How Fleeting It Is
Now that the major events on my calendar are out of the way, one question remains on my mind. Where does all the time go?
It will almost have been a year since I graduated law school. And since then, has life really started? If I were to look back, I could talk about so many crazy things that have happened, some of which were properly memorialized here. But the point is, if you just hesitate for any moment at all, time will sneak in. And before you know it -- it's spring.
I was back in Sandy Eggo on Saturday night. Reyna and I were thick as thieves, like Thelma and Louise, zipping down there with nothing on the mind but trying to lose it. (The mind. Did you think something else?) San Diego was another testament to how tricky time can be. Did I ever leave? It was all so comfortable, with my best friends around me, checking out another hot bar. And the bar wasn't the only thing that was hot!
The next morning I was having the most spicy bloody mary at Americana in Del Mar. Cirrus said with a sly smile, "Karen, you were in
rare form last night." She had a waffle with berries and coconut, I had a frittata with chicken sausage and fontina cheese, and Reyna had a Roman breakfast (something with prosciutto, I think). Waves crashed and bellinis sipped. And then we were northbound again, with errands ran and gifts purchased and music enjoyed.
We saw Stella's new digs and oohed and aahed over the exciting whiteness of everything. Of that afternoon, I also remember a malted mocha that I inhaled in under one minute. This mocha, and Santana's, and Americana, and some excellent Szechuan with Mom, made for a weekend of epic eating.
The post-Bar days were a blur, and the dust settled down enough so that I could catch Jen Schefft dismiss not one, but two bachelors tonight. As I usually do, I went online to find out the real scoop. Turns out people are lambasting her for her less than plastic behavior. Well, I salute her unwillingness to balk to the ABC producers. It's easy to see how so many bachelors and bachelorettes before her fell for, "Just propose, and we'll go from there. Trust us." This is real life, people. In real life, we are all "just friends"!
So, it's all very fleeting. Time. Love. In a lot of cases, security.
Lastly, for all the cream, butter, and sugar in Ina Garten's recipes that nearly discredits her, I am so impressed that she makes her own bleu cheese dressing for her homemade buffalo wings.
Home Sweet Home
What a traumatic three days! The thing is, though, I am getting better and better every time... what a daunting thought, that I may have to reserve skills improved upon in the last few days once again in the future. Anyway, I gave it my all, and walked away each day with a growing sense of gratification with little regard of what the result might be. After all, I'll live.
But the four days away did not exactly go smoothly. Last night, I found myself checking into a motel. Yes,
motel, with an M. It was one of those places where you enter your room from the outside. Right in the middle of the test week, I trudged me and my many law tomes out of my sister's house and into the
Vagabond Inn, a mere mile away. With one critical day of testing left to go. Timing is everything -- my sister ain't no amateur.
The TV reception was horrible and I was forced to watch "The King of Queens" while settling down with the remaining twelve out of fourteen subjects that could be tested the next day. But given the circumstances, "The real test tomorrow," I thought to myself, "is getting out of this motel tomorrow without getting stabbed." I wondered if I had spotted his motel before in an episode of "Forensic Files".
But there was fresh Farmer Bros. coffee in the morning. And lunches with Amy made the time pass by quickly, lightly, as the rain lifted and coaxed the sun back. And one step after another, I found myself back in the fresh and clean confines of a well-coordinated bedroom.
Today, I kept thinking, is this what they mean when they say, it was my last, best chance? It's so unhealthy to think of anything in those terms. When you run a long marathon, at the end of it you are glad that you are that much more fit. That you saw a sunset, or a great coffee shop along the length of your jog. But something like the Bar exam... three years, three months and three days of beatings, and at the end of it all, you can only prepare for the worst and hope for the best. You're not too glad about what you learned, you're not too enriched by the stress... But, yes. There is a sense of accomplishment. And a stiff drink at the end.
I hope that good things happened in twos. My second time, in February, in room 222 at the Inn, applicant number 2110. And if not? I say, fuck it!
