Great Friends, & One Varmint

I drove to the teahouse yesterday, to catch up with my beloved law school support group. An evening of pure joy, spent catching up with lots of younger friends who kept me going through my years at Boalt. Many smiles, much laughter, & warm hugs. You know it's a comfortable group when even the guy-guy hugs aren't awkward.

I felt a little silly calling ahead before driving up, but it would have been really sad to take the trip and, by happenstance, not manage to run into anyone. Even so, it was a slightly self-conscious endeavor - rather like being the class drama queen with delusions of grandeur. "M. Mellow's visiting! Everyone drop what you're doing and come visit moi!"

And so I got to chill with the regulars, and had a few chance meetings with other friends and personages over the course of the 7-hour visit. No laptop, no books, no cramming for me... I did bring my backpack, which made WiseYouth suspicious. "I demand to see what you have in there. There better not be any books."

Out comes the pineapple. WiseYouth manages not to let on surprise, if indeed he is surprised at all. But we agree at least that it was random and unanticipated. The pineapple was an extra left over from ZLS's going-away party. These hawaiian gold pineapples are really yummy, though, so I brought it to share at the teahouse.

The one downer of the evening? Well, to even write about it grants it unwarranted dignity. DeltaFarce picked a fight with me! No, really, what an exhibitionist nincompoop. The guy has an internet fan club on the one hand, detractors on the other, and serious mental issues. He makes a spectacle of himself on a daily basis (the source of his rep, bad or good) and then decides that he doesn't like the bad rep that he has with the regulars. And then he apparently decides it's all my fault and that he can rehabilitate his rep by beating me into submission in front of the whole crew of regulars. I'll admit I don't like him, his mannerisms, and his affected arrogance, but he's not what I'd call an evil person. He's at once very self-absorbed and insecure... it's just sad more than anything else. Especially sad that he means to cure a bad rep by beating up the oldest man in the bunch, as though I were the source of it all. Have I voiced negative opinions of him? Sure. I don't claim I haven't. There's a lot about the guy that's just wrong.

No, we didn't fight. I wasn't interested, and DeltaFarce's eagerness to throw down struck me as absurd. Bandannaboy and Languidgenius stepped in, waved me off, and eventually talked DeltaFarce into leaving. And after that, we headed out for our midnight snack.

On the one hand, that put a downer into the evening. Pure and preposterous crap that nobody should have had to deal with. On the other hand, with DeltaFarce inches from my face and itching for a fight, threatening to "fuck with me" in a transparently indirect tough-guy way, I felt something I haven't felt for most of my life. Perhaps I never deserved it before. But emanating unseen, past the field of my peripheral vision was a unfamiliar but comforting sense:

We've got your back

It was past closing time, so only the regulars and the crew were still there. Eight in all. I felt completely safe. Even had I been physically helpless, I would have been in no danger at all. Of course I feel that my good friends have my back, this was just a context it hasn't had to face before. Languidgenius spent five minutes explaining to a thick head that threatening customers with physical violence is a good way to get permanently banned from a restaurant. Bandannaboy, who has a friendlier relationship with DeltaFarce, walked the big lug outside and eventually, amazingly, got him to leave voluntarily.

I don't think DeltaFarce quite appreciated just what he had done to himself. Maybe he wanted to make a big show of publicly picking a fight with me in order to scare the other regulars. That's his usual modus operandi in everything, anyway. Maybe as far as he was concerned, this was just between him and me, and didn't believe that anyone would want to intercede between me and his ridiculous muscles. But if he had a bad rep before, it's really in the hole now.

I think I've said before that often you don't quite know how deep a friendship runs until it's been tested, and the sad reality is that often, such tests involve bad circumstances. But a midnight snack and two hours after the fact, the day ended on a fine note. Just me, my friends, and a fond farewell to Hawaii.

Frivolity

I gotta say, I love BoA. Yes, she could easily be singled out as a singular exemplar of manufactured, formulaic Kpop. Yes, she's been called the Britney Spears of Asian pop. (I disagree; she's much more tasteful. She wears clothes. I can't say the same for Britney.) Yes, her stuff is really peppy and sugary and too cute for some people to stand.

