21 months

Since I last blogged, I:

Learned how to walk in heels



Discovered I really love goat cheese and sushi (probably not together, though)



Moved to Salt Lake



Adopted a friend



Became a pescatarian



Was published



Found the perfect banana bread recipe



Forgot how to put in a zipper



Graduated law school, passed the bar, and found a grown-up job



In the next 21 months, I hope I:

Eat tons of goat cheese and sushi (probably not together, though)



Move back to Salt Lake



Adopt lots more friends



(ok, kind of kidding there)

Read a bunch of books



Remember how to put in a zipper



Blog at least once or twice



Finally see Europe



In the spirit of my cousin's inspiring blog post, stop letting fear keep me from being the person that I want to be...

(However, I am perfectly content to let fear keep me from spending a bunch of money for the privilege of jerking around upside down on little elastic cord - no thank you)

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).

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 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.

I ♥ Sleep!

You know you're an adult when you keep a running countdown in your head to track the hours left before you can go to bed.

Ok, so maybe I used to count down to bedtime as a child too, but that was just because I was worried I wouldn't get through my stack of library books before my mom made me turn the light off.

Mmmm... sleep.... only 11 hours and 16 minutes to go!

Ill (or at least feeling guilty) over ILL

Normally, I hate to Interlibrary Loan (ILL). It's nothing against the books themselves... they're lovely. I just feel so guilty making the non-profit library spend several dollars of their limited budget on getting a book sent just for me, instead of being able to put that money towards buying new books that lots of people, including myself, could read.

This summer, however, I've had to ILL quite a few books for the professor I'm working for, and I started to feel more comfortable with it. When I discovered a book that I needed for the research I'm doing for him, and found out on WorldCat that there were a dozen libraries in the country that had a copy (as opposed to the book that was only owned by a single library in the Netherlands) I went ahead and ordered it. "I pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition," I thought to myself in self-justification. "Surely they can spare to spend $2.50 on shipping for a book that's likely to be a goldmine for my research project."

The day after I put in the ILL request for the book, I got an email from the school library saying that none of the other libraries in WorldCat actually had circulating copies. I was somewhat dissapointed, but figured there was nothing I could do about it, and decided to proceed with the project without it. Today, however, as I was running another search through the card catalog, I found out that this library owns the book I requested.

Feeling somewhat dumb and wondering why the librarian hadn't said anything, I went ahead and clicked on it... only to discover that it is still in processing, after having arrived yesterday. So forget about feeling bad about having the library spend three dollars on shipping for a book... I now have a major guilt complex for inspiring the acquisition of a new book, which had to have cost at least 30 pounds (I checked), plus a ridiculous shipping charge from Europe. The worst part is, the book's a 500 page volume, in French, on a narrow topic of European constitutional adjudication, so it's not like anyone besides me is ever going to read it. *sigh*