Working

I have not been able to decide if I want to keep this post going while I am in Houston. Nothing happens here and I don't do anything so there is little to say really. My schedule is pretty much as follows: Wake up around 8 and get ready for work at 10 then I work till about 2 and go to the gym till 4:30 or 5 at which time I go back to work till around 2am and start all over again. So basically I work out two hours a day and work like 22.

I have read about 10 pages since I got back here, a testament to the wasteland that Texas is...and a brief shot at why I dread being a lawyer...a lifetime of 90 hr work weeks with no time for doing what I am passionate about, philosophy. Even when I get a few minutes to sit down and read I am so exhausted that I either fall asleep or just stare blankly at the pages.

I always used to say that the idea of working for no other reason than to afford yourself the capacity to keep working is a ridiculous circle. That is what I am doing. I am working so that I can afford the expressos and one meal a day that I need to get myself back into work. All of this just solidifies my commitment to not living like this.

If there are a few things that bring joy to your life, and you can no longer do those few things, then you have to take a day or so off to sit down and think about whether or not your life needs changing or if its really worth living. You get one, very short, expanse of time here, and I have breathed a little bit too much of life in my short 25 years to commit myself to the slow withering of it for whatever time I have left.

In the same vein, I have decided that I never want to catch myself saying, "man I wish this day/week/month would just get over" and actually mean it. Cause then what? I wish it would "get over" into what? At this point in our lives all is contingent excepting one thing, ultimately and finally we are throttling toward the second of the two unconditionals in our lives (and they are different only in semantics). I am not quite ready to "get over" the conditional and find myself on the doorstep of necessity.

People can criticize, joke about, and romanticize my lifestyle as much as they want...for me life is a pathos most of the time, terribly aware of the interrelation with its antipode. I like being with my friends; I like meeting new people; I enjoy visiting places I have never seen; I like a good cup of green tea in the very early morning, mid-afternoon, and evening; I enjoy surfing from time to time; and finally I enjoy reading philosophy and writing...

I am a philosopher, not a lawyer, not a lifeguard, not a waiter, etc...Philosophy was a choice at one time...its not a choice anymore. If I do not exercise it then I am miserable, psychologically and physically miserable. Philosophy fills my life up, and I wager it fills me with more life than most, but the flip-side is that life without it, even for the briefest time, is the most absent and empty life one could ever imagine. "The unexamined life is not worth living," said Socrates, but he was only part right...and you can figure out why.

23rd Hour Appeal

One more post from Denmark I guess...yikes I have really grown to love this place! What an about-face. There must be no other city in the world that moves at this speed. Also the parks, the green spaces, its marvelous. I think Stockholm probably outstrips Denmark in this department because there seemed to be more set-aside space there and the lake and sea make for so much water. I WILL see Stockholm in the summer before my 27th birthday (ah, 27, what an unlucky age!).

So I am in my death throes now here in Denmark...breathing that fresh Scandinavian air for the last few times before I return to the world center of smog. I am making a few last ditch appeals...very last ditch appeals. A friend of a friend is running for mayor in my glorious hometown of San Diego (and a plug, vote Donna Frye!!) so I am seeing if Mrs. Frye's campaign would be willing to bankroll a European world-tour where I would hit as many urban centers as I can by election day to gather the support of absentee San Diegans. I offer a dirt cheap zealot who believes firmly in Donna Frye. I offer a mind that is keyed toward political persuasion, the only thing I may do better than lifeguarding. I offer a body that knows minimalism of the highest degree and is not averse to slumming it for a couple months in the name of two higher causes (Donna Frye's election and my continued exile). We are at the 23rd hour! Wish me luck.

