Confused

I feel like I'm different somehow than I was at the beginning of the summer. I've become quieter and, I fear, less stoic than I was before. Things are happening to me and for me, big things. Some great, some not so great, but their momentous natures have me feeling a bit like a life raft in the middle of a hurricane. I'm just hanging on for dear life to see if I'll get out alive, and what shape I'll be in.

Law school is picking up again, I've got interviews coming up with law firms, even though my grades aren't the best. Somehow I've got to wow them by sheer force of personality (if you're not in law school, you can't possibly understand how nerve-wracking that is). I'm feeling less-than-confident about my interviewing abilities at this point.

I'm getting married in five months. Nerve-wracking. Exciting. Scary. It's a completely new and unique mixture of feelings for me. But it's wonderful. Still, though, it's emotionally draining. Proposing to Marisa was ten times harder and scarier than I feel like it should have been. And it still hasn't hit me that I'm going to be a married man. I really can't put into words how great it is and how awesome Marisa has been to me. I'm madly in love with her. Other than that, I'm just wonderfully mixed up on that front.

I spent ten weeks in a public defender's office this summer, dealing with lowlife scum and the lowlife crimes they commit. Also spent time dealing with authority figures who abuse their power and discretion at the expense of harmless, well-meaning citizens because they happened to be the wrong color or were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's a hard pill to swallow, looking at our society from such an all-around disheartening angle.

And now I'm alone. The only person I've had any extended contact with in the last week or so has been my fiancee. Most of my friends are out of town and I've been working in my room for the past 7 days on a freelance project to get some extra cash. And, as much as I love my fiancee, and even though she's my best friend, for a guy who thrives on the company of others to be deprived of it for so long, it has a funny effect on you. Numbing, really.

So, consider this a disclaimer to all of you who might at some point in the near future find yourself thinking "Todd's acting weird/preoccupied/strange, something's up with him." I promise, it's not you, and I'm not trying to be offputting or weird. I'm in a mental and spiritual spot I've never been in, and probably won't be ever again. Just taking some time to sort it all out.

A Conondrum

I was so happy with it, I really was. It makes so much sense after all.

I take pride in my moderate viewpoints. I like to think that I separate myself from the narrow-minded tautologies of the major political parties. Pro-choice vs. pro-life? How about abortion under a few outlined circumstances? Guns for all, or none at all? How about a concealed weapons permit that's just harder to obtain? State sovereignty or consolidated nationalism? Depends on the situation. Some would say I just can't make up my mind. I say I think for myself and take the bits and pieces of common sense that eek out of both parties occasionally and streamline them into a workable solution that nobody would ever vote for, of course, because it doesn't toe a particular party line. It's an odd thing to see a government that's more concerned with party theology and pissing off the other side than common sense solutions that will make everybody happy.

I was particularly pleased with my personal views on the energy crisis. We need to get off foreign oil, we can all agree on that. Face it, we suck the stuff down like we were college students at a kegger. So, it would seem logical that if we can get the same stuff on our own land, that's a cheaper solution. There are massive oil reserves in Alaska, Montana, Texas, and copious amounts of natural gas along the gulf. It would make total sense to mine the stuff. Of course, the liberal environmentalist types will inevitably whine about raping the land and destroying the habitat of some spotted owl or something. Fine, I'll grant you that we don't want to do that...but does it make a lot of sense, even from an environmental viewpoint, to pay another country more money to rape their land and sell us the fruits? So, it's not ok to destroy the environment in America, but it's ok to turn the Persian Gulf into a cratered wasteland? I don't buy that. Bottom line, as green as the collective consciousness is these days, I have a hard time believing we couldn't come up with a more environmentally friendly means of getting the stuff out of the ground ourselves than we could, say, 10 years ago. There has to be a way to do it while keeping our precious spotted owls alive.

But hold on, you say! Even if we keep using so much of our own oil, we're still choking the environment with our massive SUVs and evil, polluting private jets! And besides, how long will our reserves last us? Two good points. Pollution levels are still rising and contributing to global warming (though not to the extent the alarmists would have you believe, if you ask me). And the reserves, say, in the Gulf of Mexico would last us maybe 30-35 years tops. Clearly this isn't the whole solution. The answer, my friends, seems to lie in alternative energy. Wind, solar, electric, even nuclear. Ideas like the Pickens Plan (which Texas just implemented, putting legions of wind turbines on its oh-so-barren plains) make good sense because they promote clean, renewable energy sources. The knock on them is that they cost a pretty penny, especially when talking about hybrid cars and such. How is an average, middle class family supposed to afford a $60k Mazda fuel cell car, to say nothing of repairs that will be inevitable, because first-generation products always have kinks to work out.

So why not use both ideas? Drill for oil here in America and offshore, reducing our dependence on foreign oil, funneling the savings to alternative energy R&D, and providing tax and other incentives to hybrid car producers, vendors, and consumers. That way we get the short-term relief of offshore drilling ("short-term" being relative, I know) and the long-term benefits of renewable energy research.

I was so happy with this. Then I saw Paris Hilton respond to John McCain's use of her celebrity in an anti-Obama ad. You can see the response here.

The unthinkable has happened. Paris Hilton agrees with me, or rather, I agree with Paris Hilton, of all people. I am now at a personal impasse.

Paris Hilton is a moron. A grade "A" bimbo from the word go. She represents everything that is wrong with society, Hollywood, and pop culture. When I think of reasons for expatriation or lighting myself on fire (like everyone else does, right?), "Paris Hilton's celebrity" is always in the top 10. That said, Can I allow myself, on principle, to agree with anything she says? Do I have to now renounce my beliefs and form new ones? Why, Paris? Why must you do this to me? Why did you have to go and be all sensible like that? Jerk.

