BipolarLawyerCook

About this site:

This blog started out over at Blog­ger, but due to my lazi­ness about learn­ing html/css, and my desire for more tem­plate flex­i­bil­ity and cus­tomiza­tion, I e-migrated to Word­press in Jan­u­ary, 2008.

Begun in Jan­u­ary 2007, Bipo­lar­Lawyer­Cook is an online jour­nal. There are recipes, pho­tographs, mus­ings about the law, life, and din­ner. I was diag­nosed bipo­lar in 2005. I grad­u­ated from law school in 2000. I’ve been cook­ing, in one form or another, since I was six or seven. I am mar­ried to a won­der­ful man whom I call the Bet­ter Half in these here blog entries.

I am also a con­tribut­ing writer at Real Men­tal. I take dig­i­tal pho­tographs with a Pana­sonic DMC-TZ3, a glo­ri­fied point-and-shoot, and main­tain a Flickr page under the Bipo­lar­Lawyer­Cook han­dle. If you are inter­ested in pur­chas­ing a print of any photo shown here or in my Flickr stream, please email me. And no, I don’t have a cook­book deal. I do have a basic four burner gas stove and oven, and a lovely array of kitchen gad­gets and cook­books. My com­puter is a truly ancient Dell Insp­iron 2600 lap­top with an exter­nal wire­less card and a per­ma­nently fray­ing power cord. The bat­tery life on my lap­top is –2 minutes.

I can be reached by email at bipo­lar­lawyer­cook at gmail dot com. Please feel free to email me any ques­tions you don’t feel com­fort­able post­ing as a com­ment, or which aren’t ger­mane to any cur­rent post.  If you com­ment, espe­cially for the first time, I’ll try to respond directly by email.  I don’t usu­ally com­ment back in my com­ments section.

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Blog­ging Philosophy:

I started my blog because being diag­nosed as bipo­lar has given me a new lease on life– I have a new per­spec­tive from which to under­stand myself and oth­ers. The diag­no­sis means some things will always be harder for me than oth­ers– but it’s also given me the insight to under­stand what’s worth pur­su­ing, and what’s just bad for me. That per­spec­tive is worth all that came before.

I choose not to name my friends or fam­ily beyond nick­names or first ini­tials. They have lives to live, too. If it’s any­thing at all per­sonal, I’ve prob­a­bly cleared it with them before posting.

I also choose not to air real dirty laun­dry, most of the time. I think I owe it to the peo­ple in my life to talk to them first, and to try to resolve things that way. It’s far less to do with whether they read the site or not, and noth­ing to do with a fear of what they would think– they know I am a firmly opin­ion­ated per­son. This per­sonal choice should NOT be read as a crit­i­cism of the way oth­ers write their blogs. To each their own– really.

I also try to keep things gen­er­ally pos­i­tive. I am not a Polyanna, by any means. How­ever, there is already a lot of bile out there in our cul­ture and in the blo­gos­phere– I don’t need to add to it, usu­ally. Add to that the fact that much of my men­tal life to date has been spent being inse­cure, neg­a­tive, and depressed, and the choice to accen­tu­ate the pos­i­tive becomes more impor­tant. When I’ve posted some­thing neg­a­tive, or rant-y, or cranky, it’s because I’ve judged the post nec­es­sary to my men­tal health, politically/socially impor­tant, or some­thing so triv­ial or gen­eral that the harm I am doing to the uni­verse by not keep­ing my mouth shut is negligible.

I don’t usu­ally mod­er­ate com­ments, but if some­one is leav­ing com­ments that endan­ger my vision of this blog as a safe space for my read­ers, I will mod­er­ate as nec­es­sary. Feel free to leave me as many crit­i­cal com­ments of me as you like, how­ever, keep­ing in mind that I am both crazy and a lawyer, such that I am an unpre­dictable and vin­dic­tive per­son to annoy.

I do keep a paper jour­nal, a mole­sk­ine note­book, for some of the more neg­a­tive, per­sonal, or oth­er­wise unpub­lish­able stuff. I also use it to record notes from ther­apy and doctor’s appoint­ments, write poems, record ideas for blog posts, and oth­er­wise get the voices in my head to calm down enough to let me think.

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Other Mis­cel­la­neous Stuff:

I am a mem­ber of BlogHer. I used Pic­to­Browser to make neat slideshows from my FlickR stream on Blog­ger– I am cur­rently using slide.com for the Word­Press plat­form, since WP doesn’t sup­port Flash. I par­tic­i­pated in NaBloPoMo 2007, met tons of awe­some blog­gers, and will do it again next year. I use Google’s Reader to keep track of all the sites I like to read, and keep my blogroll up to date.

I am mostly anony­mous– you’re not going to see my name of the names of friends and fam­ily all over this blog. In March, 2008, my first free­lance arti­cle was pub­lished, and after jump­ing up and down like a five year old in antic­i­pa­tion, it seemed mean not to link to the arti­cle for all those read­ers who have so gen­er­ously encour­aged me with their com­pli­ments about my writ­ing, even though my full name appeared therein. But the thrust of the site is of the new per­spec­tive I’ve seen through the BLC per­sona, so I intend to main­tain the fic­tion, for the most part.

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Blog­ging with­out oblig­a­tion (sort of):

I try to pro­duce some­thing for this site at least five times a week, even if it’s just some links.  I try to visit the sites of my read­ers.  I try to respond to com­ments with some level of fre­quency, espe­cially if you’re com­ment­ing for the first time.  And I try to respond to direct emails, too.  But life hap­pens, and if I am slow in respond­ing to a com­ment, a ques­tion, or I haven’t been by your site in a while, please don’t take it per­son­ally.  It’s just life, it’s not you.  Really.

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Copy­right and Legal Disclaimers:

All pho­tographs, adapted recipes, orig­i­nal recipes, poems, and writ­ing on this site are the exclu­sive prop­erty and copy­right of Bipo­lar­Lawyer­Cook. Please feel free to link to the site– please email me or leave a com­ment regard­ing repub­li­ca­tion of any mate­r­ial appear­ing here.

Any state­ments set forth at this site are the opin­ion of the author, and do not con­sti­tute legal advice. No legal rela­tion­ship is intended or cre­ated thereby. Unless you have a retainer agree­ment from me, signed, in ink, with my legal name and not my blog han­dle, no legal rela­tion­ship between you and the author of this site exists.