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Man, I feel like I’m stagnating. Hardcore. For whatever reason I’m feeling restless, just three months out of school and nearly a month into my first full-time job. Work really isn’t all that bad — it’s a bit slow at times because I’ve just started and major responsibilities haven’t been shifted my way yet. The commute could be a lot better; spending an hour on the road each way within the South Bay doesn’t exactly seem all that reasonable. I sincerely appreciate being employed though. Just two months ago I was riddled with the anxiety of never finding a job. While time doesn’t go by as quickly as working at the paper did, it’s definitely not as bad as you might think a full work day is.

I figured that spending about two years out of school would be a healthy break for me, working to pay off some of my debt while giving myself a chance to prepare all my application materials. But now that I’m actually out and living through this interim period day by day, I find myself increasingly regretful that I hadn’t gotten everything together sooner. (And regretting not eating breakfast and packing a lunch on Oct. 29th).

At the root of this frustration is a burning desire to get the hell out of the South Bay. See, I have this love-hate relationship with L.A. in general. I’ve wanted so much to get out of here and move somewhere completely new, like Seattle, D.C, Chicago, New York, or San Francisco. Even Canada. But my current frustration is such that I would love just getting out of here and moving back into more urban L.A. county, like Culver or West L.A. or the PLB area. Too bad I don’t have the money.

I’ll stick it out for now, no doubt. One bit of fun I’m having at least is JKD. I refrain from calling it martial arts — the stuff I’m learning at the moment is sort of a elementary primer into Muay Thai and BJJ, with other techniques thrown in. It’s too bad I don’t have the room or the resources for a hanging heavy bag. I need to condition myself properly, so hopefully I can get a gym membership soon.

I don’t even want to post this. My mind is a mess. Help me write my personal statement.

What am I doing? Where am I headed? For reasons I can’t really disclose or even fully explain, I find myself questioning the path I’ve gone down, not merely professionally, but in all aspects of life. I guess I just feel like I’m not in the place I thought I’d be at this age, which is a mix of both good and bad.

I miss writing in this blog as a form of release, although in that case I’d prefer a dearth of content to anything.

Is this site too hard on the eyes? Too much text, not enough design? Too much light green? I like that it’s simple and straight to the point, but it might be off-putting to would-be readers. Then again, why should I care if someone doesn’t have the attention span to sit through a post… I feel apathy slowly taking over me again as Ron Paul’s chance at the presidency wanes…

Back on topic, I do want to promise myself that I’ll clearly be on track to a better life by this time next year. With that, I’m looking forward to making my knuckles bleed tonight.

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.

anger, fear, hate and distrust are such fatal human flaws…

I thought of my own homographic homophonic autantonym: unqualified.

I need to stop reading elitist trash spewing forth from law school forums. It’s really making me question the investment of going to law school to make anything less than six digits. Why does tuition have to be so exorbitant? Nay, why can’t I just erase all my F’s?

I’m really behind on work and I realized that it’s mainly because after scrutinizing an entire section layout several times and fixing headlines, I’m really not in the mood to read anything except for the aforementioned mind-excrement.

Coming up, I’m going to reflect on how I feel about L.A. and provide an appraisal of my future in it - detailing my love-hate relationship with the city and the increasingly derelict nature of our state. The coming decades will be sad times for all. Except for the filthy rich. Especially the filthy rich and old. Also, is Seattle in the cards for me? What if the big one up north comes while I’m there? While my family’s there? So much uncertainty. As you can tell, thoughts not immediately relevant are tormenting me when Wittgenstein’s Investigations should be fulfilling that task instead.

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.

until my fate is revealed to me. You like how I followed AP style with the ellipsis? Yeah, you know you do. Honestly though, how long does it take to run a sheet of paper through a scanner? Sorry LSAC gods, don’t punish me for saying that.

I want to re-emphasize how sad it is that people rarely update anymore - and it’s not because people have any less time. It seems to me that the intellectual atmosphere, the creative drive, the motivation have all just died down in recent years, at least in the realm of writing. When we look at the larger picture, blogging has taken off and reached a new plateau, coining new terms like the ‘blogosphere.’ But apart from these more high-profile blogs and other frankly commercially produced web publications, personal blogging has hit an all-time low. Among friends I liken these past four years to a bludgeon, maybe a cricket bat, that has beat us down to a bloody allegorical pulp. I know I felt that way for the longest time. That’s why I believe it’s time for a renaissance. Come on guys! Masturbate fives minutes less, eat a little bit quicker, refrain from refreshing those Facebook pages, and don’t read Wittgenstein that third time because you still don’t get it. Write! - The mind needs to be exercised too.

