the d.c. diaries

Official Retirement and New Blog

2010-10-06T12:50:00.003-04:00

Hey all! My "Late Independence Day Announcement" has finally come to fruition. I have moved into a new blog, Two Cents Richer. As such, I have officially written my last d.c. diary. Thanks to all of you who have followed the d.c. diaries over the years, both in its e-mail and Blogspot forms. I encourage you to subscribe to my new blog, and stay classy, readers.

Annie and Troy's High School Reunion

2010-08-11T17:27:00.005-04:00

"'Cause I'm a million different people from one day to the next..."
- Bittersweet Symphony, The Verve

As I ambled through the skywalk at John Ascuaga's Nugget in my hometown of Sparks, Nevada, my mind wandered to television. My brain does this frequently, considering how often I have turned to the boob tube for comfort in my recessed state. This time, I reflected on two of my closest fictional friends, Annie Edison and Troy Barnes.

Annie and Troy are students at Greendale Community College on my new favorite primetime sitcom, Community on NBC. Troy is, in his own words, "a quarterback and a prom king". Troy is dense. Troy is dumb. Troy is also intensely nostalgic. Troy has arrived on campus at Greendale banking on riding his past glories into the future. In the pilot episode, he takes a heap of abuse for wearing his Riverside High letterman jacket throughout the first week of his post-secondary life.

Annie is an unpopular obsessive-compulsive former honors student who dropped out of high school after a brief addiction to prescription stimulants, earning her the nickname "Little Annie Adderall". Annie is neurotic. Annie is insecure. Annie is also a classic late bloomer. When her hair is not pulled back "like a librarian", she is delectably attractive - but she doesn't know it. Annie has arrived on campus at Greendale hoping to outrun her dispiriting past, to leave her high school haunts behind her and establish a new identity for herself at the most ridiculous community college in America.

Walking through the doors at my ten-year high school reunion last month, locking eyes with people I literally haven't seen in a decade, it slowly dawned on me. We are all Annie. We are all Troy.

The high school reunion is a truly peculiar American experience; then again, high school is really a peculiarly American institution. We may be the only culture on Earth that so worships youth and vitality at the expense of age and wisdom that we harbor the dormant belief that the years between 14 and 18 represent the pinnacle. The apex. If you were Troy, you spend the rest of your life trying to relive it. If Annie, to reinvent it.

Like most people, I suspect, my high school experience fell somewhere in between. I have fond memories of my life between 1996 and 2000. I had plenty of friends, no real enemies, and while I was certainly no quarterback, I did stake a Glee-like presence under the proscenium arch of the Reed High Little Theater. And I was a junior prom king runner-up (my date and queen candidate still refers to us as the "Prom Losers"); likable enough to receive the Benevolent Geek Party nomination, but sans the widespread popular appeal necessary to win the general election.

Still, somewhere within an unconquered insecure zone in my brain, part of me had been preparing for my ten-year reunion since I walked across the stage at Lawlor Events Center in June 2000. Since the invention of the American general public high school in the early 20th century, there has arisen a bizarre social hierarchy in which the quarterbacks and prom kings are virtual royalty. Other shapes, sizes, and personality types need not apply. Though I've always been perfectly comfortable in my own skin as a geeky, slightly quirky intellectual with an outlandish sense of humor and personal appeal, the shadows of unspoken expectations still loomed. Regardless of what we accomplish in our lives, however many degrees we may obtain, trophy spouses we marry, Audis we drive or diseases we cure, we subconsciously bow down to the archetypal royalty permanently crowned by the 12th grade.

Jeff Winger, defrocked attorney and chief protagonist on Community, explained it best:

"You think astronauts go to the moon because they hate oxygen? No. They're trying to impress their high school's prom king."

Having crossed the reunion threshold, let me tell you something, Sandy Frink. Drop the baggage. Nobody cares.

Which was exactly the attitude I adopted as I mingled with people I literally hadn't seen since the poker table at Safe 'n Sober Grad Night. By Saturday, July 24, 2010, I had thankfully stopped concerning myself with how fit or wealthy or accomplished I would be when I followed John Mayer in busting down the double doors. I decided to let my inner Troy and Annie out of their cages, and just be Scott.

And I had a blast.

I had a blast because I finally realized that I had been subconsciously (and narcissistically) viewing my friends, themselves real people with real issues and real insecurities, as cosmic audience members in the Shakespearean theater of my life. We all have our own lives to attend to, and I discovered that some people remained the same, some people backslide, while the majority of my friends had made significant strides in the intervening decade between the diploma and the dance floor. And by turning my attention to who they were and what was going on in their lives, I feel that they paid more attention to what was going on in mine.

So we downed some overpriced Heineken, grazed the buffet for wings, baklava, and empanadas, reminisced about forgotten fun, introduced significant others, and opened our emotional yearbooks for one another to sign. And we took a sobering shot of Jack Daniel's for a fallen friend named Kenny, who was taken from us in 1998 before we ever closed our lockers in yellow hall for the last time.

By the time I finally crawled through the back door of my dad's house in the early morning hours, I realized something significant. I can't for the life of me remember who the prom king actually was.

Late Independence Day Announcement

2010-07-08T10:41:00.000-04:00

Albeit four days late and 5.5 trillion Chinese yuan short, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish all 35 readers of the d.c. diaries an ironic Happy Independence Day. Our holiday here at the d.c. diaries was a smashing success...we didn't have any nervous breakdowns, no drunken arrests, and only a broken flip flop tubing in the Delaware River. When I say "we", of course, I mean the royal "we". I am the only staff member of this enterprise.

I'd also like to make an announcement...of sorts. Within the next few months, the d.c. diaries will give way to an as-of-yet-unnamed successor blog, and will be retired into the archives of the Internet. Sad as it may be to think of the d.c. diaries floating around an endless series of tubes with the rotting carcasses of the likes of the Go network and Prodigy, this is not so much the end as it is the beginning of something new. Something big. Something mega. Something copious, capacious, cajunga.

I am declaring my own independence. I am going viral. I will conquer the Internet.

I have many reasons for doing this. The first is that it doesn't make any sense for me to host a blog titled the d.c. diaries if I don't actually live in D.C. I'm not ruling out a move back to Washington in the near- or long-term, but why chain myself creatively to one city?

Which brings me to my next reason: as I have grown and broadened my horizons, my blog has also grown and broadened its horizons. the d.c. diaries began humbly five years ago as a mass e-mail to friends and family back home in Nevada as I spent my first summer as an obscure Washington intern. Back then, it was really about D.C. and my wide-eyed experiences in a new land filled with people who don't say "dude" nearly as much as I do, and tend to bristle when I do say it. Today, it's about more. It's about perspectives from one American life on the entirety of that thing we call "American life". It's part political, part social, part economic, part satire, and other parts I haven't discovered yet. And I believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This new blog, this mythic beast that looms on the horizon of the Atlantic seaboard, will hopefully serve as a springboard to other opportunities to cultivate my other vocational passion - writing. They say that the law is a jealous mistress. Well, so is the pen. I have two hands. I can hold a gavel in one and a stylus in the other.

I will continue to post content to this blog in the interim until I have established my new master plan to mesmerize the planet. Who knows? Maybe this newer, bigger, badder, bolder venture will result in a sparsely-attended book signing at Politics & Prose or one of those small-town boutique bookshops owned by a deranged aging hippie (the ones that have more boxes of tarot cards than anything else). Until then, keep your eyes peeled, and, for the long-term readers of the d.c. diaries (Mom, Dad, my old slow-pitch softball team, and the random loons who found me through Google), thank you for your support.

- The Management

The Boycott Problem

2010-06-22T11:00:00.013-04:00

The needle is angled a little too far to the left for my liking. On the spectrum between "E" and "F", I need a little more "F" and a lot less "E". I can feel the "E" in the accelerator, shifting my way out of the parking lot of the SEPTA station.

Ca-thunk-a-thunk! Ca-thunk-a-thunk! Ca-thunk-a-thunk!

I really should have filled up the tank before the Focus turned into a Flintstones car. That would require forethought, which I often lack. Instead, I swear to God my car is actually borrowing from the physical force I exert on the gas pedal to make it the last 50 yards down Bellevue Avenue to the nearest gas station, the only set of pumps within striking distance of my God-forsaken lemon.

The sign at the station promises sunlight and hope, an oasis of green and gold. BP. British Petroleum. My salvation, an ever-present help in my time of need.

Go ahead. Shoot me.

The nozzle spews 87 unleaded into the tank. Anxiety eases; my streak of twenty consecutive months without a special gas can delivery from roadside assistance continues unabated. But as my anxiety fades, my conscience emerges as a substitute mental bother. Id has given way to superego. Images of bubbling black crude overwhelming the Gulf of Mexico, taking lives and livelihoods, stream into my field of vision. I have cast my dollar vote in favor of the destruction of a small swath of the planet. A conscientious American would have coasted on fumes until the car literally had a cardiac arrest on the I-95 onramp...

