I told you so

Remember this outrageously long rant? Well at the end of it, I predicted that now that I no longer want an attorney position, I'd be offered one. And here I am, the new "Federal Filings Counsel" at my company.

This is one of the things about spirit that twists my knickers into knots.

I am Done - an outrageously long rant

So, I’m writing again. Finally. Geez, it only took two years. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that several people from my past have reached out to me recently, some have even taken a gander at this site to see how I’m doing. It’s not a coincidence ‘cause astrologically, it’s a good time to make a big change in my life. Plus, I haven’t really given much thought lately to where I am. Haven’t navel gazed, if you can believe that. If I could have gotten someone to pay me to navel gaze, I’d be rich for the pathological heights which my past navel gazing reached.

So where am I?

As you know, after 18 years as a mostly single artist of some type or another living in New York, almost everything about me changed in a relatively short period. I think that during that transition, I shut a part of myself off with a promise that once I get “settled” I would return to my regularly scheduled navel gazing. And this blog is nothing if not about navel gazing.

“Settled” however included getting hired in my new career as an attorney, which hasn’t happened yet, even though I’ve been a graduated and admitted attorney for going on three years now. For two years I kept my eye on that prize without journaling, meditating, none of my normal practices that keep me centered. And I’ve paid a price for it. I’ve swollen up about 40 pounds and now feel like I’ve wasted five years and $120,000 of my life and energy for nothing – struggled for, as yet, no reward, and with none in future sight.

If that ain’t the fertile ground from which artistry springs, I don’t know what is.

Since this past summer, I’ve been slowly returning to myself. Started journaling. Started “therapy.” Meditate more often than not. Drink less. Still eat a lot, but started a boot camp to get me back to the gym for the first time in over a year.

What it’s done is given me the courage to tell the legal profession to fuck off. I actually hate it. My experience of it has been of pompous old white men engaged in "Inflate-the-Ego" with each other. Not that there isn’t some genuine collegiality involved as well. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the law or even necessarily lawyers. I hate what our culture has turned the law profession into. Private practice, with its needy, life-draining and potentially crazy clients, scares me. Corporate practice is a joke – General Counsel are mostly (bad) managers spending shareholder money on outside counsel who do all the heavy legal lifting. And the gates to high-level, research, writing and policymaking jobs are so well-guarded, I’d have to go back to my birth – fake my birth certificate and all my educational degrees dating back to grade school – in order to even get someone to talk to me on the phone for those handful of jobs. Either that or pretend to be more of a minority than I actually am.

Though I sound bitter, I’m actually not. My spiritual practices have put me back in touch with my resiliency, which a former therapist has told me is my unique strength. Telling the legal profession to fuck off has done wonders for my mental health. And I’m writing again, with a vengeance. And I have a writing partner. And I am registered for a couple of writing seminars here and there. I will have, if not a full novel, at least a novel-sized anthology of short-stories ready to publish by next spring. And I have a plan. I will self-publish.

I am DONE with gatekeepers and everything, and every and any one who has or will ever tell me “no.” I do not know that word. You can all fuck yourselves. I haven’t accomplished all that I have by listening to anyone who’s told me “no.” I don’t see a need to start now. The legal profession, not I, suffers for this change in my heart. Because if the world needs anything, if America needs anything, it’s more ethical, compassionate and nuanced attorneys. But it’s too late. That profession has been captured by peacocks and muckrakers, and I’m not going to waste a second more of my time “Yes’m”ing another old white guy who graduated from Georgetown/Yale/Harvard/Name-Your-Ivy League-Legacy-Concerned-Only Law School-Here (because we know that the best way to develop the pool of good lawyers in America is to admit into the top law schools, just because their forebears attended them, their less than talented offspring).

Instead, I will write. And I, not you, or you or you or you or you, will express myself to the world. And I will control Who I am and What I do. And I will give to this Planet and I will make a difference. So take it and shove it up your cornhole you bastards.

The irony of all of this is that, now that I don’t want an attorney position, I’m most likely to be offered one. And one that would, no doubt, compete with my time for writing.

Stay tuned true believers.

Wow, a lot has changed

About four times a year I am awed by something that rubs my face in the passage of time. Reviewing receipts while preparing my taxes is usually one of them. "Oh yeah, I remember that dinner. That was the night schmuck-face broke up with me and stiffed me with the bill." "Oh, yeah, that was the gift I purchased for my mother that she promptly returned to the store." Not that there's anything wrong with that.

It might come as a shocker but I haven't been writing much on the blog lately. Shhhhh. Don't tell anyone else. I'm revealing this to you and you only. Even today, I only logged on to transfer into Word some fiction I wrote last November...Jesus Christ no. It was 2007. 2007. WHY CAN'T I CAPITALIZE NUMBERS???!!!! So long as I was already logged on, I tooled around a bit on my dashboard - cleaned up my links and sighed in disappointment at how little value this blog's contributed to the Blog-O-Sphere these past two years.

