I met a friend last evening for drinks. It was about 4:15 when we got together, and by the time we left at 7-ish, winter had come to San Diego. The wind had picked up, and the marine layer was of a different quality. Things had, quite simply, changed. As I drove home from almost downtown, the ceiling was low and reflecting the lights of the cars eerily on the freeway. It seemed like an entirely different drive than the one I had made just a couple of ours earlier in the other direction.

At 5am, I was awakened by an odd sound. The wind that had been blowing all night was accompanied by something much louder. At first, I couldn’t figure out what it was, then it hit me: rain. A short burst of real rain. Rain on the roof, on the patio, and in the pool. Big drops, like you’d get from a thunderstorm, but only briefly.

That’s about as much as you can hope for here. In Los Angeles, they get actual rain that lasts for a while, but down here we get spotty, short-lived showers. There’s a strange intensity to them.

It just did that again. Three minutes or so of rain and wind and darkness, then nothing. This time, there was a bit of sun peeking through, like the summer storms from back home, except much colder.

The sun is out now again, but there are still plenty of storm clouds to the north (whence comes much of the weather here). It will likely do this on and off all day. Kind of fits my mood: occasionally stormy, occasionally sunny, and mostly somewhere in-between.

The school term is wrapping up and I feel, as usual, overwhelmed with what I have to do. More of usual, these days. Academic stress.

I have 4 exams and one “final project” to get through before I’m done for this term. I’m not terribly concerned about the Licensing exam — it is open book/open note and will be mostly drafting, so I think I can do well with that. Accounting will be pretty straight-forward with the tough stuff just in remembering a few formulas like to figure out certain financial ratios. Torts will be, well, torts. I did well in Torts 1, but this is a different prof and I’m not sure if my way of thinking matches well with hers. I mean, I can learn the rules, but there are often subjective bits that affect how one approaches an essay question and what I think is dangerous may not match with her. As long as she grades on how the argument is made, I think I’ll be okay. And the final project is a huge pile of drafting for Business Planning which I am working on with a partner so it is what it is.

The class which has me most concerned? Community Property. What a confusing pile of poo. I spent most of yesterday working on my outline and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to remember all of the shifting rules. Some of them make sense and others, well, I can’t find the logic for them. For example, if one spouse dies it seems that s/he can effectively distribute community property without the approval of the other spouse when, in life, that would be impossible. For example, if husband wills a community property vacation home before his death, without approval of the wife, but includes a provision saying that wife would then get some other separate property thing, depending on how the will is written she has to choose to either take the CP division or what the will says. All or nothing, yes or no. Sure, you can call that “approval,” but it sounds more like coercion to me.

And there are also formulae to know! I have to know how to do Van Camp and Pereira methods of accounting to determine the relative values of mixed separate and community properties. And different methods for calculating good will in businesses. Joy. Not.

So, after beating my brains with that yesterday and knowing I’d have to spend more time with that today, I started my day with a walk in La Jolla. Not the Shores, as usual, but the Cove and Children’s Pool areas (where John and Sammy and I walked recently). Not a half-bad place to powerwalk when you get there early enough. Good place to calm the mind.

I recently made another appointment with the therapist who works through my school. Hey, it’s free so why not? She helped me over the stress of having to do really well on my second set of exams, in only 3 sessions.

I had been feeling like I wasn’t getting the resolution I thought I ought to be getting after being separated for so long. Oh yeah, and the usual school stress, of course. So I made an appointment with the woman, with the vague thought that she might be able to help me find some direction.

A day before my appointment, I asked Christopher if he’d be interested in joining me. It wasn’t planned, but I thought maybe a neutral third party would help me be able to work out the best next steps. I thought having someone else say “Yup, this is too screwed up and you are best to work out an amicable parting” would help things. C said he would like to join me. I felt a bit like I was setting him up.

