It's been an eventful year, as the other post dated today (which I made a year ago) just barely begins to hint at. There has been plenty of death and pain and stress in my life and in the world at large, but I've accomplished things this year too. Mainly professional rather than personal; on a personal level I think I'm in mostly (though not quite) the same place I was a year ago. There's been a little personal growth and change, but not much. Most of that has involved trying to deal with stressful external events, and I'd really like a different kind of growth this year, thank you.

On a professional level, I graduated from law school, passed the bar, and became a real attorney, the culmination of a dream that started seven years ago. So that's nothing to sneeze at. But I think 2010 needs to be a personal growth year. The professional front is taken care of for the next while, so I have to work on the other stuff that goes into living life. Maybe I can even be happy for some of 2010.

I don't think there's any point reflecting on the past decade. When it started, I was an 18-year-old child with one semester of college under my belt. In the '00s, I grew up. I'm not done yet, either. Any attempt to summarize growing to adulthood in bullet points is futile; likewise doing the same with world affairs. So, no memes.

I think we're all hoping this next year will be better than this past year. But...

I went to Paris for the first time this year.

Any year where you get to see Paris can't have been all bad.

My UW e-mail address dies today. My address of record now is the same combo of first name and last initial as my u.washington.edu one, but with gmail.com after the @.

Meanwhile, UW finally decided to start winning some damn football games. Thanks for having the no-win season while I was watching and waiting to stop sucking 'til I was gone, gentlemen.

Turns out my boss is a big fan of college football. We quoted Eliot together to capture the weird inversion of traditional powerhouse teams such as USC losing a lot this season, such that lesser-regarded teams are winning. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Pasadena for the Rose Bowl?...

(I can hold my own on the literature front with the man, but regarding football I rely on friends' Facebook status updates for any sports info and he quickly sniffed me out for a know-nothing.)

IANAL^H^H^H AL - I am officially a lawyer. My boss administered my oath of attorney to me this afternoon. In a moment of unusual grace, the California Bar Association has liberal requirements for who may administer the oath, and my boss fits the bill. I sent off my signed and sealed registration card; now I just wait for the Bar to label me with a number and make my personal information public on the Internet. (There's a searchable attorney database online, see. 222,595 members as of November 2009, soon to increase by several thousand more!) Anyway, the Bar waives annual dues if you take the oath in December, so I'll only have to pay for 2010. Worth it given the rather nice raise I'll get for being a barred attorney, after a year on the job (though it's annoying to have to wait for that anniversary to roll around). Plus, I fall into the narrow category of exemptions from continuing legal education (CLE) requirements, meaning no paying lots of money to fly back to California and sit through stultifying classes for now.

NaNoWriMo - I won NaNoWriMo this year! My novel is just barely past the 50,000-word minimum, and it needs some editing. (Hellooo, NaNoEditMo, as searchingbuddha, another winner, said.) But I wrote a damn book, in 29 days.

( Boris )

In sum: I'm a lawyer. I'm a writer. Get vet insurance.

And remember that today is World AIDS Day. My own little problems and victories -- this world is not conclusion; another stands beyond.

Happy birthday to ilcylic today, and to snej for Saturday! May you feast on old leftovers, fresh cake, and the delectable flavor of cheating the reaper for another year.

Que te crezca el -- no, I'd better not sing the Puerto Rican birthday song.

I turned 28 yesterday and

I PASSED THE BAR TODAY!!!

Best birthday gift ever!!!

( Zenith )

( Nadir )

Natasha has a cast that totally envelops her front foreleg, and she is really unhappy about it. She slept under the bed for several hours, then came out to try to find somewhere else comfortable to sleep, growling every time she wanted to put her leg in a position the cast wouldn't permit her to. However, she was weirdly compliant in letting me administer her antibiotics (might've just been the sedative), and she's able to get up and down from fairly low spots like the bed and the futon chair. In three weeks, we go back to the vet to see if the splint can come off yet.

And for the rest of our time here, the cats can't go outside anymore except under my direct supervision. She fell from the third story and only got a bloody nose and a broken leg. I don't need to see what will happen next time. Poor thing. She had a worse day than I did. But I probably will still take her picture and send it in to animalswithcasts.com.

I took out my labret piercing, one year and a week after I had it done. It had started messing up my gumline, making one tooth sensitive, and gum apparently doesn't grow back. Damn.

Spent today on a catamaran in lovely weather, drinking rum punch, snorkeling at coral reefs, and standing in the front of the boat with my friends, while it was zooming along, singing the compulsory song. "I got a nautical-theme pashmina afghan!" Then I napped in the car on the ride home. Just like in St Thomas, where I passed out early every night: it's tiring to drink and play in the ocean in the sun all day.

Macki is coming Tuesday night and thewronghands is coming Friday night, and they're both leaving Sunday. What to do Saturday? Yesterday I and two others (a clerk and extern visiting from Boston, as the First Circuit sat here last week) went to the awesome Camuy Caves and then arrived at the Arecibo observatory 10 minutes after it closed. Planning fail. We spent 1.5 hours waiting our turn for the cave tour and I spent about 4.5 hours driving. The cave tour was 45 minutes. Kind of an unimpressive day, efficiency-wise. I think we'll end up at El Yunque and maybe the beaches near there, and the bioluminescent bay in the evening. Forts Sunday.

