La Romanza

Sometimes in the hectic busyness of everyday, a couple can forget to slow down and enjoy each other. Don't worry- this isn't dirty. Tonight, Eduardo and I decided to walk to our favorite little corner Vietnamese restaurant for dinner. The air was cool and the wind strong. As we ate, the Tracy Chapman song that we danced to at our wedding came on and we got sort of sentimental. We are not slowdanceinmiddleoftherestaurant folks, but the conversation quieted a moment and we just felt content. Then, on the walk back to our apartment, a few raindrops turned into pouring rain and we got soaking wet. Laughing through puddles and drenched clothes, we walked hand in hand in the hard rain.

Now we are back home and things are back to normal. We are watching "House" and chatting about what we want to buy at Home Depot, and I am on the internet, obvio.

But it was a nice evening. An infrequent and spontaneous romantic interlude. And a nice reminder that, even though we have been together for 7 years and married for almost 4 years, we can still be romantica.

Pomp and Circumstance

Two weeks from right now, I will have graduated from law school. It will be way different from my college graduation 4 years ago for a lot of reasons.

• Ceremony will be indoors in an auditorium, rather than at the lovely Greek outdoor theater where I had spent many drunk evenings laying in the grass.
• My hat will just be a black hat, not decked out with a masking tape peace sign. I still don't like the war but I'm not a hippie anymore.
• More regalia, although maybe less regalia than my high school graduation (the IB diploma meant a LOT of cords and tassels and medals).
• I won't be packing up and leaving a life in California and all of my friends from the past four years. That was the hardest part of graduation-- being excited, but also feeling an immense sadness at leaving so many good friends and a life I had made in California. This graduation seems like it will be much less emotional. I will go out to lunch after the ceremony with my family, and then life will continue as it has for the past few years. A good life it is, and way less dramatic than flying to a whole new life less than 24 hours after graduation.
• A career. At college graduation, I had no idea where I was going to work and how I was going to make money. Now I have a real job that is more properly defined as a "career." My grandparents have been saying I am "obsessed with my career" for years. I always found this funny since I didn't have a career. Now I will.
• Do they play Pomp and Circumstance for law school graduations? I sort of hope they play the Law and Order theme instead.

I'll let you know.

I Heart G.K.

That would be Garrison Keillor. And, yes, I love him. Not only do I love that one of the best and brightest liberals in America is a Norwegian-Minnesotan, but he brightens my Sunday mornings like no other. When I roll out of bed, I am immediately excited to grab the Op-Ed section of the Strib and turn to Garrison’s column. Yesterday’s was especially good. He wrote about the lessons of history- how in retrospect all of the mistakes people and governments made seem so silly and so obviously, well, mistaken. But of course, it’s never really that simple.

One of the examples Garrison gave was the Temperance Movement and the Prohibition Era. In 2007, it seems unfathomable, bizarre, and uber-Puritanical that alcohol was illegal in this country. But Garrison goes on and this is where it gets interesting. The Temperance movement was actually led by women who were also Suffragists. They were not the conservatives or the Puritans of their day. They were women who had experienced how other women, who had virtually no political power or economic control over their lives and were extremely dependant on their husbands’ incomes, could have their lives ruined by alcoholic and abusive men. At least in part, Prohibition came about due to women activists who believed that women’s lives would be vastly stabilized and improved if their husbands were sober and providing for their families.

This is fascinating to me. Maybe it’s old news to others, but despite 22.5 years of education, including AP U.S. History and several American Studies-type classes in high school and college, I have never learned about the Prohibition Era from this perspective.

I woke up on Sunday morning looking forward to sitting on my balcony in the April sunshine and reading the paper. I had no idea I was going to get a different perspective on a topic I didn’t even realize I was interested in.

This is the perfect time to start making a list of books/topics that I am going to read/study for fun once the bar exam is over: Connections between the Suffragist movement and the Temperance movement. (Maybe read about this while wearing an ERA button and drinking a lot of wine?)

Major props, G.K., major props.

Electric Youth

When I used to go to the Dominican Republic and spend weeks in the campo, I thought it was romantic/quaint when the electricity would go out for hours on end. It meant peaceful silence peppered only by laughter and conversation and the clicking noise of dominoes being slammed on the table. I felt wise, and actually enjoyed the enlightenment of being unplugged.

The romanticism started to fade when I lived in Santo Domingo, not anywhere near the fresh ocean breeze like the resorts have. When the electricity would go out, I would lay awake all night unable to sleep due to the overbearing and stifling heat. Still, in the day time, I didn't mind the lack of constant electricity. I would just wander around my neighborhood and get my face tanner or listen to the battery-powered radio.

I guess now I am officially old. Today the electricity was shut off in my apartment for exactly 1.75 hours, from 5:45pm to 7:30pm. I almost went crazy. I was pissed, particularly because it was a scheduled shut-off that I was told would happen from 2-3pm, when I was at work. As it was, I was unable to finish my workout on the treadmill, unable to cook dinner (the gas was shut off too), and I missed the first half of American Idol. Maybe I'm not old. Maybe now I'm just truly American -- exercise machines, dinner at 6:30 and American Idol.

On the upside, I got my reading for tomorrow done without distraction. This is something that should happen every day, but that's a story for another blog-day.

Welcome!

If you come visit, this is some of what you will see! We love it.

Countdowns

I swore off counting down the days. It's always been a habit--for better or worse, and as I get old(er), I don't want to wish time away. I think I spent too much time counting down days in college until I could see Eduardo again. Now I sometimes wish I had college back.

But I am granting myself a couple of exceptions to my no-counting-down rule.

1) I graduate from law school on May 12. One month from today. I never counted down until college was over--I loved it too much. Law school is another story. I am sick of it and I only have like 2 friends, 1 of which doesn't go to class anymore. It is therefore acceptable to wish the next 30 days away.

2) We are going to take possession of our new house on June 30. This is further down the line. I am not going to wish all that time away because there is going to be a bunch of fun stuff between now and then, including a trip to Albuquerque to see many college friends, which should hopefully satisfy my above-mentioned hankering for college. But, you heard it here first: I can't WAIT to to have more space. I can't wait to have wood floors. I can't wait to have a big laundry room with a washer and dryer that don't require quarters and, just as importantly, a big space to just put stuff. I can't wait to have more than one place to sit. It's going to be so novel, I might just sit in a new place every 5 minutes. Kitchen chairs, dining room chairs, living room, family room, patio, front steps. Maybe best of all, I can jump! or run to the other side of my space without worrying that bothering people below me. On this front I'm not so much wishing time away as I am grateful that my rental days are numbered.

Taste of Spring Water, not "Spring Water"

Minneapolis has great water, usually. Usually I use a Brita filter, but in Minneapolis, even if pitcher is empty, you can get a delicious glass of water from the tap in Minneapolis city limits. It's cold, clear, and clean. Except in the Spring.

The thaw from Minnesota winters makes the water taste disgusting and smell like fish. It goes away by May, but from mid-March until usually the end of April, Minneapolis tap water is foul. I don't get it. It seems like water recently fallen as snow or ice and melted should be cleaner. It seems that the water should be nasty in August, when the Mississippi river has been used and abused by summer enthusiasts for 3 months.

As such, I have resorted to a behavior I normally oppose: buying 20oz. bottles of Dasani from the vending machine at school. I guess my love for cold clean water trumps my social convictions. And I just thought of this-- in some small way, I am contributing to the lack of accessibility of clean water in our lakes and rivers by buying into the plastic water bottle craze. It's a never-ending cycle of my desires battling my beliefs. A cycle, just like every Spring when the thaw comes and the water tastes like ass.