Stay of Execution

A Summary Of What I Have Written About Going To Law School

1) Dont' go to law school just because you're not really sure what else to do.  It's too expensive for that, and debt is a big, bad thing that you need to think hard and carefully about before you load yourself up with it. 

2) The legal world attracts risk-averse, heirarchical, highly competitive types.  They frame a lot of the conversations about the profession.  Therefore, a lot of default expectations about where you should go to law school, what you should do while you're there (e.g. law review), and what kind of job you should knock yourself out to get after school, have to do not with the substance of the activity, not with whether it fits your personality, interests, or skills, but on the perceived "prestige" and exclusivity of the choice.  I maintain that this is a bad way to make decisions about your life. 

3) Law school is really fun.  I loved it.  It's hard, in a good way.  It can help you think very precisely.  You'll understand our government better than you ever did, and you'll come away with great respect for the system we've built.  (And you'll probably mourn harder the damage we're doing to due process with bills like this.) Learning to read statutes and legal language is useful: it means nobody can bully you.  You can parse out problems in a great way.  But these skills are not necessary to living a happy and productive life.  Incurring a great deal of debt to get them is not a good idea, unless you are certain that you can pay off that debt without doing something that you hate.

4) Most lawyers at big law firms hate it, wouldn't recommend it for their children, and wouldn't go to law school if they had it to do over again.  Pay attention to that.  Read this article.  It is these same people who mark this career path as extremely prestigious.  But they wouldn't do it again.  One speculates whether "prestige" is something that unhappy people use to prop up decisions that they regret. 

5) The happy lawyers that I know tend to be those in small or solo practices, those who are public defenders or prosecutors and who feel a strong sense of mission to their work.  The business model of the billable hour and the culture at large law firms makes it hard to have a balanced life, and lawyers at big firms are often unhappy.  This is consistent with happiness research, that suggests that people who spend their time doing things that connect them to other people, and that give them a concrete sense of helping other people and being part of a larger community, are more content in their lives.  Above basic subsistence levels, neither money nor "prestige" contributes to a sense of well-being.  We are wired to constantly chase things that won't make us feel better.  To be content, we need to recognize these tendencies, and not jump on the hamster wheel and try to run faster. 

6) I think the legal profession is often dishonest to aspiring lawyers, in what we fail to tell them.   The most shameful way is ignoring the impact of debt on the freedom of young people to shape their own destinies.  You have a lot fewer options if you need to service $150,000 of debt than if you don't have any, or even if you only have $40,000.  The platitudes about a law degree "opening lots of doors" is incomplete if it doesn't acknowledge all the doors that an extraordinary debt load closes. 

7) My posts about the culture of the legal profession are gathered here, and my posts about my own professional journey are here. 

Testimonial

I got an email from someone today who started blogging because of stumbling across this blog.  I wrote back to her, and said this:

I do think that if you blog, honestly, for six months, it will change your life.  I'm not sure why, exactly, but it will.  I think if you get in the habit of first noticing, then describing, the truth about your life and your reactions to it, it will become impossible not to speak the truth.  And when you've made telling the truth and being tuned into your world a habit, you will make changes to things that don't work for you.  And so you'll make room for wonder, and you'll become more fully yourself. 

Enjoy.  I don't think we know what we have to say until we start saying it.  And I definitely don't think we know our power until we start being honest and brave in front of other people. I'm still learning how to do that, but this blog is teaching me how, daily. 

Left Out

I have managed to avoid most of the Internet blog memes out there, which is good because I am put off by the concept, even if I sometimes read the answers with interest.  Nonetheless, I have been excluded from the best meme I've seen yet, by the great Esther Wilberforce Packard.  Sigh.  I'll have to keep to myself who I would choose to have drowned in borscht. 

