A Token, Really A Trifle

ariel: but without my voice, how can i --
ursula: you'll have your looks! your pretty face! and don't underestimate the importance of body language ...

i never thought i'd have occasion to relate to a disney princess BUT today i had a taste of what it was like to be the little mermaid. i woke up this morning with absolutely no voice ... i sounded like a 50-year-old chain-smoking, two-bit hooker all week. probably staying out till 4AM drinking schlitz (yes, it actually exists and it is disgusting) with my fellow public servants didn't help. and this morning all i could manage was a barely audible hiss.

although my patience for the pain is wearing thin and i certainly hope my antibiotic/narcotic cocktail will kick in before my heap of court hearings on monday morning, it's been kind of a fun day. i've had the opportunity to really listen to my surroundings. my improvised sign language has vastly improved, which has been a great exercise in creativity. and i have been endlessly entertained watching pity transform peoples' faces when they realize that i can't talk. everyone is super-nice and i haven't had any problems communicating. i'm not convinced that ariel had it so bad when she traded her voice for legs. but then, i do not have any princes to convince of my love.

now i'm hunkered in with my drugs and ice cream and newspaper, trying not to move my head and waiting for the snow. yippy.

Tee Hee Hee

i'd like to take a minute to thank my family for my sense of humor. i'm not sure that it's something i learned from them as much as a coping mechanism i adopted to survive the first 25 years of my life, but my family has provided the ideal conduit to perfect this defense to pretty much everything.

i know i am easily amused and have been told i laugh a lot compared to the average person, but the world is funny. some days i am in awe of just how ridiculous my life is.

my clients lie to me all the time. i know this is true, but i choose to believe otherwise and am subsequently devastated when i negotiate a great deal only to discover that it is invalid since my client was under the influence of cocaine during the court hearing. cocaine! the other attorneys in my office are generally more realistic. however, it was nice to see kennedy (who is incredibly badass, my hero) caught off guard yesterday ... she fought for a deal on this guy's aggravated DUI charge because he's now disabled, in a wheelchair, and can't physically sign his own court documents. he swore to her he couldn't even drive in his condition. since then he has racked up another charge: driving on a suspended license. kennedy was livid and i sat in my office and giggled at the barrage of comments regarding the guy's "disability on demand" and how his legs WILL be broken when kennedy gets done with him. with the inherently incomplete information i work with every day, instances such as these should not be surprising.

my office represents a lot of crazy people. i assume this is pretty closely related to the fact that a lot of them are guilty, and a lot of them are guilty because they have substance abuse problems or undiagnosed mental illnesses that prevent them from making rational decisions about their behavior. side note: sorry if you don't buy into game theory and the prisoner's dilemma, but i'm still an economist at heart and, therefore, must assume that people act rationally so that my model of the world will continue to function. anyway, one of our more colorful alleged felons (who dresses like billy idol) wrote a letter to the judge on his case to tell him that tim, his attorney, had a big butt. how do you take yourself and your life seriously when your client -- who you are representing for $0 as a service to the state and in recognition of the importance of the basic tenets of the constitution -- thinks that the most important thing that he can tell the judge in his defense is that his attorney has a fat ass.

real life IS better than anything you could make up.

The Stubborn Contest

my dad and i recently got into a pretty major argument, after which i made it clear that i was available to accept apologies any time that he decided that he wanted to speak to me ever again. (unfortunately, my parents raised me to stand up for myself, and they have been paying for it for the last 25 years.) he did apologize and when i spoke with him this weekend he informed me that he was advised by several persons close to us both that although he is certainly very stubborn, he did not want to be in this situation with me because i would win in the battle of wills.

