I have to acknowledge this
I DO NOT WANT TO GO TO LAW SCHOOL THIS FALL.
I have been hiding this fact from myself and other people for a long time. I sent my signed letter of financial aid off to the UW on Monday, agreeing to take on $18,500 in debt in the form of Stafford loans for 2005-6. I sent them that $100 deposit awhile back, and received a letter acknowledging they'd gotten it and giving me info about getting a MyUW login for the UW students' site. I bought Should You Really Be a Lawyer? right before I visited the UW and barely skimmed it while I was in Seattle. I was so excited when I met the author, Deborah, randomly at a dinner awhile back, because I was really torn up then as now about whether I should go. But I pushed down all those doubts and sent in my confirmation and sent in $100 and sent in my agreement to take on all this debt, and almost every day somebody asks me, "So when are you moving to Seattle?" and my reaction to it is so telling. I don't even want to talk about it. I just say "early September, I'll be living with a friend, it'll be so cool" but I don't feel excited about any of it. I feel fucking terrified and I have to let it out to myself and to everybody else that I don't want to go, I don't want to go, I don't want to go.
I want to ESCAPE. I want to get away from my life: away from this city and away from California and out of this stupid fucking country that I haven't set foot out of in almost four years, because things keep getting worse and worse on every single level, and I am a nervous wreck. This morning on the train I was reading Immortality, by Milan Kundera, which I am only a few pages into, and he wrote this scene about his main character, Agnes, walking through Paris and just hating everybody and going nuts from the noise and the crowds and the soul-sucking deadening effect of modern life, and she wonders just how close we are to crossing the little-recognized tipping point where everything breaks down, and I recognized myself in her.
Every day I spend three hours doing the following: driving to the train station, waiting for the train, being on the train, walking from the SF terminus to work, and then doing it all over again in reverse at the end of the day. And it stresses me out way, way more than it ought to. I hate everybody around me just for existing. I've become hypersensitive to the presence of other people, because I am around so damn many of them all the time. I go off at the least little thing, I get totally infuriated by the million little errors and obnoxious moves that other drivers and pedestrians make, by being followed too closely by somebody behind me on the sidewalk, by someone in front of me walking too slowly, everything sets me off. I don't know how I ever existed before I got my iPod, because it's such a blessed release to plug into it and free myself from anyone trying to interact with me. Seriously: it's a cloak of invisibility. With those little white buds sticking out of my ears, I don't get approached by panhandlers, people on trains and planes don't try to strike up a conversation, all those strangers just leave me alone, which is all I want them to do.
The really stupid thing about having been driven crazy by city life is that I'm being driven crazy by San Francisco. San Francisco is not a real city. It is a measly little provincial settlement out at the far end of the territories that too quickly got too big for its britches 155 years ago and still thinks that it's "a world-class city" (quoting the KFOG bump) despite being a place where the trains stop running at night. There are maybe four all-night restaurants. It's pathetic. Do you know how many people live in San Francisco? Less than 800,000. This swells to a little over 1 million during the weekday when people like me from the even-more-pathetic suburbs come in to work. That's not a real fucking city. And this is what's made me so stressed-out and hateful of the human race: the crowds and noise of a pretend city. Although, to its credit, San Francisco is filthy and reeks of urine in most places, and there are a lot of sketchy people and pretentious hipster guys whom I want to punch in the face wandering the streets between the train station and my work. That's real city-esque.
So that's why I'm sick of the Bay Area. I've lived here all my damn life except for undergrad and it's definitely time to get out, but Seattle isn't far enough. Seattle's a lovely city and I'm going to piss off a few people by admitting that I don't want to move there in September after all (I'm sorry, thewronghands and spider88). But it's still in America, and crunchpod's avowal that he's met a lot of petty, hateful people in Washington and would love to see it burn does not fill me with confidence. Once I had zoned off on the train after reading that passage about Agnes, I glanced at my neighbor's paper and saw an article about how the "academic freedom" debate is "gaining momentum." (I don't think it was this USA Today article, but it was similar.) This is a grievous and disgusting state of affairs. And the photos that went with the article? The one of a girl who thinks that the bills would curtail freedom of speech shows her frowning, with a blurry background. The one of a girl (who coincidentally looks almost identical to the first girl) who supports the proposal shows her with a confident smile, and in the background hangs an American flag. Oh my fucking god.
