dripping with alchemy

A woman I worked with when I was a summer associate had been out on maternity leave when I started, and just returned. I hadn't seen her in nearly 2 years now, and so the first thing she wanted to talk about when she saw me was...the wedding. Ah, yes, the wedding. Of course. How quickly I forget. It was nearly a year ago now. A year!

A year ago at this time, I was getting ready for finals. Finals. Even the concept feels so foreign to me at this point. When I was in law school, occasionally someone would make reference to something that had appeared on a final I had taken. (Generally, talking about law school finals is totally taboo in all civilized circles, but now and then in conversation someone would drop a "oh, yeah, like that bizarre hypo with the cat and the lady with the pick up truck...") Anyway, when one of these references came up I, without fail, had no idea what this person was talking about. From the second I walked out of that exam room, if you had asked me one thing that was on the test, I couldn't have told you. Honestly. It's like how they say some abuse victims don't remember their abuse because they've just repressed the memory? I didn't understand how that was possible before law school. It's not like I'm not remembering because I don't want to. I honestly just don't.

This is all a long-winded, roundabout way of my saying...I think I also blocked out law school. Sometimes when I think back on it, I feel like it didn't really happen. Like I came out of college, took a three year nap, Rip Van Winkle style, and woke up a lawyer.

A year ago! Almost! Crazytown!

turn smile shift repeat

So I'm now a full month into my job. And it's...I mean, it's job. There's a reason they have to pay you to go to jobs (and in my case, arguably overpay) and the reason is they all suck a little. But I spent three years--three miserable years--of my life telling myself that if I could just get through those three years, then I would get to be a lawyer. And being a lawyer was going to be awesome.

And some things about it are kind of awesome. There's a lot of problem-solving. I get to be a part of a team way more than I anticipated, which I unexpectedly sort of love. Plus, I get to give legal advice. There's something about that which is totally weirdly satisfying. I also think the issues I'm dealing with are pretty interesting in a majorly nerdy way. And those sweet, sweet lawyer paychecks certainly don't hurt.

But then. But then. I'm working kind of a lot, and there's a lot of pressure for me to be working even more. My employer laid a ton of people off in the last year, and there's a lot of anxiety about when or if they might be laying off more. There's a lot of tension about who's working what kind of hours and whether we ought to be doing this or doing that. Incidentally, in a total fluke, I happen to be in one of the busiest groups at my firm, but even I had a super slow day this week which caused me to have a "well shit, if I can't even get work in this group, I might as well pack it in now."

On top of that, I have no idea if I'm doing even a passable job. I get feedback in the "here, make these edits and then send it to the client" kind of way, but not in the "yeah, you're a pretty good beginning lawyer" kind of way. I guess they hired me on the basis of the work I did last summer, which must not have sucked, but then sometimes I get some pretty negative feedback (one partner, for whom I do the majority of my work, had to remind me to "mind the small things"....I shut the door to my office and cried.) and it's like....this? This is what I'm doing with my life? Why??

Oh, not to mention there's no exit strategy. I'm in a sort of niche area, and there's not really a lot to do from here, even if there were available legal jobs out there.

Maybe part of the problem is that I have always been relentlessly, disgustingly goal-oriented. I worked hard in high school to get a scholarship to college. Check. I worked hard in college to get into a great law school. Check. I worked hard in law school to get a firm job. Check. Now that I have that job I have sort of a feeling of a ship at sea. Now what? I had thought I'd be on a sort of partnership track, and maybe in a few months I'll decide that is what I want, but right now, the idea of working at this same place doing this same work until I retire makes me want to put knives in my eyeballs. The idea of billing 2000+ hours a year and taking a blackberry on vacation and always being on call makes me want to quit today. But that great law school didn't come cheap, so I guess for at least the next 10 or so years, I'm just going to have to suck it up.

out of touch

I have never been the kind of person who's really good at staying in touch with people. There are a number of reasons why this is a flaw in my personality, but I'll skip over them to the punchline: I should stop it. It's a result of this flaw that I have very few people I keep in touch with from high school and college.

Keeping in touch is a weird thing anyway, in the Facebook Era. I mean, I know exactly what basically every member of my high school class is doing now--both in terms of their careers and education and families, and in terms of what they had for lunch or what color their bra is. (That is a whole different post, which will likely never get posted.) But do I actually speak to any of them? Basically no.

For a long time, I thought of this as thoughtful pruning. And, to some extent, I still do. I have no time in my life for people who aren't pretty awesome. Everybody has to deal with a number of not-that-awesome people every day--as part of our jobs, our commutes, our web-surfing, our grocery shopping, whatever the fuck it is we do all day--and I like to keep that to an absolute minimum. Seems fair. But what got thrown out with that bathwater are all the people that I really like but just somehow never made time for. Or people that I made time for at one point in my life and just stopped later because of distance or laziness.

