A Few Additional Observations

There is a chick in the coffee shop where I am right now crying on the phone, and I'm pretending not to notice, which basically means I am not looking directly at her. What is this about? Take this little bit of public theater someplace else, lady. Is that horrible? Probably. I'm probably cursing myself with a future public-drama moment that I find embarrassing and impossible to move to another location at that moment. I guess sh*t happens and sometimes you cry on the phone in a coffee shop and that's kind of how life is. I am trying to feel a little compassion here, but it's really hard.

In other news, I was thinking about the thing I said a few posts ago about how I sometimes don't like telling people that I am a lawyer, because it complicates their impression of me and I think adds a little - okay wait a minute the crying lady just hung up in anger and said she is going to the hospital. My compassion is expanding because of the potentially tragic element in this scenario. She is calling a cab. I don't know what to feel about this. Emergencies and crises are intimate - my instinct here is toward providing her with a little pretend privacy in the form of not looking at her. Okay she's in the bathroom now. Sheesh.

Well here's what I was going to say about lawyering: I am aware that it sounds impressive to people to have worked as a lawyer in Manhattan for a few years. People do not realize that this is NOT that impressive, and it's hard to convince them that it is not really such a big deal, but sometimes people look at me like I pooped at Yale and didn't even think twice about it. This is definitely not the case. But the impact of this past lawyer life to the outsider is to provide extra credibility to my current choices, which, objectively speaking, are pretty lame. I live in a tiny apartment with cruddy carpeting in a tiny little "city", I have zero job/career ideas, make no money, and I'm taking a yoga teacher training class. But since I already had, and then rejected, what some people see as a professionally glamorous career path, my current state of existence isn't just the desperate searching of someone with nothing else going for her, but the calculated and mindful undertaking of someone who Sees Life As It Is. And nothing could be further from the truth - I have no idea what I'm doing, I am desperately searching for something, I am very conscious that spiritual inquiry and never-ending-learning are ways to merely expand my distraction enough to fill the time available while I excuse myself from meeting the challenges of actual life, because that is at least a little better than just pacing and pacing and pacing until the end of time like some 1950's housewife. Yes I am still reading The Feminine Mystique and yes it is basically killing me softly with its song.

So what I'm getting at is that telling people I was a Manhattan lawyer is yet another exercise in vanity.

Also coffee shop crisis lady has regained her grip on existence and seems to be wrapping it up hysteria-wise. That's good, I was a little worried.