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Wednesday November 05, 08
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07:11 AM - back again...
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the phrase "10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag" is stuck in my head.
i have no idea if he's on a war against all women because of supposed wrongs in the past. however, from what I've seen, it seems like it's his own fault that he's ended up where he's ended up...and i guess, in keeping with a lot of guys like himself, he blames other people for what went wrong.
he reaffirms my mantra: any guy over the age of 30 with a steady job and who hasn't been married has something wrong with them. if they're gay, that's one thing. if they're straight, there is usually something going on like they're living in their parents' basement or what have you.
i know that i talk from my own personal experience of being quite single for so long, but guys have it made. it's not that hard to be a catch because, when you take the fact that there are a lot of sociopaths, idiots, guys sitting in prison, drug addicts, mama's boys who spend all day on grandma's couch and won't find a job, etc., it's not that hard to belong the winner's circle. you can be a chauvinistic moron who is barely employed and you will find somebody. Robin Hood has lots of women staring at him as a potential mate in spite of the fact that he is woefully underemployed, doesn't have a car, and lives in a rat hole at age 40.
yes, judging by how quickly Robo managed to find somebody else in the interim proves my point. he'll probably do to her what he did to me, and then move on to the next girl.
maybe i shouldn't take this as a grave offense. it may be that i'm just too good for the guy and he knows it. at the very least, i can say that i was brave enough to overcome the silent hostilities to strike up a conversation, strong enough not to go home with him that night, and big enough to at least say a friendly "hello" to the both of them last night. PLUS, I wasn't the one shitty enough to try and bed somebody and then show up with somebody else at a function a week later to rub it in.
Will history record these events? Probably not. But oh well.
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Tuesday November 04, 08
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08:06 PM - it finally didn't happen!
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it's election night.
i'm at home and having drinks.
i WAS at the party being held for watching the festivities, but Robo showed up with who I guess is now his regular date and I had no desire to pretend like I was having a grand time the entire night.
ho! what a great turn of events from "i think about you a lot...i want to rip your clothes off...come and see my new apartment...nobody has been there because it is sacred..." just two weeks before.
he is a sad individual. so, was he trying to bed me out of triumph that i caved? or did he say "screw it" when i put up a tiny bit of resistance and find somebody else?
how DOES a person go from being excited to talk to somebody to having a new date to functions in the next week? ...that is, if he wasn't already dating her before i returned to the picture.
i guess if that's the case, that this guy is about as sad as I measured him up to be.
and i get the feeling that i'm the "oh, that's the crazy girl who can't get over me" chick by the way i'm gestured at, even though I wasn't the one who invited the other back to their house. all i did was say, "how are you doing?" and suddenly, I'M the leper. I was minding my own business, was dumped in Spain over facebook, and now I'M the leper.
how do i explain this to people?
i've been careful my entire life. i've done (what I believe to be) an excellent job of keeping out riff-raff. i had a mental picture of who i wanted to date and what kind of personality they had. It turns out that I was right in keeping true to that mental image.
the first half of this year was a great year. One of my cases was argued in front of the 4th COA at school, I was selected to be a board member of the Law Journal, and I was elected Secretary of the WLA. I arrived at this point in my life where I wanted to open myself up to relationships. ...editing out a whole bunch of stuff...
I dunno....i thought maybe the fact that it was eating me up inside meant that it was salvageable. I thought that maybe that because I had held out for so long that i was immune to being exploited. i thought maybe if i had lived my life right, a guy that was supposed to be something special would fall right in....
i feel cheated. i feel like i was delaying the inevitable, like the fact that i had barely dated anyone for my entire life was just a futile attempt to keep me from being a cheap floozy that i ended up becoming, or being torn up emotionally from it with no apology from anyone or anything.
heh. it's almost like it wasn't a question of IF it was going to happen, but WHEN.
it's like that movie where the kids don't die on the airplane that crashed, but death is still trying to hunt them down. i feel like i've been combating the obvious outcome, yet it STILL managed to hunt me down and find me out of a sense of destiny.
"no matter how hard you try to be careful and precautionary about the situation YOU ARE FUCKED!"
yes, so i feel like pimping my ass out because there is no sense in anything anymore. i'm 34 and get to see people 10 years younger than i am cavort about in the kinds of happy relationships that i've never known.
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Wednesday October 22, 08
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10:05 PM - so, it finally happened!
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i have no idea why i added the exclamation mark, but I finally spoke to Robo. ...and we had dinner... ....and more would have happened had i not put the brakes on it.
as you know, this has been bothering me for ages, and I finally had to accept that I was going to have to confront it. So, i waited for him in the hallway after class and barely spat out that the Innocence Project meeting (that he is helping found) was good. It then ended up with talking about the thing quickly followed by admissions of feelings (HE started it).
