Little Mind Mind Too Much

I've been obsessed with this whole law school thing anew since I've started receiving replies. I just got another the other day from NY Law School with a scholarship offer. I find myself getting nervous as I check the mail. Awaiting a phone call from some dean of admissions or another. Awaiting a laudatory email telling me I made the cut.

And that's the problem: the trap of this whole process. It becomes so wrapped in ego that it loses its original meaning. There's a sort of message board where people post their numbers. Acceptances, LSAT, GPA, etc., so you can see who is getting rebuffed and who welcomed. I find myself feeling competitive with these people for no good reason. Only little mind drives this. I want to be smarter than them. It chafes me when I see higher scores, when I see an acceptance to a school that wouldn't have me.

But I did not begin this law school quest with the intention of proving myself smarter than others. (Or perhaps there is some part of me that, childishly, did.) I did it because I wanted to pursue meaning. I can't think of anything that projects the illusion of meaning like a judgement of worth like a law school acceptance. It's not about the numbers. The numbers are immaterial at this point. I know I will be able to go to school and that should be enough for me.

I've not blogged for a time now because I've been thinking about nothing but L.S., and I do not want to be a bore, prattling on about whether I got in here or there, and how hysterical I am about nonsense. On te one hand it's not nonsense: where I go to school matters. On the other hand, the worry that is driven by ego does lack sense. And the reason I did not want to write about this senseless anxiety is that, if it is tiring for me, how tiresome might it be for a reader.

Anyhow, I am endeavoring to allow my big mind some space. Reading, relaxing. The last chapter of Noam Chomsky's "On Nature and Language," (most of which dealt with linguistics and was over my head), titled The Secular Priesthood and the Perils of Democracy highlighted for me how extreme our cultural indoctrination is. He speaks of the intentional fetishizing of superficialities. By the media, by the corporations, by the universities. He speaks of the secular priesthood. The intelligentsia: academics who believe it is their duty to direct society because they are in fact superior to the masses. Someone recently remarked to me that part of the function law schools serve is as finishing schools for corporations. I will not go down this path. I will not become one of these men, either directly or complicitly commanding the people who supposedly are not fit to do it themselves.

One final note: speaking of ego and petty b.s., I am ashamed to say that in my personal essay attached to my law school applications, I boast of my learnedness, name-dropping authors who I have read, such as Chomsky. I've read Chomsky. I must be some kind of super-intellectual. Blech.

Glad I got that off my chest.

The below pic is the first to appear when one searches Noam Chomsky with Google Images.

Inconvenience Store

Well, I told the JetStop girl how I wanted to take her to the movies and go to a restaurant together, or maybe, if she was into it watch a fight or something like that on TV at my apartment. She said she was busy, and I asked her about next week. Then she said she had a boyfriend. Today, when I went in there, I said hi to her, and this guy who works their came up to the front and she went in the back. I wonder if he's her boyfriend. I wish I didn;t ask her. Now she wont even talk to me anymore. At least then I could still imagine we might be friends or boyfriend and girlfriend. She probly hates me. He does too. I guess I won't go over there anymore.

I was looking at beckett's stuff, and I don't want to be rude or anything, but it seems like he should be happy. I wish I could be smart and do something like him. I like my job and all, but it would be good to be rich. Then lots of girls would like me.

We're Sorry, The Number You Are Trying...

One of the main struggles I am dealing with right now is the fundamental disconnect between study and practice. From what I understand, many people have very positive law school experiences, then emerge into the drear corporate life, which, at 80 hours a week without any excitement, sucks their souls dry until they are bitter, amoral, or stop practicing law. Does a six-figure salary compensate adequately for a crap life?

I make enough money to be content right now. If I wanted I could get a full time job and be making a lot more. I'd be settled in for life. But I would still have to wake up and go to a job I couldn't care less about.

I do not doubt that I have the mind for the work and study. I don't think I will regret the time I spend studying law, whether I end up practicing or not. The big burning question then is whether the debt load I incur while studying will be manageable at graduation. Will I find myself with few options but to take that corporate job? I know a musician who went through NYU Law with a public interest focus and background and is now in corporate hell. He has limited options because of his debt and family obligations. I don't have a large family at the moment, but little Becketts may be somewhere over the horizon and I don't want the possibility to be precluded by a requirement that I work at near-poverty-level wages for my loans to be forgiven.

Plus, the Dozer wants me to pony up a grand by March if I choose their program. Only problem is I may not have a decision from Brooklyn or any of the others by then.

Cardozer

Lo, I have been accepted into Cardozo Law. Crap. I mean awesome. I mean crap. That's fantastic. Fantastically frightening. It's just what I wanted. Just what I wanted a year from now maybe. When I'm ready. Not like mostly ready. Or largely ready. But ready ready. Really really ready.

But, no, I have to decide within a couple short months whether or not I want to plunge 100k+ into debt, abandon my artistic life for a few years, and study my pants off in the land of mega-Type-A personalities. That's the downside. The upside would be not having to go into my stultifying day job anymore.

Do I have a chance to fight the power? The man? The machine? Or am I just beginning my assimilation? Or was I assimilated at birth? If I continue to pursue the art thing, I need to find a new path. The one I was on drove me to law school.

Super Google

More good times.

Googlemaps pedometer.
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

More useful than Cats, if a little less funny.

