I find out my results for the Bar Exam in 3.5 hours. My stomach is full of knots, I tossed and turned last night, and my whole body is tense. It's terrible that one test can do this to me!
It seems like the whole world hangs in the balance of this test. If I pass, life goes on as I expected, I become a lawyer, will hopefully work for a nonprofit, etc. If I don't pass, it'll seem like my 3 years (and $180k!) in law school was a total waste....and I will have no idea what to do with my life. I guess that's a little melodramatic...if I don't pass, I'll just try, try again come February. Right now though, that sounds like my personal Pergatory. I can't imagine going through Bar Exam hell again.
I'm just trying to trust that God is good, and that God brought me to law school for a reason, regardless of whether I pass or not. It's easy to say that....but hard to feel and believe it.
So...if you see me in the next few hours before I check my results, do me a favor: Don't say "Oh, you're going to pass" or something similar. You don't know that. Only 39% of the people who took the February California bar exam passed, and I'm sure the other 69% had people telling them they were going to pass too. Just tell me you're praying for me and that God has a plan for me, either way.
And if you get this soon, and care to partake in the pre-results novacaine that i'll be indulging in with some friends, we'll be at Bluefoot Bar in North Park from 5pm til I find out my results (via iPhone) and either run out of celebratory steam, or, if i don't pass, until I want to go home and barricade myself in my apartment and eat a gallon full of tear-filled ice cream. Either way, you're welcome to come :-)
Waiting 4 months to find out if a test that determines if the entire course of your education was worth it, is total mental torture, fyi. Kids, if you're reading this, don't go to law school.
Wow...it's been a long time since I've posted anything.
Life since the Bar Exam has flown by. I enjoyed a solid month of amazing travels....it was probably the best month of my life. I spent 12 glorious days in Hawaii laying on the beach drinking froo-froo drinks, snorkeling with pods of dolphins, exploring tiny Hawaiian towns, touring coffee farms, and my personal favorite, backpacking the Waipio and Waimanu Valleys. Then, with less than 10 hours between trips, I took off for the John Muir Trail to meet some friends to do the last 50 miles and climb Mount Whitney. The scenery was stunning, the company awesome and entertaining, and the hiking was absolutely perfect. We summited Mount Whitney at 5:15am to watch the sunrise from the highest point in the continental US. Perfection. We parted ways in Yosemite, and I climbed Half Dome and then headed out for a solo road trip down Highway 1. I hiked, wine-tasted, explored, ate and camped my way down the coast from San Francisco back to San Diego, stopping in Monterrey, Carmel, Big Sur Cambria, Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, and every little cute town along the way. The whole month was filled with indescribable beauty. I am lucky.
Now that I've lost my vacation-high and am settling back down into reality again, life is a paradoxical mix of stagnation and unpredictability. In a way, I feel like I'm waiting for my life to begin....and I hate the feeling. I'm normally all about living out the moment and making the most out of life, but I can't help feeling like my life is on hold right now. I'm in bar-exam-limbo, along with many of my fellow bar-takers. I'm not yet an attorney, no longer a student. Stuck in waiting-land.
In the mean time, I resigned myself to working a temp job. Doing work that requires no mental capacity and that anyone with a high school education could perform, while holding Bachelor and Doctorate degrees, is demeaning in a way, and definitely not how I envisioned life after law school. It's paying the bills though, and in a way, it's a nice break after the stress of law school and the bar exam over the last three-ish years. For now, I'm just keeping my eyes open for any legal employment, and trying to network with the legal community.
Working full time, even at a menial job like the one I have, is strange and new for me. Working, then coming home and having my time to myself without having to do homework or study, is still a novelty for me. I enjoyed my first weekend as a full-time employee immensely....and now understand the phrase "working for the weekend." On a positive note, my non-working (and homework free!) hours are affording me time to catch up with friends I neglected over the last four months because of finals and the bar exam. Since the bar required all my time, mental ability and emotion, I all but disappeared and missed out on the happenings of my friends' lives. While it was a necessity, I'm feeling the effects now. I feel a little out of the loop, and distant from my community. It's a strange feeling, to feel like no time at all has passed since my life consisted of only the bar exam....but remembering that three months-worth of events occurred in the lives of my friends....events that I wasn't able to be a part of.
Life is strange. Now that I finally have the time to reconnect with friends, I'm finding it a little difficult. I think I learned to get by with little social interaction and rely on myself instead of friends (since I never saw them) while studying for the Bar. Now that same behavior, while a survival mechanism at one point, is a hindrance. I've always been a pretty independent person, so it's too easy for me to continue to be alone with my thoughts. I need to pull myself back out of my shell. My friends are helping pull me out though, and I've definitely enjoyed the beach parties, wine bars, dessert nights and line dancing randomness that have filled up the last few weeks!
