Turkey Day and Provisional Acceptance
Nov. 29th, 2020 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Lots o’ narrative in last night’s dream, but the only part I can remember now is that I ran into Susan. Did we talk? I’m not sure we talked. But we were certainly aware of each other’s presence.
Susan was living in a gorgeous house in a compound that reminded me a bit of that collective Heidi Aberg once lived in just off Adeline back in the day. Everyone who lived there was part of a secret society, and the person I was with—who may have known that I knew Sue but who did not seem to be aware of how well I knew Sue—was rattling on and on about the secret initiation rites.
Huh, I thought. Secret initiation rites—most un-Sue-like. I wished I dared to ask Susan about those secret initiation rites.
Implicit in the dream was the thought that I had visited the compound before. You had to go up this incredibly steep mountain path and take a dozen wrong turns, and then you’d stumble across it.
After I woke up, I wondered: Did you really dream that before?
RTT and I had the Big Fun, though if he has IT, I have IT too, ‘cause we snuggled a fair amount.
The catered Adams Turkey Day feast lacked cranberry sauce, so I made some and also got my hands on a Claude-baked™ pumpkin pie. We gorged!
We also watched a lot of Eric Andre and The Whitest Kids You Know.
I’d never heard of Eric Andre before! He’s a kind of Andy Kaufman for the 21st century; his jokes are this combination of gross physical comedy and highbrow intellectual. Cruel humor! Extreme punking. I thought he was awfully funny, which probably makes me a baaaaad person. Oh, well.
Since he responds so well to sketch humor and improv, I thought RTT might be up for making a Black Friday video at the local mall. When I see art I like, I generally want to imitate it, make something like it.
But RTT, though happy to accompany to the mall, did not want to join me in the type of merry antics that would have made an interesting video. In fact, I had to be careful not to embarrass him.
Consequently, the Black Friday stills and videos I shot—wheedling signage, empty stores, desperate fluorescent lighting—are pretty uninspiring.
Art Photos™! They’re just never, ever what you see in your head.
Still. If I can hunt down an accordion-y, Nino-Rota-ish instrumental of I’ll Be Home for Christmas to use as a score, I might be able to do something with them.
I did not spring The Talk on RTT.
We were getting along so well that I just didn’t want to jinx it.
He’s still seeing his therapist, so I imagine each session is some variation on The Talk.
Neutral territory! Much better venue.
Because no matter how hard you try, when you’re somebody’s parent, you can’t help being their Monster from the Black Lagoon. Every Talk you initiate, every comment that can be even faintly construed as reproof, dredges up the blackest of muck from the deepest of waters.
What else? Ichabod decided to take the health legislation analysis job in Sacramento.
He’s actually in mild despair over it.
Which, in a way, is kinda funny: Dude! We wanna pay you a shitload of money to be intellectually challenged and not have to think about what goes on here after you leave at the end of the day!
As opposed to: Dude! We wanna underpay you and overwork you to deal with the wretched of the earth whose anguished faces will monopolize every waking moment and haunt your sleep!
‘Cause, you know: He really wants to be a public defender.
When he was considering the decision and asked me what I thought, I refused to give him an answer, contenting myself with that most cloying of all maternal platitudes: I have complete faith that whatever decision you make will be the right one.
And I told him to talk to Susan, who’s his godmother and who recently retired after a long career as a federal appeals attorney. (Maybe that’s why I dreamed about her?). I figured it there’s anyone on the planet who gives good advice, it’s Susan.
He made the announcement during the Turkey Day phone call.
“Give it two years,” I said. “In the meantime, Sacramento is the state capital, and I have to think there are a ton of legal aid clinics with whom you could do pro bono work. Let your day job subsidize your avocation.”
“It’s the wrong career trajectory,” he said glumly. “There is no way I can recontexturalize this if I want to go back to working on reforming the criminal justice system.”
“Sure, there is,” I said. “You have to think more creatively. Plus any potential employer who doesn’t realize that 2020 is an unusual year when people are forced to make decisions according to their practical best interests rather than their dreams—i.e. I have a shitload of student loan debt to pay off; I can't afford to be unemployed—is a fucking idiot you don’t want to work for.”
(Click for full-sized photo)
Also Nafisa texted that she passed the USMLE exam but with scores that were too low to obtain a provisional MD license.
Are you going to retake it? I texted back. If you need my help, you have it.
I need to take it again, she texted. Of course I need your help. You have no idea how you changed me.
Which I found immensely flattering.
She has to retake the exam by Dec 31. The only dates the exam is being given are December 18th and 19th—which gives us only two weeks to get her scores up.
I’m not sure it can be done.
I’m afraid that she’s setting herself up for another failure, given her life circumstances.
I totally understand that, she texted. But there is no other way. I think I need to be more organized and priorities my responsibilities—
Prioritize, I thought.
— But this is the only way or I have to stop dreaming. And I will be house-wife forever without doing anything else
OUCH.
Well. I’ll see what I can do. But I’m gonna have to be more brutal this go-round than I was last. And last time I was really brutal. I had to break her of all her bad habits in a very short period of time. I suppose that’s what coaching is all about. But, hey! I got her writing scores up considerably. She could have gotten a provisional license if writing was the only thing they’d tested her on.
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Date: 2020-12-01 05:00 am (UTC)I might get to do some tutoring with refugees too! This organization I support in Rhode Island was looking for mentors for teens. *fingers crossed*
That cloying maternal advice is true though! Mainly-usually-mostly, anyway.
That double rainbow is magnificent.
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Date: 2020-12-01 12:09 pm (UTC)Isn't it, though? I saw it on the drive home. It lifted my heart.