A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-December, 2001
Wednesday, December 12, 2001
5:30 PM. My first night in my apartment went okay. My bed was comfortable to sleep on, but I woke up at 4 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep.
I didn’t have a cold, but at times this morning, I felt queasy and wondered if I had a stomach virus. Before I left for Nova, all dressed up in a shirt and tie, dress pants and shoes, I thought I was going to throw up.
But now I think it was nervousness about seeing Pat Jason. Once I met with her, I felt relieved and even kind of exhilarated. Pat will be around on Monday and Tuesday of next week.
On Monday at 8:45 AM, I need to go over to Human Resources to do my paperwork. At noon is the law school Christmas party.
This Sunday, I should get to the hooding ceremony at 12:30 PM, half an hour before it starts. They’ve set up a table for me, and I’ll hand out the PLI (Professional Law Institute) materials on the Multistate Bar Exam and introduce myself to students and faculty. Pat said I don’t need to wear a gown.
She gave me the number of Hillary Cleary, who does the bar exam workshops. I may want her to run the whole program for the February exam, as Pat agreed with me that it’s better not to do something fast and dumb.
Barry Goldstein was terminated last week after “abandoning” his job by not coming in to proctor an exam, something everyone at the law school has to do.
So there will be no transitional memo, and Billie Jo will go over Barry’s computer and find out if there are files I can use. They hope to give me a box of materials, but I may be creating a new program out of whole cloth.
My office won’t be in the library but in 180, a little room in the corridor where the classrooms are. It’s somewhat isolated. On Monday they’ll let me set up my office and see about getting me a laptop.
Pat seems lovely. She’ll be my supervisor, though she said that as the program evolves, Gail Richmond, the associate dean for academic affairs, may also be my supervisor. I left the law school building – Leo Goodwin Hall – feeling excited.
I walked over to the Parker Building, where I hugged Steven and Santa – Maria was on vacation – and said hi to various faculty in Liberal Arts, like Ed Steve and David McNaron. Everyone there seemed to know about my job at the law school.
Although I wanted to see Ben, he was busy with end-of-term appointments. I did have some leftovers from the Liberal Arts Division’s Christmas party.
Then I went to see the brand new five-story Alvin Sherman Library, which, along with the multi-story garage next door, opened just this past Saturday. The library – the biggest one in all of Florida – looks like a terrific resource.
Then I came back here. As of now, FedEx hasn’t tried to redeliver the packages they attempted to deliver while we were out yesterday after 4:30 PM. One of us has stayed here all day. Dad went out a couple of times, and this morning at Walmart, I bought some needed items. I keep spending a lot of money and just seem to keep having to buy more stuff.
I exchanged the mislabeled twin sheet for the futon for a full-size fitted sheet, but they overcharged me for a belt I bought, so I need to go back to the store.
While Dad was out early this morning, I managed to find time to exercise to a Body Electric video using my new weights. I also called up some credit card companies to report my change of address.
When I returned from Nova, the woman from State Farm called to say my driving record checked out, so I went to their office and paid the premiums on my auto and renter’s policies. I still need to get a Florida driver’s license; I’d forgotten about that until now.
I’m afraid Dad was a little bored today. His front tooth is loose, which is a big problem. But he did say that today was the first day he felt he was on vacation.
I think one reason I felt a little sick during the day – even a little in the afternoon – is that with things slowing down, I had time to think about the enormity of the changes in my life.
Walking to State Farm, I recognized my former next-door neighbor, Leslie and her dachshunds from the back, and called out her name.
She was surprised to see me and said how good I looked. (Santa and others at the Parker Building told me the same thing, which surprises me, as I think I aged a lot over the past year, given all my anxiety problems.)
Leslie introduced me to her newest dachshund, and after we hugged goodbye, I told her I would see her around.
Over the next couple of months, as I begin work and gradually get used to living here again, I’ll have a higher comfort level.
But even now I already feel more at home here than I ever did in Arizona.
Sunday, December 16, 2001
5 PM. Thanks to Vincent’s calling me back at 10:30 PM last night and my talking to him for nearly two hours, I barely got any sleep.
I’m stressed out from today’s hooding ceremony and not looking forward to my first day of work tomorrow.
Dean Harbaugh told me I should “relax” and “enjoy yourself.” I’ll try, but doing that would be hard for anyone in my position, and it’s not easy for me.
