Friday, September 6, 2013

Tangoing at the Twilight of Trial With a Bag of Deep Fried Fritos

Previously on A&A's Adventures in Cohabitation - Nefarious ingresses blocked our heroin's path and marred her once unfurrowed brow, creating a dichotomous split between Adellas Wright and Thompson. Teams remain on standby to ascertain which one is the evil associate as they lurk the dusky halls of Englettlaw. Track is dead! Long live the mountain... Andrew adjusted to a whole new ballgame... before changing the channel with some speculation on the loss of American interest in baseball as a game. But a heavy return to the plotting and planning of a training schedule evermore in flux for a shift in focus. And fall fell with a glorious thump and thunder. 

Coming up: Rerembering tango and a headily focused weekend of unfocus. Will regrets and opportunity costs continue to niggle and roil or merely melt in the reverie of a moment? A long awaited visit with a healthcare provider who gets it and a new nutritional plan for making this little DINK-bunny a but more white-pants beach approved in time for winter. As her questing moves her to the harrowing nomansland of Northern Seattle for nutritional answers, will Adella discover the key to making carrots of durians? A Happy Trial Prep Day gets weirder and sends out distorting energy into the ether. Nobody is safe. Will the family loss summon a guest appearance from Mulder and Sculley? Will Adella's long-lost  half-siamese cat, Puff, reveal that he has been the mastermind all along??




Re-remembrance of Things Past Present and Future

It was a good day for re-remembering of all sorts of varieties. Sometimes it is particularly easy to forget how much pleasure certain activities bring. This is a blessing, that forgetfulness, because it blinds me to the opportunity costs ever-lurking in choosing any single pleasure. Infinite choice in a finite world can be unbearable, and once struck me as so when I was younger.

They - that ever abstract they who go around rampantly tut-tutting and adaging in pretty fonts and memes more contagious than herpes - are always saying that you regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did do. I'm not sure I agree with that. There are several points in my life where I did things I wish I had not; and when I have not done something, it is usually because I was not quite ready for it yet and the experience would have been wasted on me.

But if I do agree, I would also add that this is only because our tendency to frame it as such - doing one thing always means not doing another. It's easier to think about the things we never did, because they remain perfect and free of the complicating heft of reality. But isn't it really another less-committed way of saying we wish that we hadn't done whatever else we did in place of the things we didn't do? Or are we just that bitter with the universe for so much potential and only a narrow space for actuality? I think, having far too grand and vivid an imagination, I did used to harbor some bitterness about that fact.

This was a particular point of pique, given that I am quite introverted (I know I know, that's very in vogue now, but like all true hipstroverts, I was like that waaaay before it was cool, like even before the internet!). As such, I have a far more limited tolerance for stimuli and, as such, a far lower capacity for things I can do before I need to retreat and recharge. It has meant a lot of careful picking and choosing and planning to manage some sense of balance between those things that bring pleasure (other than hanging out with myself and a good crossword) and my natural need for recovery from those things. This used to bother me a lot, as it meant doing any one thing was pointedly at the cost of doing any other thing around the same time. Perhaps, these days I've cultivated the ability to let go of the pleasures lost, at least by suspending them for their times and places.

But from time to time rediscovering those pleasures is energizing. Tango is something I love, but I don't necessarily miss it until I am in full thralls of its quiddity - one amazing workshop, a perfect dance, a deep breathy grounded mutual reverie, or a beautiful set that is both intrinsically familiar yet rediscovered in that arrangement and location.

Yesterday, I went to a workshop with Oscar and Georgina with Andrew. It was a close embrace workshop, so I thought it might be of interest and benefit to him while also touching on the essentials that I prefer. And the experience was so strikingly redolent of days past. Like a song that triggers time-travel into another self, I felt those days in Buenos Aires, my first Tango Festival in Seattle... the days even further back when I'd drive to Seattle several nights a week for classes because I'd done all there was to do in Bellingham and was voracious for me. I remembered the almost maniacally giddy self that emerges in most learning situations, but exponentially expands when dancing is involved. I beamed and glowed and burbled along my winding path of many partners. They reframed some essentials of technique in their own language, sometimes pulling me along and sometimes stopping me for pause. As always, the essentials of any kind of dance reemerged as the basics and I felt a little tingly. We left, as we always do, talking about how we needed to get out dancing more. I'm not sure we will, because I've had this euphoric resolution several times, but it is good to remember that this part of me is there and will come out to play if I coax her. 

