Well! It finally happened, in the fourth week of classes -- I got called on. Contracts. Something about the doctrine of promissory estoppel not being applicable because businesses don't deal in promises, they deal in offers. Yeah, I don't understand it either. I got the first part right, and then the prof asked me something that I had no idea how to answer, so he kindly didn't press me and just asked the guy next to me what he thought.

There are fishers of men and fishers of answers, and my Contracts prof is one of the latter -- we play the "Read My Mind" game in the class sometimes. Sometimes he presses the person, but more often he'll just move on.

I'm fond of my Contracts prof because he's amusing and a little strange, and yells out things like "Can I get a witness?!!" when no one volunteers to answer one of his rhetorical questions. He'll stop the class to take a poll on whether women really think that there's an assumption that a man will pay for dinner if the man asks a woman out, or to discuss the correct pronunciation of "Manolo Blahnik" (he was, hilariously, pronouncing it "MaNOlo [correct] BlaNEEK [so, so incorrect]").

There's a lot of criticism of him as a teacher: he makes you read his mind, he sometimes doesn't review cases before class and so makes one of the students go over all the facts of a case (which are not that important), he cancels class 10 minutes before class. But I like the guy.

Perhaps that's why I shot the ole hk grin at him this past Friday when we passed each other in the street, and sang out, "Hello, Professor --!" And perhaps that's why he bore down on me in class today when he's never called on me before.

Or perhaps I'm overestimating my memorableness and charming smile by a couple light years.

Or it could have been Make the Silent Asian Girls Speak Day, since another sista got called on for the first time today.

Or it just could have been my turn to wilt in the headlights, heart going faster than a mouse hedged into a corner by a bespectacled, erudite cat.

In any case, after my heartrate went back to normal, I was surprised at how unfazed I was at the whole thing. I congratulated a fellow classmate for getting the biggest laugh of the class when, upon being asked what a subcontractor would say if their general contractor didn't get his bid, leaned in close to her microphone (yes, some classrooms have mics for all the seats) and said in a charming Eastern European accent, "I don't care." I was rather pleased and grateful when someone in my Civil Procedure class told me that he'd been nodding in agreement when I spoke in class and was unpleasantly surprised (but not as much as me!) when the prof asked someone else for the right answer. (We agreed that I'd been about 2 sentences further along in the opinion than the prof wanted me to be.)

Oh dear -- 3:30 am. The memo I've just written for tomorrow morning is the pits. But as Emily, my college freshman counselor said, "Good is good, but done is better." I try to live by those words. And so anon -- to bed, to bed, to bed.

Just before I left Korea, bigbro and I got disinvited to our aunt and uncle's house, where our mum is staying. The story behind it is long and tortured and complex, but the end result was that we went, they saw us, we had a long discussion, and we're okay now. Or so I thought.

They're making a big effort to keep in touch with me now, calling every weekend, but I don't want to talk to them. It's gotten worse over the past few weeks, to the point where today, I was nearly hostile to them on the phone and then burst into tears after I hung up.

My aunt and uncle have been fixtures in bigbro's and my lives since the get-go. They were stable parental-like forces when our parents weren't. We got shipped up to them a couple summers in a row and they treated us like we were their kids (they don't have any of their own).

They are working class people, my aunt and uncle. He's career military -- joined when he was 18, and never left. She dropped out of junior high in Korea to work and take care of the other kids in her family. They both married young and divorced, and found each other and struggled through some tough years in their own marriage before coming to a mutually respectful place of comfort and understanding.

bigbro and I grew up solidly upper middle class, with private schools and private lessons all over the place. I've only recently started to understand how profoundly my aunt and uncle and their working class background affected the way I see the world. I never would have dated John if they hadn't been in my life. John and I were an odd couple, mismatched in almost all ways, and no one really understood why we started dating, not even me at the time.

Many people here, many people at my undergrad college, come from families where there were lots of lawyers or doctors or psychologists or other professions requiring college and a graduate degree. Those people know where they are headed. They know who they're supposed to become. More than that, their parents and their families know who they are, what they are experiencing.

It's odd. My aunt and uncle are very proud that I'm here at this school, getting a law degree. They are so proud they could burst. They urge me to study hard, not to catch a cold, to eat well. They have no idea what I'm doing. And they have no idea that the more education I get, the more our lives diverge. Sometimes I wonder, "Don't you understand that what you're urging me to do is alienating me from you? That I have to drastically dumb down my conversations with you? That I can only deal with you in short doses because it's tiring to have to do that? That I lead a completely different life, one that you can't even imagine?"

I am simplifying all of it, I know. I think they do have an idea. I think they do feel the distance. I think they are afraid of it. I am afraid of it too.

