The official endorsement: Vote Obama

The remarkable thing about this election is that there's a candidate I really respect and admire, unlike every other time, when it's been two vaguely repulsive figures. Back in 2000, Gore was too sanctimonious and Bush seemed like an amiable dunce. Go for the dunce! What could possibly go wrong? In 2004, I had recognized the error of my ways and was looking forward to voting for Howard Dean, who was like a "West Wing" fantasy come to life (plucky Northeastern governor comes to Washington) yet I ended up voting for John Kerry, who looked and acted like one of those dour talking trees in "The Wizard of Oz."

This time around, I hitched my star to Obama way back in April 2007, and boy, have I been pleased with how that turned out. From the stunning victory in Iowa to the soaring convention speech to his cool, professional demeanor in the debates against grumpy old Senator McCain, he and his campaign have had remarkably few missteps. Not only do I see Obama as an inspirational figure in America -- a symbol of progress and a bellwether of great things to come -- but McCain, for whom I voted with passion in the 2000 Virginia primary, has done a thorough job of losing my vote: The selection of Governor Palin by a man who promised "country first." The constant drumbeat that the city where I live and the region where I grew up is not "the real America." A wholehearted embrace of smear tactics and strategies designed to appeal to our worst impulses and fears. An acceptance of the right-wing ideologies that he fought so long against. And the introduction of Joe the Plumber to the national scene. Every time I read "Joe the Plumber" I hear it in the chirpy cadence of a parrot voice. Thanks a lot, John McCain.

So, in the spirit of these final few days, as everybody hunkers down and all the newspapers and magazines put their cards on the table in one last appeal for wisdom and clear judgment, here's my own, the first official presidential endorsement in the history of this blog.

Take it from your old pal Mike the Lawyer: vote Barack Obama for president.

Young, gifted, and white

Tonight I was at a country club steakhouse in Carlsbad with six other partners and associates from across the country. After a couple vodka gimlets and a glass or two of red wine, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and asked the hostess if I might borrow a pen and paper, and I wrote this:

To be young, gifted, and white: arrive at a steakhouse in Carlsbad - gilded walls, warm familiar lights. Loud red-faced men in dark blazers represent a possible future. A room of garrulous laughter, multiple cocktails per setting - rich men, white men, salads of prosciutto and greens and thick beet juice dribbling down our chins. The power! The ease! Who have we become?

Yet the music - Jill Scott, John Mayer, Erykah Badu, D'Angelo. "Cross My Mind," "He Loves Me," "I Don't Trust Myself," "Didn'tcha Know." Even here, in Carlsbad, among the privileged class, with a blazer and a soft belly awaiting me in some hazy potential future - this is who I am. I tell the waiter the music here is fantastic - amid everything else, he agrees.

Blogging by blackberry

Right now I am in Los Angeles, blogging with my thumbs on my brittle little blackberry because this is my lone connection to the internet. I'm here for new associate training, where they teach us how to be lean, hungry, fire-in-the-belly type lawyers. We came here as boys but we'll be leaving as men.

Soft, pasty men, actually, since we haven't really left the hotel compound where we eat, sleep, abd slump in conference rooms all day (except for last night's dinner, drinks and salsa dancing downtown, which should not be underemphasized--these hips, after all, do not lie). Tomorrow we move on to a resort in Carlsbad for another three days of rest, relaxation, and powerpoint. For now, here's a poem I wrote during a session today:

Hotel conference room
Downtown Los Angeles
Beige room, chairs
Outside, California dream
Tangle of freeways
Cars' dull roar
Bright empty sky
Stifled behind glass.
My golden state
Of nowhere. California!

October farmers' market

Yesterday at the Farmers' market the bins and crates were bursting with color. As L diligently sorted through the apples and squashes to find our week's worth, I was swooping through the crowds with the camera, waiting for the elusive moment when my view of the riotous color was unbroken by a reaching hand. There were as many people taking photos of the produce as actually purchasing it; maybe us city folk have an acute need to memorialize the changing of the seasons. To capture these delicious colors so they'll endure longer than this brief, perfect moment in the year.

The email I expect to receive every time my Blackberry buzzes on evenings or weekends

Why aren't you here? Everyone is here working hard, and you're not. That's really disappointing. You really screwed the pooch on [some work issue] by (a) being bad at your job and (b) not being at your job right now. If you're going to be bad at something, at least be bad at it here in the office. That's just common sense.

