Century Delayed Synchronicity?

The New York Times is reporting today that demonstrations spontaneously broke out in at least one airport yesterday over President Donald Trump's Executive Order (now stayed, maybe, by a Federal Court) barring entry by citizens of certain nations.

And yesterday, we reported here, on the start of three days of rioting, in 1917, over the recently imposed delousing policy of the United States on the Mexican border.  What we didn't note, but likely should have, is that rioting spread from El Paso to at least one other border town.

Anyhow, interesting sort of similarities.  It isn't history strictly repeating itself, but history rarely does that.  But it's in the same room.  Entrants from another nation that was experiencing a civil war and policies regarding the same.

And both at ports of entry.

2016 exits, and 2017 begins

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world

Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur.

I know that years, as a measurement of time, are somewhat arbitrary in their calculation.  Why not have them run from June 1 to May 31, for example?

Well, we don't.  And being a calculating species, the calculations mean something.

I can honestly say that while I doubt it would be apparent to many people who know me, unless they know me very well, 2016 was one of the hardest years of my adult life.

It started off, I suppose, sometime mid winter, maybe even in December 2015. I've completely lost track of it but some time ago we had to move my mother from what I'd call a nursing home into an assisted living facility.  I thought she's like that better, and maybe in the end she did, but that was hard.  Anyhow, sometime in the middle of the winter things really began to change.  Her already impaired memory rapidly began to decline.  And then her health followed.  This was followed by endless trips to the emergency room until an honest doctor informed us the end was really here and we could just best prepare for it.  At that time, we supposed it to be days, but it became weeks, as her tough old physical self refused to go where her mind had already gone.

 

My mother, as a young adventuresome soul.

My relationship with my mother had been strained since some point in my early teens but one of the odd twists of fate that occurs in life is that my father, who stuck with her in a way that truly did honor to their Catholic marriage vows, died just as an earlier condition of her began to stabilize.  He was 62 years old at the time, nine years older than I am now, and that had been a hard thing for him. That left me and my mother in that relationship and in a lot of ways it repaired itself as a result.  Later that left me and my wife with dealing with the devastating decline in her health and mental status and we carried the ball on that, helped by my father's fantastic siblings, for years.

She finally passed away in April.

You will hear people guiltily proclaim such things to be a relief. I don't know that I've felt that in any sense so much as a vacuum, and its hard to describe.  I'm an only child and now the framework of my early life is gone in a temporal sense.  In a other worldly sense it seems more real than ever, however.  To some degree the burden of my mother's illnesses has gone and the mother I had back before I was 13 is strangely present.

In another, however, I feel like I lost both parents this year.  I hadn't really realized it but the need to take up where my father had left off when he died kept me from fully feeling the impact of his loss even though we were very close.  Filling his shoes at home was a huge job, and I never did it adequately by a long shot, but it took up a lot of the space that grief would have filled.  Now that its gone, the grief came in late with it. 

 

Me and my father at the local fish hatchery, about 1966.

January through April, therefore, was a nightmare.  Weeks thereafter weren't much better as we dealt with all the things that a death brings along.  It was a hard winter and spring.

Death didn't stop there, however.  Just before my mother died, her brother Mark died.  I didn't really know Mark and I'm not sure if I ever met him.  He was the sibling of my mother's that I knew the least about. She was quite close to her brothers and sisters but for whatever reason Mark is one that I just heard less about.  I only talked to him once in recent years and at that time it was quite clear that he was very confused, not a good sign, so old age was catching up with him.  My mother, in a state of decline, reacted not at all to it really, which I suppose was a good thing.

Locally, just as my mother started to decline one of the male relatives in my extended family did as well.  He was really the last of my father's generation or near generation of my collection of local male relatives left alive. My Uncle Bob died some time ago as had my Uncle Bill.  My Uncle Frank is very much alive be he is quite a bit younger than my father.  Joe was a contemporary of Bill's and like him a World War Two veteran.  With him, it seems to me, the last of the giants of my youth have passed on and those of us left behind can hardly measure up to them.

As if that wasn't enough two more death visitations hit before the year ended, indeed within the last few weeks. One was the death of the husband of a high school colleague of mine.  This is the second time she's lost a husband. This one passed when a blood clot developed following knee surgery, and therefore it was unanticipated.  A true tragedy that left her with two distraught teenage daughters.

The second was the odd news that my grandmother's estate in Quebec is winding down.  It's been open since the 1970s. That seems nearly impossible in the American context but it had something to do with providing money from the sale of her house in Montreal to support an uncle in a nursing home.  He's still in the nursing home so something must have been worked out, but its odd to think of.  This year, as my mother became increasingly ill, she was asking about her own mother and if she was still alive.  Now, in an odd way, her mother's estate has come back to visit us after her daughter passed on, the third of her daughters to do so.

In the spring my son graduated from high school.   That is of course a happy event, but it's hard not to be a bit self reflective about it, particularly in a year like this.  I'm not going to go into it in depth, but what it does bring to me how very, very fast we grow up and into adulthood, and for that matter how fast adulthood passes us by. At age 53 the horizon of my time here on Earth is clearly visible. That doesn't bother me all that much but it does make me realize how very poorly I compare to my father and his role as my father.  I wish I'd been that good of father to my children, but I haven't been and I'm well aware of it.

Some of that is occupational and some of it isn't.  I've come to be very much aware of that this past year as well.

Occupationally I've worked now for nearly 27 years as a trial attorney, and I'm using the term advisedly, i.e., "trial attorney".  Plaintiff's lawyers have appropriated that term as if they're the only trial attorneys that there are, but that's complete bs. There's no trial without a defense and plaintiff's lawyers are no more or less trial lawyers than defense litigators are. For that matter, I've long thought that the real trial lawyers out there are the state's prosecutors and the public defenders, both of whom are in trial all the time.

Anyhow, civil litigators, which may be a better term for trial attorneys, don't make the best spouses and parents, I think.  It's a really stressful occupation and it follows a person home everyday.  Additionally, and as I've tracked continually on this blog, civil litigators travel constantly and this means that you aren't there a lot.  I've missed birthdays of my children, spouse and late mother, via travel.  I was out of town in a trial when my daughter became quite ill as a young child and I was in trial when the outside water line froze.  All this means that my wife had to do double duty quite a few times, including times when my mother was quite sick, and that's a hard and unfair thing.  Additionally an occupation that trains you to interrogate and argue and which regards those as virtues will impact your personality at least to some degree, and probably not universally in a good way.  Looking back on it, it's pretty clear to me that my own father was much more patient and caring than I have been in the same role.  He wasn't a lawyer and he was always there.

