Sua SponteMy law school odyssey: the ongoing narrative.
Today my 1L class graduates law school.
I wish I'd kept in better touch with more of them; Friendster is nice, but email is better, and instant messenger, ah, if only there had been time. But even as far as we've diverged -- and it probably hasn't been that far, anyway -- I'm still rooting for my original peeps, my moot court section, my study group, my outlining buddies, all the folks with whom I shared that long bloody firewalk. Here's to Section 5. Long may we litigate.
Congratulations!
It gets on my nerves -- not in a bad way, like a persistently stiff lower back, but in a petty trivial way, like realizing I can't use those eggs because they expired in January -- when people complain about the pointlessness of a third year of law school.
Why are we still here? the thinking goes. (See Jeremy's take on the matter for an eloquent example.) We've all got jobs already, or clerkships, or whatever. There's nothing substantive left to achieve either on- or off-transcript. We're just sitting around writing silly papers and blowing off Legal Profession and otherwise cycling through the same old routine that law school has become over the past two-plus years.
On one hand, I can't really disagree with any of these points. (Well, that's not true. In the rest of the law school universe, only the luckiest people already have jobs lined up. Plenty of 3Ls at other schools are still pounding the pavement in search of work, and lots of people even at fancy schools didn't get lucky in this year's clerkship process and are still paying attention to their grades so they can reapply. But I don't think Jeremy, or any of the other bored 3Ls, means to disparage these folks; they're just speaking from their own perspective, that's all.) If you've already written papers and taken exams and gone through interviewing and hit all the rest of the milestones on the regularly-scheduled path through law school, then by the time you're a 3L, you've basically seen it all before.
But indulge me for a moment while I put my transfer-student hat back on. If you haven't been in the same place for three years, then maybe you haven't seen it all before. Even my husband realized this, last summer: transfer students never quite make it past 2L. Your first year of law school, at the old place, basically becomes a yearlong prep course for your first year of law school at the new place. And even though you'll have completed three years of law school total by the time you graduate, only two of those will constitute your Real Law School Experience in the end; your pre-transfer year winds up being little more than background, set dressing, a way to put the new place in context. You never actually hit the saturation point at the new place quite like you would if you'd been there for three whole years instead of just two.
[hangs transfer-student hat back up between the coonskin cap and the propeller beanie]
And even if you did spend all three years at the same law school, I'd wager that there are probably still a few things left to explore. In my school, for example, there's certain clinic work that is only available to 3Ls. There are all sorts of minicourses and inhouse seminars and other semi-serious scheduling candy that is frequently offered pass-fail, just to give you a pressure-free taste of something you might find interesting. If you haven't already done moot court or a journal by the time you're a 3L, you're still welcome to try it here if you like. (In fact, at least half of the finalists in our moot court competition are 3Ls this year.)
I also think there's something to be said for the repetitive stuff. The lack of novelty in one's 3L year -- and this is largely true even for transfer students; you've taken classes and passed exams before, you've written seminar response papers, you've even probably done a Substantial or two by now -- is, at least to me, an incredibly comforting thing. I wrote about this feeling back in January, when I was working on my write-on:
Now that my outcome has been determined, nothing I do (short of flunking out) will be outcome-determinative any more. There is no cause for alarm. Nothing is at stake. People wonder about the purpose of a 3L year; I argue that this is it, this first and last opportunity to take action without consequence, this long-desired chance to sit back and just experience law school with nothing riding on your choices.
It was with nontrivial regret, back last October, that I gave up my old pullman backpack. It had rolled by my side since the beginning of my 1L year, had served as a badge of honor of my transfer-student status, and had even played itself in last year's law school musical. Unfortunately, the dog had rusted and stuck and gummed up in so many joints and ballbearings that even I had to admit it had reached its end.
So I sent it back to L.L.Bean, and bless them, they gave me a hundred bucks of store credit. That, plus some incremental input from my stepmother, translated into a sorely-needed new suitcase just in time for Christmas. For school, I reclaimed the old backpack that I had used during exam season, the one that had belonged to my husband back in college. It was plain black and boring as hell, but it fit my laptop and casebooks. I added a rainbow ribbon from the Outlaw folks to liven it up, and decided that it would work for the duration of my law school career.
Unfortunately, it didn't.
I noticed a few days ago that the black backpack had begun to fray at one of the seams. Eh, I thought, whatever. I then forgot about it until my Con Law casebook burst right through the hole, a bright red corner followed by a bunch of white pages sticking out against a field of loose black thread. Oh. This was no good. It was a Jansport bag, so I couldn't exactly send it back to L.L.Bean.
It looked like duct tape was my only remedy.
Then I remembered: my husband and his father, two summers ago, back during that week when we took the inlaws to Yosemite and I decided to transfer schools while pondering the view from Sentinel Dome, had gone to Sportsmart and acquired a bunch of camping-related goodies. One of these was a bright red hiking backpack.
Sure enough, it appears to fit my laptop just fine. I might even be able to squeeze a casebook or two in alongside.
"Figures," groused my husband when informed of my intentions, "you could even wreck a mountaineer pack with your law school casebooks."
I've got five months left: I just might.
I can never just let something die. Even when something is as self-evidently beyond my control as the clerkship application process, I still find myself wondering how I could have done it differently. Most recently, my mediocre streak of luck has led me to take a good hard look at my resume.
My resume has two law schools on it.
This is a fair representation of reality; I have, in fact, attended two law schools. But maybe it's not the most flattering thing to note that virtually all of my law school accomplishments are listed under the first of the two, when I plan on graduating from the second.
I've never been anything but proud of my transfer student status. The word alone has its own aura in my mind; whenever I get junk mail from credit card companies inviting me to transfer my balance, I can't help but smile at the magic word before shredding the envelope. To me, "transfer" means everything that I'm proud of: toughing out the worst year of my life, taking myself to the mat, and, with the help of prayers and promises and a dazzling dose of luck, winning my match.
Only now is it occurring to me that the "transfer student" label may not speak so highly of me to a critical judge or clerk. At this point, it's at best an excuse for the fact that I'm not on a journal -- and may not even say that much about me to the unschooled eye. Maybe it's time for me to pull the label back in to my personal collection, my jewelry box of credentials, and not use it so emphatically in public.
"Where's your rolly bag?" A. asked me last week.
"I retired it," I said. "It's too loud and squeaky to take into the library...the wheel wells are ruined, all full of rust and crap from winter."
I've semi-retired it. The thing sits in my hall closet, gazing sadly at me like a basset hound. But a grueling salty winter has made it well and truly unusable. L. L. Bean purportedly offers a lifetime guarantee on their products, so I'll probably see if there's anything they can do to revitalize -- or replace -- my puppy. Giving it up altogether is a big wistful step that I might not be ready to take yet.
I'd like to redesign my resume, though. I'd like to demote my old school to a bullet point under my current one. And even though it's late, I'd love to book a real talking point or two this year, some black-and-white evidence proving on paper that transferring schools was as good a decision for me as I know it was.
Who knows how my luck might run without a label?
It has been a year since I transferred law schools.
I've been following with great gusto the adventures of the transfer applicants' Yahoogroup, watching the process unfold again for dozens of people as it did for me last summer. When I was applying, there was no Yahoogroup; not that I would have joined one anyway, since knowing exactly how uncompetitive I was would have made my nightmares even worse. Although even in my self-imposed ignorance, I had a pretty good sense of how uncompetitive I was.
It made no sense to me that I got in. By conventional wisdom, I shouldn't have. All of the strongest points of my application were things that admissions committees aren't supposed to care about. Everything is supposed to center around the numbers, and by numbers alone I do not deserve to be where I am today.
This has cast an odd light on my law school career post-transfer. Now that we've been at the school for a year, I'll bet the rest of my transfer classmates have gotten over it. They earned their seats, they Go Here Now, and that's that. But all year I've felt as though I was still earning my seat, day in, day out, dedicated to paying off the admissions folks' bet on me and my forgettable numbers. Certainly there are moments when I let go, sit back, look around, and just bask in how glad I am to be here. But most of the time, there's something else to do, another opportunity to chase, more work to be done to cement my position as a contributing and productive member of my graduating class. It's different from my 1L misery; it's not miserable. But nonetheless it never stops.
