How'd you ever get the Devil to dance.

BBC NEWS South Asia Benazir Bhutto killed in attack

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Benazir Bhutto was assassinated this morning; the world is really just fucked sometimes.

I truly wanted to write a happy, light-hearted post, since it's the holidays. Unfortunately, the world does not stop for the Christ's birthday. The bad shit doesn't stop getting cranked out, even while kids are asleep in their beds, waitin' on presents, and a made-up man in a red velvet suit (hope there are no kids reading this, ha ha. SURPRISE!).

I don't think I'm a particularly negative or pessimistic person. I continually hope. I hope that things can get better, I hope that the world can find some spark of sanity, and that it catches and starts a three-alarm uncontrollable fire of human decency.

Last night, my 13 year old brother was talking about wanting to be a lawyer. I'm pretty sure I wanted to be a vet, or a scuba-diver or some shit when I was 13. What I mean is, next he'll want to be a genie or a spray paint artist or a monkey trainer or whatever rotating series of careers are desirable to a teenage boy (skateboarder? surgeon?). But last night he wanted to be lawyer, and was throwing all kind of prosecutin'-prefixes in front of his name:
A.D.A. D.A. Attorney at Law.
My parents asked him what he would want to do as a lawyer.
I don't know... be a prosecutor? Work with detectives? Some Law and Order stuff? Public Defense?
As soon as he said public defense my parents suggested corporate law...
Yeah, I guess I could do corporate law.
I don't know... maybe I'm the crazy radical older sister who goes away to college and ends up coming back with half a crew cut and 3 new piercings and a whole slew of impractical ideas about how the world works.

Dear Gabe,
Please don't become a corporate lawyer. I know you probably won't anyhow, but I want you to remember this moment, because this is the only decent advice I have to offer to you: Do something to help the world. You're only 13, but we've lived New York, so maybe you can kind of already see how messed up the world is and how many problems there are. I'm not trying to scare you, but there will always be unimaginable suffering and pain, and seemingly unsolvable problems, and things so fucked up that you want to look away from it. But please don't look away from it, look back at it, and decide that you want to at least try. You're one of those crazy-smart kids who is born genuinely caring about others without an ounce of selfishness. And that's so fucking rare. So please become someone who helps change the world, if that's even possible; don't be the gun-firer, the tank-driver, the 2.5 kids in the suburbs man. Please don't sell your soul to make it big in America. You'll regret it; maybe not right away, but one day you'll look back and wish you were Lot's wife. You don't understand what that means, but you will one day. I love you, please don't brush this off, but really listen to me. I'm asking you to make a hard choice. I'm asking you to give up on other futures you could have, on alternate lives which would be easier, and take less effort and thinking, and I'm begging you to take the harder road, the road where nothing is easy and there isn't much reward for living it. Not many people can walk it; I can't even do it sometimes and I want to give up and just paint for a living. I get exhausted trying to understand the intricacies of the human condition, and I think sometimes I exhaust others because of it. But I really try and I want you to try too; selfishly, one day years from now when I'm exhausted by this I want to look over and see you working for it too. Maybe nothing will get better in our lives, but I retain the hope that maybe, maybe, it will. So please, don't be a corporate lawyer.

Love,

Your sister.




I don't mean for this letter to be some artificially-made devastatingly poignant moment. I just watched him think about lawyers and remembered a letter I got, once, a really long time ago, that changed me. And I think, most of the time, even when I'm scared and really fuck up shit, that I'm doing the right thing, in the end.