So, while I have been cooped up in my room this week working on my brief for Moot Court, the Noise Pop Festival has been going on all over San Francisco. It's basically an annual week-long festival where a ton of really legit indie acts perform. It's kind of a big deal. Unfortunately, as I am a law student and no longer a care-free undergrad, I had to limit the amount of awesomeness I could partake in. Because our Moot Court class had been moved back another day, for example, I could no longer try to make it out to see either Matt Costa on Wednesday night or Martha Wainwright on Thursday (I think I'm destined to never see any member of that family live as her brother is playing two Southern California shows, one of which is one of my favorite venues in SoCal, and nothing in NorCal).

Dinah and I initially were going to see Ra Ra Riot's Friday night show, but it sold out by the time that we actually decided we would go for sure. Instead, we got tickets for St. Vincent at the Great American Music Hall. I had actually just heard her CD when we got the tickets. I actually wanted to also see A.C. Newman today. I held off on the tickets because I had put my name down for a contest for free tickets. I didn't win them and by Thursday the tickets were sold out. So sad.

Anyway, I'd been excited about the show for a while. Thursday night rolls around, I check funcheapsf.com and lo and behold, there's some Diesel music event earlier in the day on Friday, where several Noise Pop performers (Ra Ra Riot included) were doing a free show in the Diesel store. All you had to do was RSVP. So I did, just in case I decided some time during Friday that I would have enough energy for two shows in one day (hey, I've done it before).

So, after I managed to trudge through my ConLaw assignment for Monday, I decided to give that Diesel show a try. I had a couple of hours to kill before the St. Vincent show anyway, so what the hell, right? I get all the way out there at around 5:45, stand in the line to get in, only to hear that the people in front of me got turned away because they didn't RSVP before Tuesday. Apparently, they were supposed to tell people who RSVPed after that they weren't going in, but they didn't. She offered to let us come in after 20 minutes, but at that point it wasn't worth it so I walked back to the Tower. Oddly enough, after all of that, the only thing that I was upset about was that I wasn't getting free pizza out of the whole thing. I hardly eat pizza, but for some reason the thought of free pizza that wasn't from Costco set off the pizza cravings. I stopped by Lush on the way back because I love Lush. Also went to Rasputin and thought about getting pizza at Blondies next door for 3 minutes until I decided that $4 was too much to pay for a slice of pizza when I had loads of jambalaya still waiting for me back at the Tower.

I got back to the Tower, ate dinner, and passed out for a while until Dinah got here around 8. We walked over to the Great American Music Hall. It's O'Farrell and Larkin-ish, which is actually up near the Olive Bar and that place that we had GAAP Idol. In fact, it's actually right around the corner. By the time we got there, the first band was actually performing their set. In fact, it must have been an incredibly short set because they finished a couple of minutes after we got there. The venue wasn't that crowded by the time we were there, so we managed to make it up to a spot pretty close to the stage.

The first band we saw/second band up was really good. The band was Rafter and they played pretty fun dance-y music. Also, they introduced almost every other song that they played as being about "sex and love." I really liked their set, actually, and was surprised that they had gone up so early.

I've also come to realize that for all the awesome that my camera is what with taking shots at 40x zoom and all, it really hates taking non flash pictures at shows that are not incredibly blurry. This is unfortunate because I'm not a big fan of taking flash pictures at shows anymore, but fortunately the fact that I can change my flash setting to taking really soft pictures makes up for that problem a little.

Anyway, they put on a great show and I was totally set to get their music after the show if the next band wasn't impressive.

The next band was Crypatcize and I was expecting a lot from them because they described them as mindblowing experimental indie pop. I guess that meant I was expecting something more in the vein of Animal Collective or maybe Deerhoof or something. They were pretty fun to watch, but they were definitely more pop-sounding. They were also incredibly cutesy, and kudos to the awesome sea otter shirt that one of them was wearing. They were fun to watch, but I liked the first band more. And actually, now that I have found their Myspace and am listening to the music there, I like their music more.





Actually, between the Rafter and Cryptacize sets we ran into a girl, Brooke, that we had not seen since high school and we talked a lot with her and her friends between Cryptacize and St. Vincent. It was pretty random, but it was really cool to see her again.

As is usually the case, the venue got incredibly packed after Cryptacize's set was over and we started being crowded by people that we had not seen the entire evening. That was fun. In fact, while I was trying to talk to someone, this gross couple started like grinding against me or something to push their way in front of me while they were doing god knows what. That's always a pleasant experience. In fact, that couple and their friends provided a lot of groans from our now merged group throughout the show.

The girl was strange. She looked at my purse at some point and became very distraught. "How do you clean your purse if you can't machine wash it?" This question caught me off guard, mostly because it's often surprising how out of touch with reality technology has made us. I responded "You hand wash it." She glared at me and went back to sitting on the ground.

St. Vincent took the stage and we knew that this would be another interesting show because security guards were trolling the crowd trying to catch people who were taking flash photography. Thus, I only got a few good shots in of St. Vincent.

Anyway, almost as soon as this show begins, the group of people in front of us lit up a joint and started smoking. Right in front of me. In fact, I'm pretty sure more of the smoke hit my face than they actually got to ingest. Which is fine, people like to smoke marijuana at shows. But usually, this is something left to Dave Matthews or Jimmy Buffett concerts. St. Vincent's most definitely not in that vein of pot-smoking music. Also, being the nerd that I am, I spent a good five minutes applying what I learned in Property class and trying to figure out in what ways these people were being a public nuisance.

