CCIX - heart strings

I once used to keep a photo of this girl I loved with me. Of course, I didn't have her permission, or ask. But I kept it because, because why, because I believed I had the right to keep it. I believed I had the right to look at it every once in a while, to give in to the longing I had to be the object of her gaze, her wonderful, enchanting grin. For her to be mine, in a quiet, solitary moment which no one could take away from me. In a way, I needed it, I needed to possess, to hold, to own, I needed that moment to be mine. Just a god damn photo, but for some reason having it was more valuable than the cost, the shame of keeping something like that, and how silly it really was. Such idleness! And yet I can still remember her face, her grin, without closing my eyes. Every bit of it. So beautiful, she! And would that it tugs no longer at my heart strings.

It's a memory that hasn't resurfaced for so long. I've forgotten it until today. Just now I found a girl's photo that reminded me of that photo, not framed the same, but it brought up the memory, the thought of it, my desire, in just the same way. Oh god, to feel love again, so much longing; I'm not sure I believed it.

I tell myself all the time, to varying degrees of ironic chastisement, that hope springs eternal in the bosom of man. It's funny, and it helps me to laugh in my solitary moments, to get over being defeated. Hope springs eternal! Oh, lord, just a chance.

CCXIII - always, baby

If I had a baby sister, I wonder what she'd be like. Well, she probably wouldn't be very tall. I'm not even taller than my dad. She probably wouldn't be much taller than my older sister, and that's not very much to beat. My mum is not very tall. I suppose she'd look a lot like my older sister, have dark hair, dark eyes, fair skin. I need to give her a name. I'm thinking Hannah is a good name, I'm thinking that would be a name I'd put on my arm, in tall, elegant, sloping script. I think Hannah might work. My dad didn't have a name for her. I don't think my mum has a name for her. I think I have a right to give my baby sister a name, if anybody should, I do. I'd like to give her something unique too, a life, a backstory, a part of being alive for twenty something years. I'm thinking I'll make her a story. I'm thinking, this is my little sister we're talking about. I have a little sister and this is she.

Hi, Hannah. I'm your bigger brother. Maybe in the past I wouldn't be a good one, seeing as how I'm hopeless as a little brother to my elder sister (should that matter?). I'm your bigger brother, and I don't care what the other story is or are, I'm actually your bigger brother, and damn if I don't intend to be the biggest meanest one there is. Fuck, man, that's all there is to it. Hi, mei. I miss you. Hannah. I think it works. You're Hannah now, OK? You get it? You're my baby sister. Wow. Hannah Ho. You live, you get it? You are my baby sister. Hannah, bub ba pup ba doo bah. I just never realised it, that's all. I am an older brother, that is me, you. We -frantic finger gestures- are.

OK, not too tall. Well, probably not. I'm guessing you're sassy. I'm guessing you're a little confused, because you're the youngest, and it took me a long, long time to figure out who I am. Maybe I'm fast forwarding a little to where you must be now, and I mean it's not like we can skip all the past, right? So you're probably a little confused, but I'm basically hoping that you're not lost to me, that between me and you we kinda got something a little figured out, the way that I guess my elder sister and I, me, kor, never really made sense of, never really got to. We lost, that I know, but I'm hoping that somehow you and I made it. I'm really hoping that's true, that that's some part of me in you that would have somehow given you the courage to be a girl, a woman. I'm guessing you're sassy, notwithstanding all that, I'm guessing with my sniping and my bullshit somehow you're a lot funnier and maybe you make me laugh. Very few girls can make kor laugh, you know that? It's true! But I'm guessing you can make me laugh that ridiculous laugh that I make when I'm alone and I'm just fucking enormously tickled. I wonder whether you have that same laugh as I do, because no one else does, that booming, ridiculous, insane laugh. I hope you do! I would be so proud of myself if that were the case.

I'm guessing you're cute as a fucking pin poking through a button on some fucking fuzzy belly of a plush unicorn. God damn it, I bet you're the cutest thing I've ever seen. You know, I've fallen in love twice in my life. Twice, two proper times. I still bet you're the cutest, though, I bet you're the cutest. Hannah, I bet you're cuter than the lot of em put together. I bet you're funny. I wouldn't bet you're smarter than me - I just don't sense it. It's not that I don't believe there isn't anyone smarter than me, it's just that I don't sense it. Of course I can fucking handle having someone smarter than me in the family, what are you, stupid? Sorry, I like saying that a lot, well, at least thinking that out loud. But if you were smarter than me, well, come on now, you know and I know that that would take a lot of smartening. Hey, I'd be your biggest fan if you were. But let's just not say you're the smartest kid in the family, OK? We'll talk it over, we'll leave that for now. I bet you're funny! I'm dying to know that you're funny, kid. I'm fucking dying to know that you're funny.