I know it's oh so cliché to be a liberal whining about this country going down the tubes, but you fucking tell me what I'm supposed to make of a nation that's working on passing laws that would let students sue their professors if what the professors say offends them, and whose administration wants to censor NPR and institute a national ID card, and where nearly half the populace thinks the press has too much freedom and over 20% thinks that the government should have the power to censor the press, and what I'm supposed to make of my own state that passed the DNA database law, and everything else bad that we all know about, as the Noble Experiment that was America crashes further and further into dismal failure. It's over, people. It was a nice try, but we're not what we aspired to be and we will never get anywhere close to it ever again. You know what else I realized the other day? I hate George W. Bush more than I hate Osama bin Laden. I just can't muster up any hatred for him on the gut level on which I hate the President. That's just fucking wrong and inexcusable. That means my thinking has become clouded and I've turned into a caricature; I am no longer a thinking, rational person.
Which is what lawyers are supposed to be. Oh, that's right, the original topic of this post was not wanting to go to law school. Well, why I don't want to go this fall is because I've got cold feet and can't face settling down yet. I want to spend at least the next year living abroad and experiencing other ways of life before I come back and settle down and go to law school, if indeed I do go. My passport's good until 2009, and maybe by then the stupid biometric ID passport issue will have been resolved to a good end, but probably not. (Did I mention I'm a born pessimist? I got it from my dad, along with my brown eyes.) I want to get out of this country and move to another one. And I know, from my friends who are living abroad and from reading other expats' accounts I know, that Americans don't live in other countries because those other countries (Japan, France, UK, Sweden...) are perfect, and maybe they're not even all that much better than the US. But they're different, and maybe they're better in a few key ways, such as having something to offer that the American emigré needs.
And what I need right now is to get out. I need to get away from the hordes of people. I want to go someplace quiet and sparsely populated and slow. And cheap, because I don't have much capital available to me to work with. I have an entire paycheck's worth of bills coming due at the beginning of June, and since I screwed myself out of a proper salary back in September when I signed on with CNET (and I thought I was being oh so shrewd), I just keep losing money. One more source of stress and one more reason I'm too nervous about starting law school in the fall: I'll have $6000 to work with, along with that $18.5K in debt and whatever other debts I take on from private loans. I'm so scared of not going to law school this fall, because it represents a real, solid, high-paying career, and given that I have no idea what I want to do with my life, no dreams, no ambitions, no substantial hobbies, I don't know what the fuck else is ever going to come along that will give me a respectable career and an income anywhere close to what my father brought home to his daughters.
I'm scared of disappointing everyone whose esteem I desire. My parents especially. They're super-excited about me going to law school, particularly my mom (my dad's really too taciturn to ever really be described as "super-excited" about anything). "A doctor, a mechanical engineer, and a lawyer," my mom will exclaim, having two younger daughters who are working on actual useful undergrad degrees leading to actual useful high-paying careers. I'm the eldest and I'm kind of a fuck-up compared to my overachieving, perfect middle sister and even the youngest, who spent her freshman year of college being kind of adrift but has decided she wants to do sports medicine. Here I got my parents to pay for a stupid English degree, I have an unspectacular job, and I'm very, very lazy.
All of you who detest your coworkers who do the bare minimum required of them and are aghast at people who don't spend all their spare time on various interesting projects and dreaming up nifty new ideas like you do: I am the kind of person you loathe, and do not want to be friends with. I am a disappointment to you, if only you'll take a hard look at me and see what I see from my inside perspective instead of what you see from your outside perspective. I crave the approval of my boyfriend and I crave the approval of my friends who are all going to come back and say "there there, you're not like that, I've known you for years!" and I don't want to disappoint my parents and if I go to law school and don't sleep for three years and then become a lawyer and work 80-hour weeks writing endless dreary contracts in the thousands at what sounds like it could easily be a really dreary, boring career that I plunge myself deep into debt for and so have to keep doing no matter how much I hate it until my debt is paid off, then maybe I can fool everybody into thinking that I'm anything more than a waste of food, water, air and your time and affection.
