PT-LawMom

Have to leave after class tomorrow for a few days away for work. Looks to be an insanely busy week! It’s almost 10 and I have yet to pack. Procrastinating with a little meme. Pumpkinhead and I had a blast trunk-or-treating on Friday night at the church where we attend DivorceCare. The families decorate the insides of their trunks and hand out candy from there. I’d never done that before. It was way fun!

Then we spent Saturday evening at Blue Eyes’ house where he made yummy grilled chicken, pork and veggies for us. Pumpkinhead went to play with friends for a few hours and Blue Eyes and I watched Office Space. Soooo funny!

Today we had lunch with Chapin so that he could see Pumpkinhead and we could go over some papers and other things. Chapin hung out and watched a DVD with Pumpkinhead and his friend for about two hours while I studied in my room. That worked out all right. Then I spent the afternoon trying to work with a very patchy Internet connection. Damn Comcast!! I’ve spent the evening Flairing out my Facebook page (now that I know where that came from - LOL) and IM’ing Blue Eyes. I need to get productive and start packing but I’m blah. Been hurting all weekend. Damn, damn, damn my stupid nerves. I thought that raising to 90mg of Cymbalta would have helped but it has just kicked my Bow-chicka-bow-wow completely into the ground. Yep, I am 29 going on 80. Going to take a B12 shot, make an appointment with the neurologist and keep moving.

H/t to The Nocturnal Wench

1. I’ve come to realize that my last kiss was… tender and sweet but frustratingly unproductive.

2. I am listening to… “Tu Sonrisa” by Elvis Crespo and the sound of Pumpkinhead snoring in my bed.

3. I talk… too fast!

4. I love… my son, books and chocolate. Combine them all and I’m having a great night!

5. My best friends are… in and out of my life.

6. My love life… is a rollercoaster ride.

7. I hate it when people assume… that I am uptight, reserved or otherwise unpleasant.

8. Love is… intoxicating, hard to find and fun when you’re in it.

9. Marriage is… more difficult than outsiders can imagine but ultimately a worthwhile endeavor with the right person. It’s finding the “right” person that is hard.

10. Somewhere, someone is thinking… way too much about unimportant things.

11. I’m always… worried about something.

12. I have a secret crush on… no one. I’m not a secret crush kind of a girl, more of a “hey, I like you” kind of girl. Just ask Blue Eyes.

13. My cell phone… is a Blackberry, always at my side.

14. When I wake up in the morning… it’s because a five year-old has busted in for morning cuddles before we both get up to face the day.

15. When I go to bed at night…. I can’t sleep lately.

16. Right now I am thinking about… what to pack, all the crap I have to do tomorrow at work, whether it will get done, whether Pumpkinhead will be okay while I’m gone, whether the medication he’s on will work, whether Chapin will REALLY pick him up from daycare on Thursday, whether I will fall flat on my face at my presentations this week, and many other things.

17. Babies are… adorable and I’d love to have another someday but I think the neuropathy and malnutrition has probably slammed that door shut.

18. I get on Face Book… and spend waaayyy too much time on it.

19. Tonight I will… try to do something productive.

20. Tomorrow I will… try to get up and off to work early and actually make it to class like I’ve planned before catching my 9:20 p.m. flight out of the airport 1.5 hours from home rather than the one that is a mere 10 minutes from my house.

This is me with most people in my life these days. LOL.

I know I have the roundup this weekend but it just isn’t going to happen until tomorrow. Probably tomorrow night. Just got back from a very relaxing weekend that ended on just a bit of a tense note and I’m not in the mood for blogging right now. Tomorrow I am definitely going to tell you all about my lovely weekend (well, maybe not all…) and get that roundup right up. But in the meantime, please forgive my blogger apathy. Don’t really want to face work or school either so don’t take it personally. LOL.

I’ve talked about blogger anonymity in the past but a classmate encouraged me to speak about it again after I fake-hid from him in the hallway knowing from my stat checker that he’d read a certain post the night before. [For the record, he said he found the post entertaining. Hey, it's a public service, man - meant to be educational, not funny.] Luke’s posts on anonymity (well, all of his posts really) are much more thought-provoking and well-researched than anything I could come up with right now. After five years of motherhood, a year on brain-altering anti-convulsants and in the midst of the work/law school/single parenthood rollercoaster, my ability to speak eloquently on any topic is somewhat impaired (hence my complete silence in class these days).

Therefore, I am going to steal a few lines from one of my new drinking buddies: “I will continue to blog because I almost feel like it’s something I have to stand up for in the same way that I insist on wearing pants. Whenever I hear a woman attorney tell me the importance of buying into sexism and wearing a skirt to interviews I think, “Wow. If all women thought the way you did, we would have never gained the vote or been able to enter the workforce.”

I’m not a complete revolutionary over here. I can follow direction and do quite well in a professional environment. I don’t think I will ever be able to be a lemming though and I’d rather be at the beginning of change then catching up at the end.”

I agree with Ana. I come from the first country to give women the vote. I was raised by parents who taught me that my opinion mattered and that I should speak my mind no matter what others think. (In reality, I’ve learned that I DO need to think before I speak sometimes - LOL). I’ve always been an “out there” kind of girl. I’ve been in the Washington Post three times talking about topics from working motherhood to healthcare to gentrification. I’ve written embarrassing (to me) short stories and poems. I started a gay/straight alliance club in the middle of my preppy upper-class high school. God knows I’m outspoken, as do my parents. Would I want my boss to read my blog? Eh, probably not. But there are many, many sides to me and I am not ashamed of who I am, what I do or what I write. I do have a few “private” or “password-protected” posts but those are posts I wrote late at night or in the middle of a funk that have to do with my family members or a very sensitive, personal topic that I realized I just wasn’t willing to share with the world but also was not willing to delete.