...or would they?

In the immediate aftermath of the only oil spill in history to spawn its own academic subject, hesitance to pull into a BP station is understandable and, at least in the abstract, commendable. Who wouldn't want to stick it to Tony Hayward, that evil yachting captain of industry whose company's negligence may single-handedly devastate an ecosystem into perpetuity?

Well, you're not sticking it to Tony. You're sticking it to Ed.

Ed is a daytime cashier at the BP station on Lincoln Highway and Bellevue in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, one of over 13,000 independently-owned BP gas stations worldwide. Contrary to what you may have heard, BP doesn't actually own the vast majority of the establishments that bear its logo. Instead, like virtually every other major oil company, it enters into futures contracts with local franchises to deliver gasoline, contracts that are not exactly easy for the franchisees to get out of. So by the time you have opted to bypass BP in favor of more "righteous" companies like Shell or Citgo, Mr. Hayward and the the shareholders of BP have already lined the interiors of their wallets and the cabins of their flotillas.

When I pulled into Ed's station just after noon today, my car was one of four in the parking lot. The owners of a Chevy Tahoe, Infiniti G20, and Pontiac Grand Am were the only other patrons. I meandered into the store to grab a Gatorade to quench my perishing thirst. Ed, an Asian man in his 20s, didn't look too excited behind the double-plated glass that separated us as he rang up my purchase. After he dispensed my change, I decided to raise the issue.

"How's business been?"

Ed doesn't seem to understand my query. "Excuse me?"

I'm delicate, but direct. "Over the last two months, how has business been for you guys?"

Ed wavers. "Ehh...it's been....yeah, it's been fine...it's been alright."

The four cars in the lot during a non-peak hour indicate that he may be right, but I press anyway.

"The oil spill hasn't hurt you?"

In an instant, Ed's eyes indicated that he knew what I was getting at.

"Oh," he said. "Dude, it sucks. Totally sucks. I see way more cars drive by without pulling in."

I give him my sympathies, and inform him that I'm asking for the purposes of writing about the BP spill and the subsequent public backlash. He tells me "good luck", and I walk out the store and drive off. All the other cars have left, and none have taken their place.

But it bears repeating that BP isn't the one hurt by the burgeoning BP boycott. With a few notable exceptions, most modern boycotts generally don't work, primarily because they either target the wrong "evildoer" (i.e., Ed and the managers/employees of independent BP stations) or they aren't broad enough in scope to generate the economic leverage to get the bad guy to comply. Your individual boycott isn't going to amount to much if others are more than willing to suckle at the teet of your nemesis.

Example: as a senior in high school, I courageously participated in the 2000 American Gas Out in an effort to bring gas prices back down from the earth-shattering $1.50/gallon heights to which they climbed. From April 7th through 9th, I didn't buy gasoline. I sure felt proud of myself when I, like every other brave soldier who entered that conflict with me, celebrated my efforts by filling my near-empty tank to the brim on April 10th. We sure showed them!

As of this writing, the primary "Boycott BP" Facebook page has 704,930 fans and counting. If only those three-quarters of a million people had a chance to talk to Ed.

Plenty O' Fish in the City

2010-06-02T17:49:00.003-04:00

A friend of mine from law school, now working as an attorney in Manhattan, has asked me to share her own blog about the trials and tribulations of dating in NYC. Think Sex and the City, minus the odious blonde.

the d.c. diaries heartily recommends Plenty O' Fish in the City.

The Partial Spectator

2010-06-02T09:52:00.004-04:00

I couldn't help but note the irony as I took in the fresh-cut green grass of Lincoln Financial Field in South Philly. My first visit to one of the crown jewels of the National Football League, the home of the Philadelphia Eagles, in the birthplace of American liberty. And I was watching...soccer.

It was my first taste of live "football", as the unenlightened call it. For a sports nationalist like myself, this was a huge step, and it came with a hearty dose of quasi-historical guilt. Almost two hundred thirty-four years ago, the Founders risked their lives so we didn't have to play the games of our imperial cousins across the pond. Thanks to their bravery, we can play our own...baseball, basketball, real football, and the UFC. These are the pastimes of patriots. Our ADD-addled brains just can't handle the slow, plodding nature of the world's absurdly most popular game.

This tension opened a paradox in the sports-time continuum on Saturday afternoon as Team USA took on the Turkish national team. The patriot within was compelled to root for the Americans, but having a rooting interest in a soccer match is one of the most fundamentally un-American things one can do. It's kinda like when your son enters a drag queen beauty pageant. You find the contest offensive, yet deep down you'd be sorely disappointed if he didn't emerge victorious.

So there I was, screaming with 55,000 others at Landon Donovan as he dribbled through Turkish defenders in his sequin dress and pumps. I had support. Leave it to Philadelphia, of course, to supply obnoxious soccer fans. Turkey actually had a respectable contingent, as the second- and third-largest cities in Turkey (New York and Washington) are within driving distance. They were incredibly nice people, and their women are strikingly beautiful...with apparent staying power. As they chanted "Turk-i-ye! Turk-i-ye!", clad in red, I heard the following retorts that chilled the patriot within:

"Slaughter the Turks!" (unlike the Dallas Cowboys, the "Turks" are an ethnic group, and slaughtering them is genocide)

"Go back to Europe!" (the land now occupied by Turkey was once known as Asia Minor, thus, technically, Turkey is not really in Europe)

"Good luck in the World Cup! Wait! You're not in it!" (neither would we be if we were competing with Germany, England, and Italy as opposed to El Salvador and Haiti)

...and my favorite...

"Let's go Flyers!"

The last line was delivered by a beer-soaked fat man as he staggered down the stairs. I reminded him that there was no ice on the field and no one was skating, and he promptly stopped talking, to everyone's laughter and delight. I do what I can.

All of which is to suggest that the sports patriotism to which I alluded earlier has its limits. It also suggests that American fans...or, Americans, generally...could use a lesson in cultural sensitivity. We are all partial spectators. We are partial to our towns, our teams, and our traditions. That doesn't provide an excuse, however, to provincially apply the sports manners we accrued during all those years at Veterans Stadium and apply them to an international friendly.

I may love America, and I may not have any passionate love for soccer, but I do know enough to know that you don't really need to "slaughter the Turks." A 2-1 victory for Team America is enough.

Socialist Anxiety Disorder

2010-05-04T14:56:00.010-04:00

The other day, I plugged my earphones into my laptop at my co-working office in Center City Philadelphia and indulged myself in the rants of a madman. A priest and prophet in a time of fiscal meltdowns at home and the ominous threats of dictatorships abroad, the man heaped blame on a wide range of bogeymen for casting their curses on an America in decline. One bogeyman outshone the rest as the ultimate source of domestic evil.

It's that damned Socialism.

You'd probably be surprised to know that the madman to whom I refer is neither Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, nor the ultimate pariah of the airwaves, Michael Savage; neither did these rants arise in the aftermath of 11/4. The madman was the populist Father Charles Coughlin, and the year was 1937.

It's a banality, I know, to suggest that history does repeat itself. Then again, I've watched an awful lot of Lost over the course of the last year, and as a result I'm convinced that time really is more circle than line. Once upon a time, large swaths of Depression-afflicted Americans suspicious of FDR's New Deal imbibed Coughlin broadsides with titles like "Somebody Must Be Blamed", and the nation neither slipped into "socialism" nor civil war. I have to remind myself of this every time I stroll down the road and spot an otherwise well-intentioned patriot clutching a copy of Glenn Beck's irony-inspiring Arguing with Idiots.

Or, more appropriate to 2010, when I read some of the status updates of my conservative friends on Facebook, the agora of our time. They often raise legitimate concerns over the lack of fiscal discipline or accountability in Washington. Unfortunately, I find a good number of their arguments to be simplistic, reductionist, and alarmist. Forget a real discussion over how government can effectively be utilized to curb excessive risk taking on Wall Street or to contain the swelling costs of health care. Far too often, they speak in shorthand, with "socialist" or "socialism" the blunt weapon of choice.

"Obama is turning this country into a socialist dictatorship!"

"The health care reform bill is socialism, pure and simple!"

Aside from the decibel level, there are two real problems with the over-misuse of the word "socialism" in any debate over the policies of our 44th President. The first is that Obama is not a socialist. Ask any actual socialist. Fiscal policy is not a binary choice between unfettered market libertarianism on the one hand and centralized state ownership of your cats on the other. In between lies a vast middle area that recognizes property ownership and entrepreneurship as the foundation of a free and efficient economy, but also understands that free economies can only exist with a reasonable exercise of government oversight of and, dare I say it, participation in the economy.