I bet you'd like Casablanca too. I bet it! Casablanca is great. I only watched it around the time that I was in NUS, you know. I wonder what you'd study. I would miss the hell out of you if you went overseas, or worse, NTU. Fucking NTU. Anyway, I bet you'd love Casablanca. It's this old timer war romance with some real fucking movie lines, man, and a real bit of music too it. You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh, is just a sigh ... Wow, man, I think you'd like all the old timey stuff, same as me. I wonder if you're the purest of all of us, me included. Maybe somehow with you, we'd be closer. Maybe you're the best of us, maybe you bring out the best in us more of the time than anything. I bet you don't give a damn about photos, same as me. Well, this is maybe just wishful thinking.

Hannah, where are you now? Where are you? Can you hear me? Can you feel me reaching out to you, calling you from where I am? Can you hear me being here, holding your hand? Am I, will you stay with me, please, baby sister? I'm sorry, baby, I'm sorry.

I wonder if you'll like me, Hanny, because you know, I think all the kids I know like me. I think you'll like me! But at least that's what I'm thinking. I like to give people nicknames. You can have a funny one, or a cute one, or a cool ass one. But you cannot call me strange nicknames, because it doesn't work like that. Nobody calls me strange names anyway. Wee Jin is pretty fucking strange to begin with. You can fucking call me kor, or mister bear, or something, even Hey Buddy when you're annoyed with me. I would go what and probably glare at you, even though that sounds very mean. I don't want to hear you swear but I guess someday I'll let you do it when I'm around. You probably don't like to drink, but what do I know, right? God, you'd better not get influenced by bad kids. I would kick the fuck out of some punk kid who even thinks about giving you the wrong idea. Yeah, there is no half assed brothering around here. Mm hmm. Oh, boy, that kid who you like, he'd better have something to back his shit up. I do not find him funny, nor smart, nor good enough to be cocky. This is a conversation we're going to have a lot. You won't like it, I think, I'm not your dad. But god damn it, there's going to be some standards around here. Hannah, I'm talking to you, and I'm trying to do it as if you know I'm worth listening to. We're going to have to work that out a little, I think. I don't know how patient I am, sometimes. Usually I have to realise that I need to take a couple steps back so that this weird thing called "patience" can sometimes happen. Oh, you're going to know this about me, and you're going to grudgingly like it. I am a bad, bad tempered kid, man. I ain't gonna yell at you, but if I do, God, just don't, let's just not. I am a bad tempered man, kid, I know it hurts things pretty bad, but I just have this god damn fuse that will get triggered. But all that aside, you've got to like me, that's all there is to it. You've just got to like me, Hanny penny. Wow, it'd be so surreal doing all the stuff I want to do with you. Maybe all this is going to come true.

Kor loves you, OK baby, hugs! Mama would love you so much! Goodnight, Hannah. God bless you, mei.

CCXII - narcissus

It used to be that photos of yourself which weren't too flattering were merely artefacts, merely artifacts, I can't decide which. A little vaguely embarrassing, or maybe slightly endearing given some time, a little, well, what can you do. These things happen, it's just a bad photo of you. Nobody's wonderful all the time, a disney princess in every shot. Maybe with a little less horror and a little more bemusement a small window opens onto your sense of self esteem. But OK, no need to get into neuroses. But I think these days you try to hide these things somewhere they don't see the light of day. God, a bad photo. Let's get rid of the evidence and pretend that only some distilled notions of beauty exist in these momentary frames. I find that so awful. What are you afraid of exactly? What bugs you about so called imperfection? That you don't look beautiful from any other angle and at every other time the cameras aren't turned on? That to the people sitting beside you and whatever they don't know what you look like except through the clinically desensitised square of a photograph? That through eyes you could never look through someone is judging your odd features in some totality of beauty that you could never add up to? Geez, I just find that awful. It's so sad that the concept of photography, how we think of that in the general, has come to only so much. Wondering why some people look fabulous in photographs. It's all so silly. Examine the picture in your heart first. I remember reading that somewhere, or maybe I'm paraphrasing. Real truth and beauty is far above what appears unglamorous. Light doesn't reveal what looks good, it reveals what we should have known.

"Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one's general culture. one's set of values, one's clarity of mind, one's vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life."

"Without the participation of intuition, sensibility, and understanding, photography is nothing. All these faculties must be closely harnessed, and it is then that the capture of a rare picture becomes a real physical delight."

- Henri Cartier-Bresson

CCXI - empire

Kishore Mahbubani, writing on western geopolitics (vis-a-vis China, Russia, the Middle East, etc.) observes,

"What explains these failures? It is surprisingly simple. After two centuries of success, the region’s leaders assume their role is to sustain the expansion of western power. Not one of them has wrapped their heads around the new undeniable reality: the real challenge of the west is to manage decline."

(http://www.mahbubani.net/…/Look%20to%20China%20for%20wisdom…, 21 March 2014)

Perhaps one should be hesitant to carry this sentiment too far past the context it originated in. But it seems to ring a faint, evocative bell, at this time. Perhaps something has broken, perhaps our onlooker's faith in the rationality of things eventually turning out right, given recent events, has gone slightly askance. Or can it simply be that this is, after all, the end-game of western political art; that this is, for the happy fatalist, the inevitable outcome of such as democracy untrammeled, the good/evil polarisation of a two-party republic, the final renaissance of populism, capitalism, individualism, demagoguery, and all that?

If this is true, then perhaps it is not that such and such a man steps into the space, it is that the space was always there for such a man as him. Yet that is perhaps the common, unitary truth behind any form of politics, any form of government over a polis - that in the end the guardian who guards the guardian is at best some kind of man, or men. Socrates argued that it was essential for the guardian class of each polis to be specially educated and nurtured for rule, and rule be reserved to such as these. Wishful thinking, but probably the only good prescription.

The troubling thing, in my view, is that I'm not entirely sure this particular man has realised that he has to, whether he likes it or not, manage something that seems to be a little on the decline.

CCX - at a last moment, realisation

Little birdie, did you not know?
Did you not know that the road you lie on is rough and ugly
That the great hulking shapes that roar by your body are unkind
That while you have grown from so small a birdling
Warmed by the golden, sometimes waning autumn sun
And the horrid rain so cold and discomfiting to your nest of patchwork twigs
Picked and weaved with careful beaking
That the wind that sings grand themes to your kinfolk
Reminding them of grandfathers taking wing on lesser plumes
Now carries tidings of their children, where they lie
Little birdie, did you not know?
That if you miss the sudden turn
That so often you managed so well, and so deftly
Carving so freely your arcing paths in the sky
And near the ground, and past the columns and trees
Tracing paths of joy and being
Little birdie, did you not know?
Your chest of feathers are soft and furry
They glow softly in the evening sunlight
Your dark wings now fold across your eyes
And the life you once held spreads now to the earth
That the sequence of your final tumble
Spiralling, collapsing, crumbling
Will not be mourned
Little birdie, did you not know?
Such as you now know, little birdie.

CCIX - stranger things

I find it so frustrating trying to explain Latin American literature. It's inexplicable.

In a way I've always felt frustrated trying to describe things. It's a frustration that has many sources. First, you're trying to describe an idea, a concept. I don't think it's a failure of the English language itself, but in general, there are some things which defy easy description. I think most of the time what we're looking for is just that, short, clear, precise description. That's the holy trinity. If it's done just right it has a self propagating kind of assuredness about it. A bit, one-eighth bites, just enough to grasp someone's attention, good enough to get the essential core idea across, maybe even a little to get someone to think of the nascent possibilities.

And I think that the older I've gotten, the more I want to understand something right down to its core, right down to what it essentially means. I want to know it, I want to hold it in my mind like I hold a stick in my hand. I want to feel it, grip it, heft its weight, sense its range of motion in my wield, swing it around a little, feel the world bend a little around its whip. I just feel like that's how I want to know things. Put two and two together once in a while. Think the way these things should be thought. But (and!) it's hard, and it's even harder after that to do justice in a word.

