sappy but happy

"I like reading.  And writing.  And talking.  I think I'll go to law school!" 

That was the extent of my logic. I was young (21) and crazy (let's leave it at that).  Plus I was big into politics and politicians are all lawyers.  Deep analysis, I know.  I signed up for an LSAT class on a whim, right around the time I started dating a hilarious, pensive kid in my French class. I finished up my law school applications at a public library in the middle of nowhere New York, with my poor mission companion (now a Mary Kay lady) reading over my personal statement wondering how to get me to hurry so we could hit the laundromat and maybe have time to grab a sammich.

Anyway, in those days, I thought I was such a big deal.  I had big, big plans that involved big, big schools (and big, big debt) and no husband and definitely no babies. Remember how I met this guy who talked me into the J. Reub?

The first time I walked into the law school for a tour, I had been home from my mission for three days. I was incredibly awkward, naively earnest and cringe-tastically self-conscious in a way that only sister missionaries with an extra twenty pounds can be. By the first day of class that August, I was still awkward, earnest, and self-conscious, only now I was engaged to that handsome kid from French class.

Early one Saturday morning when I was a 2L, my car wouldn't start.  I had about an hour to travel fifty miles and argue in front of a panel of judges about whether pre-arrest silence could be used as substantive evidence of guilt.  (Riveting, right?)  I'd been preparing for months. So even though my new husband was fast asleep and had a million places to be later that day, with thirty seconds notice, he drove me the fifty miles (in his PJs, no less) and I made it there with about thirty seconds to spare. And when it was over, my mom drove me the whole way home.  Ditching your plentiful Saturday plans at the drop of a hat to help your wife or daughter do her thing.  Is that true love or what? 

Because of that Saturday, I ended up winning an award that made it sound like I had cancer.  (Spoiler alert: I don't.) 

And one of the law school secretaries left me an awesome "Where are you????" voicemail as I was giving birth because my Wills and Estates final was starting.  Husband spent several long, will-send-him-straight-to-heaven hours trying to distract our hungry newborn in a study room as I sat on one of those inflatable donuts and made up the test 7 days later.

Remember how on the first day of school as a 3L, at the last minute I had to bring my four-month-old baby to class?  And how I ended up staying at school with her for more than twelve hours as classes and meetings piled up, and my car broke down on the freeway on the way home and EVEN THE HAZARD LIGHTS WOULDN'T WORK?

And how about when we decided to move to the Midwest on a whim a week after graduation and I had to take two bar exams?  And when my mom babysat her brains out so I could study for the first exam, and then sponsored my Beehive babysitting fund from 1200 miles away to allow me to study for the second?

Anyway, it's been such a cool and varied experience and a significant number of my favorite people on earth are people I met in law school.  And, pretty much every milestone I've had as an adult has happened between point A of deciding to go to law school (meet hub, finish college, serve mission, adjust from mission, engagement, marriage, pregnancy, hub starts grad school, childbirth, first job, first move across the country, second baby) and point B of actually becoming a lawyer where we live (this week). 

All of these tidbits were running through my head this week, because on Monday, my two-and-a-half-year-old tugged on my suitcoat as my dear husband distracted our eight-month-old with some blueberry puffs, and I was sworn in as a lawyer in our new state. The new lawyers being admitted were scattered throughout the small auditorium, sitting here and there in the crowd with their families. We all stood, repeating "I will" in unison after the Justice posed each question. 

And I don't know quite how to describe it, but as our little girl wrapped her arms around my legs, our baby clapped excitedly and tugged on my necklace, and my happy but exhausted husband smiled at me, I wondered what the young-and-crazy "big deal" gurrbonzo would have thought of this picture. 

And I think she'd like it.

whew part A

I have so much to tell you!

It's old news now, but I shall still share part A (the bar exam) in bullet points, bc that's how I roll, er, type. Parts B and C involve our trip west and then some local shenanigans so please stand by.

The Bar Exam 2.0, or, If I Ever Want To Take Another Bar Exam, Please Kill Me.

