back from DC

That was a little bit of a stressful weekend, and now I'm glad it's done!  Here's how it went down.  My team and I won all of our oral arguments, but failed to advance to the final rounds because our brief score was a little too low. That's kind of surprising considering my incompetence in public speaking but, hey, maybe it's in the eye of the beholder.  In retrospect, I should have spent a little more time on the brief.  We ended up missing out of the final rounds by .222 points.  If we had overcome that hurdle, it would have been substantially easier for us to win the competition because the later rounds only took into account oral argument scores. But what's done is done, and I'm really glad to have participated!

The hotel we stayed at, the "W," was the most pretentious hotel I've ever stayed in. As I blogged about a while back, this is a hotel that's next to the white house, so you have dip-kids and rich fellas staying there and partying.  Everything costed an arm and a leg, but lacked all functionality whatsoever.  It's hard to describe the hotel, but let me just comment that you could hear people getting busy in the next room, and two of my teammates ended up staying in a room with a see-thru shower - haha.

All in all, I really enjoyed my time! The team really connected and I know that I'll cherish the late hours and we spent in our hotel rooms practicing with loose ties and shaggy looks.  Oh, and Harvard ended up finishing as one of the bottom teams.

ready, set ...

Go! I'm going to DC on thursday after preparing endlessly for this moot court competition. My team and I have been hammering our oral arguments left and right day in and day out for that past month, and it's been exhausting. We're finally at the [start of] the finish line. My two other teammates will be arguing on thursday and I will be arguing on friday.  If we advance, we argue three more times on Saturday. It's going to be a crazy few days, but we've prepared so much not to do well.  The good thing is that I seem to have peaked at the right moment. After multiple miserable attempts at arguing my position, I think I have finally have a good handle on all of the issues - now I can simply speak without having to really think so much. So, to the extent that I understand the issue well enough, I feel more relaxed and calm.

Please root for us! We'll be going up against the likes of Harvard, so it'll be one heck of a ride, but I'm confident that we'll prevail!

5 cases and a salad

We had our APALSA 2nd annual banquet yesterday and it was a total success. Admittedly, I didn't do much, but I was glad to be a part of something close-to-inaugural. The keynote spoke about re-defining our identities as Asian Americans and looking beyond our events as simple networking opportunities. There was much more to it than that, but in my simple-minded fashion, I've condensed the half-hour talk into a single sentence for brevity and for a lack of time. Although perhaps in direct violation of the keynote's guidance, I was able to meet a partner at a law firm who works in land use - she gave me her card.

I'm juggling five different cases right now, though luckily I'm not arguing all of them.  One is Miranda case, another is a Fourth Amendment with aspects of warrentless arrests and probable cause, the third is First Amendment and Ripeness, another has to do with standing, and yet another is a statutory problem relating to property in the city. This weekend at least one of those will be off my mind after doing oral arguments in DC.  My mind is about to explode with the number of facts I have to remember, but I do feel that I'm getting better at retaining information, which is good considering that I'm taking the ridiculous MPREs again the weekend after next.  

Late nights have been messing up my sleeping patterns for a while. The other day I enjoyed a late night/early morning salad. A big salad.

a fleeting moment of relaxation

It's 12am and it's my new bed time. Today was a whacky day. I stayed up until 4am yesterday finishing a drafting assignment, which was really fun. I never thought that organizing words on a piece of paper could be so enjoyable, but I was clearly mistaken. But because of my late night adventures with my paper and pen, I was forced to skip my 8:45am class today. Actually, my body woke me up at 8am, but it was already too late to get to class on time. And in retrospect, I'm glad that I gave my body a rest.  I got to school around 11am, began my office hours at the writing center, but failed to really do anything productive on an empty stomach.  I later intended to attend a meeting, except that I realized after arriving that the other person had postponed the meeting. Wasted time. Then, I attempted to do my homework for my next class, but the my body gave way and I ended up falling asleep in the APALSA office. I somehow got my homework finished, but I had completely forgotten about our moot court class, which occurs every thursday. How I forgot about a regularly scheduled meeting I can only be due to the wear I am causing my body. Guys, I'm exhausted.

I got home after class, immediately started preparing for a moot we're doing with another team tomorrow, and did the daimoku for about 30 min, until midnight. And now I type away to reveal my day's musings. I don't know how I ended up on youtube before writing this entry, but I randomly found Utada Hikaru's "Goodbye Happiness." I've never heard of the song, but the randomness of it all, and the upbeat tempo helped me relax in way I can't really describe. Here ya go.




And here's one her classics. It reminds me of junior year of college...