So this is my resolution: to be a better friend. I'd even share a milkshake. Maybe. Probably not 3 ways, though. I take my ice cream more seriously than that.

So, as you have probably noticed, I've quit blogging the day to day stuff since the hubs is largely taking care of all of that. Bless him. So I'm sure if you're interested in what we're doing all this time, you're following his blog too. If you just come for the hilarious tone of my writing, well bless your little heart you sad, sad person.

I turned 25 in Vancouver last week. Actually, by this time it's been over a week. Anyway, here I am in my 25th year and still feeling a bit like a lost puppy. Not having a home or permanent address or knowing how to answer people when they ask you "where are you visiting from?" will do that to a girl, I guess.

It was a good birthday, but a bit hard for me. I take birthdays very seriously. I love them. As I've told a lot of people, I love birthdays. I love the idea that there's one day of the year where YOU are the special person. People you love and that love you call YOU to share their hope that YOU especially have a great day. They give YOU gifts to ensure your day will be great. I love my own birthday and I love other people's. I love going out to dinner and I love cards and I love cake and I love candles and I love how people try to act like they don't care but really they do. I just love it. And it's not all about presents (though who doesn't love a perfect gift?).

This year was the first time I've ever been away from all my friends and family (except the hubs of course) on my birthday. And because I was in Canada, anyone who wanted to call me was calling internationally and my phone was roaming, so I didn't answer and just let it go to voicemail. While voicemails are great, it isn't quite the same.

Also, the hubs and I agreed, due to our current financial status, that we'd skip presents this year. Since we share finances and basically this whole road trip is one big present to ourselves it made sense at the time. And with our mailing address up in the air, it meant I didn't get presents from my parents or sister, either.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful or whiny. Though maybe I am? I had a great day with perfect weather eating delicious food in a beautiful city with the man I love. And I loved it. All I'm saying is next year, I'm staying home, having all my friends over and answering the phone when my grandma calls, you know?


The other big milestone that's happened recently is that I FOUND OUT I PASSED THE BAR. This means that I am one swearing in ceremony (November 5! Mark your calendar!) away from being what I think I've wanted to be for an abnormally long time: a real live lawyer.

The bar admissions people had told us that results would be out "the first two weeks of October." Sure enough, when I awoke on October 1 in San Francisco, people had already started posting their positive results. Of course, I went to check the bar website. Which had crashed.

The site had also crashed last year and the board's answer to this was to "release results gradually," which is to say they planned to send emails to test-takers throughout the day in alphabetical order.

This was the first moment since getting all the annoying paperwork done that I regretted changing my name. My marriage changed my last name from a very respectable beginning of the alphabet name to a sad, lonely end of the alphabet one. My husband claims it's the middle, but I swear, it's the end. And this meant I would have to wait until the end of the day (more or less) to find out my results, even in the best of cases.

Of course, the best case scenario did not come to pass. As you can imagine, with you know, telephones and that great system of tubes we call the internets, people with names not at the beginning of the alphabet heard that people had started to get results and went to check their own. Roughly 3,000 people checking in the course of a few hours crashed the site. They somehow had not anticipated that people would hear results were out or that, upon hearing it, they'd want their own results?

Hey, maybe next year, you guys could just set up the server to handle the traffic I guarantee you'll get? Just a thought.

So this meant that, when I woke up in San Francisco, I knew results were out, but couldn't access them. The hubs, our friend Liz (who had taken the same bar as I had and is similarly alphabetically disadvantaged), and I had planned to leave for Yosemite that morning, where internet access would be harder to come by, so we dawdled for a bit before deciding just to leave anyway.

This was going to be a long day. How, when you know results are out but don't know your own, are you supposed to think about ANYTHING else? We made half-assed attempts at conversation for a bit, but mostly just waited. We were getting texts from a friend of Liz's telling us that some people had just started to get emails with their results right in the email (novel concept, eh?).

We drove for a few hours before stopping to buy groceries...and check results. They weren't out.

We kept driving. Kept trying to talk or think about ANYTHING other than whether or not Liz and I would be lawyers by the end of the day.

We stoppped again. No email. Liz's friend (god bless her) suggested we try the cached version of the bar website. Success! We were able to log in! Success! We both passed!

Both Liz and I were too excited/relieved to do anything but read the "We are pleased to inform you..." line and basically freaked out in a Starbucks in the middle of nowhere. We had to go back a few days later to check again (on the un-cached site) so we could make sure it was for real and actually read the letter (which included, among other things, the caveat that if we didn't get around to being sworn in in the next 4 years, our passage would be revoked. Who ARE these people for whom they have to make such crazy rules?).

Anyway...this post goes firmly under the label My Life Doesn't Suck. It will be an interesting winter trying to adjust from this absurd vacation lifestyle to having to, you know, work. A lot. BECAUSE I'M A LAWYER.

wanna feel a warm breeze, sleep under a palm tree

This is a strange season for me. It's the first back-to-school season in 23 years (yikes!) that I haven't been going back to school. So all the blogs I read are about the new year and all my friends are buying books and new school supplies (oh, my love of new school supplies is boundless) and I'm...sunning myself in Aruba.