Don't get me wrong, I love describing things. Way down deep in my soul there's something that gets very satisfied when explaining something, and doing it right. I feel when I was younger there was probably something like that in me, but I couldn't always do it right, and that was usually both a little embarrassing and a little frustrating. It didn't come from a desire to be smarter than the next guy, nor to be a little stranger, nor to be deserving of a little more attention. And I'm glad it wasn't these things. In some ways I think it's a curiosity that my books have given me. Books can give a lot of things, and all you have to do is sit back and think a little. Sometimes I wonder what people actually think when they read what I've written. It's a little hard to imagine that the ideas that sprout out of their minds are the same ones that I have; after all, everyone's wired a little differently. We're not reading code with the same programming language and instructions, we're all a little different. What's evoked in each of us? The prejudices, memories, lingering tastes, blind spots, haunted senses. What music we listen to. I mean, it's pretty incredible. Nobody reads the same thing out of the same written words.

And sometimes ideas are very complex. Some ideas take a lot of introductory understanding. It's hard to describe a car to someone who's never seen a wheel, so in the same way it's hard to describe, I suppose, Kafka to someone who's never really been introduced to the core philosophical concepts. You can't just hand someone five thousand lego bricks and ask him to build a battlemech. I'm not even saying Kafka is a complete car. But not everyone has a really robust, intuitive sense of, say, validity and soundness. You know, I've always felt that the most dangerous thing in the world is to draw the wrong conclusions from given premises. That, and the danger of mis-describing something, are basically the evils which the whole house of philosophy was built to fend against. The most important thing in the whole wide world is to correct incorrectly drawn conclusions, no matter how strongly someone feels about them. The problems philosophy usually runs into is that a) certain premises which philosophy relies on are essentially contested, and b) some core concepts are metaphysical, so that it may seem as if the "best" and most commonly accepted answers are given short shrift, while really our dear philosophy people aren't able to produce sufficiently beautiful (short, clear, precise) answers in return, and they claim that they'll never be able to. So that seems to give us nothing, which is more beautiful than the deception, but not always. I think what they label absurdist existentialism is basically a paradigm example of this sort of philosophical terminus.

But you know, that's beautiful, if you can live without having to embrace something. It's not easy, but that doesn't mean such nothingness is meaningless. Better to be a "fool"? Well, I can't say. Camus discusses the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was from the old Greek legends, a king (there were many kingdoms during the period these legends were set in) who was supposedly very intelligent, very curious and perhaps a little audacious. I kinda get the impression he was a little morally ambivalent. Well, in the Greek mythology conception, morality is basically heroic deeds and worship of the gods. Anyway, Sisyphus does a bunch of things which infuriates the gods, makes them look foolish. That's the one thing they really don't like! The dead can't go to hell because he tricks and binds Death, something like that. Hades gets pretty angry. They catch him and force him to roll a fucking boulder up a hill. When it reaches the top it rolls back down. It's an eternal sort of punishment, a warning to fucking humans not to mess with the gods. In a way it echoes Prometheus, who is chained to a rock while an eagle eats his liver, which grows back every day. Anyway Camus says, well, we're all like that a little, really, it's an analogy of ourselves. We go through these incredibly taxing routines, and some of us don't really realise the futility of it all in a way. But Camus also said, sure, of course Sisyphus is wise enough to recognise the irony of his labour, the asinine futility. Roll a fucking rock up a hill, only to have it roll down. But Camus says, hold on, once he's reached the top, he's man over himself again. His feet plop down the sides of the hill after the boulder, and in that ease he's fully alive, fully aware, cognisant of the triumph of that moment. I was riding my bicycle one night. Rolling downhill, not having to fucking pedal, I realised exactly what that felt like. I don't know that it was "worth" it to have pedaled all the way up that hill, but that moment of pure recognition felt like a special, purified through fire, kind of breaking the n^th wall. Maybe that's all existentialism is, really.

And I mean what kind of music do you listen to? Shit, man. That's a wonderful example. Some music is simply way too hard to grasp. A lot of classical is like that. Some people just don't like rock the way that I shun balloons. Too unpredictable, too rude. Hell, it's pretty impossible for me to identify a Miles Davis tune. What does that make me? I don't know. Music sounds different at each time of the day. In the evening, jazz makes sense, not while the sun shines. It's bizarre. What does that make us? We're not computers and programs, moods matter. What is that, what is mood? It's so bizarre.

