Practice

If I could go back to my 1L self and advise me on what to make sure I do in law school, I'd say take as many practical (rather than substantive or theoretical) classes as you can, because learning by doing can be way more effective than learning by reading theory.

This semester I am taking two practical classes: the small business legal clinic and contract drafting. Both of them have already provided some of the best experiences I have had in law school.

In contract drafting class, I am rewriting some form contracts, which is a very useful skill to learn. You might imagine that this is a very regular thing for law students to learn in law school, but actually I have heard that contract drafting classes are quite rare. The one at my school is a very small class that always has a huge wait list, so I am glad I got the opportunity to take it before graduating. It's much more useful than my technology licensing class I took a year ago, in which I read about licensing, and looked at some rather dense and unintelligible contracts, but didn't really learn much because I wasn't asked to draft anything.

There is so much garbage out there in contract language. When was the last time you read a contract that you understood even half of? Ok, ok, I know. You don't read the contracts you sign. I don't either. But wouldn't it be nice if you could understand what they said when the shit eventually hits the fan and you have to actually go back to read them? I am planning to eventually amass a collection of coherent form contracts that I can use in my future practice. This class is a great chance to get a start on that.

The small business legal clinic is turning out to be something I probably should have done last year to build up some of the confidence that the first year tore down. I started it with a great measure of anxiety. I have been struggling with anxiety issues for many years, and sometimes it is more bearable than others, but before this semester started, I was in a pretty bad place in terms of managing it. It was getting to the point where I was starting to contemplate seeking professional help, but that's not something I want to do before the bar application process, so I've been holding out. But in the last two weeks, I have been able to work on a lot of my anxiety issues via the clinic class. I have already had to interview two clients, which is an intimidating thing, but they went well and my confidence is growing by the day, noticeably.

On the day of my first interview, I was nervous as hell. But I got through it in pretty decent shape and had a nice endorphin high the rest of the day. I was so insanely cheerful that day, and had a bunch of positive interactions with people throughout my day, including random strangers. The following day, I was exhausted from having had so much positive energy the prior day, so I kind of crashed and retreated into my shell again. But clinic is forcing me to come out of that shell on a regular basis, and it is having derivative effects in my life outside of clinic that are starting to stick around a little longer.

Today I had my second client interview, which went great, and I carried my positive attitude into my after-clinic hours. I am beginning to realize how important human relations skills are to the practice of law. It's customer service, really, and in any industry that performs customer service, it is a boon to be kind and pleasant to people in general. You never know who may walk into your law office needing help some day. And you want to build interpersonal skills so you can provide good customer service for the needs of your clients, because they are at the center of what lawyers do. I am feeling more confident, and can actually envision myself getting into this profession and eventually being good at it, one step at a time. It's nice to have positive, confidence-building experiences at last, instead of just being torn down in the classroom all the time.

I think this last semester will be a good one.

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In the end

Lately, I am very resistant to going to bed. I am not resistant to sleep: I love taking naps during the day. But even if I am tired, I don't want to go to bed at night, because that means my day is over, and tomorrow will come by the time I am next cognizant. I just want to grab on to time and hold it back for a bit. Hold it until I am ready for it to advance again, and I'm not sure how long that would take. It could be quite a while. Maybe it's that I'm finally starting to feel "old", or maybe it's that I feel like there is just too much in front of me to handle, and I don't want to get to it yet, or at least not all at once. It's kind of paralyzing, when you see how many obligations lay ahead of you. Ironically, all I really want to do is sleep right now. Sleep until winter is over, like a nice hibernating bear, those lucky bastards. (See how much of a break they get from life every year.) But sleeping means time advancing, and I don't like that right now.

So yeah, these are my last few days until my very last semester of law school begins. What's that you say? You can't believe I'm here already? Feels like just yesterday this journey began? Yeah, that's what pretty much everyone who hasn't had to live with me or otherwise suffer with me through the past 2.5 years seems to be saying. Time is relative, my friends. Of all the notable 3-year blocks of my life -- junior high, high school, most of college, my first full time job -- this has been by far the longest and the most self-transformative. I feel like a completely different person from where I once was, and it has taken a long, long time to become like this.