Crash and Burn
Everything everyone's ever told me is now rushing back, even as I feel that I never learned a word of law in my life. I don't want to take this accursed thing. Was it worse the first time? Was it better when I just didn't know what to expect?
I feel more powerless now than I have in recent days, and I think it is largely due to having to shack up at my sister's house, since she lives near the testing center. I am without many of my usual comforts (wireless internet excepted -- as always). But a situation like this only highlights the fact that those comforts really were never important at all. And that when it comes to a critical task at hand, everything must fall to the waist side.
I found it amusing that two posts ago somebody felt compelled to use Brad Pitt's cause to poke a pitchfork at me about the past Bar exam. (Tracy's term.) I thought, at first, hey, does my dad read my blog? Then I knew that wasn't fair of me, because my dad has been so supportive that I have found it difficult to speak to him lest I am overcome with guilt and underachievement. I thought secondly that the individual was the sort that would swipe candy from a child's hand. I have never minded feeling stupid. I have made a career of it, an art of it. It is immeasurably more foolish, after all, for a person to have never felt stupid in their life.
It really only bothers me when I let people down. I have been so lucky that the people around me never let me feel that I have failed them. If people create the sense and the purpose, then I am filled with it.
The Road Oft Traveled
Jason had a meeting at the Worker's Compensation Board (whatever
that is) in the Valley this morning, and on his way back down, he swung through West LA so we could lunch. We darted in and out of the rain and ended up at the good ol' stand-by, Clementine. I had a killer cold sore the past couple of days, and today's lunch of a gruyere and leek panino was a celebrated return to eating.
He was all spiffed up in a suit. "Do you always wear that?" I asked. "Only when I have to go to the Board." "What does that mean?" "Oh, you know, I just go there and stuff." That's what happens when you work. It's all just stuff, pressure, nonsense, this and that. Jason talked again about preferring to study (like, even for the
Bar) over working.
So, let me tell you, Jasons and Vans out there, I am sitting here with the greatest misery in my back, having typed for so long carpal tunnel set in and already healed, and not having de-squinted my eyes since late December. (Which, for a Chinese kid, leaves little surface area for visible pupils.) Tony talked before about a post-Bar brain going to mush. Everybody, don't take your bar passage for granted. I can't wait to let my brain go to mush when this is all over. Soak up your employed or unemployed Bar membership and thank your lucky stars that you were part of that 48% from July 2004, the lowest passage rate since 1986, and in fact, I even encourage you to hold up a glass and laugh tauntingly at the pathetic 52% that will return to battle on Tuesday morning at 9:00am.
I can't wait to wear high heels again. To see Carlos and have hair all one-color, or at least, all one-scheme. To pick up a paycheck and be able to plan fabulous parties.
Women are hopelessly predictable. They all just like shoes, handbags, and chocolate. Thank God I'm predictable.
Language Is Leaving Me
I used to be lunatic in the gracious days.One of my Yahoo! Italia news headlines today is: "Brad Pitt interpretera' se stesso." Very simply, "Brad Pitt to play himself."
So Italians think it's stupid, too.
Be His or Hers
I had a hot date tonight... with my law books. I've thought many times in the last couple of days of amusing things to ramble about on here, but somehow my date of every night would swallow up those coveted moments. It's just as well. If I were to faithfully recount my most recent human interactions, they would be limited to a conversation about a double boiler and another about cat food.
This self-inflicted alienation has had adverse effects. I am in hopeless, intolerable need of maintenance. I want a facial so badly, I feel like when I go out into the world, people look at me like I am the Mask. Or Son of the Mask -- that's more relevant. And tonight, I suffered a minor panic attack that sort of left me shriveled up on my bedroom floor, with Tracy and Emily uneasily asking what they could do to help. It passed -- as all things do.
It's an unhealthy state of affairs, this bar-taking thing. It's just a hard phase in what is otherwise a great life. This, I know. A great life that still presented me with a few unexpected surprises on this day, and between the nervousness, nausea, and weariness, I smiled a great deal.
Happy Valentine's Day.
Please Read the Company Handbook One More TimeQuite possibly one of the rudest things I've ever encountered in my life. Today, incredulously, the barista at the Starbucks counter greeted me with, "What is it?"