I didn’t eat enough before I left for the Signature Grand at 12:20 PM, and when I got home nearly three hours later, I felt weak with hunger and dehydrated, with a headache from tension that is still with me.
There have been so many changes in my life that it would be amazing if I came through this totally unscathed.
Everyone at NSU Law is very nice, and the hooding ceremony was moving, if a bit long, but meeting so many new people at one time is . . . well, I’ll resort to the word stressful again.
I know I need to take some of the advice in the platitudinous speech by the guest speaker, Judge Melanie May of Broward’s innovative Drug Court, who’s been appointed to the Fourth District Court of Appeals. She repeated familiar aphorisms about success that nevertheless made sense.
Afterwards, during the champagne reception, I felt kind of foolish sitting out at a table with a nameplate “Richard Grayson, ARP Director” and trying to hand out the PLI materials for the multistate exam to graduates who mostly did not want to think about the bar exam today.
One woman told me, “I think you’re mean to remind people they have this hurdle on a day for celebration.” Her tone made it clear that she was kidding, but I felt foolish anyway.
Jane Cross, who sat next to me during the ceremony, knew I felt weird, and this was clearly something she thought I shouldn’t be doing.
Apparently the Dean isn’t that concerned about the February bar exam, but that seems to be Pat’s priority for me.
I’ve already sensed the crosscurrents and conflicts I’m facing. Jane said I’m going to have to decide what my priorities are on a job where everyone will have a different idea of what I should be doing.
As Dean Harbaugh said, the first few weeks I’ll be learning – although Jane told me I need to start by setting up the ARP teaching assistants for the spring classes.
I’m not used to wearing a suit, though I suspect that as time goes on, I’ll get more comfortable in one. Still, tomorrow I don’t plan to wear a jacket and instead will put on just a dress shirt, tie, dress pants and dress shoes.
As for Vincent, I’m less taken with him after our long conversation last night.
He wanted my advice on how to deal with his friends in San Francisco who think he’s “an intimacy junkie” and kind of weird.
Apparently, Dennis Cooper told people this lie about his turning down Vincent, who supposedly begged him for sex or something like that.
As Bill told Vincent when he got back to Memphis: “Why do you care what people like them think?”
My respect for Bill, already high, got even higher when I heard his response. I couldn’t do much better than that.
I don’t know why Vincent feels he needs so many allies in the literary world, and I heard more about Dennis Cooper, Dale Peck and others than I care to.
But I didn’t cut Vincent off, mostly out of genuine feeling for him and partly because I was interested in this gossip.
After getting off the phone with Vincent, I took an Ambien, but I slept less than four hours and didn’t feel all that great today.
Reflecting on our conversation now, I feel Vincent was a little thoughtless in taking up my time when he knows that I’m going through big changes in my life.
But of course, he’s told me time and again how self-involved he is.
I’m also coming to think he’s not as smart as I once thought: Vincent didn’t realize that Broward County was close to Miami.
I guess I’m grateful for the call, which told me things about Vincent that his emails don’t. I still care for him, of course, but I’ve got more important things to do than deal with Vincent’s problems. Maybe he is an intimacy junkie.
He told me he made mixtapes for Dennis (who never acknowledged receiving them) and other friends, so I’m not as special as I had thought.
Even though I’m attracted to Vincent, it would be a bad idea to get involved sexually with him. I want to stay friends, but I need to lower the intensity of our relationship.
Wish me luck tomorrow at work.
Monday, December 17, 2001
7 PM. I survived my first day working at NSU Law, and I feel tired but also excited.
Last night I slept great, but tonight I feel very keyed-up. I’ve got to wind down somehow.
Today was obviously atypical. I didn’t exercise, eat normally or read the paper, and I was at the school from 8 AM to 5:30 PM.
While I feel overwhelmed, I also think that Nova Law School is a good place to work, and I will have a lot of support there. Slowly I will familiarize myself with the job.
And I feel at home at the university, where I already know a bunch of people. This morning, when I went to do my paperwork at Human Resources, a former student, Diana Ortiz-Rios, helped me get out of the office quickly. And this afternoon Lynn Wolf, with whom I taught in Liberal Arts, came by to see her husband Paul Joseph and seemed glad to see me.
As I left this evening, Dean Harbaugh – Joe – was also going home, and he continues to be friendly and supportive.
Pat Jason is kind, and this afternoon, following the Christmas party luncheon, Mark Padin and Jane Cross were very helpful.
