Overheard in Big Law

This is a series I’ve been wanting to start for a while. It’d be a foolish one to host on my blog, though, which is only semi-anonymous. I think it be a great stand-alone blog, like Overheard in New York. Maybe it already is a stand-alone blog. I don’t have enough material for something like that, though, because I try to avoid the crazy. I didn’t talk about grades in law school, and I didn’t talk about practice exams when I was studying for the bar, and I don’t talk about hours, or partners, or other associates at work. I leave at 7:15 and work from home in the weekends. I try to be a normal person. Sometimes the crazy sneaks up and finds me, though, and it hits me like a brick, my job is not normal.

Like last week at happy hour.  I’m standing in a little circle with a few co-workers and we’re sharing war stories. A handful of people are collectively griping about a particular case that routinely requires all-nighters. They went around the circle: one guy worked for 36 hours straight; another girl got called back to the office at 10 p.m. and worked until 5:00 a.m.; another girl spent Christmas holed up in a conference room reviewing documents; a fourth person asked if there was any way she could get on that case, because things had been getting a little slow for her. She knew the case was hell, but you don’t want to get slow too long, because you risk falling behind on your billable hours, and not meeting the annual requirement. She needed work, she said. And then a few minutes later, it came out that she billed over 350 hours last month. That’s 12 hours a day, every day. Or 14.5 hours a day, six days a week. That, by the way, puts her way ahead in terms of meeting her billable hours requirement. She needed work like a Mormon needs another hour of church on Sunday (um, not at all). And this girl was looking for work, anxious about not doing enough, begging to be staffed to the case with the absurd hours and assignments.

This girl is all in. A total weirdo. But when she explained her predicament, and how 350 hours really isn’t all that much, my colleagues nodded their heads and went back to their stories, and I realized they weren’t griping so much as bragging and that if there was a weirdo in that group, it was me, with my lack of drive and my leaving at 7:15 and my gut instinct to keep a good distance between me and the crazy.

People always ask why I don’t go to happy hour. They assume it’s because I’m a Mormon. Or because I’m too busy. But really, I avoid happy hour for the same reason I avoid reading lifestyle blogs by overachieving women who seem to do it all. I can’t handle people who make normal and sane out to be an anomaly.

Trading Up

We didn’t always live on Lakewood. Before that we lived on Aldine on the third floor, and before that we lived on Melrose. Before Melrose it was Racine, and before that I can’t remember. But what I remember most is moving. 

So we moved. I hinted before about apartment hunt and the accompanying fight with our landlord, but I don’t think I ever told you about our new digs. Which isn’t all that surprising, since I never told you about our old digs. [There is nothing more boring to me than interior design blogs. And I like design.] But I will tell you about our new hood.

We moved four miles north to Edgewater, out of our ideal little block in Lakeview East. It feels like growing up. Like trading the express bus for a red line stop with a round the clock cop parked out front. Intelligensia for Metropolis. Gays for Lesbians. Boutiques for tree-lined streets. The apartment we loved for an ungodly amount of rent to an apartment we love more for $400 less. Too much space for maybe too little space, but a back deck with room for a grill and a stone balcony off our bedroom. A vindictive landlord who lived just a few blocks away for landlords in New Jersey who don’t hate us yet. Month-to-month insecurity for an eighteen month lease. Lakeshore First Ward with its babies and hot young mothers for a long drive to the Foster Building and a ward that looks more Chicago. Melrose Diner for M. Henry. High rise condos for low brick walk-ups. Noise for wind in the trees. The lake for sun in our front room most of the hours of the day.

We moved four miles north and I pass three cemeteries on my way to work every morning. We live in spitting distance of four churches, not that I’d ever spit on a church. Edgewater isn’t hip or gritty or up-and-coming or known. It’s sort of just like home.

This Is A Post For The New Year

What do you do when you run out of things to say? You work. You read. You take in other people’s stories. You put pen to paper in a journal no one else will ever read. You wonder if you’ll write again, but only half-heartedly, because you know you will. When the time comes, you write slowly, and you start with what you know. Always write about what you know. Or what you want to know.

This is what I know:

2011 was not good. It was the year after the year I graduated from law school and got married and passed the bar and flew to Europe and moved to Chicago and bought furniture and got a job. 2011 was the year I learned that all those things don’t add up to much except a life that looks good in pictures, or on a resume.

2011 was the year I learned that Mormonism doesn’t make me happy. Don’t misunderstand. I don’t mean to say it makes me unhappy. I mean to say, I used to think this peculiar religion was the key to everything sparkly and good. I embraced a fierce and devoted faith and came out of it still deeply unhappy. We don’t have all the answers.

