Daffnee

Judith (my coordinator) helped justified the insane amount of avocado-and-crab dip and other toasted appetizer bits at yesterday's year-end 'social' by noting I spent 41 hours on shift at the Wellness Centre between September and November for an average of 3.7 hours a week. I'm not sure if it's a good thing (I'm contributing!) or a sad thing (most of those hours were spent studying while wearing a neon-green nametag, interrupted only periodically by a nervous-looking guy hoping to buy condoms or a girl looking to get on the Pill). All I know is that Blue Chip Cookies are frickin' awesome, regardless of trans fat content or whatnot.

Must breathe deeply and get some sleep, as tomorrow is a good day to die -- or face close to 300 high-school debaters while fuelled only by pizza and watery coffee.

JaqtaHvIS Daq ghoSpu'bogh pagh ghoSqangbej!

For most people, love-hate relationships usually involve alcohol. I've never been content to be most people, so my current love-hate relationship has more to do with debate than a bottle.

Debate and I broke up in Grade 12, after I realised debaters talked a whole lot about nothing -- Seinfeld was still popular then, so I guess no one else saw it as a problem. During third year, I gave debate a second chance, admittedly as a career move; I needed to know if this kind of verbal and procedural posturing was something I could do for a living.

The verdict? Yes, but only if I do it my way. The stereotypical debater, the one everyone has in their mind and cringes at any time I mention debate tournmanets, must be that of the loud, amoral, pre-law go-getter that delights in constructing a case less on its own merits than the flaws of the opposition. I suppose that's partially true; I feel Conrad Black's spirit hovering over most of the debate tournaments I've ever been to.

On the other hand, I don't believe it has to be that way. You can win an argument without slandering the opposition. There's still room in an adversarial legal system for Atticus Finches, even though it's a lot harder to come up with good points instead of simply saying the opposition members are myopic, poorly-educated, incoherent, illogical, and socially irresponsible cretins.

I'm obviously insecure about my chosen profession. I don't know where I want to go, what I want to do, or (perhaps most importantly) how much I'm willing to spend. I had a short chat with Tej (2L at UBC) and Bryan (corporate litigator-to-be whose only conversations I've ever had with involve law school applications) yesterday night, which only made me more confused; the more I think about it, the fewer reasons I can think of for dropping almost $200,000 for an American legal education, especially if I want to work in public interest or any less-lucrative area. Anybody want to weigh in with an opinion on this one?

So, after all this -- does anybody out there feel like judging a high school debate this tournament this weekend? We're still desperately seeking judges! Free food! Zitty high school debaters! Rum and eggnog! Unchecked abuses of power! I promise it'll be a good time.

Acquired today between French and Economics class: cucumber handbag, red shoes, leather bookbag, and old cable-knit sweater.

All doubts pertaining to my femininity have now, I hope, been put to rest.

If I had to, I'd characterise this weekend's theme as "family-oriented". Not to say I spent a lot of time watching Disney movies or anything, but more that it started with a (emotionally trying) family dinner and ended with my roommates discussing the joys of motherhood. My 21-year-old, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, has-a-hairdresser-brother Japanese exchange roommate and my Ph.D. candidate roommate with one kid already back in China both want to have a kid soon. Wow.

Never mind the separation of church and state, I'm more interested in the separation of personal politics and that annoyingly accurate insight parents have into their kid's psyche. My parents have a distinctly unfair advantage -- twenty years of unhindered psychological observation means that I've never been able to surprise them. I can't even burst into tears and argue adamantly that despite what they say, I will take French 12/stay in Honours Physics/go into public interest law, and expect to have a half-decent response. My parents invented the smile-and-nod. It's actually a dead-stare-with-knowing-smirk, but that would give too many clues as to where my own prized (and trademarked) *smirk* somes from.

And they were right, of course. I wish I had a blinding conviction that I want to work for the UN and prosecute war criminals in the Hague, because that would be insanely cool and give me a chance to check out the Bavarian palace in the middle of winter and enact my Beauty and the Beast fantasies -- but I don't. All I know is I like the sound of my own voice far too much, have a thing for English accents, nice suits, and doing the right thing. I really am a dime a dozen, aren't I?

End of season for the Spiked Crannies -- we rule. Best game we've ever played. Totally worth the huge chunk of cash I lost to registration because FCRA still hasn't reimbursed me yet.

Saturday night was a last-minute invitation from Cindy and Syl to go to their roommates' birthday dinner at Koji's downtown, and ended up being an interesting exercise of six degrees of fairview separation. My roommate was there, along with the guy next door that's always half-naked and eating scrambled eggs when I ring the doorbell, and Mike's (or Mindy's, depending on who you ask) roommates. I, incidentally, had the honour of being Mike for the evening.

And Sunday? Banana bread day. Ended up being banana cake, but I figure if I don't tell anyone it's like those guys that make up artificial flavours and name them afterwards.

Ironically, Dan's Singledom vs. Coupledom post just reaffirms our running gag of quirk -- I totally agree with the guy. He tells me he's setting up something on Incurable Goodness (sounds like a gourmet cookie to me), so I'll keep my comments from this for awhile.

