When I was in seventh grade, a long-time family friend showed me a fortune he had saved in his wallet. "The secret to patience is doing something else in the meantime," it read. The tasteless cookie long gone, its message endured, not only in my friend's wallet but in my impressionable twelve year-old mind.
Sixteen years later, I find myself in a situation where all there is left to do is wait. Accordingly, I have started looking for Something Elses. When I first returned from the bar I was content to let my mind rot by engaging it as rarely as possible. Continual viewing of the Olympics was conducive to that, and I did my best to keep it going. And it wasn't even the fact that I found myself watching online streaming of equestrian eventing that suggested I might want to use my brain once in a while.
No, it was my continual BarBri nightmares which convinced me that "doing something else" required actual doing. One night it was Richard Conviser himself, reminding me of what's required for injunctive relief. The next night was David Epstein, making fun of Richard Conviser to drive home the sales of goods rules. The third night I deliberately had too much wine with dinner so I'd be too busy peeing all through the night to have time for any nightmares.
Thinking I had started down the road to alcoholic self-medication, I have since resolved to do other stuff. So far I have I cranked up the speed in the kitchen (I have a lot of butter and flour left and it needs to go), gotten a haircut, taken my bike in to be fixed, finished Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth (you must read this), began Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires, and weighed the pros and cons of taking a Duck Tour.
Oh, and laughed heartedly and appreciatively at the NYTimes' fashion police. Good taste is universal.
2 comments:
I, too, continue to have BarBri dreams. Either that, or I dream of three other things: 1.) moving in/out of a dorm room, 2.) starting another year of law school and already being behind on homework, or 3.) some kind of organized crime network is trying to kill me. Like clockwork, every night it's one of those three. Sigh...
I'll go on a duck tour with you!
I wish I could pitch in with helpful suggestions, but I am having no luck with books (imagine trying to read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" when you skip descriptive paragraphs). However, if you need help polishing off all those baked goods, you know who to call :)
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