Daffnee

I am an eating, sleeping, movie-watching machine. Coming home to Vancouver after a semester in New York is like having an instant lobotomy -- everything is suddenly very placid, quiet, and orientated on food. (I snack so often I've kind of stopped having regular meals. Ah well.) It was also supposed to be something of a detox program for myself, but my Dad and I have been going through the wine collection so that hasn't worked so well. I have been sleeping almost 9 hours a night, though, which is doing terrible things to my skin (no clue why) and kind of cramping my breakfast routine.

Christmas was dominated by my aunt's psychotic gift purchases, cooking, and furtive backroom dealing among the nuclear family as to what we could return, re-gift, or relocate (to New York, of course). Does anyone out there have a particular kind of chocolate that they love? We have an enormous stash downstairs that's either heading to JFK with me, or will be left downstairs to grey with time. Speak now, or forever refrain from saying I don't try to spread the wealth as best I can!

As for being back home...family car rides in the beige Camry is probably the closest I'll ever get to returning to the womb. As a triplet. (No kidding -- I got off the plane at YVR and discovered that 1) my sister has turned into my duplicate, sporting the same grow-out shag of hair, addiction to comfortable pants and similar Nicole Miller glasses, and 2) my brother, already my nerdy intra-family doppelganger, is now approaching my height as well. Ack.)

No good things to say on the PS2 review front yet: Final Fantasy X-2 has horrid music and offends my feminist sensibilities, and Return of the King seems like an extended ad for the film. I have higher hopes for LoTR: The Third Age and whatever else my brother has acquired since September, but I have been a bit disappointed so far.

On a final note, I love The Incredibles. Mancini/Bond-like score and Pixar. Mmm.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

So I kind of forgot how much time is spent commuting in North American suburbia. All of a sudden I realise I probably shouldn't have spent as much time griping about sitting 16 hours a day while prepping for exams, because that's pretty much the relationship suburbanites have with their cars, isn't it?

I got back at 2 AM on Wednesday morning, and found the silence at night here absolutely deafening -- it's a big, freezing house, and without a drop of sound. I never felt so self-conscious while just brushing my teeth.

Aside from that, being home is like putting my brain on cruise control; there's so little thought required to just being here. We banter, we grocery shop (that much hasn't changed) and I refrain from breaking into hysterical laughter when my mother tells me not to drink at cocktail parties. Some things are better left unsaid, especially by the oldest daughter that's drawing heavily on two decades' worth of accumulated parental goodwill.

I just killed a bug on my mum's desk. I think that's my first insect homicide in three months.

It's snowing in New York City. The white stuff here is dry, almost like sand -- nothing like the wet splashy stuff back home. Kind of like a dusting of powdered sugar on the doughnut (cupcake? Timbit? no, not timbit) that is my first semester at law school.

I managed to not get pictures -- again -- of the legal peoples during this first exam time, immortalised in such classics as One L and The Paper Chase. I really wanted a shot from my usual place, at the head of the table; I like commandeering the end, for some reason. A nice, long shot of the kids on either side, laptops and papers and casebooks and pop cans strewn across a conference table. Crumpled paper bags (from my coffeeshop cookie) and I (Heart) NY plastic bags from the takeout that feeds us -- that picture would have made us look so much hardcore than we are.

Statistics are deceiving, too. If I were to calculate the number of hours I've parked myself in a chair under the pretense of doing "work", it'd boggle minds -- but I can't even say it felt like work. It's just copying, transcribing from notes to notes while MS Word fixes up the hundreth "reasonableness" I've managed to mess up. And yet this, too, is learning.

Look at me ramble -- it's kind of past my bedtime. This never used to happen, guys.

Every year around this time I have to tell myself it's not a contest -- it's not the number of hours clocked in the study chair, it's learning and all that good jazz. I know it's not a macho contest. After all, I can drink coffee and caffiene with the best of them. Still, every year I feel like I just don't have the staying power that all these other kids have.

Is it burnout? If so, it's never happened before, but how else to explain why I come home earlier and earlier each night? I mean, come on -- it's not that hard. It's not that nuts. It's just overdrawing my resources, that's all.

