I Need to Read More Black Authors

It's MLK Day, a holiday to honor the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It just so happens that on this particular MLK Day, the first since drumpty-the-vile-twit's inauguration, I mean usurpation of the White House, one might feel a little depressed, either when one contemplates the racism emanating from the mouth and thumbs of said vile twit or when one just looks around one's society at all the work still left to do in the attempt to secure freedom and justice for all.

But. As they say, start where you are.

Where am I? As usual, reading, thinking, and thinking about what to read.

This morning I posed the question of what would be a good Martin Luther King Day read -- something by the man himself, perhaps, or some books that increase understanding of what black people have suffered in U.S. society, what injustices have gone into creating and perpetuating the racism we still practice, what power structures are in place, and so on. A couple of days ago, I posted about the writers from "shithole countries" whose books I've read over the past year and asked my Fbriends what authors not from Norway they have been reading since the occupation began. Last night, as I thought about what book to read next, I decided to make a conscious effort this year to make sure less than half of the books I read are by white male authors.

Today, these thoughts led to curiosity about the exact numbers, of how many authors I've read are white males and how many are not. Luckily, we have Goodreads! Which means I was able to sign in to my account, where I've tracked the books I've read since joining the site in 2008, and go ahead and count 'em up. First, I did a quick tally for the 46 books I read last year, calendar year 2017, and it was: White Guys: 16, Not White Guys: 30. That's not so terrible, I thought (other than the fact that I read only 46 books last year, but that has already been addressed and my New Year's resolution to get back to higher number-of-books-read-per-year levels has already been enacted, fear not), and I was a little proud of myself that I had read more authors who were Not White Guys than I had read White Guys.

Pride, ya know, goeth before the fall.

I then checked out my 2016 numbers. First of all, I read only 42 books that calendar year, which is even lamer than 2017 but we all know how distracted I was by teaching...or drinking...or being driven to drink by teaching during 2016. Or by Quincy coming from China...or by the Cubs' World Series...or something. Anyway, that year it was White Guys: 15 and Not White Guys: 27. Still a similar ratio. Let's have a look at 2015, with 54 books read. White Guys: 32, Not White Guys: 22. Yikes! Now, to be fair (although why should you be?) you could recall that that was the year I read about ten books of Edwin Arlington Robinson poetry -- basically all of his poetry I could. *What do you mean WHY he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry three times people THREE and I had to read his collected poems for hundreds and hundreds of pages and ... yes, I said "had to"*  But even though that's just one White Guy taking up ten slots, it's also ten slots that didn't go to books by Not White Guys. So anyway....

Clockwise fr top left: Danticat, Colbert, Achebe, Adichie, Coates

I know -- we probably all know -- that in general I read a fair amount of books by women. But guess what -- the majority of them are white. Damn it.

After checking out these initial numbers, I decided on this particular Martin Luther King Jr. Day to continue perusing my Goodreads "Read" shelf to see how many black authors I read last year, in 2017. The answer is: five.

In case you're interested, they were Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Brandy Colbert, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Edwidge Danticat. One of them I had read before last year as well. Two I had been meaning to read for quite some time. But, well, that's not very many. Five black authors out of 46 books read.

Um...it gets worse. In 2016, I read one. (Assata Shakur)  In 2015? One. (Maya Angelou)

Yes, I've read authors from a variety of countries and of a variety of ethnicities and races, this year and last year and every year. And yes, I've read as many writers who are Not White Guys as are White Guys. But I need to do a whole lot better.

I mean, it's one thing when you sit in your canon-driven literature classes and read a lot of old/dead white guys (although to be fair -- and this time, I will be, to my teachers -- I was actually exposed to quite a lot of Not White Guys over the years, in my English major classes, I daresay at a better rate than in some of the rest of academia....) but now in my "real" life I am not beholden to a syllabus. I can read whatever I want by anyone. So. Why don't I read/haven't I read more black authors?

