Stay of Execution

Dinner With An Old Friend

I went to the Wine Bar last night, where I sat at the bar and had a salad and a glass of wine.  I brought my journals -- three volumes -- for the period spanning April of 1999 until spring of 2000.  Reading them was so vivid.  It was a turbulent time -- the end of my first year of law school and most of my second year.  During that time I broke off a four-year relationship, started a new job that both delighted and consumed me, was disappointed by a very good friend.  I turned 27 that year.  I was running a lot and reading a lot and thinking a lot and worrying a lot, and taking karate and working and writing.  From the journals it's hardly apparent that I was in law school at all, except every so often for panicked descriptions of how far behind I was, or which classes I had skipped that afternoon.  I had a brief and sweet and exciting romance, I flirted, I speculated and made lists and set goals.  I pasted love letters (written or received) and poems or newspaper articles that struck me for some reason or another into my journals and pulling out those materials and reading them made me laugh and cry and sometimes both at once.  I didn't have very many local friends at the time -- I was lonely but didn't know it, really, or only knew it sometimes.  I wrote about dreams I had had and reading them last night I could see prescience in the dreams that I didn't realize when I wrote them down.  I was struggling with my own ambition and competitiveness and need for perfection and challenge and recognition and the way it tugged against my desire for beauty and playfulness and lazy time to read poetry and be outdoors.  Sitting at the bar reading I had my hand over my mouth, sometimes I laughed out loud or gasped or shook my head and blinked back tears as I relived something sharp and sad.  My memories of that time aren't particularly distorted but the edge and the urgency and the immediacy of my emotions as they moved through me and as I wrote them on the pages of the journals surprised me anyway.  Also the wisdom and self-awareness I was discovering then, some nuggets of which I've lost in the intervening years and some of which have become guideposts.  There was a freshness to my writing, an urgency to the way I was living, that I wonder if I've lost.   

I've been keeping a journal for seventeen or eighteen years now -- I have maybe thirty volumes of different shapes and sizes on a shelf near my bed.  There are interruptions of course, and now with this blog I don't write so much in my current journal.  I hope in five years I'll be able to look at this period of my life and learn and feel as much I did during last night's dinner. 

Latest Car Accessory

Yesterday was mostly cloudy and windy but there were moments when the sun broke through the clouds and the sensation of the sun on my skin was so welcome and warm. During one of these moments my friend and I kneeled on the shore looking at shells. In Maine the shore is mostly broken mussel shells, rocks, and periwinkle shells. Periwinkles are generally grey or brown or grey and brown and white stripey, but occasionally you see smaller, bright yellow ones that look just like kernels of corn dropped off of someone's corn on the cob. I kneeled on the beach in the sunshine and picked out the yellow periwinkle shells, from the teeny tiniest size to as big as my pinky fingernail. Now my car's coin tray has an array of a dozen or so small bright yellow snail shells. I think it is a lovely addition.

When My Dog Is Sleeping

When my dog is sleeping sometimes she has dreams in which she will shift and stir and jerk, and sometimes in those brave chasing-the-neighbor's-collie-out-of-the-yard dreams she'll need to bark at the intruder, and when she does it comes out through her sleeping closed mouth as a high pitched series of "Boofboofbofbofbof" and a low sort of warm growl. It does not sound at all tough but I can tell she's doing good hard dream work from the way she twitches and moves and until the "boof-bof-bof-bof" tapers back into slow and heavy breathing I laugh and watch her, feeling proud and full of love for my sleeping defender.

Dog Update

The three-legged dog swims just as well as she ever did with four legs. Also does pretty well scrambling around on rocks. And gets just as excited about a thrown stick as ever before. We now scoff when we see other dogs, those kind with too many legs. They just look so clunky and extraneous.

Playing Defense

I've been feeling for a month or two like I'm playing defense, trying not to fall into a funk.  Like there's a big hole right next to me and if I am not careful I'll slip into it and getting out will be hard.  I'm trying to shake things up.  I'm going out to places I usually don't go.  I'm filling up my days so I don't find myself home alone or as third wheel to Housemate and her honey.  I'm fighting the urge to go to bed at 8 and I'm getting up with the sun.  I'm exercising more and harder than usual.  I'm peoplewatching and going to movies and going swimming and walking and saying "yes" to invitations I might ordinarily say "no" to.  I'm making sure to notice beauty wherever I go.

I'm also trying to stay out of my own head.  I'm not writing in my journal.  I'm not spending much time with my closest friends, reaching out to acquaintances instead.  I avoid talking about myself and turn conversations back to others because I'm not all that proud of my life right now.  There's no arena -- intellectual, professional, social, romantic, athletic -- I'm really jazzed about.  I'm waiting for my certainty to come back. 

I think so far I've managed not to fall in the hole.  It's an unusual focus for me, concentrating on just staying on level ground.  I'm usually so steady on my feet, and I'm usually trying to go somewhere, climb a mountain or something.  Instead I'm just kind of teetering here, nervously eyeing this hole next to me, wondering if there's something I can grab hold of for balance.  I've been depressed for a couple of months here and there before, but mostly it's a phenomenon I don't understand or have much of an instinct for.  I have trouble empathizing with my friends who are prone to depression. 