Finally, one of the guys in the group. The tallest guy, who happened to stand directly in front of me, had some creepy stalker obsession with St. Vincent. He would try to engage her in conversation between songs and she clearly looked upset about this.

Sometimes I wonder why people are the way they are.

Other than that obnoxious bunch, the show was great. I expected her to be playing with a band or something, but she was up there by herself. I couldn't see but I think she had some sort of recording device set up there with her for the drums and other effects. She played a lot of songs that I recognized from the album and some new songs that will be on the new one. She played all the songs that I liked and that was good with me.





All in all, this was a great show and definitely made my one Noise Pop 09 venture very worthwhile.

After the show was over, we said goodbye to Brooke and her friends and headed over to the Rafter table to get their music. Also picked up a couple of free Noise Pop buttons and a Noise Pop 08 sampler. They had some deal going on where you could get all four of the albums for $20, so I said why not and did that. This made the singer very happy, so he gave me his pick. It's somewhere piled under my stuff. I should put it with the other picks (mostly Phantom Planet) that I've accumulated over the years.

We left the venue and instead of braving the Tenderloin at midnight, took a cab back to the tower. Good day for music.

There have been a few free happy hour shows throughout the week. I missed a chunk of them because they were during the week and I had class, was volunteering, or studying, but there was a Saturday afternoon one that I wanted to go to with this awesome band Music For Animals. I would have gone but around 3:30, I decided that I was in a stay in doors and study mood, so I stayed in.

That's about it. Time to go back to Moot Court.

This whole Moot Court on Thursday instead of Wednesday thing has thrown off my week. On the plus side, I got an extra day to make the final rough draft of my brief (that i'm turning in at least) look nice. I took me like 2 hours to find a stupid citation so that I could make one point that I was obligated to make. That was fun. But I've been enjoying watching Lost on Wednesdays night happily knowing that I'm done with Moot Court for the week and, well, that didn't happen.

Lost last night was amazing. I'm just going to pretend that Season Three didn't happen. I think that things would be better that way. I mean, really, I still can't believe they dedicated an entire episode of the show to Jack's dumb tattoo. Like we even care about it.

Tonight's episode answered a lot of questions. We know why Whidmore hates Ben. We know how Locke died. We saw him attempt to get people back to the island. There was an entirely unnecessary scene where doctors tried to fix Locke's leg.

My question is how Ben got Eloise to trust him. I hope they go into that more. We also still don't know what happened to Ben before he got on the plane (the theory I've seen floating around the Internet is that he's killed Penny). Also, what did Sayid do to get arrested?

Also, I love that Ben's been playing everyone the whole time. It's not that it wasn't expected or anything because that's his purpose on the show, but it was pretty cool. So if Whidmore's the "good" guy now, why is it that he sent that crazy guy to the island with loads of C4? I think Whidmore mentioned it, but I was reading for Contracts at the time, so I think I missed it.

That's all I can say for now as I've got to go run to GAAP.

Oh.

I hate how American Idol's set up this season. I hate this Top 36 business. I hate having a fourth judge. I hated how it felt like auditions dragged on forever. Anything else? I don't know.

Happy Mardi Gras!

I think this might be the first year in a long time that I did not wear Mardi Gras beads all day. Actually, I don't think I did last year either because I don't remember bringing Mardi Gras beads with me to DC. If I did, it would have been for the sole purpose of wearing it on Mardis Gras and that's actually a little obsessive on my part.

Being the superb Catholic that I am, I always tend to celebrate Mardi Gras, but not the rest of Lent. I don't think I've ever in the history of my life kept a Lenten promise, so I gave that up a couple of Lents ago. I did briefly consider how long I would last if I were to give up celebrity gossip, but I'm sure I'd last about an hour and a half. I've been a vegan for longer than that. Definitely saying something. I wonder if I'm going to do the vegan for Earth Week thing again. Those were an incredibly difficult few days.

Off topic. Anyway, despite the fact that we had a load of reading for Property and Con Law for tomorrow, the fact that I'm on call in Contracts on Thurs and should start that reading, and the fact that my brief is due soon, I took a few hours out of my day to celebrate Mardi Gras my way - by gorging on jambalaya. Actually, in the past, we've made a whole day out of it with french onion soup for lunch, jambalaya for dinner, and beignets for dessert (great day of eating). Since I barely have enough space to make pasta, I don't think that this was a possibility. Also, I would probably set the Tower on fire if I tried to make beignets here. I'm so off track of what I was just saying that I don't even remember where I was.

I got the groceries yesterday at Safeway and started prechopping vegetables between classes. I went to GAAP (which was unbelievably hectic for an afternoon). Had to go to Walgreens again because I'm almost out of printer ink ... again. Finished Property reading, went to the gym and started the cooking part (I showered first. Just wanted to clarify on that point.)

Anyway, I'm used to cooking jambalaya for a large group of people. I did it mostly from memory (had to double check on a few sites to make sure that I had the process right), so I was completely off with everything. Also, I used to use Chris or Josh's enormous pots, so my usual portions could not fit in one pot. This caused stress and I had to pull out a second pot and find an impromptu cover to make this.

Since I did i all from memory, I also didn't know the proportions of anything. I just kind of played by ear. I thought this could have ended up being absolutely disastrous, but it actually ended up being the best jambalaya I've made. I think I got a little too excited about the cayenne pepper though because it's incredibly spicy.

