Lunchtime. About forty-five minutes ago. Anna and I are at the kitchen table. Carlo is ... well, that's a good question, but he always comes back, usually dirty and sweaty and happy, but that's not important right now.
Anna: Daddy?
Me: What, Anna?
Anna: Would you die if someone chopped you in half?
Me: Almost certainly. Why would you ask me that?
Anna: Just wanted to know.
Me: No one is going to chop you in half, Anna.
Anna: I know. Just wondered ... Maybe if they got really mad at you they would.
Me: No one you know could ever be that mad at you that they would chop you in half.
Anna: Carlo gets mad at me sometimes. Like, really, really mad.
Me: I'm not going to let Carlo chop you in half. Promise. And I don't think he'd do that anyway. He doesn't get that mad at you.
Anna and I eat our lunch.
Anna: Would you die if someone chopped off the top of your head?
Me: Like, just the top? How far down from the top are we talking, here?
Anna: [holds her hand at eyebrow level]
Me: Yes, you'd die then because your brain would be gone.
Anna: Yeah, I guess you couldn't live without your brain.
Me: Anna, no one is going to chop the top of your head off.
Anna: I know. I was just wondering.
Anna: You need your heart and your brain. Have to have both of those, right?
Me: Yes. But I guess you could get a heart transplant or an artificial heart. You have to have some sort of heart, but you can live without the one you have now if you have to if everything goes just right.
Anna: Yeah.
Anna and I eat our lunch. Ryan Adams' Ashes and Fire plays in the background.
Anna: What do people mean when they say you have a "broken heart?"
Me: [thinks about how to answer this]. Well, when people are in love, they say that they can feel it in their heart. And when that love goes away for some reason, people say that they can feel the pain there too. As if their heart is ... broken.
Anna: [thinks about the answer for a bit]
Anna: Daddy? Have you ever had a broken heart?
Me: [silently crumbles, silently dies]
Me: Done with lunch, honey?
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Anna's PowerPoint Part II
First she did a baseball PowerPoint. Now she has gone after my second obsession: Batman.
I'm starting to get the sense that my own daughter enjoys fucking with me.
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Anna's PowerPoint
Anna is learning how to use PowerPoint in school. I told her that I never learned how to use PowerPoint. Which is true. I used to just tell a secretary or a paralegal that I needed a PowerPoint that said blah, blah, blah and it just appeared. Ah, those were the days.
Anna thought this was sad, so she said she would make me a presentation. I had no idea what it was going to be until she was done with it. This is it:
Anna thought this was sad, so she said she would make me a presentation. I had no idea what it was going to be until she was done with it. This is it:
Ain't gonna lie. Kinda proud.
UPDATE: Oh good, there's a second one.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Goin' to California
I've written before about certain places representing unhappiness for me. Florida, which had always seemed to hold ghosts for me. Interstate 71, which holds dread. But there are good places too. California is a good place. It always has been. I haven't spent a lot of time there. Six trips across 15 years or so. But all of them stick with me.
My first trip there was in 1997. My brother was at the end of his second enlistment in the Navy and had been stationed in San Diego. My two best friends from college, Ethan and Todd, had, in the previous two years, moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively. We visited all of them and, unwittingly, had pretty much the quintessential California vacation experience: beaches, Hollywood, wine country, San Francisco, strange grad students in Berkeley, the works. Touristy and cliche? Sure. But I fell in love with the place.
In 1998 I was there for a wedding. My love of San Francisco weather hit home on that trip, as I traded muggy gross late-summer Ohio for the cool foggy Bay. Whenever I'm uncomfortable in the summer here, I think about falling asleep in the attic bedroom of the old house in which we were staying in the Berkeley hills, window open, cool breeze coming in, pulling a blanket up to keep the chill off and wishing it could always be that way.
I was back in 1999 for a ski trip. I flew into San Francisco and rode with friends to Lake Tahoe, sharing a car with a guy whose tech company had just gone public. He was a millionaire on paper and spent the entire drive trying to wrap his brain around it all. Looking back, it was such an on-the-nose portrayal of the dotcom bubble days that I sometimes wonder if it was all put on for my benefit.
