--- I would like to apologize generally to all my friends out there for being such a lousy friend in return. I have about 3 weeks of email to catch up on with everyone, but I simply have not had the time. I am sorry for this pesky life choice that has made me so much less available.

Hopefully I will be able to catch up with the long weekend next week and only one class so far assigning pre-class reading.

In the mean while, though, thank you for not giving up on me.----

After my first week of living in nyc, one thing is abundantly clear: I have some toughening up to do.

There were temperatures in the mid- to high-80’s last week, and I was suffering! And then on Wednesday when I stepped out in the morning to get some paper, it was raining! Somehow it had never occurred to me that it might be important to look out the window before leaving my apartment.

This is a pretty clear and embarrassing artifact of the life I have been living in Seattle these last fifteen years. If you think about working a jobby job, you realize quickly how little exposure you get to the elements on any given day. I get in the car in the garage, drive through whatever the sky is doing to work, park in the garage at work, and take the stairs up to the air conditioned office.

At no point on most days does nature inconvenience my life at all at home. I remember some days last summer when I had to wear long-sleeved shirts even though it was blisteringly hot out (for Seattle), because the a/c at work was so freezing.

My walk to school is only nine blocks, which is sweet – I walked seven times that far to get to work in India. But in the heat, I have to consciously slow myself down to avoid arriving drenched. And I have no idea what those nine blocks will be like in the rain or snow.

And it is all just me. I don’t hear anyone else complaining about the weather. If I hear anything, people are glowing about what great, pleasant, mild and perfect summer weather they are having.

I am so out of step.

Otherwise, it was a great first week at law school, but just about any measure you care to use (excepting the measure of “does school cost less than $300 per day of instruction?”).

The first two days were meet-and-greets in biz-lingo. Big fluffy meetings with free food and students and faculty welcoming us to the school. It was a painless intro to school and gave us a chance to get our class schedules and go buy books.

Seven hundred dollars for books. Gah!

And of course we had homework before the first day of real class – over a hundred pages to read from textbooks plus a few briefing exercises. But that was okay, because at least we had a few days before Wednesday to do the reading in.

At least I and the others who bought their books before the bookstore ran out had that time. Lots of people were running around reading from photocopies and not having the other books. Bad planning from the bookstore.

Wednesday started off great for me. I spoke up in class and nailed a point that had been eluding the discussion up till then, which gated the prof to move on with his presentation. It was trivial in the grand scheme of things, I know, and I doubt anyone in class remembered it three minutes later, but it was a relief to be visible, to demonstrate value, and have some nascent feeling that LS might be okay.

Thursday in class was also brilliant, but this time because the classroom discussion was freakin’ fantastic. “THIS,” I thought, “this is why I went to Columbia instead of saving $150k and going to the UW!”

People were popping out almost at random with just genius thoughts and leaps in the argument! I wanted to applaud! In my mind, I would think, yeah, I could have got there, but it’d have taken me another five minutes of casting about!

Class on Thursday was like playing a game of best-ball golf.

Someone would toss out their best idea, and we’d go from there to the next person’s best idea, and so on, always leaping from peak to peak instead of having to plod along through the valleys connecting all the dots.

I was thrilled through and through. It was so exactly what I am here for.

Today was fine, too, and at the end of it we were casually handed god-awful huge amounts of weekend reading and writing to do.

The peeps here are fantastic and bright and friendly, all of which are so nice to encounter. There appears to be no gaming for position at all. Or maybe I’m just not seeing it because I do not really tune to that activity. But so far, so good.

I am varying degrees of impressed with everyone I’ve met, and looking forward to meeting more of my classmates in the coming weeks. The hard part is remembering names and faces with so many of us.

By a happy chance, I am 1 of only 2 Scotts in the entire class. I guess Scott went out of vogue right after I was born. This is so new for me. I cannot really remember any other time in school when I was the only Scott in class. Eye am spekial!

And that, I think, takes me back to my studio, where I sit now.

Did I already mention enough times that if you are in new york and you do not ring me up and we do not hang out and consume much drinks and conversation that I will have a very difficult time forgiving you through several lifetimes yet to come?

I am three thousand miles from home. Excepting a few very very nice family people, I haven’t any good friends for hundreds of miles around. I would love to see you. Really.

Anyway, for most of the week, my furniture consisted of:

ONE inflatable bed.
TWO floor-chairs from Target at $6.88 each.
TWO cardboard boxes from moving, serving now as small, low tables.
ONE bench from the piano.
ONE cooler acting as another chair or table.

Even in a studio as tiny as this one, that left a lot of free space when the bed was up (because it weighs five pounds, I can lean it up against the wall, like an inflatable Murphy bed, when I’m not sleeping). But that is okay, really. No hurry to fill things up.

Happily, my uncle Ed drove over from CT with furnituary gifts from my wonderful aunt Francie. Now I have added a microwave and a toaster to my possessions, and great was the quantity of peanut butter toast consumed yesterday.

I also now have two chairs that are so old school that they just slay me; all brown/gold fabric and honest-to-god brass tacks nailing the upholstery to the frame. I get the happy giggles just looking at them. If you have a calling card, you may present it to the butler and he’ll show you in, where you can sit on one of my incredible old-school chairs.

Also also I have a yellow dresser, which not only holds my clothes (thank god) but is also the monitor/printer stand now.

Finally, I have a card table from Francie and Ed, which is an essential life-saver, as I discovered when I tried to study on the ground earlier this week. I am a dude who needs a table to put a book and elbows on.

So though I am far from crowded in my tiny space, I am at least now functional. If I can score an iron this weekend, I am gold.

Why oh why did I give away my 19” monitors? This 17” life is the sux. Of course, as soon as I start looking, then I want to buy nothing less than at least a 24”.

Life is a busy thing the next month. There are various dinners and drinks and socials non-stop well into September, and once September starts, then LS classes start in earnest, probably making the suffering of today look like an affectionate hug.

With all that, I do not really know when I will have a chance to settle into new york and actually get a feeling of living somewhere new. And what am I supposed to do with capitals? “New York City” looks terrible, as does NYC. A lower-case nyc doesn’t seem that offensive, nor does the lower-case new york with the city part left unspecified. What do the native peoples do?

Crazy east-coast. I asked for a whiskey-and-soda and ended up with Coke in my drink. I gotta break the code.

A very great week behind me, a tour of the UN tomorrow and baseball game on Sunday and more school and events next week to look forward to, but very little chance to be still and actually feel like I am living in nyc yet.

Thus far, the reality of my semi-permanent commitment has failed to sink in. I might as well be here for a conference. Or in a studio for a few months working, as in London.

At some point, I am expecting to be well and truly freaked out that this is all for real.