Imagine an America with no free public education system, in which the intellectual development of the next generation of workers were left to the whims of the "free market". Public education is, at a theoretical level, antithetical to the abstract idea of the market; yet it is wholly irrational to call it "socialist", unless you believe that Thomas Jefferson was America's first socialist. Or imagine an America in which investment banks trade risky securities in the shadows, away from government oversi....sorry, I know. That one hits a little too close to home.

The second problem with the conservative overplay of the S-card is more basic, and it can be resolved by opening the dictionary. The primary definition, according to my Apple dashboard app:

"a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."

In other words, the primary producer, distributor, and seller of goods is the government. That is the dictionary definition of socialism. Over the past century, the cultural definition has become more fluid, but that only augments my point. To peg Barack Obama as a socialist is akin to crowning him the Queen of England - it is a title with no real meaning, save for creating the false impression that the Obama Administration wants to trade your guns for a sickle and hammer.

So I pose this challenge to my conservative friends - and I do indeed call you friends. If you agree to stop dropping the S-bomb, I'll agree to let you all in on the little known secret that Adam Smith decried the concentration of wealth and that the New Deal did not impose socialism, but actually saved capitalism from it.

Elba, Pennsylvania

2010-04-20T12:53:00.003-04:00

It turns out Ol' Dutch was right. The economy does trickle down after all. We have all become recipients of the trickling. You see, some years ago, a brilliant group of investment bankers and financiers in Lower Manhattan invented a series of complex equations designed to capitalize on risky lending. Subsequently, some Math happened. As we have all learned, Math has consequences. For me, the consequence of Math was the inability to find gainful employment, resulting in a one-way ticket to the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I am 28 years old.

I am a lawyer.

I now live with Mom.

Thus begins my temporary (indefinite?) exile from my transplanted home in Washington, D.C., the city I have grown to both passionately love and despise. I'm a politico. The bulk of my friends are in D.C. I can't practice law anywhere but in Maryland. Not living in D.C. is difficult for a guy whose blog is titled "The D.C. Diaries". Difficulty aside, mindful self-reflection is often thought to be the best medicine for what ails us. The enlightened response to my exile would be to settle into serenity and allow the currents of life to carry me in whatever direction they please. I could lose myself in the moment, sacrifice my worries on the altar of the Universe...

...or...

...I could harness the piss and vinegar percolating in the depths of my soul and figure out a way to break loose from my captivity.

I could be just like Napoleon.

Napoleon Bonaparte is a fascinating character study. L'empereur is also an appropriate model for me to emulate over the coming weeks and months. Napoleon, hereinafter referred to as "Nap", is perhaps the most beloved (or least reviled) malevolent dictator since Alexander the Great. The reasons for this are complicated and wreak of moral duplicity. I suspect that his relatively sympathetic portrayal in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure may have something to do with it. You can't very well take Hitler to a water park, can you?

Nap's crimes against humanity notwithstanding, the man's resolve is admirable. He had seven siblings. He spoke with a thick Corsican accent that earned him the ridicule of his French classmates. He was probably dyslexic and autopsies suggest he stood no taller than 5'2". Nonetheless, he quickly rose through the ranks of Robespierre's military and, despite turmoil and arrest, came to declare himself the Emperor of France and conquered large swaths of Europe. He was the cock of the walk, a young nobody who reached the pinnacle.

Then, there was mutiny. Forced to sign the Treaty of Fontainebleau after devastating wartime losses, Nap was exiled to Elba, a small island in the Mediterranean. As a consolation prize, however, Nap somehow retained the title of Emperor. This was no mere ceremonial title. The dude actually governed Elba, issuing regulations, developing mining and agriculture, and building a small army and navy. Though technically in exile, he didn't act it. He kept his eye on the French throne he once abdicated, and eventually returned to re-claim it.

In this respect (and this respect only), Nap is my inspiration, my muse. I am neither short nor dyslexic but, like Nap, I overcame numerous obstacles to claim my "throne" in Washington. Having been momentarily deposed, I must do as he did and spin the Math back in my favor. Nap never really learned to spell, but his teachers pegged him early on as a math whiz. In this sense, Nap was calculating. When the time was right, he escaped from exile and took back what was (completely not) rightfully his. While waiting to retake France, though, he settled for dominion over Elba.

So I begin working out my own Math to counter the Math that put me here, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. While I lie in wait to escape and conquer, I can at the very least play fort and rule the City of Brotherly Love with an iron fist and an aluminum laptop. Nothing to fear, readers. I will return. In the meanwhile, you all can join me as together we build our very own Napoleonic Complex.

The W.O.N.G. Way

2010-02-14T19:58:00.003-05:00

"Just because you can" doesn't mean that you should.

That's the mantra I want seared into your consciences. There are many things that are allowable but nevertheless should not be done for the sake of others, or for personal pride. Like consuming the equivalent of four square meals at an All-You-Can-Eat buffet, or failing to bathe before boarding a commercial airliner. There is one practice, however, that is so vile and disgusting so as to become the target of my ultimate contempt. I am speaking, of course, of aging, out-of-shape men who insist on embracing full frontal-and-behindal nudity in the men's locker room at public gyms.

This, my friend, is the W.O.N.G. Way. Wrinkly. Old. Naked. Guy.

I will not go into full detail, primarily out of a sense of propriety. But let me draw a rough...um..."picture" for those who remain blissfully in the dark. The men's locker room is many things. It is a storage facility. It is a restroom. It is a sweat lodge. And it is a changing area. Now, in the course of changing into your sweat-stained Georgetown Table Tennis shirt, navy blue socks, and snow white New Balance sneaker, there is an inevitable moment in time in which you will be temporarily in the raw. This incidental nudity is a necessary evil, and acceptable in the course of one's transformation from government analyst to graceful athlete. I am not a Never-Nude. However, such nakedness must be never be prolonged beyond a period of reasonable necessity. The men's locker room is many things, but it is not the Garden of Eden.

Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of fitness enthusiasts, including those at my branch of Washington Sports Club, display a hazardous, reckless disregard for these basic rules of social etiquette. For some inexplicable reason, they treat the locker room as a fat-friendly nudist colony, where nakedness is not merely a physical state, but a state of mind. They will lounge around in the buck, rubbing their butt-sweat all over the benches. They are also often guilty of "traveling", by literally picking up their pivot foot and milling about the place, engaging in otherwise routine activities like shaving, weighing themselves, or using the blowdryer, all with their manhood on full display. Some of them even engage in full-blown naked conversations:

MAN BOOBS: "Evening, Sam."

FRECKLED BACKSWEAT: "Jim, how are ya; how's Diane?"

MAN BOOBS: "Fine. Fine. Your kids in college now, right?"

FRECKLED BACKSWEAT: "Nah, not yet, but Steven's looking at a lacrosse scholarship...Hey, it's Randy!"

JUNGLE PELVIS: "Hey guys, is this locker room getting colder?"

This sort of perverse interaction occurs with alarming regularity. The rest of us are forced to endure it because, technically, there are no gym rules against it. We also cannot ask them to politely put some damn clothes on, because to do so would require us to come into close contact with their glistening man flesh. There is also the remote prospect that they may gang up on us on a fit of rage, which would exacerbate the atmosphere of tension further.

I am curious, however, to know at which point these late bloomers shed the ordinary sense of Puritan shame that average people carry concerning their own bodies. Perhaps they are too influenced by Greco-Roman culture; or maybe they are simply releasing decades of corked sexual frustration stemming from traumatic gym class experiences in junior high. Never mind. I'm not that curious. I just don't want to know.

Now excuse me while I change into my jean shorts for the shower.

Paperboy

2010-02-11T09:15:00.002-05:00

And now for something completely different...

...yesterday, I warmed the cockles of reader's hearts with my own tale of snowbound horror from the Chevy Chase Pavilion on the D.C./Maryland border. Today, I would like to introduce my first "guest writer" reporting from a different perspective from the same location. His name is Aaron Brooks, a 5th-grader from Bethesda, Maryland. His family is cooped up at the Embassy Suites, presumably due to a power outage in their home.

This morning, I made a second consecutive trip to the Cafe Cino for the Embassy Suites breakfast buffet, the only place open for several blocks. While I contemplated retrieving a copy of today's New York Times from Starbucks a couple of floors beneath us, I received a surprise delivery from Mr. Brooks. It appears that Mr. Brooks had channeled his restless energies in a productive manner. Hence, the first issue of The Suite Times, a three-article accounting of the goings-on in Friendship Heights in the midst of the "Snowpocalypse."

