02.07.10
Why Yes, It’s 10pm on Saturday Night
I still don’t know anything about lawyering.
In fact, I still refuse to believe that is a word. It sounds ridiculous. It sounds even more ridiculous in terms like “let’s pretend we’re doing some lawyering”.
But I do know that it’s a bad sign to complete hours of case law and statutory research for a persuasive memo and be unable to get past the thought:
My client is obviously screwed. I wonder if I can get away with writing for the Defendant’s side and claiming it was an honest mistake.
01.27.10
Afternoon Fun
Think what you will about therapy, but making an incredibly reserved psychologist laugh so hard that she snarfs her tea all over her oriental rug is totally worth the copay.
01.25.10
Homesick
One of my best friends has left her partner of eight years. She is bravely moving forward, trying to find apartments in the city and to feel what it is to breathe on her own after inhaling the air of someone else for so long. She is nervous, she is excited, she needs to sell her share of the condo. She is repeating my story 2.5 years later. Maybe she’ll move to Boston? Maybe she’ll switch careers? She cannot wait to go live.
But she’s never really been alone before. Never had her own apartment. Always had a man. And she needs help navigating it all. I’ll try, I suppose. She wants to know what it’s going to be like.
I tell her it’s going to feel like you’ve lost a limb. You’re going to wake up at night and reach out. Change your sheets, buy a new bed. Put it against the wall. Sleep with someone inappropriate but don’t let them spend the night. It is a death of sorts. There will be mourning. Some days you will revel in this freedom and others you will see couples everywhere.
You’re going to learn that there is so much you don’t know how to do. The things you counted on him for are going to seem enumerable and endless. Taking the trash out is going to infuriate you. Setting up a wireless system is hopeless. You are going to need your father, a lot. In fact some days you are going to be embarrassed by how unprepared you feel for your own life as an adult. It’s ok. It’s entirely your own fault, but it’s ok.
The worst times are going to surprise you. The first time you get sick and you’re completely alone and you’re out of dayquil is going to send you into a tailspin of epic proportions. Build a support system of friends. Call them. Call me. I can’t bring you the medication from Boston but I can call someone who can when you’re too pathetic to do so.
The best times, of course, are also going to surprise you. Nights that come out of nowhere. Dance parties with your girlfriends. Pictures of you with your face pressed up against your best. Discovering that taking the trash out still sucks but there’s so much less of it because you recycle every damn time without being asked. That first kiss– the one where he takes your face in his hands.
The guilt lifts. The clothes shift. Get a smaller couch. Get a smaller TV. Get a better therapist.
She asks when the void fills. I tell her, regrettably, that it does not fill. The wound closes a bit every single day but the void remains under the surface.
11.28.09
The Quiet
I’m surprised that no one really spoke of the isolation at law school. The weight of spending so many hours a day quietly on your own. The bizarre contradiction of wanting to break out of your study seclusion and the fear of being asked to speak in class. There are weekend days that pass and I realize that I have yet to say a word. I’m so sick of reading them.
They did warn of the lack of self-confidence. The statistics of depression of a 1L are far above the average American. No feedback and a complete mind remolding will do that to a person. Some of us drink. Some of us drank already and now just have less time to do so. We were cautioned against doing “more cocaine” in our orientation but I have yet to see it. If you’d ever like to make a room full of young adults uncomfortable just insinuate that a lot of them are already doing a substantial amount of cocaine and watch them try not to make eye contact with one another.
Someone asks about my day and I’ll realize that I didn’t accomplish a single thing they’ll understand so I just say “read”. Maybe I ate some oatmeal and went to the gym. I wonder if the doorman has any theories about what it is I do. Strange hours, no visitors, lots of books and dark circles. We’ve all started to get so antsy– hundreds of communicative, social beings with little time to speak.
I’ve said that all I want to do on holiday break is sleep. Truthfully all I want to do is surround myself with large groups of chatty people.
And drink.
But no cocaine. I refuse to pay 8% interest for drugs.
11.26.09
Still Here. Still Thankful.
I’m eleven days out from finals at my first semester of law school. Obviously updating my supremely neglected blog is the most important thing I could possibly be doing. Twelve hours of studying down and I’m only one outline closer to not failing out of law school.
