Counting My Blessings

I've done a lot of bitching and moaning here about life in a big law firm and my desire to escape this climate at some point. But I'm not going to do that today. I've been at my job for over four years now, and at times it has been intensely frustrating and something I just wanted to walk away from. But I didn't.

And at times I am quite certain that some people at this firm wanted to walk away from me, such as when my workload suddenly dried up and I was the heftiest salary among our group's associate ranks with not nearly enough work to stay profitable. But they didn't walk away from me even though over 10,000 BigLaw associates all over the country lost their jobs in the last 2 years, often with a lot less justification than my firm would've had for pulling the rug out from under me. They stuck by me, and so I've stuck by them. After a very rough year or so, I have good cases again, I'm busy as hell (hence no blog posts), and I have a chance for the brass ring promotion at the end of the year if I play my cards right. Much to my great amazement, things are good again.

It's been sort of like a tough marriage to a good man who can be mighty annoying sometimes. Neither of us is always happy about our mutual obligations and commitments, but during the worst economic crisis of my generation, I feel tremendously lucky to have found loyalty from a big, soulless corporate law firm...the last place I would have ever thought to find it.

I personally know at least five people who have been laid off during this recession, and it feels like that number grows every day, often when I least expect it. Every single time I hear their pained announcements of the unexpected news, I feel a gut check--like I know I am tremendously lucky not to be in their shoes. And who knows? I still could be before it is all over. But for now, I am turning over a new leaf. No more whining about it here. My law firm ain't perfect, it has its quirks and drawbacks, but we've stuck it out all these years depsite all the difficulties, and that means something.

To draw the relationship analogy out as far as it can stand, maybe after getting screwed over so many times by the dashingly handsome assholes I've made questionable commitments to in the past, I now understand and can warmly appreciate the simple pleasures of life with a decent, honorable guy who may not seem as superficially perfect at first meeting, but has turned out to be much more real and enduring than anything I've ever known.

I would never have thought I would still be here by now, but I am, and I'm learning to be happy. For a girl who has said often that my theme song is Steve Earle's "I Ain't Ever Satisfied," that is a surprise. A happy accident.

If this lawyer thing doesn't work out...

I could probably give it a go as a cupcake baker. Behold my creation for my father's birthday:

I resemble that remark

The American Bar Association has been studying my graduating class of lawyers (class of 2000) for the past 8 years, much to my surprise. Apparently they have been following a slew of lawyers who graduated at the same time I did, and periodically poll those lawyers to find out where they're working now, what position they've achieved, and how happy they are in their role and their chosen profession. The results from the 2007 round of polling might surprise you:

76% of my fellow graduates are happy they became lawyers
9% are still at mega-firms with more than 250 lawyers (this includes me)
58% have changed jobs at least once
11% are now serving as in-house counsel
19% of female attorneys and 30% of male attorneys in small firms have made equity partner
6% of female attorneys and 22% of male attorneys in mid-sized firms have made equity partner
8% of female attorneys and 10.5% of male attorneys in large firms have made non-equity partner (large firm equity partnership tracks are often longer than 7 years)

The satisfaction numbers obviously come from a time before the recent economic slump and associated law firm layoffs. I would expect that satisfaction to drop somewhat if my graduating class were polled today. But it is still interesting to see how people with my experience level are crafting their careers.

Like many of my colleagues, I have changed jobs 3 times since I graduated. I returned to a mega-firm 3 years ago after going to a small trial boutique for 2 years. Why? I learned that whether I was at a small firm or a big firm, the pressures and problems were largely the same. I still had the pressure to bill bill bill hours, to turn out top work, to make myself available to clients at all hours and produce perfect results. So if I was going to have all that pressure no matter what, why not have top notch resources behind me and make twice as much money? If I voluntarily leave this job, it will most certainly NOT be for another law firm. Much like a hefty chunk of my colleagues, my greener pastures (should I choose to seek them) will be of the governmental or in-house variety.