But I'm not letting myself feel overjoyed at the moment. If nothing else, I'll let myself feel relieved that a weight has been lifted. Yet, I still have no idea what I'm walking into.
At any rate, I have no idea if I had just added a layer to my existing problem, but the old paradigm just wasn't helping.
Last night, I had some sort of dream where I woke up completely drenched in sweat to where I had to change nightgowns. This occasionally happens, but 9 times out of 10, it happens more at mom and dad's house...and mostly that's because mom has a plastic slip-cover on the bed and pillows. Add two blankets and a bedspread and you have a right old oven.
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Saturday October 18, 08
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11:13 PM - work smarter, not harder
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so, the WLA auction is coming up.
charity auctions (unless it is a $5k a plate dinner) are an exercise in economic inefficiency. You:
1. Spend countless hours soliciting donations.
2. Spend countless time and money arranging these items for sale, and coming up with and spending money on incentives (such as snack foods) to draw an audience in to bid.
3. Mostly result in bids that are less than the value of the items offered.
I think WLA keeps their auction alive because of tradition and the fact that we, as the junior league of the law school, need practice in pointless and non-hand-dirtying means of helping the worthy-needy in our future jobs of soccer-mom lawyers.
Sure, you might raise $10k, but it's a bit like going through the trouble of crossing the street to avoid walking on the same sidewalk with one. Usually, a handful of people do all of the work. Granted, I hadn't done much on my end, and I'm ashamed of that because I am a board member. Sure, I plan on buying something and donating, but I haven't been pounding the pavement like some of my cohorts. Mostly, my big contribution has been towards suggesting a couple of places that I KNOW donate to charities (like Whole Foods) which causes the gung-ho vice president to hop on the phone and call these people.
I'm not sure what that's all about. I don't know if she wants all of the glory, or she's just incredibly enthused about her role as VP. So, in a round about way, I got two donations for the auction.
Tonight, I sat down and wrote a letter trying to encourage WLA member participation in rounding up donations. It sounds hypocritical, yes, but my main goal was to draw attention to small things they can do to donate. They can buy something and donate it. They can get their family's business to give their tax write-off to us.
Naturally, at the same time, the VP had written her own letter. We had sent them out at nearly the exact same time for people to read.
Since I'm now trying to use people skills (as learned in negotiations class), I pointed out that she had made points that I didn't make and vice-versa and that we should combine the two letters. After all, I think I had written a much better section on how to get people involved (because it was clearly written with creative examples instead of written in a jumble) while she made the point that if you find a donation, your name was entered into a raffle.
I hadn't heard a word in response.
I get a feeling she's thinking, "well, MY letter is better and I'm just going to wait for the other board members to verify that fact for her." That, or it's the "we don't like Suzanne because we don't like thin and normal weight people who can make dietary restrictions like vegetarianism."
Yes, she basically treats me like I'm not there, like I'm on par with BP even though he's a fat-ass jerk. I've been nothing but nice to her in the past, but she does have an attitude problem where she's constantly making snide remarks about thin people. Also, she is one of THOSE people who are threatened by my diet. She parried me with a bunch of obnoxious remarks, which I mostly fought off with grace. I probably slipped a little when it got really old that she wouldn't drop it and kept shoving meat in my face and going "MMMMM!!!", but I think that's all she needs to "prove" that I'm somebody she doesn't want to talk to.
I would be more offended by it except that I know other people who are like that.
Speaking of jealousy...
apparently, any mention of my role as a board member on the law journal is not allowed. "we" apparently think we're all better than everyone else because we sit around and talk about law journal all the time.
oh, and members of the mock trial team are in that same boat.
we are partially being vilified by Dean Rey-Rey.
Yes, can you BELIEVE the associate dean of the law school is telling other students that WE are bad news who thinks that we all deserve life to be handed to us on a silver platter?
Here's the scoop:
Our illustrious editor in chief decided that the 3d year law students who serve as our underlings needed some scholarship money. Prior boards had finagled money out of the prior dean because we were the nice, over-achieving white kid Journal. There is another journal on campus dedicated to minority issues which was started by Dean Rey-Rey back in the day. He's hispanic and constantly reminds people every goddamn day that he came from immigrants and made it to Harvard Law after which he worked for Jones Day. He hasn't worked much in the public interest areas, but makes his token contributions such as starting a law journal that writes about immigrants.
Basically, it's the academic equivalent of a charity auction.
"we'll write a bunch of articles that nobody will ever read (because nobody ever reads journal articles) about discrimination and that will solve the problem.....oh, and i'll sit around and bitch about how good white people have it."
Yeah, you know...when you break it down like that, it seems to give the impression that there are certain members of his community that not even HE wants to help, but hasn't yet come to terms with that fact. Not that I hold it against him because there are members of my own community that can be cut loose.
