Daffnee

It's the day before the American Thanksgiving, and my kitchen table has been overflowing with flyers from the likes of Macy's and Lord & Taylor. Things are getting quiet around here -- my profs scheduled things so that we wouldn't have class today, and lots of people have picked up and headed home for the next five days. The roomie was good enough to leave a note, which was nice:

"Bye bye! Happy Turkey Day!"

As for me, I spent six hours in the NYU student centre today doing my best to hack through the monstrosity that is civil procedure. I can only think of two other times that any school class has inspired me to make such a studious effort, namely Physics 102 (Electricity and Magnetism) and English 346 (Milton & the 17th Century). The major difference is that back then, I knew I was doing horribly. Now, it's just despair.

Wait a minute -- I think I forgot to take my meds today. I knew there was a reason for it!

Pep talk time -- six hours of class today! Go team!

*sigh*

I've made up my mind to "get down to it" from now on, seeing as Thanksgiving is closing in and December 10, 15, and 20 are starting to look awfully close on the calendar. After cycling through denial, great egoism, passivity and mild concern, my friends and classmates have done a great job hitting home how absolutely unprepared I am to be examined on these subjects. It's a little scary.

Still waiting for the Center for Human Rights to get back to me on that internship. It's the only unknown condition: if I get it, I'm Geneva-bound and will lose money next summer; if I don't, then I'm Vancouver-bound and get to convert my American stipend into Canadian monetary fun.

I'm drinking Pepsi at 10 AM and feeling rather crummy about myself for my intellectual train wreck during my internship interview this morning. (Sidebar: I found out that I was interviewing for an internship with the World Health Organization last Thursday). This only goes to show that the Daphne who was once a 7 AM, chipper morning person has devolved -- with no insult intended to those who were never morning people -- into a gravelly-voiced, intellectually incoherent and poor figure of a law student. At this rate, I'll be a full-fledged corporate whore and without a social conscience or recognizable brain by the time I graduate in 2007.

My world is ending, and it's only Monday.

It's great to start the week off with some melodrama.

My, this is awkward. I don't have anything to do, and it seems like it's becoming a recurring thing. How else can I justify doing absolutely no work yesterday and giving up 2 hours of my life to watch Van Helsing, as attractive as Hugh Jackman is?

I feel a little odd because I'm not energetically organizing study groups, worrying about outlines (which I call "glorified study notes" not to be done till the term is almost over), hung up about the job search (going to wait to see if my internship application was a bust first) or very keen on reading ahead. I'd rustle people up to watch West Wing and Law & Order with me, but I think they interpret that as some underhanded effort on my part to pull them down lower on the grading curve -- are my pills too strong? Should I be flipping out? It is November, and Remembrance Day is tomorrow. I think this is the point when we started worrying back in the day.

Perhaps worrying about not worrying can actually be construed as a good sign -- it shows things are OK. Kind of like the way we worry about our rogue politicans in the True North; the very fact that they're the "rogue" ones is somehow comforting, considering they're really not all that bad.

It's kind of a shame that everyone that's been dying to see me genuinely under the influence since I was a teenager wasn't around for this weekend, when I discovered that

1) I'm a very affectionate and affable drunk;

2) People aren't actually more attractive when impaired, but extra EQ points will give others that impression;

3) There is still such thing as a free lunch (well, drink) in this day and age; and

4) The neighbour/classmate/friend who said that he was going to introduce me to ethanol, like so many others, actually managed it. A curse on your houses, all those who tried and failed.

I'd write more to prove that I didn't spend the entire weekend intoxicated -- I attempted to play basketball and reconnected with my ethnic identity, too -- but there's an environmental advocate giving a talk downstairs in 5 minutes and I need to get there early to get free coffee.

I'm not trying to turn into those once-a-week bloggers that I generally despise, but it's been an unusually packed week. With what, you might ask? Well, there was that whole US election thing. And then that corporate counsel diversity dinner thing I got to get dressed up for. Don't forget that memo thing on money laundering due at 11 AM this morning -- ending forever my mental slip that had me associating "memo" with "Post-It note". Things are objectively still going well, but the most I remember from the week is eating crap, sitting lots, a constant caffiene headache and a conspicuous number of empty chairs in most of my classes.

I've also discovered I hate being called "Ms. Shih", mostly because nearly all the times I have heard it in my life were in Contracts class while I try to figure out 1) what the question was, 2) what page I'm supposed to be on, 3) what the little pictogram I have of a hill and bulldozer signifies, and 4) whether that pictogram was a doodle or the key to understanding everything there is to know about avoidance and losing contracts.

The Socratic system is what happens when really smart people get together and devise a way to use peer pressure to get back at everyone that ever made them feel awkward in junior high.

Incidentally, I'm currently taking submissions to be included in "Why the UN Should Like Daphne" essay for the dedicated UN legal internships offered by the school over the next summer. Does anyone have any thoughts on why I'm the World Health Organization's candidate of the century?