divine angst

On New Year’s Eve, I like to think back to all the things I’ve done in that year that were momentous (or that I did for the first time). Here’s a portion of that list:

1. Got married

2. Visited Italy
   • spent two days trying to find the Spanish Steps

   • ate real bistecca alla fiorentina and it was GOOD
   • found “our” wine while having a snack in the Piazza della Signoria, which we now buy whenever possible
3. Gave two weeks notice and started a new job (all my other job switches before have been preceded by other factors, like moving)
4. Said goodbye to my mom when she moved several hundred miles away
5. Saw a Wagner opera
6. Was a bridesmaid to one of my bridesmaids
7. Went to a “feting” (NOT a wedding)
8. Decided to go to law school
9. Visited Sedona and saw the red rocks
10. Had my wisdom teeth out, five years late
11. Said goodbye to my best friend when she moved several hundred miles away for culinary school
12. Took the LSAT
13. Debauched in Las Vegas for four days
14. Applied to law school
15. Hosted Thanksgiving at my house
16. Found out I’m going to be an aunt next summer
17. Got accepted to GWU, where I know I’d enjoy being a law student

Wow! That’s a lot! There are some good things in there, and some sad ones, and some that will shape the direction of the next several years of my life. I’m a little scared when I realize that, YES, I have been accepted to law school and this whole adventure is no longer just a flight of fancy. It’s actually going to happen. And you know what? I’m thrilled. Best of all, I have my soulmate with me and we’re on this rollercoaster together.

Happy New Year!

By the way, have I mentioned that tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and I have been wearing flip flops and a t-shirt all day? Really ridiculous, and makes it not feel like New Year’s Eve is tomorrow.

It also makes the menu planning I did this week sort of unusable. Nevertheless, tonight we are having osso buco. Hey, I’ve been craving some sort of braise. I may need to jack up the AC so the temperature is appopriate for digging into all that goodness, though.

Yesterday, after my good news from GW, I drove about an hour to see my best friend. She recently moved away for culinary school, but came back to visit friends. Seeing her was the perfect topping to yesterday. We ate good food (tomato basil bisque, yum); had pedicures (and I had a manicure, also)—good girly fun; and then we had cocktails. The visit was too short, but they always are, and I think we’re going to try for a spring trip to New Orleans, just to get some more good girly time in.

I also took my sister to dinner and gave her her Christmas present. She showed me her new apartment—her first all-by-herself apartment— and her tax ID number: my little sib is starting a business on the side. Her own apartment, her own business, and even a new friend-boy…these kids today, they grow up fast! I’m so proud of her.

This morning, as a treat to Mr. Angst, I got up early and made us breakfast: buttermilk pancakes. As an extra-special treat, I frothed up some milk for our coffee with my new milk frother, the best Christmas present ever. When we went to Italy on our honeymoon, breakfast at our hotels always included excellent coffee and warm, foamy milk. We’ve been trying to recreate that ever since, but I hadn’t been able to accurately duplicate the foam. Now I can have foam whenever I want it! Hurrah!

My vacation is almost over, so I’m going to have to make the most of these last two days. Excuse me, I have a new book to read. (NOT the Glannon, though. Sorry.)

Just found out I got into George Washington! It’s a good day in the Angst household.

UPDATE: It only took me an hour to realize that I probably don’t need to apply to American anymore. I think I’ll save my $65 and focus on Chicago-Kent Honors.

I haven’t written about the horrors in southeast Asia yet because, frankly, I’m still absorbing all of it. It is almost impossible, at such a removed distance (and from my extremely advantaged standpoint), to grasp not just the numbers—CNN says the death toll could top 60,000—but also the difficulties of getting information, traveling to remote locales, beginning to distribute aid, and rebuilding in that part of the world.

I know that it’s terribly un-PC nowadays to ask strangers and psuedo-strangers to pray for anything—and I certainly don’t want to offend my readers—but I really do ask that if you pray, pray for the people who are still waiting to be rescued, who are looking for their families, who are without shelter and food. And if you want to help, Larry has some links to aid organizations, as does Janine.

I had my Northwestern interview this morning. I had to drive to a nearby city for it, so I was on the road again. Despite having to travel again so soon after coming back from a week away (and I am sure that sentence could read better, but I don’t feel like working on it), the interview went off pretty much without a hitch. She was very nice and personable and made me feel very comfortable; we talked quite a bit about the environment at Northwestern, which I was starting to think might be too corporate or business-oriented (she disabused me of that notion, so hurrah!). Somewhere in the midst of it all, she told me that she felt I would fit in quite well at Northwestern, that my experience, etc., would make me a good match.

