Just rewrote... PLEASE JUDGE ME!!
Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2010 6:05 pm
Hey everyone, I just rewrote this PS to cut out a couple of hundred words. Please judge it and let me know. I need to submit Thurs or Fri, so I am taking all criticisms. If you vote that it needs work, PLEASE give me your critiques. Thanks for your help! I am willing to do PS trades if you want to PM me.
Instead of being fast asleep at 9:30 in the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, I was nervously inspecting the bare cabin of a 1950’s era Cessna with a rather rotund fellow who called himself my pilot. As I listened to him describe the trouble I would be in if I did not exit the cabin in a certain manner when we reached 10,000 feet, I began to reevaluate the decision that I had made only hours earlier and asked myself why I was doing something that could genuinely be described as foolish. The short answer was that I had been planning on making this jump for at least four birthdays now, but, to be honest, the real reason was that my mother had passed away only five months earlier and I realized that I was running out of time to put my well laid plans into action. So, as the pilot finished his speech on how to survive a two mile fall, which I did not feel was anywhere near comprehensive enough, I crammed into the tiny craft with 4 other men, all of whom seemed as quietly reflective about this decision as me. As the propeller started to spin, one of them even crossed himself and seemed to mumble a quiet prayer.
Change is never easy, but sometimes it is exactly what a person needs to get moving with their plans again. This is one of the major lessons that I learned from my mother throughout her life. When I was nine years old, a mere three years after my parents divorced, my mother decided that our family needed a change to broaden our horizons, so she took a job with the Department of Defense and moved us 4,500 miles from upstate South Carolina to southern Germany. At the time I hated the idea of leaving my family and friends to move to a country where I could not even speak the language, but I would spend the next nine years learning new languages, making friends across cultural boundaries, and developing a thirst for knowledge that comes from experiencing arts, architecture and other works that many people only get to read about.
It was this thirst that originally led me to study economics in college and gave me to dream to pursue a career in law. However, after college this dream quickly dissipated when I discovered the cost of law school and realized I was not in a position to take on anymore debt. So, I instead entered the workforce after graduation and began to search for a new career path. But after working for a year or so, I had a conversation with an old family friend who worked as an international trade lawyer in Washington, D.C. As he discussed some of his old cases with me, I felt my passion for law reignite and I began revisit my dormant dream. I opened up to my mother about it in October of 2009, and, to my surprise she began to push me to realize my dream at any cost. She even went as far as to buy me two LSAT preparation books and have them delivered to me without my knowledge. The books arrived from Amazon on November 1st, my mother passed away on November 15th.
On the morning of the 15th, I had to catch an early morning flight to a training program for a new job that I had recently started. After I had checked in for my flight, I decided to give my mother a call, since we hadn’t spoken in a week or so due to the time difference and my new job. After 6 rings, her boss unexpectedly answered her phone and turned my life upside down with a 10 minute conversation. The next few months were a complete blur for me, with her memorial and a 4 day trip to Germany set in the middle of the holiday season. As the calendar changed to a new year, I felt the grief reducing me to a shell of my former self. But in February, a new problem suddenly came to the forefront. Due to the complexities of the German and American probate codes, my brother, who lives in Portland, OR, and I were potentially liable for almost $600,000 of debt between real estate and medical bills in Europe that threatened to consume our mother’s estate in the United States.
Since I had volunteered to act as the executor of her estate, I took responsibility for solving this problem. I began spending hours after work in the library reading German and American legal code, I worked with German consulates in Portland, OR; Atlanta, GA; and Greenville, SC, and consulted lawyers in South Carolina, Washington, D.C., and Frankfurt. With their help, I was able to discover a method where we could dispose of the German liabilities without affecting the estate in the United States. With the rush that I felt from solving this complex international problem, I again felt my drive to study law return and on March 23rd, I registered for the June LSAT. With this new found eagerness, I finally went home and sat down with my mother’s last gift to me, the LSAT preparation books, and began studying for the upcoming exam.
So, when the door of the tiny Cessna opened at 10,000 feet, I couldn’t help but think of my mother. As my compatriots flung themselves one by one out into the icy blue sky, I realized that even though dealing with my mother’s death would continue to be difficult, at least the loss was forcing me to put my plans into action and pursue my own dreams. As I slid across the floor of the plane to the open door, I clutched my mother’s pendant of Saint Patrick that I wear around my neck and said my own silent prayer. I then gripped the edge of the tiny plane and pulled myself into a front flip out into nothingness. As I stared at the quickly approaching ground, I grew excited knowing that my life was moving again, and that nothing would be able to stop me from continuing on to law school so that I could learn to help people understand the complex legal system that I had only scratched the surface of. Nothing, that is, except a malfunctioning parachute.