Daffnee

Let's do a recap of what Daphne ate this weekend, in lieu of any detailed description.

Sunday
Blueberry pie a la mode (Waverly Diner, 1 AM)

Monday
Coffee (deli on Broadway, 8 AM)
Bagel (bakery on Staten Island, 9 AM)
Italian wedding soup and roll (Meatballs Plus, Staten Island, 1 PM)
Japanese pastry dumpling involving a kumquat and red bean paste (residence, 5 PM)
Mexican-French fusion stew with funny dough blobs (East Village, 8 PM)
Red velvet cake (Magnolia Bakery, 10 PM)
Peach martini (Fat Black Pussycat, 11 PM)
Grape martini (Fat Black Pussycat, 11:30 PM)

Tuesday
Bagel and strawberry cream cheese (Bagel Bob's, 9 AM)
Noodles (home!, 1 PM)
Frrrozen Hot Chocolate (Serendipity, 5 PM)
Chicken stir-fry (home, 8 PM)
Loose-leaf Earl Grey tea (Cafe Dante, 12 AM)

Pictures from Thursday's Fall Ball should also be forthcoming, though from the dubious source of other people's cameras; I only hope they do not paint a picture of me as the typical Asian (alcoholic) lightweight. That being said, there's something about tossing a bunch of lawyers-to-be into a costume party and some free alcohol for good measure! My Go-Go Yubari costume idea fell through, but I'm going to make an effort and see if I can pull it off for tonight.

Oh, and I got my fortune told for the first time. I had the opportunity at grad, but I was being Neo-esque then and found it illogical for someone who believed in "making her own fate" to even toy with getting her fortune told; since then, I've realised that making one's own fate requires too much work and it's much better to have a tired fortune teller used to getting asked inane questions about strangers' love lives to tell me what's up. And what's up is apparently that I will love my chosen occupation (unsure), will have a stressful year (true), recently had a heartbreak (mostly untrue) and know someone pregnant (true). Is that a clear and convincing record for the fortune teller? Who knows, but it's comforting that someone out there objectively thinks that I'm going to be a (gasp!) happy lawyer.

Tarnation! I just messaged my parents with the screen name "Daff - 6 martinis, cake and pizza".

I knew Craigslist is ubiquitous to New York life, but this seems a bit ridiculous.

I don't believe in backposting, so anyone reading this site needs to get comfortable with the idea that everything blogged about is unadultered, unproofread verbiage straight from my brain. I mention this because a) I only recently found out that professional bloggers (by which I really mean just Belle de Jour, who has sadly stopped posting about her fascinating career) are backposting hacks, and b) I couldn't think of a grand unifying theme for all the stuff I want to jot down today so it's going to be in list format. Law school seems to be really huge on list formats, by the way, so let's just think of this as me "outlining" my life instead of my courses (as I should be).

1. Illiteracy

Does anyone remember that Reader's Digest article that came out in the mid-nineties that discussed adult illiteracy in North America? I must have read it when I was in elementary school; there was a woman who described how she had lived the entire thirty-something years of her life without being able to read, getting through it all by memorizing what the names of dishes looked like (she was a waitress) and making a squiggle when she couldn't remember (so she would be called by the chef and she could tell him directly), saying she wasn't interested when discussing books or magazines, and so on.

I couldn't believe it. I was a bookworm, in the most literal sense -- I attribute my poor physique mostly to the years I spent on the couch reading Conan Doyle, and anyone who thinks otherwise can talk to me directly. At about the same time, though, I began to develop this deep insecurity that I somehow wasn't fully literate in either of my languages. Maybe this had to do with the way I would pronounce some words wrong, or some vestigial guilt from pushing so hard to quit Chinese school, but I had this fear I would end up like Jean Chretien and be utterly unintelligible to the people around me. At that point in time, most unlike now, I was under the impression that I had ground-shaking insights to share.

The relevance of this digression? I feel pretty darn illiterate here too. Not because of this law school thing -- enough has been made about the "language of the law" -- but a real sense that I'm no longer making myself as clear as I once was. Part of the credit must go to my peers; they're very good at forcing me to justify myself. Part must be that I'm not in Kansas/Vancouver any more. And part probably comes from being in a city where nobody really understands anyone anyway.

When I talk about my past, about my opinions, about current events, it feels like I'm accessing something disconnected to me. I'm like the RAM accessing a hard drive, or a corpus callosum of my past memories, if you will. This might be the flu bug talking, but there are times when I don't feel like I'm even here.

2. Super-Size...someone else

So I watched Super-Size Me on Friday while doing my best to convince myself I really didn't need to go out and make my cold worse, and am now a little more freaked out of restaurants than before. The vegan girlfriend freaked me out a bit too, but it's mostly this entire culture that normalizes food that comes from boxes. Boxes! I had never even seen the inside of a frozen dinner until this year. What's with the law school diet of PB&J and pasta? Power bars? Does nobody here know how to cook?

