The magic of Lost

Apparently, the island on Lost can heal people with cancer, make crazy, bald men in wheelchairs walk again, and teach people English in no time. In just over a few months, Jin is nearly fluent, and he's been able to learn it all and still have time to catch fish with nets -- a rather time-consuming process of its own. Maybe Jin has actually been time-traveling to a daily ESL class? Hey, it's Lost, anything is possible.

This is how happy I am to be done with law school!

Everybody is just a stranger, but that's the danger in going my own way

You know the scene in Heat where Robert DeNiro says he lives his life so that he can leave it in 30 seconds if he feels the heat around the corner? I don't know what "heat" I've been worried about, but I've lived my life the same way. I've moved in suitcases rather than moving vans and have always felt a sense of freedom in keeping as many doors to the future open for as long as possible.

But all that is changing now. I bought a couch, and not just any couch, but a foldout couch that weighs a million pounds. I will need movers to move that couch, and it was too expensive to ever leave behind. And I'm going into a profession where you have to be licensed on a state-by-state basis in order to practice. Come this fall, I will (hopefully) be licensed in two states, which leaves 48 domestic states and the rest of world as locations I can't just pick up and move to on a whim. And I have cats. I always figured if the "heat" was around the corder, I'd just leave everything but them, and imagined stealing away in the middle of the night out the back door with the cat carriers slung over my shoulders. Having traveled with them more than any person should ever have to travel with their pets, I now know that they lack stealth and would surely give us away. So it seems that I'm going to Philadelphia for the foreseeable future, which is both comforting, because I've come to the conclusion that I've moved enough, and scary, because if it gets hard my flight or fight response will be limited to only one of those options.

But I can't help but be excited about a new place. Moving is always an opportunity to re-evaluate priorities; what am I willing to pack and bring with me and what am I willing to leave behind? The Romanian jeans that I had to try on in the middle of March in an outdoor market behind a mostly see-through curtain? It's time to let those go. But my box of martisor pins? Those are coming with. My pile of Runner's World magazines? Those will be thrown away. But my pile of magazines with Johnny on the cover? No question.

And what about my fear of new places and my worry that living in one place too long will make me feel stuck and stagnant? I think I might leave those behind as well. But the action figures? Those are non-negotiable.

My new favorite author

Since I didn't read much while in law school, I've been trying to catch up now that I have some extra time on my hands and before bar study starts in a few weeks. I've read two books by Jonathan Safran Foer and cannot rave about them enough -- "Everything Is Illuminated" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." It does no good to try and explain the plots because they aren't those kinds of books. They are the kinds of books that make you pause after every chapter because you think you might be, however slightly, a different person for having read it and you need time to find the contours of your new self before moving on.

Doing Good

Everyone knows the grammatical rule that while you can be good, you cannot do good. I struggled in law school with deciding whether I would choose a career where I would be able to “do good.” The other day I saw a woman take two bananas out of her grocery bag and lay them beside a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. And I thought to myself: why do I spend so much time worrying about my career, when I’m able to walk by homeless people day after day and never stop to give them food? Why do I think that my gesture of good must be so grand and so self-sacrificing? When did such a simple act of kindness become so foreign? From now on, I want to worry less about whether I am doing good and more about whether I am being good in all that I do.