I have been living life for the past week and a half in fast forward. After a long stretch of time where life felt routine, everything is happening at once: I've been really busy at work; I need to move into my new place; and I am leaving for my weeklong vacation in Costa Rica tonight. So far, so good...

I went to Angeles National Forest yesterday and had a blast.. and today is my sister's graduation. Argh!

Did you know that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had a blog? I sure didn't. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon his Los Angeles Times-hosted blog site. Kareem is one of those celebrities/sports stars that I didn't know much about, except by reputation. One of the UCLA basketball greats, and later a legend with the Lakers. So it's a real treat to hear it from the horse's mouth.

The thing, is, it's not just that he is famous, but that his blog is actually pretty entertaining and thought-provoking. He has a wide variety of interests, ranging from the Lakers (he is on the inside as a manager and consultant, I think) to music (Herbie Hancock, Nina Simone), to politics. One the best topics he's covered, and one of his favorites, is staying in shape as you age. Obviously it's something he's going through personally, but he always writes in such an accessible manner that you don't have to be a legendary 7'2" athlete with a sky hook to appreciate it.

Kareem is quite an interesting character study. He is smart and intellectually active. He's also fully conscious of the unique position he occupies in society, how he got where he is, and the nature of his celebrity status. Yet at the same time, he's incredibly modest. He acknowledges his sports achievements in a matter-of-fact manner, but clearly refuses to be limited by them. (Tongue in cheek references to the Sky Hook abound in his blog.) He reads his comments and seems to genuinely appreciate hearing from his fans across the world.

One of the most interesting tidbits mentioned in his blog is his association with a company called Iconomy, which he describes as "representing celebrity icons in their quest to achieve more than momentary success." What a great idea. Take that momentum and run with it. Certainly, he's written six best-selling books on African American history, among other things. So already, one can easily label him a historian, not just a basketball player.

Not that I agree with everything he puts up. His recent post on "Horton Hears a Racist" is a bit off the mark. For one, it would be more aptly named "Horton Hears a Sexist"; and anyway, it's such a trivial nitpick at the Dr. Seuss movie adaptation that I don't know why he bothered. Still, his heart is in the right place.

On Sunday, I went to visit my friends Will and Gloria in their swank apartment in the Miracle Mile with the sole purpose of taking pictures of a little dog. To be specific, his name is Winston and he is a puppy Yorkshire terrier. As you can see, quite adorable! It was challenging to shoot such a squirmy, hyper, excited little guy. At one point, he was licking my camera lens (well, the filter in front of the lens, but same difference.)

I almost want a puppy now... but I can see how much work it is. Regardless, I can tell that adopting Winston has really changed Will and Gloria's lives (or at least, their routines, since puppies need lots of attention!) He's their little baby.







See more of Winston!

Caffeine does weird things to me. When I have a lot of it during the day, it usually has an adverse effect on my productivity: my brain feels like it's buzzing around in my skull. But I also find that same caffeine from 8-12 hours later lets me stay up and be productive late into the night. Yet I can still fall asleep any time that I want to. Is this odd? Or is it the best of both worlds?

Is it just me, or did February 29th just feel like any other day? I feel that the novelty of this day has totally passed me by. Maybe I should have gone out drinking or something.

I haven't been in the sharing mood as of late. However this was too good not to post! Last night, after going to Rafallo's Pizza with my family in Hollywood, we walked outside to find a twenty-foot geyser of water coming up from a broken hydrant on the corner of Vermont and Fountain Avenues. There were a whole bevy of firefighters and police, not to mention gawkers and bystanders having a good laugh. For some reason, I found the scene to be one of the most surreal and refreshing things I've seen in a while.

I mean sure, you can think about the practical side -- the dumb car, now missing, that managed to knock the hydrant flat on its side (as you can see in the picture), the amount of water being wasted, and the law enforcement and public resources tied up by this snafu. But it's also a reason to snap people out of their ordinary routines and laugh at the irony -- a real fountain on Fountain Ave.! I saw a firefighter dive under the plume of water to see if he could fix it and come out all soaking wet. It didn't help, but it looked like he was having fun.





By way of catch-up, I came back to LA three weeks ago today; I started work at the Federal courthouse in downtown the next day. So far, it's been really quiet, as my co-clerk hasn't started yet, and my judge has been out of the country for the past week. However, it promises to be a wonderful job and I'll have more to post soon.

I thought I had moved my excess junk out after graduation. My dad came up in June with four big footlockers, I filled them up, and he took them down. However, you don't realize how much junk is hiding in your place until you have to move all of it out.. especially when said junk has been accumulating for two whole years. (That's the last time I moved out completely.)