• The exam itself was tolerable. Could it have been worse? Yes. Could it have been better? Yes. Do I think I passed? Yes. But most people think they passed, and there are always people who don't, so, who knows? I hope I did, and I'll be sad and mad if I didn't, but I will survive, and I will let you know if it's good news, and if it's not, let's just all act natural.
  
• Picture this: the exam site was 2 hours away...which is juuuuust long enough to be a big fat headache when you have a full day and a half of testing and a nursing baby. Soooo, yes, we took a family field trip and my dear, dear husband chased our girls around a large and unfamiliar city for two days. And if you imagine us all sleeping in a cozy hotel room that goes: wall/crib/bed/crib/wall, that's about right.
  
• They forbid taking ANYTHING into the bar exam room except my plug, laptop, and ID. No wallet, no cell phone, no nothing. Luckily we've been practicing ESP so rather than getting stranded in an unfamiliar city making collect calls from a lice-ridden pay phone, I sent husband vibes when it was time to come get me and it worked.
• I didn't study property. BOOYAH. Did you know that? Are you impressed with my bravery or shocked at my foolishness? They give you 15ish topics to know cold, and then a national testing group releases essay questions on 9 of those topics, and many states choose 6 of those. So there's lots you learn that you won't be tested on, and sometimes you just need to make those sorts of calls. During studying, I quickly realized it was going to take up three valuable days to learn property (a pretty specific, complicated, laden with terms-of-art topic) and the odds were pretty small I'd get an essay question on it. So, (vulgarity alert), I grew a pair, threw caution to the wind, said, "Nope," and just skipped it. Gutsy eh? Well, e-friends, I'm here to tell you, TO RISK IS TO LIVE, bc the gamble paid off and there was no property question! Is this 27 years of paying a full tithe? Perhaps. Bc that could have really been a dumb move. And if you are going to take the bar sometime soon, DO NOT FOLLOW MY EXAMPLE, because there WILL be property on the the multiple-choice portion, which I didn't have to take this year because I took it last year in another state. Got it? But still, phew.
  
• Though I survived law school with nary a testing software problem, I spent a solid 15 minutes of the first 90 minute essay with a frozen screen and a busy proctor trying to fix it. I utilized my hypnobirthing breathing and remained relatively calm, but still, LAAAAAAME. Thank you, Hypno-Debbie (our initial hypnobirthing teacher from a few years ago).

This is the first sentence of the world's most hilarious cheese-riffic hypnobirthing cd, so say it in your highest, creepiest dreamlike voice:

"And now it's time to relax..."

experimenting: perma-BAAA! & perma-boohoo

warning: rambles ahead. though really, what else is new?

I have this friend...let's call her Schmerin, to keep her identity safe. Long ago, people were often shocked to discover that Schmerin and I were friends, and they would say things like "You're FRIENDS with her? She HATES me!" But I knew she didn't hate them. This exchange occurred repeatedly. You know how most people default to reasonably friendly? As in, unless you have a reason to DISLIKE someone, you generally like them? Well, I realized that Schmerin defaulted to dislike, meaning unless she had a reason to like you, she seemed to dislike you. So the world (and by world I mean school) was full of people who thought Schmerin hated them when really she just had yet to interact with them enough to have a reason to like them. (Fret not; she later figured this out and adjusted her default position to something less socially awkward.)

Similarly, most of us have a neutral face or vibe that we send off when we aren't high on life or in the depths of despair. It's not awful, it's not thrilled, it's just NORMAL. Yesterday I met someone whose default position is high on life. Like, unless she has a reason to be down, she has an enormous frozen smile on at all times and shouts and claps her hands. She says her name happily, she says goodbye happily, she says "GREAT MEETING YOU!" the same way she would say "I WON THE LOTTERY!" or "I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'RE GETTING MARRIED!" or "IT'S SO GREAT THERE'S PEACE ON EARTH."

I'm a happy person and many who know me may find ME overwhelming, so if I, the bombarder, am bombarded, that's really pretty impressive.