Now, I do love me a reading project. A lot of my reading projects are list driven, and a lot of those lists tend to get populated by some of the same Old/Dead White Guys over and over again. Just to name three of my life-reading-projects-in-progress, the Pulitzer-winning fiction, the Modern Library Top 100 Novels, and the 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die feature no shortage of White Guys. Still, there ARE other races and genders on those lists. And I don't JUST read books from those lists (obviously, or my projects wouldn't take me so long), so I do read other novels. But I pretty clearly need to start some kind of African-American novels project. Who's got a list for me?

And this is not to mention my oh-my-god-it's-been-going-on-so-long-but-is-almost-finished Prez Bios project, launched during the Dubya administration, in which I've been reading a biography of every U.S. president in order to see where we went wrong. I've made it through all the men (White Guys a-plenty!) up to Dubya himself now, and the vast majority of the biographies have been written by, you guessed it, White Guys. White Guys write a whole lot of our history. It's just, like, totally in their hands.

What are we all going to do about that?

All of your suggestions are welcome - suggestions of novels written by black authors, suggestions of non-fiction written by black authors, and suggestions for how we can all do more to speak truth to power, fight entrenched injustice, and keep working toward freedom and making Dr. King's dream a reality.

This was the folk-music-icons weekend that was

Back in the day, by which I of course mean the late 1980s, I accumulated a few pen-pals. Yes, pen-pals -- remember those glorious days, of sitting down with pen and paper, writing a letter, and sending it off to your new "friend" who lived in another state or another country? I loved that hobby. Only one of my pen-pals lasted for years and years of correspondence -- she and I had quite a bit in common and a lot to say to each other, and even ended up both living in New York City at the same time years down the road and getting to meet and be friends in real life, which was in itself amazing. However, this particular story isn't about that pen-pal, but rather about a fleeting pen-pal with whom I briefly wrote letters and then lost contact forever but who, nonetheless, had an impact on my life through the act of sending me a particular cassette tape.

This particular fleeting pen-pal was named Nancy (I think? that's how long ago and fleeting this was) and was, again I think, from Oswego, NY.  I do hope I'm remembering that correctly and not mixing her up with someone else. Anyway, the fleeting pen-pal in question and I decided we would exchange tapes, and we sent each other lists of the albums that we owned and then let each other know which of the other person's we wanted and copied them onto blank cassettes and sent them to each other. (I know, hello, copyright laws, anyone?) We were young adolescents still with a manageable amount of albums, and I can't tell you what the hell else she sent me or what I sent her, but I very specifically remember one dark brown Memorex cassette she sent to me that had on one side a copied Cowboy Junkies album and on the other side Indigo Girls.

I even remember exactly where I was when I was looking at her letter with her list of albums and thinking, "Cowboy Junkies. Indigo Girls." I didn't really know what their music was going to be like -- anyone whose hit songs I knew and loved I had probably already acquired via Columbia House Record & Tape Club or from Sam Goody at Metrocenter mall, so browsing her list was a chance to try something new I wouldn't have otherwise stumbled upon. And this was the mother lode.

I played the hell out of that 90-minute, no-longer-blank cassette. I played it at home, in my parents' cars, and anywhere else I could get it in a tape deck. I loved those albums fiercely, and -- good future copyright law student that I was -- I eventually bought both of those albums properly, thus giving the artists and record companies their profits and more importantly getting my hands on the liner notes. And needless to say, that simple act of being intrigued by my pen-pal's album list -- I can still vividly see it in my mind's eye, can perfectly visualize her handwriting -- launched me on my lifelong Indigo Girls love and fandom.

What if I had never exchanged those handful of letters and cassettes with this random girl across the country? Would I have come to know Indigo Girls and Strange Fire, and then later, Nomads*Indians*Saints and Rites of Passage and all the rest? When? Would I have been too late? I once read a piece in Psychology Today that said studies indicate that the music you listen to during that adolescent time, like toward age 14 or so, resonates more deeply with you than anything you ever listen to in the future, no matter how much you like what you come across in the future. And among the cassettes I spent those early teen years playing over and over were Indigo Girls, Bob Dylan, R.E.M., Simon and Garfunkel,  Cowboy Junkies -- folkies who still speak volumes to me today.

