And Such Is the Paradox of Living

I'm winding up my first year in law school; only three more weeks of class before finals. It has been a stressful but productive year. I've struggled to find time for everything, but that's par for the course, supposedly. I've barely done anything with my music — nothing new has been written, but I've managed to do a bit of mixing and mastering. My language study has fallen behind; I was keeping up with Mandarin and French in the fall (didn't find time for Spanish). Now I'm back to Hindi/Urdu, because I'll be returning to India this summer. I will be working in a legal internship in Hyderabad (although Telugu is the official state language, Urdu is most common in the capital of Andhra Pradesh), for the Council for Social Development, advocating for women, children, and disadvantaged social groups.

I don't get to do much reading outside of class material, but I'm currently working on Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I'm still on Swann's Way, but it is by far the most amazing novel I've ever read. The last french novel I read was Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma — fast-paced and a bit thrilling, whereas reading Proust is exactly like the first paragraph of Swann's Way:

Fumez-Vous?

A French family just came to our homestay, with a little girl, and we also happened to eat next to them at a restaurant last night before the blackout. I forgot to mention, the commies here like to conserve energy, so there are mandatory blackouts for a half-hour each night. Each district is designated a different half-hour block, but everyone is prepared and life goes on just fine without the juice. There are also random blackouts now and again due to weather or grid strain, but these generally only last five to fifteen minutes.

I was delighted to speak a bit of French with the little girl, who couldn't keep to her seat at dinner. We chatted a while, but the cutest was at one moment she lept over to me shouting "regardez!" One of her top front teeth was missing, and she was inserting a toothpick in and out of the gap. When they first arrived the girl was wearing Western clothes, but by then her parents had found her some jungle-hippy threads. Then she asked me for a smoke.