You know what we all thought you were? A team player. But it turns out we were wrong. You're not a team player. Playing on a team with other people is not something you're good at. Maybe that's why running is the only sport you're sort of good at. One of us came up with the idea (but the rest of us agree) that if you were running in a relay race, you would probably mess that up too, because you would toss the baton into the street, or just not show up for the race, like how you didn't show up for work right now. Because you're not a team player.

We are so disappointed in you. Don't even bother coming back. Learn to play on a team. But not our team.

Best,

Everyone

Aunt Evvy

My great-aunt Evelyn died today. She was old -- ever since I was little, she was old -- and she lived a good 90 years or so. After a long battle with illness, her death came as a relief, and she died with her sisters and loved ones nearby.

We called her Aunt Evvy, although I've seldom seen that name written down, so I'm not even sure how to spell it. As I said, even when I was little, she was old and wizened. She was a tiny woman, small and trim, with a heavily-styled bloom of white hair and a raspy voice worn by cigarettes, a gruff voice leavened with kindness and reassurance. Like many of the older folks in my family, she carried a smell of cigarettes that was somehow rich and comfortable.

But the remarkable thing about Aunt Evvy was that she had none of the coldness, or detachment, or impatience that you think of when you think "wizened old lady." She was always so kind and thoughtful. When I was little we would go to her house and she would give me my first haircuts. She always had candy in a bowl in the family room, and a painting of dogs playing poker in the basement, near the pool table, which seemed to be Uncle Dan's domain. He carved wooden ducks as a hobby, mallards with brilliant green heads and the females with a more subtle palette of browns and grays. When I would spend the night at my grandparents' on Saturdays, Uncle Dan would always drop by in the morning with the Sunday paper, and we would all sit around the kitchen table and eat donuts, me reading the comics while they all drank coffee and smoked.

Aunt Evvy was known among the family for her pies. She was a brilliant cook, but dessert is when she really flexed her muscle. My favorite was her chocolate pie, but she had plenty of others in her repertoire, and she would bring several to every family event, enough to leave entire pies to be divided -- thick, overflowing, rich and painful pies that would kill lesser men than us -- after everyone had eaten as much as they could bear.

She and my mom seemed to have a special connection. My mother has been utterly vigilant during Aunt Evvy's long illness, and I heard about many visits where Aunt Evvy could barely communicate, or struggled to talk, or just spent her time yelling at the nurse, which was reassuring to see. But there were moments when Aunt Evvy was lucid and able to communicate with my mom, and I heard about times when the old Evvy was shining through -- kind and loving, rubbing my mom's back to comfort her even as she had come to comfort Aunt Evvy. I was so happy Mom got to share these moments with her.

In the last couple of years, she suffered a lot of loss and pain in her life, and death seemed to be a welcome relief at some moments. I wrote about it here, a couple of Easters ago. She was a strong and resilient woman. It seems fitting that as I sit here writing, I can smell the pumpkin pie L baked tonight -- the first pumpkin pie of the season.

For my entire life Aunt Evvy has been a fixed point in my family -- part of the bedrock of men and women who had always been around, whose proximity and reliability and good will and assistance and love were taken as a given. I think about how close she and my grandma were, how much my mother loved her, how much my grandfather valued his friendship with her and Uncle Dan, and that's when I get a better sense of the brunt of the loss. She was a good and beautiful woman, and even after the pain of these long last months, there's nothing to do but miss her.

Haiku at the end of the week

Dinner out with L
Next, New Yorker festival
Still me, alive and well

Zombie

Get this: yesterday I worked all night. I went to work on Wednesday, expecting another normal day at work. Cut to the part in a movie where the hands of the clock keep spinning, yet I remained working at my desk. Outside it got dark out, and all the lights in the buildings came on, and I was still working. Even later the lights of midtown started flicking off one by one, and I was still working. Even later the sky began lightening again, which was surreal, yet I was still working. A couple hours later people started coming in to work -- people who had showered, wearing clothes they had just put on, and I was still there, looking like a zombie with greasy hair in some extremely battered business casual clothes. "I haven't gone home yet," I croaked to my admin.

By 10 am this morning I felt like death warmed over. I could barely concentrate and was closing one eye to read. My contact lenses felt like hockey pucks in my eyes. Thankfully once our work was done I came home early, around noon, to eat some food for the first time since dinner and get myself cleaned up.

