Uh oh. I think I drank too much Diet Coke to go to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight. And three interviews tomorrow! I need to guzzle caffeine tomorrow, not today.

You know, I think one of my suitemates is "borrowing" my shampoo, which I keep in the bathroom. It has a distinctive fragrance, which I enjoy very much, but not really when it wafts out of the bathroom after someone else uses it. It's a 99-cent bottle of shampoo, so it's not about the cost. I'd certainly let either of my suitemates use it -- provided they asked me first.

Annoying.

Today was pretty busy -- I got up early to read evidence, trying to get ahead in the reading, since I knew I wouldn't be able to read much tonight for Thursday's class (and indeed, I haven't read at all tonight for that class). After evidence and employment law, I had a quick lunch while researching one of the firms I interview with tomorrow, and then went to catch the bus for mediation.

I'm mediating in a new part of town this semester, where the population is predominantly black. There were 3 non-black people in the courtroom: me, another mediator, and the collections agency lawyer.

The magistrate gave us a case to mediate, and the two women followed us out into the corridor, followed in turn by the friends they'd brought. We went to a conference room and I gave the intro spiel. One of the parties then said she wanted to go before the judge, and didn't want to do that mediation, so that was that. We all stayed for the docket, though, and it turned out that the two women were related in the most interesting way: they were certainly both in their early or mid-twenties, but A's father was the father of B's children. Or, A was the stepdaughter of B. Or, as A put it, her children were B's step-siblings.

Logic game!

Anyway, the judge made short work of the case, which clearly had a lot of other stuff going on underneath the actual complaint brought.

Afterwards, I took the bus home with one of the mediator trainees, who had observed our aborted mediation, and discovered, as I suspected, that she was very cool. She took last year off to work in Mexico with community-level financing, in order to make the most of her last year (hoping to come back knowing what she wanted to do). She said she still didn't know what she wanted to do, but she did feel more focused. Bravo, mediator-trainee! That is pretty darn cool.

She also mentioned that she'd loved the project finance work she'd done two summers ago. And she hated legal research and advocacy. So we can always hope...

Tomorrow will be busy too: classes, then three interviews, then two firm receptions (at obscenely fancy places). This weekend is also the second week of training for Student Org #1: 9-5, both days. Oh man.