Bring your love, baby; I can bring my shame.
One thing that's been on my mind of late has been the efficacy of writing things down.
I'm in a place right now where I'm not able to write the final descent in The Sparrow and much of that might have to do with being happier than I've been in a while.
Yesterday, I found out that a client I'd been working with through my clinic was granted habeas relief for his 18-year wrongful imprisonment. It had been an honor to work on this case and with this man, and I've been on a bit of a pink cloud ever since yesterday. I've had to demur the congratulations hurled at me and my partner as most of the tough work had already been done. By him and by my clinic professor and our clinical fellow. Nonetheless, I felt as though I'd had a stake, and though I cannot imagine how overjoyed his family is to have him back and how moved he must feel to finally be released, I do feel as though I've played a part, however brief and however small, in the effectuation of a miracle.
I had my first and only final exam on Monday. As I'd had no other exam to study for, I'd spent 1.5 weeks kinda, sorta studying for it and, as I already had a job locked down, paid the thing as little mind as permissible. I walked out feeling as though I'd finally figured out the law school way of taking an exam, which seems to involve spewing as much as you know about everything in answer to a question that is perhaps more specific than what such a response would allow. But, pending the turning in of a final contract on which I'm working with a friend and partner,* I will officially be done with half of law school. The first half. The worst half. It still hasn't quite hit me, except that much of the guilt I would feel at waking up at 2pm and doing nothing until I'd go and smoke hookah with a good friend and converse over sports and politics and fathers and retirement was gone. No guilt. No shame.
A good friend and 3L successfully launched her publication, in which I am a contributor, after months on months of tireless effort between her and her editorial staff. The launch party was a wonder.
A week from Saturday, I will be attending the wedding of one of my best friends.
Two girls I knew well in college announced engagements within the past week and a half. My high school girlfriend is expecting her first child.
A very good friend of mine here was proposed to by her boyfriend last night/this morning. (She said yes.)
This held much real estate in my mind as I held counsel with my hookah buddy, had me thinking (as is its wont) about the future.
The reason I've hesitated about writing things of this nature down is that so much of the semester has been filled with the living of life. Calamity, chaos and serendipity in equal measure. One of the most sublime evenings in recent history was followed by a crippling deconstruction of self at the hands of another. A future opportunity was jeopardized just as a bevy of friends rushed to my aid, aid I did not realize I needed until after I'd been forced to accept it. I sold a novelette to a magazine I've revered and admired for the better part of a decade. A good friend has sold his novel and a collection of his short stories. All of this has happened so swiftly that I only seem to have time for the barest of Facebook status updates.
I'm preparing for a road trip with a very good buddy of mine and longstanding hookah companion since my NYU days and it's turning into a bit of a Rust Belt tour. I have James Agee and Walter Evans in mind and, knowing that I will write extensively about this trip, worry that this will turn into Recession Tourism. Poverty Porn. There are things that need to be seen, but there is not a need for exhibitionism. I don't know if Agee ever came to any definitive answer or position on how exactly to walk that line.
One of my worries is that thinking about how I will write about something means I'm not 100% in the something, the moment, the event, whether it is catastrophe or blessing.
I've been fortunate to have seen 5 plays in the 6 weeks before my Corporations exam. The last of them starred Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and was a surprise gift from a friend who had come to visit from Atlanta.
My mother, around Thanksgiving, reached the culmination of a thing she'd been questing for ever since the fall of 2010 when so many things seemed to be falling apart. And another member of the family seems to be inclining, however delicately, towards a less self-destructive path than the one he was on. Tenuous, that thing.
Along with all of this has come two essays that have turned into severe and less than luminescent interrogations of problematic parts of myself. Intrusive and honest and exacting stuff that has brought to light a lot of what I had suspected but only really discovered in earnest of late. It has been helpful therapy.
And I haven't even got to the changes that finally reaching my late 20s have wracked on me. Among them, a sudden thirst for romantic comedies and corny Dad sweaters (of the Christmas variety).
I wrote 50,000 words in November and have barely written a word since.
Maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe I've simply thrown my arm out. Or maybe it's a combination of things, resulting in a shift, fundamental and elementary, in my very state of being.
I don't know what it means, but I'm reminded of that Sunday in Mom's Bible Study group where we went over Chapter 4 in the Book of James, and discussion focused on how to negotiate submission to God's will and our proclivity for planning. How do we exercise agency in the midst of a pre-determined course.
There was no definitive answer. But prayer was recommended. As well as open-mindedness. And faith.
That, I guess, is what I'm still trying to learn. The lived reality of faith.
