A Few Things Before (a perhaps permanent) Hiatus

I am purportedly studying for the bar exam. It sucks. Everyone warned me that it would suck, but I brushed off their complaints as so much hyperbolia...after all, these are the same people who warned me that first year of law school would work me to death. (Not even to sickness, or pallor, or depression. Maybe a bit of anxiety but really, that's par for Pooja's course.)

Nonetheless, the bar really does suck. Unlike law school exams, which were generally open-book, one subject, and often (freakily) fun, for the bar exam there are: 1) no notes 2) no pontificating 3) a dozen and a half subjects. Argy, argy, arg.

That's my ostensible reason for signing off-- to study. But, if you've been clicking refresh, futiley, as I have for the past three weeks, well, you'll know that I am so off blogging. Several reasons: First, I'd like to invest my energies in other writing (at least after I stop writing 300-word essays that begin, "This case shall be governed by the Uniform Commercial Code of Contracts, article 2"). Second, and far more importantly, I am totally off the real world. Everything just sucks. I'm quite happy, internally, but the world makes me miser-fucking-able. Things I can barely bear to think about (yech!):

1) The accelerating gap between rich and poor in the US, which seems to have swallowed anything that resembles a middle class

2) Kaavya Vishwanathan. So much about this story was sad before the plagiarism charges struck. A book "packaged" on Madison Avenue, written by a Superstriver whose abiding passions were Gucci bags, Mary Kate Olsen, and investment banking, occupying full page spreads in newspapers and primo shelf space in bookstores. What does that say about the state of book and newspaper publishing? THEN the fact that the poor kid was so pressured to perfect her frou-frou fluff that she actually copied someone else's. Poor kid-- not only was she brutal on herself, but she had exceptionally bad literary taste.

3) Guantanamo, and the Supreme Court's tepid ruling on it. If only Kennedy had the balls to say that the dungeon violates the Genever Conventions. (Also, see Road to Guantanamo if you haven't. I expected to cringe at the brutality; I was unprepared for the ineptitude exhibted by U.S. military. It'd be comical in a Hellerian way, if only it weren't (for the most part) accurate.)

4) Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. I don't know that I will ever stop mourning the war and the terror it's unleashed on the Iraqi people.

5) Missing my friends. I wouldn't sacrifice being with Jonathan to live in a more Pooja-friend-rich place, but damn, I miss you all and many, many others who don't read this. Please visit. Cambridge is actually salubrious for another couple of months.