I confess, law school life has made me weird. Okay, more weird. I have never been normal, to be honest - my high school dorm friends have openly accepted my craziness which reached its peak before the SATs, included but not limited to the following: randomly bursting into silly high kick dance moves to my theme song (yes, I had my own theme song, and no, I am never going to sing it again), asking the same annoying question about what would be my next practice score (I was sixteen years old, give me a break here), and also had a habit of taking naps in other people's beds (I had a few favorites). In times of extreme stress and pressure, people take extreme measures to cope. We are all coping mechanisms struggling to survive in this intense world after all.
An unhealthy companion I have met on since last year is the evil hand, the hand that forces me to munch nonstop when I get nervous and stressed. Like the evil hand would sometimes make me finish a tub of sunflower seeds, a box of chocolate almonds, and sometimes even both in one sitting. The evil hand would coerce me with sweet and delusional words: it is trying to keep me awake while I'm doing my reading, fulfill my study breaks, and you might have figured out by now, the evil hand never rests. The hand which reaches again and again until my fingers scrape bottom and realize its all gone. The hand that is not mine and not under my control. No, stop! Stop!
After a semester of trying to fight the evil hand and failing on multiple occasions, I have tried to occupy the evil hand to take on a new habit. Feeding others! Study breaks (or even sometimes just study times) would be occupied by surfing the internet for recipes to feed my friends, scribbling down my new grocery list filled with ingredients for my next feeding project.
Brown and sad bananas gave me ideas. Brown and decadent cocoa banana bread!
And once in a while, the evil hand would do something even more evil, like baking browned butter carrot cake in the middle of the night. This would be justified under the words - You will never give into sleep when something is baking in the oven! So all for that, pecans would be toasted, butter would be browned, carrots grated. The hand would mix it all together and pop it into the oven.
Half was fed to my brief partner D the first day. The next day, I topped it with lemon cream cheese icing topped with lemon zest, and most of also went to D - we were practically going crazy and hungry spending almost all day writing that brief, the hand never offered help.
I think I kind of made peace with the evil hand for now. Wait, where did this Ben&Jerry ice cream come from....
