Let's Cripilate

During my first year of college, I took a lot of naps. Time was not fixed to a schedule in the way you might pin up streamers across a wall. Instead, it was a blob, an easily reconfigured mess of a resource resembling those beanbag chairs of which college kids are so fond. I did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted because time was under my control. The nap was the weapon through which I wielded such incalculable power. I would use it as necessary to catch up on sleep, which, really, was just time I'd allocated to other pursuits. One night, I drank an entire case of soda and then "went to bed" at 11 AM. Why? Because. I was eighteen, and a lifelong nocturnal streak was no longer inhibited by parents and high school.

My first year of law school, I reprised the napping. My schedule was more fixed than it had been in college, but still, graduate education accommodates sleeping during daylight hours. Law-school naps can be dangerous emotional endeavors, though. No one mentions this when you enroll, but law school is an elaborate, protracted experiment in guilt tolerance. There is always something else to read, and you sleep uneasily knowing that even when you're not working, someone else, someone against whom you'll be graded, is. So when you nap, you kind of sleep your feelings. It's healthier than eating them, I suppose, but sometimes napping can feel less like slumber than stupor.

My napping days, advised or otherwise, are over, though. I finished law school yesterday. The reality has not yet sunk in because I find myself greeting downtime with a guarded fear that I have forgotten something. I hope that by the time I return from a two-week road trip, this has subsided. In the interim, I will be consuming americana, regional culinary delicacies, and a healthy amount of playoff basketball. I also will be writing more regularly, again.

My first contribution is a piece I helped my friend and idol Tom Ziller put together. See it here.

Now, I need to go visit a George Custer museum so that I might reconnect with the seventeen-year-old Joey who wrote a short hagiography about Custer for an American history class. The same class that ended with a substitute teacher crying about Judy Garland and giving me a 97 for another term paper about Allen Iverson, bad shooting, and the decline in NBA scoring. We were assigned a simple project: write about anything historical and based in America. The comments accompanying the grade: "I have no idea what most of this means, but I've heard of Michael Jordan, and I can tell that you are excited about this topic."

That's where lawyers come from!