Stay of Execution

Notes to Self

1) Just because you're really good at some things, doesn't mean you know how to explain to others how to be really good at those things, or things like those things.

2) People who know a lot about results may not know a lot about process. But they might think they do.

3) People who know a lot about substantive areas may not know a lot about people. But they might think they do.

4) Respect and affection are completely different things. People can respect people they don't like and like people they don't respect. It's easy to get confused, though, and seek both outcomes with behavior that may only result in one.

5) Trust must precede demonstrated trustworthiness. Otherwise it's not trust.

6) Most people don't remember things very well or for very long. The set of exceptions to this rule are very highly personal and emotionally-triggered things.

Discovery

I know this guy, a little bit, socially.  He's on the outskirts of my tribe, I guess, and is closer to an acquaintance than a friend, although he's not on the outskirts for any particular reason.  He's always struck me as perfectly nice, reasonably smart, interesting, etc.  The other day I saw him and he was dressed up more than usual.  He looked nice.  I commented, and he said he'd just come from work.  Oh, I asked, realizing I didn't know the answer, what do you do for work?  He told me, and the instant he answered I discovered I suddenly found him about three times as attractive, and three times as interesting, as I had before.  Indeed, he's moved up from being more or less just some guy I kind of know to an object of some fascination for me.  I had no idea that someone's profession would elicit this kind of interest from me.  I have no idea where it comes from.  Clearly I'm carrying around a bundle of unconscious preconceptions about the profession that I was previously unaware of.  I've been wondering what other unconscious preconceptions I've got.  And how I can get to know this fella better....

Night Swimming

Today was a great day -- I made two new friends and got some good work done and had stimulating conversations and ate sushi and read my book and went running, and I'm ready to go to sleep so I can wake up and have another great day tomorrow. But if you're not outside looking at the moon you really ought to be. I don't care what's on TV -- the moon is more compelling, I'm sure of it. I just walked down the road to the water with my dog, and when we scrambled down the steep path to the beach we marvelled at how high the tide was. Higher than I've ever seen it here. And calm, with the moonlight sparkling on it, and the air thick and warm, and airplanes moving slowly and soundlessly overhead, and a couple of lighthouses flashing away in the distance, and a ferryboat moving across the water. It was so still and lovely that on an impulse I stripped off my clothes and went skinny dipping in the moonlight, a little bit shivery cold but so pretty and quiet and shimmery greeny-black. The dog paddled silently beside me, and we circled out and looked back at the shoreline and the glow of the lights. Then I clambered out and sat for a while on a rock letting myself air dry, feeling pale and a little bit cold but mostly just happy to have this kind of summer night available to me. And then I put my clothes back on and the dog and I made our way back home past lilies in bloom and under the sweet fragrant shadow of the beech trees. Now the dog is sacked out, breathing her heavy regular wheezy snore. Sleep tight.

How Did I Get Here?

People arrived at this website in the last hour with the following web search queries:

"Biglaw"
"july 2004 illinois bar exam"
"practice MBE questions"
"what makes a good law firm"
"Are Harvard grads smarter than everyone else"
"love of material things"
"dogs eating pantyhose"
"speed walking a marathon"
"LEE casual dressing"

I don't know what, if anything, can be learned from this.

Time Is Money

As I go around meeting with people I am becoming aware of how ingrained my habit of keeping track of time has become. I don't think I realized how pervasive the habit of tracking ones minutes had become, and how it affected my social interactions. When you're a lawyer, time is money, right? And so every coffee or lunch break you take to catch up with a friend is time you're not billing. If you're a lawyer and the person you're meeting isn't, you still notice this. You're giving up precious time to meet with them. Maybe they don't quite appreciate it but if the lunch lingers on a little too long, well, geez, you've really got to get going. Don't they understand that this time has a price? Maybe it's free for them, but it's not for you. Conversely, if you're having lunch with another lawyer, someone more senior than you, whose time is worth lots more (or at least, whose billable rate makes their time more expensive), you feel a sort of strange gratitude. You expect them to get through the lunch and then briskly bring things to a close and get back to the office. If they linger or suggest coffee, well, wow, that's so generous, what a good guy this is.

