Sua SponteMy law school odyssey: the ongoing narrative.
My husband and I seem to have swapped moods. He's starting to chill out, coming down to his last weekend in California. I, for some reason, am freaking out. What if the furniture truck really can't pull up to our loading dock at the end of that narrow road? Where the hell am I going to arrange for my car to be dropped off? What if my husband arrives at the apartment, decides it's too noisy, and hates it? Hates being here? Hates this whole effort? Thinks I shouldn't have transferred? Blames me?
He'd have every right to, poor guy.
Some days are good days: kickass classes, promising career prospects, a school where I finally feel like I belong. But some days I feel as though I've taken a good thing -- a comfortable apartment in California, mild weather, my husband happily commuting less than a mile to his office -- and thrown it away, screwed everything up.
I think this is the end of the line: after two months of bouncing around the country like an uber-perky ping pong ball, I'm finally running out of gas. I'm getting damn near the limit of my tolerance for hotel rooms, suitcases, and things called "home" that are empty and echoing where I still leave guilty footprints in the carpet. I miss my husband. I miss my bed. I need a good cry, I think, or a bottle of good Scotch.
At least the Lexis Nexis people are pitching today at school. Lexis Nexis points always make me happy.
In a few days things will be much, much better. Provided my husband doesn't hate the apartment.
My furniture is on a truck somewhere in Middle America by now. My car just made it onto its own truck yesterday, and should be here next week. I fly back out to California tomorrow for the last time this term (knock wood -- ailing grandmother may make a liar out of me on that one) and return here on Sunday, for good, accompanied by husband and pets.
Within a week, this place should be home.
A study of the green lights on the DSL modem indicates that we probably already have high-speed Internet access in the apartment, which would be a bit more helpful if our computers weren't on the truck along with our furniture. (The chassis of our computers, at any rate. The hard drives are here, all wrapped up in bubble tape, snug in a cardboard box which I carried on my flight back from San Francisco last week.) I'm particularly fortunate to have a mattress on which to spend my nights, on loan from one of the building's leasing agents. A late-afternoon Target run yesterday resulted in the place now being possessed of such amenities as a kitchen garbage can, scented candles, a silverware drawer divider and a bathroom fan.
And yet it still doesn't feel like home. It's just empty.
"The echo!" exclaimed St. Daniel in sympathy when I phoned him this afternoon. "The echo is the worst!" He's right; the faraway whoosh of the traffic, the windlike noise of the elevator, the elevatorlike noise of the wind, even the faint distant beeping of construction trucks going in reverse all reverberate around my unlit and unfurnished apartment as though it were a megaphone. It's still a vast improvement over the place I started in this building; but I'll sleep a lot better when the inherent subtle noises of the place are buffered by my bed and my couch and my stereo and my husband.
The weather is fun, at least. From indoors it's fun. I regretted not having carried an umbrella yesterday, while jog-trotting the two and a half blocks from my parking space to the law school; but by the time I reached the building (at a dead sprint) I was laughing out loud. In the space of less than three blocks the weather had gone from cloudy to drizzle to pouring rain to hail. Tiny white marbles spilled down onto the sidewalk and bounced gleefully under the awning where I was fumbling for my key card.
"It's hailing!" I giggled to the LLM student who let me in. "Look! That's hail!"
She was unimpressed.
I, meanwhile, will remember my umbrella from now on.
People, upon hearing that I was transferring law schools, warned me about the winters in my new location of choice. "You're going to die," was the consensus among my seasonless California friends. I blew this off; I grew up in New Jersey, and have worked in Milwaukee in March. I know from winter. I can handle it.
Er, yeah.
Today it got cold. Not bitter nasty cold, but seriously chilly with enough of a bite in the air that I found myself wishing I had worn at least one more layer. The big bank thermometer near the strip mall where I unsuccessfully attempted to buy a halogen lamp today read 39 degrees. (Degrees Fahrenheit, that is.)
