nine or so to go.
i should feel better about this ’round about thursday, when my paycheck gets deposited.
# # #
in other news, as far as i can tell, there is no other news. primaries? presidential nonsense? a world beyond the route from my house to my office?
hah, i say! hah! all myths.
attempting an 85 hour work week with one day off: nutso.
attempting same without the support of a very tolerant g: insanity.
following up with a 105 hour work week: quite possibly suicidal.
sleeping for 2 days straight when it’s all over: priceless.
(oh, and paying off a nasty credit card in the process? part of why I’m engaging in this insane experiment. I don’t need IRB approval if it’s just me, right?)
so your project increases your max billables to 15 a day for 14 days straight. and on day one, the system craps out before 11am and you spend the next 12 hours watching the screen go from blank to server error to eventual document.
at least I got dinner out of it. I’ve has worse dates.
scroll down to the hatches if you don’t want to read about my political unawareness.
a drawback of big news happening over the holidays when you’re stressed and working and not really paying attention to anything:
you find out benazir bhutto was assassinated the day after it happened, by chancing upon a beat-up copy of the friday washington post in the lunch room.
“it was all over NPR yesterday!” said one of my staff attorneys.
“i’ve spent the last two days listening to alice et june in the car. besides, i tend to listen to WTOP on the way in to work anyway. news, traffic and weather on the eights. but the news is mostly sports.”
“it’s all over tv!”
“television? oh, yeah. stopped watching when the writers’ strike began and the daily show and colbert report went into reruns. i suppose i would’ve found out about it there, but, well…”
“you don’t read the paper online?”
“yeah… before i started spending 12 hours a day reading other people’s e-mail for a living.”
“oh, well, then.”
well, then, indeed. unless it’s being piped directly into my brain (i.e., in front of me, while i’m awake and not in a click-coding daze) there’s a good chance i’m oblivious to it. in this case it’s rather disturbing because i always found benazir fascinating, and the fact of her had achieved a sort of cult/icon status in my worldview. that she was assassinated does not surprise me; it’s the fact that she’s dead, jim, that i can’t get my head around. odd disconnect there.
i’m not even paying attention to the upcoming primaries. can’t bring myself to care, really, political junkie that i once was. hillary looks smug; obama cadaverous. the candidates i like (kucinich and dodd) don’t have a snowball’s chance in a blast furnace. and if you think i’m going to pay any attention to the freak show that is the republican race, well, then, you don’t know me very well.
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i did really really like sweeney todd, though.
oh! and on the topic of sweeney todd, neil gaiman mentioned on his blog,
I even loved Johnny Depp’s early-Bowie-when-he-was-still-doing-Anthony-Newley singing style.
(if you’re not sure about this, listen to bowie’s please mister gravedigger; gaiman suggests the laughing gnome.) reconsidering the movie in this light, i realized that what i found most disconcerting is how much depp-as-mister-t looks like christopher walken. talk about creepy.
awhile back, my laptop was OOC (out of commission) due to a broken dc-in board. jesse, a tech-head friend, was kind enough to fix it in return for some beer and a trout-and-asparagus dinner. for several months, all was well in the world of laloca’s laptop computing.
then, just this week, i noticed the strangest thing. my laptop wouldn’t connect to the house wireless. or rather, it would connect, but it would self-assign an IP address. it was driving me nuts. could verizon’s service really be so bad that the router was konking out at least twice a day?
well, i’m sure it could, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. because i discovered that my laptop connects just fine as long as there’s another computer in the house actively connected to the router.
strange, ain’t it?
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other things i won’t have time to properly blog about:
what with the pay-for-renovation megahours i’m working.
but here’s an interesting thing to note - and perhaps in the future ponder on its implications. it seems a disproportionate (when compared to the proportion of law school graduates they comprise) number of the contract attorneys at my site are black women.
a text conversation between me and a friend who is doing the contract law gig at a firm on the other side of the river.
ms: all creatures need love. except spiders (killed 1 last night with fake butter spray, then poured dish soap and salt on him).
me: be nice to spiders. spiders are our friends. besides, that sounds like dinner.
ms: we could probably get the terrorists to talk the same way. and if waterboarding isn’t torture, fake butter spray definitely wouldn’t count.
me: did the spider give up any intel?
ms: yes but i checked and it’s no good.
me: not corroborated by the roaches?
ms: i think the spider would have told me anything to stop having salt poured in his eyes.
and it pretty much went downhill from there.
you would think (if you were me), that finding pants - nothing fancy, just plain old pants-that-aren’t-jeans, suitable for “business casual” - would not be a herculean task.
you’d be wrong. at least, you would be if you went to a mall to buy said pants, which is what i did yesterday. g and i braved tyson’s corner (never, ever, ever again). we started at nordie’s, because i figured that their half-yearly sale would be a good place to buy pants.
wrong.
they had two - count ‘em, two sale racks of women’s pants. that’s it. all fugly. and i started to tense up.
