because clearly, jesus christ wants THIS.

"You turn this nation over to the fags and our soldiers come home in body bags."

i'm not kidding.

frey fray

okay. i read a million little pieces. not having had much experience with alcoholics, drug abuse, and ciminal activity, i figured that it was at least mostly true, if a bit exaggerated. i read it in one day. i stayed up until all hours of the night. i couldn't put it down, and i loved it.

(this, by the way, had nothing to do with oprah's book club--thanks to benji for his very thoughtful christmas present.)

then i read on the smoking gun that, actually, it was mostly not true. so, okay. do i really care? mmm... not so much. it was a good read! yes, part of the appeal was the idea that a real person had really had a real root canal, really without anesthesia--but in the grand scheme of things, who gives a shit?

and then, larry king live does an interview, like there aren't more pressing world issues that need our attention. oprah phones in to support her buddy james--cool, i like that she stands by her recommendations. jimmy basically tells the smoking gun to go to hell, which is really not the best idea when they're spot-on with their criticism... whatever.

after some more drama, oprah gets jimbo back on her show with his publisher and just lays into him, saying she felt betrayed yadda yadda yadda. he apologizes (when oprah's mad at you, you're really in the shithouse), feels really bad about it, but stands by it as a memoir. i figure, thank god this stupid controversy is over so we can stop hearing about it.

ah. how silly of me.

Late Friday afternoon, plaintiff's attorney Marc Bern said he filed a lawsuit against Random House and its Doubleday imprint in U.S. District Court in Manhattan charging that the publishers misrepresented that book as nonfiction. His client, California resident Karen Futernick, alleges in the suit that she purchased "A Million Little Pieces" on that basis but that the defendants "failed to conduct a reasonable investigation or inquiry regarding the truthfulness or accuracy" of the material. Mr. Bern said that he will seek more than $50 million in damages for the plaintiffs. "Nobody can get away with profiting with a product that you represented as something that it is not," says Alan Ripka, another partner in Napoli Bern Ripka LLP, the New York City law firm that filed the suit.

$50 million dollars.

nice.

relax

this is the first weekend in a while that involves little or no obligation. it's kind of nice. last night i got home from work around 730, watched satc and ate cheese and crackers, and did sudoku puzzles before falling asleep before 1am. all in all, a very restful and comfortable night (especially with my new bed accessories!).

today i'm meeting up with abhay for lunch in about an hour. later, i'll have dinner with eric and possibly see a movie. in between, i'd love to find the idiotarod, which is taking place in nyc this weekend. i've never seen the race, but finding it is complicated by the fact that they don't say where they're going! very frustrating. if i can find out the end point of the race, i'll con bay into coming with me to watch the finish. it should be ridiculous.

tomorrow night: chinese new year at cottage, hopefully minus the person next to me vomiting in their noodle bowl. maybe mikeliu and sarah will be there, and i can congratulate the happy couple, possibly by hitting them in the face with cream pies. seems appropriate.

new things!

i decided to invest a bit of time and money in making my (very small) room slightly more livable. first, i moved my bookshelf to by the bed from its old home by the door, and i moved the laundry basket to where the bookshelf was. this made some space by the desk and allows the closet door to open and close completely, which really opens up the left side of the room. then, i put up a couple of wall dressings that had been waiting for attention: my surrealist poster of the two bodyless girls; my concert tickets; the collage from the ultimate team at the end of senior year. also, i put photos in my frames and set them up on the dvd player. and also, i decided to buy new beddings. i ordered two fluffy pillows, a down comforter, and a duvet cover from overstock.com (cheap! and fast!). the last of it came today, and now everything is in place. the final things on the list are new, non-white curtains, which should brighten up that end of the room a bit, and frames for my prints from greece and poland. i'm very, very happy with the results so far. *pats self on back*

also, i've been listening to everything but the girl obsessively for the past couple weeks. i'm about ready to go out and buy everything they've ever recorded. tracey thorn is my new hero. what lovely lyrics! what smooth music! and such a silky voice! yes, wonderful.

