Why dont more people support their local pbs station? Do they feel guilty like me when they watch Pink Floyd playing pulse, knowing that ordinarily that would be something that they would have paid for to see, but now, since they dont have to, since they can sit back on their couch and feel an awkward mixture of duty and apathy, with the latter just slightly besting the fight, well, they just wont. And if its gone tommorow, I'm sure something else will be on. Can't count on people's charitable will. Maybe I just subliminally really want a tote bag, whatever that is.

I find myself here again, actively trying to waste some more time, avoiding studying for evidence, or crim pro, or bioethics. All subjects which I chose to take earlier, before the semester began, and which now, I'm trying desperately, failingly to justify my disinterest in. There was an interesting articlein New York magazine this week about burnout. One of the more interesting points made was that contrary to common intuition, burnout is not mainly the effect of unrelenting work, with correspondinglyy little rest. Rather, its a function of something more abstract, an ennui born of the complete collapse of personal motivation, drive and ambition. When a person feels totally the utter worthlessness of his efforts, and himself. The article mentioned that its more prevalent in twentysomethings, then older folks since they still have the opportunity to have their dreams demoralized and ideals disillusioned, whereas old people have already been graced with those byproducts of life.

Money

I've been studying on and off now for the last couple of weeks., alternating weekly between classes. This week I'm on Evidence and CrimPro. I finished going through the crimpro materials once through last week and I'll go over them again later around Wednesday or Thursday, and I feel pretty confident for the most part about that stuff. Evidence, on the other hand, is taking me longer to run through, though the course as its being taught by the professor seems easier than some of the professors friends of mine are taking. Its difficult to find any passion for this stuff and after more than a year of this, I've pretty much given up trying.
Finals are in less than two weeks from today, and I feel pretty calm for now. Last year, at this time I was a complete wreck. Couldn't eat, or sleep, and I had a constant knot in my stomach, and the general feeling that my life was miserable and that I was doomed to complete and total failure. Things didn't turn out that way. I ended up doing pretty well first semester, better than I did second term. But I still don't know if I think that it was ultimately worth the aggravation. Second term, I wasn't as completely panicked and approached exams with a more measured attitude. I did a bit poorer than first term and that was unfortunately just enough to drop me out of my scholarship money and greatly affect my standing in the class and short term job prospects. Still, though I'm somewhat bitter, in comparing the two experiences, one marked by an near miss of a total mental, physical and emotional breakdown and the other by a more even keeled, balanced approach, I still think that presented with the choice again I'd take the latter even though that laid back attitude may have contributed to my lower grades.
The problem as I see it is that peace of mind just isnt valued enough in today's society. It gets pushed aside in the single-minded pursuit of wealth, which itself is more illusory a goal than truly attainable. And though there may be those people who understand that its ultimately a zero-sum game between wealth and happiness, most are blind to the reality that too much of an emphasis on one almost always comes at the expense of the other. I think its a function of misguided American values, which originally laid the foundation for it with the exhaltation of the so called "puritan work ethic" which emphasized the virtue in slaving away at something at the expense of all else. As if the product of one's labors is somehow worth more than the man himself.
Having been to Europe, I came away with the impression that the culture there places a higher value on quality of life than we do. And quality measured not by how much one has, but on how one uses what they've got.
I always found the expression "wasting time" somewhat perplexing. Of course time is the one thing you cant buy more of, and so it makes sense to value it. But how does it logically follow that to make the most of it, one has to do anything. What makes "accomplishment" more valuable for the time spent than not having "accomplished" anything, having just let time elapse naturally. And so you rarelyt hear about those who stop and take the time to think for awhile about what kind of life they'd like to pursue. We're simply encouraged to follow the herd. Its a simplistic picture of a complex situation, I know. But how many people do you know who give even the slightest thought to what it is that makes them happy, why so and whether their efforts in life are truly directed toward that end. Really, its well worth the time.