My friend B.'s mom told her, when she was having doubts about stuff, that if she feels that whatever choice she makes is wrong, then she should stop stressing out over making the wrong choice, and that statement freed B. to do what she knew in her heart she wanted to do. What I know in my heart is that going to law school this September is not for me. It's so fucking scary, it's all I've been talking about all this time, I've spent hundreds of dollars and many hours on the applications process, and here I am facing down the reality of pulling out of it. The ballsy thing to do would be to withdraw my acceptance to the UW and withdraw my waitlist spot at UCLA. The less-ballsy thing to do, which I am leaning towards in order to CMA, is to ask UW if I can defer a year (I need a good reason, I don't know if "I'm freaking out" is sufficient) so I don't have to reapply next year, and don't tell UCLA anything, since it's a small chance I'll get in off the waitlist anyway. I hate the idea of reapplying a year from now. All that money, all that time, all over again. Maybe I won't even want to reapply a year from now; maybe I'll be really sure that law school and lawyerhood is for me, and I can make my applications stronger than they were this round. I don't know.
It's going to take a large amount of energy to take this headlong plunge towards law school and slam on the brakes. That's just the laws of physics and they apply to my personal life as well. The law school thing has taken on a lot of momentum, and it would be really easy to go with the inertia of it and let it take me straight to Seattle. It'll take a lot more expenditure to stop, stop everything. And then it'll take some balls to hatch and execute an escape plan and quit what is a decent if unspectacular job to go to... I don't know. From safety to where? No other country will be perfect, but maybe I can pick one that will be better for me than the U.S. for a while. Or for longer. Someplace whose faults and peccadilloes and appalling breaches of decorum I find more tolerable than the place that has made me what I am.
Oh, I don't know. I just lost all of it, just now, all the fire I had on the train, that huge screaming realization that I felt the deep need to announce to the world. I don't want to go to law school, but I should go to law school. Otherwise I'm going to spend my life poor, unfocused, and adrift. I don't have any dreams, so what am I giving up by getting a good career and an "Esq." after my name? I really do not have much longer to decide this... until it comes time to either move out or chicken out and hunker down until next year.
P.S. My angst is so similar to the season finale of "Gilmore Girls" that I watched last night with my mom and sister, it's not even funny. Actually it is funny. "I'm 18! I stole a yacht and got arrested! My rich boyfriend's dad thinks I shouldn't be a journalist! I'm not going back to Yale next year! God, my life is so difficult!"
I have been hiding this fact from myself and other people for a long time. I sent my signed letter of financial aid off to the UW on Monday, agreeing to take on $18,500 in debt in the form of Stafford loans for 2005-6. I sent them that $100 deposit awhile back, and received a letter acknowledging they'd gotten it and giving me info about getting a MyUW login for the UW students' site. I bought Should You Really Be a Lawyer? right before I visited the UW and barely skimmed it while I was in Seattle. I was so excited when I met the author, Deborah, randomly at a dinner awhile back, because I was really torn up then as now about whether I should go. But I pushed down all those doubts and sent in my confirmation and sent in $100 and sent in my agreement to take on all this debt, and almost every day somebody asks me, "So when are you moving to Seattle?" and my reaction to it is so telling. I don't even want to talk about it. I just say "early September, I'll be living with a friend, it'll be so cool" but I don't feel excited about any of it. I feel fucking terrified and I have to let it out to myself and to everybody else that I don't want to go, I don't want to go, I don't want to go.
I want to ESCAPE. I want to get away from my life: away from this city and away from California and out of this stupid fucking country that I haven't set foot out of in almost four years, because things keep getting worse and worse on every single level, and I am a nervous wreck. This morning on the train I was reading Immortality, by Milan Kundera, which I am only a few pages into, and he wrote this scene about his main character, Agnes, walking through Paris and just hating everybody and going nuts from the noise and the crowds and the soul-sucking deadening effect of modern life, and she wonders just how close we are to crossing the little-recognized tipping point where everything breaks down, and I recognized myself in her.
Every day I spend three hours doing the following: driving to the train station, waiting for the train, being on the train, walking from the SF terminus to work, and then doing it all over again in reverse at the end of the day. And it stresses me out way, way more than it ought to. I hate everybody around me just for existing. I've become hypersensitive to the presence of other people, because I am around so damn many of them all the time. I go off at the least little thing, I get totally infuriated by the million little errors and obnoxious moves that other drivers and pedestrians make, by being followed too closely by somebody behind me on the sidewalk, by someone in front of me walking too slowly, everything sets me off. I don't know how I ever existed before I got my iPod, because it's such a blessed release to plug into it and free myself from anyone trying to interact with me. Seriously: it's a cloak of invisibility. With those little white buds sticking out of my ears, I don't get approached by panhandlers, people on trains and planes don't try to strike up a conversation, all those strangers just leave me alone, which is all I want them to do.
