Non-Actionable Puffery

I finished my internship on Friday; it was an amazing couple of months! I was lucky enough to be given more responsibility than is typical for law student internships, and I learned so much from the experience. Looking back to my first day, I was terrified to stand on an arraignment, even one where we weren't asking for bail; just a few weeks later, I conducted an entire Sex Offender Registration Act hearing myself!

The internship was wonderful, but I'm going to enjoy having a little more free time between now and the start of school at the end of the month. It won't be 100% vacation – it's job application season, and I also have work to do for the journal I'm on – but compared to 40+ hours/week, it feels like I have buckets of time to relax. I'm also tremendously excited because my best friend is coming to visit me in just a couple of days! The biggest downside of living in NYC is that I miss my West Coast friends like crazy, so I've been desperately looking forward to this.

I'm also so excited to have more time for fic! First things first, I have to kick things into gear for tolkienrsb. I also have a couple of other ideas I'm hoping to work on this month, including a fairly ridiculous MDZS fic about copyright law:

I saw this prompt over at mdzskinkmeme exactly one week after my copyright exam, and I pretty much have no choice but to fill it! I've been doing some thinking about what common law copyright principles would develop in ancient fantasy China, and also how I could make it funny. I'm thinking copyright for talismans and arrays would be fairly similar to how copyright in software is treated under U.S. law – which also gives me a great chance to make a pun about Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int'l, Inc., 516 U.S. 233 (1996), which is a landmark software copyright case. (Admittedly, the pun would probably only be funny to me.)

It should surprise no one that "Crack Treated Seriously" is one of my favorite tags!

In spite of, well...*waves vaguely at the world at large,* 2021 was a pretty good year for me personally.

My biggest accomplishment this year has nothing to do with either fandom or law school: After biting my nails since kindergarten, 2021 is the year I was finally able to quit! *\o/*

I got to go to my law school classes fully in person starting in the fall – and what a difference it makes! Interning in a DA's office this summer was a great experience as well, and I was able to confirm that working in local prosecution really is what I want to do with my life.

On the fannish side of things, I finally got up the courage to join the Silmarillion Writers' Guild (and the SWG Discord server) – and I'm so grateful to everyone who's been so welcoming! I also wrote my longest (and best) fic to date: my tolkienrsb fic, Letters from Himring. I know 5k isn't long at all by most writers' standards, but it was a milestone for me, and I'm very happy with how the fic turned out! A big thank you to my artist frog-in-a-pond for giving me the go-ahead to write weird academic pastiche, because if I'd tried to do a more traditional fic format I don't think I'd have been able to finish anything I'd be satisfied with.

As for the goals I set for 2021 in last year's Snowflake Challenge, I'm batting 500: My first goal was to do all of the assigned reading in advance of each lecture, and I didn't manage that. But my second was just "Write fic! Even if it's bad!", and at least I got that done!

The community on DW and the conversations I've had here have been such a wonderful part of my life in 2021, and it's been great getting to know many folks better. Happy New Year to all, and here's hoping for a more hopeful year ahead!

It's the third Sunday of Advent: Gaudete Sunday!

Gaudete Sunday is one of my favorite days in the liturgical year. Gaudete means Rejoice! Advent is a penitential season, like Lent; the next-to-last Sunday of Advent, though, is a sort of celebratory foretaste of Christmas joy. That's reflected in the day's liturgical color, pink, which is a lightening or softening of the penitential purple.

It's also a perfect day to sing my favorite Christmas carol of all, "Gaudete, Christus est natus!" This year I made a Spotify playlist solely comprised of half a dozen different versions of the carol:


And here are the lyrics: ( Read more... )

I have a term paper due by midnight tomorrow and exams Tuesday and Thursday, and I'm currently running on too little sleep and too much coffee, so I haven't exactly been feeling joyful. But Gaudete Sunday reminds me to take a breath and remember the many, many reasons I have to rejoice.

Hard to believe it'll be October tomorrow! The weather is finally starting to feel like fall.

Nominations for Yuletide just closed. I nominated The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and the Templar Knight Mysteries series by Maureen Ash. I'm very excited for the exchange this year! Are you planning to participate? What fandoms did you nominate?

My evidence professor told us the hilarious story of the Phantom of Heilbronn today. Between 1993 and 2009, one unknown woman's DNA was recovered from 40 crime scenes across Austria, France, and Germany, including multiple murders, mystifying investigators and leading to suspicions of a serial killer. The mysterious "Phantom" turned out to be a worker at the factory that manufactured the cotton swabs used to collect DNA samples.

Finally, it's a bit early in the year, but I hope you'll enjoy the most beautiful rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus I've ever heard:

...and I'm profoundly grateful for air conditioning.

It's been a while, hasn't it?

I started my summer internship at the DA's office three weeks ago and it is amazing.
( job stuff )

You know how I said I wasn't going to do an exchange this summer because I had another idea I wanted to focus on? Well….I signed up as a potential treat writer for tolkienrsb, looked at the gallery, and saw an artwork I absolutely had to claim. I'm very excited about this fic! I'm a little nervous, though, as well – you'll laugh, but 5k will be the longest single fic I've ever written, and it's definitely far more than what I could throw together at the last minute, so I'm going to need to be disciplined about working on it.

