Zen and the Art of Market Cycle Maintenance

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

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

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.