what words did you use to persuade them? / Yours.

IF... 

 

1. ...there was one road in life you should not have gone down but did, which would it be? 

     it sounds like blasphemy, but I would at this point have rather not worked at the financial place

2. ...you had to recall a time in your life when your self-esteem was at its highest?

     in my final year of law school, I was involved in a "scandal"—not of my own making—that resulted in the early, forced 'retirement' of a tenured professor. (Read: he fucked up big time, in front of witnesses.) However innocent I was, and despite the overall rightness of that situation, it left me in a pickle. 3Ls were required to take a seminar course, which at my school meant small (10 or fewer students), intense (a much higher degree of reading/discussing/writing/analyzing than a typical class), and productive (with one major paper comprising the great majority of the course grade). The mess that the icky prof had created resulted in my need to take a second seminar course. The options were always limited, and seemed even more so during the only term when I could take mine. I ended up in Sports & Entertainment Law, a completely implausible topic given the geographic location of my school, my interests, and the likely result of my law school career. However, needs must when the devil drives, so S&E it was.

    It ended up being a terrific class, one of my favorites, and the prof was marvelous. Rigorous and exacting, yet also personable and motivating, he taught us so much about the music business, and player representation, and publishing. It was this last bit, combined with movies, that spurred me to write the best paper of my life. It was a study of copyright protection of historical works, as applied to the movie Amistad (1997), starring Morgan Freeman, Anthony Hopkins, Matthew McConaughey and Djimon Hounsou. The movie was subject to a lawsuit brought by the author of a book on the ship Amistad, who claimed that the movie was based on his work, and so he should be paid. The suit ultimately failed, but is still interesting and relevant because of the issues that it raised—most significantly, the idea that no one "owns history" and that historical facts are not subject to copyright protection.

    That paper was really good. In fact, my prof believed in it so much that he submitted it for consideration in a national writing competition. And I won. How's that for a self-esteem boost?

3. ...you had to pick the single most spiritual moment of your life so far, when would it be? 

MIA

     my first time on a plane on approach into Miami International Airport. It felt like I was coming home.

4. ...you were to say there has been a person in your life who has been your symbolic lighthouse, who would it be? 

     my physical therapist in the Flatland. He is the most uniformly positive person I've ever known. When we met, we took an immediate dislike to each other, but that was sort of understandable under the circumstances. (He was a student, I was his grad assistant, and he wanted to argue about a test question. I thought he was pompous, aggressive and rude. He thought I was arrogant, dismissive, and uneducated.) About 3 years later, we met again when he was a working physical therapist and I was his patient. We remained

in those roles for several years. Then, after that professional relationship ended, we became real friends. He spent loads of time at my house, maintaining a prickly but affectionate relationship with my cats, enjoying frequent dinners, and sharing encyclopedic and bizarre medical miscellanea. Around the time that I moved back north, he moved out west. We've stayed in touch, though, and regularly proclaim our love via FB.

    He's sensitive, smart, funny, and inspiring. As he's often said of others—he's the nicest guy in the world.

5. ...you could relieve someone else of one burden in life, what would you take away? 

     serious medical diagnosis. There is a combined weight from the illness itself and also the emotional effect of the diagnosis. Reconsidering oneself, new, as an ill person—while at the same time releasing the idea of being "healthy" and immune to some harsh realities.

6. ...you were to name the person you have known who brought out the deepest feelings in you (other than love), who would it be? 

     the usher. If I could, I would wipe all memory of him from the entire world, not just my own brain. He is unconscionable.

7. ...you were to design a room for contemplation, what would it look like, and what would be in it? 

     pale grayish blue walls, a comfortable chair, a small amount of abstract art, and a couple of high windows revealing nothing but treetops and sky.  

 

[from If: Questions for the Soul; the title quotation is from Amistad]