Otherwise I have developed a summer theme for my time in Houston (unless I land part time work in San Diego where I have several offers of couches to crash on if I can come up with food/surf wax/book money). I call it a "Spartan Summer" for several reasons. I will dedicate myself to toil with the masses this summer, but I am also dedicating myself to 2-3 workouts a day and a steady diet of theory. I plan to complete my first book this summer co-opting several themes I have been working on lately that have emerged as a series of temporal essays. The ideas are roughly a critique of liberalism and the rule of law (specifically in international human rights law), a theory of international human rights law that is communal and inter-subjective, and finally an argument for international legal, political and economic integration. I see myself as going out on a limb here because I plan to defy all the party lines I can possibly defy in the process...and I plan to spare no rhetorical weaponry in the process. Thus, in two days the Spartan Summer begins, and so history re-emerges from the current stagnant and decadent pause.

The Turn of the Screw

Well, events have really come apart here lately...it looks like very very soon Denmark will be coming to a grand conclusion, more like a whimper. I have found that I am just as worthless to Denmark as I am to the United States in the course of my "job hunt." Good to know, I will add it to the list of growing grievances I have to cash in before its all said and done.

I did land an interview in the next couple days! In London, all day, on a Sunday, for lifeguarding..."you sound like just the kind of candidate we are looking for!" I think the market is trying to tell me something..."just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" I can obviously not make a full day lifeguarding interview in London in two days, and really its just as well. I hung up the tiny red shorts and fox 40 whistle almost two years ago and swore my near decade-long odyssey in lifesaving had passed.

I was a good lifeguard...in fact I am a very good lifeguard and its definitely still what I am best at. What is frustrating is I was a good rookie guard 10 years ago...when I was 15. I am 25 now and I have about 4 more jobs, two states, two continents, 7 years of higher education and two degrees behind me and I am still just that...a lifeguard. The market doesn't lie, its truth, God, good, justice and everything else so long as the commodities are cheap. The battle lines between me and the market were drawn long before I came along and these little indignities will be addressed too...(probably my favorite quote by Marx addressing the sores on his rear-end that he developed by sitting day and night working on Das Kapital, "The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles for all time!" Word is that a Starbucks went up recently where Marx's favorite pub used to stand...I fear the bourgeoisie has all ready forgotten Herr Marx's carbuncles).

So I return back to the United States, an exile in my own nation, and half-defeated. Get this, my California Driver's License is expired and I cannot renew it because I am not in California and do not have a California address...I am a stateless person because I am a resident of a state I cannot live in, I have a permit to live in Denmark but cannot work here, I am accepted to study in the UK but cannot get a permit to live there till September...and I am on my way back to one of the biggest countries in the world where I feel completely out of place. I suspect that you have not heard the end of me though. The "prince" has made a habit of airing the bizarre behaviors of these invaders from the north for the last 6-7 months, but I am going to an even more bizarre land than this one I leave. I will have no end of complaints and absurd observations from the place where I am going...this place is really more of an incident or a spectacle...this place is Texas.

Texas and I share no lost love between us, in fact I overcame Texas a long time ago (and folks, lets not make the non sequitur conclusion that since Texas is horrible I don't like any of my friends and family there...must I deal with that collapse of logic right now from a state that twice elected quite another event to governor, "W"). Texas should expect nothing but hostility from me, and I declare right now that the cowboy capital of the world will rue the day this wayward "citizen of the world" was banished to a term of imprisonment in that place. Yes, for now I am certainly defeated, but I have been defeated before. I will return to my old delusional, arrogant and flippant ways, and I will disembark from the semi-republic of Texas. My life has a fair balance of pleasant and unpleasant aspects and I plan to will the pleasant back to the forefront, by force and with malice aforethought if necessary.

I should say a brief word about our dearly departed Denmark (in my universe I am the center...its never me that is "leaving," I always just am and everything else slides away; its not me that is "difficult," everyone else is impatient; its not me who has no redeemable aspects to offer society, its an out of whack world of madmen that just don't take my inherent value serious enough). I have REALLY come to love Denmark of late. I have never been in a more relaxed and easy-going place in my life. The winter, well the winter is like slow death especially when you are new, don't know anyone, and have just left a place where it is probably still sunny and warm with decent surf. The Danish people may well be the most beautiful people on earth (second only to the Swedes probably and nobody but the Danes and the Swedes are buying this "two different nations" thing). The Danish people are hard to approach to a newcomer, but they are wonderfully friendly. Nobody ever just came up to me and talked to me when I was out, but when I talked to others I was always met with a big warm smile. I think it will be the people I miss most.

