Previously Unpublished

Went off espresso this past week. Well, I had a single shot in a demitasse Friday morning, but it was solely for taste and nothing more. Other than that I have not had any espresso since last Friday.

Why is this significant? Well, since I haven’t been blogging that much, the online community is oblivious to my coffee consumption since starting work at a firm with an espresso machine. A good espresso machine. No copper tubing, but I doubt it was cheap. And it makes an amazing crema. Plus the machine will make double shots on command. I normally have six shots per day: two doubles in the morning and one in the afternoon. However, sometimes I’ll have more than that.

The problem? Well obviously it isn’t good for you to overindulge in anything. I was abusing the espresso. I purposely would pack it on if I started to feel the caffeine in order to get sort of a euphoric caffeine high, especially if I had to stay late working on something. I mean I like the taste, especially the almost bitter quality, which I’ve written about before, but mostly it just became a habit. The corollary (I picked this word specifically), is that for the past three to four months, I’ve felt sort of intermittent dull pain or pressure in my chest. Not all the time or I’d see a doctor, but it was starting to get noticeable enough that I couldn’t always write it off to stress of a new profession, the legal profession or indigestion.

Then, after much debate in the office regarding the benefits and detriments of espresso (Some doctors advocate coffee, like red wine, in moderation. However, it is a non-filtered coffee), I decided to just stop. Shockingly, I didn’t have any noticeable caffeine withdrawal other than having to go to bed earlier. Plus all week, I’ve felt great. Like I could go running. I almost think I work faster too (I had this theory a couple times during law school that drinking coffee accelerated my already overactive mind, distracting me from within with thoughts). So no more espresso other than the token shot.

I wonder the impact this will have on the office supply (I work in a fairly small office, so it would be like the second largest oil consumer in the world, suddenly no longer needing oil). The only real drawback is losing the camaraderie that drinking the espresso brought. It was sort of a shared interest I had with my bosses.

To make up for the loss of the habit, I tried tea. However, I’ll have to come up with a simple and less involved brewing method. The espresso was so simple and tea requires getting water, heating it, letting the tea steep, disposing of the bag, cleaning up drops from pulling the bag out. I imagine some sort of desktop single serve brewer, but so far, have not found one.

Time to get a shot….smoothie and then work.

-jd

Hello again. Thought I’d write in the old blog this year. Not too much to say since law school ended. That was sort of the common theme around here. There was a lot of periphery stuff, but grinding it out for the JD was the main point.

I’m not sure what to do with this old thing. I have a number of ideas for new writing projects, mainly revolving around mundane little projects as I move forward through life. Well, not boring to me, but probably to most readers. For instance, yesterday we went to a local yogurt haute called Yogurt World because it was supposed to be the cat’s meow; it was. At Yogurt World, you serve yourself as much frozen yogurt in as many flavors as you like and deck it out with toppings. You then pay by the ounce. Mine was such a hodge-podge of goodness that I could only call it a “trash can.” Hence the name of this post.

Once in a lifetime, huh? Well, it was cool to me and is probably the best frozen yogurt joint in town. Of course being that I moved to a new town after law school, pretty much everything is the “best.” For instance, I have also located the best margarita for happy hours, the best Irish bar, the best mojita bar and the tastiest caipirinha place.

I had an idea to turn this into a one stop shop for self-publishing as sort of a side-business, but there are a number of places online that seem to do what I had envisioned doing and also this domain name is apparently already purchased as a stand alone “.com.” But don’t you worry. I imagine I’ll come up with something to post since my girlfriend will not be able to put up with my meandering orations forever.

-jd

Good thing my girlfriend didn’t have to return the engraved watch she got me that had today’s date on it!

-esq.

Two events unceremoniously passed this week with hardly a mention…until now! First, November 2, 2007, was the 2 year anniversary of this blog. You can check out the first post here. Second, sometime a couple days ago, the blog had its 10,000th visitor. Not really much to get excited about, especially since this blog has been in limbo for the past half year or so. Also, compared to many websites, an average of 5,000 visits (non-unique to boot>who knows how many I’ve added myself) is not really a big deal at all. But this is my website and being the baseball fan that I am, I like milestone numbers.