Back to my story...
so our EIC felt compelled to pester the administration to give us $28k for scholarships for the AE's. We were shot down. I finally got to sit in on one of these meetings where we pooled together half of the money and where we would ask them to come up with the other half. I had misgivings about it, but I tagged along because I was in the office and couldn't think of an excuse to get out of it.
Basically, what people in OUR group said didn't really help the stereotype of us all being a bunch of self-important and over-privileged white kids who want things on a silver platter....although, technically, things that were leaving people's mouths aren't any different than 95% of the student population who thinks that we are all entitled to good jobs once we graduate. Even so, he is absolutely running with it and helping spread rumors among the student populace about what WE are....I guess it is in a bid to counteract whatever rumors HE thinks WE'RE spreading about HIM.
yay! welcome to law school.
Yeah, what a childish and unprofessional prick. Does he SERIOUSLY want to alienate tomorrow's alumni donors like that?
yes, that, combined with the fact that this bitter old crow that the WLA president hangs out with has poisoned her with stories about what we did to HER article that she co-wrote with a professors (which was a big old piece of poop, if i do say so myself, because i read the damn thing).....yes, so apparently, just like the whole vegetarian issue, speaking about your long day editing some crappy article is off-limits as a subject of conversation because it is a sign of ingratitude, privilege, and thinking that you are better than everyone else.
Damnit, I'm PROUD of what I've achieved. I don't feel like I'm the queen of England by a long shot, but I don't understand this whole "you are not allowed to complain because you have it better than me" attitude. So, if I got a job I really loved and came home after a really bad day, what am I supposed to do? Say, "I was bitched at by my superior for something that wasn't my fault, but that's OK because I've got the greatest job EVER"?
Damnit, I'm tired of being sensitive to other people's jealousy! I've had to be sensitive to S and A because I get stared at by more men (although, guess who is getting married and guess who just broke up with her boyfriend? I am not either of those!)
I go to the gym and I can write like a maniac. I spent nearly a decade working in a soul-destroying job, lonely, and unable to escape my predicament until I came to law school. Even now, I've been waking up night after night at about 4am and thinking about how I'm nearly 34 and don't have anyone in my life. If I want to try and win Robo back in spite of his being a jerk, or if I'm proud that I went from being a law-school reject to a board member of it's chief Journal, I ask everybody to screw themselves. Nobody understands my problems in the slightest and nobody is eager to help solve my problems or share in my triumphs.
From what I gather, I'm supposed to hang my head and disown my biggest accomplishments in life, date a 40 year old alcoholic Peter Pan who doesn't own a car and lives in a rat hole of an apartment, not be happy if any man expresses interest in me because I'm rubbing it in everybody's faces that a man actually found me desirable, and supposed to not grieve about Robo even though this is the first time (in as long as I can remember) that somebody emotionally touched me in that way.
yes, thank you, Dr. Phil and your "snap out of it!" attitude. my god, if only all of life's problems were solved in that way. Yes, let me turn off love, pride, and happiness because it just isn't right.
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Saturday October 04, 08
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10:49 PM - school stuff
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I'll bitch about school life in general:
well, if anyone recalls the story about the guy who is the Women's Law Association treasurer who caused a huge stink because we didn't vote for the shirt HE wanted....
i can finally identify a lot of his problem as stemming from MASSIVE EGO.
of course, THAT was obvious. and part of his argument was premised on some lame shit about how if the t-shirt doesn't have HIS logo on it, it is destined not to sell and the WLA would take a hit in the pocketbook.
today, his ego cost the WLA a couple of hundred bucks.
last May, the WLA did a law school talent show event, won the group category, and got gift certificates to Fatso's (a sports bar).
We decided to have a social event this month which used the certificates. I threw out the fact that BP hosted a regular volleyball gathering on fridays. I figured that my suggesting this would be the equivalent of an olive branch, plus it gave him something he could do and be his own thing. We decided to hold it on Saturday afternoon, although there was a big question about how many people would show up. After all, attendance at the first meeting was relatively sparse because of a mix-up over the room. 1L participation is down in all groups across the board. Even so, BP thought that over a hundred people would show up! Why? Because he's crazy. I thought we might clock in somewhere between 25-50 TOPS, but the likely scenario was probably 20 at the most. You have to get people who are excited about volleyball, want to go out at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon, have been keeping up with the WLA events, etc.
We were all "nooooo...there is NOT going to be 100 people" but he didn't let that "nooooo" stop him.
When he reserved the facilities, he ordered about $400 worth of food. Not only that, he changed the start time to 2pm without consulting anyone.
