Win for Life

I've seen a lot of a certain lottery commercial recently. A balding guy grins maniacally while talking the viewers through his shit-eating-grin-inducing life. He's won Win For Life, so he gets a million dollars a year for life. Thus, he shows us how he rows a treadmill (next to his accountant) and drinks wheatgrass (next to his personal trainer). He is doing these healthy things, he explains, in order to live as long as possible, so as to keep the money pouring in for as long as possible.

For a while, I didn't pay much attention to this commercial. But it annoyed me a bit more than other commercials. Tonight I realized why I find the commercial so unnerving. The lottery-winning man is grimacing because his life is gruesome. He is attempting to smile, (because the the thought of money still excites him), despite the harrowing prospect of year upon year of life bent on nothing but its own extension.

His family would keep him alive at all costs, unless those costs got too close to one million a year.

Life of the Mind

So the law firm I worked at this summer offered me a job today. An honest to goodness, 160,000-a-year-to-start-corporate-servant job. I would be a courtesan to the moneyed elite.

When I was maybe 8 or 10, when I was in first, maybe second grade, a friend of the family who I idolized told me corporate lawyer was a great job. He said that was where the money was. He said corporate lawyers were rich. I thought rich equaled unassailably happy, so for awhile, when grownups asked my little self what I wanted to be, I said corporate lawyer.

Before that it was fireman, and then missionary bush pilot, then, after corporate lawyer, astronaut and Air Force fighter pilot. By the time I was in high school I realized that me and most of society were not a good fit. Between that realization and the deep pain I felt within me, artist seemed like the natural choice.

So visual artist, then actor. To survive, I became a proofreader, including legal proofreading, and after years of underusing my brain and longing for more challenge I decided on law school so that I could make a daily difference in people's lives. I wanted to be a public defender, or maybe work for the ACLU. So I went to a less prestigious school than I could have in order to minimize my debt.

I have done very well in law school. That success got me this job, which payed me $80/hr, $3,100/wk, for 11 weeks this summer. This summer has provided me with a direct path to worldly wealth and success.

I don't want it. I like a lot of law work, but I don't like the work I did this summer. I like that I got good training and became a better thinker and writer, but I need a client that I care about. I need a person, not a corporation, to help. I am applying for clerkships. If I get a position with a judge for a couple years, it will delay the decision for a while.

You may be reading this wondering, he doesn't want to do the job, what is the problem? You may also be reading this wondering why I am so conflicted about a job that could set me up financially for life. I don't want to work 80 hours a week, but I don't want to be broke. I want to be able to raise children and not subject them to poverty. On the other hand, I don't want to be "The Cat's in the Cradle" dad and never see my kids.

I will be taking the bar exam in one year. If I accept the job with this law firm, they will pay for me to study for the bar. And of course, once I take the bar and start work, I will have the money to buy a house. How strong the golden handcuffs become would be a function of what kind of house I buy, what kind of suits I decide to wear. If I don't take this job, I will have to drop one more loan on top of the rest in order to study for the bar.

I have struggled since entering law school with how to live within a culture to which I am deeply opposed without assimilating the values of that culture. It's tough. I want to accept, be accepted, fit in, and not live in constant dissonance. Put another way, were I to take this job, in two years would I still be indifferent to the Hamptons and Cape Cod?

I know I should turn this job down. But it's hard for me to say "no" to people who want me. And it's also hard to say no to a solid offer of a good job that could help me build a safety net for me and my family when I will have to wait until the New Year to know whether I can get the job I want. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

This is a very long post, but this is a very weird, difficult time.

Meaning What

Maybe you know what I meant, maybe I know. We can agree that it was an accident, right?

I take the strips of paper from shredded documents. I stare at the parts of letters and form them into words like these.

Summer Love

I apologize, as all periodic bloggers must, for my long absence. Law school is on hiatus while I work for the man. I am working for an international law firm. A firm that is called a midsized firm. Something like 250 attorneys worldwide. And attendant staff. But why count them? I just got back from a recruiting event. A scavenger hunt in the Village, topped off by a boozy dinner at a nice restaurant, and a cab home to Queens.

While many of my classmates wonder why they have been unable to find work for the summer, while many of them work for low pay, while all over the world people starve despite being desperate to work, some of us make $3,100 a week. Apparently, my work is billed at $250/hr. And I am not even at a "top" law firm. Those summer associates by and large do no work at all. I do a fair amount of work. And I am learning a lot. The problem is that doing this work at all is contrary to my politics.