Thankfully, it's working. My grades have gone up since first year. I've even learned that mine was the top exam in one of my 2L classes, something that never happened to me as a 1L. All the effort I put into my e-commerce seminar paper paid off and saved my winter-quarter average. The harder I work, the more I stick myself to it, the more it looks -- and more importantly, feels -- like I belong here. It may have been a fluke that I got in, but it was no accident, and it was certainly no mistake.
By now the immigrant syndrome is mostly gone. Things like the USNWR law school rankings still get my goat, since I do retain some fairly distinct memories of what it's like to be on the other side. Generally, though, I've come to see myself as a student at my current law school, where quarters and numeric grades and colder-than-fiction winters and this particular range of opportunities are the natural order of things. Maybe this in turn means that I'm over the hump in the coping process, and the process of recovery from my first-year hazing is all downhill from here.
It'll always be strange to talk about 1L, I realize. It's hard not to sound like I'm exaggerating, pumping melodrama into the retelling until the memories are inflated to bursting with artificial pathos. Or maybe my experience reveals something unflattering about me: a low tolerance for discomfort, a tendency toward hysterics, a knack for making bad decisions and then crying over spilt milk. I certainly don't want to seem as though I'm indicting the school I came from; plenty of people go there and love it. Maybe my experience was all my fault, all self-imposed. Still, that doesn't make it any less real.
Maybe this furious workaholism -- the guilt fairy, the addiction to options, the sense that I need to re-demonstrate my worthiness on a daily basis -- is really just a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Psychological insurance against ever having to "go back." Or if not, then something like PTSD, but sharper and shorter-lived; something that is already fading and will continue to fade as I put more time and distance and good solid calming numbers between myself and there.
I went to a barbecue a few weeks ago with some old 1L friends, including L., the study buddy who had come back to visit in my dreams. She introduced me to some of the other people at the party, naming the school to which I had transferred with a sharp edge to her voice. "You say that as though it's a bad thing," I needled her with a grin. "Of course, no rivalry here," she shot back with a wink -- but the edge was still there. I didn't tell her about the dream.
But there is no rivalry. Our schools' markets barely overlap. I doubt that my presence there was important enough to anyone that they'd bother expending the energy to resent me for leaving. And I think I've pretty conclusively made my peace with the place, appreciated what it gave me, and gotten over the part where it kicked me to the curb. In the end I made it to where I wanted to be, which was all that mattered.
I love my law school now. Yes, it's a crazy amount of work, more than most of my peers at other schools plan to do as 3Ls. But even so, it's my work, my place, my school. And this year I'm looking forward to actually letting up a little on the pace. One of my graduation-requirement papers is already done; the other I'll be drafting over the next few weeks. Eleven classes are all that stand between me and a J.D., and a job awaits me afterward. Sure, the bar exam will come. But now, with no 1L fear left, and nothing left to prove as a transfer student, this year will be my time.
Was transferring hard? Yes.
Was it ever a problem, adapting to the new culture? Um, sometimes, yes.
Did I ever miss the old school? No (although at times I came close).
Did life at the new school ever just suck? Yes.
Did I ever regret my decision to transfer? Not once.
Congratulations to the newly-minted crop of transfer students (and ~~waves~~ to all those applicants still awaiting good news -- keep the faith!). As far as I know, these are the ones who also have blogs:
Jeremy Richey, who transferred from University of Akron to Southern Illinois University.
Schteino, who transferred from University of Miami to Boston College.
Musclehead, who transferred from Washington University in St. Louis to Emory.
Mr. Uninhibited, who transferred from USC to NYU.
"Transfer Law Student", who transferred from "a good law school" to "a better law school." (Amen to that!)
Did you transfer? Are you blogging about it? Email me or comment on this post and I'll add you to the list.
I haven't had a post about elephants in awhile.
Here's the story of one who tried to transfer, but alas, it just didn't work out. Ah well. Sometimes it doesn't.
Now is my favorite time of the year: the season when the first round of transfer acceptances go out, the first fruits of the application process for people who have spent months at the grind and weeks pining for good omens. The transfer applicants' yahoogroup has been alight this week with news of people getting The Call. Having been-there-done-that myself, I couldn't be happier for everyone who's now hearing that most brilliant of news.
I'm on the transfer student committee at my adopted school (which now, to my delight, considers me a "former transfer student"). Usually the committee is responsible for organizing term-time events, a la Meet The Famous Professor, Perspectives On Something You Might Not Otherwise Study, or Law & Economics Won't Kill You: Part 1. But this is my favorite season, the most important part of the transfer process to me, and so I've volunteered to ride shotgun on the welcome wagon. I get to call up admitted students, answer questions, and talk up life as a transfer student. I love this. Last fall quarter was one of the most exhilarating times in my life, and God bless these kids, they're about to go there too.
This is an entertaining exercise in personality-splitting: Person X, who just posted a positive result to the yahoogroup, might be the next person I call. But until we talk on the phone, I don't know your name, and you don't know mine. It's sort of like dancing with a stranger at a masked ball and then meeting them at the gym the next day.
Whatever happened to masked balls? Why'd we stop having them? Talk about a concept that needs reviving. Maybe that'll be the theme for my thirtieth birthday party this January: Masquerade. Extra points to anyone who shows up wearing a veil. (Infinite extra points to anyone who shows up wearing seven.)
A handle-less commenter writes,
do you feel the grading curve was easier at your old school than at your current school (e.g. it is harder to land at the top of the heap at your current school bec people are just brighter).sometiems i wish i had started my 1L year at a lower tiered school so I could perform better my 1L year and then transfer and get a rockin' job as a 2L. But instead I hit dead center both 1L and 2L years
My 1L section has at least 1 rumored future Sup Ct clerk, and more than a few who are in that realm....sigh, you seem to have had better luck starting off at a lower tiered school...
Your honest assesment appreciated.
Could you start out at a USNWR Tier 3 or so and do well enough to transfer? I don't see why not. But I doubt it would be any more of a cakewalk than doing well at a Tier 1 school, nor would it necessarily put you in a better position for on-campus interviewing than if you had done your 1L year at your target school. Competition from other students isn't determinative of your own performance; if you made a goofy mistake on an exam at a high-ranked school, there's no guarantee that you wouldn't have made that same mistake on an exam at a lower-tier school.
Nor is it true that the grade curve eases up as you move down the USNWR rankings; my 1L school had a far harsher curve than my current school. I couldn't say with honesty that it's harder to wind up at the top of the heap here than it was there. Winding up on top has nothing to do with the average ambient IQ in the student lounge. It's got everything to do with gaming exam structure, knowing your professors, meshing with the school's values and just plain working your way inside the machine.
The greatest danger in starting out at a school you dislike with the intent to transfer is that your plans might not work out. Even if you smoked all your exams, your target school might still decide to fill that seat with someone like me and leave you hanging. Then where would you be? Certainly less likely to get a rockin' job than if you were in the mainstream at a top-flight school. And far less likely to be happy in your day-to-day. Being surrounded by future Supreme Court clerks and other such brilliant types is a good thing! They'll make your classes more interesting, your out-of-class conversations more enlightening, and your personal network richer in years to come. Relish them. The curve will fade from memory, but they'll keep.
That's my honest assessment, for what it's worth.
See also T-FAQ part 1, part 2, part 3.
Is it possible to transfer from a Tier III/IV to a Tier I school?
JD2B showed me the way to this page, which unfortunately seems to have disappeared since I first read it. It was the story of a law student who transferred from Thomas Cooley to Boston College. (There are graduation pictures still live on the site, although I'm not sure which person in the pictures was the author of the page.) I have no reason to believe that this was not a true story. It can be done.
(Update: here is a cached version of the Cooley-BC transfer page.)
Continue reading "the transferring faq, part 4"
Herewith a Collection of Many Links: the transfer policies and procedures for a good hundred or so law schools. Where no policy was published on the school's web site (that I could find), I've linked to the contact page for the admissions office. They should be able to provide you with details on the school's transfer policy.
