Mes Belles Lettres

It's only Tuesday and I feel like it should be Saturday, May 14, 2011 (I think that is a Saturday, someone double check and get back to me.) I had a class on Sunday. A law school class, not a church class (which I always have on Sunday and expect to have on Sunday and want to have on Sunday.) The law school class was three hours long. The professor is a German man who teaches at the top law school in Italy. He was funny and engaging. He spoke again to my comparative law class today. So I'm glad he wasn't boring. Sunday night it got down to -23 degrees Fahrenheit. When it is -19 degrees at 8 AM your car makes horrible screeching noises when you start it. It was disturbing, and worrisome, but she seems to be doing okay. I dropped a class yesterday. I feel infinitely better about this semester. I was sitting in the class thinking about how I didn't think the professor was a very good teacher (not able to transfer her vast knowledge on the subject to us students very ...

I got back to Vermont last night, unpacked, and thought about how I wanted to be in AZ. Alas alack, here I am. In the library. I lost an hour of my life trying to get the new faster wireless internet to work on my computer (I'd like to light this laptop on fire.) Now I need to read for International Human Rights Law, Corporations, and Legal Ethics (my classes for tomorrow.) I've gotten one more grade back so far. Still waiting on four more. I hope this semester is less stressful. I hope it still flies by so I can go home in May and be there for the summer. Dear Vermont, you are a beautiful place. Coming out here has been so healthy for me for so many reasons. I think of who I was a year ago. Angry and bitter. Still too heartbroken to comprehend. I am not that anymore and I know that coming here helped me a lot. I don't truly love you though. You are not now, and never will be home. I don't miss you when I'm gone, and I dread coming back. Much of this is not yo...

I just stared and stared at it for about five minutes. One grade. That's all I've gotten back so far. I have five other classes I'm waiting on and I have absolutely no idea what my grades will be in them and I'm incredibly nervous to find out. But I poured four months of myself into this past semester and I felt drained and exhausted, and pretty much like I was never doing enough and was going to fail everything. Then, there it was. An A in a class I took in law school. Last year I worked so hard for some frustrating Bs and B pluses. The difficulty of this last semester was like the first two combined. Plus three billion. Times a million. Divided by one. Minus zero. Yeah. It was that hard. Long late nights in the library until 11 or 12 PM. Sleepless nights wondering if all the effort was worth it.  Weeping and crying over some of the awful reading I was doing (seriously, deciding to write a paper on the correlation between pornography and violent crime is emotiona...

Here it is, the last family birthday tribute of the year. Today is my brother Tyler's birthday. Tyler is the biggest dummy I know. Okay, I had to say that or Tyler would read this whole thing and think I don't love him. So Tyler is a mere fourteen months younger than me. When we were little he used to think he was older than me, nobody knows why, probably because he is crazy. He eventually realized he was younger, but it was too late, by then he was much taller than me and loved to pretend he couldn't see me at all when looking straight forward because I was so short. So growing up Tyler and I were always really close. We have a pretty similar sense of humor so we'd always be laughing really hard at things for a really long time, until Tyler got dumb and we fought for awhile. One thing about Tyler is that he can't play games. He is really competitive (like most of us Reynolds) but when he was younger he wouldn't take losing very well so he was banned fr...

So I gave you a couple days respite because day three was super long to read, and quite frankly, I knew we were all taking time off to spend Christmas with our families. My Christmas was most excellent and I hope yours was too. So, the last day of New York: Saturday morning we woke up and packed to check out of our hostel and then we headed over to the LDS temple. The interesting thing about the New York temple is that it has a meeting house above it. I thought it might be kind of weird to go to church in a building like that, especially above a temple, but after we were in the temple doing various things (I did baptisms) I went up there to change into street clothes and once I got off the elevator at the third floor, it was just like being in any other church building on a Sunday. After changing we decided to head over the Central Park to walk around and find a place to eat, because we were starving. I was in the temple for a LONG time. Kathy had done a two hour session and by t...

ADDENDUM: I forgot to tell you about my subway boyfriend on our first day in New York. At some point on Thursday we were on the subway when this guy hopped on with his electric guitar and his amp and started playing a song for all of us. Now as is typical in the subway there were several musicians at different stops, but this was the first guy that actually got onto a train, with an amp. It was loud, and, not very good. Afterward he wandered about asking for money. I had no cash, but when he got to me he said, "you're very beautiful." "Thank you." I responded. "Will you be me girlfriend?" "Um, well, I already have a boyfriend so I can't." "Oh well thank you anyway." Then he said something else, but all I understood was "hotel room." So I figured no matter what he had said, it was something I didn't want to hear so I just responded, "no." "Oh well thank you anyway miss." Then at the next stop h...