I was really excited because I figured I could easily make the gym tonight, then be home in time for the VP debate. I took a nap around 3, figuring I would wake up in time for the gym. Later, much later, I woke up to find a dark apartment. At first I thought it was early in the morning, and that L had woken up before me, but then I remembered that I hadn't had a night yet. I looked at my watch, and it was 7:15 -- too late for the gym. But I guess I was too tired anyway.

Here's the thing about literally working all night: I felt kind of tough, like I'm proving myself in an admittedly stupid way, and I feel sort of ridiculous for having to do it. The last time I did this I was in college, writing a horrible paper in Spanish about Erasmus. (Or, as he's known among the Spaniards, "Erasmo.") But the real kicker is the fact that it messed up my Thursday plans, and I suspect I'll be a little run-down through the weekend as well.

My tips for working all night: (1) Don't eat crap. I stuck with ice water and frequent trips to the bathroom to stay awake, and ate some candy but otherwise didn't eat a lot of junk and soda the way I wanted to. (2) Listen to music, but keep it mixed up, so nothing gets labeled as "the music I worked all night to," because then I would grow to hate it. And I just got new albums by Ne-Yo and Eric Benet, who seem to be bookends in a way (I feel like Ne-Yo's stuff represents my past and present, while Eric Benet is singing about the kind of love and relationship that I'm still a couple years away from experiencing, in some ways), and as great as both albums are, I didn't want to permanently associate them with my wretched night in midtown.

Moving on...

Debate-wise, tonight I thought both sides did pretty well, given the expectations that were set. I really appreciated the dialogue between the candidates and the points of mutual respect and agreement that both sides were happy to note. But I thought Biden wiped the floor with Palin, in terms of specifics, directness, context, and understanding. I don't need or want a Vice President who winks at me from the television.

Too much

I think I'm becoming a weirdo about recycling. The combination of L's locavore wisdom and scathing disdain for bottled water, plus the reams of paper that fly around my office on a daily basis, have pushed me over the edge.

Our printers at work (where I am at this moment, mind you, and there's a long time yet before I'm going home) are set so that the first page of every document is a paper identifying who printed the thing. So today I casually told my administrative assistant (!!) that if she wanted to set aside all those papers, I would be happy to bring them home to recycle, since there isn't really any recycling here at the office. She looked at me like I was crazy. I began to feel stupid, and all of my environmental righteousness leaked out of my body like toxic waste out of a drum barrel as I explained how I set aside all my recyclable, non-confidential papers to recycle at home. Is that weird?

At Chipotle tonight for my pathetic lonely dinner, which I squeezed in between billable minutes at some alien midtown Chipotle, I set aside the bottle I had purchased with my meal so they could recycle it. Then I saw another bottle lying on top of the garbage, so I plucked it out for recycling, too. Then I noticed a second bottle in the garbage, under some napkins that didn't look too dirty, so I pulled that one out. Then I saw a third bottle, just a little deeper, and I was going to reach in when I realized -- you need to leave. Do not root through the garbage at Chipotle. But that's not weird, right?

Camera

During our trip to Asia I eventually got sick of taking self-portraits of us, where I hold the camera out in front and aim it backwards, and then, thanks to a miracle of perspective and proportion, a nice picture comes out. We would be standing in front of any kind of vista or open window or body of water, and L would thrust the camera towards me and say, "here, take one of your pictures." Gradually I became self-conscious doing it, especially when there were other English-speaking people around, because I feared that it made us look weird and untrusting. Sometimes people would stand nearby sort of expectantly, ready to engage in the tacit tourist pact where someone asks you to take their picture, with a subtext of "...and please don't run away with my camera," and then you actually do it and give it back. Being the antisocial misanthropes we are, we rejected this whole thing and just did it ourselves. Because otherwise we would have spent the whole trip apologizing extravagantly for interrupting other tourists from their sightseeing, and then discreetly wiping the camera down with Purel after those dirty Europeans returned it to us.

Also, here you can see that L and I basically have the same glasses, since we got the his 'n' hers versions. Stateside we are careful to avoid wearing them at the same time, since we've already started dressing in a dangerously similar fashion ("Hey, you're wearing Gap jeans, Reef brand flips, and a North Face fleece over a t-shirt? Me too!" "Ha ha! How white does it get!"). But eventually we realized that of all the reasons the local Asian people would be laughing at us, identical eyewear is probably not at the top of the list.