That was a long story about jambalaya. I took pictures of it to post, but I don't actually feel like uploading them from my camera.

Now I've got a ridiculous amount of jambalaya and will be eating it for the next week or so. I would have even more if Gina and Jeanne hadn't stopped by to try some. (I got their stamp of approval, yay).

Also, I've been elected Director of Communications for KALSA (Korean American Law Student Association). It was a really intense election process and the vote was close, but I ran unopposed so...yeah. Go me.

Okay, back to the brief.

I've been M.I.A again, mostly because I've been doing work. Lately, it's been that feeling that I'm working all the time, but am still behind in all my classes. I guess I'm not behind on normal person standards. I've done almost all of the reading through Wednesday. Usually I'm done with all the reading by Wednesday by the end of the weekend. Also, I did not do as much work on Moot Court as I would have liked (usually because me editing a section would result in me searching for a non existent SCOTUS cite that I just need for one stupid sentence). Also I made it a goal last Tuesday to send out four more job apps. That didn't happen. Hopefully today will be a Moot Court/Job App day. Or maybe I'll just edit my cover letter in Property. We'll see.

Tomorrow's Mardi Gras and since I made no jambalaya last year, I think I have to do it this year despite all of this stuff. If anything, at least i won't have to cook for the next year, right? I always end up with so many leftovers.

And this week is Noise Pop. I've got tickets to a Friday show. Wanted to see Ra Ra Riot, but they sold out. Instead, we're going to see St. Vincent. Also put my name down for some contest for AC Newman tickets, but we'll see how that goes.

What else? Oscars last night! Kate Winslet finally won. I really thought Hugh Jackman was a great host and that they didn't show enough of him. As much as I love the Daily Show, Jon Stewart has been a very awkward host. Not too many nightmare dresses this year. I guess if I had to choose any oscar movie this year to see, I chose the right one. Slumdog was the big winner of the night. Usually, I vote for the big movies that I've seen by default, so that went in my favor this year. I got 17/24 this year. Pretty good. Also, yeah, who didn't see Heath Ledger's Best Supporting Actor win coming? What I didn't like this year was how, instead of showing clips for the acting roles, they had previous winners come and tell the already big headed actors how great they were (also missing as presenters were last year's winners Javier Bardeim and Daniel Day Lewis). I'm glad Tina Fey presented.

Question, though, that came up when Milk won its first award (screenplay i think). Since Prop 8 passed by such a small margin, would it have made a different if Milk was released a few weeks or even a month before? I guess even with a margin that small it might not have, but it's something to think about I guess. They're hearing the case soon here. I kind of want to watch, but it's probably going to be incredibly crowded.

Anyway, yesterday I also volunteered for the National Trial Competition. I got some flyer for it in my SIC box a couple of weeks ago and thought it sounded cool. It didn't sound as cool when I had to go to bed early Saturday night and wake up Sunday night knowing that I was going to spend half of my day on that instead of my brief. It also didn't sound as cool when it decided to be cold and rainy on the day that I actually decided to leave the tower. It was actually fun. I was the bailiff, so I kept time for everyone. It wasn't actually as easy as it sounds. I didn't have a timer and I had to make sure to stop timing when there were objections. It was fun though. The case was based on the Michael Vicks case, so they talked about killing dogs a lot and the people in the competition were incredibly intense. A lot of shouting and Phoenix Wright moves. Pretty cool.

Anyway, I need to get back to reviewing my notes for property before class starts. Just wanted to say I'm still alive.

So, the last few days have been hectic. Last week, actually. I meant to update this some time between Friday afternoon and now, but I have not had the time.

Friday night, Chris and I went to the Stinking Rose for an early V-day dinner. Since it had been pouring off and on and we didn't know where the place was, we took a cab out there. The restaurant was really good. Very cute, actually. Maybe I'll post pictures of the place later. I forgot my camera, but took a few pictures on my phone. Anyway, The Stinking Rose is an Italian restaurant where everything is uber doused in garlic. Their tagline or slogan is "we serve food with our garlic," so you get the idea. As a garlic lover, I enjoyed this. They have this garlic parsley spread on the table for you to put on your bread. We also bought their popular appetizer, Bagna Calda. Pretty much a tub of olive oil with giant chunks of roasted garlic in it. Chris got muscles and I got this pesto and asparagas pasta. It was really good, but as a result of all that garlic, I had what can only be described as a garlic hangover the next few days. And we smelled so bad.

We walked back from the Stinking Rose once I realized that it was semi close to where I volunteer with the Immigration Clinic. Walked through Chinatown. It rained a little towards the end of the walk, but we were very fortunate that it didn't rain any more of that time. Got frozen yogurt for dessert. I'm happy to know that there are frozen yogurt places in SF.

We got back after that and watched the premiere of Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's new show. I thought it was pretty good. We'll see how it goes or how long Fox decides to keep it.

The next morning, we got up early to go to Brenda's French Soul Food. I've been wanting to go this restaurant for a very long time (actually might be going for lunch tomorrow). They've got Louisiana cuisine and they're known for being very crowded like all the time. They're also only open until 3 pm. We got there around 10. The place was pretty small. I wouldn't have noticed it if it wasn't for the big line outside. We waited around for about an hour to get into the restaurant. Missed the rain, fortunately. The food was amazing. We got the beignet flight, which is pretty much a sampler plate of their four signature beignets. I loved the crawfish beignet. I'm pretty sure that that alone would have been enough to make that 1 hour wait worth it. But, there was more. I got this andouille sausage and cheese omelete. I'm not sure what Chris got, but it was good. I also tried grits for the first time, and I thought they were surpringly good.