I hope the adcoms feel the same way! I’d be thrilled to get into Northwestern; it would take some of the pressure off of me if we end up going to Chicago for Mr. Angst.

So now I’ve finished everything I needed to do for my top five apps; they’re all just waiting to be read, I guess. I suppose I should get cracking on that Chicago-Kent essay, and maybe send in my American application. I have the week off—theoretically, I have plenty of time to do both. We’ll see how realistic that is, though!

I almost forgot! How exciting that Jeremy ended up in the New York Times (still on the front page, no less!) and yet even more exciting that AL and Jeremy are one and the same.

I admit it, I am one of those people who blogrolled both Jeremy and AL. I read both pretty regularly, and, nope, didn’t pick up that they were one and the same. (I wonder what that says about my powers of observation.) I’ve always wondered, though, how real AL could be. Well written, definitely; fictional, absolutely.

Anyhoo, I think I just want to give a big “Hooray!” to Jeremy for landing in the Big Paper—and another “Hooray!” for keeping AL “secret” for as long as he did. He definitely deserves that book deal.

In the last three days, so many things have happened, and I have not written about any of them. No, nothing momentously life-changing; just lots of events.

Christmas Eve with the Angst-in-laws was lovely. They have an old tradition of having fondue for dinner, so we all happily dunked into cheese and broth. We played Pictionary, and the men’s team won (despite the women being more talented. We had harder cards). We opened gifts and giggled a lot and took pictures.

My sister-in-law (the soon-to-be-mom) gave me a copy of Civil Procedure by Joseph Glannon. I chuckled at the gift—it was humorous!—but she was dead serious. (She is an attorney and went to Harvard, so it wasn’t too random a gift.) She gave me a smile and told me I held the key to understanding CivPro right in my very hands and that I’d be glad to have it next year. It was still a little funny—such a strange thing to receive, essentially, a textbook for Christmas, and be very happy about it!

On Christmas Day, we attended church, watched some football, and ate turkey, ham, potatoes, asparagus, and…something else….I can’t remember, but the table was covered with food. Oh, and bread pudding. A true holiday feast. The meal sort of exemplified what I love about this season: it’s a chance to gather together and eat, drink, talk, and enjoy being with each other. That’s really what’s most special about Christmas.

Of course, after lunch, we had to make our way to the airport—where the line to check in on Delta was longer than I’ve ever seen a line, anywhere. We opted to check in at the SkyCap, only to wait another half hour while they cleared up the security flag on our tickets. (I think it’s because we flew into one city and out of another.)

By the way, Christmas Day is the day to travel if you love being on airplanes with LOTS of small children. I’ve never seen so many young ones in the airport, including on little girl who was draped atop her father’s rollling suitcase, sound asleep.

By 11:35 pm, we were home again, home again, jiggety jig. Asleep by 12:30; up by 8 for choir, and now I’m heading off to Houston for the night: Northwestern interview in the morning. Not sure what to expect.

1. Christmas cards written and mailed: check and check

2. Gifts wrapped and under the tree: 3/4 check and check
3. Biscotti in the oven: check

We also saw Meet the Fockers which was, to be honest, pretty good. Babs really stole the show, and Dustin held his own (despite his skin resembling shoe leather). Good clean family fun.

Tomorrow:

1. Finish wrapping gifts

2. Start to pack up (we leave Saturday evening)
3. Make fondue (Christmas Eve tradition)

A good day planned, all in all.

All Christmas gifts needed for this portion of the holiday festivities have been purchased. I still need to buy 8, maybe 9 gifts, but those can wait until we’ve returned home.

Also, I note on weather.com that the weather at home is unusually cold. This means that my plants are dead, sadly. Why would I have covered them before we left? It never gets cold before Christmas. Plus, they’d have died from lack of sunlight. Well, now they’ll be dead from freezing. I’m a bad plant mom.

I have finished my American application, but not submitted it yet. I need to print it out and review it before I send it off. After I do that, I’ll work on my Chicago-Kent essay. (Seeing as all Christmas shopping is done, I don’t have anything to do tomorrow and Friday morning.) Oh, and I am going to help my mother-in-law set up a recipe website. And write and mail Christmas, er, Holiday cards.

OK, so I do still have a lot to do and little time in which to do it. Sigh. Vacation always goes by too quickly, especially when I spend so much of it sleeping in.

TV times on the East Coast confuse me. I’m a mid-country kind of girl, and ten o’clock is the hour for TV dramas. But not over here, apparently.

How do people get any rest over here? Good TV isn’t over until 11pm, and then they have the news to watch!