Let me clarify: I am not complaining. Only a complete fool would be complaining about this. In fact, I am at the very least relieved not to be going back. Most of the time, I'm ECSTATIC about it. But it is strange.

Actually, I keep having moments on this vacation where I feel like I need to pinch myself. HOW, I ask you, HOW did I get so lucky?? The hubs and I are struggling with at times feeling like spoiled brats and at times feeling like we deserve what we have--at least as much as anyone deserves what they have. I know that I've worked hard through my schooling and that having time to chill out is a good thing. I also know that having free lodging at two really nice places and the luxury of the time to use that gift is...unusual. I know that a LOT of people work a lot harder than I ever have, and in worse circumstances, and without the kind of support and love I have every day. So it's hard to reconcile that with, you know, sunning myself in Aruba. But I am valiantly attempting, in the immortal words of Mr. Tim Gunn, to Make It Work.

analytics

I finally figured out how to and did install Google Analytics on this website. The results are probably slightly skewed by the fact that (1) I haven't been posting because of the bar exam and (2) none of my friends have likely been reading because of the bar exam, but nonetheless, there are people out there. People who read this. Who visit this site, presumably to see if I've updated. People who then "bounce" when they see that I haven't.

(I could never pull off saying bounce in real life, like "this place is lame, let's bounce" but it's the real word that Google uses to explain people who don't click through to other areas of the site, but rather read the first page and leave. Who clicks through to other areas of a blog on a regular basis is beyond me, but Google seems to think I ought to be worried that y'all are all bouncing. I'm not.)

Anyway, I've been obsessively checking the analytics (of course) since I installed them, and it has spurred me to post. So thank Google, all of you who've been waiting for this.

I realized something last night, as I was sitting here doing flashcards (again), unshowered (still) and alone. It occurred to me that this is the worst month I've had since December 2006. That September, I had started law school, and it did not go well. I had gone in thinking this is exactly where I belonged and came out not sure I was fit to belong anywhere. I went in knowing I wanted to be a lawyer and came out not sure I wanted to be anything. I went in thinking I was smart and came out sure I was the dumbest person the school had ever admitted. In short, it sucked.

But September was far from the worst of it. The worst came only after Thanksgiving. See, pre-Thanksgiving, I had this fantasy that I was going to quit school and do something else...anything else. I was going to work retail or go get my masters in philosophy or join the Peace Corps. It didn't matter. I could leave. I could get away from that terrible place and its psychological abuse and its terrible books you couldn't possibly read and rampant, permeating douchebaggery. I was going to leave. But after Thanksgiving, the jig was up. I wasn't going anywhere. I'd already spent well over $15,000 on that psychological abuse. How was I going to pay that off with a retail job? But worse was the fact that after Thanksgiving, I had to start studying for finals.

This is not to say I hadn't studied pre-Thanksgiving. Well, actually, it is. Law school, I imagine, is a unique beast. There is, for me at least, a sizeable amount of work that goes into "being prepared" for class. This, for me again, generally entailed reading a lot of cases and then distilling them into notes for myself. That takes time. In my first semester, it was generally taking me between 5 and 7 hours a day, in addition to the time I spent in class. (It wasn't until much later I got any faster.) So anyway, after Thanksgiving I had to put in those 5 to 7 hours PLUS an additional 4 or so "actually studying."

And I was so fucking lonely. I had made some friends that first semester, of course, but it's hard to be a total nutjob with people you just met two months earlier. Particularly when those people think, sure, law school sucks, but it's not THAT bad. They studied this much in undergrad. They worked this much after college. They saved the children of Africa. Whatever the fuck they did, it was somehow better preparation for this than whatever the fuck I had done. I couldn't even remember what I had done. Who I had been. What life had been like before law school. I imagined it was pretty rad, but I didn't trust my memory. I tried to explain how awful it was to my family and to my boyfriend, and they assured me that I was very smart and it would all be fine. I felt like they were a million miles away.

Anyway, the feeling I had those first few weeks of December 2006 is the feeling I've had the last few weeks of July 2009. I feel like no matter how many hours I'm putting in, everyone else is putting in a few more. I feel like no matter how many more hours I put in, I couldn't possibly learn all this stuff. I couldn't possibly fit three more facts in my brain, I couldn't possibly understand one more doctrine, but everyone else is, so I had better. I feel like there's a pretty good chance I made a horrible mistake going to law school and now I have to just live with it.

Anyway, this is all by way of saying I should be studying right now, but somehow seeing the numbers--the fact that there are real people out there who check this sad little page and then sadly bounce away--made me feel like I owed it to you to say something. And right now, all I have to say is, to quote Marshall from HIMYM: Being a lawyer had better be AWESOME.