Merry Christmas, Friends!

The 10,776 Word Monkey on my Back

154 footnotes and it's still not quite done...

But, in 36 hours, with my T&E final over and my paper turned in, I get to take a nap.  SO excited!!!!!

TTMMH

(Things That Made Me Happy [this weekend])

Finding out I was 1,000 words further along on my 10,000 word paper than I had thought ~ hot cocoa with whipped cream and snowman-shaped marshmallows ~ putting up Christmas lights ~ over-hearing one first grader ask another first grader to marry him when they were both grown-up (she said maybe) ~ naps ~ watching Mike finish up the Christmas decorating

Better-than-anything cake ~ wearing ridiculously comfortable outfits ~ looking at apartments online and planning how I would arrange the furniture ~ toast with cinnamon sugar ~ finding potential job opportunities ~ getting sympathy from my awesome brother ~ stumbling across exactly the right quote for my paper ~ imagining life in 12 days (after my last final) ~ eggnog french toast ~ not crashing on the way to church, despite fishtailing all over the road ~ getting a boost on my paper from Write or Die ~ pretending I own this coat

And (finally!) 5 glorious, fluffy inches of snow!!

Being too lazy to go outside in the dark and take my own pictures, I hope you all enjoy this image taken from WikiCommons instead.  Quebec, South Bend... it's all the same thing, right?

November...

On the one hand, there's nothing I love more than the onset of wintry weather, the first few snowstorms of each year, and the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas bonanza of festiveness.  In this sense, November means Christmas lights, hot chocolate, and boots/sweaters/scarves.

On the other hand, though, law school has turned November into a month of outlining, paper writing, and not enough sleep.

Normally, the wonderful and the horrible aspects of November offset each other, and it ends up being a perfectly average month.  This year, however... lets just say homework has left me with little patience for any more gray, windy 50° days.


Since I started writing this, November has tried to oblige me with somewhat more exciting weather - Utah might be taunting me with festive snow storms, but I bet it can't boast of a tornado watch right now :)

Confession:

I'm only one Team Jacob t-shirt and one Justin Beiber album away from middle school.

When I was thirteen, I essentially acted like an adult.  I watched movies like Citizen Kane, read Dickens and Vonnegut, and listened almost exclusively to classical music, with some classic rock occasionally mixed in.  At youth gatherings, I inevitably ended up in the corner talking to one of the adult leaders about Ibsen's feminism or something we had both read in the New York Times.  I didn't fit in well with the kids my age, and I didn't know how to relate to their obsessions with make up, boy bands, and middle school drama.

Now I'm twenty two, it's almost as if I'm making up for my lost adolescence.  Sure, I'm still a reasonably responsible individual, and I still probably wouldn't fit in well with a group of tweens (somehow I don't think they'd appreciate my fondness for words like "bucolic" and "effervescent" or want to discuss the pros and cons of legal positivism).  At the same time, however, my tastes have become remarkably juvenile.  From what I usually feel like watching (10 Things I Hate About You, Post Grad, Clueless) to what I usually feel like listening to (Glee, High School Musical, and Taylor Swift [sorry Britny!]), I ought to be fourteen years old.  I prefer Seventeen to Cosmo and Forever 21 to Banana Republic (although the latter is purely because, if I have $30 to spend on clothes, I'd rather get eight t-shirts and a headband than one camisole, especially if it might be made by child labor either way).  I worry about who I'm going to sit with at lunch, and I'm still mildly scandalized when I find out two of my classmates are sleeping together, even if they've been dating for months.  This week, to celebrate the mid-term break, I checked two books out of the library:  James Joyce's Dubliners (a collection of literary short stories) and Nancy Farmer's The Sea of Trolls (a young adult novel about an eleven year old who gets kidnapped by Vikings).  Guess which one I loved, and which one I found boring and may never finish.

P.S.  It turns out the secret to enjoying Notre Dame football games is to sit with one's friends, at least ten rows behind obnoxious sophomore boy and his sophomoric friends (who, more than halfway through the semester, still haven't managed to figure out that their assigned seats are not in the middle of the law student section).

Go Irish!

Notre Dame might accept students and offer classes, but beyond the trappings of dorms and dining halls, ND is football.  I've seen Rudy, peeked through the fence to glimpse the football team practicing, and watched almost every home game on tv.  I was SO excited that we were finally able to afford tickets this year (for a student and a spouse, tickets to the home games cost $500).  Yesterday was the first game of the season.  Mike and I got to campus early and wandered through the huge crowds of people, who were all dressed from head-to-toe in Notre Dame gear and were taking pictures of everything in sight.  Grown men were acting like children on Christmas morning; it was hard to watch them and not get absurdly excited for the game.

