death by cuteness

sometimes cute overload makes me absolutely DIE. e.g., this picture of a teensy kitten.

chocolate ice cream

great, now i'm addicted to chocolate ice cream too. i had a bowl late last night to keep myself awake (and give my taste buds a treat) while editing into the wee hours, and now i need one for absolutely no reason. why did i have to buy the extra-big container?

editing

i'm staying up way, way past my bedtime finishing the last round of substantive edits for my law review article. i'm sitting in bed with my laptop on my lap and a stack of cases next to me, eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream (and writing to you, dear reader) in a desperate attempt to keep myself awake.

these edits are due "today," which means by midnight in california, right? i am such a terrible procrastinator. but i'm going to get it done. as painful as it is right now, and as much as the poor editor who has to review and input all these edits is going to hate me, i'm doing a really thorough job, and the article is going to be much improved.

big eyes

from a certain angle i have scary-big eyes.

best weekend ever

i think i set a record this weekend for accomplishing the most stuff. here is just a small sampling of the fun times had over the past few days:

- got cable
- put together a clothes-hanging rack from Bed, Bath & Beyond with my own two little hands
- cleaned up my (metaphorically) tornado-ravaged room and unpacked a lot of crap that was still in suitcases, transforming my room into something surprisingly liveable
- shared a lovely thanksgiving dinner with my bf's family
- saw the movie Fast Food Nation (decent but not great - it's hard to turn a nonfiction book into a fictional narrative)
- attended The Barber of Seville at the Met (awesome and way less boring than i expected)
- went to a lame comedy show at The Laugh Factory just for the heck of it
- finally found a reasonably inexpensive, reasonably cute, vintage vanity/desk for my bedroom (being delivered tonight!)
- finally put the bed skirt i bought a month ago on my bed, which does a great job covering up all the crap i've shoved under the bed
- bought a stepstool for the kitchen at K-Mart
- changed the single lightbulb on my bedroom ceiling that had been burned out for a week (well, a very tall person i know may have helped)
- put up a giant framed art deco-y advertisement on the wall above my bed (ditto)
- bought several pairs of earrings at Macy's in the mad post-thanksgiving throng, and then changed my earrings for the first time since i got my ears pierced in june

- and most importantly: GOT WIRELESS INTERNET AT HOME. this is the awesomest ever. it's the kind of thing that you don't really appreciate til suddenly you don't have it and you are reduced to stealing weak-ass signal from your neighbors that drops every five minutes.

i certainly have a lot to be thankful for! (aww.)

pixy stix

i am totally addicted to pixy stix. i've been eating a few a day to keep the ol' energy levels up at work while doing endless, stupefying research, staring at my computer screen for hours on end. but it's getting out of control. i've probably had a dozen in the last few hours. i need the sugar high! i can't stop!

celebrity sighting #1

on sunday i had my first official celebrity sighting since moving to NY! very exciting. (actually, a couple of months ago i thought i saw these two actors from that show Weeds - the brother-in-law and the hot israeli chick - at an old-school punk rock show near union square, but no one i was with had ever seen the show so i could get no independent confirmation.)

so anyway on sunday i was getting my hair cut & dyed in this fancy salon (but i was getting it done on the cheap by a friend of a friend who's a stylist-in-training), and a famous movie star was getting her hair cut there too. okay, not so famous that i actually recognized her or have seen any of her work, but my stylist pointed her out, and i recognized the name from my gossip magazines: elisha cuthbert. (i always used to read that name and think it must be pronounced something like "eliza" with a "sh," but i realized today, after telling several people about seeing her, that it's probably just a weird spelling of "alicia." that would certainly make the pronunciation a lot easier.)

it was pretty neat. it made me feel like i picked a very posh salon, anyway.

danger

my sister just told me that a girl she knows was attacked recently, not too far from where we live. three guys followed her into her apartment building when she was coming home, raped her, held her hostage all night, and then took her to her bank, at gunpoint, when it opened, and made her take out all her money and give it to them.

gentrification is a dangerous game. but it's impossibly expensive to live in safe (i.e. well-to-do) neighborhoods. so what's a girl to do? stop leaving the house? take taxis everywhere instead of walking at night? always walk with other people? spend 3/4 of your income on an apartment in a building with a doorman?

i think my immediate neighborhood is probably somewhat safer (busier, more middle-class) than the neighborhood where this happened. but the truth is, there's not really anything you can do to ensure this kind of thing won't happen to you. the best solution might be just to lie in bed all day with the covers up over your head.

fancy dress

i'm going to a "black tie" wedding in a couple of weeks, and i need to get a really fancy dress. floor-length, etc. i've never owned or worn such a dress before. i'm going to be a bridesmaid in another wedding next spring and i was sort of hoping those dresses would come in before this wedding, so i could just use the same dress for both purposes, but no such luck.

so i had to go shopping, which i hate. i find it dreadfully boring and challenging, because i pretty much hate everything.

