update from the front

GAAAHHHH!!!


(that's the sound of amanda drowning under the weight of legal pads, multiple colors of highlighter, all of the losers in the "find the perfect ball-point pen" competition, the approxmately 30 pounds of bar review books and the mailings from swindlers advertising consolidation...oh, and the billions of inches of rain that have fallen on the mid-atlantic in the last 3 days)

i'll be back later, after July 26. Well, after July 28 since I'm planning on being asleep/intoxicated/incoherent/antisocial for two days after the bar exam.

just another conversation with my mother

M: Here’s a picture of a squirrel, immortalized in front of Half Dome.
A: You realize it’s likely been dead for quite a long time, since that was on your honeymoon.
M: Well, its great-great-grandchildren would be glad to know we had the picture.

If you have never seen my family's collection of photographs, you will not understand why my Christmas present request was to spend two weeks with my mom in the evenings sorting and chronologizing the family history. That's right...TWO WEEKS. Now, my mom is tasked with putting the orgainzed photos (we put them in order, separated them by year into ziploc bags, labeled the bags and stacked them on the bookcase that used to hold the mismatched, falling-apart albums) into the newly-purchased, matching bought-at-Costco albums. I'm on the phone with her right now and she's giving quite amusing, if nonlinear, commentary.

Anyway, about the current mental state of descendents of accidentally immortalized squirrels...my mother and father and brother (and, yes, I) took pictures of just about everything. My mom wanted to make sure that everyone who had any contact with our family was represented in the pictorial history of the Allens. My father wanted to make sure that all the cool places and things we did were chronicled. My brother got distracted and took pictures of shadows and treetops. I liked capturing people doing things. Thing is, we're all ADD and there's not even a semblance of order or organization. Well, now there's a semblance.

yeah, I'm still alive

To my loyal followers on the Mainland: I do still exist.

There is both too much and too little to warrant a blog update. Suffice it to say that I am reaching the end of my law school, and general academic, career and am preparing to move back to Maryland.

Of course, there's more to all of it than that paltry one line. But, I like to write about current events (of international or personal interest) and humorous interludes, not the chaos of winding things up. I'll eventually get back to keeping track of news and opinion and something will inspire me to rant...

friends are great, they give you chocolate cake...

and parties and lei and movies and gift cards and bracelets.

comments and parking stalls

For any of you out there who read, and subsequently got annoyed by, comments on my blog in the last month, be relieved: i have fixed the rampant window-opening. I would have fixed it earlier, but I wasn't online a whole lot over my month-long break back on the Mainland.

That announced, I report from the front that Amanda has returned to Oahu (it's amazing how I could have lived on this island for roughly two and a half years and still not be able to think of "Oahu" for "geographical location" in Scattergories because there was obnoxious music coming out of Adrienne's Bose-mounted iPod, the backbeat of which music was out of sync with the ticking of the timer). I begin classes tomorrow afternoon after what I predict will be a morning of biting my tongue in the face of idiotic beauracracy. I will have to pick up my parking permit which will require having gotten my student ID validated for spring semester which will require that I stand in line with hordes of vapid undergraduates which will require that I get to campus early (but not so early that the damned ID office isn't open yet) which may in fact require carpooling to campus with the roommie because I don't have my parking permit yet. Then will buy books. Then will read in one of said books before first class of the semester. Then the planning, the doing, the prepping, and so on, etc, ad nauseam.

Oh, but at least when I got back here I was able to sort out the parking stall issue in my apartment building. See, the woman from whom I'd been renting a stall, as her tenants did not have a car and who had assured me that there would be no need for her to take the stall back before my departure from the islands in May, changed tenants and called me in MD to tell me I had to vacate the stall. Ha, I still had ten days before being in HI and no spare key for my roommie to use to move Apollo. Long and the short of it, though, I will have on Saturday a spot seven spaces up from my previous spot and at $15 less per month than I had been paying.

i still hate dentists...

but now it's 'cause they're hurting me even when I'm at home. Well, "hurt" is probably a bit much. "Causing discomfort" is more like it. What is going on? I am wearing a "transparent space maintainer." I have a retainer. And it is in for the first time right now. It's tight and rubbing against part of my gum and feels funny on my tongue and it's making me afraid to keep my teeth closed normally 'cause I don't want to mess this $40 thing up. It's there to make sure the tooth behind the gaping hole where the oral surgeon ripped the busted one out from doesn't start to tip forward like the Leaning Tower between now and when I get the crown in March. I'm going to be wearing this thing at night for roughly two and a half months, and I'm not particularly happy about that right now. See, I had no orthodontia as an adolescent or young adult. I never had those metal retainers or any braces or headgear. This is strange and feels funny. So there's my (not so surprising) update on how I feel about dentists.

On other, happier, notes: I am finished with 5/6 of my law school career. The only obstacles I have between me and a diploma are two clinics, three classes and the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (to be taken in March). Then there's that granddaddy obstacle of them all, the bar exam. In the shortterm, I know that I'd rather spend next summer watching 64 football matches (um, World Cup). In the longterm, though, I really would like to be licensed (and get to use "Esq." on business cards and signature lines). All of this seems to be approaching quite rapidly...hope I don't take my eyes off the road at the wrong moment and miss my exit.

I head back to DC late tomorrow night/quite early Friday morning east coast time and arrive Friday afternoon. I will go with my dad to pick up a Christmas tree, go home and decorate it, then make sure the house is in order for the ~80 people coming to the annual Allen Holiday Party, enjoy the party on Saturday, sleep late Sunday, go to Adrienne and Mike's for their holdiay party on Sunday, then sleep, then shop, then open presents, then sleep, then start working on the bar application (you have like a gazillion page application you have to fill out to get to take the bar exam), then sleep. Mmmmmm...sleep....

sexism in the classroom?

My Professional Responsibility class got a bit heated today, and I don't know that anyone was entirely wrong or entirely right. We got into a discussion that I've found myself in several times in the past few weeks, both with fellow law students and with other friends of mine out in the wide world. The topic? Sacrificing family in order to have a successful career. Most of the discussion in class centered around the concerns women have as we enter into what is percieved as a non-family-friendly profession. But there were also valid points raised by and about men and the choices they have to make regarding personal relationships and involvement with their families.

I won't claim that only women should be participants in the dialogue about work vs. family. But, I do have to say that women and men face different questions in that conversation. There is something unique about the status of women as childbearers and not just possible childrearers. I want to have children. My eventual husband will want a family, as well, but he won't have to take a break from work to have the children and then recover. That doesn't make me better or worse or more or less sympathetic, but it does make me different from male lawyers. I feel for men who are about to launch themselves into lawyer-land but who will want to be active participants in their marriages and nuclear families, but for the most part, men have fewer either-or choices to make than professional women.

It is entirely possible to have a very successful career as a professional woman and to raise children well, my mother is my prime example, but it still irks me that after all this time a woman still has to wory whether she will be forced to sacrifice one aspect of life and end up feeling as if she's missed out on something she wanted, or feeling dissatisfied, or feeling resentful.

This post, obviously, is nothing close to a full treatment of all the issues concerning families and careers, but it's what I've got right now.

And, as Kelli says, "every time I look at these course evaluation forms I get mad because 'male' is the number 1 circle and 'female' is number 2. Fuckers."