In 2003 The Great Road Trip wound its way through the Golden State. Some of the most pivotal and meaningful moments of my life and the lives of my friends occurred at that time. Or were in the process of occurring, even if we weren't then aware of it. I learned that I was going to be a father in Los Angeles. I had what may have been the closest thing I've ever had to a real breakdown in a hotel room in Berkeley, but it was followed up immediately with one of the few moments of catharsis I have ever known. I also had two of the handful of moments of pure bliss I've ever had in my life, the first sitting by the San Francisco Bay in Sausalito and the second while laying in the middle of the highway in Death Valley. It's taken me years to unpack all that went down in the two weeks or so I spent in California during that trip, and I still don't think I've unpacked it all.
I was back in 2007 for a short L.A.-San Diego trek, centered around my then recently renewed passion for baseball. Dodgers and Angels games with Todd, Padres games with my brother. Grasping for the first time that maybe, maybe, that could somehow be my life.
The last trip there was 2009. Another wedding. I was filled with optimism at the time. I was deep into negotiations to leave the law and write full time and knew it was only a matter of weeks before that would happen. For the first time we had left our children for more than a day or two -- giving us precious time away together -- and it was going great. One afternoon on that trip, as she took a nap, I sat in a cafe in Calistoga marveling at how well everything was going, thrilled that all of my dreams involving my work, my family and my marriage were within my grasp.
Obviously all of that didn't come to pass. But the fact that I can think of that trip with my ex-wife -- and the particular moment of thought I had in that cafe -- without any hint of sorrow when I still can't think of other times I had with her without a sense of loss and waste says a lot for where I was at the time and how uniquely powerful the place in which I felt those things is to me.
I'm going back on Thursday. To Los Angeles. It's another wedding but, more importantly, it's a weekend with Allison, who I haven't seen in six weeks and who I miss dearly. And it's in California, where everything has always felt right to me, and where I have always felt peace.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Craig Fan Fiction? Sure, why not?
I have this image of Craig sitting in a high chair in a front of a fireplace, smoking a pipe (not really, the pipe is expelling bubbles) and the man is dressed in a Braves bathrobe thinking intently in front of Chess set with baseball players as figurines (Braves vs Nationals). Caption: “Why do thee always vex me so?”
Soon after that he expanded the idea into one in which I sit in my "lair," which is some mix between the Bat Cave and the headquarters of a Bond supervillain, smoking that bubble pipe and monitoring the entirety of the baseball world via a huge video monitor and, somehow, controlling things and people and stuff. Oh, and I had a sidekick: my HBT Daily video host Tiffany, about whom I've written before.
Yes, a little strange, I'll grant you that. Even stranger when he moved the operation out of my comments section and created an entire "Craig's Lair" blog out of it. Complete with background facts and stuff. And the"Craig Signal," pictured above.
I can't say that I fully understand the motivation behind it, but the author, Francisco Colemenares, is harmless enough and the posts haven't gotten creepy or anything (I'll admit that when Tiffany was introduced I worried that it would turn ... weird). Indeed, they often operate as pretty good satire and kind, subtle mockery of the things I write about over at the blog. And they often make me laugh.
This isn't strange, is it? I sort of think it might be strange. But I guess it's OK too.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Old Business
It's an exaggeration to say that drafting legal documents is all copying and pasting, but not that much of one. At least if you sort of know what you're doing. Make sure you know what you're trying to accomplish, find a good form and pay attention to the local court rules and you're most of the way home. After substituting "Craig Calcaterra" and "Petitioner" for "State of Ohio" and "Plaintiff," I was on my way to turning my last legal brief -- written in 2009 -- into my divorce petition.
I had been putting it off for a while. For logical reasons mostly. I wanted to have everything settled between us prior to filing rather than make the court have to weigh in, and those negotiations took a little time.
But there was part of me that was procrastinating due to the unpleasantness of the task. To reducing 16 years of marriage to a pleading, two contracts and a handful of affidavits. Given my complicated relationship with the legal system, doing such a thing seemed like an even greater insult to the memory of my marriage than did its ignominious end.
But I got through it. To be honest, it was easier than I thought it would be. For as much as I disliked it when I was practicing, there is a certain calming ritual to legal writing. To formatting the page just so. To inserting just enough terms of art to make the document accomplish what it's supposed to accomplish without making it unintelligible and jargony. To going back and making sure that your editing didn't cause the numbered paragraphs to be non-sequential. To make sure your Exhibit A is, in fact, what you said it would be in the body of the document. After a little while I was able to forget that I was drafting the documents that would put an end to my marriage and just think of it as a necessary task.
After a while the words become secondary to the form and it all washes over you.
