Roommate foibles

Today I came home from work and made a surprising discovery. I have a roommate! And he is a cockroach! I opened the door to my fridge to get a snack and saw, to my horror, a COCKROACH crawl from the top of my fridge door INTO THE BUTTER DISH. (Okay, I don't really have a butter dish. But it crawled into where the butter dish would be if I were a more culinarily inclined subletter.) I did a little investigating and it appears that this cockroach has been chilling (ha! Get it? Chilling!) on my fridge for quite some time. He appears to live top of the fridge door, below the door of the freezer, protected by the hinge of the door. Let's not even get into how I figured out he's been living there. Suffice it to say that there is, shall we say, evidence that this was not his first afternoon in the place, if you catch my drift. So because he appears to have been living here for quite some time, (and, let's face it, given how hardy cockroaches are, he's likely to be here long after I'm gone,) I decided to dub him my roommate and give him a name. John has taken the camera with him on a "business trip" to Los Angeles, so I had to try to draw him and his little home. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to Jonas the Cockroach: Welcome to the neighborhood, Jonas! You'll understand if I never eat anything that comes out of that fridge EVER AGAIN. Anyone want to get dinner out tomorrow?

Oh Drat

Side note: This post was initially titled “Oh Shit,” but I decided that I should try to keep the swearing to the body of the posts, not the titles. I am trying to tone down my offensiveness after my baby sister sent me the following email last week after I used the word “shit” in an email to her work account:

Please do not send emails containing inappropriate language to my work account, as it may be perceived as offensive to others.

Oops. Sorry Sis! So yeah, no swearing in post titles. ANYWAY, as to why this email is entitled “oh drat:” I’m screwed. I’ve been working at this job for five weeks now. If you've been paying attention, you know that I've not exactly been loving it, especially since I seem to be the go-to girl for all the little annoying projects that attorneys were supposed to do but don’t have time for. I’m writing their memos, preparing their Continuing Legal Education programs, transcribing their handwritten notes from phone calls with foster care advocates in North Dakota. The attorneys who have assigned me work (there are two of them) have been out of town for approximately 97% of my time here, which has made it hard to get regular feedback, and has also made it nearly impossible for me to motivate myself to actually work on these tasks with any amount of efficiency. So I was planning to chalk this up to a learning experience, happy that I didn’t need or expect a job offer from this office, and that I wasn’t relying on them for a letter of reference. I was doing my work, but not doing it with any particular sense of urgency, and those written projects that I was turning in were not especially awesome. I was leaving work pretty much at 5 on the dot to go to yoga in the afternoons. I was taking leisurely lunches. Except then I realized yesterday that, oops, I AM relying on them for a letter of reference. Gah. It turns out that one of the fellowships I’m interested in applying for needs a letter of reference from a law school employer, and since I’m applying for a job at the place I worked last summer, it would be sort of weird and redundant to get a letter of reference from them. So I need a letter of reference from here. And I have four working days left in which to try to secure a great letter, after 5 weeks of friendly mediocrity. Shit. So the question is this: if you had four days to turn the ship around and start making a whiz-bang impression on your boss in an effort to convince him that he is SO GLAD he hired you, even though you only worked for him for 6 weeks, how would you do it?

Not really that scary, but an odd sort of haunting

Is it possible for a toilet to be haunted? A la Moaning Myrtle? Because I think mine is. It keeps making weird glurging noises at random moments, and starting to run and then stopping again. I will walk in to check on it and the water in the bowl will be splashing back and forth, as if the whole thing has been violently shaken. If a whiny pre-teen ghost comes out next, I’m moving.