These transfer policies -- and for that matter, these links -- are current as of the date of this post.
Continue reading "law school transfer policies"
See also T-FAQ part 1 / part 2.
Commenter Jordan posted The Question in the comments section of Part 2 of the FAQ. You know The Question; if you've as much as pondered transferring schools, someone has asked it of you. Here is Jordan's eloquent distillation thereof:
I have never understood the transfer madness. Why WOULD anyone ever want to do such a silly thing? Why not just finish off where you started?
Continue reading "the transferring faq, part 3"
See also T-FAQ part 1.
Continuing on with those burning issues at the forefront of the potential transfer student's world:
What are my chances of transferring to [school]?
This is a function of several different variables: not only how well you've done at your current school and how selective your target school is, but also the value your target school places on transfer students.
Some schools profess to care little for transfer students as a distinct group; they'll accept a few every year, but only to compensate for attrition. (In other words: if anyone left the school, their seat in the class becomes available to transfer students.) Others consider transfer students as important to class diversity, and actively save space for them in the rising 2L class.
Call the admissions office of your target school and find out where they fall on the scale. Even if they don't have an overt policy (they'll usually tell you if they do), they can still tell you how many transfer students they've accepted in previous years. Compare this number to the total class size. Anything over five percent potentially represents a transfer-friendly school. Remember, though: past performance is no indication of future results. Actual numbers may vary extensively from year to year. Your admissions-office contact should be able to tell you if this year is in any way unusual.
Continue reading "the transferring faq, part 2"
Lately I've been receiving an unusual amount of blog email, as the spring semester grows long and restless 1Ls begin to ponder their transfer options. (Don't worry, emailers, your identities are safe.)
So here's the first post in what will hopefully become a small series on transferring law schools: an amalgamation of actual questions I've been asked in email, actual responses of mine, other questions that I've been asked outside of email or asked myself, and potentially a few rants. I promise to try and keep those last to a minimum.
And if you've got a question of your own, feel free to email me at suasponte_org NOSPAM at SPAM-ME-NOT yahoo I MEAN IT dot com. Or just leave a comment. :)
Here's the approach I'd recommend now. Look at where you are, look at how you're doing there, and make two lists: reasons to leave, and reasons to stay/things you'll lose by leaving. Then look at your potential range of destinations, and for each one list out the advantages (and disadvantages) to being there compared to your current school. (I am a compulsive listmaker; YMMV.)
For example: if you've got a solid GPA or class rank in your current school, have made it onto moot court team, feel that you've got a good shot at law review or a topical journal you love, etc. these are all reasons to stay. But if you're dissatisfied with the culture of your school, class size, administration, and so forth, these are also factors to consider.
Most law schools zero out the first-year transcripts of transfer students. No schedule, no grades, no class rank is preserved. My current official transcript doesn't even mention the courses I took last year, specifying only "Credit Awarded for Academic Work Done At [School]. Hours: 40. Grade: P." Given my 1L experience, I was perfectly thrilled to have the entire year reduced to one pass-fail line item on the 'script. But if you did better than I did as a 1L -- and you probably did, if you're seriously considering transferring -- losing your hard-earned grades and high class rank may bother you. Keep this in mind. Do you want to trade them in for blanks?
Be sure to research opportunities for things like journals and moot court at your potential transfer school(s). Can you write on to a journal? What is the school's policy of accepting transfer students on to law review? Is there space for you on the moot court team, and if not, can you still work on the board or coaching organizations if you wish? And if you can't get involved in these things at your new school to the extent that you could if you stayed at your first-year school, is it still worth transferring for other (e.g. location, cultural, career opportunity, etc.) purposes?
Don't forget that you may be making the decision for more than one person. If you're in a relationship, are married, have children, need to live near family, or otherwise have responsibilities that keep you in a particular place, give these appropriate consideration. Make the decision that's best for you given a particular value of you. Disregard hypotheticals (e.g. my husband's ill-fated question, "Well, what would you do if you were single?"). It doesn't matter what you'd do in an imaginary frictionless environment; the question is what you should do given your actual situation.
Will transferring law schools hurt my job prospects?
I doubt it. There is a strong presumption among recruiters that transfer students were at or near the top of their 1L classes, which translates into immediate if conditional respect when you walk into the on-campus interview. I felt I was received at least as well as, if not better than, my "native" fellow 2Ls during fall interviews. Of course, the first question any interviewer will ask is why you transferred. If you can give them a reasonable, thoughtful answer (N.B. "this is a much better school" does not count, regardless of how true a motivator it was for you) then you should be fine. Just remember Rule #1: speak no ill of your ex-law school.
(Note that you will need to bring a copy of your 1L transcript to on-campus interviews, as your new law school will not provide it to recruiters but they'll still want to discuss it. So they *will* see your 1L grades; they'll just see them as a conversation piece rather than a feature of your permanent record.)
How much transferring will help your job prospects depends on the degree of disparity between your origin and destination schools (particularly if one is known for a certain specialty). Two of my fellow transfer students started out at nearby top-25 law schools, where they probably had quite similar on-campus recruiting options, at least in terms of law firms. In fact, more than half of our transfer class came from schools within the USNWR first tier. The firm where I'll be working this summer recruits at my former law school; I believe this is true for several of my fellow transfers as well. Were we more likely to be hired by these firms at our current law school than our ex-law schools? Hard to say. But for the people who transferred from lower-tier schools (see also my rankings rant), the increase in opportunity was appreciable.
For me, the main career advantages of transferring were peripheral to law firm recruiting. My new law school places strongly into federal clerkships, government, and legal academia, all things that I would love to try. Certainly nothing prevented me from pursuing these options at my ex-law school, but here I have a lot more doors already open. This is particularly important to me since I don't have my heart set on a particular career path, but want to experiment as much as I can.
The mere existence of a higher USNWR ranking, however, doesn't necessarily mean that the range of potential career opportunities offered at that school will markedly exceed those available at a lower-ranked school. Be sure to consider this. Research your options. Make sure you know what you're getting, and make sure it's what you want.
Forthcoming: the numbers game, improving from fall to spring semester, letters of recommendation and more.
-->Continue reading "the transferring faq, part 1"
I've been nursing an idle curiosity for a little while now, and wanted to do a little informal research.
Law students: of the transfer students at your school, roughly what percentage are female?
(If you don't know, check the facebook; some schools list transfer students in their own separate section.)
By now I've been at this law school long enough that I've almost begun to think of myself as a plain old student, rather than a transfer student in particular. I've gotten over the fits of awed giggling and have almost come to take for granted certain features of the school that blew my mind upon initiation: there is a heavily-patronized schoolwide trivia contest here, and a musical, and a facebook to which you can submit your own picture which also features candids taken throughout the year and *gasp* even caricatures of professors.
But I haven't forgotten my roots, either. And it still stings to hear people condescend to folks in the position I occupied last year.
It's an odd place to be, with one foot in the old country and one foot in the new. You can neither gush about your newfound happiness to the friends you left behind, nor can you truly represent how unhappy you were in your previous life to your current compatriots without someone taking offense and thinking that you're just trash-talking the school or a professor or perhaps even them.
I think I'm now to the point where I can speak frankly about last year, finally. Which is why it upsets me when people blow it off.
I have never been so unhappy in my life, not before nor since. I am neither a gunner nor grade-obsessed by nature, and would gladly have gone through law school without giving a damn if I could have. Had there been something else over which to obsess in order to bring about a transfer of schools, I would have obsessed over that instead. People can be flip about 1Ls as a class going grades-bonkers due to peer pressure, but had that been all there was to it, I would certainly have resisted to my utmost.
Today at a lunch for transfer students, a certain professor commented offhand that the lifestyle described in One L was, at pretty much any law school, "an exaggeration." And recently Heidi posted one of her exam-season mantras: it is a grade, not a prison sentence.
Both of these things rang my little hey-wait-a-second bell. There are people for whom a grade *can* be a type of prison sentence. Sure, it might have been their own fault for making the evidently bad judgment call to attend a law school from which they were unwilling to graduate. And I can assure you that they've kicked themselves for exactly this reason, many an evening, staring out the window at the nighttime clouds. But that doesn't make it any less excruciating, nor is it an exaggeration to take objective measure of their misery.
