melville

i’m at anna’s apartment. the sink drips ominously and the fridge grumbles. muted bass drips in from next door, an oppressive chorus of three beats. but everything else is still. the modernist coffee table is set crookedly in relation to the couch, but one is modernist wood and the other is soft florals so i guess that’s the idea anyway.

there is a midcentury armchair next to a mid-90’s television. a chabby chic letter-writting desk fills space. a white book case, microwave, and mini-fridge make that corner more chabby-chic than i had realized until this moment. generally, i hate white furniture. it always looks unfinished to me. or maybe so damn finished that it emits a suffocating vibe of finality. it’s as though all the white furniture in the world collectively tells you, “we were too good for paint.” it could be worse though: primary colors.

my boss asked me to skip work tomorrow to ensure that my virality (pun) is adequately diminished. i’ll be home all day, no room mate. i have a shakespeare essay to write and i imagine i’ll try to start that fairly early. get a nice big, yolky breakfast in and sit down with the riverside. or at least a passage from othello. we shall see.

lsat scores released as early as friday and no later than monday. not feeling too great about it but that’s probably a defense mechanism at play. lower the expectations, build up the anxiety. hopefully it will make for a good or decent start to a great weekend with some friends from home (read: from cal) and an enjoyable albeit early day at the rose bowl. the historic rose bowl, that no one cares about.

anna’s cutting some dragonfruit. it’s bright and layered on the outside but she tells me its black and white inside. black and white fruit. almost logically impossible. a grayscale hat for the chiquita banana girl.

discussion today momentarily centered on the fact that the recipe of coke is so highly guarded. we decided there was no need, for two reasons. one – coke is the only company that can legally import coke plants (they’re not called coke plants). two, even if someone made the same exact drink, it is highly likely that it would not “taste as good” to anyone that likes coke. marketing tastes good. and coke markets well. i said probably the best, with nintendo as a second place. i suppose apple is in the top five. and maybe chiquita bananas.

the fruit is here now, it is literally white with black spots. like poppy seeds, like coke. like cheap imitation marble. white watermelon marble, tasteless. nature’s wonders.

slow writing for a slow day in a slow week, with a slowly developing solipsism.

senior

this year is reading heavy. actually – it might not be more reading heavy. i think it’s actually that i’m giving completing about 90% of my reading an earnest effort. regardless, i’m getting lost between the super messed up world of shakespeare and the super “i don’t care about you wasps” world of edith wharton. edith wharton was  a racist, by the way. i wish i knew this during SAT training when some pseudo (or proto) feminists responded quite angrily to my declaration that the edith wharton piece in TPR’s sat manual was unfit for mass consumption because it was entirely boring. it’s hard to teach a bunch of high school boys about literature when the first example they see is about how one woman’s living conditions are so unsightly because her cook also cleans.

of course, there are the nuances.

goals for this year – exercise more than i have in the past two weeks. guide pad through times tough and boring with minimal drama for the members. my phone has already begun ringing about every 30 minutes (with some inane questions…”what is the exec email?”), which is actually fun in an interesting way. phone ringing during exec with call that must be taking…not so fun.

at some point i should take this blog back from daily updates and “i hate the lsat but kinda love it” to the exploration of some grander thoughts (or grander topics). un/fortunately, those thoughts seem to occupy one’s mind when they are feeling especially down, which i haven’t really had to face lately. i’ve fallen into mostly happy routines, but routines always make me uneasy and make me crave some form of the hurtling sensation. in my experience, the most interesting people are either those that are entirely at peace, or constantly facing some sort of evolutionary tension. i’m far too young for peace, and i’m banking on the next decade or so of my life to provide me with enough tension to retain some level of personal interest.

but maybe the most interesting people are actually the ones that are at peace in the center of continual turbulence. in that case, we all have a lot of work to do. it’s an admirable goal, but i’ve never been especially calm. i don’t believe in stressing over many things (academics, grades, clothes, hair), but sometimes i feel hyper antsy at the smallest things. i wish i could attribute that to some grand artistic tendency, but that seems like a stretch.

but then again, maybe i’m just not seeing it.

cheap

lots, lots, lots on the mind. this is a bastard move but i’m going to the pen/moleskine tonight. wanted to post that today is the day my last year of undergrad starts, though this week for me is characterized by reduced work hours and a sense of overbearing, approaching lsat finality that clouds much of everything else.

i also need to shave.

lsat

it’s either going to be great or disappointing.

10 days left. let’s make it great.

law

i’m reading One L, and it is actually far more fascinating than i imagined. though it may be a bit bloated, the description of the ever dreaded first year of law school is fear-inducingly enticing. there is something raw yet refined about the sheer amount of work and pain that appears to go into it. i feel as though i’m moving closer and closer to feeling sure about law school.

the book involves a number of scenes with professors of different varieties, and i can see the personalities in the shape of some of the professors at work that confirm this nature of the experience. it seems an awesome challenge to put yourself through – the type of challenge i’ve been latently yearning for of late. something transformative and beneficial. in the first year alone one learns the basic tenements of contracts, torts (damages), criminal, lawyering skills, and civil procedure. in short, you add on pounds of knoweledge and you learn just how much you can learn – you push yourself beyond being pushed.

the undergraduate experience is surely stressful at times but most people, i think, would agree that if we truly dedicated ourselves to an academic life for the four years, we could all do pretty well. i thought i’d need some time before i felt ready to dedicate myself to law and law school, but i think i can enjoy this year and the following summer to prepare myself for the transformative hell of being a “one l.”