My husband, still in California, doubtless went to the office today in his standard uniform of khaki shorts and a black T-shirt. I, meanwhile, have realized that I need to make some wardrobe investments, pronto. And does anyone have any suggestions for taming hair that is not frizzy from humidity, but rather staticky from lack thereof?
I half considered challenging Becky to a cold contest, but reconsidered. She would win instantly. And repeatedly. Wintry though my newly-adopted climate may be, it's got nothing on the Canadian hinterland. And yet Becky's doing great there, despite her warm-weather origins. Who's to say that winter is something purely evil? ("Yver, vous n'êtes qu'un villain...")
It's interesting, watching what must be my New Jerseyan racial memory of seasons resurface. The leaves here, while a far cry from the glorious Halloween-era foliage to which I was accustomed back in high school, have paled to a fine pleasant gold. There's a briskness to the air that translates to a briskness in one's step, a hop-skip along the sidewalk as you try to outrun the chasing chill. This is high autumn, with winter rapidly approaching, and I remember that this is how it's supposed to feel. Four winters spent in a place with no winter has not made me forget.
"Our good time of year is just starting," says my mother of Florida, where the humidity is just beginning to wane.
"So's our bad one," I say back, but smile none the less.
Discovering that the first segment of my two-segment trip to San Francisco had been summarily canceled: bad.
Being miraculously rescheduled onto a nonstop and arriving two hours ahead of plan: good.
Many consecutive hours of productive packing action: good.
Not getting to bed until 3:15 am that night: bad.
Realizing, at 3:15 am, that pretty much everything was packed: good.
Waking up at 5:45 am the "next" morning: bad.
Having enough time to break down the bed and pack the linens in the last open box before the movers arrived: good.
Falling asleep on the living room couch until a mover asked me to get off it so that he could take it down to the truck: bad.
Getting both the movers and the housecleaners in and out in the same day: good.
Interview at a firm I really liked, on two and a half hours of sleep: bad, bad, bad.
Giving a friend a ride home to the south bay, so that I wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel: good.
Being compelled to throw away perfectly decent furniture because Goodwill would not come pick it up and we couldn't get it to a dropoff location during business hours: bad.
Spotting people, not two hours later, loading that same furniture from the Dumpster into the back of their car: good.
Realizing that we were now possessed of two dark, empty, furniture-free apartments: bad.
Checking into the cute little hotel on El Camino with the jacuzzi tubs in every room: good.
Saturday spent tying up all of our remaining loose ends: good.
Relaxing with husband over sizzling tofu platter and beef rendang, and hearing him say in mild awe, "This is actually going to work." -- priceless.
Discovering that three law firm dings had accumulated in the mail this week: easily forgotten.
Of all the days in the year when I could have used an extra hour, this one was probably among the most appropriate.
Damn, I love switching off of Daylight Savings Time. Even if it means putting up with the other side of the coin once a year. I just can't imagine living in one of those odd cities where the clocks never change...
This is the second-to-last Thursday evening I will spend on a plane to SFO. Hopefully, it'll also be also the last weekend where I spend my waking hours mimicking a recently-beheaded chicken.
The movers arrive at our apartment tomorrow morning, as do the cleaning people. I've got an appointment at 2 pm in The City for which I desperately hope I won't be late. My husband has already informed me that we won't be sleeping tonight, since so much apparently remains to get ready for the movers before they arrive. I've been tasked with scrubbing down the chinchilla cage with bleach, which will be twice as much fun as usual since I probably won't even get there until midnightish and the thing needs to air out overnight before the movers take it.
Etc.
Blogging will be slow to nonexistent until early next week, due both to snowed-under-busy-ness and my desire to avoid public griping.
At least the new apartment is working out. I couldn't be more relieved; slept quite well last night. Now to get my furniture there too...
Denise gets the credit for discovering the blog of Alex Wellen, author of Barman.
My husband is still in California, so part of my job in the new-home-procurement process is putting myself in his position and perceiving the apartment through his eyes, as though he were evaluating the place along with me.
