A Holiday Celebration at Ford's Theatre

group-shot-holiday-celebrat.jpg, originally uploaded by CaseWriter21.

A group of us taped this back in June, and it was held until tonight. If you look close, you can see me! I'm next to Wynonna, or however you spell it. More pics to come!

The Michigan Review's effect on my job search

So I was interviewing with three magistrate judges this morning in downtown DC, and one of them asked me about my 60 Minutes experience. That led to my mentioning that I was editor of the Michigan Review, which we liked to think of as a "journal" because in contrast to the Michigan Daily which you could read in the 10 minutes between class, you actually had to sit down and think about Review articles. This prompted one of the judges to ask, somewhat suspiciously, "Is that anything like the Dartmouth Review?" Uh oh. "We're in the same network," I said, "but it's not like the Dartmouth Review."

She explained to the other judges, "When I went to Dartmouth, the Dartmouth Review was like this extreme right-wing newspaper."

I quickly went into Damage Control mode. The Michigan Review was a thoughtful paper, I told them all. I explained that I consider myself fairly moderate -- "I'm a registered Independent!" -- but that Ann Arbor is like Berkeley, and the entire spectrum shifts to the left, so that all of a sudden I'm "right wing." I got yet more mileage out of the Ward Connerly speech from 9.5 years ago, explaining that Review types just wanted to have an actual dialogue, but BAMN ("the coalition to defend affirmative action by any means necessary," I said, to groans) kept shouting him down and wouldn't let him speak. I told them how I was drawn to the Review because it was a thoughtful group of people who examined all sides logically.

After about 5 minutes, having gotten way off the initial point, I said, "So, in conclusion, the Michigan Review is not like the Dartmouth Review."

Thank God she didn't go to Cornell! (When I was in college, The Cornell Review was known as the most outrageous right-wing paper in the network.)

The Deadening of One's Soul: an Epiphany

I wanted to document review until 9 pm tonight but I simply cannot work anymore. My brain is completely fried. This is without a doubt the most mind-numbing work I have ever done in my life (and that includes the data entry I did for my uncle when I was 12). I cannot describe how tedious and boring this is. It literally deadens my soul.

I am a creative person. I like to write, to sing. To think. I loved the first year of law school because it presented me with an entirely new way of thinking about the world. It took philosophy -- a subject I had enjoyed in college but found to have no practical effects -- and applied it to the world. Criminal law taught me about theories of punishment. Contract law taught me how to analyze the agreements people make with each other. Torts showed me the system that we as a society use to determine who is responsible when one person accidentally causes another to be injured.

And I loved communications law because it pitted the law -- a slow moving beast -- against technology, which literally moves at the speed of light.

Document review is the antithesis of what I am interested in. It is legal purgatory, a job doled out to those who didn't get an offer from their summer firms. It pays well but I want to drown myself in my water bottle every day.

I'm going to keep looking for communications law jobs, but I am also going to expand my search to clerkships for any level judge, and also criminal defense and prosecution. And I am going to continue to submit freelance ideas, and work on honing my fiction writing, and take voice lessons and audition for the opera chorus.

All I know for sure right now is that I don't see how I can keep doing this job through the end of January. I have to do something else, anything else.

I don't care if it pays half as much.

No reward is worth this.