The thing about the food there is that it's sleep-inducing food. I passed out when we got back. Uncle Brian picked us up around 3:30 and we went home. Went out to get chachangmyun for dinner. So much eating this weekend.

Home involved Old Navy, much frozen yogurt, watching Oppa rearrange the office, reading, and getting the Wii Fit. Really fun game by the way.

Came back on Monday, where I finished ConLaw reading for today and started editing my brief and writing my summary of arguments.

At that point, I thought I was being producive because I thought the only thing we had to turn in today was the Summary of the Arguments. When I finished it, I thought "oh, hey, I'll be able to edit my brief a little, get Thursday's reading done and work on my oral argument a little tomorrow." I went to bed with that happy thought in mind.

I woke up the next day. Went to GAAP. Even did most of my Con Law reading for Thursday. Went to the Immigration Clinic. Checked my email after it was over and found out a draft of the entire brief was due.

...

Yeah.

Put me into a kind of a panic. I managed to fix up most of it. One section of it is absolutely terrible. I'm not even sure what to do with it at this point, but I've got to work on that paper a little each day from here on out.

There was additional stress because I found out right before I went to bed last night that I was out of printer ink. They apparently don't sell printer ink at the bookstore, so I had to run out to Walgreens to get it. Usually this is like nothing, but when I have to compact this into the short hour that I have between Contracts and Property, those 20-30 minutes are kind of a big deal. And of course since I wasn't able to prep for property, I actually got called on today. I took good notes though, so I was able to answer most of the questions even if I did have to find my notes to remember what the case was about.

Thats about it right now. Lost is on. Will probably be posting about that later. First, I need to get tomorrow's reading done.

I should go to bed soon and I have a lot more to post, but I just wanted to do this one thing before I went to bed.

late last night I finished book #9

Bahamarama by Bob Morris

I got it at the library while I was looking for guidebooks on Peru (they had none of those). I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but this one had a really loud, cool and Jimmy Buffett-escque cover so I was intrigued. It definitely makes for summer reading as it's set in Florida and the Bahamas and is a fast paced thriller-type novel, but it was definitely a fun read. Quick read too. The "big twist" was painfully obvious and the main character was not entirely likeable, but it was fun. The author had an equally loud-looking book in the library. Maybe I'll save it for later in the year.

Chris is here. It's raining outside and cold. We went to the library today because we were looking for the Watchmen graphic novel. They didn't have any copies in the library, but I kind of got a library card. I say kind of because I actually have to bring in some proof that I live at my SF address to get a silly card. Meaning I need to go back at some time and show them mail that's addressed to me and postmarked in the last minute. Pretty much the only mail other than junk mail and mail for previous tenants is my Netflix stuff. That's not postmarked. I told Chris to send me a letter or something. Whatever.

We also ate at the Soluna Bar for lunch. I went there for some Environmental Law Society happy hour at the beginning of the year and Dinah told me it was good, so I've been meaning to check it out. Even for lunch, it was a bit pricey (well compared to the cheap food we went out meaning to get), but it was pretty good. I've tried it now, so I'm happy. Wow it's raining pretty hard outside.

We've got a dinner reservation at the Stinking Rose tonight. I know it's not Valentine's day, but we didn't feel like celebrating on the actual day. Everything would probably be crowded. Thus, we are going tonight. Need to figure out how to get there though. It's pretty far. Google Maps told us to take the cable car, lol. I'm pretty sure that a bus will take us there for a lot less.

I actually just logged on to share to things: cool phone and a cool artist (actually makes for some perfect rainy day/study music too).

Time for contracts.

I have to leave for GAAP in a bit. This leaves me in a bind. I don't have enough time to start reading the 60 page behemoth known as my Enviro Law reading or to start writing more cover letters for jobs (the huge influx of firm layoff posts at ATL today is kind of intimidating) or do anything else mildly productive, so I'll just post here about Lost.

This season has been great so far. In the four or five episodes since the season premier, the show's seemed to finally start answering a lot of the questions we've been asking since season one. Of course, they give us 20 more new questions. I don't know if it's all the leaping or the lack of flashbacks, but it feels like the pace has increased significantly this season.

Charlotte used to live in the island. She speaks Korean (better than Jin). Last season, they seemed to build up the fact that she could speak Korean as part of her mysterious past. She probably just studied it in college or something. I'm assuming this because now that she's dead, this question is going to be left unanswered (unless we find out when Faraday meets little Charlotte). I was actually kind of warming up to her too.

We finally know why Rousseau is crazy. Non-crazy and happy Rousseau was kind of making me nervous and uncomfortable, so it was nice to see her with at least one large gun at the end of the episode. And apparently the only reason she didn't get sick like the rest of her group was because Jin stopped her from pursuing Smokey. Why the rest of her team decided to go after it, I have no clue.

Locke's sacrifice is presumably what stops the island from going into Quantum Leap hyper drive. I wonder what year they are in right now. I'm going to presume that it's an earlier Dharma time period so Faraday can run into little Charlotte, but we never know.

Also, creepy old lady is Faraday's mom. The blinking spoiler lights were right.

New questions:

Who is Charlotte's father? You know it's going to be someone they're all connected to. Maybe Whidmore?