The other way around

It seems like everywhere I go, I find frustrated lawyers who wish they could leave the practice of law and write for their living. It's certainly a favorite dream of people stuck in a life that often feels devoid of true creativity. (Just today, I had to tell a partner that I have "no pride of ownership" in the brief I spent the last week working on, after he told me that he felt bad making some major changes. Given that I'd cribbed much of it from other briefs on the same topic, it was most definitely not my creative baby and he could slaughter it all he wanted to!) We are always looking to the past, looking to precedent and templates and trying to make sure we are everso consistent with what has gone before. Great writers concoct beautiful words out of thin air, and it is about as far opposite as possible from the experience of your average BigLaw lawyer. Thus, it's pretty easy to see why the big firms are filled with people dreaming of becoming then next Kerouac, or maybe just Grisham or Turow.

So it was very interesting today to read an interview with Elizabeth Wurtzel, who you may remember as the author of such 90's mainstays as Prozac Nation and Bitch: In Defense of Difficult Women. (A book I still wish I'd gotten around to reading simply for the title alone. Maybe someday.) Wurtzel has been seldom heard from in the last 5 years or so, and for good reason: she has been attending Yale Law School. Last week, she began working for Boies Schiller and did some work on the Wachovia/Wells Fargo deal. The WSJ law blog interviewed Wurtzel about why she'd decided on this reverse escape career path. Basically, her reasoning can be summed up here:

I used to feel that I spent too much of my time in my pajamas doing nothing, and I’d think ‘in the time that I don’t spend writing, I could raise a family of five.’ In a lot of ways, being a writer is lonely and alienating. You hear about the work ethic of people like Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike and you think ‘well, God bless them, but I don’t know how they do it.’ Most of the rest of us just wind up watching Oprah. I was roaming the neighborhood every day, lingering at the dog run with my dog. It was really bad. I just wasn’t doing enough, and I feel like law school sort of gave me my voice back. When you have a lot to do, you get a lot done. At least that’s how it’s been for me.

It was quite fascinating to see someone complaining about feeling useless for sitting around in her pajamas writing for a living, when I and virtually every other lawyer I know pretty much consider that our idea of heaven. But it is also nice to hear someone excited about practicing law like we all were once upon a time. I could not help to think, however that we'll have to see how she feels a year from now about the daily grind. Much like I suspect I would last about six months in her former life before I'd either collapse into a pit of laziness or crave structure so much I'd go racing back to the first firm that hired me. The grass is always greener...

Commitment Issues

I realized this morning that I have been at my current job for 2 years and a little over four months, and that this is the longest I have continually worked at any job in my entire life. My work history goes something like this:

High School:
Summer job in a hotel gift shop (3 mos)
Part time job for a chain of golf stores (1 year)

College:
Resident Assistant (1 year)
Cashier at Disney World (3 months)
Assistant to Lobbyist (2 months)
Clerical Temp (~6 months)
Part time Legal Secretary (1 year)

Law School:
Summer Law Clerk (3 months)
Part-Time Law Clerk for Small Firm (8 months)
Summer Associate (3 months)
Law Clerk for Solo Practitioner (9 months)

Post-Law School:
Associate with Big Law Firm (little under 2 years)
Associate with Solo Practitioner (~6 months)
Associate with Litigation Boutique (2 years, 1 month)
Current Job with Big Law Firm(2 years, 4 months and counting)

It had never dawned on me before that I have never really made the big long-term commitment to a particular company or job. Now, in college and law school that was a function of the temporary nature of my position--I was always headed on to somewhere else, and everyone understood the gig was temporary. But since I graduated from law school, it certainly looks like I tend to get antsy and want to make a change before 2 years pass by. I doubt it was an accident that my sudden urge to research greener pastures seemed to hit in about February of this year.

But for long-term success and happiness, I need to find a place that I want to stay and build something of my own, to carve out my own niche. I just have to figure out how to do that. I certainly don't want my resume to look like one of a serial firm-jumper, and yet that is exactly how it looks right now. So if I make another jump, and who knows if I will (not exactly many cushy landing spots appearing on the horizon these days), I need to know it's to a place where I want to fully commit. I've dated BigLaw, but if I leave here for somewhere else like In-House or Government, I should be ready to marry.

