always pack a snorkel before getting on the boat and remember to tatto those pants

On my drive home from (a very quiet day at) small claims court I realized some things.

First I realized - thanks to the other students in my car (nary a stowaway: I just like to share the opportunities that owning a vehicle presents, like not having to walk thirty miles to get home from the Shoreline small claims court and griping about parking!) - that I am in fact much *less* burnt out than I had imagined. Or at least relatively speaking, I am less burnt out, and since everything in law school is set on a mandatory curve, this is like basically the same thing as not being burnt out! I was by far the least despairing member of the car. There was talk of dropping out en masse and starting a farm. Discussions of nights spent staring desolately into space for four hours because *it's just too much* and descriptions of homes many weeks without food, because getting groceries is just too difficult with all the work... I sympathize, but I also felt an odd bit of relief.

I am undoubtedly feeling the strain of winter quarter, but overall I'm doing pretty well. I'm not cracking (crack-ed, yes, but crack-ing...) I'm feeding myself. I manage from time to time to cull my resume, update my cover letters, send these things out into the job abyss and get some work done. Even though there seems to be no clear relationship between my sense of how I'm doing in a class and how well I actually end up doing, I do actually sometimes ace some classes, whereas many students seem to experience that no matter how hard or little they work, they always get the exact same grade. Rather delightfully, I still get to see my very tolerant and marvelous boyfriend despite our insane schedules, thanks to the miracles of google calendars and some sheer grit and determination. Plus, just last week I played one of the awesomest tango evenings I've ever played - garnering an acclaimation from one of my favorite tango couples that it was one of the best sets they'd heard in the area for months! Sure, I'm broke and exhausted, the future is hazy and my GPA is destined to feel the heavy pull of the big three-oh, but we're all in the same boat (and I'm taller, so I'll likely drown last if that boat keeps taking on water). The power of positive thinking!

But speaking of being taller, I also realized - or perhaps just reflected - that it is awfully difficult for me to find professional clothes that actually make me look professional. It's quite fun to go to court, because it means I get to abandon my traditional student uniform of cave-woman hair and laundry-basket-refugee "shirts" and look somewhat human. I even put on makeup and everything. Nonetheless, I do not look particularly professional if you see me without my coat.

 I know I've angsted (so full of angst that one must pronounce it "AUHGNST" with fingers spread across the forehead) about the poor fit of certain clothes in the past. But now I'm doing so in professional terms. Mostly, my personal difficult is that 1. I'm tall and 2. I have a much narrower waist than hips. These two factors seem to combine to ensure a perpetual strip of exposed belly flesh that is altogether unprofessional - since I don't really have much fat in that area, it's less a "muffin top" than a "deflated sufle top" but it still has this immediate effect of making me look like a child in her mother's dress up clothes perhaps the Pillsbury Doughboy's secret valentine. The tall thing means that my shirts usually cut off around my belly button and the waist-to-hip means that even if they're longer, the professional shirts tend to shimmy up from the wider to the narrower part. The tall part plus the wider hips part means my pants usually gape at the top, since I need a larger size to account for the height and hips than I do to account for the stomach and waist and inevitably this gape results in pants-slouch, which results in perilously low cuts (not nearly as sexy in work pants as in jeans) and the visible belly strip.

Anyways, I actually have a brilliant solution to this: a pants tattoo around my belly! Of course this will involve a commitment to a single material of pants for the rest of my life, but I like to think that this will just ensure that I have a signature. I'm thinking it will be about two inches just around my belly button - which of course will be disguised as a button. Sure tattoos cost money, but what a savings compared to a lifetime of tailoring! Clearly I'm a genius.