Gainfully (albeit temporarily) employed!

With passage of the NY Bar comes a slew of forms that need to be filled out, not the least annoying of which are employment affidavits that need to be filled out by every legal employer I've ever had. I finally got around to e-mailing all of my former bosses over the weekend, including my old boss at PBS. She e-mailed me back yesterday and said I could stop in with the forms sometime next week.

Then, today, I get an e-mail from someone in HR at PBS telling me that the counsel's office could use a temporary attorney to fill in until January and that my old boss had recommended me. I called back and explained that I was still seeking full-time work and that I might have to leave suddenly. Nice HR lady said this wouldn't be a problem. Whatever amount of time I could work would be appreciated. It seems like I'll be doing mostly IP work (trademarks and copyright) out of PBS corporate office in Crystal City.

So, quite suddenly and completely from left field, I'm employed!

Go me.

Spotlight on DC: Fenty names a white lady as Police Chief!

I found myself wide awake at 5:30am this morning and, after an hour of tossing and turning, I gave up and left the warmth of my bed. I spent the morning reading the Times, CQPolitics, wikiHows on how survive a plane crash and a free fall...you know, the usual stuff. I was dismayed by a story from yesterday (which I first glimpsed on Wonkette) about a new issue of presidential one dollar coins. As Wonkette points out, the U.S. Mint is taking the only circulating currency with a woman (two actually -- Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony) on it and replacing it with a hit parade of old, (mostly) dead white dudes. (See the bottom left corner of the Post's front page for a sample of what seems to be the Jefferson coin...not that he isn't already featured on the nickel.)

It was with my feminine side feeling a bit attacked that I sauntered over to the bagel place around the corner for my power breakfast of a bacon, egg, and cheese, coffee, and a lemon-lime gatorade. There, while I waited for my order, I noticed the front page of today's Washington Post (above).

I knew that newly-elected Mayor Adrian Fenty was looking for a new Police Chief. He notoriously butted heads with the current Chief and was all about the proverbial fresh start for the city. I was surprised -- as, it seems, were most people -- that he picked an internal candidate that was essentially the old chief's protege. I'll admit it: My initial reaction was a favorable one, probably due to (a) the fact that I'm a huge fan of women in positions of power that are traditionally filled by men and (b) the token injustice (get it?) of the coin imbroglio above. Upon thinking about it some more, I'm even more pleased with Fenty's selection of Cathy Lanier as DC's new police chief.

First, I think that appointing internally is a huge statement of support for the city's police force. By that, I don't mean that the union is going to be jazzed (it isn't), but I think it's an important display of confidence. While I certainly wouldn't say that DC has a particularly fantastic police force, it certainly doesn't have a terrible one. By choosing internally, Fenty's showing that quality can be found within and, although DC remains a very dangerous city, that progress can be made.

Second, bringing in outsiders isn't always all it's cracked up to be. True, there is something to be said for a fresh perspective, but with that comes the need to reinvent the wheel. Lanier knows the District, its police force, and -- most importantly, I'd say -- its residents. While it can be said of any city, DC truly is a unique place. Bringing in an outsider would've meant having to school that outsider in how DC works. I would also worry about the tendency of change to disguise itself as progress. Let me put it as best as I know how . . . with a random analogy, of course: I could buy a shiny new Kia. It might look nice and I'd finally have a cup holder. But there ain't no way it'd protect me in an accident better than my 1988 Volvo. New isn't always good, and it certainly isn't always better.

Finally, I'm frankly excited that he appointed a white woman. As a white person who has worked in urban communities before (and hopes to do so again), I like the reaffirmation that my participation isn't precluded by my race. Lately, I've wondered if -- not unlike a reverse Harold Ford, Jr. in Tennessee -- a white person might ever be elected Mayor of a city like DC or Representative from a congressional district mostly comprised of a city like Newark, NJ. While Lanier's appointment certainly doesn't answer that question, it allows for the possibility that a white person might have a role in serving the residents of our urban areas.

Good luck, Chief-select Lanier.

[Edited to add this link to continue the feel-good-about-womanhood vibe. It's a story from the Christian Science Monitor on women in the 2006 election. Check it out.]

Amtrak had me in a foul mood until I saw the front page of the Times.

[Photo credit: Tom Hanson/Canadian Press, via Associated Press, via NYT.] I don't even know who the dude in the yellow in the back right is but his mildly disapproving look only adds to the fun. (I know that lower left dude is Chinese President Hu Jintao but not because the Times told me -- interestingly enough they only id the white people in the photo.) The photo might've been particularly effective at improving my mood due to a bit of a girl-crush that I have on Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. Tee!

I needed this photo after a pain in the ass run-in with Amtrak this morning (and last night). While at dinner with Genger last night, I realized that I should probably figure out how to get home for Thanksgiving. Normally, I rent a car (surprisingly cheap through AAA) due to its convenience, but I wasn't looking forward to driving through holiday traffic on Wednesday. So last night, on Genger's urging, I went to the Amtrak website to book a train.

