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By fightinfilipino
you know, i least expected Ralph Nader of all people to trigger this weird brain renaissance i’m suddenly feeling. yes, that Ralph Nader, the same guy whose soporific voice and oft-oddball stances inspired…dozens…of voters to head to the polls and hesitate oh so much in marking the checkbox for Barack Obama. but i had the chance to see Nader speak at a conference in D.C. this last weekend, and aside from guilt tripping all the law students in the room for even considering big firm jobs, he also recognized that the most challenging problem for more civic-minded law students was keeping the drive to do good things in the world.
these last few months, i think i lost that drive without realizing it. i had been just skimming along in classes, a bit disconnected from the real. but in D.C., i hung out with a metric tonne of very cool, very amazing folks who are all doing impressive and important work in politics, social work, employee rights, healthcare…you name it. and as i spoke with these folks, and shared ideas and talked shop with them, and even played a few rounds of pool and Connect Four with them, i began to remember what it was like to actually think and apply outside the classroom, to take all this accumulated legal knowledge and solve actual important problems, not slog through rarefied hypos. dammit, Darth Nader was right. that was the fire in the belly i needed.
and today, i was already on a good mood streak, but i saw a film at the San Diego Asian Film Festival that really drove the point for me. the film, 9500 Liberty, was a documentary on the undocumented immigrant debate raging in Manassas County, Virginia. the film showed a story becoming all too familiar in a lot of US communities: influxes of immigrant populations of color into traditionally-white-and-affluent neighborhoods, and the ensuing fight by locals to push these “darkies” back out. but if the basic premise is (sadly) one that seems mundane, the documentary was anything but. the film took things a step further by not only pointing out the myriad parties involved in this struggle, but also the intense conversations and arguments taking place between folks from the community, police, politicians, pundits, business owners, and the whole country. this was also one of the first documentaries i’d ever seen that took advantage of technologies like youtube to show the conversation developing naturally as the film was shot. the filmmakers took great pains to eschew the omniscient viewpoint and instead capture the organic and volatile nature of the immigration conflict from first-person perspectives, from the people actually involved.
my views on immigration would take a whole post by itself. but i think what i realized at the end of it all is that i’ve missed being a part of that tumult, being a voice for others who might not or cannot speak out in the struggle over immigration reform and enforcement. and i have a clearer idea of how i want to get back in there and be a scrappy fightin’ filipino once again. i really really need to finish this law school thing first, but my brain is hatching schemes all over the place how even law school will help me get back to the path.
who knows, maybe i’ll actually update this blog more frequently, too 
By fightinfilipino
i haven’t written on this thing for months. so of course, right when i need to be stuffing as much knowledge on torts into my head as superhumanly possible, i decide right now to write a blog post.
it’s been really hitting me over the last couple of weeks that i’ve been wrong, seriously wrong, on how i’ve been approaching things i’ve felt were really important to me lifewise. one of the attorneys i used to work with was one of the senior lawyers at the firm, so he had a lot of experience and knowledge not just on immigration law (he worked for the INS for a long time, too), but on living as an attorney. unfortunately for him, he learned things the hard way, absorbing insights by making some wrong choices and bearing the aftermath.
this attorney was in no way a bad person, at all. i’ve told him this before and i’ll say it now: i can only hope to be the kind of attorney he is. he knows immigration law inside and out, and has very keen instincts on how to proceed with a case and how to work with clients. more than that, he’s a hard, honest worker, and won’t stand for shortcuts simply on principle. that’s admirable to me.
but, and there’s always the cautionary “but” in every story, this attorney found his way only after traversing tough waters. originally he had focused his life so much on work that other vital things, like family and friends, and taking care of himself, were subsumed.
he and i and another attorney ended up being the firm’s official “Night Crew”. we stayed late to get work done, sometimes far later than the other attorneys and paralegals in the office. and then afterwards, we would all head to a local piano bar to relax and, well, self-medicate. it was during these trips out that this attorney sat me down and told me not to do what he did in being a workaholic and nothing else. he told me to find things important to my life and to follow them as much as i could, outside of the law career.
