been there done that

At long last, after nearly an entire month of keeping the pace of school, I'm experiencing a long-awaited sense of déjà vu. I've got a stack of photocopied, cross-referenced, Shepardized cases on the couch cushion to my right, the laptop on my lap, some nice upbeat Dvorák on the stereo, and my first memo for El-Dubyar, as yet unwritten, on the to-do list for tonight.

I've got a paper due, and I'm procrastinating. It's like college all over again.

'Course, if it were college, I wouldn't be blogging; I'd be involved in some vehement, heartfelt, and yet utterly trivial discussion with my roommates, or tweaking the HTML on my old home page, or listening to St. Dan and his roommates play their guitars, or studying Italian poetry over coffee with A., or trying to convince my husband-to-be to set aside his fifteen-hour problem set for a few minutes since I was calling long distance. The music back then would have been Rachmaninoff or Ella Fitzgerald, the computer a 1991-issue 486 named the Elephant, and the furniture consisting largely of stacks of loose cushions. My hair had not yet begun to turn gray. I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living.

I miss college.

My procrastination skills, I'm proud to report, have weathered the years since graduation far better than any other skills I acquired as an undergraduate. I've already unloaded the dishwasher, cleaned off the mess of mail on the kitchen table, put some chicken out to defrost for dinner, and even finished my Crim Law reading for tomorrow. By rights, I should be devoting these present moments to organizing my memo, pulling together an outline, reaccustoming my eyes to the Courier font.

I will, soon enough.

Right now I'm reminiscing, though. Ah, how I miss it. I wish A. would call up from a blue phone so we could head over to the Taft Caffè and pick up where we left off, pondering Ungaretti. M'illumino d'immenso. I wish I'd get an ntalk request from J. that would keep me up all night and make me cranky the next day in the best kind of way. I wish I could hear K. play the Rain Song on his guitar one more time. I wish I didn't have to dye my hair. I wish I'd thought so many things sooner than I did.

Section 415 of the California Penal Code defines disturbing the peace as either fighting in public, making loud and unreasonable noise, or using offensive words in such a manner as to provoke an immediate violent reaction. The guy in our hypo didn't really do any of the above; upset with his best friend, he swore at the top of his lungs in a public park, which could perhaps have been unreasonable noise except that it wasn't really. Then, when an off-duty police officer leading a troop of girl scouts on a park tour overheard him and asked him to stop, he swore at her. Swearing at a police officer has been known to constitute "fighting words" under California law. And I'm thinking about this again now, and that's good, and memory lane is getting a bit too misty so I'll go back to work now. back to work now. back to work. to work.

thus spake /jca @ September 17, 2002 08:30 PM