There’s so much I have to do, but as Mark said, I need to prioritize; obviously, my first concern is getting the ARP teaching assistants together for next semester.
I’ve got to email all the faculty teaching Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, and Property and ask them for their suggestions for TAs.
Already I have a couple of professors who say they don’t want ARP teaching assistants, but I already schmoozed one of them, Angela Gilmore, and I’ll try to convince her to participate.
I met so many new people today, although I’ve learned the names of only a few of them: Richard, the facilities director; Paula, the administrative person who did the Law Center HR stuff; Gail Richmond, the academic associate dean; and lots of faculty and staff people.
But I got set up with my laptop, which locks into its port, and that is my office computer. The print on Outlook Express, the email program, is hard for me to read, so I’ll have to find out how to change it.
Billie Jo got me a box of Barry Goldstein’s stuff, most of which was totally irrelevant; he must have been a total fuck-up who did very little.
Mark xeroxed a lot of the materials he used at his former academic support jobs. (He followed Jane into the position of academic support director at St. Thomas Law School.)
I need to put some structure into the program, but I’ve got to decide what my priorities are.
Although I report to Pat, she’s never run an academic support program, so I want to rely more on Jane, Mark, Steve Friedland and other faculty members who have experience in the field.
I’ve got so much to learn, but I’m a voracious infovore, and over the next year, I’ll manage to immerse myself in material.
The whole field of academic support in law schools is only fifteen to twenty years old, and I want to be a part of it because there’s a future there. This could be my niche.
At 6 PM, I met Dad at Gaetano’s pizzeria for dinner. He leaves early in the morning.
I have a lot to contend with in my personal life as well as at work, but I can’t do right now.
Tuesday, December 18, 2001
8:30 PM. After spending the last couple of hours reading today’s New York Times, I’ve relaxed a bit.
It’s going to be a difficult adjustment to my new life, but I’m pretty confident I can adjust without going through the kind of major life trauma that marked last fall, winter, and spring as I struggled with anxiety and depression.
For one thing, I’m alert to the signals, and for another, I have learned some mechanisms to control stress, including taking drugs when I need them.
When I think of how much I’ve accomplished in the last two days, or in the last week, I feel good about myself.
Yes, there are nagging problems. I have yet to get mail at the apartment. But I learned that’s because I didn’t fill out a change of address form, so I mailed one to the Apache Junction post office on my lunch hour.
Mom sent me three packages of mail that they are probably holding, and I told her to keep what comes until I tell her to send them.
Another worry is when I put the key in the ignition, the car won’t start unless I keep moving the steering wheel and it somehow clicks. So far it’s always started eventually, but it’s worrying because I’m always afraid the key won’t move, and I’ll be stuck somewhere.
Then there are more minor adjustments. Dad left early this morning, and as much as I’ve always liked being alone, I miss his support. I hugged him heartily when he departed at 7 AM.
Today at work was quieter, but there were problems there as well. I thought I’d lost my notebook with everything I’d written in it for the session with Mark and Jane, but after Richard told me they’ve had problems with people who clean the office, I found the notebook in a box.
These people had also moved the plug so that the power source from the computer went off because it was under my chair’s wheel. Steve from Computer Services got me a surge protector that solved that problem.
My voice messages are somehow being sent to Lawyering Skills and Values and their poor secretary, Mary Kay. Richard called Telecommunications to try to rectify this problem.
There’s so much left to do, but I did do a lot of emailing today. I wrote individual notes to each of the 16 professors teaching Property, Civ Pro, and Con Law next term and got responses from about half a dozen of them.
Either they want me to find teaching assistants for them or they suggested a student or students for the position. I then wrote these students.
I also wrote to Chad Power, a fall-semester ARP TA and the Student Bar Association vice president, whom I met in October, and to my old undergraduate student Jared Spingarn, whose name I saw on several ARP sign-in sheets.
I wrote to a few other people on campus, and I contacted Marty Peters at Iowa, who got the position as academic support director there that Mark Padin was a finalist for.
I also thanked Mark for all the help he’s given me, and I talked to Jane a couple of times.
So I made good use of my time today. It’s just that I’m not used to working eight hours a day.
As unsettling as living from place to place without a job was, from mid-May until now, I had unlimited freedom to do all the stuff I needed to do and to leisurely loll about coffee bars and fast-food places.
