I'm a little distracted.
So, I'm feeling okay about finals. Broad concepts seem to be falling into place and the things I put into my notes without really understanding them are starting to make sense. That said, I'm sooooo distracted. My summer plans are coming together and I'm anxious to get started on them. It looks like I'll be living with friends (in some form or another) for most or all of the summer. On the job front, instead of being the only law student working in my office, they've decided to take on a couple others, as well. The actual work of my job is also starting to sound surprisingly enticing. I'll be roadtripping out to California in a little over a month and the thought of driving through western America is unquantifyingly more interesting than proximate cause.
I talked to a friend who's a 1L at Berkeley today and it sounds like we're going to have a nice little crowd of ex-South Dakotans in the Bay Area this summer. I would be surprised by that, but lately I've been realizing that my friends and acquaintances tend to be both extremely mobile and ambitious, which means they show up in unexpected parts of my life over and over again.
The last ten years of my life can be easily divided into four time periods: high school, college, DC, and law school. Each has its own distinct location but I'm starting to see that the cast of characters for each is no longer distinct. At my office reunion party this past weekend, in addition to my former co-workers, I saw all sorts of people I knew in high school and friends from college, many of whom had worked on the campaign and others had worked in our state offices.
Friday night, I stayed at the house of someone I knew in high school. She became friends with one of my college friends when they worked on a campaign together. He's staying with her until he finds his own place in DC. Her other three roommates include another guy I knew in high school and a girl who's dating one of my former DC co-workers. The fourth roommate I didn't have a direct connection to other than the fact that he worked on my boss's campaign.
It'd be easy to blame these "it's a small world" situations on the small population of South Dakota and specifically the state's small world of Democratic politics, but the situations happen outside that world, too. One of my best friends from college got to know one of best friends from high school a few years ago when they were both participants in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. And, most recently, I've been emailing a law student in Berkeley, who just happens to be friends with one of my section-mates, about a summer sublet.
It's a fun phenomenon and it makes me think I've done a good job picking friends. Well, I guess all I can really take from the fact that my friends are befriending each other independent of me is that I'm consistent. That's cool. I'm glad my community of friends can no longer be divided into lists, but has instead formed a network. That's what we're supposed to do, right? That's what NYU keeps telling us will happen with happen with our law school classmates, but I'm less interested in that at the moment. Right now, I'm more interested in keeping track of where the ex-South Dakotans (and that includes those people not originally from SoDak who gave up chunks of their lives to work for our politicians) end up. They're a creative and fascinating bunch and I think this network will develop in unpredictable ways.
I talked to a friend who's a 1L at Berkeley today and it sounds like we're going to have a nice little crowd of ex-South Dakotans in the Bay Area this summer. I would be surprised by that, but lately I've been realizing that my friends and acquaintances tend to be both extremely mobile and ambitious, which means they show up in unexpected parts of my life over and over again.
The last ten years of my life can be easily divided into four time periods: high school, college, DC, and law school. Each has its own distinct location but I'm starting to see that the cast of characters for each is no longer distinct. At my office reunion party this past weekend, in addition to my former co-workers, I saw all sorts of people I knew in high school and friends from college, many of whom had worked on the campaign and others had worked in our state offices.
Friday night, I stayed at the house of someone I knew in high school. She became friends with one of my college friends when they worked on a campaign together. He's staying with her until he finds his own place in DC. Her other three roommates include another guy I knew in high school and a girl who's dating one of my former DC co-workers. The fourth roommate I didn't have a direct connection to other than the fact that he worked on my boss's campaign.
It'd be easy to blame these "it's a small world" situations on the small population of South Dakota and specifically the state's small world of Democratic politics, but the situations happen outside that world, too. One of my best friends from college got to know one of best friends from high school a few years ago when they were both participants in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. And, most recently, I've been emailing a law student in Berkeley, who just happens to be friends with one of my section-mates, about a summer sublet.
It's a fun phenomenon and it makes me think I've done a good job picking friends. Well, I guess all I can really take from the fact that my friends are befriending each other independent of me is that I'm consistent. That's cool. I'm glad my community of friends can no longer be divided into lists, but has instead formed a network. That's what we're supposed to do, right? That's what NYU keeps telling us will happen with happen with our law school classmates, but I'm less interested in that at the moment. Right now, I'm more interested in keeping track of where the ex-South Dakotans (and that includes those people not originally from SoDak who gave up chunks of their lives to work for our politicians) end up. They're a creative and fascinating bunch and I think this network will develop in unpredictable ways.
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