The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I happened once to catch an episode of "Sex and the City," where a character bemoaned that the hard part of writing was being able to hold a thought in your head long enough to write it down.

I totally understand what [this fictional person] was saying. It's an apt insight into what the ability to write really is about. It's not just about coming up with interesting thoughts but also being able to capture them on the page.

Unfortunately I find my ability to write wavers from time to time. Sometimes it's because I can't come up with anything interesting to say (although this isn't often the situation…), but lots of times, like now, it's because my mind is too… cluttered? busy? distracted? to be able to hold onto my thoughts long enough to get them down. It's like having overloaded RAM - there's just no space to hold thoughts while I process them. Either I need to start deleting stuff or get a bigger swap file…

It's all very frustrating. I usually sense that there's a perfect way to articulate what I want to say, but I just can't conjure it up when I go to try. It ends up leaving me feeling trapped in my own head. If I really work at it I can sometimes eek something out, but I hate not being to capture my ideas perfectly. And sometimes an imperfect expressions just won't do. If I can't explain myself with precision and delicacy, I'm better off not even trying. (Thus I'm getting increasingly behind in all the things I want/need to write yet can't write quite right right now…)

BarBri has begun. So far so good, sort of. I've liked the lectures. "Charles Whitehead of USC" (how he is always introduced) did the last two days of lectures* on criminal law. Yesterday was on general criminal law, and today was on criminal procedure. He was fairly entertaining, all things considered, and it wasn't too hard to take notes on what he was saying. In fact, it was kind of interesting, since this is the New York version of the course. First they teach us the law that will be on the multistate portion of the exam (which isn't connected to any particular state, and when I say "isn't connected to any particular state" I often mean "is not law in any state in the union at all"…), and then they point out the New York exceptions that we'll need to know for the New York portion of the test.

Although it will be a mess to memorize, it's kind of fun to get this first inside look into the actual mechanics of New York criminal law. I see it played out all the time on "Law and Order," but now I finally have some insight on those particular New York vagarities that I often see portrayed. TV will never be the same after this…

As if I have any time to watch it. I still feel behind the 8-ball and am behind on all sorts of things that are hard to channel the energy for. I got some stuff done today, but there's lots more to deal with and I'm tired. In a way I'm just not ready to ramp up for this. I can handle going to the classes, that's fine, but we're supposed to study 5-9 hours every night as well, and I haven't gotten my head around that part yet. (Although I suspect that 2-5 will be the most I'll ever be able to do on any given day under the best of circumstances in order not to go completely insane by the end of the summer.) I presume I can catch up this weekend on the crim material since it wasn't unfamiliar to me, but I don't want to get too far behind at this point.

* By the way, these "lectures" are not live. We all gather in a large classroom to watch recordings of the ones done live in New York City last week. Oddly enough it's not really as off-putting as you'd think…

Day 3 of BarBri, and I still kind of like it so far. The lecturers have been pretty entertaining, at any rate. And there's been the running theme of them reassuring us that mediocrity is ok. In fact, it's better than ok - it's the only way you'll pass the damn test.

Today they gave us a brief overview of NY essay writing and then some tips on how to do the MPT part of the test (Multistate Practice Test, where they give us some information and some law and expect us to produce a lawyerly document in 90 minutes). I spent the time deciding that the MPT lecturer, Prof. Ruescher from St. John's, probably grew up in the Bronx, or maybe Yonkers. As opposed to, say, Queens or Brooklyn, etc. At first I was a little thrown because he doesn't sound quite like my dad, who in my mind has a prototypical Bronx accent (although he has been in NJ for 35 years, so perhaps it's less definitive than I've thought), since their long "o's" were a little different. But their long "i's" were very much the same. It's a very distinctive "i", and a little hard to describe (much less imitate), but, basically, when my dad says things like the word "buy," you can kind of hear the "u".

Now, you may well be wondering what all this has to do with the MPT, but then again you probably should be wondering what the MPT (or the whole bar exam) has to do with anything anyway. (You're probably much more likely to figure out the former than the latter...)

Everyone says you should travel after the bar. Since I'm such a travel addict, why should I object? Well, maybe because I've traveled so much in the past few years that lying on the beach somewhere seems like a better plan.

But after giving it some thought I got kind of excited about doing a Cathy-style trip. This is the kind of trip where the journey is the trip. No camping out in one place for days on end, it's all about going from one dot on the map to the next just to see what they're all like. And the perfect itinerary for this kind of trip I decided was the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

But then I discovered that I couldn't get to Vladivostok on a free plane ticket. In fact, I'm not sure I could get to Vladivostok at all even if I paid, nevermind doing a weird multi-continent open jaw Star Alliance itinerary. (Alaska Air used to go there but does not appear to anymore.)

So instead I've reserved a free ticket for a nearly two week trip to China. Which at first I thought I really wanted to do, but after having thought about the Russian railroad trip now doesn't seem quite as much fun as it did before.

Although maybe I'm just stressed because I haven't been able to reach my friend in Shanghai and may not be able to before the reservation expires in 3 days. This plan was originally born out of the idea that I'd get to see her and perhaps travel with her once I'm there. But since free seats are hard to come by (and money to actually pay for a ticket even harder...), I may have to just book it and hope I can work out an itinerary on my own later. Not speaking Chinese, however, may make this complicated...

(So I'm open for travel suggestions for China, or suggestions in the next few days for somewhere else in the world that might be interesting to go.)

Edit 5/26: Well, ask and you shall receive, sort of. Unfortunately I don't have $8-9000 to throw at this...

I wrote before about the problem I was having with my lender regarding my bar loan. Despite 17 years of meticulously-maintained credit and all my private student loans being with them (for which they'd given me a very favorable rate), all of a sudden I'd ended up in this Kaska-esque vortex of unfavorable interest rates when I went to apply for my bar loan. This isn't a rational result, I said. This is policy, they said.

So what are you, I asked them, a company of robots? SOMEBODY is making this decision. I want to talk to them.

And eventually I did. I got as far up as a VP. It went back and forth for a while as they recognized the problem yet still clung to the policy, but I kept pushing. And eventually it turned out that they were not, in fact, a company of automotons: the human beings agreed that there was a problem with the policy and they fixed it.

I am now extremely happy, at least as happy as anyone could ever possibly be borrowing $12,000... Pushing the issue will have saved me a lot of money over the life of the loan, but more than that, it makes me feel good about my arguing ability. It wasn't beligerance that won the day; it was a combination of obstinance (which I was always good at) and logic (which I've honed in law school). And it worked.

I might make a good lawyer after all...

What's the bottom line? Well, I do feel surprisingly down surprisingly often, but I also recognize that there are a lot of good things about my situation. I imagine I'll oscillate for a while, kind of like one's perspective does when looking at an optical illusion. You know, like the one where it's hard to tell if you're looking at a set of candlesticks or facial profiles, or the one where you can simultaneously see a picture of both a young woman and an old one. Every second your perspective might shift from one to the other, because both views are equally present and valid.

That's kind of where I am right now. Sometimes I see the donut, sometimes I see the hole. Of course I'm working on my donut-noticing skills because I don't think it serves my interests to be too negative. Who will believe in you if you always fixate on your inadequacies? But to be fair, it is a weird time. Transitional periods are always tough, and there's no sense beating myself up for beating myself up about it… I've got a lot to do, and I'll do as much as I can as well as I can. I've got a workable plan, and if I can improve upon it that will just be gravy (or icing, if we want to continue with the pastry metaphor).

So I imagine I'll go back and forth in the next couple of months between crankiness and confident fortitude. And all of which will be true, if not also apparently paradoxical. I suspect, however, I'm not the only law graduate in this emotional boat. Even those who have jobs and somewhat more clear futures are likely experiencing growing pains. Plus law school has this annoying way of making the grass always seem greener in someone else's yard, so no matter how awesomely set someone's life seems to be, there will always be some emotional ambiguity as one consciously chooses to foreclose some options and set forth on a new path.

Last week I took a few days to go out to California. It was ostensibly a job-hunting trip, but it ended up mostly being a time to catch up with old friends. Which was perfect, because that's really what I needed, particularly with not feeling so good about myself. Because there wasn't a person I saw who didn't give me the hugest pat on the back for my accomplishment: finishing law school. At first it baffled me, because I didn't think it was such a hard thing to do. I mean, while I found law school to be hard to be perfect at, but I didn't find it hard to do. I liked it, I understood everything… Yes it was intense, challenging, and a lot of work, but I still wouldn't say it was hard.

But then, I've been so busy staring at the hole that I may have missed the donut. Instead of defining myself by what I didn't do, my friends all wanted to define me by what I did do. It's good to have friends to do that. And by the end of my time there I was inclined to believe them…

The trip also had a couple of other really positive moments. One came with a visit to the place I worked last summer. I've sometimes had concerns about whether it was a good idea to have taken that job, since it involved neither litigation nor an area of the law I'm likely to practice in. But my visit erased all my doubts - it was absolutely the right thing to have done. Even if just for the people. They are some of the most dedicated, supportive, and generous people I've ever had the pleasure to work with. I'm lucky to have had that experience and them in my life. And yeah, maybe from a subject matter standpoint it stands out as a little esoteric on my resume - but that's a good thing. I'm obviously passionate about tech law and the related civil liberties issues, and that's not hard to see. But there's other things out there in the world, and other people with their particular needs for justice. Ultimately I will be a better person and a better lawyer for having had the occasion to really understand this.

Meanwhile the other positive moment came when I cold-called on a staffing agency. I picked one I'd heard of when I was a webmaster and got in touch with their legal services arm. I met two recruiters who generously went over my resume, gave me some great advice, and explained how to get into the system to be staffed out. And both of them confirmed that I am indeed employable. It was definitely a happy day to find out that, if my dream job should not happen to fall in my lap between now and then, come the end of summer I'll still be able to pay the rent.

Part III: The Whole Donut

I've been working on these posts for a couple of weeks now, trying to figure out how to articulate what's on my mind. It's hard because there's a hesitance to post anything that might be tinged with negativity, especially these days as I start looking for a job and expect possible employers to wander by. But I am committed to telling this story of what it is like to be in law school honestly, and that requires talking about the downs as much as it requires talking about the ups. To the extent that this blog serves as a chronicle of the law school experience in a way that can possibly provide a benefit to anyone else (and I have reason to believe it already has) it needs to be complete. Or at least not artificially peppy simply because the bad things aren't discussed. Besides, the ups are contingent on getting past the downs - without talking about the low points it's hard to really get a sense of the accomplishments.

Anyway, what I've been meaning to talk about is how surprisingly "blah" I've been feeling for a couple of weeks, ever since the semester effectively ended. I first noticed it a few days later in Memphis where I was supposedly taking this celebratory trip. "Shouldn't I be really happy right now?" I thought. Then why wasn't I?

The feeling carried through graduation. Apart from the portion of the ceremony where I walked across the stage to get my degree without falling on my face, I found the whole thing disappointing. Part of this, I decided, was because I felt like I was finishing without distinction: no awards, no cum laude by my name, and I didn't even get to make the student speech (something I'd really wanted to do with my polished rhetorical skills). I was suddenly awash with a sensation that I must have gone astray at some point. I went to law school to make something out of myself, not to be another indistinct face in the crowd. But that's how I felt. So what had gone wrong?

Well, nothing. I mean, nothing bad. I didn't fail at law school. Nor did I get through by merely the skin of my teeth. I did have lots of accomplishments, just not of the kind that easily translated into particular distinctions at graduation. The awards were won by people who far and away deserved those particular recognitions, and as far as the speech was concerned I did prepare a decent one that made it to the final round of judging before another worthy speech was chosen. I begrudge no one for any of this, not even myself.

There is, of course, the grade thing. Ignorance was indeed bliss, because at graduation I realized that though I may not know my GPA, I inadvertently inferred from all the cum laudes that apparently I wasn't in the top third of the class. Do I care? Well, I care to the extent that I'm forced to care by people for whom grades are taken as great proxies of worth. I think that's silly, but silly or not that's what some people do and as a result certain doors to future opportunities may be open or closed to me based on them. So I care not because they should matter, but because they apparently do matter.

But what I really care about with respect to my grades, something I hadn't thought about in a while, is why I couldn't manage to make the top third. Well, it doesn't all bother me. For instance there were certain things I couldn't control, like the vagarities of grading and the fact that, to the extent grades and rank are relative, I went to school with lots and lots of smart and talented people. So while I might have objectively kicked ass, if my classmates kicked more ass they'd get better grades on the curve and a higher rank. OK, that's all fine. Then there were things I could have controlled yet didn't necessarily, like taking better notes or focusing more on fewer courses. I could kick myself a little, but I chose breadth over depth and I'm willing to live with the results of my decisions on how to spend my energies.

What bothered me at graduation, though, and what I hadn't thought about in a while, was the effect that my first year roommate had on my overall GPA. Let's not kid ourselves: I wouldn't have gotten straight A's. And I'm all for taking responsibility for the things I could control. But first year put me in a hole that I was never able to work my way out of, and through absolutely no fault of my own.

I worked incredibly hard. I acted responsibly (no drinking or late night cavorting, etc.). I read, I studied, I did all the things you're supposed to do. But over the course of the year I was worn down to a nub. I couldn't control when I slept, because the roommate would wake me up at all hours. I couldn't control what I ate, because the kitchen became too disgusting to cook in so I could only eat pre-packaged food. I couldn't control when I relaxed, because even ensconced in my room I could not get away from her noise or cigarette smoke. Law school is plenty intense, and I was totally up for that. But everyone knows you need some refuge from it, yet I had none. Not only was my home no place to recharge, but it ended up a place to fester in impotent distress as I endured not only the impact of her behavior but the daily "fuck you" slap in the face her refusal to do anything about it entailed.

I did what I could and tried to ride it out. And after the year was up I tried to keep pressing forward and not looking back. But at graduation, as I felt all my work had come to naught, I couldn't help but look back at it and wonder what I could have achieved in law school if I'd not been so hobbled my first year. I'm really not exaggerating its impact (as it foreclosed various 2L job possibilities and did a nasty number on my self-esteem), nor am I exaggerating how horrible or sapping the situation was. Just thinking about that year makes me want to cry. And throw up. It was one of the worst years of my life. In fact it's amazing I did as well as I did. But, you know, when one of the members of my study group was cum laude, and the other was magna cum laude, and you couple that with the fact that I was neither an idiot nor lazy, it helps support the theory that there was something particular to my situation that year that prevented me from succeeding to my fullest capacity, and that's what's most upsetting about it. It doesn't really matter what the actual grades are, or whether I missed the top third by two people or two hundred. Because of her I never really got to find out just what I could do.

But what's done is done, and I think that's the real reason why I feel bad in general: law school is done. Over. No more. No more semesters, no more opportunities to achieve. Not just in terms of GPA, but in terms of any of the opportunities law school has to offer. I may not be thrilled by the statistical distillation of my time there, but I loved being there. And so, yeah, I was relieved to have the semester end, but there's no relief in having the whole thing end. It was the definition of my life for three years: I was a law student. Every day I got to learn the law. It was a decadent existence, and I'll miss that. But more importantly, it forces me to face a question I currently feel unprepared to answer: now what?

Part II: The Donut

Edit 5/31: Law school is a process, and every day is a new day, with new ways to think about things. This particular post is fairly sour, having been written at a time when I felt fairly sour. Knowing that I would probably feel differently later I still opted to post it because it did capture a truth of the time, both about the way I was feeling generally and the specific subject of my gripes, and I felt that was important to include in my story. I stand by that decision, but I offer the following caveat to readers who might be tempted to overread this as a definitive portrait of me. It's not; it's a snapshot. And only a partial one at that. Please then do read the other connected posts and the comment below for a more complete (though still necessarily limited) view.

In the past month or so I've started getting a whole bunch of emails from technical recruiters pitching web jobs at me. They are clearly working off of very old versions of my resume (my current one has nary a technical buzzword on it) but it is kind of interesting/flattering/reassuring to be getting these. It's been 3-4 years since there even were any jobs like this around.

I imagine that actually taking one of these jobs would be quite difficult from a technical standpoint. My (x)HTML skills are ok, but I'm a little out of the loop with the latest CSS/JavaScript/AJAX innovations. On the other hand, I essentially know what they are, and if I were to pursue this avenue I would be more interested in project management than hands-on coding anyway.

But then again, I shouldn't even be thinking about this. I'm a[n almost] lawyer, dammit! Still, the sad thing is that if I did take a temporary technical job instead of a temporary legal job, I'd probably get paid a lot more. (Potentially 2-3 times more.)

Money aside, though, it's something to think about. If I went back to tech I could be in management with a significant degree of responsibility and ownership. Whereas with law, I start from the very bottom and will need to do whatever bits are thrown at me. Obviously, of course, with law I have much to learn, but at the same time, I do crave a job where I can actually feel empowered. With tech I think I could have that right away. With law… it may be a while.

I stayed up too late on Wednesday running through tutorials on Lexis Nexis. I got through as many as I could stand, which was four, although I was allowed to do as many as six. OK, technically I was allowed to do all of them, but I could only get bonus points for six of them, and Wednesday was the last day I could get any points at all. So while it wasn't a bad pedagological exercise, the real reason for the effort was point acquisition...

For non-law people, Lexis Nexis (like Westlaw) is an online information service that students get free access to while in law school in order to get us hooked on their brand of digital crack and thus be willing to pay through the nose for it when we are practicing attorneys. Both services like to throw lots of perks our way to get us to use them, including via a system of reward points you can eventually cash in for things.

Since I could no longer accrue points I cashed out today. I suppose compared to some I didn't have that many points - only 4105. Some people end up in the tens of thousands, I think, although I don't exactly know how (but if I had to hazard a guess, probably by seizing every possible opportunity to collect bonus points). And some may have fewer because they use Westlaw more, so many of their points may be on that system. I should actually go see how many I have over there (assuming I still can) because early on in law school I mostly used Westlaw. But about halfway through, I think , I got fed up with Westlaw and switched to Lexis. The problem with Westlaw is that if I went idle for a few minutes it would kick me off the system and I'd lose my place in my document. I found this very disruptive to my work flow and so switched to Lexis, which would let me stay in the same place for days and days and then continue on when I was ready, without needing to log in again.

At Concurring Opinions Jason Mazzone asks recent graduates what advice they'd give to their 1L selves.

Well, some flippant things come to mind, like don't move in with the evil roommate!!! More substantively, I think recommend to myself taking some pre-law school courses just to have given myself an edge. (I'd heard mixed things about them, and I didn't need them to get through school, but I do tend to perform better when I am not encountering something for the first time so for me it might have been worth it.) I also would recommend to myself to have been more disciplined with my note-taking and outlining.

Beyond that I don't have too many regrets. Except perhaps for my third year. I'm not reflecting favorably on it, and I think that's a large source of my lingering (though slightly lifting) crankiness.

To be clear, I don't regret Germany. I do vaguely regret not taking German Law as P/NP, but that's neither here nor there… I also don't regret not traveling more, for the most part, since I've traveled so much and already seen most of Europe, yet I do regret not making it to Greece, as well as a particular circumstance that interfered with my ability to travel a bit more, but that's neither here nor there either.

I also don't regret any of my US classes. Well, I wish I could have taken a few more of them, but there were only so many that could be squeezed into the schedule. I do vaguely wish I had taken Wills and Trusts or Consumer Law instead of Tax, given the relative utility value, but it's not really because there's a problem with having done Tax (it's just that I didn't get to do the others too).

The problem is mostly with extracurriculars. Every year I liked to accomplish more things beyond just school. That was key to my being satisfied with my life choice to become a student. And to a certain extent I did do other things this year. For instance, I'm very glad about the moot courts. The bigger problem is the journal, because it sucked up a lot of cycles with very little to show for it. The biggest part of that was the colloquium. A lot of effort was dumped into making it happen, and then it didn't happen, so I had nothing to show for all that effort. Looking back I wish I could have reclaimed it for something else that would have resulted in something tangible. Plus there are other frustrations too (e.g., I'm not sure being an article editor is all that it's cracked up to be). On the upside… well, I'll save that for when it comes to fruition. But I do find when I think back on the year that the journal took more than its fair share of my life, and I'm not sure I'm ok with that. Too many other things I wanted to do got sacrificed, and that's a lot of why at this moment I have the sense of regret that I do. (Especially since my obligations for it have not yet ended and I'm worried about what else it will cut into.)

Anyway, I realize as I write this that I've used the word "regret" quite a bit. Granted lots of those occasions was in the context of "don't regret," but still it's a little weird for me to throw that term around because I'm not normally someone who sits around wallowing in regret. I kind of don't believe in it. And for the most part, I've not had to experience it. A lot of that is because I'm usually good at making important decisions. Like coming to law school. It was a decision carefully and thoughtfully made, and thus there's no regret about it. But my decision-making process is a necessary defense mechanism. While my choices usually work out, I hate it when they don't. It's not that I expect everything to work out perfectly, but I try to minimize the risk or at least be able to anticipate the possible costs so I can accept it when things don't work out optimally. The problem here is that I really hate making bad bets. I so rarely do, but when it happens I don't like it at all.

While I was in New Jersey I used the opportunity to go to the dentist. I saw the new guy again. It's sort of interesting - I came into the practice when I was four years old. Which was exactly when this new dentist was born...

Anyway, because he's a recent arrival to the profession his licensing exams are still fresh in his memory, so we compared notes. In some ways dentistry exams are better than bar exams. Like in the fact that they are regional, meaning that he could practice in any state in the northeast without needing to be retested - a luxury lawyers don't have. (He would have to take the test again if he wanted to change regions, though.)

They also contain a clinical component. Now, in some ways bar exams do too, like through devices such as the Multistate Practice Test, where we are given some facts and need to prepare a brief or memo from them. Arguably that portion of the test is a little less "hands-on" than the dentistry exam, but then again lawyers are a little less hands-on with their clients than dentists are anyway.

However the dentistry exam seemed to share the bar exam's predilection for testing on the least common denominator of the practice. For the bar this means that we're tested on all this common law that no longer is in use in any jurisdiction. But because it is not used in any jurisdiction, it's equally wrong in all of them. Whereas if they tested us on actual law of a jurisdiction it would only be right sometimes, and it's apparently better to be wrong all the time than only sometimes. For the dentistry exam this testing attitude meant that he had to perform some outdated techniques.

Now, that would be bad enough if he were doing them on a mannequin, as was the case for some of the skills he demonstrated. But for other skills he had to perform them on a real, live person. Like filling cavities, which he did on his mom and his brother's friend. Of course, after he told me he'd done this on them I got to thinking that it was awfully fortuitous that his mom and brother's friend just happened to have had cavities he could fill for his exam...

Turns out there was nothing fortuitous about it. He, like all other dentistry students, had had to go to great lengths to find potential patients. He did it by throwing a big party and then screening all the guests, and as it was he still had to pay his "patients" $100 for the privilege of fixing their teeth. (Apparently his classmates were also forced to bribe people as well.)

So I guess on reflection maybe law students don't have it so bad. If our tests were more like the dentists' we'd have to go pay people to rob a bank or something...

Even though BarBri has been completely boring lately, I did find it interesting that FOB came up in today's material. Unfortunately I don't think it was the INCOTERM FOB, but rather the American usage, which is different. Here, you can see my lovely, painstakingly-illustrated PowerPoint presentation about the INCOTERM that I gave during my International Commercial Transactions class in Germany. It was quite well-received. Even the prof was raving about it weeks after!

Also in today's material was a discussion of assumption of risk. What I thought was interesting is that the default rule we are learning is exactly what I said it should be - that the owner maintains the risk, not the renter.

Unfortunately, it seems like material we learned already in BarBri may now be wrong. For instance, we were explicitly taught that if there was not a knock on a door before entering, a police search would not be valid. Now it's not clear exactly what might happen if there were no knocking, but in any case what BarBri had told us now seems to be wrong.

The other day my computer hiccuped while my Palm Desktop software was running, and as a result it somehow managed to eat a large chunk of data. I've grudgingly become used to losing any new data not previously saved (and annoyingly the Palm software only seems to save on exiting) when my computer crashes, but in this case everything seemed to have survived intact EXCEPT for all my appointments after May 2005. I have no idea why anything would have disappeared at all, or why only calendar data was affected, or why only data since that particular date vanished. I also have no idea how to recover it (especially since the Palm device itself has been unwell so I've not been syncing it to that), so I guess I'll have to re-enter everything from scratch.

Still, I guess things could be worse. I'm a little sad about losing the past data (sometimes it's nice to be able to see where I was a given day) but it won't be too hard to reconstitute the future appointments. Except for a few doctor's appointments I had to call up to get the details of, my life from here on out is pretty simple: bar review, bar exam, bar trip. The end. I have not a single appointment after September, and almost none after the middle of August. Which, while a little scary as an existential predicament, will make reprogramming my datebook a much simpler operation. Guess sometimes it's good to have no future...

Apparently there are nearly 300 million people in the United States. And most of them are not reading my blog. But for the select few who do... the creme de la creme as it were... I would like to extend my sincere apologies for being so boring lately. It seems to be all I can muster to bitch and moan about bad BarBri lecturers, because that's where my brain is: getting stuffed full of random bits of law. While there are many other interesting things I'd like to talk about, I'm having a problem quieting the internal frenzy enough to be able to blog about them coherently and cogently (or even just one or the other). I suppose I'll give it a shot anyway when I get a chance, but please lower your expectations accordingly.

In the meantime, I would like to offer props to the BU registrar's office for getting our law school certifications sent off so quickly. A quick perusal of the NJ bar deficiencies list suggests that many other schools have not been so quick to do so. Happily I am not on that list (which also means they got the results of my fingerprinting).

Plus I would like to add that the BarBri Torts lecturer is very good. (Well, we may not be learning a ton of law, but we are getting to laugh a lot, which surely we wouldn't be doing on our own these days...) And that I hereby recant my criticisms of the Contracts unit, since in going over my notes the other day I realized that they actually were pedagogically sound after all. The essay guy is still terrible, however, and now I'm wondering if I need to fork over some money to do the 1 day essay course since I find myself so confused on this front. Bad, bad BarBri for profiting from the confusion it inflicts...

So as we all know, I converted my Lexis points to a Macy's gift certificate and a series of 1970s retrospective DVDs (The Electric Company, Season One of the Muppet show, and a Moody Blues concert to replace the VHS version I have since my VCR is broken and I probably won't replace it, although it should be noted that the concert in question is technically from sometime in the 1990s. But I digress...).

There were, of course, Westlaw points to cash in too.

So what did I get for them? Why, Eugene Volokh's Academic Legal Writing book, of course.

I am such a geek.

Today in BarBri was more on tort law, and in the course of the lecture the professor went over animal law. Basically, if you have a domesticated animal that hurts someone you must have behaved non-negligently with respect to the animal in order not to be liable for the injury. But if you have a wild animal you are liable for any injury it causes no matter how much care you took trying to prevent it.

The professor went on, "Look, on the exam, for a domesticated animal the example will be a dog. And an example of a wild animal will be something like a lion. Don't drive yourself crazy while you are studying trying to figure out the rules for weird animals like llamas and such."

I'm sure he thought he had come up with an obscure hyberbole to illustrate his point, but he was wrong. First, a friend noted that it was not an academic question, since one of his relatives actually had a llama farm. It might therefore have actually been handy to know, in fact, what the related liablity would be.

Then during my swim lessons later today, during Zoo, when it was my turn to pick the animal, on a lark since they were on my mind I proposed that we be llamas. I was prepared for my suggestion to be too esoteric and stump the kids, at which point I'd have to explain to them what a llama was, but I was wrong.

Me: "Do you know what a llama looks like?"
Girl: "I saw a llama today."
Me (incredulously): "Really???"
Girl: "Yes, there was one at the zoo."

Llamas, it seems, are everywhere. Which is just further confirmation of what everyone says, that the bar exam doesn't test law that anyone uses. Because if it did, clearly we would have learned about llama liability.

Edit 6/28: ¡Cuidado - hay llamas!

Photo by Adam Badik. Used by permission.

By the way, according to BarBri, as of this weekend I'm allowed to be a jerk for the rest of July.

Just so you know.

It's been an intense couple of days as I've managed to massively increase my productivity. I've synthsized a bunch of notes (though I still have more to do, having gotten behind at the beginning), I've done a bunch of practice questions (210 total, 105 of them yesterday), and simultaneously made some headway on some unrelated things I need to take care of. The result: my brain's tired. Very. But there are some hopeful signs:

Yesterday was a practice essay-writing session. I don't think I did very well on the essays - I couldn't remember the NY Practice materials, and I have almost no Wills and Trusts material stored in my head anywhere - but it was the first time I'd done an MPT. I'm very curious to get my score back, but I feel like I did pretty well. I didn't write an introduction, which may have been bad, but I think I caught all the issues and it was appropriately organized. I hear that's all you need to do ok. And in a weird way, it was kind of fun. With the MPT you don't need to know any law. You just have to demonstrate that you can think like a lawyer by parsing some law and facts (that they give you) into a sensible written communication. I like doing this; it's one reason why I want to do more appellate advocacy because brief-writing taps into these skills.

Then today we all migrated to the World Trade Center in South Boston for a simulated MBE, the 200-question multiple-choice part of the bar exam. It was 3 hours before lunch and 3 hours afterwards. On the way home I graded myself. I got a 116. While this isn't high enough to pass, it's good news anyway:

• For one, they say that the average score on this practice test will be about 105, and I beat that.
• They said that the average increase is 28 points between now and test day, which is enough to pass even with a 105.
• The actual score will be scaled, which tacks on even more points.
• There's still three weeks of study time left, plus the PMBR for more review. (And that's a pretty good score considering how much I haven't studied...)
• Most of my wrong answers tended to clump around certain subjects. So getting a better handle on any one of just a few subjects should get me several more correct questions.
• My score tends to suggest that when I'm unsure, I'm making good guesses.
• My accuracy got better as the exam went on, which suggests I was learning more than fatiguing.
• I'm not having any time problems either. I'm fast on my practice questions, and today I finished both the morning and afternoon sessions with 30-45 minutes to spare each.

Now, in theory going fast could be a little bad because I wouldn't want to rush too much and miss important details that an answer turns on. But I don't think I got more than a small handful of questions wrong because I went too fast, and I think the speed will be good for me. And not just because it'll mean I'll be able to get a jump on my commute down from Albany to New Jersey* for day 3 of my exam... I think it's good to be fast as an antidote for brain fatigue. Even today, as I was experiencing the symptoms of it, I was able to press through, and the momentum I had helped insure that I didn't stall out. It's really easy when you're tired to just glaze over and stare at a page without processing it. And there's just not enough time in the test to spare for that. So instead the speed helps feed my curiosity. I read the question, ponder an answer, and then get curious to find out what the next question is all about. That curiosity is a good thing, as it keeps me turning the pages. (200 questions are a lot to get through!)

