#haha then i got to spend another $40 for an uber home since i obviously couldn't ride back with my friends who could see it 🙃

[officialbabayaga]

philip glass should be sending me christmas cards. i'm so attached to the OST for the Illusionist that even though it's less than an hour long i've been listening to it on loop for 4 hours now, with 6 hours to go until this goddamn paper is due 💀

[canaryatlaw]

So I'm kind of tired, but it's more of a you woke up at 7 am and are still awake at 1 am go to bed tired rather than a complete and total state of exhaustion. This has also been the first week when I've gotten out of bed on time every morning since at least the beginning of February. I'm very happy about that. Anyway, today was pretty good, busy but good. I did wake up at 7, got ready and went to work, where I continued to work on the huge stack of trial prep papers I have, which I am slowly but surely making progress on. After spending another 8 hours on it I'd say I'm probably a third of the way through. The document I'm writing up is around 30 pages. Sigh. This is gonna take a while. But yeah, I worked on that pretty much all day, which is fine, it's boring but it's not terrible, at least it requires some brain power in summarizing and formulating what to write, so it's better than just flipping through files aimlessly. Over my lunch hour I traded between reading my oral argument outline and catching up on fanfiction, lol. I feel like I'm not making a dent into the massive back up in my inbox, but I am steadily reading and deleting emails, so it's gotta add up at some point. Hopefully over break I'll have time to really address that. The highlight of the day came around 4:40 shortly before I had to go. I had given my supervisor the affiliation agreement and first report we needed to do for field placement for him to sign off on, and the office has the supervisors do a mid-point and end-point evaluation that they keep on file in case you want to work there (since pretty much everyone they hire has clerked for them) so he had me look it over at the same time and omg you guys, it was so nice I wanted to start crying. I was a little nervous about it because I did miss a lot of days because I was so fucking exhausted for an entire month, and there was that whole incident with the crazy attorney saying I lied to her (which I knew he knew wasn't true, but still) but it was nothing but compliments and it really made me so happy. I actually wrote it down on my computer to put in my "cheer up notes" doc and I wanted to share with you guys what it was because it made me so happy, so here it is: “Rachel is hard-working, intelligent and has an incredible ability to learn the mission statement of the Office of the Public Guardian. She is an excellent legal writer and is very open to receiving comments. She has good courtroom presence and is a pleasure to work with in the office. She has all the elements in her to become a remarkable attorney and guardian ad litem.” Like......I don't think I could ask for a more glowing recommendation. And like, I do work hard. I work really hard, but I don't necessarily expect it to be noticed, I've kind of been conditioned to think it's the way it HAS to be if you want any chance of surviving in the real world, and maybe it is, but to see it really noticed like that just made me really, really happy. So that left me on a good note, though I then proceeded to leave my lunchbox in the refrigerator, where it'll hopefully stay for the next week since I'll be on spring break. Whoops, lol. So I had to do my oral argument at school at 5:30, and I did not trust public transportation to get me there on time because I've been burned way too many times by it. I knew getting an uber would mean having to deal with traffic, but I figured it still gave me a better shot. Except my uber app crashed like 3 times before I could even get one, so I ended up saying fuck it and used Lyft (not that it really matters, since most drivers are on both). Got a nice driver, had a pleasant conversation with her, traded stories of crazy funny things her kids have done and my siblings have done. It was nice. I ended up getting to school around 5:25, a little later than I would've liked but it worked. Our prof wanted us to go in pairs, one for each side, so we could argue against each other basically. So the girl I'm against is already there, we're friends so it's not a big deal, but we sit and talk for a few before our prof shows up and we get started. Overall it went pretty well, there were a few times I kind of got stuck cuz she like brought up a case I hadn't read and I just had to admit that which kind of sucked (but at the end she said in real life that wouldn't happen because you'd get your opponent's brief in advance so you'd know what to argue). But she said we both did really well, and I can deal with that. So I was happy with that. By the time we finished it was like 5:55, and I had small group at 7:30 so I had some time to kill. I went down to the lounge but it was