I'd like to share this 11-year-old wunderkind's review of Clyde's Restaurant, as I can preemptively claim that I briefly knew this young man years before his first byline in Newsweek:

Clydes is primarily a dinner restaurant near the Embassy Suites Hotel in Chevy Chase. It is the talk of the town with its 2000 to 2300 customers on an average weekend night. The atmosphere is incredible, with old fashion cars, antique toy planes, beautiful paintings of ships, and detailed murals. It also has an electric train running around the room at ceiling level. It wasn't running last night when my family had dinner there; maybe because the storm closed down all the above ground means of transportation. The restaurant has a booth type interior. With the dim lights of the main eating area, it has a dramatic feel. On weekdays it gets an average customer number of 1100. The food at these places lacks some quality but overall it's good. I mean it doesn't all have to be gourmet. This restaurant is probably the best restaurant in friendship heights.

Inside this restaurant there are two bars. The main floor bar, with fancy drinks, is a place where more mature drinkers go to have a Manhattan on the rocks; whereas the bar downstairs is a place where you can enjoy watching 10 different sporting events and not stay focused on one single game. This downstairs bar is where you can scream loudly with your other college buddies. Older people don't go down there unless it is to go to the restroom. At the sports bar there is an oval shaped bar surrounded by an oval shaped booth area bordering the room. The restaurant is 8 out of 10 overall rating, probably the place you would go to have a nice family dinner.

I'm not sure which is more impressive: Aaron's command of the written word, or the fact that he knows what a Manhattan is. Nice work, Aaron. We'll see you in the Big Leagues.

Snowpocalypto

2010-02-10T14:09:00.003-05:00

I have to say - the structural redundancy of the mall skylight is impressive. Six glass triangular panels rise and converge at a center point, each bearing the significant weight of snowpack, preventing what sunlight remains from reaching the floor of the atrium of the Chevy Chase Pavilion below.

It is the second time in a matter of days that Mother Nature has seen fit to caress the Mid-Atlantic with another doting blizzard. Last weekend, the Potomac Basin saw 30 inches. Over 300,000 homes - including my little bungalow - went hours, some even days, without heat or electricity. Streets went unplowed. In spite of its latitude, the District of Columbia remains perplexingly incompetent when it comes to handling the wintry elements. Either way, we had a slight reprieve earlier this week. This morning, though, Jack Frost returned with a bitter vegeance, promising an additional foot or so, courtesy of howling winds.

I am anxious awaiting Pat Robertson's pronouncement that this is God's punishment on the capitol for our attempt to pre-empt divine healing with universal health care.

Such theology would dovetail nicely with the parlance of this time. "Snowpocalypse" is what they are calling it, or so I hear. I have also heard "Snowmageddon" and, in a tip of the hat to the first-place Capitals, "Alexander Snovechkin". The sound you hear is the collective groans of transplanted Washingtonians from the Northeast or mountainous regions, to whom this is not the end of the world as much as it is "Wednesday". Reno may be no Calgary, but given the number of snow days I was forced to "endure" as a child, I reserve the right to roll my eyes with them.

Still, the relentless bluster is annoying, if not outright frustrating. Our lives have, for the moment, come to a screeching halt. Commerce has been slowed, knowledge has ceased, and tongues have been stilled. It may not be the end of the world, but it at least feels like our second intermission.

I have personally developed a heightened sense of cabin fever, so much so that this morning's 20 mph winds failed to deter my escape from the apartment to a nice brunch at the Embassy Suites at the Chevy Chase Pavilion. The only thing I can do to combat the stir-craziness is to scribble my thoughts furiously in my Moleskin. The Montgomery County Judicial Center has been closed since Monday morning; given the below freezing prognostications for the next several days, the snow and ice will likely linger long enough to secure me a nice little 11-day weekend. This might be delightful, but for the fact that I've already spent the last three months in a desperate scramble to find something to do. First, the hedge fund windfall relegated me to a part-time, unpaid position with my old employer. Now, the snowfall has temporarily snatched even that away from me. It's as if God and man have conspired in a villainous attempt to deprive my life of meaning.

I keep reminding myself that this, too, shall pass. But when? A blizzard, in and of itself, is nothing. I've seen worse. On top of the present malaise, though, it is insult mounted upon injury. I'm a zen dude, but even zen dudes have to engage the valve and release some steam. This is just irritating.

Yet the snow is but a metaphor for all of our collective troubles. Relentless. Unyielding. Not instantly lethal, but gradually dulling. There is little we can do but wait and pray that it doesn't bury us all. The shovels are of ill use if the snow won't play fair. For now, I'll have to settle for glancing occasionally up at the skylight, awaiting the hour when the snow will melt and the sun will return to shine heaven down upon us.

Let's hope the roof doesn't collapse before it does.

Bagging Rights

2010-01-15T14:19:00.000-05:00

NOTE: I know many of you are eagerly awaiting my review of Sarah Palin's book, but, to be quite frank, it is taking forever. In the meanwhile, enjoy this little anecdotal eco-nugget...

Kermit the Frog really doesn't get enough credit for his genius. Put aside, for the moment, his lack of muscle tone or his weak will in allowing Ms. Piggy to romantically run rough-shod all over him. The man (er...frog) is an exceptional artiste, and he presciently hit on the zeitgeist of our generation:

It's not easy being green.

My recent experience at Rodman's provides a suitable object lesson for this problem. Rodman's is the aristocratic convenience/liquor store on Wisconsin, situated around the corner from my lavish sunlight-starved bungalow on Harrison. Consider it a rich man's Rite Aid. I regularly replenish their coffers with small purchases of various sundries: hummus, Grape-Nuts, Uniball pens, antacid, etc. Only a few things at a time. Poverty precludes large shopping sprees.

The all-East African staff are ordinarily very polite and charming, a breath of fresh air compared to the anti-joy bureaucrats at CVS. They actually smile at you, which is a bonus in D.C., where getting a service worker to acknowledge your existence is a victory itself. They ring you up, then wistfully bag your purchase and wish you a pleasant evening.

Or at least they used to.

"Would you like a bag, sir?" The female cashier tapped on the register, awaiting my response.

I glanced up from fiddling with my iPod Touch, puzzlement creeping across my face. I bought a few more items than usual, so the question sounded ill-placed and the answer obvious.

"Uh, of course, yeah, sure." I returned my attention to my New York Times app.

"It's five cents, sir."

My head snapped back up, mouth open in a gnat-swallowing position. The cashier pointed at a sticker on the countertop. Happy New Year. As of January 1, 2010, the District of Columbia now exacts a flat five-cent tax on all disposable bags at stores and restaurants. Of course, the sticker was written by Alexis de Tocqueville, and "asked" all D.C. residents to "help" the environment, echoing the spirit of enlightened self-interest. What an exciting opportunity in the spirit of civic volunteerism!

Eager to do my part, I enthusiastically grunted and shrugged. The cashier typed into the register, and $16.10 magically became $16.15. I swiped my debit card, grabbed my bag, and hustled out into the Arctic freeze. On the walk home, I quietly cursed the D.C. City Council.

I'm certainly no granola, but I think I have a pretty good ecological track record. I did spearhead the creation of the Green Campus, Clean Campus campaign in law school. I've always cut up those anachronistic plastic soda rings to prevent canardicide, and I drive a Ford Focus. The first two required some effort, while the third has come at a considerable sacrifice to my sex life. The plastic bag cost me a nickel. And, boy, did that piss me off.

It's really absurd that I feel this way. Perhaps the bag tax did nothing more than rouse my Inner Libertarian. I already have a serious beef with the meter maids who impose arbitrary tickets on innocent cars. It's not the five cents, I argued to myself. It's the principle! How much more can they take from me! My inner dialogue actually scared me as it progressively moved from pity party to Tea Party. A mild financial annoyance devolved into an expository lesson in personal liberty. Mankind is by nature free, I mused as I fumed at the plastic bag that held my soy milk hostage, but everywhere he is in chains. Somewhere, Rousseau spun in his grave as I trivialized the hell out of social contract theory.

After my rage subsided and reason re-surfaced, I came to three conclusions. The first was that I really needed to start working again. My private seminar on The Economic Philosophy of Plastic Bags was a serious waste of credit hours. Second, I realized that I had fallen prey to the Progressive's Dilemma. I am more than willing to skewer the leisure class for their objections to "paying their fair share" in income taxes to provide for the general welfare; yet, I remain hesitant to match a nickel to their thousands. Leaving marginal utility alone for the moment, this effectively renders me a hypocrite. If I am bound by the underlying American social contract to support the common good, then I must accept the burdens (a nickel or no bag) with the benefits (increased tax revenue and a marginally cleaner D.C.).

Finally, the stupid plastic bag tax has reminded me, yet again, that we, as a species, suck. Man may be by nature free, but he is also a selfish asshole. A quest may be noble in the abstract, but Prince Charming won't brave the fire-breathing dragon to save the Princess unless she shows a little leg. An oil baron won't shut down his refinery unless he sees profit in natural gas. An idealistic public interest lawyer won't give up his plastic bags unless he can save a nickel or two along the way.