It’s great that people still check in on the old blog. Especially all the July 2007 bar takers and also those who return time and again thanks to the major search engines spitting out my posts that involve the word “anal.” See here. I really need direction with this thing. I have a lot to say and my girlfriend would probably rather all the gibberish be spilled here as opposed to her overworked ears. Some themes that interest me are: scanning anything and everything I own that is in loose paper form, the television show How I Met Your Mother-”Suit Up!”, everything that needs fixing with the world starting with the “Oh, 8?” presidential candidates, and why everyone has a novel in the corner they can’t finish. Or some variation on a theme.

For now, I’m just happy to have checked out the counter to see the big 10k threshold crossed. What else is there to do with my time other than work and obsess about Bar Committee Claus’ naughty & nice list.

-jd

The only good thing about falling back to standard time is that you sort of have a burst of energy the first work day after the time change. I was early to work and felt I got a ton of stuff done despite the fact that it was a Monday (not that I wouldn’t normally work hard on a Monday…it just felt easier today). Otherwise, I hate doing the time change thing and having to walk out of the office after the sun has gone down everyday instead of just the long days. It’s such a psychological drag. I’d be thrilled if we always had light until 7-9pm as if it were summer all the time.

Because then it’d make up for the summer I lost this past May, June, and July.

Okay, I’ll say it. Bar. Bar bar barby bar bar bar!!!

-jd

Gosh darn it I’m lame. All that drama and buildup right before the bar exam and then in the month following that little adventure all I do is make a post about reincarnation nonsense.

So yeah. It has been a month tonight since I was out past my (now routine) bedtime living it up as only those who have just taken a bar exam can. I can’t believe a whole month has gone by. I remember everything about those three days as though it were yesterday. In some cases I’ve had more nightmares about the bar since the test than I did preparing for it (usually involving me being late and/or not having the right ID to get in). Of course overall I’ve largely put it out of my mind (okay, except for the daily jolting notion that runs through my head as I consider having to take the damn thing again). I usually placate any notion of failure by picturing the “this name appears on the pass list” wording on my computer screen in a couple of months.

I know anyone who still follows this blog is probably wondering: what does he mean by, “now routine,” when referring to bedtime. Well it means that due to the demands of my new job (arriving ~8), one that is great even though it did start a mere week after the bar, I have to go to bed ~10 every night to be effective (note that this is posting ~12). I won’t be posting really anything at all about the job, for obvious reasons such as that I am extremely grateful to be employed in such a dismal post-law school job market, but I am still trying to think of ways to maintain a public conversation online without the benefit of law school to rant and rave about. I’ll come up with something.

In the mean time, make sure to check out Superbad. It was great- although it’s the first time I’ve seen a sort of teenage humor film and thought to myself that I am definitely at a different stage in my life now. At least I can still fondly remember trying to secure beverages for a party while not have the appropriate credentials. McLovin. Genius.

-jd

Will be back soon. Reincarnation takes awhile.

-jd

I have secured the Martinelli Apple Juice. A tradition of mine since as long as I can remember, dating back possibly as far as elementary school when my dad would stop by the convenience store if he took us to school and one of the prized beverages to be had was the little apple shaped glass bottle of Martinelli’s. It was and still is the best tasting apple juice I have ever had, including the times I have been to an apple mill and had fresh apple juice pressed (though that is good too in its own right).

However, the main significance is that the usual reason my dad was taking us to school was because something big was up. Maybe he needed to help transport a science fair project, or was chaperoning a trip, or we had to go somewhere at a special time because we were taking a test and thus were also entitled to a special treat to get ourselves in gear. Every major test I have ever taken for as far back as I can remember, I have made it a point to have a Martinelli’s the night before.

Moreover, it has to be the little glass bottle, for tradition’s sake, because it doesn’t taste as good in the larger containers it comes in now, and finally because having become edumakated (I think it’s funny I had to look up how to misspell that word), into symbolism, and also raised Catholic. I have developed this little mythology in my head about how the apple is like the fruit from the tree of knowledge (it doesn’t go any deeper really than apples being a symbol of knowledge, though I do find the whole battle between good and evil fascinating).