An hour or so after midnight on January 1, 2012, I was huddled under a scratchy afghan on an air mattress in the basement entertainment room of the Rocky Mountain cabin that my in-laws rented for the holiday. I whispered through the dark to my husband. Last year was not good. I think this one has to be better.  Robert quietly disagreed, as he often does, but this time I was glad for it. He is right that even our bad years are good. I was right, too, though. This year has to be better.

This is what I want to know:

This will be the year I learn how to make a beautiful life. Not in the form of pinboards or clothes or pictures on my blog. No, I want to take the time to watch the sun set over west Chicago from the window of my office in the sky. I want to feel the air in my lungs. I want to know that God sees me, and you, and you, too. I want this to be a year for doing good, or at least moving closer to it. I will embrace a fierce and devoted faith and a family so fierce and devoted they put my faith to shame. I want to know that this year will be better.

 

This Post Is About Christmas

Last year I was a bit manic about Christmas. Robert and I were unemployed in the most fortunate of ways for four months at the end of last year. All this free time combined with the weird unnamed but still present pressure to make our first holiday season together a good one meant that I was making ugly centerpieces out of hot glue and silk leaves and salt dough as early as mid-November. We felt ill-equipped to take the best traditions from our respective families, so we went ahead and did them all: we plucked cheap chocolate from behind cardboard flaps on the advent calendar (my family) and we picked candy out of a plastic Santa head (his family) every night for a month; we read holiday stories out loud to each other (my family) and watched Christmas Vacation (his family) at least twice; we looked at lights from the car (my family) and picked up tamales from a local Mexican restaurant on Christmas Eve (his family); we ate sugar cereal (my family) and cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning (his family).

I also felt this pressing need to use the holidays to signify that our family was new and separate from our families of origin, so we made up new traditions, often without much thought. We bought a nutcracker and I made the executive decision that we would collect nutcrackers. We painted our own wooden ornaments. We started singing the 12 Days of Christmas on December 1st and didn’t know what to do with ourselves when we finished on December 12th, with the holiday still two weeks away. We scoured the internet for gifts and banned each other from our individual computers so that we couldn’t extrapolate from the other person’s amazon.com history.

All of this culminated in a massive fight on December 23rd.  I don’t remember what it was about.  [I never believe it when other people say that, but I really don't.]  I do remember yelling a lot and making the ominous threat to “remember this forever” and then running to the shower because that’s the only way to escape from someone you live with when you don’t want to put on a coat and boots and brave the sub-freezing temperatures outside.  I also remember that Robert took an angry nap, and that this also made me mad, because Robert always wakes up from angry naps confused and oblivious to the fact that he had any role in causing the dissonance between us.

This year we axed a lot of the Christmas preparations.  I only got two days off of work, the 23rd and the 26th, and I worked long-ish hours in December. We also moved between Thanksgiving and December 1st, and spent a lot of this month unpacking. We still bought a tree and did the Santa head/advent on the nights that we remembered and added a nutcracker to our paltry “collection,” but overall it was decidedly more mellow. Accordingly, my now-annual December 23rd meltdown only lasted ten minutes and since we were stuck in a car driving downtown when it happened, it didn’t end with me taking an angry shower and Robert taking an angry nap. I worried that we wouldn’t have the time or energy to enjoy the holiday season, but this last month has been one of peace in an otherwise stressful year, and these last few days have been more than that, more like brilliant spots of joy. I came into this year full of fear that my job would drain the pleasure from my life, and my marriage. Instead, it’s brought the things I love into sharper relief. And I’ll take two days of quiet, meaningful celebration over a month of singing the 12 Days of Christmas twice through next holiday season as well.

[Photo credit:  Robert.]

Scrooge

A few weeks ago I tweeted about the joys of working in an office during the holiday season. There is a many-feet high Christmas tree in the lobby (dwarfing that token menorah you see everywhere this time of year). There are gift baskets in the kitchen area almost every day (scavenged down to the nuts no one likes by the time I reach them mid-afternoon). There was a department holiday party where my co-workers all got tipsy on wine and we finally said interesting things to each other. I have a small poinsettia in my office and wool socks on my feet and sometimes snow swirls outside my window.

Now I am going to gripe about the downside of working in an office during the holiday season. I am going to sound like a cheap bastard, but hear me out. A few weeks ago, my floor started up a collection for the two women that pick up and drop off our mail. A few days after that, someone solicited donations from the entire firm for our receptionists. Last week I learned that we are also giving to some other mail people — I think they deliver mail outside the office?

