Wow, can you believe it, two days till Christmas! Unfortunately this year I didn't make it out of the city. The lack of vacation days, my cousins visiting and law school stress resulted in zero planning for the holiday. Given my blank 250-word essay for Yale, and the many scholarship essays in need of being written, I tried to convince myself that it would actually be a smart choice to stay in the city and get some work done. Wishful thinking, of course. It isn't easy with so many visitors dropping in and out of my apartment. I had a hard time saying no to traveling college students, who reminded me of my homeless self not so long ago. As a result, three teenagers now occupied my couch, gobbling up all the food in the fridge and talking "xi` tin" 9-X dialogues I'm too old to understand. Ah, youth.

I love the first week of December! December 7 features me dragging home at 10pm drained and stressed - what can you do, when your boss is freaked out, it's your duty to also sweat - to find a big, very purple envelop hovering under Mugg's giant grin. "It says NYU", he did a little dance. I hungrily tore the envelop apart, then did a long ridiculous dance myself.

In at NYU!

What a great relief, since this means that I have an option to stay in the Big Apple, keep my perfect apartment, breathe Central Park air, and well, enroll at a top-5 (US News ranking) law school in the nation! NYU is also ranked 2nd nationwide in International Law, which is a field I am interested in pursuing. Woohoo!


And today, my status checker changed to "Decision Rendered" at Cornell. The admission office was nice enough to tell me the decision on the phone - I'm in, and invited for the Dean's Scholarship! I have been scared multiple times by Mugg's endless snow storms tales from his undergrad years in Ithaca, but still am extremely happy. Cornell is a beautiful place, and has much to offer with its small class size and a liberal-arts-ish environment.


Five down - still 10 more to go, including one visible elephant i.e. the Yale apps. I definitely plan to finish it before the holidays, before the flurry of visitors will keep me breathless. Where I end up next year will largely depend on where Mugg will be, so crossing fingers for us both!

And on a non-law yet amazing note: a good friend of mine told me yesterday that she is pregnant! I can't even describe how happy I am, for I know that this baby will be in the best hands for all his/her life. My friend used an expression that I've never heard before, that she cannot wait to fall in love with her child. Wow. I feel like we take for granted that we must love our family, yet know fully well that it sometimes is the hardest thing. But to be truly fall in love with your child, your mom, your dad, how amazing that must feel like. I'm planning to stop by a baby store to get the expectant mom a present, and also a gift for the new-born son of my middle-school friend. She was the first to get married, and the first to have a kid, pioneering the 86-ers rite to adulthood. The new lives of my friends make me feel a bit more grown up, and definitely put my trivial stress on work and law school in perspective. Yes, it is a soft and gentle reminder - there are more important things in life.

:-)

Miami still awes me with its sense of space. Every night, Mugg and I take a walk along the surburban neighborhood of Pembroke, whose concentric circles of houses interlaced into a sort of maze. We'd walk for hours, talk about our future, stop to observe a cute wandering cat, chase each other through the high neatly trimmed trees lining down the road. It feels funny to be in surburbia.

On Thanksgiving night, we joined a party with another Chinese family at their house. The husband is an amazing cook. My eyes grew in bewilderment as he glided his big, iron chef knife across the cutboard, twirled home-grown vegetables into neat stacks and molded pearl-white buns. I sat with the parents, listening amorously to their tales of the early days in the US, while Mugg engaged in a Wii battle with the family's kids, a 6-year-old and a teenager. The Chinese lady nudged me with her elbow, "Your boyfriend is so playful!" Mugg's mom nodded, "He grew up a good kid." I suddenly felt warm from the inside out. It has been too long since I last rocked in a comfortable chair, listened to small talk, and stuffed my tummy with a delicious family dinner.

The next day, we went to South Beach, where the warm sunlight and light breeze immediately knocked us into a long nap on the sand. I woke up dazed, staring straight into the immensely open sky above, and blanked out for a full minute before remembering that I was still on Earth. It's the oddest feeling to realize that - oh right, I'm human.

At midnight, we went with Mugg's friend to catch the first show of Ninja Assassin - a bloody, anime-esque action saga that features very real six packs from, guess who, the girly Korean singer Bi/Rain. Albeit the (always) unnecessary Hollywood violence, I was pretty amused, especially when an Europol agent snidely commented that "This guy [Bi] looks more like he belongs to a boyband than in a ninja club" - right before being slashed in two, of course.

