A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late January, 2002
Thursday, January 24, 2002
7:30 PM. While taking my walk up and down SW 30th Street to Pine Island Road a couple of hours ago, I realized I was obsessing about my job and not listening to NPR’s All Things Considered.
And as I thought about my problems at work and my doubts, it suddenly struck me how lucky I was to have the luxury of worrying about work.
A year ago, I had terrible anxiety symptoms every day and didn’t know if I would ever get better. I didn’t have a full-time job. I was living in a place where I didn’t really feel comfortable.
And here I am now, walking along in a t-shirt and shorts on the edge of evening in January in South Florida, relatively free of any anxiety – I didn’t take a Triavil till an hour ago, and last night I slept from 10 PM to 5 AM, though I did take half an Ambien at 2 AM – and I felt rested and healthy.
Tomorrow a paycheck will be deposited in my checking account, and I don’t have to keep relying on cash advances or student loans.
I feel safe and have gotten over the mugging in Mesa.
So what am I kvetching to myself for? Because, like the scorpion who dooms himself by killing the . . . I forget what animal it is, a frog or a turtle . . . that is ferrying him across the river, “It’s my nature”?
Look, I may not be an ideal fit for this job. But I can always find another job. Certainly I need to do what Susan and her husband kept urging me to do last year about the anxiety symptoms: to be present with myself.
I felt weird because at 4 PM, I decided to go to that faculty get-together, where I felt like an outsider. I had to stand because there were no more chairs at the table, and when I contributed to the conversation, I felt like I was saying stupid things.
Well, next week I won’t go to faculty events like that, if only because I have other appointments.
I do like talking to students, whether it’s counseling Mike, going over papers with Cindy and Beatriz, or working with Manu and a new TA Steve Friedland hired, Donny, to find a time and room for their ARP session – all of which I did today.
It’s also nice having access to a computer all day so I can write to Sat Darshan or place a personal ad on PlanetOut (looking for friends, not a boyfriend).
Some days I’m bound to feel awkward, and I can’t really blame snobbish law professors. I’m not a faculty member, and I never really wanted to be one at a law school, as the workload and pressure seemed too much for me.
Of course, I envy professors their freedom. As Kathy Cerminara said when she stopped by my office this morning, she dislikes keeping “administrators’ hours” as director of the Master of Health Law program: “As a law professor, I was used to coming to work at noon.”
Well, I stayed in the office from 9 AM till 5 PM today, with an hour off for lunch.
If I had more of a life of my own apart from work, I’d probably feel better.
In some ways, yes, life would have been simpler if I were still at my family’s home in Apache Junction and doing adjunct work.
I’d have more free time but no place to call my own, and I’d be much closer to bankruptcy, and I’d be in Arizona, where even Sat Darshan decries the winter desert chill that goes through your bones.
If I were still adjuncting in Arizona, I’d be feeling I had no hopes of ever getting a decent job. Now that I have that “decent job,” I complain about it.
Perhaps it’s the isolation. The faculty offices are upstairs, and the administration offices are across the hall.
When I was a staff attorney at CGR, the UF Law faculty looked down on us, but we were an us: there were other people, like Liz and Tim and the other staff attorneys, who were in the same position, and I was a part of an office, a family.
Here, I’m an office of one. But I am near the students, and I guess I’m coming to view them as my primary constituents.
This morning, one day after putting up the “Richard Grayson, ARP Director” sign on my door, Jonathan hung up my UF Law diploma in my office so students will stop asking me if I have a law degree.
I really like Jonathan and Jessica and Richard and all the other non-law employees at school. So maybe I’m starting to feel at home at NSU Law.
But I still have doubts about my ability to master this job. Nobody’s criticized me yet, and because the term started only a few weeks ago, there hardly seems enough time to do so. I just don’t feel I have a sense of direction.
Jane Cross’s email to the ARP Committee talked about them discussing the program “under Richard’s leadership.”
I guess I don’t yet know how to be a leader. But maybe it’s a chance to learn.
Saturday, January 26, 2002
8:30 PM. I’ve just come back from spending two hours in my office, where I read some of the Sunday Times, emailed Tom, and tacked up on my bulletin board reproductions of colorful paintings by Warhol, Stuart Davis, Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan.