Of course, it's easy to pin the blame on something other than on ones self, and maybe that's just it, frankly.  Probably my father was just flat out a better person than I am.  I certainly cannot be one of those people who laments the faults of his father, to be sure, as mine are much more manifest than his.  My personality may be such that I would tend to exhibit a lot of these traits no matter what, who knows?

Anyhow, given the passing of my remaining parent and the arrival in adulthood of my son, these defects have been quite glaring, in my view.  I have pondered those a fair amount.

I noted travel above and this year has had some unique travel incidents that added to the general gloom of the year.  In January 2016, just after the turn of the year, I had my 2007 Dodge D3500 develop a critical exhaust problem which required me to seek assistance immediately, which in this case meant driving all the way back to Casper in sub zero weather without stopping and, moreover without slowing down too much.  Quite the adventure that only those with diesel particulate filters would be familiar with.  The exhaust system of that now old truck had to be rebuilt.  In late summer I went to my mother's old house to pick up my son, who now lives there while attending college, so that we could go to Cody.  I had a pretrial hearing that morning and he was coming along.  It was early, early, and as he didn't come to the door, I briefly waited and then decided to go to the door and knock. Even though I have never done this before, I forgot to set the parking break and left the truck in neutral.  As I was at the front door, I heard a rolling sound and . . . to make a long story short it rolled down the block as I ran after it until what was going to happen was obvious.

 

 Sigh. . . .

And what was going to obviously happen is that it was going to hit a house.  Yes, a house.  But, oddly enough, or perhaps not, it executed a nice backwards right turn and swung off to the side of a sides street, hitting a tree and bouncing into a Subaru, which it destroyed.   My truck was pretty badly damaged but workable and I drove it to Cody that day, but not before I was made a little late by a really long delay as a real jerk of a policeman investigated the thing.  It's the second time a member of my family has had to interact with Officer Crabby who is, frankly, an asshole to deal with even when you fully admit its your fault.  He needs to retire. . . to Syria.

Anyhow, that was a bad deal but I have a lot of vehicles and so it wasn't a huge inconvenience when I was down to my Jeep, which I drive most days anyhow.

It was inconvenient when, a couple of weeks later while my Dodge was in the body shop I hit an elk with the Jeep.  Uff.

 

Ouch.

It had to be hauled into town. We were lucky that I was driving really slowly at the time, but it sure did the damage. So, at that point, I had a Jeep and my Dodge D3500 in the body shop.  Before the Jeep came out, sure enough, my wife's Tahoe went in for some fender damage it sustained in a parking lot.

No sooner had the D3500 come out of the shop and the check engine light went on.  This meant it had to go into the garage, which it did. While there it was determined that it needed a new clutch, which isn't cheap for a big truck of that type.  Went it came home it went back out in the field, hunting, next weekend and the check engine light came back on with an exhaust warning.  Usually the diesel particulate filter will burn off but it wouldn't, so it had to go into the deisel shop for that.  It was there for a long time while they worked on the exhaust and when I got it out they warned me right away that it might need new injectors but they didn't do them as they were pricey.  Well, I didn't even make it home before the light went back on. Sure enough, I needed new injectors.

To cap it off, early this month I drove to Pinedale in arctic weather and the light went back on. Fortunately, this time, it was something really minor and was back out of the shop within a day.

At some point in this vehicular saga my wife suggested that maybe I should consider looking for a new truck.  I bought this one new in 2007.  I'm really disinclined to do that as I like the truck and if I were to do it I'd have to buy a really pricey one to get the same thing I have now, a 1 ton manual transmission truck.  I'm down to Dodges, really, which is okay as that's what I like anyhow, but it's clear the options for manual transmissions are dwindling.  That actually argues for getting a replacement now, while I can, but I drive the Jeep most days and have a foolish notion in my head that at age 53 I won't ever need to buy another vehicle.

Indeed, I started the year off hoping to finish improving the Jeep to where I want it to be, which would have required adding an external tailgate rack to it and adding a winch but I gave up on that due to all the vehicle expenses.  Maybe next year. And with all the money that's now gone into the D3500, I'm keeping it.  It only has 140,000 miles on it and I figure it's good for at least another 140,000.  Besides, somewhere in this mix I'd bought new tires for it and I hardly have any miles on them.  I do regret not switching out to higher walled tires, however, as I've always found that this truck doesn't have the clearance it should.  Now that it's old, and I've done a lot of work to it, however, I'm going to definitely get higher walled tires next time around.

That's because I get that truck stuck in the snow nearly every year and have this year, while elk hunting, which of course I did this year. This is so routine for me, however, that it's not in the list of unfortunate events.  I do that every year.

Which was on one of the few days this year I was able to go hunting.

 

I've complained about this already, and if you ask my wife she'll tell you that I'm wrong, that I went hunting every weekend during big game season, but that just isn't true.  It isn't true as, for the first time in my life, I didn't draw an antelope tag.  I also didn't draw a deer tag, but of course I could and did go general.  I drew elk tags, however.

This is a matter of some frustration and part of it is my fault. I could have and should have put in for landowners tags for antelope, but I didn't.  I didn't as I wanted to be able to range over the entire area, not just the place the landowners tags pertained to, which is ironic as last year I shot an additional antelope on that very land.  But neither my son nor I drew.  Very disappointing.  And frankly it makes me a bit miffed, which I generally am not, on how licenses are apportioned.

We went general deer, but that was frustrating as Rob's goons followed us all over to make sure that we didn't step foot on private land, which I will remember next general election when he's running for reelection.  We never did, but we could have gotten a deer but for that.  But we also could have gotten one if I hadn't been so busy.

Now, a person with work in an area that's having a big down turn cannot or should not complain about being busy and I'm really not, but that was part of it.  I didn't have the time to devote to it this year like I normally do. That was a big part of my lack of success for elk as well, which I've already lamented. Added to that, when the weather finally turned to where t he elk hunting got good my son was in finals so that meant I was doing it as a solo project. That's not easy, but it also was an odd thing I hadn't really experienced since I was his age.  Indeed, it made me look back at that period when I was in university and he was here.  I kept wondering why he wasn't getting out for big game. Well, now I know, too late to appreciate it.

Being busy has, this year, added to my waist line. My weight routinely varies by about five pounds and I haven't gained weight, but I have gained girth.  This doesn't make me fat, but going into 2017 I need to do something about that.  My trousers are tight and I don't like that.  This is due, again in part, to being really busy.  If you are getting up early, working all day, and coming home tired at night you likley aren't going to get a lot of exercise.  And I'm not one of those people who feels comfortable going to a hotel gym.  Wait, I'm not one of those people who feels comfortable going to any gym.  This has never been a problem for me as I'm not a heavy eater, but when you are not getting a lot of exercise during the day it can start to become one.  This year I need to loose a few pounds, which is not all that easy to do really.