Of course, in order to do that I should probably have at least a tiny clue of what I really want.

Physical manifestations of stress

I need a vacation so bad it literally hurts.

I've been rife with anxiety about the impending recession, some slowness across our group at work, and my fears that another round of layoffs in the law firm world are imminent and will include my firm. I've had a little other personal stress as well, but nothing terribly out of the ordinary. It's my fear for my job security that keeps me awake at night. Night after night.

In addition to the insomnia that comes and goes, I have neverending stomach acid and reflux at night. I find myself chewing antacids before bed almost every time I go to bed. And then when I get there, I just lay there because I can't sleep of course due to thinking about all this stress. Sometimes as I lay there, I apparently clench my jaw or scrape my teeth back and forth across each other like a nervous tick. I do this when awake too at times of particular stress, and it's taking its toll. My right side of my face feels constantly sore and sharply stabbing when I move my mouth the wrong way. Unfortunately everything that involves eating constitutes "the wrong way" these days.

But most troubling is that about 2 weeks ago I started to feel the familiar fluttering thud in my chest every once in awhile. I know from my ex who also had them that they are known as PACs and though he was not a doctor, he was a rampant hypochondriac who voraciously studied every ailment he believed he had. This one he chalked up to his valve closing too soon, causing a little backflow of blood into the aorta. I have no idea if that's really how it works, I only know that it feels like a small thud in my chest and then I have a sudden need to cough. When it's happening, it happens a few times an hour. Sometimes it will be three or four times in a minute, and then I won't notice it for days.

Thanks to my job I have occasion to learn about all the strange and unfortunate things that can suddenly an inexplicably go wrong in the human body. I know that certain cardiac conditions are diagnosed through measurement of the ejection fraction of the heart valves, and "ejection fraction" is something that sounds like it involves backflow of blood. Or at least it might. I also know that my mother had an arrhythmia and that they can be hereditary. And I know that I have not had these heart thumps for lack of a better term in many years, and their sudden resurgence worries me.

I suspect many people would tell me that what I need right now is not a regular physician but rather a psychiatrist, since my paranoia appears to be making me feel all of these things. Unfortunately I have never believed that seeing a psychiatrist would help me. I would refuse to take any drugs offered and find that therapy feels like a useless exercise to me. My life is actually pretty good when I step back and gain a little perspective, but that's precisely the problem. My life is so good that I don't want it to change suddenly and without warning. See, my life seemed pretty good once about 7 years ago too and then the bottom dropped out of it and I spent a long year trying to swim back to the surface.

My mother told me on the phone tonight that even if the unthinkable (actually I wish it was unthinkable--it's all too thinkable for me right now) happens, she will not panic. She has seen me come back from that deep abyss before, at a time when even I did not know if I could. She also saw me make it down here to Georgia without a clue what I would do once I got here, only to find surprise them by building a life quickly here that is better than anything any of us hoped for. My parents are in a much better financial situation today and able to help, and I am mentally more resilient than I have ever been. So if it happens, deep down I know I will be OK. I know I will have survived worse. And I know I'll always find a way back up to the surface.

The problem is the worrying, the not knowing in the meantime. Perhaps because of my previous experience and in particular my feeling that I did not get out in time even though I knew I should take precautions, I am too cautious today, too paranoid for my own good. That's what everyone tells me. I don't want to be the Cassandra making everyone else nuts with my dire predictions of the horrors that await. But I also know that sometimes my sudden feeling of impending doom isn't just me being crazy. Sometimes it's my warning signal and when I ignore that signal, my body pays the price.

The second week in May cannot come soon enough. I hope that 5 days away from it all playing poker in New Orleans will help calm the waves of worry that churn in my stomach every day along with what sure is starting to feel like an ulcer. But in the meantime, I need a treatment plan. Unfortunately, I have no idea where to start.

Signs, signs, everywhere signs

It's beginning to look a lot like 2001 all over again. Law firms are shortening and scaling back their summer programs, pushing back start dates for incoming first year associates, laying associates off (though still usually couching it in terms of "performance issues"), and nobody has much work to do.

