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| So I took the LSAT a couple weeks ago. I haven't really told people because I'm still not sure I want to go to law school, and people congratulate me for taking it, which seems like something I don't deserve. I studied hard for about a month, but I won't die if I do badly. I think if I bomb it, it's a sign that I shouldn't go to law school.
I find out my score on the 19th and I'm trying to distract myself as much as possible from thinking about it, but it's not working so well. I've spent much of the last six years trying to repress the hyper-anxious number-crunching prestige-conscious person I was when I was applying to colleges, but it's all beginning to resurface. I made myself a spreadsheet of schools I'm considering, with LSAT and GPA ranges, and rankings (and tuition, public interest and loan repayment info, immigration programs, etc.). Ugh, why am I so neurotic about this stuff?
Yesterday I went to a law school forum thing and spoke to a bunch of admissions officers, but I feel like I can't make any decisions, including whether to apply to law school, until I get my LSAT score back. I am trying to work on a personal statement in preparation for asking for letters of rec, per Viv's suggestion. I hate uncertainty.
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| I am incredibly sad about the passing of Ted Kennedy. Everyone else has been talking about his life and his achievements, which are, of course, impressive. He had a hand in every major progressive reform of the last 47 years, from the Voting Rights Act to Title IX to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
But to me? Ted Kennedy is the reason I am an American, and he symbolized why I'm proud to say that. He is the reason my parents could immigrate to this country; he is the reason they could become full citizens; he is the reason that they could raise children who had no notion that, just a generation ago, things were very different.
President Kennedy had proposed reforming the immigration system, but he was assassinated before that could happen. Instead, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was the first bill Ted Kennedy shepherded through the Senate. I wrote my thesis on it, and as I read the Congressional hearings, it struck me, again and again, how momentous and fragile this bill was. It couldn't have been an easy task for a newly minted Senator to take on, but he fought for greater justice in the immigration system and it changed the country forever.
I know it's not exactly fair to celebrate this one person when there were folks working around the country to make his legislative work possible, but he gave me hope. He had a privileged life, and he recognized it, and he spent his entire life trying to make sure that other people would have access to the same privileges he enjoyed. That's remarkable. Ted Kennedy was the voice of people who couldn't speak for themselves in the hallowed chambers of the Senate. He was the steadfast ally and the fiery champion, time and again, of people of color, of working people, of immigrants, of poor people, of the unprivileged. Many of the things he fought for came with no political gain, no flood of donations; he fought for them because they were right, because these issues were important to him. He had tremendous faith in America, in its people and its political institutions. With all that he had witnessed, with all that he himself had engendered, who were we to doubt?
The government, and, yes, America, will be a poorer place without him in it.
The words he spoke about his brother, Robert Kennedy, 40 years ago, fit him as well:
[He] need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. | | |
| This is everything I've been trying to say about sports for years. More thoughts about this (and New York) later.
Roger Angell, "Agincourt and After," (1975):
It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift. | | |
| So, in the last three weeks, I packed up half the stuff I own, flew across the country, hung out with Alice and her boyfriend, went through a four-day training in Boston, moved to New York, started a new job, found a place to live, and moved in.
It's been pretty overwhelming. I don't have any conclusive judgements about New York yet. It's definitely cooler and rainier than I thought it would be, but everyone's been telling me that it's unusually so for summer here. It sometimes smells like garbage, because people just throw their trash bags on the curb. And there are people everywhere, all the time. Sometimes these people are East Coast preppy in a way that doesn't really exist on the West Coast (I saw a guy wearing pink shorts with sailboats embroidered on them, and a polo shirt with the collar popped). Sometimes these people are just rude and mean (some lady snapped at us when we stopped for a second to get out our umbrellas). I like my job so far, though, and I'm tremendously grateful that I'm getting to work on an issue I care so much about.
I've been dreaming about graduation a lot lately. Not graduation exactly, but everything leading up to it, hanging out, counting down to the time you know you're leaving. And it hasn't been college graduation, it's been a weird mashup of events and people from different times in my life. Because I am easy to psychoanalyze, I think it's because I just left the Bay, and I'm feeling weird and kind of empty, just like I did after graduation/other times in my life when I left people. I don't know. I'm ok, don't get me wrong, and I think I'll have fun here, but I really miss being in a place I feel comfortable, with people I love.
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| My name is Stephanie, and I'm from Texas. In school, we learned Texas geography, Texas history, and stories about Texas legends. We visited the Alamo and the San Jacinto Monument. We pledged allegiance to the Texas flag, memorized the state song, sang about how the stars at night were big and bright deep in the heart of Texas. It's true, everything is bigger and brighter in Texas (or at least the sky is). People won't shove it in your face, though. They just take it for granted. Everyone knows Texas is incredible and no one ever leaves for good. (This is true. Texas is one of the "stickiest" states in the country.) I, for one, never thought I had Texas pride until I left. I guess, really, when I talk about Texas, I'm talking about Houston. Houston is this crazy mix of Cajun and Tejano and Southern and Western with lots and lots of immigrants thrown in. It's an immigrant city. Something like half of all Houstonians weren't born in Houston. Houston is one of the few cities in the United States with greater-than-national-average percentages of African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Of course, this means that Houston has fantastic food. I was raised eating kolaches and steak and hush puppies and fried chicken and pho and crawfish (by the bucket) and barbecue (brisket!) and chili and fajitas and jambalaya and chicken fried steak and tamales and blackened catfish and cornbread and Vietnamese sandwiches. But it's more than that. My high school is the most diverse high school I've heard of (30% white, 30% Asian, 20% African American, 20% Hispanic). Growing up, almost everyone I knew spoke a different language at home and had a story about how their family had immigrated to Houston. I don't remember ever feeling ashamed of my parents' less-than-perfect English; it was totally normal. Houston has random ethnic enclaves around every corner (possibly encouraged by the lack of any zoning laws). There are ranches and high-rise condos, and every size and shape of house in between. It's the kind of city that has a place for you, no matter where you're from or what you want to do. Houston's ugly and dirty, hot and humid, but, boy, it's got heart. Random strangers are nice to you. Not, like, polite-nice. Like go-out-of-their-way-to-help-you-get-to-where-you-need-to-go nice. People will say "ma'am" and "honey" and offer you watery iced tea. They'll make conversation about the weather and smile at you on the street. And it's not really ugly; it's just got its own kind of beauty. It's completely flat, so the sky is bigger. It storms and it’s humid, so there are slow-moving bayous and Spanish moss on all the trees. There's a sense of possibility in Houston that I've felt nowhere else. People really believe that they're going to be successful, that their lives will be better. It's the kind of city that dredged its own channel to the ocean to become one of the busiest ports in the United States. Maybe it's the crazy boom-and-bust oil cycle, maybe it's the immigrants, maybe it's the low cost of living, maybe it's the lack of zoning, or maybe it's just the fact that it's a city built out of nothing but swampland, but it's a pretty incredible feeling. I might not ever live there again (although I hope I do!), but I never forget where I'm from. | | |
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