Let's not even talk about Punky Brewster

Full disclosure: I am a few years older than John. This and my decision to go to law school after working for a few years means I fairly frequently hang out with people who are younger than I am. It doesn’t bother me, because I enjoy these people’s company and age is just a number and all that. I have, however, somehow developed an annoying tic about it, where I make jokes about how old I feel, or lecture on how much more mature and experienced I am, or roll my eyes exaggeratedly when some 22-year-old whippersnapper in my law school class asks, all wide-eyed and sincere, “What was the Challenger?” But I don’t really mean it. I annoy myself when I make these jokes and comments, (it’s all just so trite,) so I can only imagine how irritating it is for my very-patient friends. Yesterday, though? Yesterday I actually felt it for real, this feeling suddenly older. My friend Murphy and I went to pub trivia at a bar up near her place. (Side note: I LOVE pub trivia. Trivia? And Beer? What’s not to love! If you live in Chicago and know of a good place for pub trivia and are looking for teammates, email me. Seriously. I’m good.) The highlight of trivia is the audio round, where the quiz dude plays little snippets of songs, usually revolving around a theme, and you write down the song and the artist. This week’s theme was “animals,” and the third song he played was the opening strains of “Sullivan Street” by the Counting Crows. Both Murphy and I immediately dove for the pen in a race to write down the answer. We hummed along, both of us feeling nostalgic and remembering the summer when “August and Everything After” seemed to be playing everywhere. (Murphy and I have been friends since high school.) Seriously, this album that was so much a part of my early high school experience that I still envision particular parties when I hear the chorus of “Mr. Jones” or am transported back to awkward walks to the beach (to awkwardly make out with awkward boys) when I hear “Anna Begins.” (I’m really showing my stripes as another boring white suburban kid here, aren’t I? Why couldn’t my formative albums have been something cool! Even something totally embarrassing would be better because it would be funny! But Counting Crows? That’s just dull. Sigh.) Then Murphy and I happened to glance over at a group of college kids sitting next to us. There were about 15 of them, obviously new friends out together for the first time, caught up in the excitement of what I assume was college orientation, full of conversations about “where are you from” and “what was your high school like?” and “do you think the bartender is going to notice that my id is fake because I look about TWELVE.” And these kids, listening to the same song that had transported me and Murphy to such a happy nostalgic place, were totally blank. Fifteen of them and not a single one had any idea what the song was. I was so startled by this, that this album that is so tied to that particular point in my life could be so old as to be unknown to these kids sitting next to us. It was kind of jarring. And I felt OLD. Not in a bad way, but in a “holy crap, how much time has passed if the Counting Crows are now oldies it just all went so fast” kind of way. So I’m interested- am I the only one who has really strong memories associated with particular songs or albums like this? For me, the biggies seem to be the ones that were on heavy repeat during summers in high school- the rush of driving in a friend’s car with newly-acquired driver’s licenses, flirting with tan boys at backyard parties, sitting on the beach on balmy nights watching lightning storms cross the lake…. What about you? What were some of the albums that defined particular periods in your life? Or, if you want to make me feel better, has anyone else had some really good “oh my god the people I’m talking to don’t remember _______, I am so OLD” moments recently?

Things that could happen to you on your morning commute to make you feel awkward:

As you exit your apartment, you could see your across-the-hall neighbor standing naked in her doorway, full-on making out with her heavily tattooed boyfriend (who is wearing an oddly jaunty newsboy cap,) complete with boob squeezing and moaning for effect. You might, as you enter the incredibly narrow hallway separating your two apartments, have trouble avoiding touching them, such that for a brief instant, the three of you appear to be engaged in a unlikely passionate embrace uniting naked, newsboy, and law firm business casual. You might then break into a sprint for the exit to the building to avoid having the even more awkward conversation that goes “oh! Hi! I’m pseudo! I recently moved in across the hall! We’ll have to hang out sometime when, you know, you’re wearing clothes.”

How not to take a compliment

A nice woman who works at my office complimented me today on my shirt. She had also complimented me on a dress I wore last week. (Did I mention that she is nice?) She and I and another woman were in the kitchenette, doing that elaborate morning polka between the coffee machine, the milk in the fridge, and the sugar on the counter, all trying to prep our hot caffeine as soon as possible so we could stop feeling like trolls, and she said, to the other woman, “don’t you just love how our intern dresses? She always looks so adorable!” I was so surprised that, instead of saying “thank you” like a normal person, I snorted with laughter and said “you may be the only person ever to mistake me for someone with fashion sense!" For homework tonight: practice saying “thank you” graciously, so as not to alienate coworkers.