This queasiness is unsettling. As game day nears, I’m becoming increasingly aware of how much my future is riding on this test. I’ve been doing consistently well on practice exams, but I’m afraid of a brutal curve or just a lapse in performance. You could argue that the cruciality of the test applies to everyone, though I sincerely doubt many need a high score to the degree that I need one, given my abysmal grades. I need to just push this negativity out of my head and remember that the mere existence of such a test is a saving grace - without it, I would never even be in contention.

Regardless of my chances, I’m restless. Impatient, even. I want to get my future started and I feel as if there are too many opposing forces in the way - forces that I’ve established through my previous mistakes. If only I could somehow get this struggle across to the people who will be deciding my fate…

Baby steps… I must take baby steps…

I was devastated when I didn’t get into CAMS. I remember receiving my letter in the mail later than everyone else. There was a letter code on the envelope that corresponded to admissions decisions and I knew even before I opened it that I had been rejected. I even cried.

Rewind to a few months before when I showed up to the Cal State Dominguez Hills campus dressed in a snappy suit, ready for the interview that would make or break me. At that point I was pretty convinced that I wanted to be a lawyer, specifically one who specialized in environmental law. I don’t think the people at CAMS took too well to my life goals. I guess they were only looking for people who wanted to be scientists and engineers.

I don’t blame them. I then unenthusiastically went to my interview at Bishop, knowing that my performance didn’t matter, as it was widely known to be a formality. And surprise, it turns out that I scored in the 99th percentile on my admissions test and got into all the honors classes. Cool. Maybe I would be happy here? I later switched to wanting to be a doctor, something that might’ve garnered me an acceptance letter to CAMS had I possessed it a few years prior. And I carried this through to my first year of college - until I realized that I had never been all that great at math or science. So much for being Asian, right? Science had always been one of my favorite subjects. But I wasn’t particularly good at it. I only got a 2 on AP physics, while I got a 5 on AP language. Naturally, it made me wonder whether I had wasted my opportunities.

Now I’ve come full circle - having a goal similar to the one I held when I first nervously approached that heartbreaking interview.

Apart from a few obvious, major, academic regrets, I don’t have any qualms about the route that I ended up taking. Bishop is where I grew, it’s where I formed a big chunk of my identity, it’s where I met my love, and it’s where my allegiances will lie, always.

I wonder if I’ll feel the same way about UCLA four years from now. As the setting for the most turbulent period of my life, it’s impossible to divorce my experience from this school. I love it and I hate it, but its mark will remain with me, whether for better or for worse. I wonder if I could’ve reached this same point in my development through a more streamlined process - taking philosophy from the start, carrying my career goals through until now without the medical detour. Probably not. Which is why I’m not hitting myself on the head too hard.

The real world lies ahead, dire and despondent in its overcast splendor (am I just talking about Seattle now? maybe, if not for the direness and despondency), but paradoxically full of optimism for us silly humans. C’est la vie.

Sometimes I lose sight of my passions, and this is when I’m happy that I have a blog. Here I am, slacking at work, reading through my old posts, some of them written with such conviction and intensity.

When I made the choice to go to law school, I wanted to go into one of two fields: environmental law or public service criminal law, i.e. prosecution or public defense. These are two very low-paying fields, but I don’t think I’d be happier anywhere else. (Tangent: If nothing else, I would’ve liked to have high grades to even get into a lower-ranked school as long as I got a scholarship, so I could take one of these public service jobs without debt). As I read over my apologetic rants on anthropogenic climate change, I gain back some perspective - if I can do that for anyone who happens upon this site, then my insignifcant mark on the internet is good for something other than my purgative ambitions. Tied down by work and classes this entire summer, I easily forgot the things I was ardent about. I’ve pissed away the diminutive free time I did have, excusing my ill-advised actions by telling myself I deserved the r&r. It’s time for a major change. I now have to put my ambitions and aspirations into overdrive, and make that final sprint to make something of my passions; I need to stop postponing my life the way I’m procrastinating with my philosophy paper at the moment.

With this reinvigorated perspective, the time has come for me to embrace diligence and enterprise. Finally.