Last night, I stretched out on the floor of the master bedroom and paid attention. Our building towers over the waterfront highway, and the traffic noise concerned me. Would it keep him awake?
Probably not, I concluded, since he's a big fan of white noise and loves to keep floor fans running in every room in our home. Even if the traffic itself didn't produce sufficiently comfortable white noise for him, it could certainly be masked with a floor fan. Or, for that matter, with the ocean-waves CD which my husband routinely sets to repeat throughout the night. The isolated motorcycle seemed to be the only real noise issue, and we have those even in Califo--
*whoooooosh* RRRRRRRM.
I sat up on the floor. What the hell?
Five minutes of due diligence, which I really had no excuse for not doing sooner, revealed that the twenty-eighth floor of this particular building was home not only to my apartment, but to two (2) loud humming whooshing elevator machine rooms. To enrich the situation even more, one of these machine rooms shared a wall with my master bathroom.
*whoooooosh* RRRRRRRM.
Even cranking the ocean waves would be useless here. There was no way my husband could sleep in this room.
I spent the night on a mattress (fortuitously borrowed from one of the building's leasing agents) in the middle room, which we had conceived to be my husband's office. Even there, the whooshing and humming was audible. "You were supposed to get us a livable place," groaned my husband over the cell phone. "Are you telling me that I can't live in this place??"
"Umm."
"I can't handle an argument about this right now."
"Me neither."
He swore.
"I'll talk to the leasing office in the morning," I said.
"And tell them what? That we're breaking our lease after twelve hours??"
"Umm."
I didn't sleep well, even after people stopped taking the elevator every five minutes.
But then, this morning, I got lucky.
I went to the leasing office, began to tell them that the elevator made too much noise, and found myself, to my horror, on the verge of tears. (At least it didn't happen during yesterday's deposition.) "Are there any other two-bedrooms available?" I finished before my voice completely broke. I felt my face flushing purple. Stupid, stupid! You need to negotiate, not whine!!
"I think...yes, let's check...oh, honey! Don't worry! It'll be OK!" said the motherly leasing agent, noticing my distress.
OK, maybe whining wasn't such a bad plan.
Long story short: tomorrow I will move my borrowed mattress and two suitcases from apartment 2804 up to apartment 3304, on a floor blessedly devoid of machine rooms. My rent will increase by $62 per month, my square footage by 200, and the number of electrical outlets in the office from 4 to the elusive 5. The traffic noises will attenuate over five more stories. And the elevators can hum and whoosh to their hearts' content, but I won't be able to hear them. (The leasing agent stood in the hallway and called them repeatedly to check while I listened in the bedroom. All clear.)
It's amusing to reflect on what suburbanites we have become, how spoiled we are for things like quiet and stairs and parking lots. Or maybe we've just been suburbanites all along.
I took my first deposition today in Trial Ad, and it didn't go well.
It didn't go poorly, I don't think. But my performance was decidedly lackluster. The Force was not with me; I couldn't get my witness to distinguish between two types of contracts whose differences had been the subject of some dispute between him and the party I represented. I came away shaken, thanking goodness that I could always just go and practice transactional law if this whole litigation thing didn't work out.
It probably didn't help that I was up late last night drafting interrogatories and suchlike for one of the defendants in my case, and wound up deposing a witness for the other defendant today. Nor was it particularly helpful to wake up at dawn with planes flying overhead ('twas my last night at the Ramada, so I chose the airport one out of cheapitude), truck downtown through the famous traffic on the interstate, and spend most of the morning procuring my new place. For that matter, it also wasn't so great to have a makeup Trademarks class today, reading for which devoured a great deal of my remaining spare time.
I bet that if I'd had a good solid week of no travel and no logistical issues, a week just to hunker down and get under the skin of this case the way I did last year in moot court, it would have gone better. I would have spoken fluidly, gotten all the admissions I was looking for, and had no problems with stumbling over my own script. But I have not had such a week since August, and will not until November.