But it fills a niche. I need peppy, sugary, excessively cute music sometimes. I spend enough time in the mists of melancholy, and sometimes I need out. It's as simple as that. Granted, mixing Vienna and BoA in the same playlist doesn't quite work, so what I play depends on what mood I'm in and what I'm doing. Same as everything else.

And she's quadrilingual. That's awesome. I can only speak one language, myself.

Foul Spirits

Okay, now that I've had a chance to vent my wounded pride, I suppose I should admit that I don't necessarily come across as a very nice guy. I'm bitter, melancholy, I hold grudges, and am prone to voicing florid but empty threats about my taste for retributive cruelty. I don't pretend not to be driven by fits of negative energy, but even if negative energy is all you have, you can still put it to constructive ends. It's worth a try, anyway.

Verdict: Guilty by Association

“Hey, have you heard this one? Why did the research scientists replace their lab rats with lawyers? Because…”

*cutoff*: “Because scientists get less attached to lawyers, because lawyers breed faster and move slower, and because there are some things that rats just won’t do.”

It’s pretty much a given that if you go through law school, you’ll probably end up hearing almost every lawyer joke ever penned. That’s quite a few, and they’re overwhelmingly unflattering. Heck, I get a bit of a kick out of it myself, since I can always shrug, smile, and say, “oh, but I’ve been a software engineer, too.” I’m not just like every lawyer you ever had occasion or misfortune to meet.”

I took the Bar Exam at the end of this past July (more on that perhaps, sometime in the future), and results aren’t going to come out until November. I’m not a licensed attorney yet. The J.D. makes me a lawyer, albeit one pending authorization to practice in California (so will everyone please stop asking for free legal advice until I can legally dispense such a thing, and meanwhile properly incur all the attendant potential for liability? =) ) But important details like being properly licensed aside, the knowledge that I’m going to start practicing (hopefully) soon seems, in the eyes of some, to make me suddenly and instantly, personally responsible for all the ills and inequities of the system.

Got screwed by the law? Got swindled by a lawyer? Went through a separation? A bad inheritance dispute? Heard about something outrageous in the news? Wanna complain about eminent domain? Go yell at M. Mellow! He’s one of them, ergo, it’s all his fault. (This is often followed by an immediate request for free legal advice.)

Well, I’m exaggerating. It’s not that bad, oh no. The more polite friends bring up specific issues they’ve heard of just to ask me my opinion – just to see whether I’m going to justify the result with some convoluted strain of chicanery, or decry the outcome as one of those charmingly American miscarriages of justice, or wave my hands helplessly in befuddlement while mumbling, “uh… I don’t know.” These often lead to great conversations; in recent memory, talking to Enji about eminent domain, and to Lil’Terry about downloading music.

Lots of other discussions, however, aren’t just talking about issues. Everyone seems worried about my soul. “But you’re going to be one of the good guy lawyers, right?” “So, are you ready to make a lot of money off loopholes in securities law?” “Beware the Dark Side! Deceit, greed, guile – the ways of the Sith these are.” “Let me guess – you’re going into corporate tax shelters. That’s where all the real money is, right?” Y’know, sometimes that bugs. I mean, really. When I stop to take measure of the various impulses, memories, and old wounds that grasp the rigging and spin the helm, charting the course of my life, I can’t help but be a little offended by the imputations. I shouldn’t take it too personally – and I had better get used to it! Let’s face it, we Americans have a love-hate, love-to-hate, hate-love-hate-just-a-little-bit-more relationship with our lawyers. I’m sure my friends are probably just saying it as a half-joking, half-pointed reminder that “we love you the way you are. Please don’t become corrupt.”

Oh, believe me, I don’t consider myself to be immune to corruption. The impulse to do well for yourself, to get ahead in the game, to take the short cut, or even to fight fire with fire, all of these are powerful human motivators. Have I felt them? Sure I have. Everyone has. Good principles and wholesome ethics are very perishable qualities. You always have to watch yourself. Periodic introspective checkups are a must. Does your soul have a clean bill of health? I don’t know, when was the last time you paid a visit to Dr. Conscience? One of the great ironies of virtue is that some degree of humility is one of the foremost, most simple cornerstones of a good heart. I could be wrong, but I think that the moment when you believe your own goodness to be unimpeachable is the moment at which you are most in danger of becoming a hypocrite.

