I can’t believe it’s already been two months since my last entry, which was written in China! Time definitely flies by when you’re busy, and lately I have been. Of course, this is no excuse for not continuing my writing.
I decided early on to devote this summer to applying to law schools and preparing for the LSAT. I realized that during the last two summers, my internships made it very hard for me to look at the LSAT, since I would mentally excuse myself from looking at my books because I was tired after a day of work. And there was the fact that my high school friends weren’t far from where I was living, so the desire to spend time hanging out with them usually outweighed my motivation to concentrate on more work.
This summer has mostly been a lonely one, since I’m living at my parents’ house, away from where I went to high school. It’s the first time I’ve stayed more than a couple of weeks at home since high school. During the last two summers, I was in Connecticut for internships, and during winter breaks, I shuffled between CT and NJ. Luckily, I’ve stayed in touch over the years with a best friend who I went to elementary school with here in NJ, so I called her up a couple of weeks ago, and we hung out. It was nice catching up and seeing how little things have changed. But since she’s living with her boyfriend at Rutgers, taking classes there, and has her own summer travel plans, I can’t expect to see her more than a few times. My boyfriend is also away in California working at his new full-time job at a national lab. I flew out in July to see him, and while we had a great time, I also find it hard to push the thought of us always being apart out of my mind.
Taken at the beach at Santa Cruz
Although my parents are around, I haven’t actually had any conversations at length with them. At least we haven’t gotten into big arguments the way we would back when I was in high school. Back then, it seemed like the bickering would never end. Since college, it’s been a lot more peaceful between us, but it’s also sad that this harmony is coming after my childhood, when it would’ve meant so much more to my development and happiness while I was growing up. Besides bland conversations over dinner about law schools and their work lives, we haven’t talked about much.
I have talked to my brother, K., quite a lot more this summer than I have in the past two years. And while two years seems like such a short time to me now, I realize that at his age (15 years), two years means a world of difference. He has grown up so much during my absences at school already, and one reason I don’t feel as bad about being stuck at home this summer is that now I can see him before he grows up entirely. He’s about 5’ 7” now and since he only started getting growth spurts last year, I’m guessing he’ll be at least 5’10 before he stops growing. This might not seem like news to anyone, but in our short, Asian household, it means we’ll have someone “tall.” It seems silly to be obsessing over my brother’s height, but thinking about K. has always brought out my maternal instincts. With our six-year age gap, I’ve always felt protective and nurturing towards him. Often times when I disagreed with my parents’ authoritarian attitude and lack of effort in communicating with me for reasons other than school, I mentally noted the things I resented and promised myself to give K. more than what I got.
Besides SAT verbal prep classes earlier this summer and marching band practice coming up in mid-August, K. has spent his time with me at home. Of course, I remind him to do all the things (i.e. summer reading, AP chemistry prep, physics SAT II prep, and clarinet) that my parents made him write down in a schedule, and I do get mad and discipline him when I’m pretty sure he’s been playing games online for hours instead of working, but I try to maintain a balanced approach to being a good older sister. It’s complicated. On the one hand, I want to “parent” him because I want to see him grow up well, but on the other hand, I really want to be a sister to him, not a mom. I don’t want him to be constantly stressed out or even scared when talking to me the way I was talking to my parents while growing up. I want him to think he can share things with me he wouldn’t with my parents. I want to be a role model for him, to tell him how I got to where I am, and to be there for him.
Over lunch, I’ve tried casually starting conversations about how school life is or asking him about his friends in the neighborhood. It seems so natural for siblings in other households to talk to each other normally, but when you grow up in a household where the parents don’t lead normal conversations with the expectation that everyone will participate, but rather address each child separately, you end up feeling awkward and unfamiliar with what to say when the parents are out of the picture. It’s even more awkward now that K. is a teenager and is capable of sharing his personal life on a much more equal level to me, since when he was little he’d just talk about whatever small topics were currently distracting him. I used to be able to address him like he was a little kid, but now, just two years later, he deserves more respect and can’t be talked to that way anymore. I also realize that as we get older and older, the less and less the age gap will matter.
I took K. out to Friendly’s the other day, since we got some coupons in the mail, and enjoyed a nice lunch together. We made fun of the bad service, since the waitress really didn’t seem to want to be there, and made small talk. I tried to get him to tell me who he had a crush on, but he got embarrassed and just asked why I wanted to know. Even though it must’ve been awkward for him, I think I made progress, just by letting him realize that A) I’m interested in the goings-on in his life and B) That I’m not going to be mad at him for sharing. Perhaps he’ll tell me by the end of the summer!
Even if I don’t significantly raise my LSAT score through the Powerscore course I’m taking in Manhattan, at least I will have bonded with my brother. The LSAT really is getting on my nerves, though. My score has pretty much barely changed (always +/- 1 point) on the practice tests, even though I feel like I’m learning a lot through the course and homework materials. I know my biggest problem is the Logic Games. I haven’t gotten to answer questions on the fourth game during the last three practice tests I’ve taken, much less finish the section. It bothers me a lot because I know that given just 5-10 more minutes, I could essentially get all the questions in that section correct. It’s disheartening because even though I’m doing many, many practice games, I can’t seem to get my speed down to 9 minutes a game. Given that I’m doing much better on the other sections of the LSAT, doing poorly on the logic games makes me feel even dumber. It’s as if I’ve always been hiding a secret deficiency because up till now, nothing brought my disability to light. Now, LSAT preparations are shining a light on this gross deformity, this atrophied muscle that had never been exposed. Please excuse the political incorrectness of this statement, but it’s like I now realize that I’ve been a high-functioning retard the entire time. I seriously hope that over the next month, I can overcome this and that if I don’t do well on the LSAT, at least it’s not because I couldn’t finish.
In other news, I’ve been reading Anarchy and Elegance, Confessions of a Journalist at Yale Law School by Christ Goodrich. It’s about a journalist who did a one-year M.S.L. degree at Yale to supplement his journalism training. It’s interesting because he writes about Yale Law School from an insider’s perspective, but at the same time, he maintains some distance between himself and the institution because he doesn’t aspire to become a lawyer and he’s only there for the one year. However, the book probably isn’t very good for my morale given that I’m applying to law school. Goodrich appears committed to the conclusion that law school makes you lose your humanity, your soul. He criticizes the cold, meticulous way in which law imposes a set of rules that are to be applied whenever certain facts exist, with the human face of the players involved in the case removed from consideration. He is disgusted by the way in which Supreme Court cases are often decided because the justices just want to clarify a view of theirs or because they don’t want to allow a certain case to imply the legality of an action in future cases, which Goodrich views as the case turning on mere technicality, rather than on the implications for the lives of the people in the case. He also doesn’t like the fact that law generally doesn’t allow for uncertainty or exceptions; juries are never told to decide whether a defendant is “probably guilty,” even though the reality is often that there is no certainty.
I think I’ll read Anarchy and Elegance to the end, just because it’s readable and relevant, and I don’t like stopping books in the middle, but I hope that Goodrich leaves some room for me to believe that lawyers aren’t all evil and heartless. I often find myself looking for sentences that show the weakness of his reasoning or overgeneralizations he makes so I can mentally attack his credibility. This works to an extent actually, since I think he does over-exaggerate (his journalism background coming through?) and he says that he never wanted to be a lawyer in the first place. He even says in the beginning that he had a long-standing joking with a friend that the friend should shoot him if he ever became a lawyer.
Between the book, visiting the boyfriend again, LSAT stuff, law school apps, nine cycles of America’s Next Top Model, and bonding with the brother, I have a lot of things to do in the remaining month I have left before senior year begins.
Oz Evolving 