I liked reading this. You are a gentle commentator. I'm feeling a lot of grief today, though, and this is how it is coming out.
I know I'm going to be doing significant projecting here, but:
> at the time he wrote it, he was still very much a young man finding his way in the world
Nobody ever helps you with this, and nobody ever cares except when you slip-up, and then they are quicker than river rapids to get you back into line.
Nobody.
Parents. Teachers. Coaches. Bosses.
You try to do you best to respect and honor where you've come from, but everyone in that context just sees you as a compunctionless heathen who betrayed them. Then, you do your best to lean into the completely foreign milieu – of things like clerkships, cocktails, and cummerbunds – in which you find yourself, and everybody makes you feel like sh*t about where you come from regardless of how solid you are.
Your whole life basically becomes just one big display for everyone to jeer at you, because they've never had the courage or talent to make something of themselves – to really find out who they are and what they are made of.
J.D is a second-generation immigrant in some ways, just as I am; if not literally, then in spirit. Forced to reconcile the past with the future, with absinthian ankle-biters at every turn – and not a lick of compassion from your 'betters'.
> feeling with an unease about his true motivations
You have a right to be as suspicious as you want. And it never hurts to be skeptical of politicians.
But, if I were to guess, in the privacy of his backyard, late at night: he wants nothing more than to be considered genuinely American, and to be a representative of what means (regardless of his public office aspirations).
Thanks, Rajeev. I appreciate your comment a lot. That's really true about the lack of help. I think in a big way, a major source of my skepticism comes from being so similar to J.D., and, that being the case, it's difficult for me to actually fathom the success he's had. Though I have my own relative success, in many ways I still feel like I'm living in that old house in what was a nice neighborhood when my dad was a child but became a ghetto well before I as born.
I see so much of myself in his story. So much of what my childhood could have been for the worse had things been just slightly different. I think about just how different (and similar) J.D. and I are in terms of mindset because of that. There's another part towards the end of the book where he checks his addict mom into a motel so that she's not on the street. He talks about the struggle between caring and not losing yourself. I think about how I can't be bothered to respond to more than one or two texts a year from my addict mom. Though I've forgiven her, I just don't have anything to say.
I think about my own young family and how I struggle to lead in the ways that I am called to because I didn't have an example growing up of what that ought to look like. The difficulties in starting a legacy from scratch. So I do really resonate with J.D. both as the chubby kid getting screamed at by his mother driving down the highway and as a man who's succeeded by many metrics despite that.
No matter my skepticisms, I am glad to see someone like J.D., someone like me, standing on the edge of America's destiny.
I liked reading this. You are a gentle commentator. I'm feeling a lot of grief today, though, and this is how it is coming out.
I know I'm going to be doing significant projecting here, but:
> at the time he wrote it, he was still very much a young man finding his way in the world
Nobody ever helps you with this, and nobody ever cares except when you slip-up, and then they are quicker than river rapids to get you back into line.
Nobody.
Parents. Teachers. Coaches. Bosses.
You try to do you best to respect and honor where you've come from, but everyone in that context just sees you as a compunctionless heathen who betrayed them. Then, you do your best to lean into the completely foreign milieu – of things like clerkships, cocktails, and cummerbunds – in which you find yourself, and everybody makes you feel like sh*t about where you come from regardless of how solid you are.
Your whole life basically becomes just one big display for everyone to jeer at you, because they've never had the courage or talent to make something of themselves – to really find out who they are and what they are made of.
J.D is a second-generation immigrant in some ways, just as I am; if not literally, then in spirit. Forced to reconcile the past with the future, with absinthian ankle-biters at every turn – and not a lick of compassion from your 'betters'.
> feeling with an unease about his true motivations
You have a right to be as suspicious as you want. And it never hurts to be skeptical of politicians.
But, if I were to guess, in the privacy of his backyard, late at night: he wants nothing more than to be considered genuinely American, and to be a representative of what means (regardless of his public office aspirations).
Thanks, Rajeev. I appreciate your comment a lot. That's really true about the lack of help. I think in a big way, a major source of my skepticism comes from being so similar to J.D., and, that being the case, it's difficult for me to actually fathom the success he's had. Though I have my own relative success, in many ways I still feel like I'm living in that old house in what was a nice neighborhood when my dad was a child but became a ghetto well before I as born.
I see so much of myself in his story. So much of what my childhood could have been for the worse had things been just slightly different. I think about just how different (and similar) J.D. and I are in terms of mindset because of that. There's another part towards the end of the book where he checks his addict mom into a motel so that she's not on the street. He talks about the struggle between caring and not losing yourself. I think about how I can't be bothered to respond to more than one or two texts a year from my addict mom. Though I've forgiven her, I just don't have anything to say.
I think about my own young family and how I struggle to lead in the ways that I am called to because I didn't have an example growing up of what that ought to look like. The difficulties in starting a legacy from scratch. So I do really resonate with J.D. both as the chubby kid getting screamed at by his mother driving down the highway and as a man who's succeeded by many metrics despite that.
No matter my skepticisms, I am glad to see someone like J.D., someone like me, standing on the edge of America's destiny.
I legitimately LOLed at "curry slurping"