It’s a good thing I’m on vacation.

I need to work on SOMETHING. Either my Chicago-Kent essay or my Christmas cards. I am not doing either. Or I could work on my American application, but I need to do that on Mr. Angst’s computer, and he’s using it.

Instead of working, in fact, I am watching Gilmore Girls with my inlaws and my husband and generally enjoying not doing anything else. (Of course, Gilmore Girls is currently showing an extra-marital post-sex scene, which is moderately uncomfortable with the inlaws being across the room from me. Urk.)

I could also wrap Christmas gifts.

Nah. I think I will go take my shoes off, though.

Northwestern’s online status check is finally back up, but the information is moderately incorrect.

For instance, my status shows that my application was received on October 15. This is completely wrong, since I didn’t start work on my apps till the beginning of November.

It also lists me as being complete, but I haven’t had my interview yet. So I can only hope that their system upgrades are causing some glitches. I didn’t go through all the waiting to get my interview set up only to have it not count for squat!

Meanwhile, I haven’t been working on my two additional apps as I promised myself I would this week. I haven’t even been working on my Christmas cards, which I also said I’d get done this week. I’ve been basically lazing about like, well, like a woman on vacation. I can’t really complain. At least I’ve bought 3.5 Christmas presents. A little productivity is better than none.

I am going to be an aunt next summer. I am VERY excited!

Also, it might snow tomorrow.

Days left till Christmas: 5
Gifts I’ve bought: .5
Gifts left to buy/make/assemble: 14

I am in deep poo.

I know, I’m on vacation. Blogging shouldn’t be a priority. But I would like to say that our mini-trip to DC has been great fun so far. I am having a very good time. I have seen a good friend from college (who I didn’t see for five years, saw two months ago at our reunion and again tonight, but you’d never know that and we picked up just as if we talked every week, and that’s kind of weird but also very cool), visited some beautiful campuses, eaten good food and drunk good drink. Mr. Angst has had good interviews, and the weather has been lovely.

So nice has our trip been, in fact, that we may stay an extra day. (This is the Angst-in-laws doing—they are bringing an overnight bag when they come up tomorrow, “just in case.”) I’d be happy to do that and have the chance to go see American tomorrow.

In any case, this has been a lovely beginning to my winter vacation. If only I had gotten more sleep last night.

Four being how many hours of sleep I got last night in our trek to the city of D and C: Washington.

Or, actually, Baltimore. Last night. Tonight, DC. It’s sort of confusing.

Anyway, if you were one of the GULC or GWU students madly studying (or actually taking) for exams while I poked around in your cherished study spots, I send you (1) big apologies and (2) waves of good luck.

Also, I’m complete at GWU! Yahoo!

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I am not really a phone person.

I like having phone conversations with friends and family when I need to catch up. I even like MAKING those calls. But I am not so much a fan of my phone ringing off the hook with calls from friends and family who just want to chat at all hours of the day. It frustrates me when I look at my caller ID and see that X, who I have talked to three times in the last two days, is calling AGAIN, and I know the conversation will take forever because X will go off on tangents every third word.

It’s 40-something degrees outside, and the AIR-CONDITIONING just blew on in my office.

Come on, people, figure it out.

I should be happy—UT has finally ordered my LSDAS report. However, they have somehow managed to LOSE the copy of my resume that I sent them when I sent my application.

See, I submitted my app electronically via LSAC, but forgot to attach my resume. So I just sent my resume in an envelope with their “race-gender affirmation” letter.

And I guarantee I know what happened. Some $8 an hour employee opened my envelope, saw my affirmation letter and some extra paper, and didn’t know what the extra paper was and probably threw it away.

Now I have to scramble to get a my resume together—by which I mean find the file on my computer that is the CORRECT resume for UT—put it in the mail TODAY before we LEAVE TOWN, and HOPE and PRAY UT gets it this time.

I’d call, but I’m not sure I woulnd’t end up talking to a moron on the phone. Or at the very least, someone who is too excited about their impending Christmas vacation to bother helping me.

Grrrr.

UPDATE: OK, I was a little peeved when I wrote that. I did call, the woman I spoke to was helpful, and informed me that the only stuff that shows on their online information page right away is the stuff they got with my application. Since I sent my resume under separate cover, it’s not yet been associated with my application. She even took my name and will make a note on my file that my resume is around there, somewhere.

When I get back from the holidays, I’ll follow up to make sure all is well.

NOW I can be happy about this! Yay! UT requested my report!!