I also don't seem to be having time problems on the writing parts either. I'm having law problems on the essays because I'm unfamiliar with the New York materials still, but otherwise I'm able to stay within the recommended parameters. I finished the practice MPT with about 5 minutes to spare following a pretty complete answer.

Obviously it's no time to rest on my laurels. But I was feeling tired, stressed, behind and worried about what my performance today would be like... so it's nice to see some sign that maybe I can pull this off after all.

* By the way, the New Jersey locations were finally announced this week**. Secaucus, here I come! That's not so bad, actually. Better northern New Jersey than southern given the shlep down from Albany. However, where in Albany is still a mystery, which is kind of annoying given the imminence of the exam.

** Before Trenton flooded and before the government shut down...

Edit 7/1.

Yesterday's practice MBE was held where many people will be taking the actual MBE later this month. As I was leaving I happened to notice how incredibly close it was to the venue where Huey Lewis and the News (and Chicago) will be playing that night. So as a public service, I decided to post a warning for the band and attending fans:

The second night of the shows in Boston coincides with the first day of the Massachusetts bar exam, which will be administered about a block away from the venue. So if you arrive at the show early, do not be alarmed by the thousands of dazed, pale people who may be wandering around. If you do not provoke them, they will not hurt you. So do not poke them with sticks (battery!), or shout at them (intentional infliction of emotional distress! er, maybe...), or run them over with your car (negligence!). Just let them be, and soon they will scurry away into the shadows to prepare for the next day's testing without inflicting upon you the Article 2 distinctions of contract formation, the different types of future property interests, or each of the elements behind the various common law property crimes. Trust me on this, you wouldn't like it one bit if they did. (For instance, ever wonder why we have the expression "dying of boredom"? If you don't take these precautions, you might find out.)

Just trying to be helpful.

In reflecting on my day, I realize that I wasn't just a dork when I met Wil Wheaton. I managed to be a dork before meeting Will Wheaton too. My brain is in sad, sad shape. I think I'm starting to turn into a zombie, quite frankly. This is probably par for the course, although BarBri only said that we were allowed to be jerks in July, not the living dead. So I may be taking liberties here.

In any case, my hopes for being massively productive this weekend have been dashed on the rocks of reality. While there's plenty to do, it was clear I needed a rest before heading into the home stretch. I did do a little studying yesterday, but today and tomorrow I'm mostly taking off.

Last night my friend spent hours and hours helping me resurrect the data from my laptop. The root of the problem, fortunately, is not the hard drive so the files were all still there. We took it out of the laptop and attached it to a USB converter, which allowed us to plug it into his computer as an external drive so we could see all the files. I grabbed the most mission-critical ones and copied them to alternate media, but I'm still a little out of sorts without being able to run a few applications (e.g., the Palm Desktop, because though I do have a reasonably current export of the data it's not totally current, and anyway, I need the application to be able to parse the data that I do have). Still, if I wasn't reeling from the inadvertent 2am bedtime caused by all the geeking around, I might actually feel relieved...

We did in the course of all this nearly kill my iPod, however. I tried using it as a back-up drive - at 60 gigs it's bigger than my actual hard drive! - but there must be some technique for using it that way that we didn't know. Somehow the song database on it ended up getting rebuilt, and in the process it rolled all the backed-up non-music files into it. So to clean it up we took them all off, but then something weird happened and the iPod forgot that it had any songs on it at all. Fortunately something else weird happened and it mysteriously suddenly remembered, but we're not entirely sure what went on. And so much for using it as a back-up drive. But at least I have nice music to stress out to now.

By the way, this is the friend that I met on the plane back from a Huey Lewis and the News concert. Hence the logical conclusion that but for Huey Lewis I would still be in even deeper technological hell. Because it if had not been for Huey I would not have gone to Mississippi, and if I'd not gone to Mississippi I would not have met my friend on the plane coming back from it.

What is odd, however, is that the flight where we met was on Delta...

Today was the last day of swimming lessons. It was good to teach again. Hanging out with little kids was a great antidote to bar stress. The littlest ones especially were so silly. Today their imaginations ran away with them and they pretended to feed the fish in the pool. Then they decided the fish were thirsty, so they had to give them some water to drink. Yes, they were very silly, these kids.

On the other hand, it's good to simplify my life. According to BarBri, pretty much every waking moment should be spend on studying. OK, that's not exactly what they say, but they are calling for 11-12 hours of study a day. I don't think that's quite going to happen, but it's clear that many, many hours will have to be spent on it, so the fewer things competing for my attention, the more studying I'm likely to do.

The annoying thing about all this is that it's hard to tell how much studying is enough. Relative to how much I usually study for things I am studying a lot. But will it be enough? I don't know. I'm shooting for doing as much as I can stand, but I'm not sure it makes sense to push myself beyond that even if I haven't done everything they recommend. Mental fatigue seems as great an enemy as ignorance. In fact it's worse, because it causes ignorance by making it impossible to learn and/or recall. Last night, for instance, I really should have done some more practice questions. But I realized it would be a complete waste of time since I would not be in a place where I'd be able to learn anything from the endeavor.

So right now I'm trying to get all my notes together, although I may start taking shortcuts and use the conviser book for a couple of subjects since otherwise it's taking too long to be worth it. I'm also going to have to adapt the self-paced program, at least for the next few days, but hopefully I'll be able to hit the big subjects often enough, do enough essays, and get in enough practice questions to get everything nicely reinforced without also going insane.

Hard at work poring over my notes, I was interrupted by the arrival of the mail. Included in the mail was my Notice of the Class Action against BarBri. Such irony! Or is that all part of the BarBri method, to make the material they've been teaching us “come alive” through real world examples?

I actually liked BarBri. Except for the writing parts, I thought it was a reasonably effective way of filling my head with all sorts of stuff I probably wouldn't have filled it with on my own. Of course, we need to still see if I pass the damn test, but assuming I do I would recommend BarBri.

That notwithstanding, however, I'll still stay in the class action. While I think BarBri can compete successfully in the bar review course market, it's a problem if they're not competing because it means there's no pricing pressure. Or any other pressure. Maybe BarBri would have been even better if it had to be.

Besides, the deadline for withdrawing from the class action is August 13, and who among current bar takers has time to mess with all that now???

Of course, it remains to be seen what the plaintiffs, if they do win, might win for damages. Because a discount on a future BarBri course is not going to be much of a prize...

One of the pieces of advice BarBri had given was that we should be preparing a condensed version of our notes for our final review purposes. Well, I did that. But the problem was, it took so much time that now I feel behind. And my hands hurt from all that typing. But at least it's all nice and neat and orderly in a binder...

So now I need a final strategy for the last week. I think I will not follow the paced program per se because the holes in my knowledge are not necessarily where BarBri thinks they might be. And I'm going to need time to hit some things more than once, plus there's PMBR sitting in the middle of the remaining time, and I will probably lose a lot of study time tomorrow. The PMBR will mostly take care of the multistate subjects and get some additional questions in. What I also need is a few occasions to get the NY subjects in (particularly the big ones), a lot more NY essay practice, and at some point a few stabs at the NY multiple choice questions. And some more multistate questions. And some more review. And... and...

(For what it's worth, I am coming close to 12 hours of study a day. Some of those hours are more productive than others, but I'm blowing off very little of the day.)

Today we took the 200-question PMBR simulated multi-state test. I still finished early, but a lot less early. And I actually did two questions worse on my score!?! BUT, PMBR says that we should add 36 points to it to get our scaled score. And if I do that, I'm fine. I might even be fine enough to pass California's higher score requirement. Still, it makes me nervous not to be scoring better at this point. Now, they did say that this practice exam is particularly hard. But at the same time, I noticed several significant areas that weren't on it at all. Which makes me wonder how we are going to review them tomorrow and Wednesday. So I've decided to bring my final study document with me to the lectures, and if what they are saying doesn't seem engaging, I'll just use the occasion to review my own notes. There are definitely a few areas where I know I need to plug some holes.

Anyway, tonight is for cramming some more NY law into my head. Then at some point I have got to figure out how to do more essays. I think at this point I may just take a day to do nothing but essays, since squeezing them in here and there doesn't seem to be working. I did ok on the practice MPT, though, so I think I'll let that part pretty much go.

Gah, I wish there was more time...

The PMBR thing seems to be turning out ok now that the lecture has started. The woman giving the presentation is very listenable, and when I'm not interested in what she's saying I can read my handy dandy final study document instead. It's a pity that easments didn't end up on the practice test because they're tricky and would have been good to review, but otherwise the course will probably have a decent effect on my eventual score. Especially since I pretty much blew off the BarBri practice MBE lectures, and especially since I've been learning more effectively through listening than reading, it's probably a good idea to have decided to do this, at least for me. Plus it keeps me off the streets...

What is a little weird is that even though it's being held at BUSL, the course is full of non-BUSL grads. I think it's the only Boston location, so there's people from BC, Harvard, and probably the other local law schools. While we BUSL students know our way around the building and neighborhood, there are throngs of confused people stumbling about our law tower looking for the restrooms. And then the local businesses are also getting confused by why, instead of being slow for the summer vacation, there are several hundred people suddenly descending on them during the lunch break.

- the PMBR lecturer today.

It's amazing how much better you can feel about the state of the world when you have no idea what's going on in it. My excuse is bar review; sadly not everyone has one nearly as good justifying their sense of bliss...

Anyway, PMBR is now over. I'm satisfied, although I recognize that its utility may vary from person to person. While it worked for me other people learn differently and might have preferred to have just holed-up with an outline. Also, I think part of the reason it was good was because of the live lecturer, Professor McElroy, who was great. She had a ton of energy (the fact that she could manage to walk us through 200 questions without herself getting bored, despite having done this over and over in recent weeks, was quite inspiring, actually), good humor, and decent and accessible explanations with helpful restatements of rules. The only significant downside is that, particularly in the area of property law, there are a few things PMBR says that conflict with BarBri. She acknowledged them, and cited the source of her authority, but it's still hard to know whose rules to follow.

In the meantime, it's time for the homestretch. Nearly everyone I've talked to has scoffed at the BarBri 11-12 hours of daily study suggestion, but most people are getting in 6-8 (me too). Also, a lot of people are jettisoning the proposed BarBri curriculum (also me too) because it was just too hard to keep up with if you hadn't quite been on top of it from the outset. That said, everyone is recommending doing practice essays and questions, so for the next few days I think that's pretty much all I'll do. I've read about as much as I have patience for; now it's time to test out my memory and use the exercise to shore it up.

Everyone is also recommending bringing the study to a close by noon the day before the exam (Monday for me). I think I'll abide by that too, although I may save that afternoon to review the instructions for the test and look over the possible MPT formats. I got a decent enough score on the practice one that I'm not worried about preparing for it. Like I told my friend, “It's my gift to myself to not have to study for it. Sort of a ‘Congratulations for being competent.'” I think it's good to do that, since so often I don't feel competent... Besides, I have a tendency to actually learn the law that comes up on the practice MPT, and there's no spare space in my head to waste for that.

Back when I was having problems with my horrible ex-roommate I called up a friend of mine in desperate near-hysterics. She calmed me down and then consulted with her sister for possible solutions to my problem. “Why don't you put something like raisinettes in the shower? No one will be able to tell what they are, and they'll presume the worst,” they proposed. Alas, this was not a good plan because I shared the bathroom with two other roommates who were decent enough not to antagonize, and, anyway, the evil roommate probably wouldn't have noticed. As it was we kept finding her own candy wrappers in the bathroom...

But I appreciated the suggestion, and then really appreciated the gesture she followed up with. One of my complaints about the evil ex-roommate was that her lack of cleanliness was making it impossible to cook in the kitchen, and as a result I was not getting enough fruit and vegetables in my diet. So my friend decided to solve my problem by sending me a gigantic vat of raisinettes, with a note reminding me to get “five a day.”

The raisinettes were lovely, but it was the thought that meant much more. In that awful, trying time that act of thoughtfulness itself was one of the things that helped me get through it.

Similarly meaningful was the graduation gift she sent me. She's been going through a lot lately in her own life, and all I want is for her to be well. The last thing I wanted or expected from her was a graduation gift. But when I talked to her on the phone she was insistent about getting me one. And apologetic. “I've got it all picked out. I'm so sorry you haven't gotten it yet!” And I tried to assure her that it was totally ok, I really didn't expect anything, please don't go to any trouble, etc. It's always awkward to get gifts anyway, right? It'll probably be something totally nice but totally unneeded, and then you'll feel guilty that they went to the effort and expense...

But the gift that finally arrived was one of the most thoughtful things I've ever received. It was a crystal candy dish, engraved with my name, with a note that in my new job as a lawyer I should always keep it on my desk and filled. To get me started on that she also enclosed a package of raisinettes.

Meanwhile, as graduation neared another friend of mine started cheering me on, telling me how proud she was of my accomplishment. It should be noted here that these are non-lawyer friends. I neither know them from law school, nor were they already lawyers. They just happen to be friends who've come into my life through the course of it from other contexts. Anyway, this other friend has just gone back to school herself, and this spring we exchanged mutually-encouraging correspondence to get through our respective final exams. At some point she mentioned to me that she was now addicted to M&Ms because she'd been using them to bribe herself to study. “Well,” I said, thinking to myself about the above story, “You'll just have to switch to raisinettes!”

Eventually our exams all ended, but then my bar exam loomed. “Should I send you some raisinettes?” she seemingly jokingly offered. I don't think I've even responded to the email, caught as it was in my whirlwind. But in this case silence was apparently interpreted as acceptance, because in the mail today she sent me eight boxes of them!

Of course it's not the raisinettes themselves that's so touching. It's the thought, the gesture, and the steadfast enthusiasm she offered with it. When I've started to feel doubt, she's been a cheerleader to help me get through it. Both of them have been. Both of them tell me how proud they are of me, both of them remind me of what a big deal this all is... Which is so easy for me to forget as I get mired in it.

In any case, I am now well-stocked with raisinettes. Guess what will be my snack when I take the bar exam... It won't just be their chocolate that will help get me through it though; it will be the encouragement and support they represent that does.

Before the concert the other night we sat around in the parking lot for a while, studying. Mike was sitting on his backpack, so I offered to put his oranges in my backpack instead so they wouldn't get squashed. Then I forgot to give them back. But being the good little pedantic law student that I am, I called him up the next day to get his consent to consume his oranges. I didn't want to be liable for having impermissibly converted them, or, worse, imprisoned for having embezzled them. Did you know that if I'd eaten them that would have been the crime? No? Well, good thing you're not taking the bar then...

Anyway, the studying is inadvertently winding down. There's a lot of mental fatigue and I'm now progressing really slowly. Plus today is a frenzy because I leave for the bar tomorrow and need to pack and prepare generally for being away a week. So the agenda for today is to get through the rest of the NY questions I've been working on (which is a good, albeit annoying, way to review NY subjects), and then today and tomorrow do what I can with another round of MBE questions, some NY essays, and some light reviewing of the final study document.

But I think it's perhaps more important to de-stress than to try to cram. Even if I had to do the test today I might do ok, and I think there's the very real danger that while I might learn more if I cram between now and then, I also might forget more by seizing up in a panicked paralysis. Now is the time to start having faith in myself, I think, and just do the minimum of what I need to keep from getting rusty.

Saturday was spent on a tear trying to get my life in enough order to leave for a week, without completely neglecting studying. Sunday I woke up and did some practice questions and then packed up the car to pick up some friends who had arrived from England to see some Huey Lewis and the News concerts in Boston later that week. Since I was going to go to the show on Sunday in Saratoga Springs, and since it's only 30 minutes or so north of Albany where I had to be the next day anyway, I'd offered to take them. On the way out of town I plotted the scenic route, which inadvertently ended up with a detour in Cambridge I hadn't quite intended and being accosted by a park ranger when we drove by the house where JFK grew up. We'd only meant to swing past to take a look from the street, but the ranger was determined to give us a survey of our impressions of the place. While it is a noble research project to make sure the national parks are being all they should be, we weren't quite sure of the benefit that could be derived from administering a 15 page survey to people who'd only just driven by. But he was bound and determined to make us take it, so we did.

Once in Saratoga Springs I tried to study, but I couldn't. The mental focus that had been deteriorating earlier that week was pretty deteriorated by then. I decided not to worry about it, and pretty much just issue-spotted the various conversations I had that night instead. Then there was the concert, which was good, but I nonetheless sort of regret having gone to. Not for any bar-related reasons (yes, I probably ended up staying up too late but there was a definite derived benefit from having done so that ended up evening out the cost-benefit ratio) but for some other reasons of its own. More on that later.

The next day I dropped my friends off at the bus station in Albany so that they could go back to Boston, which was good because it put me in downtown Albany where I could scope out the test location. I'm glad I did, because it was pretty un-obvious how one was supposed to reach it, let alone find parking. It was the Empire State Plaza, an enormous complex sitting on the bluffs above the Hudson next to the capitol building. It appeared to have been designed in that white granite socialist utopian vision that marked lots of structures from the 50s-70s. But though the aesthetic was obviously dated, that wasn't really the problem. The problem was that it just wasn't a very usable structure. There were very few signs, pedestrian flow from level to level was extremely inhibited, etc. And it was almost impossible to figure out from google, yahoo, mapquest, or actual in-person experimentation to figure out how to successfully approach the building so that you could park. Fortunately I found a great lot attendant at a non-visitor lot who took about 15 minutes to explain it all to me. As I drove off I told him he was a hero.

Then I found my hotel, a Motel 6 in a different neighborhood but that turned out to be an easy morning commute on local roads. I took myself out to an early dinner and ice cream at Friendly's (where I also reviewed my NY Domestic Relations notes), and then came back and attempted to go to sleep. BarBri had warned us that this might not work, however, and they were right. It was almost impossible to wind down to the point where sleep would be possible. In the end I probably got a reasonable amount for the night itself, but not enough to recover from the night before and, more annoyingly, the previous weeks' nights where noisy neighbors and garbage trucks routinely kept waking me up before I was ready. I did, however, have one very vivid dream that I remember. It was about taking the bar, of course. And in this dream I failed it. But not because I didn't know anything; it was because I kept having to pick up all my test papers and move somewhere else, and it kept using up all my time. I remember feeling so panicked, that I was not going to have enough time to finish the exam because of all the moving around and that I was going to fail the bar because of it. It was definitely a nightmare, this dream. But in a weird way it also made me feel better, because the only reason I was failing was because the circumstances kept making it impossible to finish. It wasn't that I couldn't have passed – in the dream I knew what I needed, I just didn't have the opportunity to get it all down. On the other hand, while it was easy to draw that validating conclusion, waking up in a cold sweat the night before the bar was not all that much fun...

Finally the first day of the test is upon me. I get a 5:30 am wake-up call because I'm convinced I need to study more, and a horrible attendant at the visitor lot the day before freaked me out by saying that they were going to run out of spots on test day. So I tried to be there by 6:30, although it ended up being 7:00, and in reality as long as I had been there before 7:30 I probably would have been ok. Then I studied in the car. I'm sure I learned absolutely nothing, but it made me feel better.

Inside it was a mad house, as over 1000 stressed, confused, and lost people milled around in the hallway. There were almost no signs to direct us. But then they opened the doors, got everyone checked in, and we sat down at our stations. I liked my test location. It was a large, square, inverted wedding-cake tiered room, with a big, square parquet floor at the bottom, ringed on three sides with 3 or 4 levels of tiers. I was on a top tier, facing the door, which I found suited by latent claustrophobia. The tables were also only designed for 2 people, so you were always on the end and didn't have to share a long row (thus reducing the number of people who could shake the table while you were trying to write). Our proctor was also very nice and un-scary, which helped too, and the room, despite the number of people crammed into it, was actually pretty quiet.

Then it was time to begin. Per BarBri's suggestion I did the NY multiple choice questions first (50 in an hour). Despite having done many practice ones in the preceding days I don't think I did well on this. I'm pretty sure I definitely got about 5 right, but when I went to the car at lunch to do some more review, I discovered that I probably had gotten at least 5 definitely wrong as well... On the other hand, BarBri said if we got only 50% we'd be ok, and it was only 10% of the total exam score. So I feel stupid about the ones I missed that I feel I should have gotten, but otherwise I think it's probably not a problem. Especially since I think I did ok the rest of the day. The first essay I did I think flailed around a little bit, but I'm sure I got some points. The other essays seemed to go much better though, what with better IRACing and I felt ok on both my issue spotting and rule announcing. Not perfect, but a hopefully plausible passing attempt. And then there was the MPT, which was almost exactly like the practice one we'd done. I did everything on it that I'd done right before, plus the things that I'd missed, and if all that's not good enough then I don't know what else to do. It's also 10% of the score, and hopefully I did well enough on it to compensate for the iffy multiple choice.

It was a relief to have that day over because it meant I could now stop thinking about the special NY subjects and its distinctions and focus on the 6 multi-state subjects. For the next day was the MBE, the 200-question multiple choice test. The morning session seemed hard, but I still finished ahead of schedule and felt kind of ok. In retrospect I wish I might have double-checked some of my answers in the extra time, but it was a toss-up between doing that kind of due diligence and risking undermining my confidence for the afternoon, which was already a little shaky. And by the end of it was completely shot. I was not nearly as fast as I normally was, nothing on it looked familiar, and all I could think about was that I'd just punted the MBE and would now have to take both NY and NJ again, no matter how good my essays were. After all, this was supposed to be my sure thing, the day I was looking forward to that could compensate for iffy essays. In reality, it ended up the other way around.

I did finish a little early, but barely. And I did make myself take some time to go over a few questions. (I had a clump of 5 "D"s running together, and I was pretty sure that probably wouldn't be right. So I did them all again and switched answers for 2 of them. But when I tried similarly to go over some blocks of 3 I couldn't immediately find anything better to answer for any of them so I left them alone.) But there was no way I was going to stay until the end. Within 15 minutes from the end of the exam session no one is allowed to leave the room in order to keep down the noise for the people racing to finish. But I had a commute to Secaucus to get through, and there was no way I wanted to be there when the NY-only exam takers started high-fiving for having finished their entire exam. My sanity required an early escape, so I made one.

The drive itself wasn't so bad, but I felt terrible almost the whole way. I felt sure I had screwed it all up. If only I'd done more practice questions. If only I'd done different questions. If only, if only, if only. None of my massive study efforts mattered; I'd obviously failed to turn over enough of the correct stones and now I was going to fail.

In the light of day, having now talked to other people, apparently this is a normal feeling. Everyone found it hard, everyone left it thinking they failed. And obviously lots of people with this feeling didn't actually fail. I think the negative feelings have something to do with a conversation I'd had with a friend on Sunday:

"Good luck on your exam. I know you'll get an A."

"Actually, you don't need an A on the bar exam. You pretty much only need a D-minus to pass."

"Well, then, good luck, and I know you'll get a D-minus."

"Why thank you! That's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me!"

Because that's the problem. I know I wasn't doing A work on that exam. And in my mind, if I'm not, I might as well be failing. Besides, I'm not used to doing D-minus work, so I don't have any sense for when it's D-minus work and when it's F work. All I was aware of were the questions I didn't know, which were in great enough quantity to let me know that I wasn't acing the thing. And, of course, all I remember were the questions I didn't know. I have no memory for the ones that I did know, since there was no complementary sense of panic to etch those into my brain.

My mood actually lifted on the drive down from Albany as soon as I got near the NJ border and Route 17. I think that's because when I was a kid and my mom took us skiing in the Catskills, when we got to that point it would mean we were almost home, so I naturally associate it positively. Unfortunately I still had a way to go to Secaucus, which is a very confusing area to drive through. But I reached the hotel by about 7pm and was in bed between 8-9. It was a much nicer hotel than the Motel 6, but the only area where it mattered was that it had a free computer I could use. I had absolutely no stamina to blog, but I was able to check my email for the first time in half a week, which made me feel better.

The next day I also woke up around 5ish because I had an entirely new subject to learn. New Jersey only tests on the 6 multi-state subjects, which is very convenient, but they also include New Jersey civil procedure. Per BarBri, I wasn't to even try to review this until the night before the NJ test day (I study better in the mornings so I waited). Fortunately NJ pretty much follows federal civil procedure rules so there wasn't much that was new, and it was less technical than the equivalent NY subject.

The test was held in a gigantic exhibit hall, empty except for rows and rows of tables. I sat next to a guy who had taken the previous days' test in Illinois. But he was wearing a Yankee t-shirt, so it felt like home. (Unfortunately the nice NY Yankee pen I had specially purchased for my bar essay-writing ran out of ink during the morning NJ session. Fortunately I had bought some back-up pens on Sunday for just this contingency so I was able to continue.)

New Jersey has 4 45-minute essays in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. I think I was weak on two of them, but I surely got points, and I'm reasonably confident in my writing ovreall. So I guess it's anyone's guess as to how well I did do on any of these essays, but I didn't leave there kicking myself, at least.

I was exhausted after all this. I went to my dad's house and nearly went to sleep at 6pm, but decided to stay up to eat dinner. I haven't eaten or slept properly in a week, and it's probably a significant factor in my mood. I also didn't sleep a lot that night, because I woke up at 4am on Friday to drive to New York City. Why? Because there was to be a free Huey Lewis and the News concert in Bryant Park for Good Morning America, and what better way to celebrate the end of my bar exam hell with a HLN concert? A free one, no less.

Fortunately having checked my email at the hotel I was able to discover in time an offer for VIP entry to the show. As a result I was able to get right up front. But them, while we were waiting, these two guys came into the crowd with a box. Claiming to be from the band's record label (without indicating what label that was) they took out of the box a series of tacky (in more ways than one...), obviously hand-painted, styrofoam letters that spelled out "We [heart] Huey." Somehow or another, when the other fans who were very enthusiastic about holding up the letters finally figured out how to correctly spell "Huey," I was left holding a "Y." I'm really not sure how that happened, but now I can say that I've at last achieved a life-long dream of holding a "Y" on national TV. (You can see a bit of me and the blue "Y" at the end of the video here.) I did a very nice job holding the "Y," if I do say so myself, because I was very afraid of being accused of negligently waving my "Y." I really did think that to myself, in so many words. After which I really wanted to slap myself.

Actually, my post-bar celebration involved not just one but two Huey Lewis and the News concerts yesterday. Again, what could be better?

The second concert was at Jones Beach. I've always liked Jones Beach. When I was little we almost never went to the Jersey Shore but we'd often go to Jones Beach. It has a great seashore to swim at, other activities like mini-golf and pitch and putt, and soft-serve icecream. (Although this is one instance where Friendly's having taken over the franchise is not an improvement. The ice cream should be a simple vanilla or chocolate cone, maybe twisted and maybe chocolate dipped. Friendly's ice cream is too fancy for the milieu.)

So after the Good Morning America show I drove out there to spend the day. I did some swimming and had my ice cream, and then went to take a nap in the car. But I woke up before I wanted because the weather had suddenly changed. The sun had been driven out by ominous looking clouds and the beginnings of sprinkles. Which was kind of deja vu all over again, because the last time HLN played at Jones Beach, in 1991, the show also almost got rained out. (The Jones Beach theater is uncovered.) Fortunately the weather cleared in time for the concert to begin.

HLN was terrific, as usual, and the jamming with Chicago on "I'm a Man" was an indescribably fun performance. But – this is the second HLN concert this week I've cried at. What is up with that?

I don't cry through the whole thing; the music always wins me over and by the time they get to "Heart and Soul" I'm inevitably singing and dancing. In a way this is a pity, however, because I clearly have a good cry in me that's not coming out. But given what their music means to me I wouldn't expect it to come out here.

The problem has nothing to do with the music or the concert itself. The problem is that there's a really annoying quality to the concert-going that completely brings me down. It's why I didn't go to too many shows in the 1990s – astonishingly few, given my recent predilection for going to see them anywhere I can. It stopped being so much of an issue in 2003 when I'd decided I was going to law school. The vibe is annoying – I really don't need the flashbacks to the social dynamics of 4th grade at this point in my life – but I can deal with it when I feel good about my life and what I'm doing with it (hence the change in 2003 when I finally felt like I had something to say for myself). Unfortunately instead of self-confident I am currently insecure and needy, and, compounded with some other event-specific circumstances, I was not able to navigate it. So instead of the concert making me feel better, or at worst yielding a neutral net result, I ended up feeling worse. I can't continue to attend them if this is going to happen.

I will, of course, continue to attend in the near future because I have tickets to 4 more upcoming performances - two almost immediately, and two in about two months. I'm not as worried about the first two because some aggravating factors will not be present, but the other two have me concerned. Fortunately they are a few months away, which gives me some time to pull myself together. Which obviously I need to do, and obviously not just for this.

This was the week of the bar exam. Since it is naturally a critical piece of the Great Change, I should probably blog about it.

Part of me doesn't want to. I'm back to misplaced-donut mode and very sour on a lot of things (including some that might surprise you). It's not quite misplaced donut mode because it doesn't involve the sense of backwards-looking regret that the last episode had. For the most part I got past that. This time it's more complete and utter fear looking forward to the future... OK, I exaggerate because that was sort of a fun phrase to write. Still, there's a pervasive worried sentiment of "what now?" running through a lot of my thoughts and necessarily coloring my expression of them.

Nonetheless, here's the week. (Start here and work your way back to this entry.)

My cousin had bought tickets to Chicago last night and discovered it came with a free Huey Lewis and the News concert. So he brought me, which was nice. (And bought me ice cream, which was also nice. Proper Carvel softserve ice cream, in fact.) I managed to hold it together and didn't cry one bit this time...

It's occurring to me that I've probably spent this week only semi-conscious. I've been able to do one thing before me (e.g., drive, eat, study, take a test), but I've lacked any capacity for multi-tasking or sophisticated thinking. Case in point: I drove some people out to their hotel in Wantagh on Friday. We didn't really know where we were going, and we weren't able to pull up directions online. We decided we'd just head to Wantagh and then ask around, and this was our plan until it suddenly dawned on me an hour later we could call the hotel and ask them. Normally I'm good at this problem solving thing. But lately, not so much.

Anyway, my consummate exhaustion is also screwing up my sense of perspective. But it's a busy time between now and, oh, say, the end of time. I'm not quite sure when I'm going to finally get to rest up and return to my former reasonable self.

A friend of mine emailed me:

Don't be depressed about your bar exam. Chances are good that you will die in 60 years at the latest and there will be plenty of things until then you "should" be depressed about.