When I was done I secured the necessary signatures -- mine, hers, the notary and the witnesses -- and made the necessary copies. I was left with a neat stack of white paper, properly bound and ready for the clerk's stamp. I put them in my messenger bag and, for the first time in over two years, went to the courthouse.
In some ways it was more emotionally daunting to walk through those courthouse doors. I had a nice bit of catharsis upon my marriage ending and I'm moving on in healthy directions now. I still feel like I have unfinished business with the law, however. Maybe because I left it instead of the other way around. Whatever the case, I found the few brief minutes I spent there Monday morning mildly unsettling.
As the clerk took the documents and stamped each one, I was waiting for her to give them back and to tell me that they weren't in proper order. To tell me that the local rule I had followed in preparing them had been amended recently and that I needed three more copies, two more signatures and a different kind of fastener because staples were no longer sufficient. It dawned on me as I was waiting that the two biggest anxieties of my life -- my difficult legal career, complete with all of the little rules that always seemed to vex me, and the deterioration and ultimate failure of my marriage -- had joined forces. I stood there terrified that I'd have to redo the documents and prolong this unpleasant process.
But it all checked out OK. The clerk handed me back my copies and gave me a slight smile and nod, which is probably as close to a "have a nice day" a person who processes divorce and child custody documents all day can muster. I took the elevator back down to the lobby and walked out onto the sidewalk. It was cold, but clear and the air felt clean. I took a deep breath and exhaled, feeling lighter than I had in a long while.
The final hearing is set for March 20. After that, there will be no reason to look backward instead of forward anymore. And what has so far been a pleasant new morning can grow in to a bright new day, unimpeded by old business.
I had been putting it off for a while. For logical reasons mostly. I wanted to have everything settled between us prior to filing rather than make the court have to weigh in, and those negotiations took a little time.
But there was part of me that was procrastinating due to the unpleasantness of the task. To reducing 16 years of marriage to a pleading, two contracts and a handful of affidavits. Given my complicated relationship with the legal system, doing such a thing seemed like an even greater insult to the memory of my marriage than did its ignominious end.
But I got through it. To be honest, it was easier than I thought it would be. For as much as I disliked it when I was practicing, there is a certain calming ritual to legal writing. To formatting the page just so. To inserting just enough terms of art to make the document accomplish what it's supposed to accomplish without making it unintelligible and jargony. To going back and making sure that your editing didn't cause the numbered paragraphs to be non-sequential. To make sure your Exhibit A is, in fact, what you said it would be in the body of the document. After a little while I was able to forget that I was drafting the documents that would put an end to my marriage and just think of it as a necessary task.
Married: July 1, 1995 at Beckley, West Virginia ... Residents of Franklin County, Ohio since May 20, 1998 ... two children were born of this marriage ... Petitioners are separated, and have been living apart since October 21, 2011 ... the residence shall remain in the possession of The Husband ... a Shared Parenting Agreement has been entered into ...
After a while the words become secondary to the form and it all washes over you.
When I was done I secured the necessary signatures -- mine, hers, the notary and the witnesses -- and made the necessary copies. I was left with a neat stack of white paper, properly bound and ready for the clerk's stamp. I put them in my messenger bag and, for the first time in over two years, went to the courthouse.
In some ways it was more emotionally daunting to walk through those courthouse doors. I had a nice bit of catharsis upon my marriage ending and I'm moving on in healthy directions now. I still feel like I have unfinished business with the law, however. Maybe because I left it instead of the other way around. Whatever the case, I found the few brief minutes I spent there Monday morning mildly unsettling.
As the clerk took the documents and stamped each one, I was waiting for her to give them back and to tell me that they weren't in proper order. To tell me that the local rule I had followed in preparing them had been amended recently and that I needed three more copies, two more signatures and a different kind of fastener because staples were no longer sufficient. It dawned on me as I was waiting that the two biggest anxieties of my life -- my difficult legal career, complete with all of the little rules that always seemed to vex me, and the deterioration and ultimate failure of my marriage -- had joined forces. I stood there terrified that I'd have to redo the documents and prolong this unpleasant process.
But it all checked out OK. The clerk handed me back my copies and gave me a slight smile and nod, which is probably as close to a "have a nice day" a person who processes divorce and child custody documents all day can muster. I took the elevator back down to the lobby and walked out onto the sidewalk. It was cold, but clear and the air felt clean. I took a deep breath and exhaled, feeling lighter than I had in a long while.