I've got to reassess my priorities. The entire point of all this effort -- the househunting, the packing, the husband-uprooting -- is for me to attend law school here. I have no excuse for doing so halfassedly. I know that grades are not the motivating factor this year that they were last year, since I've already gotten to the place where I needed them to take me. Still, I can't just give up and let myself slip back down the curve. It's no excuse that the curve is gentler here than at my previous law school. I love to multitask, and have been doing plenty of it lately, but it's time for me to focus. This ball has been in the air for far too long. Moving will end soon, interviewing is almost over, and I know exactly how I need to spend the rest of my time henceforth.
Incidentally, I did learn one important thing about taking a deposition: if you ask a simple question, and your witness does not immediately respond, do not attempt to rephrase or clarify the question unless someone asks you to. Control your desire to speak conversationally. Just shut up and let the silence hang.
` hang '
No more Ramada!
No more Ramada!
I've signed the lease, done the walkthrough, picked up the keys and even booked myself a parking space in the labyrinthine subterranean garage. I am no longer homeless. I am homeful. I am so full of home that I can already feel my possessions expanding to fill the new space. Even if the only article of clothing I can currently hang in the closet (the closet! the closet!) is the one suit still on its dry-cleaner hangers.
But my building has its own dry cleaners, so other suits will soon follow. It has its own dry cleaners, its own gym, its own video rental facility and its own grocery store. People warn me about the horrendous winters here, but it seems that we won't really have to experience them much if we don't want to. It was a gorgeous eighty degrees here today anyway, a far cry from the snow I'd been warned to expect in late October. I doubt it came near eighty back in the Bay Area. For the moment, it seems as though we've traded up as far as climate.
(I know, I know. But it hasn't happened yet.)
Tonight is my last dinner out, in celebration of my newfound homefulness. Tomorrow...ah, tomorrow I cook.
Welcome, Eleanor Siobhan!! And congratulations to proud parents Heather and Dave!
next up: Denise. ;)
It's a lovely chilly Saturday on this particular coast, I'm about to meet some excellent old friends for lunch and an afternoon ogling hottie crew guys cheering for my alltime favorite athletes at Head of the Charles, and things are just generally going much better than they felt yesterday.
Much of this is due to an excellent evening spent in the company of both Waddling Thunder and Jeremy Blachman, whom I had not previously met in person. What terrific people they are. It's tough to hang around with them and not take away a far saner perspective on things that really shouldn't be stressful, when you think about it. I still can't stop grinning. Cheers, guys.
I didn't realize this until WT and Jeremy told me, but apparently Will Baude deduced from Unfashionable Observations' statistics that I had actually transferred to Harvard from Tulane. I didn't. Still, it's fun to be gossiped-about when the gossip is complimentary. Tulane and Harvard are both fine universities. But I still hope both of their crew teams will be eclipsed this weekend :)
Apparently the on-campus interviewing sequel season is stressful enough for the ordinary, resident, nontransfer student that my new law school recommends a courseload of only three classes in the fall term.
Add "living out of a suitcase" to this, and the personal energy burn rate goes off the scale.
Today, after two separate occasions where I actually wore the thing in public without noticing, I took off the jacket from my lucky suit and was appalled to spot a huge bleached-white stain on the navy lining. How it got there, I have no clue. I carry no bleach in my suitcase. The dry cleaner swore he had nothing to do with it, but is in any event attempting to re-dye the lining right now in the interest of customer service.
At least it's only on the lining. At least it doesn't show through. I should count my blessings here. The suit is still perfectly wearable. It's not as though I went through interviews with a great white bullseye between my shoulder blades.
Or maybe it is like that.
I need a home and a closet and a place to hang my goddamned interview suits.
Had I not transferred law schools, I would be participating in my first extramural moot court competition this week.
Best of luck to my teammates D., M., and whoever replaced me. I may attend a different law school now, but I'll always root for you guys first and foremost.