I thought it would be easier to take the money and run. The idea was that I would use this lucrative summer of working for the man to pay off my final year of law school and work in the public interest. But a year here could by a house, and pay off my loans, and, and, and suddenly I am at a corporate firm, and forty years old, and thinking, a few more years, and I'll make partner, and I'll really be able to make a difference.

Meanwhile I'll own real estate in the area and in Vermont and have close friendships with corporate overlords. I can see from here how easy it is to become what I loathe.

I got lucky enough to be assigned a pro bono case (meaning the client gets free legal representation), and the client is a self-entitled professional student. The kind of person who always gets off while the homeless person whose threats are clearly the products of insane delusions gets five years.

Of Decedents

Part I.

The thing that sucks about the Sean Bell trial is that either the prosecutor brought a case they shouldn't have, or they or the judge did a bad job. Either the cops shouldn't have been up on those charges at all, or justice was not served. The defense lawyers sounded pretty good at riling up the prosecution witnesses and getting them to contradict themselves. But the prosecutor should have been prepared for it. He should have known the weaknesses of his witnesses.

I was flat-out wrong about the possibility of rioting. The paramiitary police presence in this town had something to do with it, as did the fact that a couple of the police were black. Instead of being a case that symbolized out of control police driven by hatred of blacks, it was a story about out of control police who just screwed up royally.

Part II.

So I spent three hours, from 6:30-9:30, dealing with decedents, trustees, grantors, right of election, the rule against perpetuities, ademption, abatement, per stirpes distributions, essay questions, multiple choice questions, a monitored bathroom break.

Here's the way this excruciating process works. You spend a whole semester learning new concepts, statutes, and cases, attempting to assimilate large and complex doctrines in a day or two. So one thing piles on top of another, on top of another. If you seek out the professor, or read more deeply into a topic, you can alleviate what confuses you, but that puts you at risk of falling behind, since it's more all the time. All the while, you have to collect all this information with an eye to assimilating it all at the end of the semester. You make outlines, or flashcards, or charts, or you reread your notes. And as the semester goes on, and the number of things you failed to fully grasp accumulates, the final exam looms larger and larger. And, finally, after you are exhausted from a semester of reading cases and sitting through alternately challenging and brain-deadening classes, and writing papers, and editing footnotes for a journal, and writing briefs and doing oral arguments for moot court, it's time to study for exams. Just when you are burnt out enough to fall down and sleep all summer, time to study for finals. So you break out your notes and outlines, and study aids, and you tell yourself "this isn't going to be that bad," and at first you feel okay about it. But the more you study, the more you realize the gaping holes in your knowledge. You realize that this is a memorization contest that you can't win. And the pressure builds every day as the final gets closer. A bad grade, and your scholarship could be in danger, or you won't be able to apply for a clerkship, or you won't do well enough to graduate cum laude. One grade gains an outsized importance, and the pressure is ever-increasing, because you have no clue what the test is going to be about. So you go into the test that stands as your grade for the entire semester, and you wait and wait for it to start, and try to make small talk to pass the time, and then it starts. And your heart is pounding, and then there's a question you don't know. You're totally thrown. Can't remember it. Stuff you know, or think you know, and you just can't be sure of the answer. One after another of 120 multiple choice questions, and none of them are easy, because you have to look for tricks in all of them. You have to apply an exception to an exception to a rule, and hope you did it right and mark your little T or F in the bubble.

Then you read essay 1, and think, wow, I think I know how to do this, and you start through it, and then realize it's not quite what you thought. This is something you've never even contemplated before, and now you have to do a correct analysis of it applying a set of tools that you barely know how to use alone, let alone in harmony. It's like asking a person who's learned to play recorder, triangle and base drum to conduct a symphony. Subtlety? You'll be lucky if you nail all the obvious stuff. You're sure that there are issues layered into the problem that you can't see, but you don't really have time, because you only get 45 minutes per essay. So about 2 hours into this thing, you're heartrate is still through the roof, your mouth is dry, and you can barely force yourself to do the last essay. So you bang through it, feeling less worried about whether what you're writing is wrong anymore, because it's too late now, you just have to go with what you have. 15 minutes to go and you try to recheck your 15 or so multiple choice that confused you. You generally come out the same way. Fret and change one or two. You have no idea what just happened in the past three hours, and then it's over. They call time. And then someone asks you a question and you know you missed at least one big issue. And you start thinking about the test, and what you did wrong, and how much you were unsure about. You look around at a roomfull of ashen faces. People say things like, "the professor could have just beat the shit out of me, and saved me this agony." You go home thinking, "maybe I really blew it. What if I get a C? A C-? Is it even possible for me to get an A?"

