Three things for Friday, Jan. 26
Procrastination, Dominic Sessa, and hangin out (but in a gay way)
Earlier this week I was procrastinating at work (what’s new?!) and I fell down one of those Google rabbit holes where you look up random people you went to high school / college / grad school with and see if anything interesting ever happened to them. This is always a slightly embarrassing thing to admit to do doing, of course, particularly when it’s someone I wasn’t even friends with really, and I’m just lurking to see if there’s any good, outrageous gossip I completely missed out on over the last decade plus or so.
Turns out I hit pay dirt this time around, because through my random Googling I learned that one of the people I went to law school with and who was friends with some of my friends is now disbarred and no longer practicing law at all! Admittedly, the disbarment happened in 2017, so it’s not exactly breaking news. Had I stayed in touch with more people, I’m sure I would have heard about it at the time (or worse, maybe I even did hear about it, but just completely forgot, since I was never really great friends with this person).
But of course, procrastination and curiosity are powerful motivators to keep on digging whenever you find dirt like this, and so I had to know why this person was disbarred — what could have possibly caused a graduate of an elite law school to fall so low as to be drummed out of the profession and stripped of her license to practice law permanently??
The answer, in this case, it seems, is “a total abdication of responsibility.” It turns out my former classmate was disbarred because she basically … stopped working? She had her own family law practice but somewhere along the way she stopped responding to clients. She didn’t return calls or emails. Clients gave her retainer money, and then she would disappear for months at a time, no updates, blowing off deadlines.. just fully and totally failed to follow through on even the most basic tasks or communication with people who hired her. Now to be fair, I have no idea if she maybe had health issues or whatnot.. I don’t know the gritty details about any of this, and I don’t want to make the story more salacious than it sounds. My point in relaying this story is more about the inner monologue it triggered within my own thoughts as a I read it. That is, I thought to myself something like.. damn. People really do that, huh? Just blow off work and never go back? That … sounds kinda nice, actually. Sometimes I worry that’s what I’m gonna end up doing, too.
Like.. there are times (right now, for instance!), especially in winter.. when it’s just so. fucking. hard. to keep doing the thing. To do the piddley, measly little work tasks I’ve set out for myself each day. I can’t motivate! I don’t want to motivate. The work feels so arbitrary and pointless and inside my head I’m slightly panicking that days just go by and work isn’t getting done, and here I’m feeling worse and worse about myself for this continued failure every day to return calls or draft a letter or whatever — and no one ever talks about how this feeling sets in from time to time and it’s the worst and I just wish I could throw my laptop into the frozen Lake Michigan and say FUCK IT ALL, I can’t TAKE the brain-dead, empty, not-working-but-barely-working of it day after day. It’s a frustration about work, sure, but it’s also about everything else. It’s about the three or six or eight text messages or emails I still need to respond to, and now it’s gotten awkward with how much time has passed and I feel like I missed my window, but the obligation is still sitting there unfulfilled. It’s the failure to do the thing that, were I in a better space, were things just swimming along and the sun shining, I would have take care of these things with no problem. But it’s not like that right now, and my own head is in a different, more stressed out space and so I’m not doing it. I want to be clear that what I’m describing isn’t serious enough to be “depression,” (at least not for me), and I know that time will pass and it’ll all get done.. but .. goddamn. There are times work just doesn’t suck, exactly, but it hangs. It hangs so heavy. And it suffocates. Right now I’m kinda short of air, work-wise. I hate it.
I really liked this article in the NYT about Dominic Sessa, the 21-year-old breakout star of The Holdovers, which has been nominated for several Oscars.1 Sessa himself wasn’t nominated, but this is his first movie of any kind at all, and the article is about how he’s adjusting to award season and the world of fashion designers and red carpets. Sessa is 21, his only prior acting experience comes from high school, and he’s just so, so innocent of all the lights and celebrity and attention. It’s just really fun to see someone that normal in that crazy star-studded setting. (He went to Paris Fashion Week and ducked out to buy a scarf for his mom!). Anyway. It’s a short article, and I thought it was cute.
Lastly, I don’t speak a word of German, but this video of 1970s gay German dudes hanging out is pretty great and seems like not a bad way to spend the winter months, if you have five or six friends and you all feel so inclined.
The movie is titled Schwulsein, or translated as “It is not the homosexual who is perverted, but the situation in which he lives,” and it’s from 1971. You can read a translated Wikipedia page about it here. Like I said.. I don’t really know the language, so I can’t speak to the art itself, I’m just going off the vibes. And the vibes are.. I mean.. not bad! (the haircuts though are extremely questionable).
That’s all for this week. Maybe I can keep up this blog and make it a slightly more regular thing this winter! I’d like to think that’s possible. Mostly I just want to get caught up on a few emails to some friends and do some work things and not feel quite so hopeless on the procrastination front. We’ll see how that goes. This trip to New York (which is just over the weekend and really just to see family) has been a good way to mentally re-set.
I also really, really liked The Holdovers, but that’s neither here nor there.
Lady sounds like a boss ass bitch who knew how to thrive and prioritize years ahead of us all. Good for her.