[Soundtrack for this post: Red House Painters, Red House Painters (Rollercoaster)]
[Beer for this post: Goose Island’s Mild Winter]
(1) I will do almost anything to avoid doing what it is that I should be doing.
When I was in law school I would read just about anything other than what I was supposed to be reading. I’d pass the time reading briefs and listening to oral arguments in random cases that I had nothing to do with and had nothing to do with my studies. I’d read blogs and news about Indian law. I’d watch seven episodes of Law and Order back to back, telling myself that I was doing it to critique the evidentiary objections (or gross lack of them). What’s somewhat strange is I wouldn’t read fiction or something more overtly fun. I’d justify my extracurricular reading and viewing by telling myself that these things I was doing instead of what I should’ve been doing were actually good for me, legal education wise, and that was usually true to some extent. But it was rarely, in the grades-obsessed world of law school, as good for me as doing what I was supposed to be doing would’ve been.
The surest way to keep me from reading a brief or a book is to assign that reading to me or to otherwise make it known to me that what I am supposed to be doing is reading that brief or book. I am a great procrastinator, and this is part of the reason why.
I will not do what it is that I’m supposed to do until the last possible moment, often I will misjudge and I will start too late. One very recent example of this, and what made me think about this today, is this: I had a brief to write that had to be filed today. The person I was writing it for made the great mistake of telling me that she didn’t need it until the end of the business day. So that’s when she got it. I was up pretty much all night writing it and then got up and had to continue pounding it out all day today. This is incredibly annoying to me, and possibly to the people I was writing it for. I really wish I’d done it earlier. Why didn’t I? I have no idea.
When I was in college I developed the habit, after I realized I could get away with it, of not starting a paper until around 11pm the night before it was due. I figured out that I averaged about a page an hour—thus a seven-page paper would take me seven hours. Thankfully most of my college papers were in the five- to seven-page range (my thesis, of sorts, was the biggest exception—it was about 40 pages and took me way more than 40 hours to write). So I worked through many nights in college. Which leads me to the second thing I don’t like about me.
(2) I am a night person.
I used to think this was cool. Maybe I still do, in some respects. But I also really wish I were one of those worm-getting early birds. I have romantic ideas about the charm of getting up before the sun, being a farmer looking out my kitchen window surveying my fields while I cradle a cup of coffee, steeling myself to tackle my day. But I’m not. I’m a night person. The late night hours are when I am most productive, if I’m working, and are also when I feel most like me.
I did pretty much all of my college work after 10pm. I also did much of my law school work in the later hours. And even if I’m not working, night is when I want to be up. For a while I had to be at my first post-college job by 6am. Which meant I had to be out of my house by just after 5:30. Even then, I was often up until 2am, sometimes later, hanging out with my housemates or just with myself. I survived an extended, unnecessary period of getting three hours of sleep a night, all out of stubbornness.
My night-person-ness has been a cause of some strife in my romantic relationships. One of my girlfriends, who I lived with, made it clear that she thought it was important that we went to bed at the same time. But she went to bed at a regular person’s reasonable time, which is to say much earlier than I wanted to. My wife has not been as forceful in expressing this same desire, but I suspect that she’d appreciate it if we went to bed at the same time. The problem for me is that the night is when I want, almost desperately, to be up. In some powerful way, it is when I need to be awake to be me. Productivity aside, night is when I feel the most me, when I feel the most connected and in tune with my thoughts, emotions, and general self. Without that time, I’m scared I’d lose myself.
What bothers me about this is that I don’t understand why the time I spend alone, in the early morning hours, is when I am most comfortable being me, why I see that time as vital to maintaining myself. Why can’t I do it when I’m with my friends and loved ones? What does that say about me and my relationships? It makes me sad. But it is true. And I don’t know how to change it or even if I can change it.
(3) I have no idea what I want to do with my life.
Ever since I graduated from college I’ve felt that I’ve had the seemingly luxurious problem of having too many options. The problem has only gotten worse since I finished law school. I understand why many people would say it is a nice problem to have, but I think it is hard. Choosing, particularly when there is more at stake, is not an easy thing to do.
After I moved to Chicago and quit my job at my old law firm, I was both apathetic and torn about what I should do. The possibility of leaving the law suddenly seemed like something to consider. And, for lots of reasons I won’t get into, the decision would’ve provided a great deal of relief. I once told a friend, when I was first thinking about it, that as long as I thought I might want to stay in the law, my current situation would be agonizing, but if I just made the decision to do something else, to leave the law behind, I would be much happier and more free. But the problem was, and still is, that I’m not sure that’s what I really want, so the decision has lingered and has not become easier.
In a chapter from his unfinished novel, The Pale King, David Foster Wallace narrates the awakening of a college student named Chris Fogle (this excerpt is from an article in The New Yorker, I have no idea if the ellipses are the magazine’s or Wallace’s):
I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger and watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns” on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith. . . . There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid. . . . Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera . . . and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ ” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. . . . It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’ ” . . . I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.
I find this to be exceptionally true.
I am convinced that my directional ambivalence has been the root cause of much of my psychic pain, my great angst. There are several things that I think I’d like to try but haven’t out of fear, the fear of it being the not-optimal decision. The flipside here, though, and a corresponding fear that helps bind me in my crushing ambivalence, is my fierce the-grass-is-always-greener nature, that if I make a choice I will be constantly haunted by what-ifs. Damn me and my gutlessness.
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