My internship is already a quarter over. It doesn’t seem right, but…I promised the state of Florida eight weeks of my free labor in their Department of Children and Families and I already put in two, so yeah, a quarter over. So far it’s been pretty painless—lots of researching and writing, plus observing in court, looking up criminal records, and listening to hours and hours of a trial for one sentence that may or may not have been said. There is plenty of entertaining drama involved in all of these tasks, the details of which I have to keep confidential, but just a taste: If a married woman in Florida has a baby, her husband is automatically the baby’s legal father, even if he’s not also the biological father. However, the record can easily be set straight if the legal and biological fathers appear in court for a paternity hearing. You wouldn’t think that kind of thing happened too often (at least I wouldn’t have), but, in Miami at least, these paternity hearings happen every. single. day.

The best part of my internship is that I work 9-5, Monday through Friday. After being an au pair and then a 1L, waking up after the sun has started to rise, having a few hours every evening to cook and eat a proper dinner and then veg out, and having entire weekends to work on my tan and my novel are downright luxurious. Speaking of which, my novel is coming along, as it better be, because my goal is to electronically self-publish it before my twenty fifth birthday and I’m going to be twenty four and a half on June 25.

I recently read (on the internet so it must be true) that telling people what your goals are doesn’t actually make you more likely to accomplish them, in fact it may have the opposite effect, because just telling people gives you some amount of satisfaction, possibly enough satisfaction that you no longer feel motived enough to accomplish your goal. But I don’t care.

My new objective, while I still have some free time, is to work on getting a Polish passport. I probably should have gotten on this years ago when Poland joined the European Union, but I didn’t because I was still counting on marrying a French prince charming, plus I had kind of always looked down on my fellow Poles as carnivorous bible-thumping xenophobes and wanted to join Europe via a more enlightened country. I guess as I get older I’m getting more realistic and less principled. After all, I am donating my time this summer to a state that names its public schools after confederate generals and is home to creationist theme parks.

But as a happy side note on the only thing that really matters: 51 days until Paris, and 54 days until Munich!