Some bloggers are still here; some have closed down; some have sold out. Me, I'm just struggling with the same old challenges - abundance, fulfillment, trust. You know, the usual. And while I've been struggling with that in the non-pixilated world, the Blog-O-Sphere has been changing without me.

Christmas Eve

If I channel surf to find only Home Alone (any variation), Bourne Identity, Ice Age or Prancer playing on all the movie channels - AGAIN! - I’m gonna scream.

My beloved Mac G-4 died this morning. It makes a car-gear-like grinding noise when I try to start it - you know, like when you try to shift gears on a manual and miss. And after mucho minutes twirling spikes in a circle, up pops a folder icon with the Finder logo trading flashes with a question mark. I take that logo to mean that my OS is somehow corrupted and I need to re-install. I would re-install except that there’s a DVD stuck inside the drive, a kool one too - I’m Your Man, a documentary about Leonard Cohen. So re-installing is out of the question. And no, it’s not the DVD that’s making that terrible grinding noise. That was happening before I inserted the DVD. Besides, the noise is coming from the battery side of the box, not the DVD side of the box. I’m not brave enough to open up anything more than the battery port and the memory port. As far as I can tell, nothing’s out of whack in those two places.

Sigh. It’s been a good machine for five years. I’m going to have to bite the bullet and take it to the Apple shop and cross my fingers that it can be saved. And while I’m at it, get an OS upgrade, if it’s not too old. The timing sucks as Christmas has left us cash strapped. Blah.

Dan is performing tonight and again tomorrow morning. I’m off work and will spend the day baking, by special request, my first ever red-velvet cake. When Dan gets home, we’ll put pizzas in the oven – after Thanksgiving and all the Christmas baking I’ve been doing, I’m too burned out to cook again – and then open gifts. Who knows after that. No new snow is predicted over the next few days. Back to ghost-town work on Friday – I kind of enjoy working when no one else is around. It’s stressless and I get a lot done when I don’t have everyone shoving “emergencies” my way. How much of what people shove at you are emergencies anyway? Honestly, nothing that crosses my desk would cause death, destruction or even mayhem if left undone. Such drama. So, though I’ll be at work on Friday, it’ll probably feel like a seamless beginning to the weekend.

So, bitch slap that seasonal affective disorder to the curb and count all your blessings, yo, ‘cause we all have them, no matter who you are, no matter how broke, how lonely, how sick, there is something good somewhere going on in your life. Look at it, embrace it, warm yourself with it, even if just for this one day out of the year. Live in a little denial and fuck the rest of it. At least for 24 hours, believe that nothing but good exists in your world. Even if you read this and roll your eyes, think for a minute. Even if you have to work at it a little bit, isn’t it better to explode into the New Year than piss and moan your way into it?

Well, okay, piss and moan if you want, but don’t blame the rest of us if pissing and moaning is all you get out of 2009. I mean, if that’s the way you start out…

I, however, will hear none of it, at least until January. I mean, Daniel Craig was just on tv without a shirt. And Ghost Hunters airs later tonight. Things are looking up. Have a happy ya’ll.

PTSD and the Working Girl

And most impactfully, I have been and am still training myself to react according to the truth of the moment, rather than to overreact to events that trigger a trauma memory. More on that in another post.

So I started my job last February. It had been a pretty bleak job search. When Dan and I strategized our life together – my moving to Boston because a law degree was more portable than his freelance musician work (not in terms of pulling in a paycheck – Dan always pulls in a paycheck – but in terms of pulling in a steady paycheck, which was important as I had consolidated my education loans to lock in a low rate, which meant there was no grace period after graduation – I had to start paying them off immediately) – I had not factored in the number of good, local law schools that were feeding the area’s legal job openings. And, not being an economist, there was no way for me to have predicted that the country had gone into a recession last November, the month of my admission to the MA Bar. So here I was, very bright and hardworking, graduated from a 4th tier, albeit prestigious public interest law school, not summa cum laude (there was no such thing at my alma mater) but with impressive accomplishments nonetheless, competing for $40,000 a year jobs at Legal Aid (high by Legal Aid standards, but still not enough to cover my expenses, by the way) that were, in the end, being awarded to Harvard graduates. None of my cold-call resumes, of which I mailed out about 200, resulted in an interview. My targeted search resulted likewise. The most exciting position I applied for was as an attorney at the new consumer protection unit at Boston’s Legal Aid (my sources inside Legal Aid had told me the organization was undergoing a renaissance – an unusual surplus of funds – I don’t know if this is continuing). Even though I had an inside connection who allowed me to use her name when I contacted the Consumer Protection manager directly, the best the manager could do for me was to suggest that my chances of be awarded the job would increase substantially if I were to volunteer my time with the unit. That wasn’t possible on a full time basis what with $120,000 in loans immediately due. But I was willing to try to squeeze my work-week around to volunteer at least a couple of days a week – maybe even weekends. But the unit manager wouldn’t return my calls after that first conversation. She was willing to see my resume. But I had to find out well after the fact that the position was filled without my even being called in for an interview. During those uncertain months, I couldn’t even get a contract attorney position even though I was registered with and checking in every day to all the agencies in town – and firms don’t care from where you graduated if all they want you to do is document review. No, during those uncertain months, the only work I could get was administrative work, paying between $8-$15 an hour.