The gift certificates covered a small portion of that.
yes, that's right. without a head count. without living in reality about the situation, and without considering the idea that if we run out of food, we can always get the kitchen to make more, we got a full buffet of chips, queso, stuffed jalapenos, potato skins covered in cheese, chicken strips, and some other meat-based finger food....AND he bought enough drink tickets ahead of time to buy about 20 pitchers of beer. Why? Because HE had come up with this "brilliant" plan of having a membership drive where, if you sign up and pay your dues, then you get a free pitcher of beer.
We drank 3 total, and I don't think any of them were inspired by the "membership drive."
I personally thought the idea of giving away a free pitcher of beer like that was kind of tacky and was probably not going to be successful, but you know something? THIS is the sort of law school the administration is breeding. If the administration doesn't have the huevos to boot out a problem child like him, the people who have to work with a person like that end up feeling resigned to that person's whims. It's bad enough that he appears to openly gloat in front of people if turn-out to a meeting was small. The whole thing feels like those awful episodes of CSI: Miami where the lab tech's abusive ex managed to land a job in the department so he could have a "legal" reason to constantly pester her....or about Harrison Ford's recent movies.
"Ha HA! You can't get rid of me because I own this place. So, it looks like we'll be living next door to each other and being all nice and neighborly-like. I might even drop by unexpectedly one evening to borrow a cup of sugar..."
The Restorative Justice Initiative showed interest in coming along for the ride and were strong-armed by said BP into contributing about $150 cash based upon this crazy whim that 100 people total would show up. I'm not even sure WHY they agreed to that amount since there are maybe about 20 people max in that group and maybe they were duped into thinking that this is a great way to get the word out. However, only ONE person showed up from RJI.
BP is still planning on going up to them and hitting them up for the $150 to try and cover the boo-boo that he ordered that much bar food AT ONE TIME. They may pay it because they promised, but they'll be pissed.
speaking of other stupid law school antics....
Journal, I hate thee.
It's bad enough that I have to sit in a room with people who whine that they "only" got a B+ in a class. The majority of these people are over-privileged twits and it shone through when we decided to march on the administration.
Basically, the deal is this:
The Associate Editors (3rd year students who are not privileged or interested enough to wear a "BOARD MEMBER" name tag a staff writer orientation) do not get scholarships for what they do. The board members get a substantial scholarship. For the past year or two, the AE's got "scholarships" paying the hour or two of credit that they would have to pay in order to get class credit for being on the Journal. However, we have since had a changing of the guard.
Here is the problem:
the Journal is considered the conservative white bread publication. The Scholar is the "minorities issues" publication put out by another group. The old guard sucked up to us and would give us things we wanted. The new guard represents the people that are "pro-Scholar."
They are being spear-headed by the new "interim associate dean" who prides himself on his life story of how he went from being a child of poor migrant farm workers to being a graduate of Harvard Law. Instead of working in civil rights, he sold out and worked at Jones Day (one of the largest law firms in the world) and eventually ended up here.
Basically, instead of using his down-time in his VERY busy life as law professor (and overly-paid job of being an "expert witness" in trials) to work for the mexican-american legal defense, he's adopted the completely white-bread approach of throwing bones at the minorities who apply to this fine school.
in other words, it appears he doesn't want to sully his hands with anybody except those who "made it this far."
and he basically admits it, so i can't fault him too much for being a hypocrite. he reminds me of the hippies that used to teach my RTF classes back at UT except that he is actually hispanic and not some white person who decided to go to Honduras for a couple of years and bring the locals the ways of whitey.
this much is obvious. However, our illustrious Editor in Chief of the law journal decided to spear-head a movement to get scholarships for the AE's.
yes, after the last two scholarships were supposed to be "one-time only" deals, he decided to approach them with yet another "one-time only" scholarship.
however, to give our gang scholarships would mean that they would have to do something for the Scholar. Otherwise, word would get out and he would look like a chump for selling out to whitey.
in other words, it's turned into a mini-race war.
i'm not surprised, and I think we should let the thing drop because i think that it is a complete waste of time. plus, i think its a disingenuous ploy to get the AE's to do their job correctly and with some ounce of passion. *I* do my job correctly because that's the kind of person I am. I'm tired of these whiny little bitches who have turned in a half-assed job to me to dig through in order to do my edits. Why? Because they carry around this expectation and their own needs first.
however, let's say that there are certain elements of the board who seem to think that if we get pissed off enough that we aren't being given our due as being "superior" that bugging the crap out of the administration will change minds.
yes, that's right. go into the meeting and say stuff like "but we do more work than the Scholar!" to the guy who was a member of the brain trust that launched the Scholar to begin with. Also, tell that person that we're asking for scholarships because people are too self-absorbed to care enough about doing a good job otherwise. "gee, man, we have no impetus for getting those people to do their jobs since the job market sucks so badly that nobody has the incentive to apply themselves..."