Damn!
Damn!
Damn!
Betcha this guy gets mugged. Repeatedly.
At least there's still hope on the East Coast.
So much for outlining...
Here is an interviewing secret for which I wish I could take credit, but can't (credit is actually owed to these folks):
Wear red knickers (undies, boxers, as you will) under your interview suit. They boost your chi. No, really, they do.
Looks like Sua Sponte is far from the only blawg to have recently fallen prey to comment spam.
I have this to say to the penis-enlargement people: Piss off. I'm female. So are roughly half my readers. And the other half are far too well-endowed to have any need of your services.
Graffiti spotted on a wall near my hotel today, right when I most needed to see it:
DO NOT BE PARANOID
Just when things couldn't get any crazier: this week I am neither at home, nor at school, but elsewhere entirely, and a fine elsewhere it is. (With the possible exception of my exceptionally snug accommodations, that is. My hotel room here is perhaps the smallest I've ever seen -- it's roughly triangular, with each perpendicular side adding up to maybe eight or nine feet. The bed is a twin. There is no closet. There is, however, a dry cleaners across the street. Funny how things always manage to work out.)
I had a lovely dinner last night with an esteemed fellow student blawger (there, now I've given away my location), and have been hitting many of the standard pilgrimage destinations in town, but had a bugger of a time figuring out Internet access. There is a Starbucks around the corner from my hotel, which claimed to offer T Mobile HotSpot service; alas, my wifi card could not detect any signal in the cafe, so I found myself out $3.10 for a grande chai and still in search of connectivity.
Yesterday I remarked how similar my hotel was to the Abigail, my home away from home on any night before a morning exam last year. This turned out to be a truer comparison than I'd initially guessed: not only is the hotel a cute converted brownstone with stained glass around the front door and gilded crown moldings, it's even next door to a law school itself.
Did you know that, as an actively matriculated law student, you can walk into pretty much any other law school in the country (with some exceptions, of course) and they'll let you use their library? Including their computer labs? Funny how things always manage to work out.
I felt as though there should be some sort of secret handshake involved. There wasn't. Maybe I'll invent one, just to feel extra-goofy.
packing
packing
packing
packing
packing
[guess what we're doing this weekend?]
I was wrong, last week, to assert that a late-night plane flight across time zones followed by a day of interviewing was truly exhausting. The truth is out: a late-night plane flight across time zones, followed by a day of interviewing, followed by an evening of packing and then another day of more packing -- now that's truly exhausting.
And now my keyboard is being snatched out from under my fingers. Not sure when next I'll blog, but I know for certain it won't be from California.
Whee!
G R E E T I N G S Capricorn
There might not be a way to avoid the endings that are about to take place, but one thing you can control is how you react to them. Try not to let your emotions show, no matter how disappointed, sad or upset you may feel inside. There is a time and a place for getting teary-eyed and this is most definitely not it, Capricorn. Although it's necessary for you to appear strong while you're with other people, go ahead and give yourself permission to have a good cry once you're out of the public eye.
From the moment I arrived at my new law school on Labor Day, I was struck by the profusion of fauna on campus. There was a cohort of shrieking shiny black birds that would wake me up in the morning with an array of noises, one of which resembled a New Year's Eve party favor (how the heck does a bird do that?). Perfectly-balanced squirrels would bound along electrical wires in neat gray sinusoids, putting their fat brown California cousins to shame. There were spiders the size of my thumb, busily fashioning webs as tall as I was between trees sticky with humidity. And, most excitingly for me since I hadn't seen these since leaving New Jersey, there were big floaty orange monarch butterflies. All over the place.
Now the season is beginning to shift. The spiders seem less prevalent; maybe they've gone into hibernation. The whooping, screaming birds seem to prefer parts of town other than the Ramada. The squirrels are off squirrelling, or something. A stray butterfly will appear every now and then, looking lost and perplexed. And yet now I'm seeing more wildlife than I'd even noticed before, everywhere I go.
