The Proper Task

So, in proper procrastination style, I’ve spent the last hour or so reading about kicking the habit of compulsive eating. Over and over again, I read the advise, “listen to your body. ” The claim goes that if I would only listen to my body, I would hear that it is full and presumably that it wants to be no fuller.

And, I agree. I think listening to my body would do a fair amount of good with regard to compulsive eating. But, I spend just about my entire day not listening to my body. I have to.

My body says it’s tired. My body wants to go for a walk. My body can’t sit in this chair anymore. My body wants a desktop because this laptop is killing its neck. My body gets hungry in the middle of a three hour lecture. But in all these occasions, I tell my body to shut up and deal.

If I made a habit of listening to my body… I don’t know. I’d have to quit law and become like an acupuncturist or something.

Anyway, for those who are interested, here is an online book about nondieting, self-acceptance and all that.

I can’t stop eating. I just can’t. I haven’t weighed myself, but since coming to law school I’d venture that I’ve gained about 15 or 20 pounds.

I’ve tried various tricks to get myself to stop, but none of them have worked.

Though I generally have an internal locus of control, I can’t help but notice that many of my fellow Americans have trouble putting down the ho-hos. So, I suspect that part of the trouble with my eating is cultural.

Several aspects of our culture, I think, are suspect: advertising, unfulfilling work and family lives, too much work, etc. But one is the one upon which I will latch tonight: too many food products. How could you possibly get tired of eating chips, for example, when there are 28 different kinds of chips at CVS, 40 at Giant, and 65 at whole foods? You couldn’t. So, my new plan for curtailing my eating is that I will never eat a new food product again as long as I live. R&D all you want, Kraft, but if you didn’t have it on the market and in my stomach by today, I’m not trying it.

I realize that it will probably take me about 30 years to get tired of all the foods that I have tried up until now, but hey, at least I’ll get tired eventually.

Now I have to go finish my Black Bean All Natural Tortilla Chips with All Natural Black Beans.

EDIT: Oh, except you, Coke.  Make a diet soda with a sweetener that won’t give me brain cancer and I’m all over that.

I was having lunch with a 1L friend today and we were discussing the legal reasoning I struggled with below in my brief. I have an oral argument tonight, and I am pretty nervous, because the judge’s questions really throw me off.

The standard that I am arguing is that the police officers knew or should have known that their actions would elicit an incriminating response from someone they were holding in their custody—that is, that the man in custody experienced the functional equivalent of interrogation.

But this confuses me, because this seems to be an issue of fact (and this is an appeal). Whether a person should or shouldn’t be expected to know something seems to me to be a question for social scientists to weigh in on more than just random cases in different circumstances that were decided in the past.

But in describing my woes to my friend, I had a (possibly incorrect—is there a lawyer in the house?) breakthrough. If we say that this standard is a matter of law, then I guess it is like saying ‘what does the law think a reasonable officer should expect.” So, it’s like imagining the law as a person, we’ll call him Law, and then arguing what he would think a cop should know. We figure out what he would think from what he has written on the subject (i.e. the case law).

Maybe this is really obvious to everyone else, but to me, it’s a breakthrough because it is much easier (and more interesting) for me to try to get into someone’s head (Law’s) then it is to imagine a headless, faceless, amalgam of opinion (law).

Something that I feel is lacking in my fellow law students’ attitudes is a sense of the beautiful in what they do, a sense of art.

Yes, we are all in school to become lawyers, a particularly conservative profession by trade, but government—law—is one of the most radically spit-in-your-face-absurdity enterprises that you can imagine.  It is, at its heart, the very embodiment of living, undulating, creating meaning together.  Being a lawyer, in that sense, is very much like being a choreographer, a playwright, or a painter.  Influencing how people live together—who has what power, who has what entitlements, who has what rights—is an artistic venture.  As most people with at least a college course in philosophy understand, there may well be no right or wrong, good or bad.  There is no “public interest” that can be absolutely defined, so instead we can craft what appears, to us, to be beautiful.