yeah, i can tell you how to motivate the AE's to do their job: quit pooping on them. that's right. and stop the "we're so freaking special because we're on the board" crap that probably aids in pissing them off. Hell, i got pissed off today when i (along with everybody else) was instructed to fill out a check list of pre-processing edits that we were supposed to complete and turn it in like we were back in the 5th grade. do you know why we were given that task? because, over the summer, we had a practice run at editing an article and apparently, it got to the very end of the line and was a piece of poop as far as mistakes and substantive errors.
yes, instead of acknowledging that they only gave us ONE week to do these magical revisions, that we were missing several steps of reads and re-reads, and the fact that people were busy, burned out from finals, or were out of the country, the EIC decided that we were all idiots and needed to be watched.
frankly, i think it's INTERESTING that no one person's section was "better or worse" than the others as far as catching mistakes go. is he serious? does he not realize that this points to the fact that the person who was acting as original editor was possibly not incorporating our changes into the piece, or even read the referenced sources to see what they said? how can it be that 9 people turned out the exact same quality of work? when I was selected to be in this position, the woman who congratulated me said, "your editing skills are better than ours!"
yeah, so i was pissed, but i think it's also part of his personality just to say, "well, i won't blame ONE person because everybody needs to hear it!" which i guess is nice for him as he doesn't have to actually confront anybody directly, but it pisses off the rest of us who don't do that shit.
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Tuesday September 30, 08
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10:30 PM - yes, i'm still alive!
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i hadn't written here in almost 3 weeks which is a record.
And i don't have any one thing in particular to blame it on.
while I still check this website daily, I must admit that, after all this time, the Mozzer's antics have grown a bit old.
another thing that i guess has affected me is the whole Robo thing. I haven't spoken to him (still), but I sense that it's coming shortly (if you can believe that). Today there was actual eye contact and smiling on his part in the library....not to mention the fact that he is always buzzing around. At this point, I'm still feeling so ambivalent about everything that i'm not looking forward to it. what i wish is that the guy back in Austin (who also hangs out on facebook) would get a car. Therefore, I would have reason to push it as I REALLY don't want to do long distance dating.
yes, maybe it sounds like an excuse, but being separated from someone you enjoy being around completely sucks. the weekends Robo was gone were bad enough (but tolerable). The time in Spain was a nightmare. I'm very skittish about anything where I must repeat those feelings since I feel drained. I also don't want to repeat it with Robo for that very reason. other than the fact that i enjoyed myself, there isn't a good reason to reopen myself to that.
and so what else has happened?
oh yes...
my uncle and his wife were nearly killed by a possibly drunk driver while on a motor scooter. They were driving around the back roads in Alabama when some 28 year old woman with a history of DWI's ran up behind them and rear-ended them. She didn't even know that they were in front of her until after she hit them. She then drove off without stopping.
The found the woman when she told somebody who told somebody else who then called the cops. She then confessed, but claimed that he didn't have his lights on.
My uncle had a broken shoulder blade and collar bone and road rash (which is what happens when you scrape along on the asphalt at whatever speed they were going). His wife didn't fare as well. She basically had a crushed pelvis and had to be taken to a large city hospital because they didn't have the resources around here to deal with that sort of thing. She had surgery which apparently lasted 7 hours. the doctors were amazed that she didn't bleed out and die right there on the road, however, here she is, in rehab.
in some bizarre way, i feel like i brought it upon them by sticking up for the idea that DWI laws were ludicrous. it's almost like karma, but the truth is, we don't actually know if she was drunk that one time. Granted, it is suspicious that someone with multiple DWI's at age 28 and who sped up and rammed into the back of a scooter without even seeing them was probably on something. But at the same time, this woman proves what i've been saying about DWI laws. you can lower the BAC to .02, but that wouldn't have affected THIS woman. my guess is that, considering that all signs point to the likelihood that she has a drinking problem, she was probably a .15 at the very least. if anything, worrying over people who are a slight hazard just means that there are less resources to deal with THIS person.
No, I don't simply mean the act of arresting them. There is nothing there for alcohol treatment. More importantly, if you overcrowd the criminal justice system with loads of people, it just ensures that someone like that slips through the cracks and nobody tackles the underlying issue: you can arrest her 100 times and it wouldn't have mattered if you were looking strictly at deterrence.
knowing the people i've known with substance problems, i can tell you that there is something that just isn't right about them. and it takes a village to build a substance abuser. there are usually enablers who tell them how great they are and how everybody else sucks. they also have skewed beliefs about their situation and they generally don't care who they hurt along the way. i think that because of the "you're so wonderful and everybody else sucks" attitude that is reinforced, they can steal your last can of food and think they are entitled to it. what they do is kill of the guilt and deal with the ensuing consequences with substances.
