New Kid on the Hallway

Two things

1. Yay, thank you for all your comments on my last post! They were most cheering. (And the day did get better - I was kind of tired and whiny.)
      
2. Why, how, WHY are there WASPS flying in our window?? We live on the TENTH FLOOR, people. Of a cinderblock high-rise. We have no screens on our windows because, well, it's the 10th floor and they'd blow out. We have our windows open. It's a lovely fresh sunny morning (supposed to turn into a warm afternoon), and in the last 15 minutes THREE WASPS have invaded the apartment! (NLLDH has killed each of them for me, thank God.) What are they doing here?? There is nothing to eat or do whatever it is wasps do to things sitting up here in the sky. There isn't even any wood handy, as this building is made entirely of man-made materials. This is ENTIRELY unacceptable! Is it perhaps my payback for gloating to someone recently about how there aren't any mosquitoes out here???
   
   (Just so you know, I am so very, very, very deathly afraid of wasps.)

Be my cheap therapy

Okay, people, I am feeling tired and stressed and incompetent and sad. Not for any particular dire reason, and it's nothing worth boring anyone with the details, but since that's my headspace at the moment I haven't been blogging. Because there's no point in spamming the internet with my moanings when they basically boil down to: Barbie [who thought she was actually pretty smart] says, LAW IS HARD.

So the point of this post is: I would really love to hear about cheerful things right now. Jokes? Inspirational stories? Cute puppies or kittens or orangutans or whatever animal strikes your fancy?* If you have a moment to spare (or you're looking to procrastinate), I'd love to hear them.

(In the interests of reciprocity, I'll note that looking at a lovely plump kitty who likes to squeeze into boxes [Maru; I can't find the link to his blog from here but there's a link at http://boingboing.net/2008/11/08/magu-the-cat.html] or gorgeous pictures of piles of eeny weeny kittens [at http://www.theittybittykittycommittee.com/] is always good for raising the spirits. Unless, of course, you think cat blogging is a self-indulgent waste of time leading to the downfall of western civilization, in which case, don't look - they will probably only raise your blood pressure.)

Frustrations of the former academic (or possibly just confused about grammar)

It is driving me crazy that when judicial opinions talk about different degrees of crimes -- first degree murder, second degree assault, and so on -- they do NOT hyphenate in the way that I would expect them to.

That is, they say "first degree murder," not "first-degree murder," and I keep having to go back and take out my hyphens.

(I'm not completely crazy, am I? My way would be the correct way in the ordindary world??)

Okay, back to the land of the hyphenless.

Random comments on the 1L year: I shouldn't even blog this for fear of jinxing it

So, when I was making plans for going to law school, I read a lot of how-to-succeed-in-law-school guides (a sucker for a good self-help book, I am), as well as a lot of law school blogs and online forums.

Something that a LOT of these sources emphasized was how hard law school could be on your marriage/relationship.

There was a lot of warning that non-law school people can't understand what you're going through in law school, and that you had to prepare your partner for the stress you'd be under and how much time law school would demand, and that you would have to remember to give time to your relationship so it wouldn't founder. There were also a lot of comments on how many couples break up when one of them goes to law school.

Sometime in April, I turned to NLLDH and asked, "Have you found that me being in law school has put a strain on our relationship?"

And he just laughed and laughed and laughed.

Because actually, no, we haven't found me being in law school to be a particular strain on our relationship. (Caveat: I realize I've only finished one year, so this may change, although I should add that most of the comments about the strain of law school that I've seen talked specifically about the first year.)

But honestly, I don't think this is because law school isn't hard. It's because in comparison to the strain that getting Ph.D.s and working in academia place on a relationship, law school is NOTHING.

When I look back at my life since NLLDH and I first got together (in 1993!), here are all the ways that earning Ph.D.s and being academics put pressure on our relationship:

• After completing his doctoral exams (in the minimum time allowed by our grad program) and immediately turning around and teaching his first independent course, a summer (and therefore compressed/intensive) course, NLLDH, who has issues with perfectionism and was dead exhausted, had a kind of a mini-breakdown just before we moved in together.
• Throughout grad school, he struggled with excruciating writer's block.
• Throughout grad school, I struggled with an excruciating fear of my advisor/her feedback.
• When he used up what was the standard level of grad student funding in our department, he decided to move back to his parents' house to finish his dissertation. (Since he was a foreign student in the US on an educational visa, there were limits on what kind of employment he could take.) We broke up based on the theory that we would be living in two different countries.
  
