History repeats
(or, Freaky Coincidences)

So! Law school for the class of 2007 starts on Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2004.

First-years, however, have orientation and registration from Sept. 2-3.

I hate orientations. They're like camp, and I hated camp. There's nothing more effective than an institutionally enforced atmosphere of friendliness to get me to shut down all my charms, clam up and start glowering. When I was a dismayingly socially awkward 13-year-old camper at Camp Conifer -- the camp for Korean Americans! oh yay! -- I was admittedly pretty short on charm. But now, 15 years later, I've acquired some! And I won't be able to display them, because I'll be too busy resenting the fact that I'm supposed to act all friendly and interested in people for two days just because we're gonna be sharing some classes together!

Ugh. I really hope I can be mature about this whole law school thing.

I got a last-minute editing job yesterday morning -- a professor of history for whom I did some work before asked me if I could edit a 10-page paper by this afternoon. Sure, says I, half-asleep, but, uh, the fee, since it's, uh, a really quick turnaround...

Okay, I'll pay 50 percent more than your usual rates, he offered.

Done! Fate seems to have taken a hand; my payment for this job is exactly the price of the two pairs of glasses I saw with my grandmother last Saturday. Which means I must now go buy them, of course.

As an added bonus, the paper was a pleasure to edit. It's so much easier to do good work on a piece that's well-written to begin with and needs some tweaking here and there and clarification and maybe some reorganization. His specialty appears to be the history of electrical engineering, and I actually enjoyed learning about the Edison effect and Fleming's valve and all sorts of things I'd never voluntarily read about.

God, sometimes I think I should just get a grip and go to history grad school already.

Speaking of history grad school, I learned last month that the wife of my old history T.A. died after a sudden illness on May 23. I didn't know her at all, despite going to their wedding (albeit as a very desultory guest), but I had kept in touch with my old T.A. over the years, so I was deeply saddened for him. His wife, like he is, was in her mid-30s, a professor of Classics at Yale.

I don't know the nature of her illness, having simply sent a condolence card to Ted, but I gather it was sudden.

There's no reason why you should know this or remember me writing about it, but in late May last year, I was shocked to find out that a former colleague of mine at the Justice Department suffered a heart attack and died almost immediately. He was 45 years old. He died on May 15.

It is only a sad coincidence in timing, that I know. But the fact remains that as of yet, I haven't personally known many people who have died. In fact, I have only been to two funerals in my life. One was my uncle's funeral last year, in early June. He died after a long battle with cancer. And the other one was my maternal grandmother, who had a stroke on Memorial Day weekend in 1998, entered the hospital, was told she would be fine, and then died a few days later on May 28.

Why write about this? Why even presume to think that there's any sort of cosmic connection whatsoever, when life is random and people die every day and some happen to die in May?

Well, for one, I'm reading Paul Auster's Red Notebook, which is full of stories like this, so just now, I'm primed to view coincidences as fraught with meaning. And for another, well, last weekend, there was that other repeat of history, when I ended up sleeping over at Curly's exactly a year after ending up sleeping over at KB's. Same house, same circumstances, same day.

A reviewer at the centerforbookculture.org, in a review of the Auster book, puts it this way: "unlikely coincidence and the odd ways in which fate brings people together. ... These are preoccupations of anyone interested in creating a coherent narrative out of the chaos of life." I never could accept the theory that everything in life is random and meaningless.