Stepping in a New River

My lack of posts of late is despicable. Somebody should have yelled at me, but I won't blame you.

Several developments of late: I've begun studying for the LSAT(-an). Again.

Once back in the summer and fall of 2006, I pretended to study enough and horribly underestimated it's difficulty. Granted, I also was really unsure about what to do with my life, had fallen asleep every time I sat in on county criminal court, had 3 roommates who played Madden football 6 hours a day, and it was football season at Notre Dame. Many excuses, and all of them amount to a great big bagel when your sitting in a stadium sized classroom with 500 of your peers who seem to be flipping pages much faster than you, and you start Christmas treeing the answer sheet when you have 2 minutes left but have given up a long time ago.

I made the mistake, and you might say, of not canceling that score. At the time my sub-conscious wanted to prevent me from having any chance to get into law school, so I decided to keep it. I think I also wanted to punish myself for the embarrassment warranted when you commit to something and then bullshit and procrastinate for a few months until you wake up in the middle of the night with rapid heartbeat.

Less than a year later, I made the best, and most unlikely, decision for my future that I could have ever considered.

I came to California.

I loosened up. Went to an acting studio. Got healthy. Lost weight. Engaged my mind. Did Yoga. Made new friends. Found my girl. Lived differently. Grew personally and became more flexible. And best of all, I started to care again.

Oh, I kept drinking, but eventually I chose to avert hangovers. I found other outlets for my energy. And even now, I still don't know exactly what I'll do with my life.

But I found a direction, or maybe more specifically, a collection of philosophy and experiences that I was both very lucky to seek and encounter so quickly, and that I most likely would have never found in law school, or many other places in the US that I might have chosen if I didn't harbor a deep, albeit naive, dream of making it as a Hollywood screenwriter.

So I find myself trying to ford the LSAT river yet again. But this time it feels very different, and I'm a transformed pilgrim.