Our seats were right next to the stairwell the players came through, which was really cool.  Our team stayed ahead the entire game, and we ended up beating the Boilermakers by a comfortable margin.  Despite some missed tackles, it was a very promising start to the season. And yet...

It was a mostly-miserable experience.  Perhaps this was partly the product of overly-inflated expectations, but  I couldn't wait for the game to be over, and kept thinking I'd be enjoying it more if I were watching it on TV.  Tailgating, it turns out, is pointless if you're not ingesting large quantities of beer. The ridiculously overpriced hamburger I got before the game was almost entirely raw, and the two bites I had before looking down left my stomach queasy for hours.  The stadium was so packed that we didn't have room to stand facing forward, but were forced to stand twisted sideways (and my shoulders are NOT that wide).  My shoes got drenched in Coca-Cola, and everything smelled like vomit and alcohol.  We had to remain standing on the benches the entire game, and even then a guy in front of me was so tall I could only see half the field.  

Our section, which was supposed to be reserved for law students, was inundated by sophomores who were too drunk to find their real seats (which certainly didn't help the crowding problem).  One of them, who decided to sit on Mike's other side, was constantly throwing his elbows out during cheers and knocking Mike and I down from the bench.  This same fellow yelled a constant stream of filth, not only at the referees and the other team, but at our own players.  His friends found it hilarious.  

Notre Dame students have the tradition, whenever our team scores, of hoisting small-sized females into the air  and throwing them up and down in celebration.  The large, obnoxious sophomore was not paying attention, and thought that we had scored off an incomplete pass.  He grabbed a drunk girl sitting in front of him and threw her up in the air.  The other boys nearby didn't notice, and were busy trying to listen to the referee announce a penalty.  Obnoxious boy couldn't catch the girl on his own, and she crashed down onto the ground, hitting her head on the bleachers.  Blood started pouring down her face.  A few of the boys seemed mildly concerned (i.e. put a worried expression on their faces and quickly asked if she was ok, but continued intently watching the game), but obnoxious boy thought her injuries were even more entertaining than his profanities.  The girl's friends were, perhaps, even worse.  One of them yelled to obnoxious boy "Make her stand up so I can get a good picture."  And so obnoxious boy forced bleeding girl to her feet and held her up while her "friends" pulled out their cameras.

All this stood in sharp contrast to the games I watched last year, sitting on the comfy futon, eating homemade salsa and cookies and getting homework done during the commercial breaks.  I'm all for cheering the Irish on, I'd just rather not do it from the stadium.  As we have season tickets, hopefully yesterday was an anomalous experience, but ... I feel like such a terrible Notre Dame student right now.

The Finals Diet

If I kept a food diary, this is what the last 24 hours would look like:

Dinner last night -  a mini bag of baked potato chips, orange juice, and one bite of disgusting macaroni and cheese, made with canned whipping cream instead of milk

Midnight snack - tortilla chip fragments from the bottom of the bag

Breakfast this morning - 1/2 a mini bag of baked potato chips and a handful of sweetened coconut

Lunch - a can of green beans and three oreo cookies

The conclusion?  Studying for finals and trying to finish several massive papers = no time to cook or go to the grocery store = a wonderful way to encourage creative meal planning. If I don't get off Blogger and finish footnoting my paper, dinner tonight just might be canned tuna and ranch dressing over spaghetti noodles.  Yum!

3, 2, 1, - Back to writing my paper!

I may be looking towards a late night of paper-writing, but I'm not here to complain about it, I promise.  Not that my random observations will be any more exciting:


3. Running in the rain is not nearly as awesome in practice as it seems in theory.  Especially when the individual contemplating the running is as out of shape and un-runnerish as I happen to be. 


2.  Cadbury mini eggs are incomprehensibly delicious.  I may or may not have (ok, may have) eaten an entire bag since Easter.  Why do they not sell these things all year?  They make M&Ms seem so inadequate in comparison.  Plus, unlike M&Ms, Cadbury eggs are animal-cruelty free (although, unfortunately, still the product of all sorts of awful child labor... my Transnational Corporation and International Human Rights class is ruining my life by giving me a conscience.... as if the calories weren't already enough to feel guilty about.)