Bittersweet

My brother's bar mitzvah is today. Bittersweet. I wonder if he knows that. I wonder if he realizes how the rest of the family may be feeling. That our joy is blunted, tempered, inchoate. That though we may strain, we can never escape. I cant speak for them, but they haven't forgotten. I know because I've tried. And sometimes it works, and I can go on like anyone else. I'm not special, I'm just like everyone else. And I can forget that time when everyone else who I was no different from, looked at me, singularly. They didn't buy it, they wouldn't.
So tonight when you see me dancing, hugging, smiling, don't be fooled. It's still there. And if you look closely. If you're the type that can make that distinction. Between tears of joy, and those of sadness. You may just notice. Something. Someone. Missing.

Thankgiving

I'm in a bit of a rush tonight, since I spent most of the evening trying to study and didn't really give much thought to tonight's post. I thought I might say something about thanksgiving. For most of my life, thanksgiving really didn't show up on the radar for me since my family, for better or worse, didn't celebrate it in any significant way. This wasn't because my folks arent grateful for the freedoms that living in the U.S. affords us. Its more of an irrational relic of an overly religious mindset that ignores the possibility of there being any justification for recognizing a holiday that isnt expressly sanctioned in the bible. So while friends of mine would get together with family and friends to watch or even play some football before tucking into a hearty turkey dinner, my family would almost actively make a point of deliberately not taking part in the national festivities. We would generally order pizza for dinner, and on the occasions when I'd ask my mom if she could prepare turkey, she would insist that there was no reason to have turkey tonight, since we could have it any other day. Eventually, this attitude just became another lever pushing me further away from the increasingly incomprehensible religious ideals of my family and the community in which I grew up.

Frusterated Fingers

I haven't posted in a couple of days, mostly due to my studying schedule which has been occupying most of my time as of late. Finals are coming up in a couple of weeks, and I'm trying to keep on top of my classes as much as possible, in the hope that I can do better on my finals this term, and thereby at least marginally increase my job marketability. I've been coming to school on the weekends, something that I never did during most of the semester, and staying late in the library after classes. I can't say that I make the absolute most of my time while I'm here. I waste alot of it playing online games, im-ing with friends, and mindlessly, almost desperately, surfing the net, but I do get more work done here than I would if I tried studying at home. It's not just that there's no chair in which to sit at the lovely new desk positioned in the corner of my living room, barely two feet from the ever constant glow and murmer of the tv, but that the endless distractions which present themselves the minute I walk through the door are almost impossible to avoid, much less, ignore. So against the inchoate protestations of my inner laziness, I drag myself here in the hope that after exhausting myself online trying to find somthing, anything, that might distract me from my task at hand, I might actually buckle down to do some work, at least for a couple of uninterrupted minutes.
I also haven't made my final decision yet on whether to take my exams by computer, or to handwrite them. And just so that the reader doesn't think that I'm some kind of hopelessly atavistic troglodyte who couldn't tell a mac from a toaster, I happen to have many computer savvy friends who, value my old world affectations, when they're not mocking me for my hopelessly backward ideas about the obsolescence of social relationships and the computer game driven disintegration of one's personal identity, much less of the unusability of last years ipod. Last year I performed better in the first semester when I handwrote, than when I tried my hand at typing for the second semster. Now while that's not an ironclad proof that my skills at typing are inferior, it does give me pause now when I'm supposed to make that possibly monumental decision again. A decision which will unbelievably, given its extraordinary banality outside the current context, have a significant impact on my future. Should I maintain my commitment to improving my typing skills, or should I admit defeat at least temporarily and handwrite? I probably won't end up making my decision until close to the last minute. But here's wishing me well, regardless of which method I end up choosing.
Last night I received the first three disks of the third season of 24, which I've become addicted to during the past month. I get them three at a time from netflix. And I think i'ts a really good service, for its value, and I haven't had much problems with them aside from the occasional scratched disk. I do sometimes visit the local video shop to rent something on the spur of the moment when I want to see something that I didn't have on my list or at home. And I feel bad for the imminent demise of the institution. I dont think that in five years from now there'll be such a thing anymore of your local neighborhood video rental store. But that's the price of progress. Much like how I bitched and complained last year about how it wasn't fair that all the other students, who I viewed as essentially nothing more than glorified secretaries, given their incredible proficiency with Microsoft Word, had a distinct advantage during finals, when despite their perhaps shortcomings with a firm grasp of the subject material, could nevertheless bob and weave themselves a semi-decent answer by dumping a barrage of words on the professor in the hope that he values length over substance, an attitude expressly adopted by my Contracts professor in the last day before the final. I still don't think it was fair, anm am to this day concededly bitter given that my Contracts grade had a hugely disproportionate impact on my future legal career, but at some point you just have to accept that this is the way of the future, all standardized tests having for the most part by this point gone digital, and learn to type well enough to function with the rest of society. Life just isn't going to slow down to accomodate those who can't keep up. I still think that I write and think better using pen and paper, but I'm aggressively trying to improve my skills witht the keyboard so that I can remain competitive amongst my peers. Interestingly, as a last word on the topic, I happened to catch a short interview on tv the other night of John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and he happened to mention in response to a question about whether he types or writes his opinions, that he still handwrites all of his responsa, including all drafts and revisions.
But my frusterated fingers obstinately soldier on.

