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june 29, 1996:
more on being bitter
Now that I have been back for a week, I am slowly easing into this whole I-live-in-a-cold-city idea. And, it did warm up at the end of the week, which changed everything. (Not that I ever really leave my apartment.) But still, even though all of the flame wars on mailing lists endured are past, people still hassle me about being so bitter. Well, in part I am so bitter because you all make me crazy.Even, sometimes, the letters you write.
Dan writes:
Dear Rebecca,
.... What do you have to be bitter about? ...
Sincerely,
Dan F
John asks:
your faq says you aren't conceited, but you're bitter? why? because your friend died. ...
talk to you later.
Dear Dan, John, and everyone else who hassles me:
Yes, yes it is true that I'm bitter. And it is also true that much of it has to do with my dear deceased friend named Yale, which closed the question for me, once and for all, about whether there is justice in the world. Answer: there is not. A bitter pill to swallow for an optimist and idealist like me. How can I believe in anything?
Yale is one of the reasons why I quit the practice of law. He was basically worked to death by his law firm, which sent him on trip after trip after trip to trials in distant and ugly cities such as (sorry) St. Louis, Missouri, where they would chain him to his chair at a big conference table in a hotel meeting room, and force him to sit and write briefs 16 hours a day, planted across the table from a woman he was infatuated with, staring at her long blonde hair and hazel eyes, but not being allowed to talk to her, or able to, even if he were allowed to. And they would keep him in that hotel room without break from 8 am until 12 pm, and then release him to his hotel room, where he would collapse, but not be allowed to call me because he was not allowed to make long distance phone calls. He would be gone for three weeks at a stretch. No breaks, no weekends. If he had plants -- much less pets! -- they would all die in his absence.
Yale liked me. He saw eye to eye with my disgust with the world. He used to nag me about doing something else besides law with my life. He told me that I should have a television show like "TV Nation," that I should buy a camcorder, that I should just write, and that I needed to move back to California. He said that law firms were for people like him -- people who were scared and who could not really do anything very well, and who lacked pizazz. But that was so untrue. Yale could do many things well, not the least of which was support me, and listen to me, and make me laugh, and be a true friend. And he did it with pizazz.
When I finally made the big decision to leave the law, I wanted to tell Yale right away. I called him and left him at least 10 messages. The messages were vague -- "Yale, I gotta tell you something big. Call me." But Yale apparently was on another one of his trial trips.
When Yale returned from his final trip, he felt ill. He lay down one afternoon to take a nap and never woke up.
I never had a chance to tell him that I followed his advice. I never had a chance to thank him.
Thinking about Yale makes me sad. The other night, a conversation I had with a friend of mine where I mentioned Yale (which I rarely do these days) brought me into crying convulsions a couple hours afterward. I sat on my big fluffy chair and bawled my brains out like a complete ninny.
It was at that moment that something tremendously odd happened.
My next door neighbor, who shares my back patio with me, and with whom I have not spoken too much, knocked on my back door. "What." I growled, and then opened the door.
"I am just checking to see if you are alright. You sounded horrible." And she gave me a ... hug.
I was too shocked to notice what was going on.
I told her that I could not talk about it, and then I told her about Yale anyway. Amazingly, she listened.
And somehow I felt a little better.
So I guess that I am not bitter about everything.
or, if you must, back to Rebecca's Revenge
Copyright 1996 Rebecca Lynn Eisenberg mars@bossanova.com All rights reserved.