1. Ok, so I promised I wouldn't talk about my paper, but: so glad not to live in China!  Let's just say the reading I've been doing about forced live organ donations from prisoners who refuse to denounce their illegal religious beliefs is making me more than a little bit squeamish.  Also, I dislike most rice, so the country probably wouldn't be a good fit for me anyways.

The Skinny

A few years ago, whenever I saw someone wearing skinny jeans, I shuddered.  The 1980s and early 1990s are not a fashion era I find very aesthetically appealing, and I didn't really want graffiti denim and parachute pants to make a comeback. I still feel that way, but I've become acclimatized to skinny jeans - and seen a lot of people pull them off adorably.  But my closet remains resolutely full of flared pants and bootcut bottoms that are quickly becoming "mom jeans"

Part of it is due to my overall ignorance when it comes to fashion - I love clothes, but I like shopping on the cheap and definitely don't keep up on my Chanel and St. Yves Laurent (if that's even a thing) or what ridiculous get-ups are draped over models on the catwalk (they can pull off anything... I can't).

Another reason I've avoided skinny jeans is because many of them simply don't fit.  A while ago, I found a great chart that evaluated your measurements - and it kindly informed me that my ankles would only be proportionate on a woman who stood over six feet tall.  Many skinny jeans in my size, even some of the stretchy ones, literally will not fit over my monstrous heels because the bottom hems don't have much give.

Both of these obstacles could be overcome... there definitely are skinny jeans out there that would fit, and they've become so pervasive that you can pick them up at K-Mart and wear them with any shirt on the shelf.  The real reason I persist in my mom-jeans is psychological.

There was a period of time, when my family lived in a ridiculously big house we couldn't sell and my family was trying to pay two college tuitions (both mine and my mom's) when we didn't have much money.  As a result, I was dressed mainly in hand-me-downs from relatives and the bounty from an occasional trip to DI.  When I was 14, I owned three pairs of jeans, and all of them were skinny jeans.  Today, this would probably be fairly normal.  In 2002, back when Britney was still all that and most teenagers didn't even text, wearing a pair of skinny jeans was something only women over 35 attempted.  Any passer by could have seen that I must be wearing clothes someone more sensible had rejected, and I was painfully aware of it.  Shy 14 year old girls don't tend to excel at "working it" in "vintage". 

When our/my money situation changed, I loaded up on flares and gave those skinny jeans back to DI.  Unless you count weak moments in dressing rooms when I've temporarily thought about giving in to the trend, I have't been in a pair of skinny jeans since.  My past experiences being unfashionable have scarred me to the point where I now insist on being unfashionable.  My main consolation, besides how awesome it is to wear skirts and not have to worry about pants at all, is that at some point bootcuts will be back and I'll be the hippest 30 year old mom around.

The Invention of Propaganda

Last night Mike and I watched The Invention of Lying.  From the trailer, the movie looked very entertaining - I imagined a screenwriter overhearing a child telling a fib and thinking to herself  "What would it be like if we lived in a world where everyone ALWAYS told the truth about everything, and then one man discovered how to lie.  He'd have a lot of fun, but someday it would catch up to him and he'd learn a valuable lesson... hey, this would make a great movie!"

The first part of the film was pretty enjoyable, though peppered with the unnecessary and unappealing vulgarity that Hollywood seems to throw into every PG-13 comedy.  About halfway through, though, during a long and uncomfortably sacrilegious scene, it became evident that the movie was actually born in a conversation by a bunch of Hollywood executives who consider themselves enlightened, creative intellectuals.  "Let's make a movie," one probably said "that forcefully drives home the point that Christianity is a sham and organized religion is a myth that paternalistically exploits people.  Oh, and let's package it as a comedy and get some big name actors, so people will actually watch it."

Such a disappointment...

You're (Unfortunately) Not a Kid Anymore When...

My sweet tooth and I are very good friends, and for a long time it has encouraged me to give it free rein in the mornings... preferably with some pie or cinnamon rolls, but, in a pinch, by munching on Trix, Reese's Puffs, or Cap'n Crunch.  Mike and I bonded over Blueberry Muffin Top cereal, and I've always stayed as far away from Raisin Bran and Rice Crispies as I could.


Lately, however, I've undergone a transformation.  While I still would NEVER turn down pie for breakfast (ok, so maybe I would if it was mocha or blueberry or a very mushy pumpkin without whipping cream), Reese's Puffs aren't so tempting anymore.  Instead, Mike and I load up on cereals with words like "almond", "grain", "oat", "morning" and *shudder* "fiber".  The worst part isn't even that we've been duped into buying them... it's that we're so deluded that we actually think they taste good.  I've taken to eating cereal just in the morning, but also again after I get home from school.  The dishwasher is full of bowls and spoons, proof of our new habits.