The surge in animal population seems to consist entirely in small flying beetlelike bugs. They're everywhere -- on campus, downtown, all along the waterfront, clouding the air like giant gnats, busily buzzing around as though they were late for an interview or something. I was a bit put off by them at first, since there were just so many of them, everywhere you looked. Then one landed on my elbow.
They're ladybugs.
This city has an infestation of airborne ladybugs.
I can only imagine what sort of massive-scale good luck this must indicate.
Pending the result of a criminal background check, I am no longer constructively homeless.
Since our ill-starred home purchase fell through last month, my husband and I changed tactics and decided to rent a place downtown. After a little bit of searching (literally, a little bit -- all these places are uniformly nice and uniformly priced, it was just a question of location) we chose a two-bedroom, roughly 1200 square feet, on the twenty-eighth floor of a high rise right on the waterfront.
Of course, I don't actually get to live there until 10/20, assuming that the background check doesn't derail my lease application because of my unpaid parking ticket in Menlo Park. And even once I do "move in," it'll be the air mattress and the hot pot for as long as it takes for the truck to get here. But it'll be home, or at least start becoming home, as soon as I get the keys. And the Ramada probably won't miss me.
I guess I'd be happier if my husband were happier. He's got the short end of this stick: he's in California, packing like a madman, while I'm here enjoying school and eating out every night. (No refrigerator at the Ramada, see.) He has apparently relieved every office supply store within ten miles of our apartment of their entire stock of book-sized boxes, and still has more to pack. I should be there helping him. Much as I'm loving my classes and this city and everything that's going on around me, I feel guilty that he's doing the hard part right now.
Not too terribly guilty, though. I am flying back out on Thursday night, after all, and can pick up my share of the packing then. And now that we've got a lease here, more or less, it makes the packing that much less painful since we know there's an actual destination at the end of the haul.
Still, moving is never something you want to spend any more time on than you have to. It sure will be nice when we're here, we're settled, and everyone down to the chinchillas has quit freaking out. At least in the short term.
I can't wait.
With the tension of the move and the new law school and me airport-hopping for much of this month while my husband stayed in CA and wondered what was going on, it was only a matter of time before we both snapped and started shouting at each other like psychos.
I've got to give him credit, though: he was the one with the presence of mind to shut all the sliding glass doors right when it became obvious that we were in for a real row.
It started, as real rows in the A. household tend to, over me thinking that he thought one thing while he thought that I thought something else. After nearly five years of marriage, and seven years of dating before that, we can claim with some justification an ability to read each other's minds. Alas, if only it worked reliably.
Here was the source of our disagreement: I had told our CA landlady that we were moving out on the first of November, implicitly giving her permission to show the apartment to potential renters before then. Hubby did not think this was our target date, did not even think it possible to get the place clean and packed before then, and was unwilling to have strangers exploring our home before we had moved out.
Much shouting later, we concluded that it was scarcely possible for us to get our act together any sooner than a month from now, and that moreover the landlady was unlikely to find a renter between now and then anyway with the rental market being what it was in Silicon Valley. We did, however, channel much of the energy that we hadn't wasted on shouting into a marathon box-packing and house-cleaning session. I left the kitchen sparkling clean, the chinchilla cage freshly lined with law firm rejection letters, and the linen closet halfway emptied of linens; hubby filled a dozen boxes with books from the study, and has about another dozen to go before all of our bookshelves should be more or less accounted for.
We didn't get much sleep last night.
I found myself furious, last night, packing, and not just because I was in the midst of a spat with my husband. Why should this be so difficult, moving? I grumbled to myself. Why do we have to do all this packing? Why do we have so goddamned much stuff??
No pair of human beings requires thirty different towels. I don't care if they're bath towels, beach towels, guest towels, and other-purpose towels; we should have maybe half that. And all these pillows! We never use them, and the only company we ever have is the inlaws for a week each August. Hardly need the pillows, let alone the five cotton blankets. And WHY do we own so many books? In this day of ubiquitous Internet and public libraries, what are we doing with so very many kilograms of inefficiently stored information?