The final hearing is set for March 20. After that, there will be no reason to look backward instead of forward anymore. And what has so far been a pleasant new morning can grow in to a bright new day, unimpeded by old business.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
New Morning
One day last October I wrote something raw and personal. She read it. She sent me a message saying "hey, I know you're gonna be OK, but hit me up if you ever want to talk." So we talked.
I didn't know her that well. We had been vague Internet acquaintances for some time, but not close in any way. But I needed to talk to someone like her. I had friends helping me deal with what I was going though. I needed those friends to help me recover from the past year and make sense of my new life. I still need them.
But I also needed a friendly voice and ear who wasn't immersed in all of that. Someone with whom I could talk about the present and the future, not the past. Someone with whom I could, however temporarily, forget about all that was troubling me. Someone with whom I could be myself, whatever that had become. She quickly became that person. But as the small talk grew larger, it became clear that something else was going on.
The random coincidences piled up. We shared the same interests. The same humor. The same temperament. So much of the same past. We didn't, as the old cliche goes, complete each other's sentences. We spoke them as the other formed the very thought. It was all light and casual and friendly on the surface, but I found myself talking to her all night and into the early morning. I found myself thinking about her more and more.
Then one night:
I'm glad she said it before I did. It was so soon after my life spun out of control that I didn't know if I trusted myself or my feelings. I didn't know if I was misreading it all. It turns out I wasn't. And her wondering aloud didn't ruin it. It ignited it.
We spent four days together in Dallas in December. I just got back from spending five days with her in San Antonio. Every time I go away someplace I get a feeling of relief when I come back home. Happy to be back in my own space and in my own bed. For the first time ever I've not felt that same relief upon returning home. Being with her was so comfortable. So natural. I felt at home.
I know all of the objections those who care about me will raise. I'm not ignoring them. I know all of the obstacles we face. I'm not denying them. All that matters to me is that she brought me happiness and joy at a time when I figured I'd never feel those things again and that those feelings have outlasted the initial euphoria that often accompanies something new.
And all I know is that last week, at 6:30 in the morning, I woke up and for a moment and I didn't know where I was. Then she stirred. She wrapped her arm around me and kissed me softly. And nothing ever felt so right.
I didn't know her that well. We had been vague Internet acquaintances for some time, but not close in any way. But I needed to talk to someone like her. I had friends helping me deal with what I was going though. I needed those friends to help me recover from the past year and make sense of my new life. I still need them.
But I also needed a friendly voice and ear who wasn't immersed in all of that. Someone with whom I could talk about the present and the future, not the past. Someone with whom I could, however temporarily, forget about all that was troubling me. Someone with whom I could be myself, whatever that had become. She quickly became that person. But as the small talk grew larger, it became clear that something else was going on.
The random coincidences piled up. We shared the same interests. The same humor. The same temperament. So much of the same past. We didn't, as the old cliche goes, complete each other's sentences. We spoke them as the other formed the very thought. It was all light and casual and friendly on the surface, but I found myself talking to her all night and into the early morning. I found myself thinking about her more and more.
Then one night:
Am I allowed to wonder aloud what's going on here? Or does that ruin it?
I'm glad she said it before I did. It was so soon after my life spun out of control that I didn't know if I trusted myself or my feelings. I didn't know if I was misreading it all. It turns out I wasn't. And her wondering aloud didn't ruin it. It ignited it.
We spent four days together in Dallas in December. I just got back from spending five days with her in San Antonio. Every time I go away someplace I get a feeling of relief when I come back home. Happy to be back in my own space and in my own bed. For the first time ever I've not felt that same relief upon returning home. Being with her was so comfortable. So natural. I felt at home.
I know all of the objections those who care about me will raise. I'm not ignoring them. I know all of the obstacles we face. I'm not denying them. All that matters to me is that she brought me happiness and joy at a time when I figured I'd never feel those things again and that those feelings have outlasted the initial euphoria that often accompanies something new.
And all I know is that last week, at 6:30 in the morning, I woke up and for a moment and I didn't know where I was. Then she stirred. She wrapped her arm around me and kissed me softly. And nothing ever felt so right.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Shyster: Epilogue
Here ends the little writing project. There were eleven installments before this. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 ,Part 6, Part 7 , Part 8, Part 9, Part 10 and Part 11.
I started writing this series for very personal reasons. A lot has happened in my life over the past couple of months. Some terrible. Some -- which I'll be getting to in future posts -- wonderful. I needed a project in which I could immerse myself. I needed to get down in writing what had been floating around my head for a few years. Other events in my life were going to eclipse it and I didn't want it to slip away.