I have seen this horror movie before, and I can tell you what comes next.

Incoming first year associates will be forced to enter or split with practice groups they do not want to work in but that are busy, such as Bankruptcy. Firms will start offering incoming first year associates buyouts to either delay their start by a year or not come to the firm at all. Other firms will promise that if all associates forego bonuses this year, then they will avoid associate layoffs. Quietly, the criteria for receiving a good review and keeping your job will be ratcheted up to sky-high levels. A few handfuls of associates at each firm will be asked to leave during their reviews for not meeting their hours requirements, and then another few handfuls, and then at some point the firm will no longer be able to deny that it is laying off associates due to lack of work.

In 2001, it seemed as though every firm in Boston was cutting people left and right. Some of them had the cojones to call it a layoff. Some pretended they'd just managed to hire an inordinate number of bad apples and were weeding them out. My firm laid off over 20% of its associates in a span from October 2001 to October 2002. Other firms more dependent on tech clients and more affected by the NASDAQ collapse laid off as many as 40%. With hundreds of highly qualified laid off BigLaw associates on the streets fighting for the same handful of jobs, people stayed unemployed for months after their 3 month severance ran out. Salaries froze or went down.

I know I sound like a harbinger of gloom and doom, but the signs are popping up everywhere. Remember how I said the crazy BigLaw raises last year and the year before were a bad thing and a portent of approaching doom? Now, hopefully, you see why.

The sad reality in situations like this is that not one but two classes of associates become the most expendable: the young associates who are not profitable anyhow and are thus overpaid relative to the money they earn the firm, and the most senior associates who are paid the most. Last time, I was in the former category and now I have the misfortune of being in the latter. I do not have a good feeling about this at all.

I'm the best! And I have no life!

A survey of attorney productivity with a breakdown of male vs. female and parents vs. childless found that childless women attorneys are the most productive of all 4 categories. (Women with children being least productive.) Surprisingly, unlike with women it appears that men with children are more productive than their childless counterparts. I have a couple of theories of why that might be, such as perhaps the childless men are still looking for mates, or maybe the men with children would rather work late than go home to screaming babies. I don't know.

The important thing is this: I am the only single woman in my practice group. This means, apparently, that I should be billing circles around my coworkers! But alas, I am not, because I am lazy and easily distracted and would rather go drink beer with friends or sleep occasionally than slave over a hot computer all day.

This sort of survey just reinforces what many of us already know: Ladies, you apparently can be a high-powered lawyer or you can be a mother, but you can't really be both. Most of the high-ranking and high-earning female attorneys I've known and known of over the years have been childless. Given that male attorneys can apparently find time to breed, it's quite sad that the profession won't find a way to accomodate women's desire to do the same and also make partner.

I don't know if I ever want to have children. But I don't want my ability to do that to be foreclosed by my chosen profession or my desire to have a full time job at a top law firm where I get meaningful and interesting work. Why can't I have both?

Then again, right now I'd settle for time to find me a babymaker.

Kill it! Kill it!

This article from Slate about the hopefully approaching death of the law firm billable hour makes my heart soar. Yes, it is true that billing your life in six minute increments is the most soul sucking experience imaginable.

For those of you who have never done it, and who work a full time job, simply imagine if at the end of the day today you had to be able to give a written accounting of every single thing you did for your job. Imagine you needed to have written down in detail every single project you worked on, every phone call you made or received, every conversation you had, every email you drafted or read, and every document you wrote or edited. Imagine that your description of each item needed to be precise in exactly how long it took and what you did for that time. Now imagine that if you could only account for what amounted to 6.5 hours of work today even if you were there fore 8, that your salary would be cut by 20% for today. And imagine that if your accounting were wrong, if someone else remembered that conversation as being 25 minutes when you had it as 30, that someone would complain about it and you would be intructed to be more precise next time. Imagine that in addition to writing ALL of that down and being painstakingly accurate, you also had to assign task codes to every single thing you did through some arcane system designed by the ABA just to further torture every billing lawyer on the planet.