Please hold for the next available operator

This actually happened: Today, instead of getting my act together and doing my assignments for work, I decided to get my act together and arrange my financial aid/loans/grants for the coming year to see whether John and I can still afford to buy goat cheese or will have to trade down to Velveeta (shudder.) Part of this year’s payment plan involves cashing in on my Americorps education award, which I received as part of that teaching gig I used to have, and I thought this afternoon would be an excellent time to put that in order. Trouble is, I don’t know quite how to put that in order. I looked on the interweb for a while, and while Oregonvolunteers.com and comebuildhousesinthesticks.org yourheartbleedsforthepoor.net all make reference to the existence of Americorps education awards, I couldn’t find a website that actually explained to me how to redeem an Americorps education award I have already received. Since I felt the need to do this RightThisMinute and not wait until I get home to Chicago (where my files in all likelihood contain the exact form I need,) I decided to call the National Education Trust “hotline.” Their automated voice menu suggested that para asistencia en espanol, I could oprima numero uno, to learn about opportunities to volunteer and get education awards I could press two, if I was a financial institution calling to inquire about a particular Americorps student I could press three, and if I had any other questions I could wait for the next available operator. So I waited. And waited. And then made a little game out of inventing lyrics to the asinine hold music. And then made up another little game called OH MY GOD ITS BEEN 26 MINUTES AND I’M STILL ON HOLD AAAAAAACK! (which, go figure, is not really a fun game). Then, after 28 minutes and 24 seconds (yes I put the call on speakerphone so I could continue reading 6th Circuit caselaw the whole time and no I did not waste 28 working minutes doing nothing I can’t believe you would think that about me), the hold music stopped and I got the ringing noise and I almost died from excitement because someone was going to finally answer my questions about my education award and then! Then! After 31 minutes and 14 seconds on the phone MY CALL GOT DISCONNECTED. So yeah, if anyone knows how to redeem an Americorps education award, can you just tell me? Because I’m not ready to give up on the 5 grand I’ve got coming to me but I’m also not every calling that fucking hotline again ever ever ever. Ever.

om

After learning that joining a gym for one month in New York was going to cost me $250, I decided that it was about time that I Learn Yoga. Nevermind that I am spectacularly uncoordinated and my soul is not really adequately primed to receive spiritual enlightenment. It's cheap! And supposed to make you limber and flexible! Sign me up! So this week I've gone to yoga three times in an effort to get the full value of my $20 unlimited one-week newcomers pass. All was going swimmingly- I hadn't fallen over onto anyone, yoga pants had not fallen down, teacher had not drawn attention to my shocking inflexibility in front of everyone- until today, when we were doing some kind of pose involving lifting our legs very high in the air, the woman in front of me KICKED ME! In the FACE! With her gross bare feet! And then, instead of saying "sorry for planting my untrimmed toenails in your nose," she said "you're too close to my mat." I wanted to say "well, sweet pea, there are 35 of us crammed into this little room- I'm about as far from your mat as I can be without actually sitting in the lap of the person practicing behind me," but all I could muster was "sorry." Not sorry! Really not sorry! Unclear why I felt compelled to apologize! I believe I will take the day off from yoga tomorrow. I need to re-center.

"Why no pinch?"

Afternoon productivity has reached an all time low here en la oficina de pseudostoops. This is, I think, the inevitable byproduct of a job where bosses see interns and, instead of thinking “there is a girl with a brain whose brain I will exploit to try to do better work” think “there is a girl with an unlimited access Westlaw account whose unlimited access Westlaw account I will exploit to try to find an absolutely nonexistent case that doesn’t really matter all that much anyway.”

Argh.

I had a whole post of some length drafted about how excruciating it is to spend your sixth consecutive day searching for some nonexistent cases and law reviews, but I fell asleep typing it so I will spare you. Instead I offer you this, which you’ve almost certainly seen before but makes me giggle every single time I see it despite the fact that it is, technically, an advertisement for what must be one of the Top Five Ugliest Cars of All Time. Do you think it would be weird if I got a neighborhoodie that said "Maybe little pinch?" Because it would love it a really lot.

Karma. It's a bitch.