So it falls to the carrot and the stick to save the Earth. I'd like to think of myself as an altruist, but who am I kidding? That's just human nature.

Palintology Part I: Curiosity Kills My Better Judgment

2009-12-04T16:57:00.001-05:00

Installment 1 of a 3-part saga...

I am doing this so you won't have to.

This is the moral justification I arm myself with in anticipation of those moments when Sense and Reason demand to know why I am reading Going Rogue: An American Life, Sarah Palin's ghost-written attempt to forge a conservative reply to Obama's The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. Neuroscientists posit that watching too much television renders our synapses inert, transforming tender brains from complex decision engines into passive receptacles for anti-cerebral garbage. Before I considered launching into this inarguably stupid project, I figured that Palin's five-chapter quasi-memoir-of-sorts would have the same stunting impact on its readers. Its mind-altering effects could prove doubly damaging to an ex-Republican like myself, much like a single shot of whiskey would send a reformed alcoholic tumbling off the right side of the wagon.

Yet something latent in my soul demands that I determine what, exactly, makes this woman tick. After three years at a liberal law school, I grow tired of choir-preaching. I have read and heard plenty to reinforce my own "worldview", to borrow from the ex-Governor's evangelical parlance. I have purposefully avoided gazing through the looking glass at what remains of the Western conservative realm from whence I came. It is stunting my growth. It is time that I make an effort to try and comprehend the teabaggers and insurrectionists who constantly insist upon being physically present in our fair city whenever Michelle Bachmann calls upon them. Consider this an exercise in socio-political exposure therapy. I want to re-discover what, exactly, makes the 2008 Republican nominee for Vice President tick, and, more to the point, what about her drove so many Americans who otherwise appear to be stable and balanced so bat-guano crazy. This is a journey into the whimsical world of Dittoheads and Beckophiles, of Birchers and birthers alike.

So, on behalf of my progressive readers, I embark on a missionary voyage into a savage heart of darkness that would have even given Marlow pause. And on behalf of my conservative readers, all of whom probably live nestled at the foot of the Sierra Nevada (and stopped reading two paragraphs ago), I lend you a moment of my consideration.

With some caveats.

First, I have not purchased (and will not purchase) this book. In fact, I haven't even flipped open a page or even perused the flyleaf yet. I won't buy it for two reasons. Reason Number One - I do not wish to contribute to what amounts to the Palin 2012 political action committee. Ms. Palin has deceived herself into believing that she is presidential material, and I firmly believe that any penny spent on this book could potentially be spent on a campaign ad demanding Obama's birth certificate. Reason Number Two - I do not wish to be subject to a Northwest D.C. "eye-shaming" by bookstore patrons who are decidedly to my left would rather buy ethanol directly from Hugo Chavez than be caught dead with Palin's book. Upon conducting a keyword search at a monitor somewhere near the Self-Help section at Borders, the computer cheerfully announced that it was likely in the store, but that I would have to "see an associate for assistance". A-ha. A witness protection program for conservatives. They are a persecuted minority in this neighborhood. I don't know how George Will survives here. Turns out, they took down the display and relegated the book to a small segment of the best-seller shelf.

Second, I am a bit weary that by reading Going Rogue, I am effectively legitimizing the growing apparatchik that follows in Ms. Palin's wake. Liberal readers, you may think that Sarah Palin is already among the large swath of those who are famous for no reason, and you would be partially right. This book review will only provide another (albeit small) platform for the woman who is credited for single-handedly defining democracy downward. Why more attention? I can also hear my conservative readers (Dad and maybe one or two others) scoffing at yet another attempt to persecute this poor woman.

I aim to do neither. The review will serve as neither a grandstand or a guillotine. I can't imagine making much of a dent in Palin's popularity one way or another, and, in either event, I will treat her fairly. In the spirit of full disclosure, I deeply dislike her. I think she is vapid, dense, and bad for America. She is also a human being, and while I giddily malign her inability to name a major newspaper, her faux populism, and her bridge to nowhere, I won't engage in the same personal potshots about her family life deployed by crass cultural snobs. I think it is disgusting, and a profound strategic mistake, to delight in Levi Johnston's accusations that Palin called her Down's Syndrome child a "retard". It is not necessary that we enlist his "help."

And now, I turn to acknowledge the Elephant in the room. I just can't ignore it anymore. Especially when it's wearing lipstick...

1-0

2009-11-29T15:51:00.004-05:00

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following entry in The D.C. Diaries concerns real legal events. Although attorney-client privilege does not prohibit the revelation of public details concerning a client's case, I have opted to give my client a pseudonym and re-invent certain details about her life in order to protect her personal privacy.

My heart pounded in my chest as I scrolled down the page. Curse the Board of Law Examiners, I muttered internally. Why is this page so long? I imagined that the caffeine-addled patrons of Borders could hear both my internal dialogue and the rhythmic thumping that accompanied it. They paid no heed. I courageously pressed forward to find my seat number, among the last of 1,583. Finally, with a stutter-step of my breath, there it was. Bold and cold, set amongst dozens of others in a table invariably copied-and-pasted from a Word document:

"1433 - Pass"

No exhilaration. No celebration or triumph. Just a wave of calm relief. Oh, thank God, I whispered as I exhaled. I wrestled with the Maryland Bar Examination, and I prevailed. It was 4:32 in the afternoon on a Friday, and I promptly dialed ten digits on my cell phone.

"Hello?" my father replied on the end.

"I'm a lawyer."

I suppose now that I am. But believe it or not, passing the bar exam was not really a cause for celebration for me. More than anything, I'm just glad that I don't have to fight with that beast again. No, passing the bar is a means to an end. In a sense, it was a formalization of an end that was reached eight days earlier. "1433 - Pass" was nice to read, but the following words were even nicer to hear:

"...the respondent has met her burden of proof..."

My co-counsel Priscilla and I sat numbly in a small courtroom on the 13th floor of a mid-rise office building in the Ballston neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. The Immigration Judge reclined attentively as the attorney for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) read aloud a prepared statement. Behind us sat Adaline, a short 30-year-old African woman. As the DHS attorney moved through the elements of the case, Elizabeth, our supervising attorney, gently took Adaline by the hand and began interpreting in clean, unbroken French. I was too exhausted to feel anything, and I had actually braced myself for defeat. I turned to Priscilla and whispered what I never expected to say that afternoon:

"I think we just won."

Priscilla didn't respond. Instead, she stared through her glasses, likely in shock. It took her some time after that to form a complete sentence.

The DHS counsel continued: "Your Honor, upon seeing and hearing the respondent's testimony today, in light of the evidence on the record, including expert medical and psychiatric evaluations and the corroborating testimony of three sworn and notarized affidavits, the government concludes that the respondent has met her burden of proof that she has a well-founded fear of persecution upon return to Burundi, on account of her dissident political opinion, such that she is unable to return and avail herself of the protection of its laws."

The Judge turned and sternly looked at Priscilla and I, a wry smile creeping up the side of one lip.

"Mr. Daniel, do you object to the government's finding?"

I'm normally fairly quick on my feet when speaking publicly. It took several guffaws before I was finally able to blurt out, "Sure, Your Honor." Nice.

The Judge chuckled. " 'Sure', it is. Then I'll adopt the government's position as dispositive in this case. Asylum is granted."

I heard Adaline begin to weep deeply. I had seen and heard her cry before, mostly out of unfathomable sorrow as she recalled trauma from the darkest recesses of her memory. This cry was of a different genus and species. From a different place in her heart. I quickly scribbled on a note in French, tore it from my legal pad and passed it behind her.

"Bienvenue aux Etats-Unis," it read. "Welcome to the United States."

Adaline, a French-speaking native of Burundi and a victim of severe political persecution in the form of a machete, was my first client as a student attorney with the International Human Rights Law Clinic during my third year of law school at American University. Before Adaline arrived in the United States four years ago, she had endured beatings, imprisonment, and death threats in her native country simply for her dissent against government policy. Her original application for asylum was denied on "credibility" grounds by a faceless bureaucrat. She was placed in immigration removal proceedings. The stakes were nothing less than her right to live. Win, and she can stay in the United States indefinitely, apply for her green card, and perhaps, down the road, citizenship. Lose, and she is as Daniel cast back into the lion's den from whence she escaped.

We were originally slated to argue her asylum claim in October 2008. A procedural snafu resulted in the continuation of the case until October 2009, well after Priscilla and I were scheduled to graduate. We opted to continue with the case on a pro bono basis, as the Immigration Court does not require bar passage, only a J.D., to practice. Otherwise, Adaline would have a third set of brand-new student attorneys working her case in the span of little more than a year.

And now Adaline is free to live, work, and play for the rest of her life in the United States. Her children will soon be granted legal status in the U.S. under a grant of derivative asylum. That still hasn't set in yet. We saved her life. There is no rhetorical eloquence or poetic oration that can possibly describe what our victory means.

