A Good Excuse for the Times I am Accused of Not Listening

I will leave Kelsey the honor of describing all of the fun parts of the weekend. I've been up since 4:40AM and can't really remember anything other than the endless amusement park from hell that today has been.

Remember when I said that after medical processing I would either be in JAG for sure or learn something new about myself? Well play that PBS "The More You Know" theme because I am just chock full of new knowledge. First thing's first- I am extraordinarily healthy. My blood pressure is rock solid and I can go silly-looking calisthenic exercises in my underwear all day long and I have astoundingly good bladder control.  If anything, I thought that some moles on my back might give me problems, but NOPE- not one question about them. In fact, of all of the invasive and embarrassing procedures that I had the pleasure of waiting in line for Disney-style over a seven hour period, the only one that gave me any trouble was the least embarrassing and least intrusive of them all: the hearing test.

I was shocked, given that I have been successfully hearing things for my entire life and I have never had an issue with... not being able to hear something. Apparently, this is because my left ear is SUPER-OVERPOWERED and can hear gnats breathing in a meadow a hundred miles away, while my right ear has tricked me into thinking it works by processing basic information and then letting my left ear fill in the gaps. To be sure that this was truly the case, I went for a $100 ear-flushing (which was almost comically unpleasant) and took the test again. Same results.

Now, this does not mean I am out of the running for being in JAG, but it does serve as a reminder that there are still many things left that might end my journey early. This is potentially one of them. The doctor at medical processing recommended me for a hearing waiver, which he said he thought I should have because being a lawyer does not require the best of hearing (so long as you can hear what the judge is saying, which I can because, as earlier mentioned, I have never been aware of a hearing problem before today). We'll see how that goes. My JAG liaisons think that everything will be fine, but they don't get the deciding vote.  I will keep the blog updated. If I can't be a JAG, that will be really unfortunate, but it'll be better to learn early so that I can start looking for prosecutor/public defender jobs somewhere.

In other news, I also found out that the paper I wrote for my death penalty seminar has been accepted for publication in a law journal. I am still waiting to hear back from other potential journals, so I won't say where it is being published yet, but it will be published somewhere. If that was a karmic tradeoff for my disqualifying hearing condition, then I would say it was a Pyrrhic victory. Then again, I don't believe in karma.

How I Write My Blog Nowadays

Step 1: Check date of last blog post.

Step 2: Feign incredulity that the last time I wrote was so long ago.

Step 3: Check phone for pictures I have taken since the date of the last blog post.

Step 4: Try to remember why I took those pictures and what I have been doing the past two weeks.

July 4th was an excellent holiday, as always. I had somewhat of a long weekend (Kelsey did not, she had to work Friday and Saturday) since I had Thursday off. I did go into the office on Friday, but halfway through the day the assistant to the Special Counsel came in and asked me (and the one other intern who was there) why we were there. So I left. Kelsey and I mainly watched Game of Thrones and shopped at Costco. On Sunday, Kelsey threw a Wimbledon party and we ate cucumber sandwiches and scones and strawberries and cream. After that we went to get lunch with Brian and Kay during their stopover at Union Station (we didn't eat- too much hand-whipped cream. As a side-note, whipping cream by hand with only one whipping-thingy is time consuming. I'm sure everyone else already knew that.). After lunch, we went to a surprise party that Josh put together for Steph W. It had to be a surprise because if Steph had known it was a party she would have brought all the food and drinks regardless of us telling her not to. Hence the party's theme: a "Niceness Intervention." I'm not sure it worked.

This weekend Kelsey and I will be going down to North Carolina for Tyler and Bitsy's wedding. As luck would have it, my medical exam for the Navy was scheduled for Monday near Richmond, so I got Kelsey a bus ticket back (a nice bus, with wi-fi) and she is letting me borrow her car to drive from NC to Fort Lee, which is considerably closer to NC than it is to DC. The Navy has gotten me a hotel room, which is nice, and told me to be up at 5:30AM the next morning to be prodded all day, which is... less nice, but understandable. So, on Monday I will either know that I am medically qualified to be a Navy JAG or I will learn about a disease or disorder that was otherwise unknown to me that disqualifies me. Good information to have, either way. 

Now, onto the lone picture that I found on my phone:

I suppose I took this on my way home from work last week because they were demolishing a building and I thought it looked cool. Thank goodness I got a picture of this instead of, you know, all of the actually interesting things I did over the past 11 days. I would have stolen Kelsey's pictures, as usual, but her phone lost them when she loaded music onto it.