The office I’m working in currently is directly across from a woman I’ll call Scary Bossy Lady. SBL’s job tasks appear to include managing the air conditioning system, managing the computer equipment, and sending all-office emails about the state of the refrigerator in the break room. Last week, we got a series of fridge status emails from SBL, which got progressively more ridiculous as the week wore on:

Monday: Please remember to label your items in the refrigerator, and throw out things that are past their prime. It’s getting gross. Tuesday: At the end of the week, any item that is not labeled is getting thrown away. It is DISGUSTING in there. Wednesday: No matter what you may think, your mother DOES NOT LIVE HERE, and we do not have a maid service. Please stop being inconsiderate and spare the rest of us your grossness. Thursday: The fridge is truly foul. Anything that is not labeled will be thrown away tomorrow at 2 p.m. This includes Tupperware and other things you might want to save!!! BE POLITE!!! Get your stuff out of the fridge or it’s HISTORY! You’ve been warned. Friday morning: Enough is enough. If we can’t pull together as a community to take care of the fridge, how can we really be living up to our mission to protect foster children? We should all be ashamed. Remember, 2 p.m. tomorrow! Friday, 1:59 p.m.: I am truly disappointed in the response to this fridge crisis. I am now throwing away all items in the fridge, even those that are labeled, so that we can turn off the fridge over the weekend and leave it open to air out. It is the only way to get rid of the stink caused by our total breakdown of fridge etiquette.

She is truly absurd. So I walk into the office this morning and it is infested with flies. Teeming. Flies EVERYWHERE. The building maintenance guy came up and said, loud enough for the whole office to hear, “man, was the fridge open all weekend like that? Why would you do that? That’s what drew the flies in here. For sure. No question.” Ha! Take that, SBL!

Warning: Gusty Winds Ahead

My office shares a building with a language school that caters to young Europeans who want to practice their English, and as such there are always slim, fashionable, cigarette-smoking men and women gathered in clusters around the elevators and entryway. Every time I walk through a group of them I feel self-consciously unglamorous, just another boring American going to just another boring job while they all lounge around, taking deep draws off their galoises and sharing exciting tales of international travel in their heavily-accented English. So imagine how awesome it was when, yesterday afternoon, a gust of wind blew by just as I was walking out of the building, catching my pretty new summer wrap dress and flipping it wide open, exposing my decidedly non-sexy underpants to the gawking crowd of European language school students. I believe I will wear a mask to work for the rest of the week.

The Big Banana

When Mason’s Sister and I decided to visit Mason in Washington D.C., renting a car seemed like the best plan. Amtrak was going to cost us almost $200 bucks each, flying was the same and involved getting to and from the airport, and the Chinatown bus, while cheap, is notoriously inconsistent between NY and DC, and we’d be tied to their schedule. Plus, I was going to help Mason’s Sister move from Queens to Brooklyn, and I’m pretty sure the Chinatown bus isn’t so hip to detours. So rental car it was. Typically, I like road trips. I like tuning the radio dial to whatever random station you happen to get wherever you are, driving through towns I don’t know, and the long stretches of time to think as you drive down the highway. Road trips present the perfect opportunity to consume foods you’d otherwise scoff at, like Pizzeria Pretzel Combos. And after a couple of weeks in New York, I was really excited to get out of the city, too. Even when I picked up the rental car and nearly went blind from the horrible horrible green-tinged yellow color (the photo makes it look like a nice gentle gold- don’t be fooled,) I was still excited because We were going on a road trip! But this was not, as it turned out, a road trip. This, my friends, was a seven-hour rush-hour-style commute. It was the worst drive I have ever made. After moving 100 yards in two hours through the Delaware Memorial Bridge toll plaza, Delaware is dead to me. Mason’s Sister and I got progressively loopier as the minutes of not moving ticked by. We dubbed the car “the Big Banana” (look! It was even yellow on the inside!) and started talking to it like it was another person. We spent hours thinking up our very best New Jersey jokes to try to punish the state for having the horrible New Jersey Turnpike. By the time we got to Mason’s, we were hot, grouchy, and demanding margaritas. Fortunately, we had called ahead to warn her of our tequila needs, so we were off to the cantina as soon as we arrived and all turned out well. It was a much-needed weekend of being among friends where the conversation is comfortable and the company is good and not once do you sniff the air and say “I wonder if someone peed on the sidewalk in front of my apartment this morning?” It was, in short, a nice break from New York. My boss lives on the New Jersey/Delaware border, because that’s the closest place his family could afford a house on his public interest salary. After this weekend, every time I think about his commute I want to cry a little for him. Having a house is nice, but how he has managed not to maim his family in a fit of rage after making that drive twice a day is totally beyond me. If that’s the kind of sacrifice it takes to work in public interest in New York, I can say with confidence that it is So Not Worth It.