Of course, there's always the possibility that she was just reading a script written by someone else. Maybe she doesn't understand, much less give a crap about, all this energy stuff. There's a good chance that as long as she can jet around in a pink Ferrari with that stupid dog and bottle of Bacardi, she couldn't care less about $4/gallon gas.

Yeah, that's it, she's just doing that to be funny. That must be it. She doesn't really believe it, or understand what it even means, does she? I can safely keep my beliefs without being ashamed, right?

Right?

The Obligatory Internet Rant

"You know what Stewie? If you don't like it, go complain on the Internet."
--Brian the Dog, Family Guy

Allow me to put one of my favorite one-liners to literal use. The day has been long. My mood is foul. My nose is currently running at half capacity, as my allergies have decided to drop by for an extended visit. As such, the day has been filled with hacks, coughs, and the kinds of sounds that a horse usually makes when it sneezes.
Normally, this does not get me down. If anything, the allergy meds make me extraordinarily entertaining if you mix a little caffeine in there. I can be the life of a party if you hand me a Coke and a couple Claritin-D. But today was different. Today was a bad day.
I usually dive into things when I really want them. The upshot of this, of course, is that my learning curve in such endeavors is about as gradual as that cliff that the roadrunner always gets the coyote to fall off of. I hit a lot of branches on the way down, too. Eventually, though, everything settles out and I wind up doing well. My mission only got better as time went on, the second semester of law school was markedly better than the first. My mistakes gradually tapered off after I started working at Finale. Good ol' Father Time has been my savior in this sense, as I imagine he is for everyone, save those few maddening prodigies who look at something for 2 seconds and then proceed to do it perfectly. Given time, I can pretty much do anything I set my mind to.
Even with this in mind, however, the learning curve doesn't get any less painful. There's always the lingering doubt in the back of my mind that wonders if this time things will never get better, that this time I've bitten off more than I can chew and I'm just not cut out for what I'm doing. This time, after hitting all those branches on the way down, I'll hit the ground and immediately get crushed by the 10-ton Acme anvil that fell off the cliff with me.
I've always wanted to be a criminal attorney. I was going to be a prosecutor, I just knew it. Nothing was going to stop me. It was a foregone conclusion. The law was my muse. And then I came to work at CPCS.
Oh sure, I can do a client interview, I could even do client intake if I had to. I've found homeless clients in the middle of the city, and batted legal theories around with people years ahead of me. But my reasoning and my arguments, more often than not, suck. I know I've only taken one very broad criminal course up to now. But for whatever reason I felt like I should be able to come to the same conclusions my bosses come to when we do motions or look at cases, despite my lack of experience. This morning my boss wanted me to look over a case before a motion to amend hearing. I had maybe 20 minutes to do so. I told him I didn't think the case applied to our situation because of some differences in the fact pattern. And after 5 minutes of looking at this case the guy says no, it totally applies, and yanks out this crazy inference, and I had no idea where he was getting it from until I heard him argue it. And it makes total sense. Oh sure, I wasn't as familiar as he was with our present client's situation; I don't know the nuances of a criminal proceeding like he does, and where and how to poke holes in an argument. Maybe if I did things would have been different. But I don't know that for a fact. I could just be an idiot. As it stood, I walked out of court feeling very out of place in a hall of law.
I went back and looked over some past memos I had written up. Admittedly, they were hastily thrown together at the behest of an attorney who didn't want a formal memo so much as a quick overview of the law. But I still looked it over and saw problems with organization and clarity, and it pissed me off even more. Then I looked at the present assignment I had to do. Like most assignments at this office, there's very little (read: no) case law expressing a clear answer to the question at hand. I absolutely did not feel up to the task. I knew I was just going to mess it up again. I was abjectly demoralized. Fortunately, I spent the rest of the day on a field trip to the house of corrections to visit a client, so I could avoid the problem for the rest of the day.
You might say I'm being too hard on myself, and the thing is, you'd probably be right. I inflict a lot of this mental punishment myself. I'm extremely hard on myself, expecting miracles while at the same time exacting very little from those around me. I suppose it's better than being the opposite, but it still makes those branches I hit on the way down sting a lot more than they probably should, by all rights.
The most frustrating part is that I know all of this. If this were someone else, I'd absolutely tell myself to chill out, calm down, it'll all be fine, you're still learning and you will be for a while. Yet I can't follow my own advice. For whatever reason, I expect to be perfect when I'm not, and I won't be for a long time, if ever. And so, I wind up at the end of the day feeling like a failure, like this time, I'm in over my head.
Only now, the thing I'm struggling most with is my lifelong dream. The inevitable what if questions arise. What if I've been mistaken all along? What if I can't do what I've always wanted to? Throw in the fact that an ADA makes about as much as a McDonald's manager (quite literally) and a change in goals seems altogether necessary and devastating.
I've heard it all before. The things we want most take the most effort, it's always darkest before the dawn, etc. etc. I've said all these things to others. Yet they offer no consolation in this instance. Only the slight spark to trudge onward. Does that make me a hypocrite? I hope not. I sincerely believe in the veracity of those maxims in the lives of everyday people. Yet for whatever reason I won't let myself accept them, as much as I want to.
I've always said that my view of the universe and the grand scheme of things is what keeps me going. And it's true, even in times like this where I just want it all to go away. No matter what, I keep going. But it doesn't make those branches hurt any less.

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