i’d always been fairly single-minded whenever there was something i felt i needed to do because it was right, but often i would become so focused on my goal that i didn’t carefully consider the consequences. my actions were like shaking a strand on a spider web: no matter how intent you are on one strand, the vibrations ripple out to the rest of the web and reach things you didn’t even realize were there, like ravenous spiders for example. i learned this the hard way when i decided to join a full-on protest during undergrad. i found it again while i was working with youth facing the threat of deportations or prison time in juvi. while i was so focused on the end goal, i didn’t even stop to think of the ripples i was sending out in other places, not until those ripples magnified and returned to burn and hack and slash me.
when i moved out to SD, i had a rough time of it at first. i’ve always been a nomad and used to transplanting myself to new places. i also have a lot of family up in LA with whom i did spend a lot of time. but i didn’t realize the depth of my loneliness, being separated from all my lifelong friends and my parents and sis, until law school’s jaws had firmly ensnared me. things eventually became ok, because i remembered what my attorney friend back home told me. i sought out friends and made it a point to hang out with them, as much as possible for law school anyways. i started getting back into web tinkering and messing around with drawing and graphics. i even got to rock out again, at least in video game form, on a bass (thank goodness for Rock Band). and i swore to myself that i was not going to let all of that go. i was looking forward to Spring semester.
now i’m sitting in our school’s mock trial office praying i suddenly evolve the power to absorb law knowledge by osmosis, and i’m wondering if i’ve only shot myself in the foot for keeping my single-mindedness on those life and non-lawschool things, if i’ve pursued them too zealously. i’ve been a bull in a china shop.
my attorney friend was not wrong. i know that in my heart. but the way i’ve been seeking my own heaven here hasn’t been right, either.
PS: thanks USD for giving me all this extra non-time. i really appreciate it.
By fightinfilipino
so…which one do you all like?
or:
By fightinfilipino
i’ve been hearing from an increasing number of law school alums that their own careers weren’t the result of their directed, dogged search for an area of law in which they wanted to practice, but instead was the culmination of a series of coincidences. i had a hard time swallowing this at first. i realize that right when you get out of law school, you’re not immediately going to find your dream job, that it might take a few years to be practicing in your favorite area of law. but until now i very much believed that on the Quest for My Career®, i’d find some amazing subset of law while in school and follow its thread out into the real world.
but with what happened tonight, i’m starting to believe the happy accident stories. earlier today we’d heard from the school that our grades, long kept in captivity in some secret, dingy vault miles below the school’s foundations, were going to be released. finally i could learn whether or not i flunked out, or flunked out with style. turns out i didn’t flunk out after all. i also had a practice mock interview scheduled tonight with a law school alum who graciously volunteered to help us burgeoning law students practice our interviewing skills. having happily established that i get to stick around for at least another semester, i went in to the interview expecting to just “shoot the shit” with a random alum.
the alum i interviewed with was a newly-minted associate attorney with one of the larger law firms in town. he was working in corporate litigation, a field that i have almost no interest in whatsoever. but figuring i needed to emphasize my “excellent research and writing skills”, i go on to explain a little about my past semester (studiously dodging the grades question) and how that must be very on-point with business litigation memo and brief writing. i mention the names of the professors we had last semester, and my interviewer’s eyes lit up at the mention of one of the professors. it turns out that he had had that professor for a corporate law class, and that, like myself and a lot of other people, he too struggled with what turned out to be an economics class in disguise. we spent the rest of the interview jovially talking about the craziness that is law school. at the end, i got the requisite business card, and a mention that if i needed some help figuring out the San Diego legal community, he would be more than happy to help. the professor coincidence made the interview a hell of a lot smoother than it could have been.
