"Thou shalt remember the Eleventh Commandment and keep it Wholly."

3.18 pm

I had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance yesterday. Disturbing enough that I seriously considered whether it would be best to let it go rather than blogging about it. My sheer amazement at what was said, coupled with my own (someone naive) disbelief that these kinds of sentiments were alive and well in Berkeley caused me to sit down and examine some of my own base assumptions about the people I interact with on a daily basis.

We were talking about taking full advantage of the school's health insurance before we graduate and join the ranks of the uninsured. I mentioned that I needed to make sure that my birth control prescription would cover the time from graduation until my job starts in the fall.

My acquaintance turned to me with a strange look. "You take birth control?"

"Yes," I said. I was a little puzzled at this question, but after all the torts case we read the first year about birth control and other feminine medications (think DPS) I could see why someone wouldn't want to go near the stuff.

"You're having sex?" my acquaintance asked.

"Yes."

"But... That's just wrong!"

I'm pretty sure that my face reflected the complete and utter shock that I felt.

"Oh my gosh, I've offended you," my acquaintance said, backpedalling to assure me it had been just a joke.

I wasn't offended. I certainly wasn't upset. I knew that this person had spoken without realizing that what they said might be something which I wouldn't agree with. In some ways, I think my acquaintance was more startled than I was by what had been said and by my reaction to it.

What made me react the way I did I was my incredulity in having someone tell me that an action I had taken - something which had no bearing on that person and did not affect their life in any way - was morally wrong. I'm pretty sure that was the implication. The shock came because I thought I had left that mentality behind when I left Florida.

On reflection, it's pretty clear to me that the "my morality is right and your morality is wrong" frame of mind is alive and well here on the West Coast. It comes in a different flavor, however, which was why I didn't recognize the similarities at first. It only takes one orange-jumpsuited John Yoo protest to make you realize that there's a significant chunk of the town convinced that they have the full backing of a higher authority. They just call it by a different name.

4.14 pm

Here's what I would have said to you if I hadn't been so caught up in my own assumptions about how people should behave.

I don't consider myself religious. I don't have any disagreement with religion, and for the most part I think religions give people a much needed way to shape their lives and beliefs. Some people have ten commandments. I have one: "Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily."

4.36 pm - A sort of postscript

I was fairly certain this came from Stranger in a Strange Land, but after much fruitless thumbing through my own copy I am forced to conclude that it is, in fact, from the notebooks of Lazarus Long. Even so, I highly recommend Stranger to anyone with questions about morality, religion and the strange customs of Earth. Even now, almost ten years after reading the book for the first time, it gives me a strange sort of happiness to hear someone say grok.

Thou art God.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day

9.05 am


I did not wake up with gum in my hair. I did, however, wake up an hour before my alarm went off with the realization that I hadn’t heard my partner’s alarm go off. Which meant that he had about ten minutes to get up and ready for work or he was going to be late. Miraculously, we got him out of the door on time. When I say “we” I really mean “he got himself” because my contribution consisted of sitting at my desk blinking at him and wondering if it was at all possible for me to go back to bed.


I then spent the next forty minutes hitting back or refresh on my web browser trying to get tickets to hear Bill Clinton speak at Berkeley. I had this vague thought that if he did any sort of book signing or meet and greet (remote, but not entirely impossible) I might have been able to say I met both Clintons. Which would be almost as cool as getting to meet Obama.


It was not to be, however, and all I got were a series of messages informing me that the website was at full capacity. I was actually rather impressed by the number of different messages I got – some from Google, some from Drupal, some from Cal itself. (My favorite was “Bad Gateway!” Very bad Gateway! Never do that again!) It was like a #neilfail on an even grander scale.


My obsession with hitting the back button every five minutes to try to get these tickets, combined with the incredibly not-smart idea that this morning was a good time to change out the music on my ipod, resulted in my leaving the house about 2 minutes after I meant to. Which led to me seeing the train sitting at the platform from the traffic light at the BART entrance and realizing there was no way I was going to make the train and therefore running full out toward the station entrance.


Naturally, the train slid away before I was even close, leaving me out of breath and feeling rather foolish.


9.12 am
I also failed to win fountain pen this morning. I failed to even get a mention as having a nice journal or impressive work. The journal I can understand – I’ve definitely gone for function over form. They’re my journals, after all. Who’s going to read them but me. And I can see why a middle-aged man would be unimpressed by the decorating skills of my teenage self.


For a moment I was kind of bummed out over not having been at all recognized. Trying to balance being a law student and still having a creative side is difficult. The technical requirements of legal writing have a tendency to suck out creativity or to ensure that it is expressed in strangely melodramatic ways (Cardoza, I’m looking in your direction). A nod from an established Creative Person would be an affirmation, a hint from the universe that I’ve not been lawyerized yet.


For a moment I allowed myself to feel terribly disappointed. Then I read his picks and discovered that I was not at all impressed with any of them. It wasn’t that it was bad writing; it was that it wasn’t my kind of writing. There are, after all, thousands of ways to tell the exact same story (didn’t someone say once that there are only 100 or so stories in the world?).