Gloaming

I've been paying attention to sunset lately, in a sort of mundane way.  We can't sail in the dark, obviously (or maybe it's not obvious -- some coaches tape flashlights to the masts as a way of dealing with fall's increasing darkness).  And we can't start practice until class is over, so as the season goes on we have a shorter and shorter window to work with.  Over my desk I have calendar showing the sunset times for the next month, and I look at it often when I'm thinking about what we'll do at practice.  Next Tuesday it will come 13 minutes earlier than today.  The week after that, another 12 minutes.  On the water, I watch the sun dropping toward Pole Island, and the light getting yellower, then flatter, then blue-shadowy.  I look at my watch, because at this time of year I don't know what time it really is based on the light.  Driving home I look at the sky and at the clock.  About 10 minutes after official sunset there was still light in the sky, but the treeline was black, a silhouette against a yellow sky.  I can't figure out how the sky goes from yellow-red to blue without passing through green anywhere, but it does, and away from the place where the sun is brightest it is red-orange, changing to a darker blue-purple without seeming to go through yellow.  Tonight the moon was up, a sliver, hanging near the horizon and glowing silver.  We'll have a full moon next Friday, October 6th, which I know from my sunset calendar and from trying to plan a moonlit practice for the team.  I suppose there are people whose job gives them reason to keep track of the moon, just like I'm keeping track of sunset these days, but the moon always takes me by surprise.  I never know where in the sky to look for it, or how big it will be, and it seems that just when I'm getting used to it being full it's getting small again.

You Might Have Forgotten

How the pre-Disney "Little Mermaid" story went.  I remembered the part about how when she left the sea, each step she took with her legs felt like walking on knives.  But I'd forgotten that she gave up her voice, too.  And I completely forgot how it ended -- that the prince didn't choose her, after all, and that she chose not to kill him to save her life, and she ended up as the wind, a daughter of the air.... 

My Love Life Is None Of Your Business: An Internal Debate

How much, if anything, should I write about my relationship with Mr. NBT?

A friend of mine was once telling me about Linda Greenlaw's book, The Hungry Ocean, once, and said the whole book was a plaintive cry for a partner.  I remember hearing that and thinking, wow.  Yikes.  I hope my writing never sounds like that. 

But I sort of wonder if it has, on this blog.  And I wonder if that's all that bad. 

The reasons I don't want to write about my love life:
    1) I don't want to screw anything up.
    2) This weblog is public, and comes up when you Google my name, and who knows who's reading it?  I certainly don't.  I know some people who are reading it: my parents, some of my friends, an ex-boyfriend or two.  Mr. NBT, a couple of his friends.  A whole bunch of strangers.  Who knows who else?  My boss?  My students?  Who can say?  Hi folks.  All of these are different audiences, who would get differing amounts of information if the subject came up over a glass of wine.  I'm trying, when I write here, to write honestly, with a minimum of spin.  This seems a tricky topic for that aspiration. 
    3) Happiness is boring to read about.  Sadness, longing, pain: all of those things take courage to write about.  But contentment, well, where's the bravery there?  Am I artful enough to write about hope and expectation, comfort and trust, without sounding smug?
    4) If I admit I'm happy, or that I'm looking forward to something, and then it falls flat, I can't shake it off easily.  Everyone will know that I didn't get something I wanted.  Safer to play it cool.  Then if I get heartbroken, maybe nobody will know.  No big deal.
    5) I don't want to invite a bunch of strangers to advise, speculate, and comment on my love life.  That feels kind of tender.  I trust the crowd here at Stay of Execution: you're wise and warm and it generally feels like you're rooting for me.  But, yikes.  Sometimes a stray comment here has me doubting myself for days.  Am I a bad person, truly insufferable?  I don't want it to make me doubt someone else, or make him doubt me.