And then, then, then, you have to shut out that experience within 12 hours or so, because you have another beating ahead in just a few days, and you can't let the demoralizing experience of one exam ruin those that follow it. You need confidence in these things. And after all the testing is done, after every poor law student has attempted to spew back an entire semester's learning in three or four three-hour sessions, the month-long grade watch starts. Some people will move to the top of the class. Some will get Fs. Some will get A+s. Some will lose their scholarship money. For many, it won't make a very big difference. But every day, multiple times a day, you'll be checking to see if any new grades are up. You might even start checking before finals are over.

By the time all grades are in, work for the next year has already started. Moot court, fellowship applications, clerkship applications.

And then it starts again.

I know you reading this will think: he's just got to relax. One grade isn't that important. And you are right, but if you were in this place, it would happen, to you, too. It happens to everyone here. It's intentionally stressful to the point that finals are traumatic experiences. I really do remember certain awful finals moments with absolute clarity.

The school looks like a prison, and around finals, it becomes one in the short term.

Part III
I swear, Hillary Clinton must have made a deal with the devil. It explains everything.

Part IV
And the Elliot Spitzer thing was only a month ago, but now all the press can talk about is miley cyrus doing a sexually suggestive picture for Vanity Fair. Apparently, people were angry that Vanity Fair photographed her as an underage sex object. Isn't that what she was before? The picture may well go too far, but how does it go any further than her image as it stood?





So it's okay to have her dressed like a stripper in a schoolgirl outfit why? Because she's actually young enough to be a schoolgirl? That's okay, but the Vanity Fair Shoot is not.


Underage girls are constantly being tarted as sex objects.



But the one picture that causes outrage is one in which she is undeniably naked beneath that sheet, as opposed to undeniably naked under scant clothing. It must be that putting her on the bed under the sheet acknowledged without artifice that she is a sex object, which shoved the Disney Channel parents' faces into the awful truth: Miley Cyrus is a sex symbol. Countless creepy men and adolescent boys drool over her, and countless young girls try to replicate her precocious sexual alure.

Vanity Fair didn't cause the problem. It took a picture of it.

What a Surprise

Our justice system fails again. The Sean Bell killers walk.

The charges were politically calculated. They tried to take the middle road. No murder charges so the cops don't get too pissed. Manslaughter charges that won't stick to try to placate the masses. One has to wonder how much the prosecutors really wanted a conviction. The judge said the prosecution witnesses were not credible, while the defense witnesses were. A bunch of black dudes from a strip club is found less credible than a group of police officers brought up on criminal charges whose testimony is self serving.

What makes the most sense of what we know from that night? An undercover officer with gun drawn approached a car full of guys who had just had a confronation. They try to get away, and bump the cop with their car. The cop panics and fires (he claims he incorrectly thought they had a gun, and was terrified of being shot). The whole swarm of them panic and fire. So the cops' defense is, when it boils down to it: we were incompetent, but not criminally so. They were there to run a prostitution sting, and found themselves in a situation they could not handle.

I don't know the ins and outs of the trial. The judge's decision may well be correct. But people will not accept that police who behaved insanely, firing 50 times (one even emptied his clip and reloaded), can be innocent of all charges.

Will there be riots? I am located not far from the courthouse, and I hear helicopters circling above. No justice, no peace?

Are You Named Dylan or Julian?

Then, chances are, you are one of the guys above, or your parents live in Park Slope.

More of the Same

April already? Really? Winter just started. Hell, it was just Thanksgiving.

The trees budded. It's light out at 8:00. It's bright out, but still cold.

I've never before felt I wanted to hold back time like now. The summer will be by, another fall, and I will expect the calendars to read 1999.

I feel 21. Not like I did when I was 21; then I scarcely felt.

When I was 16, I made problems up to see how many I could leave unsolved. They were biting flies that swarmed me. Terror and beauty were no different. Abjection and beauty. Desolation and beauty. I wanted to somehow draw inside me the thousand night lights of the oil refineries along the Turnpike, near Newark Airport. I wanted to draw them past my reflection into the car into my self. That they represented some grand truth I knew certainly.

I wanted simultaneously to be destroyed by wickedness and to defend purity. Even if that sounds trite, it is also true.

I still make up problems. Now I solve the problems too. Each fly is hardier than the next. Each next whisks with it the thrill of maybe being the one that prostrates me.


I remind myself that when I fixate on the past or the future, I miss the present. I hold my breath, I force a deep breath, I imagine popularity or rejection. I hold my breath. If I'm lucky, I'll think, this is right, which it no longer is. Then I force a deep breath. Then I rue.

Stop Trying to Make Sense of Coincidence