Getting Sick

Being the only person in my law school class still wearing a face-mask every day to ward off COVID-19, I have at times felt like a paranoid oddity. Classmates passing me on campus outdoors have been known to do a double-take when I wave hello. "Oh, it's you," they say. "I barely recognized you without the..." The reaction I get to the N95 around my nose and mouth is, I imagine, somewhat akin to what people who wear religious garb must experience. Thoughtful and enlightened people around them in society know they are supposed to not comment on it; certainly not negatively. But they notice it nonetheless. And the occasional comment slips through.

Given this uncomfortable situation, I have at times thought of following the lead of my classmates (and basically everyone else around me in public) in ditching the mask. The arguments in favor of doing so are familiar to all and have apparently proved convincing to the majority of Americans: so long as one is fully vaccinated, including with the Omicron-targeted booster, a case of COVID is only as likely to kill you as the flu (a disease that we ought to all vaccinate ourselves against, but which didn't prompt any of us to wear masks pre-pandemic). 

Issue Spotting

 Our 1L Torts professor warned us: as soon as we went home for the holidays, mid-way through our first law school year, we would start to bore everyone in the family to tears by spotting legal issues everywhere. As she explained it, this was part of the oft-mentioned process of "learning to think like a lawyer." The people and setting you remember from holidays past would be the same; but you would now be scanning everything that happened for potential causes of action. 

I have noticed this to some extent; but where I experience the greatest warping of my brain in the aftermath of the first semester is when it comes to non-law-related reading. Even when one turns to a novel in the hope that it will provide one with relief from thinking about final exams, one finds one can't help but read each book with part of one's mind as simply an extended fact pattern on a test. One starts to perform mental "issue spotting" on every page.

Repeating Himself

A couple years ago, I emerged from my office building at lunch hour to put some change in the parking meter. At my car's last known location, I met the yawning horror of an empty space. "No!" I thought. "But why not just a ticket? I'd pay for it! Just don't say they towed me; anything but that!" Of course, that is precisely what they had done. I looked over at a sign I had no memory of glimpsing before. It said something about an extremely rare farmers market event in which everything on the block would be towed, and this-- of course-- happened to be that one day. 

Fuming while I waited for the Lyft to arrive to take me to the impound lot, I found my sardonic fury crystalizing into verse. Not wanting to lose the thought, I jotted down the lines in an email to myself in my phone (I append them as a footnote below, if you want to read the lines); then promptly forgot all about them. 

Belittlement

 It's final exam period of the first semester of law school and--against all my inclinations and better judgment--I find the anxiety creeping into me. "Don't worry," the deans and professors and administrators all say. "I wasn't worried," I reply. "But should I be? You're making it sound like maybe I should be worried." The tests are just 100% of my final grade for each course, so if I do poorly then all my work earlier in the semester will have been pointless; but I shouldn't worry. The tests are just rigorously curved so no matter how well I do it might not count: the only real question is how everyone else did; but I shouldn't worry too much about it; it's not that big a deal.

And I stand there listening to all this and try to stuff the rising anxiety back down my gullet. "No!" I bellow to the anxiety; "I am NOT going to worry about this! You can't make me care about this! I'm a grown man! I'm over thirty. I don't have to care about school or tests or grades anymore. I've been through all that. I've worked for a living. I've done work for pay, and no one there ever said I needed to be anxious. So why should I be anxious over work that I'm paying for the privilege to do! You can't trick me into believing this is real life. I've seen real life and it does not resemble school!" Such are my inner lines of resistance, as the fear nevertheless inevitably burbles within me. 

Therese/Tiresias

 Observers of the American scene might be forgiven for thinking that the culture war obsessions of the recent midterm election were unique to this third decade of the twenty-first century. The Five Thirty-Eight politics podcast informed us the other week that rightfully-defeated Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker made a point-- for instance-- at every campaign event of bringing up the specter of Trans women competing against cis-women in sports (in their view, his harping on these esoteric themes was one of the reasons his campaign failed to resonate with average Georgia voters), and how unfair this would purportedly be. Then there was the distinctly post-Dobbs debate about state legislatures' role in regulating abortion, in which Walker's own alleged hypocritical funding of several abortions inevitably intruded. 

As 2022 as these debates might seem, however, world literature attests that they are as old as the culture war itself. Turning to Guillaume Apollinaire's groundbreaking surrealist drama, The Mammaries of Tiresias, we find all the same questions that still haunt our cultural warriors' imaginary: anxiety over a perceived breakdown in traditional gender roles, debates between pro- and anti-natalism, fear of looming catastrophe if people were permitted to cross over or otherwise defy the gender binary... Apollinaire's play--  in which a woman transforms herself into a man, goes off to conquer the world, and her husband starts to asexually procreate in her absence, in order to sustain the population of their local Zanzibar-- presages the modern-day world of far-right commentators raving about how the Trans movement will supposedly depopulate the Earth. 

Beards

A couple months ago, my dad happened to say to me in passing, "You know, why don't you try growing out your facial hair?" I was irritated and vaguely alarmed by the suggestion, and it took me a moment to settle down enough to realize there was nothing intrinsically offensive in what he had said. It was just an idea. I could take it or leave it. And there was nothing wrong or immoral about growing out a beard, was there? So why had I reacted with anxiety and a flash of anger? 

It required some introspection before it occurred to me that the beard here was symbolic of something greater in my private psychology--some proposed treachery to myself. As soon as I was able to grow facial hair, after all, I had been shaving it smooth, and therefore the suggestion to let it grow was an insinuation that I might violate my own inner taboos and habitual practices. And what my dad hadn't realized when he spoke was that I was precisely in the midst of contemplating such a self-transformation--just not in the realm of facial hair. So for him to suggest a change along these lines made me feel caught out in the open. 

Otiose

 Friends keep trying to creep me out about artificial intelligence even more than I already am. They show me websites that will generate an endless number of variations of original artworks; software that will write article copy for you that has never existed before. The visual productions are uncanny. The written prose the AI generates is somewhat less impressive. The quality of the writing is low, and it gives me more the impression of a search engine cobbling together component parts of the internet. It does not give me the spine-tingling subjective sensation others describe of communing with an actual mind. 

I admit, though, that I do worry about jobs. As I've argued before, the AI probably will not displace the need for human cognitive labor. The output of these machines is often flawed, and will require human workers to check and correct it. I can't imagine all companies opting to fire their human editors and replace them with machines, at least not anytime soon. I can, however, foresee an epoch when copywriters will be expected to save time and increase our efficiency by first generating the copy through an AI, and then editing and massaging it from there.