Here's why I'm tempted to write about it:

Creepy Neighbor

As part of the bathroom renovation project, I cleared out some shelves of miscellaneous bathroom products.  I filled up a bag with some things I no longer want in my life, but that might make a teenage girl very pleased: various hair products, makeup that I don't wear, sample size lotions, etc.  There's a nice teenage girl who lives up the street.  I know her name from when I first moved here and she used to ride her bike and stop at my house to pat Belle.  Now I nod hello to her when I am running and she's waiting for the schoolbus, but I have very little interaction.  I would like to offer her all of this stuff.  If she doesn't want it, she can throw it out, but she might have fun with a girlfriend trying on the various colors of lipstick.  But does offering it to her make me a creepy neighbor?  I don't want to be a creepy neighbor. 

Why I Care About Coaching

I emerged from college more broken than I went in.  I said that to my housemate last night, in a rare dinner together.  I was trying to explain why coaching feels really important to me.  Why should it matter if kids at an elite college get better at making small sailboats go around buoys faster than other kids at other elite colleges? 

I can't explain that part very well except to tell you that I am certain that it does matter.  Sailing matters, just because it's worth doing.  That's so innate to me and who I am that it's like asking me how to read, or why be interested in people.  I lack the vocabulary to break some things down into smaller parts.  The best stab I can make at explaining sailing is that to be good at it, you have to notice invisible things.  You have to get really good at tuning in to subtleties, to things that haven't happened yet: a wave that is rising and about to change, a windshift that's ahead, a puff that will change all of the forces on your boat.  I really do believe that getting good at noticing makes you happier, and makes you a better person.  It lets you live in the moment.  It lets you use all of your senses, and many of your muscles.  It lets you lose your rational mind and experience flow and response, the bodily sensation of being connected and tuned in to the world around you, water and wind and sky.  I think that's fundamentally worthwhile, as an experience and as a habit.

And I know what a watershed time college is.  I am not sure I have the answer to my question, but I think what college was about for me was understanding hard work.  I saw and learned what it meant to work hard, at school (I didn't do much of that, but I witnessed it, pretty close up), in a sport, and in relationships with people who were different from me.  I didn't always work hard but I learned the difference between working hard and not working hard, and I generally saw a payoff when I worked hard.  But I limped out of college.  I came out convinced I wasn't very smart, and wasn't particularly anything else, either.  Anything I might have once thought I was good at, or distinctive for, I'd met people who were way more accomplished at than me.  I didn't know how to feel okay about myself if I wasn't the best at anything.  I scuttled off to the middle of nowhere to spend a lot of time outside and lick my wounds. 

I love college students.  I like watching them.  They're smart, and they're open-minded, and the world is still new.  They're very funny; I'm always laughing.  They don't have the masks that adults have, so you can see emotions play out on their faces.  And I want, fiercely, to help them feel more sure of themselves than I felt about myself when I was in college.  I am not sure I can do that; I'm not sure anyone could have done that for me.  But maybe I can.  And that, more than anything else, is why being a coach matters to me. 

Tether

Having a new long-distance relationship in my life has given me a new relationship with my cell phone.  Mr. NBT and I send text messages frequently.  We also use the camera feature on our phones to snap pictures of our surroundings and send them off to each other.  Indeed, those pictures are worth 1000 words.  I'll snap a photo of sailboats at the dock and college students leaning against them, waiting for wind; he'll send back a picture of an empty coffee cup and a breakfast plate with a napkin crumpled up on it.  It's a great way to capture place and scene that you can't really do with a text message, or even with voice.  And it just takes a moment to send a reminder that I'm thinking of him, and that I want to show him the world I live in.  We talk on the phone, too, of course.  I'm not sure I've ever talked with someone daily like this.  If I did, it was a long time ago. 

So we got our cell phone bills the other day.  Oh my.  Besides the unexpected magnitude of the bills, there was verifiable, searchable documentation of our pattern of communication.  How often do we talk?  For how long?  Exactly how many text messages do we send and receive on a typical day?  I am too sheepish to report the results here. 

Question

What is college for? 

Another way to ask the question: by what measure should those connected with a college determine whether it is providing its students with a good experience?