Which is why it is so upsetting to me that I was disinvited to their house, which I always thought of as my home, this summer. If the primary way in which I connect with my aunt and uncle is through emotional channels, then what happens when those channels get stopped up? What happens when they choose to turn a valve and close off the duct? What then?

I had an odd conversation over the weekend where someone explicitly invited me to join their social group. Isn't that odd? It's pretty much the strangest conversation I've had since the beginning of this semester. On second thought, that wouldn't be too high of standard, since we are talking about law school here.

I enjoyed the biggest laugh in several weeks tonight when my old high school friend said about her recent blind date: "Well, he was kind of wheat-colored [an old in-joke] and, well -- go and be more masculine!" We were sitting in a pho restaurant, commiserating over the day, which was low for both of us, and we walked around Cambridge for an hour or so afterwards. I'm so grateful she's living here. Otherwise I would have probably spent the evening lying in bed utterly depressed.

As my friend suggested, it's a good bet that getting readjusted to this country is making the law school thing much harder. One big thing is that I'm on my own again, which is such a shock after living nearly two years with relatives. Somewhere along the way I really got to like living with family, and I feel alone here. Thank goodness (and this is the only time you'll hear me say it, so take note) for the dorms. If I were living alone in an apartment I think I might be really psycho by now.

I have, by the way, started checking under the bed again. For axe murderers. And monsters. Things that go bump in the night.

What was I saying about being psycho?

I am so beat.

Yesterday and today did mediation training form 9 to 5. Absorbing all that informtation and applying it in role plays where fellow trainees were calling each other names and being obstinant while also dealing with co-mediators who have different styles -- yeah, tired.

I'm really grateful for the free food, though. Good sandwiches.

And I learned a lot. A humbling experience: I thought that since I'm already fairly empathetic and communicative, I'd just naturally be good at mediation, but it's a very fine art, guiding people through the issues and coming out the other side having them understand each other's point of view. I'm less sure of my abilities in this area than I was on Friday, before I started training. I think it'll be good, though.

I have another weekend o' role play two weeks from now, and then I can start going to court and actually dealing with people who have real problems.

I had a conversation this weekend with someone who said I was drawing too strong of a line between myself and people younger than me, and he's probably right. It's not really the age thing anyway -- there's a bunch of factors that play into it. One is if the person's worked a job in the real world. I met my "big sib" this past week, who started law school at age 26, and she said, "There was one class where we were talking about at-will employees, and I was amazed at how many people sat there and raised their hands in favor of at-will employment when they've never even held a real job. They just had no clue whatsoever about the real world effect of what they were saying."

Another thing is marriage. There are at least two Mormon men in my class and both of them have a maturity than I wouldn't expect from people right out of school. Both of them also did missions overseas, and that plays into it too -- living abroad for at least several months seems to have an enormous maturizing (?) effect on people. (Maturizing? Maturing. Whatever. I'm tired. Last night I couldn't figure out how to say "I couldn't lie down in one direction" in the past tense -- tried out "I couldn't have lain down -- no, lied down -- no, lay down?" and finally ended up with "I couldn't have become supine in one direction.")

Anyway. It's 10 on a Sunday night and I haven't done any reading since Friday afternoon. I'm mildly screwed for this week. I'm going to bed.

It's been a brutal two days of nonstop classes and reading. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are my crunch days, with four classes each, at an hour and 25 minutes each, and last night, after all my classes, I interviewed for the mediation program, where you are trained to mediate disputes in small claims courts around the Boston area. (That's an option given to people who go into court for claims smaller than $2,000 -- they can sit down with a mediator and try to work out a solution together before going before a judge.)

I was paired up with another applicant and we had to role-play, with us as the mock mediators, and the real mediators playing the role of the squabbling parties. The whole tone of the exercise seemed very therapy-ish to me, which is fine, but not what you'd expect in a legal setting; I was praised for asking one side how he would feel if he were in the opposing party's position. That's the kind of thing I'm kind of good at, though.

I'm a bit worried that if I get in, the time commitment will kill me -- there's 32 hours of training over two weekends, and then about three hours each week (you go to court every other week, but have office duty the week you don't go to court). On the other hand, if I just do reading and sit in these classes discussing cases and hypothetical situations the whole time I'm here, I'm going to go stark raving mad.

It was kind of invigorating, that interview session, but it left me little time to do the reading for today, so this morning I went to Property and Contracts, and then went home and furiously read for two hours for Civil Procedure, and then went to Civ Pro, and then went home and furiously read for my First Year Lawyering workshop.

I was intending to come home and collapse, but a hallmate invited me to a party, and so I went, which was very good because I talked the whole time to a very nice gay boy who, if we become friends, will be my second friend here.