Tonight, I have been madly helping Mr. Angst with his personal statement. That is to say, in the grandest tradition of writing instructors, I have been gently (but swiftly, since he has to fax it tomorrow) guiding his very good core statement toward a clean and precise written document.

I have had such fun! I love the red pen, the molding of language; I so enjoy seeing what can be and encouraging it to come out.

Yes, I know, this makes it sound like I should be a writing teacher. And I’ll admit that a big part of my law school personal statement was about eventually hoping to teach lawyers the importance and impact of language. But I also know that just teaching kids and adults to be more effective writers wouldn’t satisfy me quite enough. I think I need more than that, I need to know something better is coming from what I do.

Maybe that’s why I’ve enjoyed tonight so much. Mr. Angst’s plan is to go into a program that has a great deal of moral merit; he wants to do something great and wonderful and important and I am so proud of him for that. And I know that the writing I am helping him with will help with that goal. So it makes me very happy. Also, I love him, so that contributes to my good mood.

I feel good right now. Very good. Proud, and happy, and (a little) arrogant about how good I am. ::::sizzle::::

Look, I know that, as far as many people are concerned, Lemony Snicket is Harry Potter’s bastard stepchild (and I’ll admit, I have not read the Lemony Snicket books), but could the producers of the new movie NOT use the same font on teasers as they did for the Harry Potter movies?

I’ve been in meetings all day and no one really wants to read about them, so I’ll just give you the funniest thing I’ve read in about a week.

I only laugh because I recognize myself in this story. Thanks for the giggle, Milbarge.

My dear friend from college who I am excited to see on Friday in DC just got engaged. And suddenly (well, not suddenly, but again) I realize that I am at that age where my friends are growing up and getting married. Every time I get a wedding invitation or birth announcement in the mail, I go through this same sense of anomie: How can we have grown so far, so fast?

I do not think of myself as particularly old. Of course I am not old—I have not even passed 30—so I use the word “old” in a more metaphysical sense. I always seem to think of myself as younger than I am. For instance, my family thought I had waited a really long time to get married; I thought I was almost not old enough. I still sometimes think it’s OK to shop in the juniors section at the mall, not because of sizes but because the clothes are cuter.

The other day, I looked at my refrigerator door and noticed that, instead of crazy pictures from bars and parties that have always decorated my kitchen, my magnets hold wedding pictures and, even more shockingly, pictures of my friends’ kids. Oh my God, I thought, I have become my parents.

I have crossed the threshold. I am an adult. When we get together, my friends and I talk about home repair and taxes; we talk about the rising cost of insurance and whether or not Horizon milk in the paper box lasts longer than the store brand in the plastic jug. We don’t gossip about who is sleeping with who, because everyone has a significant other. We watch our language because, chances are, someone’s kids are in the next room.

So, even while I am thrilled and oh-so-excited for my friend, who deserves this happiness so much, I am also a bit wistful for the days when she and I were young and foolish, living on yogurt and ice cream in a small apartment in New York City. I feel a twinge of some indescribable loss, knowing that we really have left that life behind, in favor of the great adult unknown.

I never was one of those people who thought my youth would be “the best time of my life,” so I know this will pass. But for the moment, I just can’t help but feel a bit sad.

This morning, I got a call from my Northwestern interviewer (finally! yay!). Apparently, in my last email to her, I transposed some numbers in my phone number, so she couldn’t get a hold of me. Thankfully, she took a look at my signature, saw the correct number, and tried again.

I’m set to meet with her two days after Christmas. We’ll be returning from the Angst-in-laws’ on Christmas night, I’ll sing at church on the 26th, then I’ll drive to Houston and stay with my brother. He lives five minutes from her office—better and better! She sounds quite friendly, so I am heartened. I’ve read (on the boards) a few horror stories, so I’ve been a little nervous.

By the by, the trip home was lovely. I spent oodles of quality time with my grandparents, saw my aunts and uncles who still live in that town, and attended the funeral of the young man I knew who was killed in Iraq. The funeral was packed, and the local paper did a number of stories on him and his family. Part of me was bothered by all of that—there were people at the funeral who didn’t even know him!—and part of me was glad for it. See, on the one hand, it felt a little exploitative, particularly of his family, for this very personal tragedy to be all over the news. But on the other hand, the entire city seemed to be celebrating this young man’s life, and that’s a wonderful thing. So I am still sort of mixed up about it all.

My sister was also there for the funeral, and we had a very nice afternoon together, something that is quite rare. I was glad for that, too.

All in all, the weekend was nice, Monday morning is turning out pretty good, and best of all, I start my vacation in four days! Now, if only I could get rid of the low-grade headache I’ve had for three days, things would be perfect.