9.28 am
I will continue to tell my story. I will tell it in my words, and I will tell it the way I want. I will remember that I write not because I want other people to read my work (although it is always nice to know that what I’m writing resonates with someone) or to make money or even a living (again, it would be nice, but I’m aware of how unrealistic that is) but because I can’t imagine not writing.

In which one attempts to prove herself an author

6.57 pm
Kyle Cassidy is doing a fountain pen give-away to would be writers. In order to show that one is a) a would be writer and b) the type of person who would actually make use of fountain pens, he's asked that people post pictures of their handwritten journals as well as a writing sample. It's rather like the college admissions process, but one actually has the chance of getting something useful at the end of it.

And since I have been ruminating on how it might not be a bad thing and let slip to any fellow lawyers and would-be lawyers who know me that I write for fun...

And since I have been ruminating on how slowly killing all those parts of yourself that are human in the cause of professionalism might be a rather strange way to go about living...

And since I have been ruminating on exactly what sort of lawyer I wish to be when I grow up...

I am posting here my "entry" to the fountain pen contest.

First, we have the journals.  I've been keeping a journal since August 22, 1997.  I had just come home from overnight camp, and there were so many things that I wanted to hold on to in my memory forever, and I knew that if I didn't write them down they would slowly start to fade away.  

The open pages are bits of poetry, some of it still unfinished.

A page from one of the journals.  I took another photo after I realized this one had blurred, but I rather liked the blurred edges better.  Since you can't read it, I'll tell you that it's a timeline for a short story/novella that I wrote as my senior thesis in college.  It is, by the way, a great story.  One that I really should take out of the drawer, dust off, and finish one of these days.

Here's that writing sample part.  The left page is me trying to work out the poem.  The right page is the pretty much completed poem. I wrote it in the Berkshires, while I was on a vacation with my family, about a boy I knew in Florida.  There were things that I wanted to get into the poem but didn't quite fit in.  Like how he called me "beautiful," as in "Hi, beautiful," causing me to wonder if he was being complimentary or covering up the fact that he never knew my name.

6.57 pm
I tend not to write stories long hand, although there are a few pieces in the backs of my journals, some from airplane rides when I didn't yet have my laptop, some because the story needed to be written instead of typed to continue telling itself to me, and some simply because I had a pen in my hand and the notebook was there.  Mostly, though, I write out poetry.

Stories flow through and from my fingertips, the words appearing without much directed thought on my part.  Occasionally I will delete an adjective, insert a verb, wipe out an entire paragraph that refuses to cooperate.  More often, I will simply keep typing, knowing that I write best when I don't think about it.

Poetry is different.  It demands that each word be weighed, be rolled around the mouth and tongue before committing it to the page.  I find that the simple act of writing the words helps me better understand their relationship to one another, the meter of the whole piece.

A fountain pen would make lovely poetry.

Pretty the World

10.06 pm
The pre-Symposium dinner at the Prof.'s house was tonight, and driving home I felt like I'd been pulled back into a strange sort of time warp. It started with the road through the Berkeley hills, sinuous and twisting back on itself so close I couldn't help but wonder why it doesn't bite its own tail. (A lifetime ago, it seems, I rode through those hills on the back of a motorcycle, the bay spread out below us like Elliot's evening.) Then onto the highway - 580, moving strangely slowly tonight, only 60 instead of its usual 85 - and music playing instead of the usual lineup of news/cultural/historical podcasts. (Once, I drove up the highway after work - 880, probably going too fast, sometimes headed to the dive in Jack London, sometimes to a bar on San Pablo instead, usually with a boy in a Lexis who didn't love me following close behind - with the music loud enough to drown out the night.)

10.14 pm  
Sometimes I miss waiting tables. Lazy mornings writing in a rose garden, the sun soaking my shoulders and putting honey colored highlights in my hair. Getting to work early enough to polish my silverware and my stemware. Nights when the kitchen didn't go down in flames, when the kitchen plated my food and slid it into the window the instant before I walked into the back. Taking the elastics from my braids at the end of the night and letting them unravel. (Do you know what I love about your hair?" he asked. "I love the way its perfume leaves trails through the restaurant.") Staying at the bar until last call and then a little later, watching the boys play pool on battered and tilted tables.

10.23 pm  
Sometimes I think the poetry has left me.


A few years ago, I was bitten by a spider that got stuck under my shirt and left bites all along the path it had taken to get out. I wrote: "The bites along my ribcage are like a constellation. I look in the mirror, from this angle and that, trying to read a pattern from the random scattering." Someone told me that it was such a beautiful way to describe it - like poetry. I wasn't trying. The words just came, sliding out from beneath my fingertips the way all my best work does. Law school, though, with its emphasis on reason, with its careful writing techniques designed to strip the humanity, to strip the poetry from the words...


10.30 pm  
Sometimes I think I am the one who has done the leaving.