  • (That didn't actually happen, because we moved his stuff to his parents' house, then moved me into a new apartment, and he moved into my new apartment to catsit for the 6-8 weeks I was in Europe doing dissertation research. By the time I got back, he'd got a non-departmental TAship that he managed to keep for the next two years, so he never moved to his parents' house and we just kind of pretended we'd never broken up. Still, it was a strain.)
• When he finished his degree, he got a job about 5 states away. I was writing my dissertation. Should I go with him? Should I not go with him? I was going with him. No, wait, I wasn't. Okay then. He moved away, and we broke up (again on the basis of being in two different places) for 2 years. If he had not had to move for this job, we would not have broken up.
• We ultimately got back together, and got engaged while living across the country from each other. We got married 7 months later where I was working as a full-time adjunct, and the day after, he had to fly back to his job. (Honeymoon? what honeymoon?)
• I got a job at Rural Utopia. He came with me, had nothing to do for the first semester (in the middle of nowhere where we didn't know anyone yet), and spent a lot of time drinking.
• Ultimately, NLLDH got full-time teaching at Rural Utopia, which was great, and more than a lot of academic couples get. However, although we saw each other in meetings and what not, and ate lunch together on campus, we also had workloads/schedules such that he'd get up and leave the house before I woke up in the morning, we wouldn't see each other till dinner, and then he'd go to bed about 8 pm and I'd stay up and work for 3-4 more hours. (Yes, we did get summers "off," so there was that.)
• NLLDH decided that staying in his position at Rural Utopia (not tenure-track, not permanent - renewed year-to-year, so not secure, no support for research) was not something he could do long-term, other academic options didn't pan out, and he decided to go back to school to retrain for a new field. I also got a new job at Former College, in a big city, based partly on the idea that it would be easier for NLLDH to find a satisfying job in that rural area. Which meant that we left Rural Utopia, I moved to Former College City, he moved to Second Grad School City, and because he never did find a job in Former College City, we lived mostly apart for the three years I worked at Former College.
• During which time I suffered from depression, ran up a bunch of debt (partly the impact of maintaining two households and paying for travel, partly me being a depressed dink), and was relieved as much as distressed when Former College booted my ass.

(The list above is necessarily incomplete, since it's from my perspective, and NLLDH might very well add to/subtract from it.)

Now, I don't mean to suggest that academia was the cause of ALL BAD THINGS EVER that NLLDH and I have gone through in our relationship. Because it definitely wasn't - he and I brought plenty of our own issues to the party. Many couples might well have made very different decisions about these matters than we did, in ways that might have reduced stress levels. Moreover, I'm not someone who sits around bemoaning what happened in the past, because it's what has made us who we are, both as individuals and as a couple. I don't regret any of the things we've done or haven't done because of our choices to pursue Ph.D.s, try out academic jobs, and change careers. So this isn't meant to say that ACADEMIA RUINED MY LIFE, DAMMIT. And finally, I realize that lots of careers, never mind life itself, put stress on relationships, so I don't at all mean to say that only academics have to deal with relationship angst.

Nor is law school entirely stress-free. The exam period kind of sucks, because it really does expand to suck up ALL. YOUR. TIME. I told NLLDH at the beginning of it that I was probably not going to be able to cook, clean, or be very much fun while exams were ongoing (his response? "You do EXACTLY what you have to do to do well on your exams, and screw the rest of it till they're over." So that wasn't so bad, although we're both sick to death of frozen pizza). I did feel somewhat disconnected from him throughout the process, because I was immersed in the Dormant Commerce Clause and zoning amendments and inchoate crimes and personal jurisdiction and so on, and so my brain was just in a completely different place; I was so consumed by exams that when he said something about something else, I occasionally felt like, "How can he expect me to think about that??"

But I would submit that in comparison with the strain that academia placed on our relationship, me going to law school is NOTHING.

(But last caveat: we don't have kids, so that has made both the academic careers and the current careers less stressful.)

Random comments on the 1L year: friendship

Rather than try to write some huge meandering post summing up my 1L experience, I thought I'd just throw out some random observations periodically; this is the first. How many there end up being will depend on how inspired I'm feeling.

One of the deans at my law school loves to tell us how you make the BEST FRIENDS OF YOUR LIFE in law school. These are the friends you will HAVE FOR LIFE. Treasure this time, because among your classmates will be your BEST FRIENDS, EVER.

Now, I like this dean very much, but I wish she would stop saying this, because I think she's completely wrong. I think she's confusing correlation with causation: you don't make the BEST FRIENDS OF YOUR LIFE in law school because you're in law school, but because you make really great friends at that stage in your life when this dean (and many others like her) just happened to be in law school.

