A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early May, 2002
Monday, May 1, 2002
10 PM. I’ve been talking to James, the guy who called on Tuesday night. He’s very sweet and almost seems like a Southern gentleman.
I was presumptuous enough to send him some reviews of The Silicon Valley Diet, and instead of being totally disgusted, James said he was interested enough to want to buy the book.
He was the ninth child in his family and the only boy. His father was a vet, and James was going to be a doctor himself until he couldn’t dissect animals because he kept thinking of his dead grandmother.
Starting at age 18, James was in a relationship for a decade, and he says it’s been extremely hard for him to deal with dating and all the games that people play.
I don’t think I’m any kind of a bargain, especially at this time in my life, and I know he wants someone in a committed relationship like the one he had before.
My track record is not good; maybe it doesn’t really exist. Compared to James, who’s 33, I feel so old.
Last night I slept okay, and when I woke up at 2 AM, I probably didn’t need the half an Ambien tablet I took because I would have gone back to sleep again without it.
Dr. K must be right about sleep robbing me of serotonin: today I woke up feeling anxious, but the anxiety faded after I got some cereal, milk and a banana inside me.
Like last Wednesday, today was a good day at work. I’m sure that if I didn’t have the bar exam, I’d be very comfortable right about now.
Joe collared me early this morning and talked about his plan. He said I needed to get a copy of Professor Wightman’s LSAC bar passage longitudinal study from 1994, which covered my class, the law students who began in the fall of 1991.
Joe said I should also look at Wightman’s articles on the bar passage rates for minorities and women. We’re having the meeting on Monday after the faculty vote on LSV candidates.
I went out to lunch with today’s candidate, Anna Peralta Beerman, who graduated from Cornell and Penn Law School and who’s been in practice ever since. She is currently counsel for AOL Latin America.
Jane Cross was her shepherd, and Mark Padin also came along. I suggested we go to the Tower Deli, and I again had a turkey sandwich, although this time I didn’t risk eating slices of onions and tomatoes.
Jane told me I’ve got to tell Pat and Joe and anyone else who wants my time this summer that I absolutely need to focus on preparing for the bar exam.
Jane, who’s passed the California, New York and Florida bar exams, said the amount of material I need to go over is so great that I should spend five weeks doing nothing but bar preparation.
I guess that scared me, so I did talk with Pat afterwards, but she didn’t seem to get it. She said that she took the test rather cavalierly and “just squeaked through.”
I didn’t really do much today. This evening I listened to more of the Contracts tapes, including about 20 minutes when I went for a walk.
My sciatica is still hurting, but it hasn’t gotten any worse. Hunching over when I read the giant-sized workbook with small print is not good for me, so I’m going to have to find a way to study more comfortably, which means I need either a different chair, a desk and/or reading glasses.
I did look at some old Florida bar exam essay questions, and they’re not as complex or tricky as law school exams – but of course, I seem to miss some of the issues, and what I could spot, I didn’t really know how to answer the question.
The bar exam is still about three months away, and I guess I can absorb enough info so that I can answer the essay questions with a passing grade.
Pascal missed our morning appointment, but he wanted to come by this afternoon and go over citations with me.
Pascal is a mess. I didn’t know what to tell him, but I asked him to cite several cases, after which I corrected him and showed him how to use the Blue Book to check.
I mean, I’m a bad person to teach this because I want to scream, “Just look it up in the damn book!”
Pascal has so many problems that I don’t know how he’s gotten this far in law school. Jane had him in her AAMPLE Negotiable Instruments class and said he got a D or a D+ and is a horrible writer.
But as Mark said, after three years, NSU has to graduate him or else it seems that the law school has perpetrated a fraud to get his tuition money.
Tony Chase sent out an email saying that he was putting out movie posters in the administrative kitchen, so I went there and got five posters.
In the office, I put up the posters for Marat/Sade and Kurosawa’s Ran.
Three of them I brought home and taped to my wall: the poster for Tampopo and two of Gong Li’s Zhang Yimou movies, Raise the Red Lantern and The Story of Qiu Ju.
I talked with Mark Friedman for about twenty minutes after 5 PM, so today I was at school for almost nine hours.
I haven’t exercised since the weekend – unless you count tonight’s short walk.
Hopefully, even if I don’t sleep well, I won’t have the heartburn problem I had last Wednesday night.
I haven’t called Neo back yet. I guess now is not the best time for me to have placed the personal ad on Yahoo. Now is when I should be using my capacity for living a monkish life to my advantage.
