Things Are Looking Up

New President. It's been a long time since I felt like our president could do some good for the nation and the world.

New Job. I will be serving a 2-year clerkship starting next year. Normally, law clerks do research and help draft judicial decisions. My job will be more focused on recommending whether the appeal should be heard at all.

New city. Moving from New York City to a smaller city. Looking forward to more time with Mrs. Beckett, more time outdoors, less time spent in traffic, lower expenses, and more snow.

Still Waiting

I have always felt there was something I would become. At some, point, I would awake into the life I was meant to live. But days and years have passed and I have not had my great awakening. I have become clearer, smarter, more focused, less self-destructive. But I am not changing the world. I still want to change the world. I still believe in the power of my insight, and my ability to help. I am a good teacher. I am a good thinker, and a good writer. I am empathic.

Within a year, I will be a lawyer. And, if nothing changes, I will be working at a law firm. Not because it is my dream, but because it is where my life is going right now. I have to be patient now. I am still in school. I am still learning. I am still building my skill as a thinker, writer, and advocate.

And I am still waiting for my life to start, even as I understand that this day, these moments are my life. They are all there is.

This time must have my care and focus. Every moment is another opportunity to awake into the life I am supposed to live because my life is the life I am supposed to live. I think this is akin to the weak anthropic principle. I have seen it rendered many ways. I attempt to render it thus: the possible conditions that can lead to the present state are necessarily unique. It's why deduction is possible. I have seen something; therefore, the universe of what could have happened is limited. Imagine, for example, that you see a wilted flower. That wilted flower can only have been produced by a limited set of occurrences, e.g., the life and death of the flower. Moreso, that flower could not be, were you not there to see it.

Just so, I now am. I could not be otherwise. My very existence removes a whole world of possibility from existence. My existence prevents my father from having been killed in Vietnam. That I never have played professional baseball prevents me from having been a professional baseball player. Thus the future affects the past as much as the past affects the future. It is a way of stating an obvious imperative that's easy to overlook.

Related: There is no meaning independent of the listener. There is no reality independent of consciousness.

Perhaps I should not be twisting astro- into metaphysics. But how else to know whether they go together?

photo: (c)2007 Derek Ramsey, grabbed from this page.

High Anxiety

Do you live your life in a state of high anxiety? Do you feel like a motor drives you from one task to the next? Do you constantly worry what others think of you? Do you have trouble relaxing? Do you feel like you're running toward a goal that keeps moving further away? DO you sleep erratically? Do you always feel like your world is about to collapse around you?

If so, you may be suffering from panic disorder, law school, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and/or manic-depression linked to the need to please others in order to maintain a sense of self worth.

Self-medication is not advised.

Today

Police Chasing a Dog or Police and Dog Chasing a Person?

So I just got out of bed to make a trip to the bathroom and to have a light snack. As I sat at the desk in front of the window in our cozy garret apartment, I noticed police lights up the street. I then noticed movement and heard some shouting. Then I saw a couple of policeman jogging up the street. In front of them appeared to be a giant dog. A huge dog. The size of a small horse. A mastiff or some such. One of the policemen had some sort of chain. Someone yelled "back it up, back it up," and behind the dog/police parade appeared one unmarked police car with a dashboard light coming up our narrow winding street in reverse. After that came at least three more police cars.

I went downstairs and outside to investigate, where my landlord and the tenants below us were assembled, gawking at the receding lights. Sadly, I was the only one to have seen the dog. Less sadly, the thought that a horse-sized dog was loose unnerved the girl who lives below us. Her boyfriend theorized that they were looking for a claw-hammer murderer/rapist. I doubt they could have had any object but the capture of a giant dog.

It is always possible that they were actually chasing some felon (perhaps a claw-hammer murderer/rapist), that the dog was a police dog, and that the cops running behind the dog were simply holding his chain. For this to be true, my estimate of the dog's size would have to have been way off. Police, so far as I know, do not employ horse-sized dogs. It's possible I erred, though, given that I watched the action take place on a dimly lit street maybe thirty feet away.

Nevertheless, I lean toward it having been police chasing a dog. They were running down the middle of the street. Why would a fugitive or a dog chasing a fugitive do that? Anyone who's seen Cops knows that fugitives go for backyards. They want to hide. Also, I never saw a person running in front of the dog; just a dog trotting (seemingly nonchalantly) in front of the cops. Finally, I was immediately struck by the size of the thing. For a moment I really did wonder whether it was a horse.

Regardless, it was more than I bargained for when I got up to piss and eat some crackers.

Welfare

Dear Conservatives,
If you support the bailout of failed financial firms, stop your sniveling about assistance to the indigent.

Dear Libs,
If you support welfare programs, please spare the world your outrage that the feds would bail out financial firms.

Dear Everyone,
I am aware that corporate and personal welfare are two different things. But both are premised on the idea that our government should protect us economically, even when we are partly to blame. The differences lie mainly in how "us" is defined. Unfortunately, the indigent do not have the same voice or power as corporate America. Example: Bankruptcy. Tough on consumers; cushy for corporations.

Also, Dunkin Donuts on Lefferts Blvd. in Kew Gardens has consistently tasty coffee. Much better than at the Metropolitan Ave. Kew Gardens location, at which it is consistently burnt.

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.