Also is Christian Shepard Jacob? I'm still not entirely sure what his purpose is on this show other than being Jack's dad. (minimal Jackface this episode)

Are Juliette and Sawyer going to happen? It seems like they're trying to set it up, but it seems kind of awkward. The previews show Jack/Kate happening (again), so...

What happens next? They're obviously going to get to the island. But I don't see that taking the rest of the season. They've got to get Sayid, Hurley, and Kate on board. Does Ji-Yeon have to go as well? She wasn't born on the island though, so maybe not.

Are they reincarnating Locke? I imagine it would make it seem slightly less ridiculous than having to carry his corpse back to the island. Also, I'm sure Benry can find some way of making that happen.

Are they going to explain the Whidmore/Benry feud? They have to right?

Old Question:
Are. They. Ever. Going. To. Explain. The. Four-Toed. Statue?


Okay. I've got to go now. Those were my quick thoughts on Lost. I also went to this art law panel that my Property Professor put on yesterday. It was really cool. About art in the public sphere, so it was a lot of wall murals and stuff. I had to run to Moot Court, so I missed the end. That was upsetting. The last guy was pretty cool. The only thing i saw of his before I had to go was this art project he did where they set up a miniature park and bench in a metered parking space in SF for 2 hours a couple of years ago. I'd find a picture, but that's going to make me late so you can google it yourself.

This is a pretty cool cover of Take On My by A-Ha.

I have not, as one might imagine, fallen off the face of the earth. Well, I guess I have in some ways. No, actually, I've spent the last few days hacking away at the rough draft of the argument section of my brief. Essentially it's the whole brief because I had to write every section except for the summary of arguments. Sounds good. I have finish this a little later than I expected, but my estimated time of completion was around 12, so I'm not that far off just printing this tree out so that I can turn it in tomorrow.

Yesterday was more or less my "Happy Writing Night" and I got most of the paper done then. I even actually turned Heroes off halfway through to focus. Yes, I was that dedicated. I did watch Chuck. It was a rerun, but it was a rerun that I had not seen before. No Gossip Girl. Apparently I also didn't get the memo that there was a presidential press conference last night. Go figure. Yesterday, I also officially started my summer job search by actually putting a couple of applications in the mail. This involved running between the Tower and the post office on Market several times. There's actually one closer than that, but I was specifically told not to go there. Not a good opportunity to experiment with that instruction. I was actually very productive last night and I think I wrote 14/18 pages of my brief (it's longer with all the additional stuff like the title page and the table of contents, but the actual writing part is about 18 pages long). That was pretty good. I was even actually productive between Enviro Law and Contracts and got another section done.

At one, I left to meet up because a group of us were going out to have lunch with our crim professor from last semester. I put my keys and my ID card in my purse. Somehow, between the Tower and the 200 building, I lost my ID. I texted Gina to tell her to pass on the message that I was running late, ran back to my apartment and did a frantic search for my ID. Nowhere to be found. Since I was running late and holding up the group at this point, I just got a visitor's pass to get into the building. Lunch was fun. We ended up eating at a Thai place that isn't Lalitas (no hate to Lalitas, but there's only so much of it you can take). I don't actually remember what hte name of it was.

Note to self: start playing golf again.

I didn't end up getting back until almost three. This meant that I had to 1) resume stressing about my ID card and 2) print out a resume and run back to the 200 building for a meeting with the man who runs the Alumni Mentorship Program. On the way up, I asked the security guards if they had seen my ID. They hadn't. At this point, I just assumed some random homeless guy was now in possession of my ID card and actually planned to get a new one. When I went to sign in at the 200 building again, the security guard told me that my ID was in the 198 building. Ran across the street to get it (yay) and ran back in time for the Alumni Mentorship meeting. That meeting went well also, and it also ran longer than I thought it would.

Got back at 4:10 and gathered my stuff together. Was supposed to meet Gina and Grace downstairs at 4:30 because we got a ride to this training at USF for the Immigration Clinic. We learned how to fill out naturalization forms. That ran until 6:30. We got back around 7. Went to the gym and got back in time for Idol.

And start trying to write my paper. Kind of. I got distracted by other things along the way.

That's about it. Tomorrow I will resume normal life, which includes doing laundry and making my apartment look half-way presentable (this is something I actually started in an attempt to not write my paper earlier, but whatever).

Also, I finished book #8.
This one as Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. He's wrote the Hours. I had to read that for some class in UCI and I actually thought it was boring. Monica had some of his other books as well. I borrowed those and really liked those. Beyond that, what really drove me to buy this book was that it was $2 in the Borders Bargain Bin. Basically it's one big with three short stories that take place in New York (past, present, future) that are connected by Walt Whitman poems, some white bowl, characters named Simon, Lucas and some derivation of Catherine, and other stuff that I can't actually remember right now because I should probably be asleep. I don't think I've ever read a Walt Whitman poem. I don't know if having read the poems would have given me deeper insight into the stories. The first took place around the industrial era. It was very depressing and I actually liked the second and third stories more. The third one was very science fictiony, which Ithought I wasn't going to like, but actually did. It was pretty different from what I remember of his other books. It was an enjoyable read, but I think I liked the two books I borrowed from Monica more.

Now to decide what to read next. First sleep.

Last Fm Time

I've got a lot of mini things to post about

1) I've finished Book #7 of the 50 books I plan to read this year. This one was A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain. I've started to like reading travel books, mostly because the authors get to go to fun places that I either have never been to or will never be able to go to. This one is about food. Food + Travel = Happiness in my mind. In this book, Bourdain travels around the world looking for the perfect meal. He goes to Russia, Vietnam, Cambodia, France, California, Morocco, etc. and tries everything from goat testicles to (the much dreaded) vegan food. In the process, he more or less comes to the conclusion that there really is no one perfect meal. I've never actually seen his show. Might have to at some point. He's got kind of a big ego, but his book's a fun read.