i really think this is true. i am reminded most recently of my final semester of law school when i decided my con law professor was an ignorant, pompous jerk and i hated his guts, so i wore dark glasses to class for the final 4 weeks, including the exam, "because i couldn't stand to look at him." and so if i passed him in the hallway i could pretend i didn't see him. and i got an A in his class. it was kind of a silent battle, but i was still 100% committed and i won. jerk. i don't generally want to hold grudges and wage surreptitious wars, but sometimes my conscience fails to allow me to do otherwise. luckily, stubbornness can easily be recharacterized in more flattering terms, like dedication and perseverance, which is how i will refer to this trait in reference to myself from now on.

today i persevered through a half-marathon. even though i had only run 1 time since i moved to prescott because i am too wussy to brave the freezing dark. i registered for it when i first moved to arizona to inspire me to keep running despite the 9% humidity (no that is not a typo) ... and since i was already registered, i figured i'd just wing it. winging things is not really my style, and in fact, i cannot even think of a single example of something thing i have winged (wung???) in my entire life. but it's not like i've been spending the past 2 months laying on the couch watching soap operas and eating bon-bons -- i go to spin class! claye quickly informed me that this is not the same as running, and maybe cycling doesn't use the same muscles (how should i know? i only have an economics degree and a law license...) but the concept of self-torture transcends any differences between a bike, the road, or 7 mountains. it's really easy to keep going when that is the extent of all the choices you give yourself.

as races go, this was a fairly entertaining one. there were bands at every mile so i got to throw up a lot of metal signs, even at the group of mainly banjos and the mexican mariachis. little kids and cheerleaders were doing fun dances on the sidelines. i started out next to a guy wearing a mullet wig and an inflatable guitar around his neck. i also had my first experience with lactic acid around mile 10. i remember learning about this in high school biology ... something about anaerobic respiration and it being a really inefficient way to make ATPs. then the lactic acid builds up in your muscles and causes them to cramp up. i did not remember what this meant in the long-term or what i could do to fix it, so i decided the best course was to run through the pain, maybe a little bit faster than before. because the faster i ran, the faster i could get to the end and stop running and do any number of other things, such as gnaw off both my legs with my own teeth. i am so dedicated. apparently that was all the inspiration i needed ... i actually knocked a couple minutes off of last year's time! i spent the evening daydreaming in the bubble bath and feel significantly less gimpy. i think i will be able to wear my heels tomorrow (good thing i have 1 sensible pair) and successfully extricate myself from my car in a manner that does not involve taking a nose-dive onto the pavement and rolling to my destination. by the way that did not happen yet, although i was afraid that it might.

F*#&ing Snow Day

today was my first experience driving in winter weather. i'm talking below freezing with 6 inches of virgin white snow on the unplowed road at 7AM and steady tick-ticking sleet on the roof of my car. and while randee celebrated his 2-hour delay, there aren't any snow days @ the camp verde justice center! i must get to court because my client is innocent (just like all my clients) and needs me there to protect her constitutional rights!

this is the moment that spending 5 summers driving a monstrous dump truck in a mine came in handy -- the same techniques i used to maneuver my 25-ton truck through the swampy mud worked today while i backed my car up the steep incline that is my driveway.

at least i didn't have to scrape the windows! praise the lord for garages.

however, by the time i returned from work, the driveway had not improved to my liking -- i have to be back in court tomorrow and all that slush was going to freeze up. so i dug a shovel out of the fabulous garage. this probably sounds pretty ambitious of me, but i managed to infuse some laziness into it by not changing out of my suit. instead i pulled on some bright orange sweatpants on underneath my skirt and my best clemson sweatshirt over my blazer and topped it off with a baseball cap and mittens. then i proceeded to slip-slide my way around the driveway for an hour pushing heavy wet snow around, cursing winter weather under my breath, and only busting my ass twice. and only one of those times was a neighbor walking by! i probably should've made him take a picture of me, but i assume he's busy at home hanging garlic and crosses by all the windows to keep the crazy lady across the street from eating his children tonight.