What lies ahead for me? In short term, a Capstone paper; a few classes; some writing assignments; a single remaining final exam; a clinic; graduation; the bar exam. Then? I don't know. Everyone asks what's next, and all I ever say is I want to get hired by anyone who will hire me, pretty much. But then the advice begins. You could practice such and such law. And sometimes they are right, sometimes I could practice in that area. But usually they just bring up some area in which I have neither experience nor interest, and they've never gone to law school anyway, so they don't really understand why it's not feasible for me to do whatever they think is a brilliant idea for me to do. I just want people to not ask me what I'm going to do next, because I don't know, and no, you can't help me figure it out, most likely. But I will find something, at some point, and when I do, I'll let you know.

As my friend heidikins recently wrote: It all works out in the end. If it hasn't worked out, it isn't the end.

I think that's going to be my new mantra.


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Dead Batteries and Self-Induced Isolation

This Christmas Eve, Ian and I spent 4 hours chasing after a new car battery to rescue our dead car.

We had spent the morning downtown, having lunch and walking the streets, listening to brass bands playing on sidewalks, admiring the Christmas tree in Pioneer Square, and watching the statue man stand still like a statue in the cold for tips (that's got to be harder than it looks).

On the way home from our restful Christmas Eve activities, Ian decided we should stop at the Safeway close to our house for some Christmas Eve snacks. While I sat in the car with the headlights on, Ian went into the store. He was in there for a good 15 minutes, I'd say. I watched several carloads of people come after him and leave before him. By the time he returned, I tried turning the car over to the dull sound of clicks, signaling a dead battery. I felt like a dunce for leaving the headlights on, but Ian said he's been suspecting that the battery wasn't holding a full charge anymore and expected it to go soon.

We felt fortunate that this happened close to our house, as it was only a 7 minute walk from where the car died. But we felt not so fortunate that this happened on Christmas Eve when places that sell batteries are not likely to be open.

We took our groceries home, then brainstormed on the best mode of rescuing our car. In retrospect, the thing to do would have been to hang out in the parking lot of Safeway with the hood raised and wait for some good Samaritan to give us a jump so we could take the car home and worry about a replacement battery Monday. But, I guess the best way for me to explain why we didn't do that is that we are both very independent people who like to do things ourselves before depending on help from others. Character flaws, perhaps, but that's just how it is. Ok, maybe that's a cop out. See what I mean at the end of the story.

It was 3:30:PM, and on Christmas Eve, that means options would quickly be running out. There's a Les Schwab about a 10 or 12 minute walk from home, so we decided that instead of trying to figure out a bus route to go to some unknown auto parts store far from our home, we'd try walking over there. I suggested that Ian give them a call first to see if they were open, but he was like, "let's just go." And I was willing to just go along instead of calling myself. Another thing about Ian and I is that we are both rather averse to making phone calls if we don't have to. It's kind of a phobia that I actually think is not too uncommon. Anyway, since Murphy is in charge of the universe, Les Schwab was not open today.

A Jiffy Lube was open (just in case you need your oil changed on Christmas Eve), but they do not sell car batteries. I seemed to remember in my childhood seeing car batteries stocking shelves at convenience stores like 7-11 (am I hallucinating about that?), so we poked our head in a couple gas stations along our way, but I am either dead wrong about that, or gas stations have just stopped stocking them. Running out of options, I got over my telephonophobia for a minute on our walk and called the local Fred Meyer, asking if they stocked car batteries. Our Fred Meyer recently remodeled, and while the layout is much improved, the selection is much diminished: they no longer have an automotive section at all, so no dice.

We looped back around to the Safeway, since we were closer to that than our home at this point, and tried the car again. No avail.