After the workshop, I suggested avoiding the traditional "we go home and fall into our Saturday routine" approach; it was far too nice a day for routine. Instead, we wandered downtown and stopped at Chocolate Necessities for iced coffee. Even though we didn't do much, there's just something different about being out in the world. One of my favorite past times is one that refocuses the attention in ways that simply can't be had in familiar environments. Andrew was talking about comic books (he had borrowed one of my birthday gifts) and how he had slowly learned that the point of these are not to accomplish having read them, but to stop and take time with them. Seeing them as a crux point between an art gallery and a narrative, I agree. There are hours to be had in every panel of a well-crafted one. He extrapolated that he tries to remind himself to take time while eating or while walking through an art museum in a similar way. It reminded me of my meanderings on lingering, the idea of being present in given moments, but that we have to choose which moments are worth that full attention. Coffee by the side of the street on the last dregs of a beautiful summer's day, perhaps, should always be on the list. It was a nice and unexpected date afternoon all together. Dancing and gelato!

And reading. Oh yes. As I've mentioned before, I tend find reading an enormous quicksandy portal right out of reality. I can go months without reading a thing (or struggling with a single couple of pages), but once a book grabs me, the rest of the world shuts down. Yesterday, I picked up my kindle to bring to Masterlube with me. I have been about 10% into a book called Room for several weeks. Needless to say, I am now finished with it and I have long chunks of my day from yesterday that I do not remember. I'm now waffling between riding that reading-momentum through another book or letting the moment pass as a crystalized instance of transportation plumb out of this world.. 

We also had some of the ho-hum and the every day for balance, of course. There were groceries. There was a convolutedly difficult outing in search of a discover pass that began at REI (with a brief interlude while every employee in the store combed the store to find the foot pod that Andrew finally realized was far out of his price point and never mind), ended up in a parking lot just outside of Haggen's where we sat in the car to call Haggen's to see if they had it. There are times when I'm overstimulated and start to flood that I call introverting out, and I suspect this might have been an Andrew IO moment. Glad to say we acquired one of these passes at Fred Meyer's, so we are allowed to continue discovering willy-nilly. 

And for now, I'll remember to remember that there are several things worth doing (well or otherwise) and when the time is right, I will pick right back up with them like an old friend. And I really should do (whatever activity I love but don't do as often) more. Really. 






Happy Trial Prep Days Take 4 - 

Well, they keep getting odder and odder and we keep chugging along towards trials that never quite seem to happen. Becket would approve. Our weird one in June: bumped. Our bizarro one in July: bumped back to the end of September.

 Our Bald Birthday Party Soprano to Take us to a Zoo Where We Can Have Happy Days: The Musical crazy times ten trial in August: bumped and then not bumped and then ping-ponged around the courthouse before finally being continued until November (which will likely then be continued until January 2024, which will likely then be preempted by alien invasion).

Which brings us to number 4 (taking on Chinese superstitions for a minute, this is a very unlucky number so I've learned to expect the worst). Number four should have been easy. Nothing has happened in over a year. There was a lot of fighting for a good seven months before things got settled in August 2012. The other party - confidentiality bars the juiciness, but I can merely say she is a piece of work that would seem at home in a David Lynch movie - seemed to  have vanished (we thought perhaps there were pending warrants out for her arrest and she'd gone on the lam - funny how we keep thinking this about MIA other parties).

It had been status quo. The finalization was meant to be a formality, something to ensure that the state-hopping extravaganza that has characterized this case wouldn't perpetuate in newer and nuttier states...

After no contact for a year, the other party's back, baby. Ten days before trial! She wants a continuance and has set a hearing for two days before the trial. She thinks Washington doesn't have jurisdiction anymore. She thinks there's lots of NEW EVIDENCE (how she wrote it in her declaration) that the court doesn't know about (possibly because she never attempted to inform the court of it... just a thought). Didn't say what any of this might be or provide any proof of anything, but all this still needs to be taken seriously. Because with our spell of trial luck and the unpredictability of these things, there's no telling what grand catastrophe will finally derail our train ride to trial. Of course since all the applicable deadlines are before the hearing, we can't wait to see if a continuance will be granted. This takes away some of the appeal of shrugging and saying "ok, I didn't really want to spend this week scrambling anyways... let's move jurisdiction to Antarctica and whichever party loses can get set out on an iceberg."

Did I mention that she filed this motion on Friday and mailed it to us, so it was waiting at the office yesterday morning? +Pamela Englett  and I had come in to labor on Labor Day. We thought it would be a quiet day working on witness questions and exhibits and getting ourselves sorted for the coming trial deadlines. It was meant to be catch-up, given how much of last week was occupied with triage on other cases.

Instead, I spent all morning drafting response declarations, combing through email and mailing records to tabulate all the times we've tried to contact the other party, writing a leviathon legal memorandum about how no continuance should ever be granted ever (never ever ever was totally all I put in my conclusion section), and ruining our client's labor day with various documents and questions. 

