xy

Things could most definitely be worse, but generally, life is taking a toll on me. There are less than two weeks of instruction left in this quarter and as was the case with all previous quarters, I am way behind. As expected, senioritis hit me pretty damn hard these last two months. And while I was formerly excited about being genuinely done, finding work in Jersey and continuing my ongoing redemption, my mom waffled on me this weekend, decimating my plans for the next year. Hm, “next year.” Writing it out makes the situation seem less horrid. It’s only for a year right? I actually have no problem with not going to the garden state. It’s just that, and he won’t admit it because he doesn’t want to pressure me, my dad’s been looking forward to me living at home. It can get lonely in a small family like mine. I looked at it from my own perspective these past few weeks; we work our tails off while our children are young and then when we finally have time to spend with them, they’re grown up and in college. Maybe I’m getting a little off track here. Regardless, these important considerations are pulling me in a lot of different directions.

As if all this wasn’t dejecting enough, I now don’t know where to apply for work, and the places I actually have been applying to haven’t shown me much in the way of clemency. Why couldn’t I have a unique, more marketable skill set? Not only are writing and editing positions scarce in a field nearly unmatched in its competitiveness, but some employers out there take shameless advantage of the high supply of jobseekers in the field and offer only contract positions with no benefits or some other ridiculous technicality that keeps us from getting insurance and job security. I’d love to teach but I’m graduating at an awkward time. Here I am thinking that finishing up in January is better because there isn’t a huge influx of summer graduates into the job force. I think my lot is just as bad at this time, if not worse. Everyone loves to cite a bad economy as the problem. But you notice that it’s the perpetual reason? There’s just something fundamentally wrong with the world imo. I’ll have more to write later; I’m just waiting on a stinkin’ layout.

Given my history of taking on increasingly difficult work and longer hours with inversely proportional pay, eventually entering the legal field — I hope I can — won’t be any aberration from this trend, and I’ll most likely be well-equipped to handle the challenges, whether it’s billing a bajillion hours or making an obscenely low and unlivable wage as an ADA. Irrelevant, premature you say? As unreasonable as it is, your choice of school really impacts — I mean this in both ways — the path your career will take. And you thought settling for a subpar undergraduate institution was bad. So why even consider putting myself through the suffering?

1. I’m a prestige whore and I have to make unnecessarily excessive compensatory restitutions for the fact that I’ve attended a public university that is neither Cal nor UVA. Ironically, I’ll most likely end up at a school outside of the traditionally reputable bastions of legal education.
2. I’ve actually been inside a courtroom several times and the trial process is engrossing and powerful.
3. I feel the more literate (read: transactional) portions of the profession play to my strengths. Who would take the dubious obligation of attempting to glean meaning from and make sense out of a vapid, rambling mass of text in a poorly ventilated hotbox of body odor half the days of the week? Me, baby, me.

In more positive news, I was again complimented on my unusually light eyes, their being mistaken for color contacts. Even I’m baffled by this phenomenon, as neither of my parents possesses this trait. I was also asked twice in one day whether I am in fact fully Asian. I’m not sure if the latter falls under the heading of positive, but it’s surely intriguing and not too distantly removed from the comments regarding my pupils irises. My bad.

I admit I have a piss-poor record of keeping to my writing promises, i.e. not putting up racquet or beer reviews, but I hope to redress this shortcoming in the imminent future and actually write a coherent bit about Los Angeles as I have committed myself to doing a few entries past.

And with that, g’day my friends. Or at least all four of you who read this. This is my quality entry for the week, so I hope you read it or else I’ll be heartbroken. I’d love to bring you more cynicism and ideally some funnies, but Wittgenstein beckons.

I’ve decided to be mature and put off applying to law school until I have maximized my chances for admission, by gathering work experience and taking community college courses to raise my GPA, even if that means waiting two or three years. Not only will this give me a chance to pay off my undergraduate loans but might also allow me to save up a little bit. Of course, this is all just empty talk until my score comes in on Monday. I’m basically hoping for two unlikely scenarios at this point - get into a tier 2 with a scholarship and take any job I want after graduating, or get into a top school with no money and get a firm position for a few years to pay off massive debt; the latter will vastly open up the job market and a nationally reputed alma mater simply provides more reach for your career in all respects. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, but who doesn’t like thinking optimistically about the future?

Addendum: Production totally sucks tonight. I wish adcomms and grad schools were more aware of the work we put in here for practically no money. Even with shitty nights like this, I still love my job.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.S. ice expert said on Tuesday.

This means the ocean at the top of the world could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020, three decades sooner than the global panel’s gloomiest forecast of 2050.

People are still skeptical when I try and admonish them…

Not entirely on a whim, I applied to the Breeze last week. I did this without any hope of getting a response - just a shot in the dark. Surprisingly I received a call back this past Friday. They caught me entirely off guard while I was with Jaymie and Tug in some bakery on Fairfax. I wanted it so bad so I started talking as if I could really pursue this job while going full-time in school. They gave me the weekend to call or e-mail them back.

I wanted to get my thoughts straight so I just finished writing them in an e-mail, basically saying it was unfair for them to spend their time on me in their candidate search and based on previous job experience that they obviously had no need or desire to worry about what I did outside work. The awesome thing is that the guy I talked to was very nice about it and even said that I could reach them when I was ready to work and that we would go from there. Of course this all rests on the assumption that there will be something available for me at the time. If there is, great. If there isn’t, I’ll find something else to do. I’m just happy knowing that there are nice people like that, and that I do have a real shot at some of the copy-editing positions out there.

