Confession

In a little over a year, I will be taking [insert state here] bar exam. Which, is really just going to be... so awful. Like there is literally nothing pleasant about this time next year, and roughly the two months preceding it.

Which means that in a little more than a little over a year, I will, in theory anyway, have a real live legal job lined up, and will become a practicing attorney.

I find this fact pants-crappingly terrifying.

This is my confession. Incidentally, I just got off of Skype with an old high school friend of mine who is now in Mississippi of all places, and a large chunk of our conversation was a kind of collective disbelief that we are, in fact, adults. There are legitimate kids now, younger than us, and we are not them. We are old and, in my case, in a year will be fully independent, theoretically competent adults. Or at least we will expected to be. This is expected of me, who has only ever known childhood, adolescence, and youth.

I don't think I am dumb, and I know that I can probably handle it. It's more of a shock that it is actually happening. Growing up, that thing we call "adulthood" seemed so far off into the future, this kind of shadow thing that, even though you heard about it, and knew that conceptually, in the abstract, one day you would reach it, you never *actually* thought it was going to happen to you.

And then it does. Even in my "young adult" days, which was college until about now, I could put on the aires of responsibility, and had more freedom, but in the end, I could always play the "student" card. I was (and am, for a few more months, anyway) relatively insulated. You don't think about the time passing, at least I don't. And it passes quickly. And it happens so fast, it creeps up on you, you don't see it coming, so when it finally does happen, you wonder if you are really ready for it. You want "another five minutes" to get ready. But it has already happened, and the question is whether you can handle it.

Adults always seemed so... old, and together, and I always thought by the time I was an adult, I would have it all together, that the pieces would all be in place, and that I would know what to do. My parents, and any adults I knew, always seemed like that to me when I was a kid. And now I am starting to realize they were probably winging it as much as I am. And as anyone does. That realization, I think, is the real source of fear or dread or whatever. The knowledge that at some level, we are all throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. But we are still to make something of that shit-flinging, and "not fuck up."

In the end, most people figure it out. I will too, I am sure. It's just so... sudden. To quote The Grateful Dead (or Jimmy Buffett, depending on what recording you are listening to), "woh oh/what I want to know/where does the time go?"

Life

Me

And because I referenced it in the blog, and it is relevant, and I like the song:

Uncle John's Band by The Grateful Dead. Alpine Valley Concert 1989

Random Things about D.C.

I have been in the District now for almost two months (more than halfway done with my time here...wow). In that time, I have observed some things about the city and its inhabitants that are idiosyncratic. Every city does have their idiosyncrasies, but DC seems to have a lot, and a lot of "ticks" that are rather unique to it. Here is a list of some of the more prominent things I have noticed:

1. Charter schools. On my walks to and from work, and around the city generally, I tend to observe the scenery and world around me (sometimes at the expense of looking where I am going...whoops). I have noticed something strange: I haven't seen one "normal" public school. All of the non-private schools are some form of Charter school, which is really more like a quasi-private public school. I know that charter schools are becoming more of a (somewhat controversial) thing in cities --Chicago has several, whose ads are always gracing the insides of El cars-- but Chicago and most cities also still have their regular "neighborhood" public schools. In two months here, I have yet to see one regular public school. This is actually one of the first things I noticed when I got here. It's weird, and gets me wondering if DC is on some kind of program or policy where all of its public schools are now charter?

2. There are three types of people (well, professionals anyway) in DC: 1)lawyers, 2) consultants, or 3)consultants who want to become lawyers, and vice versa. Literally everyone I have run into in DC --whether coworkers, or people at "networking" events, or the time on the Metro I randomly ran into a girl I graduated high school, operates in one of those three categories. I guess there is also the odd doctor, because people get sick and need hospitals, but like everyone else is a lawyer or a consultant. Even people who are not actively practicing in those areas, have some kind of degree (JD for law, idk what for consulting) that is geared towards law or consulting. I guess this is not surprising, since DC's industry is government, and government is mostly lawyers, and what private sector there is, is geared toward supporting or catering to government. But I have never really been in a city with such a generally homogenous group of people.

Image courtesy of memegenerator

3. No one is from here. Kind of an addendum to the above, but very few people I have met are from DC, or even the immediate surrounding area. Again, this makes sense, because it is the nation's capital, where people come from all over the land under the federal government's jurisdiction to (in theory anyway) govern the country. In a lot of cities --particularly New York and Chicago-- you get a lot of people that were born, raised, and stayed in the city or immediate surrounding areas, and have never left. Or they left briefly and then came back. Of course DC is physically smaller and has fewer people than these cities, so it is natural that there would be fewer native DC-ites, but just how few there are is kind of surprising.

4. People here talk in code. Again because DC is ground zero for government business and (more to the point) bureaucracy, there are lots of departments of the government all over the city. There are also just a lot of agencies --public interest, NGOs, think tanks, etc. And much of the work that is done in DC, is codified in and carried out pursuant to federal statutes. What do all of these three things have in common? If you guessed, "You can essentially boil the names of those entities down to easy-sounding acronyms," you'd be right: FEC, FTC, CII, SEC, ACLU, FOIA. All important and prominent thins within the District, all will fun acronyms. And for the most part, people only refer to these things by their acronyms. But, for the uninitiated, it means they pretty much speak in code: when every noun in a sentence is some kind of acronym, the sentence has no meaning if you don't know the acronym. May as well be speaking ancient Greek. So yeah, that took some getting used to. I guess that is why they call DC "alphabet city."

Pretty much this