I did eventually get back to my precious little trial brief several hours behind, and even trudged through most of it. But it was certainly a lot heavier of a holiday work-day than anyone had anticipated. My stomach does somersaults thinking about how many hours we just billed him for. But that's trial, baby. 

Whatever happened to this whole collaborative mediation alternative dispute yadda yadda yadda practice? Oh yeah, it's still there in theory. Just takes up a lot less stomach acid and doesn't tend to hang around for several years of agonizing pend, so perhaps it doesn't make quite the same impression on my internal organs. Also, for me, it mostly involves administrative duties on the collaborative law board, which has yet to yield me actual referrals, per se, but which is a lovely way to channel my mad-note taker and planner in a productive form. And a lot of the members of the board really missed their calling as caterers, so some of the get-togethers alone are worth the membership dues and duties. 

On Sunday I had signed myself up for a much needed massage with my dad's masseur-par-excellence. Apparently my father and I have the same tight shoulders! I'm such a daddy's girl. Anyways, my neck could use another ten or fifty hours of work, but masseur-man had to cut me short after already going about ten minutes long. As is usually the case after an appropriately deep tissue (I want the very chasms of those tissues, or it was just a rough swedish) massage, I may have been more sore afterwards than I was before. After Monday's festivities I most certainly am more sore!

All the deep breathing and whatnot had certainly helped with the stress levels, but I did a fair amount of work to reverse any benefits of the massage yesterday. I do have another massage scheduled, but not quite this soon. In the meantime, it was definitely an evening to split some mad Russian hops with+Andrew Wright, who spent the day off gallivanting up, down and around Tiger Mountain (his only pilgrimage of the year, but he used it well).

I told him that he'd had fun for the both of us and I considered any fun he acquired on that day community fun. I guess that means he got some of my community stress. But I think it all foamed out over a beer... and who can say which of us was more wiped and sore by the end of the day? It was a pretty close tie.   




How to Gain Weight the Hard Way - Part Five Billion: The Sporty Nutritioney Edition - 

So as I occasionally do, it's time to revisit my ongoing quest to get junk back into my trunk. Basically the trajectory of my current predicament goes something like this: slightly overweight in early twenties, got into dancing and became perfectly curvy healthy weight in my mid-twenties, got into law school (family deaths, family illnesses, a ridonkulous car crash litigation, the bar exam, and other super nifty air-quotably fun stuff like actually being an attorney, with a side of stress relieving exercise and a gradual shift in diet to rabbitfood) and I went on a slip slide up to my thirties and down to about my current weight.

Whatever that is. I've actually killed yet another scale, so I have no idea what I weigh, except that on a doctor's scale I weigh 130 pounds while wearing shoes and clothes, and carrying a purse and a clipboard. I think it's me. Just this summer, so far there's been a toaster, a microwave, and another scale (all of which were recent replacements of prior failures) that have made their final dying swan spasms. Actually, the scale may just be out of batteries, but since the batteries are quirky and on back order... well I'm assuming that I am probably not significantly heavier or lighter than I was three weeks ago. 

At any rate, the major collateral of all of this unweighty thing - aside from the utter impossibility of finding any clothes that fit and the open season on awkward conversations about my physical composition with near strangers who feel they can discuss me with me as if I were some figuring in a museum gift shop - is that my hormones appear to have gotten all survival-mode wonky; as a result certain activities that ladies participate in (you know, riding in white dresses on horses, and playing tennis in white jeans, while pouring blue liquid on absorbent pads) aren't really coming naturally. I've had the lectures; I've had the pre-screen for eating disorders with my doc several times; and I've had the basically "ok most of America should eat and work out like you do a little more, but could you just eat some french fries already" conclusion.

I have been working on it and had previously started to pull up a bit. Or was it just summer, therefore humid, and really I was just retaining more water? No clue. All those paradoxes about measurement and the utter impossibility of actually doing so froth to the fore when you're actually concerned about the results. Then, my weight went back down a teeny bit after three non-trials and two weeks running after nephews. Was that the change in weather? Was I just sick? Was the scale giving its final death rattle in a blitz of inaccuracy? Lord knows.

Over all, though, the trend was mostly positive, but devilishly slow. I had made many tweaks to my diet and started aiming for a baseline of 2200 a day, up to about 2600 on more active days. People who've seen me eat once in a day think I don't eat much. People who see me eat on the hour all day long, know that's not really true. 

At any rate, after a slew of blood tests and the usual ticking off of the template checklist, I got a referral to a gynecologist and met with him earlier this week. He's an athlete and seems to work with several athletic women. Before jumping to the "you're thin, duh" he went through the ovulatory process, and told me why several unrelated common causes of anovulation were not indicated by the results. He then walked me through where the remaining issues might be other what he called chronic caloric malnutrition.