It's raining here now, and I'm sitting here in my ratty bathrobe, thinking about the girl at the party who said she'd turn the eligible age for presidency in an election year, and wondering if she wasn't joking. That's the U.S. presidency, by the way. I've got a slight beer headache and I'm very glad that tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah because our Property class was canceled for the holiday. I wonder if my honorary Jew status is still good. In any case: Shana tovah, everyone.

You know what's sad? Sad is when you get up at 9 am and walk three-quarters of a mile to go grocery shopping and spend an hour there because it's nice to be in a huge grocery store with so much Stuff and check out your stuff and manage to cram it all into the free bags you got from Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis and walk three-quarters of a mile home laden with 10 pounds of groceries on your back and shoulders and get home and be really eager to eat those organic blue tortilla chips with the little pepper flakes on 'em and find that they aren't there because you left them on the checkout counter. That's sad. Very sad. I'm still recovering.

Last night there was a floor meeting in my dorm and I was told by two people that I didn't look 28 at all. Which is nice. But somewhat diminished by the fact that they were 7 years younger. I don't know why.

I wake up at 8:30 these days because of the sunlight streaming in through my blinds, and instead of trying to sleep more, I actually get up. It's very strange. I think it's because I feel like I have so much reading to do. Which I do. It's like, endless. After I finish this entry, for example, I'm going to get started on my contracts reading for tomorrow, which means I will totally forget what I read for today.

Well, at least I have some rice cooking next to me. I bought a little five pound bag yesterday and I'm psyched. I found a cannister of furikake at the store too, a Japanese rice seasoning which is basically salt but yummier. (Though now that I look at the label, it was made in China. Huh.) It's been a few weeks since I've had rice and I miss it.

The first week of law school is over!

I only have one class on Fridays, but I really sort of frittered the day away: after class (which starts at 8:50 am -- ouch), I ate in my room and IM'd with Maiko for the first time since I've been back in the States. I read a little Contracts homework, and then met a nice woman I met two nights ago for lunch. There's an odd little Asian food court place a few blocks north of the school, full of real Japanese people and real Japanese ramen! I didn't think I'd be able to find a ramen shop here, but I'm glad to be proved wrong.

Lunch was very nice. I think I might have found my first friend at law school. She was a math and bio major in college and she sometimes does math problems for fun when she finds herself missing it. How can you not love someone like that?

After a late and long ramen lunch (not as good as in the Ramen Museum in Yokohama, but how could it be, really?), I went back to my dorm and found 40 people sitting in the common room just outside my door, watching a criminal law documentary some prof had assigned. I so need to move rooms.

I got in my room and was horsing around on email (oh, the dangers of the computer!) when I got a call from my high school friend and Cambridge compatriot Nina, who's in CA visiting her folks. She was on Catalina Island and she was bored. She's coming back to Boston next Friday, and can't wait. She's so not a west coast person, even though she's from L.A.

I squeezed out of my room, knocking quietly first to let the documentary-watching people sitting against the door know I was about to leave, and went for an unusually long run along the Charles. The weather made me do it -- breezy, blue skies, friendly white clouds, cool but not cold. The world can be so beautiful. Life can be so beautiful. Outside the law school.

Back at the dorm, I chatted a bit with two other dorm dwellers, and was gratified to find that they too had no evening plans, just studying. So I went to my 8X12 room and did some laundry while doing some reading. (Note about laundry: lord knows dryers use up hella amounts of energy and all, but jumpin' jehosephats, I missed gathering up a big pile of warm, dry clothes from the dryer.) Around 11 or so, meinen langsam freunden ("my slow friend" -- yes, in-joke) called up: she's taking a break from her residency in the Bronx to play in Boston this weekend, so we're scheduled to spend tomorrow afternoon together. It's been a year since I've seen her, so -- yay!

After we talked, I hung up and took up my Contracts book again. And here I am. Briefing cases. At 1 am on a Friday night. Law school sure is fun. No, really, I mean that. Kind of. Well, when you feel like you have friends it's fun.

I now have a laptop, and so there's no holding me back now from spilling all about this school. Except there ain't much to tell. There's a new, fuzzy atmosphere the new (she came last year) dean of students is trying to inculcate, and that was crystal clear in her address to us newbies: "The competition is over," she said, and paused for effect. "You've won." There used to be all sorts of scary competitiveness here, but a new age has dawned, and it is round and pink and fuzzy.

We all joked about it afterwards (and still are -- "I might have flubbed that answer, but I'm winner. The dean said so") but it's actually kinda nice.