Now, imagine having to do that every single day for the rest of your life. Even on weekends, because Lord knows you might answer a phone call or send an email on the weekend and every single thing you do for a client needs to be captured. Imagine that if at the end of a week you could only account for 30 hours of work completed despite having been there for more than 40 hours, that you new you were now behind and would need to catch up next week by billing 50 hours instead of 40. Imagine that asshole clients told you that they would not pay you for travel time, so if you spent 8 hours travelling to San Francisco for a project, you could only bill for the time on the plane that you spent reviewing documents or drafting a proposal, even if that only amounted to half of the time it took you to get there. Imagine that an incredibly difficult project took you 25 hours to complete, but the client came back and said they thought it should only have taken you 15, and that they were not going to pay you for the "extra" time you spent. Imagine that so many of the mundane things we do around the office--cleaning out our inbox, filing things away, cleaning up or reviewing our calendars or to-do lists, and general team meetings and conversations about how things are going overall, could not be captured on your daily billing. Nor could any client pitches, involvement in professional organizations, attendance at seminars or conferences, or company parties and events.

It would suck, right? You'd want to rip your hair out after a couple days? Welcome to the world of the law firm lawyer.

The article is correct that many clients are seeking flat rate or alternative billing arrangements in order to keep legal costs down and remove incentives for their outside counsel to bill the shit out of their cases. My current firm has such an arrangement with one of our clients, and my last firm had that arrangement with the auto manufacturer I represented. The problem is, we still had to accurately bill our time even though the client was paying a flat fee. In the event the client was able to obtain attorney's fees in a case, they needed our records to show what they were entitled to recoup. And, because the entire firm was not on flat fee arrangements, for bonus and advancement purposes they still wanted to know how much we billed. The same is true in my current situation.

If anything, the flat fee arrangement simply gives those of us who work on those cases a reason to be lax about worrying about whether our time accounting is entirely accurate. The paralegals fudge a little in how long they spent creating that file, I don't worry about whether my accounting of a meeting perfectly matches that of someone else who was there, and there is no incentive for us to be efficient in our work for that client because we know that whether we spend 3 hours or 9 hours writing that motion, the amount our firm gets paid is the same and nobody will be questioning whether it should have taken us that long to complete. The lack of client oversight over our bills might seem great to the client, but it prevents us from being as efficient or cost conscious as we would be for a client under a regular arrangement.

So, while I agree with the premise of the article that the billable hour method of capturing costs is outdated and problematic and needs to be revised, I don't know that flat rate arrangements are the way that clients and firms should go. I would much rather see some sort of apportionment of arrangement where the firm determines an overall number of hours that I spent on client X's work over the year, calculates the percentage of my salary that should come from that client's billing, and then somehow determines an appropriate amount to bill that client for the work that I did. The problem is that law firms want their money now now NOW and do not want to take such a long term retrospective view to billing. (As opposed to attorney salary and bonus, where long term retrospective views are all the rage!)

I don't know what the answer is, but there's got to be a better way. I and virtually every lawyer I know are so incredibly tired of billing our time that I think most of us would take a hefty pay cut if it menat nobody would ever again demand an accounting of what we worked on. It is THAT soul-suckingly awful to do every day. And if virtually every other industry in the world can find a way to be productive and profitable without such an arcane way of seeking payment for services rendered, so can we. Someone just needs to figure out how.

Goodbye, 2007

Someone asked me yesterday why I bother with New Year's resolutions, when people always just forget about them after a few weeks and then feel bad about it at the end of the year when they think back to their lofty and unachieved goals. I do it because usually I have either completed or made significant progress on at least half of my list, and that gives me a sense of accomplishment and an inspiration to renew those goals I still need to work on for the coming year. This year, I did complete the landscaping of my house and completed most but not all of the decorating. I bought a new car. I began exercising regularly, even if I did fall off the wagon. And I took a real vacation, albeit a brief one. Other things (getting thinner--something I've been aspiring to for nearly my entire adult life) I didn't do so well on, but hope springs eternal. And thus tomorrow I have the foundations for a new list.

