2011 Resolutions

i) reorient my life to my values, rather than orient my life to external demands. I find that I easily wrap myself up in the demands others make on me. not necessarily a bad thing, but one that I am going to change this year. I want to spend more present and conscious time w/my wife. I want to have coffee with good friends. I want to read fiction. these things will only improve my grades and career prospects. I know this. I've tested it. 2011 is for making this a reality.

ii) recreating and blending career plans. I jumped on the work-at-a-big-firm-until-your-debts-are-paid-off bandwagon with a vengeance 1L year. it's a good career path! but I'm not sure it is for me. my career ideas are really broadening and incorporating my own interests. perhaps because the job market isn't great. perhaps because a few people close to me who are movers and shakers in the legal field are rethinking the world of law. perhaps because I live and breathe the entrepreneurial life. who knows. all I know is, that my career path will be my own. I'm tired of listening to "the way it is done." know, that if I am a barista in 15 years, it's what I wanted to do. ;)

iii) remembering that my physical being and my intellectual being are one. I alway seem to forget diet and exercise when the going gets rough. all that does is make the going rougher. this year I'm sticking with my running schedule, integrating a pilates/yoga routine, and paying attention to my diet. goals: sub 3:10 Boston qualifier; body weight btwn 155-160lbs; 300 pushups at one time; and a regular yoga practice.

iv) growing Fizzy Media, LLC. My good friend Paul and I started a web development company. we have a few clients and a list of wild ideas. we're going to make them real. we're going to learn much in the process.

v) living minimalism. I don't need a lot. but I feel I do. this year will be an exercise in parsing out the unnecessary.

namaste, my friends.

Who are you?

You know those days you look in the mirror and realize you haven't seen yourself in weeks? Two-thousand-and-ten was a speeding freight train of revolving weeks of that feeling. Sometimes I was standing on top of the train, wind in my hair, arms out-stretched, thrilling the sky. Other days the train just pulled me along behind, bumping along the railroad ties, usually trying to study while doing so. I didn't really blog as a result, and my life was poorer for it. Let me recap a bit though, going into this New Year. After all, anything worth doing is worth doing badly. ;)

• My sister-in-law Vivers decided to move from Long Beach to Boston in January! We spent five awesome months together watching Friends, wandering Boston, getting lost, looking for work, having long discussions over dinner, and living the life. She moved out to her own place after she found a full-time position (in her desired field nonetheless), but she's close and we're blessed to see her often.
• Anne and I started the domestic adoption process in April. Still finding words to express the joy of being in this process. Anne (she-of-the-golden-tongue) has several powerful posts on this incredible journey here: http://renidemus.blogspot.com/.
• I finished my first year of law school at Boston College Law. I had a blast. It was both harder and easier than I anticipated. I am so glad for the opportunity to be in law school, even in this terrible economy. It's what I am meant to do. and I love doing it.
• I didn't have gainful employment during the school year for the first time since 2003. In retrospect, I would have worked 20hrs/wk. Work + school makes Taylor a better student. I missed working. I missed having something different to turn to during a long day of productivity.
• I made new friends and caught up with so many old friends. Social media is amazing. Those who hate it don't understand it.

I also discovered a lot about myself:

• I love IPAs. especially Imperial IPAs. Stone Brewery helped me fall in love with drinking a pine tree. Somehow they remind me of the whole West Coast. Brewery based in San Diego helping me remember the pine forests of Washington State.
• I miss not playing my cello. seriously. I played for nine years and then left it in the case the last three. Time to change that.
• I love to read and that means I love to write. All kinds of things. I'm good at it too. I never seem to actually do any writing though. I procrastinate on papers, I leave aside blog posts, I only occasionally write a piece of short fiction. Hm.
• I'm not sure I can spend my life working for someone else. I can do it. I like doing it. But it doesn't allow me to create in the same way as starting my own venture. I start things. I begin things. It's what I do naturally and best.

Reading really took a central role in my life this year. I was doing hundreds of pages of it for law school and needed something real to keep my mind going. I subscribed to The Paris Review, One Story, the New Yorker, and Zoetrope. I blazed through The Master and Margarita (which I'm still trying to understand: a beautiful, wild book). I reread many more books as well. I delved deeper into my poetic mainstays: Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, and Jane Hirshfield. It balanced out my law school experience, I'm certain. 