The spring has been incredible...so much light, green, flowers. Its so seasonal here that the entire community undergoes a collective shift in disposition around March. The city is beautiful with a lot of green spaces, beautiful buildings and old cobblestone roads. The place is just crawling with bookstores and cafes! If the books were not $100 a piece and mostly in Danish I would worry I might have died and gone to heaven.

Man, I really don't even want to talk about it now cause I just wish I could stay longer...it just got really wonderful like 1-2 months ago and that time was consumed by law school. I won't say anything about my friends here cause I just don't want to. I don't think I am going to post anymore from here in the old world unless I return to go to school in the UK in Sept.

Farvel, tusind tak...jeg elsker Kobenhavn og Danmark!

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.

Nothing to Say

I have nothing to say...school is done and I am looking for a job. I was more qualified to work when I was in high school than I am now. Blogger keeps messing up my posts. I have lost about 3 in the last week and I am fundamentally opposed to starting and finishing a "draft." This is not class...I write and I post. Even when I write papers, even if it is a 50 page paper, I will write it in one sitting. I don't like starting and stopping things. Do it once, hard and as fast as you can. So now my file on blogger is full of "drafts" I will never finish. They will be released post-humously as my "missing letters." The weren't missing, they are right here, I have just discarded them so there are huge spaces in the narrative of my life. If you don't keep telling the story than you are no more! As Bartleby says, "I'd prefer not..."

One "Hot Racket"

Guys we have to get in on this. I was at the mall today and I thought I would stop in the sporting goods store to look at some shorts to wear to the gym. I usually like to work out in an old pair of boardshorts or something, but I have not coaxed myself into working out in what is essentially underwear like the Europeans yet. So I figured they may finally have some shorts in the stores since its getting warm, and if I am lucky they will have a pair that are longer than 2-3 inches from the waist to the end of the leg. I saw some boardshorts and thought they would be perfect until I noticed the price, 699-799 DKK. Folks, thats like more than $100-$120 for a pair of shorts.

So I got to thinking, unfortunately...as many of you know we can pick up name brand boardshorts in the US for $30-$50 tops, and we can get Target brand boardshorts for about $15 tops. So I want to get in the importing/exporting business, we will be called "Vandalay Industries." The plan is to buy a couple thousand dollars worth of board shorts and bring them out here in suitcases. We will mix name brand and generic boardshorts. I figure we can mark them up to right around $100 and still undercut our competitors. The generics we can sell for $60-$75 dollars. Everyone knows that a pair of Quicksilver boardshorts is functionally equivalent to "Wham" or "Tubular" boardshorts at 4x the cost.

The only problem I can foresee is that nobody wears boardshorts in Denmark, but I think a good marketing campaign could change that...like any good "free" market where people can "choose" what they want we will con people into thinking they are freely choosing Southern Californian attire. We have precedent for fooling people into buying the surf culture, in about 47 of the 50 states for instance. We can either open up our own little shop and put some crummy dinged up surfboard in the window, or we could just provide them wholesale to other retail stores.

Some may object that I am contributing to spreading the gawdy and valueless culture of Southern California as American hegemony, or just ripping people off to my own advantage. This is not how I see it though...I think of the young Danish lad who has worn out a copy of Endless Summer and spends his nights thinking of barreling waves. I suspect I would be a criminal if I let this child, call him Lars, buy a pair of Quicksilver boardshorts for $120...so what if I get filthy rich in the process and never have to suffer some stupid job.

The Interview

"Well, Mr. Carey, is it? Why don't you tell me why you think you would be a good fit for our firm?"

