American Planes

Flying on a plane is always wonderful.

When we went to visit my cousin Bebop for his high school graduation last month, there was a man on the plane successfully executing the loudest snoring I had personally experienced being generated by a human being.  I could hear this guy snoring from several rows away over the roaring of the jet engines.  This was the kind of snoring that illuminates for you where the turn of phrase "sawing logs" came from.  And then you realize that the expression came from the days of manual saws, and in fact this is more like a "chainsaw" kind of log-sawing sound, or a "coordinated orchestra where all of the instruments have been replaced with buzzsaws" kind of sound, or perhaps an "entire paper mill processing a tree into pulp in under a minute" kind of sound.  That's the kind of loud snoring this guy was producing.

On the way home from that trip, out of revenge and a sense of wanting to enhance the suitability of the plane's name, I proceeded to conk out for the entire four hour flight back on the dreamliner (while Husband patiently tried to type on his laptop despite having me sprawled out into his seatspace).

Even knowing that no one could ever snore louder than the guy I heard on that one flight, the latest flight I took was destined to be terrible.  We flew last Thursday night - the night before the Day of Independence miraculously and wonderfully fell on a Friday.

like it specifies in Article III.

But that had its consequences, which were primarily consequences to the sanity of those waiting in line for security at the airport.

Specifically, the lines were insanely long and insanely unfair.  We had a moment where one of the TSA agents was going to shuffle us into either the teal line or the red line.  (Of course we couldn't go in the green line because that was the TSA pre-check line and of course I can't GET pre-check because the waiting time for an interview is currently, literally, five months.)  And though maybe I'm not illustrating this quite right, you can see that the teal line is three times as long as the red line.

It's not a great picture, but it's better than the rage-versions I drew on the back of a blank page of a brief while on the plane.

You can guess which line we ended up in.

Of course, the gray line hadn't even started when we got in line: they opened it up once we were a little bit into the red line and just stuck there.  In sum, we had plenty of time to ponder the gross unfairness of the line system.  It was both unjust and inefficient, which is like a double whammy to an attorney with an econ degree.

Once we were on the plane, Husband and I didn't get to sit together, which was meh but okay since I had some work to do.  I watched out the window a bit, half-listening to a small British child discussing with her mother the merits of buses while realizing I forgot my earplugs.  When we reached cruising altitude, I (with great resignation) pulled out my stack of papers to read and BAM -

the girl in front of me reclines DIRECTLY into my face.

Here is a public service announcement for the people of the earth: if you are not SLEEPING on the plane, don't recline!  Spare your posture and sit the heck up.  You will also be sparing yourself my undying loathing to the extent that interests you.

I am trying to work with the seat in front of me three inches from my face, realizing I can't look up any cases because airplane wifi is $19 and essentially worthless anyway, when the girl in front of me starts watching a movie.  Out loud.  With no earphones.

Which is, in more orderly societies, punishable by 18 months hard labor cleaning TSA rubbermaid bins with nothing but a toothbrush MOISTENED BY YOUR OWN SALIVA AND...

and then I saw the sunset throwing magenta light against a mountain glowing against a lavender twilight.  I glimpsed my own profile cast in sharp relief on the cabin wall by the orange sunset fire from the opposite window.

It was very instagrammable.

And I then noticed that the girl in front of me was taking a photo out the window too.  While her movie still played on out loud.  As she ignored it.

Sunset or no, it was lucky that we landed soon after.  Lucky for her, that is.  

Work Clothes

It’s a sad truth that a lot of my decision to become a lawyer was motivated by Legally Blonde.*  Wearing pink, practicing law, and teaching everyone about gender discrimination: that was the dream.

For awhile I was pretty pleased to be at least 1 for 3 on that - practicing law.  And the truth is, I don't have the fashion stamina of our fictional friend Elle.  I didn't go to class in law school in designer dresses; I went in yoga clothes regardless of whether I was going to pretend to do yoga that day.

In sum, I like style but I’m horribly inattentive to it. I generally treat it about the same as my high school boyfriend treated me - sometimes I spend time on it but other times I completely forget about it because I’m off playing laser tag with my friends.  (This is the most accurate metaphor I’ve ever created, and I was a poetry major.)