I didn’t answer emails today, except for brief notes to Ronna and Lindsay.
It’s been a month since my GERD began that night after I taught the evening section’s exam-writing workshop.
Tuesday, May 7, 2002
9 PM. Today was a pretty good day. I’ve noticed that as I try more daring foods, my GERD isn’t acting up. I had some spicy dinners the last couple of nights, and while I did wait three hours before lying down, I didn’t have any distress.
This morning, with the Supreme Court Cafe closed, I walked over to the cafe at the library and got real iced tea. The caffeine in it neither made me anxious nor seemed to affect my stomach.
My sciatica comes and goes in the same spot, on my shin. Late this afternoon I went to the chiropractor, and after he adjusted me, he gave me some exercises to do at home.
I later went out for a walk, listening to the PMBR Property tape for about 45 minutes. Dr. Davis said I should avoid leg exercises but that walking is fine if it doesn’t bother me.
I slept all right last night, although I got a wrong number at 2 AM that woke me.
This morning I got to work at 9 AM. I was surprised to get an email from James, and I wrote him back, telling him why I thought we were very different, and I told him all about my anxiety.
He just now called, and we spoke as he was driving back to Pembroke Pines from Fort Lauderdale, where he had dinner with friends.
I still think we’re not compatible, but he is still interested in me, so maybe I’ll meet him this weekend. James is open to a friendship if a relationship doesn’t develop. But his main goal is to find a life partner to settle down with, and I don’t think I’m there yet – or that I’ll ever be there.
He said he’s always had a very strong sex drive, and of course I don’t, although James said that could be due to my lack of experience.
James couldn’t understand how I wasn’t jealous about Gianni or Sean having boyfriends. People are so various, of course.
At work this morning, I went to see Pat, whose beautiful little blonde granddaughter was watching a Pocahontas video. We’re going to try to see Joe at 10 AM tomorrow.
In my office, I read some New York Times articles online, and I also read my PLI outline. I’ve gone through Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, and I still have to get through Evidence and some of Property. I finished listening to the Property tape tonight.
I still haven’t heard the Evidence tape, but after lunch, I got The Nanny Diaries tape at Barnes & Noble; I also went to Target, where I used a discount coupon from Visa to buy some odds and ends, including a notebook for bar review, a pair of swim trunks, and some batteries.
It was pretty quiet at work today; nobody came in to see me.
Sat Darshan wrote that she plans to make a deal with her old boss at the Khalsa Montessori School to let Kiran go there next year. She’d be closer to home and more likely to meet friends in the neighborhood that she could have play dates with.
Dharma is getting used to her new home, Sat Darshan reported, and she seems happy in New Mexico.
I spoke to my parents, who told me that China is once again having trouble seeing and is walking into walls. They think her hair is getting into her eyes, but they couldn’t get an appointment for a haircut until next week.
I find that I’m getting slightly less panicked about the bar exam. I called Steve Friedland at home, and he said, “The competition down here isn’t very tough.” I guess I’ll see him at the BarBri lessons.
It will all work out. I just figured that it will take time to come together for me and that maybe by mid-July I’ll be feeling more confident.
I need to start doing practice questions and practice essays. Right now, it all seems overwhelming, but if I put in the time preparing, I should start to feel better about it.
Of course, studying the black-letter law is boring compared to the intellectual excitement of the case method in law school. By contrast, this is cut-and-dried and voluminous.
I should have called Shane tonight, but I didn’t. I’ve also owed Vincent a letter for a long time, but I will wait to write him until after my reading on Friday.
Jack Rutland from the Stonewall Library emailed to ask me what I would need for the reading, and I said just a lectern and microphone and a table for my books.
I haven’t started to get nervous about the reading yet, and although I hate to give myself a kinahora, I think it will probably go well. My readings last year in Chicago and Dairy Hollow were good experiences, and even the reading in Santa Monica went okay.
I’ll just do the best I can. It’s not as if I’m unfamiliar with the locale, after all. I probably should study some more tonight, but I want to relax the rest of the evening.
Hey, I didn’t have sweaty palms this evening. Not yet, anyway.
Friday, May 10, 2002
9:30 PM. I just returned from my reading at the Stonewall Library.
Only about seven or eight people showed up, and not all of them stayed for the whole time, and of course I didn’t sell my books, and I ended up taking more books back than I came with because I figured I could use the books that Red Hen Press sent to the library.
But still, the audience was appreciative, I got to be a semi-celebrity for an evening, and I had a chance to read. If a larger crowd had come, I think they would have enjoyed it.