Classes aren't like the lectures I loved in college. They're very interactive, and I live in terror of being called upon (though in this kindler, gentler era, the profs really are pretty kid-glovey dovey about the Socratic method). I never participated in class or section as an undergrad, and some things don't change. Which makes the teaching method even more horrific -- after you give an answer, the professor asks you to back that up, or to consider another factor and say how that affects your answer, or goes to another person and then back to you and asks you to respond. I hate that shit. It's fun for some, but I've never even been a dinner table debator. It's interesting to listen, but I don't want to participate, I just don't.

But enough complaints for tonight. I think I'm going to apply for this mediation program, where you go and act as a mediator (duh) for people coming to small claims court. I'm not sure how competitive it is. It sounds interesting, though, and sort of up my alley in terms of interest and strengths. Most of the time, I think, people just want someone else to say that their concerns are valid. I can do that.

I'm in Cambridge, I'm settled in my dorm room, I have a fridge. The day after tomorrow I start classes.

Having no computer of my own yet is turning out to be fairly inconvenient. (I keep waffling between a PC or a Mac and I really must decide soon.) After being woken up from my nap this afternoon (prompted by too little sleep last night, since there was an impromptu hall party going on immediately outside -- and I mean immediately -- my door) by Uncle John and the Tacoma Crowd, I walked down the hall, intending to take a walk outside to clear my head. Most of the doors in my hall were closed, except for two, in which the respective residents were sitting at their desks, tapping at their computers. Working? Possibly -- I put in a couple hours yesterday myself on the copious amount of reading for Tuesday -- but possibly also doing email or talking to friends.

Most of the people in the dorms are young, as is most of the class -- I heard the average age is 24, which, puts me definitively in the "oldster" category. I've actually only met two people older than me, but I've met a whole bunch of people from the class of 2000. The HIGH SCHOOL class of 2000, that is.

So far no one seems really scary, except maybe for the Rhodes scholar who happened to belly dance in London for spare change during her scholarship (and that's admittedly cool, just kinda intimidatingly cool). The class of 550 is divided into 7 sections, which are again divided into several subsections. If my subsection's representative at all, the class of 2007 is pretty normal folk, from quite diverse backgrounds, and with only a few bright shiny superstars.

I walked outside tonight through Cambridge and was struck by how empty it was compared to Seoul, where people are out until all hours. The brick-lined streets are quiet and empty here, except for the lively Square, where I stopped to listen to a folk singer on the street (one of three I saw playing). She was singing about love and sounded like a smoother, softer version of Natalie Merchant, and I thought, if this were a movie, that would be the soundtrack song playing as the heroine wanders through the streets of her new home, a little wistful and homesick, wondering what the coming year will bring.

I'm not sure what song would have been playing last night, when I went to meet ABD in Boston, to meet his friends and see a movie. The T is undergoing some renovations and closed a stop (perfectly incredible -- can't imagine another city that would do it this way), which meant that passengers had to get out at one stop and be shuttled to the next. With that and the general slowness of the T (also perfectly incredible), I was late to meet ABD, and even called to say I was giving up on going, but ABD insisted I come out and he would wait for me.

Well, somewhere along the way, on the Green Line, I was thinking about how law school was going to suck, and how I felt I really didn't belong there, and I starting thinking of where I would go if I dropped out (hypothetically) on Tuesday. I could stay in Boston, find a job. Or maybe it would be better to flee, go home, recoup. And then it struck me -- there ain't no home to go to. The recent family drama in Tacoma really shook my faith in my folks there, and I lost something pretty valuable in all that -- the belief that I had a place to go, no matter what.

So with this and the nonstop meeting of people in the past two days and the lack of sleep lately and the feeling that I don't belong here, I got off the train and found ABD waiting, and followed him into the building, and then suddenly I knew, I just knew that if I met one more new person and had to make nice and charming one more time, I'd scream. So instead, I burst into tears.

Yay, the first week of law school!

We skipped the movie, ABD making lord knows what excuse for me, and went to a pho place in Chinatown, a skeezy part of town, and talked for a while until I felt calmer. ABD drove me home, with the new fridge he'd procured for me, and three bags of groceries, and... there was a hall party going on, participants of which paused briefly to stare at me as I dragged the three bags of groceries and a boxed fridge into my room. Yes, I went grocery shopping on a Saturday night, girls and boys. What can I say? I'm old and it was fun.

My room is unfortunately facing the common area of the floor, so of course I couldn't go to sleep for a while. I assembled the fridge, stocked it, read the New Yorker, and finally went to bed around 2 am. The sun woke me up at 8:30 this morning. But despite the short sleep, I felt a lot better.

Boy, this is turning out to be a really long entry. I was really just going to write about my walk tonight outside in the cool (and I do mean cool -- people are wearing fleece sweatshirts already) Cambridge air, but I forgot all the profound things I thought about during my walk, so I had to write all this blather instead. Okay, enough.