I bring this up because some remarkable things happened this weekend. Tonight, Sunday, I attended a concert at the Chicago Theatre: Four Voices - Joan Baez, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Indigo Girls. When this tour was announced a few months back my breath caught and I thought, this! This is something I cannot BELIEVE I am going to be able to witness! Now, of course I knew that they were all friends, and I know about Mary Chapin singing backing vocals on Amy and Emily's album and Amy and Emily singing backing vocals on Mary Chapin's around 1991, and I remember when the Girls performed with Joan Baez in the early mid-1990s for a benefit and she thanked them for letting her be an Indigo Girl for the evening and called them young whippersnappers, and I own the CD (yes, I eventually moved from cassettes to CDs) from the benefit where Indigo Girls and Mary Chapin and a bunch of other artists all performed with Joan Baez and planted roots for this blossoming friendship so I've heard them harmonizing in pieces and knew of their crossing paths but THIS - a tour called Four Voice, with lots of dates, coming to my town, playing cities near me - it was amazing news.

And it was an amazing concert, needless to say. There are so many highlights, and perhaps I'll tell about more of them in another post, but here let me just assure you that among the evening's joys was the final song of their main set, a cover of a particularly good, particularly relevant, Nobel prize-winning even! song that with their Four Voices became THE best performance of a song that I have witnessed being performed live, ever.

But there was also another little thing that happened at the beginning of this weekend. On Friday night, it just so happens, I saw Cowboy Junkies in concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music. For whatever reason, I had never got a chance to see them in concert before this weekend. Unlike Indigo Girls and Mary Chapin Carpenter, whom I've seen multiple times (Indigo Girls, dozens), I somehow had missed out on the Cowboy Junkies until just this past Friday. There was Margo Timmins, in all her fifty-something glory, and that voice! That achingly lovely voice, with all those heartbreaking, swirling Cowboy Junkies songs. That was the opening of my weekend, and then it ended with this other collection of voices, including the legendary Joan Baez, up there showing us what incredible things words and music can do.

And I thought, how odd, how odd indeed that my weekend was bookended by incredible, life- and music-affirming concerts featuring the two bands that were on either side of that blank cassette sent to me by pen-pal Nancy from Oswego, NY nearly thirty years ago.

And I thought, how beautiful, how beautiful indeed that we are gifted with time on this planet where we can make and share our art, where we can hoist our visions onto the world stage and where we can tuck recorded sounds gently into an envelope with a bit of extra postage and let them be carried across the miles to someone who needs to hear them, or where we can now just upload them with a few quick finger taps on a keyboard.

In spite of all of the hard things, and the misery that Margo openly jokes about (wondering aloud to her audience why anyone would come to a Cowboy Junkies concert expecting to hear happy songs), and some of the political happenings that Joan, Mary Chapin, Amy, and Emily talked about and sang about and alluded to, and just despite the ever-ongoing struggle -- in spite of these things, my god but isn't there some beauty to be found out there, to be brought into our lives thanks to the random simple chances we come across?

One More Day Before the Storm

As Macbeth said, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..."  

But I do believe that tomorrow, Monday, December 19th, will in fact signify something.

The future, which occurs after the present

I've had this super-weird confluence of personal, professional, and political timing, which all seem to be coming to a frothy head tomorrow. So, when I woke up today (Sunday, December 18th) and Facebook was offering up Fb memories of our three-years-ago trip to Hong Kong Disney, I decided this image of me at Tomorrowland says something important.

Tomorrow means hope. It's not all gloom and doom creeping in at a petty pace, Macbeth. Now, Macbeth is my boy (i.e. favorite Shakespeare tragedy) and he certainly has it right that there are fools and poor players all around us strutting and fretting (ahem TheDnldWTFTrumpface ahem). But the very notion of tomorrow brings hope, as one of my OTHER favorite plays of all time reminds us. So, so, so much hope for the wretches whom Macbeth might call "walking shadows" as they contemplate revolution in Les Misérables:

"There's a new world for the winning/Do you hear the people sing?"