So when my company offered me a paralegal job starting in early February 2008 at a substantial increase from the salary I was last making as a paralegal, I took it. It was at least a law related job, in an industry with which I had experience, and my manager had put the possibility on the table, right up front, of my being promoted into an attorney position somewhere down the road. It was the best offer in a series of non-existent and otherwise terrible offers.

I’m not cocky about too many things, but I am cocky about my ability to bounce back from adversity or change/violence, because it’s been tested so often. I’ve always been resilient – more resilient than most. Which is what my last therapist credits for my survival. And, while I’ve lamented ad nauseum about all the change I’ve been through in the past two years, I don’t think that most of what I went through in the last couple of years was too much for me to handle. It was draining yes, and more so than I expected. So there I was, depleted after the marriage, the move, the graduation, the Bar exams. Depleted, needing rest, and vulnerable. But not so much that a month or three of keeping my head low and getting enough sleep every night couldn’t have healed. What it was, was the grim understanding that I was in the exact same professional circumstances I had been in four years ago. I did not have to spend four years struggling through law school, go into$120,000 of debt (indeed, I’m still paying off a portion of my undergrad loans), and move states in order to be a paralegal doing SEC disclosure work at a large, multi-national life insurance company. The straw that broke the camel’s back (funny, I almost wrote, “the camel that broke the straw’s back,” which somehow, feels even more appropriate), what depleted me in the end, was the enormous amount of energy – because time is energy, money is energy, physical motion is energy – I spent to go absolutely nowhere.

The Devil You Know

A favorite saying from a former acquaintance is that “change is violence.” A dramatic statement to be sure, but I think it accurately makes the point that change is not smooth, even when it’s positive. And in the midst of that kind of violence, it’s easy to embrace the devil you know than to reach for the angel you don’t.

It’s taken some time for the dust to settle so that I can see clearly. So that I can see that I have a disability. An invisible one – which is hard enough to see without the dust – but a disability nonetheless. And like all good drama queens, when I need to the most is when I’m least likely to take care of myself.

I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve mentioned it in other posts (which have not survived the "best of" scissors – so no links; be grateful! Very very grateful). The short of it is that growing up in the shadow of fear – that the very source of my life, my parents, could very well also be the death of me – gave me many of the same symptoms as veterans returning from war. The stress chemicals released when it appears likely that you’re going to die, and the long term effects of regular and consistent application of those chemicals to your body – those are real, regardless whether the threat would be from enemy hands during combat or from one’s own family.

It might seem odd that I “suddenly” come to this conclusion, that I didn’t recognize my symptoms earlier, especially since I spend so much time navel gazing. What kind of idiot misses something like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? Sheesh! Well, it is not widely recognized outside of disaster and combat survivors. And since my childhood abuse didn’t result in bruises or hospital visits, in other words, since it wasn’t Visible, mental health professionals wouldn’t even consider it as a diagnosis. I mean, if a child comes in with pain in her feet, absent a genetic history of it, a doctor is unlikely to consider diabetes as his first diagnosis. After treating other possible underlying causes for the pain, a doctor might eventually come to a diabetes diagnosis after those other treatments fail. Complex PTSD, which is what I have, is as difficult and nuanced to diagnose in the absence of other obvious markers.

In that earlier post, I wrote about a recurring sensation that comes while I’m just hanging around, minding my own business, and feels like something – usually something big, fast and heavy – was going to come out of nowhere and blow my head off. Only now do I realize why I started getting that sensation in my late 20s. It was because that was the same period of time when I overcame some of my worst addictions – the addictions that kept the trauma at bay. Ever wonder why so many veterans do drugs and/or drink? What do you think would happen to them if you took their addictions away? They would probably suffer some similar version of symptoms from which I suffer. Indeed, many of them do despite the addictions. The sensation of violence isn’t all. I have also had to retrain myself to sleep again. And most impactfully, I have been and am still training myself to react according to the truth of the moment, rather than to overreact to events that trigger a trauma memory. More on that in another post.

