I guess these things don't shrivel up and die if neglected, like plants, or wander off, bored, like someone who wishes she'd stayed home rather than attending, say, a Mount Vernon District Democratic Party Ice Cream Social at which, it turns out, she knows no one. Just a hypothetical example.
I spent the first half of this week out in Sonoma County; I flew out there to meet with a realtor. I'm trying to sell the property my husband and I bought out there back in 1988 or thereabouts. We used to camp and hike there, Fred, Mike, and I, when we lived in Davis, and Fred and I planned on retiring there some day. Since he died I've been trying to decide what to do with the property, and now with law school looming I need the money.
Mike still can't or won't decide where he wants to go to law school. He has, at least, narrowed it down to UVA or Columbia. He also got into Duke and Georgetown but he only applied to Duke because they asked him to and waived the fee, while Georgetown was basically his "backup" school.
Columbia has the largest program in Chinese law outside of Asia, and Mike's gotten email from the prof who runs the program, on account of his (2nd) major in East Asian Studies. It could be an exciting career, I'd think, international law with a specialty in China. Only NYU outranks Columbia in international law, and Mike didn't apply there, don't ask me why--his choice of schools was nothing if not random.
He skipped the "Admitted Students" program at Columbia, though, because it conflicted with the program at UVA and they were handing out free t-shirts at UVA. This is what I'm putting up with. We're going up to New York on April 12 to spend the following day, a Friday, visiting Columbia. We won't be able to take any tours because the tours are on Mondays through Thursdays. Mike seems to be doing everything he can to avoid liking Columbia.
He says he doesn't want to live in New York, that New York is a big scary city. Yes this is the son who spent a summer in Beijing after having studied Mandarin for one whole year. I know this is the same son because I only have just the one, see. He doesn't want to leave his friends behind. It's true he'd have to give up his "social life", but I say you can have just as much fun sitting alone in your apartment drinking beer and watching cartoons in New York as you can in Charlottesville.
The only thing that concerns me about Columbia is the housing. I'm starting to worry that if he doesn't decide soon and start looking for a place to live he won't be able to find anything anywhere near the campus, which is in the upper-west-side of Manhattan.
