The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

It dawned on me last night that there is something I did not get in the mail. Bills have come, circulars have arrived weekly, and even the box set of "A Bit of Fry and Laurie," which I treated myself to as a reward for having the first disposable income since 2001, safely arrived from Amazon. But I did not get a notice from the California bar examiners explaining their essay re-grading policy.

Which I did the last time.

The last time I took the California bar exam, sometime during the agonizing months-long wait for the scores to come out, I received a form letter out of the blue stating their policy for re-grading the essays. Apparently if your score was close to the cut-off, they'd send your essays through another batch of graders and then average the new and old scores. Which turned out to be exactly what had happened to my essays the last time. But back when I'd gotten the letter I hadn't known what to make of it - did everyone get that letter? Or only those people whose exams were subject to that policy?

The scores from the July exam come out in a little over two weeks, and the crawling of the walls has begun. Once again my life has fallen into a holding pattern, and it's driving me nuts. I am not living the life I want to live, and it's time to do something about it. Naturally it would be nice to have the scores in hand so I can know what I've got to work with. And passing would, of course, be the best scenario, because then I could easily stay in California and continue to build my life around my houseboat. But either way, some changes are in order.

One of the reasons I came back to the Bay Area and settled where I did was because of the ample ambient opportunity for lots of outdoor activity and exercise. But ever since my 62-mile bike ride I've been but a bump on a log. And if I keep this up, my physique will soon be indistinguishable from a bump on a log. Which is not acceptable.

And then there is my poor blog, my poor neglected blog. I'm sure I must have lost some of my audience. Even I'd get bored with the silence if I came by to read it regularly. But issues of audience and influence are only part of my problem. More significantly is the tremendous psychic toll it takes on me not to write. I need to write. I need to write. I need to write. Fish need water, people need food, I need to write. It's one of the basic, non-negotiable aspects to the universe. As I think I've noted before, not being able to write makes me feel like I've lost a limb. So this current situation, of not being able to write regularly, is also unacceptable.

There's no question, these deficiencies must be remedied. Not just for the sake of my sanity but also for my lawyering. The health and well-being engendered by exercise is necessary for all people in all careers, but particularly for those in careers whose long hours constantly threaten to consume body and soul, it's an indispensable antidote. And as for writing, like any muscle, the writing parts of the brain need regular work-outs in order to maintain their peak performance. I've also noted before that writing begets more writing -- by keeping the mental wheels greased and inspiring the confidence that I will be able to find and capture the right words when I need them. Which could be for a legal brief as much as it could be for a blog post. So if I'm going to want to write all sorts of briefs rapidly and well, which, as I lawyer, I will, I'm going to need to write plenty of other things too.

So some tweaking of my life is definitely on order. How much tweaking, we'll have to see. There's other considerations too: am I building up the expertise I want in the area of the law that interests me? Am I making a difference in the world? Am I making enough money? Trade-offs on any of these things may be necessary, certainly, but lately I've felt like I've traded everything off. And that's not acceptable either.

The absence of the mailing from the bar examiners makes me think my exam didn't need a second look. Either I passed properly or I punted the whole thing, and it's too late to do anything about it now. But it's not too late for me to take a second look at my life, because I certainly can do something about that.