before closing the case once and for all.
When the building commissioner arrived, I was in thethroes of this sort of speculation. Luckily, I now had to think about him and his problems with the law, which distracted me from my tortured logic.
He seemed pretty upset. He was a high school teacher. This was the first time he’d held government office, and this was also his first brush with the law. He was afraid he might be arrested any minute.
I asked him to explain the situation in general terms. I took a quick look at the official notice he’d received and read through a few other documents he’d brought with him. In the end, I told him he could relax: As far as I could tell, there was really no serious evidence of wrongdoing on his part.
He seemed dubious, but relieved. He thanked me and we said our good-byes; I promised to meet with the prosecutor and inform him that my client was entirely willing to come in for an interview and felt sure he could clear up his role in the matter.
One by one, my colleagues—oh, how I dislike that word—came into my office to say good night before going home. This ceremony always makes me feel like a doddering old fool.
When I was finally alone, I called down to the Japanese take-out place a couple of blocks from my office and ordered a truly outsized meal of sushi, sashimi, temaki, uramaki, and a soybean salad. When the woman taking my order over the phone asked if I wanted something to drink, I hesitated for just a moment, then asked for a well-chilled bottle of white wine as well.
“Chopsticks and glasses for two, I imagine,” the young woman said.
“Of course, for two,” I answered.
8.
Forty-five minutes later, I was clearing a jumbled mess of plastic trays, little bottles, chopsticks, empty packets, and napkins off my desk. When I finished, I poured myself another glass of Gewürztraminer, stuck the plastic cork back into the bottle—I hate those plastic corks, but I have to admit that I haven’t had any corked wine since they were invented—and put it in the fridge. Every step performed slowly and very carefully. That’s how I always do things when I am preparing myself to begin a new task that makes me anxious. I do everything I can to delay the moment when I’ll have to begin, and I have to say, I’m pretty creative about it.
They call it a pathological tendency to procrastinate.
Apparently, this is a syndrome that is typical of insecure individuals who lack self-esteem; they continually put off disagreeable tasks in order to avoid being faced with their own shortcomings, fears, and limitations. I read something along those lines once, when I was leafing through a book called
How to Stop Procrastinating and Start Living
. It was a self-help book that explained the syndrome’s causes and then suggested about two hundred pages of crazy exercises to be used—I’m quoting verbatim—“to rid yourself ofthis disease of will and live a full, productive life, free of frustrations.”
I thought to myself that I wasn’t all that eager to have such a productive life, that self-help books that tell you how to change your life give me hives, and that a certain amount of frustration really didn’t bother me. So I put the book back on the shelf where I’d found it—as usual I was in a bookstore reading for free—and I bought an Alan Bennett book and went home.
After clearing away every trace of my Japanese dinner, after drinking a little more wine, after checking in vain for new e-mail, I realized the time had come.
I decided to read the file in the chronological order in which the authorities conducted their investigations, beginning with the event in question and moving forward from there. That’s not usually how I go through a file.
If I’m examining a file in which a warrant has been issued and my client is in jail, or under house arrest, the first thing I do is to read the court order for the warrant, which is the last document in the judicial
When the building commissioner arrived, I was in thethroes of this sort of speculation. Luckily, I now had to think about him and his problems with the law, which distracted me from my tortured logic.
He seemed pretty upset. He was a high school teacher. This was the first time he’d held government office, and this was also his first brush with the law. He was afraid he might be arrested any minute.
I asked him to explain the situation in general terms. I took a quick look at the official notice he’d received and read through a few other documents he’d brought with him. In the end, I told him he could relax: As far as I could tell, there was really no serious evidence of wrongdoing on his part.
He seemed dubious, but relieved. He thanked me and we said our good-byes; I promised to meet with the prosecutor and inform him that my client was entirely willing to come in for an interview and felt sure he could clear up his role in the matter.
One by one, my colleagues—oh, how I dislike that word—came into my office to say good night before going home. This ceremony always makes me feel like a doddering old fool.
When I was finally alone, I called down to the Japanese take-out place a couple of blocks from my office and ordered a truly outsized meal of sushi, sashimi, temaki, uramaki, and a soybean salad. When the woman taking my order over the phone asked if I wanted something to drink, I hesitated for just a moment, then asked for a well-chilled bottle of white wine as well.
“Chopsticks and glasses for two, I imagine,” the young woman said.
“Of course, for two,” I answered.
8.
Forty-five minutes later, I was clearing a jumbled mess of plastic trays, little bottles, chopsticks, empty packets, and napkins off my desk. When I finished, I poured myself another glass of Gewürztraminer, stuck the plastic cork back into the bottle—I hate those plastic corks, but I have to admit that I haven’t had any corked wine since they were invented—and put it in the fridge. Every step performed slowly and very carefully. That’s how I always do things when I am preparing myself to begin a new task that makes me anxious. I do everything I can to delay the moment when I’ll have to begin, and I have to say, I’m pretty creative about it.
They call it a pathological tendency to procrastinate.
Apparently, this is a syndrome that is typical of insecure individuals who lack self-esteem; they continually put off disagreeable tasks in order to avoid being faced with their own shortcomings, fears, and limitations. I read something along those lines once, when I was leafing through a book called
How to Stop Procrastinating and Start Living
. It was a self-help book that explained the syndrome’s causes and then suggested about two hundred pages of crazy exercises to be used—I’m quoting verbatim—“to rid yourself ofthis disease of will and live a full, productive life, free of frustrations.”
I thought to myself that I wasn’t all that eager to have such a productive life, that self-help books that tell you how to change your life give me hives, and that a certain amount of frustration really didn’t bother me. So I put the book back on the shelf where I’d found it—as usual I was in a bookstore reading for free—and I bought an Alan Bennett book and went home.
After clearing away every trace of my Japanese dinner, after drinking a little more wine, after checking in vain for new e-mail, I realized the time had come.
I decided to read the file in the chronological order in which the authorities conducted their investigations, beginning with the event in question and moving forward from there. That’s not usually how I go through a file.
If I’m examining a file in which a warrant has been issued and my client is in jail, or under house arrest, the first thing I do is to read the court order for the warrant, which is the last document in the judicial
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