When I got the phone call offering me a place at this law school, I had a week to decide whether to accept. A good dozen people offered advice, but some of the most salient came from a dear and unabashedly candid friend: "You sounded so miserable at times during the year," he said, at a time when most everyone else was glossing over my recently-concluded agony as unremarkable and par for the course. If I transferred, he said, "gone would be any worry that you'd slip next year, or anything like that. You'd be at [current beloved law school]. Game over." You'd just have to go to school, study, take exams, pass them, and life would be OK. No more fear. Imagine.
It's easy to look at someone who's just put him/herself through the wringer as a 1L and blame the victim. You chose to attend that school. You should never have made such a dumb decision if it wasn't a place you'd be comfortable. You're basically just a snob anyway, wanting something more comfortable than where you are. You should learn to fit in. Too square a peg for the round hole? Shave off your goddamned corners, egotist. As though your 1L experience was any worse than anyone else's.
If it was, it was all in my head. Which is trivial and meaningless to anyone who doesn't live there.
I'm pretty much convinced at this point, though we've never discussed it outright, that I had the worst 1L grades of any of the transfer students admitted to my law school this year. Most of the rest of them, while still thrilled to be here, see it as something they earned or deserved. Perhaps I should too, but I don't. Even though we're all friends, I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing with any of the other transfer students just how much my first year left me fucked in the head. The closest I've come so far is confessing my Torts grade to A., who countered with "Well, that professor was probably just an asshole...you did well otherwise, right?"
That professor was not an asshole; he was amazing. And I suppose I did all right otherwise, but not necessarily well enough to justify my being here. I couldn't tell you this in person without you laughing, A., but I'm here because of a lot of prayers and a lot of luck. And no matter how cold it gets, or how much my husband fears the effect on his cholesterol of the red-meat-based local diet, I'm still just lucky.
Rule: no disrespect to the people whose luck is still in abeyance.
Update: For the record, I didn't have the nerve to move this post from "draft" to "publish" status until August, 2004. Time (and water) make smooth the sharpest stones.
After nearly an entire Friday spent dedicated to the task, my husband, his father, and his grandfather (and there's nothing quite like three generations of A. men at the same kitchen table, swearing at each other in a fugue) managed to reassemble the damaged mirror and reattach it to the otherwise-undamaged Mitsubishi. My husband is now attempting to convince his dad that the other mirror -- also a replacement after a long-ago incident with a garage door -- was improperly installed by the Mitsubishi guys, way back when. "Come on," he says. "We know exactly how it goes now. It'll take us an hour to fix it."
(Fortunately, my father-in-law is having none of it. At least for now.)
Since that rainy Labor Day when the cab pulled up in front of my sublet, I haven't once dreamed of my old law school. This could just be a by-product of an overfull brain pan; when I'm preoccupied I tend not to dream much about anything. It wasn't much of a visually exciting place, anyway; the buildings were ordinary-looking buildings, the classroom decor was basic beige, and the locales in which I dream are usually distorted and baroque and Technicolor so the old school might not have made it through the subconscious filter.
So it surprised me, the other night, when I dreamed that I was back at my current law school, rushing to campus since I'd already missed the first meeting of my 9:45 Con Law class, freaking out that I still hadn't bought any books and I was going to be late for Tax. (Yes, I've almost completely decided that I am going to take Tax this term. Which may explain some of these dreams.) Then I caught up with a group of people in the student lounge who calmed me down, told me that classes didn't start until tomorrow, and got to chatting about what courses we were all planning to take.
And one of those people was L. from my study group last spring.
She was also a transfer student here, in my dream, and somehow I'd managed to go through all of fall term without knowing she was around. But she didn't mind. She was just there, happily hanging out with the natives, and as glad to see me as I was to see her. I forget what we wound up talking about, but L. and I seemed to be agreeing on everything in that supportive, resonant way that feels almost like a verbal hug.
I never got to say goodbye to most of my studygroupmates. I couldn't figure out how. There is no good way to tell people that you're leaving their school for a fancier one without either bragging or somehow expressing disdain for the place where they still are, and I had no desire to do either. I did email C. to let her know I wouldn't be back, but after an expression of surprise I didn't hear back from her again, and putting myself in her shoes I could understand why. So there wound up not being a going-away party.
I do miss my friends from last year. Even though the sheep's clothing never quite fit me -- on good days I felt like a spy, on bad days like a sad fraud -- they accepted me anyway, and as bad as things got, I was never alone. There is a real bond that comes from firewalking together, gritting our teeth and squeezing each other's hands and not quitting, that's of a different nature than the ethereal philosophical angst experienced over coffee in Nicer Places. It's a solid carbon-steel thing, shared veteranhood. It doesn't go away even once you win the lottery.
Last night, finally, I dreamed I was back there.
It was early November, and I was taking Tax, but Tax was a once-a-week seminar (only in dreams, heh). I'd spent all of October flying back and forth, as in real life, but apparently I had not once shown up to Tax so far this term. I picked up a handout that said "Week 6," then realized that my books were in my locker and I'd forgotten my laptop at the Abigail Hotel. In a panic I mentally ciphered the number of days I'd need to spend catching up on the reading before I could begin my outline. There couldn't possibly be enough time. I bolted the room, ran to my locker, and found it empty with no lock. Of course, I remembered, I'd taken the lock myself.
In search of my laptop, I saw myself dizzy on the stairs and lost in a few dingy alleyways before I finally wound up on MUNI with A. from my El-Dubyar research group. At least it was something like MUNI, but the sunlight was a bit too intense and A. somehow had baked cookies on the trolley and was offering me some. They were excellent.
Undemanding times like vacation take a weight off your subconscious, I guess, and all the stuff that's been pinned down there comes bubbling up and floats away.
I think it's time for me to get back in touch with my old-school friends.
I think we're finally done moving.
It's worth noting, first off, that this is the first weekend I have spent here since mid-September. The first Thursday I didn't have to rush out of Corporations, hoof it to the airport, return a rental car and catch a plane. The first Saturday night that my husband and I were actually able to go out and see a movie. No hotels, no packing frenzies, no interviews, no funerals. Just me, home.
And I think it is home, now. We've hung up all the pictures that are going up in this apartment; we've unpacked every last box; and now the empty boxes, unhung pictures, and old Pendaflex files are firmly (and I mean firmly -- crowbars are required to extract them) ensconced in our four-by-four storage downstairs. The furniture is all in place. The stereo is working. The computers are live and online. Aside one large framed poster and two boxes in our front hallway that are destined for the Salvation Army, we're basically moved in.
It's about damn time. There is a scant month left in the term. Rather, there is a scant month between today and my last exam; classes are already beginning to wind down. Last year I was outlining my arse off by now, or at least trying to through the fog of El-Dubyar. Despite the fact that the academic term here is several weeks shorter than it was at my previous law school, I can't help but figure that my exam preparations should already be well under way.
Then again, I've had a pretty good response from nearly everyone I've invited to form a study group. (Only one person had already committed to another group, and another preferred to study alone, which doesn't count.) This tells me that a nontrivial number of the 2Ls at my school are at roughly the same place as I am -- keeping up with the reading, more or less, but spending the balance of their free time on things like interviews and continually planning to start the outline this evening.
Of course I could be wrong. They could have just been studying au solitaire up until now. But I'm not going to freak out about it.
It is an unimaginable luxury, to be able not to freak out about it.
I am fortunate -- well, hell, I'm fortunate just to be here, and not a day goes by that I don't appreciate it. But I'm particularly fortunate thanks to two especially well-timed, well-placed school customs: the 2L dispensation and the B+ curve. The latter is an obvious benefit to anyone who's just transferred from a school that curves to a 2.7. But the former is even better: 2Ls, in our fall term, are permitted to take three courses instead of four since we're theoretically all over the place on callback interviews.
"Don't do it," one of last year's transfer students told us at orientation. "I'd already accepted my offer by October. I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with."