Pseudostoops discovers patriotism, twice.

Patriotism the First: Mason's Sister and I have driven down to Washington D.C. to visit Mason and to absorb the culture of our nation's capital through the consumption of far too many margaritas. After one day here, I now pray* at the altar of air conditioning, which has allowed me to rediscover warm showers and sleeping with sheets and blankets. Patriotism the Second: I'm no good at rousing speeches, but TMAO sure is. The whole thing is worth reading, but this part actually caught my breath, because it's such a perfect crystallization of something I was never quite able to articulate about teaching:

As hard as it is to know that for all the late-nights and early-mornings, all the Saturday Academies and strategic interventions, you still came up short; as hard and painful as it is to accept that, it is harder and more painful still to be a young person without the skills to be successful.

He's good, huh? Maybe we should all buy his book.** Back Tuesday with decidedly unpatriotic tales of how much I hate driving through Delaware and New Jersey. *Because patriotism in this country is largely about prayer these days, no? Ba-dum ching! ** Because capitalism is patriotic these days too,, right? Man, I'm on a roll here!!

What's in a name?

One of the most interesting projects I’ve been involved in at my new job (and by “involved in” I mean “did that thing where I foisted myself upon the lawyers doing the actual work because if I had to spend one more minute staring at Westlaw on my computer screen I was going to lose my shit,”) has been choosing pseudonyms for child plaintiffs. When a child is a named plaintiff in a lawsuit, someone has to choose a pseudonym for them to protect their anonymity. In many cases, lawyers end up using a kid’s initials, or “Baby Jane Doe,” or something similarly generic. Here, though, a significant part of our legal strategy to shine a bright light on state foster care systems, and one of the ways we do that is by giving the kids real names to make their stories as sympathetic and accessible as possible. A newspaper story about "Cecelia" can be a lot more heart-wrenching than one about "Little Girl Doe," right? So we choose names for them, usually something that starts with the same first letter as their actual first name. So, for example, if we were choosing a name for me (pseudostoops) we might pick something like “Penelope.” Except we could not choose Penelope. Why not, you ask? Because another part of the legal strategy is to choose common well-known names that are not racially identifiable, and Penelope is obviously a name that implies gorgeous busty latin movie starlets. This is where it starts to get interesting. Foster care advocates understandably don’t want foster care dysfunction to be seen as a “black” problem (so LaShawn is out) or a “rural” problem (so Kaytlynne is out) or a “preppy” problem (sorry, Glynnis!), so every effort is made to find nice neutral names for our named plaintiffs. Except it is really freaking hard in some cases to find a name that is racially neutral. Also, having fifteen people in on the discussion doesn’t help- its like choosing baby names by committee. In fact, the conversations we’ve had about this have convinced me that if and when John and I ever have kids, we will not tell one single person we are planning to use as a name because input from any more than two people causes the process of picking a name to go entirely off the rails. As an example, this is how the conversation went when we were trying to pick an “L” name for a little girl who is a plaintiff in a case:

Lawyer 1: I know! Leyla! Lawyer 2: What, is she cheating on George Harrison now? Lawyer 3: Liza? L1: Ugh. I knew a total upper west side princess named Liza. Too white. L2: Plus, the judge would always be picturing her with dark eyeliner circles and a weird pixie haircut, which is kind of gross since she’s only five years old. L1: Lily? L2: Is she wearing a ribbon belt and carrying a boat tote? L3: Laurie? L1: My arch nemesis from college is named Laurie. L2: Lana? L3: Too Russian L1: Leela? L3: Too Indian L1: Lorena? L3: Too criminal L1: Leah? L2: Hm. That’s not bad. L3: Yeah, but the choice of spelling would be a dead giveaway. L-E-A-H is really different from L-I-A. L1: This is going to take forever. I’m going to order in some dinner.