When the Electoral College meets tomorrow, will they hear? Will they do the right thing, the moral thing, the Constitutional thing, and use their best judgment to cast their votes, which means casting them so that TheDnldWTFTrumpface does not ascend to the presidency?

While that's happening politically, I also personally have a huge and emotional development tomorrow in my professional life. (No, the electors aren't going to elect me...that I know of!) One era is coming to an end, due in large part to reduction-in-force layoffs that came slamming into one of my gigs, but not entirely due to that, as I have seized upon a blessing-in-disguise opportunity to do some stuff when this particular new little era of mine dawns. AND, just to compound the personal/professional/tomorrow timing of it all, the last month and a half has been a whirlwind, a mighty and fierce whirlwind, of me working two and a half jobs, laying groundwork, and figuring out lots of big stuff, and all this has been happening since Monday, November 7, the first "One Day More," which led us to the horrible Tuesday, November 8 election day or more accurately the horrible Wednesday, November 9 Day After. So for one month and a half I have been in this intense stirring up of life and time (working every day, sometimes two jobs, plus other events, with no time to think but just go go go with eyes on the prize), with big developments, and meanwhile this parallel thing happening of Trumpface and the end of the world and the burgeoning fight for the #ElectoralCollegeExMachina moment we all need and then after a particularly intense last burst of the 36 hours from 11 a.m. Friday through 11 p.m. Saturday where I was just everywhere serving three or more masters and just go go go went went went I came home and rested.

Sleeping deeply.

And waking up today to Facebook memories of Tomorrowland and the imminence of tomorrow, December 19, when one big thing ends in my personal life, AND there is one superbig chance for the whole world in political life.

Sing it, Les Misérables:

"Tomorrow is the judgment day
Tomorrow we'll discover what our god in heaven has in store
One more dawn
One more day
One day more."

Consider Cat Stevens

Today I thought quite a bit about Cat Stevens. I don't want to end up like him. Allow me to explain.

So, like, Cat Stevens is awesomely talented, and he made a huge contribution to the world with his music, not to mention his charitable, social, etc. contributions that came after his pop star days.  I mean, let's just take Tea for the Tillerman. That is an incredible album. It is so easily a desert island disc. It is in fact such a desert island disc, such a masterpiece, that I can't imagine anyone not liking it. There are some albums I would bring to my desert island that I recognize might not go to everybody's desert island, but this one? No, this one is sheer musical truth. If someone were to listen to Tea for the Tillerman and not like it, I would really, seriously ask that person what the hell is wrong with him or her.

And by the way, to explain that it contains "Wild World," "Sad Lisa," "Miles from Nowhere," "Where Do the Children Play?" and "Father and Son," among other amazing songs, does not even do it justice, because it is an album album, to be listened to as such, in one big flowing fell swoop. It will move your soul, if you listen.

OK, so then on top of that Cat Stevens has a million other musical hits, AND he has collaborated with loads of great stars, AND then he quit the music industry to go soul-searching, AND he has tried to make the world a better place, AND, of course, there's the whole fact that he is not even named Cat Stevens anymore -- well, I mean, he never was, as that was a stage name, but now he is Yusuf Islam -- and he is all about his personal spiritual journey.

And despite all this, you know that in his obituary in The New York Times and wherever else, they're going to hit on the "Salman Rushdie controversy" within a few paragraphs.  (Note: it's ironic that I'm totally having a Cat Stevens moment in my heart and on my MP3 player this week, because literature-wise I am having a Salman Rushdie moment this week -- what's up with that, universe?)  I mean, you can decide for yourself whether or not Cat Stevens was misunderstood and whether or not he actually ever "supported" even in theory the idea of the fatwa against Rushdie, but the bottom line is that he's in the mix. He's associated with it. People burned his albums. (Record albums!!! Remember those? How could the kids today ever even protest a recording artist so fervently? No wonder Chris Brown has got off so easily in the public eye--what are the kids supposed to do, a mass deletion of his song from their iTunes? Not the same effect, I'd say.) Designing Women referenced the burning of his albums as the epitome of free speech mental gymnastics in one episode. The Cat Stevens-Salman Rushdie controversy is famous, famous, famous. I personally don't really think all that entirely much about it, because 1.)I do think he was partly misunderstood 2.)I think all religious fervor is f****d and more attention should be paid to all of it, not just highlighted examples in famous people and 3.)as I mentioned, when I listen to Tea for the Tillerman, I am transported to a higher plane, regardless of subsequent actions of the man who recorded it.

