Ambition

A week or so ago, I met someone who told me that he wanted to be President of the United States. My natural urge to giggle at such a pronouncement from a twenty-six year old guy was suppressed by the earnestness with which the statement was made, but this earnestness did not save me from awakard conversation when asked the inevitable follow-up, what do I want to be.

The answer to that question used to be easy -- a lawyer -- and people would stop pressing for a more specific answer. And anyway, I used to have much more defined idea of what would come after the JD. I'd spend a couple of years at a law firm doing what lawyers do, then do those things in the government for a few more years, and eventually make my move into the political realm. I didn't really know how this was going to happen, but I knew that it would.

Now two full years after receiving the degree and the bar memberships to make being a "lawyer" a reality, I find myself without a clear answer to the question of what I want to be. I still want to be a lawyer, but this is hardly an answer that shows ambition (earnest or otherwise); I've already met that goal. But what I want to do as a lawyer is probably one of the hardest questions I'm often asked -- my answer varies daily and in response to my audience. A judge? A professor? A federal prosecutor? A politician? A parnter in a law firm? I certainly don't mean to complain about bevy of options that remain available to me, but for the first time in my life, my career path is much less clear. Without the next step in focus, it's very easy to lose the ambition that has driven me this far.

Maybe it wasn't just the earnestness that made me suppress my instinct to giggle, but the sense that even the loftiest goals can provide direction that I sometimes wonder how I've lost.

It's a world of laughter, a world of tears...

I have grown up constantly being warned by my mother and grandmother that they are omnipresent--if I ever were to do something untoward, they would find out through their mysterious powers. And while I still lived within a 100 mile radius of the matriarchs of my family, I often did not want to chance it.

My mother likes to tell a story from her teenage years: Not exactly being the wild and crazy type, my mother and her friends misused some shopping carts as vehicles in the local grocery store parking lot, far from the watchful eyes of my grandmother, only to return home to my grandmother's speech about how embarassed she was to know that her child was making such a scene. This story served its purpose; I spent my formative years in fear that they knew everything that I did. Eight hundred miles away now, I feel relatively secure that their powers don't extend quite this far.

Over Labor Day weekend, I attended a wedding of a high school friend in suburban Detroit. I knew no one at the wedding-- being the sole high school friend of the groom to attend--and I made a brief accquaintance with only a few others. Over this past weekend I opened the door to my friend's apartment to see the bride's cousin sitting at my friend's dinner table, a friend of a friend of my friend, apparently.

Not exactly my mother's ominpresence, but it does make me wonder that maybe eight hundred miles is not quite enough to escape her powers. It's a good thing I behaved at that wedding.

Rooftops

A year and a day

Maybe I do have an addiction. My withdrawal symptoms ebb and flow, but three hundred and sixty-six days since my last published blog post, I find myself starting fresh--a new template, a new title, and a new focus. Well, hopefully that new focus will come in time.

I've been living in Washington, D.C. for almost a year now, trying to sort out a new job, a new group of friends, a new-ish city, and the creeping feeling that adulthood may have unexpectedly arrived at my doorstep. And if writing in this space on occasion does not help with the sorting, at least it will give me the opportunity to share words not followed directly by a formal citation and to gather thoughts that are not billed in six minute increments.