(via Rog, aka armchairathlete.blogspot.com/)

Immortal Felinity

Because I care.

Fan art. http://catbeing.com/index_protect.html

Time for a Change This Time

I didn't win the lottery. I hear it's not so grate for people that win anyway. I don't know. I still wanna win. I still get my tickets every week, and I don't care if Vijay thinks I'm stupid. Change Your Life. That's the lottery's slogan, and I think it's a pritty good one. I think maybe I should be more like my hermit crab, Glen. He changes. He goes from one shell to another shell and in between, he could get eaten by a bird or stomped on by an elephant or something. But he takes the risk. You know those posters that say, like, Keep on Truckin' and have a picture of a cat on a trisicle or something? I think the lottery should have one like that that says Change Your Life and has a picture of a hermit crab right when he's changing shells. I'd let them use Glen if they wanted. Maybe I'll send them a letter.

Mom always asks me what my New Years resolutions are. So, here they are, my Change Your Life resolutions.

1. Make some new freinds. I'd like to go to a party next year.
2. Get a girlfriend. Ask out the girl from the JetStop.
3. Fix up Glen's terrarium real nice.
4. Do better at the gas station (always clean everyone's windshield and see if they want me to check there oil)
5. Watch 24 from the first season.
6. Try sushi. (Could go to Shogun on a date)

7. Get a hobby. Like making model airplanes. I also still have a coin collection I could start up again.
8. Stop paying so much money to watch the Pride Fighting Championships.

9. Learn to box. (this could also help with number 1 and 2)
10. Start dressing nicer. Some of my clothes are the same for like ten years, and everything smells like gas.
11. Be nicer to mom.
12. Make a journal entry every day, even if its real short.

I'm Like Busy and Stuff

How the hell does anyone know what they want? Why? How? Who?

When I was young I figured there'd be a point at which I'd say: well, I've done it. That settles it. I'm doing what I love with the person I love in the place to be, and everything has fallen into place. In some respects that's true. But more broadly I've come to understand that I'll always feel some sense of dissatisfaction, if not with my plight, then with the world that revolves around me. (That's right, goddamn it! Me, baby, me!)

So we've passed a few more arbitrary demarcations of the passage of time.

I may be getting older, but my mind is becoming more agile. It better. My body certainly isn't.



The above picture was taken from www.drfrankensteinlabs.com, where you can purchase such oddities.

Striking Out

Very appropriate that the tale of my last post was set in the subway. I may never be able to ride the rails again. This transit strike may go on indefinitely and force us to car pool forever! Oh the horrors.

Actually, it's not been so bad. I'm one of the lucky few to have a vehicle and some coworkers to ride in with. After a brutal drive in yesterday, I wised up and took the Battery Tunnel today.

My little green Escort got into the city like shit from a duck's ass. Into the office in under an hour.

Of course, all the MTA strike drama simply distracts from the sad fact that I have to work at all, but that's another post.

What else is there to sayabout the strike? Well,it gives self-obsessed New Yorkers yet another opportunity to genuflect to their own toughness and resourcefulness. It gives us all more proof that the world does indeed revolve around New York City, in spite of current astrophysical theory. We are an anomoly. A unique and brilliant people destined to dominate the country's news media with every little adolescent fit we throw.

Can Touissant and Kalikow just have a fistfight and get it over with. Or just lay their manhoods out on the table, have Bloomberg wield the ruler, and declare the longest negotiator the victor. Except first, they'd probably have to agree on the formula that included girth as well as length. Then maybe they could add a category for technique, judged by Pataki. Now this is a negotiating process I could get interested in.

I can just see the headlines in the tabs: "Touissant Tool Trumps TA" "Kalikow Eats Union Meat" "Little Gloomy Bloomy".

The Secret of Nimh

I've got a little box of rodenticide behind a filing cabinet at my desk here at the old office. I didn't put it there. Facilities did, years ago. What is odd is that the mouse that frequents this area of the floor seems to really love the space behind the cabinet with the rodenticide. I see him a few times a day scooting across the way under a different rack of grey metal filing cabinets. It's pretty exciting. Really. It's a fantastic diversion. I'm just glad it's not a glue trap behind my desk. I don't especially want to drown a squealing mouse.

Speaking of rodenticide, though the one time I've told this story, I was disbelieved, two nights ago, as I was waiting on the subway platform, I watched the rats scurry around, as I am wont to do. In the past I've wondered why these things never seem to get hit by trains. The trains are damned fast and the rats show even less fear of the trains than they do of humans. Well, one of the little scurriers that caught my eye seemed to be gnawing on something especially tasty. I looked away, looked back, and realized that he was not hunkering over a discarded cheesesteak but a much larger relative of his. I walked over to get a closer look, and the big rat's head was partially flattened. I can only speculate that it somehow got its pointy face up on the track at a very inopportune moment. I tried to tell myself that maybe the little guy at his side was trying to revive him. But the fact that the living rat was so obsessed with his dead comrade's crushed head was too much to ignore. It was clear. The rat was feasting on the flesh (presumably brain matter) exposed when this monster rat met his maker.

Excuse me while I vomit.

All better.

There are a ton of pests in this city, no doubt. And they're all in this area. Shopping. Then there are the rats. Man, that's a poor excuse for humor. I must still be shaken from the ratibalism I witnessed.

The secret of Nimh? Soylent Green of course.