It may be out of character for me to say this, since I’m usually so tentative and diffident, but if people didn’t come, it’s their loss.
I started with “But in a Thousand Other Worlds,” and I talked about writing for little magazines and webzines, teaching at Broward Community College, getting Florida Arts Council grants, and running for the Davie Town Council on a platform of giving horses the right to vote.
Then I spoke about my being active in gay politics in Gainesville and going to law school, and I read “Boys Club.”
Rob said I should read for 90 minutes, so for the first time I read “Mysteries of Range Management,” which works surprisingly well, given the dull passages about leafy spurge.
It’s good to remind myself that over a lifetime, I’ve achieved a lot as a writer and that I am, after all is said and done, a survivor.
I’ll survive the sciatica, which – as a guy at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center told me after pegging me not just from Brooklyn but from “near Avenue U,” and then another guy, passing by, said, “Mill Basin” – will go away once I feel less anxious and tense.
Today was a pretty good day. Although I sweated through my t-shirt last night, I slept well. For the last three mornings, I haven’t felt any anxiety.
Work was very quiet today. I had to fax my registration for Seattle to the Law School Admissions Council again, as they didn’t get it yesterday, but they finally received it, and it was taken care of.
Before I went to work, I did 30 Torts questions from the PMBR workbook, and at work, I did 30 more. I got 17 of the first 30 right and also 17 of the last 30; of course, I’m learning a lot as I check the answers.
This is the best way to study for the Multistate Bar Exam. Everyone says to do 50 test questions a day, but today I did 100, and it didn’t feel stressful, except I crouch when I’m trying to read the workbook, which is bad for my posture and, hence, my back.
I did 13 Criminal Law questions and got 13 right, but I got only seven right out of 20 Contracts questions. I figured I’d be strongest in Constitutional Law, Criminal Law and Torts – which is why I got the tapes for Contracts, Property and Evidence.
But it’s early, and I have time to learn. I read quickly, and I usually can do the questions in a little over or just under a minute – and we will have 1.8 minutes to answer each question on the exam.
I emailed Mark B, Sat Darshan, Tom, James, and a couple of others. Diane wrote that she’s not moving into the house in Woodstock until June but instead is staying in Fire Island, where she’ll be most of the summer.
I had a full iced tea today, and it didn’t seem to do much harm to my anxiety level or my acid reflux.
In mid-afternoon, I walked back from the library with Tabi, who works at Student Affairs; she’s from Peru and, like everyone in the office, is very nice.
I left work at 3:45 PM and went shopping at Publix. Then I went into the hot tub because my leg was bothering me.
Tonight Fred told me he’s seeing a neurosurgeon this week for his still-undiagnosed lumbar problem. It sometimes seems that everyone’s got back or has sciatica problems.
After my reading, I hugged and kissed Fred, who has been wonderful to me, and I thanked him for giving me the chance to read, but of course he said they owed me thanks.
I sort of wish there were more people there at the reading, but I can’t compete with bingo. I’m not going to fret over the small crowd, though.
Hey, I forgot about my sciatica and GERD as I stood at the podium. I did start to get a little tired, winded and hoarse by the end of the reading, but that’s natural.
I certainly wasn’t nervous beforehand. I guess I was more nervous about my exam-writing workshops, but I’m going to evemtually gain confidence at work, too. I’ve just done more fiction readings, so I can feel more relaxed about them.
Hey, if I do well on the bar exam, I can see myself doing kind of what Steve Friedland does, teaching for BarBri, and taking other states’ bar exams just for the hell of it. (He took the Kentucky exam last summer.)
Tonight helps me recall how well I’ve done in my life.
Twenty years ago, I had the confidence of a guy who was teaching full-time at Broward Community College, having a love affair with Sean, and publishing Eating at Arby’s and Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.
Ten years ago, I had the confidence of being a good student with the first year of law school behind me.
Five years ago, I had just left the job at the Center for Governmental Responsibility; I had moved out of Gainesville and was preparing to spend the summer at Ragdale and at Teresa’s parents’ house in Brooklyn, and I got an op-ed piece accepted by the New York Times.
Even now, as anxiety-producing as the bar exam is, I know I’ve survived my first few months as a law school administrator, and I’ve survived my anxiety in Arizona, and so far, back here in Florida. I am glad I returned here.
Yes, I may have had some rough days this winter and spring, and rough days may be ahead for me, but over time, my life will calm down and I’ll be over the physical problems.
Nobody can take away my wonderful travels of last year, and next summer I will travel again.