Unsolicited Advice

Well, Hurricane Henri was a bit of a bust. It was very humid and we got a bunch of rain, and that was about it. I didn't even close my window all the way. To compensate for all the nothing that happened, the National Weather Service is posting "weather history" tweets about Irene ten years ago, because whoever runs their social media has great enthusiasm for their job.  Irene was my very first hurricane. For context, I had just moved here from Arizona, where the very concept of getting catastrophic amounts of liquid water from the sky was terrifying and alien. I'd grown up in Phoenix, where "monsoon season" brought brief, violent thunderstorms that flooded out low-lying roads for about six hours before all the moisture vanished into the porous sandstone. I was by myself in a sublet up near Electric Ave in Somerville, barren but for a futon, my suitcases, and an internet connection. My sister had just sent me a charmingly abusive email, which became the last ...

I am still in the slightly-overdramatic juris doctor 's class. Classes. They're intense but useful enough that it's worth killing myself to get through them. They're also bringing up a lot of uncomfortable stuff about my educational history, and how I handle a classroom environment. I learn best when given as much information as possible right up front. I joke that I learn everything via cryptography, because that's actually the standard procedure you follow when trying to decrypt an unknown message in an unknown system: Gather as much cyphertext as possible, put it in a big pile, and then sit down and stare at it (or get a computer to stare at it) until patterns jump out. I often make better progress starting out in the advanced class, as I've done here, and then doubling back to the foundations course once I have some experience. Most beginner classes are streamlined and pared down until you're learning only the thing that is directly relevant at any given...