My watch died in Tijuana.  I was waiting in front of the gigantic orange dusted beams made of concrete, attached to the sign “US Customs and Border Patrol,” next to 6 or 8 lanes of cars, in the middle of a line of white tourists with baseball caps fringed with sweat stains, brown families with samsonite and happiness and something else I couldn’t figure out, and black security guards with sunglasses and 360-degree brimmed hats to keep the Mexican side of the border out of their eyes.

I flicked my wrist and brought my watch into view.  The face, blank.

I blinked twice before I looked at it again.  I bought it off Amazon.com thinking that it was a good deal.  The cheapest and the bestest, as my aunt from Meerut would say.  She was the only from India that could make my sister’s wedding; everyone else who wanted to come, couldn’t.  My uncle and aunt in India who spent hours and hours of telephone calls with my mom in Houston in the middle of the night, or early in the morning, imagining each detail of my sister’s wedding, writing down that piece of their imagination, and buy items according to their imagination-map, couldn’t make it to the wedding.

My watch was solar-powered.  I thought the Tijuana sun would make it stronger.

We were walking to the concrete orange monster structure from my friend’s house; it was a one-night deal since I live so close to the border.  Tijuana is easy from LA if you have a car, money, and a U.S. passport.

My friend told me that there have been marches in Tijuana in opposition to Arizona’s anti-immigrant law.  They were massive, I think.  My friend’s friend pointed at my friend’s shirt, laughed, and said “get out of here Arizona!”  It had “southwestern” design on it.  Throughout the night, he oscillated between hiding his shirt with his borrowed jacket or saying it was from New Mexico.  Each time, everyone around him giggled, including him.  I even got in on the joke once or twice, but was careful not to overdo it.

We searched for food at 3am on La Sexta, and found tortas of savory mayonnaise and the thinnest portobello mushroom slices, skinny avocado pieces, and onions and who knows what else.  I usually hate portobello mushrooms, but it was good that night.  The bread was flaky and soft, and not anything like any torta I’ve ever had.  My friend told me that the owner of the torta restaurant was deported.  He lived in Riverside, and he said he couldn’t live there no more.  He was on the run, my friend said.

I look at my partner and told her it was dead.  I looked around, she looked at me, and she smiled at me below her faux ray-bans. I pursed my lips, shuffled my feet forward, bumped someone’s samsonite, and waited.

This is what happens when school is about to start.

But I’ve dug myself into a whole hole this time, procrastinating a bit and piecing through various legal theories in my head when they should have been on paper.

4 hours later…

There are a lot of things I would rather do right now than not sleep.  I am not done, but I will sleep because I’ve gotten past that verge, where completion cannot come unless you do what’s biologically necessary.

Oh, the grave ridiculousness of this late night rant.

Dear Friends – Please come out to this conference on April 13th and 14th, 2007 at UCLA School of Law. It will be an opportunity to discuss some of the most critical issues of our time, to discuss Critical Race Theory and where its been and where its going, and to engage with practitioners, organizers, students, and others invested in contributing to and building a racial justice movement.

Attendance is FREE and spots are filling up quick so please follow this link to register and to check out the agenda: http://www.law.ucla.edu/home/apps/crs/.

I tab pieces of time through the music I listen to, the people I meet at certain moments, the work I do, the things I read, the ebbs and flows I notice. These markers are there for convenience, but they are also framed by a strange neurosis – that at any moment, things could be taken away, that at any moment, things could be drastically different, that at any moment, things are no longer the same. Its as if the gargantuan processes of change that move the planets, that make our worlds work, were siphoning their energy specifically into me and my life, into my developing mind, my itty bitty heart. As if I was singled out to realize that things are always changing.

But then, I have always had a penchant for drama.

This might explain why I have this love-hate relationship with change. I often welcome it, and lately I realize I thrive off of it. But I have historically dreaded it.