Finally, I like this photo because I feel like it tells a nice story as you read it left to right: first you see a pretty mountain backdrop, then you see L looking all cute and happy to be there, and then your eye keeps moving to find me apparently asleep and completely disinterested -- I think it's kind of funny.

Travel journal

This was when we were in Koh Tao, Thailand. We stayed in a little bungalow perched on top of a pile of large rocks. All we could see from our rickety bamboo balcony was the open sea, occasionally cut by a water taxi making its way around the island. There was a small oil lamp near the door and I spent a good amount of time trying to light the wick, but it never took. Instead we sat under the yellow bulb and watched the night settle in around us.

In this photo I was writing in my travel journal, which has come to be an essential part of any trip. Before I got this volume I would write what we did in the margins of guidebooks or scraps of paper, trying to remember the names of restaurants and tour guides, and the results were always cryptic and useless later on. Once I got smart and got a journal, I started writing more and taping in small relics of the trip: ticket stubs, postcards, etc. This particular volume accompanied me to Italy, Spain, California, Montana, Hawaii, and ended its career in Asia. I read something by Italo Calvino in college about how the cities we visit both ask us questions and answer our questions. So I always find myself wondering what a particular place is asking of me, and answering for me. (New York asked me everything.)

Anyways, so that's my travel journal, and here's a photo L took of me slumping over to write in it. In the photo you can see the oil lamp to my left, along with a thick copy of Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again." To my back is the wine-dark sea. The first chapter of the Wolfe book had me energized and feeling young and literate and alive, but unfortunately it went downhill from there. But for that brief moment it was spectacular.

Where did it go

Today I spent eleven hours at work. Today was also Sunday. Yesterday I spent a good four or five hours at work, and Friday was another eleven and a half.

Today someone asked me in a way that I hope was at least partly in jest: "Do you hate your life?" And I said, "I don't hate my life." Seeing an opportunity, my interlocutor said, "Do you hate your job? It's ok if you hate your job. You can tell me you hate your job. I do sometimes." But I wouldn't say it.

The thing that gets me, though, is that work has effectively demolished my weekend. I came home tonight a little after ten, after walking forty blocks in the rain to get home, but I was still tense and angry and frustrated. I hate feeling this way. And as I was leaving work, I thought, hey, in twelve hours you'll be back here, and it will only be Monday!

Today in my office I was listening to music, and I turned it up louder and was singing along and dancing in my special ergonomic office chair, since work is the only place I've been able to do that. During James Taylor's "Mexico," I realized that I felt like Rapunzel, imprisoned in that tower. Do you think Rapunzel billed by the hour? I kind of do, because I do, and it seems like she and I have a lot in common, as far as being imprisoned in a tower.

I'm trying not to be bitter or frustrated but it's getting increasingly difficult, when I can't plan my evenings, I can't enjoy L's good home cookin' and I can't even enjoy the nice evening time with her I've taken for granted for so long. I don't want to get used to this lifestyle because it sucks. There comes a certain point in the workday, once the day has turned to night and I don't even realize it until I turn around in my seat and see that the view of midtown has been cloaked by darkness, that I look out the window and wonder how I got myself in this situation, where there's an expectation of such unrelenting availability and devotion to work. Is this my life? Is this who I am now?

(Today I was walking the halls, knowing I was alone, and the tune to "Damaged" was in my head, since the song has been a blight on my soul for like five months now, and instead of singing "how you gonna fix it, fix it, fix it," I was singing, "I think this is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit," and it's an indicator of the way we live now that this was a major victory in my day.)

My goal for the week is to reclaim myself, and to be less angry and more happy. I need to see my wife, read more for pleasure, get some more exercise, and write more. The thing that kills me about legal writing (or at least the legal writing I encounter) is the overwhelming artlessness of it. I'm going to try to update this old blog every day this week, with at least something. It will probably not be very profound or artful, but it will be a part of me that is not watching time slip away in six minute increments.

"First day, first night"

On Monday, my first day of work as a lawyer, I came home at 2 am.

On Tuesday, I came home at 9:30 pm.

On Wednesday, I came home at 12:30 am.

On Thursday, I came home at 6 pm (things were slow).

On Friday, I came home at 12:00 am.

On Saturday (!), I came home at 7:30 pm.

On Sunday, I rested, and wondered if this would, or could, continue.