I started writing this series for very personal reasons. A lot has happened in my life over the past couple of months. Some terrible. Some -- which I'll be getting to in future posts -- wonderful. I needed a project in which I could immerse myself. I needed to get down in writing what had been floating around my head for a few years. Other events in my life were going to eclipse it and I didn't want it to slip away.
But a funny thing happened as I gazed at my navel: a lot more people have been reading it than I ever thought would. And, apparently, a lot more people are going through the same career angst I went through over the past decade or so. In the last month I've received several dozen emails from people offering me encouraging words. Thanking me for writing it. Congratulating me on finding my way out of darkness and into light.
Most common, however, are people asking me if I have any advice for them. But even now I can't quite say why it worked out the way it did. I can't, as I am so often asked to do, give anyone any pointers. While it unfolded in somewhat orderly fashion in these posts I wrote over the past month or so, it felt like anything but orderly as it was happening. All I can say is that a writer writes, as the old expression goes, and I made a point to keep writing.
The key, though, is that at a couple of times in that process I stumbled over some good luck. Better writers than I never get a chance to make a living writing and it's not for lack of skill or lack of effort. It's just for lack of the good fortune I happened upon. Maybe it's silly, but I occasionally have something akin to survivor's guilt over the fact that I've been able to make this my career while those better writers did not or, as of yet, have not.
I also sometimes wonder if I have cost myself something for going so hard after what I wanted.
As I wrote a couple of months ago, my marriage is ending. I'm not going to suggest that my writing is the cause of that. Anyone who knows what actually happened with my marriage knows that's not the case. But at the same time, every action has a reaction. People are creatures of habit and routine. Who's to say that my refusal to be content with my professional life as a lawyer didn't upset the expectations of others? Who's to say that in doing what I did with my life, I didn't throw off my marriage's equilibrium, even if that equilibrium was ultimately unhealthy and unsustainable? Maybe my soon-to-be-ex-wife had settled on a world view in which I would go downtown and fight with other lawyers all day for the next 30 years, and my short-circuiting that was something she simply couldn't deal with anymore. Maybe my search for meaning and fulfillment spurred a corresponding one on her part and it simply wasn't compatible with us staying together. I have no idea. You have to ask her, I suppose.
The point of all of this is that, even though I laid all of this out as the straightforward narrative of a boy who made his childhood dream come true, nothing in life is so simple. There are no definitive paths. There are no definitive beginnings. There are no definitive ends until the day we die. I'm doing this now. I wasn't doing it before. I may be doing something else later. As all of that happens, other things happen. People come into your life and then leave. Others come into your life after that and, hopefully, stay. Those dreams you had once no longer hold currency. New ones crop up. No clear narrative of anyone's life can be written until they're dead and gone.
But what I've written over these past couple of months captures a chunk of it. An important chunk of it and one that will always be with me. And no matter where else life takes me, I will be able to draw on these experiences. To look back and say:
Most common, however, are people asking me if I have any advice for them. But even now I can't quite say why it worked out the way it did. I can't, as I am so often asked to do, give anyone any pointers. While it unfolded in somewhat orderly fashion in these posts I wrote over the past month or so, it felt like anything but orderly as it was happening. All I can say is that a writer writes, as the old expression goes, and I made a point to keep writing.
The key, though, is that at a couple of times in that process I stumbled over some good luck. Better writers than I never get a chance to make a living writing and it's not for lack of skill or lack of effort. It's just for lack of the good fortune I happened upon. Maybe it's silly, but I occasionally have something akin to survivor's guilt over the fact that I've been able to make this my career while those better writers did not or, as of yet, have not.
I also sometimes wonder if I have cost myself something for going so hard after what I wanted.
As I wrote a couple of months ago, my marriage is ending. I'm not going to suggest that my writing is the cause of that. Anyone who knows what actually happened with my marriage knows that's not the case. But at the same time, every action has a reaction. People are creatures of habit and routine. Who's to say that my refusal to be content with my professional life as a lawyer didn't upset the expectations of others? Who's to say that in doing what I did with my life, I didn't throw off my marriage's equilibrium, even if that equilibrium was ultimately unhealthy and unsustainable? Maybe my soon-to-be-ex-wife had settled on a world view in which I would go downtown and fight with other lawyers all day for the next 30 years, and my short-circuiting that was something she simply couldn't deal with anymore. Maybe my search for meaning and fulfillment spurred a corresponding one on her part and it simply wasn't compatible with us staying together. I have no idea. You have to ask her, I suppose.