2007 was an up and down year for me in so many ways. I started the year crazy busy at work, billing insane amounts (for me, anyway) and not having a single weekend off between December and sometime in April. I became the "Discovery Bitch" for a major client and was headed for trial in June, and then the case settled and the discovery project slowed way down, and suddenly the rest of the year wasn't so bad in terms of workload. But I also got dumped twice in 2007, the first hitting much harder than the second, but both resulting in struggles to stay friends and also making the year feel much like an emotional rollercoaster. I had some major fights with some very close friends, but as I always do I resolved to work it out and smooth it over as best I can.

I had some other random challenges, like my basement flooding due to roots in my pipes, and this leading to the yard and driveway being dug up and then the new landscaping. Or, my car's air conditioner shitting the bed in 2 weeks' worth of 100+ degree weather, leading to me getting a new one. In a lot of ways, 2007 is encapsulated in those experiences. It seemed like a tragedy at the time, but forced me into a change I knew I needed to make eventually, even if I didn't plan on having to adjust to change so quickly. And somehow, I found a way to make it happen.

There are some major events decisions looming in 2008 for me, most notably in terms of career path. I need to find a way to save enough money that I can either leave this job or, if I am put up for shareholder, buy my "share" if I am successful. I also need to save money for a new mortgage, while at the same time trying to pay down my car payment and student loan faster than presently set up for. This means I have to stop splurging so much on myself and my friends and family, which trust me will be harder for me than it sounds. I need to stop splurging in other ways too, and get back on that treadmill and stay with it. This is the year for getting serious, and as much as I hate to do it, I've waited long enough.

I have some other smaller and sillier goals in 2008, ones that should seem too small to mention but are important to me. Though it may have seemed like I did not enjoy my trip to New Orleans to play poker last month, it is definitely something I want to do again and get better at. Hopefully, I'll have the chance in Tunica in the next few weeks. But I also really want to try and win a World Series seat this year. I don't know if I'm good enough yet to win one, but I know I have to try. I also think my friends and family won't understand if my "real vacations" this year all center around poker, but I might as well kill 2 birds with one stone!

I have plenty of other personal goals that are far too personal to get into here, but they all fit my theme for 2008: no more bullshit. I've wasted so much time in my life on bullshit, on things that don't matter enough and people who don't matter enough, wasting time that I could have spent on things that make me happy or that advance my goals in some way. And that needs to be over. This means, with other changes, that blogging will probably significantly lighten for 2008. I know that every time I say that I end up holding out for a week or two before going back to my usualy 3-5 posts per day, but I really mean it this time. No. Really. I do. Blogging, for me at least, is a luxury of time. And as I look towards the year I will turn 33, time is a precious commodity now.

Finally, because this post isn't long enough already, I'll do the usual "Year in Review" thing that so many others have and give you a smattering of my favorite posts from 2007. In order by date, they are:

January--Circling the Drain
February--Will Blog for Food
March--It's ALL Hate Speech (in which a commenter called me an alcoholic who's just as bad as Ann Coulter, the highlight of my year!)
April--Dear John...it's not me, it's you
May--"I lost my junk in a tetherball accident" (the original video is no longer available but can be seen here)
June--The Gawker Mindset
July--Liveblogging the Genarlow Wilson oral argument, part 2, part 3, postlogue
August--A question
September--The Weekend that Was
October--The good fight
November--The poker odyssey
December--the conclusion of the poker odyssey

Phew! That took awhile!

Raging bonuses

The only thing dumber than the collective rush of BigLaw firms to all match salary increases in lockstep is the strange New York quirk of setting associate bonuses in lockstep. I have never understood this concept, primarily because I thought bonuses were about two things: rewarding someone for working and billing more hours than expected by the firm, and rewarding someone for the high quality of their work. If every single associate who hits their 2000 hour target gets the same $25,000 bonus, why bother to work harder than anyone else? Why bother to care about putting out the best work product you possibly can?

