What I Do, Part 29

Ever have a conversation like this:

Of course you have. We all have. When it’s a private conversation or a couple of minutes of a fake documentary for a fake heavy metal band it can be amusing or a bit frustrating, not much more. Incomprehensible logic is funny when it’s Christopher Guest and Rob Reiner and it’s for entertainment, not so much everywhere else.

Where this particular thinking gets a whole lot less fun is when it matters. In an important conversation with a spouse, employer, employee, lawyer, judge, mediator, this kind of logic only engenders frustration… or anger … or a combination of the two.

The problem is this: the chances of running into someone who employs Nigel’s brand of logic dramatically increases when you wander into a legal matter. Divorce, custody, adoption, most certainly criminal, you are confronted by people who have established ideas, thoughts, and ways of thinking that are pedantic at best.

Usually, it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just … there. Sometimes it’s the product of years of doing and explaining things the exact same way over and over again for years; sometimes (to paraphrase Joseph Heller) it’s what happens when
mediocre people are elevated to positions of authority; and mostly, it’s because the person you’re patiently trying to explain things to has a viewpoint or interest directly opposed to yours.

You can not go into something as life-altering important as divorce or custody or adoption alone, you need someone used to the system and ridiculous logic who keeps her head about her while holding your interests above all.

That’s what I do.