My friend is currently located in China, or as he put it, "the centre of ultimate wisdom phrases." Somehow I'm not sure this was one of them though...

Welcome Blawg Review readers, and thanks to Jeremy for the link! I've looked at the other first person write-ups describing the exam he linked to, and though the particulars of their states' exams were different from mine, their observations match my experience. In fact it feels much better to see other people echo what I felt. It makes me think that maybe I really wasn't stupid - the MBE really was hard!

Anyway, as I write this I am out of the crucible and beginning my bar trip. Can't say I'm all that thrilled with United right now - after waking up at 3am to finish packing since I could barely function from exhaustion yesterday, I discovered that my 8am direct flight to San Francisco was now changed to a 10 am flight to Chicago getting into SFO at 3:30pm if I was lucky and could stand-by on an earlier connection. Fortunately I did, but my day got so chopped up I could neither get anything done nor properly sleep. I'm starting to forget what sleep actually is, quite frankly. I don't think I've gotten an uninterrupted 8 hours in over two weeks, at least. Not good. But once I'm done here and go back to my luxurious Motel 6 I'll see if I can at last get some in.

Interestingly, however, my seatmate on the Chicago-SFO flight turned out to be a 0L heading off to law school this fall. I hope I didn't scare her off... I did dump a whole bunch of advice on her, but it was kind of good for me to get back in touch with what I liked about law school. The bar was just so horrible (arduous, pointless, stressful, etc.) that it's darkly colored my perception of this whole law school endeavor. I vaguely remember having actually enjoyed it, so it was nice to have the occasion to get back in touch with those now-dusty memories.

Anyway, I'm out here for a few days before continuing on with my bar trip. There's a Huey Lewis and the News concert tomorrow night*; we'll see if I can manage to not cry at that one. As long as I can finally get some sleep beforehand I can finally start to heal. Everything will feel much better then.

In the meantime, a shout out to my laptop loaning friend on the other coast, on whose spare machine I am writing this. Friends are awesome. (Especially friends who are geeks.)

* For what it's worth, I did pack my "y."

On balance I'm glad I went to the HLN show in Turlock, CA, on Tuesday even though it was kind of out of the way and was held in the company of lots of cows... And I held it together and didn't cry this time... On the other hand, after this one I'm ready to swear off Huey Lewis and the News concerts for a while. When I go to them, like when I went to this one, there are lots of really good things that happen. But lately there's also been a couple of really frustrating moments too, and I've really had enough of exposing myself to those. They are interfering with my ability to enjoy the music, they negatively color the whole concert-going experience, and, worst of all, they make me doubt the sincerity of all the really good things that happen. I'm tired of torturing myself with that kind of emotional whiplash, so I think I'll give it a rest for a while. There are the two shows at the end of September I have tickets for, and I suspect I'll still go, but I'll take some extra steps to try to innoculate myself from the nonsense. Then the band is off the road for a while - at the moment indefinitely - which is sort of too bad but gives everyone a chance to get on with their lives.

One of the really good things that happened in Turlock, however, that wasn't at all undermined by the weirdness is Paul Thorn. He and his band opened the show. I had the privilege of meeting them and can authoritively say they are both fabulous musicians and great people. I can't recommend seeing them enough. Screw the Huey Lewis and the News thing; I think I'll go be a Paul Thorn fan for a while.

Since writing the above, I've become informed of sad news regarding the former News bass player. While I was apparently having my moment on Tuesday, he was apparently having his.

I want to say, in contrast to all my griping, what a wonderful person he was every time I met him. I haven't seen him in years, obviously, but as an awkward teenage fan getting to meet the band for the very first time he stood apart as kind, generous, incredibly sweet and approachable. While I was happy just to get autographs from the other band members, from him I always got a connection that would leave me with a smile lasting days, even years, thereafter.

I sincerely hope he beats the demons plaguing him. It's impossible to think of him as the criminal he's been charged with being. Cognitive dissonance indeed.

When I was a little girl - a very little girl - I used to tell people we were moving when we were just going on vacation. This seemed to cause great confusion in the neighborhood and frustrated my parents, but as far as I was concerned it was a lot easier to say "we're moving" than that more cumbersome phrase, "we're going on vacation," and anyway, going on vacation still involved physically "moving" to someplace else so I steadfastedly refused to be cowed by their limited syntactical preferences.

Anyway, this comes to mind because in theory I'm on vacation right now, the beginning of my bar trip, and I've managed to start the process of moving.

This spring I fomented the plan of packing up and driving back to the Bay Area where I would at least get some temp work for a while (although of course I'm still entertaining the prospect of actually acquiring a real job) and then study for the February California bar, all the while giving myself some breathing room to decide what I want to do with my life (and where I want to do it). So then I got to thinking about where I might like to live while executing on this plan. I've lived in Berkeley, and I like it there a lot, and I've lived in the South Bay, which except for the awesome biking terrain, I didn't like so much (not cosmopolitan enough for my tastes at this stage of my life). I've never really had the desire to live in San Francisco proper, but what about Marin County? But I've never lived in Marin. I've been to Marin, and for a brief while I worked in Marin, but it was always a place I went home from. So since this is all a temporary move, I decided it would be a good time to try it out.

One thing that has me concerned about Marin, however, is the traffic. So I wanted to live somewhere close to San Francisco, where I suspect I'll be working. And then I decided, as long as I'm entertaining fantasies, that it would be nice to live somewhere with a view of the water.

OK, that's the wishlist. But was it doable?

On this trip out to California, induced by the Turlock stopover, I ended up with a few extra days in the Bay Area. I decided to use them to find a place to live so that when I drove out at the end of the summer I'd have someplace to drive to. Little did I realize how hard a tast this would be given my limited geographic preference. There were very few listings for the area at all, and it also dawned on me that people would probably want a year commitment but I wasn't sure I could give more than 6 months. Then lo and behold I saw a listing for a 6-month sublease. To make a long story short, I went by yesterday to meet the person, saw the place, met two out of the three other roommates (the latter I am assured neither smokes in the house nor has a crowing alarm clock), and signed the lease. It was practically kismit as everyone's timing worked out so that this could happen, not just the timing of the lease (I only want those 6 months), but also that it happened that my brief time in the Bay Area happened to correspond with her day off so we had hours and hours to work all this out.

And worked out it is. I am so massively relieved to have gotten this done I can hardly fathom it. It means I can completely enjoy the rest of my vacation, go back to Boston and take the time to properly organize and pack up my life, and then not have to worry at all about what awaits me after my drive back west. It's decadent...

It was of course a little weird to rush into the decision - I pretty much saw the place and decided to commit on the spot, which is a little more spontaneous than I'm normally comfortable being. But I'd basically decided that as long as there wasn't something horrible about it necessity dictated this kind of speedy course of action. The only significant downside I did discover is that there's no on-site laundry, but the laundromats aren't too far away and I can usually get away with doing it only twice a month. Otherwise the room comes completely furnished (necessary, since I'm only bringing a carload of stuff), it's clean, it's quiet, and the kitchen even has a dishwasher! (Huzzah! I've only been promising myself that my "next" apartment would have a dishwasher since four apartments ago...) It's right by a bus stop, it's an easy bike ride from the ferry (I'll need to get myself a commuting bike), and that water view? Right outside my window: the room is on a houseboat.

By the way, in case you are wondering what happens to a houseboat in an earthquake - it shakes. Around 8pm when I was meeting the roommates, the houseboat lurched in a way unlike how it apparently rocks in the wind. It really only floats during high tide, so when it was resting on the bottom and the bottom shook with an earthquake, so did we. It was if Marin County was saying to me, "Welcome back to California!" with a geological wave...

I'm still in China. This isn't surprising; I'm not planning on returning until late Wednesday. But this means I will have spent more than a week in a foreign country. I can't remember how long it's been since I've spent more than a week in any one country I wasn't living in. Being here so long is definitely taxing my attention span...

Well, I'm kidding. Kind of. I am actually restless, but it's not really an attention span thing as much as an anxiousness to get on with my life. I have a project to finish, a job to find, a move to make, and a life to get in order. I really want to get started on all this and wandering around China is not helping me do any of these things. This isn't China's fault; there's nothing wrong with it and in the long run I'll be glad I was here. It's been a decent trip so far, and I suspect it to at least remain tolerable for the last few days of it.

But I'm having an increasingly difficult time enjoying it. Today I had to cut my sightseeing short and sit in an Internet cafe just so I could feel like I was making forward progress on things. There's a limit to what I can do from here, but I at least wanted to write this. Blogging has become a necessary release for me, and having not been able to do it for the past few days has added to my edginess. I may not be able to get caught up right now in writing about my trip (the keyboards at this place are awful, so I may write my missing entries by hand and post them later) but I really needed the outlet of writing this. I was practically crawling the walls earlier today, feeling so cut off from my own life, and it's starting to show. I'm still brooding about old annoyances I can't do anything about, I managed to rip myself off earlier today through some inept negotiations with a souvenir vendor... Come on, I'm capable of better than this, but right now I'm really off my game. What I really need right now is to move on, past all this, of law school and the crevass of crap that was July. On the upside I seem to be healing from the psychic wound inflicted by the bar, and despite the march around China I'm much more caught up on sleep. But now I'm really, really ancy to take this new person I've grown to be out for a spin to see what I can do.

Unfortunately the answer is not much from here.

See the comments here. How can this test possibly be a rational measure of anything worth measuring???

I just flew in from China (and boy are my arms tired...). I left the hotel in Shanghai at 3pm China time (3am EDT, I think) on the 16th and arrived home at 10 am on the 17th. I think that made for a 31 hour trip, if I figured out the time zones right. Lots of blogging will ensue as soon as I get enough energy to sit upright at the computer long enough to type it all in, but since I'm not quite sure when that will be, I thought I'd at least post this.

...To say the remaining entries may be a little delayed while I suffer through the inevitable: I feel like crap. I knew this would happen. I knew I was playing Russian roulette with my homeostasis (did you know I'm the kind of person who uses the word "homeostasis" in conversation?) with the bar, the China trip, et al... I managed to hold it together physically for months on end, but I knew this medical house of cards would come tumbling down at its first opportunity, and it has. China, and the 31-hour commute home, completely did me in. I don't think I'm suffering from some dread Asian disease (or even simply jetlag), but rather some opportunistic bug seems to have taken up residence and is using my body as its personal playground. Eviction proceedings consist of lots of sleeping and flooding my system with fruits and vegetables - well, any sort of real food, actually. I may have been a little underfed in China. It was really hot, so that killed my appetite, and then there were food safety issues, particularly regarding water since you can't drink what comes out of the tap. So that foreclosed all sorts of cold dishes (including lots of fruits and vegetables), and also screwed up anything that involved ice (frappucinos, anyone?) since I couldn't ascertain the source of water the ice was made from. Maybe I obsessed over it more than I needed to, but I was already so worn that I knew I'd needed to dodge the germs rather than leave them to my exhausted immune system to fend off. Unfortunately, there was the communal eating* to confound my plan...

* (Plus public spitting, amusing sanitation facilities... Chinese culture may be really good with the concept of holistic medicine, but it seems really weak on epidemiology. No wonder it's where things like SARs and bird flu get rolling; China is a giant vector...)

My laptop! It's alive! Finally!

It's hard to explain the 1.5 month long saga that got me to this point. Ultimately IBM did right by me and I'm satisfied, although a) it still cost me some money and b) I'm not entirely sure it's IBM I'm beholden to. They keep selling off so much of their business... So while I'm sitting here willing to buy from IBM again, I can't. It's Lenovo now. But then again, maybe it was Lenovo that took care of this. Or maybe it was someone else. Who knows?

But in any case, the computer works and my hard drive was not wiped. Which is convenient. I think. There's a part of me that kind of would have liked a clean slate. But, nah, this is better... (right?)

And not a moment too soon. Yet maybe it was good that it took this long and I had month and a half away from my machine. It gave us time to see other people...

Another quick hit while I'm embroiled in finishing up my project (then I can finish up the Tales from China travelogue...): Ian Best is has posted some advice for 2Ls. I agreed with his recommendations, and added a few more.

It's worth noting, however, that the consensus is that students should load up their 2L year to buy themselves flexibility for their 3L year. If only the ABA let them do that...

It's hard to believe that given the glacial pace of change in the universe, in my lifetime - a mere fraction of a blink of an eye in cosmic terms - we've managed to lose a whole planet.

There's a lot of gnashing of teeth going on regarding the recent demotion of Pluto, Thinking of the Children, and what this will do to all their textbooks, which are now all outdated. And then I realized that it's not really too bad; the kids will be able to deal. After all, when I was growing up I had one of my cousin's old kids' space books. He's 12 years older than me and didn't really need it anymore (it wasn't exactly on his college reading list...). Anyway, I remember flipping through it and noting the page where it said that, "Someday we'll land on the moon!"

I think the book is packed away in a box somewhere so that someday I can pass it on to my kids...

As I've complained before, my belongings are currently strewn about the U.S. in two, soon-to-be three, states. Lots of stuff is in my dad's attic, and the rest is crammed into my room at my mom's. I'm now in the middle of trying to go through everything stored at the latter, to cull my possessions and decide what I'm taking to California (one car-load maximum) and what I'm leaving behind. And what is getting left behind for good.

So far I've filled about 10 shopping bags with stuff to get rid of. I'd like to be even more brutal, but I can only do that in the right mood. The mood that says "I'm [going to spend money/break my back] [shlepping/keeping] THIS???!!!???" That mood strikes occasionally but not consistently. At least right now I'm trying to get things more organized and not have like things located in three different boxes. But I only have two days to finish this project before I need to drive off.

Obviously things would be easier if I weren't such a packrat. I'm actually much less of one than I used to be (5+ moves in 3 years will do that to you) but there are some interesting rewards for having been one. For instance, there was the AT&T Wireless class section settlement. Why, I got an extra $6 from my settlement because I still had my old records and could authenticate my entitlement. (The check arrived last month, and believe you me that extra six bucks is coming in really handy these days…)

It would be much easier to divest myself of stuff if having saved it didn't keep getting positively reinforced…

Posted 9/5.

A visitor to the neighborhood called out to me. "Excuse me, is it legal to park here?" I took a look at the signs. They are indeed cryptic here in Brookline. But it struck me, upon looking at them, that yes, it would probably be legal for them to park there for two hours. And I told them so, before quickly adding, "But I in no way warrant this advice. If something happens to your car, I'm not responsible."

Actually, I didn't say that, thank goodness. But what's alarming me is that I almost did...

I am still in Brookline. This is wrong; I was planning to leave today. But the project of packing and loading the car has taken eons longer than intended, and it's still not quite done. I was all set to blog about how I was such an old hand at these cross-country moves and had car-loading down to a science, but, like a textbook on evolution in Kansas, science seems to have gone out the window.

A major error was the premature loading of the Body Bag. The body bag is an enormous duffel bag I bought in the luggage neighborhood in Paris (yes, they have a special neighborhood in Paris for luggage, somewhere slightly south of Gare de l'Est) back when my old French boss had stiffed me on sending my things back to the US. In making alternate arrangements I was apparently really concerned with getting all my belongings into the same vessel, and apparently not so concerned about how I would manage to carry said vessel. The thing is huge. You could put (note: this is a speculation, not a request) both my sister and me into this thing, and we'd still have room left over for an intimate party of 12. What I typically do on these moves then is put all my clothes into this bag and then lay it out on the back seat. This approach means that my wardrobe can never consist of more than would fit in the bag (although in the interest of full disclosure my jackets and sweaters are in other containers). But that was ok; my wardrobe did need some culling. In particular there were lots of more dressy clothes languishing in my closet that I just couldn't keep. Well, I had to keep lots of things I hadn't worn recently because when I go back to work I'll probably need more in the way of office-safe clothes than I did in law school (gosh I miss the Dot Com boom, when showing up to work in anything short of full frontal nudity was totally fine). But some of these things I've had since high school. Which wouldn't be a problem, unless you consider that I was in high school in the 1980s. 70s retro may currently be in, but it will be quite some time before any of these things say "hip, happening, suave professional" as much as they currently say "fashion-impaired laughingstock." Then again, they may always have said "fashion-impaired laughingtock," given that my fashion sense is normally equivalent to that of a fashion-impaired laughingstock. But in any case time has not done anything to minimize the effect.

So where was I? Oh yeah - Brookline. Where I put the Body Bag in the back seat and buried it with book-laden xerox boxes before having optimally filled the foot wells. So now I have pockets of unused, now-inaccessible space, with lots of things that could have used that space waiting to be loaded. So much laborious shuffling may need to take place tomorrow morning to rectify this shortcoming.

Can't say I'm looking forward to it. The laborious shuffling has gotten really old. I have some things that have been shlepped back and forth around the country so often I've lost count. I move it in one direction only to need to soon move it back in the other. It's the very definition of futile. Even Sisyphus himself would gladly push his rock around rather than have to carry my boxes to and from my car and erstwhile abode yet again.

At this point, so would I.

The break in blogging was due to the traversing of the country. After taking 2-3 days longer than expected to pack the car (and I still managed to forget stuff I would have liked to have, but then again the car was completely stuffed) I finally hit the road one evening, leaving the Boston skyline glistening in the orange sunset behind me.

First stop was NJ, where I spent the next day going to NY to see lots of people. The next day was on to Indiana, where I spent the following day also seeing a friend. This is the 4th cross-country trip I've done, and it stands out as unique because this time I've actually stopped along the way. For all the others, except for the possible stop in NJ, I've just driven through as fast as I could (usually taking 3-4 days). This time, though, I decided to actually see some of the country I was driving through and so veered onto a more scenic route after Indiana, heading first up to Wisconsin so I could see what Madison looked like. (Ann Althouse is quite the Madison propagandist, but her praise seems quite deserved. Even though the weather was gloomy it was still a nice, very-livable-looking city.) Then it was on to South Dakota, where after spending the night in Sioux Falls I checked out the sights of southwest part of the state. From there it was onto Wyoming, where after a night in Caspar I continued on into Nevada. I got as far as Winnemucca, and the next day reached Marin by 2pm after treating myself to Church's Chicken in Berkeley on the way.

It wasn't a bad trip. The car held up, the weather was good except for the Wisconsin day (i.e., no tornados), and a lot of the scenery was really striking and new for me. Well, the Chicago part of the trip was an awful mess - Chicago is always the worst part of any cross-country drive. In fact, Illinois in its entirety is, although granted my little jaunt through the bit of I-70 in the south wasn't too bad. Basically, Illinois is one gigantic construction zone and has been for years. I remember seeing along the road on one of my other trips these cutesy signs written in faux-child "handwriting" begging people not to run over their construction-working parent. I get the distinct sense, however, that these "children" will be working on their PhD theses by the time their mommy or daddy finally finishes that piece of road... Oh, and parts of Wyoming are really boring. Mostly the I-80 corridor. I was on some rural highways in the eastern part of the state, and that terrain looked interesting, but once I connected again to I-80 there was nothing to see until I got to Utah. Nevada might also be considered boring by some, but I find it boring in a much more interesting way. But note that Reno is making a serious run for Chicago's title of "most annoying city to drive through," given its predilection for reconstructing large portions of the Interstate. The worst experience I ever had there was one night when I was trying to leave Reno, but streets had been closed off for an event and everyone was getting detoured to an on-ramp that the DOT was in the process of shutting down. Reno's charm is diminished by the impossibility of escaping it...

Anyway, the Sierras were nice but the eastern side was extremely hazy, with smog on par with that encountered in China. It was clearer by the bay, where the fog was starting to creep in. I crossed the Richmond Bridge behind a modified car carrier filled with brand new golf carts, which I found kind of amusing. Then I turned left, went a little bit farther, and finally (finally!) was there. The end.

I've been here a day so far. I'm tired, my back hurts from carrying a ton of stuff, my room's a mess, the living room's a mess, my stuff is strewn about everywhere... but I'm happy. Or at least on my way to feeling happy. I feel like I belong here. On the boat, on this boat, with these people in this place. Whatever reservations I may have about Marin (e.g., the traffic) somehow seem quite moot. The water is a soothing neighbor, and one I'm glad I can visit with every day.

The people neighbors are nice too. All my roommates seem great. It's a very sane living situation with respectful adults (two of whom are older than me, which is a nice change from law school where I generally kept ending up as the oldest person in my circles) and there's reason to hope that it will be smooth sailing from here on out. (No pun intended; the houseboat doesn't move except up and down with the tide and slightly side to side with the wind.) I also really appreciate the way they all greeted me yesterday at the end of my long drive: "Welcome home." It really feels like that's where I am, and I'm really glad.

I've got a bunch of things I've thought about blogging queued up in my head, but I'm doing a lot of dashing around trying to get moved in and all and not having time to flesh them out to where I'm comfortable posting. My few feeble drafting attempts have led to some dreadful writing, so I've decided to hold them back until I can finally get the time to take a deep breath, relax, and stop trying to force reluctant words together. My ideas are fine, but the words needed to express them just aren't flowing so well right now. So I'll get myself better organized generally, and presumably that will clear up the mental fog to where when I revisit the things I want to say I'll be able to give them the words that they deserve.

The job hunt has begun, and the first step has been to update my resume. I've gotten conflicting advice (actually, every bit of resume advice inevitably conflicts with someone else's) about whether it was ok to be on two pages, but the most recent has been that it should only be on one. It was a little traumatic to make it fit on one because about a half-page of information had to get cut, but for the first time I felt able to do that. I'm much more focused now on who I am and what I want to do. Not perfectly focused, but I feel less desperate to show lots of people that I have lots of diverse background just in case that happens to be what they need. There's still a little of that kind of thinking, but much less so. My resume now should indicate experience with writing, moot courts, internationality, technology, and management. The more of those aspects I can get into a job, the better the fit.

There's still some tension with edits the career counselor wants me to make and what I feel comfortable making. It took a huge psychic leap to even make the changes I have, but I'm at a place in my life now where I can finally release my obstinate grip on some previous sacred cows and rethink just how sacred they need to be. Still, the game now is one of self-esteem. The reason I do not have a job is not because people don't like my resume, but because people haven't seen it. The challenge now is to feel good enough about who I am and what I can do to get it out there. So while I feel a little bad because I appreciate the help, other than small nits here and there I don't think I'll be taking the rest of the counselor's advice. When I read through her suggestions I see myself getting completely lost in them. Who I am, what I've done, and why I think it's all important is important to convey if I want people to see it as important to them. I can't read a million employers' minds, but I can understand mine and then use cover letters and interviews to explain why it's one they want working for them.

Somewhere, months ago, I had the pipedream that I would get back from China, pack up my life in two days, race across the country, and be ready to start work right after Labor Day. As we've now seen how life has actually played out, I think the appropriate response to that notion is, "Ha." Who was I kidding? No, the way things have actually played out is probably the way they needed to. Things take time. Moving takes time. Massive life changes take time. I started doing better the day I realized this and began to cut myself some slack. The result: I adjusted my timeline and decided that I would be ready and willing and able to work as of this week. And I was. Unfortunately, there's been no job to go work at.

I did go register myself with the staffing agency I'd met in May. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have much in the way of legal jobs right now (or at least not in my geographical area). So I went across the hall and registered myself with the technical arm too. According to them, they get short-term web coding gigs all the time, and I've decided that I would be perfectly content to do them. The hourly rate could generate a decent amount of cash (often more than the law jobs could) and it would get me back on the "going to work every day" horse. I miss that horse...

There almost was a job that began this week, but I couldn't dig up a portfolio site quickly enough to land it, so here I am, still on the bench. On the upside, this leaves me with lots of time to try to line up a proper legal career position. Of course, even with web jobs here and there I think I'd still have time. But at least now I can go to the post-season day games at Oakland Coliseum...

In addition to looking for a job, it's also time to think about registering for the February California bar, which was the impetus behind my relocation plan. I just called BarBri, where it looks like I can save some money by being a "BarBri alum," but it will still cost an arm and a leg to take their course in January. On the other hand, given that California is reported to be the hardest exam in the country, this might not be the time to skimp.

Unfortunately, I have to start signing up for everything before I find out my results from NY and NJ. I guess I'll have to just presume the best and forge ahead. If I do have to redo the others, I guess that will happen in July. I really really really hope I don't have to redo them, although I still get nightmares from that stupid MBE, that neither BarBri nor PMBR can prepare you for since it seems to be changing. On the upside, however, the BarBri woman I talked to seemed to validate my sense that there was indeed something more sinisterdifferent about July's exam.

And, as even better news, people who complained about it are starting to get their results and find out they passed. Of course, that will just make me feel really stupid if I find out I haven't...

This wait to be licensed really sucks.

For every state bar at some point every applicant must complete some form of a moral character application. That's what California calls it, but everyone else has something similar. It's where you end up inventorying your entire life so that it can be investigated to see if you are indeed of moral enough character to be admitted to the bar.

Now in theory, that all sounds good. Who wants a dishonest lawyer? On the other hand, who are we kidding? Does this massive amount of paperwork really solve the problem?

I doubt it. For one, the poorly-phrased forms seem to be designed only to trip up the honest applicant. List every address you've had for the last 10 years/since you were 21/since you were 18? List every employer? And by the way, why did you leave them?

Now maybe if I were a 25 year old straight-through-from-undergrad JD this would be fairly easy. I wouldn't have had time to have had a complicated past. But as someone older, the lists are quite large, quite hard to remember, and quite hard to find current contact information for (as certain states, like California, insist upon).

Then we get to the problem where some bars will want to contact these former employers. Give that I'm pursuing admission in three states, that's a lot of phone calls to impose upon my previous employers. (And in the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished department, the non-profit public interest firms that were nice enough to give me internships way back when now get to deal with the hassle of documenting my moral character and having said documentations notarized, as the state of NY requires.) Then there's the complication that while for the most part my career has been fine, I had a few missteps at the beginning where my employers turned out to be of sketchy character themselves. I thought they were safely relegated to the past where they couldn't affect me anymore, but it seems that when it comes to being a lawyer apparently one does have a "Permanent Record," and unpleasant employers from the long-distant past get to come back and screw with your career all over again.

The one upside to being an older applicant, however, is that it's easier to come up with people to be personal references for my moral characters. The requirements vary from state to state, but most want 2-5 people who've known me well for at least 2-5 years, not through school or family relation or employment, and ideally are admitted lawyers themselves. I think if I were 25 that would be a much harder list to compile. What's nice about being older, generally, is that you can now actually have a lot of old friends who know you well. And if, like me, you're lucky, several of them will be lawyers, too...

In the light of the morning (I think I stayed up past 1am making the finishing touches) I've very happy to see my nice, shiny new blog installation waiting for my posts. I've postponed a couple of things trying to get this taken care of, so it's really nice that I can finally get on with my life...

I'm also pretty proud of myself. For all my other installations and upgrades I had help. This time I did it All By Myself, and it was a much bigger deal. It was probably the largest, most technical project I've worked on in years. So I'm proud of that, and I'm enjoying the rush that comes from having successfully problem-solved a major endeavor.

You can see, in reading the previous posts, what an endeavor it was and get some idea about what the technical challenges were. However, in the light of the morning, the calm after the storm, I'm a little less annoyed at SixApart than I was earlier. Now that I have the latest version running, properly installed on a proper ISP, I'm starting to be a little impressed by it. I have much more nuanced control of things than I ever had before. Some of that I think is because 3.3 is better than 3.2, particularly on the admin screens. Some of that is because the thing finally runs in a fraction of the time, and without choking, thanks to the new server. And some of that is because I had to dig into its inner-workings more deeply than I ever had to before in order to get this to work so as a result I have a better idea of what I can make it do.

Still, I find Movable Type increasingly unfriendly to non-technical people. The latest version is particularly poorly documented (the online knowledge base mostly covers the previous version) and the community forum has gotten annoying to use. (Fortunately, that forum is indexed by Google, so I was able to get answers to everything I needed by running queries there.) I also think the lack of backwards compatibility to its earlier default configurations is Not a Nice Thing. It wouldn't be hard for them to have provided some support for my entries sequence problem, for example. A section of particular instructions in the documentation for people coming from that installation legacy. A plugin for the export function that could automatically insert spacer posts and then split up the export file into importable sizes. Or at least some indication that you were going to run into that problem (right now they make it sound like import/export is a straightforward thing, when it's obviously not). Ultimately, however, I was able to cobble together a backdoor solution - so it's good at least that one was possible - but it seems too common a problem to leave everyone to solve on their own.

Solving it was interesting. You can see, in the earlier post, my mental wheels turning. I often experience a moment of flashover panic when I hit a wall. Maybe this is a bad thing, I don't know. Maybe it's a bad thing only when I let people see it... In this case, though, because I was messing about with a production server, taking it up and down, I thought it important that people know what was going on with its availability. Still, maybe I did so with a bit too much candor... On the other hand, in the process of articulating the problem I also began to solve the problem. I hadn't yet thought of the second option, the one I eventually pursued, at the time I started writing the post. In having to analyze the problem in order to explain it, though, I was able to see the possibilities and figure out the fix.

The fix probably would have gone a bit quicker if I were more technical, but especially given my rustiness, it went pretty quickly. And I got my hands into all sorts of things - figuring out how the MySQL database interacted with MT, moving things around in a UNIX shell, revving up the vi editor and making it do all sorts of things I'd never made it do before, hacking at some HTML, hacking at some MT variables... Pretty much every aspect required some geeky effort.

But here's what I found interesting, and why I'm filing this post under the Great Change category: because law school helped me do this. In certain ways it obviously didn't help - like letting my technical skills get rusty - but the training of becoming a lawyer has made a marked difference in my diligence and resourcefulness. I'm becoming aware, first of all, that soon there will be no more handholding. Once I'm licensed, it will be up to me to find answers. No professors to run off and ask, I'll have to come up with solutions myself. And to do that, I'm going to have to search through documentation to find what I need.

So that's what I did here. Relied on myself to research the problem, pored over the documentation, and came up with the answers. Sure, I've done this before, but much less so. Or at least with less confidence. Before, if I'd solved the problem it kind of felt like I'd just gotten lucky. Whereas now, even in the midst of it, it felt inevitable.

Something has definitely changed in me, and for the better.

I've just clicked the button to apply for the February 2007 California bar exam. Five hundred twenty-nine dollars later (not including the $144 initial registration fee), the deed is done. Tomorrow I'll go register for BarBri and I'll be all set (at least until it comes time to start studying for it).