I have a huge awareness and guilt about being even a few minutes late to meet another lawyer. I don't like being late to meet anyone, (although I am, alas, more than I wish), but when I was billing time I noticed a slight resentment when I had to wait around for someone. Interestingly, I think I resented it more when a non-lawyer was late to meet me (they just don't understand what it means to bill by the hour!) than when a lawyer was late (oh, the pressures of being a lawyer, something must have come up). When I was late to meet another biller I felt like my inconsiderateness was easily translatable into economic harm, and would wonder as I apologized whether they'd passed the time calculating how many dollars my delay had cost their firm.

Non-lawyers don't seem to do this. Sometimes people are rushed and sometimes they aren't, but whether or not somebody's rushed doesn't have anything to do with their status or what their time is "worth". Nobody's particularly keeping track. Isn't that interesting?

Adrift

So it might seem funny to say this, but one of the biggest challenges for me about being unemployed is managing my own pace, and my own mental judgments about that pace. I came out of the bankruptcy conference with something of a vision brewing of what I want my life to look like on the other side of this employment gap. And I went tearing out into the world, meeting with people, talking about opportunities, setting things up, brainstorming ideas, etc. Anytime somebody called or emailed me with a suggestion or a possibility I responded with, "Sure! I'm unemployed -- I have lots of time, let's meet whenever it's convenient for you!" And so I was literally racing from appointment to appointment, meeting with folks, turning over rocks and generating possibilities at a breakneck pace. By Friday I was exhausted. Which I found totally dubious and unacceptable, because I looked back at my week and couldn't point to anything I'd DONE. I was just talking and thinking, all brainstorming and no follow through.

So this week I decided to take things slow, to schedule no more than two professional outreach meetings or conversations on any day, and to build in lots of downtime for actually processing the ideas I've generated -- fleshing them out until I understand them with some clarity, weighing them in my head, etc. My current guideline for managing myself in these structureless days is to balance my days better, building in time for exercise, time for administrivia (bills, laundry, groceries, various unexciting paperwork), time for writing, time for generating ideas and meeting with people, and time for following through on the ideas that I've already generated. And some time being outdoors. I think it's a good guideline, although I've been only partly successful at executing it. Today, for example, was not the right mix, although I did get some things done in the midafternoon after the race committee wisely cancelled the race.

I noticed that although I was manic and exhausted when I spent the week running around talking with people, my mood was generally pretty hopeful and excited about the opportunities I discussed. When I slowed down a little too much, my confidence drooped correspondingly. I get a bit skeevy and panicky if I go too long without interacting with people or doing meaningful work. Yesterday I tended to administrivia most of the day, and only met with one professional contact, and it was dreary and grey outside and I lost any sense of progress or certainty of my own abilities in the world. I didn't feel like I was moving forward and I wondered why I thought I would have have any chance of pulling off wild success. I know that this happens to me if I go too long without a certain kind of structured progress; I predicted it before I stopped working. And I know it's not reality, any more than crazed overconfidence is reality.

I've been visualizing this summer's spell of unemployment as a river -- there will be money on the other side of the river, and there will be structure and a clear sense of purpose. So I am trying not to get wacky or grab desperately at things just because I've got very little of either just now. I do believe that this fluidity will bring rewards I haven't yet identified. I'm just beginning to see the landscape that might be available to me when I get to the other side, and it's going to be a while before I understand my options. So for now, while I'm swimming slowly along in this river I need to remind myself that I'm floating, not drowning. No need to thrash about or exhaust myself or grab at the flotsam. It's easier said than done.

Dreary

So today I've volunteered to help out with the Junior Olympics, where 300 + young sailors will be competing in a big hoo-rah of a regatta for glory and fame. The problem is that it is pouring down rain and will be all day -- flooding expected in lowlands, etc. That would be unpleasant but bearable if there were going to be any wind. But there's not going to be any wind. And the organizers of the race are going to be desperate to get a race off anyway, even though the water will be glassy smooth and the boats just miserably drifting around in the rain, because yesterday there was no wind either and although they started a race there wasn't enough wind to finish it. So today is the only hope for having this regatta be a success and nobody is going to be willing to admit that it's just not going to happen. So I'll be out on a motorboat in my foul weather gear like a drowned rat, moving buoys around and talking to the race committee on the VHF radio and waiting for wind that is never going to come. It's likely to be miserable.