When did trains become the most expensive way to travel? I used to train between Jersey and DC all the time for around $80 one-way. When I looked up Wednesday afternoon, I was greeted with scads of sold-out reserve trains and a sampling of Acelas at a mere $193 a pop. ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY THREE DOLLARS. ONE WAY. Seriously?

So I checked earlier to see if one of the reserve trains was still open. I saw the 11:30am train was available for $128 (still more than I'd like to spend but whatever) so I went for it. I filled in my name, credit card info, address, and pressed the big orange PURCHASE button. That's when I got an error message saying that my train was sold out. How shitty is your software that you can't hold a train for a customer through the 2-minute period that it takes to fill in purchase information? Ugh.

After refreshing a few times and only having a 7:25am train available in a price I was willing to spend (still $128), I decided to just go to bed and book something this morning. Maybe they'd add trains or cars or something. Ha! Anyway, not only did the 7:25am train sell out coach seats (leaving me the option of taking a $152 business class seat), but the stupid site wouldn't take my AAA discount because it was less than 3 days before my travel. Nearly at the end of my rope, I decided to just suck it up and take a 6:35am train for $111. (This was after pricing a plane ticket and discovering that the only reasonable flights to the area were out of gruesome Dulles and into inconveniently distant JFK.) So I went through the billing process again.

Yes, you guessed it. Another error message. This time it wasn't about the train being sold out, just some nonsense about the system screwing up. So I called Amtrak. That's when I got one of those creepy automated systems. Named Julie. They're always named Julie or Sandy or some other white girl diminutive. It's never like, "Hi, this is Ramon, Amtrak's automated phone service," or "Hello beta, this is Anjali." But I digress. Julie weirded me out and was a bit complicated. By the time I got her to check trains, I had already successfully purchased the 6:35am train online.

So now I'm paying $111 to travel home at 6:35am in coach. I hate Amtrak. But I love Bush and Putin looking like they're about to make out.

Dream a little dream of me.

[Edited to ask for the some powerful, positive groupthink for Joshy, Charles, Nancy, Sharon, Ryan, Ryan and all my other peeps who find out about California at 9pm EST tonight. Never underestimate the power of positive thinking. Good luck!]

For years now I've regaled people with with tales -- and sometimes reenactments -- of my dreams. I tend to dream a lot, remember much of them, and even often force myself out of bed immediately upon waking to write down the details of a dream.

I'm tired of the dreams I've been having. As people who've heard about a dream or two of mine already know, they tend to be rather epic in a nonsensical sort of way. Whether I'm cruising around my hometown with Lauren Voss and Elijah Wood in a station wagon or riding mini-airplanes around a prehistoric seascape (complete with dinosaurs), my dreams are often busy as heck. It's exhausting. I can't say that I'm psyched that (a) my dreams are usually rather draining and (b) in them my life is frequently in peril.

It's not that I have a ton of bad dreams all the time. I mean, I've definitely been stabbed on a cruise ship, chased through my old middle school by a homicidal clown (this was probably due to the clown complex of the generation that watched the film version of Stephen King's It), and nearly eaten by crocodiles. A bunch of people know what happened in a dream that started with "I was lying in my bed in my apartment in Jersey City and then Nula comes in to wake me up" and ended with "Shut it off! Shut it off!!!" Then there was the time I was stuck in traffic on the way to beach and soldiers started vaporizing all the cars in front of me. Hang on, I might have that dream written down in an e-mail somewhere. YES!

Completely unedited from half-sleep on the morning of May 28, 2006:

So the dream started and it seemed like we were going on vacation. Think our post-finals trip to OBX. Initially it focused on this random girl who I don't know. I just saw her getting ready for the trip. So we're all driving in what seem like SUVs with trailers down this road and suddenly these large government-looking vehicles show up and block our way. There's a lot of us...picture a large-scale bumper-to-bumper situation -- it's not all law school people. People start getting out of their cars and one person - the initial random girl - actually gets shot by one of the government dudes. Then something weird starts happening. Way down in front, people start disintegrating. Like, what Phoenix does in X3. I start looking around but everyone's frozen. So I grab Charles (he is the easiest to drag along) and start running towards the side of the road. The only other person I remember seeing was Victor (also running). It's complete chaos as people are running and disintegrating. (It seems that the disintegration is being caused by these soldier dudes.) So I run (still with Charles) through a small bit of forest and it turns out that we're on a mountain. So we start climbing down. (I had significantly more upper body strength in my dream than I do in real life.) We just keep climbing down and I can hear shit still going crazy up and behind me. After what feels like forever of climbing, we get to the bottom which seems to be some family's backyard. They ask us who we are and I explain what was happening above. They immediately let us in.