Some History

I promised last night to fill in a little about myself, where I grew up, went to school, family, friends, etc. so I'll try to sketch out a short, but hopefully compelling bio.

I'm 26 years old, and in law school for the second time in three years, the first having resulted in a rather ignominious catapult to failure. Well that's not exactly true. There were a variety of factors that contributed to the experience , neither one of which would have sustained alone my subsequent decision to withdraw in the middle of the year. I first enrolled in law school straight out of college, and in retrospect should have done some more research into whether it may have been a good idea to take a year off in between to work, travel, and generally recharge some of my burnt out batteries coming off of three years of intense academic studies. One of the problems I struggle with is the tendency to constantly second guess myself, and so almost immediately after I got to law school, I became uncomfortably aware that I was one of only a handful of students who hadn't had any life experience. I became convinced that I had started to early, and was thus at a distinct disadvantage compared to my more experienced and worldly peers.
I had also moved out of my parents house and into a shared apartment with three other roommates, who I ony met a few weeks before school was supposed to start. And by the time classes rolled around, I was unprepared for the extreme commitment necessary to survive what I soon found out was the appropriately, and understatedly named "one hell," first year of law school. Within the first few weeks I knew something was wrong, having settled into a routine of skipping class, sleeping in, smoking alot of pot, and preocuppying myself with what had become a rather time and energy consuming apartment politics. It did'nt help that I was painfully aware of the incredible burden my loans put on my future life and career options. In undergrad, I had made the considered decision to save money by choosing a local school, with a state subsidized tuition, over a perhaps more interesting, but exponentially more expensive private university. I really enjoyed my experience there, populated as it was with a more down to earth, local crowd, in contrast to the vanilla, upwordly mobile jerks that I found myself in law school with. When I was accepted into my first choice law school, I was incredibly disappointed when I found out that my parents who had offered me the choice of going to a private undergrad on their dime, refused to put the money for that into law school. I had felt that my choice had been to forgo a more expensive college, in the foreknowledge that I wanted to go to grad school and that the money set aside for undergrad would be applied to law school. My parents didn't see it that way and encouraged me to take out full loans to carry me through. While some students can write off the loans until they graduate, not worrying about them, I was having a more difficult time, and kept agonizing over the limiting effect they would exert on the flexibility of my future.
I was also going through the beginings of a major religious upheaval. And anyone that has gone through something like that, understands what an emotional toll it can take. Rather than focusing on my studies, I found myself expending most of my intellectual, and emotional energy grappling with my father over my new direction in terms of my religious outlook. I remember being up at two or three o'clock in the morning composing another long email explaining to my father why I was not forsaking him, turning my back on my heritage, destroying years of ecumenical education, throwing out the baby with the bath water(we've all heard that one). But this was only one of many factors which contributed to my eventually making the decision to withdraw from a top-tiered school, and spending the next year and a half trying to find more stable footing. My roommates eventually found out what I'd been hiding from them, namely, that I'd dropped out of school, and while one of them was supportive the others immediately started figuring out how to get me out of the apartment. When the lease came up for renewal a couple of months later, I was informed that I wasn't going to be asked to sign with them. I bargained to stay for another couple of months, and unable to find an apartment or a job during that time, I was forced to move in with my grandparents with whom I had stayed for part of my college years. I still remember the feeling of desolation and abandonment that first night back in my grandparents house, far away from law school, manhattan, and the first true wreck of my life.

