:(

failing the bar exam
everyone says it's not the end of the world
i know the truth
it is

Patron of the Avant-Garde

If you live in the New York metropolitan area, I strongly suggest that you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and check out its special exhibition, "Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde."

I've been typing and deleting paragraphs about the exhibition. I can't talk about the art - it's too gorgeous. I'm totally humbled.

I'm Sad.

My love affair with baseball is over.
The Mets lost.
I hate the Cardinals.

* * *

Does anyone else think that maybe the animal kingdom has decided to stop taking our shit and fighting back against us humans, tooth, nail, and claw? I do.

A Tiny World After All

It started off as a really lousy Monday. The kind of Monday where you wish that there was just one more day to the weekend. The kind of Monday where you wish your commute was longer so you could sleep that much longer on the bus. The kind of Monday where you drag yourself through your workday and people in your office tell you you look "tired" (horrible in office parlance). The kind of Monday where, as you trudge across 42nd Street from the East Side to the West Side, you step in a grate and ruin the calf-leather covered heel of your expensive Italian stilettos, a purchase you really couldn't afford to have ever made. The kind of Monday where you wonder what fresh hell life is going to put you into next.

* * *

At the Port Authority, there was a woman sitting on the stairs that lead from the entrance on 42nd Street and 8th Ave to the second floor where the New Jersey Transit buses run. This woman was sagging over herself, head laying on crossed forearms laying on knees. She had on flip-flops and her feet were dirty. Her hair was wild. Everyone was taking the escalators to avoid walking past her, but I didn't notice her until I had taken the first step. For a moment I considered turning around and taking the escalators, but I didn't. It seemed rude to go to such great length to avoid coming into any sort of proximity to her. I mean, she wasn't a leper.

So I climbed the stairs. I have to admit, I felt a little scared. Something about her was vaguely frightening. Everyone else was rushing, rushing, rushing through. And she just sat motionless in the middle of it all. And then it happened. As I was going past her, she slumped her body towards me, groaned, and shot her arm out as if to grab my ankle. I jumped about a mile. No, that's a lie. I did a little hop jump skip to about three steps above her. Then I stopped and turned around. I don't know why. She also had turned her head to look at me. The expression on her face sent my heart into my throat. I thought she'd be an old woman but she wasn't old. And her eyes looked dead. There was not a single glint of light in them whatsoever. This was a lost woman. This was a person in the depths of despair.

And what did I do? I turned my back and went up the stairs. And this is evil, evil, evil of me, but I actually felt better about my shitty Monday, because at least I wasn't her. Sure, I make a pitiful salary. Sure, I have enough debt in law school loans to keep me from buying a house for, oh, say, the next 10 or 15 years. Sure, sometimes I get slightly tired of struggling with bills and not having enough of a cash flow to live in my own apartment and wishing I could just win the lotto and move someplace far away from New York City where I can have a bit of ocean and a bit of mountain together and start everything over afresh. But these feelings reflect certain moods I get into. At the end of the day, I am never a wrecked piece of humanity washed up on the stairs of the Port Authority, without a glimmer of hope for anything good in life.

* * *

Afterwards, I started feeling bad again because I had taken comfort in the awful abject patheticalness of this woman. So I called Andrew and asked if I could come over - I needed him to cheer me up and tell me I wasn't terrible. On the way to the 210 gate, I noticed a small changepurse on the floor. I picked it up and took it on the bus with me because I was right by the gate and I really didn't want to go all the way downstairs to the Lost and Found. I figured if there wasn't any identifying information in the purse that I could use to contact the owner I would just bring it to the Lost and Found the following morning. When Andrew and I went to get coffee I took the changepurse out to inspect it. There was a license in it. Umara. A Muslim girl. The address on the license was in Teaneck - the town right next to Andrew's. I called information to get her phone number and arranged to meet her at the Blockbuster by Andrew's house.

She pulled up in a Mercedes. Someone else was driving - she hopped out of the passenger seat side. As soon as she saw me she said, "You were in the seat in front of me on the bus!" And I said, "Yes, I remember seeing you." Mainly because she was yakking on her cellphone and I turned around to give her a look, but I didn't mention that. Then she said, "Did you go to Stevens?" I was astounded! I said, "Yes." Turns out she graduated in the year ahead of me. For some reason I have no recollection whatsoever of this girl but she remembers me I guess. She told me she recognized me on the bus and then when I called to tell her I found her wallet she thought my voice sounded familiar and then when I told her my name she figured it must have been me! What a small world, right? She tried to give me a gift but I wouldn't take it because it seemed chintzy to do so. So she told me to at least take the card. It said, "Thank you" on the front and she had written "I'm so glad there are people like you in the world." inside.

I wonder if the woman at the Port Authority feels the same way about me.

The Ugliest Team in the National League

It is really difficult to watch the NLCS because the St. Louis Cardinals are so hideously ugly. Especially Ron Belliard. He is exactly like a troll. Every time he's at bat he sticks his tongue out and compulsively licks his bottom lip. And it appears that his tongue is dark purple. It's an absolutely revolting sight.

I tried to find pictures of him with his tongue out but I couldn't find any. Probably because no one can actually bring themselves to focus their camera on something so god-awful and nauseating.

Thank god the Mets are good-looking in addition to being awesome. Ha! They TROUNCED the Cardinals tonight. Woo woo!

The Sunday Times

Part 1. Fishing

So sometime last week I straggled home from after-work drinks at about 11:30 p.m. I was feeling guilty because I hadn't been home any time before 11 p.m. or so since, like, forever. I always mean to spend time with my family but then I don't, because coworkers want to go out for drinks (and lawyers want to drink A LOT - I can attest to that fact even though I'm not a lawyer yet), or because I want to go see my boyfriend, or because I have plans with a girlfriend. And then even if I do get home early by some miracle of life I usually just end up giving my parents a sullen hello, getting shifty-eyed, and stomping straight up to my room where I smoke weed and look at porn all night. Just kidding.