Even so, someone who also likes the Cat Stevens music asked me on Monday, "Do you know much about his life?" and I said, "Yeah, some" and I found myself talking about the alleged support of the Rushdie fatwa within a few sentences. What gives?!  This is why I know it will come up in any and all Cat Stevens remembrances. It's just such a pop culture touchstone.

And that is why I say that I don't want to end up like Cat Stevens. Not because I don't want to end up Muslim (well, that either) but because I don't want to end up with this one random incident always being brought up about me. I want my contributions to be diverse and far-reaching and not overshadowed by any one thing, especially one thing that might be a foolish mistake. I mean, it's like Bill Clinton, who could have been a truly great contributor to the world but will always have Monica Lewinsky haunting him...some things just will not go away. I think one of my goals is to get my art and self and creations out there in the universe without ever having that one unfortunate disrupting incident.

Now, as for a series of rebellious and crazy incidents over the years? This is definitely on the table.

Lovely, Dark and Deep

Well, my middle schoolers are back. I guess they couldn't stay away forever, as I had suggested. My Tuesday/Thursday evening middle school class consists of three, sometimes four, remarkably bright eighth graders who look and act to me as if they are more like 15 or 16. They have a good command of English usage, excellent vocabulary, and stellar class behavior. Their reward? Poetry!

'Tis true. Poetry is not dead. Today I needed a lesson plan for them and I decided we would spend the class reading and discussing "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Most people in the U.S. (and the rest of the English-speaking world? do tell!) recognize the last line, "And miles to go before I sleep." They might even know it's repeated, and that it comes from a poem where a speaker and his horse are in the woods. The first line, "Whose woods these are I think I know," is also reasonably well known by English speakers.

So I decided my brilliant Korean middle schoolers could and should handle it. We started class discussing some key vocabulary: snowy, downy, frozen, harness and queer. After having them make sentences with those words, I next practiced the form "Whose ____ this is I think I know. It's [so-and-so]'s" with various objects in the classroom. Then we moved on to plurals, like "Whose pencils these are, I think I know. They're Emily's." So they were prepared to understand the first line.

Man, it is such a great poem. I'm not afraid to say it. Even after reading it many times over the years, I still physically feel the emotional wallop of that last stanza. Luckily, my students know what a symbol is and does. After we read the poem once, we discussed it stanza by stanza. Then I had them read it again, each student reading the whole thing aloud, and after each reading I would ask a different question about it, like "Which words in the poem help you picture the scene?" (frozen, dark, snowy, horse, etc.) or "Why do we say, 'I promise'?" or "What will happen to our speaker next?" We also talked about the man off in the village, and the fact that the speaker is reflecting on what his horse thinks.

After almost an hour, we were ready to move into the all-important reckoning with the repeated "And miles to go before I sleep," to discern why it would be said twice. I love hearing students offer ideas I hadn't thought of. I articulated for them the idea that the first line keeps us in the literal story, but that repetition really makes us veer off into the symbolic, with "sleep" becoming that final sleep.

Naturally, their homework is to write about their reactions to the poem. I think we will write our own poems next week. I had them write weather-related poems when I had most of these same students in an evening class two (academy-)semesters ago. But now we're getting into meaty stuff.

I do have lots of ideas, but if any of you have suggestions for a poem or two that I should teach to my middle schoolers, feel free to comment!

Prize Time!

So the Pulitzer Prize winners will be announced this Monday, April 12th. I love the Pulitzer Prizes - um, hello, understatement - and look forward to the yearly announcement. This year, however, it's kind of weird. I have NO idea what will possibly win any of them.

