Restaurant Research and Reaction Papers

I love birthdays- they're like little holidays sprinkled throughout the year and offer a great excuse to eat cake, be spoiled, and go out with friends and significant others. I turn 25 next Monday. My girl friends are taking me to a wine bar Thursday night and JP and I are going to dinner on Saturday while two friends dote on Landon. I have a reaction paper due at 4 PM on a scholarly paper I still don't understand enough to "react" to, but I've spent the last hour perusing restaurant reviews online for our dinner out on Saturday. I feel so much pressure! I love trying new places, I love researching, and I love reading menus, but there's too much information about too many restaurants! And we're leaving Chicago in a little over three months and there's so many restaurants we haven't tried yet. I'm torn between going to a tried and true favorite and trying one of the million other great restaurants in this city. And I want to go somewhere nice where we can have a long, multiple course meal, with drinks, but I don't want to spend all of my birthday money on one night. We both love Latin American food, but we just went to Carnivale to celebrate JP's admittance to business school (definitely one of the best meals I've ever had), so I'm thinking we should branch out to another type. There's just too many fantastic places to eat in this city!

Sigh... I suppose I should return to working on my Law & Politics paper that's due in less than 3 hours. I've read all 53 pages of the paper being presented, twice, and I still don't understand it. The authors are proving a theorem that seems completely intuitive to me and they never explain why this theorem matters or needed to be empirically proven at all. So far I have two pages rambling about my belief that all papers should have a point and this one does not. You should be able to answer the questions, "what is this paper about?" and "who is going to (want to) read it?" after reading the introduction (or at the very least, the entire paper) and I still can't answer either one. I'm not sure my professors are going to like it, and I'm not sure how I can possibly expand on that any further to reach the length requirement, but I'm armed with a diet coke and chocolate chip cookie, so I'm going to try. I wonder how many times I can get away with using the word "understand" in a single paragraph...