Anyway, I was feeling guilty for coming home late again. (That was the last relevant thing I said. Late in my house is defined as after my grandma goes to sleep. That also is not really relevant.) My dad looked up from his newspaper and asked me what I was doing on Sunday. "Um, what time Sunday?" I asked, because I had plans to go out on Sunday night for my girlfriend Jocelin's birthday. He said, "Sunday during the day." I said, "Nothing." He asked, "Want to go fishing?" Well, now. Not really. That's what I thought. Because I don't really like fishing. But what I said was, "Sure dad. I'm not doing anything."

So Sunday morning I woke up at 9:40 a.m. and got ready to go fishing with my dad. It didn't take a lot of preparation. I basically didn't shower, put on some sunscreen, and wore some clothes. At 10 o'clock, I hopped into my dad's Yukon and tried not to feel motion-sick as he drove down to the dock. My dad is THE worst driver in the world. It's a miracle he still has his license. He's gotten so many speeding tickets he's now super paranoid about getting pulled over, so he goes at a 45 mph crawl on busy highways while managing to accelerate and brake, accelerate and brake, every twenty seconds. It was a short drive so I made it without getting too nauseous. Usually if we're going anywhere longer than a half-hour drive I wheedle my dad into letting me take the wheel.

Anyway, so we went fishing. It's about an hour and a half, maybe two, to go down the Hudson river out to the bay. It's a pretty little journey - we went through the Palisades, under the George Washington Bridge, and past Manhattan, Ellis Island, and the Statute of Liberty. But there was a lot of debris in the water that day, which was a bit nerve-wracking for me. I was piloting the boat and I don't like seeing a lot of things float around, because I get nervous about hitting a big log or something.

So we drove out until we hit open ocean. My dad cut up these huge clams to use as bait, and then he pulled out these long, thick, nasty live worms. They were so gross. When he put the worms on the fish hooks they bled all over the place. YRCH.

We didn't have much luck with the fishing. My dad kept moving the boat around but all we caught was a shark. It was a little one, maybe two feet long, but it was still a shark. My dad brought it onto the boat to take the barbs out of its mouth. Then he stabbed the shark! I was horrified. I asked why he didn't just throw the shark back without killing it and he said because the shark would die anyway because his mouth was all mangled and also because the shark would keep going after the bait. That didn't make much sense to me but I don't argue with a man wielding a big knife who just butchered a shark.

After the shark incident my dad decided to drive out a little further, to get away from the bad shark karma, I guess. When my dad dropped anchor I started to feel a little ill. The boat kept swaying side to side, side to side. I hardly ever get seasick, but I was having a little bit of a rough time. But I didn't say anything. We set up the fishing rods and I went to the little kitcheonette to make ramen noodles for my dad and myself for lunch. As I was watching the pot waiting for it to come to a boil, I put my finger in my mouth to chew my nail. I know, it's a bad habit. When I did I tasted clam. Not good clam, but fish-bait clam. I felt extremely nauseated, promptly ran upstairs to the back deck, and projectile-vomited the sweet potato I had eaten for breakfast. (Yes, Koreans eat potato for breakfast. They also eat corn on the cob for breakfast.) I'm not exaggerating there. The vomit seriously projected like five feet horizontally. Thank God I was in the middle of the ocean on the boat and not, say, on the 6 train at rush hour, otherwise a lot of people might have been mad.

My dad saw me throw up and promptly took down the fishing rods and said we had to go back. I felt really bad because we had just spent three hours getting to where we were so he could fish and said, "No, no, I feel much better now." But he was having none of it. Just as well, I still felt a little sick, so I just went down to the bunk to lie down for an hour. When I got up we were by the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and there were a lot of boats around so my dad wouldn't let me drive. But when we got a bit more upriver past the big ports there was much less traffic so he let me drive. I like driving the boat so overall I had fun. But I felt really bad for my dad. My poor dad. He hardly got to do any fishing at all. But then later after we got home my mom told me my dad had told her I had gotten really weak because I got sick on the boat and I was mad that he called me weak and I ddn't feel bad anymore.

Part 2. Birthday

I was really tired after all the boating but I'm a trouper so I went out that night for my friend Jocelin's birthday. We went to Bar 89 and Lotus. Bar 89 was once a trendy hotspot but I'm not sure if it is anymore. It has weird bathrooms. They are unisex and they have transparent stalls and you think, "Ohmygod everyone is going to see me pee." But then once you actually go into the stall and lock the door the stall turns opaque. Not completely but someone would have to try really hard to see you pee, and they would only see a vague outline of you anyway.

After that we went to Lotus, which is a club in the Meatpacking District. I hate clubs but I also love clubs. I hate them because I hate the way they make you stand on line while some overgrown frat boy who's pretending to be Italian or something (meanwhile he's in a wrinkled suit) stares you up and down and decides whether to let you into the club. The stupid doorman decided my friends and I weren't cute enough to get in for free, so we had to pay $10. We were pretty insulted. But I overheard some other girls complaining that they had to pay $20, so we decided not to be too bitter about it. I also hate the crowd most of the time. Although we did see Patrick Swayze at the club. We got all excited and talked about Dirty Dancing. And that's why I do love clubs, because I love dancing. My boyfriend absolutely hates clubs like Lotus, and so I haven't been to any in a really long time, but once I was there I had a really good time. I had forgotten how much I love dancing.

All in all it was a good Sunday.