What I mean is that you make (some of) the best friends of your life in your early twenties, when you still have that "Hey, you live near me? We can be BFFs!" kind of attitude left over from college, or whatever it is that just makes making friends easier. Maybe it's because many people in their early twenties are relatively uncommitted to spouses/kids/other family, have more flexible schedules and lives - I don't know exactly. I do know that in the last few years of blogging I've seen a number of people my age talk about how much harder it is to find/make friends as you get older, and guess what? Law school doesn't magically change that.

I made amazing, wonderful lifelong friends in my early/mid-twenties, just like my law school dean did. The only difference is that I was in grad school at the time, and she was in law school.

I should say that I have made friends in law school, and I like my classmates very much (I can only think of a few exceptions, and even among them, only one person truly BUGS me. I figure that's pretty good). I'm often surprised by how nice other students are, whom I've assumed to be completely uninterested in talking to me. (I make those kinds of assumptions a lot. But that's probably a subject for a different post.) My classmates are really cool people. But I have not made MY BEST FRIENDS FOR LIFE, EVER, OMG.

So I kinda wish my dean would shut up already about us all finding our BEST FRIENDS, because it makes me feel a little bit like a loser, when I think it's really just more me being a non-trad.

(I mean, some of it is just me being anti-social. I don't drink, so am not very interested in the standard early-twenties kind of parties/going to the bar, but I don't know if that would be the case for everyone my age. Moreover, I live in a different city from my school, and don't really want to hang around campus all day waiting for some kind of social event to start; I want to go home! And spend time with my husband! I'm a boring old married lady, people!

The sort of sad part is, it's not like I have a wild and crazy social life filled with people outside law school; I don't really know many people in this state besides my classmates and my husband's co-workers. I would like to make more friends, honestly. Nonetheless, it still feels like I have an actual life outside of law school, not that law school is my life, if that makes any sense, and so I do get tired of the YOU WILL BOND WITH YOUR CLASSMATES! YOU WILL LOVE EACH OTHER FOREVER!! talk.

I keep forgetting I'm not an academic anymore

I had a funny (to me) conversation with a fellow student before one of my recent exams. Zie is much younger than me (which probably goes without saying, but is worth noting for this story). Anyway, we were talking about one of our (male) professors, Prof. Smith (not his real name), who happens to be married to a (female) professor in the law school. The other student was trying to figure out who Smith's wife was, and I said, "Oh, it's Professor Jones." (No, not their real names.)

"Oh," zie said. Pause. "I wonder why she didn't change her name?"

What I wanted to say was, "I wonder why you'd expect her to?", or, more confrontationally, "Why should she?", but I was polite and just said that a lot of women in academia don't change their names, because if you've been publishing in a field before you get married you don't always want to change your name and make it hard for people to track your work. (I had to point out that I hadn't changed mine, too.)

Which is not to say that all academic women keep their maiden names, or that they/any/all women should keep their maiden names; there are lots of reasons on both sides, and changing/not changing is an individual choice.

Just that it still surprises me when I encounter someone who clearly thinks it's odd when a married woman doesn't change her name. Especially when that person is younger than I am.

(Related comment: for some reason, I remember it being the attitude among my women friends in college, that we weren't really planning to change our names. The ones who got married soonest after college - so, say, early- to mid-90s - tended to keep their names. And then a bunch of people were getting married at the end of the 90s/beginning of the 00s, and since, and they all have changed their names. So my question to you all: Did women keeping their maiden names enjoy something of a vogue in the 90s and then become less popular again? Or am I all confused about this because of spending so much time in academia??)

This is one of those posts I hate about how I don't have time to post

Seriously, this is the most pathetic post ever, because its point is to say, I don't have time to post!!, which you have all probably figured out, and since you probably read through an RSS feed, you'll know when I do post. But I felt a little rude just leaving the last (interesting) conversation in the air, so to speak, so wanted to assure you that it's not you, it's me -- it's finals here, and between Con Law and Property last week and Crim Law and Civ Pro next week, I've done nothing but study lately (well, study, and rotate between e-mail, blogs, and Facebook when I'm dying for a break. I can gauge the efficiency of my studying by how often I take these breaks; when I reach "write 2 lines of outline, check blogs again, repeat," I know I should just pack it in for the night).

Last night, in fact, I dreamed that I went to a review session for my Property class. Except that after it was over, I realized that I'd already TAKEN my Property exam. And I couldn't remember what other exams I had yet to take. Which made me very, very nervous...

Anyway. By the time I finish up this year my medievalist friends will be immersed in Kzoo, so have fun! I'll try to think of something coherent to say to sum up this first year of transition, for when I return.