I exaggerate. Not about the outline part. The failing part. I think.
I’ve sat at my computer for the past thirty minutes reading over the posts I wrote last fall. So much has changed again, but there are still things I am thankful for. More now than ever before.
I’m thankful:
1. Izzi found an excellent home with M in Louisiana. Hands down one of the hardest decisions I made this year but probably one of the best. Large dogs are not meant to spend 23 hours a day alone in a tiny apartment.
2. The ability to run again (new this week!)
3. What seems to be a loudly ticking biological clock. I previously thought this was complete bull. It’s not. I see young families walk through the Public Garden and it hurts. I love it.
4. Walking through the Public Garden
5. Living in this city. It’s where I’m meant to be. I cannot look up without smiling.
6. Waking up this morning with a man that makes me laugh. Everything about him, actually. I am thankful to be hopeful again. Most of all I am thankful that there may be someone who doesn’t make me quiet myself.
7. My family, of course. I miss them every day.
8. My friends. They may be far away, but I still love them and know they love me back.
9. Law school. At the moment.
10. A cozy apartment that I cannot afford.
I am thankful for this outlet.
10.11.09
October
The first few weeks of law school are a honeymoon. You move to a new city, break off the end of a dying relationship, buy $800 worth of books, and try to acclimate. While drinking and socializing and somehow dropping the summer pounds you picked up. You love the smell of highlighters. You love the smell of Boston. The library is adorable, and you actually read there.
You go out to a friendly dinner with someone you’ve known for a few years, and the conversation and the wine flows and there is so much laughter. You feel invincible. You feel beautiful. You feel like you’ve ended up in the right place for the first time in your life. You wake up spooned, exactly the same position you were in hours before. You love his smell.
There’s running along the river, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. There’s barre class and girls’ night out. Jeans you can’t afford. Sprinting home from a bar without telling anyone you’re leaving because he’s waiting for you outside and you jump in without questions, top down racing along Commonwealth.
And then it is October. And your classmates become shrill. You have yet to start your outline. You sometimes forget the right book. You hate the smell of highlighters. You are tired. All the time. And you wonder on occasion while you’re starfish on your bed watching Hulu again because you cannot bear to open that book if you are in the wrong place. You break your foot. You heal.
But this city still pulls you in. The law is still comforting in a powerful, bizarre way.
It starts to smell like fall. And he still smells like potential.
06.04.09
Gradumacation
While navigating my way to a doctor’s appointment yesterday afternoon I almost ran over approximately fourteen different members of the Deering High School Class of 2009. Ah, the jaunty caps, the blinding hope, and the strapless dresses peeking out from under polyester gowns. I was annoyed, of course, because I was running late (and that’s my go-to emotion).
I graduated from high school eight years ago. Sweet baby Jesus, eight years ago I was forty pounds overweight, rocking a J Crew dress and a nose stud, and walking down an aisle with the shortest and creepiest guy in my class (lining up by height never works in my favor). I don’t really remember the ceremony besides the speech I had to give. I remember being the only girl smoking a cigar on the front lawn with the boys. I remember a brief lunch with my family at the house, opening a box that contained little Tiffany studs which I promptly exchanged for a silver cuff necklace that I have yet to wear (and that doesn’t go with the mall studs I got a few years later AT ALL). I remember my parents dropping me off at the SuperSecretProjectGraduation event.
Project Graduation I remember in detail. My mother apologizing to me in advance because the thing had been planned by a particular group of women that my very kind and quiet mother described as “tyrannical”. Matching t-shirts handed out on the bus (mine: size Large). Shuttled to a bizarre boat tour that took us to an apparently haunted island where we had a lobster dinner prepared by two women who were both hunchbacked. A sub par comedy show following dinner (preformed by a comedian that I had actually hooked up with the previous winter). Back to the boat, then on to the local equivalent of Chuck E Cheese. Back to the bus, onto the most rundown movie theater in town to watch Pearl Harbor. Then bussed out (still in the rain) to a park 20 miles away where we were given stale bagels and cream cheese and no coffee.