Now, without addictions to anesthetize my symptoms, I have to mollify them through heavily applied “treatments” – meditation, healthy diet, exercise, and rigorous checking in. Like a diabetic who doesn’t take his insulin on schedule, when I fail to apply my treatment, I pay severe, though different, consequences – anxiety, depression, erratic moods, and sluggish living. And still being new to taking care of myself, my treatments fall off in times of change, oh say, like when I get married, graduate, move from my home state of 18 years to a new state, and try to get a new career off the ground in my late 30s. Nothing in my life right now is familiar, not even the weather. I should be doubling up on my treatments. Not slacking on them entirely.

So why am I not writing? Because I am not myself at the moment. I am in that spiral – needing energy to reinstate my treatments but not having energy as a result of not having followed my treatments. I might have to let some things go – searching for work, hell, even work itself – in order to focus on just getting myself back up to speed. With money as tight as it is right now, however, I’m just not sure how that’s going to be possible. But, you’ve already read about that.

It just never ends

Perhaps I was naive - Hindsight frequently reveals that I am. I'm beginning to think that I'm like Michael Crichton - that I pursued a graduate degree in order to have something to write about. What makes me naive is that, considering the number of attorneys who are deeply dissatisfied with their jobs, I still went to law school for professional happiness. First, I did feel that I met my intellectual match in law school. But then the professional realm is very different. More on that later. For now, things are cuckoo crazy busy at my job. And there is no end in sight. I'm getting fat and I'm going insane because any personal time I have in which to exercise or write is spent recuperating from insanely long hours and unnecessary wackiness at my job (some of it caused by dysfunctional processes, some of it caused by nutjob co-workers). Well, I also spend some of that time drinking with compatriots - generally not other attorneys - who are similarly psychologically inclined. That adds calories to the waistline as well.

I mean even now, as I'm writing this, in the back of my mind is a voice chastising me for not using this time to do some work instead. I'd like to stab that voice.

I work in financial services, and the grim joke on the floor is that busyness ensures job security. I internally roll my eyes every time someone cracks that joke. I *don't care* about hanging onto a job that isn't the right fit for me, or working with crazy people. Unfortunately, the current state of the economy and the burden of education loans greatly restrict my mobility.

They say that every obstacle is a spiritual opportunity. So I'm still struggling to solve this obstacle. Unfortunately, this situation doesn't allow for much interesting reading on this site. Once it does, then we'll know that the "obstacle" has been dissolved.

Oh yeah, go Obama!

Again and again and again

Yeah, okay, so I’ve been away for awhile. I have all sorts of excuses, etc. The short of it is that the transition I just went through? Well, instead of the ripple I expected, I got a tsunami.

I’ve been spoiled my last decade or so. After the first five or six years, during which I was miserable, I adapted to and became good at living in New York. As much change as I navigated during those cumulative 18 years in New York, at a minimum I always knew who I was and where I was. I didn't credit that knowledge enough for the comfort and stability it gave me. I've lost my mooring in New England. There have been identity struggles, adaptation to not only the region but also to my new marital and professional status. Even now, 1.5 years after graduating and moving, writing this list makes my chest seize up. The list overwhelms and angers me.

Reading this, you’d think that I was/am miserable. Not true. It’s just that I have a delicate constitution when it comes to writing. That might seem like a cop-out… even I have a voice in my head that chastises me for making excuses: “If you’re a writer then you write; if you don’t, then you’re not.” But that’s exactly the point: what/who am I now? The absence of my reflection in the world has always been the norm, but *now*, now that I have a clearer idea, believe it or not, of whom I am and what I'm to be doing during this life, this planet, instead of becoming more familiar, has become more alien. This disconnect makes me question my new certainty about my place in the world. And writing feels more and more dangerous in proportion to the width of that disconnect. But this is a larger story we’ll get into later.

For now, amazingly enough, I do have a couple of series of posts that I started during this long hiatus. That’s right! A couple of *series*. One post is so old, I was still in law school when I drafted it. I think they’re relevant for explaining what I’ve been going through the last year and a half, so I'll dust them off, but they need editing and elaboration. Stay tuned Mr. Moth.

The Smartest Guys In The Room

Just watched this video. Spooky. If you learn nothing else from this site, learn this: do not ever trust a corporation. I repeat, do not ever trust a corporation. And get off the utility grid as soon as you can.

Don't get me wrong. If you have the discretionary income and you want to buy corporate products, go ahead. But the minute you decide you NEED 1000+ cable TV, or the Apple Air with the latest (buggy, no doubt) operating system, and the super deluxe, latest, greatest cellphone-videoplayer-mp3player-palmsized-supercomputer, they have you by the short hairs.

Fact is, they spend a lot of money to convince you that you NEED things you don't need. Buy the gadgets and services, enjoy them, but be prepared to walk away from any of it at any time. That's the only way to retain power over corporations. You think this is self-evident don't you? Then try this experiment. Use absolutely no electrical gadgets for a week. Do not use your gas or oil fueled heat. Use battery operated gadgets until they run out but do not recharge them when they do. I guarantee you that you'll think you need these things after about 48 hours. But if you had to live without them like, for real, you'd realize that you don't really need them.