And then last week, a co-worker in my department who shares a secretary with me asked if I’d pitch in to give her a gift. “Sure!” I said. I know and like my secretary, and depend on her daily. Giving her a gift would feel more like, well, giving a gift, and less like I’m getting hit up for a donation. My co-worker went on to say, “We’re all thinking of pitching in X dollars.” It doesn’t really matter how much X is. What matters is that X is the same amount that Robert and I set as the budget for gifts for each other last year, and double the limit we set in previous years. X is way more than double what I’m spending on any single member of my family. Yes, in theory I can afford to give X, but it’s pretty clear that my co-workers and I don’t approach Christmas in the same way, when the gift they want to give to our secretary is way beyond what I’ve ever spent on Christmas gifts for all my friends and family combined in a single year. So, I guess I do want to be a jerk about it.

I said yes, but I felt weird about it. Like, I was only saying yes because I didn’t want people to think I was cheap, which is a really unsavory way to feel about giving a gift. Also, we can afford X, but it’s a stressy amount of money. So today, I told the girl collecting the money that I was giving half of X (still a lot!). I explained some extenuating circumstances we have and she’s a nice girl, so I figured she’d keep it quiet, even if she didn’t really understand. 45 minutes later she called me back to let me know that everybody decided to get their own independent gift cards for our secretary. It’s not really clear to me why this happened. I guess nobody could handle looking like they gave less than X, since my gift of half X would reduce their average, and there’s just no polite way to let our secretary know, hey, I contributed more to the gift card than the first-year on the west side of the building.

Now that I’ve been freed from the burden of contributing to a gift card, I am free to give her what I’m giving to everybody else I know: a box of Robert’s fancy schmancy homemade salted caramels. I know, I know, she’d rather have the money. And maybe next year I’ll be comfortable with it. Until then, I think part of being a grown-up is learning to make decisions that are motivated by something other than, but what will people think?

Scenes From My Interfaith Marriage

Something that I think people wonder about but never ask about is what an interfaith marriage looks like on the ground.  I think it’s something people wonder about because it’s something I wondered about, before I had one.  So I vowed to start writing and talking about my own marriage, in a public forum. And then it turned out that interfaith marriage was a lot like, well, every other marriage. It’s hard, but not because of religion. We fight about laundry, not God. I stress over my own status as a Mormon way more than I worry about Robert’s status as non-Mormon. 

The difference between us is most clear in the morning, when we get up and one of us puts the kettle on the stove. He pours the boiling water slowly into a glass vessel over freshly ground coffee. I splash it quickly into a travel mug with herbal tea before I run out the door. Sometimes the difference rears its head again at night, when he’s heating up cider. He might spike his, but I’ll take mine without booze, thank you. Is that what the interfaith aspect of our marriage boils down to? Different taste in beverages?

Sometimes, though, it becomes radically clear that the person with whom I am the closest sees the world with eyes I can’t fathom.  Like this morning, when the dog was careening around the kitchen table after the spot of light at the end of the green laser pointer Robert waved around with one hand (a spoonful of oatmeal in the other).  When Robert turned the light off, the dog looked expectantly at him.  Robert commented that, over the last six months or so, the dog has clearly come to know that we control the light. He’s also figured out that even when we train it to one spot in the ground at let him paw at it for several minutes, there’s nothing of substance for him to grab. The dog knows he’ll never pin the light down, but he chases it anyway. Ha, I said. There’s an obvious metaphor there.

And then we spoke at the same time: You’re talking about God, said Robert. I’m talking about the almighty dollar, I said, my answer overlapping his.

Is it possible for two people to be further apart? Probably not, but we just laughed at the moment and went on eating our oatmeal, sipping different hot beverages from matching mugs, and watching the dog.

It’s The Little Things (That Make You Realize Your Job Sucks)

Actual conversation at the firm holiday breakfast:*

Me: Does anybody have any holiday vacation plans?
Coworkers: I might take the 24th and 25th off.
Me: …

Coworker: I have to leave early today to pick up my suits from the dry cleaner.
Me: What time does your dry cleaner close?
Coworkers: 8 o’clock. P.M.
Me: …

*If you’re thinking that nothing says, relax, take some time to enjoy the holidays, and we appreciate your hard work this year like a booze-free breakfast at 8:00 a.m. on a Monday, well then, you must work be responsible for the absurd holiday party decision at my firm and I’d like to have a chat. Also to thank you for the Mormon-friendly hot chocolate bar amidst the various coffee beverages. It was delicious.