Somebody who has lost a few pounds is my son, which is due to the effect of living outside the house.  My wife is a good cook and its always easy to eat more of anything if you aren't the one cooking.  Now that he's living outside the home, in my mother's old house, he's cooking for himself and he's not bad, but like a lot of single adult men, you just don't feel like whipping up three big squares a day.  One will do, and that tends to be a single course meal generally.  I well recall it from when I moved to Laramie and lived on my own, although I have to say that we weren't exactly doing much fancy eating at home at that time anyhow.

As noted, he's now living in my mother's old home here in town while he attends college, which is working out well.  However, the house itself turned out to be one of the years events.  

My mother loved her house and when she became ill I kept it.  I feared, and I am certain that I am right, that if I had sold it it would have killed her.  I rented it out for awhile but for much of that time it was empty as a busy person has little time to be a landlord.  Well, neglect on my mother's part of certain things and the long passage of time of all kids mean that certain things needed to be worked upon, and one of those things was, the plumbing.  In a major way.

 

The plumbing line, in the basement.

This was totally unanticipated and not a very pleasant experience.  Fortunately insurance paid for a lot of the work. Thank goodness for insurance.

And then there was politics.

That may seem to be an odd thing to add to all of this, but I think a lot of people felt a bit out of sorts this year due to the election. The General Election turned out to be truly surreal and we're still feeling it.  The Presidential election turned out to be a sort of revolution with the voters saying no to the establishment of both parties, and for good reason, but in a sort of scary way.  Nobody ever knows where revolutions end up once they start, and we don't know yet.  Some turn out really well, such as the American Revolution.  Some turn into freaking disasters, like the French Revolution.  As the revolution isn't over, we don't know where it ends up.

Even locally it was bizarre and it continues to be. Odd gaffs kept one candidate from being reelected but didn't keep another from being elected.  Candidates and even reelected politicians resigned on an untimely basis messing up the polls and the results of the polls.  A body of the Wyoming legislature launched off on one of their occasional "don't tell me what you want, we know better than you" efforts, which hasn't fully played out yet.  It was a truly odd year.

It strikes me that all of these things are simply life.  It's just that they all occurred in a single year.  But then, they probably weren't all that bad.  The truck didn't go through a house, by the Grace of God.  The elk didn't end up in the window of the Jeep.  Insurance covered the plumbing.  So, all in all, it was probably a better year than I imagine.  

Still, I'm hoping for a better 2017.

High School Graduation and Introspection. A Colonel Nickerson moment.

 Me, at the fish hatchery, when I was probably about three or four, placing this photograph in 1966 or 1967.  My father to my right.  He'd live to see me graduate from law school and start practice, but not much longer htan that.

I've been thinking. Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. 28 years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything. Hardly made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking's very healthy, but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!

Colonel Nickerson, musing to Colonel Saito, on the bridge, in the film Bridge On The River Kwai.

I've  been having a lot of moments like Colonel Nickerson recently, although thankfully I'm not a Prisoner of War in Burma during World War Two (I doubt I'd be afflicted with introspection in that situation).  No, it's not my services as an officer in the British Army in the waning days of the British Empire that's causing me introspection, but rather high school graduation.

Not mine.  Well, maybe mine. But more than anything, brought to mind by the graduation of my son.

I graduated from the same high school in 1981.  For that matter, my father graduated from the same high school in 1947.  He didn't seem similarly afflicted, but  then he kept a lot of his feelings to things to himself.  I'm not sure I do as well with that, and I do think, to some extent, that can be a virtue.  Anyhow, if he harbored introspective thoughts dating back to that time, when I graduated 34 years after he did, he didn't show it.  I'm not sure that I am as my son graduates 35 years after I did.  Hard to believe that much time has passed.  But it has.

And its the passing of that time and the opening of options that causes me to ponder.  Like Colonel Nickerson, the options aren't opening up for me, but for a younger generation.  I worry about them.

I worry in part because the country seems to be on such a set of railroad tracks as to its general direction that it concerns me.  While it makes me sound like somebody "feeling the Bern" I feel the country has gone badly economically off track.  And while it makes me also sound like somebody listening to Trump, or maybe the more radical elements of the Green Party, I also worry about a nation that that seems to have concluded that its ability to exploit the resources of the country is unlimited, and its ability to absorb a human population has no limits. When I read, as I recently did, that Denver plans on building 10,000 homes this year, I wonder why they aren't crying in agony on the process of making the hideous blight of prairie a titanic hideous blight of the prairie.  I guess I'm some sort of aboriginal at heart and I don't see things going in a direction that has very many, or maybe any, positives right now.

But I worry about that, or rather I've been pondering that, in the context of what's noted above.

I graduated from the University of Wyoming's College of Law in 1990.  I've worked as a lawyer ever since that, never having had a break of employment, and all for an employer I started working for in 1989, only eight years after I graduated from high school.  That's not an uncommon lawyer's story, and that's one of the things that perhaps was the most attractive of about a career in the law.  There was always work (much less true for new lawyers now) and a person could find a good job and keep it for their entire careers.  I've been doing this now for twenty six years, almost the same as Nickerson's twenty eight in the film.  I'm not complaining about that.  But in noting what seems to have been a well planned path of early hard work and industry paying off in the form of work (indeed hard work) and stability would be painting a false picture.

And it is odd to think of.

Particularly in a year like this, which has not been a good one for me on a personal level, which has nothing to do with a professional level, unless you stop to think that a person's life is their life, and there really is no such thing as a personal level or a professional level.

My father in the early 1950s, while in the Air Force. This photo was taken in Casper, so it may have been right at the end, or right at the beginning of his service.

 My mother, second from right in light colored dress, with her sisters, in St. Lambert Quebec.  This photo would date from the 1940s.

My father, to whom I was very close, died in 1993.  I don't know that a person ever really gets over the death of a parent they were close to.  He was only 62 years old at the time. For years I'd mentally mark things I meant to tell him next time I saw him, but then of course rapidly recall that he was not here to talk to. My  mother died several weeks ago, but she'd been dying all year long.  Being very busy professionally and with two kids in high school, 2016 has been a blur.  That's probably why there are so many blog posts this year.  When I'm stressed, I tend to write.  My mother and I were not as close as my father and I were for complicated reason that had a lot to do with her long term health.  The past seven years she was not able to live at home and its been a huge burden in all sorts of ways, including psychologically, quite frankly.  Now that she's gone, in some odd way, the healthy active mother I recall from my youth, really all the way back prior to my being in high school, has sort of returned.  I'm glad of that.  By the same token, her memory now visits me more it seems than it did when she was in the final long years of her decline.  Present stress, as it were, has yielded to past recollections.

But, in the context of this year, past recollections also turn to present introspection.

I can't, in the present context, help but looking back to 1980-81 when I was a senior in high school getting ready to graduate.