So I go through these swings, particularly at work. I’ll have times when the only thing I wear to work is the work pants I bought because while being cut like work pants, they are actually pretty much made out of black sweatpants fabric. I have a similar skirt that I bought at Costco for $12 which is, again, made of sweatpants fabric.  Maybe literally, though I'm not sure.  Okay, okay, I actually have two sweatpants-skirts: one in gray and one in black. I wear them a lot. I have five plain white blouses. I have some long-sleeved t-shirts with just enough detail on them for me to I call them "work shirts" and wear them to work, silently daring anyone to call me on it.

At some point in the last year (and after having spent my first year out of school wearing a boring suit every day) I decided to switch it up. So now there are select times when I decide to wear very impractical things that I stubbornly decided are what a lawyer should look like, mixed in with the fact that I actually hate how boring lawyers look.

N.B. Most of my coworkers are dudes and you can’t tell them apart other than by hair color/quantity because they are all wearing the same grey pants and blue or white work shirt. They actually get kind of mad when I point out when two or more of them are wearing the exact same outfit on any given day. "Hey, you guys match!" It’s a fun game for me.  

Question:  If you line up three in a row of them wearing the same outfit, will they explode into points of light, vanish, and award points like in the jewel game on my phone?

Whether I’m dressing stylishly or not is, I think, inversely proportionate to the number of billable hours I worked three days before.

And when I do decide to hang out with style, I go in unique directions. For instance, my new work pants are awesome wide-legged white pants with pockets (a la Veronica Corningstone)...

which I recently wore with a baby-pink ruffled shirt and a beige lace cardigan and a belt with a bow on it. I looked a little like Louis Quatorze via 1973:

 Yesterday I dressed like I was going to a Republican summer picnic campaign fundraiser - ie red sleeveless dress under a white linen blouse with tan sandals. I have a pink, blue, and green flowered blouse with a black sequined collar; several enormous statement necklaces I wear like ties (and occasionally I will just jack Husband’s actual ties and wear those, since they’re very cute and he never wears them); varying dresses in teal, hot pink, and patterns.

This whole situation is aided and abetted by my grandma, who is a very stylish former model who likes to buy clothes that are too big for her and then give them to me. It’s from her I got my leopard-print silk blouse and the red sleeveless dress and the bright yellow blazer.

I think it’s my one rebellion against the severe gray-panted, white-walled, blond-wood office aesthetic I live in where we get e-mails from the office manager instructing us to put plastic lids on our ceramic coffee mugs to keep from spilling coffee on the coffee-colored carpet. If I’m going to wear heels to work, they are going to be my hot-pink patent leather ones.**

...or my beige 4-inch-heeled Mary Janes. Or the gray Cuban heels. I have black pumps (also with four inch heels - heh) but those are only for court, and no one ever takes me to court. So there.

The net result of my swings in style is that I alternate between excessively boring and functional and borderline caricature of a lady lawyer. So I dress, on average, like a usual attorney - the standard deviation’s just higher than you’d expect.

* It came out when I was in 8th grade.  Like that's an excuse.

** Sassy came to visit last week and when she drove up she looked at my outfit (black blouse, black mesh eyelet overskirt over a hot pink underskirt, hot pink heels), she marveled, “Did you wear that to work today? Wearing pink and lawyering? You are living the dream!” Sassy always makes me feel better about my life decisions.

Implausibly long hair, plausibly don't care

Upon re-reading yesterday’s post, I realized that it may be considered embarrassing for a grown-up lady professional to be measuring her achievements relative to Disney princesses. I don’t seem like the type of 28-year-old who you would expect to have a closet Disney princess attachment. I didn’t have the early signs: never really liked Lisa Frank, wasn’t a fourteen-year-old who insisted on having glitter pens and replacing standard tittles with hearts, etc.  Even now, my interests include sarcasm, college football, and manliness contests.

But I am not going to apologize for liking Disney princesses. And I do NOT want to hear how they are anti-feminist.  I do not want to hear it because in a world where women’s stories are marginalized and treated as less important, the Disney princess is in fact prioritized as the central character whose existence and actions motivate the whole of the narrative and who play an extremely positive role of simultaneous dynamic change and stabilization/civilization within the context of the film.  In other words, even when a different character is in charge of decapitating the villain, it's the princess who is making the good things happen.

Look, folks, I have an English degree and a fondness for pop culture. I once wrote a 30-page paper on feminine agency and power in Clueless. You don’t want to tangle.  Leave me my princesses.