Stress.

Okay, I understand that my mood during the first few days of my period tend toward bitchy and rude. I snap at people, I speak back to parents, and generally stew in a bad mood. But let's be honest: I've been doing this twelve times a year for almost six years. According to my English-major-math, that means at least seventy two times.

Should we have not expected Logan to be a Supreme Bitch Goddess for two or three days around the middle of the month? This means that we should adapt to allow me to reign as Supreme Bitch Goddess for those two to three days and accept my behavior. There is honestly not much I can do about it.

And this ultimately leads to emotional eating as even I become disgusted with my own behavior. Just today, I ate an English muffin with peanut butter and added chocolate chips in the hopes of curbing the chocolate cravings that always accompany my period. Nothing. So for lunch, I tried for a chicken wrap. Okay, but dessert ended up being chocolate creme pie with more chocolate chips added. Not two hours later I was eating an M&M cookie with peanut butter. Fridays are pizza nights, so I tried to be good with a salad before my single slice of pepperoni. No dessert yet, but the night is early yet.

I am pretty much desperate to get out of the house but knowing I can't since the only car left has piss-poor breaks and there's no way I'm driving that out. I asked Mom to bring me to work (she works nights at the operating room) and she jokingly said I could come. So I'm stuck at home as I beg that I manage to stay sane enough to not go on a killing rampage or lock myself in a room with the bag of chocolate chips and munch away.

At the moment, I'm blasting (quite literally) my Broadway showtunes playlist on iTunes which is helping to slowly raise my mood and thoroughly annoy the rest of the family, all of whom despise showtunes.

Breakthrough!

Today, at work, my grandmother came to visit. She lives about two minutes away from the golf course and my grandfather works there with me. Anyway, we were talking (me ranting, actually) about the miserable pieces of humanity I have to deal with over the phone. Well doesn't she say "And you want to be a lawyer? Talk about the humanity that they deal with!" My heart stopped not from fear, but from semi-joy that someone was taking me seriously!! I reassured her that I'd be on the side of the "good guys," that the humanity would be on the other side of the courtroom.

I was so excited it nearly made what started as a crappy day sparkle.

PS - I love, love, love Linda Fairstein and her novels. Some of the best books I have ever read and I am overjoyed that I decided to pick up my half-finished copy of The Bone Vault during my boredom at work and find myself flying through all of them. Right now, halfway done with Lethal Legacy and cannot wait to get my hands on Hell Gate. It's lovely to be able to see inside, really inside, what life as a NYC prosecutor really is like. Linda is not making this up or trying to remember what the offices looked like from a short research visit. SHE LIVED IT! Such an inspiration and an amazing author. But, she should also sort of get Alex and Mike together. Just saying that with all the sexual tension she has built between them over the series, SOMETHING needs to happen!

An Uphill Battle

That's what trying to convince my parents that I'm serious about law school is. They are still convinced that since I set out for college with the goal of becoming a high school English teacher, that is the only thing I ever should be. Every once in a while, Dad says "Well, we have two of them heading into education," (refering to me and my younger brother who is majoring in Secondary Education and History), but I fight to tell him that while I am still majoring in Secondary Education and English, it is only with the goal of having something to fall back on if law school doesn't work out.

Anyway, I have been frantically swallowing up legal novels. I only just picked up my nearly-finished copy of Linda Fairstein's The Bone Vault and have been swept up in her entire Alexandra Cooper series. In fact, I'm nearly finished with Bad Blood and was heartbroken to find that I am nearing the end of what she has written. To quell the months of waiting after I get to Hell Gate, I have picked up the first book by Alafair Burke and the one book that shows up on every "Do You Want To Be A Lawyer" list - Scott Turow's One L. A co-worker has also pointed me in the direction of John Grisham, a novelist I had avoided since he tends to focus on large firms rather than my area of interest, criminal law, but since I have all summer, I might try a few of his.


I am working at a golf course for the summer, answering the phones to make tee-times. An incredibly unexciting job, but a job nonetheless (hey, I'll take $10 an hour!). Basically, I sit in my own office with a phone, computer, sheets of info on rates and directions to the course, and two or three books. I've gone through a book a week since I started work. I addition to reading, I have had plenty of time to research law schools. New York Law School is still my top choice, followed by NYU and Columbia. My reasonings are as follows:

- NYLS is smaller. While that may seem conterproductive in a society that recognizes the Name Schools (i.e., Harvard, Yale, etc.), I don't want to attend a school where I am a number. NYLS seems to be just the right size. Plus, looking at my GPA (which is sure to change over three years), NYLS looks to be my best bet. Only time will tell with the LSATs.

