Month: November 2024

I’m in Kentucky this week, to the slight detriment of my productivity but to the benefit of my soul. I extended my Thanksgiving stay this year in order to hunt deer last weekend. Independent of the success of the hunt, there is something invigorating about watching a sunrise bring a glow and warmth over a frosty field. There is life in a sunrise that is absent from staring at a computer screen. The sunset has its appeal too, but the sunrise evokes more in me since I see fewer of them due to the orientation of my apartment.

This annual hunt also offers a chance to fill my freezer (and my parents’ too) with venison. I’ll be taking a cooler full of frozen meat back with me, as I do almost every time I come to Kentucky. It is good lean meat that has been a staple of my diet since I was a child, even if I rarely serve it to guests.

I won’t go into any great detail here about the hunt itself, but it was a successful weekend. That means I’ll be able to take another cooler full of meat with me at Christmas when I return. We’re about to start the end-of-year sprint that is integral to our transactional legal practice, so even a short, dedicated time of being in nature should prove very useful.

Even though I walk on the campus on a regular basis, I have no affinity for Duke. Some feelings from childhood simply run too deep to overcome without a truly compelling reason to do so. Seeing a game at Cameron Indoor, though, is something I’ve wanted to do for some time. On Saturday, I got that opportunity.

One of the members of my men’s bible study is a law student with a season ticket in the graduate student section. For games with lower demand early in the season, he is able to get guest tickets. Wofford is exactly that sort of visiting team—a team that is projected to be bottom half of its mid-major conference—but is also my alma mater. I asked him if he could get me a guest ticket, something that I fear took more effort on his part than he let on given his class schedule, but eventually he got three. That meant that we were also joined by one of my Wofford classmates and his wife.

Law students are still able to access their parking lot on game day, so we had game parking as if we were top-level donors. Then we just followed our host, showed our IDs at the ticket booth, received pink wristbands, and were whisked through the entrance doors to our places on the baseline. I say places because there were no seats. This being a student section it was standing room only and two people to each bleacher platform, at least at the start before the crowd thinned later in the game. Then we stood and took in the pregame atmosphere, an atmosphere that hardly approached a fever pitch but was still more than most due to just how small the arena is.

Wofford won the opening tip and scored first to take a 2-0 lead. I jokingly told my friend to take a picture of the scoreboard. Sadly, the comment proved prescient. Wofford proceeded to shoot 2 for 20 from 3 point range in the first half and trailed 51-14 when the halftime buzzer finally sounded. Things like that can happen when plan B is just more of plan A. The second half wasn’t much better for the Terriers, but Duke was in cruise control so the lead didn’t balloon in quite the same manner (though the margin did ultimately exceed 50 after a goaltending call got overturned during the last media timeout).

I took a small step towards repaying the favor by introducing my law student companion to a breakfast place close to campus yesterday morning. He is about to go into cave mode in preparation for exams, the time of the first year of law school that proved most stressful for me. He seems to be in a much better place emotionally than I was at the same point, something I hope continues for him.

I participated in a church men’s retreat this weekend. It was great to get out of the city for a little while and to be out in some cabins in the woods. It was not quite the outdoor experience I would have had if I had gone to Kentucky for the opening weekend of deer season, but I made that scheduling decision well in advance.

There were plenty of ideas presented that could be fodder for rumination, but the one that I’ve been turning over and over is “What is success?” For the first time in several years, this is becoming a live issue for me again. Given the current trajectory of the law firm, we are going to receive more and more financial rewards and we are already experiencing a modicum of professional notoriety in our niche market (though I’m still nowhere near being used to being the “celebrity” in the parasocial relationships that can form when you listen to someone through a number of presentations). These are both good things, things I enjoy. But I already know that they won’t be enough to satisfy.

I don’t have an answer to the question at this juncture and I’m sure that the answer will change as I go through different seasons of life, but thinking about the question and talking about it with a few people over the past few days has pointed me to a few areas where I want to change. Paso a paso.

Last week during my church small group, one of the things I discussed was how I want to do more things with people during the week. I then proceeded to shoot down the first suggestion that was made, perhaps a bit too hastily, but I am the old man of the group and so was forgiven at least by the continued flow of conversation. It wasn’t like I had any ideas myself for the week that is now past, but I threw the request out anyway.

Heading into the weekend, one of the group members posted a directive in our WhatsApp thread. In response, last night a group of us went for dinner at a local taco chain for their discounted Taco Tuesday promotion. For those who have spent any length of time around me, you’ll know that food is very important to me. I’ve planned entire days on vacation around meals. Americanized Mexican food, though, is not one of my regular genres.

Conversation topics varied from English soccer to which TV show I should watch next to engagement stories to meeting people on airplanes to why I wasn’t going to watch any election coverage when I got home to myriad other topics. It was a dinner party atmosphere that I so rarely experience and worth throwing off my meal planning schedule. As for the tacos, I’m glad I did not pay full price. I had some very good tacos in Mexico City earlier this year, and these weren’t in the same league. I still ate all three that I ordered. Then I picked up a second dinner on the way back to my apartment and enjoyed the poke bowl much more. It wasn’t like I made the drive for the food anyway.