It takes me a little while to realize they're shady as hell because they won't let us use the phone or anything. Slowly other people start to show up at these people's large house (apparently the climbing down the mountain idea wasn't solely mine). And the family houses all of us. We're not held prisoner or anything. There's a whole town but something's wrong with the phones and things are just weird. None of our cell phones are working. The people I distinctly remember being there were Charles, Victor, Humann, Graham, Sparrow, Natalie, Voss, Rickel, and Reichs. And the weirdest thing was that Charisma Carpenter (aka Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Cordelia Chase) was also there. She was another student at the law school in my dream and it was totally normal for her to be with us. Anyway, so we're all trying to figure out what to do and how to contact anyone else. At dinner one night (they feed us, too) one of the little girls (the family has a few) mentions a computer. So I immediately inquire about it and the mother (who looks a lot like Mary Kay Place) and I get into an argument. Anyway, she finally hands it over (it's a laptop) but it won't let me access any websites. There seems to be no way to contact the outside world. A conversation with the little girl reveals that things aren't as they seem and that we're in danger. So we start organizing (because random people from our group start disappearing). We somehow manage to get guns (I love that we can't get a working phone, but a cache of weapons isn't a problem). I unfortunately woke up right when we were going to shoot our way out of town. It was going to be pretty cool.

It was a very talky dream with a lot of conversations about where we were. In a way, it almost had LOST-esque undertones. My favorite theories were that we were in a Truman Show-type place, that we were in a government experiment, or that we were being held hostage by some weird hillbillies. Not sure.

That should give you a fair idea of the complexity of my dreams. They're all like that. And it's getting tiring. Last night/this morning, I had a dream that it was the night before the bar exam and I hadn't studied. I was with a few of my friends at a diner of sorts hanging out with Professor Zubrow (who, in my dream, owned the diner) and everyone was talking about the exam. It suddenly occurred to me that it was the next day and that I hadn't prepared at all. What was interesting was that I was still in-dream when I realized that I had already taken and passed the bar. It was really weird. That's another thing that happens a lot in my dreams: I realize I'm dreaming and yet the dream doesn't end. I've had to snap myself out of a few dreams by actually shouting, which is less of a problem now that I live alone.

That reminds me of a time when I had a dream that I was running down a city street. I wasn't running from anything; I think I was looking for something. Anyway, I got to a corner and an old lady was walking her chihuahua. I tripped over the chihuahua, flew through the air, and woke up half on the floor. See? Dreaming is dangerous. I should get sedatives.

[NOTE: Edited to remove a certain friend's first name after entirely too many google searches for his entire name led here. It was sort of creepy. He's better off.]

Bar Crawl

I passed both the New Jersey and New York bar exams. I found out about NJ the other night after I met up with Ale at a bar. I'd spent the day serene in my ignorance not knowing that Jersey had been released until Ale informed me. I had to force his lovely girlfriend Rachel to take me to her apartment so I could check. Of course, I initially looked at the wrong candidate number and thought I'd failed. Big ups to Moira, Ale, and Rachel for being with me at the time.

New York came out this morning. At 9am. I woke up at one point during the night and actually said, out loud, "I wonder if it's 9am yet." It was 4:30am. I spent the last hour before the results were posted refreshing the website every 5 minutes or so. Finally the link appeared (highlighted in yellow) and, after inputting my social security number and birthdate, I peered through my fingers and saw . . . a lot of little text. I guess I was expecting a large PASSED or FAILED to flash across the screen. Instead, I was greeted with a congratulatory paragraph, which, yes, I actually had to read to determine if I'd passed. After getting the good news, I was completely overwhelmed with relief. I think I might have peed a little.

I feel very lucky to have made it through a terrible process that is nothing more than hazing. I'd like to thank God, my family and friends, the Italian World Cup Team, and the lovely people at Johnnie Walker.

My feelings are best expressed as the opposite of those of the little Santorum girl in this photo:

[Thanks to Ryan Smith for sending me the photo.]

Wow. I mean, WOW. I apologize for being absent, but I assure you that it was for a good cause. For the last two weeks, I've been working with Senator Menendez's campaign for reelection here in NJ. It's been a truly thrilling trip and I'm so thankful that I decided to get involved.

I spent most of the time working at the Essex County Democratic Headquarters. There I assisted the staff in working to get out the vote in my predominantly Dem county. I attended a Menendez rally in Newark where I got to see (and shake hands with!) President Clinton. On Election Day, I worked with the Democratic legal team on their anti-voter suppression efforts. I must admit that it was really effing cool to be at the Essex County Board of Elections on Tuesday. I observed the goings-on of that office as they handled voting machine and other issues. I was extremely impressed with the people working there. It was also pretty neat to play around with a sample voting machine that the Clerk of the Board had in her office.

Still, the best feeling was seeing that all the efforts of people like me around the country actually made a difference. I went into Election Day refusing to believe that the Dems might actually pull it off. I was tired of being disappointed. Two days later, it looks like I had nothing to worry about. Menendez kicked Kean's ass. The Dems took the House. By a lot. They took the Senate after Mister Macaca conceded earlier today (which I totally called). Rumsfeld resigned. Bolton won't last much longer at the UN. Bush is freaking out. Honestly, even the minor disappointments like Marilyn Musgrave retaining her seat are tempered by the fact that now that all Congressional Republicans are in the minority and need to deal with that. It's not fun to lose control of your committees, to have your bills never reach the floor, and to have to call a chick from one of the gayest congressional districts in the country your boss. Maybe the Republicans that didn't get reelected were better off. I return to a new DC tomorrow. Who knows? Maybe the social scene will get a whole lot better after the mass exodus of the neo-cons.

Let freedom ring.