And, I mean, read those words as dismissively as they sound, because he did not raise an eyebrow, flex a dimple, or wink flippantly. It was totally deadpanned in a way that let me know I was wasting his and everybody's time.
Anyway, nothing came of it. I ordered my stupid coffee, stood dejectedly by the stainless steel carafes, and thought about how I would blog this extraordinary event. Unparalleled rudeness at my haven of all havens, Starbucks with its greenery and multi-colored woods and whimsical art and lilting jazz tunes, and now, crotchety customer service.
Maybe the most important thing I have learned in the past few years is how to live cleanly. I don't mean taking showers or anything that obvious. It is just the extra something you get in your life by putting things away, dusting a little more often, and throwing stuff out every month by the boxload. Realizing that buying anything in family or industrial size invites clutter. Remembering that keeping is just an item or two away from stockpiling. I hope I can improve to the point where one day, I can just make do living in an all-white house with only one glass to drink from. Oh, what
Real Simple and The Container Store can't do for you...
Lastly, a very important day.
Happy Birthday, Tracy!
Gong Xi Fa Tsai
Quick and dirty blog. Lost access to my trial version of Dell's photoshop and so now I can't minimize cute little pictures to accompany the text. Got a whole arsenal of them, though. Still trying to negotiate how to acquire free editing software; should pose no real obstacle. In fact, Alex, want to send me something? Sorry to spoil the magic. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
My Burning Questions of the Day
1. Why does food look so much tastier in cartoons?
2. Why does anybody go downtown in LA? For anything at all?
3. Why does parking cost more than dinner?
4. Where is my Sheryl Crow CD?
5. Why can't I just get better?
Many happy returns in the year 4072!
Sweater Weather
I have been fantasizing all day about sweaters. Now, I am by no means a sweater type of girl -- my fashion preferences are generally Californian and I can't stand the feel of non-cashmere knits on my skin. But there is something in the air that has now possessed me with the need to own a thick, oversized cardigan with large buttons, preferably in a beige or off-white color. Maybe this is all from reading about New York fashion week and how the poncho is sadly passe.
Another item that has been curiously in my path all day is mozzarella cheese. I thought about it longingly while studying, though with no real plans to eat it. Then, on a trip to the market to pick up eggs, my eye inadvertently caught fresh mozzarella in more than a couple places. Then, my mother called me asking if ranchero cheese was the same as the fresh mozzarella we ate that one time. What gives?
As
Mary very astutely pointed out once, there is something distinctly silly about telling someone else what you dreamt the night before. Realistically, it's one of the most useless things you can tell anybody. So that's what you dreamt last night -- what of it? It's neither true nor interesting, and serves no purpose. It may or may not tell something about that person's psyche, but that's circumstantial. Mary pointed out that when a story is prefaced with, "You know what I dreamt last night...?" we are predisposed to tuning out.
On that note, I still want to describe what went through my head in last night's slumber. You can stop reading here, because as discussed above, I understand that you don't care. But as I will inevitably look up this blog entry in a few months or years, I'd like to memorialize last night's dream(s) here just for shits and giggles.
On some crazy or desperate whim, I called up this guy that had asked me out some months ago. I never had any intention of going out with him and I don't even know why I gave him my number. (Though good at being rejected, very bad at rejecting.) I left him a misleading and unnecessarily flirtatious voice-mail about wanting to hang out sometime. Sometime within the dream, said guy got back to me with an enthusiastic response that we should hang out soon. When listening to his return voice-mail, I experienced a sinking feeling in my stomach, of the, "What have I gotten myself into?" variety.
Cut to part two of the dream. Tracy and I were either evicted or ousted from our current apartment. We were allowed to move into another unit down the hall, which was considerably smaller, and quaint like European apartments. Wood fixtures and recessed nooks. This portion of the dream concerned me fretting around the new apartment about how the hell I would fit my stuff, if I could saw my couch in half or something, and other sorts of details worthy of a show on HGTV. The new place had a very odd floorplan, where the living room was octagonal and the kitchen was much more like a large veranda.