At this point it was 4:15 and we didn't have many options left. We thought of asking our apartment manager to come give us a jump, but they appear to be away, and besides, we feel crummy about bugging people on a day many treat as holiday. Finally, we decided that Sears Auto Center would be the last choice for a car battery on Christmas Eve. We called ahead (lesson: learned) and found that they would be open until 6:00. Only problem now was traveling the 4 or 5 miles to get there on time. We looked up a bus route which would drop us at the mall where the auto center was located 45 minutes before closing, but we would be dropped off clear on the exact opposite side of the mall parking lot area, and would have to walk fiercely in the cold to get there after having already waited a half hour in the cold for the bus.

We did all this, got the battery, and then called a cab to take us back to the car, because there's no way we were going to carry a car battery back through that long walk and bus ride (car batteries, it turns out, are quite heavy). A $23 cab ride later, we were standing at the car again. Ian decided to just jump the car with the new battery and take the car home then change the battery later from our own parking lot. Immediately upon raising the hood and connecting the jumper cables, a woman parked in front of us asked if we needed a jump. We told her no thank you, but it was ironic that we were so reluctant to ask for help, and we went on this big adventure, and just when we were close to finishing our independent quest, some kind person offered to help. All we really had to do was ask and this whole day would not have been the headache it was.

This experience underscores something that Ian and I have both been experiencing lately: isolation. For some reason, this year we have both started to feel quite homesick and lonely. We just miss being around people that we know and love. We don't make friends easily, and though we have made friends here, I can't say we're particularly close to any of them. I do enjoy some of them quite a bit, but I have not achieved the same level of intimacy with anyone in Portland that I had achieved in Salt Lake.

Ian and I were talking about these lonely feelings lately and Ian said something that struck me: "You know how when we first moved here, we thought the people of Portland were all so nice and friendly, unlike the people in Salt Lake?"

"Yeah," I replied. I can't say I'd describe the people of Portland the same way today.

"Well, it was us. They were friendly to us because we were receptive to meeting new people since we were in a new place and didn't know anybody. They reflect back to us what we give to them."

That made a light bulb go off for me. I think it's true. I for one tend to keep pretty closed off from people for a lot of different reasons. One reason is that it's only the people who are close to you who can really, really hurt you. Another is that even strangers can hurt you, though maybe not as badly, and I have had plenty of experiences in life that have made me distrustful of the way people will behave toward me. Another is just that I am an introvert. While extroverts find social settings a great way to unwind, I find them taxing on my system, and I need a lot of alone time to balance it out. Thinking back on my close relationships in life, they have, for the most part, been with people whom I grew up with as a child, or with whom I lived as a roommate. A couple exceptions exist, but in all cases, there has been an environment ripe for intimate development of a friendship. I'm not the type of person who's going to become best friends with someone if we haven't ever had a real conversation about who we are as people. And growing up with people or living with them is a great way to facilitate those conversations. It's harder to get there without that.

But the bottom line is, we are alone because we have made ourselves that way. I can take a lot of alone-ness and not feel lonely, but I think it is to the point where something's got to give, and I guess Ian has convinced me that the change has to come from me. But Inertia also rules the universe (right up there with Murphy), and it is hard to make myself move when I am so used to standing still.

I guess I have a lot to work on in the new year.


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Bad Hand

This is why I should not be allowed to hand write my exams:

I'd give myself an F if I had to grade an exam that looked like this. TGFC (Thank God For Computers).

It's finals season now. I'm probably taking my first exam tomorrow, assuming I can decipher all the chicken scratch on my notecards and put my exam taking tool together in time. Believe it or not, I am immune to my own bad handwriting most of the time and should be able to read it just fine.

I have four exams this season, and will probably be done with them in a week and a half. Most of them are unscheduled, which is why I'm playing the timing rather by ear. They are all open book and 3/4 are part multiple choice, so I am feeling pretty good about it.

The one concern is that my school is making us use some new exam software this season, and I can just envision tons of problems happening. Hopefully not to me, otherwise some poor professor is going to have to read my bad hand and my grades will suffer the consequences. :S


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