I had a feeling that this would not be a problem for me. I ignored his advice and did it -- and could not be more thrilled with my decision. Now, instead of last year's horrifying battery of four exams in quick succession, I'm only facing two. (And a closing argument during exam week, but that should be fun.) Outlining for two classes in the next few weeks is eminently doable. And now I'll finally have time to do it.
And nothing left to unpack!
My furniture is on a truck somewhere in Middle America by now. My car just made it onto its own truck yesterday, and should be here next week. I fly back out to California tomorrow for the last time this term (knock wood -- ailing grandmother may make a liar out of me on that one) and return here on Sunday, for good, accompanied by husband and pets.
Within a week, this place should be home.
A study of the green lights on the DSL modem indicates that we probably already have high-speed Internet access in the apartment, which would be a bit more helpful if our computers weren't on the truck along with our furniture. (The chassis of our computers, at any rate. The hard drives are here, all wrapped up in bubble tape, snug in a cardboard box which I carried on my flight back from San Francisco last week.) I'm particularly fortunate to have a mattress on which to spend my nights, on loan from one of the building's leasing agents. A late-afternoon Target run yesterday resulted in the place now being possessed of such amenities as a kitchen garbage can, scented candles, a silverware drawer divider and a bathroom fan.
And yet it still doesn't feel like home. It's just empty.
"The echo!" exclaimed St. Daniel in sympathy when I phoned him this afternoon. "The echo is the worst!" He's right; the faraway whoosh of the traffic, the windlike noise of the elevator, the elevatorlike noise of the wind, even the faint distant beeping of construction trucks going in reverse all reverberate around my unlit and unfurnished apartment as though it were a megaphone. It's still a vast improvement over the place I started in this building; but I'll sleep a lot better when the inherent subtle noises of the place are buffered by my bed and my couch and my stereo and my husband.
The weather is fun, at least. From indoors it's fun. I regretted not having carried an umbrella yesterday, while jog-trotting the two and a half blocks from my parking space to the law school; but by the time I reached the building (at a dead sprint) I was laughing out loud. In the space of less than three blocks the weather had gone from cloudy to drizzle to pouring rain to hail. Tiny white marbles spilled down onto the sidewalk and bounced gleefully under the awning where I was fumbling for my key card.
"It's hailing!" I giggled to the LLM student who let me in. "Look! That's hail!"
She was unimpressed.
I, meanwhile, will remember my umbrella from now on.
People, upon hearing that I was transferring law schools, warned me about the winters in my new location of choice. "You're going to die," was the consensus among my seasonless California friends. I blew this off; I grew up in New Jersey, and have worked in Milwaukee in March. I know from winter. I can handle it.
Er, yeah.
Today it got cold. Not bitter nasty cold, but seriously chilly with enough of a bite in the air that I found myself wishing I had worn at least one more layer. The big bank thermometer near the strip mall where I unsuccessfully attempted to buy a halogen lamp today read 39 degrees. (Degrees Fahrenheit, that is.)
My husband, still in California, doubtless went to the office today in his standard uniform of khaki shorts and a black T-shirt. I, meanwhile, have realized that I need to make some wardrobe investments, pronto. And does anyone have any suggestions for taming hair that is not frizzy from humidity, but rather staticky from lack thereof?
I half considered challenging Becky to a cold contest, but reconsidered. She would win instantly. And repeatedly. Wintry though my newly-adopted climate may be, it's got nothing on the Canadian hinterland. And yet Becky's doing great there, despite her warm-weather origins. Who's to say that winter is something purely evil? ("Yver, vous n'êtes qu'un villain...")
It's interesting, watching what must be my New Jerseyan racial memory of seasons resurface. The leaves here, while a far cry from the glorious Halloween-era foliage to which I was accustomed back in high school, have paled to a fine pleasant gold. There's a briskness to the air that translates to a briskness in one's step, a hop-skip along the sidewalk as you try to outrun the chasing chill. This is high autumn, with winter rapidly approaching, and I remember that this is how it's supposed to feel. Four winters spent in a place with no winter has not made me forget.
"Our good time of year is just starting," says my mother of Florida, where the humidity is just beginning to wane.
"So's our bad one," I say back, but smile none the less.
My husband is still in California, so part of my job in the new-home-procurement process is putting myself in his position and perceiving the apartment through his eyes, as though he were evaluating the place along with me.
Last night, I stretched out on the floor of the master bedroom and paid attention. Our building towers over the waterfront highway, and the traffic noise concerned me. Would it keep him awake?
Probably not, I concluded, since he's a big fan of white noise and loves to keep floor fans running in every room in our home. Even if the traffic itself didn't produce sufficiently comfortable white noise for him, it could certainly be masked with a floor fan. Or, for that matter, with the ocean-waves CD which my husband routinely sets to repeat throughout the night. The isolated motorcycle seemed to be the only real noise issue, and we have those even in Califo--
*whoooooosh* RRRRRRRM.
I sat up on the floor. What the hell?
Five minutes of due diligence, which I really had no excuse for not doing sooner, revealed that the twenty-eighth floor of this particular building was home not only to my apartment, but to two (2) loud humming whooshing elevator machine rooms. To enrich the situation even more, one of these machine rooms shared a wall with my master bathroom.
*whoooooosh* RRRRRRRM.
Even cranking the ocean waves would be useless here. There was no way my husband could sleep in this room.
I spent the night on a mattress (fortuitously borrowed from one of the building's leasing agents) in the middle room, which we had conceived to be my husband's office. Even there, the whooshing and humming was audible. "You were supposed to get us a livable place," groaned my husband over the cell phone. "Are you telling me that I can't live in this place??"
"Umm."
"I can't handle an argument about this right now."
"Me neither."
He swore.
"I'll talk to the leasing office in the morning," I said.
"And tell them what? That we're breaking our lease after twelve hours??"
"Umm."
I didn't sleep well, even after people stopped taking the elevator every five minutes.
But then, this morning, I got lucky.
I went to the leasing office, began to tell them that the elevator made too much noise, and found myself, to my horror, on the verge of tears. (At least it didn't happen during yesterday's deposition.) "Are there any other two-bedrooms available?" I finished before my voice completely broke. I felt my face flushing purple. Stupid, stupid! You need to negotiate, not whine!!
"I think...yes, let's check...oh, honey! Don't worry! It'll be OK!" said the motherly leasing agent, noticing my distress.
OK, maybe whining wasn't such a bad plan.
Long story short: tomorrow I will move my borrowed mattress and two suitcases from apartment 2804 up to apartment 3304, on a floor blessedly devoid of machine rooms. My rent will increase by $62 per month, my square footage by 200, and the number of electrical outlets in the office from 4 to the elusive 5. The traffic noises will attenuate over five more stories. And the elevators can hum and whoosh to their hearts' content, but I won't be able to hear them. (The leasing agent stood in the hallway and called them repeatedly to check while I listened in the bedroom. All clear.)
It's amusing to reflect on what suburbanites we have become, how spoiled we are for things like quiet and stairs and parking lots. Or maybe we've just been suburbanites all along.
No more Ramada!
No more Ramada!
I've signed the lease, done the walkthrough, picked up the keys and even booked myself a parking space in the labyrinthine subterranean garage. I am no longer homeless. I am homeful. I am so full of home that I can already feel my possessions expanding to fill the new space. Even if the only article of clothing I can currently hang in the closet (the closet! the closet!) is the one suit still on its dry-cleaner hangers.
But my building has its own dry cleaners, so other suits will soon follow. It has its own dry cleaners, its own gym, its own video rental facility and its own grocery store. People warn me about the horrendous winters here, but it seems that we won't really have to experience them much if we don't want to. It was a gorgeous eighty degrees here today anyway, a far cry from the snow I'd been warned to expect in late October. I doubt it came near eighty back in the Bay Area. For the moment, it seems as though we've traded up as far as climate.
(I know, I know. But it hasn't happened yet.)
Tonight is my last dinner out, in celebration of my newfound homefulness. Tomorrow...ah, tomorrow I cook.
Pending the result of a criminal background check, I am no longer constructively homeless.
