Irony Can Be Pretty Ironic Sometimes

On Monday I promised a post the next day about Facebook.com. Well, part of the reason that I didn't get anything posted on Tuesday about Facebook was because I spend way too much time ON Facebook. It's pretty addictive.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Facebook, and I'm assuming that's almost all of you because most of the readers of this blog are older than 22, it's kind of like Friendster but set up with college networks. Every single person at Vanderbilt who came here straight out of college has been on Facebook since undergrad, and almost everyone who didn't come here straight out of college has never been on Facebook. It's the great divide.

At first I resisted joining, because I never really got anything out of Friendster, and I never joined MySpace either. BUT, after seeing it in action with my roommate and a bunch of my friends, I decided that for my social life it was a necessary evil. And evil it is, at least in terms of sucking my time away from reading and sleep.

It's awesome. It's got great potential for digital flirting, along with helping me get to know people that I've met over the last few weeks. What's basically happened so far is that when I meet someone and have more than a 2-minute conversation with them, either I "facebook" them or they "facebook" me, meaning one of us requests that the other become our "facebook friends." As of 9:00 PM on Wednesday, September 27th, I have 57 friends, 52 of which are in the Vanderbilt network.

I think the two most fun aspects of Facebook are the photosharing and writing on people's "walls." With the photos, if you upload an album, say, for example, all the photos that you took at the tailgate for Vandy's first home football game, you can "tag" the people in each photo and tell Facebook who they are. I was tagged in five or six different photos people took that day and posted to Facebook, and because I was tagged you can see those photos when you look at my profile. Of course people can also comment on photos. As for the "wall," it's really just a messageboard on each person's profile where you can post comments to or about that person. And when you're looking at someone's profile and see a wall post that doesn't seem to make any sense, you can click on the "wall-to-wall" and see the two people's back-and-forth wall convo.

There are also groups set up, mostly for comedic value, although some are issue-oriented, but I'm not too into them. One of the few that I am in is called "Fantasy Gunner." The basic premise is that before each class you pick a "gunner," i.e. someone who's always raising their hand, and you get points for every time they raise their hand and get called on. You get bonus points for all kinds of different things: if they reference a case we haven't read yet to slyly demonstrate that they've read ahead, if they pose a "hypothetical," if they go talk to the professor at the front of the room after class ends...

A couple weeks ago Facebook introduced a new feature called the "newsfeed." There was actually a bit of an uproar about it and it was in the news. Now when you log on to the site, the home page you see has a list of what all of your friends have been doing on facebook over the last couple days: who's written on who's wall, who's added whom as a friend, how many of your friends are now officially attending that party on Saturday, who's posted photos from the weekend. I think even the people who were up in arms about it at first have got to admit that it's pretty convenient.

Anyway, if you're interested in Facebook, I recommend checking it out. You used to have to have a college e-mail address in order to sign up, but they just (as in yesterday) rolled out a new system where people in the real world can sign up. Then you can search for me and we can become Facebook friends. Yay.

When I first signed up I was at such a disadvantage compared to the younger people who had been on forever, because none of my friends were on, so none of them had posted photos with me in them and tagged me, so for the longest time the only photos I had on my profile were ones that I had uploaded and tagged myself in (which is, like, a total faux pas and totally lame).

The General Deal Down Here

Part of the reason that I'm re-starting the blog is because a few people have actually asked me to get it going again because they enjoyed it, which was a little surprising and a lot flattering. But another part is that I've been doing a pretty poor job of keeping in touch with the folks back in the Northeast about what my life down in Nashville at law school is like. So while the Clubhouse will continue to have musings about Roadhouse II on DVD or the fundamental nature of Simpsky, at least for the next couple weeks I'm gonna try and catch y'all up with what I've been up to and how law school is going. There've been a lot of funny stories and things that have come up that I've been excited to share with people, either in person or through the blog, so I just hope I can remember them all and get them up on the web. That way when I come back to New York we can just hang out without me having to recap the whole last couple months of my life, and it'll be just like I never left. (I'm using the word "left" for lack of a better synonym, but for the record, I have not "left" the Northeast.)

