This is Lucky covering her ears to tune out my constant complaining.

And this is the picture I'm going to show Lucky the next time she tells me she never really wanted a little brother.

The bar

So, I made it to Philadelphia and then quickly fell into the dark hole that is the bar exam. Three years of law school didn’t do it, but it only took three weeks of bar study to turn me into a full-fledged coffee drinker. I have a lot to update people on, but most of it will have to wait until August. I’ve been trying to come up with a good metaphor for the bar exam, and since I’ve been watching Olympic trials this weekend, I’m going with the always dependable sports metaphor. So here it goes. Say you decide you want to go to the Olympics in three years, but you’re not really sure what sport you’d like to compete in. So you spend a lot of money to go to a school where you learn a little bit about every sport and not very much about any sport in particular. At the end of three years, even though your self esteem has taken a beating and you and everyone you know is sick of your constant complaining, you decide you still want to go to the Olympics. Before you can compete, you have to pass a test. Now, the test will only actually cover some of the sports in the Olympics, but they won’t tell you which ones. So you run, and you bike, and you hurdle, and you learn the balance beam, and you dive, and you swim, and you ski, and you learn to ride horses and shoot a bow and arrow and bowl and play badminton. All so that on the day of the test you can perform in whatever sports they choose for you.

The metaphor might not make sense without knowing more about the actual test. It’s two days (but because I’m doing two bars, mine will be three). One day is for state-specific essays – six essays which can cover 23 topics. Each essay will likely have four parts, each on a different legal area. And even though practicing law is all about doing the right research, for the test you get no information, so if you don’t recognize the elements or know the applicable law, you got nothing. Then day two is a 200-question multiple choice exam covering six subjects. This one isn’t state specific because everyone takes the same one. Multiple choice questions can really only ask about areas of settled law where the law is the same in all 50 states. For example, in criminal law, parts of the common law have been replaced by statute in all 50 states but in somewhat different ways. So what do they test on? The common law, because the states uniformly DON’T follow it anymore. And since they test on areas where the law is firmly decided, the test doesn’t always focus on the most important elements of the law. For example, sidewalks are generally open forums for speech, but the sidewalk in front of a post office isn’t. I mean, why in the world would you have to protest directly in front of the post office? Walk down the freaking block and hold a big sign. But apparently that’s an area where they like to trick people, so I had to make a flashcard to hold just that fact.

Here’s my take on the exam so far: I don’t think it comes down to your knowledge of the law. I think it comes down to poise under pressure. 200 multiple choice questions in six hours means less than two minutes a question. But worse than that, a passing score is often only about sixty percent. So for six hours you have to maintain your composure even though you feel like you must be failing because almost every other question has not only felt wrong but has probably actually been wrong. I’m hoping that works to my advantage. Living abroad gave me a lot of skills to bring back with me, but I felt stupid pretty much the entire time I was away. Opened my mouth and sounded like a one-year-old no one could understand. Got on a bus that was clearly marked as going to Iasi only to find out it was going to Bucharest and I was the only one who didn’t know. Tried to buy a package of plastic cups one day and was told they only sold them singly; tried to buy them singly the next week and was told they only came as a pack. Stupid. Two years of feeling stupid, uninformed, confused. What I came to appreciate was that feeling stupid is a necessary component to trying new things. Sometimes new things are exciting and exhilarating and sometimes new things are the common law elements of crime. But they both have their payoffs and right now I’m trying to focus on the upside of all this book learning. It might seem silly now, but if I learn enough from the process, the end result will just be icing on the cake.

The magic of Lost

Apparently, the island on Lost can heal people with cancer, make crazy, bald men in wheelchairs walk again, and teach people English in no time. In just over a few months, Jin is nearly fluent, and he's been able to learn it all and still have time to catch fish with nets -- a rather time-consuming process of its own. Maybe Jin has actually been time-traveling to a daily ESL class? Hey, it's Lost, anything is possible.

This is how happy I am to be done with law school!

Everybody is just a stranger, but that's the danger in going my own way

You know the scene in Heat where Robert DeNiro says he lives his life so that he can leave it in 30 seconds if he feels the heat around the corner? I don't know what "heat" I've been worried about, but I've lived my life the same way. I've moved in suitcases rather than moving vans and have always felt a sense of freedom in keeping as many doors to the future open for as long as possible.

But all that is changing now. I bought a couch, and not just any couch, but a foldout couch that weighs a million pounds. I will need movers to move that couch, and it was too expensive to ever leave behind. And I'm going into a profession where you have to be licensed on a state-by-state basis in order to practice. Come this fall, I will (hopefully) be licensed in two states, which leaves 48 domestic states and the rest of world as locations I can't just pick up and move to on a whim. And I have cats. I always figured if the "heat" was around the corder, I'd just leave everything but them, and imagined stealing away in the middle of the night out the back door with the cat carriers slung over my shoulders. Having traveled with them more than any person should ever have to travel with their pets, I now know that they lack stealth and would surely give us away. So it seems that I'm going to Philadelphia for the foreseeable future, which is both comforting, because I've come to the conclusion that I've moved enough, and scary, because if it gets hard my flight or fight response will be limited to only one of those options.

But I can't help but be excited about a new place. Moving is always an opportunity to re-evaluate priorities; what am I willing to pack and bring with me and what am I willing to leave behind? The Romanian jeans that I had to try on in the middle of March in an outdoor market behind a mostly see-through curtain? It's time to let those go. But my box of martisor pins? Those are coming with. My pile of Runner's World magazines? Those will be thrown away. But my pile of magazines with Johnny on the cover? No question.

And what about my fear of new places and my worry that living in one place too long will make me feel stuck and stagnant? I think I might leave those behind as well. But the action figures? Those are non-negotiable.

My new favorite author

Since I didn't read much while in law school, I've been trying to catch up now that I have some extra time on my hands and before bar study starts in a few weeks. I've read two books by Jonathan Safran Foer and cannot rave about them enough -- "Everything Is Illuminated" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." It does no good to try and explain the plots because they aren't those kinds of books. They are the kinds of books that make you pause after every chapter because you think you might be, however slightly, a different person for having read it and you need time to find the contours of your new self before moving on.

Doing Good

Everyone knows the grammatical rule that while you can be good, you cannot do good. I struggled in law school with deciding whether I would choose a career where I would be able to “do good.” The other day I saw a woman take two bananas out of her grocery bag and lay them beside a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. And I thought to myself: why do I spend so much time worrying about my career, when I’m able to walk by homeless people day after day and never stop to give them food? Why do I think that my gesture of good must be so grand and so self-sacrificing? When did such a simple act of kindness become so foreign? From now on, I want to worry less about whether I am doing good and more about whether I am being good in all that I do.