This conversation went on, I kid you not, for two hours. Two! With three lawyers! Plus interns! I’m pretty sure that when we put in our petition for fees we are not going to be able to bill six lawyer work hours for “plaintiff name choice meeting.” I kind of understand the impulse to resist explicitly ethnic names, but should it matter? There are usually between 5 and 10 kids named in each of these cases- rather than 5 or 10 bland, neutral names, would we be better off picking a sort of vaguely multi-ethnic menagerie? Instead of Laura, Peter, Christina, Mary, and James should we be choosing Laura, Prakthan, Chante, Maria and Jaewon? To me, the latter group seems a lot more reflective of the diversity of low-income communities- though you may have some Lauras, Peters, Christinas, Marys, or Jameses in black, latino, asian, and other non-white communities, put them all together and to me it sounds like a WASP playgroup. The risk, I suppose, is that when you have a group of mostly white lawyers in an office in New York choosing “ethnic” names, you risk having “diversity” in that sort of nauseating self-consciously p.c. “crayola crayons now come in many skin tones!” kind of way. So I guess there are pitfalls either way. Anyway, clearly the legal research I’m doing isn’t quite catching my fancy yet, because I’ve been mulling over this name thing for like four days now. Anyone have any thoughts? Or, more importantly, any neutral L names to suggest? Because if the lawyers have their way, we’re going with Liza, which, for obvious reasons, I think is a very bad choice.

Breathe easy

When I was a little kid, maybe 4 or 5 years old, I had a horrific asthma attack that sent me to the hospital for adrenaline shots several times in the course of the week. My poor mother nearly died worrying about me, since no one in my family had ever dealt with asthma before and hearing your small child wheeze pitifully is apparently a terrible terrible thing for a parent (so she tells me.) For about 10 years after that, I would get wheezy pretty much at the drop of a hat- I would wheeze when I exercised, when the spring trees bloomed, when in the presence of a cat. I managed to contract pneumonia three times by the time I was 15. I was, in short, a respiratorially challenged child. I was also, as it happens, spectacularly unathletic. All those trite stories of childhood athletic trauma – getting picked last for kickball, being unable to climb the rope, having to stop and walk in the middle of the mile run – I experienced them all. Typically, I would attribute my poor athletic skills to my asthma, because if you have a medical condition kids are not supposed to make fun of you for being slow and pudgy and lacking upper body strength. It doesn’t really stop the kids from thinking you’re uncool and hoping you get assigned to the other kickball team, but it means the teachers give you a little break when you collapse into a coughing, exhausted pile at the end of the 800-yard dash. Then, in high school, something interesting happened. I decided that I didn’t really have to be unathletic. I was pretty good at tennis, and I wasn’t bad at volleyball, and I was getting pretty good at ultimate Frisbee. I decided (well, my mom’s cajoling probably played a role, but I was receptive) I should try out for sports. Since I went to one of those crazy wacked-out high schools where competition to get onto sports teams rivals that at D1 colleges, I selected as my chosen high school sport…badminton. (Don’t laugh. Badminton is really big in the rest of the world! It’s the fastest racquet sport on earth! It is very challenging! Shut UP!) I loved playing badminton, loved being on a team, and especially loved that I was, for once, not the worst player of the group. I played my freshman and sophomore year, then got involved in theater (I know! Such a shock! Since I’m so low-key and have such an aversion to all things dramatic!) and quit sports. But something important had happened: I had concluded that I wasn’t destined to be terrible at sports forever, and in the process I had somehow convinced myself that I didn’t really have asthma anymore. Sure, I got pneumonia and bronchitis my freshman year and spent the better part of that winter and spring gasping for breath. Yes, technically, I could still not run a mile outdoors without seriously compromising my peak flow. But the breathing problems no longer prevented me from being minimally athletic. As I grew up and became an adult, I adopted the position that “I used to have asthma,” and for the most part that is correct. I stopped getting bronchitis every year and started jogging (on a treadmill, but still! Jogging!) several times a week. But then, at the beginning of this summer, I contracted some sort of chest cold, and that chest cold turned into a dry wheezy cough. Initially I assumed it was part of the cold, then after two or three weeks I started cracking jokes that I was allergic to my office mate and it was his fault (he was not amused,) and then I blamed it on my dirty New York apartment, and then on the oppressive heat, and eventually, eight weeks after I first started wheezing, I found myself in a doctor’s office in Manhattan patiently explaining to the doctor that “I don’t have breathing problems, I used to have breathing problems!” The doctor sighed, measured my peak flow, listened to me breathe, and promptly prescribed an Advair inhaler. And people, let me tell you: inhalers are wonderful. I’d forgotten what it is like to breathe deeply and properly. It is fantastic. No moral to this story, really, just pseudostoops reporting that breathing is back on track. You’re enthralled.