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.