Since our ill-starred home purchase fell through last month, my husband and I changed tactics and decided to rent a place downtown. After a little bit of searching (literally, a little bit -- all these places are uniformly nice and uniformly priced, it was just a question of location) we chose a two-bedroom, roughly 1200 square feet, on the twenty-eighth floor of a high rise right on the waterfront.
Of course, I don't actually get to live there until 10/20, assuming that the background check doesn't derail my lease application because of my unpaid parking ticket in Menlo Park. And even once I do "move in," it'll be the air mattress and the hot pot for as long as it takes for the truck to get here. But it'll be home, or at least start becoming home, as soon as I get the keys. And the Ramada probably won't miss me.
I guess I'd be happier if my husband were happier. He's got the short end of this stick: he's in California, packing like a madman, while I'm here enjoying school and eating out every night. (No refrigerator at the Ramada, see.) He has apparently relieved every office supply store within ten miles of our apartment of their entire stock of book-sized boxes, and still has more to pack. I should be there helping him. Much as I'm loving my classes and this city and everything that's going on around me, I feel guilty that he's doing the hard part right now.
Not too terribly guilty, though. I am flying back out on Thursday night, after all, and can pick up my share of the packing then. And now that we've got a lease here, more or less, it makes the packing that much less painful since we know there's an actual destination at the end of the haul.
Still, moving is never something you want to spend any more time on than you have to. It sure will be nice when we're here, we're settled, and everyone down to the chinchillas has quit freaking out. At least in the short term.
I can't wait.
With the tension of the move and the new law school and me airport-hopping for much of this month while my husband stayed in CA and wondered what was going on, it was only a matter of time before we both snapped and started shouting at each other like psychos.
I've got to give him credit, though: he was the one with the presence of mind to shut all the sliding glass doors right when it became obvious that we were in for a real row.
It started, as real rows in the A. household tend to, over me thinking that he thought one thing while he thought that I thought something else. After nearly five years of marriage, and seven years of dating before that, we can claim with some justification an ability to read each other's minds. Alas, if only it worked reliably.
Here was the source of our disagreement: I had told our CA landlady that we were moving out on the first of November, implicitly giving her permission to show the apartment to potential renters before then. Hubby did not think this was our target date, did not even think it possible to get the place clean and packed before then, and was unwilling to have strangers exploring our home before we had moved out.
Much shouting later, we concluded that it was scarcely possible for us to get our act together any sooner than a month from now, and that moreover the landlady was unlikely to find a renter between now and then anyway with the rental market being what it was in Silicon Valley. We did, however, channel much of the energy that we hadn't wasted on shouting into a marathon box-packing and house-cleaning session. I left the kitchen sparkling clean, the chinchilla cage freshly lined with law firm rejection letters, and the linen closet halfway emptied of linens; hubby filled a dozen boxes with books from the study, and has about another dozen to go before all of our bookshelves should be more or less accounted for.
We didn't get much sleep last night.
I found myself furious, last night, packing, and not just because I was in the midst of a spat with my husband. Why should this be so difficult, moving? I grumbled to myself. Why do we have to do all this packing? Why do we have so goddamned much stuff??
No pair of human beings requires thirty different towels. I don't care if they're bath towels, beach towels, guest towels, and other-purpose towels; we should have maybe half that. And all these pillows! We never use them, and the only company we ever have is the inlaws for a week each August. Hardly need the pillows, let alone the five cotton blankets. And WHY do we own so many books? In this day of ubiquitous Internet and public libraries, what are we doing with so very many kilograms of inefficiently stored information?
I found myself unabashedly loathing every chattel that passed through my hands en route to a cardboard box.
I'll make promises to myself at times like these, promises like "I'll never buy another book again, I'll just get everything from the library" or "All I need is a pot, a saucepan, and a skillet, and everything else is going to Goodwill tomorrow." And then I fail to follow through. We're on a bookbuying spree these days anyway, since both of us discovered the Discworld series at roughly the same time. And while I've delivered loads of kitchen stuff to Goodwill, I kind of like the stuff I have left. Sometimes. When I'm not packing it up, that is.
But we do thin out our possessions every time we move. I'll grant us that. Relocating to California in 1999 resulted in several dumpstersful of crap that didn't need to accompany us there. Much of the dodgier furniture we currently own will not be making it onto the truck this time. And since I was anticipating buying a house before the transfer news came through, I had already cleaned out my clothes closet and shoe collection. Now it's the same challenge on a different scale. Let's see how much weight our home can lose.
Postscript: Last night I threw my white marble mortar and pestle into my suitcase instead of a box, since I could only imagine it making any box unduly heavy. Today, when I picked up my suitcase at the baggage claim, I noticed that the zippers had been threaded together with a piece of blue plastic stamped TSA. I hope at least the inspectors were amused.
Among the myriad terrific features of my new law school, a particularly congenial one is the welcome extended to transfer students. Not just by the administration, which is great in the way you'd hope it would be, but by one's fellow students. People will sit down at my cafeteria table and say, "I don't know you. Are you a transfer student? Wow, where from?" I feel that I already know at least half of my graduating class by face, which is something I couldn't have said for my much larger ex-law school after an entire year there.
As welcoming as everyone is here, though, there's one thing about me that prevents me from fitting in.
I appear to be the only person in my class with a pullman backpack.
Actually, as of this morning, I realized that this was not technically true: a fellow transfer student also walks the dog. But no one who has attended this school for more than a month appears to share our inclination to spare our bad backs. Even the 1Ls (at least I'm assuming they're 1Ls; they've all got civ pro outlines spread out on their library tables) shoulder their burdens with aplomb.
I'm thinking this might be due to the fact that there is actually a season called winter in this town, complete with snow and ice and other impediments to a wheelie bag. I may have to switch to my husband's black backpack when the weather decides it no longer wants to play nice with my pullman. In the meantime, though, I'm thinking I might still need to effect a change of luggage along with my change of venue. I do only have two casebooks to manage this term. And then there's just the wanting-to-be-part-of-the-culture thing.
'Course, maybe it's my destiny to be the random woman with the rolling bag on a stick, adorned with a Lexis Nexis beer opener keychain (nonfunctional, I determined last night) and a button from a women's law journal at a different school. Maybe I just gotta be me.
Or maybe I'm just spoiled and don't want to carry anything on my back that I can drag behind me.
So the Ramada Inn it is!
At least for this week. At least until I can get a lease signed. At least until my husband and I can make up our minds on what we're actually looking for. The townhouse/condo model had more of an upside as an investment than as a rental situation. We could probably find a cheap and workable apartment in the neighborhood around my law school. But maybe we should go downtown, literally, and look at some of the fancier highrises: smaller living space, sure, but when will we ever do something like this again?
That's the strangest thing of all: this is still unreal. I don't think my husband yet believes that we're actually moving, that he's actually going to have to leave California. And I'm hardly helping. Going "home" to California last week (which is still home -- I just paid our October rent) neatly smoothed over the impression that my sublet and daily cross-campus hikes had left on me. Am I actually doing this? Where do I live? Why does it seem strange that I leave home, get on a plane, and spend the better part of a Sunday commuting to law school? And I thought Caltrain took forever...
I'll be back in California on several occasions this month, which complicates the whole psychological relocation process. "I don't need a hotel," I tell the people booking my flights, "I still live there." But that's not true. My husband still lives there, as do my pets, as do most of my shoes. But I'm hovering somewhere over the country at about 35,000 feet. Or else I'm comfortably ensconced at my law school, still so thrilled to be here that the whole homelessness thing just evanesces out the window. There is that. Beyond all the administrivia that a cross-country move entails, there is one place where I absolutely know I am, and that is here. Here!!!
Lest I come across as completely monopolized by Oh See Eye and the house hunt, I should mention that I am, in fact, taking classes this term. I've got a trial advocacy seminar -- fun for someone who hasn't yet had Evidence! -- on Monday evenings, and then two back-to-back lecture classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays: Trademarks and Corporations. The reading has not yet hit fever pitch, which is a good thing. I've been told I should attempt to write on to the Law Review, and will probably give it a go at some point, but right now I'm just purely glad to be here.
