rambling

so, i think it's time for a good rambling. or a good something. after cooping myself up for the past couple of weeks over dwindling pct work from the patent office, a broken car (now fixed with a $50 oxygen sensor expertly installed by big don's good friend jp), and a general state of morose denial and anxiety, i gotta do something.

wilco is playing eerily in the background and as a result i can't get the cover of yankee hotel foxtrot out of my mind. and that, of course, reminds me of last february when i flew out to chicago, walked across the river from the loop, and proceeded to fail the illinois bar. i really thought i passed it, too.

should a rambling blog entry be an excuse for baring the nastiness of my daily life? probably not. scratch the couple of paragraphs i was going to write.

i've got about four hours on two dvds of the idiot. i always wondered what kurosawa originally envisioned and what his final product actually was. could it really be that the complete version is unavailable? we'll see if the russian filmmaker can rival the japanese master.

alright, i just paused itunes. louis prima is fun sometimes, but it's hardly the mood i'm in. the other day, for the first time in a long time, the random play generator spat out tori amos (can't remember which song, something from under the pink, probably) and i didn't even raise a finger to skip it. honestly, it's probably been nearly ten years since i've felt like this.

is it because of a relationship ended? despite the fights and the anxiety and the anger and the jealousy (and whatever other dramas and emotions unique to any individual relationship i've ever had), there is a psychologically stabilizing aspect to being with someone. to talking in the evenings, to going out, receiving emails and text messages and planning and actually doing things together. at this point in my life, i don't miss my prior relationships. i'm sure i'll get to that point with this most recent one, sooner or later.

more than anything, though, there's this looming anxiety that's tormenting me. nothing unique, certainly, for a man with most of his life still ahead of him, but still troubling. is this really it?

it's not what i signed up for way back when. it's not what i wanted all those times i wanted to end it all but stepped back in favor of some personalized version of a wonderful life. of course, in one sense it is--a large part of the levees holding back previous hurricanes was simply a desire to not hurt my parents. perhaps the parents were simply cloaked manifestations of my Über-Ich (does any honest, thinking person really, seriously, prefer id and ego to es and ich?). but, really, i just thought it would be different, that some things would have worked out better, that my academic and professional accomplishments would have been more impressive, and less marked by such catastrophic failures.

i applied for and was just granted two general forbearances and a deferment for my student loans. of course, it's nice to get some relief from the payments for a while, but at some point it's going to go back to the way it's been--over half, indeed over two-thirds lately, of my income going to pay my debts, with really no end in sight.

i wonder, though. what if a big firm had scooped me up during my law school interviews, handed me a salary somewhere between $75k and $125k, and got me set up doing litigation or prosecution or some other nonsense? would i really have taken it all any differently? would i really have stuck at it? or would i, as i have so consistently over the years, given up on it, withdrawn, and found myself in the same depression i'm currently in, for practically identical reasons? looking back, while it hurt at the time, it seems that the associates and partners who looked at my resumes and interviewed me, and rejected me, got it exactly right.

so what to do about it all? i dunno. i put in a resume with the patent office a little over a month ago, which, i think, puts the total over the years at seven. no doubt i'll get rejected again. the recruiters i sent my resume to a week ago haven't responded either. a part of me wants to go back to chicago and try one more time to redeem myself by enrolling in an LLM. would it really matter, though? what would it actually do beside add another twenty or thirty or forty grand to the pile of student loans? wouldn't it just forestall the day of reckoning, when i have to accept my lot and just get over it?

i dunno.

the problem with rambling is that you end up saying things you never intended, ideas and thoughts so distasteful you know you'll never want to read them again, and that really, really have no audience with anyone else. my original thought was that this would turn into a blog about the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty apparent in the latest deseret book holiday advertising piece which steadfastly refused to acknowledge the stephanie meyer books sitting on the store bookshelves while gushing praises for the latest emma smith pseudo-biographical revisionist nonsense. i mean, at least stephanie meyer has the courage to accept the label of pure fantasy as a descriptor of her work. shoot, that old hag sheri dew might even turn a profit if she would embrace best-selling vampire romance novels. and she might, just might, make some ground in reducing the hideous stench of priestcraft emanating from her stores by replacing liz lemon swindle portraits of (pre?) apostate emma with books that make no balls about the metaphorical delights inherent in sucking the blood out of susceptible customers.