While I've enjoyed my time with friends, my life overall feels kind of lackluster, and dull. Anticlimactic. I suppose it's just the post-graduation and post-bar-exam blues. The only way I can analogize the bar exam and all of its intensity is to running a marathon at a sprinter's pace. After crossing the finish line, you're left spent and depleted in every way, wondering if the momentary high of crossing the finish line was worth the 26 miles of agony, having a hard time remembering what made the idea of doing it exciting in the first place. The bar left me feeling utterly worn out; mentally, emotionally and spiritually. When I look at myself just seven months ago, I was passionate and excited about life, my career and my future. The bar kind of stripped that away from me, to the point that right now I'm having a hard time feeling excited about the idea of being a lawyer. In reality, I know that I'll bounce back from this. Deep down inside, I know I'm supposed to be a lawyer. My innate sense of justice, analytical brain, ability to find loopholes in any argument and inability to not consider the legal implications of everything I see, tell me that (and also tell me that I would be ridiculous at any other career). I know this is just one of those "this too shall pass" moments in life.
I guess right now, it's just a little difficult to envision what life on the other side of this stagnation looks like. Perhaps it's because for my whole life, I had a next-step planned out....a course of action that I could count on to get me through the monotony of life. In high school I looked forward to college; in college, law school; etc. My future holds no more clearly demarcated steps now. Life is now unpredictable, and I have no idea when I will get a legal job, or what type of job it will be....assuming I pass the bar. For a life-planner like me (and pretty much every other law student/lawyer), this is a strange place to be.
For many of my fellow law students, engagement/marriage was the next logical step. That, however, definitely hasn't been an option for me. I never wanted to get married until after law school was over, and made dating choices accordingly. I never really considered the fact that my career may be viewed by potential partners as an impediment, until recently, that is. I met a guy a few months ago, and the pre-dating phase was going really well. He was funny, smart, active, ambitious, well-rounded, and outgoing.....basically almost everything I had wanted in a guy. Dating hadn't even been on my radar when I met him. I was completely content being single, but he sought me out and we spent a lot of time together. I let my guard down and started really entertaining the idea of he and I going somewhere, and got excited about dating for the first time in a really long time. In the end, he cited career differences as a reason for ending things. My career....not his. He made an off-hand reference about me working 80 hours a week, and seemed to have an idea in his head of what my career looked like. The conversation went on for a while , and he mentioned him traveling a lot and me not being able to because of work....but overall, it came down to my career as an attorney (a career I didn't even yet have) outweighing anything about me as a person. Lawyer=dating deal breaker. It completely offended my sense of justice that me and my possible future career could be so neatly (and unrealistically) summarized, categorized, and discarded. If he had actually factored my personality and career goals into his lawyer=dating-deal-breaker equation, he would have known that I have no desire to be a corporate attorney, work 80 hours a week, or make partner. I want to be a public interest attorney, work for a nonprofit, and raise a family. The whole experience with him started off amazing, then ended with me stereotyped into a career I don't even have, and don't ever want (not to mention a slew of communication issues that left me feeling more worthless than yesterday's newspaper...but that's a different story). Overall though, it got me thinking about the whole love-and-law interaction.
Or should I say lack of interaction? After that dating fiasco, I started talking to people about love lives and legal careers. I don't like what I've found. One guy friend told me that men don't want to date female attorneys for a host of reasons: the female making more money, having a "better" career....or the kicker: men want to marry nurturers and so are attracted to nurturing professions like nurses or teachers, whereas attorneys are trained to be good at arguing, and "nobody wants to marry a woman who's a good arguer." The first two I can handle. If a guy was too insecure to handle me making more money than him or having a career that traditionally has a high social ranking, then he's a guy I wouldn't consider dating in the first place. The last reason though? Ouch, that hurts. I take offense to it because I consider myself to be really nurturing in a relationship, and have always known that my husband/family will come before my career....but all the justifying in the world won't do me any good if prospective dating partners can't get past me being an attorney. A female attorney friend of mine told me that before she finally met her husband, she would initially tell men that she was interested in that she was a nurse or a real estate agent. It wasn't until she had won them over that she would "confess" her true profession. How sad is it that some female attorneys feel they have to downplay their profession in order to meet men?
I know these are extreme examples...and not all men are like this, but that brings up love-and-law problem #2: while us female attorneys were foregoing relationships to focus on our education, it seems that all the good men who wouldn't be threatened by our professions already got hitched. I had always heard that the higher up the education/corporate ladder women climb, the smaller their selection of suitable partners becomes....but now it's ringing true. I painstakingly hauled my laptop and legal casebooks up every rung of that damn ladder and arrived at the top, sweaty and with $150k in debt, only to find that all the eligible men had climbed back down to marry the less sweaty women at the bottom. Sigh. What's a girl to do?