ok, so take a person with that mentality and arrest them. 95% of the time, you haven't achieved any effect. a person like that is mentally gone.
of course, nobody wants to talk about substance abuse counseling, subsidized taxi rides, public transportation, and so forth that keep people off of the road to begin with. They'd much rather create the road hazard first and put everybody else's life at risk in the name of possibly catching them.
anyway, enough of my diatribe. other than that, i've been the laziest 3rd year law student on the planet. I signed on to be a member of the board for the Law Journal because I felt like it would boost my standings in the job market and because i felt like the public defender's office--while great--was not where i was destined to go. i don't want to be a litigator and i don't want to pry into the sadness of people's lives. on the appellate level, it was ok because somebody did all of the dirty work as far as interviewing witnesses. my personality is much more geared towards research or drafting wills or doing some B.S. for the government.
however, i MISS going to work. I miss that work in particular. i can't freaking stand my job at the Journal. I'm on campus all day and reading a bunch of b.s. articles and with a bunch of people who whine because they "only got a B" in one of their classes when they are now going off to work for some $140k a year job where you live in your office and see the sunlight through a small crack in the bricks.
yes, i miss meaning in my life. at any rate, i think the fact that i went to the dentist today and had to have a filling done without dental insurance shores up my resolve to get a job with the state once i graduate. i don't care. please give me good health insurance and 3 weeks of vacation. given what my employment options are at this point, i would be doing fairly well off.
yeah, i know this whole entry is a downer, but my god, life has really sucked.
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Sunday September 14, 08
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08:32 AM - riders on the storm
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i called my sister yesterday because it was my niece's 2nd birthday. her husband's brother lives in Houston along with his wife and two children. they rode out the storm, but decided that life without electricity really sucked, so they left town.
I guess their decision in riding out the storm isn't quite that dumb considering they are 50 miles from the coast and officials were telling those people to stay inside, but their cousin almost decided to ride it out, but then realized that maybe being 2 miles away from the coast was a bad place to be, so he left. Ren Faire guy and his wife and baby live about 12 miles from the coast and they apparently vowed to stay. No word on whether they changed their mind about that one. You'd hope they would. Even if the structure was OK, do you REALLY want to have a one year old child in a place that will not have electricity (and possibly) clean water?
My niece turned 2 yesterday. Her parents got her a blow-up castle to jump in. Of COURSE she's not spoiled!
anyway, one final story...
i was in the library the other day and sitting at a table with this guy who was in the same section as I in my first year. He's a fellow quiet person that doesn't appear to have made any friends, but I don't think it bothers him that much because he has a girlfriend and other friends outside of law school, and we've built a minor acquaintanceship upon that. We were studying and he got up to pick up some papers from the copier.
I heard Robo come in. I had my back to the door, but I could hear him talking to the library staff. I didn't turn around, but his voice disappeared, presumably because he went upstairs to the career services to get coffee.
in the meantime, the other guy came back and he and I got into a discussion about our Race and Racism class. While he was talking, he looked past me and got a funny look on his face, but kept on with the subject.
I suspected what was going on, so I turned around and got a look.
There was Robo, sitting in a chair in the lobby area, staring directly at me.
Of course, i didn't say anything to this other guy, but I was just kind of...I don't know. I can't believe he was openly staring at me like that. I don't know if he's waiting for ME to come over to him or what to re-start the dialogue. and I don't think it's just guys he acts like this with. I was talking to my ex-roommate from Spain and he walked by and sighed loudly. it's like he's jealous that I'll talk to them, but won't talk to him. all i know is that he has a shitload of apologizing to do for a lot of stuff that he did....and it's not "he left the toilet lid up again!" sort of stuff. it's stuff like "why did you stand me up for our last date at Magnolia before I left town?" sort of shit.
he says he's been in relationships that have lasted 4 years, but considering the fact that he doesn't appear that he knows how to treat women, i almost find that very hard to believe. oh, he has certain aspects of it down, but way to go in showing what a massively undependable person you are! true, we had only dated for about 4-6 weeks at that point, but as far as i was concerned, it progressed fairly quickly. we were definitely not in that stage of going out on occasional dates....and maybe that was the problem. maybe everything went too fast and things came out way too early.
in other news, the other guy back in Austin was trying to impress me with the fact that he cooked Spanish cuisine at the house. He's a nice guy, but three things riddle my chances with that relationship: he has no transportation, so he can't even get here. god knows where i'll be living next year. THIRD, in spite of the fact that A is dating somebody else, this guy is her "man in reserve" in that she would be dating him IF he woke up and took her. she doesn't say as such, but the fact that she doesn't bring him around to any social events speaks volumes of her protectiveness.
of course, you're saying, "well, she's dating this other guy..." which is true. but i think it would require actually loving that other guy instead of taking him because he's available.