we head back to the career services office, me relating an anecdote from when i was still working in Boston and some of the bizarre corporate ethics issues we ran into in some immigration cases. as we enter the office, one of the career services counselors more or less thrust a box of sandwiches at us and asked us to stay and eat a bit. being a law student, it is a moral obligation for me to accept free food. my interviewer grabbed a few sandwiches, chatted a bit more, and then took his leave. during this last bit, another student in the room, a 2L, overheard that i had been working for an immigration firm. we started talking a bit about H-1Bs and PERM and how the economic turmoil of late has been upending hiring of foreign nationals. it turns out that the guy currently works at a local branch of one of the major multistate immigration law firms. he immediately asks me for a resume copy and says he’ll check if the local office needs 1Ls for the summer. job opportunities +2! then, out of the blue, he asks me if i had heard of a company where one of the other alumni interviewers was general counsel. incredibly enough, the company was one of my old firm’s major clients; we’d done a ton of various immigration cases for them, and the general counsel was someone with whom i’d chatted on a daily basis. we immediately launch into a long conversation about the company’s immigration work and what the company was like as a whole. turns out that my new immigration buddy was looking to apply with the company. i let this insane coincidence stir in my head a bit.
at this point, the career services counselor comes by to chat a bit about our interviewing experience, and then mentions that the alumni interviewer from that company wanted to talk with my immigration buddy about a job offer. i hung out a bit in the office to see if i could say hi to this alum before i left; a few moments later, he walks into the office and conducts an informal, friendly interview with immigration-buddy. i step off to the side to avoid being rude, but listen in on the job opportunity, a legal research position over in China. i can’t help but be amused, since i had done a good deal of work before with the China branch and knew some of the staff there. after the alum finished the interview, i step up to “introduce” myself, and the alum’s eyes brighten like a flash bulb. he asks me about how i’m finding law school and a bit of the recent immigration scuttlebutt, and then invites me to visit his office near LA on a free day and have lunch. he even mentions that his own paralegal, a person whom i also talked with frequently and knew very well, would be glad to see me. he offers me his card, briskly shakes my hand, and leaves for the evening.
it only hit me then that the entire night was a string of coincidences. the odds of these discrete events happening all in a row were ridiculously low. i’m idly considering hitting the local poker club around the corner just to see if this luck holds.
the notion that this all happened in the space of a couple of hours has me bewildered. but on a detached level, i recognize that i just had three very good ways to find a jobby job for the summer, and perhaps for something more substantial later on, presented to me during an evening i thought would consist of going through the motions of a fake interview. i’m still going to have to invest a bit of effort to find work, sure. but the next time i hear an attorney tell me that they found a job or even a calling they liked through a combination of happy accidents, i’ll be more inclined to believe them.
By fightinfilipino
By fightinfilipino
i think i’ve turned into a city boy.
don’t get me wrong, i haven’t forgotten my bucolic roots. i grew up in Simsbury, Connecticut, arguably an epicenter for the agricultural pursuits (read: tobacco) of the original American colonists. this was a town where cow-tipping was the thing to do on Saturday nights (well, aside from the copious imbibing of fermented liquids and smoking of…substances), and where things like 4H and the Big E were the major annual events. as a kid i’d run out to the middle of the woods in our backyard and play war games and camp out and go fishing with the local kids and classmates.
but you can’t get the kind of energy that a city provides, or the diversity you can find within just a 5 mile radius. i spent my winter break in NYC, right smack in midtown, near Rockefeller Center and 5th Avenue. yes, that particular spot isn’t authentic city. the midtown area is definitely made for tourist folks. part of my time there was spent training on the art of dodging others’ photographs. i’d be walking in front of, oh say, the giant Christmas tree near Rockefeller at nighttime, idly thinking how pleasing it was to see the tree using LED lighting to cut down on energy consumption, when all of a sudden i will see a flash in my blind spot. i realized quickly that i’d just ruined some tourist family’s carefully planned family photo. by the end of my first week i’d gotten to the point of looking out for cameras like a gazelle looks out for lions stalking in the grass. i was doing barrel rolls to escape clans of irate Danish tourists. forget the seedy gangs of new york, tourists are the real danger!
aside from leaping out of the way every so often though, i was reminded about how much cultural diversity was packed into such a small area. i walked about three blocks or so uptown and hung out at the MoMA, admiring the always-impressive collections of symbolic and psychedelic pieces. the museum had a tourist-friendly Van Gogh exhibit up, but they also had a Joan Miró gallery as well. a brief walk in the other direction took me to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where my favorite Pope, John Paul II, had visited almost two decades ago. i’m still impressed by the enormity of the building, how small you feel even when the Cathedral is packed to the brim with the faithful and the thronging tourist crowds.