Endings

1. The end of my computer. My computer died on Thursday. One minute it seemed to be fine, then it froze, then when I rebooted, instead of the reassuring Apple logo I saw a flashing file folder with a question mark on it. This was clearly not a good sign. It turned out the hard drive was fried, so I lost everything on it. I spent the whole day trying not to freak out and consider the magnitude of the loss; like a moron I never backed up my files. As a result, I lost all my music, all my photos, and three years of law school notes, as well as other miscellaneous writings (aborted attempts at fiction and my resume) and who knows what else. On the plus side, most of my law school notes are floating around my email account, I recovered my music from my ipod, and L has most of our photos. But I feel like a complete, complete idiot. Over the weekend I got a new hard drive and have begun the long road back. Incredibly aggravating. If you have photos of you and me from this modern era of digital photography (2003-present) please send them to me so I can reconstruct my life. I feel like such an idiot. It's hard to overemphasize that point.

2. The end of my high blood pressure. For the last few weeks I have been worried that I have high blood pressure, but now those fears have ended as well. At the optometrist's a while back they took my blood pressure as a perfunctory matter, and it was alarmingly high; at the end of the appointment it was even higher, because I spent the hour worrying about it. Then when I returned to the doctor later in the week it was high again. I looked up high blood pressure on the internet (never a good idea, I am not allowed to look up possible medical conditions on the internet, but I made an exception for myself) and there was absolutely no reason for me to have high blood pressure. I looked at the ingredients of Chipotle and wondered if maybe sodium was the problem. My nutritional regime had been based on things like calories, sugar, trans fats; it turns out sodium is this whole other axis that has nothing to do with anything else. But then this weekend I was home with my folks and my mom took my blood pressure multiple times with multiple devices, and my blood pressure is fine. I think the earlier doctor had a bum machine. Realizing I don't have pre-hypertension was seriously the best news of the weekend. I celebrated by eating a salt lick dipped in melted cheese and not exercising.

3. The end of a tire. Driving around Virginia yesterday, one of the tires on my mom's car blew out. We were rounding a corner and singing along to John Legend's "Green Light" on the radio when there was a sound like a gun shot and the car seemed suddenly unbalanced. I pulled into a handicapped parking spot and discovered a half-inch sized hole in the side of the wheel ... how the hell does that happen? Being a non-driving city dweller I hadn't had to change a tire since high school, when my failure to engage the parking brake caused the unoccupied car to roll forward when my dad jacked it up to replace the tire. This time around my father-in-law was there to help us figure things out; by the time we ate lunch I was a sweaty disaster. But at least it wasn't my fault.

4. The end of an era. In addition to the end of my computer, my brush with hypertension, and my mom's rear passenger tire, one other thing is ending too: my late summer indolence. Tomorrow is my first day at work at the law firm; my first day of work as a lawyer; my first day of work in a new career; my first day of a new life. Wish me luck.

Sarah Palin

I was feeling really good about this presidential election until last week. Back in the olden days of late August, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that Americans would do the right, practical, courageous, intelligent, inspiring, obvious thing, and vote for Obama, and he would be president, and all would be right with the world. L and I woke up early in a hotel in Singapore to watch his acceptance speech at the convention, and were high-fiving each other in our fluffy hotel bathrobes as we cheered this small culmination of the American dream.

However, wily old John McCain had a trick up his sleeve. Initially his selection of Sarah Palin as VP was baffling: not only was she blatantly and irredeemably inexperienced, but she had all these issues with ethics investigators and state troopers-in-law and her own inconveniently pregnant children. It seemed like another Harriet Miers debacle, and I expected a similar result: she would last maybe a week, and then we'd have a much more appropriate candidate, like the buffoonish Mitt Romney.

Boy, was I wrong. Now I'm sort of terrified of Sarah Palin, and not just because she can kill a moose with her teeth. In one fell swoop, she revitalized an entire political party, turned the entire campaign on its ear, and stole the momentum of the Obama campaign, Sarah Barracuda-style.

(Incidentally, there were some moments of sublime ugliness at that RNC convention: thousands of people chanting "drill, baby, drill"; the mockery and derision of community organizers by people who have never needed them to secure their basic rights; and Mitt Romney's blithely incoherent speech, summing up the intellectual acrobatics required to make any kind of sense of the Republican message: "We need change all right -- change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington -- throw out the big government liberals and elect John McCain!" Obviously.)