My flight leaves on 10 PM on Tuesday, and I can't jolly wait to stock up on the hugs I've been sorely missing. Thank god New York hasn't been oppressively lonely, because there's a great library just around the corner that seems to be the place for depressed kids to fling themselves off of. It's been good. I guess it still is, except for this weird and distracting throbbing in my right temple that's been bugging me all day.

Maybe it's just the feeling that there's so much that I could be doing besides sitting in a chair learning about products liability and intentional torts. I was joking today -- in the context of LoTR, of course -- that if I had dedicated all the hours of education I've accumulated over the past two decades into archery or swordfighting, I'd be pretty pretty handy with sharp metal even given my unsoldierly physique and lack of hand-eye coordination. Or imagine all the trees I could have planted. Or whales I could have saved.

They're not kidding when they say a good night's sleep is priceless.

There's no time to catch up on the blog like the night before one's first law school exam, is there? Lordy, I'm looking at the schedule they gave us during orientation in mid-August -- nicely coded with highlighter, of course -- and the colours look sadly faded. The Civil Procedure green faded from lime to seafoam; the Lawyering yellow from zesty lemon to watery chamomile. The Torts pink is still the same, though -- which makes me wonder what they put into that 40th anniversary Hi-Liter.

Yes, I'm rambling. It's nerves. I don't think I've ever slept so badly, or knew that muscles could get bunched so tight (around the neck area, mostly) from studying in a seminar room. This feels like first year -- when I woke up at 5 A.M. the morning of my first term physics final because I was so stressed I set my alarm wrong, or in second term when Marisa and I camped out in Hennings for 3 days straight and endeared ourselves forever to Halpern. Only this time it's going to last for more than 3 days, even though I don't objectively think the material is that much harder; at times it really does just seem like stressing out is the thing to do.

Darn, I'm such a follower!

Broke from the crowd tonight, though. Refused to give into the last-minute cram bug, came home, did laundry and cleaned house. (Sure sign that this girl's jittery, btw.) I can't believe it's December. I can't believe I'm in New York. I can't believe the next time I go home after Christmas will probably be the Christmas after that. How did I get here?

This is not to say I don't love this, though. I really do. It's just ... scary sometimes. And though I'm getting lots of goodwill by giving neck massages for the study buddies, you just can't give neck massages to yourself.

I'm going to Switzerland this summer! After toying with me for almost a week, the Center for Human Rights and Justice finally got back to me -- I'm one of the new NYU fellows to the World Health Organization this summer.

I guess I can scratch "work for the UN" off my "things to do before I die" list by next August. Joy.

It's Tuesday night, I've just finished half a tub of peppermint cookie dough ice cream, and I'm now upstairs with three compatriots in law trying to get meaningful work done. I can't believe the stress level of some of these people at law school -- and if these are supposedly the "happiest" law students in the country, I should be counting my blessings.

I was doing great at maintaining my image as the Westcoast coaster for such a long time, too, before I had a spectacular breakdown over Saturday and Sunday. Having taken Thanksgiving completely off -- meaning lots of turkey, and generally not getting to bed until 4 AM -- and seeing people studying in the lobby at 2 AM in the morning, I think I was starting to get guilt-tripped into not freaking out more.

Do I know anything? On quick reflection, yes. Do I know enough? In all honesty, who knows. That's the beauty of the grading curve; it doesn't really matter how much you know, as long as you know more than everyone else. Funny that they should use that system in a school that prides itself for camraderie.

What works? What doesn't? I went to a talk by the first Asian-American tenured professor at this school, and I have to say that this superkid from Harvard really managed to freak a few people out. As far as I can gather -- and I was admittedly distracted by the mushrooms on my pizza -- he spent most nights in the library, reading and coming up with every conceivable argument for every topic broached in class. I like to think I'm more of a seat-of-the-pants, on-the-fly kind of kid. Depending on the end result, that makes me either a skywalker (not the Star Wars kind, the law school kind) or a slacker.

More cheerfully -- snaps for Lindsay, who won a whopping 3% for the Greens in her southern Alberta riding in the recent election! Now that's keeping perspective. I've also taken to introducing people to the Hobbit Name Generator that brought me so much joy in my days of math and physics.

I'm saving the Quenya translator for my darkest hour in the days ahead.