Five days until my PR (Professional Responsibility) final. Studying for that class has been frustrating (my friends and Cedar must be pretty tired of my complaints). The Professor’s lecture style makes it very difficult to take notes as well as to organize broad concepts into a coherent outline. But you have to start somewhere.

My second final, on Wednesday morning, is Transmission of Wealth (ToW). ToW should be called “Wills and Trusts” but the professors thought it would be more confusing to students and would-be employers by making up a fancy name, which I can tell you, doesn’t actually reflect the material covered.

Can you tell I’m a little disillusioned with law school professors right now? “Disillusioned” is the nice way of saying it.

Last night Britta and Wolfe stopped by with tasty Paseo sandwiches. Paseo is a Cuban sandwich restaurant in Fremont and makes the best sandwiches I’ve ever had. Seriously. I had a grand old time eating, making hot cocoa, protecting Cedar’s sandwich from Britta and Wolfe’s wandering fingers while he worked late, and sending out sarcastic emails to Hellfish, my ultimate team. Turns out sarcasm is a wonderful palliative to a cranky law student.

In talking with Cedar about the kind of job I’d like last night, I’ve decided on the perfect job for me: managing Cedar’s photography business. I haven’t yet figured out how to incorporate my two other interests: historical linguistics and the study of the negative psychological effects of law school and the legal profession. If you think of such a job, do let me know!

The other thing I realize about my ideal job is summed up by one handy phrase: “Happy medium.” That should by my personal motto actually. The reason is long, detailed and boring, but the upshot is that litigation is too time consuming and doesn’t have enough human contact. Transactional and service jobs don’t have enough deadlines or structured supervision. Public interest work pays too little and is often emotionally draining. Private practice can be boring, morally dehumanizing, and require way too much time. Some of the dissatisfaction I feel stems from the specialization of the world: lawyers in particular focus and narrow down until they are experts on, say, trust litigation, or non-profit formation. I need variety, the happy medium. I am determined to find the relatively interesting, 40-50 hour, varied, and at least a little geared towards the needs of humankind job.

That’s a snippet of my latest work: “Ali’s View of the Labor Market and Where She Fits In.” Stay tuned for more installments.

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