2) This season of Lost has yet to disappoint. What happened last night? A lot of things. It was a Kate-centric episode so we got a lot of Kate and a lot of Jack-face. Still no flashback, which is kind of disappointing. Sayid demonstrated more of his pure powers of awesome. Someone's lawyers are trying to take Aaron away from Kate since he's not really his kid. She stalks the lawyer to figure out who it is. The lawyer happens to go to Claire's mom. Jack, being Claire's half-sister, steps up and says "hay, i've totally got this." He confront's Claire's mom and it turns out she has no idea what he's talking about, so he Jack-faces away into the distance and tells Kate to leave as quickly as possible. We find out it's Benry's lawyer doing all of this. He's also getting Hurley (or Hugo, since that's what everyone seems to be calling him now) out of prison. Anyway, Jack tells Kate that they HAVE to get to the docks, where they meet Ben and Sayid. Kate is clearly pissed that Jack tricked her into meeting with Ben. Sun, meanwhile, is hiding in a car with Aaron and is holding a gun that she got out of a chocolate box.

Meanwhile, on the island, we return to Quantum Leap on crack. Charlotte, Miles, and Juliette get nose bleeds. Sawyer sees a scene from Season 1, they get shot at by random people, and Ziggy malfunctions once again. Oh, also...Jin's alive. Yay! He gets rescued by a boat full of French people and we get to see young pre-crazy jungle woman Rousseau. Given that they're quantum leaping, we won't see her for long, but I wonder if we're going to FINALLY get backstory on that woman.

Also, I wonder if present-Locke is dead for good.

Yup, I don't think we have to worry about Lost going back to the crapfest known as Season 3 for a while.

3) There was a lot of eating today.

For lunch, I went with Jamie and a couple of other girls to Ananda Fuara, which is a vegetarian restaurant on Market and Larkin. I pass this place whenever I go to Walgreens and it's intrigued me for quite some time. Unfortunately, I feel like it was closed whenever I walked by. Considering how drab and semi-Tenderloiny it looks from the outside, it's really cute on the inside. I was actually pretty nonadventurous today and had eggplant parmesan, something I could have just as easily gotten at Morty's next to GAAP. I don't know. I was in an eggplant mood. It was really good though. It's also relatively inexpensive and I've heard good things about their other dishes, so I guess I'll have to go back and try something else there some other time.

For dinner, I went with KALSA to Cocobang. It was a post-BOB party since KALSA hosted BOB. I was actually supposed to volunteer and pass out kimbap at BOB, but I could only get Career Office appointments at BOB time or GAAP time and I figured that helping homeless people was just a little more important than giving law students free kim bap. I missed Korean drums, apparently, though. That would have bee fun. Anyway, we went to Cocobang. Chris and I had been there before. It's definitely one of those places that's more fun to go to in a big group. We shared chicken, and bibimbap, and dokkbokki, and I don't remember what else. We also had soju. It was fun. A lot of the group went to a norebang after. Jeanne and I went back. Homework, what else?

4) Group auditions yesterday for Idol were fun. That Tatiana girl is obnoxious, but she's never going to bring as much drama as the twins from Season 5. In fact, they might as well give up trying to make Hollywood week seem uber dramatic becaus there is never going to be a Hollywood week moment as great as this one.

That's it. Sleep time.

Today was a very long day. The only reason I'm still up is because I'm trying to get ConLaw done for Thursday. It's literally like five pages, so it's doable.

Today's my early day. I have to be in class at the unheard of hour of 8:30. I know, law school can be cruel sometimes. Somehow, I'm like 2 lectures ahead in that reading, so all is right in the world of environmental law...I think. I'm still terrified of his final.

Okay, done with Con Law.

Anyway, I watched Chuck between Enviro Law and Con Law. I'm glad that show is back. I love it. It's a good contrast to Heroes, which sometimes takes itself too serious. Also, Adam Baldwin's kind of amazing on the show. This was the dreaded 3D episode. Thus, for all of us who do not have the pleasure of having 3D glasses on hand, we got to watch a blurry episode of the show with many lame attempts at making things pop out at you. What I found more intriguing about the preview was that they show Tony Hale shout "No touching." I have to imagine this is a reference to a certain canceled Fox show (they even played the "Final Countdown" later in the episode). We get to see Charlie back from the Lost-dead. He plays what I imagine Charlie would have been like when I was in Driveshaft. Well, I guess he'd need a little more heroine and a diaper to be Driveshaft Charlie. When is Scott Bakula coming to the show? That's what I'm waiting for.

I got called on during Con Law. It caught me off guard, but the fact that I mispronounced the name of the buyer actually managed to buy me a few minutes to review my brief. That helped.

GAAP went by really quickly today. I guess when you're there for only 45 minutes, anything goes by quickly. I spent the time working with one person and ended up getting vey little accomplished. We had to fax in some form and it takes a day to process, so it's not really anyone's fault. He's coming back on Thursday and we should be able to sort that whole mess out.