Seeing as how my first semester of law school is coming to a quick end, I am looking back. And here’s what I realize: some people I’ve met I will know forever, some only for another few years; some ideas I’ve encountered will serve as the bedrock of my working life, some will be irreconcilable and plague me; some potential relationships will come to fruition, some will not; some conceptions about social justice I will latch onto, some I will discard; some simple things I will remember that I love, some I will not; sometimes I will cry, sometimes I will not; sometimes I will laugh, sometimes I will not; sometimes I will make someone else laugh, sometimes I will not; some people I will respect because of their politics, some I will respect because of the way they teach, some I will respect because of the way they act, some I will respect because of who they’re not, some I will respect because they need it, some I will respect because they’re just good people.

In other words, I haven’t seen much new or much old. Maybe its because change has its way of staying the same, and that it may be possible that I don’t dread it as much as I thought I did.

So how do I make this bloggable? Have I gotten so deep into this that it becomes near ridiculous to bust out another blog post? Sometimes, it feels as if it does. But once I get my head out of the books, I naturally arrive here, probably because I haven’t written in a while and because it feels normal, in a sense, to be here.

So what’s been going on? I’ve been learning that the lives I read about in cases – who have been shot, stabbed, battered, wounded, defrauded, misrepresented, left to die, left with a bad deal – are mere characters that explain a staggering array of rules that are designed to govern us, that set up normative bounds within which we can play and do whatever we like. But once we cross those bounds, sirens abound.

The characters are many and they are mostly women, people of color, and others who live their lives in the margins. Most of our law is designed by problematizing their suffering. And yet, I see a discrepancy, where are a disproportionately high number of men of color behind bars, immigrants in detention, people shot without compensation. Clear indications that the law doesn’t work for the people that made it the way it is.

But is what I am seeing true? That it was “designed” by those most residing in the margins? I’m not sure – if it weren’t for people challenging the status quos of their time, the law wouldn’t be where it is now.

I feel that I have a lot more to learn – I’m only 8 weeks into this mess. Come back to me in a year and I’ll tell you what inconsistency I obsess about then.

In the meanwhile, I’ll keep my nose in the books.

I was cooking this in advance of this week, my second week of classes in law school. I figure I could make a big pot of black beans and consume it in bowls and plates, with forks and spoons, atop tostadas or inside flour tortillas until I finish it. It worked last week.

It is bubbling, this pot. I realize I had left the cover on and kept it a little warmer than I should have, causing a few bubbles to escape eagerly onto my stovetop. Those bubbles had to be eager to ruin the perfect white of my oven; they saw how clean it was and realized that it needed some character, some flare.

The bubbles and the resulting purple dye that comes when the bubble is burst is a reminder that this perception of reality is never clean, never pure. As I dive into the second week of law school, I’m realizing that these rules, these cases, these strange situations that we are made to think about are about to get more complicated. I read maybe five or so cases last week and they laid out the rules in a nice way. Our laws are increasingly coming out of people’s situations, when someone decides to sue someone else, they are deciding to use law and make it too.

And people are complicated. Our relations and our beliefs and our ambitions are complex. As I see more and more cases – peoples’ stories – coming my way, I also feel the purple soaking in. The more I read, the more it becomes apparent how dirty things are about to get.

• I heard the word ‘notwithstanding’ a lot. I forsee that word becoming a part of my daily lexicon within a few months.

• There were a handful of desis in the crowd. Naturally, I am the see-the-desi-on-the-street-and-gawk kind of person so I saw the desi in the law school and proceeded to gawk. I noted the number of times I gawked; it was more than five. So there’s more than a handful of us there.

• Alumni and Staff focused on the word ‘ambiguity’ and words in its general vicinity a lot in their panels. As in, ‘embrace the ambiguity’ and ‘love the gray areas’ and ‘law is not exact.’ Apparently, the law is ambiguous.

• I feel my blog will slowly become a bundle of lawyerly phrases, notwithstanding I have enough time to write in this darn thing (Did I use that right?)

• This was the first time it was mandatory for me to wake up before 9:00am, in any time zone. I swear, the waking up will get me.

• I feel my blog will slowly become all about law school, especially during the first year.

• I need to go to sleep now from waking up so early today and to wake up early tomorrow. Why did I sign up for this?