Gail Richmond and Phyllis Coleman were in the lobby when I came in; I notice they’re often wearing sweatshirts.
By the time I came out of the law school, it was a gorgeous, humid night, and I felt so comfortable walking around in shorts and a t-shirt.
Maybe it’s all about my becoming comfortable.
Coming home on I-95 from Fort Lauderdale last night at around this time, I thought: This feels like home.
When I reported the feeling to Dad later that night, he said that South Florida still felt like home to him, too. He’d like to come here in April or May after his cataract surgery.
Dad liked the surgeon, whom he met on Friday; the doctor was born in Brooklyn, is Jewish, and is a three-time Jeopardy winner, so he’s smart – and he’s performed over 700 cataract operations.
Dad has to go back this week for the measuring of his eye, and he hopes for an appointment as soon as possible because the blurriness in the eye makes him dizzy and nauseated.
I told him about work and my evening at the Stonewall Library. It was nice to hug Fred, who was in charge of the event and whom I greeted when I walked in.
About forty people were at the library. More, I’m sure, were in the Gay and Lesbian Community Center’s hall for “Hoe-Down Bingo Night.”
It looked like only five of the people there were women, and nearly all of the attendees looked older than I.
The reader was an honored elder (at 60) of the Fort Lauderdale gay community, a man who’d written (and self-published) an enormous autobiography.
I actually forgot his name – who’s the old guy here? – but he’d been a theoretical physicist who wrote his first book on relativity, a philosophy professor denied tenure by MIT in the 1970s, a psychoanalyst, a late-blooming early gay activist in Boston, and an amateur opera singer, as well as a great philanthropist.
No doubt he is a wonderful person who’s lived a vital and rich life. The passages he read – suggested by questions from the audience – were very much those of a logical, plodding mind: occasionally interesting but very long-winded.
Still, I was grateful to be out with people who knew and could chat about Allan Bloom and Victor Herbert.
Fred, who got Vincent’s novel from Patrick, said that if Vincent is going to visit me, I should “plant the seed in him” about reading at the library. (I wouldn’t touch that line with a ten-foot dildo.)
The Stonewall Library is a good organization. After paying my $25 dues (I already belong to the GLCC), I can borrow from their collection.
Last night I noticed Jane DeLynn’s last book of stories and essays, and I thought about how much I liked her at MacDowell in 1980.
I remember that day we tried to play golf at the Peterborough Country Club. When Jane kept yelling at me to “Replace the divot!”, I had no idea what she meant.
I slept soundly, and when I awoke at 6 AM, I tried to avoid exercise because of my back (two separate problems: my middle back and the old pain in the ass), but I did do laundry and I made out my final credit card payments for the month.
At 9:15 AM, I went to Barnes & Noble, where they had my favorite iced tea, blackberry sage, and I read today’s paper and skimmed Time, Newsweek and the Advocate.
It was a wonderful time for me; I didn’t take Triavil for the third morning in a row.
After I got a baked potato at Wendy’s, I went to my office for a bit, and at the NSU library, I took out two videos.
Back home, I had lunch at 2 PM. Then I drove into Fort Lauderdale to the new Barnes & Noble on Federal Highway between Sunrise and Oakland Park Boulevards, near where I used to go to Unemployment and the eye doctor in the early 1980s.
The area now has a lot of superstores, though of course once upon a time Jefferson Ward was there.
Anyway, the South Florida Society of Poets was having an open reading. I just wanted to see Michael, their leader, whom I like.
The reading was on the second floor of the bookstore, and there were about 17 poets in all, mostly women of a certain age.
I spoke with a 42-year-old former therapist now on disability who started writing poetry a few years ago and now has twenty poems published in little magazines.
I knew that the best poets would be mediocre and the worst, horrendous, so I made up an excuse to leave early: that I had to pick up Aunt Sydelle at the beauty parlor. Michael seemed okay with that.
I asked her about Blake, and she said he’s teaching paralegals at night as a way of doing something other than his law practice.
Leaving the store at 4 PM, I cruised a cute guy in a muscle t-shirt. But I’m really just too old, too inexperienced and too shy to carry that off.
