I have finished the bar exam, for what I hope will be the only time. I won't know if I passed until October. October when? Sometime in the middle. I don't know. I seem to have lost every piece of paper I ever got from the WSBA. But I will repeat, isolated and in all caps, because I am likely to get surly if anyone I know forgets:

I WILL NOT KNOW BAR PASSAGE RESULTS UNTIL MID-OCTOBER.

(I looked it up. They mail results Friday, October 10, you fail to receive them Saturday the 11th, and then the results are public on the WSBA website Monday, October 13. Because lawyers enjoy yanking one another's chains.)

Why the surliness? Every bar-taker I know has found it fucking ENRAGING when people don't remember when it is or that it's 3 days or that your whole livelihood depends on it. My parents remembered it was Tuesday, but thought it was just one day, and thus left me, like, 9 messages (OK, 6) in the past two days, including three left DURING yesterday's exam. Sigh. They're old. I know. It still pissed me off.

But that's not what I really wanted to write about. I wanted to write about "Fake Plastic Trees," the Radiohead song. Remember how when you were a teenager, you'd hear some song and think "Yeah, those lyrics speak my world, man! It's so true!!"??

I don't have that with "Fake Plastic Trees." But it is the latest instance of my getting a song in my head, one that I own and have heard, but have only a tangential awareness of, never particularly liked, and haven't actually heard in months, that I suddenly need to hear 8500 times. Usually I'll wake up with the song in my head. Usually there's some lyric that I didn't even know before that's weirdly apposite. Is this my unconscious hitting me over the head, or an exercise in fortune cookie relevance?

Examples:

• Winter quarter, 2008. I have two federal court briefs due during the last three weeks of the quarter. I have more work than I can do, I feel like a failure, and I'm exhausted. In my head: Radiohead's "Don't Leave Me High." Lyrical themes: Reach exceeding one's grasp, damage, irrevocable loss of self. (You'd kill yourself for recognition / kill yourself to never ever stop / You broke another mirror / you're turning into something you are not.)
• Late spring quarter, 2008. I wake up at 2:00 a.m. to work on a brief for work. My one final is in 4 days, but I literally have not opened the book for that class and only attended half the lectures. I don't yet have a post-graduation job. In my head: "Drowning," by the English Beat. Lyrical themes: apparent success followed by dismal failure likely driven by arrogance. (So in between the sleepless nights / You dream that you are winning fights / But then it happens, dreadful thing / A wave appears too big to swim / You're drowning, you're drowning.)
• June 2008, I awake on the second day of writing my last paper of law school with Emmylou Harris's "The Light" in my head. I see the light. I see the light at the end of the tunnel....
• July 2008: I have to spend 3 days at Meydenbauer Center in downtown Bellevue taking the bar exam. On the night of the second day, "Fake Plastic Trees" starts going through my head. Lyrical themes: Everything is plastic, it wears her out, and there's some vague sense that things would be either better or perhaps much worse if the singer could be who someone else wanted.

What strikes me about this is that, like most humans, I've always had an emotional response to music. But it used to be that I would hear something and think "Yes, that's how I feel." Now some part of my brain sorts through B-sides while I sleep and sends some kind of singing telegram to my waking life.

Never have your landlord store your shit in a shed. Something bad will happen.

OK, I knew when Ms. S helped me build my ginormous parking strip garden last year it would be awesome, and it is indeed awesome.

Behold:



Most of that stuff is edible, except the poppies and the lilies. I'm now totally in love with mustards, which you can eat young as salad greens in the summer, old as cooked greens in the winter. I'm actually a little concerned that I have too much of a brassica monoculture going on and I'm going to breed up some horrible disease.

Yes, that tripod is made from that damn aerial antenna that appeared in my yard the other month.

My neighbors are getting into the act now, with a long-term plan of ripping out the parking strip grass and replacing it with raised beds filled with vegetables, separated by gravel paths lined with pots filled with more vegetables:


I think they should do it right now. As I am, with my front lawn:



Cinderblocks, people. They're versatile, and you can usually get them free.

Also, my crazy ass fancy irises are starting to bloom:



As are the roses:



If it's not edible, fragrant, or extremely beautiful, I don't want to grow it. I'm considering a stand of raspberries for the front yard.

I just realized I'm looking forward to bar prep. During bar prep, I will be expected to accomplish only one thing: bar prep. Somehow in my mind, the sheer lack of juggling will make the whole experience orderly and restful.

When I got home this evening, all that was left was the central Festivus-pole-like component.

Again, what the fuck?