At that time, I only had sort of dim general ideas about what I might "want to do" for a living. Since then, I've become so cynical about this topic that the "want to do" aspect of it strikes me as a bit of an illusion. I know some people doing what they want to do, but most careers are what people do because that's what they can do, their lives have evolved to do, they have been placed to do, or that they end up doing.  Do the many cubicle workers in big offices do that because they want to?  I doubt it.  Does that mean that people who have ended up where they are dislike it?  No, that certainly isn't necessarily the case either.  In looking at the lawyers I know, I know a few who always wanted to be lawyers and love it, but I also know some that have had long happy careers that ended up there the way I did, life took one turn, and then another, and then another.  I suspect that latter path is more common.  Or perhaps it was more common, with that being not so much the case now. In any event, those turns, the "and then another, and then another" are precarious.

But when you are a senior in high school you get a lot of questions, nearly endless questions, about what you want to do or are going to do.

Looking back, I recall some of the kids I knew then having pretty distinct ideas about what they wanted to do. To the extent that I know what they are doing now, only a couple of them really had those ideas pan out.  That's pretty common, and its part of the angst of being a parent and part of the angst of being that age.  One of my friends wanted to become a dentist, but became a very successful electrician. Another started off an engineer, changed several times, and then dropped out, but became a successful businessman.  One who always wanted to be a geologist ended up being a teacher.  Of my undergraduate geology colleagues only one, that I know of, ended up employed in the field as a career. Of the graduate students I knew, and kept up with, all ended up successful, but only one actually ended up in geology.  One went on to own a business that is closely related to geology, two ended up lawyers in addition to me.  This take odd turns, or sure can.

An added angst about being a parent is that as a parent you are well aware that doors really start slamming shut for people right about this age.  There's a really common set of slop dished out at that age that things will work out, that you have time, etc.  In truth, every decision you start making at that age starts to have real ramifications and long term impacts.  A decision not to go to the University of Wyoming in 1981 probably saved me from being a university drop out, in my view, about a year later.  Casper College, the local, and excellent, community college, was truly a better path for me.  That decision, however, lead to an immediate decision to enlist in the National Guard, as I'd planned on taking Army ROTC at UW, as I was still interested, although increasingly less so, in a possible military career.  By the time I got down to UW two years later that interest had passed, although not because I didn't like being in the Guard, I did.  I just realized that wasn't a path I wanted to take.  Having said that, having joined in the Guard was one of the very best moves post high school I ever made, and I made it weeks after my high school graduation.  A decision not to take any more math in high school than I had to (which wasn't much, at that time) ended up being a painful decision in me in college as I essentially had to take two full years of high school algebra and geometry in one semester, which I didn't enjoy.  Even though I took up through Calculus II in university, and a semester of physics, I've felt mathematically impaired ever since.

It was a bit of a suggestion from my mother that lead me to major in Geology.  I'd been interested in majoring in Wildlife Management, but a single comment from my father about the difficulty in finding a job in that field deterred me.  Geology, due to the time period I took it, was the same way by the time I graduated.  At that time, in 1986, I applied for and was admitted to Geology grad school and law school.  Law school was an idea that just vaguely occurred to me because of a suggestion by Jon Brady, a Casper College history teacher who had a law degree, that I had an analytical mind and should consider law school, maybe.  I'm sure he didn't know what my actual major was.  I've since learned that there's one other lawyer here in town that ended up a lawyer due to a suggestion from Mr. Brady.

I never considered any other four year school other than UW, even though my mother suggested it.  So here one thing happened after another, in a stumbling fashion, and I ended up where I ended up.  In 1981 when I graduated, I had no intention or concept of being a lawyer.  In my first two years of college I repeatedly flirted with dropping out, and probably only because I was living at home, and more particularly living at home with my father, kept me from doing that.  He never said I had to stay in school, but he did absorb my complaints and didn't feed into them, and so I kept on.  By the time I was in UW all thought of dropping out had passed and I made it through a very tough field of study, only to graduate to unemployment.  Law school was a breeze compared to my geology undergraduate (and I've never since understood why anyone thinks law school, any law school, is tough.  It isn't).  Coming back to Casper I re-met the girl who would become my spouse.  Fate, happenstance, synchronicity?  Who knows.

The same is true, I'd note, for my parents.  My father's father died when he was just out of high school.  It was my grandmother who caused my father to go on in school, not my father.  He was working at the Post Office at the time and would have stayed there.  My mother, who later graduated from Casper College, was pulled out of school, during the Great Depression, to work by her mother.  Reaching her 20s, she went to Western Canada against the wishes of her mother, which took iron grit on her part.  Who would see those twists and turns coming?

What I do know is that things are dicier than they seem.  And quicker.  A decision to "take a year off" often becomes a decision to settle for jobs that are low paying, forever.  Going to work in a high paying manual labor job at 18 often turns into unemployment and unemployable by 38.  A hitch in the Marine Corps at 18 tends to turn into a default decision never to go to school that's effectively made by 24.  Minor bad decisions, or even slight bad turns, turn out to be huge life altering mistakes in more than a few instances.  Keeping on keeping on becomes an imperative after high school, in those first few years, but the culture somewhat tends to camouflage that.

A Cornucopia of Unsettling Career Advice and Commentary

 Plan for stained glass window depicting the Lamb of God surrounded by depiction of  modern professionals: architect, dentist, typist, housewife, construction worker, doctor, businessman/husband, and psychiatrist.  To what extent this culture places anything more central than money is questionable.

Some of these posts meander, and this one certainly is going to.  But that's in part because I've been experiencing both some unsettling conversations in this arena and experiencing some synchronicity regarding it as well.  So here goes.

Let's start off with a comment I recently heard.

 Lawyer, sitting, at a desk (probably in a law library). Sitting remains a lawyer constant, but trips to the law library have nearly completely vanished due to on line legal research.*`

Recently I was sitting in a deposition when the very bright young lawyer across the table, who no doubt has a bright career in the law ahead of him, commented on how he just couldn't stand to be sedentary indoors.

Eh?

And you're a lawyer?

Lawyers may try to fool themselves about it, but being a lawyer is, always has been, and always will be, a sedentary career.  Indeed, it may be growing slightly more sedentary due to the computer, although it's always been fairly sedentary.  No two ways about it. It so surprised me that I commented "well you picked a funny career then", to which the another lawyer sitting there laughed and the court reporter loudly exclaimed "yeah".  The young lawyer seemed surprised, like maybe that had never occurred to him, and even looked unsettled.

Maybe he should be unsettled, as it wasn't all that long thereafter that I discovered that the Wyoming State Bar Association has a Facebook page.  I checked that Facebook page out as, of course, I'm a member of that association, all lawyers in the state are.  It was a bit of a shock for a peculiar reason. 