Even though my desk, chest of drawers, and closets are pretty much empty, there is so much crap to catalog and clean up. It is disheartening, especially, if it won't fit in our two cars!

I've got the day off and it's a beautiful 70 degrees outside. The smell of cool, moist, fragrant summer air that is wafting through my window. I want to go out on a bike ride to the nature preserves. I better hurry up and finish my studying so I can go!

UPDATE: I got tired after 5 miles out trying to climb Page Mill Road and had to turn back. I barely made it past Moody Rd., and it's still another 5 miles of straight out climb to get to Skyline, my original goal. I'm not good enough yet.

I've decided that, since I won't have much time to grab something to eat during bar review, that I should stock up on easily preparable frozen foods. So last week, I bought a giant pack of 17 Hot Pockets from Costco. Judging from the box, they looked like they had delicious pepperoni and cheese inside. Even better, prominent lettering on the front said that they could be prepared in only two minutes!

That turned out to be a bad decision. I had one as an afternoon snack today after my post-bar-lecture nap, and it left me with a stomachache for hours. Desperately seeking an explanation for my plight, I finally inspected the Nutrition Information on the hot pocket package. 360 calories, and 180 of them from fat. Not only is it gonna clog my arteries, it doesn't even taste that great!

On the bright side, I have 16 more of them to go, and about 7 weeks left at Stanford. I can't wait for another crack.

I got a road bike just over a month ago and have been able to take it out 5-6 times so far. It's really great and can really take you places that my feet aren't likely to reach! For instance, Page Mill Road and Alpine Road take you up to the rolling hillls behind Stanford, to the south. And to the north is the Baylands Preserve, a marshy area by the San Francisco Bay that you can reach via Bayshore Road, just alongside the 101:



I went there on Monday with my neighbor Julia (pictured) and her friend Andrew (photographer, not pictured.)

I learned how to ride a bike for the first time about a year ago, and have been biking to class regularly this year on a little old bike I inherited from my cousin Greg (who graduated from Stanford last year.) So I'm still a little new to this whole bike thing, and I really love it. My road bike is a Giant OCR 2, which is fairly awesome. The only problem so far is that I'm still afraid I am going to fall off.

I am still having trouble concentrating on Bar Review. Luckily, I am not behind or anything. I just need to be diligent, which may or may not be easy given that I am going to my friend Alice's wedding this Saturday in Las Vegas...

I came back from church to find twenty disgusting, hairy little caterpillars on my bicycle (pictured above.) In the past month, these guys have been everywhere on campus, a veritable plague -- they hang from a certain kind of tree from tiny silken threads, just waiting to get in your face or hitch a ride in your hair. (Or jump onto your biciycle!) Sometimes the trees are so thick with them that it's impossible to pass and I am forced to change my route, or risk becoming a target.

I don't know where they come from, or why the hell they hang upside down from trees. Nobody seems to know their raison d'etre, although the story going around is that their natural predators were destroyed by campus construction and thus they have been proliferating unchecked. That sounds too apochryphal to be true. All I know is that, right before writing this post, I looked down onto the sleeve of my brown thermal shirt and found not one but two camouflaged little buggers on my wrist. That's disgusting!!

UPDATE: Many people at Stanford are wondering about this too. The University groundskeepers even have a webpage dedicated to The Caterpillar Story, and there is of course a Stanford students Facebook group dedicating to Killing the Caterpillars (you might have to be in the Stanford network to see it.)

It's over dude, it's over.

I am amazed how suddenly the end of my law school career has crept up on me. It was only a year ago that I was a 1L (actually, it's been two); at the very least, it's only been a blink of an eye since last summer (actually, it's been nine months.) The memories still are fresh, and it's been all too easy to convince myself that time hasn't passed, that I can stay in the same frame of mind and in this frame, the world will remain in geosynchronous orbit.

But if there is a fundamental rule of life, it's that nothing stands still. The only thing you have control over is how you choose to remember as it passes you by. Even then, you will never get to re-experience things as they really were. The tyranny of memory imposes its own version of the story on the events. Perhaps it's something unavoidable, something our minds have to do in order to spin a coherent narrative out of an incoherent world. In any case, it sucks.

I graduate in just over three weeks. I take the California Bar in just over three months. I leave Stanford after that. There is no way to pretend that there is plenty of time left for my current way of life. Change is coming, and in large quantities.

Then again, what am I afraid of? I thought I accepted long ago that it's not the destination in life that truly matters, it's the ride. (It would be nice to be remembered some day, of course, as a good person who did worthwhile things.) I have already vowed to live every day as if it were my last, and to accept things as they are, and enjoy moments when I am in the middle of them. I no longer feel the need to write extensive journal entries documenting what I had for lunch every day (although it's interesting to go back and read them), and I no longer feel the urge to constantly take pictures when I am with friends. Those were my ways of trying to freeze time in place. At least this is what I have told myself.

