Warning to self (because no one else is reading): I will most likely have to end this post abruptly. I am at work -- in case you've forgotten, self, you're clerking at the law firm where you'll end up working after school, to pay some bills during your 3L year -- and there is apparently a very urgent assignment just waiting for me to knock it out. But the partner who's supposed to tell me about it is unavailable, as I suspect partners are wont to be, and so I'm sitting here waiting for his ass to call me back. But the shit is urgent!!! So anyway, when he calls, off I go.

So yeah. It's funny. This diary-type idea seems to be taking the form of a message to myself in the future. I think that's a worthwhile endeavor. I also think it's funny, because when I was in college -- eleven years ago -- I had a laptop (one of the first) with a word processing program on it (don't remember whether it was Word or Wordperfect). The "help" section allowed one to annotate the pages. That's actually a pretty good idea, I think. Don't know why they don't do that anymore. Anyway, I took to just randomly inserting little notes to myself, with the idea that I'd find them later. I think most of them were basically stupid, or let's say silly or absurd. I do remember one of them saying something along the lines of, "remember, you're a good person, even though you sometimes feel like you're not." Well, this is undoubtedly one of those moments that I'm so glad that no one else reads this shit. It's incredibly self-indulgent to spend time writing notes to yourself about how you're a good person. Even more so when the note is actually about how you once wrote a note to yourself about it!!!! It's ridiculous.

But in a way, that in itself is interesting. There appears to be a theme running through my semi-adult life, a fear that I will forget who I am somehow. It's not a bad thing to make some small effort to address that. I think the "you're a good person" stuff, as unbelievably masturbatory as it is (I hate it when people use that word for some reason, but I guess it's appropriate here), is about the sense I've had, ever since college, that I was a good person as a kid but I'm not anymore. I really feel like, when I was in high school and before, I had a good heart, and I'd put a lot of effort into doing the right thing. Not so sure that's me anymore.

Of course this plays very importantly into the concerns I was talking about yesterday, about the relationship with my family and all. I mean, this sort of goes to the heart of it. I've always been afraid that my family loves the guy they knew -- the guy that lived in the house with them. But that's not me anymore, and I'm always worried they wouldn't like me if they knew who I'd become.

Yuck. All the above got interrupted by some news from my wife, we'll call her W, that her family is not going to help us to buy a house to anything approaching the degree they'd originally told us they would. Basically, this puts all the bullshit above in perspective. That's stupid, this is urgent. Now I can go back to lying awake at night.