ブルーカラー

I realized something the other day. I am blue collar. I make up for gaps in intellect with sheer force and determination; or at least I try to. I enjoy physical activity. I don't particularly like theory. I like to earn my honors, but what I want most is for people to recognize the work that went into getting there. To be clear, I like khakis, not dress pants. When I see poverty, I see empty fridges, not lines on a graph. I'm in Baltimore, the epitome of industry.

That is why I particularly liked Eminem's Superbowl commercial. It gives Detroit, which is practically now a ghost city, a new look - or it returns to the pride it once had as an industrial powerhouse. It's powerful. Check it out!

MICA. BSO. flute. productivity. drafting.

This morning I visited MICA, or the Maryland Institute College of Art, one the nation's best Art schools. It was so nice to be an environment that is founded on creativity and learning rather than rigidity and competition.  I found the idea of creating art as a homework assignment really .... cool.  The reason I was there was to attend their Buddhist club meeting, which was well-attended, partly due to club leaders' amazing enthusiasm and diligence.  They took me on an a mini-unofficial-tour of the campus - It's a wonder that I've never stepped foot on campus ever since coming back from SUA - MICA's only a 5min drive from my school.

Speaking of MICA, I'll be visiting a nearby symphony center called the "Meyerhoff" to watch the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra perform.  My mom and I bought a "three for $75."  I've always had some appreciation for classical music, but I never knew anything about it.  For some reason "classical" always conjured up images of Charlie Chaplin. In any case, we're going to be enjoying some Rachmaninoff (performed on piano by Yuja Wang, an amazing young pianist who I've seen on youtube - see below), Brahms, and Schuuman.

Meyerhoff Symphony Center. Credits: rocketwords.com

Yuja's Turkish March is particularly good. As for flute music, here are two prodigies below who are famous on youtube. I haven't been able to practice as much as I have wanted to lately, but partly because of the onslaught of recent obligations (see post below).  I need to buy my next lesson book.

Finally, here's a random piece from 耳をすませば, which I randomly found while watching the above videos. Ghibli always makes me feel the world is vast.



Productivity.  I've had to adjust my demanding schedule and so, I've been sleeping at midnight and waking up at 5:30 over the past two weeks. It actually feels wonderful. I've also been trying my best to eat [large] salads for lunch, and eat breakfast.  It was difficult at first to discipline myself to do this, but once I got rolling, it was easy.  I had a lot more energy and could concentrate on my work for longer periods of time.  I also cut out coffee, which does wonders.  In sum, I'm evolving into an aged woman.  One thing I could still use is some exercise, though.  Between interning, SGI activities, and school, it's impossible to find time to exercise.

I'll finish up this post by stating just how fun drafting is.  Litigation is over-rated.  It's extremely fun, but it takes a toll on you.  You have to constantly deal with people, but I get a social-overload between all my other activities lol.  So, I prefer having fun organizing words on paper.

tumblr reluctance and my schedule

I am reluctant to switch over the tumblr, despite its sleek templates. The biggest problem with tumblr is that you can't follow blogs that are not, as they call it, "tumbleblogs." That's a little disappointing, and a little too commercial in nature for me. Also, there's something about tumblr that makes me more prone to post shorter and no-brainer posts. That's not to say that I post anything particularly meaningful here, but at least I attempt to write somewhat longer posts. You don't really get the same feeling of a "blog" on tumblr; it feels more like a impromptu brain-splatter of sorts. It's twitter on steroids.

Blogger has not caused me any trouble, and in fact, I kind of like the free form of it all. I have faith in Google that it will make any changes necessary to keep pace with competition. 

Aside from all this talk about blogs, I'm in a little bit of a rut right now. There are so many things to do...

(1) moot court competition: practicing oral arguments before the competition in DC during the last week of Feb

(2) work as the advocacy chair: Coordinating oral arguments for first year students and fixing up the 

(3) Writing Fellow work: Preparing a presentation on "motion-memo to appellate brief," and scheduling sessions with my students in Section D2 by end of Feb.

(4) Finishing projects for my internship at City Law Dept by the end of Feb.

(5) MPREs (again!): I need the last week of Feb to study for it

(6) Multiple class tests/projects: Evidence test and Real Estate drafting

(7) March 16th meetings

(8) GKI exhibition preparation

(9) Bar applications: Why the heck do I need to submit a traffic citation docket report from seven years back in Laguna Hills?

(10) job search: the never ending and looming boulder atop my head!

I need to shorten my hours at my internship. Otherwise, I'll never be able to do all of this! NMRK.