Clearly, we have a problem... and I think I've decided the perfect solution.  We'll stage an intervention this weekend in front of the TV - enough subjection to advertisements for sugar bombs and cocoa kernels and we might regain our sanity.  


P.S.  It has occurred to me that my face in the last picture looks far more MySpace than Chaplin, and definitely does NOT make me look ridiculously happy.  I must have been thinking about that parade :)

Three Reasons to be Ridiculously Happy

1.  It's still Spring Break, for another 48 hours and 4 minutes

2.  Thanks to the motivation provided by this delicious-looking photograph taken by my cousin, I have a giant container of homemade oreos sitting on my counter!

3.  At the outlet mall, I picked up this amazing hat for a mere $2.  I feel like a plaid Charlie Chaplain (despite the fact that this is most definitely a trilby, not a bowler - yay Wikipedia for clearing that up).

\

Granted, I can think of other reasons to be happy too, like having good health and a place to live and whatnot, but they're currently being cancelled out by the fact that it is literally raining on my parade.  Or at least on the parade that we would be downtown watching right now, were it not raining.

The Problem with Living in a City that Embraces Alcoholism

Like most former Utahans who have been forced to venture out into the wilderness of the eastern half of the United States, Mike and I miss Cafe Rio a lot. At least here in Indiana, there's not much Mexican food at all - the only popular Mexican restaurant chain in the area has gross, overpriced food, and even the people who love it admit that they really go for the cheap margaritas.

So every time we fly home to visit family, Mike and I make a point of stopping by Cafe Rio. He always gets a pork burrito, but I tend to mix things up... the burritos are good, but so are the salads and the tortilla soup and everything else on the menu. When it comes time for dessert, though, I insist that we get tres leches. If they're out (which happens far too often) then we hit up another Cafe Rio later in the trip to make sure we get some. Luckily, Mike loves it too, but I think my affection for the dessert borders on the frenzy otherwise reserved only for heroin addicts and meth moms.

To be sure, I've tried making the dessert myself a few times - my life would be much easier if I could conjure up tres leches on demand. Duncan Hines makes a mix that results in a decent cake, but I'm pretty sure you can't get them out here in the Midwest (I've definitely looked). The few from-scratch recipes I've tried were only theoretically edible, and ended up being a waste of whipping cream and sweetened condensed milk. In short, it's a sad, cruel world.

The other day I was pining for tres leches instead of doing my Fed Courts reading, when suddenly I had a brilliant stroke of inspiration. I opened up the internet and Googled "tres leches South Bend IN". And, believe it or not, the results showed that there is a local Mexican restaurant that's supposed to have good food and has tres leches on the menu. Less than two hours later, we were there at La Esperanza.

The food was delicious, and while not dirt-cheap, there were plenty of filling options in the $7 range. It was Mexican food as it's supposed to be - like it is in every random "Dos Amigos", "Del Sol", and "El Burro Agradecido" in Utah (no idea if those are the names of real Mexican restaurants... but hopefully you get my drift). We'll definitely go back next time we're craving Mexican food. But overall, the trip was a disappointment, and not just because our server allowed us to run out of water early in the meal and only came back when we were finished eating.

No, the real problem was the misrepresentation of the tres leches. Sure, they had it, and from the picture it looked pretty delicious (although not as good as Cafe Rio's). But thanks to the description, Mike and I didn't try it. A moist cake soaked with three milks and topped with cream and berries sounds delicious. A moist cake soaked with three milks and wine... not so much, no matter how many strawberries they thrown on top.

So here I am, still craving "real" tres leches and determined to eat one every single night I'm in Utah for my summer internship (which might leave me unable to fit into any of my suits, but it'll be worth it). Until then, if any of you want to commission a refrigerator truck to send a pallet of tres leches my way, I'd be most grateful.

Yay!!

As you may be able to tell by the new layout of my blog, which manages to be cute and use my favorite colors (black, teal, and purple) without being overly girly, my brother rocks. Especially given the fact that during the creative process, I must have changed my mind about a hundred-million times. I would pontificate further on his awesomeness, but I just finished a reading assignment of death, and tend not to be at my most eloquent at 2:16 in the morning after reading over 50 pages on federalism, preemption, and jurisdiction.

Thank you, Bronson! I definitely owe you one.

