gunner

i'm a veteran at this whole law-school thing. hell, i have a law degree and everything. you'd think that one more year of this would be painless and smooth. i mean, i'm in my element; i am studying my favorite subject matter, the one to which i am dedicating my professional life. i am at a world-class school, and i have every opportunity to be everything i want to be. but something's been just a little... off about this whole experience. we're four weeks in, and inside my program, i feel totally at ease and comfortable. tonight, it finally hit me exactly what the problem is in my new home.

it's that it's not really a "home." everyone's perfectly nice in the general population; no one's been outwardly cruel or horrible to me. but these kids are not interested in being a community. this is one of those schools where every person there, especially in the non-LL.M. crowd, is 100% out for himself or herself, and frankly, you're kind of in their way. this is such a misguided approach to law school, to the practice, and to life in general. good lord. i mean, it's not surprising, i guess. it's a whole school full of hardcore overachievers, people who have reached for the best all their lives. why stop now? it's gotten them everything they've ever wanted.

except it doesn't have to be that way. look, i'm a recovering overachiever myself. and i've spent a lot of time lamenting the time in my life when i settled. but there's a definite - and vitally important - difference between striving healthily for the best you can get and what these kids are doing. devoting yourself to the cold, ruthless pursuit of the next brass ring on your list, damn the torpedoes, is by far not the only way to get what you want. take it from me; above average effort nets you almost as much as bare-knuckles overwork, and it makes you a LOT happier.

so i look around at the overcompetitive, hyper-"friendly" gunner kids at my school with a combination of confusion and pity. it makes me sad for them, but it makes me feel that much better about my strategy for life. i may not be the valedictorian of my class. but i'll give this program my best. that means my best in academics, in culture, and in the bare recognition that i'm not the only person on the planet, in the city, in the school or in the hall. we all earned our way here. why not be friends?

fevered ego

i interrupt this fun night of memorizing elements of hearsay exceptions and watching the nationals lose to touch on a subject near and dear to my heart - egotism. it's not a word with which i'm unfamiliar. i've been tarred with that brush a time or two. i mean, hell; this is my favorite shel silverstein poem:

i love myself
i think i'm grand
i go to the movies
just to hold my hand
i wrap my arms around my waist
and when i get fresh i slap my face

but as much as i adore myself, i cannot fathom the depth of thoroughly unnecessary onanism that is going on over at ESPN tonight with lebron james. this is the height of spectacle, and why? because it's freaking BRON-BRON! we are all WITNESSES or something! gaah. no thanks. and not just because i'm not a fan of his to begin with. it's so much more.

i like baseball, football and hockey. those are team sports at their cores. yes, technically, basketball is too, but under the reign of david stern, the sport has become all about THE SUPERSTAR. the NBA essentially exists as a group home for fevered egos and drama queens. it's appalling. drew brees is my quarterback, but without tracy porter, it's suddenly not so clear that the saints win super bowl 44. the yankees won the series, true, but who was the MVP? hideki matsui. my beloved ovie is a god on the ice, but the capitals' best weapons have names like brooks laich and semyon varlamov.

but in basketball, it's all about the god. and bron-bron is god. so that's why the sports world is being told to stop on a dime to watch him tell us all where he's going to play next year. well, no thanks. you're not bigger than the game. i won't buy in. i'll watch my local last-place baseball team try to get it together and win tonight, and i'll watch them do it as a unit. as raging an ego as i can be, even i know when to say when.

when.