So I went across the street to Whole Foods and managed to find the couscous wraps I like, which haven’t been available in their Plantation store.
I exercised lightly at 4:30 PM and then had a bite before I went off to my office, where I could hear a couple in the nearby A/V office having a horrendous fight about money.
Wednesday, January 30, 2002
6 PM. I would go out walking now, but before I’d get too far, darkness would fall – and it’s a little cooler than it has been. I just got home a little while ago.
Last evening I watched the video of Spike Lee’s Crooklyn, a lyrical evocation of summer in Brooklyn in the early 1970s that made me nostalgic for my own childhood. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, we played the same games that they did in the movie’s opening montage: hit the penny, “red light, green light, one-two-three,” salugi, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, Strat-O-Matic Baseball.
By 9 PM, I was feeling tired, so I thought I’d lie down and listen to Bush’s State of the Union address on radio. It didn’t take long for me to fall asleep – and even without Ambien or Klonopin, it was a deep sleep, too: over seven hours of it, filled with dreams set in New York City.
Of course, I got up at 4:30 AM. Because I was nervous about today’s 3 PM ARP Committee meeting (and also about coming down with the stomach virus spreading like crazy in the law school), I took a Triavil after breakfast.
At my desk at 9 AM, I spent the morning doing this and that, and I also read whatever parts of the New York Times I hadn’t finished earlier, and I emailed back and forth with Mark Bernstein.
At noon was the lunch with the latest Goodwin Visiting Professor, Deborah Lipstadt, the scholar who was sued by the revisionist historian David Irving over her book Denying the Holocaust.
She had to prove the truth of her statements about Irving, and she won in court and on appeal: no easy feat under Britain’s stricter libel laws.
Of course, I followed the news about her trial, and I also knew her previous book, Beyond Belief, on how the media downplayed or ignored reports of the Holocaust.
When I was introduced to her, I asked her what she thought of Max Frankel’s mea culpa about the Times’s Holocaust coverage in the paper’s 150th anniversary issue last November.
“It was just okay,” she said, “and they used my material without attribution.”
Lipstadt’s speech, as we had lunch, was interesting even though it presented only her take on the trial. She was blunt and funny and had a real New York accent, so I liked her.
The 3 PM meeting of the ARP Committee attracted just Jane Cross, Mark Padin, Mike Masinter, Pat and Gail.
We talked about different issues: my plan to do an exam-writing workshop; the possibility of hiring ARP writing tutors; the poor first-semester performance of the summer AAMPLE students; and other stuff.
I reported on what’s going on with the ARP study groups and how we can recruit and recognize teaching assistants (maybe with certificates and a reception).
The professors gave me suggestions for the exam-writing workshop, and after the meeting, Mark gave me reams of material from his old academic support director days. Again, I felt somewhat overwhelmed by the scariness of doing this for the first time.
The professors think the exam-writing workshop needs to be done in mid-March and that there should be two sessions, one for day students and one for evening students.
What really worries me is that I don’t have the dedication that Mark and Jane bring to academic support. Being an adjunct or temporary full-time faculty member for so many years has made me accustomed to not doing any more work than I had to because I could never count on any institutional loyalty.
Also, I still see myself as a writer who’s taken this position because I needed a job. I’m not used to hard work.
On the other hand, I did work hard as a UF law student – in the first year, certainly, and even after that when I was teaching adjunct undergraduate classes for Santa Fe and Nova.
But here at NSU Law, I’m essentially running something and not really taking orders from anyone. The ARP program is what I make it – and right now I’m still on my newborn-foal legs: I’m shaky, and I don’t feel like a leader.
Mark or Jane would have taken this program and had it up and running smoothly already. Of course, they have lots of prior experience in this field, and I’m a newbie: nobody has mentored me but Mark and Jane.
I just don’t know if I have the ambition to be good at this job. I guess I still view it as something temporary, and that’s not a good attitude. I am always ready to leave work early.
Thursday, January 31, 2002
8 PM. Last evening I took out the photos that Mom had sent me. Most of them were either recent photos of my friends and their children or the pictures I took during my college years.