California was as electricity dependent as the rest of us. And look at what Enron did to them. Don't think Enron is an isolated example of corporate malfeasance. And get off the grid as soon as possible.

It's the End of the World

1. In a news report over the radio about some oil drums catching fire, the first piece of information reported was that the fire would affect gas prices. The second piece of information was that two people died in the blaze. This was a headline piece, aired every half hour that morning. The order of importance of each piece of information never changed.

2. I usually love Kathy Griffin because she is outrageous, but I was disappointed by her latest Bravo special. It was boring as sin, mostly because she talked about herself and how she responded to the celebrities she runs across rather than talking about the celebrities and the wacky, fucked-up things that they do. Maybe it was the recent Emmy speaking, but all I know is that someone finally got to her. She's not watering down her act on her own. I guess this qualifies for this list because I thought of all people, Kathy Griffin would be the last to succumb to Hollywood establishment.

3. It took 17 years of living in New York before a member of my family finally came to visit me there. I've been in New England approximately six months and already, my sister and nephews are visiting. What the fuh?!!

4. And finally - today I was made I an official card-carrying member of the Massachusetts Bar. You can now legally sue me for malpractice. At one point in my life, I would have said that I didn't want to be a member of any Bar that would have me. But after having met a few of my fellow admittees, I'm sorry to be a member of a Bar that would have them. In my defense, I have to remind you that I've come a long way from the time when I was happy to be admitted to any bar (note that that last is spelled with a small "b").

All the above is pretty clear evidence that the end is nigh.

Random Thoughts from the Wandering Lawyer IV

1. What the fuck is up with John Cusack? From Say Anything, to The Grifters, to Grosse Point Blank, and then High Fidelity, the guy then does America's Sweethearts, Serendipity, Runaway Jury, Must Love Dogs, 1408. And now, NOW, Martian Child. When will the guy do another decent film?

2. We have a ghost in our upstairs. It spoke through me the other night as I was drifting to sleep and vulnerable. It made me say, "urrgurgle."

3. My husband will play his first bar gig next month - something fun and contemporary, something other than the stuffy classical music he usually plays. That's right, I married a rock star!

4. Filed our taxes (after getting an extension). Getting quite a bit of money back. Just in time for more of my school loans to come due.

5. Okay, I'm at a temp assignment where the people have been very nice. I'm breathing easier now about Bostonians. But this weather! I'm going to have to rethink moisturizer.

Random Thoughts from the Wandering Lawyer III

1. I don't get the whole Norah Jones thing. Yesterday, one of her songs came on the radio (and I hate to admit it, but I'm so Norah-apathetic, I can't even remember what song it was), and it had this repeating chorus that brought to mind Keanu Reeves in Speed. Early in Speed, our nemesis Dennis Hopper asks Keanu a repeating question, "What do you do?" after offering him a choice between bleak and bleaker options. Hopper's inflection changed with each utterance of the question, presumably, as would be true of any good actor, because his intention for each changed. Later in the film, after our good guy Reeves turns the tables on Hopper and likewise offers him a choice between bleak and bleaker options, he asks the same question, "What do you do?" Twice. That moment has got to be one of the most mocked line deliveries E.V.E.R. Because Reeves' inflection doesn't change at all between utterances. Proof that he doesn't have any intentions when he acts. Blech. So Norah's repeating this chorus, and that oft mocked Reeves' moment comes to mind, why? Because Norah's singing blues and there is no change in her inflection from one utterance to another. This is the blue's lady! You're supposed to be moved by your soul, which would then inform your delivery. But no. She sang the chorus the same way every time, and, though pretty, I wondered if Norah had any soul. Because this song was as telling of that absence as Reeves' moment in Speed was of his lack of intention. I'm afraid enough of the backlash from crazed Norah Jones fans - have you ever looked them in the eye as they are talking about her? it's like Children of the Corn! - so I won't go so far as to say that she has no soul, or that she is to blues what Keanu Reeves is to acting. But at a minimum, she is what my husband would call "musically rudimentary," and hardly worth all the adoration showered upon her.

2. Go Gore!

3. Hmmmm, I got so impassioned about the Norah Jones thing, I can't remember what else I've been thinking.

Like omigod! That's so tubular. or Random Thoughts from the Wandering Lawyer III

Like, Moon Unit Zappa turns 40 today. Omigod! I am so old.

Or, I still have half my life to look forward to. And now that I am actually beginning to understand my way in this life, I suppose that it, the rest of my life that is, is worth looking forward to.