So, we get there and start talking with Luan (the therapist). Rather quickly after listening just a bit she starts talking about adult children of alcoholics and the descriptions were shockingly accurate. In ways it fit both of us. While I think C’s parents have issues with booze, that wasn’t a problem chez moi, so I was wondering why I was connecting to so much of what she was saying. She went on to say that while most of the literature is about children of alcoholics, really, it is any emotionally unavailable (seriously screwed-up) parenting.

DING!

Luan said that if you put 500 people in a room and only 2 of them were ACoA (to use a general acronym, regardless of actual booze), those two will find each other. Always.

It made so much sense for me. Part of what attracted me to C was that I knew he had been marginalized by his family in a different but similar way as I had been. We both had the experience of being last born and told, explicitly or impliedly, that we weren’t exactly wanted children. We both knew when our families talked about events, we weren’t a part of so much of it– our childhoods weren’t like our siblings. They weren’t all bad, but they were different. I thought we would be great for each other because we had this gaping hole in our background and together we could make our own safe spots. Walking wounded.

So much of our screwed-up-ed-ness was a sense of conditional love while growing up.

Yeah, you read that right. We didn’t get unconditional love. We didn’t get support — we got threats. Familial “you’re either with us or against us” and not, “you are still safe and loved even if you did just screw up in a very big way.” Shifting expectations. No security.

I reacted by trying, desperately, to be perfect. C took the other path and gave in to the failure. We both have trust issues, intimacy issues, but on some things he went one way reaction-wise and I went the other, like the perfect/failure example I just mentioned. Neither of us really knows how to be anything even close to “normal.”

So suddenly there is this whole new world to try and understand. If Luan is right (and reading the book she recommended makes me think she may be on to something) there is much more to try to grasp before we chuck this all away. She said she thought we might be able to come out of this intact, but that we both had to learn more about ourselves, and then each other, before we would know what to do next about “us.”

Not what I expected. And I’m not sure how I feel about it. But there it is.

Yesterday, I had an afternoon class cancelled and the class after that was mostly review, so I decided to skip it and study for the MPRE this Saturday. After several hours of it, I took a couple of hours off to go to JD’s studio to help sequence his portfolio for a review event (also happening Saturday morning).

It was such a pleasure to look at art and use the other part of my brain for a while. I made some suggestions, pointed out a few things that I thought were significant, and in return JD took me to dinner (since this is something I normally charge for in my biz, I didn’t feel bad letting him do that). He asked if I was in the mood for a really good burger, ’cause he knew of a place. Sure. It had been a while since I had eaten beef so that sounded good. I was expecting to go to the Burger Lounge in La Jolla or something, but instead JD’s TT pulled into the lot for the Torrey Pines golf course.

We didn’t go into The Lodge at Torrey Pines, but rather to the bar/resto under the lodge (there is no link on the site for it). Outside by the fire pit, a couple of golfers were enjoying their “19th hole” but we went inside and sat at the bar itself. (dark iPhone pic of the bronze “cow on wall” and the back of the bar)

It had a nice menu, but I decided to trust JD and try the burger and a glass of Pinot Noir suggested by the bartender. The wine was as advertised, with a nice little bite and warm notes.  The burgers arrived quickly and they were large, simply presented, and came with just a touch of mayo on them (a California touch, which I like). Mine was quite good and they actually cooked it the way I asked for it (rare) without the usual “we’re not supposed to do that” one gets from most places today.

We talked about the business, and law school, and the food, and other stuff. The bartender (a young man) joined in on the musings about how younger people don’t use their phones to talk anymore– text, email, FB, but they don’t call. And there was golf on the TV in the corner. In the quiet moments while eating, I thought about how I could see my father sitting at that bar, after completing a round, drinking what I am sure would be a pricey martini. And how odd it was that I was in there with my non-golfing artist friend.

Nice break from the practice questions and frustration of legal ethics rules (deceptively simple). I’m hoping that when I take the practice test today that break will have helped solidify the data in my head. One very good thing came out of last night: JD told me the bar in the very fancy hotel across the street from where I take the test makes the best margarita in San Diego. I may indulge, after.