Habits: Cooking

I now have a kitchen gadget that sings to me.

Okay, maybe not sings exactly, but this lovely creature plays "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" when it starts making me rice and a different song when it's finished. And I guess more importantly, it cooks stuff really well. I bought this with the hope that it'll make packing tasty, healthy lunches for law school more convenient.

Like fixing my sleep schedule (which is going really well, actually!), cooking on a daily basis is another important habit that I'm trying to ingrain in myself before orientation begins. In college, I didn't do much cooking at all and ate a lot of unhealthy junk from fast food places. It's not that I didn't like healthier food, but I had a lot of classwork and a massively screwed-up sleep schedule that stressed me out and didn't put me in the right mindset to start teaching myself more about cooking. I had really good intentions; I even got a CSA box every week. But school-related activities and my unfamiliarity with how to prepare the stuff I got just led to me feeling guilty when I opened the door to get milk and saw the sad, neglected kohlrabi sitting there.*


I didn't learn to cook growing up, unless you think shoving a slice of cheese between two pieces of toast and calling in "grilled cheese" counts as cooking, which I don't. (It's still good, though.) I could do very basic stuff— follow directions on boxes, scramble eggs, that sort of thing—but I never really got into proper cooking until I was out of college and living with seventeen roommates.

As a member of the co-op, I had to take on five hours (or "lumps" as they were called, since the time for each task could vary a bit) of chores/responsibilities. In the year I was living there, I did dish-washing, bathroom-cleaning, floor-mopping, newsletter-editing, and cooking. Every day, there were two people assigned to cook, a two-lump head chef, and a one-lump cook who basically just chopped stuff. I one-lumped a few nights a week with some of the more experienced co-opers, and I began to get a lot more comfortable with all aspects of cooking, from basic prep to the more creative aspects of putting together a meal.

After living at the co-op, cooking seemed a lot less daunting, but it's still not a daily habit. In law school, I don't expect I'm going to be making myself three home-cooked meals a day, but I'd like to try to make my lunch most days. I got this awesome lunch jar so I can bring stuff that will stay hot or cold. In these last several weeks leading up to orientation, my goal is to cook at least one meal per day that I'm at home. That way, by the time that law school really gets going, I won't have to attempt to work in a new routine on top of all the other stress I'll be under.

On that note, I'm off to make lunch.

*I'm still not entirely sure I know what to do with kohlrabi.

links of interest:

Just Bento - a good resource for packed lunch recipes.
The Cooking Adventures of a Tired Law Student - a recent law grad's cooking blog.
Cooking for Geeks - really fascinating if you're interested in the science behind cooking.

Habits: Sleep

There are sixty-three days left before law school orientation starts, a month and handful of days until I move to Minneapolis, and I have some really important stuff to take care of. I, of course, have to deal with all the forms and fees and everything that goes along with matriculating into law school, but I have some less-official but equally-important business to attend to: changing old habits and cultivating new ones.

Top on my list of priorities is to get my sleeping habits in line. I tend to be a night owl, but staying up until two or three (or five or six) probably won't be the ideal schedule for law school. And trying to start waking up at seven in the morning after months of going to bed around that time seems like it would just make getting a successful start in law school that much harder. The recent trip to Minneapolis actually forced me to wake up at a normal-person time (we had to start driving at 8-9am to get a full day of driving in), so I'm already on a much better cycle than I was a few weeks previous. Still, with a couple of months ahead of me and all that time to potentially screw up this great sleep schedule I have going, I'm a little worried. Right now, I'm staying with some friends who have 9-5 jobs and are up and about in the mornings, but soon I'll be left to my own devices. I need to create some sort of plan to keep this up.

I've experimented in the past with various ways to wake myself up the morning, but approaching my schedule that way may have been a little misguided. No matter what wonderful intentions I have the night before, no matter how many individual alarms I set, my brain in the morning never has my long-term best interests in mind. I'm frustratingly good at stumbling around in the morning, turning off multiple alarms without really waking up. But all of this comes back to being able to get to sleep on time at night. Even when I am on a normal-ish sleep schedule as I am now, my bed time tends to creep later and later, and I think I'm going to have to put some strict measures in place to stop that happening in law school. The first (and probably most important) of those being: no computer in bed. The bed is for sleeping, not drowsy Pinterest or Tumblr-browsing.

Also important, and this kind of goes into another post I intend on writing, is exercise. I'm not planning to start triathlon-training, but I want to set aside time for regular physical activity, if only to break up the monotony of sitting and reading all day. There's been some recent research that indicates exercise and sleep quality are linked (though there are some interesting responses to that claim too), so it's possible that it might contribute to feeling better in the mornings. I haven't been very active since had reconstructive ACL surgery a few years back, but this lull before the 1L storm is probably the best time to start up again. More on this later.

Somewhat-related link:

Above the Law - You Guys Aren't Getting Enough Sleep, Are You?