And so, in a little over two weeks, I will be sworn into the Maryland Bar at a ceremony of pomp and circumstance at the Court of Appeals in Annapolis. Soon after, I'll begin my practice, winning and losing cases of varying degrees of magnitude. But I'm sure that nothing in my career will equal our victory for Adaline last month.

So, as far as I'm concerned, I am now and will forever be 1-0.

Smartness, and Other Trivial Pursuits

2009-10-09T11:52:00.009-04:00

Being unemployed clearly comes with a list of downsides. Hovering at or near the top of that list is what materialists might call a lack of "cash flow". I actually disagree with that. There is plenty of money flowing through my life. It is flowing in a unilateral direction away from my checking account.

But, hell, I'm an unbridled optimist. I like to believe that all things happen for a reason, and that the closure of one door portends the opening of another. So I've decided to brave my perfect storm of joblessness and impossible debt by utilizing my time in the wisest possible manner, to navigate the rudder of my ship of life in a new direction. I have decided to renew a lifelong quest that long ago fell dormant under a pile of casebooks.

I will accumulate more useless knowledge than any other person on the planet.

This expedition was inspired by a book I picked up earlier this week at Borders, which sits amidst the six-figure retail icons mentioned in my last entry. It's called The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. The author, A.J. Jacobs, is a writer for Esquire magazine and later went on to publish the best-selling The Year of Living Biblically, in which he spends an entire year attempting to follow the Bible as literally as possible. I'll read that volume later, as it is essential to my own quest. In The Know-It-All, Jacobs sets out to accomplish the nerd's equivalent of scaling Mount Everest a hammer, nail, and dental floss: he intends to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from cover-to-cover. Every word of every entry on every page of every gold-embossed leather volume, from a-ak to Zywiec. It is the sort of epic adventure that can transform your everyday polite house nerd into a remarkably maladjusted pile of Social Anxiety Disorder. And I'm jealous.

I'm jealous because I once believed, as did Jacobs, that I was the smartest human being alive. I had proof, too. Count the trophies. Third-place in the Washoe County Spelling Bee in sixth-grade, runner-up in the Sierra Pacific MathCounts competition in eighth. Never mind the fact both of these trophies indicated that there were at least three people in my age group in Northern Nevada who apparently knew more than I did. Narcissus never saw anyone else hogging his reflection, and neither did I.

Like an academic Linus, I clung to my intellectual superiority as a security blanket. It was my perverse and ill-advised way of clawing my way up the public school pecking order. I didn't have much else. Sure, there was my stint as the class clown in fifth-grade (Ms. Davis, for the fortieth time, I am sooooo sorry for running around the classroom with scissors). Other than that, I was a slightly above-average athlete with below-average social skills. Knowing shit was my investment in a brighter future, one in which I would arrive at my high school reunion in 2010 driving a BMW with a supermodel wife. I am clearly behind schedule on this plan.

Admittedly, the whole "I know a whole lot of useless crap" motif didn't work well for me socially in Reno. I don't think I scored any points with the Bully's waitress after a softball game in which I, under the moderate influence of Killian's, recited who won and lost every World Series from 1903 to the present. But in D.C., this sort of aversion to social connection paradoxically works. Washington is easily the most educated city in the United States; some might say that it is over-educated. It is not difficult for me to imagine a scene at Sidwell Friends High School where the chess champion shoves the quarterback into a locker. And in this up-is-down, black-is-white, right-is-left, nerds-are-in and jocks-are-out town, it's time for me to utilize my strengths to climb the antisocial ladder, a ladder climbed only through the accumulation of useless trivia (see any Irish pub in D.C. on a Wednesday or Thursday night).

It irks me to no end that this pyramid of geek-hood is dominated by those, like A.J. Jacobs, with an "Ivy League education." Oh yeah? Well watch out. Because I have a degree from the Western Athletic Conference.

Unemployed in Greenland

2009-10-06T17:44:00.011-04:00

For those of you who are somehow impressed by my life's accomplishments, I would like to invite you into my world at the moment. As I write this sentence, it is 5:46 p.m. on a Tuesday in October. Three years ago, I would have told you that, at this very moment, I would be wearing a well-tailored suit, ironed shirt and tie, and a newly polished pair of dress shoes, perhaps hunched over the latest issue of The Washington Post Express as I ride along the Metro on my way home after a hard day of work.

Close. Very close. I am planted firmly on my ass in the middle of a mattress mounted on a cheap IKEA bedframe, wearing a white tank top and a pair of blue pajama pants hunched over my Macbook while episodes of Lost: Season 1 play on a loop in the background. Sexy, I know. But sexy is a luxury I can't afford right now.

Which is ironic, considering where I live. About a month ago, I moved into a new apartment in the swanky, upscale Friendship Heights neighborhood of Upper Northwest D.C. For the uninitiated, Friendship Heights sports a Saks Fifth Avenue, a Williams-Sonoma, and a Neiman-Marcus. Say no more. I may be in Friendship Heights, but I am definitely not of it. My humble abode sits atop a row of brick townhouses. It's nice and quaint, but it doesn't have the turbo-charged luxuries of some of the other places around here. For example: there is no natural sunlight in the living room. Well, there is a skylight that illuminates about a third of the room, giving it the ambience of a solitary confinement cell in a 19th-century French penitentiary.

This is not to say that I don't like the apartment. I actually love it. But it also highlights the fundamental problem with my life right now. You see, a few days ago, I lost my job. Which is actually impressive, because it implies that I had a job. It was a temporary job with a residential real estate company involved in long and protracted litigation. I signed on, ostensibly through January, as an independent contract attorney. Sounds glamorous, I know. Over the course of three weeks, I was sent thrice to Atlanta, Georgia and environs to review files. Mountains and mountains of files. The job specifically required a J.D., but I am inclined to believe that the necessary skill level was that of a lobotomized orangutang. But I got to wore that suit I talked about, walk briskly through the airport glancing at my watch to convey busyness, stand in light at rental car counters, and basically feel more important. Plus, I got paid. Not much, but enough. And that's all a guy can ask for right now.

Until it isn't. I got laid off on Saturday, hours before a 25th birthday party. Celebrate good times. Turns out that my job isn't necessary anymore, so I got the proverbial pink slip. So now, instead of playing moderately affluent adult with a shirt-and-tie, I am back to Square One, playing the moonlighting blogger with a degree, debt, and a dearth of time on my hands. That is why I am at home on a Tuesday wearing a tank-top and PJ's while a block away The Real Housewives of Montgomery County spend their husbands' green at Bloomingdale's.

Such is life. Unemployed in Greenland.

A person of a darker disposition might be deterred or daunted, or delve into the depths of deriving depressing drivel from D words like it were D-Day. Dude. I won't make you read a sentence like that ever again. But I digress (*grimace*). Things aren't so bad. I don't have to deal with the exhausting burdens of business travel every week, and maybe I can spend a little more time on things I find enjoyable but haven't had the time to.

Like reading books.

Or watching Lost for the billionth time.

Or looking for another job (eh).

Or blogging.

Unemployed in Greenland. Thumbs-a-twiddle.

Zen and the Art of Market Cycle Maintenance

2009-04-13T21:17:00.000-04:00

I'd like to share with you all the two events that tie for the scariest moments of my life. Conveniently for my word count, they were essentially the same event that happened twice. They both happened on the beach. That's awful. Beaches shouldn't be the setting for bad things. In theory, people shouldn't die at amusement parks, either. But I guess reality doesn't respect the artificial barriers we like to erect to insulate ourselves from its nasty bite. That's right - reality bites. Ask Janeane Garofalo.

Anyway, to the setting: either Zihuatenejo, Mexico, in November 1987 (5 years old) or Ka'anapali, Hawai'i, in August 1989 (7 years old). In both instances, I'm on a family vacation, minding my own business, playing with Micro Machines and/or G.I. Joes while building immaculate sub-prime sand castles, right on the shoreline where the water laps onto the beach. You know, the spot where you can just stand and let the surf pound the coast and sink your feet deep into earth. It's late in the afternoon as the sun prepares to set over the pristine waters of the Pacific. If my vocabulary at the time had been enhanced, I would have thought the setting serene. Given my youth, we'll go with "mega-fun".

As the sun begins to set, the waves begin to crash harder as the moon begins its shift. Most other children at the beach must have had a stronger survival instinct; they cleared out like cockroaches from a blast radius. Me? Courageously stupid. I decide that now is the time to hop into the water and go for a little swim.

