I'm not sure if it's because it's the start of summer and half the firm is on vacation/a long weekend/leaving early to coach Bud's baseball team or Sissy's swim team, or because I haven't been able to sleep more than two hours in a row since early last week, or because I've just survived a month-long assault by appellate brief (two a week is just too much, as much as I love them), but I am having a very serious case of a general malaise de travaille -- et du vie, actually. The office is deathly quiet, which means I feel the need to run around being loud and boisterous to fill in the void left by the simultaneous vacays of my two favorite co-workers and the family-emergency leave of absence by my secretary, and whenever I stop running around being loud and boisterous in order to sit down to try to do some work (and also so the remaining partners don't try to check me into daycare or something), the void of silence suffocates my ability to think so that even doing the stupidest, most run-of-the-mill discovery responses requires Herculean effort. I don't wanna go to work, I want to sit home all day and read novels and bask in the sun on my back porch while drinking some delicious cold beer and... do nothing. But noooooo --- I have to go be a boring "grown-up" and "go to work" and "earn money" so that I can "not be homeless." Ick.
*This post of course has nothing to do with popcorn, but is so named for the following reason: when I was just a wee book-grub (instead of the irredeemable full-grown bookworm I am now), I had a fascination both with the standard classics (Lorna Doone, The Count of Monte Cristo, War and Peace) and the trashy teen novels (Sweet Valley High, Babysitters Club). My mother, of course, loved that her ten-year-old daughter was lugging around Dickens when her friends' children were still moving their lips to get through The Bobbsey Twins, but she was much less thrilled with the SVH obsession and every single time she saw one in my hands or even in my general vicinity, she would have a fit about how ridiculous these "popcorn" books were and how I must stop reading these "popcorn" books or my brain would become fluffy and air-filled (like... you got it, popcorn). So, in the lingo of la famille Lawyer, "popcorn" means not the food but anything lacking in "nutritional" value...