I woke up relieved on two counts. First, that I hadn't actually made a boob of myself by calling the would-be suitor. Second, that we were able to retain our current, larger, infinitely more spacious residence. I conclude the following interpretations of last night's dreams:
1) that I must really crave positive attention from a male, any male, right now, so as to invite it from somebody I actually find icky;
2) and that a combination of reading too much real property law and wanting badly to play The Sims 2 led to the space-solving panic. Also, getting a disturbing flashback of those first months in the Third Street apartment in San Diego, torturously strategizing how to live in a sardine can. Space is such a luxury.
In other news, the bathroom at the Starbucks on Westwood and Olympic is one of the cleanest I have seen. Although, for a girl who spent five of her formative years in Taiwan, this is not saying much.
Night and Day
It's nice that many years later, I can continue to read new meaning in the wisdom of Porter's lyrics. "Begin the Beguine" recalls the heartsick longing that we often get when we hear songs that attach to old memories. How you'll be faced with a flood of images and sensations by merely hearing a beat, a tune, a voice. I bet Cole Porter would never have imagined that his music would have such impact in decades to come, as sung by Ella Fitzgerald blaring out of a Dell laptop.
Not that it was as good as a Porter melody, but I heard some very random sounds from outside my window today. The shrill banshee laughter of, presumably, a neighbor at a party. The percussive drumming that could only come from the rhythm section of a marching band. They were odd reminders of life being lived outside these thin apartment walls, as I continue to sequester myself in here with only books and a blog.
And then my mind traveled back, and abroad, to the time that I would lay alertly awake at night in my studio in Florence. It was bad jet lag compounded with a sort of girlish fright in being alone in a small unit of a cavernous stone building. There were many flights of stairs and no elevator, as was typical of those 16th-century edifices. It would be 4:00 am and I would always hear the loud, hollow treading of late-night Italian partygoers ascending, sometimes punctuated by drunken song and giddy conversation. I would wait for the clop-clop of their shoes to recede, before wrapping myself tightly again in the covers, urging myself to fall back asleep. And I would wonder about where they had been. How old they were. What kind of shoes they wore.
There is that same disconnect now. There's so much going on outside and so many questions I have about what they're doing. I don't remember anymore what it's like to have free time. Maybe I never really had free time, maybe none of us do, and maybe those people living outside my window are not enjoying their free time like I think they are.
On another unrelated but enormously more distressing note: I had lunch with an old classmate and some of his friends yesterday. His friends were younger college girls who have logged time mostly in beach cities. On a lark, I asked them what they thought of Ashlee Simpson. "Oh, we totally watch her show, but really just to make fun of her." I nodded with approval. And her sister? "Oh my gosh, I
love 'Newlyweds'. Jessica Simpson is
so cute." "Isn't she totally cute?" "And sooo funny."
And here I thought we were all in this business of celeb-mocking together. It turns out that there are people who really do watch the Simpson sisters out of admiration and not disdain. This is what J.Lo was referring to when she talked about "feeding the machine."
So don't let them begin the beguine.
Let the love that was once a fire remain an ember;
Let it sleep like the dead desire I only remember
When they begin the beguine.
Oh yes, let them begin the beguine, make them play
Till the stars that were there before return above you,
Till you whisper to me once more,
"Darling, I love you!"
And we suddenly know, what heaven we're in,
When they begin the beguine.
- C. Porter
Borderline
Feels like I'm going to lose my mind. I don't know if it's the caffeine or the interminable hours of staring at text, but I am sitting here feeling completely contained, incurably restless. I have the urge to run around mindlessly. Or stand idly by a bar, dimly lit from varying angles, casually sipping a Cosmopolitan so lightly pink you know it's perfectly heavy on the Grey Goose.
And after all this, I know that it's still not enough. It will never be enough. I learned these lessons so many months, even years, ago. One year ago around this time I was preparing to go to a Moot Court competition in Nashville. I remember being run ragged around that time, eating, drinking, and breathing First Amendment law. And if it weren't for this wretched Bar exam, I would still be in the throes of an appellate brief from work, had they not filed an extension in consideration of my circumstances. It's always something! In my life, February is supposed to be filled with love and birthdays. And yet -- in the past few years, it has just been law, law, law.