At 3am, as the battles wore off the screen, we walked through the empty arches of the Miami mall and drove home. I rolled down the window, so the wind blew my hair into a mess and scattered Gun N' Roses "Take me down to paradise city, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty..." along the highway. The smell of the night was intoxicated.

"Why is the sky blue?" I turned to Mugg, "Just imagine if it were some odd colors - like bad-cheese yellow."

"It's the way molecules in the air reflecting light. It just happens to be in a spectrum that our eyes can see. And it just happens to be in the blue range of the spectrum."

Seriously, it is but a stroke of random luck that the molecules float around in the right way, so that I get the mood-lifting joy each time I look at the sky?

I took a deep breath and held tight to Mugg's hand, floored with gratitude. Oasis came on the radio. And I suddenly felt like I could live forever.

Seriously, all I want for this Christmas, and next year, and the next ten years to come, is a JR1.

For 0L-wanna-be-1L, "JR1" has suddenly become the holy grail of our life-long quests. The famous "JR" is Josh Rubenstein, the brand new Dean of Admission at Harvard Law and a graduate of class of 2006. Being paid to research, I quickly found out that he had worked briefly on the Hill prior to HLS, and joined Bain for 3 years upon obtaining the JD. So this guy, in my guess, is probably in his early 30's. Is it not scary, that someone so young holds entirely in his hands the power to guide my career, life, and happiness?

JR1 is the phone interview made by the Dean, a prequisite for a follow-up acceptance call (coined the "JR2"). While a JR1 doesn't guarantee a JR2, the absence of one decidedly leads to a rejection/waitlist. Words on the streets are about 1,000 applicants out of 7,000-8,000 files were offered a JR1. And of these 1,000, about 750-850 were admitted. Since late October, the online 0L have shrunken to a bunch of neurotic, nervous wrecks as the first JR1 trickled out. Based on last year's statistics, JR2 will start coming out the few days before Thanksgiving for those who have had their JR1.

My endless wait, and the agony of each minute during such wait, has knotted my mind in a frenzy. Thanksgiving is coming in a few days. I'm hoping that the Miami sunshine and the delicious home-cooked meals of Muggy's mom will ease my sore disappointment. But oh I know it is gonna hurt, long and throbbing even after decisions have all rolled out next spring.

To quickly summarize the season's yield so far:
- Acceptances: Duke (giant envelop), Georgetown (tiny envelop), UMichigan (a big package with an USB and hand-written note from the Dean complimenting my work at NERA)
- Schools who have rolled out acceptances but haven't made decisions on my file: UCLA, UVirginia, Berkeley
- Schools I still not complete: Northwestern (pending interview), Stanford (oh Dean Reese, will you ever fax my form?), Yale (if I ever muster enough wit to write the infamous 250-words essay)
- Endless wait: NYU, Columbia, BU, UPenn, Cornell, Harvard

When I was a kid, I thrived at reading. I was that kid who picked the thickest book on the shelf, who pored through the classic novels (The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, White Fang etc) before hitting puberty. I pretty much spent all my allowances renting books at the many used bookstores around Hanoi. Do you remember those, with musty smell and stacks of uneven volumes protruding from their fading shelves? The novels I read were published in the early 20th century, on yellowish paper so thin that there were always holes on them, and bind together with thread. I would buy book covers and neatly wrapped them up to preserve their fragile spines. Books were my great friends; they were magical, joyous, and never failed to transport me to their magical worlds.

Last weekend, I met up with Yuko for a 5 miles race to kick off the famous New York marathon in Central Park. The air was crisp and cold; the leaves have started turning colors. I haven't seen Yuko in a while - she was busy with the new job and I with applications. It was good to catch up - we talked about a friend's upcoming wedding, Stuyvesant Town and the East Village life I have not frequented since moving out. We of course talked about Yuko's love life and a recent disappointment. I tried to encourage her but knew that when one was waiting, any wait no matter no short was excruciating. We talked about the loneliness of the city - one easily got lost in such a big place. But it will be okay, we consoled each other, because we are young, and the night is young.