New Ideas

It's been a week, and I dont think my writing's getting any better. My sentences, word selection, syntax, and paragraph organization are all weak. Not too mention the haphazard and inconsistent topic selection. So it's time for something new. I'm going to start carrying a pen and pad with me and jotting down occasional notes during the day to better get a handle on these shortcomings. I hope to see some improvement over the next few weeks, and if not then we'll try some other ideas. If any of my non-existent readers have some, I'd love to hear them.

Food for Thought

I've been staying in school late the last couple of weeks. I started off the semester slow, generally getting home around five or six, and leaving the house close to eleven. Part of the reason was to spend more time with my wife who's currently out of work, and part of it was just my own laziness. Now with the term winding down and finals approaching fast, I feel like I should be putting more into my work, trying to pull up my grades this term so that I'm in a better position after the break to look for a job. Not that my grades were that bad last year. Actually I did fine. My only disapointment was in contracts. I had studied diligently for the exam and ironically that wound up being my lowest grade, thereby setting in motion a domino effect of failure, resulting in my losing my scholarship, and lowering my subsequent job prospects. It was admittedly frusterating, especially given the work I had put in, but also for the implication that grades were not a direct function of effort. It's a hard pill to swallow. I had always believed strongly in the maxim that you get out what you put in. Now I'm not so sure.

So despite my eroding trust in the ability of hard work to yield just results, I'm here in the school library when I'd much rather be home eating dinner. I haven't eaten yet today, and I know that seems to be an indication of some kind of disorder, but its not. I used to follow this kind of nutritional schedule when I was younger. In elementary school I would skip breakfast entirely, snack on a piece of bread for lunch, and come home to eat a full dinner. And this worked for me. I didn't feel weak or sluggish, on the contrary, I was plenty full of energy and able to sustain myself just fine. I recently read about this new movement called caloric restriction, a radical attempt to limit intake to the lowest possible nutritional requirements, in the hope that this will prolong the aging process, and extend life expectancy. Of course, this raises the question of whether a higher life expectancy is worth a lifetime of hanging on the edge of starvation. I suppose that' s for the individual to decide. As for myself, extreme crash dieting may at times be acceptable, but I don't think I could ever live like that in the long term.

Iran today announced again that they would like to see Israel wiped off the map. Incredibly, academics and intellectuals wave off such proclamations as empty rhetoric, devoid of any real practicality. Its all posture, they maintain. I'm not so sure. Most of their analysis is centered around the understanding that the president of Iran, who's making these threats, doesnt hold any real power in the government, and that the power rests with the Ayatollah, who they assert is more politically pragmatic. Wasn't that also the case with the Chancellor of the Weimar Republic ?

I remember now what I wanted to write about today, but it's too late. I'll get to it tommorow. I was supposed to fill in a little personal background about who I am, my history, aims and interests. I can imagine your all sitting on the edge of your seats in anticipation. Tommorow, tommorow.

