paper airplanes

I started Bar/Bri last week, too. No offense to any lecturers, but damn is this boring! Useful, but I had enough trouble making it through 50-minute sessions of stuff like corporations and civi procedure. Now they expect me to learn whole semesters of this stuff in four-hour and seven-hour blocks? And, no, paying better attention the first time around wouldn't eliminate the need for Bar/Bri review. Trust me. On a happier note, a college friend who I lost touch with is enrolled in the same lecture schedule as I am; we bumped into each other after Friday's session and exchanged email addresses. Yay!

thank you for holding

I'm terribly sorry for my extended break from blogging. Batya came to visit for Shavuot (began last Tuesday night) and stayed through yesterday afternoon; before that I was cleaning and cooking and pretending to organize stuff. Ah, who am I kidding? I'm a chronic procrastinator. I'm sure there were plenty of wasted minutes and hours since my last entry during which I could have found time to post a few sentences.

Anyway, our oven broke again. For about a year, the bottom heating element didn't work. Julian and I (ok--Julian and his father) replaced the element in December, and the oven worked just wonderfully from then until last Wednesday morning. Yup, in the middle of Shavuot. And, yup, I had planned to cook more stuff in the oven for later in the holiday and for Shabbat. Looks like my tendency to make ten times more food than necessary was not such a bad thing this time around. Of course, now I am back to stovetop-only cooking plus broiling. No more brownies, no more kugel, no more roasted chicken, no more cheesecake. Maybe it's time for a full kitchen renovation after all.

musical midrash

...and while I'm linking to Jewish sites, I need to put in a plug for Shir-Yaacov's Musical Midrashim. I will be the first to say that you have to be in the right mindset to listen to these, and they're not for everyone, but I like them. Consider this my first music review.

He has a blog too, in case you're interested.

KosherBlog

It seems a fellow Brookline resident is running this site. Restaurant reviews, wine discussions, travel tips, but most importantly: "exotic" product finds! The sort of foods that the non-kosher world takes for granted--good cheese, decent balsamic vinegar, stuff like that--is fairly hard for us to find, and even harder to find at a decent price. Mr. Abbett, thank you. I look forward to bumping into you in shul one day.

goin' to the chapel

Congratulations to the hundreds of same-sex couples who will celebrate their marriages--full on marriages--today, this week, this year. I have never been so proud to be a Massachusetts resident; I spent the past 20 minutes reading the news and grinning like an idiot. It's almost enough to make me a Red Sox fan.

Also, Governor Romney: Shut up.

rain

My grandfather's unveiling was this morning. The weather in Netanya was hot, mostly sunny, slightly breezy. Just a few degrees above what I consider comfortable, enough to leave a film of sweat on my back and make me thirsty. Not too humid, though.

We started saying Tehillim (Psalms) and about two verses into the first one, I felt a drop of water hit my shoulder. I looked around: no one was washing a nearby gravestone, no one was pouring water over her head or even drinking from a bottle. *ping* A drop hit a nearby stone. My aunt whispered to me: "What--it's raining!" And indeed it was. Even Rabbi Wolicki noticed and looked up to the sky somewhat befuddled. The rain lasted only a minute, maybe less.

I guess God was a little sad that Grandma and Grandpa had to leave us. It's hard to find good people like that to do Your work here, huh?

bzzzzzzzzzzzz

I'm quite certain there were no mosquito bites anywhere on my body when I went to sleep a few hours ago. I woke up around 2 AM with some sort of buzz-detection system going on in my head. If I recall correctly, certain items in my dream needed to be "together," and when they were separated there was this droning sound. Or maybe it was the reverse. Whatever it was, it seemed perfectly logical at the time. After about ten minutes of this semi-conscious confusion, I realized the droning was--surprise, surprise--an insect of some variety. Another few minutes...hey, my arm itches! Lights on: agh! big, ugly, swollen mosquito bites.

For those of you who don't know this, I do not react well to mosquito bites. I am incredibly thankful to Ms. Mosquito for attacking my left arm way up near the elbow, and reserving the hand- and wrist-bites for my right side. Had she bitten my left hand, I'm pretty sure we'd be cutting up my wedding ring in the morning.

Anyway, I read for about half an hour, half-noticing a faint buzzing in the room but figuring maybe Ms. Mosquito would take the hint that she's not welcome and buzz off (sorry). Close book. Turn off the light. Snuggle down into pillow. Doze slightly.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Lights on. I stare alternately at the ceiling, the corner near the window, and the space between my pillow and the wall, waiting for the buzzing to come back. Ten minutes go by. Turn off the light. Snuggle. Doze.

Bzzzzzzzzz. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I think I understand water torture now. As if I weren't already sleep deprived. It's going to be a long, long day.

here

In Israel. All in one piece. Admit it, you worried about me just a little.

There will be lots to post when I get back home, I'm sure, but expect the blog to be kind of quiet for the next 10 days or so.

coming and going

In case you're playing along at home, my bar application is finally ready to be mailed. Unfortunately, Julian is going to have to mail it for me, because...

I'm leaving for Israel tomorrow--er, today. Train to NYC at 11 AM, flight from JFK at 11:30 PM. I'll try to update this blog when I get there (Monday afternoon Eastern Daylight Time, Monday evening local time) but no promises. Back to New York on Sunday the 16th, graduation on the 18th and 19th, then (finally) back home on the night of the 19th.

It's not as much fun as it sounds like. For starters, I'm leaving Julian in Boston. I love you and I miss you already (even though you're just in bed in the other room).

