The Daily Grind

I haven't much to say. Since I finished school the pace of life has dropped off significantly. That always happens after those sleepless and anxiety filled weeks of professional school exams, and I have learned to enjoy it. People who are runners will understand what I mean...that feeling after a great long run where you have taken a shower and you sit down with a big bottle of water, a bowl of fruit maybe, and turn on the music and just relax. This is easily one of the best feelings in the world and its important to take it in while it lasts. So it is with the post-exam feeling.

I am looking for work, though to no avail. My day basically goes as follows. I get up and read a couple newspapers and then go for a run. Come back and have some late breakfast or early lunch depending on when I did my run and then get ready to go look for jobs. So far the job hunt is confined to a plan...I will devise the night before a few places I need to hit and go for it. Soon the structure will come apart and I will start cold-searching. Job hunting is a lot of walking around, which is one of my favorite activities anyway so that's not bad. If the weather is nice, which it has been a lot lately, I will try to squeeze in a skate. Then at the end of the day I go to my favorite cafe and catch up on some reading...often this is the high-point of the day.

I cannot help but plugging my new favorite cafe, its called Cafe Moccador and its on Falkoner Alle in my commune, Frederiksberg. Its a 15-20 minute walk if the weather is nice otherwise its right next to the Metro station. The prices are very reasonable for Copenhagen and the staff is super friendly...nicest cafe staff I have come across in Europe yet. The lighting is adequate, and the front room has floor to ceiling windows that are open on nice days. The chairs are not Lazy-Boy recliners, but they have a varied assortment and I have not found a chair there yet that is bad enough to require me to cut my work short. I should say that style and design are very big in Denmark, and often the chairs make a nice artistic statement...they tell me about the artist's unconscious desires, but they do not tell me why I should sit my bony rear-end in a metal chair shaped like the solar system or an amoeba. They do have us outclassed by a long shot though in style and design though, speaking of San Diego the land of the slacker slob! Anyway, they do not mind at Moccador that I tend to stay for hours and work, and the servers even keep the water coming. The place is never crowded either.

Though I have not been writing here much, I have been quite active lately. Usually the discipline of exam period has a lag-effect so that when I get back to the work that matters I can work well for long periods. I have been reading and writing at a break-neck pace lately across a wide range of topics.

For leisure reading I am nearing the end of another Trotsky biography which has been nice. It was written by an ex-Soviet historian who was removed from his post for writing "un-Soviet" things about Lenin (aka, the truth). He has a healthy dose of criticism for Trotsky which is good cause Trotsky tends to be treated as either the angel of the revolution or a fascist counter-revolutionary (this was the party line in the 20s, 30s, and 40s when Stalin was using Trotsky as an excuse to kill all his political enemies and eventually Trotsky himself...all of it was exposed as lies, like Trotsky had been saying, after Stalin's death).

Trotsky is a really interesting story though. A glorious romantic youth followed by a tragic and cataclysmic fall that saw his family and loved ones killed off one-by-one by Stalin's henchmen and eventually his own murder by a Soviet agent in Mexico. Trotsky was an ambiguous man and by no means either the "good" or the "evil" man that history has tended to cast him as. Along with Lenin he committed terrible crimes in the revolution and civil war, but he was one of the few with the courage to call Stalinism for what it was, a murderous bureaucratic totalitarian government...for his crusade he paid dearly.

Besides that I am trying to close down a few things I have had to put on hold for a while to deal with the persistant bother that is law school. I am finishing up a few things with Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, the philosophy of Buddhism, and a book on the concepts of modern art. This is the ideal life for me...one spent reading and writing. Oh, I forgot to mention Foucault, I have been dabbling a bit with Foucault in the context of late theories of power relations and hegemony (less Gramsci and more Laclau and Mouffe). I have picked up something unexpected there that has drawn my thoughts a bit lately, but I won't speak of that now. My writing has been quite fruitful lately and spanning quite a range of issues, but my big project, which I am only beginning to outline, is an essay (a blasphemous little ditty I must say!) criticizing liberalism and legality (the rule of law). So far it has a name and a central theoretic idea and that's it. I hope to rehabilitate a communal theory of justice implicitly relied on in a book I wrote a criticism on last year, faulting it for a lack of conceptual soundness.

Now I must be going, I know this was not such a thrilling entry, but I thought the nicer points of how boring my day-to-day life really is would be helpful to debunk the myth. I will keep my eyes open for something absurd and funny that the Danes do so that I can write something more entertaining.