Through my blog (and other online outlets), I have met some amazing people I would never have otherwise had the opportunity to know. But more than anything, the blog is an outlet for me to better know myself. Ever since my divorce, I’ve been trying exceptionally hard to be honest with the people in my life, hence the even more direct posts and the fact that I told Blue Eyes about my blog (Hi Cutie!). I don’t usually tell people about it but, like most things in my life, I wouldn’t lie about it if someone asked me. I do adhere to Luke’s Rule: “Don’t say something behind someone’s back that you wouldn’t tell them to their face.” That is why you will rarely read me talking about my classmates or class in general. Nor do I plainly identify my school, although I have been much more open about my location as of late. [See Disclaimer]

I have always believed in, and will continue to, naively perhaps, believe in the basic good of humankind and trust that, in this day of more open communication about people’s lives, my classmates will respect my blogging as long as I don’t talk about them. The only reason they would have to smear me over it would be some desire to drag me down and, believe me, I’ve already hit rock bottom this year. Nowhere to go but up now. You’d think after years of being the picked-on fat kid, I’d know that some people are just mean for the sake of being mean, but I really believe that meanness stems from insecurity. And even when the kids picked on me growing up, I just smiled sweetly and continued to work hard. I have family that loves me, a job I enjoy and friends I treasure. That’s all that really matters.

The Queen of Meme’s Mimi tagged me for this very important meme.

**start copy**

The Peace Globe project began in the fall of 2006 with a simple post from one blog, Mimi Writes. The post ignited a flame in the blogosphere. The flame became a passion. The passion became a movement. It amazingly traveled from blog to blog to blog across the globe. Bloggers wrote passionate articles on what peace means to them, along with the promise of three Latin words scribbled on a globe - Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant Us Peace) - branded with the integrity of their names or blog names. It was positively inspiring to watch. And it began to happen all over the world - from Singapore to China to Afghanistan to Brooklyn.

Here’s the most important part.
4. On November 6, 2008 DISPLAY YOUR GLOBE IN A POST. Title your post “Dona Nobis Pacem”. This is important. The goal is for all blog post titles to say the same thing on the same day. Write about peace or simply fly your globe.

Go HERE for the other 3 globe template choices!)

If you’d like to help spread the word, take this button to your site. The code is in my sidebar.

………………………………………………………………………………………………YOUR NAME HERE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE TAGGED TO PLAY.

Please passing this meme through the blogosphere. Peace + Power
This is Mimi Pencil Skirt reporting from the lovely land of the Peace Globes.
Memeing the Movement.

**End Copy**

Anyone who wants to do this is tagged. You can get this post with links for your blog by opening it, clicking on View - Page Source and copying the portion of the code that encompasses this post.

My blogroll was broken for a while but is now working again so I’m trying to update it with the blogs of all of my awesome reader/commenters. If I have missed you, please drop me a line at ptlawmom at g mail.

Ana’s bar is very cool. Mellow, peaceful, nice. It’s a hole in the wall that I probably wouldn’t have found had she not described it for us. I arrived 15 minutes late because work exploded into craziness today (barely escaped and, had I not had the lure of Girl Time, I may not have). Stopped at the bar, saw the Shiner Bock on tap and it was all over. Took my frosty glass and walked into the courtyard to find the ladies. Of course they were hiding behind a wall of bushes. LOL. Drinking wine. Doh! Totally forgot the wine part. But, hey, I always go against the grain so I stuck with the Shiner. Besides, after four hours of sleep last night, I was punchy enough without alcohol. Wine would have sent me over the edge.

Blonde Counsel is a pretty blonde with awesome glasses and great style. She was wearing a really fashionable outfit - very put together. Ana was just as you would expect. Smart, witty, down-to-earth and smokes like a chimney. Short, tiny and cute.

We chatted, filled in the holes/expounded on the blog stories. I flashed my belly scars. (Yep, not a modest girl - who’d have thought?!?). Turns out my blog makes others feel like their life isn’t so bad in comparison. LMAO. Hey, nice to know I’m perfoming a great public service for crazed law students everywhere. Ana gave me a reassuring arm pat. BC shared a sad story of her own to commiserate. It was a real girl’s night. Hell, we even bonded over crazy parent tales. I had such a blast and was thrilled when Ana suggested biweekly Wine Time. I am soooo there.

I’m meeting Ana for wine tomorrow. Yee-haw. (I know you are super jealous.) And another local blogger but I don’t have permission (not that I asked) to mention his/her name so I won’t. What I think is absolutely hilarious is that it is almost 1 a.m., all three of us work full-time, and yet we are all up right now. Crazy bloggers. LOL. See you two tomorrow… uh, yeah, later today. Hopefully we can cheer Ana up or at least drown her in wine until she forgets about sad boys.

Well I broke my blog. But then I fixed it with some fancy backend code editing. Woo-hoo. Feeling proud of my mad coding skillz. I successfully upgraded some files that required updating, added additional plugins, put my e-mail address on the About Me page and fixed my blogroll. You will see that I’ve narrowed down the number of link categories and added a bunch of single parent and single person links. I also switched the graduated people to Lawyer status. Enjoy.

Only a few hours left in the annual blogger Boobiethon where female (and male) bloggers share their best ta-ta pics and raise money for breast cancer research. Go check out the boobies and help raise money for the cure. If nothing else, let this be a reminder to do your monthly self exam. Men too!