Given that I am approximately one-fourth of the size of my 2009 self, the Sea sees what I am doing, thinks to itself, "WTF? It's never this easy!", and hones in on me as its next, easiest target. As I big-arm my way through the water, confident in my Parks & Rec-developed swimming abilities, I fail to account for the Sea's secret weapon: Captain Undertow. Unlike the chlorinated bodies of water I was used to, the Sea likes to throw curveballs at its visitors. So it decides to grab me by the ankles like a rabid shih tzu on steroids and pummel me into the ocean floor. After a few eternal seconds scraping the roof of my mouth on the sandy bottom, struggling against the tide in sheer penultimate terror, my subconscious overrules my logic and causes me to relax, and let the Sea do its worst. Granted, in retrospect, this seems like a counter-intuitive strategy. Then again, so is the idea that you should stand still when a T-Rex breathes down your neck. Your gut instinct, in that unlikely instance, is to shed your internal organs and run like crazy in the opposite direction. Fight or flight, our instincts tell us. This is the logical way.

But I finally choose to relax, let go, and let the Sea have its way with me. Within moments, the undertow sucks me underneath the waves and, like a knuckleballer in full windup, flings me back toward the shore. I ride the waves back in head-first at high velocity. The surf smashes me into the turf at an awkward and embarrassing angle. I may have blacked out for a brief moment, then quickly pop up, dazed, confused, and woozy. The lining of my lungs are coated with salt and, somehow, a terrified starfish clings to my left temple, holding on for dear life. After I stagger around for a moment and re-gather my bearings. My subpar Daniel eyes readjust to the light and I notice that I am the length of a football field away from my sand castle sub development on the other end of the beach. Then, a peak experience, a rare moment of self-actualization - I have escaped a brush with death. I had nearly drowned. This was even more surreal the second time around in Hawai'i...I should know better, I've been through this. I'm seven now! Then, the crocodile tears of self-pity. I sprint in the general direction of "home" and find Mom surveying the water to see where the sharks have dragged me. I quickly jump into her arms with tears streaming down my face. She kisses me gently on the cheek, wraps me in a towel, and carries me away from the water. And then I forget all about it.

Everything I have said above is true, and it did happen twice. Well, I did make up the starfish part, but I think we all needed that comic relief after going through that horrible ordeal, didn't we? Anyway, the resolution of my near-drowning-in-the-Pacific experiences, in which I ultimately yielded to forces beyond my control in order to regain it, has emerged as somewhat of a metaphor in my life recently. I think we all can relate to that feeling. Since September 2008, many of us have been tossed to and fro by the brutal tides of the recession as banks started to collapse like flan in a musky cupboard. Home foreclosures, massive layoffs, bailouts of the automotive and financial sectors. Previously alien terms like "sub-prime mortgage" and "credit default swap" have rapidly become prominent in our common parlance. And with these words has come a sense of sheer panic and anxiety. Never in my life have I seen so many Americans quickly re-adjust their economic behavior in accordance with news headlines. We have stopped spending, stopped borrowing, stopped lending and, as a consequence, stopped working and stopped living.

I guess I'm no exception. I picked the worst possible job market to graduate into. I placed all of my eggs in the clerkship basket, had a couple of near-hit interviews, but have ultimately come up short. Thus, a mere matter of weeks before my law school graduation, I do not yet have a job and face a six-figure debt monster looming on the horizon. It's enough to make one panic and struggle, wrestling against forces beyond either our understanding or control to find solutions both desperate and drastic. This is also accompanied by intense psychological turmoil, complete with the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth.

As I am caught in this latest undertow, I can hear the muffled sounds of fellow swimmers also caught by the waves..."Join the pity party!" they invite me with bloodshot eyes as they swim in three-piece suits, a rescinded job offer in one hand and a bottle of self-medication in the other. As I float on through the turmoil, I remember that I have been here before. And both times, I survived. So I turn to my fellow sufferers and sternly reply, "No thanks." As my friends and colleagues struggle themselves further into the depths of the waters, I take a deep underwater breath, close my eyes, and let the Sea take me. It's time to go recession surfing, and just ride this one out.

This is nearly blasphemous in the context of the Washington legal culture. This is a city of striving; high-strung anxiety is as necessary as eating, drinking, and breathing to my peers. It is the necessary primal emotion for survival in a dog-eat-dog ladder-climb to the top. And in the context of what is going on now, it is understandable. I have certainly experienced my fair share of it over the past few months as I struggle to find my footing in order to prepare to pay back Uncle Sam.

But such anxiety is damaging. We succeed when we focus, and we can only focus when we relax, because in the end, we have to come to grips with the difficult idea that some things are beyond our control. This includes the decisions of hiring partners and judges, the reactionary decisions made in the halls of Congress, and the tight purses and harsh punitive actions of consumer creditors. If, as the likes of economists from Adam Smith to Alan Greenspan have alleged, the market is guided by the force of an Invisible Hand, then it stands to reason that a hand we can't see is a hand that we can't understand. I certainly don't get all of the nuances of why the world is crashing all around us, in spite of my best efforts to educate myself. All I know is that none of it is worth sacrificing my sanity on the alter of frayed nerves and unmet expectations.

It is with this attitude that I enter the home stretch of my law school career, into the Maryland Bar Exam, and ultimately into the job market. I can safely say that I have never faced anything scarier in my life; I also have to admit that I can do little to nothing to fix my circumstances. So I've decided to forgo the struggle, to smile, breathe, and go easy, to relax and let the undertow have its way with me. I will affirm within my spirit the prayer of serenity, to put my hopes, dreams, and curriculum vitae into the hands of my Creator with the unwavering belief that I will come out okay on the other side.

You can trust me. I've been through this before, and I am still here. Let the Forces of Nature do their work. I invite you all to let go.

I'll see you on the beach.

I Had A Dream

2008-11-06T07:50:00.011-05:00

For the first time in recent memory on Wednesday morning, I woke up refreshed after a lucid and uplifting dream. I don’t know why, but I’ve had a hell of a time falling asleep lately. I quit caffeine cold-turkey awhile back, but even that hasn’t seemed to help. When I do finally hit the sack, my dreams have been straight out of an M.C. Escher painting or a Pink Floyd video. In one of my “favorites” that I really hope the TiVo in my limbic system recorded, I was kicked out of law school and forced to return to the fifth grade, where Ms. Davis promptly turned into a fire-breathing dragon that I was forced to battle with a baguette. I swear to God I had this dream. May He spare you from the same.

But Wednesday was a little different. In my dream, I had just received the good news that I had passed the Maryland Bar Exam with flying colors, and my employer invited me over to his big white house for a home-cooked meal with his family. My boss’ name was Barry; joining us were his wife, Michelle, and his two young daughters, Malia and Sasha. The bright light of the Potomac dusk shone through the bay window illuminating an oak table. A spry “goldendoodle” puppy scurried around the table demanding scraps. The puppy, I was told, was a gift that Dad had given his girls as a gift for putting up with two years of long business trips. The conversation was light and varied. Michelle and I talked about my family; the girls wanted to know if I liked the Disney Channel; Barry and I talked about the Constitution, and what he and I together could do to restore it.

I woke up with a deep breath and glanced around the bedroom. The family of four was nowhere to be found. The only friends to greet me were my alarm clock and pictures of Heather and Ryan. It had only been a dream…it was only a dream…it couldn’t have been anything more than a dream…

In the event that you were engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the Land Shark and missed the news on Tuesday night, the American people gave this guy Barry a job promotion. He is now the 44^th President of the United States. And here’s the best part: Barry is black.

I’m going to let that sink in for a moment. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The next President of the United States will be an African-American.

I developed somewhat of a Pollyanna perspective on race relations growing up in the Wonder Bread factory of Washoe County, Nevada. In third grade music, we sang songs every January about Martin Luther King, Jr., and all the work that he and others did during the Civil Rights movement to make things better for blacks in America. And I came to believe that Dr. King’s work in fighting separate-but-equal in the South in the 1950s and 1960s was fait accompli. Dr. King had pushed racism into the American twilight, now dormant except in the hearts of a few malevolent souls on the fringe. After all, I had a handful of black friends who lived in my neighborhood, and they seemed to enjoy the same benefits of life in America that I did. Their families were like mine. They played Nintendo and they had the same problems as all of the other white kids at Lloyd Diedrichsen Elementary School. They looked, dressed, and acted just like Malia and Sasha, the two girls from my dream. I had no way of knowing that beneath the All-American identity I projected onto them, a second consciousness percolated beneath the surface, a conscious identity scarred by doubts carved by the knife of our latent historical memory.

In 1903, a 35-year-old black civil rights leader named W.E.B. Dubois penned one of the most influential works in African-American literature, The Souls of Black Folk. In it, Dubois describes how he developed what he terms the “double consciousness” that haunts young black men who suffered through slavery, Jim Crow, lynch mobs, and even subtler forms of discrimination. As a boy growing up in New England, he and a white friend went to a local store to buy candy. The friend was able to complete his transaction. He himself was declined. It was the first time in his life he had encountered such invidious and open discrimination. At that flashpoint, Dubois’s singular personal identity received a second layer, a socially imposed identity of blackness. This discrimination cast a veil over his vision, and his double identities as a human being created in God’s image and as a black man cast a lesser lot in society became inextricably entwined.