The family photos were mostly of me in adolescence. I always looked so young for my age, and I see now that I was pretty in a weird sort of way.
As I wrote to Ronna today, the photos of her look a lot like what she looks like today while I seem to have aged terribly. The mottling of my skin and the wrinkles are a result of sun damage and acne (and of picking at my pimples).
I wish I hadn’t spent so much time sunbathing in my teens and twenties.
Still, before I left work this afternoon, both Chad and Thelma told me that they didn’t think I was more than 34.
Today was Pat’s birthday, and I’d been talking to her about how, as I get older, I wake up earlier, and I mentioned this to Chad and Thelma, who didn’t believe that I was, as I said, “somewhere between 50 and death.”
Fifteen minutes after that, though, I had a copy of AARP’s My Generation magazine in my hands after getting the mail when I went home for lunch.
Although I slept only between 11 PM and 3 AM last night, I managed to function through a long day by consuming a lot of caffeine: diet iced tea (Snapple) at home and then one 20-ounce bottle and two cans of Diet Pepsi at work.
I don’t know how I’ll ever get used to these long workdays. I think what I need to do is get as friendly as possible with people here so that the law school feels comfortable. I used to spend long days at Brooklyn College because I socialized a lot.
Today seemed long because I went home for lunch at 11 AM in order to return to school in time for the noon bar exam review panel with five recent graduates who passed last July’s exam and Steve Friedland, who teaches for BarBri.
I’m really scared about taking the test, but I got some valuable information today. The essays on the Florida portion aren’t as complex as the ones on law school exams, and as someone said, you don’t need an A answer, just a C answer.
Three-quarters of the two-day exam is multiple choice, and that means doing practice exams every day as you study.
It’s going to be a grueling task, but if I get enough time off from work, I should be okay. I’ve always tested well, and I think answering a law school-type essay question will come back to me.
I spent the first two hours at work today going over the material Mark gave me, including lots of sample Torts and Contracts questions. While it scares me that I can’t remember the parol evidence rule or intervening causes, I can learn stuff that again.
It’s just that I’ve been out of law school for eight years, and the first-year courses are a decade in the past. Steve said I should be okay.
I talked to him about the two courses he wants me to propose. First was Topics in Florida Law, which will cover Florida evidence, civil and criminal procedure, and Rules of Professional Conduct, all bar exam subjects that don’t get taught in our regular curriculum.
As Steve said, they “fall into the cracks,” probably because the ABA prohibits law schools from offering credit for what it considers bar review courses.
Steve’s other proposed course is a one-credit Introduction to Law School, and it’s far more controversial because it takes away some of the prerogatives of first-year course teachers to present material.
With both proposals, I’m not going to rush into anything. I said to Pat that Steve will probably just forget about this, and she replied that Joe was the same way, so she just sits on some of his visionary proposals and never brings them up a second time.
I met with Pat and Thelma to go over how I can schedule an event, order food for it, do publicity, etc. Once I go through the process a couple of times, I’ll be able to do it on my own.
Well, enough about work. I don’t want this diary to become all about my job at the law school even though much of my life is spent there, and I wake up at 3 AM thinking about work.
On the other hand, I don’t feel stress. The past couple of nights I didn’t have any diaphoresis; this morning I went to school without taking a Triavil, and I don’t feel in need of a tranquilizer except to sleep.
Exchanging lots of short emails with Mark Bernstein today, I found him a good person to ask for advice in the academic politics of my job.
It rained a little today, but at 5:20 PM, I set out in my t-shirt and shorts with my Walkman to Nova Drive and Pine Island Road and back, a two-mile stroll. When I come home after a long day at work, I’m tired, but I crave exercise.
I spoke to Dad today. He said that Marc is taking the red-eye flight and will arrive in Fort Lauderdale at 8 AM, rent a car, and go to Lew’s in Miami Beach.
Dad had his eyes measured for the surgery; this cataract is as dense as his first one, and they need to use special instruments. Now he’s got to wait for a date for the surgery at the hospital in Chandler.
It’s freezing in Arizona, Dad said. Not only is there snow on Superstition Mountain, but there was enough frost on the ground and on cars this morning to make snowballs.
I’m glad I’m in South Florida.