Stay of Execution

Do You Know Which Berries Are Ripe?

In college I made a promise to myself that I didn't want to end up at a place in life, geographically or in my head, where I didn't know which berries were ripe and where was the best place to go pick them. Right now the strawberries are ripening, in my garden and at the farms nearby. I know where to find the raspberries that will come after the strawberries, and I know some good places for wild blueberries, but I don't have a good secret blackberry spot -- the one I know about is a couple of hours north and the one I remember from childhood seems to have disappeared. A project for this summer, perhaps.

I feel the same way about being tuned in to the daily ebb and flow of the tide. It is high right now -- a moon tide. It means there'll be lots of interesting debris floating around in the water. On my morning walk this morning it was extraordinarily low and the rocks in the muddy cove was fully exposed. I'm glad that I know that. It matters, at least to me.

Hard

I haven't told my clients that I'm leaving, yet. I asked the Big Guy to let me know the firm's preference on how they'd like me to handle it, but he hasn't yet gotten back to me. I need to tell them. It's going to be hard. I want to keep taking care of them; I don't want to leave them in the lurch. And I like them, plain and simple. The worrywarts, the guys who go blithely along without thought of the consequences of their actions, the businesspeople who just want to cut to the chase, the ones who tell me about their other projects, the things outside of work they're most excited about, I'm going to miss them.

Mail

I usually check the mail right after I walk in the door, driven by some futile hope that there will be something in there besides bills, credit card offers, the New Yorker, and a bunch of big magazines and flyers about medical things for my nurse practitioner Housemate. But last night I didn't check, and this morning in addition to the usual junk, I had two property tax refund checks from the city of Portland, and a package containing a book from a friend. It reminds me that I ought to send more nice things to people by mail, because it's such a treat to get something.

Spellbound

Two folks emailed me to let me know that "scheherazadian" was one of the final words in the National Spelling Bee. If it had been in the state round maybe I would have gotten to go to the national bee way back in the day.

Tonight I went sailing with one of the Hooked on Tonics girls and the Eligible Bachelor. A squall came through with sudden rain and heavy winds on our way back to the finish line and we got nice and wet and cold and went pretty fast, and then the squall moved past and an amazing double rainbow appeared -- a very bright inner one, starting at Clapboard Island and arching over to the water just off of Basket Island, and then a dimmer one just above it. The sky behind the rainbow was that very dark battleship blue-grey of a passing raincloud and the setting sun was coming low across the harbor lighting up Clapboard Island with this bright yellow light, making the trees look extra vivid green and the seagulls flying past it light up like these shining white dots. All framed by a remarkable double rainbow. It was a pretty nice place to be.

Gulp

A few years ago a dear friend of mine sent me a postcard on which was the following quotation: "The soul would rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's." Google tells me a poet named David Whyte is the author.

The truth is I want to be a writer when I grow up. I always have. Doing this blog has made it even more clear to me.

My mom is a writer and she's faced rejection all her life. She has been so relieved and proud at my success and independence in the world of business and law, where I can explain what I do easily, where my ability to earn a living is not in question. She thinks being a writer is a terrible thing to wish on somebody. She doesn't wish it for me. I think she desperately wishes the opposite.

I could be a really good lawyer. I was really good at law school. Sure, I'm a fumbling incompetent overwhelmed associate but I think I do a pretty good job learning things and sounding good and helping my clients. Just last night a guy from a firm I really admire was telling me he thought I could be one of the best trial lawyers in the state. I know I'll be able to bring in business and make clients feel good and people around town have given me all kinds of signals that my reputation is good and there are lots of opportunities to get good at this and make a really good name for myself. It feels like it's within my power. And would be fun and interesting in lots of ways -- my curiosity for law is genuine. Doors swing open for me.

I haven't the slightest idea how to be a writer and the only person I've seen up close doing it has found it a very painful path requiring extraordinary commitment and bravery. It is a path divorced from social reinforcement and material wealth and nobody understands it.

Leaving my job was easy. I know how to get jobs; I know how to earn money. That's never been hard for me. I know people like me and I'm good at a lot of things. This, right here, this blog post I'm typing right now, is the scariest thing I have ever done. Admitting what I really want to do not knowing how to do it and knowing I could and probably will fail at it.

[I reserve the right to take this post down and go back to being a chicken and you will pretend you never saw it.]

Enough About Me, Let's Talk About You

So one of the things I'm doing that seems very reasonable to me but apparently isn't how things are generally done, is arranging to meet lawyers around town who I like and admire professionally and think are happy in their lives. People who exhibit all three of those characteristics are hard to come by. I figure, these are the kind of people living a life that I want to live: I want to be someone I like and admire professionally and who is happy in my life. So I should talk to people like that about their careers, right? I want to learn as much as I can about what they do and how they got there and why they made the choices they made and what the pitfalls or blind alleys were for them.