In contrast to the quasi-negativity of the previous post, I would just like to say that after slacking off seriously for the first 5 weeks of this quarter, I am finally enjoying philosophy in full force once again. Frege always brings the fun it seems.

Intra-contrast! This part is a bit more reflective. Should I even bother with law school? If I follow my ideals, I’ll be in a job making 30 grand a year at most, stuck in debt forever. I could be making that at a job that doesn’t require a grad degree. I really want to do it, I just don’t know if I can handle it financially… Otherwise, I’d do editing, but the job market is so intensely competitive and I don’t feel like going to journalism school. In general, I don’t think I’m aggressive enough to be in media. I’m not the cutthroat kind. I don’t want to be seem like I’m so damn capricious, because I’m really not — I just have a lot of realistic concerns in addition to the ideal of following what I’m passionate about.

I wrote this yesterday in class, and now I’m pretty sure of my path after realizing I’d be limiting my potential if I didn’t go ahead with my ideals.

Something I left out of my wishlist: Although I still wouldn’t mind a Seagull S6 Slim (though I think my newly purchased Taylor Big Baby should do the job), I also really want a Hello Kitty Squier Strat. The pink one. Yes.

Last night I wrote e-mails to two schools: U of Washington (go Seattle!) and U of Oregon.

I’d always been leaning toward one over the other (take a wild guess), but I’m sincerely devastated after reading the two responses this morning. UW sent me back a more or less abrupt and cold reply referring me to their website for any inquiries. Where do they think I got their e-mail address from? They also spelled my name wrong. Despite that my name is written out in my original message and that it shows up in both my ucla email address and as the label when I send stuff out. Shows that they don’t give a shit at all.

UO on the other hand, gave me the opposite treatment. I received a personal e-mail from their office giving me more information on how I can shadow current students, complete with an attachment listing all 1L classes. They also offered to set up a visit for me to meet with an admissions counselor. While they couldn’t give me advice on pre-legal activities or training, they suggested general things to strengthen my record, like public service involvement.

I’m honestly really disappointed, and now I’m really hoping Seattle U (also very friendly and helpful) works out. Either that, or I hope Oregon law schools’ job markets extend all the way to Seattle.

I got it.

So do I stay another year or graduate and get a real job?

…about work, school or life anymore. I just want to be a vagrant. An itinerant one. And hey, according to Jane Jacobs, I’ll make the streets a lot safer just by virtue of my being there.

These cycles come about occasionally, and it seems one’s here again, except for different reasons. I find myself wishing that I’d gone to the east coast or Berkeley to start anew or so to speak, broaden my horizons. I don’t think I’d be the same as I am now. I’d definitely have different ambitions. I do know it’d be in the tradition of the Korean ‘be successful and employed immediately with a 6 figure salary preferably as a doctor or corporate lawyer’ mentality. I don’t believe in it anymore. Yes, I have legal ambitions, but they’re more within the realm of public interest and policy change. My mom’s still bothered by the fact that ADAs only make about 30 grand a year. So I’m still wrestling with the question of whether or not I was better off staying here.
But you know, that’s not the point. It’s that I really don’t feel like I have anything going for me. No. It’s that, I’m not happy. I think it’s just the numbness. Help me.

Getting that copy staff position (I love words and language. It’s like God gave me signs — 5 on English AP, 800 on SAT Writing, bilingualism — and I was like fuck that, I want to do neuroscience!) might just be the thing to stop me from lying down and allowing the locomotive called life to run its course over the tracks and over my alleogrical body, supine, atop them.

I think it relatively interesting that although my parents intended for my name to be Edward, the name Eddy is what stuck. It was never changed to Edward, and somehow it didn’t get shortened to Eddie. I subscribe to dictionary.com’s word of the day, and generally I don’t pay attention, despite receiving them in my mailbox. The service is usually late and they send two or three at a time, which I feel defeats the point of being able to learn a new word a day, and additionally they’re usually words with which I’m already familiar. Today’s word of the day is eddy.

To me, an eddy was always simply just a whirlpool or whirlwind. Maybe the dictionary definitions I read before were too simplified, or maybe I was too young when I first looked up my own name in the dictionary. But now that I see it again, I see something deeper:

eddy \ED-ee\, noun:
1. A current of air or water running in a direction contrary to the main current, or moving in a circular direction; a whirlpool.
2. A tendency or current (as of opinion or history) contrary to or separate from a main current.

I feel like my desire to bring about change isn’t something that should be contained to mere wishful thinking anymore. I know it seems a little juvenile or childish to suddenly be inspired by something as trivial as this, but who knows? No one knows what the future holds. In Korea and Japan this past summer of 2006, my dad and I had a lot of spiritual and religious talks, especially about Buddhism, and he told me about this eastern/buddhist ‘astrology,’ I’m not sure what to call it. It’s based on the time one is born during the lunar calendar. A monk told my dad he would first cross a small lake, then a bigger one. He ended up living in Japan, then ultimately here in the US. My dad told me I had an aptitude for being in a position of power/politics and that he was honestly disappointed when I first wanted to be a doctor. I got a little upset he didn’t tell me this before. But I guess it’s a good thing I came to my career route on my own instead of letting something ungrounded lead me. In essence, even something as abstract and insignificant like this can serve toward inspiring and giving strength.

Of course that bastard Shakespeare would beg to differ: What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But you forget, my dear William, we attach names we see fit for certain objects. Although someone like Frege might argue alongside you that these names are arbitrary designations anyway, a view like this completely neglects the historical linguistics of a language, and the tendency to ascribe more euphonous names to a beautiful object and so on!
Thanks dictionary.com. You sure made my day in more ways than you know.