Am I wrecking my life or saving it?

My block as a writer doesn't have anything to do with a lack of skill with words, or an appetite for them, but rather with a chronic vagueness or uncertainty about what to do with them.

I think my deepest, although perhaps most foolish, motivation for going to law school is that I feel it will force me into exactitude and rigor and certainty--maybe not certainty about the answers, but certainty about what the questions are.

I'm prepared for tomorrow's classes and halfway prepared for the next day's. I think I'm going to like my criminal law class with the professor I mentioned earlier. He assigned us the standard textbook, but also required a packet he'd put together of alternative cases and articles about the insanely high incarceration rate in the United States and other such rabble-rousing material. My impression is he's a tough-minded old-school lefty of the rumbling proletariat school (with further training at Harvard and Georgetown.)

I need to be around professors like that to help keep me from losing focus and wandering astray, to serve as a constant example and reminder that there are viable alternative career paths open to me.

Life passes so quickly and I can't help but question my decision to invest so much of what I have so little of in reading and analyzing legal cases. It could be worthwhile--I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think so--but it could also be a trap.

Oh, I've been worrying on this one for awhile. But now it's informed by the beginning of the experience of the reality of the thing. Law school.

There are ways it could kill your creativity, all that cutting away of all but the legally relevant facts. Not to mention the dull conformity of so many of the people around me.

But then there's also the impulse to imagine the flesh of the skeletons of stories that are in the cases. Was Morales in a gang after all? Ray v. the Eurice Bros. has the raw material for great theater, anal Mr. Ray hiring some rather lazy, though perhaps adequately competent, good-old-boys to build his house and driving them nuts with his demands for perfection. One wonders about the Ray's marriage. How did Mrs. Ray cope with a man like that?

And the austere exactitude is exciting at moments, too, almost invigorating. Like getting off the couch, intellectually speaking, lacing up some new sneakers and taking my first wheezing run around the block--and feeling like I'm going to die. And longing to be back on the couch, vaguely daydreaming.