I have more friends coming for a week in early December. Then after that I get to go home for Christmas. Even though life is generally "boom de yada"-worthy, and your US tax dollars are paying for me to go snorkeling on the weekends, I really can't wait to go home for a bit.

A week ago we had no water for 36 hours. I thought about that a lot. Even while I was busy overconsuming for fear the water would go out again.

As I have said, never a dull moment.

Work is going well, I think. I got something out the door, never to be thought of again, on Thursday and on Friday I finished the second round of revisions on a massive motion thing. Got another case now. I hope to get a three-month performance review this month - need to ask the boss about that - but finishing stuff makes me feel not wholly incompetent, so yay.

Wednesday off and Macki and I will do something fun because other people have been maimed and killed in various creative and humdrum ways in a number of wars and police actions and whatever you want to call them, and while some 19-year-old is getting his spine operated on at Walter Reed I'll be on a beach somewhere.

NaNoWriMo continues, a little behind pace, and it occurred to me that plot has to actually happen or on 12/1 I may have 50000 words but I won't have an ending.

I knew it was too quiet 'round here yesterday - Meghan got a puppy! Finn is a little bigger than a large cat and has the coloring and short hair of a Rhodesian ridgeback but without the ridge. He is very well-behaved so far and seems housetrained already despite having been found wandering around on the beach by a friend of another clerk. I gave Meghan the large, puppy-size kennel carrier Boris mysteriously arrived in here. We went to Costco tonight but they had no crates. The carrier will do, but not for long.

He is adorable and already so spoiled. If the damn G1 had a flash like Meghan's Crackberry does, I'd have gotten a pic last night when I went to visit.

"'In the tropics one must before everything keep calm.' ... He lifted a warning forefinger. ... 'Du calme, du calme. Adieu.'" - Conrad

Thursday the 15th was an island-wide general strike, including students and the many workers recently laid off by the governor as a cost-cutting measure. Protests everywhere.

This past Friday at 12:30 in the morning, 11 tanks at an oil refinery on San Juan bay exploded with the loudest sound I have ever heard. I thought it was a bomb. The fire made a giant plume of smoke that filled half the sky Friday and yesterday. It seems to be out now, or anyway the smoke is gone, due in part to the valiant efforts of firefighters and in part to the rainstorm that kept me shut up indoors all yesterday afternoon. News reports warned not to go out in the rain as it could be acid rain. My friend Eric wandered around in it for 45 minutes, not knowing of the warning, and reports no ill effects.

Next Saturday we are having an epic progressive party for Halloween: Seven Deadly Sins, seven clerks hosting, each a different sin and themed drink. I'm Envy so green drinks are key. Possibly green Jello shots, because green Jello gets no love.

The last clerk to start working started a week or two late because he came down with malaria immediately after moving here, having caught it in Thailand on his bar trip, so he was in the hospital for 10 days.

Meanwhile there have been over 700 homicides on the island to date this year; I learned yesterday that PR has the 17th highest homicide rate of any country in the world. (We rate as our own country for purposes including the Olympics, ignorant news reports about the "country-wide" general strike, and dissociating from the US in order not to bring up its average homicide rate, which is 5.-something per 100,000 compared to PR's 19 or 20 per 100,000.) I found this out after a bar was shot up last weekend near Toa Baja and 8 people were killed, including a child and a pregnant woman, and 20+ more were injured. (All, I suspect, because NYU students in Williamsburg need a little toot to make their weekend partying more interesting, and some lawyer in Chicago needs to stay awake to bill 60 hours a week.)

In short, never a dull moment around here.

From today's PostSecret: It's true! I didn't get paid until I'd been here a month, so I went on an unintentional diet and part of my ass disappeared. Even now I have to be judicious at the supermarket. But reading spider88's posts translates into making sure I bought eggs yesterday (Friday was payday!), and lemme tell you scrambled eggs and buttered toast are a hella better breakfast than Cheerios in soy milk.

Still can't afford juice, or ice cream, or booze, but that's probably just as well.

Living paycheck-to-paycheck isn't viable long-term, but this isn't a long-term job. My bills are paid, on time. And Maybe Next Paycheck I can join the gym, schedule a dentist appointment, register my car...

I did splurge on cat food yesterday. Royal Canin instead of the compressed sawdust that's so cheap at Walgreens but which the cats hate. They attacked the new food like Shaolin. So I'm no longer accidentally abusing my cats with bad food.

Started buying bologna (99 cents a package) to feed the two strays that live on the roof of the adjacent building. I call them Peaches and OJ because of their coloring. (You can tell family trees among the strays, as there are only a few coloration patterns, repeated - not unlike the fairly small pool of surnames here, which are combined as [dadsname]-[momsname].) I think this seals my fate of Crazy Cat Lady who dies alone and gets eaten by her beloved moggies.

Off to St. Thomas for the long weekend! Wikipedia says that because so many Puerto Ricans moved to the USVI for work after the collapse of the PR sugar industry in the 1950s, Columbus Day is celebrated as "PR/VI Friendship Day" there. We will see!

