The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

My project is finally done. I ended up staying up until 4am to finish it, which basically destroyed the possibility of being productive today, but at long last the thing is finally(?) done and out of my hair. Law school now has closure. (Didn't I already graduate and take the bar, you say? Yeah, well, these things happen...)

Anyway, I did do a little today, going through some of my stuff to decide what to pack for California, jettison, or save for my eventual(?) permanent(?) move. I'm trying to be ruthless so I can pare down my possessions to a manageable, moveable quantity, but it's hard.* Of course, sometimes it's a matter of timing. For instance, I'd saved a lot of my law books. I guess I regarded them as references, and truth be told I actually did refer to a couple of on a few occasions long after the course was over. But not all of them, and today I realized that, particularly for the first year courses, I really do have most of that stuff in my head. I think I was saving things like my torts and contracts books as crutches, but now that I've done all that bar review and been tested on it, I don't think I need them anymore.

I also got rid of a lot of books I'd had since my undergraduate days. Not all of them - some of them I do like having around - but the ones I never got around to reading for class and 10+ years later have still never read... At this point I don't think I'm ever going to read them, so out they go...

Then of what's left I tried to decide what I should pack up to move with me now, and what I should leave behind. The idea of leaving stuff behind really irks me. What's the point in owning stuff if you can't use it? This kind of situation has been plaguing me for the past 3 years as I've had my belongings strewn about the globe in at least 2-3 states and often as many countries... I suspect it may be some time before I settle down somewhere permanently, but I do look forward to the day when I can get everything consolidated in one place...

* In the "timing is everything" department my trip to China came in handy for this reduction exercise. My t-shirt collection had become bloated, full of increasingly ratty specimens that have been through the wash too many times. So for my packing strategy I picked out about a dozen that were in need of permanent retirement and brought them. That way, instead of needing to cram them back into my suitcase, I could just leave them behind and reclaim room for souvenirs. Pretty clever, huh? Except that everywhere I went in China the hotel staff was very nice and very honest and kept running after me after I'd checked out to tell me I'd forgotten something...