What is beautiful?  Is it egalitarianism? Order? Societal achievement?  This is something I am interested in thinking about, but to begin I will say that for me change itself is beautiful.  People challenging power and the status quo is beautiful.  People gathering all of their courage and saying “No.  I am not this.  This is not okay. I choose something else,” is beautiful. People fighting against the demands of conformity and the status quo is beautiful.

I like to think of social change as inherently artistic.  And I would like to think of my career as a lifelong work of art.  I mean, if I ever get an internship.

I am working on my now drastically-overdue brief, and I am subtly frustrated by, um… legal argument.

We spend all this time on our briefs arguing what the law is—that this IS the rule because it is like this case and not like that case, rather than arguing what the law ought to be.  Then the court rules on our cases, and through the guise of claiming what the law is, they prescribe what the law will be.

I know this idea about law itself is not new—I mean, that was the whole realist and crit shtick. So, I don’t mean to make the critique myself.  I’m only saying that as a law student, it is hard to shift gears from being able to use every argument at your disposal, to being confined to just a persuasive description of what the law is.

Maybe this is an appellate thing?  Maybe at the trial level, there is more leeway.

February 15, 2008

Frankly A. Attorney,
100 Government-lined Ave, SW
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. Attorney,

Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me yesterday to discuss the work of your mechanic, heartless organization. I am thrilled and excited about everything you do, even though you aren’t. I hope I will be able to work for you and pour all of my energies and talents into your agency for free this summer.

Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have further questions about my weaknesses and strengths or what my proudest achievement was. Thank you again for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Inspired Y. L. Student

It’s sad how overused and meaningless a word like sincerely is. I wonder if some of my disgruntlement, and the disgruntlement of some of my friends, might largely be caused by the institutionalization of the fake, or something. We make so many insincere comments each day, and jump through so many hoops of insincerity…

I mean, I’m all for “Hey, how are you. I’m fine” kind of scripts and the “sure, that sweater looks nice on you” kind of lie because they are not really lies—what I am saying in the first instance is that I am acknowledging your presence and that I do not need any special attention from you right now, and in the second that I want you to feel good about yourself. I suppose you can say the same kind of script is true for interviews. I dress up in clothes that I would not normally wear as a sign of saying, “I respect you and wear this outfit to show my respect. I want you to think highly of me.” But the lying part comes in when you answer their questions, and when you send a thank you note like the one above. I do not respect you. I think you are a sad shell of a human, and yet: Thank you! I am thrilled! Sincerely!

Anyway, my guess is that there are a bunch of problems with institutionalized lying. Most importantly for me, I suspect that the lying might have a destructive impact on our sense of selves. Especially when we do it so much. Always putting on a show.

And maybe lying is unavoidable; it is very useful and very natural, and all mammals lie. But maybe what is avoidable is having so many institutions that require it. We wouldn’t have to lie about why our homework wasn’t done so much of the time if we didn’t have too much of it to do. We wouldn’t have to lie about being angry at our friends if there was more of an understanding of the every-changing face of friendships. We wouldn’t have to lie about our creativity, emotions, dreams, identity, sexuality, and values if there was a little more acceptance out there. And I suspect if more people told the truth, the world wouldn’t crumble…

A few days ago, I considered killing myself because I did not get an interview at the Southern District of New York’s US Attorney’s Office.

More generally, I considered killing myself because here in law school, my mind had gotten so warped that I could not think of one thing that could possibly give me a subjective feeling of joy other than achievement—of doing better than those around me. Even social events were filtered through this lens of achievement: was I the funniest at the table? Was I charming? Did everyone think highly of me and like me? I could think of nothing, absolutely nothing, which would be fun other than achieving.

So I ran away. I left class during one of the breaks and went up to New York, where I have some friends. I needed to reconnect to something positive that would remain even if I got bad grades and no internships. It didn’t take long to start to calm down. I met with some of my friends and talked about this and that. I’m sure I am still filtering things through the judgmental achievement lens, but I feel calmer now.

Anyway I think about death a lot. It’s liberating to think of all times you didn’t kill yourself. You can imagine that you did, and that all this is just bonus. So, I can think: I died last week. I am now free to do whatever I want—to take risks in service of living the life I want.