Oh, it is moving in quickly. A now takes the bus home, and I take the metro, so we walk out of opposite ends of the building. Yesterday he went one way, I went the other. I walk to the door and realize… I am not on the right side of the building. (Ok, y’all, don’t EVEN GET ME STARTED on the building. I KNOW it’s a big open square with 8 classrooms around the edges. I KNOW this. And I also KNOW that I get lost in it Every. Goddamn. Day. Shut up.) So I run through the building and chase after A.
Me: “A! Are you taking the metro??”
A: (stops, looks confused). “No… I, bus?”
Me: “Then why are you on this side? I was just on the wrong side because you went this way so I assumed I went the other way.”
A: “But I went
this way because you went
that way.”
Me: “Oh my god. We are
exactly the same kind of stupid.”
Law school notwithstanding, I have also had the opportunity to be frustrated and made to look bad by my other favorite inanimate object, the Computer. So we all know my
computer broke. And I sort of don’t blame it, because it gets kind of beat up coming with me to work and school. So I decided to buy a cheap new computer off e-bay and leave that one at school. So I bought the computer, and I installed the wireless card, and…. Nothing. So after several hysterical phone calls to poor S (who was at a dinner in Chicago and did not CARE that now my second computer was acting like a spoiled 5 year old, but is wonderful and noted the “rapidly approaching Crazy” note in my voice) we decided I had to download new drivers. So! Download driver to disk, install on computer, love and sunshine and kittens!
There is no love, sunshine, or kittens.
Of course, a disk is exactly .07 mb too small. So I burn it to a CD. Yay! I am useful!
I am not useful.
My computer is old enough that the CD reader does not really read burned CDs. It does that whole spinny spinny SPINNYSPINNYSPINNY Whhheeezzee... "Please Insert A Disk Into Drive D thing." And no matter how many times I tried, and no matter how many times I explained to the computer that there WAS a disk in drive D, I couldn't. Get. It. To. READ IT.
This is now the second time in my life my entire concept of reality has been challenged by an inanimate object. See, I was a philosophy major, (bet you didn’t see THAT coming), and I have a MA in philosophy, and during finals time a philosophy student can get a little crazy. So I was writing paper after paper dissecting reality, from Plato’s forms to Decartes’ “I think therefore I am”, and ran straight into an ontological brick wall.
See, I was printing a paper. Well, the computer and I were trying to print a paper, the printer was not so much cooperating. See, in the printer’s reality, it had no paper. Therefore, it couldn’t print. In MY reality, there was TOTALLY PAPER IN THE PRINTER. I could see the paper, I could feel the paper, I
believed the paper was there. But the actual outcome was that there was no paper being printed. Therefore, the printer’s reality must have been correct. And then my head exploded.
So you can see why this bothered me. And nothing I did, no amount of reasoning with the computer, yelling at the computer, hitting the computer, or thinking bad thoughts about the computer would change the computer’s view of reality.
So now I own two laptops, (well, three, but just forget the third) and neither of them are currently doing ANYTHING I want them to do. I have been beaten by my own technology.
But just think! If this is only the first week of the semester, how much fun is November going to be!?