Admittedly I procrastinated on this. I started the application process a while ago but just couldn't bring myself to commit to finishing it. But tomorrow was the deadline to apply, lest there be a $50 late fee. The hestitation: there's still no word from NY and NJ. It will probably be about two weeks before I hear from them. In the meantime, I'm beginning to crawl the walls. What happens if I don't pass? It took a lot of soul-searching to click the submit button for California, because my plan to take its bar is largely contingent on the idea that I successfully passed NY and NJ first. I was therefore tempted not to enroll, and wait until the results came in to decide the next move.

But in the end I decided I needed to believe in myself and go for it. Besides, I've done everything else to make the CA bar happen in February. Moved here, registered, started my moral character application... Worst case scenario, if I didn't pass NY, I'll just have to do it in July. Or perhaps not do it at all.

So from now on it's the California exam, full speed ahead. I did think it interesting the "Northridge" clause in the application:

I fully understand that the Committee of Bar Examiners is the sole judge of the validity of the examination and, at its discretion, may determine that the result of any test or any part of any test or any individual's score is not valid. Should the Committee invalidate any part of the test, or if any individual's test is declared invalid or cannot be graded, the Committee may, at its discretion, decide to make a pass/fail decision on the basis of the valid portion of the applicant's test product available to the Committee. Should the Committee at any time determine that an insufficient test product is available upon which to base a valid pass/fail decision, the Committee may require the applicant to present himself/herself for re-testing at a place and time designated by the Committee.

At least I presume that's what it's in reference to, the year that the bar exam was disrupted by the Northridge earthquake. They told us about it in BarBri or PMBR this summer, because apparently it was the year that the MBE questions got released. Seems that everyone had to take the exam with them when they evacuated the building, and then, according to someone I met whose wife was sitting for that exam, they finished up in the parking lot.

As if the bar exam didn't already suck enough...

A week ago, as a result of the corrupting influence suggestion of my friend, I flew up to Seattle for the most feminine vacation I have ever taken. She's getting married next year, so the pretense of the trip was to go dress shopping - for a bridal gown for her and a bridesmaid dress for me. People who know me well may think my voluntary wearing of a dress is a sign of the apocalypse, and they may well be right. But when my friend asked me if I wanted to be a bridesmaid, it wasn't exactly an offer I could refuse. Fortunately she's giving her bridesmaids wide latitude to choose something not hideous, and maybe even wearable on subsequent occasions - should I, of course, ever voluntarily wear a dress on a subsequent occasion. (Meanwhile, other feminine touches from this trip included visiting the jewelry store to get her ring adjusted and hanging out with another friend to do some scrapbooking. Yes, my inner-woman was quite active on this trip...)

I figured I'd be going up to Seattle at some point, although I thought it might be closer to the bar when I had no plans to be working. But since I'm not working now, and since there was a good deal on the airfare, I went. This is the last trip I have planned though between now and the end of the year. While I still have lots of time, I would prefer to have lots of money. I'm working on trying to trade one for the other... I really wasn't expecting to be this idle right now, and it's taking a toll financially and emotionally. The earlier part of the week after my return was a particularly low point of existential malaise.

But the later part got much better. A solo practitioner I know threw some work my way. It's basically law clerk work, but it paid and, even better, it got me doing Real Legal Work, with real people and real cases. It's not exactly my first exposure to real clients (for instance last summer I did some work with intake), but it was largely my first real experience with actual litigation practice. I don't regret this about my law school experience, as I think it was a perfectly good expenditure of the opportunity, but for me law school was much more focused on the academic and theoretical than the practical. The moot courts and trial advocacy class were practical, of course, but they involved fictitious cases in fictitious jurisdictions. Whereas the work I got to do this week involved real cases in real places. The work I did really mattered, and that's something new.

The good news: I liked it! The bad news: I have sooooo much to learn... Which is normal; it's a myth that people graduate law school having any idea how to be a lawyer. The point is to be able to at least think like a lawyer, to be able to spot issues of law and procedure, because without that no amount of practical knowledge will be able to help the client. Anyway, there was nothing I worked on that wasn't at least somewhat familiar to me.

So I hope I can continue to get some hours helping this lawyer out, and there was another practitioner I spoke to last week that I might be able to get some work from as well. I'll still look for an associate position, because I'm going to need one eventually anyway and it would be nice to have some stability, but if I can manage to string together enough of this other work I'll learn a ton and hopefully be able to support myself for a while.

In the meantime, I still wait for my bar results. And last night I brought home my pile of new BarBri books...

So, it seems the USS Intrepid got stuck in the mud. I guess I shouldn't laugh - the other day, so did I. It was a lovely, sunny day and the tide was up so I decided to go kayaking. But I dragged my feet getting out of the house, and then lollygagged out on the water. I figured I had an hour to paddle around, but instead I stayed out for an hour and ten minutes, with the result being that I had to walk home in the mud the last few feet.

It's a big project, keeping myself on task. I've got a lot to do, and only so much self-motivating energy to do it with. Progress is definitely being made, but it's streaky and it's hard to be 100% efficient when "self-flagellation" keeps appearing on my daily "to do" list. I really need to cross that off, permanently, but it's the one thing I do manage to do every day...

On retrospect it seems my great relocation plan has not worked out as smoothly as I anticipated. Plus it essentially doubles my work to look for permanent jobs and temporary ones at the same time. But I just have to keep telling myself that eventually all this will pass, and I will be the lawyer I want to be. Because, to paraphrase Stuart Smalley, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and goshdarnit, I don't completely suck."

I mean, at least *I* only grounded a kayak. Not an entire aircraft carrier...

So I was poking around and clicked on the link I'd made at the top of my browser for the NJ Board of Bar Examiners website. This was asking for trouble, I know, because I immediately saw the line on it that said that they'd just sent out the results today.

Moreover, there was a prominent link that said, "Click here for results." So, tempting fate once again, I did.

Somewhere, in that long 3200+ list of candidate numbers was mine. After rapidly scrolling up and down in a wave of adrenaline that made it impossible to actually read any of them, eventually my eyes regained focus and found mine, where, next to it was the word, "PASSED."

!!!!!

Meanwhile, so nervous am I that this is too good to be true that I tore through my pile of bar materials to find my candidate number, just to doublecheck. And until I get the confirmation letter in my hand, I'm hesitant to believe it. Nonetheless, every cell in my body is currently shouting, "Yay!" and I want to shout, "Yay!" too...

But for various non-law people (friends, relatives) reading this, this result does not mean that I am automatically an attorney. There's a lot of other things I need to take care of in order to become licensed in New Jersey. But this was the steepest hurdle, and it seems it's now been hurdled. I'm so glad.

I have a good day
Every now and then
I count my blessings
On one hand
I start believing
The sun will shine again
I have a good day
Every now and then

- "I Have a Good Day," Paul Thorn (hear an excerpt)

Yesterday wasn't perfect. I got yelled at by some people at a McDonalds for talking too loud on my cellphone (People! It's a McDonalds! With BeeGees blaring over the loudspeaker! Who suggested you have your business meeting here???), and then I wasted $5 in toll money heading into the city to meet a group of new people I couldn't find.

But on the upside, there was the bar. I had posted a sign in the entrance hallway of the houseboat, "I passed New Jersey bar exam!" and all my roommates congratulated me, so that was nice. And it was also nice to consider just what this means.

To be perfectly honest, I feel a little blindsided by it. I've been so preoccupied stressing about New York that I didn't really think about New Jersey. I knew the results wouldn't be out until November, but I guess it hadn't dawned on me that they would come out first. I just had complete tunnel vision about New York.

But this is good, very good. For one, it gives me a little more confidence about New York. (In fact, it makes me feel a lot more confident in general.) I had felt ok about the NY essays but not ok about the MBE. I had also felt ok about the NJ essays. From what I gather, however, (to the extent it's possible to understand any of the cryptic alchemy behind the scoring), good essays in New Jersey can't overcome a bad MBE score to the same extent that good essays in New York can. So the fact that my MBE was high enough for New Jersey makes me think it was also high enough for New York.

But if, for some reason, I still don't pass New York, I can still get licensed somewhere. I think my strategy of doing the NY/NJ pairing this past summer rather than just California, in order to up the odds that someone would let me practice, has been born out.

What is interesting to think about is that this result, though such a small factoid itself ("Candidate XXXXX PASSED"), has dramatically changed my life, changing it from one merely aspiring to be a lawyer to one actually able to be one. It's the first sign of fruition for all this effort, a tangible sign that the Great Change has finally rendered itself upon me.

I want to post this so it can get filed away in Google somewhere, so that if anyone runs into the same problem I did they can figure out how to fix it:

Back when I took the MPRE I hadn't yet decided which state bar's exam I would eventually take. Since I was still a California resident, however, I chose California to have my one free score report sent. But there was a problem: apparently you are supposed to register with the California bar as a law student at the beginning of law school. This creates a file for you, and must be done in order to be able to sign up for the bar exam later. You can, apparently, register after law school, but it costs about $50 more than if you had done it at the beginning of law school. (Of course, since I was at a school out of state I wasn't really aware of all this.) Also, it means that when your MPRE score shows up, California doesn't keep it - or at least not associated with you. Thus, when you eventually do sign up for the California bar, you have to get it resent. Or not...

It seems that all the scores are submitted to California after the MPRE administration in one big roster. A call to the National Conference of Bar Examiners who administered the MPRE can tell you which roster your score is on. Then you can call the California bar and they can look up your result on the original roster and associate it with your file, once you've finally registered with them. This is much better than having to pay another $15 to have the score report sent again.

So there you go. In case anyone happens to find themselves in the predicament I was in, hopefully this will save you some money and angst.

I called my grandma after the New Jersey bar results came in to tell her the good news. Then like any good grandma she bragged about it to everyone she knew. Except apparently she told people I'd passed New York bar exam.

Of course it's not like she was wrong... just prescient!

Original image removed, but it had been a screenshot of the NY State bar site saying, "The State Board of Law Examiners congratulates you on passing the New York State bar examination held on July 25-26, 2006. Although every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this lookup screen, each applicant must rely on the official notification (via U.S. Mail) as to whether he or she has passed the examination."

Or at least so it would seem. That little caveat at the bottom unnerves me. Is it too soon to break out the champagne?

You'd think that passing the bar exam would be the best thing that could happen, wouldn't you? Well...

While I wait for the official mailing from New York, I have before me the official letter from the State of New Jersey. It's an amazing document, because it says that all I have to do is take the oath (or affirmation) before someone authorized to give it in this jurisdiction (California's ok) and just like that, I'm a lawyer.

Kind of. On retrospect I'm not sure that being admitted to New Jersey will be anything other than a huge, expensive pain in the ass.

For one thing, there are fees. "Bad lawyer" fund assessments. Maybe even new taxes. And these I'll have to pay, even with no current income and no intent to practice in the jurisdiction for some time.

Then there are CLE requirements. Not general CLE requirements, but specific course requirements that seem to be offered by just one racket outfit. Requirements that it appears I need to physically be in New Jersey to fulfill.

Meanwhile I'm now poring over the rules to try to figure out how and to what extent I can delay all this without jeopardizing my ability to eventually practice there. See if you can figure it out; so far nothing's jumping out at me.

While it's amazing to be so close to becoming an official lawyer, it's also terrifying. Like I've just gotten myself in way over my head. Never mind protecting clients' interests; I'm not even sure I can protect my own.

Apparently, however, I have 90 85 days to fix that before something of indeterminate nature, but probably bad, happens to my ability to do this at all.

It may have become clear to readers and those who know me in real life that I really suck at resting on my laurels. I suppose to an extent it's a self-esteem thing, which isn't so good, but it's also born out of an admirable desire to always keep pushing myself to become a better person. Getting the balance right between self-confidence and desire for personal growth can be tricky, and especially when there's circumstantial buffeting (read: no job) it can be really tough. Even more especially, when, as in a job hunt, there are plenty of people to always tell you what's inadequate about you - e.g., "sorry, you don't have the right experience," or "too bad you're not licensed out here" - it's very easy to become fixated on the infinitely long list of qualities you obviously don't have and ignore the increasingly long list of the ones you do.

I am very fortunate, however, that there are people in my life who keep track of what's on my list and appreciate me for it. People close to me, who are completely unsurprised by my successes, and people I didn't even know I'd reached.

To all those of the former, thank you. As we all go through our future respective great changes I hope I can be there for you as you've been for me.

And as an example of the latter, I wanted to share what someone on the Huey Lewis and the News board said. I recognize that I've been very silly with weaving my fandom in with my law school career. But it's all part of joie de vivre; something needs to take the edge off all the hard work and sacrifice. So I've been posting on the board over there while I've been going through it all, including up through all the bar prep when I joked how it was making all of us bar-takers into zombies.

So I posted an update the other day, framed in reference with Huey's upcoming Broadway gig as "lawyer" Billy Flynn, calling him a "cheater" since he was being a lawyer in New York without having passed the bar, "unlike some people." Lots of people took the hint and congratulated me, which is really nice, but what one person wrote really stood out:

From previous posts, it is obvious this is a well-deserved and hard earned accomplishment. Congratulations to you and to those who will benefit from your tenacious skills and passion for the system in the future! (emphasis added)

It really is the most lovely sentiment, because I didn't do all this just for the sense of personal accomplishment; I did it to do something important. I sometimes jolt awake at night worried that I'll somehow end up wasting all this and end up doing something small, just a job for a job's sake. (Particularly because it's so easy these days to feel desperate enough to take anything.) So it's really nice to be reminded of what I'm capable of. I'm capable of idealism, tenacity, thoughtfulness, intelligence. It's a potent combination, if I can figure out how to roll them together right.

So when I'm busy studiously noting every single hole in every single donut, it's good to have people remind me that there is, in fact, a lot of donut too. I'm very grateful for it.

Actually, it's sort of funny: my tagline at the fan board is currently the tongue-in-cheek, "All I need is a job, husband, and kids and my life will be perfect!!"

But, you know, maybe that really is all I need. Everything else important, I've already got.

It's ok, I haven't taken my oath yet to uphold its dignity. I won't be offended if you say, "New Jersey? What exit?" or talk about the pollution or the mobsters or the scandals involving governors... Normally, of course, I would be. I mean, this is the land of my birth! A place where I might like to come back to live... work... run for Congress...

But not yet. Right now I'm out of state, and that's where I need to be. Yet New Jersey is making it so impossible to come back to! The issue is that once I'm admitted to the bar, it starts the clock on certain requirements, like a set of CLE courses. In a sense, this is a good requirement because they are about bringing new lawyers up to speed on how to actually *be* lawyers in New Jersey, which they probably haven't learned in law school. The problem, however, is that only one place offers the courses, and only on certain dates, and only in New Jersey. So, to be able to maintain your license in New Jersey, you have to physically be in New Jersey.

This, I put to you, is unconstitutional. A state can't disadvantage out-of-state residents, and this requirement, given the limited options available for its satisfaction, seriously disadvantages out-of-state residents. To a degree the consequence isn't that grave; if you fall behind you simply end up administratively ineligible to practice until you complete them. But because the courses are offered only four times a year, weeks if not months will pass before you will be able to regain your license.

(Apparently you could also come to the office to watch the videos, but only on Mondays and Wednesdays and only by appointment, and as it is now they are all booked up into January, so this is hardly a viable alternative. But, really, have these people not heard of Distance Learning? I know it's a fairly new concept, one that's only been talked about for, oh, several decades or so...)

Anyway, I just called the Bar and the place that offers the courses. The best (read: only) plan I can come up with is to postpone my oath until after January 7 (I have until February 9 to complete it), after which I will have "two [quarterly] cycles" to complete the requirements within. By waiting until after the 7th, however, I'll be able to do the summer cycle where you can spend a week in NJ and knock all 5 courses off. Won't that be fun... Of course, that will only take care of the first year's requirements...

I think it's sort of interesting how when panhandlers come up to me I have to turn them down, and when I do in my mind I'm thinking, "You don't understand. I'm poorer than you. If you liquidated everything you owned you might actually have a few bucks. Me, I'd still be in the red tens of thousands of dollars."

Biting Tongue has a post lamenting the economics of law school. Essentially, going to law school is an economically irrational* thing to do. You give up years of earning potential, throw yourself into a massive pit of debt, and then might not get to work in your new profession for a long, long time - and even if you do, it might be at depressed wages compared to an earlier profession.

Moreover, as I commented, everyone thinks that because you're a lawyer, you're going to be rich. Which makes being poor all that more depressing.

* Of course, while going to law school may be economically irrational, it may still be rational in other non-monetary ways. E.g., gaining intellectual enrichment, the increased ability to serve society in a more effective way, etc. But in order to justify the undertaking these things have to be what you want, or else it just won't make sense at all.

It's official - I got my letter from the State of NY telling me I passed. New York is nice because it also tells you your MBE score. (Of course, I wish it would tell me how I did on the essays. It's weird to work so hard on something and not get any feedback. I really would like to hear something like, "Wow! That was the best MPT we've ever seen!" or even something more muted, like, "I was ready to poke my eyes out until I read your essay #2. Thanks for restoring my faith in humanity with your gentle, lawyerly prose. Love, your grader." But no, instead I get complete silence from both NY and NJ. Hmph.)

Anyway, I did much better on it than I thought: 137 raw, 147.4 scaled. Unfortunately it's not quite high enough to waive into South Dakota (damn!) but I think it's high enough to waive into DC. I also think, but am not positive, that it would be high enough for California. Which is good, because it's nice to know what I'm capable of achieving, but also terrifying because (a) I forgot everything I learned, and (b) I spent the whole time feeling like I was failing, so I have no idea what to do the same or differently the next time around.

In the meantime, I just had to turn down a job I would have been absolutely perfect for. So amazingly qualified for it's as if the job had been made for me. It was a project manager position for a company that provides knowledge management software to law firms. How perfect would I be? Well, in my previous life I managed technical projects for a knowledge management company, and now I'm (almost) a lawyer. This is exactly the kind of job that people looking to get out of law would love to land. Yet here I am, ignoring the memo that apparently everyone else has gotten saying that legal work sucks, and trying to run headlong into it.

Damn. That was hard to say no to, and I kept apologizing to the recruiter that I had to turn it down. But I really had to turn it down, despite how poor and desperate I feel right now. I have to believe that all this effort to become a lawyer will have been worth it, that I can finish making this transition and become a good one and do good and important things with my hard-won new expertise. It's too soon to bail out on that dream; I still need to see it through.

Of course, it was just a job lead, not an offer, so my decline was a little less dramatic than I maybe make it sound. But I was sure that I could have at least gotten the interview if I'd wanted it. I know I was a fabulous match. And I told the recruiter that I would be happy to work for them for the short term, say 3-6 months, while I wait for the California results. So who knows, maybe something will come of that. But maybe it's just as well if nothing does. In the long run I may be better off if I even volunteer for some sort of litigation clerkship than veer off this career path I really want to pursue.

I got to do some work in my friend's law office yesterday. It was my first experience with document review - looking through boxes and boxes of documents that may be useful evidence in the client's case. It's not glamorous work, but it is necessary. And something that new attorneys usually end up doing a lot of, since their hours are cheaper than other lawyers'. Anyway, my job yesterday was to go through a disorganized box of documents the client had provided in order to establish some sort of organization so they could be indexed for discovery. I didn't like the indexing part, but otherwise I actually sort of liked the organizing/review part. There's a forensic quality to going through documents and seeing how they tell a story.

Anyway, there I was, working on that for much of the day. At some point shortly after lunch one of my coworkers said, "You know, I could really use something sweet right now. Maybe chocolate." And then, just a few seconds later, another coworker walked in the door and said, "There's cookies and cupcakes in the lobby."

Then later, after having eaten said cookies and cupcakes, I felt thirsty. "I wish I had something to drink," I thought to myself. And immediately thereafter in walked in the water-delivery guy.

Nice office... One I'd really like to do more work in, so of course I made sure to say that...

There's a significant learning curve to figuring out the Golden Gate Transit bus schedule. After several bus-riding attempts that had me arriving in different places and times than I had expected, I now seem to have settled on a few lines that pass near where I live and get me to where I want to go in the city roughly when I want to get there (at least for the moment; if I decide I want to be there at a different time, I might need different buses...). However, I much prefer the ferry, even though it is a 40 minute walk from my home and therefore ends up being a much longer commute. For example, to be in the city by 9am, I can either leave the house by 8-8:10 to catch an 8:20 bus towards downtown, or I can leave at 7:30-7:40 to catch an 8:20 ferry. Sleepy inertia prompts me to take the bus, but joie de vivre prompts me to do the ferry. It's a pleasant walk, and the boat is so much nicer than sitting in traffic (although the commute over the Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most lovely commutes ever). Unfortunately there's only a limited boat schedule, so I'm going to end up on the bus quite a lot as well.

This month it won't be so often; there's really not much going on in December so it's hard to find proper work. I'll keep sending out resumes, but it looks like I'll mostly be working in my friend's office 2-3 days a week since, as far as I can tell, he's the only lawyer in San Francisco who actually wants to get business done this month. And that will be ok for me. I won't get rich, but I will be able to pay my rent without dipping into savings for the first time in ages.

And it is interesting being there, doing real lawyerly work. OK, technically glorified law clerk work - I can't practice without a license anyway, and I've gone so far as to see how "practice of law" is defined in California (it's different in every state) in order to make sure I don't have a problem with anything I'm doing there (I don't) - but in a firm environment, and practicing skills that will be of use to me later in my career. I spent three days there this week, the longest streak of employment continuity in a long time, and as a result I can feel the wheels turning. I feel much more empowered, more so every day. There's still a ton to learn, but for the first time it feels like it matters. It's not even like a summer clerkship, where I learn things for the moment and then go back to being a student in a couple weeks and forget them all. Now I feel like I'm building up to something important.

However, in other traumatic news, I just got my first bill for my loan repayment. Yikes...

I can practically hear you non-legal readers mutter to yourselves, "All that whining! It's not like the bar exam is actually hard..."

Well, here, now you can see for yourself. Here are the essay questions New Jersey inflicted on thousands of people, including me, last summer:

Torts
Criminal Law
Property
Constitutional Law
NJ Civil Procedure
Contracts
Evidence

Commuting is hard... Golden Gate Transit is a cryptic, unpredictable mess and leaves me wiped out as soon as I get home. Which is too bad, because I really should be blogging regularly these days. I feel like important parts of the Great Change are underway, maybe even more important than any that occurred during law school. These are the parts where I finally learn about how to be a lawyer.

There's mechanical things I'm learning about, having lately gotten to be up close and personal with all sorts of legal documents (removal notices, proposed orders, demurrers, etc.) and such. Also, yesterday, for the very first time ever (well, except for an appellate hearing or two) I got to go to court! It's kind of embarrassing, actually, that in three years of law school I never had occasion to get there. I almost got to go last summer, but the trial I was to see got postponed. And I didn't get to do a practical clinic that might have had me appear in one myself because I went abroad instead, so I'm trying to catch up for lost time. Anyway, yesterday one of the attorneys I work with had to appear in support of a motion and I went with her. It was really fascinating, watching how it all played out and listening to the arguments that preceded ours. It drove home something I've been coming to realize just by finally hanging out with practicing lawyers: that there's a lot of generally unspoken intangibles about the practice that one needs to learn. This includes things like mastering the quirks and processes of each court (e.g, attorneys sign in for court in San Francisco, but not so in Santa Clara), as well as the subtle knowledge that only experience can bring. As an example, a conversation with my boss the other day revealed that there's the way the law works theoretically, and then there's how a judge might realistically rule. In other words, you can shoot for the stars for your client, and you might be right, but judges have natural inertia and are not going to be prone to rule extravagantly for your client, no matter how justified such a ruling might appear to be. Judges prefer to take smaller steps, and by recognizing this tendency the lawyer can achieve better results through better strategy.

It's things like these that I keep discovering every day as I begin to finally ascend this massive learning curve of how to be a lawyer. So while of course if I could just snap my fingers I'd love to find myself in some nice litigation associate position I could grow in for a while, until I'm able to come up with one I'm starting to feel better about the other opportunities I've managed to cobble together. I now have at least through the middle of January scheduled with exciting, educating, and for the most part paying work. In fact, I just got a paycheck, the first one of any significant size in a long, long time. (I can pay my rent! Whee!). But not everything I do for money these days is law related. On Saturday, for instance, I'm babysitting...

My career as a New York lawyer is off to an auspicious start. Due to a ridiculous and poorly articulated procedure, the Board of Law Examiners didn't receive from me the certification that I had passed the bar in time to schedule my interview and swearing in for January. They got everything else that I needed to send, but not that.

It is, of course, my fault. I suppose. I obviously misinterpreted their instructions. I would suggest that such misinterpretation was entirely reasonable, but that hardly matters since it was apparently wrong.

It is though baffling to me that the Board of Law Examiners would need the applicants to send in the certifications that we passed the bar that the Board of Law Examiners itself produces, but apparently that's the way it is. And I knew that. I just didn't realize there was such a rush to do it since by their own admission the certifications were sent out in bulk mail and might take a few weeks to show up (in other words, they might not arrive in applicants' hands until after the deadline to have sent them back in). Since the bulk of applicants' efforts was to get the moral character application together, it struck me that the carrot and stick was to have that part sent in early if you wanted to be sworn in at the first opportunity (seemingly so they could get a jump on processing them without waiting for all the certifications to come back at the same time and cause a backlog, which apparently is what has actually happened). Sending back the certification seemed like a mere formality, since surely they could have simply received a roster of those applicants eligible to be admitted from the Board of Law Examiners directly.

(It is conceivably possible that there's actually two different departments here, but it's very unclear, and even if there are two different departments it's also not clear why it wouldn't be more efficient for them to simply talk to each other rather than relying on thousands of applicants to cut-paste-copy-collate a generally illegible document and then twice play USPS-roulette to get it back to them in time. Yes, I'm mad at myself for not having met the deadline, but I legitimately still abhor inefficient processes. There's just no excuse for them; petty governmental bureaucracies should not be able to disadvantage the public simply because they refuse to easily correct their own institutional deficiencies.)

Fortunately, however, it doesn't really matter. I'm in no rush to be sworn in, and it will simply swap one hectic time (mid-January, while I'm in the middle of BarBri), with another hectic time (the day after the California bar is over, which means I'll finish and then need to hop a red-eye to Albany - won't that be fun...). The biggest disappointment is that all my law school friends will be in Albany in January, and we won't get to be sworn in together. Unless, of course, they screwed up getting their forms in too, and then, hey! we can all be sworn in together in March...

(This also means that I'll need to find someone in California to swear me into New Jersey, since I guess I won't be swinging past there in January to do it like I'd originally planned.)

I've been very derelict updating my blog... I've got posts in the works, but it's been a hectic bunch of days so I've not had time to finish them.

But in the meantime, to tide you over until I can, you can now marvel at the sadistic torture of this past summer's New York bar exam essay questions. If, of course, you aren't already too scarred by the ones from New Jersey.

Today is the calm before the storm. Tomorrow BarBri begins. And I'll be working full-time along with it, at least for the next two weeks, while I fill in for someone on vacation at a different legal organization than I've been working at. I'm really excited about the job, if not also dreading how much my days are going to suck, what with going to work all day and BarBri lectures all night (well, four hours of it or so). Plus in the middle of all of this I actually have another job that will necessitate out of town travel. Then again, I'm looking forward to that too, since both jobs have me working in an area of law I'm really interested in.

The scary thing is just the bar. But what I'm hoping is that because I've studied for it once before, and because I passed it, I can leverage that experience to make this study round saner. For one thing, in theory there's already a lot of knowledge rattling around in my brain somewhere. Presumably the lectures will simply help me get back in touch with it and won't have their own learning curves to nearly the extent that they did last summer. Secondly, I have a better idea of just what sort of effort it takes to study for the bar. I know I didn't do much other than attend the lectures at the very beginning of the summer, and yet that was ok.

I also think that, by and large, there's less material on the California bar than the New York one. There at least seems to be fewer subjects, although I don't know how much depth there is to learn for them for California's purposes. Where I've heard California is trickiest is that you have to be able to write better on its essays and performance tests. So I'm worried about them to the extent that I have no idea what they'll be like, but I'm not worried about them to the extent that I have confidence in my ability to write essays and do performance tests (note, though, that these are different performance tests than I did before).

The bigger challenge will just be fighting exhaustion. When I'm done with the aforementioned work I can go back to the firm where I've been working, although the lawyers there have expressed some concern that I not undermine my bar study by working there. Which is very nice of them, but I need to do what I need to do, and being poor and unemployed is not it. I will stop working when BarBri stops in early February and take 2 weeks or so to do nothing but study. But in the meantime I think it will lower my general anxiety level in general if I know I can pay my rent.

There are a still few other pedestrian concerns, however. General life maintenance, for instance. Like, when will I manage to do the laundry? Also, I'd like to be able to get something resembling exercise. I've been very, very good, since I've moved here, about taking better care of myself. I have vastly slashed the amount of soda I drink, for one thing. I've put an outright ban on bringing any into the house, and I only occasionally drink it when I'm out. I didn't like the effect that drinking all those empty calories was having on my girth, and I was really unhappy when I thought about how much of my student loan debt had gone to the enrichment of PepsiCo. So I've since discovered the wonders of tap water. After all, we're not in China - we can actually drink it here.

While I suspect no exercise may happen during the frenzy of the next two weeks, after that my schedule will get more flexible and I think I'll be able to get some in. Which is good, because I'll also need that time to execute on my major goal of the new year: acquiring gainful employment as an actual lawyer. I burned up most of my job-hunting cycles in 2006 looking for temporary work, to the detriment of finding a longer term position. But now that I have the temporary front more or less covered, it's time to look towards getting my career started. This time next year today should be long behind me.

I keep having this nagging feeling that I'm wasting money by doing BarBri - surely at this point I could just self-study. But BarBri gives me structure, and last night I remembered that I learned best by listening to the lectures.

Last night I did torts, which was taught by the exact same professor, in pretty much the exact same way. But in a way that was comforting. Most of the BarBri lecturers are very good, although I realized that the second time through there was a lot more fluff in the lectures than I'd realized the first time around. It's handy fluff, particularly if you've never taken the subject or long forgotten it, but since neither of those applies to me I found it sort of slow and superfluous and tuned some of it out. I'm also afraid of introducing confusion where as of last summer there was none.

My biggest observation so far is that California BarBri is different than New York. I liked New York BarBri. They were very helpful, very accessible. California has been helpful, including in some over-and-above ways, but I feel like the organization is more distant. Right now, for instance, I don't know if for the MBE subjects I need to learn California distinctions. I'm thinking the answer might be no, since otherwise they probably would have told us, but I think it's weird that they've not raised the issue one way or another, and that there's no one at the lectures (I'm doing the taped version to start) who knows. This kind of thing would not have happened this summer.