I think it might be starting to get on people's nerves, actually. I'm generally a smiling kind of person (which is fine except when I've got something stuck in my teeth, but I digress), but lately I've been full-on, suppressed-giggle grinning rather more than I used to last year. "JCA, you're just too damn chipper," the network guy complained to me. He's right. I am way too damn chipper, far more chipper than a constructively-homeless person with a bunch of unread reading has any right to be. But every time a professor opens his mouth (and mine are all male this term), every time I pull up a mahogany-finished chair in a lecture hall, every time I park my rental car in the permit-only lot, I can't help but thrill to the simple fact that here I am.
This is it: I've left one suitcase and my pillow at the sublet, with a note that I'd pick them up next Sunday or Monday. (Hopefully no one will steal or trash them before then. I'm not terribly worried; the suitcase is almost too heavy for one person to move.) The other suitcase is in the trunk of the rental car, ready to head up to the airport in a half hour or so. I stopped by the law school one last time to stow my laptop and books in my locker. And then I'm off. To Minneapolis, then to Denver, then to San Jose.
I fly back here (with only one stopover) next Sunday, and couldn't tell you where I'll go from there. No, that's not true; I'll go straight to the law school, retrieve my laptop and books, and *then* wonder where to go next.
It strikes me that this is really more than one person ought to handle.
Last year, whenever we'd have forgotten a course supplement or not read a case or otherwise found ourselves unprepared, C. and I shared a joke: we'd wave our fingers over our laptop keyboards and then yelp, "Aaah! My superpowers don't work here! It's the law school dampening effect!" It'd be a neat superpower, wouldn't it, the ability to summon matter out of ether? "Presto Casebook!" *poof* and res ipsa loquitur.
But now I'm thinking that a more practical superpower would be the ability to be in two places at once. Or more realistically: infinite elasticity of spirit, such that it would never really matter where you were. You could juggle law school and interviewing and apartment-hunting with all of the grace of a sprite pirouetting from one lily pad to another without ever splashing or sinking. And you'd never, ever get tired.
I'm tired.
At least I can sleep on planes.
I've had some pretty amazing luck for the past two months or so; I guess it was about time for a karmic tip in the other direction.
My husband flew out from California yesterday to take a personal tour of the Perfect Place, the townhouse I'd already claimed in my mind as home. He shared my sentiments. The slate bathroom with the tobacco-red walls and the jacuzzi...the top floor office with the view...we were going to do it, we decided, really going to do it. We were going to buy this townhouse.
And we were off, back to the realtor's office to Make The Offer. Our most excellent realtor suggested that the asking price was about 3% higher than market value; OK, we said, and put in our bid at about 5% below their asking price. And we'd done it! We'd made an offer on a house! For the first time ever, we were going to own!
We gave the sellers a day to respond.
Over dinner (penne with a terrific veal ragu) at a random Italian place we found near the hotel I'd booked to celebrate, even my husband found himself smiling. In a place like that, he could live. He could work. He could set up a home office and shlep to the airport once a month. He could do it. And I was beside myself with delight, finally at a law school I loved and ready to settle into maple and granite and slate and stainless steel bliss. "Equity!" I squealed, raising my chianti glass. "Equity!!"
The call came from our realtor this morning as I was fussing with my hair. "So did we get a counter?" I bubbled excitedly to her.
"If you can call it a counter," she said grimly. "The people are just sitting on the place. They've said they won't take less than the asking price, and that they won't close until December 15."
"December 15??" The entire term would have elapsed by then; I'd be in the middle of finals. No way would we make our two-year capital gains tax threshold. Nor, for that matter, would we be likely to make the slightest profit on the place if we were overpaying from the start. And then there were the costs of selling we'd have to absorb later on, the time it takes to move a property here in this backwater market where people don't make offers within a week and close within a month of your listing date...
I graduate law school in June of 2005.
This was quite simply not going to work.
Brunch, a perfectly nice tuna nicoise salad, tasted like ashes. My husband took two heaping platefuls of food from the breakfast buffet, but I bet that right now, on his flight back to San Francisco, he's feeling every bit as hungry and unsatisfied as I am right now. It's stupidly frustrating, this; I had so goddamned much to do in these past three weeks, and I did it all, and this should have worked out, damnit. If we could have gotten our October closing, I would only have had to find someplace to squat for a few more weeks, but we would have had a home. Now we don't, and when I return to town next week I have no clue where I'll be staying.
Of course, that was true yesterday too. I should be more philosophical about this. I should shift back into rental mode, just like I did last weekend, forget about homeownership and focus on the temporariness of our presence in this town. I didn't interview at any firms here. My chances of scoring a local clerkship are lukewarm at best. There's no reason why we'd need to own a house here if all I'm doing is going to law school and then leaving, especially when I'll even be leaving for a few months during law school. Right?
So back to the rental drawing board it is, complicated a bit by the fact that I'm going to be in California from tomorrow through next Sunday. Time to start emailing floorplans, faxing lease agreements, and by the 28th I'll need something in hand or else I might be spending that night in my rental car. Even the student sublets want someone to commit for an entire term, so it's unlikely that I'll score a temporary campground between now and next weekend. It's going to be all or nothing, or rather, all or the Ramada Inn. I can just see me signing a lease for something, sight unseen, and arriving in town next week as blank-slated as I did on Labor Day.
(Well, maybe not so much. At least now I know my way around town somewhat.)
But I still feel like a three-year-old who's just had my candy stolen...
Round One of interviewing is over, and while I'm almost too tired to post, I'm pleased to say that I'm in no way down for the count. There are dings, sure, but there's good news too, and on balance I'm in a better position than I ever imagined being as a transfer student. My absence here last year has not yet, as far as I can tell, been held against me.
Nor, for that matter, has the albatross. Every interviewer did ask for my transcript, but not a single one summarily ended the interview as soon as they saw it. I've gotten "Mmmm...so tell me about Torts," "Looks like you did pretty well. What happened in Torts?" and "You did well enough to get in here, that's all that matters. Who cares about Torts anyway?" (from an interviewer I particularly liked). But I can't correlate dings to recruiters paying attention to my Torts grade, and I like it that way.
Jewish Buddha has some excellent posts on the interview process at his school, which appears to mirror mine almost exactly. I'll add more here as our experiences differ, but really, what he's said is more or less true for me too. (Plus, I feel a duty to spread the meme: let's all start using the term "ghettiquette"!! :)
Now on to the mortgage applications!
We decided to buy about an hour ago, after a marathon effort by my husband in the past eighteen hours to run all sorts of statistics on property value appreciation in the neighborhood (and surrounding areas) we're considering. I fell in love with a certain townhouse last week; hubby will be flying out in the next few days to see it; and if he likes it as much in person as he does in the virtual tour, then we'll make our offer this weekend.
I can't wait to step foot on solid ground, to finally be home. It's been an adventure, sleeping on a twin mattress on the dirty floor of an ancient apartment with cratered paint and no air conditioning. When I first showed up at the doorstep in the rain on Labor Day evening, fresh from California by way of a festive Greek wedding, my heart sank and groaned I can't live here. It made my college dorm rooms look deluxe. But now it's become almost comfortable, cooking chili on the old gas stove and washing the dishes by hand. I lived like this when I was 21, and it's good to know that the intervening years have not completely obliterated my flexibility. (Plus, a bottle of Stoli Vanil in the freezer goes a long way towards making any place feel like home.)
But greater things await us. We'll be First Time Homebuyers, which I understand to be up there with marriage and childbirth among watershed experiences in one's life. We will actually own our residence for the first time in our married life, in either of our lives. No parents, no landlord. If we don't like the carpet we can rip it up and lay Pergo. If the chinchillas nibble on the baseboard we can decide the room looks better without baseboard, and no one has anything to say about it. And the kitchen! I'll have the granite countertops, huge maple cabinets and stainless steel appliances of my dreams, even though I never even knew to dream of huge maple cabinets and stainless steel appliances. (Granite, though...yeah.)
Most important in a climate with real honest-to-pete winter: the place has a two car garage. Which is ironic, since we're only keeping one car. But that's got to be pretty damn sweet in terms of resale value.