feeling a bit peckish, i made my way over to Dean & DeLuca’s, inside the Rockefeller Plaza complex. NYC as you might know is world-famous for its huge number of delicious delis. Dean & DeLuca’s is no exception; their sandwiches are ridiculously delicious, and their desserts, lethal, tasty gastroenterological weapons of mass destruction, should be declared illegal. i had their roast beef sandwich smeared with horseradish mayonnaise. the horseradish was fresh, as if it came right from the garden. it also burned like Beckett burns pitches against A-Rod. the intense flavor cleared out my sinuses, and possibly a bunch of other cavities inside my cranium. thankfully i had some delicious carrot cake to munch on, too.
later on i hopped on the B line and went to Chinatown. aside from the really good food there (which i can’t stress enough, the always-open Chinatown restaurants are the perfect thing after an all-night clubbing spree), Chinatown itself is a revealing glimpse into American history. here you’ve got a confluence of Chinese (and other Asian) immigrants intersecting with the hustle of New York. even today, with the incessant march of gentrification erasing much of the original Chinatown, you still can see the unique essence of America’s love, and hate, for immigrants. even now, you can still witness the attempts to belong to America while at the same time preserving their own traditions, languages, cuisines, and identities. i can’t say that this phenomenon is uniquely American anymore; many countries in Europe are, somewhat ironically, dealing with the very same conflicts of immigrant waves now. but the intersection of so many peoples in one place is an integral part of the city, one i love to experience. you even have Little Italy right around the corner.
i went back uptown again to Broadway and Times Square and caught some shows. now there’s a storied tradition of American art. granted, shows like Phantom of the Opera or The Lion King are more akin to pop culture than classical art, but the sheer concentration of acting and musical and illustrative and other talent in one spot is something you could only find in a city. i met some college students working the TKTS booth and was amazed how eager they were to brave the blustery winter and brightly tell me about their favorite shows, on and off Broadway. cities provide this kind of environment, where arts aren’t characterized as superfluous; instead they’re lauded as necessary reflections of where we are as human beings (and in some cases, hilarious investigations of things like “why the internet was born?“) i very much hope these kinds of art survive and prosper. the monolith of the MTV building always seems a bit like a thieving interloper in Times Square.
now that i’m back in San Diego, i’ve got this itch to explore the downtown area. law school classes be damned! i love NYC during tourist season, but i need warm weather and sunlight during my days. what’s there to do in this fine city?…
By fightinfilipino
O_o
o_O
0_0
(this is going to be me for the next two weeks. won’t be posting for a while!)
By fightinfilipino
i realized over this weekend that i’ve been angry. not really angry at anyone in particular. maybe angry at myself for moping about for a week and not doing anything about it. or really, not doing anything about it for these last two months.
damn. has it been that long?
we law students are now standing on the precipice. below is the gaping maw of final exams, filled with rows upon rows of diamond-sharp teeth, each begging and yearning to slice and dice 1Ls. i will survive it; of that i don’t have any doubt. but how i’ll come through, how everyone will come through, is a whole different matter entirely. the logical side of my brain knows that there’s still two and a half years yet to go. but to my emotional side, it feels already like the final year, when everyone comes out of the trials alive but cut and shaped and honed, the very things that make people who i know them to be excised away. it already means the drifting apart of the friends whom i’ve come to know (and care for) to find their own paths.
i thought i had gotten over this feeling when i left Brown. i wasn’t fully prepared for it when classes finally finished, when exams and papers were finally done. back then, the same logical part of my brain screamed out to me that that was it, that college phase of life was done, that all of us were going our own ways. but my emotional side never really let go, never left that place until maybe a year after i had been working in Boston and forging new friendships. and even then, i was still close to Providence. the hour-long drive from Boston to Providence, that brief trek through the unremarkable “backwater” of both Massachusetts and Rhode Island, was an insignificant distance; even less significant was the distance between me and my classmates who simply migrated northward to Boston at the same time. it was safe. warm. comforting.