Locking the cats inside for the long weekend with lots of food and water, after a fiasco Thursday morning where Natasha somehow got onto the roof of the next bulding and it took me three hours to get her such that I didn't get to work 'til noon. It's always something. Let's see what they break while I'm gone this time.

I think it's a seaplane I'm taking!

The moss is rust-colored and thick, springy, giving under his feet. Tiny mushrooms dot the moss, their white caps kissed with brown.

The slab of rock is cold and slippery and heavy in his hand. He runs his chapped thumb along its rough dark side, his fingers straining.

The whorls of his thumb catch particles of fine dark earth, splinters of wood and leaf gone soft and black with rot, spores, insect eggs. His fingers feel about to slide, but he holds on. He looks at the key.

Or the memory of a key. An imprint in the moss, a lump of metal crumbled into the vaguest outline of an arrow pointing to a forgotten entrance. The door in the woods.

Around him the trees swallow sound and spit out darkness. In his mind, mountain-huge, one name sings thunder and shines gold-bright. He looks away, and drops stone onto rust.

And a very happy birthday to old man rubrick and young lady leahseraph!

Everything about today has sucked except work, which was unusually great. WTF. Zach is coming over now to make dinner, so maybe this will go okay.

All right! Here I am, rock you like a hurricane. ( First impressions )

...I was gonna go to Osento tomorrow afternoon for a relaxing soak'n'sauna before my goodbye party. Turns out it closed an entire year ago. The owner retired. Dammit! Nobody told me.

Guess I'll just go see Moon in San Jose instead before it disappears from theaters.

I'm leaving next week! Holy crap! Come see me off by hoisting a glass with me at Bender's, at 19th and Van Ness in SF, on Sunday from 5 PM until my brain stem curls up and whimpers for mercy.

I had a nightmare this morning where I was in the room where I took the bar exam, with everybody else who'd been there. This was the scoring session where were told whether we passed or failed and we went over every part of the exam. (This isn't how it actually works, btw.) I was holding a copy of one of my essays; I'd gotten a score of 10/100 on it. (This also isn't how it works. If you write down a stream of gibberish as an essay answer and turn that in, you get at least a 40. Really.) So it was clear from this score that I'd failed the exam.

Then one of my ex-lovers showed up with a new girlfriend, who turned out to be a vampire. A vampire in her death throes, apparently, because she flew up into the air and exploded in fireworks of blood and gore.

I woke up and spent several moments telling myself that the part about failing the bar was just a bad dream, before it even occurred to me that an exploding vampire was pretty good corroborating evidence that the nightmare wasn't real.

I need to stop thinking about it, stick to my general feeling that I passed, and get on with my damn life, because I don't want to keep having nightmares like this, blood-sucking demons or no, for the next four months.

At least I know the vampire theme was due to watching Shadow of the Vampire ("The script girl! I'll eat her later.") last night. If I can replace bar exam anxiety nightmares with regular old creepy-crawly monster nightmares, I'll be pretty glad.

I had a lovely day yesterday hanging out with whiskeypants and xaosenkosmos (who gave me a Party Member Hello Kitty washcloth from China - LOVE.). I went to see Frank Zappa's 1971 movie 200 Motels in Berkeley on Saturday with my mom, who saw it at a drive-in when it first came out, and jholomorphic. Today I'm going back to the City for drinks with a WSGR friend and BayFF, and yet again tomorrow as my mom and I plan to go to the King Tut exhibit. Wednesday is going to the movies, thankfully not in SF, with one of my bar exam buddies.

I *was* planning to go to Reno this coming weekend to visit a law school friend who's practicing there now, but he called me yesterday to apologize: He's gotten engaged to his girlfriend, who still lives in Seattle, and the only time she has free to visit him anytime soon is... this weekend. So he'll be getting a card instead of me in the flesh. I'm really happy for him. This makes three weddings to attend in 2010, so far. It was about time, I guess, as there's been rather a lull these last couple years.

Also in the works: Monterey Bay Aquarium with nmapster, Mission Peak hike with yfdp, go play outside generally...

Hey, I'm done with the bar exam!

Now the waiting begins. For four months.

Happy 23rd birthday, zoe_trope! I donated $20 to WAP in your honor. Though I should've given $23, in retrospect. *slaps forehead*

In other news, I found thewronghands' Doppelganger. I was at a dinner last night with a bunch of people after OSCON wrapped up and she was there. She's got red hair, Celtic knotwork tattoos on her to-die-for buff arms, has that aura about her of people wanting to be near her, and a calm voice that told me immediately that she was a ninja.

"Who was THAT?" I asked her friend after she'd left.

"That's Lyssa. She left Socialtext, where we used to work, to be an artist. She designed me a tattoo" - here he pulled out his iPhone to show me a picture of the tattoo design, which was gorgeous - "and she's a ninja."

"And she could kill me with one hand tied behind her back, and she flies on the flying trapeze?" I said.

"That's eerily accurate," said her other friend.

"She reminds me of somebody," I said.

So yes, the hacker/artist dichotomy is at work again, thewronghands.