The Rogers News

Category: Our Experiences

Tales of my life as told by me.

  • Art Ideas

    I wish I was a painter because I have the following ideas, which I think would best be conveyed via paint.

    (1) The hugeness of a hug. Sometimes when I wrap my arms around you and you wrap yours around me everything that seemed to matter ceases to exist and all I know is you. This is assurance – love – happiness all wrapped up around me.

    (2) The rigidness of my thinking at times. How painful it is to try opening my mind to new things. How terribly painful it is to admit my wrongs. To slow down. To be more considerate. I’ve spent many years rushing. Probably not really caring about the others in my life. It’s always been about me.

    (3) The distance that can develop between two people who love each other. That feeling you get when you are only one cushion away, but it feels like a million miles. But never that simple. And you’re never sure which one of you is the one that is far away, so you blame it on them while trying to hard.

  • Looking for Work

    I saw this inspiring bit of information in my blog reader today:

    Magdy told the publication he sent out about 300 resumes, but landed just one job INTERVIEW. “Every day I send out resumés, both electronically and through the mail, and every day I receive responses that the law firms are not currently hiring,” he said.

    Magdy graduated from Michigan State University Law School and has an LLM from Washington University. (Link) Is it just me or does it not seem like he has to be doing something else wrong? One interview out of 300 applications. That is insane. I get one job offer or maybe a handful of interviews. But one – single – uno – interview. Wow.

    I should have gone to dental school.

    I’ve been ignoring a lot of negative news like this. Daily, blog reports of the number of associates and support staff being laid off by biglaw firms stream from top to bottom of my screen. Times are obviously tough. (It was just announced that Harvard lost 22% of its endowment.) The stock market is all over the place. The housing market has tanked. Jobs are few and far between.

    I’m babbling now. But it’s time to get on the ball. Find a job. The best one I can get, considering the times. This downturn in the economy could be an opportunity to get started on the right track. Good saving habits. Get a new (used) car cheap. Get a house cheaper. Get going. Grow up (scream, clutch face)! Not sure what that even means. Growing up that is. But that’s a whole other post. For now, it’s about the job hunt.

  • Open Hearts Heal

    The following quote from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami has hung with me for a few days now:

    Reiko smiled too, cigarette in mouth. “You are a good person, though. I can tell that much from looking at you. I can tell these things after seven years of watching people come and go here: there are people who can open their hearts and people who can’t. You’re one of the ones who can. Or, more precisely, you can if you want to.”

    “What happens when people open their hearts?”

    Cigarette dangling from her lips, Reiko clasped her hands together on the table. She was enjoying this. “They get better,” she said. Her ashes dropped onto the table, but she paid them no mind.

    Having an open heart can be humiliating and humbling. It is much easier to sequester away what I most need to express — those feelings and emotions that hang on the tip of my tongue for what seems like hours. There are numerous times when I have sat face to face with someone with an entire well of words that I wanted to say, but I just couldn’t bring myself to speak. My mouth wasn’t dry. My brain was functioning. But there was something — maybe sanity or dignity or something that I will only be able to grasp much later in life — that holds me back.

  • Sitting Alone in My Kitchen

    Tonight is quiet. It is not lonely. Just quiet and alone. Accompanying my wandering thoughts is a steady rainfall that will soon become silent snow. The streetlights outside my window run along the entire length of my block in muted yellows. The cars that drive by sound like a coat zipper and their red lights blend with the yellow lights from above.

    It is raining and I am sitting alone in my kitchen.

    It seems darker outside than usual. And brighter inside. The fluorescent light above me is harsh and annoying — reminding me I am alone in my kitchen and it is dark outside. And raining.

    My pen casts a faint shadow on my yellow paper.

    Besides the rain and the darkness and the general sense of alone-ness, there is no football on television tonight. College or otherwise. I don’t like when there isn’t a football game on and I’m alone. It is what I watch when I don’t want to think. Don’t want to be involved in a story. Just want to observe distant collisions between others. Ignore my own.

    I read today that America may split into six separate countries. West Coast, Texas, East Coast, Northern States and a couple others. That seems insane like $4 gas. But that happened. And now I’m paying $1.72. So, everything ebbs and flows. The downfall of America today. The strength of the dollar the next. In my email today I read that I should travel to London. That the American dollar is at a five-year high against the British pound. Never mind that no one has any of the strong dollars. That billions are being spent by our government to save companies that should fail. That deserve to fail.

    Anyway. It is dark and raining. I am in my kitchen alone reading and wondering whatching the orange lights and listening to the zippers zip by my apartment.

  • Wanting to Write

    I want to write… I want to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo.org) and churn out a novel, but each time I have a spare moment when I could write I think of about eight things I should be doing like looking for a job, reading for class the next day, doing the dishes, running this errand or that one. And none are valid excuses. Nor is not knowing what to write. That is the point of NoNoWriMo. You just churn something out.

    I did this last year. I’m doing it again. I’d like to write 50k words by December 1st, but that’s a steep goal. Very steep goal with days passing quickly.

  • GOBAMA

    Barack Obama’s win last night goes down as one of the major historical events of my lifetime — the kind of event that makes me remember where I was when it happened. The only other event like it that I remember clearly is the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. I was eating pizza at the La Famiglia pizza restaurant (now a Jimmy Johns) on the corner of E. William St. and S. State St. in Ann Arbor, MI when I heard, faintly on the store radio, that a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Centers. I was shocked — scared somewhat, although Ann Arbor didn’t seem like it would be next on the list of terror targets. I walked to the fishbowl and watched video news feeds on TV and on the web. It was a surreal moment — one I couldn’t believe was happening at the time.

    Last night was equally memorable. I sat in the bedroom of my sublet watching the election results on both my computer and CNN HD. Next to me was my best friend and the one person I would most want to share a moment like this with. I smiled. I didn’t jump around. I just felt relieved and happy.

    Then, this morning, while I was on my way to get donuts, I screamed, “GOBAMA!” a few times. What a tremendous moment in the history of the United States of America. Definitely not something I imagined I would see in my lifetime.

  • Election Day

    Today has been really boring as far as exciting days go. I voted weeks ago by absentee ballot, so I didn’t even get to go to the polls, stand in line, and pull the lever.

    The only source of anxiety is, well, not knowing for certain who is going to win. Duh, right? Well, I’ve been hearing for weeks now that Obama has a solid lead. But I wonder if, like a mismatched college bowl game where the media commentators twist the facts to make the possibility of a close game seem more likely, I have been misled by hours of CNN.

    The earliest east coast polls just closed on what is guaranteed to be a historic day.