I particularly have no idea what will possibly win the Pulitzer for fiction, and that's the weirdest of all, I think. This is the first year in quite some time that I did not spend any portion of the previous year, the time during which potential Pulitzer winners were released, working at least part-time in a bookstore. I was off and on slinging books for so much of this past decade, that some portion of a stint always made it into most every calendar year -- but not after 2008.

And I certainly haven't been reading new fiction! Oh, I've been reading a lot, but it's all these projects I've concocted for myself in the last decade or so, like (funny, this:) reading past Pulitzer winners, and reading a bio of every president in order to see where we went wrong (started during the Dubya administration, obvio), and "re"-reading Moby Dick, which I am doing now.

So - what the heck were the amazing books of 2009? I was reading old stuff. Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City was on my radar a little bit. Lorrie Moore had a new book out, but I heard it was weird and disjointed. Sherman Alexie? What about that Tennessee family generations drama that got all that buzz a couple months ago, was that still 2009?

Note to self: read new stuff and classics during 2010!

This doesn't even touch on any of the other categories. It's also interesting to think about what the journalism winners will be. Pulitzers! My favorite! Well, one of my favorites.

(I realize this is a totally book-themed post, but it seemed in my head to be more current eventy than literary supplementy, so I put it here on the "main" blog.)

Procrastination is the cruelest month

The problem with procrastination, of course, is that -- much like a chocolate bunny -- it can never last. Today I have come to the end of this semester's allowable procrastination and have reached the point where I have to actually start working on the three 20-to-30-page papers that I have to write this semester. Well, I say "have to" although of course one does not "have to" actually do anything; one must simply face the consequences of not doing the thing. In this case I *could* just never write any of the papers, but the consequence would be that I do not graduate (yet?) from law school, and $100,000 later I'm pretty sure I want to just graduate and so I am going to write the papers.

Now there are two important questions to ask about my dread of writing these papers. One is about the writing and one is about the procrastination. First, the writing: why do I so loathe and detest writing law school research papers? I mean, I've procrastinated writing papers all my life, from that 6th grade country report on Switzerland right on through my undergraduate English major analysis of King Lear, but it wasn't because I hated writing them. I just loved procrastinating more. In law school I actually loathe writing the papers. I think it is because they go hand in hand with legal research. Legal research, to me, is only slightly more preferable than stabbing myself in the eye with a toothpick.

As for the second question, that of procrastination itself, I find myself once again wondering not why do I procrastinate (I've sort of given up on that one) but why did I procrastinate so much less when I lived in Korea? It was uncanny how different I was there. I just did things. There seemed to be no reason to wait. Why? What happened to me there that made me behave so forthrightly and productively, and why can't I get that back?

This and more will I ponder as I work on paper # 1: my Supreme Court opinion for Fake Supreme Court class. It is an apparently gorgeous day outside: I can see the sun streaming through my window even though I've been trapped inside here surrounded by stacks of legal crap. Good thing I don't really care for spring. (I'm more into summer and winter; spring is just a bi-polar, half-assed tease.) Then again, if only I did yearn to be outside springing then I could use that as a reward for myself...I will have to think of some other system of rewards. Should I get a reward after every page or every five pages?

Doom and gloom and bar examinings

Dismal. I am shaping up to have quite the dismal track record this year of blogging great thoughts. Sadly, I fear it is because I am lacking in great thoughts altogether; it's not that I'm not thinking them and just keeping them from my adoring fans. (ha) And, I know, who wants to start yet another blog entry lamenting that I've gone a week since the last post again? But ugh. So, why have I done it? What great and marvelous acts are keeping me from the bloggage? It is spring break. But that can't be why.

I am pretty excited about spring break, though. I previously mentioned how ridiculous the timing of our spring break is this semester, but it's finally here and I am SO thrilled to be on vacation that I have even started to stop being bitter about not being able to travel anywhere. (Started to stop? Hmmm.) I am SO thrilled, in fact, that I am seriously considering not looking at Facebook for the rest of the week because there are too many law school people on there, who continue to blather about law school -- even on spring break!