I also think it would be worth talking about what the Cal Bar might be like for other state bar veterans like me. Looking around my classroom, I get the sense that I'm not the only one doing the "collect the licenses" thing. I met one guy for whom California is his fifth... They do talk about attorney applicants, since they don't need to take the MBE part, but then again if I were one of them I might still be wondering how I should best tune in for those lectures. (Interestingly the guy with the 4 other admissions has opted to take the MBE. He's confident on it because he's done well in the past, so he's taking the full test in order to have it help pull up his score.)

In the meantime, having survived one night of this I think I can survive some more. But only if I can remember to go to sleep as soon as I get home. The candle is just nowhere near long enough to burn by staying up.

I spent all day Saturday at BarBri, having Professor Chemerinsky tell me everything I needed to know about constitutional law for the bar. It was pretty much exactly the same lecture as last summer, down to each corny joke, down to each minute, practically. But that's kind of impressive.

I asked him how many of these lectures he does, and the answer was astronomically high. Particularly last summer, when I think he did 17! And he rattled off a whole bunch of cities all over the country. But he says he's cutting back, and next year may only do NY and CA. Which is too bad for people elsewhere because the lectures are really quite good. Or at least relatively painless (relatively - they still take hours to get through).

Yet that still means he'll be doing 6 lectures: one in NY, and five in California. Why so many in CA? Tradition, he said. In my mind this is very inefficient, and greedy of California BarBri, since now it deprives other states' of his lectures. But he thought it was too bad that NY didn't have more live lectures. Me, I'm not so sure. I've done a lot of taped lectures, and now a live one. And while live is better, it's not so much better as to be particularly deteminative. More important is the quality of the lecture. And yes, it is important to humanize this very arduous experience, but that can be satisfied, as it was by NY BarBri last summer, by sending in staff attorneys to help reach out a helping hand, nearly literally. I don't think CA BarBri has been quite as good on this, quite frankly, but I doubt the solution is to hog more of the good lecturers like Chemerinsky.

Written 1/9, posted 1/12.

I'm writing this (to be posted later) on the plane home from Las Vegas, where I just spent a few fascinating days. I attended the 40th annual Consumer Electronics Show. It's a tradeshow like no other in the US. Over 140,000 people were predicted to attend. In fact it seemed to stretch the Las Vegas infrastructure to the breaking point. Getting anywhere took forever, at least four times as long as normal. And that's even with 200-plus extra taxis on the streets. At the same time, Vegas was also kind of quiet, as the crowds that were invading it were not its usual denizens. Just lots and lots of geeks. And their lawyers.

Which is how I came to be there, in a semi-professional capacity. A good friend from law school is an attorney in a firm that represents the Home Recording Rights Coalition, an association of technology companies committed to ensuring a safe legal environment for such companies to be able to innovate and sell products without fear of excessive copyright liability. The HRRC has also teamed up with other IP-advocacy organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to form the Digital Freedom Campaign in order to raise public awareness on the state of copyright law more generally, and to harness that awareness into the political leverage necessary to counter the legislative efforts of the content cartels on this front.

Where I came in was having been asked to help staff the Digital Freedom booth at the convention. This I was glad to do, as these are some of the issues I'm committed to advocating. And I did, comfortably, during the time I was at the booth. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and was glad for this first opportunity to finally get to stand up for these issues in a professional context.

But it turned out that I didn't really need to sing for my supper, so to speak, all that much and still had plenty of time to enjoy the convention generally, including various panels and of course the city itself.

It was a unique and fascinating experience in many ways, not the least of which is that it's not often I get to roam The Strip while wearing a suit...

Written 1/10, posted 1/12.

Way, way back before I went to law school I got involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I essentially volunteered as a legal intern for a couple of months, which turned out to be a good deal for me in several ways: I got my first, intense exposure to the technology civil liberties issues they advocate, I got my first experience being in a legal environment, and I got to meet and work with a whole bunch of fabulous people. Oh, and when the webmaster went on vacation, I got to be the EFF webmaster for a month. What they got out of the arrangement I can't imagine, as it was before law school and I doubt I was of much legal use. But I was welcomed to participate in meetings and discussions, and from time to time I probably mustered something resembling a constructive contribution. Or at the very least I didn't break anything...

Over the years I've kept in touch, and they've kept being fabulous people doing lots and lots of important work. So when the intake coordinator went on vacation, they asked if I'd mind covering for her. Mind??!!

So today was my last day there. I was there two weeks, minus the days for CES. It was a surprisingly hard job. Because the EFF, to its credit and as a result of extensive outreach campaigns, is considered such a "go to" source for help on technology civil liberties issues that lots more people ask for its help than can possibly all be served. So I was in the position of needing to figure out which cases it could consider taking, and then trying to point people in other directions for the ones it couldn't. It's two competing interests to juggle: the protection of scarce resources and the need to exude enough openness so that the people it could help in some way could get it.

And that was just one source of tension. There also was the tension between needing to provide people with information, and needing to not provide them with legal advice. It's a tension that lawyers in general are always confronting, as people are always asking them for help, and it's really hard to navigate this tension under the best of circumstances as the line between the two is pretty blurry. Given though that the EFF is also such a repository of information on these topics of law and technology it's particularly hard to unwind all the questions and provide answers in general ways, especially because for so many people the answer they really want is the one that applies to their situation alone.

Of course, the real challenge was more from needing to step into a completely new job and be productive from the get-go than from anything else. Not because anyone there necessarily demanded it of me, but because I so appreciated the opportunity to be able to help provide such important support to the public, and I wanted to make sure I really did.

I've decided not to go to the third day of the contracts lecture. The professor has already had two days of my time and I'm not impressed by what he's done with it. I find his class outlines confusing, his demeanor condescending, and I find myself deliberately tuning him out in order not to have him make a jumble of what I do already know.

It's also Saturday, and I haven't had a minute of downtime since New Years. Oh, sure, Vegas was fun and I loved my job, but it's been "go go go" for quite some time now, and I need to "stop stop stop" now and take a breath and get caught up on all the many things I've neglected.

Including regular blogging, which is why I'm boring you all with this rather unimportant post.

My BarBri course is being held at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco. It's not a bad location - perched high on a hill it's a very pretty one - except that it's not close to BART. Fortunately (for me) it generally has free parking, so I've been driving to it. Particularly after the evening lectures it's much nicer to be able to hop in my car than have to wait for a bus back to somewhere still short of home. Unfortunately it still costs me at least $5 to go to the city each time (the bridge toll is $5, commuting by mass transit actually costs more), which wasn't so bad when I was commuting to work but becomes rather uncompensatedly expensive when I just head in for lectures. So I try to make the most of my time in the city when I find myself there.

Saturday was one of those occasions. I had a lecture in the morning - a horrible crash course in Remedies (it's not that remedies are so hard, but I found the lecture and handouts disorganized and needlessly arduous to follow) - and that evening there was to be a Tower of Power concert at the Fillmore, a mere 4 blocks away downhill. How could I pass that up? So I was very good, taking the afternoon and holing up in a Starbucks listening to another 4 hours of an evidence lecture. I was also going to do some multiple choice questions, but after all the lectures my brain was pretty fried. Then the rest of the evening fried the rest of me, seeing how it included another 4+ hours of standing around.

But it was fun, and I got quite lucky. I hadn't bought a ticket in advance, and when I showed up to buy one at the box office it turned out they were sold out. A very nice guy then sold me his extra, and at a substantial discount. He had originally asked for $35, which was already $10 off, but seeing how I only had $25 in my wallet he settled for that and invited me to join him on his good spot online. But I feel bad, because as we went in, I accidentally lost him. I hope he doesn't take it personally, and just want to say for the record a big thank you to Pete the East Bay tiler. I had a very nice time at the show, thanks to you.

He'd actually seen Tower of Power for the first time at the Fillmore as a 15 year old - in 1969! This year is TOP's 39th, and they're still a great show to catch. So much so that they keep pulling in new audiences. Many people brought their kids, and I stood up front by the stage surrounded by a group of high school students who were thrilled to finally get to see the people whose music they'd discovered and been playing in school.

Being up front wasn't the best plan, though, because I'm still learning their material and couldn't make out all the words. And seeing a concert after 8 hours of BarBri lectures also wasn't really the best plan either. After the show the band did a meet and greet, and I met and greeted, but was more of a blithering idiot than usual. It wasn't really a "being in the company of famous musicians" thing as much as it was having generally forgotten how to speak English. I did, however, grunt appreciatively and then called it a night.

Happily it won't be until Wednesday before I have to go back for another 8 hours of BarBri...

"How's bar review going?" a woman I work with asked the other day.

"Look at me. See these pants I'm wearing? These really green pants? And see these socks? These really red socks? And this sweatshirt, which has neither red nor green in it, but rather blue and yellow, and when I tell you that I actually put thought into what to wear today and yet still ended up with this fashion disaster, that should tell you how bar review's going."

Yes, my inability to dress myself can mean only one thing: bar review is in full swing. Meanwhile my mom has jumped the gun and is referring people to me to answer their legal questions, before I'm even licensed in a single jurisdiction. I hope I wasn't too hard on her when I told her to knock it off... It strikes me that proud parents might turn out to be really excellent business development managers. When the time comes for that, of course, which is not yet.

Just a quick post to note the occasion - but I took my oath today. I'm officially a lawyer now.

In the letter telling me I passed the New Jersey bar came two oath cards - one for the NJ state bar, and one for the US District Court. The letter said I could take these oaths in any jurisdiction before anyone entitled to give an oath within that jurisdiction. Examples given were notaries, judges, and lawyers, because that's who can do it in New Jersey.

Lawyers would have been quite convenient, but I'm not sure if they can give oaths in California. Or at any rate, because they aren't able to administer oaths for the California bar, I didn't want to take a chance they wouldn't be valid. So that pretty much just left notaries and judges (and district attorneys, for that matter). But notaries seemed sort of anticlimactic. There's a very nice one who works in the Sausalito library, but I wanted my first lawyer oath to have a little more pizzazz than a private library oath administration could offer. That meant needing to find a judge. But where?

I first visited the Marin County courthouse, but apparently they aren't set up to do this kind of thing. "Perhaps we should be," a very nice court worker mused, since apparently they get requests like this from time to time. But they aren't now. Dejected, I thought I was back to the notary solution, but then I decided to try out the San Francisco courthouse, now that I know where it is. It took a few visits and phone calls, but eventually I was able to make an appointment with a presiding judge. (Note: I'm not sure they would have made the appointment had it been the California bar I was trying to swear into. The fact that it was an out of state oath seemed to be an operative factor in getting the appointment.)

The judge was very nice, and brought me back to his chambers to look over the oath cards. I asked him about their language, because both oaths included, "So help me God." As a big fan of separation of church and state, I'm not comfortable with invoking religion in my civic activities. He said he doesn't require that language when he gives oaths, so we crossed it out and did the oaths without it. (He also said he'd let me "affirm," rather than "swear," but that part doesn't bother me so we left it as is.) Logistically, I hope that doesn't cause problems, but it would be an interesting lawsuit I'd be willing to go to the mat for if they balked on accepting the cards.

Apart from that, we did the whole oaths the way they were written. Even though it was just the two of us in an office, it took on this mystical air of reverence. It felt like, and may well have been, the most serious thing I've ever done. I think I've been sworn in to testify truthfully on a few occasions, but those oaths were fairly perfunctory promises to tell the truth. These oaths constituted a far more serious, and affirmative, commitment to do even more than simply tell the truth. And I had to articulate each oath fully - a simple "I do" wouldn't do.

And then we signed the cards, and that was that. I had a couple of hours before my bar review course began to I called lots of relatives to tell them I was now official. Which led to an interesting squabble with my sister, who will be taking a job with the government and has to take an oath herself next week.

"I'll have to swear to uphold the Constitution."

"Hey, I already swore to uphold the Constitution! I beat you to it!"

"Yeah, well, I'll swear to uphold it better."

Sibling rivalry, it never ends...

Worst case, I take the damn test again in July. Or don't take it at all and move on with my life. Neither are ideal, but I think I need to remind myself that the world will not end if I don't pass the hardest bar exam in the country. I was feeling ok about it, but then I stopped feeling ok when I got some BarBri essays back saying that they were failing. Kind of popped my bubble, but probably the less I dwell on that the better, I suppose. I can't think about BarBri without it raising my blood pressure, especially with regard to the essays. It's a massively important feature to the course, more so than in the NY course even, but the CA BarBri office instituted some policies that made it almost impossible to derive that benefit. Ultimately I was able to turn in four of them (out of 9 possible, I think), and I was lucky that they let me turn in the last one, but I still haven't gotten the latter two I handed in returned, plus I had to do them before I'd gotten any feedback on the others so it's been really hard to use the comments as a means for improving. Granted I'm cash-strapped so it's coloring my thinking, but all in all I'm really not sure I got my $2000-worth from the course, especially since I paid less for NY BarBri last summer and feel like I got more for my money. (But either way, there's no way the course is worth the non-alumni price of $3500! Better to watch Chemerinsky on videotape than pay for the extra overhead of making sure the lecturers can all come in person...)

Argh, I hope I pass the thing just because I never. ever. want to do this again...

But in the "perhaps it's all worthwhile" department, I just got my certificate of good standing from New Jersey. So it's real, now, I really am a lawyer! At least up until I can't complete my CLEs and they make me ineligible...

There is also another bit of good news, but I'll save it for another post. Hopefully that will happen soon, although it might have to wait until after the bar, we'll see...

The clock is ticking... Only one more full day of studying left, then Monday it's time to pack up and head off to Sacramento to meet my doom destiny.

Study-wise, I'm not sure what kind of shape I'm in. I've been working hard all week, but I still feel about two days behind where I'd like to be, which I suppose could be blamed on Florida but more likely is due to having had to move rooms as soon as I came back, which chewed up the rest of Sunday and Monday somewhat unexpectedly. It all got settled down though, and then nose got inserted into grindstone, but there's a limit to how long I can keep it there. Today I had to step away from the books and watch TV (unfortunately there was nothing on worth watching) just to fight off brain fatigue. You can tell I needed the break, though, because the title of this post is what I blurted out while commenting on a situation...

The plan for the rest of this evening then is to pull together more of my notes, and then I'll spend tomorrow practicing essays. I've picked up some tips I can use from the BarBri essays that were returned, but whereas I was confident before sitting for New York that I had enough law in my head, California has me intimidated. Some of it is because, even though there's less law to know, I'm expected to know what there is in more detail. And my ability to memorize is not what it was last summer. Last summer it was all so fresh! new! exciting! but now it's all boring and aggravating. I suppose it was actually boring and aggravating last summer too, but at least it was easier to delude myself that it wasn't...

As the bar exam got nearer and nearer, I kept thinking about the Monty Python Architect Sketch. In this sketch John Cleese's character describes how the tenants are brought in and "carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives." Michael Palin's character then points out that they were really looking for a block of flats, and not an abattoir, but it's the imagery of gently being carried along and carried along nice and easy... until inevitably arriving at the machinery of slaughter that seems to have described my life in recent weeks...

Anyway, here I am in the abattoirSacramento at the end of Day 1 of the bar exam. I wasn't going to blog about the test until it was done but I'm so incredibly BORED that I will anyway. Everything about the test is boring. The studying is boring, the waiting for the exam room to open is boring, the wait for them to give out the exams is boring, the wait for them to pick up the exams is boring, lunch is boring, the exam itself is boring, even writing about it all afterwards is boring. There's three days of all this boringness (plus yesterday was pretty boring too), which basically involves me doing absolutely nothing constructive with my life for 72 hours, except for the 18 hours of immense mental exertion three hours at a time (if you can call that a constructive use of my time, which I doubt you can).

I am glad though that I picked Sacramento as the location for doing this. It's good to get away from everything and just focus on what's before me. (Of course, that's why I'm so bored, because there's nothing else to do but focus on the damn test.) Downtown Sacramento is also fairly pleasant, even in the rain, and parking isn't a problem. The exam room at the convention center is ok - not quite as nice as the room where I took the test in Albany (which was really pretty quiet), but nicer than the one in Secaucus, which was cavernous. It's loud here when people move their chairs, but it's not all that crowded. And, oddly, it seems like lots of people who signed up for the test have not attended. In my immediate vicinity I counted at least six places where the person who was to be sitting there never showed up.

Meanwhile my Motel6 turned out to be a good choice. It costs only a fraction of what the major hotel recommended by the Cal bar website charges, yet it's only a mile or so away by surface streets so getting to and from the test center is not too stressful. And it's in a neighborhood with shops and restaurants and supermarkets so at least I can eat decently. Which is really the only thing I'm doing while I'm not taking the test, because did I mention it's boring?

We met at high noon shortly before nine this morning. Me, armed with only my wits and my pencil. It, armed with 200 incredibly annoying and trivial questions, plus the copyright notice from hell. (It's practically worth its own post, this egregious, overreaching copyright notice that prohibits much more than the copyright statute actually entitles copyright holders to prohibit, and does so with the threat of greater penalties than the copyright statute actually provides for, including potential disbarment. Meanwhile merely "breaking the seal" on the question booklet is deemed to be consent to these terms, terms which you (a) can't read in advance, (b) can't note down to take with you for your own reference of what you've agreed to, and (c) can't refuse without sacrificing your entire career, since if you don't agree to them you can't take the test, and if you don't take the test you can't get admitted to practice. Talk about duress, which, ironically, is a subject ripe for testing on the MBE...)

Anyway, as far as the test goes, I suppose it ended up a draw. I felt pretty good after the morning session, finishing 45 minutes early, but dragged in the afternoon. The afternoon seemed to have more property and evidence questions, whose rules I was familiar with but had apparently not perfectly memorized. Also, I was tired. And bored. Still, I think I did better this time than last, mostly because when I was stuck I looked more at the mechanics of the question to try to isolate (read: guess) the correct answer than I did last time. I suspect that might help, but then again, the whole thing is a crapshoot, so who knows.

Now there's just one more day, just like the first day, with three 1-hour California essays in the morning and a 3-hour performance test in the afternoon. I don't know how I feel about how it went the first day. Success is plausible, I suppose, but not guaranteed. I discovered in reviewing my criminal law notes this morning that I'd apparently mushed up a bunch of insanity defense rules, which unfortunately occurred on a question testing insanity rules... And I kind of ran out of time on the performance test, which surprised me. I've never had a timing problem before, but I've never tried to write a single essay non-stop for an hour and a half straight after already having written for three hours earlier that day. The performance tests aren't hard, per se, in terms of needing to know and recall law, but they do require mentally juggling a lot of information and then physically regurgitating it. Allegedly this exercise is designed to reflect what it's like to be a lawyer. If they say so, I suppose...

Whether I'll be able to pull this all out is anyone's guess, but hopefully it's the kind of thing where you're a winner just by showing up. I talked to a fellow bar taker last night, who's been taking it in Oakland (where the lights apparently went off for 15 minutes while they were taking the test yesterday) and she, too, noticed a surprising number of absences, way more than either of us had seen when we took the exam in New York. Of course, as my dad reminded me, I did pass the bar in New York, and, "if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere." As long as the California bar examiners are sufficiently familiar with Sinatra, he may be right...

I can't believe I just did that to myself. What a torturous bunch of days. I'm not sure the California bar exam was so hard intellectually (although if I don't pass I might withdraw that statement) but physically it was an ordeal. Massive, massive amounts of incredibly rapid writing; consecutive hours of 100% concentration punctuated by hours of complete and utter boredom; uncomfortable seats; midday "respites" consisting of sitting in my car eating peanut butter sandwiches and twiddling my thumbs until the next bloodletting could begin... I'm now exhausted and walking around kind of bewildered. I feel like I've been lost in space for three days. Meanwhile my hand hurts, my back hurts, and my brain cells are threatening a mutiny if I subject them to more of that tomorrow. Fortunately it's all over, and hopefully for good.

Anyway, today seemed to go pretty well, I think. I finished early on the essays this morning, which is somewhat concerning. The first question was on wills, and I'd just reviewed my notes in the car beforehand, so I was able to move pretty quickly through it. But that's left me wondering if I ended up missing something big and important. Was my efficiency a sign of extreme competence, or just the opposite? Well, we'll see... when the results come out in May. I refuse to look at my notes to find out at any point before that. In fact, I plan on stashing everything bar related in the back of a closet until I find out if I can dispose of them for good.* One way or another it's time to move on with my life, and I plan on starting tomorrow.

* However, if anyone wants to buy my PMBR books, which I've never used, drop me a line.

When I wrote about the things I'd accomplished in law school, I left an important item off the list: get published. It had been a major goal, and it's now safe to say that goal has been met. My note was just published in the latest issue of my journal.

Writing my note was arduous and painful, and the editing process nearly killed me, but the hard work and massive investment of time has now paid off, and with the experience of having done it no future paper will ever need to hurt as much...

I also want to add to the list another law school accomplishment, which was to drive a change in my journal's copyright policy. Historically the journal had kept the copyright in the articles it published. But a few years ago, esteemed law professor Lawrence Lessig declared he would no longer publish in any journal with such a policy. He led the way for an Open Access movement, a new policy of licensing that journals could follow to be much friendlier to authors. Journals - like mine, now - that follow this policy allow their authors to keep their copyrights in exchange for a semi-exclusive license to publish them.

As a result, I am free to post my paper here, and will do so in a subsequent post. (It may also end up on SSRN, where it will be searchable by other academics, once SSRN fixes their recurrent paper-uploading bug...)

Finally, I wish to again express my gratitude for the input of those friends and colleagues who assisted me as I was working through my argument. Were it not for them the paper would not be as good as it is. Of course, any failings that may remain are my fault alone.

I'm not sure who wrote this, but it's a pretty good summary of what the California bar exam was like. Unfortuantely in reading it I'm starting to think I missed issues on the First Amendment question... but on the other hand, it's making me feel better about the wills question.

Well, enough of that. If you, too, would like to be haunted by the horror that was the exam, please do read this summary. For my part I'm amazed that someone was willing to not immediately purge the memory from his/her brain in order to write about it in such a detailed way. Personally, I'd like to never think about it again.

Link changed 3/13 to point to original author.

Might the recent bar exam actually have prepared me to be a better lawyer? Yesterday it suddenly dawned me it might have, and I find it quite distressing to award it any sort of possibly-deserved credence. But at work yesterday I was issue-spotting like crazy and calling upon all sorts of law I'd just had to cram into my head: rules regarding duties to support property, trespass, registration of judgments, remedies, professional responsibility... And just last week I had another conversation where I cited chapter and verse on subject matter jurisdiction.

Meanwhile my work assignment for today includes what essentially amounts to a bar exam performance test.

While I of course love that I'm increasingly confident that I'm able to do lawyerly work, and well, the very idea that preparing for the bar might have helped me do so is making me queasy...

- from the Sesame Street theme song

The days of the bar exam were gray and dank. So was the weather. And then, as if by clockwork, the clouds parted - meteorologically and otherwise. Starting the very next day, the weather has been some variation of completely gorgeous, so every day I've been able to go out and play somehow (walking, kayaking, biking for the first time in months...) It's very healing, and I can feel myself get recharged and ready and excited to head onto what's next. When the sun's shining, everything seems possible.

Today, however, is cloudy rainy... And I have a lot to do.

On retrospect I wish I'd done more to line up a permanent job last fall. It would really be nice right now if I could be enjoying the stability that one would have afforded. On the other hand, however, on retrospect I'm also kind of glad I didn't shoehorn myself into the first thing that paid. It was nice to stew a bit and think about the direction I'd like to take, and then to finally be able to get all my law student-ness sufficiently behind me so I could at last properly focus on steering myself there.

Still, job hunting is an annoying, arduous slog. I've been making progress, networking myself silly, pinging all the temp firms, sending out cover letters... but obviously there's more to do. I've also been working a bit, and I'm really liking the work I'm doing. It's a small firm that actually files litigation, so I'm increasingly getting to learn about the practice, which I enjoy. Unfortunately while it's nourishing educationally it's not so much financially, and I really need to find something more stable so I can earn some proper money, even if it's just on a temporary document review project. However, for some strange reason, no law firm in San Francisco (or maybe even the whole Bay Area) seems to have a box of documents that needs reviewing. I'm astonished that despite having connected with several staffing agencies there's been nothing on that front since I got to town last fall.

But what I'd really like is a proper associate position so I can get my career in gear. I keep reading story after story about how employers are desperate for people, particularly in my part of the world, and particularly in areas of law I'm interested in. I keep wanting to jump up and down and yell, "Over here! Pick me! Pick me! I'd be happy to litigate for you!" I'm happy to step up and fill the void that firms keep claiming they are desperate to fill. (Of course this will entail sending out more cover letters, since I'm pretty sure most firms can't see me waving from here...)

Meanwhile I'm also kicking around some other projects to pursue. For the first time in years my life is entirely my own. No more homework, no more studying, no more exams to pass... My life is a new canvas that I get to decide how to decorate, and I can't wait to get started.

Edit 10/20/08: The answer is definitely "nay" when it comes to Law Crossing. Read the comments below -- including those sponsored by Law Crossing in its spam attack on me -- and this update here.

This job hunting thing is making me nuts. I'm doing great on the networking, having a ton of great conversations with a bunch of great, generous people. But by now I pretty much know all the conventional wisdom, and I'm at the point where the advice I'm getting is starting to conflict.

What I really need, but is hard to conjure up, is a good, promising lead I can submit myself to. I've found some, but they're hard to rustle up and even harder to turn into an interview. Not being licensed out here is not helping either. I suppose it doesn't hurt to be licensed in New Jersey, but in terms of what I can do for people out here today, my options are limited without the local license.

So I find myself waiting. I'll still be working where I've been for the foreseeable future, which is good because it means I'll get the necessary experience so I won't fall behind in terms of my career development, but I'm falling behind in terms where I need to be financially and don't feel comfortable waiting until the bar results arrive in May to get more stable employment worked out (although that may be how things will turn out).

Which leads me to my question: should I subscribe to Law Crossing? I have mixed feelings. Generally, I don't believe job seekers should ever have to pay for a job search. In my experience having to pay has always equated to "scam," because even if it delivered some value, it likely would never deliver as much as an alternate free resource would, and it would seem to exploit the desperation of the unemployed. On the other hand, I've heard a bunch of people talk about Law Crossing, so it does seem to be a reputable site and perhaps a great (if not one of the greatest) job listing resources out there. (Is it?) But on the other, other hand, it did not sit well with me that when I went to sign up that there was absolutely no mention that it would cost anything until it started asking for my credit card, and even when it did, it didn't tell me how much it planned to charge! Not good... These are not signs of a reputable business.

Does anyone have an opinion on this? And if you think I should do it, do you have any idea how I can get a coupon code for one of the discounted first year memberships? Otherwise I think it charges $30/mo, which I don't consider particularly affordable (or a decent value).

I find myself hesitant to talk about my work in any detail, not because I'm afraid of divulging client confidences but because I don't want to tempt trouble with anyone accusing me of being too lawyerly before I'm properly licensed. I'm not: all my work is attorney-supervised, nothing goes out with my name, etc. I even looked up how California defined the unauthorized practice of law, before I got too deeply embroiled, to make sure I'd be ok (I am). I basically do what any law clerk or even brand new associate would do - learn how to do things.

Lately I've been learning how to draft complaints. A complaint is the opening volley in a lawsuit, when the plaintiff tells the court, "This is what the defendant did, it was wrong, and you need to award a remedy for it."

Some complaints can be boiled down to a few checkboxes on a standard form, and I've been working with some software known as Hotdocs to make some of those. But the other day I helped draft one that was constructed out of prose. Using another complaint as a model, after reviewing the file and figuring out the facts, I took a stab at telling the story of the client's complaint. Of course the supervising attorney could have done this without me, and most likely quicker, but my contribution was not negligible. I may just be support staff, but I'm support staff with a JD and can contribute intelligently to the inherent strategic decisions that underlie any drafted complaint.

The thing got done and filed with the court. Which is something of an accomplishment in and of itself, because often the court kicks back complaints for having some sort of defect. When the messenger brought back the papers confirming its successful filing, the attorney I was working with directed him to hand them to me. "It's her first lawsuit."

Indeed it was. "I just helped sue someone!" I marvelled. It was sort of weird knowing that the work I'd just done was soon going to ruin someone's day. It was also very exciting.

In fact, when I slipped out of the office at one point the attorney sent me an email, "Congratulations on your first lawsuit!"

Does Hallmark make cards for this kind of occasion?

I'm teaching swimming lessons again. Not a lot right now, just two classes over the next few Saturdays. This past Saturday was the first day, and so far I've got a Level II class (they can all basically float on their fronts and backs, but that's about it) and a tot class (with the little kids), which are some of my favorite classes to teach.

Technically it is a job, and technically I do get paid, but it's really only covering the cost of the commute and perhaps some pocket change. Well, it did let me get a staff discount on my football season ticket renewal... but otherwise I'm doing it just because I want to. It will allow me to extend my Water Safety Instructor certification for another two years, and of course it's a ton of fun. Call it therapy, even, as I think every lawyer would probably be better off if they got to play Zoo with four year olds from time to time... (In Saturday's class we had a lot of giraffes...)

In theory I could get more hours doing it this summer. (I might even be able to get hours refereeing soccer games too, which is something else I know how to do, now that I'm on the department's payroll.) And part of me would like to (do both). But it really only makes sense if I pursue the hours like I would a hobby. In order for the teaching to support me financially I'd have to do much more of it than I think I can afford in terms of opportunity cost. Every hour teaching is an hour I'm not developing my new career. On the other hand, because I'm still underemployed on the legal front I do still have lots of spare hours that I'd like to turn into cash, and it is nice to have at least some sort of marketable skill I can do that with... But ultimately I'll be best off if I can make the legal ones marketable too.

My plate is pretty full, literally and figuratively.

Figuratively, I just have a lot going on. I've been working a lot, which is good because it means I get money and experience, but not so good in that it cuts into my free time... Actually, the problem is that because my employers and I are both so flexible (they're happy to take whatever time I can offer, and I'm happy to offer whatever time they can take) it's been really hard to establish the routine necessary to use my time more efficiently. And apart from the law work I still have lots to do, like the swim teaching, some other projects I've got going, further job hunting, miscellaneous other crap that needs to get done, regular exercise, and, of course, blogging... As I've discussed before, it's not just about needing the time to do things, it's about needing the mental cycles to be able to pay sufficient attention to them. Particularly for writing (papers, blog posts, cover letters...) it's important to be able to give the efforts enough focus to ensure their quality.