I didn't get a chance to post last night, because I got into a fight with my wife, and didn't feel like writing. I still think that on the overall issue in contention between us, I'm right. Though the more I think about it the less I'm sure about what the issue was to begin with. The whole thing started when I came home from school and suggestedthat we order in some pizza for dinner, something that had come up that morning before I left, and upon which we had agreed. My wife suggested that we go out for the pizza instead, or alternatively that I go out to pick some up to bring back to the apartment. Now at that point I was pretty tired, having been in school all day, and was actively trying to head off the approaching signs of what looked to be a major headache. So I said that I'd rather order in since I was kinda tired and wanted to relax a bit. I paused then for a few minutes to grab a drink from the fridge, implicitly allowing us both the chance to reconsider our dinner options, and then asked again what we should do. Well apparently my wife took that as me ignoring her initial suggestion, though I didn't ignore it, I just said that I didn't want to do it. And that was pretty much it for the rest of the night, at least on her end. She went into the bedroom to sulk, while I laid down on the couch to rest my eyes for a bit. I napped for about an hour and then went out to meet some friends who I had arranged to meet up with later after school. We ended up going to a local bar, watched Rutgers upset Louisiana, drank a little and played some darts. I went home at around twelve-thirty, thinking that my wife probably went to sleep by then. She hadn't. So we both went to sleep upset.

She was still upset this morning when we woke up, but that later dissipated as the day wore on. We went to go pick up a glass top for the my desk, and dropped off the one defective piece of furniture from the set we bought last weekend. So she's home now putting it together and I'm here trying to get some work done and I still think my writing sucks. Though my typing seems to be getting better.

Maybe I need to start rereading the Elements of Style. I wonder if that's not a bad idea. I actually never read it to begin with, I just winged my way through college. But because most of my classes were writing intensive and I did very well in them, I guess I just thought that I could naturally write well. I seem to have been severly mistaken. There's always time to learn.

Shabbos is early this week, and I'm having conflicting feelings about going home in time for lech benching, and staying here to finish up some more work. On the one hand, I have been getting alot done here today in the time I've been here. I have alot more to do, and know that once I get into a decent groove, its best not to disturb it too much. On the other hand, I'll always have a large residual guilt from abandoning the strictures of my religious upbringing. I dont feel anymore like God's watching and marking my transgressions, like I did for years, in what retrospectively was an incredible cognitive dissonance for anyone past the age of 10, and who was raised in any part of contemporary Western civilization. But there's that guilt that'll always be there. The furtive shame that I can never release knowing that for all the a priori, a posteriori, cosmological and analytical arguments that can be advanced, we can never escape ourselves.

Shabbat Shalom !

Some Randon Ramblings

When I tried to sign in tonight Blogger informed me that they were switching to a Google based system. So I signed up for it and have been checking my Gmail account which is where they were supposed to forward some of the information about it. But nothing's come yet.

I'm really trying to put in more of an effort this time around to keep up with the blogging. I didnt have a chance to post anything at school today, so now I'm at home sitting up in bed, lights off, pants half unzipped, trying to compose something that doenst come off completely shitty. For the last few years, basically since blogs have come into their own as a modern alternative to the more traditional forms of media, I've been tracking them. Some more than others. I tend to gravitate toward those that deal with and address some of the issues I had growing up in an religiously restrictive environment. Lately though, and by that I mean in the last few days I came across a blog on xanga that I've found incredibly inspiring. The writer is a girl who seemed to have grown up in similar circumstances as myself and who is currently studying writing in some graduate program in California. Personal circumstances aside, the quality of her writing is spectacular. Mostly her posts are less prose than a poetic sort of stream of consciousness flow. And normally I would find something like that pretentious and off-putting, but here for some reason it really works. Inspired, I'm inspired to try and write like her. To develop whatever natural talent I may have, and pray that neglected it doenst just die, rather rusts, so that it can be nurtured and revived.

