Bucs Win! Bucs Win! Bucs Win!

Browsing around facebook, I found these two pictures of my hometown that I enjoyed seeing:

I need to relax a little.  I'm on pace to bill 200 hours this month, and that's a lot.  I have to bill 1900 hours a year, and my personal goal is tentatively 2200, which is optimal in terms of both bonus and gaining a lot of experience during my first year.  I'm definitely NOT billing more than 2200, so being on pace for 2400 is a bit insane. 

I've been billing so much because I love my job.  I'm on two awesome cases, and one of them has an insane number of discovery disputes.  The other side files motions to compel like they're going out of style, and now it's after the deadline for filing those motions, so each motion is really two motions, because they have to move for leave to be able to file their motion late and then there's the motion itself.  They send like 6 letters a day bitching about various things, which totally mischaracterize our positions, so we have to respond to all that.  I've learned an incredible amount about Civil Procedure in general and the day to day mechanics in particular.  But I know that I shouldn't keep this up for my own mental health, and that I probably can't keep it up for very long.

The problem is that I always bring home one item of work and figure that I'll maybe read a deposition transcript while I'm watching baseball or bang out a few letters to the other side while I'm eating dinner.  And I dutifully complete those tasks and check them off my to do list.  But this is a case in which there's an infinite amount of work, so it's not as though doing work at home makes me any less busy the next day at work.  It just means I get more assignments.  It makes me feel good to contribute to the team, and I know that my immediate boss needs all the help she can get because there's just so much. 

The thing is that I'm going to be a lawyer for a long time.  Right now it's all so new and exciting, which is why it's great to bill a lot of hours.  My first meet and confer with opposing counsel; the first time I'm drafting an interrogatory response; my first briefs.  I like doing what I'm doing, and so it's fun completing work knowing that there's still more new things to experience.  I think I might be rushing myself a little too much though, short-changing the other parts of my life.

There have been times in my life where I've been ridiculously lazy.  I'm ashamed of them.  Senior year of college (and the summer before it) was one.  It's so hard to believe that I'm so productive now, but knowing my history, this could well be followed by burn-out and a long period of inactivity.  I need to pace myself.

So from now on, I'm going to try and avoid taking work home.  And I'm going to try to avoid working too much on weekends.  I'm swamped the whole time I'm at work during weekdays, and that's all billable, so there's no need to bring still more work home.  Some of it has been that we've had immediate deadlines that have required me to work some late nights.  Now, though, I find myself taking briefs that are due in three weeks home to tinker with.  No more.  I'm putting the due date into my calendar and forgetting about it for the next two weeks, and I'll start working on it then.

Today I left work, picked up dinner, came home and watched some TV.  Then I ran 3 miles and read two chapters of a book.  It was nice.  Eventually I'll need to find friends outside work, join an orchestra or two.  For now, I need to make sure that I have some thing to hold on to outside of work, and since no things immediately come to mind, I'm going to have to create them.  Which I can do.  I just have to follow through.

Desperately in need
of some
stranger's hand
In a
desperate land

Things expand to fit the time available for them.  I think it's easier starting work without having a wife and family, without really being attached to anything.  There's less guilt when you work long hours; you can focus all your energy on making a good impression at your job.  Etc.  Being unattached leaves you more time to work, but do you really want the time available?  I'm still trying to figure out a sane balance.

We make decisions in an instant sometimes.  (Between the desire/And the spasm)  I wake up and think, "I don't like her" and from that moment forward it's as if it's always been like that.  I can't go back.  There's no going back.  Funny how it's possible to turn the other way though.  Much easier to hate someone you once liked than like someone you once hated.  Does that mean hate is stronger than love?  (do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!)  Or only that forgiveness is harder than dismissiveness?

Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

i don't know why but i can't stop thinking about her even though it was a few years ago that i was infatuated but recently it's come back to my mind.  one reason might be that my life has been blah lately.  there's no drama or excitement in my personal life, no current object of my affections.  and so i'm transported back to the time when there was excitement and was an object.  there's someone in the office i'm into... a staff member, not an attorney, but that would be a bad idea for many different reasons.  and so what are the other options.  all the reasons i could give to rationally explain why a relationship would be bad would all fall away if there were someone actually in the picture.  then it would happen anyway.  it's too bad when you don't keep in touch.  failing to do so probably illustrates how superficial it all was to begin with or how one-sided.  it's ironic because it might also indicate that you were too close and there's too much pain built up so you have to let it go and let silence do your talking for the foreseeable future.  but this isn't one of those, and in the latter instance i wonder whether it's really "too bad" that we didn't keep in touch at all.  no, "too bad" is wanted someone and never really having it resolved, instead having slid around it.  maybe avoiding that predictably awkward mutual understanding was for the best though.

being honest with yourself is hard when you don't know what the truth is.  and some truths aren't the type that can be rationally discovered.  you don't know where the truth is or the methods by which to extract it.  maybe that's many more truths than i'd initially imagined.  does there come a time where you just have to fabricate a truth?  generate something to live by and then fucking stick with it.  the risk is that you're wrong and wake up 20 years later having lived a lie unless it wasn't a lie all those days because you didn't know whether it was the truth or not.  once you discover it's false, if you continue in the face of that then it's a lie.  in the interim, maybe you're just doing the best you can with the information available to you.  at least generating your own reality has the advantage that you're moving somewhere even if it's backwards.  that's better than living but being afraid to be alive.  (cf. henry james, the beast in the jungle.)  too bad she prefered edith wharton.  maybe i did too.

what are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? 

One biography of Earl Warren describes him as a man who was fond of trite ideals that many others professed were their sources of guidance.  Warren was different because he actually believed them. 

"Funny" is a word that means many things to me.  Like a placeholder that I use out of laziness when another adjective would be more apt, if only I'd invest the emotional and intellectual energy to produce it.  That said, it's a funny thing to have such a sarcastic streak, to deride those who take themselves too seriously as a whole, only to take some of my own views too seriously.  "Too" seriously because they're naive sounding; views whose ordinariness cuts against my proudly embracing them.  They aren't ordinary in the sense of being widely held.  Rather, by ordinary, I mean not particularly original. 

Can deep feeling about something compensate for the inadequateness, the unremarkableness of the thing that's the object of the feeling?  Can feeling be what separates something special, something worth valuing, from Bill O'Reilly... spouting off bullshit machismo.  What gets me about O'Reilly is that I can't imagine he seriously believes what he professes seriously believe.  Supposing he did, I'm not sure how that would change my view of him. Sincerity of belief is a plus; but ridiculousness of the belief's content may more than outweigh that. 

I hate traditional gender roles.  They seem so pronounced in law.  The men act like alpha males.  The women act like alpha males.  And then there's me.  Me, the product of two parents who love me as much as any child could hope to be loved, but who can't quite find it in him to return the favor.  Is love an entitlement or something you earn?  I don't know, but the answer to that question wouldn't change anything for me.  Loving something or someone is a natural part of you, a part you can't control. 

You can't control who you love, but I think you can pick people to not love, or fall out of love with.  There's no paradox there.  Nature narrows down the field of all humanity; it presents you with a limited number of options.  But after that, it's up to you.  You don't control what offers you get, yet you retain the power of acceptance.  Well, you do and you don't control what offers you get.  What kind of person you are determines how others respond to you, so that's going to have an impact on the "natural" selection of who loves you back.  But it's not a one to one correspondence -- you only have so much control over what you project, and you often can't fine tune the output signal enough to predict the response of others with great accuracy.

I've tangled up the distinct questions of how people come to love you and how you come to love them.  Maybe I've done so because they aren't so distinct.  There are two ways to go -- you either love people because they love you back and it's this feedback cycle of mutual adoration and co-dependence or you love people that don't love you back because that love represents some hole in yourself and if only you could make them love you and fill the hole their lack of reciprocation creates them maybe just maybe you could fill that internal hole in yourself.  We don't love in some vacuum, penned up in a lonely room thinking about someone out in the world.  Or we do.  But the latter type of love isn't as interesting.  It's compelling in this fucked up way, compelling because anguish is supposed to be compelling, to be character building, and what's more anguishing than feeling alone in the universe, in love with someone who doesn't know you exist.  But it's probably a ridiculous way to go through life, a realization you come to years later, having finally broken out of it.

Every last thing before I go Every last thing before I go Every last thing before I go Every
last thing before I go I will kiss you I will kiss you I will kiss you forever 

Some fragmented thoughts.