like, completely and totally deserted so I didn't feel like sticking around there, so I went to the subway down the street and got some food since my dinner was in my lunchbox in the fridge at the office. I still had some time to kill after that, so I went across the street and got some tea from Starbucks and sat in there for a while, reading the law review article we're supposed to read for LARC tomorrow. By 7 I started heading over to the church and made it right on time. Small group was good, it was focused a lot on loving your neighbor, which if you've been following me for any length of time you know is a subject I can wax poetic on for hours on end because I have so very many feelings on the topic. It's one of the reasons I picked this small group over the others that fit into my schedule, because it's called "knowing God and loving others" and I liked that a lot. So we read the story of the Good Samaritan which of course I could recite to you by heart at this point. Then they had us break up into pies to discuss our thoughts on it and I got paired with this kind of awkward guy who was sitting next to me, he's probably at least 30 and balding quite a bit and just generally quiet, but I'm good at talking, especially on a subject like this, so we were able to keep a decent discussion going. When we reconvened as a group and they wanted to know what we talked about I of course brought up my distaste for how just about everyone walks by the homeless without so much as a second thought, as if they're not even human, and how Christians have become so good at limiting our compassion to those we think deserve it, which goes exactly against the lesson the bible is teaching here. I also talked about how love is essentially the central tenet of Christianity (1 John 4:8- "God is love" "all the commandments come down to this- love the Lord you God with all your heart soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself") and yet we've become so good at getting stuck in the complex pieces and tangential issues of religion without first applying love as an overriding principle, which is how you get the strict religious types like the Pharisees and their modern day equivalents (I don't need to name names, you know who I'm talking about). I then also brought up the les mis quote I'm quite fond of, "to love another person is to see the face of God," meaning God is the definition of pure love, his very character is reflected in you loving the people around you in the most selfless way. And I just think that's such a perfect way to put it, really. So yeah, as evidenced by the last several hundred words, this is obviously an issue I could go on about at length, so it was nice to get some of that out tonight. I've been enjoying small group a lot, though getting home afterwards has been a pain. I took the bus to the normal train stop I've been using for the route to church, but the bus was still 20 minutes away. Boo. It was 9:30 at that point, and the donut shop I tried the other day is right there and doesn't close till 10, so I figured if I have to wait 20 minutes for a bus I at least want to do it with a donut. I feel like actually trying one of their donuts on Sunday was a bad idea because now whenever I'm waiting I'm gonna be like "mmmm, donuts" because now I know how good they are. They obviously only had a limited selection left, but I ended up picking a captain crunch Bismarck donut, which ended up being like the exact type of donut I always want haha, it was a glazed donut stuffed with captain crunch infused vanilla custard with a few pieces of captain crunch on top, and it was just heaven. Eventually the bus did come, and eventually I did get home. I wasn't ready for bed yet so I turned on Training Day, which was a pretty solid episode. I need to know how many more episodes we're getting though, and how they're gonna wrap it up. As far as I can tell they haven't released any press beyond episode 1x07, but that may not mean anything left. It stinks because the show did have a lot of potential, but you really can't continue on when you lose the actor who is legit the main character and heart of the show. Sigh. It was good though, plenty of good action for Rebecca which I always appreciate. Then I watched Powerless quickly, which was hilarious as always, and I loved the captain cold shoutout, very funny episode. Then I spent like 15 minutes facing my damn affiliation agreement and evaluation to the field placement lady, though I probably shouldn't complain because she's been exceedingly patient with my quite late submission of these documents, probably because it's a pass/fail situation, but I still appreciate it. And yeah, then I packed my bag quickly because tomorrow is the start of the church kids team retreat a bit outside of the city, just for one night. Should be fun though! I'm looking forward to it, even if I may be the youngest person there 😂 we'll see. And then I got ready for bed and hear we are. I am tired though so I'll sign off here. Goodnight ladies and gents. Happy Friday.