If you boil it down, the reason I am so exasperated about the Palin-McCain movement is that is has proven to be extremely effective and extremely powerful. Obama has been laying low for a while now, and it seems like he's ceding the floor to the Republicans, letting them control the narrative. McCain's campaign manager has said that "this election is not about the issues," but rather "a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." Obama needs to bring it back to the issues. He needs to come up with a new explanation for why the hockey mom can deliver neither the change nor the experience that we need. He needs to wake up before McCain walks away with an election that was Obama's to lose. That's why I'm feeling nervous these days, because I have no idea how to do that.

Shop by numbers

Like a fool, I went to Macy's (excuse me, Macy*s) today to take advantage of their one day sale, which was technically two days. I had a simple objective: buy a couple of pairs of pants and a few dress shirts for my new job, which starts in a couple weeks. This is a very auspicious occasion, as it marks my triumphant return to a regular income and adulthood itself. So what better way to mark the event than to battle hordes of bargain-crazed shoppers for the last Fitted Wrinkle-Free Large Satin Stripe in all of Manhattan?

I wandered all over the store, up and down the rickety old wooden escalators, until I made it to the Mens Department. Recently the New Yorker had an article on how department stores deter shoplifters, and they noted that men shopping by themselves automatically raise a red flag among security personnel, since men are typically not avid shoppers. As I wandered through the store I tried to look as inconspicuous as possible, which actually made me sweat a little bit, which probably really reassured the thugs in the security camera room of my good intentions. (It actually reminded me of what I learned about false imprisonment for the bar exam, where a common scenario is when shopkeepers detain suspected thieves; good thing I know my rights as a law school graduate and bar exam applicant!)

The actual dress shirts section of the store was a madhouse, predictably. Hordes of people tussling among piles of shirt wrapped in plastic, clutching at the bags, reading the numbers furiously, then tossing them aside. Some people were actually just sitting on the floor, looking for their numbers, like sad old bingo players. I tried to stick with my standard exciting sartorial palette of blue and white, and was blindly picking shirts based on my collar size a year ago, on the assumption that my neck fat has not really increased since then. After I had wrestled four shirts away from some New Jersey moms and an old lady in a wheelchair, I descended to the pants section.

Compared to the mind-boggling array of options in the pants section, the many varieties of shirts seemed about as different as prison uniforms. I knew I wanted flat front pants, since I've heard pleated pants are uncool. But do I want straight leg? Is "relaxed fit" a signal for dumpy-butted people? I couldn't remember. Fearful that I would end up prancing into the office in flared jeans or capri pants, I sought out the familiar shelter of the Dockers area. I managed to find two pairs of their super premium khakis, the ones in a variety of somber colors with a stiff sheen of professionalism. These are not the ratty khakis I slouched around in as a preppy undergrad; these are khakis that say, "I probably have a Blackberry."

So I came home without actually trying anything on, by selecting items by the numerical sizes I already had. I figure I can try things on at home and get L's approval, or else we'll both return to sort it all out. I couldn't spend any more time in there, and I am not going back there alone.

Back home from Asia

It's hard to figure out where to begin to talk about our trip to Asia. I can't believe we were there; I can't believe it's over. After three and a half weeks the region lost none of the exoticism or mystery or romance that drew us there in the first place. We were only able to scratch the surface -- there was never enough time in any place we visited, not to mention the innumerable places we missed this time around.

Yet what we did encounter was tantalizing. The natural beauty was stunning, whether it was the view from Kho Tao, where our bungalow was perched on top of a pile of rocks, offering a view of nothing but the sun sinking into the calm uninterrupted sea; the islands of Halong Bay in Vietnam, where narrow mini-mountains jutted upwards from the green waters; the view from the peak of Fansipan, the highest mountain in Indochina, where the clouds were rushing up towards us and it felt as though we had reached the very end of the earth. The culture of the region: the calmness and sanctity exuded by the Buddhas we saw in temples throughout, whether made of wood or stone or gold or jade; the imposing temples of Angkor Wat, which possessed a grandeur and sheer power that seems to have only increased with time; the narrative of the Vietnam War we encountered at the Hanoi Hilton, where the story of those tragic years is quite different from the typical American version.