Wyoming lawyers have long used a phrase coined by one of our late bar presidents, Gerald Mason, that we're "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer".  Mason was seriously distressed by all the animosity directed at lawyers and thought if we had pride in ourselves it would combat and even reverse this, or at least he said that.  He seemed to be a pretty sincere fellow, based upon what very little I knew of him, so I think he genuinely believed it.  If so, he was highly naive on that score.

Indeed, I'm probably a rarity in that I've always been skeptical of the phrase, although I'll concede that there was and is some merit to it.  If we're proud to be a "Wyoming" lawyer, that means that there's something unique about being a Wyoming lawyer, as opposed to merely being a lawyer.  I think sometimes people using this phrase really mean that they're boosting the concept that lawyers should be proud of being lawyers, and indeed a recent article in our bar association magazine struck me that way.  There may be some merit to that as well, and I've listed an impressive list of lawyers on this website with some famous, and let's be frank, some infamous characters listed on it.  Anyhow, people who says we're "proud to be [Wyoming] lawyers" usually point to all the positive things lawyers do in society.  And there are quite a few.  If we say we're "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer", that ought to point to the unique things about that status, and there are quite a few, including that our state bar has been small enough that it has encouraged collegial behavior among lawyers.  Of course, that fact that the Wyoming Supreme Court forced the Uniform Bar Exam upon the state means that we're now to the lawyer population megalith of Colorado and there's been a flood of Colorado lawyers getting admitted into Wyoming while living in Colorado.  That's changing the practice here, and for those of us who still keep using the "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" tagline I'll suggest it's now obsolete, and probably ought to be "proud to be a UBE lawyer with a connection to Wyoming", something that is becoming increasingly accurate and which is difficult to get enthused about.*

Anyhow, that isn't really my hope, even though I retain some hope that maybe the committee that overseas the bar exam will act on behalf of the state's citizens and go back to an actual state exam, a diminishing hope, and probably a pipe dream, in which case I have no hope that the UBE won't do a vast amount of damage to the state.  My actual point is this. Mason's comments about being "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" cutting into the negative views about lawyers were naive, and that's something that those proud folks should probably be aware of.  People hate lawyers.

Chances are, however, that Mason knew that, and his comments really meant that we shouldn't add to the perception by being part of the commentary.  Indeed, if I recall correctly, he didn't approve of lawyers circulating lawyer jokes for that reason, although it's been a long time since I've read that article.

Apparently the Wyoming State Bar is actually aware of that.  That is, that people don't like lawyers so much.  The last issue of the Wyoming Lawyer (do Colorado UBE lawyers guffaw when they get that?) has an article about the perception of lawyers from outside the law, and one of those commenting flat out states that, save for when a person needs to hire a lawyer, in which case they generally like that lawyer.  There's been more and more comments in our bar journal noting that, and also more and more noting that a lot of lawyers are apparently slipping into emotional trouble in the practice.

Which brings me back to the comment about the Wyoming Bar Association's Facebook page.  It's full of articles about lawyers in trouble with their lives and beyond that, even ones that  are really  harsh on the practice in general.  It's almost like a Caution sign for those pondering a legal career, although anyone reading it surely (or mostly) must already be a member of the bar, I'd guess.  It wasn't what I was expecting.

One article that I saw listed on that site was actually called "25 Reasons Most Attorneys Hate the Practice of Law and Go Crazy (and What to Do About it)" by one Harrison Barnes (whom one other blawg refers to as a "windbag").** Wow, that's a pretty surprising thing I think for a bar association to list on their Facebook page.  And it's a pretty surprising title in and of itself.  "Most"?  Hmmm. . . .  I know at least a couple who love their jobs and are pretty open about that, and they don't have odd malignant personalities or anything.  Most has to be an extreme overstatement.  Maybe he was trying to shock.

Still the article made me recall the conversation above, as it listed this as one of the twenty five reasons***:

They are miserable being behind a desk all day. Most attorneys spend the majority of their days trapped behind a desk. There is very little one-on-one interaction and socializing when you are under pressure to bill as many hours as possible. While television shows and movies glamorize the practice of law, most attorneys spend their time in an office, sitting at a desk, staring at a computer monitor.

That's a pretty accurate statement.

 Middle aged lawyer at his desk in 1919. . . something that middle aged, old aged and young lawyers in 2015 are doing just as much, if not more, than the subject of this photograph did.

Of course, a lot of modern professions do that, and I've commented on that on this blog before.  People truly not meant to do that, but we're building a world in which that's what everyone is going to have to do, it seems.  That's a very curious fact, as it isn't really good for us.  And I suppose that a person, in pondering careers, should consider, as my young friend mentioned above, their ability o handle that.  If they really "can't stand" to be in a chair all day, the law, and a lot of other professions, probably should be considered in that context.

Another comment that struck me

One that struck me was this comment:

They are exhausted from the constant conflict (conflict with peers, conflict with clients, and conflict with opposing counsel). The constant conflict attorneys face can take a massive toll on them. This conflict is never ending and something that drains attorneys emotionally and physically.

The same author stated, concerning the rising (or perhaps now simply appreciated for the first time a a real problem) of substance abuse:

If I were to pick you up and drop you in the middle of a war zone in the Middle East, give you a machine gun, and tell you that you had to fight there for the next 30 years, that would screw you up pretty badly. You'd want some liquor and antidepressants, and you'd be pretty sweaty and pissed off. Practicing law often feels the same way. At least in the war zone, you would know who your enemy was, and there would not be so many rules!

That's actually not a bad summary of what litigators do, and of course we should keep in mind that not all lawyers are litigators by any means.  I do think that's a factor in lawyer discontent and substance abuse, however.  Indeed, I was pretty surprised a few years ago when I completed defending a pretty hard deposition of a tough deponent, and jokingly asked the opposing lawyer if that lawyer "would like a beer" only to have that lawyer accept. We actually did have some in the office and that lawyer gladly took it, saying to me "I don't think it would be possible to practice law without beer." 

It ought to be possible to practice law without beer, and of course I know a few lawyers who don't drink at all, including a few litigators who don't.****  Frankly, I haven't known all that many lawyers who really had a substance abuse problem either, although it's apparently a rising problem.  I've written on stress and the law before, and I guess this is part of that scene.

Slipping away from the law, however, but noting that I heard the following at a party of all legal professionals, I've been a bit bothered by the western concept of career once again for a peculiar reason.  I've also written on that before.

This one comes up on a personal level, I'll note.

At this party, a friend of mine made an inquiry as to what my son's career plans are.  Oddly enough (synchronicity?) the same topic was simultaneously being explored by somebody else with my wife, which I know as I could hear her discussing it.