"I could tell you how I would be a good fit for your firm, but please, allow me first to tell you a short story...a story of hope, the tale of a young boy's dream. As long as I can remember forming hopes and aspirations mine were fixed. I was unwavering, determined, and singularly-focused...I was of one mind, no, I was of considerably less than one mind. My childhood friends would move like a flock of pigeons from dreams of space travel, dinosaur excavation and professional sports glory. Not I, from the very first time I laid my blessed eyes on the cold, modern contours of an industrial strength Swingline stapler I knew, it was my destiny to spend hours behind a desk or in a cubicle collating paper and filling out forms. Some may call it a humble dream, but as I ran my hand over the handle of that cold black stapler there was nothing modest about my thoughts...with slight pressure and a melodic click an entire stack of paper could be bound together for easy transfer from desk to desk. I dreamt in sleep and wakefulness alike of having a time and date stamp where the rubber face could be rotated to reflect the perpetual cascade into the future, with each rotation I could thank providence for my rigid and menial life. I dreamt of stacks of paperwork to be scaled as some men scale the great peaks of the Andes and Himalayas. I dreamt of cavernous desk drawers as deep and mysterious as the abyss of the deepest seas. I would be a good fit for your firm because, like any other cog prefashioned for the turning of a wheel, I was destined to toil away behind a desk, or, god-willing, in a cubicle."

As I finished I had noticed the tears well up in her knowing eyes. I reached for the small stack of tissues I kept in the breast pocket of my black two-piece suit, the pocket closest to my heart, and handed her a tissue.

"Mr. Carey, that is the most touching thing I have ever heard. I did not know there were others out there! In this world of careerists and social-climbers I thought I would never meet another for whom the task itself was profit enough."

I took her hand, fingers hardened from hours of tireless work on a computer keyboard. I imagined her at work, drafting form-memos, those hands gliding across the keyboard like the fingers of Chopin carried lightly, but firmly over the ivory keys of a grand piano. The sound of the keys, some may call it a cacophony of clicks and taps, to me that sound is the very sound of music. As I clutched her tired hands and looked into those tear-filled eyes that seemed to reflect the lost soul of every corporate functionary the world over, I said, "There are many out there like us, you should never feel alone. Those of us for whom toil is inherently rewarding. We who, under weak backs and inadequate spines are banished from the world of manual labor. We who of rigid, inflexible minds are the diaspora of a once creative land. We who choose to carry, but to carry lightly...who choose to think, but to think along the strict confines of an employee handbook. We are the bureaucrats with no bureaucracy! We, we desk-jockeys of the world, we will find each other in another time...a time where everything is firmly scheduled and only endeavored with the permission of an authority. Another time in a place where the edges are hard and the colors black and white. No, you should never feel alone, and absolutely not ashamed! For the world relies on the efficient allocation of paperwork and storage of data...we are the very substratum of the universe!"

The lovely glow re-entered her eyes in a flood of relief as she said to me, "Mr. Carey, you have truly inspired me. I find you inspiring! And therein lies the problem. You speak of banal wonders the size of worlds. You tell tales of ordinary heroics. You would be a wonderful fit for our firm, were it not the blatant creativity the telling of your tale betrays! You are an imposter! You are one of the many-minded cosmopolitan free-wheelers who besmirch our very name.

Overtaken by obvious horror I moved to contain the situation, "I fear your evaluation to be in clear error! Though I tell a story, and I am a man of many stories, they are not my own. I have lifted these stories from others and I can give you the authorities themselves to prove it!"

"Authority?," she answered puzzled, "like precedent even, like legal precedent!"

My confidence restored I continued, "Precisely like legal precedent. Fear not, I can assure you that I have not had a creative thought in my life! No, absolutely not. The outer bounds of my thinking go no further than the dark-lined confines of a cell in a Microsoft access database."

Together we took a collective sigh of relief and she immediately extended me an offer, "I hope you will consider working here, I think you will find our compensation quite competitive."

"Consider? Nonsense, I will do nothing of the sort! Give me a line to sign on with an 'X' next to it and I will sign. Furthermore, I hope to put my name to many a line on the parchment of this firm...and that will be compensation enough for me!"