Latin American literature is impossible. I love it all, and I don't think I'll ever be able to describe it. There's no way to give an accurate summary of Rulfo, Borges, Marquez (might be the easiest of the lot, but still), Llosa, Cortazar. The last guy is maybe the best. I thought Rulfo and Marquez were the best, but I don't know what I don't know and I know nothing. Cortazar might be the best. Why? I can't explain it. You have to read it, and not only that, you have to fail pretty hard. Then you have to go away for three years, and read him again. That's what I did. I get him, but barely, not very well, but enough to see the little strings. Hopscotch. Have you ever heard of a book that could be read once through, and also by a certain determined sequence of chapters, 1, 27, 2, 28, 3, 46, and something like that? Christ. Cortazar might be the best. Characters both self-aware and ridiculously self-complicated, entangling with others who kind of are a little insane as well. The best thing about really good books is in my opinion the way that separate individuals appear to "understand" each other, and then whether these fictions of understanding are believable. Take A Hundred Years of Solitude. The strangest, most withdrawn, most singular characters, surrounded by other individuals who grasp what they are, internally come to terms (or simply have from the beginning), and leave them to be. How is it you understand me? I've always felt a little strange in that sense, that it was just an impossible thing for anyone to get me. I embrace that a little. A sense of otherness, a not-here kind of feeling. Just enough to stay true to a little something within.

Trust me, Latin American stuff is the best. Why? I can't tell you. I don't really want to. It's a secret, actually. But I'm telling you, it's the best. You should never expect me to explain it. I can't, and you deserve better. It is the best.

CCVIII - on lawyering

I'll be honest, I think lawyering is bullshit.

That's actually the number one answer I should be giving when I'm asked why I'm out of commercial practice. But I don't, because I have a very advanced idea of what bullshit is, and I hate to gripe, for many reasons, chief of which being that I think to gripe is to be extremely ungrateful. But let's look at all the things I didn't like about it.

OK well, at my first job I worked in a pretty cramped office. I had a computer, a desk, and high bookshelves, stuck in a wedge end facing the center of a circular floor. I think it sucked, I think it was a miserable place to sit and work. The chair I had, well, that we all had, was awful, it probably looked old when it was made, and that was probably in the early nineties. That's good in a sense, I didn't want to stay there at all. I remember sleeping on the stiff carpet once, over a weekend. That doesn't exactly make for pleasant memories, I suppose. But walking around the floor, it was a pretty sombre place, a little cold and hushed. I did not like it. I did not like the meeting rooms, well, most meeting rooms anywhere are pretty terrible, funnily enough, and I did not like the so-called partners' rooms. There was just something about that office that didn't scream fun, and coming from the university, where we were used to having beautiful spacious rooms, large tables, high windows, and corridors and halls in the pre-war style, well. It was like living in an enclosed tenement, next to crotchety landlords. I did not like it, and I felt bad for people who had been there longer than I had, which is a little strange way to be for a first year associate. When I drive by the tower I give it the finger, for old times' sake.

OK, next, I did not like three out of four of the partners I worked with. We worked for all of them at once, and immediately you might think, Oh God, that sounds awful in practice, and by and large it is, when you're at the plump end of the paddle. We had to fill in hours, which was extremely not fun. If I had one thing I would never do again in my fucking life it would be filling in my god forsaken hours. I would rather clean toilets than fill in hours. Part of the reason we filled in hours was for the partners to figure out how we were partitioned out. That is a fucking lame reason. Trying to fix a workload coordination problem between partners by having your employee report his functional hours is in my view getting it ass-backwards, given that time-spent is a function of multiple variables, including not least difficulty, efficiency and appetite. In my view it's impossible for any employee to objectively or accurately represent to one partner the task given to him by another partner; conversely, it's arguably far more effective for partners to either inform each other of the amount of work partitioned out to each employee, or to be more or less responsible for assignments to selected employees. Of course, the first option requires diligence and transparency, and the nature of a partner's work or preference for employee may make the second option unpalatable. In short I think the pool system referred to here requires far better partners' coordination than was apparent at my first job.