Well, New York is at it again as Associate Bonus Watch 2007 is in full swing. There's daily updates of who has matched, who will match, which firms are paying "special" bonuses somewhat akin to profit-sharing, etc.

It should probably horrify everyone to learn that fresh out of law school associates in New York are now going to make $195K guaranteed (with that fat lockstep bonus) for their first full year of work, some even topping $200K if their firm pays a "special" bonus. Baby lawyers, barely able to write a memo or review a document without considerable guidance from their senior associate mentors, are going to be in the top tax bracket this year. That's insane.

Also insane is that associates at my level at these firms are set to collect $110K bonuses when all is said and done. Will it make up for not seeing their friends or families more than twice a year? Probably not.

As I've said a time or two before, I'd gladly take a 25% or more pay cut if it meant I could only bill 1800 hours a year and still keep my job. I'd like the un-bonus model, please.

Randomness embodied

It's funny how when I'm absolutely swamped at work it seems like there is no shortage of blog-worthy news or topics, but as soon as I actually have a little breathing room my mind goes as blank as Paris Hilton's.

As you no doubt noticed by now, I was pretty well underwater for the last few weeks. I was working extremely late nights even on the weekends, I was sleeping too little, I had developed what sure felt like an ulcer, and I started despairing about whether I want to live this life anymore. That question still lingers, but I feel now with a couple days of decent sleep and a workday that ended at 7pm like I can afford to wait awhile and decide it on my own terms.

Of course it doesn't hurt that just in the knick of time (is it nick or knick?) my boss decided to be concerned and supportive and just generally exactly what I needed out of her, even though I rarely even get to see her in person these days. But she both encouraged vacation and praised my recent efforts, and gave me lots of helpful and positive feedback on my being on course for an associate at my senior level who has to think about the dreaded S word (rhymes with "hairholder") in a year or so. I still don't know if that's what I ultimately want, but it was nice to hear the encouragement to stay on that path. Plenty of associates at my level of seniority are getting far less encouraging and far less subtle signs about their prospects or lack thereof at this point in their careers.

So I don't know if I've been sucked back in completely or not, but I don't feel like jumping out the window anymore and my stomach no longer feels like a roiling volcano of acidity, so that's nice. I have developed a strange visual anomaly that I think I've decided is part of a new onset of optical migraines when I have PMS. This would explain the vertigo 2 months ago and why my physical and migraine were completely normal. The bad part is that I have other friends who have experienced late-onset hormonal migraines and it has gotten unbearable for them. I don't really want to go through that.

My dad also had a recent health scare, though that sounds like it may be due to new physician ineptitude rather than an actual health issue. After having low cholesterol his whole life, low to the point of freakishness, his doctor now says it's 255. He is requesting a second test, but if it really is that high then I am going to have to start really watching my own cholesterol instead of presuming that good genes would carry me along. Sadly, like most cooks I love real butter way too much and have a hard time cutting it out. I'm also scared for my dad, who at 62 years old is a prime candidate for heart disease even though he is in fantastic shape. And it makes me scared for other guys I know who have even more risk factors but who don't want to take the risk seriously.

I am quite proud that yesterday I got my mother to actually shop at and purchase clothes from designer stores. If you knew my mom you'd know this was a major milestone! My parents are going to Italy in August for an early 40th anniversary present, and my mom really wanted some cute and trendy clothes. I got her to buy 2 outfits from Michael Kors including an adorable empire waist dress (unlike me, my mom has the perfect figure for empire waist--small up top, a little hippy on the bottom) that she fought me on until she actually put it on and my dad's jaw just dropped. It was really adorable to see that interaction between them. I was lucky to grow up with such a great example of a lifetime love affair. Now if only my mom would take me up on my offer to get her hair colored to take away the grey, she'd look 10 years younger at least.

I made a cherry pie last night on a whim and holy crap was it good! I cut a bunch of pitted bing cherries up and mixed them with some prebought Williams-Sonoma cherry pie/cobbler filling, and then just used a Pillsbury pie crust. I wasn't prepared for how long a pie has to bake and I kinda overdid the filling, but it still tasted fantastic. I'm thinking of having some folks over for dinner this week as a way to use up the pie before I eat it all. I do love my cherry pie. No, not in the dirty way.