Wrapping It Up

So the advent of March has made me aware of just how lazy a blogger I've become. The hiatus has also made me decide to revamp the blog a little bit - after all, mikeandlashel.blogspot.com should really be about more than LaShel complaining about her homework once every several weeks. So stay tuned for new content and, if I can talk my techie brother into donating an extreme blog makeover, a snazzy new layout as well.

But first, before bringing in the new, we'll wrap up the old. It always makes me sad when I'm reading a random person's blog and they describe a conundrum or an exciting upcoming event, and then never mention it again. So I'll comb through later entries looking for hints on whether their dog ever came back or they got the big promotion at work, but to no avail. My own life is not nearly that exciting, but here are some random updates just in case there's a stranger out there wondering:

I did end up dropping a class - the one taught by the "greatest living legal philosopher" which turned out to be a fortunate choice because he retired a few weeks before the semester started because of health problems and the class wasn't offered after all.

My summer to-do list was semi-successful. I did the write-on and ended up on the Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy, we enjoyed the swimming pool at our complex twice before moving to our new, deluxe apartment, and we traveled everywhere on our list except Washington DC. The writing a novel, watching movies in French, and getting ahead on coursework decidedly didn't, but it was a great summer nonetheless.

The British Museum collection was amazing... Victoria is a beautiful city. In fact, I was so enamored that it was disappointing to find out my legal education is not transferable to Canada.

The Venus Fly Trap, as predicted, died a hasty and inglorious death. I'm pleased to announce, however, that our marriage somehow managed to survive.

Luckily, the IRS, after months of investigation and endless letters, concluded that Mike and I were truly poor enough to not owe them any money. Yay!


Long story short, the special meeting called by the journal wasn't about my lack of morale, but because the elected leader of our journal was suddenly no longer a student at the law school. Speculation as to why continues to abound.

And there you have it! Stay tuned for further exciting adventures :)

The Case of the Missing Casebooks

As anyone who knows me well enough to read this blog probably knows, I love bookstores. In my perfect imaginary world, I would spend two or three nights a week curled up on an easy chair at Borders with cocoa and a new book (and somehow magically not feel guilty about exploiting a commercial establishment with my loitering, merchandise-using, freeloading ways). There is, however, one trip to the bookstore that I generally dread - the one that heralds in the beginning of each new semester. Spending seven hundred dollars on books is my idea of heaven, except when that seven hundred dollars only buys four dense casebooks and their statutory supplements on such enthralling matters as Partnerships, Corporations, and Other Business Associations.

This semester I was able to buy my Federal Tax Law casebook online (saving $70), because the professor kindly informed us of the ISBN for the required text over a week ago. I hadn't heard anything about the other books, though, and deciding that there weren't enough days left to order the books online and have them shipped in time to safely be able to complete my reading assignments before Monday's classes, I headed to the bookstore, warily armed with my credit card and expecting the worst.

I quickly located the section with the law school textbooks (the wall is very easy to spot - laden with hundreds of hard cover casebooks [all around 1500 pages and uniformly bound in impressive shades of blue, red, and black with gold lettering] a quiet shopper can hear those unlucky shelves moaning and lamenting their fate like the damned souls in the Divine Comedy). I began looking through the tags on the shelves, indicating the various classes: Not-For-Profit Organizations, Administrative Law, Federal Courts... After a few minutes, I came across paper-bound books with pictures on the cover and realized I was no longer in the right section. Concerned, I began retracing my steps, peering more carefully at each tag. As before, I did see the Federal Tax casebook on the shelf, but not a hint of any of my other five classes.

Finally defeated (with irrational fears going through my head that every class I had registered for this semester had mysteriously been cancelled) I approached a bookstore employee for help. Somewhat annoyed that I didn't have my course numbers with me, she led me over to a computer and began inputting my professors' names.

"Medieval Legal History?" she asked. "The professor informed us there were no books needed for the course." One by one she looked up all of my classes, and each time informed me the same thing "The system says there are no required texts."

A few hours later, I began to get emails with course syllabi, each one including a message from the instructor that there were no required texts and he (the pronoun evidences my university's gender issues, not mine...all my professors this semester are men) would be emailing us attachments containing our reading assignments each week. So even though it means less impressive-looking tomes to use in torturing my own bookshelf, I think I can live with buying some $2 binders and using my free printouts rather than having to spend money on casebooks. Now I just need to convince my husband that the $700 I had set aside for textbooks should still be spent at a bookstore, on a shopping trip with a more enjoyable purpose :)