Things My Job Has Taught Me: Part II (You are not an Idiot or Failure)

When you go straight from a top research institution for undergrad to law school you get used to feeling like it is normal to have deep if esoteric discussions. And, unless you are truly exceptional, you also get used to feeling unaccomplished and idiotic. As a law student everyone one you know can rattle off multi-factor tests and Latin phrases without batting an eye. All of my law school friends (because if you didn't guess they are in law school) all working on becoming part of the 2% of Americans with professional doctoral degrees. Every time we go to a networking event, or informational seminar, a meeting or a social mixer it is with lawyers, suddenly none of your accomplishments are all that special or unique, this is even more true when you start passing you resume around begging people to let you work for them (generally for free.)
Basically I live in a world where the strange has become normal.
Coming home this summer has put this in perspective. At my job I sit in an office where they bring "defendants in custody" past my door all day. Generally these people are in jump suits and shackles, sometimes they are in suits neatly groomed to be in front of a jury, but nearly always they are young. Or my age.
Suddenly the fact that mixed up crimen falsi and crimen innominatam when being called on to answer a question doesn't mean I am the biggest loser on the planet doomed to fail fail.
I guess a little perspective is a good thing.

Things My Job Has Taught Me: Part I

I am working this summer and, in addition to useful, educational and  important things, I have learned quite a bit that I couldn't put on a resume, or talk about in an interview but that are significant none the less. So I will be sharing them as they come up from here on out.
The first one:
If you are a defense attorney defending meth users and dealers, don't look like you are a meth head. I understand that you are probably naturally gaunt, and we haven't had much sun so your pallor is excusable, and maybe you are colorblind so the fact that your jacket and slacks are wrinkled and miss-matched doesn't stand out to you.
But really the missing tooth is over the top.

Not a 1L any more

May was a huge month. There was so much I could have written about, but so little time to do it. There were exams, an amazing friend getting engaged, moving back home (for the summer) starting work, helping my sister through the rituals of senior year of high school and trying to keep my head above water. Thankfully the school year is over and I have finished my first year of law school. It is hard to believe how fast it has gone and how much I have done. I am working now but, theoretically, without homework I should have time to post again (fingers crossed.) I am home on the California coast and in a grand twist of irony the weather stinks, but at least it means I am stuck inside and might actually write!

[F]EASTER

Exams are quickly approaching but my roommate and I decided that Easter is not a holiday we can overlook. While we could have been observant and gone to church we decided to recognize the holiday the way we recognize most things, we cooked. I wasn't too excited about it at first, I knew the time involved with this kind of meal and I am starting to feel the exam pressure. But we did it anyway and the results were amazing (if comically large.)

First we had to buy a ham. The smallest we could find bone in was ten pounds. There are two of us (and Grace) but we decided to get what they had and figured the bone was a good portion of the weight. (Why is it that meat can't be found in reasonable quantities?) I think that the people at the supermarket thought we were crazy, our bodies half in the freezer hoping to find one that weighed an ounce less.

 Notice the ham, with a glaze homemade by my roommate. (Oh and did I mention that on Thursday we had a whole chicken so while we were making the feast I was also making chicken stock?)

 My asparagus with a lemon rue, and my first attempt ever carving. Neither, my roommate and I, who both have extensive cooking experience, had carved and we find it funny that it is such a "man's task."

Notice the yams, and the mashed potatoes and the homemade bread. Also not pictured the mini-cheesecakes we had for dessert. (Guess whose house is not carb free?) 

Grace waited patiently hoping ham would fall.

And yes that is a croque minsieur,
which I will be consuming throughout exams.
We still have 9.8 Lbs of ham to consume

I had a better time without you.

Samuel Beam aka "Iron and Wine" at the 9:30 club

I have had tickets to see Iron and Wine at the 9:30 Club last Friday since some time in January. On Thursday the people I planned to go with told me that they had sold their tickets weeks earlier. I was pissed, I couldn't believe how inconsiderate it was, especially because I don't think they would have told me at all if I hadn't asked them about meeting up. I don't know how people get away with being so inconsiderate and still have friends. (It wasn't that they canceled but that they didn't offer the tickets to me to see if I could find someone to use them, or tell me early enough that I could sell mine.)

I tried to sell my ticket and, predictably, was unable to find a buyer. So rather than let the ticket go to waste I went to the show alone. My mom wasn't happy about it. (I think she expects me to run into Sid Vicious and end up dead in the Hotel Chelsea anytime I go to a concert. This means that I often wait to tell her about them until after the fact.

It avoids conversations like this:

Mom: but why do you want to go?

Me: Because they are awesome and the lead singer is cute. [Or I listened to them every day for a month when I was hating being abroad. Or because all my friends are going. (But that just brings up the bridge conversation.)] 

Mom: But it is expensive.

Me: How would wasting the tickets saving me money?

Mom: I just don't want you to get hurt. 

Me: Mom it just Outside Lands [or the Catalyst, or the Greek, or the 9:30 club]  and I have the cheap tickets, I am not going to meet some ne'er do well musician who tempts me with his words and move into his bus.