That was 2010. A ramble, and conveyed in the manner I recall it. Here's to the New Year!

Being Able to Say: "That Was Awesome!"

I tend to come out the Gates of Summer roaring like a lion ready for fresh meat: new ideas, new people, new projects, new experiences. Two weeks into the semester the weight of the promised towers above me, curling and foaming like a bright green wave against the setting sun. "I do this every year." I tell myself as I crunch acorns under foot on the way home from class. "What happened to having time to read Dostoevsky and The Paris Review? What happened to daily yoga practice and PRing an October half marathon? What happened to blogging?" I glance up at our third floor apartment, windows glowing orange with the warm light within. These questions linger as I trudge up the stairs and turn my key in the lock.

Inside, the inimitably dressed Archie Goodwin banters with the wise and bulky Nero Wolfe who is downing a German pint as my wife bustles in the kitchen. "Ah," I think to myself, making sense of the inattentively gathered scents on the way of the stairs "we are indeed having fig and olive roast chicken for dinner!" I wander through the living room, backpack a-sway (I always forget I have it until that moment), and wrap up my Love in an embrace, soaking in her hue, smell, warmth, and flavor. "Hello my Love! How was your day?" "My day?" the question catches me off guard in a sense because I have to pull it out of my experiential flow, "it was good!" I go on to recount chronologically the events of the day, recalling agenda items as I wander from place to place with my voice. "Let me grab a pint and brain dump for a moment, Love."

Swinging off my backpack, I slide onto a chair at the kitchen table and pull out my moleskine. I'm a huge lists person. Lists remove things from my head and make them concrete and recallable for me on a page. I categorize under four areas: school, student orgs, work, and life. School always comes first on my list. I don't know why really, maybe it's because it's such an expensive area of my life. Maybe because I spend the most time there, but certainly not because I value it most out of all those categories. I pore over a page entitled "10/4-8: Agenda:"
Homework: check. "It's all reading, and I love reading. Besides, I'll have time for Thursday and Friday on Thursday morning. Oh yeah, that patent posting for Cyberlaw needs to happen. Damn business school class."
Note research and writing: "I won't ever really be done but it's progressing, I'll work on it more this evening. Thank God I get to choose the topic. Can't imagine having to spend this kind of time on something I didn't love. Hopefully I don't make it too philosophical for my editors. It'll be an amazing paper. Ooh, I need to talk to Kohler about the Dialectic of Community."
Student Organizations: "Public Interest Law and the coordinating Mock Trial are both taking more time than anticipated. Well, maybe not PIL. Treasurer is pretty basic and routine. It's all the meetings. They are killer. Mock Trial has been amazing, but rewriting the problem was a workload I didn't plan on. Ah well, it's good to be meeting with people and working on practical things."
Fizzy Media: "Man, I love web development and learning PHP/CSS/HTML5 but I wish it was my full time job. I could do this for a living. Well, I am actually. I just hate doing it part time. It's the only reason school is getting old: I hate working part time. All these apps and opportunities! It's a whole new language and I'm on the cutting edge. Can't wait to blend it with law."
Life: ...

Looking up, I realize fifteen minutes have wandered by and dinner is nearly ready. "I heard from the adoption lady today!" Annie says, her words full of light. "She said the birth mother from two weeks ago has thought about our book and would like to meet with us." Instantly my world is back in the here-and-now, heady-organic, ripeness overflowing of human life, married life. In the swift transition I recall Fr. Peter's homily from Sunday, "Do everything you do so at the end of it you'll be able to say, 'That was Awesome!'" If you do everything with that sort of energy, that sort of drive, that sort of overwhelming joy, nothing is too hard, nothing is too mundane, nothing can keep you from pumping your dreams full of adrenaline and flying them to the stars.

When you are done with your day, peering out of the cloud-wrack of this world, your body bearing man's smirch and sharing man's smell, steam rising from the murk and moil of vasty agenda, can you still say, "that was Awesome!"

Why not?