Instead of trying to fill big gaps of time, I now have to squeeze in stuff like my shopping trip to Albertsons, which I did after dinner. But I guess I’ll adjust to that eventually. I’ll learn to cut out stuff like TV-watching and instead read the paper in the morning, and I’ll find time for email as well.
Vincent wrote that Dennis’s ex, Michael, admitted he made up the story about Vincent and Dennis. Oddly – to me – Vincent was ready to wreak vengeance on Dennis, but he’s still fond enough of Michael to forgive him and accepted his apology.
All of a sudden Vincent seems very naive to me. He told me he’s writing something about South Florida and reread “I Survived Caracas Traffic” to use the Miami buildings mentioned in it. But of course that story is set in 1986, before South Beach became trendy.
I doubt if Vincent knows the difference between Miami and Miami Beach. He asked me if a snooty gay couple would stay at the Fontainebleau (of course not) or if there were trailer parks in Broward County (there used to be, but they’re mostly gone now).
It’s weird how my view of Vincent as this incredibly sophisticated guy has changed, and I wonder how good the book he’s working on now is. His first novel was autobiographical, so it rang true.
I know from experience that it’s dangerous and foolhardy to set your story in a milieu you don’t know. Given his background, Vincent obviously knows a lot about things I know little about. But I’m 17 years older and have lived in worlds he’s unfamiliar with.
After I sent him a New York Times article on books written by former sex workers, Vincent said he won’t read the Times because he doesn’t “want to be tainted by their false worldview.”
Although I was tired when I came home from work, it’s 9 PM now, and while I don’t feel sleepy, I definitely have become more relaxed.
Wednesday, December 19, 2001
7 PM. I’m feeling more relaxed tonight as I’m learning to manage my time better. With the law school now mostly deserted, I can relax a little and not worry about things.
I slept from 10:30 PM till 4:50 AM, which seems to be my basic wake-up time now. Before I went to school this morning, I managed to exercise, read most of the New York Times, and do two loads of laundry. I still got to school before 9 AM.
I left work at 4:30 PM, but since then, I’ve been reading a lot of material on academic assistance programs put together by LSAC, so I guess I’m still working while at home.
I’m trying to read everything I can about law school academic support programs. I’ve printed out web pages of various law school programs, as well as a list of books I want to get for my library.
I’m pretty sure I can become an insider in this field if I read and experience enough.
Marty Peters asked if she’d see me at AALS in New Orleans. She was on her way to Gainesville to see Don, with whom she’s writing a book on MBTI and law school learning.
After hearing from some more professors by email, I see I’m going to have to recruit many of the ARP teaching assistants myself.
I also need to tread lightly with some professors. It appears that faculty support is the prime indicator of the success of an ASP (academic support program), so I need to marshal all my political skills.
I heard from Jared, who told me that ARP needs to use more hypos and practice exams. Mark Padin told me Jared was one of the best students in his Lawyering Skills and Values class. It was good to talk with Mark, who stopped by my office for about half an hour.
I see that I can use these weeks to get adjusted to the place, but I’ll start to really enjoy the job when the faculty and students are around.
While I still have fears about dealing with all this new stuff, like training TAs and doing my own skills workshops, I’ll be stretching my capabilities, which is always a good thing.
I’m confident I can do this job.
Wow, did I just say that?
At 50, I’m starting a new career, and I feel myself excited by the possibilities.
I bet I’m going to want to stay late at school, the way I liked hanging around LaGuardia Hall as an undergraduate – because it’s the place where I feel part of a community.
Although I see the pressures involved in this job, I don’t foresee myself getting anxious. Stressed, yes – but stress is not pathological.
Essentially I’ve got the chance to create a program that could be helpful to both students and faculty members. As I said, it’s exciting.
I had time to exchange emails with Vincent, who still seems like the great guy he always was to me. I guess it’s just that my infatuation with him has worn off, and a deeper, more complicated feeling of friendship is taking over.
Kevin Pass wrote that he’s leaving Los Angeles to visit his family in Florida, and we exchanged holiday greetings.
Ronna wrote they had a big Chanukah bash for forty people, and Abigail wrote, “DEAR RiCHiE, i LOVE YOU – ABiGAiL,” to which I responded, “DEAR ABiGAiL, i LOVE YOU, TOO – RiCHiE.”
Because it’s a little lonely at home, I don’t mind spending time at the office even though there’s almost no one around at school. Still, I’m feeling okay.