I feel different these days. I'm not sure how to explain it. I've been on a temporary admin assignment these past few weeks, and it's been pretty good, but not for the salary or because it's fun or anything. But because it's given me the apples-to-apples comparison helpful in seeing exactly how far I've come. Not only in my Word skills, but in my ability to handle people and my ability to take control and manage my life. A few years ago, I would have grabbed this job and hung on for dear life, despite the fact that it's terribly stressful and way beneath me, because my fear of not having any money ruled the day. Not any more. My fear used to weigh so heavily because I lacked belief in my own value. It's easier for me to risk unemployment because I am certain that I offer something to the world - something it needs - and that my place in the world will find me so long as I continue to put in the requisite effort necessary to help it do so.

Sounds simple doesn't it? Like, something we should all feel about ourselves by the time we wrap up high school. Well, I don't know about you, but it took me a helluva lot of blood, sweat, and tears (not to mention humiliation, shame, fear, and anxiety) to learn such a simple-sounding lesson. Now if I could only make this new skin fit better.

Insert Really Great Title Here

I get these random thoughts during the day. And every so often, I'll think "that'd make a great title for a post." But none of them are coming now; so I'll let you provide one. Name this post whatever you see fit.

Managing change is never an easy task. And, as you can see by the dearth of interesting posts on this site, managing the monumental changes in my life has superceded my creative side. I've been thinking about, trying to isolate the reason why, I've not been able to sit down on a semi-regular basis and write these days. The closest I get to the cause, is the fact that not only has my single life changed, but that my life is itself no longer single. The most difficult change (practically) has been to integrate my life with another's and still keep it looking like my own.

Of course you know what I'm talking about. Everyone who's ever had a relationship that extended, however minutely, beyond semi-regular, midnight booty calling has struggled with and complained about this problem.

For instance, most of my writing used to happen in the morning, before I left my house for the day. Now, my husband and I wake up together, make breakfast, listen to the news, fight over what time we should leave for the subway. Sounds nice doesn't it? Except that I don't sit down to write. And too much absence from this blog, and I begin to forget who I am. So what (or who) the hell am I bringing to the marriage if I don't know who I am? Not a comfortable place to be, and the crevice, I suspect, of the slippery slope that is the demise of many relationships.

"So stop yer bitchin' and just close your door and write already. What a whiny post."

Yeah, it's not that easy. I don't know why yet, but it's not.

Random Thoughts from the Wandering Lawyer II

1. There is definitely a New England state of mind. I've been bumping up against it, but don't quite understand it yet - except that it strikes me as a bit more classist than the New York state of mind.

2. Eyebrows are really hard to make up. And why on Earth am I wearing make up every day anyway?

3. My husband is on the verge of getting a really good job. Keep your fingers crossed.

4. As hard as I try not to get sucked up into the whole "I'm not worthy to be a lawyer because I didn't get a job while I was still in law school" line of thought, it's a struggle. First off, I didn't even try to get a job during my last year in law school, except for one or two very specific applications, because I made a decision to commit my energy to my clients instead. Second, it's not easy to get a job when you're moving to not only a new market, but also a specific market. If finding a job is a numbers game, my situation limits the numbers drastically. Third, I'm only six weeks out of taking the Bar exams, and it's only been three weeks since I started actively looking for work; this is no evidence of unemployability. And finally, if I'd stayed in New York, I'd probably already have a nice corporate job thanks to all the contacts I'd been cultivating in the 18 years I lived there. Sigh. I know all these things are true, but still... I'm doing some admin work at a hoity toity Boston firm, and when I look at the educational backgrounds of their new first year associates... It's really ludicrous. Really. None of us, it seems, has moved very far from the clique mentality of high school.

Random Thoughts from the Wandering Lawyer

1. Islam is the new punk rock.

2. Faith is essential in free will. Patterns from our childhood govern our beliefs which, in turn, govern our actions. Free will means making a conscious choice among foreseeable options (rather than having our choices dictated to us by unconscious patterns). Therefore, in order to exercise free will, one's mind must be conscious enough to recognize that options exist, that we have many more choices than we are capable of recognizing or are willing to exercise because our childhood beliefs limit our ability to either see or accept them. Which means, in turn, that to exercise free will, to make a conscious choice, we must have the ability to have faith, the ability to believe in something for which no proof exists. We must be able to believe that our choice will resolve as we intend regardless that no proof exists to support our desired outcome. So the random thought is this: isn't it funny how many people will reject faith because, they claim, it is antithetical to free will? I will expound on this random thought in another post.

3. Snail mailing hand-written Thank-you cards build a great deal of good will.

4. I must must must clean and organize my office. I'm stalled in rewriting my corporate ethics article, which is arguably the most valuable piece in my job search, because I have no place in which to set my materials before me and organize my thoughts. Why have I been procrastinating on this? A question to be answered, perhaps, in the next random thoughts segment.

