25 Things

Since everyone is doing this on facebook, here are 25 random things about me:

1. Even though I consider myself politically progressive, I will defend the establishment, institutions, traditions, etc.
   
2. I can relate most situations in life to the Mighty Ducks movie or my experiences in 4-H or on my high school's robotics team.
3. I like that I have a boyfriend who can beat me in Trivial Pursuit.
   
4. When eating at a restaurant, I will either look at the menu online and pick what I am eating before I get there or make a impulse decision when the waiter or waitress takes my order.
5. I like to backtrack conversations in my head so I can figure out how the other person and I arrived at a given subject.
6. When I was four years old, my brother and I got sick on our trip to Disney World. We ate chicken wings every day in our hotel room, and I have been a wing fanatic ever since.
7. If it were not for my family in California, I could probably be happy living in DC for the long term.
   
8. I like walking on sidewalks and hardly ever cut across spaces.
   
9. Growing up, I used to have reoccurring nightmares about being robbed. When I was in college, I discovered that my brother had the same nightmares.
   
10. I am the only person I know who liked middle school.
11. Ever since I was a little kid, I would put my books in height order on my bookshelf.
    
12. I have watched almost every single episode of Law & Order, but I will always forget the verdicts of the cases so I will watch the episodes again and be surprised.
    
13. Hip-hop music is my favorite genre to play in the morning on the radio. I had it on when I drove to high school and to work last summer.
14. I love miniature things except for baby corn, which remind me of spores on a fern.
    
15. I never understood people who had teenage angst or whine all the time, which is probably why I think that Catcher in the Rye is overrated.
16. In preschool, I was the only girl who painted her dinosaur purple instead of pink.
17. One of my pet peeves is when people incorrectly think that the First Amendment's freedom of speech provision applies to a situation.
    
18. I love planning events and handling logistics, so I thought about trying to figure out a career around it until I realized that I could plan events on the side but I could not practice law on the side.
    
19. Even though my brother and I always got along, it was not until I started driving him to school every day in high school did we become really close.
    
20. I think my brother and I developed our parent's love for ABBA from our roadtrips to Northern California to see family.
21. As much as I loved my political experiences in college, and as much as I still follow politics in the news, I have no desire to do anything politically related in the future.
22. Aside from my mom's eggrolls and chicken curry, I did not start to appreciate most Vietnamese food until college.
    
23. I still keep a copy in my bag of the pocket constitution that my AP Government teacher gave me.
24. In high school, I attended a law program that had us visit American University law school and the DC Superior Court, two places that I would ultimately end up.
25. I love spending time with my family and feel guilty about doing anything else when I am visiting home.

Bonus fact: I will always remember random facts about people, whether about a good friend or a former former President (George Washington was 6'2, just like Alex and my brother). So filling out this was a good way of compelling others to feed me more random knowledge.

Catastrophic Failure

After having four servicemen come out and try to fix my computer in the past few months, including one who threw out his back and had to be rushed to the hospital, Dell has finally convinced me to send my computer into the Depot tomorrow. Although it generally operates fine, there seems to be some mysterious problem that automatically shuts down my computer when running in set-up or diagnostic mode. What that means, I have no idea.

As sad as I will be to not have my laptop with me for the next week or two, I know that I should just have them fully fix it before the Bar exam and while it is still under warranty. They said that if they cannot fix it, they will give me a new computer, which would also be nice. Fortunately I was able to manually back-up all my files in two places because when I ran an automatic back-up today, this is the message I got:
Catastrophic failure. I think that pretty sums up my relation with technology. As much time as I spend with my laptop and treat it with care, technology always seems to fight back, giving me some sort of weird problem. And of course today I had to work on a lawsuit involving highly technical computer server stuff. Basically a foreign language to me.

I swear, this must be my punishment in life for choosing not become an engineer like the rest of my family.

Super Bowl Sap

As much as I watch the Super Bowl for the football itself, I love the personal sappy stories that they play before the game. Since my Vikings never make it to the Superbowl, it gives me a connection to the players and I will usually just cheer for individual players based on their story, rather than a team. This year it was Larry Fitzgerald, who hasn't cut his hair since his mom died of cancer. (side note: I discovered that he was born in Minneapolis just a year before me, weird)

I will also confess that I really hate it when they show the losing team after the game. I feel a little less bad for them than I do college players- most of whom won't go pro and make millions of dollars. But I hate to see players crying after losing the big game.

I don't think I need to go into what a great game it was (which made up for the lackluster commercials). Thanks to David for hosting a great party.