Nothin' Much
(and yet, I manage to write so many words!)

Little to report from this here law school dorm. Made contact with a bunch of friends over the weekend, including someone I hadn't spoken to for over five years. It was lovely.

The Turtle* has been dropping broad hints to take the Labor Department job. Stuff like, "You know, you should re-read page 36-37 of The Good Black" (a description of the horrors of working at a firm) and "Hey, it's 4:45 and I'm leaving the office now. I can do that because I don't work at a firm!" Joiner is slightly horrified that The Turtle is being so partisan about my decision, but I kind of like it. Yes, The Turtle has an agenda -- he's a policy guy at heart and wants to improve legal services -- but he also (I believe) genuinely believes that I'll be happier in the government.

It's nice to feel like someone at this school cares about my happiness in the future. I suppose I could go talk to the career services people (here, the Office of Career Services means the people who help you get a job at a firm, which is separate from the office that helps you get a public interest job; I mean the public interest folks), but I don't need any help with the firm thing, and the public interest folks -- well, I've always felt that if you spend any time working at the firm, the nice folks over at the public interest office kind of look down on you. Which they shouldn't, in my case, because my god, people, I've worked at three different legal services centers, okay? I understand that you need to focus on the students who are trying to find jobs in the public sector right after school, but at the expense of alienating people who can't afford to do public interest right away but would sincerely like to and may do so a couple years later? That's just stupid. I hope you get explosive diarrhea, you close-minded public interest snobs!

Damn, hk. Some hidden anger, eh?

Yeah, I'm a little wacky right now, because I have been unable to sleep well for ... oh, the past 10 years, yes, but particularly the last couple nights, when my heater's been on overdrive and I've had to sleep with my door and window open to cool down the room. Not conducive to a good night's rest, I tell ya. To compensate, I've been drinking a lot of coffee, and the combination of fatigue and caffeine is not pretty.

Did I tell you I had my second career shrink sesson a few weeks ago? It didn't go so well; we only had half an hour, and we talked about Ethiopia for about 15 minutes of that. And then when I tried to talk about what I'd been thinking about, the shrink appeared to think I hadn't done enough thinking, or least enough specific thinking about what specifically I wanted to do. To which I say, isn't my whole problem that I don't know specifically what I want to do? That I have a vague sense that writing is my passion, and that I like traveling and people's stories and bridging gaps and helping people understand each other, but that this adds up to a ha'penny and a bright shiny pot of nothing at the end of the day? Help me, career shrink man!

Despite the loopy tiredness, I have a weird itch to exercise, and have been doing so pretty regularly. Over the weekend, I happened to bump into The Destroyer in the gym. Haven't seen him for months, right? Had that weird doomed souffle moment the last time I saw him, right? So I try to ignore him, I really do. But he sees me and says hi. And I have a five-year-old moment and say, "You're making me lose count." "What?" he says, justifiably. "Seventeen, eighteen..." I count out loud as I continue doing crunches. And he quite reasonably rolls his eyes and says, "Okay, bye."

Related to this (in the longest blog entry in the world where the topic is absolutely nothing), I have posted myself up on match.com. Yes, I even put down money for this ($19.99/month for 3 months). I feel that it is time. And do you know why I feel it is time? This is why: You know how there's always that weird, nerdy guy in school who's, like, way obsessed with RPG or Star Wars or something, and you sometimes think "dude is SAD," and then a couple years later, the dude's got himself a girlfriend and he suddenly knows how to interact with human beings and seems ... sort of ... normal? It's like he got socialized. And he needed a sig-oth to do it.

Well, I am that guy. I have become far too weird, and I need to be socialized. Sigh.

I am also falling asleep here, and must go pay the Sandman some of my sleep debt. Or collect on my sleep debt. Whatever. God, I really hope that sleep cures this insatiable need to babble on and on and on and ... zzzz.

* This is what Joiner calls my mentor here -- and I think it's okay to call him that, after describing him as "the only person at Crimson who ever made me feel like I could be a good lawyer AND be happy being a lawyer" for a year and a half -- because she says he looks like a turtle. I don't think so, but it's as good an appellation as any.