Mom: Well things happen. (She finishes in such a way that I can see her eye brows raise and her head tilt through the phone so she may as well be screaming "YOU SHOULDN'T GO.") Okay so that isn't exactly fair, but my Mom's distaste for heat, crowded spaces, and loud noise come out any time going to a show comes up.)

I disregarded her advice and went and I was really glad. In part because there is something really empowering about doing a "couple-y" thing on your own. I would have been upset if I had let the ticket go to waste, and while I could have blamed it on my friends ultimately I had control over the use of my ticket. While I was an anomaly, most people don't go to concerts alone, people were friendly, the beer was good and the music was better.  I generally have a head on most of the waifish hipster girls so I was ten feet back from the stage and could see everything perfectly. The whole set was amazing, and because I was alone I could sing along and enjoy the music without idol chit-chat. As an encore he did an a cappella version of "Flightless Bird American Mouth" that brought tears to my eyes. While it would have been nice to share it with someone who appreciated the music, obviously the people who bailed on me were not those people. 

  

Failure is not an option...

When I was about nine or ten my dad brought back a t-shirt from a business trip in Florida. It is a quote from Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director on Apollo 13. While it is exactly what I would want to hear from a flight director if I was an astronaut, I think as a child I would have been better served by the words of Edison "I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don't work."

While "failure is not an option" works reasonably well as a stance for the parents of a bright (if sometimes lazy) child living in a town where teachers were told not to use red pens, everyone had to be given valentines, birthday party invitations and end of the year trophies, at some point we will all fail. Success isn't about never failing, it is about learning to fail well. This has been the toughest lesson of law school. One of the secrets of the law, which is actually painfully obvious, is that you are going to lose half of the time, and if you define winning as getting exactly what you client wants well then that number is considerably lower. So law school is the excruciating experience of failing a lot, of breaking you down to very small painful parts and building you back up in a way that makes failure less personal so you can learn from losing, so that even the worst sort of day isn't really a failure.

This isn't compatible with "failure is not an option" and it has isolated me. I have created an infallible facade in front of a very human girl. When I am less than perfect there is no one to share that with because it doesn't fit with who I was created to be. There is nothing to success if it wasn't fought for and in exposing our wounds we are allowed to learn from them rather than letting them fester in the dark.

     

An amazon in a hipster bar

A couple weeks ago I went out for one of my friend's birthday. I had a good time, but I was also reminded why I don't go out all that often. My friend picked a great place, with a good DJ and without a cover, although I could tell immediately it wasn't my scene. Maybe it is DC, but I always feel overdressed if I put in the smallest effort into getting ready. The staggering number of people in hoodies and sneakers made me feel ridiculous. More so because I was in heels, I could look over the heads of everyone in the crowd. If that wasn't enough one of the girls who can grate on me begins the evening by saying "oh my god you're huge!"
Yes I am tall, but huge? Way to start a girls night off on the right foot. This girl in particular seems to bring out all my childish insecurities. Whenever I am around her I feel like my twelve-year-old self, and our interactions always seem to turn petty.
I was hoping law school would temper my interactions with superficial girls. That once we began our "professional lives" as they like to tell us, that we would all try to act like grown-ups. Boy was I wrong.
As an undergrad I developed a distaste for the subcategory of these girls who acted dumb to get men. I went to school whith some of the most fiercely intelligent women in my generation. Women who spent their days working on cures for blindness and doing research for Nobel laureates (not an exaggeration) and who would then turn around and act like idiots because when they acted like themselves they were ignored by our male counterparts. They were threatening, and boys don't buy drinks for girls who threaten their masculinity. I can't even begin to count the number of times I was told by smart, amazing women that if I just "acted dumb" that I could have a boyfriend.
And it continues, I don't think it will ever end. As long as men (on the whole)are threatened by women and more attracted to women who seem vulnerable, it won't change and the dating scene will continue to be miserable for everyone. (For women because they are changing themselves to be attractive and for men because they are ending up with girls who are either supercritical or insecure in who they are.)
The party was mostly really fun. I was having a great time aside from the occasional comments about how tall I was for most of the evening. One of my friends, not a superficial girl, was spending some quality time with her crush. The rest of us were giggling like gossipy teenagers. The crush, being either a nice guy or a typical guy who sees an opportunity noticed one of our classmates (definately a silly girl-pretty and more than that, adorable, but also willing to say and do the dumbest stuff for attention.) Like drink in obscene quantities. Anyway, crush goes to help her, gets her water encourages her to stop drinking. The bar closes and we are outside waiting for cabs and superfical girl is puking everywhere. Crush is being kind, holding her hair back. Silly girl finishes the exorcist routine, Crush tries to put her in a cab asks he what her address is to give the driver. She stands up, wipes her mouth, says, "I just want to go back to your place" then caresses his chest and it works. I wanted to throw up. My friend is miserable, I give her a "typical" and an eye roll and we go back to her apartment to watch chick flicks and drink more. And I never want to go to bar again. Which is why this week my roommate and I stayed in watched sitcoms and drank boozy smoothies.

Q: So dumb guys go for dumb girls and smart guys go for dumb girls.

Then what do the smart girls get?

A: Cats mostly

-Modern Family on discovering what it means to be a smart girl