The really stupid thing about having been driven crazy by city life is that I'm being driven crazy by San Francisco. San Francisco is not a real city. It is a measly little provincial settlement out at the far end of the territories that too quickly got too big for its britches 155 years ago and still thinks that it's "a world-class city" (quoting the KFOG bump) despite being a place where the trains stop running at night. There are maybe four all-night restaurants. It's pathetic. Do you know how many people live in San Francisco? Less than 800,000. This swells to a little over 1 million during the weekday when people like me from the even-more-pathetic suburbs come in to work. That's not a real fucking city. And this is what's made me so stressed-out and hateful of the human race: the crowds and noise of a pretend city. Although, to its credit, San Francisco is filthy and reeks of urine in most places, and there are a lot of sketchy people and pretentious hipster guys whom I want to punch in the face wandering the streets between the train station and my work. That's real city-esque.
So that's why I'm sick of the Bay Area. I've lived here all my damn life except for undergrad and it's definitely time to get out, but Seattle isn't far enough. Seattle's a lovely city and I'm going to piss off a few people by admitting that I don't want to move there in September after all (I'm sorry, thewronghands and spider88). But it's still in America, and crunchpod's avowal that he's met a lot of petty, hateful people in Washington and would love to see it burn does not fill me with confidence. Once I had zoned off on the train after reading that passage about Agnes, I glanced at my neighbor's paper and saw an article about how the "academic freedom" debate is "gaining momentum." (I don't think it was this USA Today article, but it was similar.) This is a grievous and disgusting state of affairs. And the photos that went with the article? The one of a girl who thinks that the bills would curtail freedom of speech shows her frowning, with a blurry background. The one of a girl (who coincidentally looks almost identical to the first girl) who supports the proposal shows her with a confident smile, and in the background hangs an American flag. Oh my fucking god.
I know it's oh so cliché to be a liberal whining about this country going down the tubes, but you fucking tell me what I'm supposed to make of a nation that's working on passing laws that would let students sue their professors if what the professors say offends them, and whose administration wants to censor NPR and institute a national ID card, and where nearly half the populace thinks the press has too much freedom and over 20% thinks that the government should have the power to censor the press, and what I'm supposed to make of my own state that passed the DNA database law, and everything else bad that we all know about, as the Noble Experiment that was America crashes further and further into dismal failure. It's over, people. It was a nice try, but we're not what we aspired to be and we will never get anywhere close to it ever again. You know what else I realized the other day? I hate George W. Bush more than I hate Osama bin Laden. I just can't muster up any hatred for him on the gut level on which I hate the President. That's just fucking wrong and inexcusable. That means my thinking has become clouded and I've turned into a caricature; I am no longer a thinking, rational person.
Which is what lawyers are supposed to be. Oh, that's right, the original topic of this post was not wanting to go to law school. Well, why I don't want to go this fall is because I've got cold feet and can't face settling down yet. I want to spend at least the next year living abroad and experiencing other ways of life before I come back and settle down and go to law school, if indeed I do go. My passport's good until 2009, and maybe by then the stupid biometric ID passport issue will have been resolved to a good end, but probably not. (Did I mention I'm a born pessimist? I got it from my dad, along with my brown eyes.) I want to get out of this country and move to another one. And I know, from my friends who are living abroad and from reading other expats' accounts I know, that Americans don't live in other countries because those other countries (Japan, France, UK, Sweden...) are perfect, and maybe they're not even all that much better than the US. But they're different, and maybe they're better in a few key ways, such as having something to offer that the American emigré needs.
And what I need right now is to get out. I need to get away from the hordes of people. I want to go someplace quiet and sparsely populated and slow. And cheap, because I don't have much capital available to me to work with. I have an entire paycheck's worth of bills coming due at the beginning of June, and since I screwed myself out of a proper salary back in September when I signed on with CNET (and I thought I was being oh so shrewd), I just keep losing money. One more source of stress and one more reason I'm too nervous about starting law school in the fall: I'll have $6000 to work with, along with that $18.5K in debt and whatever other debts I take on from private loans. I'm so scared of not going to law school this fall, because it represents a real, solid, high-paying career, and given that I have no idea what I want to do with my life, no dreams, no ambitions, no substantial hobbies, I don't know what the fuck else is ever going to come along that will give me a respectable career and an income anywhere close to what my father brought home to his daughters.