We don't really know what his plans are and perhaps he doesn't as well.  I have to say, at age 18 a lack of a plan worries parents but at the same time can a person rationally be expected to have one?  I'm not so sure that everyone should, and a person ought not to rush to one just because everyone thinks you should have one.

And people do think you should have one, and it turns out that they have ones for you, which is quite surprising.

Now, he tested very well on the ACT. Very well. And without bothering to do any studying for it.  So, when his ACT scores were mentioned by my wife (not me) to the above referenced friend, and it was noted that he may start off at the local community college, he was taken aback.  He was frank that a person with such high ACT scores should not do that, very much not do that, and rather should go to a major university from the onset.  Indeed, he thought about it and determined that my son should go to Georgia Tech to major in engineering.

Maybe he should major in engineering, and maybe he should go to Georgia Tech (about which I know nothing at all), but that raises an interesting aspect of Weltanschauung that hard for almost anyone in this society not to have, including myself. That is, in the western world (and my friend here is a European immigrant from one of the highly ordered European societies) there is a very strong concept that a person should exploit academics and then career to the maximum possible extent, even if that means leaving the place of their birth and all they know.

Why is that?

As far as I can tell, the only thing that's based on is a concept of money.  The general idea seems to be that a person should make as much money as they can.  It's a really primitive instinct and it probably derives from the idea that we need to keep the wolf from the door. But it's a particularly pronounced cultural concept, in my view, in Protestant societies.  By that I do not mean that only Protestants have it, that would be completely and utterly false, but it's a cultural aspect of those societies and generally held by nearly everyone in them, without any question of its correctness whatsoever.*^

And it's not as if its devoid of any rationality. There is some.  It's well proven that money won't make a person happy, but poverty sure doesn't help that situation much either. At least a little monetary surplus helps keep some anxiety at bay, unless a person is irresponsible with money.

But the acquisition of it can lead a person into areas that they would otherwise not naturally go.  Its stated by some that a person can't be a monetary success unless he loves what he's doing but the evidence of that is quite poor, and at least by my historical and personal observation the opposite is true in at least some cases.  A lot of people do well, at least for a time (whether they can indefinitely is another matter) doing things that they would rather not.

Indeed, I'd argue that this is responsible for one of the things that is constantly noted in articles like the one linked in above.  People start to compensate for their discontent, with some of that surplus money, with things that lead them into trouble.  According to Mr. Barnes, whose article is cited above:

Here are some incredible statistics:

• The American Bar Association estimates that 15-20 percent of all attorneys are alcoholics or suffer from substance abuse problems. Jones, D. (2001). Career killers. In B.P. Crowley, & M.L. Winick (Eds.). A guide to the basic law practice. Alliance Press, 180-197
   
• Lawyers have the highest rate of suicide of any profession. Greiner, M. (Sept, 1996). What about me? Texas Bar Journal.
   
• Lawyers have the highest rate of depression of any profession according to a John Hopkins' study of 100 professions. Occupations and the prevalence of major depressive disorder. Journal of Occupational Medicine, 32 (11), 1079-1087.

Pretty grim.  I think, however, that the last two items are statistically incorrect, and actually dentist have a higher rate of depression and suicide than lawyers do.

All the dentist I've every met, and I've known a lot as my father and one of my uncles were dentists, seemed to be a happy lot but obviously not all are.  Indeed, maybe only the upset in any profession draw attention.  However, I will note that dentist do suffer from some of the same liabilities that lawyers do, namely that people are pretty vocal to express their discontent with the entire group of them and at the same time complaint about their fees, etc.  Like lawyers, they make a lot less money than people believe that they do and they tend to have massive overhead.  Oddly, at the same time, it's a profession that, like the law, people from the lower middle class have pushed their children towards for a long time.  My father got into it in his own, like I did with the law, but college in general was something he was reluctant to do but for a big push from my grandmother.  His father owned a meat packing company and died young.  My uncle's father was, I believe, a construction worker.  One of my father's good physician friends, I'd note, came from a farm in Nebraska and other dentist friends had fathers who were, respectively, a railroad worker and a miner.

Which brings me back to community colleges for a moment.

My father attended the local community college, Casper College.  He did so as his mother wanted him to.  He was employed at the post office at the time, after the death of my grandfather, and his basic plan was to stay there.  My grandmother recognized that he undoubtedly had the intelligence to advance in university and she urged him to do so.  He was the single most intelligent man I've ever met and that was obviously apparent to my grandmother.  He started off in engineering and then went right from Casper College to the University of Nebraska, after a brief stop at Creighton which he didn't care for.  So, he did well, as we've been using the term, by Casper College.  And he's not the only one of his generation around here who did.  And who still does.

Indeed, recently I spoke to a lawyer about a decade younger than me who related to me that he'd started off at Casper College, in education.  He related that it was his opinion that if he hadn't have started there, he ultimately would not have graduated from university, in his opinion.  His father was a mechanic, I'll note.

Likewise, I've often suspected that if I hadn't have started off in Casper College I may have not made it far in post high school education.  Indeed, my earlier college career strongly suggests that to me.

I had no plans at all of going to Casper College at the time that I graduated from high school.  When I was in my senior year of high school, my vague thoughts were that I'd go to the University of Wyoming and major in Wildlife Management.  Like my son, I tested well on the ACT and my mother told me I could go anywhere I wanted, which frankly baffled me as I'd never thought of going outside the state.  Indeed, she darned near scared me by suggesting that I could go anywhere, in part because she cited the example of an older cousin who was going to a very prestigious university and whom I thought of as a really good student.  I didn't think of myself that way and probably regarded myself as an indifferent student.  I don't know that I really was, but I didn't have any developed study habits and therefore must muscled through high school on what I liked or what I needed to learn, when I needed to learn it.  I'd become a student, really, in college and university, a habit that became a personal character trait that's never left.*****  Anyhow, I declared then that UW was where I was going, which seemed to disappoint my mother a bit.

Shortly after that, or perhaps before that, I had my ACT scores as noted and also had to take some sort of personality career test, one of the very few and fairly pathetic things the school district did here at that time to attempt to help students find a career.  Wildlife Management was mentioned and my plan was loosely fixed, sort of. My idea was to go to UW and major in that while enrolling in ROTC, as I also wanted to see if a career in the Army, another outdoor profession (I believed) might be for me.  If it was, I figured I could do that for twenty years and then retire, and enter the Game & Fish here.  If it wasn't, I could do four years and come back and work for the Game & Fish. The concept that I wouldn't get hired by the Game & Fish didn't really occur to me, oddly enough.