Resale value!
What a week this has been to think about returns on investment...
So many boxes, so many suitcases. Must remember to bring things I'd never normally remember, like a raincoat and an iron. I am at a loss for adjectives. (Yes, it happens.)
Here is what I'm up against, in the immediate future:
8/29, a.k.a. today: Pack. As much as I can.
8/30: Board plane to Denver. Bring spouse. Bring as many suitcases as I can carry, but make sure my Denver weekend clothes are in spouse's suitcase.
8/31: Attend wedding of cousin Don, formerly known as my 3L cousin (he's since graduated, and is now getting married in Denver).
9/1: See off spouse on plane back to San Francisco. Board plane to Minneapolis. Make sure to bring correct suitcases. Change planes in Minneapolis, and wind up in my new law school town around dinnertime. Find school. Find sublet apartment. Manage heavy suitcases without dislocating any limbs. Get suits hung up on hangers, pronto.
9/2: 8 am, transfer student orientation. Which is then followed by Oh See Eye orientation.
9/3: First Oh See Eye interview.
9/4 - 9/17: Second through twenty-seventh Oh See Eye interviews, interspersed somehow with gadabout realtor road trips. Find place to live. Decide whether buying is worthwhile; if not, sign a lease. Resist urge to upgrade to a camera phone to include absent spouse in househunting efforts.
9/21: Board plane to Minneapolis. Then to Denver. Then to San Jose. Hopefully at least one of the suitcases will be left behind; my subletlady (?) has authorized me to park one at her place until I return.
9/22 - whenever I book the plane ticket back: Finish packing apartment. Arrange for movers. Arrange for airline that is OK with chinchillas in the passenger cabin. Arrange to have car moved, or else decide to put several thousand miles on it and make the trek myself.
...and somewhere among all this, I'm actually supposed to be going to law school...
Unfashionable Observations is headed out to his/her transfer school this week, but first has to stop back at the old haunt to clean out all the stuff in storage.
I cleaned out my locker (and took home the lock) back in May, so by rights I shouldn't have to return to my own old haunt. And yet I came home from yesterday's errand-run to find a message on my answering machine from a school administrator, telling me that if I was really serious about withdrawing (er yeah, I was actually kidding all along) I'd need to come in and fill out more forms.
Funny, that's not what the records office people told me. They gave me the URL of a single form, which I completed and dropped off last week.
I think I'll call the administrator and see if I can fill out these mysterious Other Forms via fax. I just don't have time to get up to The City this week, and even if I did, I'd spend it having a farewell bowl of pho with my friends rather than justifying my decision to move on.
[cue theme music: Led Zeppelin, Rain Song]
Thus, finally, 1L really ends.
Not with a bang, but with me interrupting someone talking to the financial-aid office manager. "I have a form to drop here," said I, "do you have an inbox?" "Nope," the office manager replied, "but I'll just take that for you." And she did.
I won't have technically withdrawn from the school until three different offices sign the form (which hopefully should give me enough time to receive my official transcripts in the mail before they actually cost me money as a nonstudent). But as soon as it left my hand, I was as good as gone.
I'm glad I did that. I'm glad I went back into the building, cleaned out my mail drop for the last time, returned the copy card I'd borrowed from C. back in May, and handed in the form myself rather than tossing it in the mail. It was important for me to walk through that door one last time, if only to blink once and realize that I was making exactly the right decision.
Done with the guilt. I finally emailed the professors who wrote my letters of recommendation, thanking them for their support and informing them that I won't be in any of their fall classes. I'll miss them, but we'll stay in touch. I'll take all the good things with me as I go.
Meanwhile, here's a glass of Clos du Bois chardonnay, raised to everyone there, everyone who made this year what it was. You taught me my limits, then forced me past them. You made me tough. You made me wise. You worked my blisters into calluses, and now I can dance on hot coals without breaking a sweat.
Thank you.
I've got to run up to The City this afternoon for a few errands: picking up a wedding gift for my cousin at Biordi's, having my last banh mi for awhile, snagging some torrone (a.k.a. "crack cocaine for Italians") to bring home to my husband, and giving newly-minted 1L Blue a lift back to the south bay.
Oh, and dropping out of school.
Withdrawing, I should say. I'm not dropping out, strictly speaking, since I'm already enrolled in my new law school (although I'd feel a bit more confident about that if their online system would recognize my social security number, but that's another story). I'm simply leaving one law school to attend another.
It's just strange to be leaving a school under circumstances other than graduation. I've never switched schools except at commonly-acknowledged breaking points: between eighth grade and high school, college and grad school.
I feel guilty.
Last night I dreamed I was back at the old school, attending classes, still secretly planning to move away. All my old study-group pals were reconvening, having drinks, catching up...and I couldn't muster the nerve to confess to everyone that I was leaving. (It was a surreal dream in general. My high school English teacher, Mr. Kendall, appeared as one of my study-group pals.)
Talk about needing to get over it. I woke up this morning and emailed C., perhaps my best friend from 1L, breaking the news that I wouldn't see her on Thursday after all. It's time to come out of the closet.
I AM TRANSFERRING LAW SCHOOLS! I AM NOT COMING BACK HERE! I STILL LOVE YOU ALL BUT THIS IS REALLY WHAT'S BEST FOR ME! KEEP IN TOUCH, OK??
there, better :)
Kudos to the guessers who guessed that my big news involved a change of venue. I will, in fact, not be reporting back to the law school of my 1L year when classes start there next week.
It's no secret that the school I attended this year was not the greatest fit for me. But I'd like to think that I made the best of it, and I can say with certainty that it made the best of me. Between my beloved moot court (which, yes, it hurt to quit) and the incredible shower of gold into my lap that was law review, I was all but ready to shelve my original master plan and stick around the place for another two years. Why not? I had my scholarship, things were looking up, and I might even have a shot at Order of the Coif or maybe a clerkship with the California Supremes.
But life has a way of making other plans. And then other plans even on top of those.
Continue reading "the great leap eastward"
Today things changed.
I made a huge life decision, this morning at about 11 am. I'm almost too tired to share it, since it comes with a back story that verges on the baroque. I promise to tell the whole story sometime this weekend, after we take the inlaws to Napa and the French Laundry and back out to the airport (they leave on the Saturday red eye).
In the meantime, I will leave this clue: today I quit the Moot Court team, and not without a tinge of regret.
Sua Sponte will be quiet for a few days. Already has been, if you're strictly keeping score: I spent this weekend in toasty Phoenix, Arizona, attending the baby shower of one of my legion of pregnant friends. Tomorrow we pile into a rented SUV with the inlaws and head east to Yosemite National Park for a few days of, er, hiking, I guess. Whatever it is that people do in Yosemite.
I have a lot on my mind this week, and will have some major news to share in a few days however things shake out. There, that ought to tease you enough for you to forgive me a few days' absence while we show the inlaws Half Dome!
Without publicly airing too much dirty laundry or recent events, I have some real personal counsel for people considering law school.
Apply everywhere in your likelihood range, which is wider than you think when you discard limitations like cost and geography. Then go to the absolute best school you can. Even if it means moving, throwing away your givens, going into debt, changing your master plans. Apply to the widest range of schools you can, and do not go anywhere except the best school that takes you.
[/public service announcement]
The transfer vigils are starting to heat up over on the law boards. I'm particularly encouraged by the posts suggesting that one's transfer chances are improved when applying to schools from which one was rejected or waitlisted the first time around. Ah, let it be true...Best of luck, spiritual siblings, may you wind up where you know you belong.
Of course the same old something sticks in my throat as I read posts about how one should not start one's first year at a school from which one isn't prepared to graduate. GAAAAAAHHHH. I'd really rather believe that a year's worth of boilerplate procedural classes is a great deal less random than some of the advice-givers would have me think, that the situation is as predictable and controllable as you make it.
Another interesting suggestion from the discussion: start working on your transfer essays over Christmas break. I like this; I'm itching to start mine now, but recognize the wisdom in waiting. Several months of actual 1L experience ought to give me a better set of real reasons for transferring than the visceral whine that has recently constituted much of the content of this blog. :-)