anyway, Paella guy (as i'll refer to him) is nice, and he's more my speed on a whole lot of things. If we merged him and Robo together where he had some of Robo's fire and looks, but retained almost everything else (his good manners, his lack of complete self-centeredness, the fact that you could take him home to mom and dad, steady employment, no questionable relationship with an ex, minus the fact that he doesn't own transportation (which is quite fixable because all he has to do is go to the dealership and put some money down)), I would be completely excited about that. Instead, I've got this split of two people, one of which i should like, but one of which i still feel sort of tangled up in as I guess it does feel very scary to go from what I just went through and being afraid that i might flake on the new guy because of a million factors. maybe guy #2 does have that fire, but he's reserved and i've not given him the chance to show it?
yes, so where can i find this guy who absolutely does not exist anywhere on this planet? who lives here in San Antonio and who is going to accompany me wherever I go after I graduate?
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Monday September 08, 08
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10:40 AM - this is so OLD
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I have no idea what to do.
Why do dreams and thoughts of this guy haunt me? It feels like I'm being tortured to death and I can't escape it waking or sleeping.
Here's the poopy part:
He's in my classes.
He goes to a lot of law school social functions.
He hangs out in the hallways, courtyard, and in the library and the law school is like a little microcosm that was exponentially shrank when the school hired a bunch of contractors to make this huge crater in the courtyard in an attempt to build something that was ADA compliant so the disabled could get into the law faculty and law administration buildings.
I feel a bit like Salieri: I was kept alive to torture.
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Saturday September 06, 08
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08:34 AM - i wonder how SHE feels
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he hasn't posted the details, but the guy that ran off to Memphis to spend a 4-day weekend with the girl that flew cross-country has posted that he has "come home a day early" and that he went to "memphis looking for love, but found himself instead."
hmm. i will be cynical, and say...
"oh wait...you DON'T look exactly like you did 20 years ago?"
anyway....
yesterday, we had a forum at the law school about financial aid fuck-ups. from what i can tell, there is some dead-weight that works somewhere in the financial aid chain that has screwed up a lot of people's checks....as in they didn't GET any checks.
of course, Associate Dean Rey-Rey, who was assigned to work with the financial aid office a few weeks ago to head off the impending doom (that happened anyway), i'm sure, was no doubt flabbergasted when story after story revealed that it is NOT a computer issue.
the highlight of that day was when Robo stepped forward to give his story. his financial aid has been screwed up since this summer (like mine, but for different reasons), and he apparently has a stack of unpaid bills, is sending what money he has to his child, and is sleeping on somebody's couch until his check comes in so he can have enough money to put a deposit down on an apartment.
wow. i feel bad for him, but i'm also glad that i wasn't there to have to make that decision about whether he would sleep on MY couch. how can i say it other than he apparently lived with a couple of his previous girlfriends, and it might have been hard to get rid of him after that. I think that in spite of his bravado that he's actually a very clingy individual and hates to be alone. that, of course, has its down sides. I think it's contributed to the fact that he IS 34 and is in this spot. my guess is that his mother does A LOT for him, and, being an only child (and the lone male being raised by a hispanic mother), is unbelievably spoiled rotten.
my grandma spoiled my uncle (the only son and youngest child) rotten. we're white, and I can only imagine what it's like in the hispanic culture. Coach (also hispanic) lived at his grandma's house while he was in college. From the way he described it, it's on par with the stories you hear about Italian women treating their 40 year old unmarried sons like they are kings. He had full meals with steak, etc., all of his laundry done, etc. He loved it so much that it made him eager to eventually find a wife. When Coach's sister lived at Grandma's for a while, she didn't get that kind of treatment. As a matter of fact, she was brought into the kitchen to get cooking lessons.
Anyway, i feel like i'm being shadowed a bit. for example, yesterday in the forum, he picked a place to stand after they had run out of chairs that was really close to where I was sitting. the other day, i walked to my car in the parking lot. i saw him talking to some other dude about 50 feet away. when i started driving off, he had ended his conversation and had walked away from the guy, but he had stopped and was staring at my car as I drove away.
to end on a much lighter note: my niece is almost 2! i hoped to see them in October as we have a 4 day weekend, but i think maybe i should go after finals. it will be enough time before christmas to avoid the insanity, and it will be enough time for me to actually do something instead of a half-rushed visit where i'll be working on homework a lot of the time.
i'm hoping my energy level will improve. well, actually, it's not my energy as much as my enthusiasm for what i have to do this year. why, dear god, did i run for a spot on the WLA? Why, did god, did i opt for a spot on the editorial board instead of working for the APDO or some other job? am i stupid, or what?
at the time, it sounded like a great idea to essentially live on campus during my 3rd year. as it is with me, the grass is ALWAYS greener on the other side. A couple of weeks into it (punctuated with a trip to Austin for labor day, no less), it's already gotten old. then again, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if i wasn't running into Robo at least 3 times a day. it has the dual effect of making me feel lonely and causing stress because of the bad feelings that I helped create.