i'm starting to accept the idea that life will just never slow down--at least, not in the foreseeable future. when i got back from miami, i was looking forward to new york as a restful place (not joking). instead, i've been to three birthday parties, spent a long weekend in providence, had many dinners with friends, entertained pleasant company for a weekend, and worked my butt off organizing tobacco control meetings. and it doesn't end! dad's coming to visit, and then winter league starts (which i may or may not attend), and then i go to geneva and istanbul for 8 days and two weekends, and then it's another long weekend, which may involve a trip to the south florida area, but who knows. on top of that all, i have to do my taxes and fill out the fafsa and the profile and make sure my parents do their taxes and apply for financial aid for law schools, because i certainly can't afford to go without some help. i shake my head just thinking about it.

speaking of law school, here's some news: i've been accepted to temple (philadelphia) and gw (washington dc), and georgetown deferred me to regular decision. since i applied in november, i expect that acceptances and rejections will be trickling in over the next couple of months; of course, i obsessively check every email address i own, waiting for notice. a couple others in the office have also applied for the coming fall, and we update each other whenever we pass in the halls.

i'm so, so relieved to be in to more than one school. at least this way i feel like i have some choice, like i can make an active decision about my life. and gw is a good school--and in DC--and i certainly wouldn't mind spending a year, or even more, there. we'll see what happens, i guess. i'm still waiting to hear from: chicago, harvard, columbia, and georgetown. tough crowd.

i can't decide if i should take a shower. it's only 10:15, and i'm not sleepy yet, so i guess i might as well.

i have no words.

damn the press!

well, only sometimes. like when slate opens their mouth about my starbucks drink.

a couple of years ago, i read a great article about the disappearance of the 8-oz coffee cup. in that article, the authors divulged that, in fact, starbucks made a "short" coffee and just didn't put it on the menu. since then, i usually order short coffee or hot chocolate there--it tastes better without the extra milk, and i can't drink that much anyway.

that same article also talked about how cup companies were trying to make an 80-oz soda cup that didn't collapse on itself. in some movie, i think supersize me, they showed a guy getting ready for gastric bypass surgery; his wife, standing next to his hospital bed, had a thermos of soda about the size of a mini-keg. and what are we up to now at 7-11, the double super big gulp? i think it's all a bit ridiculous.

florida news

"In a ruling expected to reverberate through legal battles over school choice in many states, the Florida Supreme Court today struck down a voucher program for students attending failing schools, saying the state constitution bars Florida from using taxpayer money to finance a private alternative to the public system."
-nytimes

While I'm still officially undecided on the question of school vouchers, my instinct is to applaud this ruling. The court really ruled on a technicality, saying that the constitution requires the state to provide "uniform" schooling, and that private schools don't meet the standard of uniformity. But I guess most court cases are decided like that, in absence of moral judgment, and I prefer that to the alternatives.

In any case.

I lived through 12 years of Florida public education. My parents used a fake address to enroll me in elementary school in Coral Gables so that I wouldn't have to go to Coconut Grove Elementary, which was (and I think still is) fairly poor and run-down. I applied to a magnet program for middle school, and admission was, I'm pretty sure, completely dependent on the SAT they used to make us take every couple of years in elementary school. I continued the magnet program through all four years of high school and ended up at Coral Reef, a brand spankin' new school where I was in the first graduating class and routinely had classes of 10 people or less (thank you IB). It was a great program in a pretty great school, and I worked hard and got good grades and ranked high and went to Columbia.