* Correction: Contract and accompanying term sheet have been turned in.
I'm in a place right now where I'm not able to write the final descent in The Sparrow and much of that might have to do with being happier than I've been in a while.
Yesterday, I found out that a client I'd been working with through my clinic was granted habeas relief for his 18-year wrongful imprisonment. It had been an honor to work on this case and with this man, and I've been on a bit of a pink cloud ever since yesterday. I've had to demur the congratulations hurled at me and my partner as most of the tough work had already been done. By him and by my clinic professor and our clinical fellow. Nonetheless, I felt as though I'd had a stake, and though I cannot imagine how overjoyed his family is to have him back and how moved he must feel to finally be released, I do feel as though I've played a part, however brief and however small, in the effectuation of a miracle.
I had my first and only final exam on Monday. As I'd had no other exam to study for, I'd spent 1.5 weeks kinda, sorta studying for it and, as I already had a job locked down, paid the thing as little mind as permissible. I walked out feeling as though I'd finally figured out the law school way of taking an exam, which seems to involve spewing as much as you know about everything in answer to a question that is perhaps more specific than what such a response would allow. But, pending the turning in of a final contract on which I'm working with a friend and partner,* I will officially be done with half of law school. The first half. The worst half. It still hasn't quite hit me, except that much of the guilt I would feel at waking up at 2pm and doing nothing until I'd go and smoke hookah with a good friend and converse over sports and politics and fathers and retirement was gone. No guilt. No shame.
A good friend and 3L successfully launched her publication, in which I am a contributor, after months on months of tireless effort between her and her editorial staff. The launch party was a wonder.
A week from Saturday, I will be attending the wedding of one of my best friends.
Two girls I knew well in college announced engagements within the past week and a half. My high school girlfriend is expecting her first child.
A very good friend of mine here was proposed to by her boyfriend last night/this morning. (She said yes.)
This held much real estate in my mind as I held counsel with my hookah buddy, had me thinking (as is its wont) about the future.
The reason I've hesitated about writing things of this nature down is that so much of the semester has been filled with the living of life. Calamity, chaos and serendipity in equal measure. One of the most sublime evenings in recent history was followed by a crippling deconstruction of self at the hands of another. A future opportunity was jeopardized just as a bevy of friends rushed to my aid, aid I did not realize I needed until after I'd been forced to accept it. I sold a novelette to a magazine I've revered and admired for the better part of a decade. A good friend has sold his novel and a collection of his short stories. All of this has happened so swiftly that I only seem to have time for the barest of Facebook status updates.
I'm preparing for a road trip with a very good buddy of mine and longstanding hookah companion since my NYU days and it's turning into a bit of a Rust Belt tour. I have James Agee and Walter Evans in mind and, knowing that I will write extensively about this trip, worry that this will turn into Recession Tourism. Poverty Porn. There are things that need to be seen, but there is not a need for exhibitionism. I don't know if Agee ever came to any definitive answer or position on how exactly to walk that line.
One of my worries is that thinking about how I will write about something means I'm not 100% in the something, the moment, the event, whether it is catastrophe or blessing.
I've been fortunate to have seen 5 plays in the 6 weeks before my Corporations exam. The last of them starred Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and was a surprise gift from a friend who had come to visit from Atlanta.
My mother, around Thanksgiving, reached the culmination of a thing she'd been questing for ever since the fall of 2010 when so many things seemed to be falling apart. And another member of the family seems to be inclining, however delicately, towards a less self-destructive path than the one he was on. Tenuous, that thing.
Along with all of this has come two essays that have turned into severe and less than luminescent interrogations of problematic parts of myself. Intrusive and honest and exacting stuff that has brought to light a lot of what I had suspected but only really discovered in earnest of late. It has been helpful therapy.
And I haven't even got to the changes that finally reaching my late 20s have wracked on me. Among them, a sudden thirst for romantic comedies and corny Dad sweaters (of the Christmas variety).
I wrote 50,000 words in November and have barely written a word since.
Maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe I've simply thrown my arm out. Or maybe it's a combination of things, resulting in a shift, fundamental and elementary, in my very state of being.
I don't know what it means, but I'm reminded of that Sunday in Mom's Bible Study group where we went over Chapter 4 in the Book of James, and discussion focused on how to negotiate submission to God's will and our proclivity for planning. How do we exercise agency in the midst of a pre-determined course.
There was no definitive answer. But prayer was recommended. As well as open-mindedness. And faith.
That, I guess, is what I'm still trying to learn. The lived reality of faith.
* Correction: Contract and accompanying term sheet have been turned in.