Still with me? Well, then you did better than I. Because I fell asleep every time we got back on that bus. And I snore. So, yeah, that really cemented my legacy within a class of 40 people. It was a miserable, miserable evening. And though it may have kept all of us from getting alcohol poisoning that evening the memory of it makes me long for a martini.
But I did have hope. I was off to a Seven Sisters in the fall, my first choice school. I had a close group of friends that I loved. I had more male interest than I knew what to do with. I was going to graduate from college with honors, rock the Smith alumni circle, and land a job writing for Jane magazine in New York.
Yeah.
06.02.09
Fail
I broke up with the June LSAT. After ordering books and paying non-refundable test fees and taking practice test after practice test my scores continued to drop. In no particular, logical order. Each section took a turn of reducing its score. And I, faced with a final few weeks in Maine, business travel, moving my life into a POD, and trying not to ruin my chances of transferring if I choose to do so told the June 2009 LSAT to pound sand.
It was a difficult decision. I don’t like to fail. I don’t like to give up. And I wanted (want?) Tulane, but I don’t think a similar or slightly higher LSAT score is going to get me into the Big Easy. The second I mailed a letter to Tulane explaining my upcoming “absence” mark (did I mention that I made this decision three days after the cancel deadline?) for June 8th I felt a weight lift. I packed up my prep tests, books, and guides and shipped them off to a work acquaintance for her use for the October test. I shipped them via my work FedEx account. She’s a client. I plan to push moral and dress code boundaries until the last day here.
So we move forward with Boston. Find apartments. Buy school t-shirts. Ditch my number twos for a few months, and get ready for change.
04.23.09
Oy
Waitlisted, with “excellent chance” scores. Reason? They’re full.
Round 2 of the LSAT? Apparently in June.
Rolling admissions takes on another term entirely.
04.22.09
Nola
There have been several examples of instigated change in my life over the past five years. Each one of them involves men, and each one of them involves New Orleans.
I work in the commercial maritime industry. Most of our companies thrive on the Gulf, and many of our clients and staff live in and around New Orleans, and we put on our largest tradeshow of the year there in December. In late August 2005 I had been working here for three months, trying to find my way professionally and personally after breaking off a long term relationship and diving headfirst into a summer of partying. As Katrina gathered steam my coworkers and I sat glued to our phones and Internet updates. We know what happened next. The city was broken.
I sought comfort in a friend who had been blatant in his declarations that I was his dream girl. It was the easy way out, and I took it. We spent little time apart after that, and quickly bought our first house together and were engaged by the following August. A moment of weakness on my part, years of settling to muster. Life moved along, and the company brought the show back to NOLA in 2006 when the stigma of the convention center began to lift.
In 2006 I had a new titanium plate and eight screws in my wrist, a giant engagement ring, and a dwindling supply of pain medications. I fell in love with the city, as damaged as it remained, and let the music and flavors and people lift a vicodin haze for a few days. When I returned home there was cancer and weddings to cancel and re-plan and life to attempt to live.
In 2007 I returned to the Crescent City with a wedding band, confidence in my career, and a failing marriage. I met M and his friends (the heads of his company) and we somehow turned one boat ride into three nights of ridiculous debauchery on Bourbon St. I’ve never been out that late. I’ve never had that much fun. And I felt free for the first time since August 30th2005. These intelligent, fun, good-looking guys WANTED to hang out with me. I had forgotten what that might be like. Absolutely nothing romantic or inappropriate happened, and I was grateful for new friends. A round of emails followed and we kept in touch while my husband and I began to work out the details of our separation and subsequent divorce.
This year I returned to New Orleans for what looks to be my final show there. M and I had started emailing again, and I wondered if I might see him there. We hadn’t really gotten closure after my run-away last spring and I didn’t know what might go down. We visited the same restaurants but stayed out of the bars.
I took my LSAT in New Orleans. My first choice school (now that the dust has settled) is in New Orleans. And if by some miracle of overlooking Tulane’s terrible admissions cycle this year I get in, I’ll be starting another chapter of my life there. And if not? I hope somebody is taking me there for Mardi Gras/my birthday next year…