But I had a few advantages going into it all. I'm not an idiot--that was helpful. I'm competitive and like to do better than other people--that helps too. My parents, while not rich by any means, valued education and pushed me from a young age to work hard in school, get good grades, and read. They had enough time to check that I did my homework at night in 4th grade, and they could take an afternoon off of work to go to a parent-teacher conference if they had to. I could look to my family in Iran to see how hard they were working, how important school was to them, and feel like I had to keep up. I'm a good test-taker (though that's a discussion for another time), so I got put into the academic excellence program in elementary school and did well on the elementary school SAT, the college SAT, the ACT, and other standardized tests. I had people around me--in my house, in my family, in my community--that provided positive (and negative) reinforcement that education equals success equals money and happiness. Not doing well in school would have been seen as a major failure by the people I cared about, and no one likes to fail.

What if I'd gone to a ghetto school where my teachers didn't give me any attention because they were distracted by the 37 ADD kids in the class who don't know how to shut the fuck up? What if no one in my family had ever gone to college or even graduated high school and the only people I interacted with at home and in the street dealt drugs or mugged old ladies or collected welfare? What if I had dyslexia but no one noticed because my school was understaffed and everyone was overworked and my parents both had two jobs and we didn't have health insurance so I couldn't afford to see a specialist to find out what was wrong with me? Maybe the drive to succeed is innate and I would have been just fine regardless, but I find it hard to believe that environment doesn't play a significant role in making people who they turn out to be.

back in the saddle again

i got back to new york on tuesday after a very hectic two months. first work was insane, then i was in miami for 2-1/2 weeks, then back to nyc for 10 days, then back to miami for another 2 weeks. i sat down with my boss today for the first time since mid-november. i just unpacked my suitcase, cleaned my room quite well, and showered, and now am getting ready for bed. it's late, and i'm tired, but i don't want this blog to die and the only way to keep it alive is to write.

i was ready to leave miami. the weather there was so gorgeous--sunny and warm and just lovely. new york is pretty mild as well, or maybe i'm just remembering january worse than it actually is. in any case, i've been pleasantly surprised by the weather. maybe i've broken through the glass wall of the northeast and can be at peace with the changing of the seasons. i'm a sun girl at heart, but i guess a brisk little breeze can be nice once in a while.

anyway. miami is exhausting. how do they do it? i think it'll take me a couple of weeks here to recover. i missed my routine--going to work, watching tv, finding something to do on the weekends... things are so much easier in miami, and harder at the same time too. there's always something going on, someone is always going to bouganvilla or the grove and god forbid they miss friday night at pawn shop. it's been exciting for a while, and a nice change from my much chiller life in new york. but i think i've reached my limit. i'm tired of feeling like i'm regressing when i go home. it's disconcerting to constantly run into people i know from high school, middle school, elementary school for chrissakes. it's like all of the hard work i've done to make myself into someone i like since leaving miami gets undone when i get around all these fools. well, maybe that's a bit extreme--i'm definitely much more confident than i was then, and happier, and generally better, and i don't lose it all. maybe i was just feeling dull from all the hoopla. too much drama. i'm happier in places where the tide doesn't move so much. i guess i like it flat. and i guess, for me, new york is just flatter than miami most of the time.

dave's leaving for his bike trip tomorrow. this necessitates major changes in my social life. i'm making an endeavor to keep in touch with old friends, and make new friends, and all in all just experience my last few months in this wonderful, wonderful place. so, tomorrow night i'm going to meet up with stoops and the gang for dinner, after i have a drink with mike, whom i haven't seen in what feels like ages. friday i'm hoping to see the spam allstars at SOBs with whoever wants to come along, and saturday i'm going to help selom celebrate his birthday downtown. i'm also going to rope someone into coming to the new iranian restaurant in chelsea with me--they seem pretty authentic, and i've been itching to find good iranian food in the city.

it turns out that i'm traveling to geneva and istanbul in february, and i get to go to (and speak at!) the harm reduction conference in vancouver in may. beforehand i'm going to try to take my own trip to the western states, maybe visit folks LA and my aunt in portland.

it's weird to think that by may i'll know whether i'm going to law school next year. i hope i hope i hope.

goodnight!