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#lawyergoals

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Hello world. I’m back. Post-bar and all.

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On Memorial Day, we remember.

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Me, the second I see my final exam

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A gift from my supervising attorney!

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ALL THE EMOTIONS

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I found a lovely, flowering bush on my walk.

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Trying to grow a plant in the backyard. Hoping the sun helps 😎

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Up, up, up

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I kick balls.

Finally a motivation video without fitness models, but with ordinary girls!

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I'm taking CrimPro this semester and picked this up to help me better understand the Fourth Amendment as I study for my final. I'll let you know how it goes!

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A few months ago, I grabbed these for $25 at the Reader’s Bookstore in the main library of the SFPL.

All of these books have been on my TBR list for quite some time and I'm excited to own them now (and read them whenever I want).

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I was the lucky winner of the Lit Hub giveaway for Rosalie Knecht’s RELIEF MAP! Thank you Tin House Books 😊

The cover is absolutely lovely! I can’t wait to dive in.

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I grabbed these titles from a redditor in r/bookexchange. These are pretty beat up, but I'm happy to have them. LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME is a book I learned about during my second year of college when my roommate mentioned it. I've been wanting my own copy since then. I had never heard of RUNNING IN THE FAMILY but it seemed like it would be worth the read. LES MISÉRABLES is a book I never thought I'd be interested in, but I love almost all books and it never hurts to read more classics!

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I stopped by @greenapplebooks in the Park this weekend -- it's one of my favorite bookstores! I picked up a used copy of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S by Truman Capote. It's been on my TBR list for quite some time.

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Emotional labor is often invisible to men because a lot of it happens out of their sight. Emotional labor is when my friends and I carefully coordinate to make sure that nobody who’s invited to the party has drama with anyone else at the party, and then everyone comes and has a great time and has no idea how much thought went into it. Emotional labor is when I have to cope, again, with the distress I feel at having to clean myself in a dirty bathroom or cook my food in a dirty kitchen because my male roommate didn’t think it was important to clean up his messes. Emotional labor is having to start the 100th conversation with my male roommate about how I need my living space to be cleaner. Emotional labor is reminding my male roommate the next day that he agreed to clean up his mess but still hasn’t. Emotional labor is reassuring him that it’s okay, I’m not mad, I understand that he’s had a very busy stressful week. Emotional labor is not telling him that I’ve had a very busy stressful week, too, and his fucking mess made it even worse. Emotional labor is reassuring my partner over and over that yes, I love him, yes, I find him attractive, yes, I truly want to be with him, because he will not do the work of developing his self-esteem and relies on me to bandage those constantly-reopening wounds. Emotional labor is letting my partner know that I didn’t like what he did sexually last night, because he never asked me first if I wanted to do that. Emotional labor is reassuring him that, no, it’s okay, I’m not mad, I just wanted him to know for next time, yes, of course I love him, no, this doesn’t mean I’m not attracted to him, I’m just not interested in that sort of sex. Emotional labor is not being able to rely on him to reassure me that it’s not my fault that I didn’t like the sex, because this conversation has turned into my reassuring him, again. Emotional labor is when my friend messages me once every few weeks with multiple paragraphs about his life, which I listen to and empathize with. Afterwards, he thanks me for being “such a good listener.” He asks how my life has been, and I say, “Well, not bad, but school has been so stressful lately…” He says, “Oh, that sucks! Well, anyway, I’d better get to bed, but thanks again for listening!” Emotional labor is when my friend messages me and, with no trigger warning and barely any greeting, launches into a story involving self-harm or suicide or something else of that sort because “you know about this stuff.” Emotional labor was almost all of my male friends in high school IMing me to talk about how the girls all go for the assholes. Emotional labor is when my partners decide they don’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore, but rather than directly communicating this to me, they start ignoring me or being mean for weeks until I have to ask what’s going on, hear that “I guess I’m just not into you anymore,” and then have to be the one to suggest breaking up. For extra points, then I have to comfort them about the breakup. Emotional labor is setting the same boundary over and over, and every time he says, “I’m sorry, I know you already told me this, I guess I’d just forgotten.” Emotional labor is being asked to completely explain and justify my boundaries. “I mean, that’s totally valid and I will obviously respect that, I just really want to understand, you know?” Emotional labor is hiding the symptoms of mental illness, pretending my tears are from allergies, laughing too loudly at his jokes, not because I’m just in principle unwilling to open up about it, but because I know that he can’t deal with my mental illness and that I’ll just end up having to comfort him because my pain is too much for him to bear. Emotional labor is managing my male partners’ feelings around how often we have sex, and soothing their disappointment when they expected to have sex (even though I never said we would) and then didn’t, and explaining why I didn’t want to have sex this time, and making sure we “at least cuddle a little before bed” even though after all of this, to be quite honest, the last thing I fucking want is to touch him.

Miri,

“Emotional Labor: What It Is and How To Do It”

(via amberying)

I want every man I know to read this and really think about how it might apply to you because if there is one overarching theme among you all it’s that you read this stuff and share it and nod and go “yeah wow men suck” and NEVER THINK THAT IT IS TALKING ABOUT YOU. IT IS.

(via karaokay)

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This culture hates women.

The other day, I was on a Twitch stream to celebrate the conclusion of Feminist Frequency’s Ordinary Women campaign. It was fun. The campaign was successful, we hung out and had some cool guests and played games and were able to just relax. We weren’t too worried about what all the detractors and harassers and haters were thinking.

And yet, of course, the harassers and haters made their hatred known in droves, showing up in the chat and doing their cultural chest-thumping routine to loudly send the message that women, trans people and non-binary folks who don’t cater to their tastes are not welcome in these cultural spaces. These people worked to dehumanize us in two ways. Those of us deemed attractive and desirable were dehumanized by being described in degrading sexual terms. Those of us not deemed attractive and desirable were dehumanized by being misgendered, masculinized, and generally told that because we fail to serve even the basic function of being attractive to them, we have no value whatsoever and should not exist.

(Believe me, there was so much of this in the chat. Just…so much. An unending stream of it.)

What saddens me so much about this is that I think these people are honestly so used to being catered to and centered by all the media in the cultural spaces they occupy that they legitimately feel “censored” and “oppressed” by the presence of women in these spaces who simply refuse to play by the dominant culture rules. Of course, they have no idea what true censorship and oppression are, but they seem to legitimately believe that there is something imbalanced and unjust about the simple presence of women there.

More than that, I don’t think that these people have any perception of just how much they hate women. By that, I don’t mean that they consciously think to themselves, “I hate women!” Not at all. Rather, like Donald Trump, they honestly believe that they have the utmost respect for women. It’s just that they have absorbed and adopted a cultural worldview that tells them that “respecting” women largely means valuing women as sex objects who exist for their benefit, rather than truly seeing women as full and complete human beings like themselves.