Corgi

There are corgis everywhere in my neighborhood of DC. They are rather ridiculous little dogs, but after 2 years they've started to grow on me. Something about them looking like "real" dogs, but with itsy bitsy legs. Either way, I've decided that a corgi would make a great first apartment dog, at least when we move someplace where a dog would be feasible.

So today in a fit of daydreaming I started looking at corgis on pet rescue sites. I now love corgi mixes, mostly because they have the face and coloring of the non-corgi dog, but on the long corgi body and itsy bitsy legs. The sheer ridiculousness really appeals to me.

Like this corgi/husky mix. It's just too cute. 

Dating Advice from Law School

Law school teaches important life lessons.

For example, today in Evidence we not only learned the federal rules of evidence, we also learned the importance of  checking out romantic partners.

Consider the following hypo. You've been dating a girl for about two weeks. Things seem great, she seems fantastic. One night you're just hanging out at her place, and she runs out to pick up a pizza, leaving you just hanging out. You're sitting there, watching TV, when you notice that there in plain sight on the coffee table is a journal. A journal with a lock that is very much unlocked. So, class poll, who peeks at the journal?

Most of us (myself included) raise our hands. The response?

"All of you get to live! The rest of you are dead!" Mass confusion.

"She's a psychopath! You open that up and it's all gee, that's the fourth boyfriend I've killed this year. I love the taste of blood. So you high tail it out of there! the rest of you? Dead."

Upon one of the people with moral scruples and privacy concerns raising their hand  for a question  -
"You can't ask questions, you're dead!"

After some more class discusion,  "how many wouldn't at least google them?"
To the 5 still raising their hands.  "I ought to kill you myself!"

When the idea that she may have wanted you to read the journal is suggested - 
"Who plants a journal unlocked for you to read? sick, needy bastard"

The supposed point of all this was to introduce the propensity rule. What I got out of it was a hilarious class period, and a renewed curiosity about Zach's journal.

Unwritten Rules leave you sad and cookieless

In marriage, never, ever assume that something is an unwritten rule.

For two years, two full years I have always assumed that we had a standard dessert protocol. If one person makes or buys a delicious dessert dish, the other person is free to partake but not to finish! So when Zach makes some pastry, I have more than a few pieces, sure, but never, ever, the last one. Always. And things always went the same way with my treats. I just assumed it was one of those normal things we had just settled into. You didn't explicitly say, hey don't eat the last cookie. It was just understood, the same way we just naturally assume that I always get the mail and Zach always takes the trash work. You just do it because we both know that's how things work.

So this morning I went over to a plate of cookies I'd made a few days ago. Last I checked, there were quite a few left, but apparently Zach had enjoyed them too. But, per our custom, the last cookie was there and waiting for me. I made an after dinner date with that cookie and went about the rest of the day looking forward to it. It wasn't that great of a day, so once dinner wrapped up I was looking forward to that cookie more than ever. I poured a glass of milk for dipping and pulled open the curtain on the shelf where the cookie had been sitting on it's plate, the last of its kind. Only to find no plate and worst of all no cookie.

So I come out of the kitchen, dessert plans foiled and splattered in a mug of milk that had been deprived of its cookie dipping destiny and had to be carefully poured back into the milk jug, and ask Zach why oh why he ate the last of my cookies? The cookie he had so sweetly saved for me? He just stared at me like I was a crazy person. So I told him the previously unspoken rule. He had no idea what I was talking about. None what so ever. Apparently it is just sheer luck that he's never gotten the last bite before now. 

He was just completely flumoxed that I had some sense of ownership over a cookie. Why didn't I just eat it if I wanted it? Because I didn't think I had to! Precedent told me that we both understood that was my cookie.

So now I have a nasty case of betrayal hiccups, all because someone didn't understand the rules. Or because we never actually said anything and I relied on assumptions and an awful lot of apparently coincidental precedent. But since he got a cookie and I didn't, I think it's only fair that he gets the blame.

The Blogging Blahs

Last night I was almost asleep, when I suddenly remembered that I hadn't blogged yesterday. So I groggily stumbled over, typed something up and went back to bed, grumbling the whole time.

That's been happening more and more, the blogging not because its fun or I have something to say, but because I feel obligated. I scrolled through the last month or so of posts, and even I, the person most narcissisticly interested in my life was bored.

I didn't originally intend to be an everyday blogger. I'm not really sure what I intended on accomplishing when I started blogging. I just liked reading other people's blogs, and felt it was only fair to expose myself a little. Still, initially I only blogged sporadically, no one really read and the whole thing started to feel like a waste of time. So I decided that for one month, I was going to blog every single day, just to get in good habits. But after one month, why not two? And then, why not six? Until suddenly I had a goal of one full year.