leaving that comfort was something i knew i needed to do. it was like ripping a particularly intractable band-aid off a sensitive wound. to grow and to learn, to find my own way, meant straining and sometimes tearing the ties i had weaved in place. but in setting my roots here, in creating ties with people i started to care about, i had forgotten about the kind of pain that comes with ripping those same ties to shreds when the time comes to move on. and now we’re at that time.
i’m angry with myself for having forgotten this. i am a nomad by nature. part of being a nomad is never allowing yourself to get too attached to places or people, because once you do, you are unable to live as a nomad again, preferring the safety and comfort of the home you have built…of the people you’ve come to care for. law school is not supposed to be my home. maybe it’s just that i haven’t had much time here yet. but the changes coming of the next semester will alter the ground upon which i stand. relationships will change; people will grow distant. these are things i know are inevitable, merely from having seen and lived it so many times.
i should have known this was coming. i should have not reveled in or enjoyed the comfort of these last months. and i am damned angry that i have been so complacent. all i can do now is focus that anger on my finals.
By fightinfilipino
it’s hard being a transplant. sometimes i wonder if i should have stayed on the East Coast, cold weather be damned.
By fightinfilipino
one of my favorite works ever crafted is the Divine Comedy. you might have heard of it. the Comedy is a an epic poem written at a time when, for many people, the concepts of heaven and earth were drowned out by the upheaval caused by the Great Famine. Dante arguably wrote the Divine Comedy at the “best” possible time, too; the 14th century later saw the coming of the Black Plague and the schism of the Roman Catholic Church, events that could and did shake the faith of so many people.
perhaps this turmoil is why Dante felt it important to explore what it truly meant to be good or evil, and what this meant with regard to the afterlife. certainly the world was left for the better with the creation of the Divine Comedy; Dante’s description of the circles of hell and the spheres of heaven left an indelible imprint. peoples all over the world, regardless of creed or nationality or ethnic background, came to conceptualize the construction of heaven and hell, as well as the interstitial spaces of purgatory, through the lens of Dante’s trek through the levels of heaven, purgatory, and hell.
Dante’s idea of the levels of heaven and hell is incredibly compelling to me; i was raised Catholic, went to a Catholic school, went to church regularly as a youngin’. while i now have many disagreements with organized religion generally and am bothered by many of the social positions Christian churches can take, i still truly believe the idea that your acts and deeds in life translate directly to the varying levels of good or evil reflected by Dante’s circles of hell and spheres of heaven.
there’s something else though that i’ve drawn from the Divine Comedy, something that Dante did not explore well enough, i think, when he committed his pen to the parchment. in his schema, Dante never fully discusses the nature of Earth, our home. he certainly explores where Earth falls in relation to the glory of the heavens and the horrors of the burning hells. but Dante did not address the living, the human beings existing on Earth.
i believe Earth is our last heaven. Earth is the missing piece from Dante’s formulation of heaven, purgatory, and hell. Dante describes nine spheres of heaven in the Comedy, assigning a level of goodness to each sphere. if this is the case, if each sphere represents the good of the denizens of each sphere, then our planet is the the tenth sphere, the final place where we human beings struggle with the basic question of what it means to be “good”. i like to think that we interface with heaven (as well as hell) on a daily basis; each human being encounters moral and ethical decisions regularly and must decide among the “good” and “evil” with which he or she is presented. wherever we go after life, whether it be one of the circles of hell or one of the courts of heaven or something else we have yet to even imagine, our acts and conduct while living on Earth determine which place to where we all shall eventually go.
our planet is the borderland, the “last heaven” between the spheres of heaven and the circles of hell. i don’t claim at all to know or even believe in a specific idea of the afterlife, but what i do know is that while we’re all here, living on these borderlands, we must strive to do good, to do unto others as others would do unto you and me. translated to 21st century internet english, the rule really is “don’t be a dick”. wherever i end up after the adventure of law school, i can only hope to remember the fact that we live on these borderlands. like i said, i personally don’t know right now if there is a heaven or a hell. but ultimately this doesn’t matter; it is the good that we do with our time here that should be our focus.