But that said, can it be that the people I know have so little faith in my own desire to do good? So little faith in my own understanding that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions and that I should neither become blind to the possibility that I may take the wrong road, or that a profession that occasionally requires me to advocate a position I don’t personally like may poison my spirit with the blight of insincerity?

In my junior and senior years as an undergrad I worked as a T.A. for the intro CS course at Berkeley. For the year before that I graded homework. This while dealing with a double major, merciless sleep deprivation, and an emotionally hostile wushu environment. Even in a martial arts club full of social rejects, I was an outcast. Social life? What social life? Even as early as the second week of my freshman year, I was forever branded as the weird and creepy one. I was shunned, people called me all kinds of names behind my back – I’ll admit, these were the unsurprising, perhaps even deserved consequences of my own social awkwardness at the time. But if you’d never had a rep like that, let me tell you – it’s a pretty damned hard one to shake. People take pills to deal with that kind of pain. Why did I take a job as a T.A.? Because I wanted spending money? Because I like the power trip of assigning grades to people just one year younger than me? Because I wanted to pad my resume? No, No, and Just a Little Bit.

The money wasn’t great. The undergrad T.A.’s got half-pay and no benefits. The power trip? No. And even if I was, let me suggest that for a lot of people the novelty wears off in about two weeks, after you’ve graded your 200^th problem set at 4 in the morning immediately after you’ve spent three consecutive all-nighters on your Operating Systems lab project. I did it because T.A.’s make a real difference, especially in as crowded and overstuffed an environment as Cal Berkeley. In my freshman year – particularly for Economics, CS, and Physics – I learned that having a good TA makes all the difference. The T.A. is your lifeline. Lots of people don’t go to section – but the ones who do learn that the T.A.’s are the ones who show you how to do the homework, what analogies work best to digest the concepts, what material’s going to be on the test. I had good grades at Berkeley, and that’s actually quite hard to manage. No, in fact I had excellent grades, and I had my T.A.’s to thank for it. A tradition like this needs new runners to carry the torch; however mighty a tradition may seem for the weight and grandeur of its history, it is always in danger of dying unless a soul in the present is willing to bear the mantle. I could never have managed what I did, with so little sleep and joy on hand, if not for Zabel, Lybecker, Simic, Elby, and others like them. I did my best to emulate their very best qualities when I went to work. I was still the shy kid, the skinny little guy with dark circles under his eyes and a debilitating insecurity complex. But, damnit, if I was going to do more harm than good, or even begin to repay the good academic karma I’d received, I was going to have to get over some of my own problems. And it would have to start with learning how to talk to people again.

I held review sessions at midterms and finals, without pay. Believe it or not, it was not officially one of my responsibilities. I put together handouts, held extra office hours, while short on time for my own work and utterly without compensation. I brought pizza for hungry students, I prepared materials the night before my own midterms… I really did care about my students. It was important to me that they have every chance to do well, and their well-being was important enough for me to take risks and make personal sacrifices. I had no time, no life, no girlfriend, no love, no happiness, no sleep, little to look forward to, and not enough food. But I think I had somewhere around two hundred students over the course of those two years; if I was making things better for that many people… well, let’s just say that I was able to do a lot more for them with that time than I could have done for myself.