But they think I want to talk about my career, or they want to tell me about specific job openings they know about, and whether they think I'd be a good fit. I mean, those are interesting subjects and I'm pleased to talk about them, but it seems premature at this stage. The first step is to figure out just what the situation is that you want to be in, and the second step is to convince those people (if indeed it is a situation that requires the consent of other people) to pay you to do what it is you want to do in the first place. In the past, whenever I've had the first step right, I've had a really good track record with the second step. Convincing people is easier if you believe something, earnestly, and you can articulate just why it makes sense to you. I'm generally good at articulating what I believe, especially when it has to do with me and my personal choices, skillsets, etc. Right now I'm in the process of building a vision. And for that I want to see how other people have done it.

People don't believe that's what I'm asking them to talk to me about at first, but when they do, I've found they really want to talk about it. Or they really don't. The ones who don't are the ones who feel trapped, or desperate, or envious.

Keeping the Riff Raff Out

I throw a fair number of dinner parties, barbeques, happy hours, and other impromptu gatherings. I like to do it. I like bringing people together, making a situation fun, making it safe for people to talk freely and laugh and lower the barriers. At my summer party I usually go around with a huge pile of temporary tattoos letting people put skull and crossbones or dolphins or chinese characters on their biceps or their feet or their collarbone. And people do -- people you wouldn't expect. At my last summer party somebody started breakdancing. At the annual Winter or Fall Games everyone gets a nickname and has to refer to everyone else by their nicknames so months later lawyers and doctors and research scientists and engineers are asking after "Notorious BLT" or "Curbside Pickup" or "Shifty Bob". At my dinner parties people talk about religion and poetry and friendship. Sometimes they draw pictures or tell stories or move furniture around. I love people, I'm fascinated by all kinds of folks, and I love it when they open up to me and to one another. One of my great fortunes in my life is that I've got lots of smart and interesting and articulate people in my tribe. Some are funny and some are artistic and some are a little bit dorky and some are shy and some are wild, and I like all the different ways there are for people to be themselves. I've managed to fix a lot of people up -- start romantic or just platonic relationships between people that blossom, sometimes beyond my own friendship with either person. I think that's because I help people show the best sides of themselves to other people. It's one of my favorite things about being me.

Both Will Baude and Jeremy posted recently about why they don't allow comments on their blogs. Jeremy's reason is sort of about not wanting to be outdone on his own turf by a commenter -- an unlikely scenario, it seems to me. And Will grumps about the other side -- he thinks the remarks by commenters on most blogs are inferior to the words of the bloggers he likes and urges blog authors to get rid of the riff raff. It's about quality control for him, I guess.

Here's what I think. This blog for me is partly about self-expression, but it's also a way of starting conversations, creating a safe place to talk about things I find interesting, some funny, some serious. It's like a big backyard party or a dinner gathering. There are interesting people here. Smarter and more interesting than me, if I've done a good job. I love that they want to respond to the things I write. I love that they want to respond to one another. I love that people are finding blogs they like better than mine by reading the comments of people here. Sheesh. I don't see what riff raff has to do with it. This is a friendly gathering of intelligent people with interesting lives, not a lecture hall.

Why Do People Buy Houses????

I just got home from an interesting conversation with a lawyer in town, but before I could even sort it out I noticed a suspicious hiss coming from the basement. I opened the basement door and found that the basement was FULL of steam. A steam room. I made my way down and found a leaky pipe, spewing more steam than water. Somehow -- I fumbled around and turned off the furnace and found the hot water heater valve and stopped the gushing. But now what? Aaaaaah. My Home Heating Systems Awareness Buddy is on his way over. It's puzzling because the gushing was mostly steam -- there's some water in the basement but it seems to be largely the product of condensation and dripping from the steam, not pooling from a flow of water. Maybe this serves me right for fixing the hot water in the first place. Word to the wise: don't buy a house. Don't buy a house if you are a single woman trying to save money and you don't understand housey systems. And don't buy a house if you want to be able to quit your job and feel like you have any semblance of control over the forces in your life. Control is an illusion, right? Okay. Back to the basement.

[UPDATE: Crisis averted. New hoses on the washing machine. And a more educated Scheherazade. I'm running out of things that can break in this house -- fridge, stove, roof, hot water heater, plumbing, washer, dryer. What's left? Don't answer that.]

Fog

Sometimes when the fog rolls in from the ocean its speed is really amazing. In the space of half an hour it went from light and sunny (after a grey beginning to the day) to dark and misty. We're in a raincloud, but across the water a fog bank has been hovering over the islands, moving in and then retreating back. It's a funny weather pattern for sure. To my left I see some blue sky. Right where we are it is raining, big drops, slanting rain. To my right, out over the water, is more rain, and out over the islands it looks like fog, although maybe that's more rain. Usually rain clouds move in from the west but this seems to be coming in from the southeast. Very peculiar.