The element that nagged at me, though, was the ambivalence I often felt about our presence as tourists. Parents would teach their kids to rush up to Westerners, offering bottles of water or necklaces or pieces of embroidery, hammering us with questions: "Where are you from? What's your name? Will you buy from me now? Or when you come back buy from me later?" We grew a little less compassionate, with an uncomfortably thick skin, to learn to ignore their entreaties and keep going. In Angkor Wat indigenous villagers sell food, t-shirts, and water to visitors. As you approach the bank of vendors, women and their kids start rushing to you, keening for you to patronize their particular little shop -- I found I couldn't bear to decide who to buy from; I would look down and let L guide us to one in particular. How do you decide who gets your measly few bucks, for a couple of waters and some fried rice?

Cambodia was particularly striking. We stayed for a few days in Siem Reap, near Angkor Wat, the country's biggest tourist attraction. I found the people of Cambodia to be the friendliest of everyone we encountered, yet as got acclimated to the rhythms of the town, the legacy of war and genocide that haunted this country became unavoidable and distinctly personal. Land mine victims would be playing music near a shop, or amputees would offer books for sale from a cart; mothers wheeled babies with horrible birth defects in strollers and the handicapped asked for alms in the shadows of the temples. We ended up buying more trinkets than we expected, just to put some money back into the community there.

Oftentimes I was very aware that we were extremely typical tourists: doing the same activities as everybody else, seeking the same photo opps and statuettes and restrooms, asking the same questions and wheeling our wagon through the well-worn tracks of others. Seeing how these towns had adapted themselves to the pleasure and comfort of Westerners seemed like some kind of international gentrification, and at times I felt guilty for participating in it. But if Westerners are going to come marching through town in our North Faces and Timberlands, shouldn't the locals be better off for it? I wrestled with this stuff a lot.

Throughout Cambodia, and especially among the temple ruins, kids would sell western books about their nation's history, deeply discounted and wrapped in plastic. After talking to a few kids who could say basic greetings in ten languages, I bought a memoir about the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s ("First They Killed My Father," by Loung Ung). On the plane home I finally unwrapped the book to start reading it, and found that it was not the typical American book it appeared to be; the text inside had all been xeroxed from some other copy, and even the cover and bindings were made of regular flimsy paper, rather than the sturdy material I expected. The book is perfectly readable and useful, but it's a little more fragile than I thought.

It was a lovely trip by all standards: I saw some amazing things, I learned a lot about a place I had never really considered before, and I got to slip out of the daily trials of life to enjoy a few exotic weeks alone with my wife. There were a lot of brilliant and strange moments along the way, episodes that merit their own short stories, which maybe I'll try to write in the next few weeks. In the meantime, though, I still feel as though my mind is back there still, and I'm still wrestling with the things I saw and learned, trying to figure out what exactly our journey meant. It's not an easy question.

Let's go exploring

Tomorrow morning we're flying to London, and then we fly to Singapore, and then we fly to an island in Thailand whose name I can never remember. We have the suitcases we need, and the thousands of pages of reading material, and all sorts of hygiene products in handy travel sizes. We have identification documents and flesh-colored wallets to wear around our necks to deter wily thieves. We have a new camera. We have bold plans and a lot of time. We have each other.

I've never taken a vacation for this long before. Hopefully the experiences of this trip will scrub my brain of the lingering stress of that charming little test I took last week. I'm excited to get away, but obviously L and I will be hustling our way into every internet cafe we can find to check on how the Olympians and the Democrats are doing with their respective moments in the sun. Nobody screw it up, please.

I've got some serious travel anxiety at the moment, but I'm trying to appreciate the pure excitement and unknown possibilities before us. Our trip is an unwritten book. And I love books! What could be better?

More to come in September.

Emergency mode

I finished the bar exam. It's over. The bar exam is past tense.

The last few days have been pretty rough, I can't lie. The night before the bar exam we decided to go see the new Batman flick, to relax. Unfortunately I didn't realize how dark and disconcerting the movie would be -- it made me really anxious, although it was a great flick. Then on the walk home we were walking by Stuyvesant Square Park, and I saw two men seeming to tussle over a cane or something...it was odd but didn't seem serious. Then I saw a woman on the ground moaning, crying for help and for someone to call 911. Like any concerned New Yorker, I kept walking, but I did call 911, for the first time in my life. The woman on the other line asked me a million questions and made me give my name and number, which I didn't expect. I hung up but my cell phone was in self-proclaimed "Emergency Mode," which meant the ringer was up high and had a different, more urgent tone. The 911 people actually called me back a few moments later to get more information, as the sound of sirens in the distance drew closer. After that experience, I went home and tried to get ready for the first day of the bar exam. Here are notes from the three days:

Day 1: New York Essays. Many, many people here: a lot of girls in workout clothes, and everyone seems to be wearing t-shirts from their law schools, which seems lame in a very basic but profound way. Happy to find that my seat is in the back, near the Men's Room. The essays are hard, but manageable. Several of them have issues or topics that I really sink my teeth into, which is nice. A woman behind me is shaking her box of Tic-Tacs like they're maracas -- give it a rest, Carmen Miranda. One of the essays doesn't really make sense -- I read it over and over to see what I'm missing, but the whole thing just seems askew. Shake it off. I walk home feeling angry and frustrated. Thirty minutes later I arrive home a sweaty wreck, am forced to change clothes immediately.

Day 2: Multistate Multiple Choice. Shit. Hot shit, this is hard. The exam is really tough, nothing like the practice tests. The questions they guaranteed would be on the test are not on the test. There are very few easy questions where I feel totally good. I always boil it down to two choices and then pick one seemingly at random. I feel like I have no knowledge in my head, and instead turn to animal instinct. I go through waves of fatigue and antsiness. In the mens' room there's a guy breathing heavily, because apparently he just vomited. On the plus side, Carmen Miranda is keeping it down today. Afterwards I walk home again filled with despair and self-loathing. Very sweaty at home. Am feeling exhausted, fatigued. My contact lenses have been in for too long, and I feel like I'm two days away from a head cold. Tonight L and I go to New Jersey, to stay at a Holiday Inn before the New Jersey test. This whole Jersey endeavor seems idiotic. When did we ever want to live in New Jersey? We eat dinner at a Chili's restaurant, and consider the path not taken.

Day 3: New Jersey Essays. The theme of the day: "fuck it." But wait a second! The first four essays are almost delightful in their clarity. I feel good moving through them. Lunch at Chipotle, which is $2 cheaper yet a lot saltier. The afternoon essays are a lot harder, and when I tackle the contracts essay I realize that all of the knowledge has leached out of my head. Oh well -- recall the day's theme: fuck it. Indeed. Hitch a ride back to the city with a friend. Go home to find a mass of balloons waiting in the dark kitchen -- my hearts skips two beats out of fear when I open the door. Go to the gym, go to the bar, to celebrate the end of the process. Couldn't really celebrate, but five Yeunglings helped.

I still feel pretty anxious about everything. I try to tell myself it's fine: I worked hard, I should have confidence, I went with my gut, and statistically, I am probably going to pass. But it's hard to let go of the anxiety, even though rationally I know there's nothing more I can do at this point. I just hope all the hard work of this summer was not for naught. The bright spot, though, was all the support I felt from everybody. I really appreciated the emails and comments and prayers and thoughts.

...And coming up on Tuesday: ASIA. What the hell?

Equilibrium

We're now at about the 48-hour mark before the bar exam starts, and for the last few days the craziest thing has been happening: I've been feeling pretty happy. There have been moments here and there -- walking to lunch on Friday, at the gym earlier today, hanging out with L in the apartment -- where I feel a sense of contentment and freedom that has been missing from my life for a while now. I think it's the knowledge that this wretched process will end very soon, and all I have to do is make it through the next few days, which will be no longer or shorter than any other.

I have been feeling pangs of confidence, and I think I'm at peace with the knowledge that I have and the knowledge that I lack. In Donald Rumsfeld's parlance, at least I know what I don't know. But I actually do know a lot of stuff, it turns out, and my head is chock full of rules and exceptions and stupid acronyms. I have a pile of flash cards six inches thick that I've run through a few times (not to mention toiled over to create) and I think I'm about where I need to be, hopefully.

I am finding some peace in the fact that life has not stopped for everybody else the way it has for me this summer. Today was the NYC Half Marathon, which I missed for the first time in three years, but a friend of mine ran it and I was excited for her. Elsewhere people are having babies and going on trips and getting married, and the wheel keeps rolling along for all of us. For me, it happened that the first few months of summer 2008 were a tad on the unpleasant side, but I'm only one person, and it's only one summer. In any event, I am happy to be at this point, knowing that at any moment I could explode (emotionally and legal-knowledge-wise) if it turns out that I completely forgot, say, an entire unit on maritime law.

The photo above is from our trip to Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean, and if you majored in geography you'll know that the Pacific Ocean takes you right over to Asia, and that happens to be where L and I are going in nine days.