The movie had a nice follow-up in the NY Times Magazine on Saturday that focused on "America's Eating Disorder", which basically said that 1) the French are all right, and 2) silly Americans, obey your tastebuds. Nutritional information is SO last year. I'm not too sure how I stand on this, actually. Tastebuds are great and all, but that's not to say I'm not worried that the pants to my suit won't fit after Christmas. There are serious practical considerations -- like having to buy a whole new set of pants -- that affect these things, you know?

3. Daydreaming of Ben Stone

I had a surreal moment in Torts today when I heard a police siren go off in the background and had the Law & Order introduction play go off in my head for a good 10 seconds before I started taking notes again.

I have visual confirmation that Bill's neighbour, the ex-Torontonian and daughter of hippies, is indeed a bona-fide New York sex columnist for the Metro. (Commuters get it free with the $2 cost of a subway ticket). The bad part is that being a New York sex columnist doesn't seem to require much literary skill or even an unusually interesting life. Disappointing, considering that Angele Yanor made quite a debacle after plagiarising for "Lucky Strike" in a newspaper as humble as the Vancouver Sun.

In Darragh's favour, she does do real journalism -- with Fox News.

The flu bug is catching up with me, meaning lots of tea, ginger ale, and cracks about how I should suck it up because Dubya says flu shots are ineffective anyway. I think the great secret of American economic power is just that here, things are the way they are because the President says so. If that's not efficient, what is? I've been a bit of a grouch the way sick people sometimes are, and now the roomie thinks I'm suicidal because she caught me trying to get fresh air -- stupid in the city, I know -- from an open window.

Did I ever mention that she wanted child-protection bars for hers because she was afraid she'd fall out?

The weather's turning grey, conspiring with the flu to create moodiness and a Vancouver-like atmosphere. I went to an all-ALSA (that's ____ Allied Law Students Association, filling in ____ with Asian-Pacific, Black, Latino, etc.) Open Mic tonight where I got to sweat in a small space with many other minority students and listen to the sound of ethnic anger, sadness, and people choking on cheese. I, for one, choked only on saltines.

I went to my first New York studio party, and met a sex columnist and psychoanalyst with a penchant for art gallery openings. Really.

It sounds so much more interesting that the details: the studio was 200 square feet and the home of my classmate and his wife; the sex columnist writes biweekly, and is a journalism student/journalist in the rest of her time; the psychoanalyst is in training has a repressed Parisian draw to metropolises and is nutty enough (in my opinion) to want to raise his family in NYC; and they're all Canadian. It's amazing what can happen when you get a group of loosely-connected Canucks in close quarters for Thanksgiving and pumpkin pie. You guys should be proud of me -- I stuck around past 9 (when the other Greenwich Village 1Ls bailed) and didn't thoroughly embarass myself.

If one is female, however, holidays like Thanksgiving (i.e. those that involve food) never let you get off scot-free. Thanks to webcams and MSN Messenger, I got to see my extended family on Saturday. I was also chastised for gaining weight, in that well-meaning (ha!) way that middle-aged and elderly women do. Well, wasn't that just what the doctor ordered. Luckily for everyone, I don't have the emotional resolve at the moment to starve myself again.

This does not mean I'm not holding a very big grudge, though.

I'm having a slightly blue Sunday, and I think it has to do with having too few hugs.

This is not to say I'm looking to be back closer to my family or get a new significant other, or physical hugs at all. I'm not about to go hug random people on the street to fill the void. It's about that feeling you get in a hug -- a basic, straightforward compatibility -- that I haven't found here yet.

Possible triggers include trading "Happy Thanksgiving" with the Canadian ex-pats here, going to a well-attended birthday party for a new-ish friend (I can't remember the last time I had anywhere close to 20 people attend my birthday), and persistent lower back pain (the grandma excuse). Has anyone ever considered that the correlation between osteo-arthritic pain and the senior citizen's need to be in constant contact with relatives isn't just a product of old age?

Great, I'm getting an end-of-life crisis at 21. And before anyone says that it's ridiculous that a 21-year-old in a class with an average age of about 24 is feeling old, there is a guy who's one month younger than me in our year. Stupid kid from Kansas with the June 1st birthday, robbing me of what little glory in the world I have!

"Falun Gong good for you! Miss? Miss?"

All Chinese New Yorkers must be Falun Gong followers, because I can't figure out else I can be stopped 4 times by them on the way back from Kmart.

It was my neighbour/classmate's birthday yesterday, and he was having a depressive moment when he didn't want to turn 25 while reading Contracts so a friend and I presented him with a cupcake and cookies at midnight. (Her idea, not mine -- I was more than willing to wait till morning!) Happy birthdays dissolved quickly into a heated debate on 1) Israel, which was educational but something I could contribute not at all to; 2) the use of critical theory in the "real" world; and 3) my own personal value system and moral relativism. People tend not to like that last one too much.