5. Got my J.D. in the mail last week. I have always found getting a degree in the mail to be anti-climactic. All I see after I open up that tube is a really, really expensive piece of paper. Feh.

Seminal

I'm brain dead. Too much organizing, planning, emailing of resumes and making new contacts. I do have an interview on Friday (tomorrow), but for a temp job. Nothing exciting, except for the thought of having a reason to get out of the house on a schedule. Funny, when I can't stay home, I want to. When I can, I can't wait to get out again. Well, not really. It's been nice. Harsh during the period while I was studying, but in the three weeks since that period ended, staying home has been pretty nice. I think three weeks is about my housebound limit, however.

I don't miss New York at all. It's amazing to me that perhaps five or six years ago, I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. I guess it's like being an artist - if you can imagine doing anything else, do it. And if you can imagine living anywhere other than New York City, live there. I have to say, three floors of house have been overwhelming to organize, after 18 years of living in studio apartments. I've made a substantial foray, but am now over all the initial panic to get it done now, today, immediately. Dan keeps telling me that I have time to put everything away, that it's not going anywhere. And he's right.

Basically all I could tell you about right now is television, but I won't. Except to say that Saving Grace is pretty interesting, and I'm totally glued in to Design Star. Thank God glitter Josh didn't get axed last Sunday! Oh, and am rubbernecking Flipping Out like it's a car crash (Jeff reminds me of some people I used to know).

So, TV, decorating, and emailing resumes. Bored yet? Before you answer, I have to mention that last Saturday afternoon, I actually sat on a beach reading trashy magazines and breathing in the view of sailboats and calm, sunny, blue ocean. I think it was the first time, in four years, that I've done anything remotely lazy without the pressure of..., well, so many things, hanging over me, ruining my calm. Last Saturday. For the first time in four years. I didn't know I had it in me anymore to be bored. Bored now? Yes. Thank you God!

In Full Swing

Job hunting that is. Has anyone ever gotten a job through an online job board? I tell myself it's a waste of time, and I do so easily enough as the last ten years of my professional career were all linked by personal referrals (even my first temp agency application was through a personal referral). But then, I remember many many years ago, when I was working in the marketing department of a national life insurance company, we hired the new director for our New Jersey office, at a six figure salary, off his resume on Monster.com. So it's not impossible I suppose. I just wonder if it's possible for someone like myself, who isn't interested in creating 10 billion versions of my resume, to be hired in such a manner. All traditional job searching advice warns us to market, market, market ourselves! As such, it takes a tremendous amount of faith to believe that if I just tell the truth, that the right job - the one that wants, not the super-polished marketed me, but the actual me (as that's the one who's actually going to show up every morning) - that that job will find me. 'Cause that super-marketed me? The one that's always selling herself? She's actually a pain in the ass to work with. And you already know someone like that don't you?

And I suppose what I really want is to find the employer with a little imagination who knows this as well as I do. I mean, what's the point of everything I went through the past four years if I don't get the job that is absolutely fulfilling to me? Because, hey, I didn't need to get another degree in order to get a job I hate.

Shake Your Pee Pee

I’ve been told over and over again that men are simple. But I never believed it. I was suspicious, couldn’t accept that any so-called male bad behavior was caused by mere lack of thinking, that there hadn’t been some ulterior motive behind some man’s thoughtless comment or action. That, whenever a man I was dating pissed me off, he was personally persecuting me and maybe I deserved it because I had done something wrong. And if, after reflection, I realized that I hadn’t done anything wrong, well then, he was just a bad, bad person. And since this ultimately happened in all my dating relationships, I eventually concluded that either men were just bad bad people, or else I was perennially doing something wrong. I didn’t understand men at all. But then, like a lightening bolt of truth in the midst of the turmoil that is the end of law school/pre-Bar exam, comes Detroit Rock City to explain and enlighten my sorry contemplative ass once and for all. And now I realize that, really, there probably never was any ulterior motive or personal persecution at all. Oh, if only I could have all those years back! How is it that I lived until almost thirty-ahem without seeing this movie?

Remember all that writing I did about who-where-what-when men are-can be-want to be… basically, my quest for today’s definition of manhood? Well, Detroit Rock City lays out all that men want: 1) despite a man’s ugliness, skinniness or other inadequacies, he always wants to get the hottest, finest chick; 2) men want to have fun, and they’ll go to great lengths to have fun; 3) men want to pursue goals (like quests), especially goals that are fun; and 4) men want to be needed and admired. SPOILER WARNING. In Detroit Rock City, each boy becomes a man during a quest to secure tickets to the concert by the greatest rock ‘n roll band ever – KISS. In that quest, each “boy” gets pushed beyond his limit as he thwarts a villain, saves the girl, gets kissed or laid, and in the end, they, collectively, not only meet their goal of getting into the concert, but the bullies/bad guys all get theirs. By the end, they’ve become men - [insert caveman grunting here]! It’s a fun and funny late-70’s styled romp, which had me, if not laughing, then plastered with a silly grin all the way through.