I know I'm being a bit melodramatic, but all this has been on my mind ever since "lawyer=deal breaker" guy decided that ladder-climbing women weren't his style. All of these ponderings probably make me sound desperate for a boyfriend/husband. Quite honestly, I'm not. I'm having fun being single at the moment. Deep down I trust (or am trying to trust) that if/when I'm supposed to find the right person, God will let me know and it will happen....without me climbing back down the ladder or denying a big part of who I am.
So there's a glimpse into the ponderings of my mind at the moment. As I type this, I'm listening to "Twentysomething" by Jamie Cullum....and the lyrics seem a little apropos:
Well, I survived the first day of the California Bar Exam!
I had a strange sense of peace and calm when I woke up this morning, that luckily lasted throughout the whole day. It increased when one of the proctors, a really friendly older lady, leaned down, made eye contact with me, and whispered "Good luck honey. I'm praying for you" to me. It kind of blew me away. She didn't say it to the other people near me, just me. God thing? Probably! It renewed my peace and was a great way to start the exam.
The security is pretty tight, and we were only allowed to bring in very few "approved" items into the exam room. Most of the items on the approved list seemed fairly superfluous to me....but these are lawyer-types we're dealing with here, so of course some people came with EVERY SINGLE item on the approved list and looked like they were preparing for the Apocalypse. We're talking two pillows (without pillow cases!), a 4X4 inch clock, entire packs of pens and highlighters (even though we use our laptops to take the exam), rulers (we didn't need to draw anything!), footrests, backrests, extra keyboards, and gallon-sized ziplocks full of medicine (the likelihood that someone would come down with a cold, flu, migraine, joint pain, allergies, cough and sore throat in one day was apparently too big a risk for these people). Another item on the list of approved items was "plastic material normally associated with the sport of swimming". Huh? I think it was in reference to earplugs...but i half expected one of the over-prepared-anal-retentive-super-lawyer types to show up with goggles or snorkeling fins. Maybe tomorrow or Thursday ;-)
After wandering through the rows and rows and rows of desks (I heard there were 2,000 people in our ballroom) to find my assigned seat, i was dismayed to find myself sitting next to THE SMELLIEST guy I've ever met. We're talking full on, you-have-to-breathe-through-your-nose-to-handle-it smelly. And i have to sit next to him for the next two days! It's gonna be rough. Maybe i should rub peppermint extract under my nose tomorrow morning or something. Or i could get there before he does and anonymously leave deodorant on his desk. I'll play it by ear :-)
Out of the 3 essays that made up the morning session, I felt pretty confident about Questions 1 and 3, but when I saw the first question, "WTF" was all I could think. (and yes, for those wondering, it comes out in my head as "WTF" and not....you know ;-) ) It was a question that I don't think anyone really anticipated. It was rough. I stared at it for about 10 minutes, trying to rack my brain for any legal concepts even remotely connected that I could throw down and sound at least quasi-intelligent. Not sure if it worked. Guess we'll see come November 21 when we find out our results! I feel pretty confident about the afternoon session...I think I rocked it! Hopefully enough to balance out my morning score!
The most exciting part of the day though, was the EARTHQUAKE!! As I'm sure you've all heard, California was hit with a 5.4 earthquake this morning. I was furiously typing away when the table started shaking and I got irritated and thought it was smelly-boy bouncing his leg up and down that was shaking the table. Then I realized the whole building was shaking....and then people started freaking out. Smelly-boy and a few others jumped up and ran out of the testing room. Other people pushed their chairs back and contemplated getting under the tables or running away. I looked up and saw some ceiling debris falling, but also saw that I was safely located in the middle between two of the giant, swaying ceiling lights, and figured I was safe, so I just kept typing away. It lasted for probably 7 or 8 seconds, and then abruptly stopped. People were still freaked out and there was a lot of buzz going on around the testing room....and then it was back to work. The Bar Exam doesn't take breaks for earthquakes! (I decided there on the spot though that if there was another, bigger earthquake, i was outa there. If I'm in danger, screw the Bar! I'll live the rest of life as a happy, ALIVE mailwoman or something ;-) ) Since it was pretty dramatic in San Diego, I can only imagine how it was for all the LA bar-takers!
I'm pretty sure I jinxed the earthquake. I was talking to a friend last night about earthquakes and how it would be funny if there was one during the bar exam. Oops. I'll make sure I don't talk to him about tsunamis. The testing location IS right off the water, after all. ;-)
Time to review my notes for tomorrow's portion of the exam. 1 day down, 2 days to go! G'nite all!
Spoken by my bar review professor today, in reference to contract formation: "Rejection in the law, like life, is often painfully indirect". Ain't that the truth.
To you men out there, here's some advice: When telling a girl you're not interested, do not give the "God has someone special for you" speech. Just. Plain. Don't.
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