“let’s get out of here, check out another store.” said g. and so we did. brooks brothers had nice pants, but at more than $200 a pair (that’s more than $100 a leg!), they weren’t a viable option. we continued on, braving gaggles of teenagers, murders of mothers, sieges of senior citizens.
“you’re getting anxious.” g observed.
“well, yeah. how hard is it to find pants? and why is it so crowded?”1
our next stop was ann taylor (all pants 25% off, the sign outside proudly announced), where after trying on at least 85 million pairs, i found one pair of pants that were adequate. (what size am i? 8, i thought, or 6, perhaps. no, in AT i’m a 4. that’s nonsense.) unfortunately the store only had one register working, and the cashier was elbow-deep in new purchases. i left the pants on the counter. as we left, the security guy/greeter happily chirped to incoming patrons, “all pants! 25% off!”
“yeah, but you only have one working register!” i snarked.
g grabbed my wrist. “you’re getting angry.”
“yes. how hard is it to find fucking pants in a goddamn mall?”
“look, let’s just go to the gap. the gap has pants.”
and so we did. and they did. and in short order (after determining that i’m generally a 6 and sometimes a 4, and wouldn’t it be simpler if all pants were sold by waist/inseam measurements like my 501s?) we left, three pairs of pants (and two new basic belts, one black, one brown) the richer.
i wore new pants today. brown corduroys. narrow wale. very nice. i even got a pair of rockport clogs to go with them.
if the gap ever runs out of pants, i don’t know what i’ll do.
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1 oh, yeah. xmas shopping season. silly me, it begins before thanksgiving now, doesn’t it? amazing how the gift-giving holidays become more of a chore and less fun with each passing year.
is very, VERY long. don’t know if i’ll be able to maintain that pace, but being able to pay off a substantial house renovation in four months is an attractive prospect.
items of note:
1. it’s hard not to eat while pulling such long hours. it’s as though the hand-to-mouth movement plus flavor burst provides just enough distraction to make the minutes tick by… less slowly.
2. there are an astonishing number of parallels between long doc review hours and long-haul flights. to wit:
a. hydration is key. drink water. use hand lotion. find a good moisturizer. you’re in a climate-controlled environment for hours on end.
b. move around occasionally. see (a) - the more water you drink, the more you need to get up and go to the bathroom. this is a good thing, as it allows you the opportunity to s-t-r-e-t-c-h.
while it isn’t as bad as the dc-narita flight, 11 hours in a chair still ain’t fun, and probably isn’t good for you. come to think of it, i’d like to see some studies on deep-vein thrombosis among contract attorneys.
c. after the first few hours, the bathrooms get nasty. now, this isn’t such a problem at my current site, where the bathrooms are cleaned and restocked 3x a day, but my previous one… uff. let’s just say it’s frightening when the condition of a 4-hole office bathroom approaches that of a one-hole airline head.
d. bring your own food, the airlines firms are cutting back on meals. despite the long hours, the firm where i currently work only provides meals on the weekends.
which reminds me. i should get out of bed and into the shower. i need to be at work soon. but don’t fret; i’m sure i’ll blog about this in the future.
well, having turned down a 40 hr/wk position with a small firm, i’m back at contract attorney work. this isn’t a bad thing, and in fact factored into my decision not to take a “real” attorney job. while the non-pay benefits aren’t great (i don’t get health benefits or paid vacations or even sick leave), there is the possibility of making scads of money in a short period of time on high-overtime projects.
like the one i started today: the firm wants a minimum of 9 hours a day (M-F), and would just love it if we were there 70 hrs/week (11 hours a day M-F, 7.5 hours on SaSu). when you figure that’s 40 hrs/wk at hourly and 30 at time-and-a-half, you can see the appeal.1
maintaining those hours over long periods of time will also turn you into a zombie.
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1 one thing you do have to watch out for is the point of diminishing returns - the mega OT also pushes you into a higher tax bracket.