But this is one of those moments where getting what I want – an understanding of men – has a double-edged sword. Okay, so men are not the bad guys that I generically thought them to be during my long, long, loooooong stretch of dating. They did not deserve my constant scrutiny or suspicion because there just wasn’t any wizard behind the curtain – what you see is what you get. And the girls who caught on to this early, as I’m now figuring out, were the ones who used to always get the guys. Because knowing the above allows one, when a guy misbehaved, to just wave it off as him being a guy; one could call him on his shit in a nice way, without the drama of having taken his actions personally. If I had known this before, I could’ve stayed or bailed on my relationships without getting all wracked up about what it was *I* had done wrong, because I could’ve, instead, assumed that I had done nothing wrong, that the failures of the relationship amounted to simply him being a guy.

But this is kind of the way I think of children. Is it the way I should be thinking of men? Which is why, I guess, men like my husband stand out. They do, at least attempt, to take responsibility for their actions. They do not pin all the responsibility on women to teach them good behavior. In other words, they step up. That’s a man. Which doesn’t mean my husband and men like him stop wanting to get the girl, have fun, pursue goals, or be appreciated and admired. It just means that I and the other circumstances around my husband are no longer responsible for his sense of self or his self-esteem – he is. And it also means that he won’t bail on me for some other admiring chick just because I’m having a bad week and can’t appreciate and admire him as much as he needs. Because his self-esteem will stay in tact even when I can’t step up. It means that, instead of whining when I can’t pay enough attention to him – because, you know, whining really gets a girl hot – he has enough self-esteem to do something to earn my attention, like offer me a foot massage or do the dishes without my asking. The Detroit Rock City guys would assume that it was my responsibility to admire them, not their responsibility to earn my admiration. See the difference? If not, no big deal. You’re just being a guy, right?

So, the double-edged sword: now that I know the holy secrets of men, do I follow it down the line, or do I continue to rebel as I have already been doing? I mean, do I just condescend and treat men as inferior (which appears to be the way the American majority likes things and is, thus, easier to live), or bail on any man who doesn't know how to take responsibility for his own actions and risk living a male-free life? The men who are in my life already, well too bad. I've been holding your feet to the fire and I will continue to do such. But what about forging new relationships - professional and platonic? I suppose that knowing what I know now allows me to, at a minimum, rebel with more confidence and certainty. And I suppose that maybe KISS was, after all, the greatest rock ‘n roll band ever.

Effort

It’s taking effort to get started writing again. Knowing that the end of my law school career is near has brought up a lot of conflicting feelings. Many of my classmates, anticipating release from class schedules and no more unrealistic work assignments, have started acting as if the bell has already rung. The massive, unrelenting effort of law school has had me running on fumes for so long that I can’t even muster up enough effort to meditate – because, you know, meditation is active relaxation, meaning I have to do something affirmative in order to meditate, while watching TV is passive relaxation, meaning I don’t have to do jack shit. And jack shit is what I’ve been doing. Oh, and watching a lot of TV. My HGTV addiction has gotten so bad that my husband has threatened to stage an intervention.

This anticipation comes with anxiety – over what I’ll be doing for work and how to manage all the debt – and a splash of excitement – of having the whole world as my oyster. I mean, this is a clean slate. I could, in theory, do anything I want. But not really. How would the world respond if I were to decide, after all this effort, that I didn’t want to be a lawyer? That all I wanted was to stay home, push out a couple of puppies, and redesign my house? Or that, all law school has done has been to reinforce that I’m a writer, an artist? I’m in so much debt, how could I afford to be anything other than a lawyer, and a corporate one at that? Faith is believing in what can’t be seen. In a moment like this, is it faith to hold out for what I want absent any sign of its plausibility, or would that just be burying my head in the sand, living in a fantasy?

I only have so much effort to give and, having been pushed past that point, a whole lotta contradictions have been kicked up. If you were to look at me from the outside, you’d see me slumped in front of the TV, preferably watching Design on a Dime or Divine Design, but if you could see inside… Aaaaaaaaaah! This is why I haven’t been writing, because I don’t have it in me to do yet one more affirmative thing. And even if I did, I couldn’t begin to unravel the mess inside enough to make sense in a post.

And the wry twist* on it all is that times like these are the exact moments when I need most to write. When writing would be most beneficial. It’s hard to convince myself, though, that writing is going to feel better than, say, buying stuff online with money I don’t have. Or surfing the web. Or scrubbing the bathtub inch-by-inch with a toothbrush.

Where’re the remotes?

*The misuse abuse of “irony” stops here.