Despertar

sons and daughters

I have to make a five-minute oral argument tomorrow. It has to be an argument against enforcing a foreign judgment against SeaBarge Extraordinaire re their breach of a Laotian dam-building contract. Anyone have any suggestions?

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It's sort of happening again. There's an unofficial Bar Review tonight in Chinatown, the first one of the semester, and everyone I've talked to so far is going. Two-dollar drink specials, people, music, a break from thinking about the aforementioned oral argument, et cetera. Brandon asked if I'm going, and I had to tell him no. For one thing, I didn't tell him this, but I feel like my whole reproductive system is about to fall out (period came, yay!). For another, I have no idea what I'm going to say about SeaBarge, and if I don't figure something out before I spontaneously fall asleep, the way I've been doing all week, I'm going to look like an idiot in tomorrow's plenery session, just like I did in today's.

Most importantly, though, and I'm as not-proud of this as I can possibly be, welcome back to that state of not being able to be around some guy because I'm afraid he's going to inadvertantly hurt my feelings while I wait for him to start making an effort not to. Justin and I had a major talk two nights ago, one that lasted till four in the morning (part of the reason I have gotten nothing of value out of this week-long seminar thing), and chances are good that things will work out in the eventual, but in the meantime, I have to be understanding of the fact that he doesn't trust his own readiness, and he has to be understanding of the fact that I can't turn feelings off with a light switch.

Okay, so he understands that. Good. But, he says, his fear is, in the meantime, I'm going to make things more difficult for myself than they necessarily need to be, by getting all irrational and tortured every time I see him interacting with somebody else. Giving some other girl his number. Behaving like the single person he is, and will be until he isn't, anymore. He's afraid he's going to make me hate life the way I did in college, except he can't put it in those words, because he doesn't know how that story went, only how it ended.

He's not going to ruin my life. He doesn't know this, but I do. I trust myself way more now than I did then, and I trust him wayyyyy more than I ever did Marcus. Put in perspective, this means very little in general.

He is right about one thing, though: I'm totally not in love with the idea of watching him consciously pretend I don't exist, pretend my feelings are in a lunchbox he's waiting to open later, just because we've talked about it and agreed he's allowed to do that. I don't want to go to some bar and spend my evening trying to give him a respectful distance, or trying not to feel bad for complicating another thing that began and could have remained platonic.

For what it's worth, though, the main reason I'm not going is the cramps thing. I was going to go on birth control, but I guess that's stupid, now.

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Unfortunately, I guess I can't delete the Chaser, because of Kailani. I misremembered how it went, I thought the whole second installment of the story was in the second journal, the gone-forever one, and had that been the case, I would have been fine with deleting the Chaser, those memories.

I forgot how good it was. It's the only thing in that whole journal that doesn't make me cringe.