The shopkeeper had not taunted Dubois or caused him any physical harm, but the message was clear. Step back. Know your place. This is the great insult that millions of black Americans have had to endure over the course of our history. It is difficult for those of us who grew up in the comforts of post-segregation white suburbia to truly empathize with the subtler forms of discrimination that cut like a thousand tiny knives into the souls of black folk. We are often content to dwell in the bliss of our ignorance.

It wasn’t until I moved to Washington that I truly began to comprehend the social, economic, and psychological gulf that separates millions of blacks from the right to the pursuit of happinesss that the rest of us enjoy. It is not so much that they are the continuous victims of direct discrimination, but that the badges of slavery persist to this day. A slave becomes a sharecropper. The sharecropper cannot produce enough food to live, so he moves North to the city. He cannot get a job in a factory because the union bars blacks from working in a closed shop. He is denied access to equal education, and settles in the ghetto. His kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids are born, live, and die there, because they attend underfunded public schools and are not given the tools to advance, to climb the ladder, to pursue happiness. It is a vicious and unending cycle out of which few escape.

Meanwhile, across the Anacostia River, the black man’s white counterpart leaves the law firm early to catch his son’s lacrosse game. He wears not a hand-me-down painter’s uniform, but a thousand-dollar suit from Brooks Brothers. It is not the white man’s fault that the black man is suffering. It is simply the sad reality that in this, the most segregated of Northern cities, they live parallel lives that rarely meet. While the white man has been afforded the blessings of liberty, circumstances have denied the same to the black man. All of this because the black man, the great-great-great grandson of a Georgia sharecropper, is burdened with not one identity but two. He is a man, but he is also a black man. There is no longer de jure segregation, but de facto segregation is alive and well in our Nation's Capitol.

So it was that after I had jumped out of bed after my dinner with that nice new family at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I threw on my running shorts, shirt, and hooded sweatshirt and jogged over to the Epicurean Deli for a quick breakfast for hitting the gym. As I sat at the bar methodically plowing through scrambled eggs and berries, I glanced up at the TV screen to catch the post-election commentary on CNN. Barry and his white friend, Joe, buried their opponents John and Sarah for the privilege of running the country. I grinned with delight; the urbane, white progressive law student, contemplating how Barry and Joe could restore the Constitution or invest in a green energy infrastructure. My brain sounded with the chatter of latte liberals sharing scones at Politics & Prose.

Behind me approached an older black woman, probably in her 70s or 80s. She wore a bandana on her head the way Harriet Tubman might have as she conducted human trains on the Underground Railroad. As she gazed at the screen, tears welled up in her eyes, clearly for the second, third, or fourth time in 24 hours.

“I watched the polls in Fairfax yesterday,” she let out. “Lord have mercy, this day has finally come.”

Her name is Ossie. She is from Macon, Georgia. She earned a degree in social work at Howard University. She had seen a lot of days, but her day – her day – had finally come.

We talked for a brief while about her thoughts about the election, its impact on young black men not unlike the young W.E.B. Dubois, and what it meant for all of us. When I told her I had done some canvassing for Barry in Virginia, she shook my hand. “God bless you, you did his work.”

At the moment I touched Ossie’s hand, I knew why I had had that dream on Tuesday night. That family I dined with – the Obamas, they are called – were not troubled by the second consciousness that seemed to have burdened our brethren. Their identities were one. As I let go of Ossie’s hand, it was as if she were relieved of her own second consciousness. She was no longer a black woman. She was a woman. An American. Barry had gone to the counter with his white friend Joe, and melted the heart of the shopkeeper. He got his candy. Ossie got her candy. We all got candy on Tuesday.

Dr. King once said that he had a dream. So did I.

Tabula Rasa

2008-09-22T22:22:00.001-04:00

The cursor is blinking. That is all it does. Like the repetitious beat of a heart, it doesn't know why it blinks. It just does. It's kind of mesmerizing, actually; slowly lulling me into a trance, an inch beneath wakefulness yet a mile above my dreams. Every now and again, my rapt attention is drawn away from the cursor and onto its surroundings, over which it casts a lengthy, ominous shadow.

Nothing. The cursor is surrounded by absolutely nothing. A virtual clean slate.

Doogie Howser must have known how I feel. Staring at an empty screen at the end of a long day, balancing the whiny demands of high school friends on the one hand and the equally whiny demands of dying patients on the other, he must been both over- and underwhelmed. Too much to do, so little to say. I think I'll just fill the screen with whatever is written in the script.

In spite of my better intentions, that's the way the last two years feel. Like lines filled in a script on an empty page.

My name is Scott. I am a third-year law student in Washington, D.C. ; those are my wings. My roots are in the suburbs of Reno, Nevada, an isolated mountain town full of independent-minded people who tend to distrust those operating under the pretense of authority. This spirit definitely rubbed off on me. Thus, when I first moved to the nation's capital two years ago, I made a silent vow that I would do law school "differently" than others did, to be a "maverick", however much that word has been misappropriated by the States of Arizona and Alaska over the past few weeks. Having spent time in D.C. as an intern the previous summer, I witnessed first-hand the poisonous effect that this city can have on the ambitious and unsuspecting. Young 20-something status seekers gather around a bowl of power-flavored Kool-Aid, toast to one another, and drink up, outwardly winking and nodding at one another while inwardly gnashing their teeth. Not me, I vowed. I would be different. I would be in D.C., but not of it.

Over the last two years, I have done a lot of the things that I am "supposed to do" as a young lawyer-in-training. I studied hard and finished my first year in the Top 20% of my class. I earned a spot on a law journal and submitted an article for publication, due in October. I qualified for a spot on the moot court team. I have interned with local prosecutors, and am working as a clinic attorney on behalf of the local immigrant community. Check. Check. Check. Check. Looks like those boxes have filled in quite nicely.

But as I have quickly discovered, checking the box is essentially meaningless. It is entirely possible to ace law school and still flunk life school. This is not to discount my accomplishments; indeed, I'm still proud of them. But while I have filled in the blanks of my resume, I have left many of the other pages in my life shamefully blank.

What matters is remaining true to yourself, your principles, mindful of your surroundings, thankful for your gifts, and thoughtful towards others. In short, if love, joy, and compassion fail to animate each second of our days, then we have and are nothing. For me, the most glaring omission I have made over the past two years has been the slow, creeping neglect of my spirit. During that fateful first summer in D.C. in 2005, I established a tradition of "blogging" via e-mail about my experiences. I called these blogs The D.C. Diaries. Some of them were insightful, most of them were ridiculous, but all of them were genuine. Genuine reflections of what was on my heart, my mind, and my soul. As a temporary resident, unfamiliar with the culture and couth of my surroundings, I felt free to fling my observations into cyberspace like a monkey with a pile of dung. My friends and family would freely (and joyfully) fling it back at me.

When I had the opportunity to come back here, I promised that I would continue to record my observations, to freely wield my pen and use my gift of gab for catharsis and reflection. In many ways, it's the only way that I know how to clean my proverbial slate. But I let two things get in the way. The first is apathy. Apathy is that sluggishness of soul that overtakes us when we allow the worries, riches, and pleasures of the present life to anesthetize us to what is truly important. Law school does this naturally. As opposed to what I perceive medical school to be like, law school is not so much a test of flames but a slow, monotonous grind. You read. You highlight. You write. You speak. You do. You sleep...eh, occasionally. And that grind has a nasty habit of lulling you into a comfortable state of uncomfortability in which you forget your values, your wants, your loves, your hopes, your aspirations. Then, like the Joker, you don't cast visions for your life....you just do things. And just doing without thinking, without reflecting, leads to doing more things that, in the end, mean little more than monkey poo.

The second barrier I face is more overt. Fear. Especially in this bear economy, the legal job market is viciously competitive, almost to the point that employers have leverage over not only our finances, but our souls. Small nicks in our character revealed on MySpace or Facebook can sink a job interview faster than if we had roundhouse-kicked the hiring partner in the face. As a consequence, I have subconsciously become so risk averse that I have allowed this fear to cut me off from my passion...writing. From self-expression. It's almost as if, as law students, we can allow ourselves to become blank canvasses on which these hiring partners can project whatever their goals, visions, and values are.

But just because a slate is blank doesn't mean that it is clean. My life is an open book. I want to be able to express myself, and so should all of you, dear readers. So I am here to announce that I am swapping out my false blank slate for a shiny new clean one, one in which I don't just live a droning life void of self-reflection or hold myself back for fear of career reprisal.

My name is Scott, and I am better than these last two years. The cursor has been blinking in the same spot for far too long. Buckle up your seatbelts and watch for flying monkey poo. The D.C. Diaries are back.