In the meantime, I am just going to try and cram as much enjoyment of life as I can into the next 4 months... finals and the bar be damned. Because from what I hear, once you start working..

then it's really over.

I picked this little guy up from Ikea. His name is Henry the Hedgehog! He's a air-filled, plush stool/cushion that you can sit on.



Henry has a crease on his forehead and another under his mouth that give him an expression that can only be described as contemplative and humorous. (This was before I filled up the plastic air bladder inside of him. They tell you to do it with a hair dryer, and it actually does work.)

Here's a picture of me hanging out with Henry.

I was just getting dinner at the Stern Hall Late Nite Cyber Cafe (oh, man..) and the cafeteria TV was showing WWE. To my utter amazement and delight, the announcers brought out Kevin Federline. He was booed like crazy, and then one of the wrestlers insulted K-Fed ("Paris Hilton with a weaker voice," the guy called him) and then later body-slammed him. It was the best.

But don't take my word for it. Oh No They Didn't! already has full photo coverage and fan reactions.


(credit: wwe.com)

With too much time on my hands lately, I have been turning to random blogs across the Internet. Here's a post that talks about a site that has possibly the Worst Comics Ever Made: Truth for Youth. These ultra-right-wing Christian comics take on the evils of rock music, evolution, drunkenness, porn, and being gay. In that order. They appear as a full-color, glossy insert in the Truth For Youth Bible.

I love comics, and to see the medium abused in such a fashion makes me very, very sad. (They are actually drawn in a sort of anime-ish, action style that is pretty decent.) But the thing that disappoints me even more is that issues are treated in such a flippant manner: how can anyone claim to have "the absolute truth regarding moral issues young people are faced with everyday?" Wait, never mind. That would be anyone who lives in a Red State.

It does not help that the creator of Truth for Youth is unabashedly self-promoting. In case your'e wondering, there are also endorsements from Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, and... Pat Boone.

I have spent the last two weekends at home -- two weekends ago I flew into LA Friday night and left Sunday morning, and this past weekend I drove down on Friday morning. Things just happened to work out the way they did, but it's allowed me to entertain the thought that I can spend weekdays at school, and weekends in LA.

It's flybacks week, so I have no class and I can do whatever the hell I want. The feeling is liberating. I'll consider it the missing piece of my summer vacation. (For the unintiated, "flybacks week" is when the 2Ls fly out to interview at law firms. 3L's can do it too, but I have no intention to re-interview.)

Too bad I can't shake this ridiculous, nagging cold..

Me and my roommate Joel are real excited. That's because tomorrow, sometime between 10 am and 2 pm, Video Service Techs is going to return our 36 inch CRT television, fixed, to our Rains apartment. It's been broken since April and I have been haggling with the repair service about this since July -- for over two whole months. It seems too good to be true..

What do you do when you meet the same, random stranger in two entirely different contexts?

On Saturday I went to the Stanford Eye Center in the medical center and participated in a clinical eye study I had been contacted about over e-mail. A polite, well-mannered medical student, let's call her Lisa, took me through the consent form and assisted the primary research doctor in performing my eye exam. The whole time, however, I had the nagging feeling that I had knew Lisa from somewhere.

By the end of the exam, I remembered. About two weeks ago, I walked into the laundry room near my apartment and found a gruff-mannered girl hogging five of the six laundry machines in there. Even though three of her loads had just finished, she refused to let me put in a load of my own, because she claimed she had three more. Though I'm too nice to just grab somebody's laundry, take it out of a washer, and put in my own, I did let her have a piece of my mind about her laundry manners. I told her that she should NOT be doing eight loads of laundry during peak Saturday hours, and that she had no claim on washers she wasn't using. (I also knew that people that come in with eight loads of laundry usually do it because they don't live in Rains and just want to take advantage of the free laundry machines.) We got into an insult match.

That was also Lisa.

I don't think she made the connection, at all. And I didn't bring it up. I guess it's very hard to recognize somebody else that you've met only briefly and in a totally different context. (In the laundry room, I was also wearing a wife beater, flip flops, and had a different hair cut.)

I wonder what would have happened if I had reminded Lisa in the eye clinic of where we had met before. Hell, since I have a follow up appointment for further tests, maybe I should. What do you all think?

It's HOT here -- 100 degrees! Rains doesn't have air conditioning, either. I tried to escape by going to the campus libraries, but they're sneaky and only leave their air conditioning at 80 degrees. Still, it was better than nothing.

Traditionally fog-covered San Francisco is starting to look pretty good about now.