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.