on my first shopping trip, at the new bloomingdale's in SF last weekend, i found one dress that i thought i might like - but they didn't have it in my size or the color i wanted. i tried one on that was two sizes too big in the wrong color, but even so i could tell right away that it was probably the one. i just had to find it at another store in the right size and color.

this is the dress i wanted:


when i got back to NY, my nightmare quest began. i went to the blommingdale's here. it turned out that, contrary to what i'd been told, they didn't have it in the right size & color either. i was at least able to try on the dress in the right size, but the wrong color. (a random fellow-shopper in the dressing room told me it was perfect and i had to get it - clearly a sign. but i hated the color.) when i begged them to check, they looked on their computers, and informed me that, in fact, no bloomingdales in the country had it in stock.

so i went online and looked up the manufacturer's website (badgley mischka - super-annoying flash website). i called the manufacturer. i looked on the website of every retailer that carries their dresses. when that didn't pan out (not on the website, didn't have the right size, etc.), i called every retailer. i probably spent a total of two mid-work-day hours on the phone, and i struck out with every one.

then finally, finally, i called the very last possibility on my list. nieman marcus in white plains, NY had suggested that a nieman marcus store in dallas might have one left. after striking out at the first dallas store number they gave me, i tried the second one late yesterday afternoon. the kind dallas saleslady, jenny, looked around and couldn't find it, but took down my number and promised to call me back.

today i wait all day, getting more and more depressed. i start to resign myself to going back out to the stores, searching and searching through millions of dresses that i hate. i even convince a coworker (and nascent friend) to join me after work today as i return to the dress-shopping trenches. ten minutes before we had planned to leave, i decide to give jenny one last call.

"i've been trying to reach you!" she says. she has? "i found the dress. i think it's the last one in the country." yes, i know, i say, and i shriek and dance around a bit. after a few details are worked out, my precious dress is finally on its way to me, via two-day express mail.

i am really, really excited. i seriously hate shopping.

i'm a lawyer! pt. 2

today i found out that i also passed the NY bar exam. hooray! not like, "hooray, my dream come true, i can practice law in new york" - but rather, yay, all this stress and anxiety and waiting are now behind me. we had pizza for lunch (again) to celebrate, and we'll have cake this afternoon.

i was really glad that all of us newbie associates passed both exams. wouldn't it have been terribly awkward if some of us did and some of us didn't?

now i'm looking forward to seeing my actual scores, whenever they come in the mail. i hope i did well, for my ego's sake, but i also hope i didn't do too well, because that would mean i studied harder than i needed to. so really, it's a win-win situation at this point. (eh, forget all that, i'm just glad i passed.)

good luck to my california friends who find out on friday! you are all geniuses and i'm sure you did awesome.

fake band members

i just watched this weird nina hagen video on ask pud, and i realized that it is totally the 1980s predecessor of lesbian feminist electroclash video artist tracy & the plastics. (far too few of my readers will know who that band is, alas.)


i wonder if that video was perhaps an unconscious inspiration for tracy (aka wynne), or a conscious one.

p.s. one of my claims to fame is that i set up a show for tracy & the plastics when i was in college, when they were making their debut tour. they didn't even have a name yet when we started planning the show!

i wish i was still cool. :(

i'm a lawyer!!

i passed the new jersey bar exam! yay. (we're supposed to get the new york results on tuesday.)

i'm out of town, technically on "vacation" today, so i didn't check my work email until about 1 p.m. eastern. the other two newbie associates had sent emails to all the other attorneys, saying that they had passed, and there were emails from several other attorneys saying, "congratulations to ___ and ___!" and planning a celebratory pizza lunch for today. so i'm sure everyone in the office was like, "gosh, no email from ilona, huh?" and assumed that i was keeping mum because i was the only one who didn't pass.

embarassment at that thought motivated me to call up someone in the office and ask them to root through my desk to find my NJ candidate ID number so i could look up my results online. otherwise i would have had to wait til tuesday to find out, which is way too long to suffer through such an erroneous misperception from my co-workers.

election results

i don't have any particularly wise or insightful commentary to make - just, YAY!

it's good to feel hopeful again. the last six years have been hard. so many defeats really drive all the optimism out of a person, 'cause the crushing disappointment is so much worse when you're not expecting it.

but now things are looking brighter. i am starting to feel very excited about 2008.

more injuries

i just cut my tongue on a toasted bagel. ow.

OC season premiere!!!

i am really excited.

(although i feel compelled to confess my secret shame that i never watched the season 3 finale - is that pathetic or what? for an OC fanatic, that is. not for a regular person.) (addendum: i just read the 10-page summary at television without pity, so at least i know what happened.)

also, i just moved at the beginning of this week, so i am temporarily without a working television set. which is a little annoying, but also kind of unexpectedly fun, 'cause it means i am forced out of my usual anti-social habits and have to find other people with whom to watch the shows i'm obsessed with. (fortunately there are only two essentials right now on my list - the OC and A_____ N___ T__ M____.)

speaking of being excited, i am SUPER excited about two movies coming out soon: the borat movie and the new christopher guest movie, For Your Consideration. i am super-hard-core obsessed with christopher guest - you know, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind... he is the comic genius of our time.