- Along the same line, while NYU is a top school on all the lists, I've read a few articles about exactly what those lists use for consideration for ranking. While most people will totally recognize the name NYU or Columbia (and probably not the one of New York Law School), do these lists take into consideration something other than the average incoming GPA or LSAT score or whether incoming 1Ls were valedictorians? Somehow, I doubt the answer is yes.

- This point is really moot when I think about it, and yes, it is petty. NYLS is simply closer to where I want to work when I graduate. I plan on spending my days either in a cramped public servant office or in the courtrooms of 60 and 100 Centre Street. Why not take the opportunity to walk to the courtrooms and sit in on a few trials during law school? And yes, I realize that NYU is not that far from the Financial District surrounding Foley Square, but still...


In other news, my younger brother (the one spoken of earlier) graduated from high school on Friday! He is headed off to Westfield State to double major in Secondary Education and History after a long love affair with military history. His girlfriend is going to UMass Lowell for a degree in Psychology. Now, the parents get a break from graduations for two years until my younger brother graduates from his vocational school, then two more years until my sister graduates from high school. By that time, hopefully I'll be in law school!!

Summertime.

...And the living is easy. Or so the song goes.

I guess it's true, though. I spend my days, 8 to 3, sitting in an office with a computer and telephone. Most of the time is spent on Facebook or playing pointless games or catching up on all that reading lost over freshman year. Plus, the weekly paycheck is not a bad reminder that things could be much worse.

I'm also taking the time to really try and figure out what I want to do with life. I entered college determined to be the 5% that never changes their mind about what they want to do. Entering with two majors in English and Secondary Education was the first step in my goal of becoming a high school English teacher. I had loved reading since a young age and wanted to share that with future generations. It all changed over the summer between senior high school year and move-in day of freshman year.

I spent the summer watching every episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. I had never really been into the crime genre until reading a series of books dealing with it and became hooked. Knowing that my weight, which is less-than-ideal for most people, would prohibit me from taking the Police Academy test and passing, I focused on the other half of the title, the 'order' part of things. Alex Cabot become my goal. I wanted to fight for the proverbial "good guys" with my perfectly groomed blonde hair and impeciable lawyer fashion. While I lack the blonde locks from my childhood and haven't quite gotten my skirts and tailored jackets together, the prosecutors are still what I aim to become.

And before anyone points out that life as an assistant district attorney is nothing like what is portrayed on television, I realized that a while ago from simply researching.

Instead of looking for good schools to get a Masters in English, I've been researching law schools. Instead of reading up on the Classics that every good English major should know inside and out, I thumb through "Criminal Law in a Nutshell."

The hardest part is trying to convince my family that I am serious about considering law school. Every time my sister catches me looking into New York Law School or NYU, she has to comment that it won't matter, that I'm going to be an English teacher, not a lawyer. My mother found out when she joined Facebook and saw that, in my profile, I had said I was considering becoming a prosecutor. Somehow, I get the feeling that they don't think I can do it or that I'm blindly following a friend who is also planning on going into law. I wish I could tell them I'm not. I feel a genuine passion for this and even though I still plan on double majoring in both English (which I've heard is a good undergrad degree to start law school with) and Secondary Education (a fall back if anything else), I have added the minors of Political Science and Writing and Rhetoric and I'm currently toying with the idea of a third minor in Communications.

I've been looking for internships for my junior or senior year. Most of them are through the Washington Center in D.C. There's placements in NCIS, the US Marshal Service, the Department of Justice, and the Attorney General's office. When I bring these up with my mother, she seems skeptical about their significance to education and how it would help me become a better teacher. It's as if she doesn't think I am serious about all this when I really want to scream it from the mountaintop that this is the course I want to take in life. I just don't understand why some people are so unsupportive of my goal in life, as uncertain and unlike the person they know it is. Yes, I started as a high school English teacher, but things have changed and what I really want to spend my life doing is standing in front of twelve jurors and argue my case.