Drip, drip, drip. The two leaky faucets in our house give me nightmares about how we're depleting the world's largest supply of fresh water and probably prompting the US to step up its Canadian invasion plans, but the constant dripping probably comes more from those stupid letters that arrived in the mail en masse last week. It's not a coincidence that I haven't been able to sleep since; I was doing a jolly fine one forgetting that I was waiting for old, cigar-smoking men to pass judgement on my badly-handwritten applications and sketchy résumé. Now, I get up at 5:30 AM because I can't sleep, and not because I'm excited. The euphoria wore off pretty quickly, and now I'm just anxious.

At least Vancouver has a primary sewage treatment plant, my laundry's folded, my stock of teabags (and hugs) is far from low and I'm re-establishing diplomatic relations with my body and maybe -- just maybe -- some semblance of a social life! Just when I started thinking art could no longer touch me, something reminds me about why we are all Still/Here.

I love mornings. I tell most people I'm a "morning person" simply because I'm more productive at that time (which is true), but the hidden bonus must be the ability to move through the world before anyone else can; there's no loneliness, because everyone is there -- they're just sleeping. In a terribly vulnerable, susceptible state.

I went to debate for the first time in probably two months yesterday, with only the intention of watching (like always), and somehow managed to end up in a round with two debaters heading off to the World Championships come December. That actually doens't matter much. What matters (to me, at least) is that I found you really can win without being bitchy, condescending, or arrogant. Heck, I know next to nothing about third-world debt relief (besides what Lemche mentioned in Econ 310 and one really bad round at the Calgary Pro-Am last year), but at least I didn't have to call other people incompetent to get my point across! For someone that spends too much time worrying about the future, it's nice to find out that Atticus Finch doesn't have to be a fiction. To be theoretically precise, it's nice to find evidence that the this cynical postmodern age can still have elements of the carnivalesque, which to me is not depressing at all.

And hey, Andrew! Thanks for some good coffee-chatting and tab-bashing. Beanery muffins are a bit on the sweet and sticky side, but it was a welcome relief from my need for academic productivity. Not to mention relief from the sense of impending doom that comes from the realization that school is becoming a tad bo-ring...but nobody tell Dan, he'll never stop bugging me about that.

First off, shame on me. That last post shows I really need to practice that whole self-restraint thing, because I obviously reneged on my vow to keep quiet about the whole application process. I'm having nightmares that I'll turn into the gossiping Chinese aunt that's in every family (you know, the one you have to avoid ever talking about school with?), which would be a hard blow to my mum, to say the least. And I guess I really don't have Dan whipped after all; he called me pretty badly on that one!

He did manage to get Teresa's site online for me, though, the culmination of 5 months' not-very-steady-work on the part of an un(der)employed college brat and an insanely well-off veterinarian. I'm serious, the woman is in her thirties and shoots kitties with a dose of radioactive iodide (curing feline hyperthyroidism) to the tune of $1000 a cat. I had friends in my elementary school classes that wanted to be vets, and I'm pretty sure this wasn't what they had in mind. In any case, this project was a nice long learning curve, at the end of which I discovered that Daphne does not work well at all in unstructured work environments. Daphne also lacks fundamental art skills and design sense. Daphne remains lucky to have engineer-turned-fine-artist as boyfriend to bail her out of bad situations like this!

But even though I've started looking at Teresa's site again, I can't say my brain's all there -- and for the first time in my life, my brain isn't even in school. For example, I put together a response paper and research proposal this weekend for my English seminar, and I can't remember most of it; most of my life since Wednesday has seen me think (and think and think) about whether the person I've become is ready to make any of the life changes that look so great on paper on first glance. Giving up coffee (which I had started drinking at age 5) was one thing, but I'm wondering if I could even bring myself to leave this city. Dan says he won't let me stay here (which should probably clue me into some potential problems with our relationship if he's willing to ship me off across the continent against my will!) but I'm still missing the sense of purpose I had hoped I would have by now.

I still want to do the right thing. I want to "fight the good fight", as Andrew puts it. I still want to help people. And I really don't want to be one of those people that say that they want to do something all through their life and never actually get it.

*faints*

Warning: Inflated Ego Ahead.

I'm hoping that the shoe already dropped by the Powers That Be was a sandal or some other kind of light footwear, because I'm waiting for its mate to drop and my inflated ego wouldn't be able to take a big hit right now. Without rubbing this into too many depressed faces out there -- I'm sorry! -- I'm so freaking happy about how things are going right now that I can't even think of the adjectives to describe it. Oh, what the heck. WHEE!!!

UBC Law accepted me -- in early November. Whee!!

The first midterm that I've taken in over a year (which I incidentally thought I bombed, by the way) was scaled up 15% -- giving me the highest mark I've gotten on a midterm since Math 101. WHEE!!

My mum came yesterday and brought me hugs and Finding Nemo. DOUBLE-WHEE!!

Wireless internet is working in Fairview -- and we bought my network card for a third of what IT Services is selling it for. TRIPLE-WHEE!!

Dan agreed to fix Teresa's site for me, and all I have to do is give him money -- he didn't even threaten to dump me. UBER-WHEE!!

This will all come back and bite me very, very hard, I know. But the fact remains -- I haven't been this stoked about life in a long time.