When I go to the top of a high building, I get a deep, excited urge to jump. My doctor says you think you understand that, that you think you know what I'm feeling when I'm at the top of that building, that you are nodding your head as you listen to me tell you this. My doctor also says that you don't understand what I'm talking about. You are nodding at something else, something I am not describing, remembering what you feel when you're at the top of a building.

So how about this: when I see a pregnant woman, I feel like kicking her in the stomach. I don't do it. And I only think as far as the moment right before actually kicking her - I don't think of what would happen as soon as I made contact, of the hard, rubbery skin and body that would hit my foot. I don't think of the pain and shock the person would feel. I don't think of the shame and embarrassment that I would feel as soon as I did it.

Urges like this one might have come from my family from way back, like my brown hair or freckles, a present from great-grandparents I never met. Perhaps from my father's side of the family, the Furthingtons, the farmers who ended up in Montana but came originally from Illinois, originally from England. Or maybe from my mother's side of the family, the Jews, from Europe, central Europe, the Jewish ghetto, full of brainiacs and wiseguys.

Wherever they came from, they buzz around like bees in my head wherever I go. I didn't really pay much attention to them, these bees, until the beginning of my second year of law school, when I was interviewing with law firms, trying to find a summer job. They just got too strong, like those killer bees I used to hear about coming up from South America.

It was a yearly routine; incoming second year law students like I was go through on-campus interviews with dozens of law firms. The student hopes a firm offers him a position for the summer after the end of second year. It would be best if it's a firm the student loves, that loves the student, and that asks the student, super-lawyer, whiz-kid, all-around-good-guy, to return, full-time, after graduation.

Before law school I thought I might be a law professor or a defender of the poor or the architect/overlord of some revolutionary social policy or an "international" lawyer. "I want to put to use the skills I have gained in the international, public service and legal arenas," I wrote in my entrance essay, rolling up all of the relevant experiences I could think of into a ball, like a Play-Do blob made of four different colors gobbed together.

But then I got a "C" in international law, I couldn't sleep before my contracts final ("B-") and I lost fifteen pounds because I was usually too nervous to eat lunch. I did end up making it through the first year, though, and even with fairly middling grades overall. I had gotten an OK job for the second summer, as a research intern for one of my professors who actually seemed to like me.

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