Sometimes I have this intuitive need to balance things out, i.e., if someone is a total bummer with permafrown and sigh, I end up louder/more animated/Tigger-esque in an effort to balance out their misery and get the room to a workable equilibrium. Similarly, if someone is smiling their brains out or bouncy or laughy or just generally sending off the stole-my-kids-ADD-meds-again vibe, I'll become the bummer just to even things out. So if you tone it down too many notches, I'll tone it up as many notches as necessary to bring the average in the room to a 5. Does anyeone else do that?

Anyway, this leads me to wonder what people who are THAT HAPPY all the time do when they ARE faced with a reason to be abnormally happy. You know? If you're using your "THEY CURED CANCER!" voice to say things like "CHICKEN IS ON SALE!", what do you use when they do, in fact, cure cancer? If you introduce yourself "HI! I'M AIMEE!!!" with the same voice you use for "YES! I WILL MARRY YOU AND THOUGHT YOU'D NEVER ASK!", how do you portray actual excitement as opposed to default excitement?

The opposite is also true, isn't it? If you are a total downer all the time (and we all know someone like this), monosyllabic in your responses with your eyelids at half-mast, what happens when something bad REALLY happens? You have nowhere to go from there, do you?

Anyway. All this is my way of saying that there is a part of me that just wants to poke bears with sticks, so to speak. Yesterday's frozen smile woman (I know this will shock you but she was teaching an aerobics class, further proving my suspicion than most aerobics teachers consume startling amounts of uppers) made me want to tell her something incredibly tragic just to see what she'd do. Is that bad?

living on the edge.

There are two things taking over my new life in the midwest (besides our kid, and getting settled): church and the law. I also spray painted a couple of our chairs today on a whim and it may have been a poor choice. Sigh. Anyway:

Church
An inevitable part of Moving While Mormon is figuring out your way around your new congregation. It's nice to have a fresh start, but overwhelming bc there are just a lot of people to deal with. Soon you find your scene and all is well, but the first month or so can be a little intense. This is especially true when you move to a state, nay, a region of the country in which you don't know a soul and so pray that there are some non-snickets under 75 that you can bond with and spend your time actively searching out new hangout friends. To advance these efforts, I'm experiencing hyperactivity. Not scurrying in circles with stickers on my forehead, Capri Sun spilled down my hot pink shirt while chewing gummi worms and shouting "I'm hyper!!!" Rather, way more involved in church than is normal for me. We're talking having randoms over for dinner, feeding the missionaries, going to midweek activities, the whole bit. This might be normal for you but for me, it's pretty intense. My new assignment in our ward is to hang out with the teenage girls. This means I do things like let a pack of seventh graders french braid my hair and throw tic tacs and be nervous about forgetting locker combinations. Pretty awesome.

The law
I'm trying to purge my brain of at least some of more useless law stuff I've shoved into it this summer in preparing for the bar, but to no avail. It is taking over my life. EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE A STORY PROBLEM and it's starting to get embarrassing but I just. can't. stop.

• Last weekend, we were at a wedding with a sit-down dinner and they had fancy old-fashioned high chairs for the little kids. Without buckles! I could not stop thinking about who would be liable if someone got hurt.
  
• The parking garage at the public library has NO FINE PRINT on the tickets. Isn't that bizarre?
• I drove past a cop who had pulled someone over and immediately started thinking about what he could and could not search if it were a basic traffic stop and how he didn't have to inform them that they didn't have to consent if he asked to search their car.
  
• Today I saw Azucar's update that a fly in her house had been there so long it had squatter's rights, and I immediately thought about why that wasn't technically true.
  
• I can't read the news without thinking about who might be liable as an accomplice or co-conspirator.
• I agreed to help a friend with something and then when needs changed, I immediately started thinking about whether there was sufficient consideration to make the modification binding.
  
• I watched last night's Dating in the Dark (good grief, I love bad TV). Are you watching it? It's delightfully/painfully dumb and I recommend it if you feel like wasting an hour of your life feeling good about yourself in comparison to the rest of humanity. Anyway, I spent most of the episode wondering what kind of waivers they signed to get on the show bc cameras go in their houses "without their knowledge." There is NO WAY that would be allowed, would it??
  

This is getting embarrassing.

This is my life, people. French braids and theorizing about reality tv contracts. I know. I KNOW.