I mentioned that to my father, who replied that there were a lot of people around here who had Wildlife Management degrees and no jobs.  That was all the more he said about it, but he so rarely gave advice of that type that any time he did, I listened.  Indeed, I don't ever recall ignoring his advice on such topics, which was always very rare.  That was enough to deter me from majoring in Wildlife Management and I decided instead to major in geology, which was an outdoor science that I was good at in high school.  It might be the case that avoiding  a career with the Game & Fish saved me from disappointment as a game warden later told me that he didn't get out hunting much as he was always working during the season, something that would seem self evident I guess, but which didn't occur to me at the time. That same sentiment is contained in an interview by Brett McKay, of the Art of Manliness, of his father Tom McKay, who was a New Mexico and later Federal game warden.  In that interview he relates:

9. What is the biggest misconception people have about the job?

The biggest misconception is that game wardens spend all their time hunting and fishing. The good wardens and agents have no time for this as they are in the field managing the other nimrods out there during hunting season. I hunted and fished much more before I became a game warden, not at all after I became one.

I would have had a hard time with that.

I did make it down to UW and I did obtain a degree in geology, but I didn't go down right away.  I enrolled in UW and went down to orientation.  Something about it turned me off right away.  It might just have been the hugely unfamiliar environment.  We were supposed to stay in the dorms and the crowd of people there, for an only child and solitary introspective personality was too much, and I backed off that very day.*~ I went home and announced I was going to Casper College.*~~ The very next day I went down and enlisted in the Army National Guard as I felt not starting off in ROTC would be disingenuine.  Joining the National Guard was one of the very best post high school decisions I ever made.

 

Me, as a Sergeant in the Wyoming Army National Guard in South Korea.  My parents weren't happy about me joining the Guard, but it was one of the absolute best post high school decisions I ever made and I have no regrets about doing it at all.

Going to Casper College may have saved my entire academic career.  My mother was very ill at the time and I lived at home.  In the afternoons when I didn't have class I went hunting or fishing.  In retrospect it was the freest I have ever been.  I got into the swing of studying at the post high school level and when I went to UW two years later I was ready for it.  In the meantime I'd learned that I didn't think I wanted a career in the military and my desire to experience that had been satisfied by the National Guard, indeed it'd last beyond that as my enlistment period of six years took me all the way though my undergraduate career. 

Would I have made it through university if I hadn't have gone to Casper College?  I don't know. Maybe I would have, but even during that first two years there were times when I wanted to quit pretty badly and acknowledge my desire to do so, although even now I'm not quite sure why I occasionally harbored those feelings.  On one occasion I recall even asking my father to ask a sheep rancher friend of his if they had any jobs, which would have been a turn in a much different direction, had it lasted, to say the least (that ranch long ago sold).*~~~   By the time I went down to UW however the urge to quit was behind me and it never occurred to me again.

Would my father have gone at all if it hadn't been there?  I don't know that either, maybe he would have.  It's hard to say.  But I can't sneeze at community colleges.  Indeed, as earlier mentioned in a post on this blog, at least actor Tom Hanks feels that he wouldn't have made it through university but for starting at a community college first.

 

Casper College geomorphology class, 1983.  This was the last Casper College class I took in my path towards a Bachelors of Science, and I already had just obtained my Associates when I took it. Technically it was a University of Wyoming class.  Of the individuals depicted, three of us I know went on to UW but only one other went on as a geology major, a good friend of mine who I am still in contact with today.  The professor remains at Casper College to this day.

Circling back around, a crash in the oilfield, much like the one we're experiencing right now, left me unemployable without after I graduated with a geology degree and I ended up in law school a year later.  I'd first contemplated the law, however, as far back as Casper College, when it became evident that I'd probably have to go on to grad school in order to find a career in geology.  I did take the Graduate Records Exam as well as the LSAT, and did well in both, and took the law route.*~~~~

 

Classroom in the S.H. Knight Building, the geology building, at the University of Wyoming, 1986.

Which oddly enough brings me back to this topic.  Recently a dental hygienist, asking my son's career plans, suggested that as his father was a "famous" lawyer, he could go on to law school and then capitalize on the last name.

Well, the thought that I'm famous is flattering, but quite inaccurate.  Indeed, if I'm famous I should be getting on television and capitalizing on my fame by hanging out with the people who are famous for being famous.  But that's not going to happen.  And unless you have a really famous lawyer last name, that's just not going to work.

But the thought that this is good advice is interesting.  Being a lawyer, in reality, is really hard, tough, work and anybody who is familiar with it probably ought to pause before recommending it to anyone.  Some lawyers I know have claimed that they'd not recommend it to their own children, although the very few I know whose have a child who is a lawyer are proud of it.  One person I know fits both of these criteria.  Of course the recommendation is based on a misunderstanding, at least in part, as to what we actually do.

 

All of which brings me back to a few points.

First of all, I think the concept that a person must maximize their economic potential deserves some serious reconsideration as part of the culture.  Not that it hasn't always been somewhat criticized.  But the idea that a person must do something as that will generate the highest income for them assumes that a high income is the highest goal, and it's pretty clear that point of view is destructive in more ways than one.  At the bottom line, just because a person can do it and make a high return doesn't mean that would make them happy.  I'd wager that there are plenty of high income people who would have been much happier doing something else, and I've heard plenty of high income people who look back on some earlier low income position as their happiest one.  Guys at their desks look back on working on family farms, or working in construction, or being a soldier in the Army, as their golden days, and not without reason.  Indeed, to at least some extent, perhaps we ought to reassess our views on this topic on a societal basis.

Which isn't to glamorize low income, as you'll sometimes find people do. Or suggest that a person can suddenly just up and have no income at all.  Not hardly.

Secondly, people should be cautious pushing a person towards a career if they aren't really familiar with it.  I have a better idea than most about a lot of careers, so I could probably do that better than most, but I don't think that's universally the case by any means.  Indeed, one of the really neat things about being a lawyer in litigation is that you get to know quite a bit about what a lot of other people do. Even then you sure don't know everything, however.  I would never have thought, for example, about game wardens not getting to do much hunting and fishing.  Some occupations we know a lot better than others, but usually because we have a close personal association with them in some fashion.

Finally, I think people should be pretty cautious about their concepts of ideal schools or institutions.  We have a very pronounced societal tendency to view certain schools almost as if they're Hogwarts institution of magic.  It's true that there are very good, and very poor, schools, but as higher education has spread in the US post war there are, quite frankly, a lot of really good schools that offer individual students an individual advantage.  A lot of people who go on to other schools start off at a community college level and beyond that quite a few graduate from universities that are very good, if not very big names.  In some occupations, in my view, such as law, some schools have acquired an inordinately revered reputation and society in general would benefit if their stars faded a bit.  It may actually be the case, in spite of all the criticism of higher education, that it's gotten so good that there are not all that many Yugos amongst the Mercedes really, except in terms of reputation, which does admittedly mean a lot in terms of later employment.