The point of all of this is that, even though I laid all of this out as the straightforward narrative of a boy who made his childhood dream come true, nothing in life is so simple. There are no definitive paths. There are no definitive beginnings. There are no definitive ends until the day we die. I'm doing this now. I wasn't doing it before. I may be doing something else later. As all of that happens, other things happen. People come into your life and then leave. Others come into your life after that and, hopefully, stay. Those dreams you had once no longer hold currency. New ones crop up. No clear narrative of anyone's life can be written until they're dead and gone.
But what I've written over these past couple of months captures a chunk of it. An important chunk of it and one that will always be with me. And no matter where else life takes me, I will be able to draw on these experiences. To look back and say:
You once dreamed something big and made it happen. You once had big problems and overcame them. You once took risks that seemed unreasonable, but survived them. There is nothing you put your mind to that, with time, effort, perseverance and a little luck, you can't accomplish. And even if that luck doesn't come, you will be able to look yourself in the mirror with pride for having made the effort.Thanks for hanging around for all of this. Now forward ho.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Shyster: Hardball
I've started a little writing project. This is the eleventh installment. Here's Part 1, Here's Part 2, Here's Part 3, Here's Part 4, Here's Part 5 , Here's Part 6, Here's Part 7 , Here's Part 8, Here's Part 9, and Here's Part 10.
My most optimistic plan for full-time writing had been to get something working by the fall of 2011. This was based just as much on the scarcity of opportunities -- there aren't a lot of full time baseball writing jobs out there -- as it was on the convenience of life.
Things like my legal career being stabilized enough to where, if I left it for something else, I could go back to it without having burned any bridges. Things like the kids finally being in school all day. Starting a part time writing job with NBC in April 2009 seemed like it would keep things squarely on that track.
In less than four months, however, I goosed it a little.
One night in late July, after a bit of bourbon, I wrote down all of the things I thought were working well with the NBC blog and all of the things I thought could be better. Then I slapped that into an email to multiple NBC people. At the end of it all I quite immodestly suggested that if I was working on the blog full time and wasn't distracted by my legal career, I could do more to make the good things happen.
I didn't hear anything for two days. I assumed during those two days that I had overstepped my bounds and pissed everyone off. That's OK. Wouldn't have been the first time. Then I got this email from the guy in charge of everything:
I tend not to notice the momentous moments in life as they're happening. I live them and carry on and only a little later do I realize that, hey, something pretty major happened back there. This was not one of those times. My mind reeled. My heart raced. Adrenalin surged. I knew exactly what I had done. I knew exactly what the response meant. I knew that, at that moment, my life was about to change forever.
Everything I wanted to do at that moment -- respond immediately, scream from the tops of buildings -- crashed into everything I had learned about business and negotiation in the previous 14 years of my professional life. I almost had to handcuff myself to keep from writing back immediately and saying that they had me no matter what, pay me whatever they wanted. I mean, how long had I been doing this for free? One cent more than whatever would keep me out of poverty was OK, right?
I calmed down. After an appropriate time I responded and acted like a reasonable person, soberly weighing the risks of leaving my legal career against the rewards of living my dream. It took a bit of time to get everything hammered out because that's just how that kind of stuff works, but we came to terms. I worked my last day as a lawyer on November 27, 2009. When I left the building that day I didn't look back. Not even once.
On the morning of November 30 I woke up at 5:30 AM. I drank some coffee. I fed the children breakfast. I took a shower, shaved and got dressed. I walked to the den and sat down in the same chair I'm sitting in as I type this, and I began to do the same thing I had been doing every morning for nearly three years: I read the baseball headlines. Then I wrote what I thought of them all.
But for the first time, it was my job to do so. For the first time since I was a teenager, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I was living the life I dreamed about over 20 years before.
And I'm still living it.
Head's up: there's gonna be an epilogue
My most optimistic plan for full-time writing had been to get something working by the fall of 2011. This was based just as much on the scarcity of opportunities -- there aren't a lot of full time baseball writing jobs out there -- as it was on the convenience of life.
Things like my legal career being stabilized enough to where, if I left it for something else, I could go back to it without having burned any bridges. Things like the kids finally being in school all day. Starting a part time writing job with NBC in April 2009 seemed like it would keep things squarely on that track.
In less than four months, however, I goosed it a little.