Lately I've been struggling to do that, I think. My muse has been very cranky and inflexible again, and the love affair with words my blogging has inspired these past years I've done it seems to be in dire need of couples' counseling. I hope this isn't how things will always be as a lawyer. I hope this is just a temporary scattered-ness due to lots of things being up in the air right now. In a month I get my bar results, and soon thereafter, I hope, things will begin to land.

Anyway, back to the full plate thing, I also mean it literally (well, metaphorically, at least). You see, I've been cooking! Regularly! Or at least vastly more regularly than I can ever remember doing it before. Having now mastered London Broil, every week I look at the supermarket circulars and plan what I want to cook that weekend. Then I go shopping, where I challenge myself to show up at checkout with the Healthiest Cart of Groceries possible. Yes, Entenmann's chocolate donuts show up in it regularly (unfortunately these ones and not these, which I can't ever find on the West Coast)... but lately so have proper representations of the other USDA-approved food groups. Last week pork chops were on sale, so I made them with a recipe I clipped from a Florida's Orange Juice ad in Reader's Digest. (I'm very embarrassed to admit that I read Reader's Digest, and I swear that I only read them for the anecdotes - and occasional sponsored recipe - and not, I repeat, NOT, for the editorial policy...) Then this weekend I made a cucumber-dill salad and a salmon filet. The salad came out ok, except perhaps a little watery (probably should have drained the cucumbers more). I ended up going off-recipe with some improvisations for the salmon: we didn't have onion powder so I used garlic powder instead; I eyeballed the other spices' measurements; I used almost all the remaining fresh dill from the salad even though it had only called for a bit of dry dill; I added lemon slices, etc. Yet it all came out very nicely, and not at all like someone was cooking it for the very first time.

Yes, I'm practically a veritable Martha Stewart these days. Except without the prison record, of course.

Happy birthday to me!

This picture is obviously from a different birthday... I spent this year's birthday in an arbitration hearing, with much less cake. In fact there was no cake at all. There were, however, cookies and candy. Arbitration is unlike an actual trial in this respect. In fact, it's unlike an actual trial in many respects. While the underlying dispute is still litigated, and by that I mean that each side presents facts and arguments and a ruling is ultimately delivered, it's all much less formal a proceeding than a regular trial. At this one, for instance, we all sat at a long conference table. We could take breaks easily and at the suggestion of either party. There were the aforementioned snacks provided by the organization hosting the arbitration (I think they're mostly offered in support of the mediations that also take place there in the hopes, since mediations are generally non-binding, that parties will be more likely to settle if they don't get cranky from low blood sugar), the judge was (and usually is) an arbitrator chosen by the parties, and there's no avenue of appeal. For an arbitration the parties will have agreed to have their dispute adjudicated privately, outside the direct control of the courts. On the other hand, testimony and evidence is still given, matters of law are still argued, and the rules of evidence still apply. In other words, it's the essence of a trial distilled.

Which was all very interesting to observe, but it did mean I spent my birthday working, which was kind of sad. I've spent the last three birthdays in the midst of final exams, and I was sort of hoping to get one last birthday to myself before I become a full-fledged lawyer and never have any free time again...

Edit 4/29: I wish I could remember what it was like to be one. Or at least I could remember how it felt, that unbridled joy that my face clearly conveys upon seeing the cake...

So here I am once again, apologizing for the lack of posts, which seems to now be a weekly ritual. It's been a while since I've produced anything substantive, although not for lack of trying. I've got a Word doc lying around with the drafts of several meaty posts, none of which have quite evolved yet into something postable for lack of enough attention to give them. My weeks lately have been particularly frenetic as things with my job have heated up and I'm trying to get lots of hours in, since hours conveniently turn into money and experience, and I want to take both when I can get them.

I see, however, how this law career thing can completely eat your life. I get paid hourly and can only get paid for work I do that my firm can bill the client for. Even if I were a regular salaried associate somewhere, the same would essentially be true. You can be *at* work for twelve hours, but you might only have done billable work for eight. The rest of the time is lost to you as work time - meaning time you can't do whatever you want to with - but there's no payoff to you for it being work time since it's only billable work time that you can cash in for pay. Thus being a lawyer requires extremely good time management skills and discipline to make sure you can attend to those eight hours of billable work time as efficiently as possible in order to still have enough time/energy/attention left for yourself and the needs of your own life. Because there's not much room for error - there's only so many hours in the week, and you still need time to eat, sleep, etc. And, as I unfortunately and unexpectedly learned this week ... if you skimp on those on one day, the resulting condition you'll be in will keep you from being properly productive on the next, causing a huge domino effect that can make you behind on everything.

I hope this isn't how it's going to be all week. I tossed and turned all night, and for the final insult, the last dream I had before I woke up was one of those very realistic feeling dreams, the kind that when you wake up it takes you a while to recognize were not real, and in this dream I got my bar results, and I hadn't passed.

Actually, the dream was more irritating than that. They gave me some papers, and I couldn't figure out what they meant. Did I pass? What did they say? What was all this information?

For some reason this dream took place with me sitting in a very similar place as the actual test, in a seat at a long row of tables. Proctors then came around to help everyone figure out all their paperwork. They were very nice, and very gentle, but as my proctor started flipping through my papers, she murmurred, "You did very well. But not quite well enough."

Figures. Because if I don't actually pass it's not because I'm going to go out in a blaze of stupidity. I know I put up a good fight. But was it good enough? This keeps me up nights...

There's no shame in not passing, my conscious mind tries to remind the rest of me. I had at least three friends who didn't pass the California bar, and I don't usually hang out in the company of idiots so we're talking intelligent people here. And I did pass NY, I did pass NJ, and I *am* already a lawyer, dammit...

But I want to be a lawyer here! I want to be able to stay on my houseboat, have a career, enjoy what the Bay Area has to offer. I'm afraid if I don't pass, economically it won't make sense to keep trying to make this work, and I'll need to move back east, where I know I can actually be a lawyer. It's just a damn test, that doesn't worry me; it's the implications of its results on the rest of my life that are causing my sleepless nights.

Anyway, there's only a week of insomnia left to go. I find out my fate on Friday, and in a feat of either marvelously appropriate or incredibly stupid scheduling, at a Huey Lewis and the News concert no less. I really really really hope I don't end up bursting into tears at this one...

Eventually I got my paperwork in, and the New York Board of Bar Examiners said I could get sworn in today. Which I did. I flew into Newark last night, stopped off for dinner at my dad's, then drove up to Albany, where I stayed at Ye Olde Motel 6, which had served me in such good stead back when I took the bar up there. I got to Albany by 11pm yesterday, and was gone by 11am today.

I guess it was convenient scheduling, since I'm using the occasion as an opportunity to see as many friends, relatives, and Huey Lewis and the News concerts I can out on the East Coast, but nevertheless it was a lot of shlep for not that much in the way of ceremony. The Third Department (which I think may admit most lawyers who are not residents of NYC) does attorney admissions once a month (although January and June are the biggest when they do most of the candidates from the previously administered bar exams). At these admission sessions they assemble all the applicants into clumps of 10-20 chairs, where you wait to be called by the person who has been looking over your file for an interview. The interview itself seems to generally be fairly perfunctory, although I suppose they reserve the right to scrutinize you further. Then they send you to another room, where every half hour they do a mass swearing in session. And that's it. Except for waiting to be called to your interview (our interviewer was very nice but extremely arbitrary in how he called people for their turn, as opposed to other interviewers who did a sign-up list for first-come, first serve), it's all very quick.

Afterwards I popped into the restroom to change out of my suit into a t-shirt and shorts, and from there it was off to Boston. What with the drive the previous day up from Secaucus to Albany and now the trip across Massachusetts, it kind of felt like I was doing the last week of last July all over again, but in reverse...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Well, actually, on balance it was pretty good, but read on to see why this might seem surprising. And technically it was more than a weekend I was away. It was almost a week, which for me, Ms. "Three Days in Cambodia," is practically a lifetime. And that's pretty much what it felt like too.

After being sworn into New York I hightailed it off to Boston to visit my mom. And my friend, who lives in the area. The Boston part of the trip was probably the longest part, lasting from mid-Wednesday to mid-Friday. While there I rummaged through my room for things I regretted not having earlier stuffed the car with when I moved to California, and my mom taught me how to make one of my favorite kinds of cookies. Then it was off to Foxwoods, a casino in Connecticut, for the Huey Lewis and the News Concert of Doom.

Yes, because this was the night that the bar results were to come out, and right when the band was to take the stage. This situation led to some confused emotions, since normally I look forward to my HLN concerts but for this one I was in no rush for it to happen at all... In many ways it was sort of an atypical concert for me, in part because of that, and in part because normally I go to my HLN concerts alone. It's rare that I can coerce other people to join me, and even if they are interested it's often logistically difficult to arrange. But in this case, because I'd known about my trip back east for so long, and because there were so many friends in the area who I now so rarely get to see, using the concerts as an opportunity to spend time with each other suddenly made a lot of sense.

Of course, on this occasion, even though my friends joined me at Foxwoods, they didn't actually attend the concert. For that I was on my own. But not really. At this point I'm acquainted with most of the people in the entourage, so as I was getting increasingly agitated in anticipation of the results, I talked to some of them about it and got to vent some of my stress a little. Soon enough though 9:05pm came around. The band had still not taken the stage, which is normal because casinos often hold them up while they stuff more people into the theater. So while I was waiting I pulled out my Treo, called up the bar website, entered my applicant and file numbers... and discovered I hadn't passed.

Oh. Ugh. There was a part of me that wasn't entirely surprised by this - I've always suspected that I didn't quite nail the test - but at the same time, I also thought that passing was a plausible outcome. As well as a highly desirable one. In fact, this sucked, and I was soon starting to process all the ways that it sucked. The first one that came to mind was that it was embarrassing. All these people who believed in me, waiting with bated breath for my result... I had to face them, and I had to face them now. So I called my mom, I called my dad, I called my friend there in Foxwoods waiting for me, I called another friend, and I called my sister, although before I could leave her a message the concert broke out...

Which brought to bore another reason why this turn of events sucked: it was ruining my HLN concert, and I feared would ruin the rest of the weekend. As the music started my brain was in overdrive, trying to figure out how to cope with this unpleasant reality. It took my attention away from the show and prevented me from really enjoying it (which was too bad, because it was a nice performance and included some songs I don't often hear them play), but at the same time, I came to be really glad I was there. I had an hour and a half to myself to work through it, with no one I had to talk to, and I was in one of my most favorite environments. Spending that moment at the concert, a moment which I was fated to spend somewhere, one way or another, was like falling into a gentle nest of soft pillows. It was safe and comforting, and that was exactly what I needed right then. I also remember keying in to some of Huey's lyrics in particular, "I'll carry on, as best as I can, I'll find the strength to face another day," which struck me as a nice sentiment to tap into.

(Of course, the rest of the song, being a lament about being cheated on by his mistress, was inapplicable.)

After the show I informed the roadies I'd already talked to that I hadn't passed. They couldn't believe it. After all, they know me as a smart, educated person - surely there was no question I could pass this test. So I got to work on spinning it. "California's a tough nut to crack. It's the hardest bar in the country, with really picky standards." They still held out hope that it was a clerical error, but at this point I didn't. Although I was still largely in an information vacuum, I knew I had to presume that this was the situation, and the sooner I came to terms with it the better. I did worry, because the prospect bothered me, that failing the bar could make me lose people's respect. Surely if I was smart I would have passed, so that does it say about me that I didn't? But the damage control I did to salvage their opinions turned out to be a useful exercise to save my own. The last thing I needed was to beat myself up over it. People who know me know that I can be my own harshest critic, and I could see myself at a crossroads: I could either sulk myself into a morose tailspin that would destroy my entire weekend (at minimum), or I could deal with it. So I dealt with it.

Still, it was enough trauma that after the concert I was ready to call it a day. I met up my friends (who it turned out were still my friends even though I hadn't passed...) and we retired to the hotel. Which was good, because I had an early day the next day. My east coast trips tend to be whirlwinds of traveling and visiting, as I try to see everyone I can. They tend to be exhausting... but they also tend to be rewarding because I do get to see so many people I care about. After Foxwoods I was off to Atlantic City for two more HLN concerts, via a stop to visit my grandma. I didn't have long to spend though, because I had to get to Atlantic City to meet up with friends coming up from Washington, friends I hadn't seen all together since law school (almost a year ago!), and I couldn't wait to see them now.

I had booked a room at the Boardwalk Howard Johnson's, which I knew was crummy but was nearby the Atlantic City Hilton, which is even crummier. In fact, it's so crummy that the band has since declared it will never play there again. But for the moment two shows were scheduled there, and my friends were going to join me for the first. I'd already brought two of them to HLN shows before (I recall one of them remembering, "I hadn't known you five minutes before you'd invited me to a Huey Lewis and the News concert," which he indeed went to) but two of them had never been. And even though the Hilton completely screwed us on our seats, everyone enjoyed the show. I was so glad. And so glad just to spend time with them. One of the benefits of growing older is that you can discover and enjoy what an amazing thing it is to have old friends, the people who know you so well that you never have to explain yourself. It's so comfortable to be with them, it feels like family (except less dysfunctional, perhaps...). Especially this weekend, I couldn't think of anyone I'd rather have spent it with.

They had to leave the next day, so I went to the last concert myself. No thanks to the Hilton, with whom I've spent hours and hours arguing, I did manage to end up with a great spot by the stage and thoroughly enjoyed the last show. And afterwards I got to talk to more of the entourage and get a lot more friendly support to finish scraping what was left of me still on the ceiling. I don't often like to publicly talk about my relationships with any of these people, because it feels contrived and affected, as if the purpose of knowing and talking to them is solely to be able to cite the conversation as some sort of trophy. But at the same time, as could probably be inferred from regular reading of this blog, we're not strangers to each other either, and I've come to know them as lovely people. Very nice, as they are often reputed to be, and also extremely intellectual, much more than people might expect. Which is not to say that people generally believe them to be Neanderthals, but given that the entrance requirements for intelligence in their professional field are not known to necessarily be all that high, it might come as a surprise to some to discover just how erudite they are. As a result their respect and validation has meant a lot to me, and especially did on a weekend such as this.

The next day I visited my cousins, and from there it was time to come home, home to California. I was ready. Surprisingly ready, surprisingly healed, and surprisingly ready to move on.

Well, I was right: I did very nearly pass the bar exam. I needed a 1440 (out of 2000) to pass; I had a 1400. I don't even have the inclination to beat myself up for it, it's all too aggravating and mystifying. Like why is it that I did 15 points worse on the MBE this time around? Particularly given that it was my second experience with it, I didn't feel as shellshocked by it this time around, and I'd actually studied more for it this time than last. It makes no sense, and thus concerns me for going forward. After all, if studying more seemed to undo me, exactly how do I fix that?

Because I'm going to do it again, and I'm obviously going to have to study for it. I can barely remember this crap at the moment, so I'll have to stuff my head with it all over again. Which is a disgusting prospect. I want to stuff my head with actual, practical law, not this garbage. I feel like I'm being asked to do the mental equivalent of being forced to eat nothing but McDonald's for the next two months. Yeah, it won't actually kill me, but I'd be much better off if I instead consumed something more nourishing.

So I will do a bunch of practice MBE questions, even though I fear the entire MBE may be a moving target (I felt like the summer and winter administrations were quite different, and I'm not sure the BarBri and PMBR materials I have to work from necessarily correlate to the MBE's current form). I also will do more practice essays this time around and see if I can up those scores. They were nearly high enough, but not quite given the MBE score I got this time around. I'll be interested to see my answers again, assuming I get them back. (I'm having trouble parsing the letter from the bar on this topic, where the first sentence indicates that you won't get them back and the second sentence indicates that you will.) I know I punted some issues on the First Amendment question and confused some defenses for the criminal law question, but I thought I wrote a model essay for wills, although judging from my score apparently the bar examiners didn't agree...

Back in February as the test neared I'd wished I had had one more week to study, and on retrospect I also wish that I'd done more practice essays, but otherwise it's hard to know how to improve now since I didn't feel, and the results also don't bear out, that I'd completely screwed something up. Perhaps I'd just been too cocky, having passed NY and NJ, and didn't quite apply myself with a sufficient sense of panic. I think I might be able to achieve that this time though, as I really don't want the California bar exam to be the white whale that haunts me for the rest of my life.

So the efforts are underway. I booked my hotel the night I found out about the results, and this week I'll register for the test. Also this week I'll begin studying in earnest. I've tracked down some materials for the new subjects that they'll test on, and next I'll work out a study schedule. I'm going to still work while I do this, which is a tough call, but I can't afford, mentally and financially, not to. Simply having income reduces lots of stress, so in that way it will actually help my studying, and my work is becoming increasingly interesting and I would feel extremely disappointed if I didn't get to do it. Instead I'll cut back my hours and cut back my projects. For the most part, for the next few weeks I'll just be reviewing 30,000 pages of documents, which should be perfect...

Edit: Geez... According to The Recorder (May30, 2007), only 36.8 percent of the people who took the exam passed. I'm sure I'm in some distinguished company, with some future law school deans or attorney generals... But what's really weird, last July 51.8 percent passed. What is going on?

I've come to a couple of realizations over the past week or so, as I've been dealing with the bar result, et al. The biggest one is that I surrender too much esteem much too easily, much too often. For example, I keep waiting to be anointed a lawyer by the jurisdiction where I'm living and working. And obviously that's going to take a while. But as everyone and their brother has been reminding me, and as I have the copies of my certificates of good standing in my pocket attesting to, I am a lawyer. Already. And it's time to comport myself as one, even here.

This means that I am going to detach my bar exam efforts from my career development efforts. Well, to a small extent they'll remain connected, just because the studying will need to take a certain priority for the next few weeks. But I'd kept trying to get all the ducks in a row, to get the license and then look for a job. And I'm not going to worry about doing that anymore. I'm licensed in two jurisdictions, including the second hardest in the country, and that should be able to speak for me. Other people move to California and get jobs on the strength of their past licenses and then take the bar, and so should I be able to as well.

Relatedly, I've been needlessly dismissive of my career thus far, and it's time to stop trying to excuse it and instead start promoting what I've done. Simply because there wasn't a ton of fanfare in being hired for the job I've been doing and the fact that I don't formally have the title of "associate" does not dismiss that it is, in fact, a substantive legal job, where I'm doing associate-type work. I've been there since November, which so far gives me at least 6+ months of experience in what I'd describe as litigation boot camp.

It's a small firm, and as a result there are not levels of staffing strata to dole things out to - the lawyers themselves do nearly everything. Which makes it a great learning experience as I can see how entire cases work, and even though litigation tends to take eons to progress, I've been there long enough to start to see entire stages of their lifecycle. It also means that the work I do can actually make a difference, and I get to be right up close to the cases. My understanding is that in some larger firm environments, an associate might be given a specific task, with no idea of the context for it. Whereas I get to read the case files and know, even when I'm doing enormous document reviews, what I'm looking for and why. And (even though I like document review - ssh! don't tell!) I get to do other things, like work on discovery and even some drafting.

It's sometimes rough. It's all new to me, particularly since I'd had very little firm experience before this. (While having had a previous career as a webmaster might in the long run be a good thing, in the short run it would have been more helpful to me right now if I'd actually been a paralegal instead...) Every day feels like I'm climbing an enormous learning curve. But, from what I'm starting to gather, every first year associate feels that way. And I'm starting to have more and more good days where I do feel like I know what's going on... Also the lawyers I've been working with have been extremely generous about teaching me things. The associate I work most closely with goes out of her way to show me things connected to the practice, even when they don't necessarily bear on a task I need to complete. (She also hounds me to read Rutter guides as well...) The principal of the firm more often tasks me for legal research, and then discusses the legal merits of cases with me, clearly valuing my opinion.

It's been a nice situation, and as I reflect on it I feel really lucky. There is the question though of "what next?" since I don't think I can stay as a post-JD law clerk forever... Discussions have been floated about staying there more permanently, and I need to think about, if it were possible, if I'd want that. From a practice standpoint it's a great environment for learning a ton, and in some important ways staying here would be a good career and lifestyle choice. But I have to decide whether it would be the right one for me. For instance, while there are the occasional tech law/IP things that come up, the practice is mostly built around debt collection (which I don't particularly enjoy, except that it's interesting to see how remedies play out), and real estate/construction defect cases. Those are actually surprisingly interesting and good vehicles for learning about litigation practice. Plus they are fairly tangible cases, with tangible injuries that are easier to assess and value than more ephemeral rights might be. But, while one of my goals is to build up a body of litigation skills, I also wish to build up a body of expertise in technology law, and that may be hard to do here.

Either way, I need to focus more on what I want from my career, and then go for it. I'll probably shuffle along with the status quo up through the bar, but then it'll be time to start making some plans and executing on them, whatever and wherever I decide them to be.

I figured I'd give a status report in lieu of the substantive blogging I'm not having time for (it's not like the Supreme Court has done anything newsworthy lately, right?): I'm working on the studying thing, and I'm working on the working thing. I'm almost through with my 30,000 documents, but I only have 4-5 working days left to finish. I've basically been working 3 days a week for as many hours as I can manage, and using the other days for studying. At least to the extent I'm able to motivate myself to. There's something about the studying that actually hurts, having to crack open my head and pour in this garbage. I suppose I'm very stressed about it, but I'm mostly pissed off. For one thing, there are so many more worthwhile things (legal things, even) I'd rather be using my brain for. And for another, I'm so not a fan of worthless standards of measure, and that's what the bar exam is. I've crunched the numbers: simply having caught one or two more issues across six essays and two performance tests and gotten six more multiple choice questions correct would have avoided this predicament. How can anyone take such an arbitrary system seriously? People come up to me now while I'm studying and say things like, "You're very bright. I'm sure you'll have no problem." To which I have to say, "Yeah, well I was bright the last time, and a lot of good that did me." Being bright obviously has nothing to do with passing the bar exam, as all the idiots out there practicing law are testament to.

But I do seem to have a certain traction among some in the lay community, who see me as intelligent and capable. Which is not to say I don't have any esteem in the legal community, but there's always qualifiers: grades, quality of law school, bar admissions, etc. Among lawyers there's always some reason people can find to tarnish your luster. But among real people, I don't generally have that problem. I'm smart, I'm educated - and people respect that.

So a while ago I'd started to think, maybe I'm trying to hang out in the wrong pond. Like the aphorism goes, isn't it much better to be a big fish in a small pond, than a small fish in a big one? Like maybe instead of being lost among lawyers I should put myself in a different world, one where I could be more important.

But that didn't feel quite right. First of all, if the analogy holds, it would mean I'd be copping out of the legal profession, somehow running away because I was unable to hack it. And that's not what I'm about. Frustrating as the legal field can be, I'm not looking to escape it. Then the other day I realized that the analogy was actually the other way around. The legal world is the small pond. The pond I want to be in is the bigger one, the broader world. What I really want is to do work that matters, and for that to happen it needs to matter to everyone.

I had a funny conversation recently with some interesting people I met at a party. Our acquaintance had begun with a debate over the single most important technological innovation in the last two hundred years. I had disagreed with their original assertion, and systematically explained why, citing both my own rationale and the work of others (e.g., James Burke). (Yes, this is the kind of conversation I tend to have at parties.) My rhetorical analysis seemed to impress them and the original antagonism evolved into a genuine respect. "What do you do?" they then asked me. But when I told them I was becoming a lawyer, it was like I'd stabbed them in the heart. In their minds I was completely wasted as a lawyer. "Well, what kind of lawyer?" they ventured cautiously. When I told them technology law, the color returned to their faces. Yes, that I was clearly right for. But anything else...

Which is kind of amusing, since all my life people have told me I should be a lawyer and I resisted for many years. So it's interesting now that I've become one to hear people tell me the opposite... But I think what they're really saying is something I'm trying to remember to tell myself, which is to not get lost in this profession. Becoming a lawyer was always supposed to be a means to an end, the ability to do something important and needed. It was never supposed to be the end itself.

There have been a few cultural influences that have wound with me through law school. Huey Lewis and the News, of course, and also Harry Potter (occasionally even at the same time).

Now, as I reach the end of my journey to become a lawyer (gosh I really hope this is the end...) Harry reaches the end of his journey to become a wizard -- or so I would gather, since I haven't read the final book. In fact, many a bar candidate has lamented this final insult, that the final installment of the series has come smack in the middle of our final bar study push. So what's a poor bar candidate to do?

Fortunately today and tomorrow require so much studying that there won't be much time to think about it. Or watch much TV or read much on the web, thus lowering the risk of exposure to spoilers. Monday, however, by design I'm hardly planning to study at all, so I'm thinking that may be a good time to read the book, after I've gone up to Sacramento and inevitably become bored. If, of course, it doesn't make me stay up too late reading it all in one sitting...

I sort of goofed yesterday, having had a coke at lunch, because it made me stay up too late last night and so I'm not too spry today. At least not yet. But otherwise I'm feeling essentially under the control. I'm maybe half a day behind where I want to be, but that's much better than the previous occasion when I felt several days behind. After I quit working last week it took me a few days to get sorted out, but eventually I fell into a routine. I tend to only be able to study in two-hour blocks, after which I find a need a change in scenery, so I typically putz around doing other things in the morning, then go out to eat and linger over my books at the restaurant (nothing extravagant, usually just Burger King). Then I usually go to the library for another study block.

It's kind of strange because historically I've not been a library-studier. I prefer to stay at home without the stress of needing to pack up and shlep to a foreign environment. But lately I've been finding I really need the structure a destination affords me, and it also makes me feel better in another way. One of my greatest laments is that despite all this open-ended time and gorgeous weather I've not been able to do a bike ride. I just haven't wanted to risk the disruption to my schedule due to the prep time, cycling time, and recovery time from dehydration. So at least the library affords me some exercise since it's about a mile and a half walk away, with a few hills involved.

In a way I guess it's good that Harry Potter is forcing me to have an Internet moratorium of sorts, because it's making me uneasy to keep stumbling on people's bar blogs. Last night, for instance, I saw one guy say, "Yeah, I really only study about 15 hours a day." Whereas I'm quite proud for regularly hitting four (though yesterday was 6!). But I'm in a different situation than other people. For one, I didn't have to learn this all from scratch. In fact, the only thing truly new for me was California evidence distinctions, since agency and partnership had been on the New York bar, and I'm learning California civil procedure through my job. For another, I've seen the test. Not this exact test, of course, and trust the bar examiners to throw in a few wild cards this time around... but it was like when I was younger and had to take the SAT in high school. The fact that I'd first taken it when I was 12 made it a lot less intimidating.

Last time I studied until my brain became almost paralyzed, so I think the fact that I'm much less uptight is a good thing. It's not that I'm blowing it off, but I'm aware that there are diminishing returns, and even counter-productive results, to lambaste myself into spending every speck of waking energy on this. Instead I've tried to work smarter, not harder. I put myself on a cycle of manageable bite size chunks of subject review (reading), essay outlines, and MBE questions that ideally brings up a subject and reinforces it every few days. Also, last time I had hardly done any essay outlines, which I decided on retrospect was a mistake, so already I feel better about where I am. Meanwhile I've decided to mostly do PMBR MBE practice questions, since last time I only did BarBri's and I wasn't happy with the results. Sure, it might be better if I did another two-hour block of studying every day, but I think just having simplified my life and keeping myself mentally under control means that the studying I have done has been more meaningful.

Anyway, today's plan is to close the loop on the last subject I need to review and finish up a few MBE questions outstanding from this week's itinerary. Then, even though I've already outlined at least two essays in every subject, I'll run through at least one of each all again. Tomorrow then is dedicated to doing a 100 or 200 question (I haven't decided yet) MBE practice test and review of a performance test (not that they're hard, but picking up points on them forgive a lot of sins on the essays, score-wise).

Then hopefully that's enough. I do feel very comfortable with spotting issues, but the part where I feel a little nervous is when it comes to memorization. I'll read and understand lists of elements and such, but the specifics seem to bounce right off my brain. To a certain extent that's ok, the actual rules can be fudged on the test, but I suspect I'll feel better and it will make my life easier if I can rattle things off more precisely so I'll probably need to add some memory drills to my schedule somewhere.

After all, if Harry and Ron and Hermione can rattle off all those spells and incantations by heart, surely I can rattle off a few rules of law...

Expecto patronum....

Day one of the bar is now done. I feel iffy about it, although perhaps that's a good sign since past results bore no logical relation to the degree of iffyness felt. Today had a torts essay (products liability, some negligence), a property essay (again with the landlord-tenant law???) and one on evidence that oddly enough hardly involved any of the California distinctions we had to torture ourselves learning. I didn't really struggle with the law so much on any of these, except maybe the evidence essay where I think I declared something admissible that isn't, but I think it will really come down to whether the bar examiners like the way I wrote my essays. Last time they apparently weren't too crazy about them, which was kind of disheartening because I'd IRAC'd myself silly. Yet when I looked at all the model essays in the BarBri practice essay book this time around, they weren't really IRAC'd so specifically. So I tried to do these essays this time more like the way the BarBri model answers looked. Will that pay off? The way things go, probably not (but if I can just hang in there and only slightly improve on the last exam performance that'll be enough).

I was kind of tired heading into the afternoon performance test (not entirely sure why, I didn't stay up that late last night...) but I guess it came out ok. Except I was having a hard time not being persuasive. It was a judge's memo, so I think I was supposed to generally be objective, but I quickly came to the opinion that the moving party was a dumbass, and it was hard to ignore (especially when I felt I could justify it - persuasively).

Then again, I spent most of the day with the really strong urge to use the word "dumbass" in an essay somewhere, which is somewhat unusual given that I rarely use it in my vocabulary. But I'm feeling kind of mercenary these days, and sometimes you just need to call a spade a spade. Or a dumbass, as the case may be.

(E.g., what would you call someone who fills a blender up to the top with scalding hot soup, turns it on high, and doesn't bother to hold the lid down? The answer apparently is "plaintiff.")

More MBE hijinx tomorrow, which I may or may not be prepared for. I feel like I did a lot of practice questions, although it's probably about the same amount as I've normally done. My scores on the drills were all over the place, although mostly in the "demoralizing" zone, but at this point I think I just need to be confident. I know a ton of rules; it's just parsing out the moronically-written questions that can be tough.

The whole bar exam is still hideously boring with ages and ages of down time, but this time there is an unexpected upside (well, two upsides if you also count that this room is carpeted and therefore much quieter). Because it turns out that instead of being here all by myself, I bumped into someone I know from Bucerius. Actually, I scarcely could have avoided her, because not only was she in Sacramento, in my test center... in my testing room... in my row... She's the person seated next to me! Thousands of people are taking this test, and I end up sitting next to someone I know. From Germany. How weird... But also nice, as it's someone to talk to during all the waiting. We're trying to exchange phone numbers so we can keep in touch afterwards, but since we're not allowed to bring paper in or out, we have to figure out how to do it without getting disbarred...