Yesterday I spent three hours shoveling the remaining compost from last year's big 5-cubic-yard order off of the driveway and into the raised bed. Then I moved the tarps, moved the 20-odd extra cinderblocks that I somehow ended up with, moved all the scrap brick, and swept the driveway.

Today I got home to find this:



What the fuck? Super. Now I have to dispose of someone's old aerial antenna?

I'm thinking of sticking it in the middle of the raised bed and using it as a trellis. Seriously thinking. Beginning to covet...

A few blocks from my house, there's a place with a largeish garage out back. The garage has a carved wood placard above the door that says "Vice Lair." I always thought that was kind of cool, partly because who the fuck uses the word "vice" anymore?

Well, as I discovered today when I walked past the place in a particular kind of slanting afternoon light, it's "Vics Lair," not "Vice Lair."

Bummer.

I've had no real time to write lately, but if I did, I'd have something to say about:

• The luxury of space. At the federal courthouse, there is a ridiculous amount of space per worker. This is partly because they designed the place to accommodate growth, but still, wow.
• Reflections on my 2L year, which was mainly boring and exhausting. Also, reflections on the changes among my young classmates.
• My insane gardening projects for this year: kill all of the quackgrass in my yard (I now refer to quackgrass as "the evil." It's like something out of Alien.), use cinderblocks to create a gigantic raised bed in the parking strip (Why cinderblocks? I was able to get about 45 of them free because a friend's new house had a bunch of them in the yard, and even if I had to buy them, they're crazy cheap ($1.19 each), as compared to those fancy stackstone blocks at $3.50. I figure once some moss grows and the plants spill over the edge, they'll look OK.), maybe re-sod the backyard. (I was concerned that I'd missed my window of opportunity, but since it looks like summer won't come until July this year (if then), I can probably do it in the next few weeks.)
• My burgeoning decrepitude.

OK, time to walk the dog, do some yardwork, do some crap for law review...

Scenario: I'm reading some blog comment speculating about whether that mass shooter guy was a sociopath.

My thought: "Yeah, but if he were a sociopath, wouldn't he have been more successful in life?"

Sigh.

Snooze alarm
Time it takes to fill my bathtub
French press steeping period
Hot cereal in the microwave

All are 6 minutes. This is kind of handy.

Alarm rings, get up, start running bath, go back to bed, hit snooze alarm, get up, take bath.

Or

Water into french press, set timer, start running bath, timer sounds, press coffee, take a cup into the bath.

Or

Set cereal in microwave, put water in french press, start microwave, press coffee, eat cereal...

Yesterday I got to school and ran into my friend F. Just for some context, F worked at Microsoft for a decade and always maintains that, dysfunctional as law school culture is, things could be worse. Anyway, F asked me how I was doing and I said, "You know, I just cannot bring myself to care about finals. Last quarter I didn't care either, and it bothered me, but now I don't even give a shit about not giving a shit." And he said "Hmmm. Country music has a term for this. What is it....it's...your give-a-damn's busted. Yes, it sounds like your give-a-damn's busted."

My give-a-damn is indeed busted. Another phrase for this state is "B me and free me," which a friend of mine learned from a prof today. Before grade inflation, that was probably "C me and free me."

I'm not sure why the apathy. Part of it is that I only have two finals. Part of it is that neither a Herculean studying effort nor complete neglect is likely to change my grade in either class. Most of it is that no one's life or fortune is at stake and I just can't be bothered with any more hoop-jumping right now.

In other news, did you know there's a gym at our federal courthouse? There's a gym at our federal courthouse, and from the fact that my intership orientation includes a tour of it, I infer that I'll be allowed to use it this spring. Either that or my "clerical duties" will include laundering the sweat towels.

I think yesterday's odd moment with the student catalyzed some kind of long-awaited breakdown. (Well, that and the fact that I have a draft of my law review article due Monday, and my period started in the middle of the night with some kind of fantastic sheet-ruining gush.) For a while I've been feeling:

• Emotionally dissociated.
• Anxiety about feeling emotionally dissociated.
• Shame about feeling anxiety about feeling emotionally dissociated.
• Fear that I am going to waste the rest of my fucking life in one long, sideways, ashamed and anxious emotionally-dissocated slide.
• Because what the fuck? Almost 10 years of therapy wasn't enough? For fuck's sake, how fucked up am I?

You get the idea.
( Catch you on the flip side... )

I've decided to deal with my conundrums about the public-ness of my blogspot blog by creating this LJ blog for entries restricted to friends only. This is the only public post here. Email me if you want to be added to my friends list. Sorry for the inconvenience.