:: Electric Psychedelic Pussycat Swinger's Club ::

:: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 ::

a new year

I don't like what I've become.

From all reports, being tossed into the rat race that is New York has had a profound effect upon my tolerance, patience, and all-around pleasantness. Not that my name was synonymous with such adjectives prior to moving out there, but at least my edges were smoothed out a bit. Looking back on this year, all I cared about, all I talked about, was my career and my relationships with people; I treated friends as advisers in whichever of these areas they could contribute. These past three weeks back home have slowed me down, humbled me.

Last week over a cup of coffee, my friend says to me, "while talking to you on the phone these past few months, you've had several moments where you were so impatient and rude that it made me not want to be around you". Hearing these words hurt, but they rang true. While in school, I'd developed this nasty habit of calling friends up to share my problems with and to extract advice, expecting them to sit patiently through every last mundane detail of the latest drama that is my so-called life. And when the tables were turned and my friends had something to share, I often grew weary at the unnecessary details and lashed out at them to get to the point. It is the phenomenon that has since been coined, "The Sal Paradise 1-minute version", where friends are expected to give me the bottom line to any story in under 60 seconds.

Hypocritical? Perhaps. Rude? Definitely. I don't know if living in a fast-paced city like NY has had anything to do with it, or if it's because law students have been trained [brainwashed] to spot only the key issues to a problem while weeding out the filler, or if I've just become a dickhead (most likely the latter), but I'll be the first to admit that all the accusations and finger-pointing are not without merit.

To be frank: I've been incredibly self-centered.

I don't quite know exactly what it is that I have been so angry about this past year. Was it the lack of money? Food? Choices? Hope? Love? Perhaps a combination of all of the above. Sometimes I feel like Captain Ahab, with my ocean of anger at a nemesis I can neither touch nor destroy. Whatever it is, whatever that's been eating away at me, my way of dealing with it has been confused and misdirected. It has got to come to an end.

After talking for a good hour, I thanked him for being straight with me. He is one of the few people whose words I consider to carry tremendous weight. As I told him on that rainy Monday afternoon, it has been tiring being nice this past year, if even only for a moment or two. I feel like Jack Nicholson's character in "As Good as it Gets" - 'It's exhausting'. But I know I will change; slowly, but change nonetheless.

That is the hope that a new year brings.

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