Haitus Excuse

so, I know I slacked in the month of June, but in my defense I started working at Central Virginia Legal Aid Society and it's kept me rather busy. Additionally I've found various activities, like teaching an Abs class and a Yoga class in the evenings as well as soccer and picking up a bti of sand v-ball and rugby.

Also, what has kept me away is the intern blog Kevin and I started to document our summer for anyone cool enough to follow along. You can check out what Kevin and I have been up to at:http://cvlaspetersburg.blogspot.com/ . The Richmond office interns followed suit and you can check them out at http://cvlasloft.blogspot.com/.

Here's a picture of all the interns (minus Catherine) at the VA State Bar Legal Aid Luncheon at VA Beach:

aren't we adorable!

FINALS!

"It's that time of year again. When a paper jam elicits panic, 1Ls dash madly about, and my internet history reveals how many new shows I discovered on Hulu, videos I repeat on YouTube, and basically any great distracting website I can find (aslpro.com, cuteroulette, BBCamerica, and YIKES: Twitter). That's right, it's finals!

With just one exam left you think I would have it all figured out by now. Sadly, that is not the case as I slowly come apart at the seams..."

So I had types the above passage right in the middle of finals week, after having completed 4 of the 5 classes I enrolled in this spring, and I do think I was starting to ever so slightly become unhinged. Luckily, in the end, it was nothing that celebrating with good friends, seeing the extended family for gpa's bday, dancing around by myself in the house, and a two-week period of nothing but babysitting, teaching fitness classes and catching up on oscar nomiated DVDs couldn't fix (all AFTER finishing my last exam of course).

Law Revue: I throw my hands up!

So today was the University of Richmond Law Revue, and it was a blast.

What is Law Revue you ask? Well, every year the law school has a variety show called Law Revue. It’s a way for the law students to let off steam. It allows us to have a laugh at our own expense gives a creative outlet for those of us who miss Art classes. Some professors even perform songs and skits.

This year I performed a song/dance where I re-wrote the lyrics to a popular dance song to reflect how much time we law students spend in the library. I had spent about a month or so on the lyrics after picking the song around spring break. A week before, I began practicing and being who I am, I decided the day of to make up some choreography.

There are a few glitches, the mic overpowers the background track, sometimes I turned away and you can't hear me (next year I'll request a Britney-style headphone mic), and I make a couple mistakes with the timing and lyrics, cause let's face it, I'm in law school so there wasn't too much time to practice. But I had a lot of fun performing it and other students said they liked it a lot.

I got a copy of my performance from the AV person at the law school. I posted it on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-nFadn3iIU

Hope you enjoy, and maybe feel compelled to throw your own hands up!

No Shoes Tuesday

April 5 2011 is TOMS "One Day Without Shoes."

I found out about it on April 4, and while writing a paper in the library deliberated on the potential consequences of going shoeless for a full day, especially one where the weather forcast called for 40 and rainy. After watching some of the videos I figured that any potentially negative outcome: weird stares, being told to put on shoes, stepping on rocks, any cuts on my feet were minimal and that it was something I could definitely do. I stayed pretty late in the library that night composing my final short paper for law of war.

Getting home, I set out my outfit, deciding to wear a long, hippie-ish skirt to pull of the whole look, made sure my toenails were painted, and went to bed. I either forgot to set my alarm or somehow it malfunctioned because I ended up waking up at 8:25am when the yoga class I teach starts at 8:30. I raced to the gym as responsibly as possible, praying that I had not only packed my outfit but proper undergarments as well. Luckily Yoga is practiced barefoot so there was no conflict with shoes there. After a slightly more chaotic than normal class I decided to wear my flip-flops in the shower for obvious hygienic reasons (the only other time I wore shoes was at a talk by a UVA law professor where members of the UR board of trustees were in attendance and I wore my cleats when playing soccer (mainly for common sense reasons).

What I found highly interesting though was that I went barefoot in the law school *all day* today to raise awareness for One Day Without Shoes; however, only 3 people asked about it. Conclusion: a) people just think I'm a hippie/weird enough to do that on my own b) law school makes people not notice rather obvious things or c) people noticed but were either too polite to say anything or thought law school made me crazy enough just forgot my shoes.

Never Before...

Never before has a University of Richmond Track and Field female-athlete thrown a javelin farther than 47 meters. Since the inception of the program the best competition throw by a member of the women's program was impressive, but this Saturday, for the first time ever, someone threw 48.08. Heather Roush threw approximately one whole meter farther than the historic best that UR had to offer. This is even more impressive considering her penultimate throw set her own PR to day of just over 44 meters. It's such a great concept to think about, not only continually improving ourselves and our own best efforts but being able to build upon every one else before us and to be better than they're ever been.

This is not the first time I've witnessed people surpass the historic "best-possible" level set by all other people who've tried before. Everyone likes the idea of human progress, surpassing what has been the best effort of mankind thus far. We've all read an edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, there are people who have made it a goal to jump more times on a pogo stick than anyone else ever has before. My sister, who swam at GMU, broke records while she was there, and is friends with a young woman who holds a world record in distance swimming. It's mindblowing really, when you think about it, that thought that for a time, that is the best time that recorded history has ever acknowledged.

I guess I just love this thought, that we can continually improve and build upon and expand what others have set before us. This ability becomes so apparent in sport, in quantifiable measures of human body and its athletic feats, but its application in the world around us causes me to hope.

My Own Cherry Blossom Festival

So the Cherry Blossom Festival will be this weekend in D.C. For the past 6 springs I have missed it due to schoolwork/living in Richmond, however I get my flower fix in by the UR Campus's lovely manicured landscape (darn all those parking tickets going to something I appreciate, makes it harder to hate the parking attendants). Periodically, when I feel like I might explode from lack of creating art, I wander around campus with my Sony Cybershot and try to capture the beautiful flowers. Many a Picasa album has been dedicated to this venture, and this is the first year I've consciously decided to capture the cherry blossoms.

The shots are varied in thier ability to aesthitically please, but some of them are totally worth the stares I recieved from various undergrads (oh, did I mention my shoes are the exact same style but different colors? cause they are, and that in itself might account for the staring). This one currently graces my desktop background. Hopefully in two weeks I can get some great shots of other flowers.

DayUno

This is actually my second blog and fourth attempt at blogging in general. I had two blogs in High School, each of which I deleted, after the passing of time made me ever so embarrassed of what my irrationally emotional teenage self thought was appropriate for others consumption on the internet.

I re-vamped one of them (it can by found at www.julesville.blogspot.com), which focuses on my travels when I studied abroad in Santiago, Chile. Unfortunately the more I did down there -- where I had to pay for time in internet cafes or buy coffee at one of the four Starbucks in the city (and entire country) -- the less I actually found myself having time to record and share my adventures via Interweb.

I'm not exactly sure what prompted this last compulsive need to share inner thought with potential strangers, especially since I am a law student with a limited amount of time and poor written composition efficiency. For example, it could take me four hours to compose a singe thank-you note after birthdays and Christmas (it just has to perfectly convey my excitement over the new gift!). I guess it's just to unleash any sort of edited-stream-of-consciousness-creativity that cannot exist within the confines of class assignments. I think I also masochistically just like to sabotage myself by filling my time with unnecessary ventures. Or maybe I enjoy the idea of having more than 140 characters with people whose judgment it distant and un-affecting to my daily life.

In short: I now reintroduce myself to the blogging community, in an experiment to see how long this will last.