I used to think there was a moment in life when it all clicked, when it all just came together, and you were a fully self-actualized adult, immune from worry and fear, immune from insecurities and self-doubt, immune from the hazards of day-to-day life. I'm starting to realize it's more of a gradual process not of getting rid of all that stuff but of learning to deal with it, and understand that some things are important, some things aren't, and most stuff isn't worth getting all that upset about. I don't understand drivers who get really mad when someone cuts them off. After all, there's no one on the road who *wants* to get into an accident, and it seems pretty darn amazing to me that we drive around at 60 miles an hour in big steel boxes and there are as few accidents as there are. So everyone's just trying the best they can. And when someone cuts me off, I'm happy to let them in, mostly in the hope that the karmic bonus I get for being polite will be returned when I accidentally miss something in my blind spot and start to make an ill-advised lane change.

The reason why I write this. I was going to post something like, "I'm sorry Waddling Thunder didn't make law review." But then I realized, with apologies to Waddling Thunder, that I'm really not that sorry. And this isn't a comment about law review, it's just a comment about what matters and what doesn't. He admits he knows it, intellectually, that this won't really change the course of his life and probably won't turn out to matter. But he feels bad because it feels bad to get beaten by other people at something you think you're good at. I understand all that, and, yeah, I guess I am sorry for him that he didn't make it, but if Harvard Law students are still relying on external academic validation, the world is in trouble.