The next morning was one hour spent watching a class of 28's eyes glaze over while our Lawyering professor enthusiastically tried to teach us how to look up cases on online databases, and two hours listening to too many questions dealing with different combinations of roofers, roofs, and contracts. My room's been sweltering since they turned on central heating, so I spent the afternoon sweating and swimming; dinner with a bunch of loosely associated people was engaging, but overpriced. Conceded to roomie and went to a club with her, aforementioned friend, 3 gay guys and a lesbian; was quickly turned off the experience by one creepy guy who apparently had a thing for Asians, and bailed as they were planning to continue bar-hopping.

I don't get these club things.

It's been continually brought to my attention that no matter where I go, I'm "one of the guys". I thought I'd been on the path back towards girly-ness in the past few years, what with the gradual incorporation of skirts, heels, and separate shampoo and conditioner back into my wardrobe, but it looks like it's all been to no avail. I'm sufficiently un-girly to have already been picked out as the least femininely sympathetic among one group of friends, over all the guys.

Either I'm a die-hard feminist in my subconscious, a self-hating woman, or have an ego bigger than Russia, because I'm the only girl I know that enjoys Sex and the City and fashion mags for the ego boost they give me. I can't really imagine it any other way -- I mean, who would *want* to live a Cosmo life? -- but it might be part of the same deficiency that prevents me from accepting that ponchos are back in style. The roommate is succeeding in turning me into more of a flake, though. I am actually attending her first Jewish matchmaking dinner on Friday.

School is getting to that point where there's exactly X amount needed to keep up, the value of X is well-known, and it's becoming a job. Some things just don't change for me: I still wake up at 8 and have my oatmeal, jog, read standing up, and promise myself I'll find time to play piano. I call home sporadically, read the news when I should be studying, and drink too much coffee. It's a life. And I think it surprises me because I didn't expect to have one when I was here.

NY Times watch: Canada apparently has a competing claim on the North Pole, along with the U.S., Denmark, and Norway. The Times also likes repeating the little factoid that 80% of the Canadian population now lives in areas that permit same-sex marriage, for whatever reason.

On a completely unrelated note, anyone reading this from the West Coast needs to add 3 hours to all the post times because I can't figure out how to change this UK-based comment service.

My university is suing Donald Rumsfeld. Really!

Here's a heads-up on how the issue of gays in the American military has finally decided to rain down upon yours truly. The story goes like this (in a short paraphrase of what I heard while packing up after Civil Procedure): long ago, say in 1978, a humble school called NYU decided to bar any outside employers or agencies that discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation from using any campus career offices or buildings. A little over a decade later, the US government introduced the Solomon Amendment, which withdrew Department of Defence funding from any university faculty that dared to say no to military recruiters.

Sidebar: the US is also one of the few remaining countries in the world that refuses to ratify an international agreement banning military recruitment of youth under 18 -- just in case you though this was just about university students trying to pay for tuition.

A couple of mutations later, and now the Solomon Amendment (under Monsieur Rumsfeld) is written such that any school refusing to admit military recruiters loses all federal funding to the entire university, including moola from education, science, and other worthy areas. All for sticking to a university's own anti-discrimination policy, which, call me simple susan, sounds like a spiffy thing.

So maddening, so outrageous, and SO the reason I decided to come here.

I really should just rename this blog "roomie-watch", because I think it's more telling of the amount of content that goes into roomie-watching.

Her latest project -- remember the Jewish matchmaking -- took a little diversion this weekend, when she decided to focus in on a particular Jewish problem in the short term: curly hair. This having never been a particular problem of mine, imagine the surprise when I find I've been co-opted into a girls-night-out this Friday. I hear hints of "makeup" and "Macy's". I'm thinking I need to make more guy friends, and fast.

We did spend an hour singing Disney songs after I finished my work for the day, though. That was nice -- I don't think I've done that since I was 10.

I can't go to bed like I was planning to right now since Marisa's messaging me from Dubai, so I thought I'd multitask instead.

How ironic that after walking 15 minutes to Chinatown and checking out the 2 most popular Chinese restaurants in Manhattan that we end up at the exact same restaurant my parents picked out simply because it shared a name with a restaurant they had considerable "contacts" with back in Vancouver. International Shoe v. State of Washington. (That's my first law school joke, for those who don't get it.) I had this craving for recognizable Chinese food that was more Chinese than noodles and boiled chicken, so I suppose garlic eggplant and sui long bao fit the bill. I'm just impressed that someone actually remembered that I had mentioned the craving at all.

On the home front, roomie and I have settled our differences adequately enough to have hour-long gossip sessions that always go past my bedtime. I'm losing sleep over her newfound aspiration to be a Jewish matchmaker. There's a market here for that service, in any case.