I'm so fucking sick of getting home and sitting around just watching mindless television for the rest of the night. I always thought of myself as something of a nihilist, but the disgusted reaction I get from watching five or six straight hours of tv makes me doubt my sincerity. If I was truly a pure nihilist, I imagine I would have less of a problem with it. Its not so much that I hate the shows, though those suck, its the same mindless routine night after night. Deep down I guess I really do mourn the lost time, the wasted years at this point. What can I do about it though. I asked my wife if we could throw out the tv a couple of weeks ago. She said no. So all I'm left with is leaving the living room after dinner, seemingly abandoning my wife, even though that's not really my intention, and retreating into the bedroom, the only other room in our apartmentm, to either read, surf the net or watch some dvd's from netflix. You might ask whether that's being somewhat hypocritical that I order dvd's while raging against tv, but I actually see a distinction. TV is the more destructive in my opinion because its never over, something's always on. Whereas dvd's are a set piece, when they're over they're done. dvd's also have a much higher production value and no commercials. The bottom line is that I just fucking hate tv and I can't seem to get away from it. In fact I blame it completely for the shoddy quality of my writing, which before I began watching television had some real potential.

Everyone around here is thrilled that the Democrats won last night. I'm not. I was looking forward to the apocolypse. I truly thought that this was the end. The Bush administration had so completely run the train off the tracks, there was just no going back. So now I have to figure out how to get back what I've completely written off. One word at a time, I guess.

Third Time's the Charm?

This is now the third time I'm attempting to blog. For some unobtainable reason, likely hanging just above my mental reach, I just can't seem to accept the reality that I apparently have little of interest to say, as painfully evidenced by the string of abandoned blogs I've discarded by the wayside over the past few years. I guess that somewhere deep down in the recesses of my tortured psyche, the belief remains that perhaps I do have something to say. Please hear my inconseqential cries, indulge the amatuerishly existential yearning I have to express myself, however sophomorically cliched that sounds. Allow me to regale you with tales of nothing, as I quench that insatiable urge to waste more and more of my increasingly less valuable time. Laugh at my childishly composed sentences with their complete disregard for the most basic of grammatical standards. And pity, yes pity me, for a wasted and undeveloped potential talent. For depriving you, and the world of my insignificant contribution to the exponentially expanding blob that the canon of written expression has become. We are all authors, even those with nothing to say.

Partly I'm just hoping to improve, first off, my awful typing skills and in the process maybe develop what we writers refer to as a literary "voice." Not to be confused with the vocal expression of the same phonetic construction, no by "voice" I mean that elusive slippery thing, you know that thing that you have when your a writer, and by which your writing is easily recognizable. You know the thing. Well I can't adequately articulate it now, but that's because I'm just starting out and don't have it yet of course. But in the coming weeks and months, with subsequent and periodic updates and posts I'm sure that the "voice" will come to me. I imagine it to sound something between a whisper and buzzing.

Looking over the last two paragraphs, I've noticed that I seem to be channeling something of a cross between high school sophomore and Weird Al Yankovic and by that I mean a annoyingly self-referential and poorly ironic humor. That sucks. And I know it. I would prefer to be more earnest in my thoughts, genuine in my self-reflections, and perhaps through this effort( and it is a huge effort seeing as my typing really sucks) I'll manage to destroy the tendency in me that produces drivel like this. Cause I know that if I came across a blog like this I'd be pissed.

Where's the anger, the rage, the fury, that gives anything in my life meaning and existence. Something I've noticed before. I find it hard to rouse myself from the constant state of ennui and complacency unless I've got something to be riled up about. I wonder, is it like that for everyone? Or do most people find their everyday lives to be compelling, interesting and meaningful. How can I sustain the necessary amount of hatred and anger to move me, while still retaining an inner calm and zenlike appearance? Am I doomed to a life of unrequested, ambivalent nihilism? Do my adjectives make any sense?

I guess that's the great thing about blogs. They serve that dual paradoxical purpose. The blogger realizes that it might be a good idea to attempt to articulate his thoughts, especially since that would go a long way to helping him move forward, but is reluctant to unless there was the possibility that he would be addressing someone, and not just writing purposelessly. The blog maintains that illusion. We can believe that someone's reading and so feel an obligation to continue the project, and do our best to present the posts logically and coherently while simultaneously reassuring ourselves that in all likelihood no-one is.