Life After Bar

There is in fact such a life... I think. We'll see. It's been an odd feeling of emptiness and confusion, mixed with a lingering phantom panic/guilt that I am not in fact practicing essays any more. I am going through the stages of bar exam, I think: there's some denial (see above), bargaining ("please, if I failed something, let it be PR!!!"), anger (random flashes of irritability and fatalistic conclusions based on the slightest triggers), depression (or really unprovoked crying jags, at least, for the first few days... they seem to have dwindled now that I've gotten sleep), and acceptance (mixed with an oddly sanguine conviction that I have, in fact failed and that will probably be kind of embarrassing to have to explain to people since I am such an ordinarily clever girl in the top 10% of her fairly prestigious law school and thus will have let my school, my friends, and the WSBA down... and yes, that's what makes the sanguinity so odd).

And yes, if you had a hard time reading through all that last sentence with the weird formatting - you've experienced the joy of being a bar exam grader. Lucky you!! Wait, I forgot the parenthetical numbering. I shall attempt to remedy this defect immediately!

Baby shark gets her wings and flies to the rescue!!

In order to completely divorce my brain from the post-bar-PSTD, I have done quite little. Well this isn't entirely true. I've drooled. I've watched a number of riveting features of Shark Week (see it's SHARKS and I just finishing the bar exam and see, lawyers are sometimes called sharks so it's like totally appropriate). Sharks are cute and some species have 2 penises, which is not what makes them cute necessarily but it's interesting. 

I have expanded my dietary range from peanut butter and bread, which is the best travel staples ever. I briefly encountered my sister, brother in law and 3 nephews (yep, there's THREE of them now, although I suspect the new one is actually an animatronic muppet) before they fled to Canada.

Oh and I have looked into finding housing now that I live in Bellingham (sort of, anyways). By "looked into" I mostly mean (1) opening up various search sites and listings (2) panicking (3) screaming "these all look the same!!!" (4) alternating between writing various management companies to schedule meetings and defaulting to my facebook respite. 

Anyways, just before I had to pull the trigger on actually looking at an apartment, I heard from my friend Matt who may have a room for me in his house. Since he is one of very few people I could ever imagine sharing a living space with (considering our respective levels of neatness, introversion, and general temperaments...), AND it would oddly satisfy my sense of narrative circularity that he is one of my two close friends from my turgid teen years and I've already been roomies with the other one.

 Anyways, I don't want to talk myself up into too much enthusiasm until we meet up tomorrow to iron out details, but I could dig it. Since I am officially moving my stuff, minus staging related furniture, out of the Seattle place on Thursday... well it would be nice to have the living situation sorted out before my sister and her brood return from their vacation within vacation

I also saw a real live(ish) movie and everything: Friends With Benefits. The undeniable appeal of this movie needs little explanation, but mainly it is that the stars are hot and fairly funny physical comedians, and there is a pretty fantastic supporting cast. 

The drawbacks of this movie are mostly that it is extremely dated, and I can't help if this movie was meant to be a period piece set in the, say, mid-2000's. Or at least the mix of "ooooh what is this novel thing where friends have sex but don't get into a relationship that the kids are doing these days" (which I'm pretty sure was a well-known and heavily experienced arrangement since before my first stab at college), the basic idea of parodying the rom-com genre while making a rom-com film (kind of been done a lot with possibly more to say), and the "A FLASH MOB, you say? What the dickens is a FLASH MOB?? How delightful!" smacks a bit of corn... yes I know, nothing new under the sun. On the bright side, I like to imagine that having been featured in a romantic comedy such as this, flash mobs have officially been consigned to the history books as that "momentarily charming but increasingly ANNOYING thing that essentially inspired the television show Glee and myriad other evils." (That's not fair. I've never seen Glee and have no sense of its evil)

But no, I guess what intrigued me most was that they made a rather pointed homage-parody-rip-off of the famous Harry Met Sally speech, both in their mock rom-com movie and in the inevitable final scene (with a FLASHMOB? What the dickens...).

 I do think in many ways, this movie strove to be something of an update to Harry Met Sally, but gave up before reaching that level. In the first case, the question was "can men and women be emotionally intimate without it getting complicated?" and in the latter it has the veneer of the complementary "can they be physically intimate..." except actually they were asking "can men and women be both emotionally intimate and physically intimate without... uh" well it does linger on the valid question of what's left to a romantic partnership other than these two intimacies and I credit them for working well with that.

Additionally, the films both revolve around an evolving dialogue between the leads about a romantic movie (Casablanca in the first place, and a fictional rom-com caricature in the second) and around conversations that bubble up only between men and women who are not dating, about their outtakes regarding dating/sex experience (the "I'll have what she's having" deli fake orgasm being the obvious example).  

I will say that I have heard from my dvd special features that Harry Met Sally actually was never intended to end happily - that  it would just be too complicated and they would be forced to part ways after the relationship went to that physical level. And in some sense, you can feel that tension and inherent doubt in the movie.We don't get that from Friends With Benefits, in which it is patently obvious from the first five or so minutes exactly how the entire romance is going to pan out.

 The writers seem to present the rom-com formula (mockingly at first) and make an outright declaration that it will be followed. Most glaringly being that - unlike the protagonists in HMS - the FWB leads are obviously perfect for each other, and although there's that emotionally unavailable thing... it just doesn't have the same repellent magnetism that really makes you doubt for a minute that they actually are already together in essentially everything but name. 

So what I'm saying is, I think I enjoyed the movie, but I wish they hadn't evoked HMS, which managed both to define and transcend the rom-com genre and which set the comparison standard rather high. But of course, as said, there are some pretty dazzling displays of semi-nudity and intermittent flashes of hilarity/profundity, and the actors really are quite good. 

Also, it was not The Smurfs, which I have been achingly tempted to go view based largely on a mix of masochism and devotion to Tim Gunn who is in a probably painfully featured in a small role.