So anyway, I secured it (this is becoming harder and harder to do) and in my mind, that was the last major hurdle to getting through exam prep. Now I just need to get down to the test center three days in a row, find parking, get the computer up, have it not fail on me, answer essays galor in a correct and competent manner and get a passing score on a 200 question multiple choice test, and then have upload work correctly, get a grader who is happy to skim over my essays and write pass, have the test not get lost as the grader shuffles to and from work, and have a passing score posted in November.

I need to watch a movie tonight. Potter 5 was good if anyone needs a suggestion. I’ll probably see Chuck and Larry at the risk of imagining family law, con law, k law, and tort law problems arising all over the place.

Good luck to anyone taking the bar exam tomorrow and for the next two or three days. I’ll be thrilled to post again at the end of the week!

-jd

Closer to the beginning of the bar exam ordeal, I wrote about songs that have had relevance to me throughout this process. A couple new ones have revealed themselves over the last couple of days as we head into the final hours of this thing (I now go by hours since 96 seems larger than 4 although the other side would probably counter that the word “days” after the numeric amount would probably in the end make one feel better about the situation than the word “hours”). The first is “Hello Stranger” via an amateur music video featuring a girl whose actions and mental state, far from culminating in a crime, have undoubtedly induced at least a little sanity into the minds of current bar-preppers everywhere (sorry, my mind is just in overdrive and every word I utter can seemingly be linked to some sort of legal concept or theory).

I would also like to point out that studying for the bar has made me smarter in other realms simply by coincidence as this is the first time I have managed to place anything other than text into the content of one of my blogs (turns out it isn’t very hard).

And then there is “Spoon,” a Dave Matthews Band classic (I tend to regress towards my earlier tastes and favorite activities when faced with a challenge - the Beach Boys and in particular “Don’t Worry Baby” have featured prominently on my iPod in recent weeks). On first glance, the most relevant Spoon line would seem to be the one about being crazy and how laughing out loud makes it all alright. That would also tie into the themes of the above video and also the song “Brain Damage” referenced in the above post. However, the greatness of Spoon continues with the line “I thought of you/and turned to the gate/and on my way, came up with the answers/I scratched my head/ and the answers were gone.” That’s like every day when I think about the bar, realize an answer, think about it for a minute, and then the answers are gone!

Okay, enough analysis since I doubt any of this will be on the bar. Just taking a short break. I imagine I’ll have two more posts (one directly pre-bar and one directly post-bar before I transform this website into either a documentary on how I balance being a lawyer and an aspiring fiction writer or else a blog about how I failed the bar because I was blogging 96 hours before the exam.

-jd

Today is Major League Baseball’s All Star Game and I am typing this post as sort of a draft in the law library in a Word document so that I can upload when I get home. By then the game will be over, and although during any normal summer I would probably have grilled some hot dogs and had a couple of beers while watching the game, alas this year I will be missing the festivities to study a lineup that includes Remedies, Business Associations, Property, and Contracts (I hope Property gets injured and has to go on the DL). There is only one Cardinal on the team this year, but it would have been cool to see some of the young up and coming pitcher in the game show off their stuff. I sort of think we are entering the era of the pitcher.

Anyway, despite not being able to watch the game, I did make a special effort to pay tribute to the game. Since the game is in The City by the Bay, and hometown hero Barry Bonds is in the house starting, I thought I’d slather myself in cream today (not-so-cryptic reference to Bonds’ alleged blissfully unaware usage of the skin-absorbed steroid). Specifically, though, I was piling on the Bengay today to allow myself to continue typing. Over the past few days, my shoulders, neck, and left arm have become painfully sore and full of knots. It’s rather unbelievable. Probably due to the crap chairs.

So anyway, I smell of old people – though it does fondly remind me of my grandfather from way back when – but it does the job and I can keep up my study time. Plus, I think everyone is blaming it on the older woman who sits in our section of the library. To her credit though, she seems to be carrying on a May-December type romance with a dude she must have met in BarBri. He is very doting on her, though it seems at the expense of his study time as he goes to get food or to copy something or wherever while she diligently studies. Whatever works, clearly.

-jd