I found myself unabashedly loathing every chattel that passed through my hands en route to a cardboard box.
I'll make promises to myself at times like these, promises like "I'll never buy another book again, I'll just get everything from the library" or "All I need is a pot, a saucepan, and a skillet, and everything else is going to Goodwill tomorrow." And then I fail to follow through. We're on a bookbuying spree these days anyway, since both of us discovered the Discworld series at roughly the same time. And while I've delivered loads of kitchen stuff to Goodwill, I kind of like the stuff I have left. Sometimes. When I'm not packing it up, that is.
But we do thin out our possessions every time we move. I'll grant us that. Relocating to California in 1999 resulted in several dumpstersful of crap that didn't need to accompany us there. Much of the dodgier furniture we currently own will not be making it onto the truck this time. And since I was anticipating buying a house before the transfer news came through, I had already cleaned out my clothes closet and shoe collection. Now it's the same challenge on a different scale. Let's see how much weight our home can lose.
Postscript: Last night I threw my white marble mortar and pestle into my suitcase instead of a box, since I could only imagine it making any box unduly heavy. Today, when I picked up my suitcase at the baggage claim, I noticed that the zippers had been threaded together with a piece of blue plastic stamped TSA. I hope at least the inspectors were amused.
M is still in early labor, it seems, and we should all quit nagging her about it, so OK, I'm quitting nagging now. To pass the time instead, I'm alternately emailing her cello music MP3s and reading all the archives of Sawyer's World, my favorite mommy blog. More mommies need to keep mommy blogs. At times like these they are eversomuch more fascinating than law student blogs. (At other times, too.)
I'm sure there are more productive things I could be doing than mooning over other people's babies. (Yes, I could certainly enlist my husband's assistance in making one of our own. But he's still at work, and unlikely to favor the idea at any rate. The part about a baby resulting, I mean.) I could be doing my reading for Corporations, for example, or studying up on Economics for Dummies so I can stop feeling so dizzy in Trademarks. And yet, as productive as those suggestions both sound, I'm completely disinclined to do either.
My law school is not so many time zones distant from California as to cause actual jet lag on the trip back, the kind that makes you physically ill. But these Thursday late-nighters do leave their mark, come Friday evening. I'm contentedly listless here at my desk, and my watch says it's almost bedtime. My husband just called to suggest dinner in an hour, though, which is a better idea. If I curled up in bed now, I'd wake up before the sun rose and then feel really out of sorts. And I've got to pack tomorrow for my flight back out on Sunday.
It's nice just to sit here, nestling in the fleecy sleepy quiet of a Friday evening at home. I'm at my real desktop computer, which sits atop my real desk. At school I have the laptop and, if I'm lucky, sufficient wifi signal to keep a telnet window open. At the hotel there's not even that. But at home I have the desk, the DSL, the 19" monitor, the decent speakers through which to listen to cello MP3s. It is just comforting to be in a place called home, even if it's only called home because my computer and desk and music and shoes are still here as opposed to on a truck. It's sweet to nestle into the fantasy of home as something more than just a place to keep your stuff.
Yeah, work can wait until I'm back at the Ramada Inn on Sunday night.
Dear friend and frequent Sua Sponte commenter Anonymous M. is expecting her first child...oh, right about now.
Lots of easy-labor, gosh-is-it-over-already waves are coming your way, hon!
G R E E T I N G S Capricorn
Business travel is profitable but not incident-free. Things happen along the way that either give you new ideas or reinforce your principles in unexpected ways. Of course, there are no guaranteed results once you reach your destination. You may be dealing with someone who has a clashing agenda. Maybe you'll be asked to give more than you get. Even if you weren't prepared for this kind of investment, it has its attractions. Beggars have a peculiar philosophy. You might even be willing to pay for some of this unsolicited wisdom. When time is money, you're suddenly wealthy.