I'm pretty sure I'll manage to stay out of the hole.  And I know I'll be galloping again soon.  In the meantime, I'm going on a day trip with my friend MC, exploring a region of the state I've never seen.      

H.O.T. Night

The Hooked On Tonics girls and I went out tonight.  We went to dinner at a hip restaurant in town, and had our heads together gossiping about sailors when my ex-boyfriend walked in with his new girlfriend.  Sheesh.  He looked like he wanted the ground to swallow them up but they came over, introductions were made, etc.  She seemed pretty game about the whole thing.  When they left the HOT girls immediately agreed that I am much cuter, and also that he was never worthy anyway.  I try to stay away from these type of conversations but must confess that the words coming out of the HOTties' mouths, matter-of-fact statements about my coolness and cuteness and the highly dubious qualifications of the ex and his new chick, were nice to hear.  Why?  I dunno.  I'm not proud of the part of me that wants reassurance, but it's there, these days more than I'd like.   

Then we went to another bar and a well-meaning fellow came out and made a pass at the three of us.  We permitted him and his wingman to hang out with us, but forced them to play "Mother, May I" for the duration of the evening.  "Mother may I put my hand around your shoulders?"  "No.  Put your hand back in your pocket."  "Okay, thank you."  "Mother may I ask you a question?"  "No.  Instead, tell me about your wingman here."  It was kind of fun.  Then we went to a third locale and danced to a pretty good blues band. 

No Longer the Cool Kid

The spunky six year old daughter of Partner Y used to like hanging out in my office, playing peek-a-boo around my desk, and drawing me pictures. When my cool co-worker arrived my stock began to go down, but we still shared some good times. When our office intern, my assistant, joined the firm the game was up. Even my cool co-worker has been completely replaced. We're lucky to get high-fives in the hallway if we ask.

Don't Go To Law School

Someone just found my blog with the Google query: "don't go to law school." Hmmmm. Whoever you are, you're probably wise to be thinking hard about whether to do it or not. I don't know whether Google will have the answer. I certainly don't have the answer. But here are some things to think about.

Don't go to law school right out of college because you're smart and you've been encouraged to by various history professors or relatives or because you like debating or arguing and you vaguely think you might want to get into politics someday. Don't go to law school because you're not sure what else to do, or because your parents really want you to. Or, at least, don't go to a really expensive law school for those reasons, unless you have the means to do so without incurring big big debt. Don't go to law school, in other words, to avoid making a decision about your life as an adult and what you want it to be like. Because if you incur big debt and make your peer group an extremely competitive and perhaps atypically unhappy group of people you will limit your ability to make that decision, clearly and well and for the right reasons.

Law school is fun. I worked harder and learned to think better than I did when I was at Yale. Partly that's because of the nature of law school, but a lot of that was because I wasn't mature enough to be particularly focused on my classes while I was an undergraduate. And when I got done with my undergraduate degree I wanted nothing to do with smart, highly critical and highly articulate people for a while. I went off to the woods and fell in love with a schooner captain and worked in a library and learned about computers and started a nonprofit and hung out with organic gardeners and carpenters and boat riggers. And I learned a lot about how to manage on a very little amount of money, and how to cook interesting dishes and how to get my laundry done before it became a crisis and how to make sure there was enough money in my checking account when rent was due and how to be a professional colleague with people who were much older than me and different in style and background and aspirations. I learned what made me happy and what made me frustrated and what I needed in my daily life to feel like I'd had a good day that day. And I began to learn that part of what I need in my daily life to be happy is contact with smart, articulate people, and some connection to a world where ideas are being pursued. I don't need highfalutin' intellectual stimulation the way some people need it, and I need a LOT of other things too (friends, fresh air, and fun) or I get restless and depressed. But I like to play with words and ideas, to engage with smart people, each day. And when I went back to law school knowing this, and knowing how to keep balance in my life, I had a fantastic time.

I really think if you go to law school before you've done that -- figured out, not just how to live as an adult, but what the elements are for you of a happy life, it's a lot harder to do it afterwards, when you're encumbered with an enormous debt, a status-crazy profession, and a whole lot of friends and family and peers who have a particular view about you and your ambitions. Suddenly you have to reject something, rather than assemble something. And I think that's usually harder to do.

UPDATE: Michigan Law student Carey discusses the dangers of getting onto the conveyor belt of law school prestige very well, here.

Sophie's Choice

Apropos of nothing, I've been mulling over this question for a few days now and on this morning's unaccompanied five mile walk I decided on my answer. What do you think: would you rather live in a world without garlic, or a world without limes?

In earlier years I would have relinquished nearly anything to keep garlic, but now I'm very attached to limes. Take the garlic; leave me my limes.

On the Ball

Nobody could accuse my law firm of not being progressive. Now, in addition to our massage therapist who comes every other week, we've got a nutritionist/trainer coming on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next six weeks to do "workplace fitness" with us. About ten of us have signed up for the program and we decamp into a big conference room at lunchtime with medicine balls and big stability balls and do leg lifts and squats against the wall and push ups and the like. Today was the second session but I had to miss Tuesday, so it was my first. I can already tell that I'll be sore as a result.

Anyway one big perk of this is that I have replaced my desk chair with my stability ball, which is good for abs and lower back and posture in general but is mostly fun because you feel like you're sitting on a Hippety Hop.