There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

.... but I've had lunch bought for me twice by colleagues since giving my notice. Perhaps out of pity, who knows.

I'm now in a position of taking my own advice. I don't know yet what I want to do next, but the lunching and drink-having and meeting-for-coffee has begun in earnest. It's a fun phase -- talking to people I like and respect about what they do, why they like it, and how they made the decisions they did. I'm trying to rid myself of all preconceptions and think about my professional life with a completely blank slate. But armed with what I've learned so far about my aptitudes and my likes and dislikes.

It's sort of a fine dance, I'm noticing. I think it is a natural human urge to want to gossip. So people poke around for the seamy underbelly of any situation. I will speak freely about what I love and admire about my colleagues at the firm I am leaving, and how glad I am to have started my legal career there. I will not speak freely about what has made it feel like it's not the place I want to stay going forward. But people want to know. One reason they want to know is whether it was my decision to leave, and obviously that's something I want to make sure they understand; it was my choice and one that I was asked several times to reconsider. But I don't want to go to the next step in the conversation; it's just not fruitful. It's a hard line to walk. So far what I've said is that it's just sort of like Goldilocks and the Three Bears -- this porridge is too hot, or this chair is too soft. It's not "just right," and when I came to that conclusion I thought it was time to go.

Bloggers in My Dreams

The night before last I dreamt that Madeline and I were driving along through the woods being pursued by a lovesick deer, who kept trying to leap onto the road in front of our car just to be near us. Instead we pulled over (Madeline was driving, and her eyesight was not an issue) and opened the door and the deer laid his head on my lap and gazed at us with these soulful, loving, animal brown eyes, heartsick with longing to be close to us.

I don't know if I've ever dreamt about hanging out with a friend I've never met. It felt great, though.

HOT Fun

Tonight was the first night of sailboat racing of the summer season. The Hooked On Tonics team was on board and ready to go nice and early. There were some pieces of the boat that hadn't been rigged up yet -- boom vang, cunningham -- but we had things working pretty well. We had a new crew on board subbing in for my co-owner. He was male, which we usually don't permit on the HOT boat, but he did pretty well, considering.

There are at least four categories of mistakes you can make in a sailboat race. Boatspeed, boathandling, tactics, and strategy. I'm pleased to report we made all four kinds. Actually our strategy might have been okay -- tough to say, given the screw-ups in the other departments.

Boatspeed is just about how the boat moves through the water -- how fast can you make the boat go. A subset of boatspeed has to do with direction -- how fast can you make the boat go towards the mark you are headed for. As it turned out, I could make the boat go reasonably fast, but I couldn't point as close to the wind as my competitors, so when sailing side by side their net progress toward the mark was better than mine, even though my boat was going slightly faster than theirs. Maddening.

Boathandling has to do with how your whole crew manages maneuvers -- tacks, when you change direction upwind, and gybes, when you change direction downwind, and sail changes, when you put up and take down the spinnaker. We had great spinnaker sets but terrible takedowns. Great gybes but lousy tacks. Pretty good starts, and good steering in the leeward mark roundings but bad sail handling. Ouch.

Tactics is the sort of chess game that goes on in a race -- how you position your boat relative to the other boats in the fleet. How you use the rules of the road to make other people get out of your way. How you use the way the wind flows off of your sails to slow down the other boat and make them fall further behind. In order to be effective tactically you need to have decent boatspeed and pretty good boathandling, and you need to have your eyes on the whole fleet at once so you can see where you want to be and where the opportunities are to hurt someone else, and where you're at risk of being hurt. Because our boatspeed wasn't great, my attempts to hurt other boats rarely worked. A couple of good moves. And some boneheaded ones. For a while in the second race I felt like a pinball -- other boats were pinning me or sending me in directions I didn't want to go.

Strategy is how to get around the course as fast as you possibly can, in the absence of any other boats. This has to do with windspeed and current and wind direction and where the wind is on the race course. I actually think we did a reasonably good job strategically -- we gained a couple of boats each time by sailing in the right place and having more wind than our neighbors.

Anyway, we got a fourth and a sixth, maybe? or maybe a fifth? The fourth could have been a second, until we screwed up the sail takedown, and then was safely a third until our boatspeed just killed us at the top of the third leg. The sixth or fifth actually felt heroic -- we were dogging it from the beginning, then got bounced between boats in a really bad position, and fought back to pass three boats. But we made a zillion mistakes, in both races. Also, it was about 48 degrees out and raining. And it was wonderful to be out sailing.