I actually very last minute decided to go to the Immigration Clinic with the Asian Law Caucus tonight. I missed the training last week because I wasn't sure if it was something that 1Ls could participate in, but they said it was okay when I emailed them. The office is really far from here. It took us about 35 minutes or so to walk there, but it was a very interesting experience. It's pretty much what it sounds like. You're helping people with immigration issues. I shadowed a more experienced volunteer today because I missed training last week. It runs every two weeks, that should be a fun experience.

Got back just in time for Idol, which was really lame. I was so excited for Hollywood week and today was just an extended round of auditions, except you hardly got to hear anyone sing. Also, the suspense has been kind of ruined because the Top 36 leaked on the Internet already. Tomorrow's supposed to be group day. That's where the fun in Hollywood lies.

While watching Idol, I started to bake brownies. We're supposed to sign up for a day to bring snack in to Moot Court and it's tomorrow for me. I decided to bake brownies and bring in chips and salsa. I made the salsa last night during Gossip Girl. Brownies were for today. When I got the mix at Trader Joes a couple of weeks ago, they were out of the really good truffle brownie mix. I was stuck with the fat free one. I got it anyway because healthy brownies aren't a bad thing... The batter was really good, so when I stuck the brownies into the oven, I expected delicious brownies to come out in 25 minutes. They weren't delicious. They have absolutely no flavor. Well, actually, no. I had to use two pans to bake these brownies. My baking pan was way too big. Jeanne's weren't big enough, so I just used two of hers. One pan of brownies were a little burnt, so they have slightly more flavor than the other one. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if "burnt" is a good additional flavor.

Bottom line is that you shouldn't get the no puge brownies from Trader Joes. the salsa came out okay. It needed more salt, though.

That's about it for today. Tomorrow's the long day of classes!

It's Monday night, which is my big television night. Gossip Girl, Chuck, and Heroes came back. Since I didn't do anything today besides go to class and spend the night hacking away at this week's Moot Court assignments (and make salsa, actually), I'll go into mini-recaps. I've got my 8:30 class tomorrow, so they can't be too long.

Gossip Girl -

We learned from the previews three things - 1) Blair was going to get expelled; 2) Dan and WhatshernameTeacher's relationship will be exposed some how; 3) Chuck did something that's really cool and has to share it with Nate. Blair's been upset that she has to pick up litter for detention. She doesn't actually do it. She makes Dorota do it for her until her father shows up. At this point, she pretends that she's been working away and gets big sympathy points. Needless to say, she's very upset with Whatshername Teacher for starting this. Since she's Blair, instead of just sitting still and basking in the glow of her now-earned Yale acceptance, she decides to seek revenge. Even her minions tell her that it's a bad idea. Then Whatshername Teacher bans cell phones from the school and everyone's on board. They decide to spread a rumor that Dan and Whatshername Teacher are in some secret affair and use the phones that UndercoverSpy Dorota sneaks into the school for them.

All hell breaks lose. Dean is upset. Dean expels Blair because Dan and Nelli snitch. I was hoping this expulsion thing would last a little longer. Judging from the way they portrayed public schools in The OC when Marissa got (temporarily) expelled from Harbor, I could only imagine how Blair would react in such a situation. I certainly doubt she'd even associate with little emo surfers.

It doesn't last long. Outraged by the scandal, the parents of Constance and St. Jude pull a last minute parent teacher meeting about the Gossip Girl site. Blair tells her dad (who I'm assuming has been living there because Elenor and Cyrus are on their honeymoon) that the story wasn't a lie, so he goes to fight for her. Blair resigns herself to a Yale-less life and even has Dorota give away the dog. Then, Serena sees Dan and Whatshername Teacher at the cafe together and snaps a picture. Dumb move on their part considering they're supposed to be showing that they're not together. An upset Serena shows picture to Blair, Blair brings picture to teacher's meeting, WT is fired.

Blair's elated, especially since she had Dorota retrieve her dog. Her dad's mad she lied. Dan's upset, especially at Rufus, who voted for her to be fired. Dan and Serena break up. Dan and WT actually hook up since she's not a teacher anymore (how old is Dan?). While they hook up, the Dean tells Lily and Rufus that they're not going to fire WT anymore. Scandal. Yes.

Meanwhile, they've got this new developing Chuck storyline that's kind of dumb. He wakes up in some hotel after some night of partying and after meeting some mystery woman. He drags Nate and Vanessa over to investigate. Instead of helping Chuck, both of them test your gag reflexes with their disgusting cute coupleness. Anyway, mystery woman is his old nanny, who rubs salt all over Chuck's wounds by telling him that he was actually looking for Bart and did not know that he was dead. Then she talks about some secret society that Chuck should definitely not look into. Like that's going to happen. Anyway, that storyline looks kind of dumb. I was hoping mystery woman would be Georgina. Oh well...


Heroes

Heroes was okay. Nathan Petrelli's apparently got this big plan to get rid of people with powers by rounding them up and sending them somewhere. Apparently HRG is in on the action as well. Peter goes back to his actual job and whines there. Claire starts looking at colleges. Matt and Daphne are together, but Matt's adopted daughter is notably missing...still. Oh and the now-powerless Hiro is living vicariously through Ando's newly acquired powers. He also conveniently injects some GPS device into both Ando and himself. We're not going to ask how he afforded it.