For the record, I have not developed a southern accent and do not apologize for my use of "y'all" above. I believe, but can not verify, that I used that word before I came down here, and its usefulness is undeniable.

I can basically sum up August 16th through today in one sentence: I've done more schoolwork than ever before in my life and I've been drinking ridiculous amounts that rival undergraduate levels, if not surpass them. Of course it's been a long time since undergrad, and the times I drank a lot are not the most lucid memories, so it's tough to guage the second part of that sentence. That's another running theme during the last six weeks: I am OLD. Most of my good friends down here are 21, 22 or 23.

One of those 21-year-olds is my roommate Dani. That situation has been about as good as I could have hoped for. She's cool and totally Northeastern. She's from Strong Island so she's got a bit of B&T in her, but she's fucking hilarious. Here are a couple photos of us at approximately 3:30 in the morning last Friday night in our apartment. Friday was parents' visitation day, so we went out to dinner with both sets of parents and decided when we went out at 10:30 to just "take it easy" because it'd been a long day and we both had to see our parents early Saturday morning. Several hours of beerpong and flip cup later, we had a few people back to our apartment for some more drinks, and Dani and I ended up on the floor.




Please note the glass of scotch in the lower righthand corner of the second photo. There aren't many of my classmates who drink scotch (and yet, I'm personally burning through the gigantic bottle of Black Label at an amazing pace). Sometime last week I was being totally unproductive so I decided that it would be best for me to just go to sleep and wake up early to get my reading done. I had a bit of a cough so I decided to dose myself with Nyquil in order to ensure a good night's sleep. Of course, then Dani and I decided to hang out and have a heart-to-heart about boys and whatnot (there's a fair degree of drama, as one would expect with a 21-year-old girl who just broke up with her boyfriend). An hour later I was three or four scotches deep on top of the Nyquil and was having difficulty forming proper noun-and-subject sentences, but it was actually one of the more enjoyable evenings I've had down here.

This post is already much longer than I imagined it and has taken more time than I had allotted myself to finish it, so I've got to cut it off and come back to some of this stuff tomorrow. I'm leaving the law school now to go home and swim some laps-- I've been very good about swimming five or six times a week since classes started, but because of all the drinking I've probably actually put on a couple pounds since I got down here. Then tonight I'm going to my beginner swing class (yeah, das right) with my friends Maggie, Ashlee and Kristin, followed by a couple hours drinking at Chili's (which is donating 100% of their profits across the country tonight to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital) and then back to my place to watch the first episode of "Studio 60" on DVR. Then it'll be up at 6:00 AM tomorrow to get to the law school early enough to get a coveted close parking spot... I mean to get a headstart on my work.

College is fun.

Tomorrow I'll introduce you to the concept of Facebook.

Due to Popular Demand, the Return of Your Regularly Scheduled Blog

Allow me to start this off with an apology: I'm sorry that I've gone so long without posting anything. The vacation from posting coincided with Mohawk Party and the vacation from work in late July. Then I was getting ready to move down to Nashville, then visiting the fam in San Francisco, then driving down to Nashville, then putting together all my furniture, then doing orientation, then starting classes....

Anyway, game on. I'm back, and I'm going to make it a priority to keep posting. In fact I'm gonna go ahead and GUARANTEE five posts per week. Anything less than five a week and you get your money back.

I've got some catching up to do, so I'll start where I left off. Amazingly, there are only two photos of me with the mohawk that I had for two full weeks, and they were taken with a camera phone. It's not that amazing when you consider that I didn't see Canoni during those two weeks, and he's the only one of us that has a camera and takes pictures.

So here's the best picture of me with a mohawk. (Actually, there's a better picture of me with a mohawk, but it's on my Tennessee driver's license. Can't wait til the first time I get pulled over.)