Another Day In Paradise

today my hair parted in a different place on its own, i'm pretty sure on purpose to show me the massive # of gray hairs that i have missed. pretty soon i will be going to the hairdresser to have my white hair chopped, blued, rolled and "set" under a massive dryer. then i will have to wear one of those funny plastic rain bonnets, rotate which side of my head i sleep on, and only wash it once a week (when i go back to the hairdresser again.) repeat. next thing you know, i'll be referring to everyone as "sonny" and holding up the express lane at walmart to write a check for my denture cream.

curley boo johnson is coming to prescott. if you don't know who he is, you need to watch more futurama, in particular the episode where professor farnsworth genetically engineers a team of super-mutants to take on the harlem globetrotters after they land in central park to challenge earth's honor on the basketball court, for no apparent reason. (FYI earth loses.) anyway, curley boo was a member of the globetrotters and is possibly the greatest dribbler of all time. i'm not sure why the heck ol' curley wants to come to prescott, but i could probably learn something from him since i am the worst dribbler of all time. this pairs nicely with being the worst overall basketball player of all time despite my brief return from retirement in law school where i scored a lifetime high of 5 points in one season. (i'm a good cheerleader though! this one's for you heidi: P-U-T-I-T-I-N put it in, put it in!) i am tempted to attend, but real life people never live up to the expectations you gain from seeing them in animated science fiction sitcoms.

i have a fun afternoon planned ... playing pirate mad libs with andy, who has graciously let me camp out in his office for the week while i'm in limbo. in exchange for my taking care of his cuticles.

we pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot

we kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot

yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me.

p.s. the tape-butt war continues to ravage the office. obviously gray hair does not make you old. :)

Au Revoir 2007

i hate new year's eve -- kim and i agreed that we haven't had fun on new year's eve since the snowball fight/water-drinking contest that rang in our 1998. and here it is 2008... BUT i do appreciate the forced period of reflection of new year's day. for 2007, i vowed to say NO more often and to have more fun. this turned out to be fairly easy during the 4 months i was at home "studying for the bar" and the 3 months i spent in tempe "looking for a job."

here are my 2007 highlights:

• graduating from law school, passing the bar, getting a job with real responsibilities and health benefits, appearing in court as counsel of record, and attempting financial self-sufficiency.
  
• moving across the country by myself to a state where i knew no one and had no job in a car i borrowed from my sister. the west coast is the best coast!
  
• getting my name in print! (i received my official copies yesterday of volume 9 of the florida coastal law review that contains my thrilling article on ambiguities in the term "mental illness" in insurance policies. and my second article is due out early this year.)
• seeing queenie in her ice cream cone dress, watching andrew ki-ya in karate class, and spending lots of time with heidi and daniel discussing a more accurate term for a butter knife and whether the buttons on your duvet should go at the bottom or the top of the bed
  
• improving my 10K time by like 100 minutes (still slow, but faster) thanks to my over-achieving, slave-driving hero, RSA. also hiking uphill 22.5 miles in one day.
  
• being able to look like an adult in a suit and heels but still be hott
• discovering new best friends: howard stern, artie lange and robin quivers, heidi the hair dresser, roommates huy and randee, andy the mormon pirate (who has actually had scurvy) and kennedy the lebanese queen, hot mel in cali, and my sister's crazy-ass poop-eating dog layla.
• finally giving in to the fact that ok, yes, maybe DVDs are going to catch on
• falling in love with cactuses, kiltlifter, spinning class, bayside, and high heels.

maybe 2007 wasn't all great -- my granny boo died. my car exploded on the interstate at midnight on the 4th of july an hour from home. i haven't spoken to my dad since before thanksgiving and it appears that it will remain that way since he refuses to admit after 25 years that a relationship with his totally awesome daughters is more important than anything else in the entire world including the need to be right. i almost ripped my pinky toe off because i'm a clumsy slob. and i still get lost everytime i leave the house since i have zero sense of direction. but there will always be skull faces to celebrate the good in the bad -- you can be a pile of dead bones and funny at the same time.


in the words of tara: 2007 is dead to me.