Yesterday I had to switch rooms at the hotel. On checking in I had asked for a quiet room. I suppose they thought a room away from the highway would be considered quiet. I suppose they might have been right, had the generic-looking building across the driveway not been a nightclub that played pulsating music all night.

And speaking of hotels, I wonder whose bright idea it was to send out a squadron of representatives from the Sacramento Visitors Bureau (or something like that) to meet us on the stairs of the convention center as soon as we arrived on the first morning to quiz us on our choice of hostelry during the exam. Glazed, semi-panicked looks hardly dissuaded them as they persisted in their appointed inquiry, because of course there's nothing any bar exam candidate would like better to do first thing in the morning on the first day of the most important test of their lives than answer a marketing survey.

Anyway, the room switch has seemed to work out, and I got a decent night's sleep. I got up early and started reviewing for the day's upcoming MBE, mostly by reviewing about 80 questions' worth of answers in one of my PMBR books. I dislike the PMBR books because they don't always explain why other choices are wrong, but I like them better than the BarBri books in that their explanations seem to capture the demonic logic of the National Council of Bar Examiners more faithfully. But I was having trouble paying attention, because I kept remembering everything I forgot to include in the previous day's essays and performance test. It's very demoralizing, realizing how many points I left on the table. Especially since I went to some effort to not have that happen, and as past results indicate, I need every point I can get.

Today's MBE hasn't made me more cheerful about my prospects. I'm know that by even mentioning it I'm risking the National Council of Bar Examiners smiting my firstborn, as they threaten to do in the rather overreaching adhesion contract on the front of the test booklets (ok, that's a slight exaggeration, but since when did cancellation of exam scores or professional discipline become a remedy for copyright infringement?), but that was a crummy six hours. I had an enormous headache all through it (still do), and there were all sorts of questions on there covering rules I've never even seen on any outline, plus what seemed like dozens of niggling, repetitive questions on every area I was weak on.

But maybe I'm being overly concerned. Maybe I shouldn't worry so much. After all, as my fortune cookie at lunch told me, "You do not have to worry about your future."

So much for changing hotel rooms. I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of repeated thumping. Someone in the room next door was kicking the wall over and over and over, and I'm sure your imagination is as good as mine in figuring out why... So I kicked the wall myself a few times, which as everyone knows is the international sign for "please stop kicking the wall." The banging didn't stop, but at least the wall stopped getting kicked...

I checked out in the morning and drove back downtown for the last day. The morning essays were on contracts with a bit of agency, a murder-first amendment combo, and community property. I have some concerns about how I handled the community property one (it was somewhat different than the ones I'd practiced) but otherwise my general feeling is just as negative as it was any other day.

On the other hand (clearly my left one, since my right still hurts from all that writing) it was so nice to be sitting with my friend. We jabbered away during the breaks, went out to lunch the last two days... It made the last three days almost seem fun. Had there not been all the pressure associated with the test, it almost would have been an enjoyable few days away.

Of course I think I need to operate under the assumption that I didn't pass. It's too long a wait to find out (four months) to get my hopes up if it turns out they'll just be dashed again. Hopefully though the caution is misplaced. I don't think I bombed the test. I just know I wasn't perfect, and I don't know how far from perfect I'm allowed to be. With any luck I was just perfect enough because I really don't want to have to do this again.

Like the raven said, "Nevermore."

On retrospect, maybe the California bar exam wasn't so bad. At least Sacramento had plenty of restrooms. And my essays didn't get eaten by buggy software...

While I reserve the right to complain further about the bar exam generally (because it's still deserving of quite a bit of criticism) I'm done worrying about how I did on this particular one. I've got other things to worry about now and can't spend any more bandwidth on this.

I've also moved on to my next legal adventure: the New Jersey CLEs. Today was the first one. In some ways it was really interesting and very practical. On the other hand, the six hour flood of information wasn't really useful as either an overview or a tutorial. I'm also Not Happy that these courses have homework that must be completed, and soon, in order to get credit. I was really looking forward to NOT having to study law in all my free time for a change, but no such luck, apparently.

Objectively I do think this CLE program has some significant flaws, including that it must be completed in person in New Jersey. I also think its utility is lessened by a somewhat amorphous curriculum. But it is an interesting concept: teaching new lawyers how to lawyer. So while I've got issues with the particular execution of the ideal, I don't fault it as a requirement. In fact, it's probably one of the most rational requirements I've ever had to satisfy in my quest to become a lawyer.

Today's course was on family law, and later this week I'll do real estate law, wills and trusts, professional responsibility, and civil trial preparation. Since each class is an all-day affair I bring lunch. Yesterday my dad, whom I'm staying with to do this, offered to pack me one. And like I always enjoyed when I was younger, he even included a note.

Unfortunately it was a lawyer joke...

I just emailed someone with the message, "Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, but I was in depositions all week."

Yes, I can actually sound pretentious with authority now, as I was indeed in depositions this week. Actually, just the last two days of it, but the earlier part of the week was spent embroiled in preparation for them. A trial approaches, so all the last-minute discovery (read: gathering of all the information and evidence needed for trial) is now taking place, and as a result things have been busy and will remain so for the forseeable future.

But about the depositions. Deposition-taking is one of the basic activities of litigators, and thus a skill I'll need to have. These were the first I'd ever even attended, so at first I was glad that I didn't have to do them. But soon I decided it was unfortunate that I couldn't because after all the document review I've done I would have known what to ask. And, I suspect, were it not for my license situation, my firm probably would have let me. But since I'm not a California attorney officially representing this client, I metaphorically taped my mouth shut and instead assisted my boss, taking notes and passing him suggestions of questions he could then ask himself.

It was all a great learning experience though, and it was good to see how depositions play out before they fall on my shoulders to do for real. It was also nice to walk away with a sense of confidence that I could have actually done them for real. In a way, I've already done things like them before. Years ago, way before law school but at the naissance of this career evolution, I toyed with becoming a journalist. The interviewing skills I worked on then are very much transferable to deposition-taking. In both situations you are generally trying to get people to say things for the record and need to form clear questions to elicit what you want. The formalities for depositions are different, as are the strategies involved in crafting your approach, but, generally speaking, crisp, clear questions and sufficient preparation are key for both.

As I mentioned the other day, I saw three Huey Lewis and the News concerts last week. Which actually reflects a great deal of maturity and restraint, as there was a fourth concert I could have theoretically gone to, but I once again chose to sit it out due to time/money allocation issues.

But that's ok because the three I saw were plenty of HLN-goodness, particularly the first, which I'll describe in a bit. The latter two were last Friday and Saturday nights at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga (and not "Los Gatos" as Huey mistakenly called out during "Heart of Rock and Roll" in the spot where he usually changes the "Detroit!" exclamation lyric to wherever he's playing, although it's not like Saratoga is any more impressive a rock and roll town than Los Gatos is, as anyone who's ever been to these wealthy suburban enclaves can surely attest). It's a decent venue though, high on the hill overlooking Silicon Valley. I like to sit on the bleachers at the side of the stage so I can actually see the keyboardist and drummer work for a change, since normally they are obstructed by their instruments.

The staff are also quite nice, and were once again very helpful in supporting my harebrained scheme to ride my bike to the show Saturday. It turns out a year is long enough to forget how awful that 62+ mile bike ride is from Sausalito to Saratoga, so once again I foolishly inflicted it on myself.

Well, it's actually not too bad a ride:

The route is over the Golden Gate and down to the Great Highway, then up and over Daly City. Laugh heartily (or bitterly) at its "Elevation: 800 ft" sign before eventually hooking up with the 280 corridor as it follows the San Andreas fault. Gently descend along the bucolic mid-peninsula lakes, prepared to yield for chipmunks and deer, and then catch the stick-straight Cañada Road to Woodside. From there pass by the venture capitalists of Sand Hill road before jogging around Stanford. The Foothill Expressway then takes you most of the way there before leaving you to fjord the traffic of Cupertino. Fortunately there's only a few more flat roads until the final insult of the 1.5 miles up Pierce Road, which summits at the Mountain Winery gate. Hitch a ride up the driveway (cyclists aren't permitted on it) and then you're there. Piece of cake.

I was joking that since I hadn't ended up collapsed in a ditch somewhere during last year's attempt, there was no reason why I shouldn't do it again this year. Yes, well... This year's ride was a little bit better than last, mostly because I now knew the route and could better pace myself. But it was worse because I'd not eaten nor slept properly over the last week, and as a result I was essentially bonking even before I hit the Golden Gate Bridge. I persevered, however, and made it in decent time (no land speed records, but within the time I had hoped). Unfortunately I was so wiped out by the time I got there I had a hard time enjoying the show. It was a little like May's Foxwoods show, only this time I was more physically checked-out than mentally so. Also, I still haven't quite worked out all the accompanying logistics, like how to get me and my bike back home afterwards. Despite some valiant efforts both occasions, I keep ending up sort of all Blanche DuBois and very dependent on the kindness of strangers (er, well, other acquaintances) to help me out on those details...

Fortunately everything all worked out, and it really only took me Sunday to recover. In fact by Monday I felt great. Not only not sore at all, but completely recharged. Maybe some of that's from the concert, maybe some of that's from the exercise. Or maybe it's from having an entire day where I didn't have to think about law... But either way, maybe it's something I'll do again next year.

I'm barging into my self-produced near-silence to announce that I FINALLY FINISHED MY CLE HOMEWORK!!!! Yay!! I can get my life back! And just think of the possibilities: fun! regular blogging! learning to actually like the law again!

Of course, they do grade these things, and for any of these five assignments they could kick back to me more homework on any of them if they didn't like my performance. Which would really, really suck. And probably make me cry.

On the other hand, I did make a good faith effort on everything. I'm hoping therefore, based on something they said in their instructions, that they reserve the do-overs for people who did their original work in pencil and such. And at least by having handed something in by the deadlines I staved off being doomed to repeat the whole freaking course again, which, as we all well know, would have required another trip to New Jersey. Even I'm inclined to make dismissive New Jersey jokes when faced with that prospect...

Stay tuned though for next year when I'll have to do still more courses, also physically in New Jersey, but at least from what I hear they don't require homework. I did, of course, chuckle bitterly at the evaluation questionnaire they asked us to submit with our final assignment, where they solicited our opinion on the form this course should take in the future. How nice of them to ask... I'm inclined to presume they'd either never asked before, or else all previous New Jersey lawyers are nothing but evil bastards who all checked off the "yes! this course should absolutely be nothing but unhelpful mandatory lectures with impossible and infinitely-long assignments thereafter" option just to stick it to the next generation...

Happy 5768! Thursday was the Jewish New Year. I didn't make it to services, but I did stay home for the day and performed one of my favorite rituals, tashlich.

For tashlich one goes to a flowing body of water and casts off breadcrumbs as a symbolic way of casting off one's sins. Since I live on a flowing body of water, this was a very convenient ritual. But I didn't want to just throw my sins out the window, as they'd just wash right back up on our porch, and that would seem to defeat the purpose. So I instead boarded the kayak and paddled out to the middle of Richardson Bay.

It was one of those gorgeous early Fall days out on the Bay, one of my favorite places to be meditative. In many ways this is a time of great newness for me, and I took some time to think about it. With the completion of the last of those CLEs an enormous fog has finally been lifted. It's a fog I've been in for years, all through law school and its year-long aftermath as I've been racing around doing everything I needed to do before I could finally start living this new life as a lawyer. Now, though, that all the CLEs and (hopefully!) bar exams are behind me it looks like I'll never need to do legal homework ever again. It's very freeing to finally get to think about what I'd like to have in my life instead.

I've already got some ideas, and I'll probably take some more time in the coming days to be reflective about where I've come from and where I'm going. But tashlich for me was part of that process, where I cast off not sins so much, per se, but aspects of my character that I wish to improve as I set forth on this new life.

Out there on the bay I had taken out two slices of bread. I'm not sure if that means I'm so shallow as to think I don't need a whole loaf to do the job, or if it suggests I'm so neurotic as to require all the pieces that two whole slices would afford. Either way, however, this is what I thought was necessary to get what I wanted from the experience.

I began by tearing a strip, tossing it, then paddling on. All went well with this, until the seagulls got wind of what I was doing. Something you should realize is how close Richardson Bay is to Bodega Bay, which is where Hitchcock's The Birds was filmed. So you can understand my discomfort when I'm suddenly followed by a squadron of seagulls trying to eat my sins...

So I mentioned a few weeks back that I was going to a wedding. Two of these three people got married:

Poor Huey, I'd kind of blindsided with the camera. But it was very nice for him to have agreed to the picture and let me introduce him to my friends. Some people bring their friends home to meet their parents, I bring my friends to meet Huey Lewis... (Well, to be fair, we've all met each others' families too.)

Unfortunately Huey himself failed to attend said wedding, which I was suppose was due in some small part to him having absolutely no idea it was taking place. In his absence, however, I nobly led my table in an a capella-cum-rhythmic rendition of highlights from the HLN song "Stuck with You," which, believe it or not, was actually contextually appropriate...

I realize that my blog lately has become "all Huey Lewis, all the time." Some of that is a creature of timing, as I did recently see a bunch of concerts. Some of that is because, while I get back on the blogging wagon, it's easiest to write about what I already know. The legal posts always require at least some research, even if it's just wrangling up links to other sites so I can confirm that my assertions at least have some basis in reality. Law school has drilled into me that sort of diligence, but unfortunately it comes with a lot of overhead to not "post first and ask questions later." I suppose it will make me more credible as a blogger in the long run, but unfortunately in the short run it also makes me more slow...

And some of this recent HLN topicality is because of how they've ended up being my bellwether throughout this whole great change thing and provided me some with the best opportunities to take measure of where I am with it. It's become clear that my ability to enjoy their concerts and company has hinged on my state of mind at the time. Which is of note now because the last several events provided the first occasions I'd had to see, reflected back to me, how markedly I've changed even just recently.

I'm not entirely sure how to characterize what's different. I'm not even entirely sure I can characterize it as wholly good, although clearly it is good in many ways. I suppose it can be described as a new confidence, which, of course, is most welcome. But I fear that it also includes something of a hardening, and this concerns me. I'm always happy to shed insecurity, but I worry I may have inadvertently also shed, I don't know how describe it, perhaps a kind of sensitivity? I worry because I don't want to lose what I think was good about me in the quest to become better. But I don't really think it was in becoming more confident that I may have become more hardened, if that is the word. What I do think is that this hardening may have actually been a by-product of becoming a lawyer altogether, and I'm not quite sure what to do about that.

Except perhaps to postpone worrying about it for another day, because with this new confidence comes recognition of new capabilities and potential, and that is fun. Returning to the wedding mentioned above, it was wonderful to get to share in Mike and Rosa's special day, but it was also special to be there because it turned out to be a reunion of sorts of our circle of friends from law school. As we wished one of our own well as he moved on in his life (married!) it became clear that, one year out of law school, all of us were moving on. Or "growing-up," as one friend noted. Marriages, careers... We're all working now, with at least one successful bar exam under all our belts. We've all come such a long way since the first year of law school when we first met, and it's clear we're all well on our way to what's next.

Now that I have more control over what I can do with my life I've decided to pick back up with the improv classes. The original reasons for doing it still apply - e.g., working on poise, quick-wittedness, etc. - but also, now that my days are starting to get consumed with law, it's good to make sure I get a chance to laugh from time to time.

(I suppose it's no surprise that out of the four women in the class, three of them are lawyers.)

Even though I'd done two levels of courses before, because it was a few years ago and I'm studying with a different outfit this time, I'm back in an intro course, going over the basics. The basics basically boil down to a performer 'making an offer,' and the other(s) picking up on that offer and accepting it by running with it. Without that accord scenes never get anywhere, and thus what we're mostly now learning about is how to make and accept offers properly.

Offers can really be anything. The first week I walked into a situation where two other students had been frozen in a pose with chests thrust out and shoulders back. It suddenly occured to me they looked like chickens, so my offer to them was when I began the scene by squawking and pecking. They then accepted by squawking and pecking too.

This week we did a drill where one person would be sitting, and another would silently enter. The sitting person would look at the body language of the person entering, determine who it suggested they were supposed to be, and then continue the scene accordingly. Because we're all pretty new at this, what the entering person has in mind isn't always what the sitting person concludes. On my turn, for instance, I entered as a person crawling through the desert, but the sitting person thought I was looking for a lost contact lens.

"Is this it?" he asked, pointing to the ground. I picked up the imaginary contact lens, pretended to put it in my eye, and then looked up at him.

"How many heads do you have?"

"Just one."

"Then it's not my contact lens."

Offers are part of the equation, acceptances are the rest. Acceptances work best when they are positive, something that takes the initial idea of the offer and extends it. When they're negative, refusing the reality the offerer is trying to create, it tends to shut things down and dampen the enthusiasm of the offering performer. In order to experience this dynamic and why it should be avoided, we did a drill the other day where we were actually supposed to negate the offer. Whatever was proposed, refuse.

Sounds easy, right? Except the person making my offer said, "I'd like to pay off all your law school loans."

I was wearing my Boston University School of Law sweatshirt, so he must have guessed it was a sensitive spot. So sensitive, that I froze. It was not possible to negate that offer. Yes, it was a a throwaway line in an improv class drill. Of course it wasn't a genuine. But I just could not make the words pass through my lips, anything that would have possibly spurned such an offer. Not even as a joke.

I mean, as a matter of course and principle I do believe in standing on my own two feet financially. But if anyone really did want to come along, saying those words I've longed to hear and offer to pay off my loans... well, let's just say it would be an offer I couldn't refuse...

That long-looming trial is now an actual in-progress trial. I'm not there every day, but I've been there a few times, watching the arguments and examinations. Like everything else about my job, it's an interesting learning experience.

I've learned, for instance, how important it can be to take good, quick, handwritten notes during the proceedings. Perhaps it actually is a point in favor of the perennial effort to ban laptops from law school classrooms that this is a skill future litigators will need. (Of course, (1) not every law student will become a litigator; (2) this is nothing that a course on shorthand couldn't better address; and (3) you never know when you'll want to crank up your laptop and review your handily-typed notes from one of the areas of common law that you covered your 1L year that may now salient to your current case...)

I've also learned how litigation essentially is a game of project management. Going into it there's myriad details to prepare and manage, all building up to the main event, which itself has different little events that all weave together the issues of fact and law that are presented to the court and laid down into the record. Therefore, like with any big project, the consequences of decisions made early on can be felt months down the road.

And, of course, like any big project, it sucks up lots and lots of time...

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.

One of my favorite video games growing up was Frogger. With Frogger you had to jump your frog from one side of the screen to the other, leaping him from one safe spot to another, hoping he'd avoid getting run over by a truck on the road or eaten by an alligator in the stream if he failed to land properly.

I currently feel like the frog.

My contract will end soon so I'll need to move on to what's next. My emotions regarding this are mixed, ranging from "oy vey..." to "o-kay!" The "oy vey" part is because it's a logistical nightmare to have to look for another job. But the "o-kay!" part is from the excitement of being free to pursue other things that interest me. I'm not simply rationalizing my reality; I really do feel that way. Of course, it's tempered by the ambient stresses of the situation, and I do fear that those stresses might prevent me from fully reaching out to grab the brass ring I've been looking for since before law school.

The key, though, in Frogger is that you have to keep your frog moving. If he sits anywhere too long he gets flattened. So I'll just need to keep rallying my forces and keep pressing forward, with enough faith in myself to know that I will land someplace good somewhere up ahead.

Read Part IV.

In my high school gym class we did a program called "Project Adventure," which was an Outward Bound-type ropes course designed to build self-confidence by having students push themselves to master challenging physical situations, like climbing tall trees or rappelling from the top of gymnasium walls. I loved it. I can't say any of it was easy, but that's the point. Knowing I could do these things when they were hard has powered me ever since.

There was one task, though, that I never could quite do. We'd climb to a platform at the top of the gym wall and then jump out to a hanging trapeze. Attached to belay lines there was little danger if we failed to reach it, but it was clearly much better to make it. I never could, though, and always fell after my jump.

I think about that trapeze jump now metaphorically, and how it relates to my current situation. Going to law school was like jumping to reach the trapeze, taking a chance to end up somewhere better.

I let myself be very open with law school, trying not to let my pre-existing sense of self interfere with the betterment the experience might offer. I thought that was the thing to do, but on retrospect I'm not so sure.

There is a paternalism that ripples throughout the legal business. Senior partners loom over associates. Professors loom over pupils. The legal world is rife with hierarchies, which is a big reason why it is so hard to align one's natural talents with their vocations. There's a lot to learn, sure, but some of the resistance seems to come from people who've been there before you who did their time and now want to make sure you do yours. Lots of the legal business seems like little more than hazing.

Of course, when you are new to it all it's hard to tell where the hierarchy is a legitimate delineation of experience levels and when it's just arbitrary. If you push back against it in the wrong instance it won't do your development any good.

So I trusted law school, a lot, in letting myself be so open with it. I'm actually not sure that was wrong; I think my law school was fairly deserving of it (but then, I think my law school was better than most). I also trusted that the experience would develop me into a fuller, more actualized person. This thinking is not an insignificant part of why I chose to go to law school. But it may be there where I may have led myself astray. Like I hadn't gotten the memo saying I'd be a fool to think law school could ever help me do this...

The problem with being so open to what the experience had to offer is that I think I forgot too much of myself in the process. I remember a moment near the end of my semester in Germany having sort of an epiphany, suddenly realizing that the whole time I'd been there, meeting and mixing with people including many much younger than me, that I'd pretty much left ten years of my education and experience back in the States. "You have another degree?" a friend had asked almost incredulously. And, indeed, so caught up was I in my present that I really had forgotten about my past. Throughout law school I wanted so much to be open to new opportunities and achievements that I disassociated myself from the ones I'd had before. And that was no good, for the law is full of all sorts of pressures and dysfunction and the thing you really need to weather the storm is a strong sense of self.

In many ways my years in law school became like a second adolescence. To some extent, of course, it is the nature of the beast. One of the first comments I heard upon arriving and indeed thought to myself was how much it felt like high school. Which sort of makes sense given that the majority of the student population has come straight through from high school and college, arriving at law school without ever experiencing that important life lesson of what it means to be an adult without the structure of school supporting it. And then there's also the fact that, like high school, you show up to classes and are taught stuff...

This high schoolish dynamic did present me with certain opportunities. Second childhoods can be fun, especially when you are mature enough to navigate them more successfully. I did get to scratch certain youthful itches that had previously been unscratched, and I'm glad I got to. The problem, though, was that along the way I misplaced to too great an extent the self-confidence my maturity and experience had earned me.

Which leads me to the criticism I found laid at my door recently. It bothered me, as I imagine criticism would bother anyone, but what was more irritating was that I'm perfectly capable of coming up with a nice long list of my own flaws, and these were not the flaws that are on it. It's not actually a positive that I can be my own worst critic. In fact, that's one of my actual flaws... The biggest problem I have with it is how much it makes me inclined to diminish myself. I buy into and kowtow to the hierarchies, I accept the "you must know and I must not" messages this industry keeps emitting, I even accept all sorts of criticism -- and this all needs to stop.

I know better. I am not an adolescent. I am not a scared 26 year old who just got out of school, I am a 33 year old grown-up! And I am entitled to derive the benefit of all my experience. I heard some French on the bus the other day and my mind wandered back to my time working in France. Why do I not think about that more? I worked in France! It's part of my life experience, like so many other things are. I need to not be so detached from them. I did manage, in a moment of confidence, to blurt out to a friend that I've succeeded in my goal of becoming an interesting person - now the job is to do something with that.

Oddly, I think there was an upside to the Great Change that can be helpful. Maybe it's just the result of all the scarring... but I do have some thicker skin. Well, maybe that's not quite the way to phrase it, as clearly this month has been fairly wounding. But the moments of wanting to burst into tears passed quickly, if they ever came at all. Instead I've felt a kind of defiance. "No, you're wrong/unfair. I'm actually fine," are the thoughts that have been coming to mind surprisingly easily.

I'm wary, of course, of becoming arrogant. It's funny how many people find lawyers to be so; perhaps lawyers are as a necessary defense mechanism. But on my list of positive qualities up to now I've been able put down "likable," and I wouldn't want that to be struck off. Especially because that's how I can know people who hold exactly opposite opinions of me than some of my critics. A benefit of maturity is the realization that you can't please everyone - the best you can do is please yourself. As I said, I'm aware of my strengths and weaknesses, and one of those strengths is a willingness to continue to grow as a person no matter how old or already wonderful I am. But a willingness to grow does not require a complete surrender of everything I am, nor should it, particularly because some of those very same weaknesses can also be my greatest strengths and the things I rely on to succeed.

Nonetheless I'm human, and I'm trying to do something important in a field that's full of difficulty, dysfunction, unfairness and frustration. I will have bad days, and, sadly, probably lots of them. But I need to do something to deal with this other metaphor I have stuck in my head: that of a toy car, the kind that you have to first roll backwards in order to make it then propel itself forward. I had begun to wonder if I'd gotten stuck in reverse as I felt everything I aspired to slip further and further away. But maybe not. Maybe it's time - I hope it's time! - I'll soon begin to shoot forward and finally grab that trapeze.

Read Part III.

Up until now, I think the most difficult period of my adulthood was the year or so right out of college. I was 22-23 and had just been flung from the comfy nest of studenthood and into real life. For the previous seventeen years my job was to learn. All of a sudden, all that changed. My job now was to do.

It took a while to get on my feet, but eventually I did, both vocationally and psychologically. Vocationally I was able to stumble into a good career. I found something I liked to do and that I could do well. Psychologically, however, it was a big change to realize I was now a full-fledged grown-up. Kids are always desperate to be "grown-up," but it's a whole other unanticipated thing to actually be grown up and now solely responsible for your own well-being. You don't even get student discounts anymore... It turns out life is pretty expensive, and you're the person who needs to pay for it.

Still it wasn't really the responsibility aspect that was most daunting; it was that everything was new. Every adult situation I was facing I was facing for the first time, with no prior experience to tap into. It was scary and disorienting ascending the giant learning curve of life.

But by the time I was in my mid to late twenties, things got a lot easier. I was starting to have the benefit of experience, where even when trying situations came up I had some frame of reference I could draw from. Plus just being aware of my own competence was very reassuring. Experience really is a wonderful thing.

So here I am now, having thrust myself into a new career where I have none. Well, not totally none, as I had some summer clerkships and internships and now a year of practice. But effectively none. And now I'm supposed to sell myself into a job that everyone knows I don't know how to do? It's incredible, but this is the situation for nearly every law graduate, where they must approach an employer and essentially say, "We both know I don't know what I'm doing. But hire me anyway, teach me what I'm supposed to do, and, while you're at it, please pay me a lot of money."

It's actually worse than when I graduated from college and had something resembling a vocational skill. With law I have preparation but little functional training. Everyone knows that law school doesn't actually teach you to be a lawyer; it's something you need to learn on the job.

Thus junior lawyers are incredibly vulnerable. You read stories of abused associates all the time, because how are they to defend themselves? How are they to assert any sort of their own esteem when they know full well how ill-equipped they are for the job they are doing? Every new lawyer is extremely aware of how incredibly dependent they are on the beneficence of their employer. They're dependent on them for their livelihoods (law school must be paid for somehow...), and they're dependent on them for every bit of experience that they'll need before they can do anything else in the field. Including anything they ever thought was rewarding enough to justify all this effort and expense to become a lawyer in the first place. Then again, who's got time to think about that? Every day as a new lawyer there's a new mountain to climb, some necessary skill to learn or experience to gain. And every day you are reminded just how little you know. It's really quite demoralizing.

And people do get lost. Sidetracked into dull "careers." Personal lives wrecked by billable hour requirements. I remember at the NJ CLE course on ethics a presenter telling us that, more likely than not, we would be developing a substance abuse problem somewhere during the course of our careers. Because, don't forget, the need for training and income aren't the only pressures lawyers face - there's also a slew of ethical and professional requirements, to say nothing of duties to clients to, you know, like, maybe win their cases...

I think about what drew me to law school, the desire to make the world a better place, and I see my situation now, and I feel like I've been dragged backwards, away from my goal. It fills me with a certain terror, especially knowing what I lost to be here. I threw away financial security and professional confidence to end up in near destitution and doubt. Worse, the Rubicon has apparently been completely crossed. I'm not even sure I could have my old life back if I wanted to. I still get pinged my technical recruiters from time to time, and just saw a job that I would be perfect for, as it was exactly what I'd done before. On a lark (and, because I need to pay the rent somehow) I sent off my resume. But the recruiter blanched. "I can't sell you for this," he said. "You have no recent experience." Of course I don't - I was too busy with this Great Change.

I realized this Great Change had made me hardened and cynical a few months ago when I saw the movie Lean on Me. One of the students in the movie is unafraid to take on principal Joe Clark and argue down his policies. He tells her, and the movie makes this out to be something of a tremendous encouragement, "You should be a lawyer." And I immediately nearly jumped out of my seat shouting, "Nooooo!!!!" When I announced way back in 2002 or so that I was planning to go to law school, there were people Who'd Been There who warned me off of it. I was glib and cocky and ignored their advice, but now I understand it and why Clark's advice was so wrong: law wastes people. It takes their natural talents and strips them away. You may be good at arguing, but you aren't going to get to argue. True, there's more to lawyering than just arguing and clearly you do need to know more than just how to do that. But should it really take three years of law school and at least another three years of practice before you might, if you are really lucky and really tenacious, find yourself in a position where your passion and professional confidence can finally maybe meet? For too many people, I fear, that never happens. And I fear even more that it will never happen to me.

Read Part V.

Read Part II.

What has made me hardened and cynical is the realization that as a result of this "Great Change," I'm worse off than when I started.

I'm not sure that everyone who does law school ends up worse off in the same way, since how you are "worse off" might greatly depend on what you started with. I started with a career that I completely chucked in order to do this. Sure, it was during the Dot-Com bust and actual pursuit of said career back then was a little bumpy. But I'd had seven years of a full-blown out-of-college professional career that I'd developed up to positions of responsibility and decent remuneration. That was a lot to walk away from, but I did because I felt there was something bigger and more important to do and that I was wasting my talents by not doing it. All my statements of interest for my law school applications included the only-slightly-facetious exclamation, "They're making all these bad laws without asking me!" Perturbed by the state of the world, I thought law school was a necessary step to take in order to get the education and credential so that the people in charge would start asking me for my opinion on how to make the world a better place.