Not that i'm solely responsible for that. He was being a bit of a jerk even before he sent that message....which in turn inspired me to write what i did.
and the whole situation gives me some sympathy for the woman who flew all the way out to Memphis before my ex-classmate apparently realized "this is a big mistake!" I know that she assumed the risk in flying out to see some guy that just lost his wife about 2 months ago, but his behavior stems from the same kind of selfishness of "I want to make MYSELF feel better" and it was done without taking into account that somebody else might get hurt along the way. this woman broke off a relationship and flew out to meet him. overly romantic? stupid? yes. but you can imagine what she was thinking when she heard the sob tale of the suffering of his wife, the 4 year old daughter who now doesn't have a mother, the fact that he is now living with his parents until he gets back onto his feet, and so forth. there are a lot of good people (especially in that part of the country) who think "This guy has shown up in my life because of the Will of God."
My Uncle felt like that. About 20 years ago, he met a woman in a Christian dating service who was pregnant with another guy's son. this guy wanted nothing to do with the kid and she was living with her mom in a trailer. he felt like God brought her into his life so he could raise this kid.
He did, but the entire marriage was a shambles because she didn't love him to begin with and she is crazy on top of it. Right now, they are unofficially separated. He lives in another city during the week and works at a brand new job and comes home on the weekends. However, there hadn't really been anything to their marriage for the last 15 years. i think that because the children are 20 and 17 and are close to going out on their own he feels like he can go on with his life. their mom is so crazy that she's basically unemployable and couldn't handle 2 children by herself.
yeah, i have a tone to my writings today. let's just say that i went to three countries this summer that had a very obvious catholic, christian influence, and I came back more of an atheist than i thought possible. Yes, i'm angry at my lot, but i'm also angry at myself for fucking up my entire summer with this trip to Spain. i should have found a real job here in the US, and I can't even tell you how, looking back on it with 20/20 hindsight, that I really effed everything up. I could have spent 2 weeks in Europe, had a much better experience out of it, and found something work related to do. Instead, i spent the first half of the summer in a crazed state, and i spent the second half of the summer trying to unsuccessfully gather the marbles that i had lost. now, i just feel too apathetic and beaten down to even bother with the tasks i've been given. i feel overwhelmed and keep secretly wishing it would all go away; that i could jump in a car and keep on driving and end up in San Francisco and eat noodles and hang out in the wharf. i could be a beach bum and write books at the coffee shops.
is it simply HIM? no. i think i actually went through a similar experience when i came back from Scotland back in 96. I spent my last fall semester there and came back to finish up at UT. i think i actually came back in the same twisted state. i didn't want to go to class or work. i just wanted to drink and get the hell out of there. and i was mean. i was mean to my roommate.
at the same time, i don't think i can simply blame it on going to Europe. Right before I went to Scotland, my grandfather passed away from heart failure. on this trip, i suffered a loss from how this relationship crashed and burned. he may be alive and haunting me every day of the week, but the loss was no less shocking because of the circumstances. either way, you lose your enthusiasm and just want to hole up somewhere.
yes, two different trips that were supposed to be amazing experiences were greatly marred and rendered unenjoyable. i think i came back after Scotland on the verge of being a truly evil bitch. My teenage years sucked (as did my college years) and this trip was the one thing i had been fantasizing about since i was 11. it's so hard to take when you arrive and are emotionally washed out and want to be alone as to not bring down the party.
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Tuesday September 02, 08
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07:35 PM - hmmm. HMMM... weird
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so, the ex-classmate whose wife of 11 years died earlier this summer from cancer has already moved on.
it's an interesting story. he found some chick he had a crush on and had two dates with back in high school on facebook. she ended a relationship and is flying out from halfway across the country to meet up with him.
of course, the only creepy part is that his wife just died back in late June, but I'll chalk it up to living in Arkansas: living on the farm doesn't mean you get an extended grieving time after a spouse dies. you need to marry the new mother of your children and cook.
(of COURSE he doesn't live on the farm! i'm just being silly)
still...you have to give it to the guy...weighs about 250 lbs, has some job as a manager at Dillard's in the middle of nowhere Arkansas, moved back in with mom and dad, and whose wife and mother of his 4 year old just died and manages to convince some woman he hadn't seen in 20 years to dump her boyfriend and come fly out to meet him....while i'm a law student who is an editor on the law journal, regular attendee of the gym, world traveler, but age 33, about all I can manage is annoyed sighs and stares out of some guy i dated for about 6 weeks.
when you've got it, you've got it, apparently.
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