I'm scared of disappointing everyone whose esteem I desire. My parents especially. They're super-excited about me going to law school, particularly my mom (my dad's really too taciturn to ever really be described as "super-excited" about anything). "A doctor, a mechanical engineer, and a lawyer," my mom will exclaim, having two younger daughters who are working on actual useful undergrad degrees leading to actual useful high-paying careers. I'm the eldest and I'm kind of a fuck-up compared to my overachieving, perfect middle sister and even the youngest, who spent her freshman year of college being kind of adrift but has decided she wants to do sports medicine. Here I got my parents to pay for a stupid English degree, I have an unspectacular job, and I'm very, very lazy.
All of you who detest your coworkers who do the bare minimum required of them and are aghast at people who don't spend all their spare time on various interesting projects and dreaming up nifty new ideas like you do: I am the kind of person you loathe, and do not want to be friends with. I am a disappointment to you, if only you'll take a hard look at me and see what I see from my inside perspective instead of what you see from your outside perspective. I crave the approval of my boyfriend and I crave the approval of my friends who are all going to come back and say "there there, you're not like that, I've known you for years!" and I don't want to disappoint my parents and if I go to law school and don't sleep for three years and then become a lawyer and work 80-hour weeks writing endless dreary contracts in the thousands at what sounds like it could easily be a really dreary, boring career that I plunge myself deep into debt for and so have to keep doing no matter how much I hate it until my debt is paid off, then maybe I can fool everybody into thinking that I'm anything more than a waste of food, water, air and your time and affection.
My friend B.'s mom told her, when she was having doubts about stuff, that if she feels that whatever choice she makes is wrong, then she should stop stressing out over making the wrong choice, and that statement freed B. to do what she knew in her heart she wanted to do. What I know in my heart is that going to law school this September is not for me. It's so fucking scary, it's all I've been talking about all this time, I've spent hundreds of dollars and many hours on the applications process, and here I am facing down the reality of pulling out of it. The ballsy thing to do would be to withdraw my acceptance to the UW and withdraw my waitlist spot at UCLA. The less-ballsy thing to do, which I am leaning towards in order to CMA, is to ask UW if I can defer a year (I need a good reason, I don't know if "I'm freaking out" is sufficient) so I don't have to reapply next year, and don't tell UCLA anything, since it's a small chance I'll get in off the waitlist anyway. I hate the idea of reapplying a year from now. All that money, all that time, all over again. Maybe I won't even want to reapply a year from now; maybe I'll be really sure that law school and lawyerhood is for me, and I can make my applications stronger than they were this round. I don't know.
It's going to take a large amount of energy to take this headlong plunge towards law school and slam on the brakes. That's just the laws of physics and they apply to my personal life as well. The law school thing has taken on a lot of momentum, and it would be really easy to go with the inertia of it and let it take me straight to Seattle. It'll take a lot more expenditure to stop, stop everything. And then it'll take some balls to hatch and execute an escape plan and quit what is a decent if unspectacular job to go to... I don't know. From safety to where? No other country will be perfect, but maybe I can pick one that will be better for me than the U.S. for a while. Or for longer. Someplace whose faults and peccadilloes and appalling breaches of decorum I find more tolerable than the place that has made me what I am.
Oh, I don't know. I just lost all of it, just now, all the fire I had on the train, that huge screaming realization that I felt the deep need to announce to the world. I don't want to go to law school, but I should go to law school. Otherwise I'm going to spend my life poor, unfocused, and adrift. I don't have any dreams, so what am I giving up by getting a good career and an "Esq." after my name? I really do not have much longer to decide this... until it comes time to either move out or chicken out and hunker down until next year.
P.S. My angst is so similar to the season finale of "Gilmore Girls" that I watched last night with my mom and sister, it's not even funny. Actually it is funny. "I'm 18! I stole a yacht and got arrested! My rich boyfriend's dad thinks I shouldn't be a journalist! I'm not going back to Yale next year! God, my life is so difficult!"