I'm also working on a shorter fic I hope to be able to finish in time to post it for Jedi June. I have so enjoyed reading people's fics for the fest this year!

And, of course, Happy Pride Month!

I have my second final exam on Friday afternoon. What did I do last night?

(a) Finished reviewing my notes, like I had planned,

(b) Took a practice exam, like I had hoped, or

(c) Watched the first few episodes of Rebels, read both volumes of the Kanan comics, and started in on A New Dawn.

...yeah, it was option (c). I'm not exactly a paragon of responsibility.

I watched the first few minutes of the Bad Batch episode (even though I said I wouldn't), but didn't really get into it. Then I saw what Indy said about it, and somehow that led to me watching the first episode of Rebels (after seeing independence1776 talk about it for years), just to try it out....

It was so good. I was not prepared for it to be that good. I was five episodes in almost before I realized it, which practically never happens for me with TV shows. And the Kanan comics are amazing! Now I know what I'm doing when exams are over! (Hopefully I can hold off until then....)

I have exactly two weeks before my first exam, and I am going to need every minute of that time if I'm going to be anywhere close to ready. (And my fic for maythe4thbewithyou is due a week from today....) I've been insanely busy the past couple of weeks, and things are only going to get more hectic, but at least then the semester will be over and it's on to summer...which will also be busy, but at least it will be a different kind of busyness. And it will be so, so nice to be back in California, and to see my family again!

I'm getting my second vaccine dose a week from Tuesday, and I can hardly wait! It's wonderful to watch the vaccination numbers climbing - right now, 40% of the population of New York State has had at least one dose, and the same for California, and 30% of adults in the entire US are fully vaccinated! There really is a light at the end of this very long, very dark tunnel.

One of the fics I wrote for the maythe4thbewithyou exchange last year was a fluffy and vaguely cringy quarantine fic (of the sort that were multiplying like rabbits on AO3 right about then). It's equal parts amusing and embarrassing to look back on; I hadn't yet fully grasped how devastating COVID would be, and how long the lockdowns would last.

The Internship Hunt is at an end, and I'm over the moon! I got basically my first-choice option: I'll be working at a DA's office in a lovely city in California. The office has a structured program for 1Ls, which is pretty fabulous; the location is great; and it's close enough to home that I'll be able to see family - for what will be the first time in 10 months! (I went to undergrad close to home and saw my mom every couple of weeks, so it's been a big adjustment.) The internship is full time, so that plus the research assistantship will keep me very busy, but I'm excited for both.

(The brief I mentioned on Saturday is also, thankfully, done, though I left it far too late and it was frankly hellish. The less said about that, the better. This was only the initial draft, but at least I have a little while to relax before I get feedback and start revising.)

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to the internship - and knowing what I'll be doing this summer is a huge weight off my mind.

It's official: Job interviews are some of my least favorite things in the entire world. I'm trying to find a summer internship, and it's so stressful.

At least there are a bunch of great fannish things happening right now:

(1) The ever-amazing independence1776 started a Jedi-focused DW comm, elphrona_outpost. I am so excited!!! Time to finish up that meta I've been thinking about….

(2) maythe4thbewithyou nominations are open, which is nuts - hard to believe it's been a year already! I'm really looking forward to this year's exchange.

(3) rthstewart's Three Sentence Ficathon is running: Part 1, Part 2. I've posted one fill so far, for the prompt "mistaking the cosplayer for the real thing," and I'm working on a couple more right now.

Finally: Lent started on Wednesday, and even though my relationship with Catholicism (and Christianity generally) is...complicated, I decided to do a Lenten penance. I'm giving up Facebook, Instagram, and - the only one relevant to people here - Tumblr, and trying to focus my energy on offline life and on places like DW where I'm actively creating and engaging with other people rather than endlessly scrolling. So I won't be reachable via Tumblr until Easter.

ETA: Not five minutes after I posted this, I got an email from a professor I interviewed with yesterday for a part-time summer research assistantship - she's hiring me! Her research is on corporate crime and enforcement, and I hope to work in white-collar prosecution after graduation, so it's perfect! And I already know her because I'm in her reading group, so I'm confident she'll be a good boss. I do still need to get an internship, but this is great news.

I had my criminal law exam today - six hours long and I was writing for every minute of it! Law school exams are a little paradoxical. On one hand, they're extremely stressful, because your grade in the course is usually entirely based on your score on the exam (and the exams are curved); but on the other hand, what you're asked to do on the exam itself is actually pretty fun. So in a weird way, I enjoyed myself.

Now I should
(A) study for my torts exam or
(B) work on my Yuletide fic,
but instead I am
(C) writing a ficlet for the Festival of Lights Fest.

...I've never claimed to have good impulse control.

Incidentally, anyone have any ideas for what a dreidel would be called in the Galaxy Far, Far Away?