/mush

Stupid FDA

We're going to ignore how much hell they put my father through at work. Today I read this. It's just such a brilliant idea to deny OTC status for Plan B. Of course making emergency contraception readily available to scared and embarrassed teenagers is just going to make them have more sex, right? We'd best pull the condoms from the shelves and make abortions even harder to get while we're at it. Gotta make sure those silly little girls mess up their lives damn good in case they're stupid enough to have sex, especially if, I don't know, they were raped or something.

(Really, if you couldn't detect the sarcasm in that last paragraph, you should probably stop reading my blog. Do I even know you?)

Look, I'm all in favor of "delayed" sexual activity; it's not a bad idea to wait until you're 16 or 18 before you start having sexual intercourse. I promise your penis won't rot off, or your vagina won't shrivel up and wither away to nothing. I'm also not a huge fan of abortion, but you will never catch me denying a woman her right to choose what happens to her body. This, though? Not abortion. Not even close. Halachicly speaking (that is, according to Jewish law), the product of conception is "like water" until 40 days gestation. Whether you count from fertilization or from last menstrual period, I'm pretty sure that Plan B falls squarely in the 40-day time frame. Setting aside my religious beliefs, though (becuase I'm not one to impose my beliefs on others, or to be particularly thrilled when others try to do that to me), I'd like to point out that Plan B affects ovulation and implantation. Once a zygote has implanted, it doesn't work anymore. If you have a problem with that, I hope you don't use any sort of hormonal birth control or an IUD. (Also, if you have a problem with that, email me. I honestly want to know why.) But the way in which Pan B works is why it's so damn important to make this treatment available to women who need it as quickly and conveniently as possible. The sooner you take it, the more likely it it to be effective. I promise you, with all the fun nausea and vomiting and possibly heavy bleeding that comes with Plan B, people are not going to be using this as their regular form of contraception.

OK, end rant.

bless you

To the nice woman on the Green Line B this afternoon who handed me a wad of tissues on her way out to the Park Street station, sympathizing with my allergies: thank you. I needed those.

nibbles

What do you know? I start sending my resume out, I get a few bites. Nothing full-time (yet). Hell, no actual offers (yet). Still, it's kind of encouraging. This doesn't mean I'm "done," though. Those of you who have been peeking at my resume: don't stop peeking. Don't stop showing it to your friends, and your friends' friends. If it's in the Boston area, and it involves the law, I'll consider it for at least a moment.

Of course, now I'm having life regret. Aside from the bit where I wish I'd gone to Drisha for a year between college and law school, and the bit where I wish I'd just gone to B.U. Law in the first place, I'm now wishing I'd taken some of these part-time, real-work type jobs while in school. Don't get me wrong, I love the warm-and-fuzzy pro bono (and quasi-pro bono) work I was doing all through school and last summer. Still, I never really found jobs where I did stuff. My research and writing skills are great, but court experience? Bleh.

Twenty-four years old, and I have "life regret." What the hell?

Don't you want me, baby?

When I started at Columbia Law School, I was thoroughly impressed with their employment rates: something like 95% of students secured employment by graduation, and 99% by six months thereafter. Woo! I'll get me a job with my eyes closed, with numbers like that.

Well, yeah, that didn't work so well. For starters, the big corporate law firm life just isn't for me. Don't get me wrong; I like a six-figure salary right out of the gate as much as the next person, but the life (or lack thereof) that goes with it is not attractive to me. Not to mention that whole selling your soul bit. I couldn't even if I wanted too, since my college buddy Satan stole it sometime in the middle of my sophomore year. Oddly enough, that's about when I met Julian. Go figure.

Anyway, my dream job involves helping women in some form or another--most likely as an advocate for domestic violence victims, but I'm pretty open on that. I would also be thrilled providing legal services for underprivileged members of the Jewish community. Ah, who am I kidding? I have a soft spot for pretty much anyone with a good story. But, truthfully, I am passionate about women and Judaism, and I went to law school with the dream of fixing the agunot problem, so finding work in DV advocacy would be a great place to start.

I've done more networking in the past few months than I care to think about. I have no intention of slowing down, but I figure it can't hurt for me to show y'all my resume and see if you can toss any leads my way. [As of March 23, 2005, I have removed the link to my resume. -s] Yes, I realize my name, address, and phone number are there. You could get the same information with the URL of this site and about 30 seconds with a phone book. I'll just take the loons as they come.

meet me at the bar

Here I am filling out my application for admission to the Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (also know as The Place With Too Many Damn Syllables, and soon to be the home of legal gay marriage). I'm glad I have all my old resumes knocking around on various hard drives, because damned if they don't want records of everywhere I've worked since I turned 18. That's eleven entries, in case you're playing along at home. It's too bad the resumes don't have full mailing addresses, because looking them up was harder than you'd think. I realize the safety concerns the drive many Jewish organizations to list only P.O. Boxes on their websites, but trust me when I say it doesn't make my life any easier. It was nothing a good memory and some reverse lookups on WhitePages.com couldn't fix though. I'm also sweating getting my two character references back from my recommenders in time. I'd like to file this thing before I leave for Israel this weekend, so that Julian isn't stuck putting together the last little bits and waiting at the post office on my behalf. After all this, I'm thinking the exam itself will be a piece of cake. Not carrot cake, though.

I've been told I have it easy, though. Apparently the New York application calls for a witnessed handwriting sample, a list of everywhere you have lived in the past some number of years, and three vials of blood. I'm kidding about the blood. I think.

blood for oil

Rabbi Josh Cypess's treatment of the murders in Gaza last weekend is quite insightful as well. It's the May 3 entry, in case you're reading this some time in the distant future.

all good things

That was fun. Then I came home and got updated on the news. Too angry to write anything on either topic right now, but for a treatment of today's Israel events, I suggest today's entry in The Land of Oz.