Making the world a better place has always been the object to this exercise, but today I feel further away from it than I did when I began.

I do feel in some ways I was lucky, however. I liked law school. I liked it a lot. Many law students are not so lucky, going to schools of such dysfunction that their spirit gets crushed right away. I was fortunate that my spirit and idealism largely survived law school intact. No, my ruination came in the aftermath.

The aftermath is what happens to law students after graduation. It's not enough to earn your JD - the clouds don't suddenly part, birds don't start singing, flowers don't start blooming as the golden sun shines down to alight your future path. No, first you must be crushed by the medieval torture that is the bar exam and then the realization that no matter what you had ever accomplished before law school you are now starting completely over at. the. bottom.

Let's look at the bar exam first, if we dare. Let's count its flaws, if we can count that high... Well, among its larger defects, first there's the complete disconnect between what it measures and anything worth measuring, but I will leave that subject to other previous and surely subsequent diatribes. Secondly, and somewhat more overlooked, is the enormous impact its timing has. The bar exam is given but twice a year. It requires at least weeks, if not months, of study, and then it takes 3-4 months to find out the results. Every bar exam imposes an enormous disruption on its takers' lives, preventing them from effectively moving on with their careers, which are so dependent on its results. This disruption further exacerbates the enormous financial stresses posed by the exam, including the hefty application fees required to sit for it, the usurious costs of study courses, and the loss of income unearnable during the time one needs to study instead of work. Furthermore, until finally receiving a successful result one's income is necessarily limited. There are some lucky students who are able to start right away as associates and be subsidized by their firms, but these students are in the grade curve-enforced minority. Most law students are forced to subsidize all this themselves.

And they are forced to do this subsidization with nascent careers. Brand new, start-at-the-bottom careers. New careers which necessarily don't pay as well as more developed careers, but since pay rates for new lawyers can vary so widely we'll leave that aspect alone for now. The bigger trauma faced by all is the newness of it all.

Read Part IV.

Read Part I.

Four and a half years ago, back when I started this blog, I knew I would be changing. That's why I wanted to blog; I wanted to track the change. But I'm not sure I really understood just how I would be changing.

I thought the change would be purely intellectual. They say one should never watch laws and sausages be made, so I thought that after I'd seen just how the sausage factory works I would become hardened and cynical. I also expected my mental processes to change. I kept hearing people say that law school trains you to think like a lawyer, and I was really curious to see what that entailed and how my thinking would therefore be changed.

On retrospect, I think I do now "think like a lawyer." I'm not quite sure where the change kicked in, but a comparison of my early-law school and pre-law school posts against later ones suggests that my thinking did get - how shall I describe it? - more deliberate. Thesis, plus support. Good lawyers don't just throw out global assertions and hope that others' intuitions will step in to justify them; good lawyering requires nuanced analogy and substantiation, and the training teaches you how to think in a way where generating it becomes second nature.

Furthermore, as I became more aware of the actual mechanics of how the law works, my thinking about it got more precise. Battlecries of "That's not fair!" and "It's unconstitutional!" generally drained from my vocabulary as I learned to more precisely identify exactly what was unfair or what might truly be unconstitutional. It's one of the more alarming realizations I made about law, actually, that there is a disconnect between how laypeople think the law is to work and how it actually does. They may be right in their intuition that something is unfair or unconstitutional, but without understanding why it ends up being beyond their capacity to fix it. I feel this is a very unhappy state of affairs, but instead of becoming hardened and cynical by my new-found x-ray vision of how the law truly works, I instead became more resolute to explain it so that everyone may now know.

Which is not to say I didn't become hardened and cynical as a result of law school. I did, just not because of that.

Read Part III.

I have occasion to reflect on the Great Change and wonder if it was really so great after all.

I've had a rough month. A rough, self-esteem crushing, cutting-you-off-at-the-knees kind of month. Which is more the pity, because there were actually some nice things that happened this month too. In fact, the month had started really well. I'd gotten a nice haircut and was feeling energized and empowered. Then, like a swallow that's just crashed into a plate glass window, all that changed as heaps of criticism ended up laid at my door. Not all at once, and not without nice things happening too, but enough so that all my energy and empowerment was eventually evaporated. Even my hair now looks stupid.

While the particulars of these post may pertain specifically to me, the purpose of writing it is not to have a private kvetch. I'm inclined to share because I think my situation may be endemic to the industry of law, and others may find themselves similarly situated. In the past when I've taken stock and written about aspects of the Great Change I know it has resonated with others. I'm glad people have found my writing inspiring to them; I can only hope I was right enough in my assertions to warrant it.

It does, however, regularly raise the hackles of those more risk-averse that I should be so candid in my posts, but surely they wouldn't want the alternative, a world where no one shared anything that's personal. This is what writers are for, to share bits of themselves so that others may discover they are not alone. Without people brave enough to share their lives publicly - think novels, memoirs, or newspaper columns, if the idea of blogs frightens you - everyone else would be islands adrift, never knowing how common their own experiences are since they would have nothing to connect them to. Writing exists to unite readers. I'm not saying that I deserve a parade for being willing to put myself out there, but my point is that excoriation is hardly an appropriate response either.

Besides, how else will the flaws of a situation be exposed if no one provides any examples? From where I'm standing the legal industry looks incredibly flawed, and someone needs to say so.

Read part II.

I was going to post this tomorrow, but I'm apparently freaking out too many people with my previous posts so I'll get it up sooner.

Friday night the California bar results became available. Friday night I was also a complete mess. I'd withstood the afore described Onslaught of Criticism reasonably well at the time, but with Friday quickly following on the heels of it, compounded with a few depressing conversations with technical recruiters late in the week, I was in no state to deal with potentially finding out that I'd not passed. Again. Yeah, I thought I'd stood a chance of passing, but after not passing the last time I was not going to be glib about it.

I left work early Friday, early enough so that I would not have to be with other people when the 6 o'clock release of the results came around. I needed the moment to be private. In fact, I needed a lot of private time right then. It had been a surprisingly hard month, and I needed to pull myself together before risking the discovery of the result.

So I came home, ate dinner, watched a bunch of Stephen Fry clips on YouTube, and went to bed. This morning then I got up and wrote the nearly 4000 words of those previous posts that had been stewing in my head all week. That's what I needed to do to prepare. It is negative, I'll admit, but (particularly the final one), it also was my pep talk.

Still, I was in no rush to find out the result. I figured everyone would know by Sunday when the pass list became public, so I figured I'd enjoy the relative bliss of my ignorance for a while longer. However I'd told a number of people that the results would be out on Friday, and they started calling me with concerned interest to find out the result. "I haven't looked yet," I told them. "I'm not ready." "You'll let me know as soon as you find out," my grandma requested. "Yes," I said, before adding only semi-facetiously, "But you'll still love me if I fail, right?"

"I'll love you no matter what!" I think she was somewhat put out that I would even doubt it, but I was grateful to hear it said so specifically. I needed to know it was ok to fail before risking discovery that I had.

I still wasn't rushing, but by now it was about 2:30pm and the mail had come. I'd figured I might eat or take a bike ride before looking it up on the web, but I decided to check the mail first just to see if the letter had arrived. The letter, you see, is much better than the website, because even if you saw that you had passed on the website you couldn't really believe it until you got the letter anyway.

Ominously, the envelope looked a little fat. I'd gotten a fat envelope when I'd failed. "But that envelope was a different shape," I thought to myself. (I'm not sure that's true, I'd have to go find it, but that's what I thought when I brought the mail in.) Unwilling to wait any longer, however, I tore it open.

At first I thought I'd failed. These letters are dense and cryptic, and nervous eyeballs tend to skip over the important words. Words like, "delighted," "achieved," "passing," and "congratulations." Words that were, in fact, in my letter.

I can still barely get my head around this. I can't even begin to comprehend the amount of relief I feel. I started thinking about it, then got sidetracked by calling people, most of whom who immediately wanted to engage in "what next?" conversations.

I'm not ready to have those yet. I'm still smarting a bit from earlier days, and I really just want to savor this. But I do know that I am suddenly much better off by this evening than I thought I was earlier in the day. And suddenly I'm so much more aware of my own strength and feel like everything just might be possible after all.

I told people before the bar results came out that my saying I would pass was like saying I'd win the lottery. (Which reminds me, I really should go buy a ticket...) My point was that it really seemed to be a crap shoot where it all came down to luck.

That's really all anyone can infer from the results, even having passed. I do not have any basis to claim I aced it; I might have passed it by a mere two points.

But, self-critical though I so often am, I am allowing myself a bit of pride. Not for having passed it, per se, but because of the particular accomplishment it represents: I did it on my own. No study course, no provided study plan - I made up my own and did it. It may have represented the best study effort of my entire life. Well, I guess I studied well for the New York exam last summer, but that time seemed easier since it was done within the context of a course and surrounded by friends doing the same. I am grateful for the fellow bar taker I knew this time around who helped ensure I had access to the correct study materials, but otherwise this was an entirely solo adventure.

I did good.

Gosh, maybe I should leave my job more often... Friday my boss took us out for a three hour lunch-followed-by-a-beer to celebrate, well, perhaps not my departure, per se, but my year-long tenure that preceded it.

It was a good job. I think I was doing the things I was supposed to be doing at this stage of my career, supporting a small litigation firm: trial support, document review, producing and propounding discovery, writing and editing briefs, etc. For my last hurrah I did a whole motion for summary adjudication, complete with memo of points and authorities and the necessary supporting documents.

It had taken me a while to get my sea legs, because I'd never actually worked in a law firm before. Well, two of my internships were technically at firms, but they were non-profits whose environments are different than those of a commercial practice. I'm profoundly grateful that I got to work there anyway, even though there had been some significant fumbling around early on as I was figuring out how everything worked. Given that it was a small environment, I think the learning curve was particularly steep. On the upside, however, if I so decided, I actually could go hang out my own shingle now and have some idea how to do it. Law school doesn't really teach you anything about how to be a solo practitioner, and nor does big firm life. I'm definitely at an advantage in this regard then for having worked there.

So what had started out as a temporary port in the storm actually turned out to be a great year-long experience. But it was inherently only temporary, and now it's on to do something else. The timing of my departure ended up a bit inopportune because it is highly unlikely I'll even be able to find another contract of any sort before the holidays, but I'm actually thrilled by this turn of events: I get a month off.

All I remember for the last five or six years or so is the sensation of running. Running around trying to support myself during the recession, to visiting and applying to law schools, to simultaneously being involved with two major volunteer endeavors I was committed to up to the gills, to needing to move across the country, to needing to start law school, to law school itself and all its coursework, papers, notes, and other extracurricular commitments, to needing to move around some more, to needing to be looking for new jobs almost constantly, to needing to take bar exam after bar exam, to needing to do all sorts of CLEs, to finishing up this trial... My future for so long has been hostage to my present, but now that present is all past. I've reached the goal I've been working towards, and now I get to set forth for new ones.

Starting with December. It's fantastic. I can't do much else with this month anyway, but for the first time in eons so little is actually required of me. No tests, no deadlines, no obligations. I'll start spreading my resume so I can try to get something together as soon as possible in January, but otherwise this month is mine to catch up on everything that has been neglected year after year and start building towards what I want next.

I'll probably take a few days to get organized and come up with a plan of attack. Today is Big Game day anyway, and then Tuesday is swearing-in day. But I'm so looking forward to working on those other projects I've got going and seeing what I can make of them now that I finally have the time.

The deed has been done.

Yesterday I went to the Oakland Convention Center for the swearing-in ceremony for the California bar. It only took about an hour, but it was a fairly large shindig, replete with various organizations (e.g., local bar associations) tabling along the corridor handing out information and congratulations. Part of me wanted to stop and chat, but I couldn't bring myself to do more than grab a free donut and their paperwork. I had to get to the big room for the swearing-in before someone changed their mind and told me I couldn't...

Once inside we dropped off our oath cards and took a seat. The majority of the crowd appeared to have been the family of admittees, but there still were probably a few hundred people there for the oath. The proceedings were called to order, a few people spoke, and then six judges filed in for the formalities. Three were from the California courts, who officially accepted the qualifications of the admittees from a representative of the Committee of Bar Examiners. Judge Saundra Braun Armstrong accepted a motion from the chief of the US Attorney's office in Oakland to admit us to the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and Judge William Fletcher accepted a similar motion for the Ninth Circuit court of appeals. Each also had their clerks administer separate oaths.

They also made their own short speeches. Recurring themes were reminders to "be kind" and have compassion, both towards our fellow lawyers and the underrepresented.

I think I most appreciated some of the comments of Judge Armstrong, particularly in light of some of my recent concerns about the Great Change. Her advice seemed like it was the most applicable to people in our position, about to enter this rather dysfunctional business we're only barely prepared for.

"Don't jump too far too soon," she said. Of course there's lots to learn, and it will take time. So take the time, she counseled us. "Learn to play the game -- and the games people play." At the same time, however, "Don't doubt your abilities. Someone else's opinion of you does not have to become your reality."

I left there feeling appropriately proud, but as I walked to my next appointment afterwards I noticed a feeling I hadn't expected. I was happy to have finally reached this day, but my happiness was somehow tempered by this subtle sense of nervousness. All this year I've been able to hide behind this giant asterisk of not actually being a lawyer in this jurisdiction. It's been a source of frustration, but it's also been a luxury, giving me some time to learn the trade without it really "having to count." Yesterday all that changed though. That asterisk that's been hanging like a cloud over my head has been blown away. Now, now it's all for real.

For the first time in years I attended a concert without being encumbered by any sort of law books. Even the last time Paul Thorn played out at Rancho Nicasio I was shlepping New Jersey CLE manuals. This time my back was spared the burden of these onerous tomes, as instead all I had stuffed into my bag was a novel. (Of course, why I brought a novel to a concert is not entirely clear. I certainly didn't read it during the show; I suppose I just feared withdrawal pains if I was completely bookless.)

Seeing Paul perform is always a pleasure. He's incredibly entertaining, charming all his audiences with his extensive repertoire of songs and on-stage banter. It's interesting how he has such ethos that his audience will allow him to alternate between humorous and poignant in his songs. I think it could so easily seem jarring if someone who sings silly songs then breaks out into something serious, or vice versa. But Paul's insights and lyrical articulation are always so spot on that audiences trust him to lead them to an honest emotion, whichever one that particular song requires.

It's also always a pleasure to see Paul in person as well. He and his co-writer/musical partner Billy Maddox have been with me on my Great Change journey almost as long as Huey Lewis and the News have been. The few times a year I see them I've kept them apprised of my progress, and the other night it was nice to finally get to tell them that the Great Change had now been completed. Passing the bar was a really, really great thing, and I don't just say that because I've been on a weeks-long party as I come up with more and more people to brag about it to... In some ways though it's hard to really impress upon people just how significant it was. It's like a near-miss of a car accident. So close to utter disaster, but because it was avoided and life continued on, it's easy to become glib about it.

I myself am starting to be awfully glib, actually. Maybe that's ok, it's clearly getting to be time to move on to bigger and better things. But it's interesting that despite it being a major accomplishment, how mentally I've already moved on to thinking about some other potentially bigger and better things I may have already accomplished...

(Of course, objectively-speaking, passing the bar was hardly negligible. You see if you would have wanted to answer these questions... Also note in particular Question #2 and tell me if you wouldn't have wanted to call someone a dumbass...)

I'm cleaning out a folder where I keep drafts of posts and found this one, which I appear to have written in July 2006, right after graduation. Seemed like one of those interesting breadcrumbs, so I thought I'd post it now.

One of the law student bloggers I read recently posted that she’s decided to postpone applying to clerkships for a couple of years. I tip my proverbial hat to her decision. It takes a lot of personal fortitude to resist the tides of “Do this! Do that! Do it now!” that sweep through law classes (ex: journals, OCI, clerkships) but I increasingly think that if you can resist the ambient pressure to do these things before you’re sure you’re ready, and instead wait until you are, it will pay off in the long run.

For instance, I conceded to the pressure and applied to clerkships last year. And nothing came of it. Instead I feel like a lot of time was lost, swallowing up effort that could better have been applied to something else – something else that would give me something to show for it at the end. It’s not that a clerkship wouldn’t be right for me, it’s that applying for one right then was not. I had no way of knowing how I would feel a year from then. I guessed that I wouldn’t want to be geographically flexible and so only applied in a very narrow geographic area. Turns out, a year later, I would have been a lot more flexible after all. But how was I to know? By doing this when I was “supposed” to do this, rather than when it was right for me to do this led to necessarily mediocre results.

It’s more than just clerkship applications that were problematic like this. When I think about my donut-losing dismay a lot of it seems to trace back to the sense of having wasted a lot of time pursuing things I wasn’t ready to pursue. Instead all that time and effort simply evaporated, and endeavors I would have liked to complete – and otherwise could have completed had I been able to focus on them – went undone.

Still, there were times when I was able to march to my own drummer. I made the conscious decision, for instance, not to look for a job while I was in school. I was sick and tired of wasting so much time and angst looking for my 1L job, my 2L job… I wanted to jealously guard my 3L year so that I could get everything out of it I could, and also give myself enough time to figure out what I wanted to do before trying to find one.

I’m sure, in the cool, calm, collected rational recesses of my brain, that this was a good strategy and will up the odds of getting a good fit. Of course, it is a little scary not to have the next thing lined up. I do daydream about paychecks with increasing frequency… But the thing to remember is that I have bigger dreams than just that, and if I intend to achieve them I have to take a deep breath and give myself the room I need to do it.

I'm happy to say that the CLE courses from hell were, in fact, successfully passed.

Yay! This means my New Jersey license is still active. Unfortunately, probably not for long...

I have to take at least two more classes this year, classes which are only taught at random times throughout the spring and summer.

Unfortunately I made the apparent mistake of taking the criminal procedure course this summer instead of the civil procedure one. If I'd done civil I would have been able to do criminal and administrative law back to back this spring, but it appears now I'll have to drop a couple hundred dollars twice this year in order to fly back to New Jersey for a single evening lecture or risk my license going inactive. Plus, because I haven't taken civil procedure yet, I don't know how to sue the state of New Jersey for having this unconstitutional requirement that puts such an undue burden on out-of-state lawyers like me...

I am also far from happy with whatever the snafu was on the part of the single agency authorized to administer these requirements that caused me to only just find out about my having passed just now... Or the fact that even after all this nonsense none of this effort will count for New York's CLE requirements.

On the upside, however, I never have to do homework ever again!!!

Edited 12/16.

If you've known me since before 2003 you're going to want to sit down for this post, preferably somewhere comfortable that you won't fall out of, as what I'm about to say is likely to come as something of a shock. People who've met me more recently may already have an inkling about what I've been up to, or at least will find it less mind-blowing to discover. But so far off the radar is it from anything I've ever been thought to aspire to that it may throw people who've known me a long time for a loop when I tell them. (It usually does.)

Anyway, without further ado, here goes: did you know I've been writing songs? And singing them publicly?

Moreover, did you know that this is something I learned to do in law school?

OK, pull yourself together. Stop laughing, crying, choking or doing whatever you're doing and pick your jaw up off the floor. It's true. The Great Change has wrought all sorts of changes, and it's finally time to talk about this one too.

It happened by accident, I suppose. Back in 2003 a few things converged: one, that I discovered I could sing in public. In the months before law school I was working at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and one evening for a team-building activity they did a karaoke night at some place in the Mission. I had to try it - after all, my hero Huey Lewis was once in a movie about karaoke, and of course I had to try to be like him... Naturally I did a HLN song, "Power of Love," but the musical track was terrible - all synthesizer, the wrong key, and the disc skipped! After having worked up the courage to get up on stage and sing, it turned out completely anticlimactic. So I did another, this time an Air Supply song. And afterwards, I sensed being more sincere than merely polite, people actually said I was good.

The second thing that happened was that I saw all those Johnny Colla concerts. Now, I also subsequently saw all those Huey Lewis and the News concerts too, and though I like to joke that "Something must have rubbed off," HLN collectively have never really inspired me to do what they do. Well, maybe when I was 12 I thought becoming a rock star was a good idea... But I never really had a non-teenybopper aspiration to follow in their footsteps. Johnny Colla's solo work, on the other hand, seemed to have had a different effect on me. To be Huey Lewis and the News would be impossible: they have an enormously thick and complex band sound, with 6-9+ musical threads being woven together at all times. My middling musicianship could never come close to replicating that. However Johnny's solo music was more accessible: a melody line sitting on top of some rhythmic and harmonic support. I don't mean to diminish his music - it's not unsophisticated. But I could more easily see what was going on and think that maybe I could do the same.

The third thing was a weird conversation I had with an ex-boyfriend shortly before I moved to Boston that had left me with some very conflicted feelings. I remember on the flight out to look for my apartment writing down my thoughts. Pretty easily - surprisingly easily - they came out looking fairly poetic without being too contrived or melodramatic (which was unusual, because so often in the past what I would have produced under similar circumstances would have been complete tripe). In fact they pretty much looked like song lyrics, but who was I kidding: me writing words wasn't really such a stretch, but music? I decided not to worry about it. I'd write down the words and maybe someday find someone who could set them to music. Except it turned out I didn't need to wait. Once I was done and read them back, they sang themselves back to me. There was no choice - this was their melody. Without realizing it, it turns out I'd written my first song.

Once you've written one the ice is broken and it's easier to write more. So I wrote a few more that 1L year. And then another thing happened, pivotal to all this: "Coffeehouse."

"Coffeehouse" was a semesterly (or so) event sponsored by the student bar association. A lounge would be taken over, snacks provided, and there would be an open mic. Which, tentatively at first, I signed up to use to try out these new songs.

It went well. Or, as I usually term it, "Nobody fled." On the contrary, lots of people said lots of nice things. In fact, soon I was being asked to perform. It seems that I could write songs and sing them in public. Who knew?

Or at least I could sing them in law school. What about a wider audience?

It was one of my goals in moving to Marin County to find out. Marin County is the home of many musical greats, including my musical heros HLN, and, well, if I could make it there I could make it anywhere... The idea was to do open mic at the hallowed Sweetwater and follow in all these amazing people's footsteps. But one thing led to another and nearly a year had gone by without having gotten around to doing it. Suddenly, though, my hand was forced when the Sweetwater threatened to close. Within a week, I was signed up for an open mic slot. And I stood on the stage that so many incredible talents had stood on, and I sang my songs.

I'm hardly a vocal virtuoso. Between 6th grade chorus and the EFF karaoke night I had never sung in public. In fact I'd hardly sung on my own at all, not since my nursery school teacher had noticed me singing my little "Clean up time! Clean up time for everyone!" ditty I liked to sing during clean up time and told me to stop... It's an extremely untrained voice of limited range, but, on the upside, it turns out I can carry a tune. A capella, even. Which is important, because my limited musicianship prevents me from accompanying myself with anything else. The instrument I can play most competently is the violin, but it's been years since I've played it and, anyway, it's hard to sing and play the violin at the same time. I quit piano lessons at age 10 so keyboards are out, and I never did figure out how to play the guitar. So, lacking other options, I just stand up there and sing.

And nobody flees. It turns out, I think, that you get a lot of points just for showing up... But I also don't feel that people are just being polite. When I sing, apart from my singing you can practically hear a pin drop as people stay engaged in my words. And that's why I can do this. Performing in public - singing in public - is a very scary thing, but, oddly, I'm not actually scared. I get nerves, I suppose, but it's more from unregulated anticipatory jolts of adrenaline as opposed to fear. I'm really surprisingly fearless about this. It's like, these are my words, this is my story and this is a my truth. Like it or don't like it, but you can't take that truth away from me.

I also have surprisingly little ego tied up in this, although I suppose the more I talk about it the more that's changing. I'm a lawyer, after all, what do I need with all this? I could completely screw it up, and life would go on.

The Sweetwater has now closed (although it's set to rise again), but there are other open mic nights which I've done. Twice I've performed at the Larkspur Cafe Theater, owned by the same people who own the Sweetwater, and I have to say that it's a wonderful thing about Marin County that it is so nurturing of local arts. This is why it was so important to save the Sweetwater, so creative people could have a stage somewhere to perform.

And then last night I performed at the Caffe Trieste in Sausalito, sibling to the one in San Francisco that was famous for being a haven for the North Beach beatniks. I fit right in, and I was reminded of one of the reasons for why I think I'm going to keep doing this: I love the reaction. It really is a rush to perform; I'd never realized that before because I'd never really experienced it before. Of course, while clapping is nice, I think the reaction I really like is laughter.

I have about eight songs now. Most of them can properly induce a chuckle in certain spots, but only one is completely silly. I think I'd like to write more silly songs, but in general I'd like to write more songs period. It's been a while since I've been able to channel any. That really seems to be the word, "channel." A good song has a certain perfection to it, as if language was created just so one day all these words could be assembled together in just this way. It's hard to be so immodest as to believe you had somehow "created" a song; it's more like you received it and just didn't get in the way.

Anyway, I need more because I have a plan. In fact, as far back as 2003 I've had this plan: I want to sing them into my computer, slap on a Creative Commons license, and release them on a CD. I've gotten really annoyed by all the rhetoric over recent years whining about how tight copyright laws have to be or else no one will create. The economics are overstated - creative people will create no matter what. I can see that from my experience. But part of the reason I wanted to do this is that if I'm going to take a position on copyright policy it seemed like it would be good to have some skin in the game, as it were.

And, of course, if this lawyer thing doesn't work out, it will be good to have "rock star" to fall back on...

We'll see how this goes, as I can't force the creativity to happen. But it's been a fun diversion and a huge confidence boost. It's a great - and fairly new - feeling to see someone else perform and be able to say to myself, "Hey, I can do that too!" Maybe not perfectly, deftly, or melodiously - but bravely. And I have to say that there's another upside to all this: suddenly plain old public speaking is much easier. After all, at least then I don't need to sing...

Photo by Larry Burgess.

The nice thing about having December off was that it gave me some time to think about what I'd like to do with my life. Don't panic: I still mean to be a lawyer. But it was nice to have the space to reflect on what kind of lawyer I'd like to be. People would ask me this question point blank, and hearing what I would instinctively blurt out helped give me clarity on what it is that I want for myself.

Generally speaking, I want to continue to develop litigation skills, ideally in the area of technology and IP law, and preferably with an international component to my practice. There's nothing surprising about this; it's what I've always wanted to do. The difference is that I've decided I'm less willing to spend time pursuing opportunities that don't incorporate as many of those elements as possible.

In the meantime, while I find the right opportunity, I plan to contract. There's a part of me that could be very happy contracting indefinitely, weaving together a life where I work as hard as I can for a couple of months and then take a month off to go live in Europe and write... But I think it's too soon in my career to opt for such a path. For one thing, while the money for contracting can be good, I don't think contracting assignments are so easy to get as to make it a predictable way to earn a living. You can't just show up at an placement agency and announce you'd like a three-month assignment starting next Tuesday. Secondly, in some instances it apparently can be really awful work in really awful conditions. From what I gather it generally seems to be pretty good in California, where there's less competition for the work (thank you, impossible bar exam, for creating a smaller pool of licensed lawyers...) and the legal requirement to pay time-and-a-half for overtime makes long hours much more pleasant, but there's lots of stories of sweatshop environments at some major law firms in New York, where temporary attorneys are apparently treated as fungible and disposable. Maybe there's some hyperbole in these reports, and maybe these stories are the exception rather than the rule, but there seems to be enough truth to them to give one pause.

The biggest reason, however, for why settling in for a while as a contract attorney isn't a good plan for me at the moment is that you can get stuck doing it. There's no significant career progression from a contract attorney to anything else. It's not like a temp-to-hire situation: few people ever seem to go from contract attorney to regular associate.

Most contract work is also document review, which is not necessarily the most scintillating aspect to law practice. I actually don't mind it too much, but I may have been lucky in that all the document reviews I've done have actually been interesting. Still, no matter how enjoyable the reviews, I know it's not the only thing I want to be doing. I want more varied work, involving all aspects of litigation, and to have some sort of responsibility for a case -- not just a specific assigned task.

Whatever I do for a living, however, will require keeping an eye on the long view: making a difference. For the foreseeable future I'm glad to work for the sake of working, to continue to learn this trade and to make enough money to make the loans go away. But if there were to come a day when I looked back on my career and saw that I had done nothing to influence sensible policy, then no matter how brilliantly I'd litigated or how much money I'd earned along the way, I'd consider my career a failure. It's this fear that's partly behind the motivation to write, as no matter what I do during my day job I'll still have an avenue for making my voice heard.

I realize that I've written a post before entitled, "The Great Change completed," because, in memorializing my first admittance to a bar, it was technically true: I had indeed become a lawyer. But for me the process of really becoming a lawyer continued on beyond that, through another year of examinations and unlicensed jobs.

But all that has finally changed, as last month I finally got sworn into the jurisdiction where I live, and last Monday I showed up for my first day of my first job that has ever required a license. Now the Great Change really is complete.

I've always regarded becoming a lawyer as something transcendental, like you start out a mere mortal and then get spat out at the other end as something else. Now that I'm at the other end, I think that's right. In a very tangible way it really does involve a transcendental state change: having a law license gives you a kind of potency you cannot possibly have without it. And the process of becoming a lawyer itself is very changing. I feel like a house that's been under extensive renovation all these years, having been taken all the way down to the studs before finally being rebuilt into something better.

Life goes on, of course, and I suspect that, like anyone, I will continue to change, as a person and as a lawyer, but this great change has been completed, and it's time to close the book on this chapter of my life.

So I have a question: does the California Board of Bar Examiners ask *everyone* who passes the bar whether they'd like to be a grader? To clarify, one's eligibility does seem to be keyed to one's residence in the Bay Area, but beyond that criteria, do they ask everyone?

Because I just got such a letter in the mail, inviting me to become a grader, and I'm torn between wanting to laugh and throw up. After all the hell the bar examiners put me through last year, trying to pass the damn test, dinging me the first time because I was apparently two measly points too stupid, oh, *now* they think I'm good enough that they want me to help them???

A part of me is, of course, intrigued. I can't actually commit to it for the July grading cycle anyway, but I can keep myself of their mailing list for future exams. Even so, would it be worth it? The gig does pay, but probably not nearly enough to justify the massive time commitment. Three hours a day, every day, for up to 10 weeks? I just can't see that kind of time commitment getting me anywhere closer to any of my professional or life goals.

And given that even reading this year's new JDs write about plunging into BarBri on their blogs is making my skin crawl, I think I need to get a lot more distance between myself and that test before I could even think about helping. I finally sold my bar review books a few months ago, and good riddance to them and that whole experience.