Taradise.

My brother is in Hong Kong and Claire is preparing for finals. I went out with Rahul last night, and I'm not in the mood to carouse. But when left to my own devices on a weekend night such as this, I invariably end up drinking by myself, listening to sad pop songs, and debating whether or not to call my ex-girlfriends. Glum nostalgia is fun. I was also planning on having some wine, taking a bath, and weeping while reading Brokeback Mountain. But Proulx's publisher decided to charge 10 bucks for her 60 page short story, so I ended up reading the damn thing last week at Borders, where crying would have been socially inappropriate.

My office party was last night. I met an associate who I can honestly say is borderline retarded. Either that, or she's got the finest Tara Reid impression I've ever seen. She's hot and was, uh, in a particularly accessible mood last night. This girl was working what Claire and I like to call the Pat Markey m.o.--throw everything you can on the wall, and see what sticks. She ended up falling down a couple times and getting kicked out of Lalo's. On an unrelated note, my work husband has run his number of firm conquests to three. This is mindblowing to me, because he has no game whatsoever.

An addendum to my last post. Despite my mild misgivings about her politics, Claire is one of the few people that I've met who doesn't fall into the "impoverished as a noble abstraction" complaint that I lodged against liberals. When she worked on her own piece of public interest litigation, she was her firm's interface with the class plaintiffs. I may well be romanticizing her, as boyfriends are apt to do, but I don't think she ever stopped viewing these women and their families as human beings, rather than some avatar of societal wrong, or the mere means to right that wrong. I love and admire her for this.