One night in late July, after a bit of bourbon, I wrote down all of the things I thought were working well with the NBC blog and all of the things I thought could be better. Then I slapped that into an email to multiple NBC people. At the end of it all I quite immodestly suggested that if I was working on the blog full time and wasn't distracted by my legal career, I could do more to make the good things happen.
I didn't hear anything for two days. I assumed during those two days that I had overstepped my bounds and pissed everyone off. That's OK. Wouldn't have been the first time. Then I got this email from the guy in charge of everything:
From:
To: Craig Calcaterra
Date: Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 7:48 PM
Subject: Re: Thoughts on CTB
They forwarded me the note you sent on Sunday. I really agree with pretty much everything you said. What would it take to get you to do this full time?
I want you to think about all that and see what it would take to make it work.
I tend not to notice the momentous moments in life as they're happening. I live them and carry on and only a little later do I realize that, hey, something pretty major happened back there. This was not one of those times. My mind reeled. My heart raced. Adrenalin surged. I knew exactly what I had done. I knew exactly what the response meant. I knew that, at that moment, my life was about to change forever.
Everything I wanted to do at that moment -- respond immediately, scream from the tops of buildings -- crashed into everything I had learned about business and negotiation in the previous 14 years of my professional life. I almost had to handcuff myself to keep from writing back immediately and saying that they had me no matter what, pay me whatever they wanted. I mean, how long had I been doing this for free? One cent more than whatever would keep me out of poverty was OK, right?
I calmed down. After an appropriate time I responded and acted like a reasonable person, soberly weighing the risks of leaving my legal career against the rewards of living my dream. It took a bit of time to get everything hammered out because that's just how that kind of stuff works, but we came to terms. I worked my last day as a lawyer on November 27, 2009. When I left the building that day I didn't look back. Not even once.
On the morning of November 30 I woke up at 5:30 AM. I drank some coffee. I fed the children breakfast. I took a shower, shaved and got dressed. I walked to the den and sat down in the same chair I'm sitting in as I type this, and I began to do the same thing I had been doing every morning for nearly three years: I read the baseball headlines. Then I wrote what I thought of them all.
But for the first time, it was my job to do so. For the first time since I was a teenager, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I was living the life I dreamed about over 20 years before.
And I'm still living it.
Head's up: there's gonna be an epilogue
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Shyster: Circling the Bases
I've started a little writing project. This is the tenth installment. Here's Part 1, Here's Part 2, Here's Part 3, Here's Part 4, Here's Part 5 , Here's Part 6, Here's Part 7 , Here's Part 8 and Here's Part 9.
After a month of unemployment I interviewed with the Ohio Attorney General's office. The people there knew me from my law firm work, much of which brought my clients -- many of them unsavory -- into conflict with various state agencies.
My interviewers asked a lot of questions designed to determine if I was what, during those cases, I pretended to be, or if I was something else. Most of them seemed satisfied that circumstances and not character caused me to take unreasonable positions in contentious litigation. In this they gave me more benefit of the doubt than I had been willing to give myself.
One other topic came up in interviews: the baseball writing, which I had included as an item on my resume. How serious was I, they asked? How much of a time commitment was it? I wouldn't be doing it on company time which, at this job, would be taxpayer time, would I? I downplayed the seriousness and commitment. Having never considered the idea that blogging from a state office computer would represent a misuse of public resources -- which is a misdemeanor in Ohio -- I paused and then said, no, I wouldn't be doing that. They offered me the job.
I began working in the AG's office in mid February. By late March, something strange was beginning to happen: I was beginning to like the law a little bit. Released from the billable hour and the need to manage insane clients, I actually started to warm back up to it. My colleagues and I sat around and discussed competing legal theories just like I imagined I would always be doing back when I was in law school but never really did in private practice. No one ever talked about the amount of attorney time being devoted to the case. Everyone wanted to win it and to win with their honor intact, but when the day was done, they went home to their families. Everyone was well-adjusted and had lives. It was almost enough to make a guy forget that he was making half of what he made back at the law firm.
I was still blogging, although my habits had changed. I made a point to write even more from home in the morning than I used to. Paranoid of breaking work rules and, by extension, laws, I never used a state computer or Internet connection to blog at the office. I brought my personal laptop and a mobile broadband card with me to work each day and would write a few posts during lunch. And, well, occasionally when I was supposed to be doing something else, but only when something fairly major was going on. It was a balance I could have maintained indefinitely if I had to. But the balance was about to be thrown off.