__________________________________________________________________________________

*`I'll make it the topic of another entry, more appropriate for the supposed focus of this blog, but a different comment I read elsewhere noted how the big firm expectation of a certain  number of billable hours of young associates is irrelevant in the modern context, as electronic legal research has made the practice of that sort of law so much more efficient. That is, a single lawyer can do the work of an entire team of lawyers.  Not only that, but one lawyer can research a topic in half a day that formerly would have taken days.  That person's comment noted that his superiors, all of whom had started off well before electronic research and never really learned it, didn't grasp that in his big firm, and therefore they didn't understand that what was for him a four hour project wouldn't result in 24 hours of billable time.  A very interesting point.

*Wyoming has seen a jump in applicants to its bar, but due to the UBE.

** Barnes seems to be employed as a lawyer recruiter, and the rest of his articles, to the very limited extent I've bothered to look at them, seem rather rah rah to me about the profession, so I don't know what to make of this one.  He notes that he was a drop out from the profession in this one, so its perhaps unusually candid.  If so, I don't know how to reconcile his rah rah posts and his occupation which would amount to recruiting people into something he claims drives people crazy.  Of course, maybe if I read all of them I'd feel differently, but I doubt that I will.

 ***I was going to list the full 25, and then comment on them, but it was too much of a diversionary project. Suffice it to say, I don't think all of them were all that common.

In fairness, Barnes offers solutions to his perceived problems as well, although there aren't many listed.  One of them is just to quit working and figure it out next, which strikes me as something that wouldn't be realistic for a lot of folks.

****The beloved late Gerald Mason, who coined the phrase "Proud to be a Wyoming lawyer", didn't drink and held what was, as far as I know, the only dry State Bar Association Annual Meeting.  I didn't go, but then I only rarely do.  I recall hearing some complaints about it, however.

Which isn't to say that I've witnessed a lot of lawyer drinking abuse.  I'm sure that lawyers drink more than airline pilots, but I really haven't seen a significant number of lawyers boozing it up.  Maybe I'd have to hang out more where that sort of stuff occurs, but I doubt it.  I suspect that this may be one of those areas where a lot of attention is being paid to a particular problem, but that means that attention is being paid, not that its increasing. 

*^It may mean nothing at all, but amongst European societies, it is noticeable that the ones that have not had a significant Protestant influence tend to be much less economic driven and have cultures much less focused on an individuals relationship to work..  Pretty much all of Europe and south of the Rhine would fit this category, and their work behaviors and life focus does tend to be quite a bit different.  The work ethic of France, Italy and Spain tends to drive Americans crazy to some extent.

Hillaire Belloc, I learned after writing this, was so convinced of something similar that he attributed Capitalism to the Protestant Reformation, with his analysis having some merit to it.  Belloc wasn't stating that in a nice way, as he was a Distributist and lived in the era of fairly unrestrained Capitalism.

*****While I didn't know it at the time, my parents feared in my later undergraduate stage that I'd become one of the classic "career students", a fear that was very parental on their part but actually not very well founded.  On the other hand, by becoming a lawyer, maybe that is what happened.

*~According to the same individual above who first is mentioned in this long winded essay, "introspection is my cure to bear".   Maybe.

*~~These struggles must be more common than I suppose.  I just watched the film American Graffiti for the first time in a long time and found, which I'd forgotten, that much of the film's central plot is based upon the central character struggling with whether to leave the next day for university or to attend the local community college.  He goes, his close friend who is going with him stays.

*~~~Indeed, I was practicing law when it sold and it was one of the first experiences for me on how agriculture was now really beyond the means of the common man, something that shocked me at the time, and which was a sad experience to observe.  Some out of state person bought it, something I can't help relive every time I drive through it, which I very frequently to.

*~~~~ I did well on both tests without studying for either.  Indeed, while I understand why a person would study for the GRE, it still baffles me that people actually study for  the LSAT.  The LSAT is just a logic test.  If a person can't do well on the LSAT without studying for it, they probably shouldn't enter law school.

Synchronicity

Several months ago, for no particular reason, I suddenly had the urge to email an old law school friend.

When he wrote back that day, he'd told me that he'd woken up in the middle of the night, and wondered how I was doing.

Synchronicity.

Recently, I went to look up an event I must speak at for my publisher.  About five minutes later she emailed me regarding the event.

Synchronicity. 

Recently I went to Denver.  The proceeding I was at went way over-length.  On the way home, before Cheyenne, my wife called and informed that friends had been in an accident north of Cheyenne.  Could I pick them up?

Yes, but only due to. . .

Synchronicity.

Years and years ago, indeed perhaps a couple of decades ago, a friend and I left work early, on the last day of Blue Grouse season, to go hunting. We never left work early, but we did that day.  We drove high up into the Big Horns, not really a wise decision on the last day of November, which was the last day of Blue Grouse season.  The road started to drift in, and we decided to turn around, but then decided to go one more ridge, for no good reason. We had actually decided to turn around.  When we got on the top of the ridge, there in the drifted in road was a sedan with an elderly man astride it.  It turned out he was just out of the hospital, from hip replacement surgery, and had decided to go for a mountain drive and become lost.  At that time of the year, with no cattle or sheep in the high country, and no earthly reason for anyone to be up there, it would likely have been days before anyone came that way.  But we did, and we pulled him out.

Synchronicity.

Some call synchronicity "coincidence", which expresses the same thing, sort of.  Synchronicity expresses the phenomenon of extraordinary things in time sync, while coincidence express to things, incidents co-existing in time.  But what is missing from the etymology of both words is the fact, and I think it is a fact, that there's a mysterious element of it which is beyond explanation, and which is metaphysical.

People can dismiss that, but they do so at their hazard.  Open to that possibility, indeed reality, many more things show to be synchronicitous.   Why does one thing suddenly go one way, when past examples show that it should not.  Sometimes, we're placed somewhere, and sometimes, others are placed somewhere in relation to us.  Probably much more often than we realize.

Being Consumed - Catholic Stuff You Should Know

Being Consumed - Catholic Stuff You Should Know

In one of the occasional examples of synchronicity that pops up, the other day I posted on National Small Business Saturday and mentioned Distributism, the economic theory applying the principal of subsidiarity in my post. Then I ran across this podcast entry on Consumerism.

This is posted on Catholic Stuff You Should Know, and therefore it does address some religious themes, but only barely really, mostly focusing on Consumerism through a Distributist lens.  To a slightly aggravating degree, early in the podcast the speakers excuse of their comments by noting Communism when in fact those comments that they feel might be controversial aren't Communist or Socialist at all, but rather purely Distributist.  That they'd discuss Distributism isn't too surprising on one hand, as the economic philosophy was developed by Catholic thinkers, but to hear it discussed is fairly surprising as so few people know what it is.

Anyhow, for a really Distributist discussion of Consumerism, here's one.