Of course, the hours system is also a way of checking each employee's, broadly speaking, efficiency, and for partners to figure out how much clients can or should be billed. Both of these two things is, in my opinion, rubbish. Efficiency in legal work is not something that can be intelligently measured (except in conjunction with other considerations, and then strictly only as a minor factor) by hours spent. Work must chiefly be assessed by the quality of the product, and forcing employees to think in terms of duration, imposed terms of duration, mind you, is in my view counter productive to a very great degree. We are intelligent people, and we broadly know whether or not we are working well in any set of circumstances. Of course, the nature of practice is extremely difficult, but I strongly doubt any notion that we have no clue about time-efficiency. I mean, come on, we've done exams all our lives under timed conditions, are you kidding me? We get it, trust me a little, OK. Well, you can guess whether or not time is a factor the partners tend to emphasise when it comes to efficiency. As such, this sort of emphasis would encourage associates themselves to be selective with their reported hours, and that would be stupid on so many levels. And conversely let me tell you this, it takes a lot of inefficient struggling to get to a certain competency. That's actually essential, believe it or not. We need time, in somewhat nursery conditions, to figure it out.

As for per-hours' billing, it's all rubbish anyway. It's estimated, given a fee cap, then the partners' hours are somehow magically massaged to make it look as if the partners spend as much time, if not more, than the associates on each file. OK, you gotta play your game, I get it. But you know, all things considered, as a reason for filling in hours this becomes rubbish.

A vast amount, a vast amount of time is spent waiting around court to be admitted into the judges' chambers. I don't even want to go into it. Every damned hearing means time wasted. I hated that feeling, it gave me a nervous, resigned anxiety. With the advent of technology this felt stupider with each passing day. I remember once taking a taxicab in this sort of mood to court, and hearing the Gypsy Kings on the fucking radio. It changed my life, man, it snapped me out of a funk, a fugue.

Anyway as for the three partners I did not enjoy working with, they were demanding, unpleasant, and curt with their time. That's fine, but I did not enjoy it. Cao Cao once wrote, 疑人不用, 用人不疑, which is to say, if you doubt someone, don't employ him, and if you employ someone, don't doubt him. Henry L. Stimson said much the same in 1945 when he wrote, as the US Secretary of War, to his President,

"The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust."

I'll admit, I was a pretty terrible associate in my first year. But you know, I think the firm could have been more responsive. There are reasons why a first year associate struggles, these aren't fucking mysteries. But I guess it's fair enough that if at first I don't impress someone, then it becomes harder, all things considered, to turn out right in their eyes. I get it. In my mind, I know that I'm pretty bad in my first year at things, just like in school. I wish I'd done better, but I hadn't, so that's the truth of it. It helps to have a little faith in people is all I'm saying.

There was also another so-called consultant in the firm who was basically the lady boss, and boy she acted like it. Working for her made my skin crawl. At some point she actually told me and another associate, well I was doing this just to test you, and you guys did a good job, you passed the test.

As for expenditure, well, at some point our claims for transport allowance home was curtailed. That kind of blew it for me. I mean, we're not fucking around here, we too want to go home, and that goddamn eighteen or twenty dollars these guys weren't willing to give out is just pathetic in my view. And not to mention that disbursements can and should be claimed from a client, given that a judgment sum usually includes a small mention for disbursements. That kind of blew it for me.

The hours and the pay, well, it ain't nothing. I get better of each, easy. I never regretted neither. And I need my own time out of work. Work isn't important enough to define me, and it never will. Most days I went home asking myself, did I earn the two hundred and fifty dollars of pay that I'm owed for today? And if I did, fuck it, that's all I wanted to know.

As for the good work we did, I had a couple of pro bono matters that I remembered well. But given the rather meagre standing I had at the firm and the attendant pressures, so much for it, you know what I mean?

Did I become a better lawyer? Yes. Would I have a better run of it now if I went at it again? I'm pretty sure of it. Is it worth my time, is it worth me getting back in it? Absolutely not. Commercial practice is the pits and little in the type of industry that was the subject matter of disputes was essentially interesting. Now law school was tremendously interesting, and as a student it was about the most fun thing I could have done. But lawyering was bullshit. I'm not cynical, as you can see. I have my reasons, and that makes me a critic, not a cynic.

The industry is in a pretty weird state at the moment, as the middle section of lawyers has gone completely thin. It goes to show you that the golden days have gone, and that in the past, being a practicing lawyer for the long haul was a far more palatable notion than it has been for recent years. Take efforts to increase the numbers of graduating students with moderately unenthusiastic growth, exports and all that internationally and you get the sort of conundrum we apparently face today, where there aren't enough spaces for first year associates, but the third to tenth year lawyers have disappeared. Well, I'm on the outside looking in, chuckling sarcastically. So screw you, practice, you were bad for me, and it doesn't take much of a man to know himself well enough to figure that out.