I guess that's it. I know this is rambly, but I really got nothing of actual consequence to say these days. Everyone's out of town, I've been both bored and miserable, and the news topics have all been played out to death.

Underwater

I suddenly realized today that I am just hopelessly swamped at work, something that should have been fairly obvious but I think I was actually in denial of exactly how bad it is. It's hitting me today as I sit here in my office facing probably 10 hours of work at least, and that's just on the one project that I need to get done by tomorrow. I could work 15 hour days for the next week and just barely get everything done, let alone all those little things I've been meaning to do but haven't gotten to because they aren't emergencies. Yet.

It is times like these when I just start to feel hopeless about not just work, but everything in life. It's strange how the water just swallows me whole and I can't find anything to be hopeful or positive about at all. I feel overwhelmingly negative about my personal relationships, my health, my friendships, the state of my front yard, you name it.

When people wonder why lawyers tend to just get fed up and leave the profession, I think it is from overwhelming feelings exactly like this. Things just start to seem indescribably hopeless and the prospect of a lifetime of feeling this way is just too much for some people to bear. I have enjoyed a couple of months now of lighter workload than the craziness that was the first few months of the year, but as everything has just recently started closing in I find myself once again just sick to my stomach at the thought of one of those soul-crushing periods of complete insanity. I am terrified I will miss a deadline and commit malpractice. I am scared that the people I work with will freak out to find things that haven't gotten done yet because I haven't had time, or because on the fourth straight day of working late I just say fuck it and leave to get some actual sleep. And I am starting for the first time to consider the possibility that I just really don't want to do this anymore. I'm not sure what "this" is, even. Could be this firm. Could be big firms. Could be litigation. Could be practicing law altogether. Maybe I want to open a restaurant.
I just know that I can't live like this forever, and knowing that means I've really already made up my mind even though it takes awhile for me to act on it. The practice of law isn't likely to change considerably just to accomodate my sanity, and that means I that I know deep down I can't continue feeling like this forever. Now I just have to find time to think about the question "what next?"

Strange Coincidence

Today's little pipe dream for what I'm going to do next if I decide law firm partnership isn't for me (or if the firm decides it for me) is teaching. Since I didn't go to one of the top 10 law schools for law faculty, and I didn't do a federal clerkship, the odds of becoming an actual full tenured professor are remarkably low. But I'm OK with that, since I think I would be fine with teaching either in a clinical program or a legal research and writing program, at least to start. Writing is what these people that I work with think I am best at, after all, not that you'd necessarily know it from my blogging. (Trust me, for brief writing I'm much better at this stuff.) And I hear that you can on occasion make the jump from such a position into a faculty appointment if you play your cards right.

So I've been scanning the faculties of local law schools, and at the same time thinking about my own research and writing professor, who wasn't really the nicest person at the time (really, none of us liked her so much) but who had worked at a big firm for several years before she got sick of it and went into teaching. And as I'm scanning the faculty of a prestigious local law school to be named later, suddenly there she is! My writing teacher! What the hell is she doing in Atlanta?And HOW FREAKIN' WEIRD IS THAT?!

The world can be such an incredibly small place sometimes, it boggles the mind. Now I'm wondering if I should contact her for advice, and if she'll even remember me. If she does I bet it's not a positive memory, since like I said we were not all really too fond of her and I didn't get the impression she liked us much either.

I'm sure this little pipe dream will pass shortly, but over the last 2 days I've had to research some issues of law that I don't normally work with in my practice (for the blogging dontcha know, because my priorities are TOTALLY straight!) and it has been interesting and reminded me of what I enjoyed so much about law school. I miss the days when legal issues were fun. Thankfully a colleague from the corporate group just came to ask me a question about personal jurisdiction, which allowed me to flex the ole brain a little bit. But it wasn't enough...I need more stimulation than I get arguing over whether we follow the Harvard rule on commas. (Actual argument, yes, my job often sucks.)