And, while I'm griping, the demographic of kids who sails in these Junior Olympic events is basically the kind of suburban rich kid who has his or her own sailboat. On the one hand I think these sailing events are really cool and amazing, and wish I'd had the chance to be racing against 40 or 50 boats, with competitors from all over the world, when I was 9 or 10, because I would be twice or three times as good a sailor as I am now. On the other hand, I travelled around this circuit when I was a nanny way back when, and at its worst I remember an off-putting combination of little league parenting and excessive wealth. Kids with $3000 boats, dressed in $400 worth of gear, complaining petulantly to their parents why they need whatever gizmo the kid on the next boat has, while frustrated dads ask increasingly angry questions about why the kid went to the left side of the course when Daddy told you this morning that the next shift was going to come in from the right. Tanned and slender wives lean against their Chevy Tahoes and talk about their Pilates instructors and the family's decision to take a ski vacation this year instead of going to the Caribbean for the midwinter championships. So I can't decide if the growth of these junior sailing events are a good thing for the sport of sailing or just silly. I'll have a lot of time to observe today.

Cleaning up

So I'm sorting through boxes and piles in a day of dreaded and long delayed administrivia. And I came across this poem by Antonio Machado (translated by Rob't Bly), that I'd set aside one day and forgotten about. I think it must have been leftover from Eastover:

Last Night

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt -- marvelous error! --
that a spring was breaking out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt -- marvelous error! --
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt -- marvelous error! --
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night, as I slept,
I dreamt -- marvelous error! --
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

General Unclassifiable

It's been a while since I've written about my digital music system, but it still gets comments from guests who come over to the house and haven't seen anything like it before. The music is stored on my computer, which talks wirelessly to a little server that plugs into my receiver. I control the music by a somewhat cumbersome remote control with a menu that lets me sort through the library by artist, album, or genre. It works pretty reliably, with only the occasional restart required.

The system doesn't have a "shuffle" function but does have what it calls "Smart Playlists," which are automatically generated song lists based on certain attributes. For example, songs recently added, or songs most frequently played. There's a "smart playlist" for songs rarely played, which we call "Least Favorite Songs" and which seems to approximate the shuffle function, bringing up all sorts of random songs from albums we'd forgotten we own. Mostly, when I don't want to hear anything in particular, I opt for the Least Favorite Songs playlist function.

Today I explored the Genre function, and discovered that it seems to have infinite potential. I'd ignored it because I thought it would be nothing more than five to ten categories, like "Rock", "Classical," "Country," "Jazz," etc. Clearly a failure of my imagination. Consider the first few genre choices: , Acoustic Blues, African, Alt-Folk, Alternative, Alternative Country, Art Rock, Baroque, Bluegrass, Blues Rock, Bop, Brit Pop, Caribbean, Chamber Music..... Fiddle Learning? Foreign Rap? These genres are somehow generated by the music system. When you upload a CD it recognizes it, and automatically enters all the identifying information about album and song titles and artist, and, apparently, genre. I don't know what "Bop" is, or "Caribbean," or "Art Rock" so this makes for a kind of fun way to choose music. I am currently listening to the genre "General Unclassifiable." It turns out to be these guys. I should have known.

Special

I spent a couple of hours tonight coaching a Special Olympics athlete in a little sailboat, and it was pretty cool. I'm not really down with the euphemistic co-opting of the word "special" to mean "mentally disabled" but there was something pretty special about the evening. It was just the two of us on this boat, a tippy and zippy little dinghy, and I gave her the tiller and moved around trimming sails and balancing the boat and directing her where to go. It was a beautiful night, warm and with a nice breeze. The harbor was busy -- lots of ferries and big cruisers and fishing boats and pleasure craft going by, kicking up some big choppy waves. But we managed to race four races, and she drove all of them, concentrating pretty hard. I had a great time. It was like college -- in college, I could be completely worn out and stressed about my classwork and unhappy about some boy or other, and then step onto a sailboat and leave everything behind. Tonight, for the two hours I was in the boat coaching Bambi, I was completely present and focused on her, and the conditions, and the boat, and getting us safely and quickly around the racecourse, in a way that would make her feel good. She wasn't very emotive or expressive, or I wasn't very able to read her emotions, but from time to time she would exclaim with delight when the wind came up or we went through some waves. I think she dug it almost as much as I did. It was a pretty wonderful way to spend the evening.