Having started to settle into my new city and my new job, I've been thinking about whether or not I'd like to be in a relationship right now.  Pretty much everyone at my firm is married -- even people my year.  That's partly a function of the fact that I'm younger than everyone there.  But that's not the entire explanation, since I'm not that much younger than a couple people who are still married. 

I think it would be really hard to be married right now, or in any kind of serious relationship.  Basically, I'm at the office from 9:30-7ish, and when I come home, I usually bring a few papers to look over while I'm watching TV.  It's only my first couple weeks too, so I could conceivably be working more hours when I get into things (or maybe just working harder when I'm at the office, rather than sitting in my friends' offices and gossiping endlessly).  It's a hard time in my life to be in a relationship though, because I want to be actively advancing my career.  This is the first time I've ever really thought about "advancement."  In school you kind of go along and try to do well, but you're in this relatively self-contained environment, and you know that you'll be sheparded along to a degree eventually.  In work it's different.  Not only are there an endless number of possible career paths, but you can switch paths at any time (although your ability to do so decreases at time goes on), and how quickly you move along a path is much more variable than how quickly you move through school.  My point is just that, a career seems like something that needs more maintence, whereas with school, it's easier to put things on auto pilot and focus on a relationship.

I guess this just loops into what someone's concept of a relationship entails.  My parents spend every second together.  They're retired, which contributes to that, but even as a kid, it seemed like they always did a lot together.  Which I guess is sweet, but it's not necessarily the way I want to be in a relationship.  It strikes me as a little boring.  I really want a separate life; one that's my own, even though I share a significant part of it with someone else.  But my work schedule right now probably goes well beyond that "separateness" that I think is healthy. 

Another issue is start-up costs.  It might be easier to maintain a relationship that you've been in for a while when you're working long hours, but at the outset, relationships require a lot of time.  You go on dates and get to know the person, etc.  You can't just come home and plop down on the couch and watch TV with them.  If you're lucky, you get into that phase sooner rather than later, but inevitably it's at least some time away from the start of the relationship.  So maybe the marrieds have it better since they've gotten all that out of the way.

GO MICHIGAN!!!
GO GATORS!!!

I'm doing my first interview tomorrow of a 2L who's applying to work at my firm.  Taking him out to lunch, actually.  After initial screening interviews, law firms give "call-backs," where prospective summer associates interview with 4 people in our office, and then 2 more people from the office take the interviewee out to lunch.  I'm doing the lunch shift. 

I think it should be a really interesting experience, but I have to say that I'm a little freaked out.  I've been working here for barely over a week... I feel so unqualified to be interviewing people.  Although, law firm interviews seem like a "soft" evaluation process, so I guess I'm as able as anyone to determine whether I like being around the person or whatever. 

It's weird though, because I still carry around a lot of baggage from when I was applying for jobs.  Basically, I applied to maybe 30 firms through on-campus interviews and got 2 callbacks, both of which ended in me not getting the job.  Then on a whim, I sent out cover letters to firms in San Diego, and the firm I work at now happened to call me and I ended up with a job.  I didn't really understand why everyone else in the universe got like, at least 5 offers while I was desperately trying to find something.  Even now, some of my colleagues talk about some of their callbacks and compare experiences; I feel really left out of the conversation, because I have nothing to add -- what with having not gotten interviews at any of these other firms.

Not that it comes up all that often, and most of my colleagues are pretty amazing people, so they deserved to get a lot of callbacks.  But, in general, I think there's something wrong with legal recruiting, and so I think I might have a different perspective.  On the other hand, I'm at a firm that actually hired me, so maybe my perspective is unlikely to be that unique here.

Being on the other side of the process now, one thing that bothers me is the needless extravagence.  Law firms bend over backwards to woo summer associates:  fancy lunches during the interview; a huge salary over the summer and tons of activities while expecting only a minimum of work in return.  And it's never-ending:  not only are we looking for next summer's class right now, but we're calling those from last summer who haven't accepted their offers yet.  By the time we finish all this recruting stuff it'll be January or so, little under 5 months before the next summer class begins. 

All this seems so unnecessary to me.  Qualified law students are a dime a dozen, frankly, and at this point, it's awfully hard to assess who's going to be a great attorney anyway.  The problem is that if one firm does this stuff, everyone has to do it, and since people are accustomed to doing it this way, it's impossible to change. 

Anyway, I'm not sure whether this person is lucky or unlucky to be interviewing with me.  But I'll try to keep an open mind.