Today, or some day very soon, marks 365 days to graduation. And, in the hustle of law school, there have been a lot of things I have wanted to do and yet just haven’t gotten around to them.
A few of them will require serious preparation (sprint triathlon), dedication (a painless half marathon), and resolve (the year of yes). I’m working on developing some kind of real list, but today, struggling through 25 minutes of laps at the pool (really.), the concept was born.
Unsurprisingly, most of the goals that come to mind right now are related to healthy living and fitness, but I’m sure I can brainstorm some variety (how about….setting foot on all seven continents??). Abundance of time and freedom is limited; this year’s the year to capitalize.
My camera is back! After a two month recovery in Texas, it has returned to me just in time for summer. And, as all can imagine, I’ve been taking it everywhere.
I am grateful to have marathon medals that did not cost me any appendages in the process (not mine, my family’s, my friends’).
At noon today I watched a big screen at the law school, saw the Boston Marathon finishers cross the finish line with smiles on their faces.
Two and a half hours later I was sitting in my bedroom in Cambridge, writing a paper, when my brother both texted and gchatted me (generally unprecedented), asking me what I was doing, was I at home, there were two explosions at the finish line I had been watching just minutes prior.
Terrorist attacks (however broadly one wants to define “terrorist”; any human being who could do this is an absolute terrorist in my book) are not new. To someone who has family in Israel, and who pays attention to the tension in the Middle East, they are, in fact, unfortunately commonplace.
But it’s not often that I sit in my ivory tower, this beautiful glass bubble that is my law school, and feel precariously perched next to destruction. Merely two miles away: blood, screams, fleeing, horror. I practically lived on Boylston for a summer. Marathon Monday is a happy holiday in this city. And one person had hell rain down on us, on this, today.
I sat in class just 29 minutes after the explosions, shaking, following a liveblog and seventeen twitter update streams, looking at photos and red spatter and feeling sick to my stomach. Needless to say I did not learn much about the fourteenth amendment today, but rather learned that no place is safe. That we cannot take our existence for granted, even here, what feels like the safest of places.
I received many, many messages from concerned friends and acquaintances ensuring I was safe — “I know you run and stuff” — and what shook me most was that they’re right; I could have been there, if not as participant (as knees preclude), then certainly as spectator, the more dangerous role today. What brightened today, though, was the fact that so many cared. All of us here got messages like that. And everyone I know personally was unharmed.
I spoke to my mother and father about my disturbance. We compared it to Aurora, and Newtown, all of the recent horrors that beg comparison, but the difference here is that the culprit today is a coward; he continues to lurk in the shadows tonight.
Show your face, monster.
But my mother also told me about her time in Tel Aviv, when she had been out on a popular street one night, and not twelve hours later the block was exploded by bombs. This is life. We thank God — or whoever — for our luck in having chosen to be there twelve hours earlier. There is no guilt, or sorrow, in having been spared.
It is eerie. But it is life. And we take each day as it comes, each morning as a singular blessing.
To preface, my camera broke. At first I thought it was going to be okay, not a big deal, but the separation anxiety I’m feeling from my ability adequately (better than an iPhone, that is) to capture my life events is more intense than I thought. In short, my camera dropped about three feet from my lap to the ground, and now it won’t turn on, which led me to thinking of all the things my D5000 and I have seen together.
Since I was in DC this past weekend, obviously I took some photos of Kirby. It’s not my fault that he’s beautiful.
In my delinquency…I am doing a reduced summary of the rest of my January.
I keep having to remind myself where I am.
You’re in Australia, driving the Great Ocean Road; you’re really far from Boston. You add eight hours to determine what time it is at home because that is faster than subtracting sixteen. You spend your time perfecting the Aussie way of saying “oh,” running it through your head again and again, sounding it out slowly, deconstructing the way it feels.
It is the new year, and I experienced it before the rest of the world. I guess that’s something — countdown on the screen a full eighteen hours before the ball dips in Times Square. I bet people hadn’t even yet congregated amongst the glow of the neon billboards.
Three hours after my last final on Wednesday, I broke my foot. I don’t know if my life could be much more comical — that the thrill of lifted responsibility could be so dragged away from me with one silly injury. Because, great, I’m free. But I’m also quite confined.
So I’m getting a wheelchair escort at JFK on Wednesday (because my improvement is so aggravatingly incremental), which will be embarrassing but appreciated. And I’ll spend my first days in New Zealand a little bit quietly.
Til then — happy holidays.