Worse Than Coleslaw

For a long time after returning back to the United States, months and months, I found myself uttering some permutation of the phrase, “Hey, I just got back from Japan,” to justify all sorts of lapses and indulgences on my part.  If I felt tired and didn’t feel like doing any job hunting on a particular day, I’d tell myself that that was okay, that I had a window of ennui in which it was acceptable for me to act like a college student on summer vacation.  If I didn’t feel like working out or eating healthy food, I’d tell myself that I had a grace period in which to allow myself to lapse.  My feeling was that I had just accomplished something truly extraordinary, and that doors should to life should be thrown open as I walked up to them like in the opening of “Get Smart.”  It felt as if I had just gotten back from Japan up until some vague point several months ago when I found myself thinking of Japan in a wistful and very-much-nostalgic sort of way as if that whole affair had gone down decades before. This shift has been reflected in many small ways throughout my daily life, as in a conversation with one of my coworkers during a slow period at work in which I was trying to justify why it was that I had not yet moved on to bigger and better things.

“Hey, give me a break, I said. “I just got back from Japan.” This must be what it feels like to return from a war, minus the post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Wasn’t that, like, five months ago?” she said.

I paused, my momentum reduced to zero, cocked my head to one side in consideration, and said, “I suppose.”

This conversation took place about six months ago.  I guess that means it’s time to move on.

Lately I’ve been occupied with applying to law school after taking the LSAT and receiving a pretty decent score.  At this point I’ve heard back from and been accepted to nine schools out of a total of 12 applications that I’ve submitted to various places.  Four or five of those schools to which I’ve been accepted are even ones that I actually want to go to, so well done there as well.  The next step is figuring out where I’ll best fit and how I’m going to pay for it.

My decision to pursue a JD flies in the face of several years of liberal arts posturing on the part of my high school and college self.  For a long time I always assumed I would be a writer and that that would become my regular day job through some nebulous process that I did not ever grasp, although I rarely let the label of “writer” define my actions by, you know, actually ever writing anything.  Years later I discovered that being a freelancer basically means that your job is to constantly be applying for jobs, and this career path seemed much less attractive to me.

“Worse Than Coleslaw” should begin being updated more regularly now that I have some distance and perspective on things and am no longer under the pressure to get it all down right now while it’s fresh in my mind holy crap there’s so much happening in every single second and how am I going to write about it all? I foresee future posts taking the form of short, disembodied anecdotes about my life in Japan that I never had the time or the patience to incorporate into a larger discussion of underlying themes or neuroses.  These will be interspersed with details on the law school admissions process, thoughts on the life of a twenty-something semi-recluse, and any other stupid thing that I feel like writing about.

I’ve come to the slow realization that I have already done the scariest thing I am ever likely to do, barring anything crazy like a combat situation or battling cancer.  Whatever else happens, I can rest easy in the knowledge that I spent seven months staring down a roomful after roomful of 30 or 40 catatonic Japanese high school kids and was somehow able to get through it.  I feel pretty good about whatever the future holds, confident as I am that I’ll find a way to handle anything that comes my way.