Government agents round up all the main characters and put them on a plane to send them off to some unknown location. The only ones they don't seem to get are Sylar, because Sylar's too good for them, and Ando, because not many people know he has powers. They catch Claire, but Nathan tries to sneak her out in an attempt to show some heart (I'm really liking cold-hearted villanous Nathan, though). Claire punches her driver in the face and sneaks onto the plane. As it's taking off, she frees the prisoners. Peter somehow gets his powers back by holding Mohinder's hand. He breaks the plane by acquiring NotNikki's power and freezing one wall of the plane. This causes a plane crash scene that I could have sworn I saw 5 years ago. The episode ends after that. I imagine they're building us up for some uber cool season or something I don't know. I should get to bed.

Music trivia of the day: Today is marks the 50th anniversary of the day that a plane crash killed Richie Valens, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, also known to Don McLean as "the day the music died."

I've been trying to brief a case for my Moot Court research for like two hours now and I just can't get into it. It's an interesting case about child pornography, but I just haven't been able to get into it. This is one of the big cases that I need to know, too. You might ask how that relates to identity theft, but it's actually not as exciting of an answer as you might expect.

Anyway, as part of Project: Get out of the Apartment More, I decided to go to the Asian Art Museum. Today was an ideal day to go because it was a great day, it was a weekend...and admission to the museum is free on the first Sunday of every month. That's definitely a plus. The admission isn't really that bad to begin with, but free > all. Anyway, I went to the museum around 10:30. In addition to it being free today, they were also celebrating the Year of the Ox at the museum. Thus, they had performances and arts and crafts tables. Anyway, the exhibits in the museum were really cool. The museum is huge (a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be). The collection is enormous. The Korea collection here was a lot bigger than the one at the Freer & Sackler Galleries in DC. There's an entire room that's filled with Jade. It's really cool. There were so many statues of Buddha (the law student in me had to stop myself from typing statute instead of statue). It's a really great exhibit. I'm going to have to go back at some other time. I got through two and a half rooms and realized that I had spent an hour there. Knowing that I would, at some point, have to actually start doing work, I kind of sped things up after that. I was there for another hour and a half or something, but I know I probably missed a lot. Also, I missed the exhibit on art from Afghanistan. It's been here since October and pretty much just ended. It looked really cool, too.

I was starving after that, so I grabbed a burrito and got work done. I got some work done, but I got severely distracted after having rediscovered the blog, Stuff White People Like. At least I'm done with reading through Wednesday. Probably spend all of tomorrow doing Moot Court. Fun times. I have a sneaking suspicion that there was something I was supposed to do today that I didn't, but whatever.

I didn't watch the Super Bowl, but I watched what were apparently the best commercials from it. The Conan O'Brien one has to be my favorite. I found out that there was an hour-long episode of The Office after. I missed it and will have to watch it tomorrow or something. Tomorrow's actually a big TV night. Gossip Girl, Chuck, and Heroes come back. I actually have to choose between my Josh Schwartz shows, so I'll probably be watching Chuck on Hulu in between classes on Wednesday. Yay Heroes though. Let's see if they can prove themselves against some really good episodes of Lost.

It's ridiculously late now, so I should probably go to bed.

Oh hey, today was semi-productive. In a way, I guess. Actually, I was semi-productive after 8 last night. I even started the job search. Granted, I started it at around 1 after I had finished reading for Monday's Property class, but at least it's something. I woke up to plans to see The Dark Knight on IMAX at 12:00. At 10:30, this did not leave me much time. I used this time wisely and proceeded to post the previous blog entry about a list of celebrities under 25. In my defense, I actually also printed out a couple of cases for moot court and retrieved them from the library (go free printing from Westlaw and LexisNexis.).

Met Gina and Jamie at 11:30 in the library and we walked over to the Metreon to see TDK. I think this might only be the second time I've seen the movie in its entirety. We have the movie at home, but I'd only catch moments of it because I was either running around doing something or playing with Bruce. Anyway, this was also the first time in a while that I've seen a movie on the IMAX (In a while is relative considering the amount of movies I have seen on the IMAX at the Spectrum). Anyway, seeing this movie on the IMAX was definitely an experience. The movie was good. Harvey Dent didn't die this time...kidding (though I still argue that if they go through with a sequel, he can still come back).

Also, a lot of movies are coming out on IMAX soon. There was a REALLY lame teaser for The Half Blood Prince (which is also in 3D...). The new Star Trek looks amazing. I finally saw a trailer for The Watchmen, which also looks great. This is going to be another good year for geeks, I imagine. There was also some Dreamworks animated film that looked funny.

Oh yeah, so the Metreon does this silly light-show type thing before showing the movie that talks about how great IMAX is and what not. They show you the speakers behind the screen. They're so big. They don't do this at the Spectrum unless it's some recent development. Maybe they just don't have cool speakers. I don't know.

The movie ended a little before 3. We were going to walk back together but then I saw SALE and VIRGIN MEGASTORE and stayed behind. They didn't have any of the CDs I was looking for. I sadly cursed the man and went to Rasputin. They didn't have them either, so I sulked and took BART back. This wasn't out of laziness, but because it was 3:30 and I had forgotten that I signed up to volunteer at 4:00 at the Water Law Symposium that was hosted here at Hastings today.

I changed and went over to the event. Sat around at the front making sure people signed out. The volunteer coordinator let me go watch the last panel after a while. It was really interesting and I actually kind of regret going to more of this event. The panel I saw seemed to be mostly about the delta smelt and other local endangered fish. A lot of it went over my head, but I really liked the last presentation.

Didn't get to homework until 6 pm. I think I did well, all things considered. Finished ConLaw for Wednesday and Contracts for Tuesday. Read through more cases for Moot Court. And resumed job search work. Kind of. Should probably get back to that actually.