I haven't missed a single day of blogging since February and have a little under 5 months left to meet that goal. It was great at first. It was good to have something forcing me to think and write. I would pen posts whenever I had an idea, anxiously planning when to publish them. I even started doing things beyond my apartment partially so I could have something to say. Best of all, and somewhat unexpectedly, my blog started to be a place of actual interaction with some amazing people I consider friends. I felt better about myself. I had something concrete I had made that I could look at and tell myself how funny or insightful I was. I had comments showing up in my inbox to tell me that other people thought I was awesome.

Those things are all still true, but so often I feel like I have nothing to say. So the clock ticks by, next thing I know it's time to go to bed so I freak out and throw some words onto the internet to keep up the trend, not because they have any value. It's even leaked into reading blogs, something I've loved for years. Now I get stressed out if I think I'm not commenting enough, or well enough, or if my G-reader gets backed up. Like I've failed at my half of the blogging covenant or something. I want it to be, it should be, about friendly interaction, but more and more it's not. I don't like that something that has made me so happy now feels like an obligation. 

I'm still going to finish up my one year goal. I'm still glad I'm blogging, its been a big deal for me these past couple of months. But at some point I need to figure out how to get back to why I like doing this. I don't know if that means being better organized and having a pile of posts pre-written for blah days or trying to figure out how to do one great post a week and not stress about the rest, or something else entirely. I don't have answers right now. But one of the whole points of this blog is to just talk to people honest and open, so I'm going to count this as a post in the right direction.

Fun Reading

I think it's cute when my husband, he who usually reads very thick, very serious non-fiction books, gets really into a YA fiction series. I've never seen him so much glance at any fiction book before, but after seeing me get engulfed in the Hunger Games trilogy last week, he decided to give them a try. 

Everytime I turn around, he's been curled up with them. Earlier, I got up to get something from the kitchen, and when I came back, sure enough he had taken advantage of those two minutes to get a few more pages in. I don't know why I find that so endearing, but I really do.

Also, he was so shocked when I told him that I had taken pictures of him reading, without him noticing. He's a little paranoid of my stealth paparazzi camera skills now. But not enough to not finish the last book.

Mystery Neighbors

At times I almost wish I knew my neighbors. If only just so I could understand what on earth they are doing in there.

At least once a week, usually on a weekend when we're trying to sleep in, we're woken up by a banging noise right above our heads, the kind of noise you would expect from someone hammering in a picture. Only people usually don't hang pictures for an hour straight. The hammering is the most common, but there's also noises that sound like sawing or scrapping. Once it sounded like they were spraying the wall with a high pressure hose.

Construction noises aren't that odd in a nice suburban neighborhood, but in studio apartments without so much as a balcony I just can't imagine anyone having enough space to live and make things.

At first I just assumed that they had just moved in and were getting settled. That theory lost viability after about a month, and the strange banging and sawing noises haven't let up.

It's not so much that the noise is inherently annoying (and oh, it is) but by now it's mostly just about the mystery of it all. I just want to know what they could possibly be doing!

Please Shut Up

To the old man on the bus who really bummed me out:

Ok, I'm sure you think of yourself as a friendly person who just enjoys striking up conversation with random people. But when the people (or person, or me) avoid eye contact, including moving their head like a sea sick flamingo, that is a sign that they do not want to talk. Answering questions with a "uh huh" and only saying more when forced into a direct question, and even then with the tiniest amount of words possible is also a sign that the person wants to just sit on the bus unmolested by fake conversation.

But if you feel compelled to burst my anti-people east coast bubble, please oh please just talk about the weather. Or even your colon. Anything but how my future is hopeless.

You knew I was a law student. That was the first question you asked. Worse, you knew I was a 3L standing on the cusp of the real world.

So why did you decide that a great topic of conversation was how this is the worst hiring environment you've ever seen, how even your best and brightest students can't get jobs? (Oh, yes, you're a professor. You should know better.)

Don't do that to us! The horrible economy is not a surprise to us. We know, oh how we know. It is not helpful information. It is the stuff that haunts our nightmares.

And when you don't know someones grades, talking about how B students are just extra hopeless is just extra cruel. I know my grades (It's a B+ average! The + matters!). I know how they look to employers. I know the soul crushing fear that comes every time I look at me and look back out at the cold harsh world. But I take a deep breath, stay calm, gather what little optimism I can and keep trying to be even more awesome and find potential employers to demonstrate my awesomeness to.

That is much harder to do when random strangers decide to verbally punch me in the gut.

So, please of please, if you ever see me on the bus again don't feel compelled to inform me how 3 years of my life was a horrible, debt ridden mistake. Thanks ever so much.