I'm ranting now. Friends and family are uncomfortably familiar with the frights of a stressed-out Karen, and maybe we're on the threshold of one now. Last night, for a magical thirty minutes I could watch formerly unemployed and fancy-free Karen jumping on trampolines and cussing like a (modern) drunk pirate on cable television. That was nice, so nice.
Didn't somebody hear me order a Cosmo? Well, where is it!
A is for Afghanistan, B is for Burroughs
That's how I'll recite my alphabet from now on. Boy, was watching the show a lot of fun tonight. You know how you hear yourself on tape or see yourself on video, and you're totally shocked that's how you look? It was like I was seeing myself for the first time. And hearing myself for the first time, as it is now apparent that I am quite the potty mouth, having been bleeped out twice for using two popular variations of the f-word.
They edited quite a bit -- to my relief, and somewhat to my disappointment. Reyna thought that I got the shaft and skipped over in the mini-interviews, but what really happened was that what meaningless conversation we exchanged really wasn't TV-worthy. The truth was that I had haphazardly filled out the game show application weeks before, having no real expectation that I would ever be on the show. I put a lot of dumb, sarcastic answers, like saying that the craziest thing I ever did was set my drink down with no coaster. I also put a bunch of stuff about idolizing Ms. Martha Stewart, which led Jimmy Carr to the "will you marry me?" bit. So actually, they cut out a little convo we had about insider trading, about what the craziest thing I ever
really did was, etc., etc.
And the natural handicap with the trampolines because of having the shortest legs of the lot (I kept practicing between takes!). And being emotionless as Jimmy closed the show, with only my very still head in the lower left corner of the screen (I thought I wasn't in the shot!). And giggling and cooing like an Asian girl (as Jose noted!). Afterward, I called my dad and as is typical of the Asian parent that demands perfection, he said, "You seem to know a lot about entertainment, but not enough about geography." Dad, did you see that I won the car?
Well, Dad can say what he wants, I guess. After all, he's the one that cleaned all that paint off the Mazda.
Eye Candy
I have plenty of things to watch on TV these days. [Insert "Distraction" plug #99,789
here.] TV's stock value is very high with me right now, as studying provides moments few and far between to indulge in front of the tube. And it is now the
only repose I have because I have to be on lock-down for these last, critical weeks.
So I watch. I watched Jen Schefft's litter of ardent suitors, wondering which empty promises would make the cut this week. (Fabrice, to my genuine dismay --
gay! Exactly the persnickety European that is my type!) I watched "The Surreal Life 4", specifically to catch Adrianne Curry and Christopher Knight on the road to falling in surreal love. America's Top Model and Peter Brady together prove that this is the land of dreams and possible impossibilities. The fortuitous by-product of tuning in was finally taking notice of the godly
Marcus Schenkenberg. Sure, I knew about him before -- Calvin Klein and Versace everywhere, erstwhile boyfriend of Pamela Anderson. But only when he is in a house full of has-beens and oddballs do I become truly, truly arrested.
Alex and Tony have been playing the dual roles of agent and publicist for me this week. So many people popped out of the woodwork, with or without my prodding, turning it into one of those banner weeks where I kept getting surprised. It has been all fun, all flattering, and I see that my "dog week" will finally culminate tonight in the airing of the show. Tony mentioned that, in a rare occasion where he left Comedy Central on for longer than a couple of hours, they played my commercial every thirty minutes. "I get it," he said, "Karen is in control of her body." The result is that he hasn't seen me in months, and yet he's sick of me. Ah, well, Tony's moment in game show history is also soon upon us...
I had a disturbing dream last night about not finishing a Contracts essay on the Bar exam. I woke up frazzled. Then I fell back asleep as I dreamed that my dad bought me a Maserati. Proof that sleeping in can cure just about anything.
And, saying it just to say it: I'm going to be on TV tonight!
