So much pain to ease my simple mind.
Today was Day 2 of life as a BigLaw Summer Associate, which so far has entailed a mélange of interminable training sessions wherein too much information is hurled discus-like at us and cushy lunches and coffee outings led by other associates and occasionally a partner or two. The atmosphere is beyond cordial and two steps past collegiate. It bears keeping in mind that the summer associate experience is light years away from what life as a first-year would be like (less eating out, more leaving at night), but (and perhaps this is me 'falling for it') I'm beginning to become enamored of the place, more specifically the people in it. On top of that, I'm genuinely excited for the work that will, in short order, be coming my way, wary, at the same time, of what I saw in my beleaguered contemporaries who had started last week and already had the just-came-back-from-the-trenches stare in their eyes, their neckties long gone. I've another 9 weeks after this one: a period of time that will likely entail much more time at my actual desk than around a table in a restaurant. But there was no soul-searching involved in getting here. No decision-making process that hadn't already happened just under a decade ago. It does feel some kind of unsettling to be on the verge of something one's worked towards for so long. The journey had become the totality of the experience, and here I stand on the precipice. When I sold my first short story (and received contributor copies that never came, lol), I thought there would be pink clouds for days. Instead, there was validation "I did this; I can do this" and then on to writing the next story or continuing the thing I'd been working on. I do hope a similar genre of sentiment captures me here. I hope I can develop the abilities I need to make this thing work for me. And I hope I can sidestep the addiction to material accumulation and instead keep in my target reticle that desire to simply do the work, to find it interesting and difficult and fun and worthy of doing.
Dr. Maya Angelou reportedly passed today. Her work has had only a glancing impact on me directly, but it has struck so many of the important people in my life, so many of the people I hug close, to their cores, touched them, torched them, formed them. As though she were made larger than life by that same virtue with which she had infected anyone who'd read her work or heard her speak or who'd seen her act or had even heard how some people spoke of her. This Grantland article, among other things, is an incredible compendium of some of her recorded interactions with heroes and icons across multiple generations. She talks with Dave Chappelle about Malcolm X and Dr. King and Tupac. She acts in John Singleton's Poetic Justice. She features in an episode of Moesha. In those interviews with comedians and rappers, it is more than two famous people talking. One watches Dave Chappelle's eyes and sees a beseeching in them. He's watching her, listening to her, and trying to figure out his life, trying to figure out his self and using her wisdom as tools for that expansive, difficult, worthy work.
It seems trite and wrong to say the world is lessened for her passing. She left us with so much, and my Newsfeed, rather than be leaden with mourning, is lifted in exaltation at the gift that she was and that she continues to be.
I will be working in the Energy and Infrastructure group this summer and, in my mind, this seems to entail financing the building of water treatment facilities and toll roads and bridges and putting high-speed rail in West Africa. Word on the street (or in the office) is that the reality is only slightly less lofty than my dream. I imagine in some places a poem is a bridge. Wisdom filtered through the prose of a novel like water passed through a treatment facility's pipes. "Good done anywhere is good done everywhere," Dr. Angelou says.
And she is right.
Dr. Maya Angelou reportedly passed today. Her work has had only a glancing impact on me directly, but it has struck so many of the important people in my life, so many of the people I hug close, to their cores, touched them, torched them, formed them. As though she were made larger than life by that same virtue with which she had infected anyone who'd read her work or heard her speak or who'd seen her act or had even heard how some people spoke of her. This Grantland article, among other things, is an incredible compendium of some of her recorded interactions with heroes and icons across multiple generations. She talks with Dave Chappelle about Malcolm X and Dr. King and Tupac. She acts in John Singleton's Poetic Justice. She features in an episode of Moesha. In those interviews with comedians and rappers, it is more than two famous people talking. One watches Dave Chappelle's eyes and sees a beseeching in them. He's watching her, listening to her, and trying to figure out his life, trying to figure out his self and using her wisdom as tools for that expansive, difficult, worthy work.
It seems trite and wrong to say the world is lessened for her passing. She left us with so much, and my Newsfeed, rather than be leaden with mourning, is lifted in exaltation at the gift that she was and that she continues to be.
I will be working in the Energy and Infrastructure group this summer and, in my mind, this seems to entail financing the building of water treatment facilities and toll roads and bridges and putting high-speed rail in West Africa. Word on the street (or in the office) is that the reality is only slightly less lofty than my dream. I imagine in some places a poem is a bridge. Wisdom filtered through the prose of a novel like water passed through a treatment facility's pipes. "Good done anywhere is good done everywhere," Dr. Angelou says.
And she is right.