And then there was wushu. We founded Stanford Wushu in 1998 while I was in grad school. I say “we” because it was a true collaborative effort. SugoiProf, KneeMatt, ChampLowkey, and our instructors who drove in from the city all deserve equal credit. Like the rest of them, I did what needed to be done to get the club running, to ferret out space for our workouts, and other assorted administrivia. If I had any uniquely personal contribution to that club, it was the personal attention. I learned everyone’s names, I put together social events, attended to injuries, and made sure no one felt neglected. I packed food and supplies for tournaments, coached first-time competitors, and let everyone know that we were a team and that every member mattered. There was no elite, no hierarchy beyond that basic requirement of instructor and student. I had a lot of responsibilities but no extra privileges. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be; it’s not about me, it’s about everyone else. If people were getting along just fine, I let them be. If someone didn’t want to get involved in the social aspects of the club, I didn’t push it on them. But I wanted to make sure that nobody felt excluded. It was an open door; everyone was welcome. Because that’s what was missing from my introduction to wushu. I stayed with the art because I loved it, even as I was treated like a pariah by most, and for no good reason. It seems to me that one of the reasons why wushu is still so small in the U.S. is because of all of the bad blood and the infighting. It doesn’t help when the people who were supposed to be your teammates think up cruel ways to exclude you and let you know, sight unseen, invectives uttered and hate unspoken, that you are unwanted. How is a sport supposed to gain new members if the people closest to you, the ones who are supposed to have your six, only hesitate in driving a shiv deep into your back because they’re busy trying to pick out the most rusted, envenomed, wickedly serrated one with which to do it? It was needlessly painful, wantonly cruel, and I would not stand for it to taint a new and hopeful endeavor. Perhaps it was ambitious, even stained with hubris, to believe that I could just put my foot down and declare, "It ends with me." But I tried anyway.

Our club grew more quickly than we had dared to dream. We had 30 long-staying members in our very first quarter. That’s a roster bigger than any other collegiate wushu club of its kind. This was as close to being happy as I’d ever really been, but when I got ready to go to law school, it was time to say goodbye. A generation in a collegiate club lasts 3 years at most. If the club retained some part of the spirit I’d tried to impart to it, either by its innate nature or by my own intentions, that would be good enough. I’m not sure I can really take credit; the club seemed to attract a lot of good people on its own merits. There are still a few people there who remember me, but what really matters, in the end, is if the place is still like that, years from now, when the changing of the guard is fully complete and no memory of me remains.

If I did these things to balm my own wounds, then I suppose that makes me selfish. But nobody goes to that kind of trouble without some kind of reason. Mostly I did these things because there have been things in my life that have hurt me enough that I doubt I can ever really forget them or quite live them down. Those events and experiences give me anxiety dreams and nightmares. They haunt me in the background of my psyche, manifesting as a shroud of insecurity and cynicism that renders me guarded and reserved when meeting new people, and I will probably be like that for the rest of my life. Although I know that there are plenty of people who have been through experiences far more horrible than mine, trials and agony that make my worries and cares risibly pathetic by comparison, this has all been bad enough for me to hope that the people I care for won’t have to be made to feel so small, so ugly, so untalented, or so unwanted.

Well, aside from being short, I know I’m not ugly, untalented, or unwanted. Life has turned around remarkably well on a lot of those fronts, and I can’t help but bemusedly wonder why I met so many horrible excuses for human beings in my younger years, as opposed to the loving company I have now. It at least makes being single somewhat easier to deal with. And with the friends I’ve made and the time I’ve spent at this second time around at Berkeley, I have some sense that the important things haven’t changed. I still do what I do, for all the same reasons.

I’m not perfect. I suppose I still have enough arrogance in me to feel irritated when other people take it upon themselves to remind me to be one of the “good guys,” when thoughts of right and wrong are actually never far from my mind. And that’s not an easy question to answer when you try to think about the wildly multidimensional nature of so many of the issues and problems that rear their heads when you are led to consider economics, ethics, law, and politics all at the same time. It’s not about “shades of grey.” It’s not about moral relativism, or reckless subjectivity either. It’s about a complex world where doing right means doing right while having a care about the wrong you might be doing along another ideological or ethical axis. It’s about not having tunnel vision. It’s about being aware enough to avoid oversimplifying a problem, or allowing simplicity or approachability to make you favor a convenient resolution where it actually causes more harm than good. It’s about knowing that the road to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions, and that while it’s bad enough to walk down that road, it’s even worse to lead those who trust you down your own personal pathway to ruin. It’s about turning around to look at everyone behind you when you come to that fork in the road, to remind yourself that when you do wrong, you may do it a hundredfold if you are not careful.

I haven’t ever forgotten about trying to be one of the “good guys.” I know the day may come where I need to be reminded of it. Perhaps perilously soon. But have a little faith, everyone. I haven’t forgotten yet.