In late March I got an email from Aaron Gleeman, who worked for the Rotoworld website which was owned by NBC. I had met Aaron once before and knew him in that way you know people on the Internet, but I didn't know him particularly well. NBC was launching a new baseball blog, he said. It was called Circling the Bases and would be part of a relaunch of NBCSports.com. Aaron and Matthew Pouliot of Rotoworld would be writing it, but they felt they needed a third person involved to round out the coverage. In Aaron's words:
I began contributing a handful of posts each morning to the tune of a couple hundred bucks a week. Basically, taking what I would have written for ShysterBall anyway and putting it on the NBC site. It didn't alter my legal workflow any. It did, however, start to prey on my mind. I wasn't making a living, but I was writing professionally. For a major media company who was invested in smart, sharp baseball blogging. Everything I had ever wanted to do -- the dream I had as a kid but buried for years and which I thought would be the end of me when it resurfaced -- was within my grasp.
The only question was whether I could balance the legal career with the baseball writing long enough to where I could make the latter pay off before the former crashed to the ground.
Again.
After a month of unemployment I interviewed with the Ohio Attorney General's office. The people there knew me from my law firm work, much of which brought my clients -- many of them unsavory -- into conflict with various state agencies.
My interviewers asked a lot of questions designed to determine if I was what, during those cases, I pretended to be, or if I was something else. Most of them seemed satisfied that circumstances and not character caused me to take unreasonable positions in contentious litigation. In this they gave me more benefit of the doubt than I had been willing to give myself.
One other topic came up in interviews: the baseball writing, which I had included as an item on my resume. How serious was I, they asked? How much of a time commitment was it? I wouldn't be doing it on company time which, at this job, would be taxpayer time, would I? I downplayed the seriousness and commitment. Having never considered the idea that blogging from a state office computer would represent a misuse of public resources -- which is a misdemeanor in Ohio -- I paused and then said, no, I wouldn't be doing that. They offered me the job.
I began working in the AG's office in mid February. By late March, something strange was beginning to happen: I was beginning to like the law a little bit. Released from the billable hour and the need to manage insane clients, I actually started to warm back up to it. My colleagues and I sat around and discussed competing legal theories just like I imagined I would always be doing back when I was in law school but never really did in private practice. No one ever talked about the amount of attorney time being devoted to the case. Everyone wanted to win it and to win with their honor intact, but when the day was done, they went home to their families. Everyone was well-adjusted and had lives. It was almost enough to make a guy forget that he was making half of what he made back at the law firm.
I was still blogging, although my habits had changed. I made a point to write even more from home in the morning than I used to. Paranoid of breaking work rules and, by extension, laws, I never used a state computer or Internet connection to blog at the office. I brought my personal laptop and a mobile broadband card with me to work each day and would write a few posts during lunch. And, well, occasionally when I was supposed to be doing something else, but only when something fairly major was going on. It was a balance I could have maintained indefinitely if I had to. But the balance was about to be thrown off.
In late March I got an email from Aaron Gleeman, who worked for the Rotoworld website which was owned by NBC. I had met Aaron once before and knew him in that way you know people on the Internet, but I didn't know him particularly well. NBC was launching a new baseball blog, he said. It was called Circling the Bases and would be part of a relaunch of NBCSports.com. Aaron and Matthew Pouliot of Rotoworld would be writing it, but they felt they needed a third person involved to round out the coverage. In Aaron's words:
It's funny, when we first started talking about the need/want to have a third person involved, the NBC folks told Matthew Pouliot and I to both come up with a short list once we got off the conference call with them. We hung up the phone and immediately IM'd each other with your name. It was like a moment from the world's most boring, least romantic comedy or something. Some of the higher-ups weren't familiar with you, but after reading your blog and doing some Googling several of them basically came back and said, "I think this Craig guy would be a good fit."
I began contributing a handful of posts each morning to the tune of a couple hundred bucks a week. Basically, taking what I would have written for ShysterBall anyway and putting it on the NBC site. It didn't alter my legal workflow any. It did, however, start to prey on my mind. I wasn't making a living, but I was writing professionally. For a major media company who was invested in smart, sharp baseball blogging. Everything I had ever wanted to do -- the dream I had as a kid but buried for years and which I thought would be the end of me when it resurfaced -- was within my grasp.
The only question was whether I could balance the legal career with the baseball writing long enough to where I could make the latter pay off before the former crashed to the ground.
Again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
