North Maple Rag

In addition to my regularly scheduled Contracts class, I sat through an extra four hours of make-up classes today. One of those make-ups was Contracts; no one should ever have to endure four hours of Contracts in one day. Anyway, by the time my last class finished at 5, I was feeling pretty crappy. All I had to look forward to for the next week was non-stop studying.

Things are starting to look up, though. I called a couple of friends from home and whined to them for a while. I think I was probably pretty annoying, but they were both very sympathetic, so that was nice. Also, there was a very nice girl with them who complimented my blog. So, thank you to her. Then, one of my non-NYU friends called to invite me to a movie. I *should* stay and study but I think it might be good for me to think about something other than law for a while.

Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night after having a dream where one of my friends was attacked. In the dream, I ended up killing the attacker to save my friend's life. The rest of the dream was my murder trial and me explaining to the jury how I was justified in using deadly force to protect her. So, can you guess what we've been studying in Criminal Law?

Anyway, I took the dream as a sign that I should go to the movie. I've planning to spend my weekend in the library and I've been feeling overwhelmed for the last couple days, so this is a good idea, right?

I also think it'll be good for me to get out of the Village for a couple hours. For the first time all semester, I don't want to be in New York. All week, I've found myself thinking about this great book, Roads, that I read last year. It was written by Larry McMurtry and I especially enjoyed the way he described his connection to the Great Plains. I also identified with him because he spent time living in Washington, DC before moving back to the plains. There are a couple passages about "the small eastern sky" that I marked the first time I read the book and they describe the feeling I have right now in New York (even though Larry specifically refers to DC).

"It's always uplifting to me to watch the opening of the land and the widening of the skies as I drive west, out of the forested country. This feeling, I suspect, is testimony to how determinative one's primal geography is. I had a plains upbringing and something in me responds to the plains as to no other landscape."

"Washington has sky, of course, but it doesn't have nearly enough to still my yearning for the plains. I felt claustrophobic in the east . . .[and] there were many times when, Huck Finn-like, I simply lit out for the territory, to the place where the sky swelled out."

Yup, that's it. That's how I'm feeling. It's time to head west. Like Larry, "I can live happily almost anywhere for a few months, but my attachment to the plains landscape is irreplaceable."

Well, I'm going to do a little work before the movie. Those of you who are in South Dakota should take this post as a warning; I'm going to be looking for road trip companions once I get home. I think I'll need a couple solid weeks of open horizon before coming back here.