Speaking of not talking about law school, I have to continue to talk about it to explain part of why I'm so happy not thinking about it. That doesn't really make any sense, but just go with it. About a week and a half ago I finally decided realized that I am not going to take the New York bar exam this summer. And it was like a moment of clarity. A thing of beauty. I felt like a new person. Really, I felt lighter. I felt like I knew myself again. It has been very difficult for me to get anything resembling advice from anyone at Hofstra about whether to take the bar exam and whether to take the New York bar exam , because they are so caught up in law world that they can't objectively determine whether it is the right choice for any one person. It's just what everyone does: graduate from law school, begin reviewing for bar exam the next day. But if everyone jumped off a cliff, etc. Add to that the dose of Long Island Syndrome which prevents about 60% of my school (maybe more) from realizing there are in fact about 45,000 other places to live in the world and REALLY no one can understand why not take the New York bar exam. But I - I have never wanted to be a lawyer, really. I just wanted to study international law. And I have done that. And I have said from the beginning that I don't want to be a lawyer. So why did I get so caught up in the bar exam frenzy? And the New York inertia?

I feel like I got the best advice from a friend who is no part of Hofstra but who has been working as a big firm corporate lawyer in Manhattan for eight years. She stated, "If you are even thinking of not practicing law in New York, you probably shouldn't take the New York bar exam. Why would you suffer through that and then just leave?" It sounds simple, but try getting anyone in a law school to say it. They have a lot invested in people passing the bar exam. But that's just because they want to have higher bar passage rates so they move up in the U.S. News law school rankings and make more money. Law schools are all about making a profit.

Anyway, the point is that I make more sense to myself when I think about not wasting three months and not borrowing six thousand more dollars just to do something that has no purpose. When I could be finding a job. A job that I actually can do. Hello, McFly?

So spring break. Not so springy, I might add. We did have one lovely weather day, on Sunday. Brian's parents visited for a couple days and we took advantage of the nice day with a trip to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, near Prospect Park. That is a good part of Brooklyn. I like the park and I adore botanic gardens, and it was lovely to stroll there.

Also dismal, Michigan State's loss last night in the national championship game. It was dismal partly because we watched the game at Blondie's and then when it was over the regular game-watching excursions to Blondie's also ended, and all the Michigan State alumni left, depressed, saying, "See you in football season." Brian and I were two of the last group left sitting there, not feeling compelled to rush out in the mass people-who-have-to-get-up-for-9-to-5-jobs exodus. And that probably made me feel even more dismal, maybe even pathetic: it was as if I were willing there to be a celebration where in fact there was none. And then the usually reliable 7 train took forever when we were going home. Dismal.

But today is another day, another vacation day, another day of National Poetry Month (I'm writing a poem a day, as are hundreds of others), and another chance at productivity and sunshine.

Fools

It is with some trepidation that I note April in my near future. Tomorrow, in fact. We all know April is the cruelest month, etc. (thanks for the enlightenment T.S.!) and more often than not I find that apart from the start of baseball season a lot of bad things happen in April and all I do is wait for the May flowers to show up. What can you say about a month that is ushered in with the only occasion that really gives Valentine's Day a run for its stupidity money? ("Today let's all lie to one another and then laugh about it!") June actually tends to suck, too. Boo, April and June, but yay for March and May. So it's sad that today is the last day of March.

However, that does also bring me reeeeeeeally close to the end of this semester and the end of my law school experience. Approaching the end of the law school experience gives me a lot to contemplate. For example, the fact that I seriously have to return to Long Island only a dozen or so more times EVER is pretty damn great. Also, the fact that I will be able to read read read novels novels novels again, without even the tiniest hint of a suggestion that I should consider feeling guilty about not reading for school instead. Recently, of course, I have pretty much said "oh well" to the guilt and started reading whatever I want again, and I suppose I was always doing more leisure reading (1-3 books per semester on average) than my fellow law students. But that's probably the most awesome thing about law school being almost over.

Coming soon, I'll share my thoughts on the bar exam or lack thereof.