Thursday, October 25, 2007

She who works full time and goes to school responds to the minister quality-of-life discussion.

I mentioned yesterday that theCSO and I were plotting to sneak out of town for a long weekend in Vegas at some point.

I should clarify that between work and school, the earliest I could possibly get out of town is Thanksgiving or Christmas, and Thanksgiving would be really inadvisable because of finals week. GA and visiting theCSO's family for a few days at Christmas are the closest I've had to a "vacation" in the last several years. I will spend most of Saturday working on a paper, and possibly portions of Sunday after I teach YRUU.

I arrive at work at 8:30 and leave at 4:30 Monday through Friday. I'm due in class at 5:45, where I remain until 7:45 or 8:45.

If I have a doctor's appointment, I fill out a form asking my boss if it's okay for me to take two hours off and I get her signature.

I don't necessarily have to be cheerful and loving in the sense that ministers do, but I do have to be detail-oriented. If I make mistakes on a subpoena or if I don't fully understand what I'm writing down about the complexities of the commerce clause's impact on the Congressional power to tax and spend, then I will regret it. (And citations. Non-lawyers would not frigging BELIEVE the crazy method we have for showing which case we're getting an idea from. It's so complex that the samples we get from our professors and TAs regularly have mistakes.)

I will only be doing the work and school thing for four years. After that, I will be an associate at a law firm for another seven or eight years, assuming the most conventional path, and we know the crazy lives those folks have.

So I'm effectively booked up until I'm forty one.

Ok, I'm exaggerating slightly here. Summers will be easier, and I hear that the first year of law school is the hardest.

And this is the life I've chosen, and I don't regret it a bit. I'd rather be immersed in interesting work and have cool things to talk to theCSO about in the hour an evening we get together than do something boring all day and then just come home at five and Veg Out like lots of people do.

But seriously, it's tough all around. Lots of us have near-constant drains on our intellectual and emotional energy. Few of us are surrounded by people who understand what we go through and apply that understanding to their expectations.

Still beats ditch-digging.

CC

4 comments:

Stephanie said...

I have been wanting to say something in the work-life balance for ministers and others discussion, but I think you may have just said it. :)

Anonymous said...

I think that's great - the being interesting all day and having things to talk about in the evening. It gets harder if kids are in the picture because they require so much time, but for a couple I think it's ideal.

Comrade Kevin said...

I suppose what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, hmm? *grins*

Segue:

Chalice Chick,

I would like to know your opinion on this: and I present it in a non-accusatory manner.

Is it good or bad that we have come to a point in this society where defining what "is" is has become a study in minutia? The complexities in the law code strike me as staggering and utterly unnecessary from any rational frame of mind.

PG said...

Is it good or bad that we have come to a point in this society where defining what "is" is has become a study in minutia? The complexities in the law code strike me as staggering and utterly unnecessary from any rational frame of mind.

My unsolicited reply is that law focuses on, and in transactional work tries to correct for, the disputes that arise between people when they either don't have the same understanding of what was meant by a set of words, or haven't thought through what they would do in the case of the unexpected. Someone once described the world as being made up of contracts (what we expect may happen and our planning for it) and torts (what we didn't contract for). With Clinton, he said when asked about Lewinsky, after she was no longer blowing him, that "there's nothing going on between us." To him, there IS nothing going on between us was true. To another person, the fact that there was a past relationship means that there's something going on. But frankly, this is the kind of shit that people always pull when they don't want someone (whether it's their boyfriend or the American people) to know about boinking. Cf. that scene in Grease when Sandy asks, "Did you go together?" and Danny replies, "No, we WENT together."