  It was so great to skip the "do you feel that you're still fat even though you're thin??" kind of Oprah special questions and have somebody just normalize my experience. Right away, he told me that in medical school it was the same thing: every one either lost or gained forty pounds over those years as a reaction to the pressure cooker of that sort of environment. He told me that being in that focus mode was what got me through and has helped me the first few years of law practice. He  affirmed that my activity levels were probably a valuable way to manage my stress and keep sane, and overall were not particularly excess, but that I may be lacking nutritional support for them.

Then he just asked "how many calories do you think you burn a day" and went on to show me how I'd pretty significantly underestimated. He broke down what his regular recommendation is for non-active women and told me where to add throughout the day and suggested I should be aiming for more animal proteins and 2800-3000 calories a day to get back into white-jeans-on-shape. He, of course, added that doing so would reduce my risk of osteoperosis and - very importantly - likely improve my athletic performance. Then he gave me the name of a sports nutritionist in Seattle and told me to come back in a month so we could see if he missed anything. 

It was really heartening to have somebody make my situation feel like a small blip of a garden variety sort (athletic amenorrhea that's more of a carrot than a durian). And novel to think about how much more food I am going to be adding to my diet. Of course more specifics should gel after meeting with the nutritionist next week, but I have a good beginning compass right now. 

At any rate, optimistic to be moving forward with some more tangibles and a plan. To the kitchen!! Or the nearest dairy farm!!






Rushing towards Continuance and into Bump-Territory: Will Trial 3000 Boldly Go Where No 2013 Trial has Gone Before (actually to trial)?!? 

Aaaaaaaand we round the corner on yet another pre-trial week of madness and mayhem. I tell you, trials are bad luck. Weird stuff crawls out of the woodwork when a trial is pending at the office. Our other cases get agitated. Affiliated parties have mysterious and not so mysterious personal hiccups. And the other parties just get crazier. I'm surprised nobody's been hit by a car on the way to the courtroom (most likely on the third floor of the courthouse) yet. 

This was a quirky week for several reasons. As afore, there were the related personal matters attending a death in the family. These are still ongoing, as it appears initial reports that my grandmother faked her own demise before clearing out several downtown banks and lamming it to Rio may have been purely fictional. I remain skeptical. I've seen enough X-Files and daytime soaps to know that the truth is out there and it's kind of trippy. Hey, if my cat Puff wasn't run over but catnapped because he was so beautiful (ongoing family story due to a suspicious individual inquiring about him just shortly before his untimely disappearance) then no passing need be permanent in the sphere of fancy. Regardless, there will be a funeral on the 14th and it will be that odd bittersweet sort of reunion activity where everyone finally gets together and is so glad to have an opportunity to see each other but feel kind of morbid about feeling happy at the opportunity etc. etc. And in between there will be crying. Bring the hankies and keep the hugs on standby. 

Aaaanyways, right, trial. Thank all the stars above (except for Alpha Centauri, who was being a little brat about negotiating my good fortunes) we did decide to come in on Monday to get things together. Not only did the Monday work-binge predate my grandmother's surprise swan dive into the primordial waters, but it also allowed us to take arms against the outrageous fortunes of an MIA opposing party's untimely return and last minute request for a continuance.

With that Monday push, we were able to wade through the Tuesday slew of unrelated emergencies and have things more or less delegable by Wednesday when all family heaven and hell broke loose. I'm relieved to say that all of our required documents went out yesterday to the appropriate places (the top of Mt. Everest where the file brief shall be burned in sacrifice to the Aesir, and the middle of the Red Sea where the response to motion for continuance shall continue in perpetuity). 

Today is the first post-blitz pre-trial showdown. Kind of like pre-season in football. We spar and battle a bit and maybe somebody comes out a little concussed, but it's not the official shebang exactly. No, today is where we point out that it's not very sporting to vanish for over a year and then reemerge a week before trial claiming that there are very important THINGS that must come to light, and a continuance must be granted until unspecified "scheduling issues" are clarified. We, of course, shall bring a counter-motion requesting a court order clarifying that the opposing party is a big fat doo-doo head. I think, continuance or no, we might get that one granted.

The battle doesn't end there of course. Either it gets continued and we start fighting about this niggling jurisdictional issue that she has hinted at. Or we hunker down for two more days and wait for the bizarre crime spree that will inevitably cause all courts within twenty miles to go on lock down for domestic cases for the next several weeks. Right now, it's a fun sort of betting pool. Not sure what the odds are but there definitely should be odds for the various contingencies and some bookies lingering nearby. 

Either way, we'll need a lot of wham bam no thank you ma'am energy for the next few days. I've got that part covered. Well except for the energy. I need some more coffee and chocolate STAT!

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