Reunion, part 2

Reunion was a bit of a letdown at first. Much smaller crowd than the 5-year, mostly people I already saw around Boston, and everyone seemed more interested in hanging out with their little group of close friends than with catching up with old acquaintances. But once I got over that and started sticking with my own group, I had a lot more fun. We wandered around campus going, "Remember Papa, Mama, and Baby D-Tau? Remember your old roommate who lied about vomiting on your mattress? Remember rolling down this hill? Remember eating chicken Carberries at 1 a.m.?" For the first time in a long while, I laughed so hard that my stomach hurt.

Saturday night we went to dinner at Pot au Feu. We used to go there during college for special occasions, but only for dessert because we couldn't afford to eat dinner. They had the most delicious creme brulee you have ever tasted -- the crunchy caramelized top tasted like toasted marshmallows, and it's served in a shallow plate so the custard was a little warm from the torch. It lived up to our nostalgia.

Our freshman dorm, however, did NOT. JW actually lived there for three years, and when he saw that the door was open he couldn't resist going in and tracking down all three of his old rooms. What a dump! I don't know whether it deteriorated in the past decade or whether my eighteen-year old self's standards were that much lower, but YUCK. Peeling paint, general grime, institutional feel. Still, it did bring back memories. At the bottom of a staircase, I stopped and said, "Here's where I fell down the stairs with two boxes on top of me when I was moving my stuff out of storage sophomore year, and you helped me up and carried my boxes all the way across campus to my new dorm." I had forgotten about that. We were just friends then, but it was during that year that we started dating. So I guess I can trace our love back to that festering craphole.

K came to the procession with us on Sunday morning. Even though he got freaked out and had to leave in the middle when everyone started yelling, he got into the spirit.

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Reunion

My ten-year college reunion is this weekend! I can't wait. I've been teaching K our fight song. At our 5-year reunion, I loved the feeling of walking down the street and seeing so many people I knew. I felt like I belonged there again.

There was an article in the Harvard alumni magazine about how Harvard alums avoid their reunions because they feel their lives can never measure up to the expectations of their classmates. The author wrote about how from their first day at school, Harvard undergrads secretly worry that they're not smart enough to be there, and years later, they secretly still worry that they're not accomplished enough to go back. How sad is that? And the author is on the reunion committee. She encouraged everyone to attend despite their crushing feelings of inadequacy.

We're less ambitious. My only worry about reunion is that there will be a long line at the felafel place.

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Buying stuff

NYT post, based on research by Dr. Miller from UNM, suggesting that we buy stuff primarily as a status signal to others. I'm skeptical.

On a related note, I'm also reading the much more persuasive Buying In by Rob Walker, which argues in part that we buy stuff to assert our identity, both as a unique individual and (paradoxically, at the same time) as an identifiable member of a certain culture or subculture. He also points out, with lots of examples, that the idea of the sophisticated consumer who knows all the marketer's tricks dates back to nearly a century ago. Interesting book so far.

Anyway, the NYT blog post has Dr. Miller's test for assessing your consumer behavior. First, list the ten most expensive things you've ever paid for. Next, list the ten things you've paid for that have made you the happiest. His theory, I guess, is that for most people those lists don't match up.

But in the comments, most people's 10 most expensive items are things like degrees, homes, cars, and childcare expenses. And most people's lists actually match up pretty closely -- although I wonder if that comes from making the "most expensive" list before the "happiest" list, instead of vice versa. For instance, off the top of your head, you might not list health insurance as something that made you really happy. But if you've just thought about how much you paid for it, it would be on your mind and you'd think, "Yeah, I guess I would have been pretty unhappy if I went into labor knowing I didn't have health insurance." I also wonder if the exercise would have been more useful if it was limited to consumer goods. But then my list would have looked something like this: laptop, laptop, iPod, iPhone, shoes. Does that stuff make me happy? I think it does, in proportion to how much I spend on it.

The main things that made lots of "happiest" lists without necessarily being on the "most expensive" list were leisure activities, especially travel. People listed vacations, musical instruments, and recreational vehicles (boats, bikes, motorcycles). Lesson: it's worth spending money on experiences that make you happy, but not necessarily on stuff.

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Yard sale

We had a yard sale this weekend. Several neighbors stopped by, concerned that we were moving. One lady came by in the morning and cleaned out our Lenox and Waterford stuff that we got as wedding gifts and never took out of the box. She came back late in the afternoon and took almost everything we had left for free. In the end, we made over $200 and gained some room in our house.

I am generally reluctant to bring stuff into the house. I rarely buy things I don't think we'll use in the near future or want to keep long-term. Still, the yard sale was a good reminder about not accumulating too much. Even though a lot of the things we sold were unused gifts, some were things we had wanted, like the cheese dome from Pottery Barn that had seemed worth the $30 when we registered for it and that nobody wanted to buy for $2. Turns out one person's treasure is the same person's junk, if you wait a few years.

All we have left is some old books, which we'll probably recycle, and my audio tape collection circa 1989. Anybody need a Guys Next Door tape?

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Lies I tell my kid

In some magazine I read, a mom confessed (or maybe offered as a parenting tip, I don't remember) that she takes advantage of her kid's inability to read by telling her that signs say things like, "It's time to go home," or "Don't touch," or whatever the mom wants them to say.

I disapprove of lying to kids for expediency. I only lie to my kid for fun. Which is why he thinks wombats say "WOM, WOM, WOM" and eat Ewoks.

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2 years, 2 months

Dear K,

Sometimes you drive me nuts. But far more often these days, I catch myself wishing I could hold you at this age for a little longer. You can run, and jump -- your primary form of locomotion for a while, jump, jump, jump instead of boring old walking -- and give spontaneous hugs and tackles and tickles, and best of all you can TALK!

You rarely stop talking, whether you're narrating a Thomas adventure as you push your engines around the track or singing the song you learned at school (which, as far as I can tell, consists of the words "Hello Lucas" repeated fifty times). You can have entire conversations with yourself, incorporating my usual responses. "I see an airplane! Yes, that plane is flying high in the sky. I see it too!" But you still need me around sometimes. Otherwise, who would explain when, halfway through your animal book, you point at a picture and announce, "That is NOT an animal. That is a porcupine!"

You have learned the house rules and like to talk about those too, like yesterday when you paced around the deck, keeping your distance from the grill and repeating, "Very hot. Get burned! That's why the oven is hot, to cook our food." Or, "Hitting is bad. Pushing is bad. Kicking is bad. But licking is silly!" Then you chase me around with your tongue out, and if you catch me you lick my pants.

I don't REALLY want you to be two forever. Eventually it would be nice to have you potty trained. But you are so sweet right now that I'm feeling my first pang of wishing you didn't have to grow up so quickly.

Love,
Mommy

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My third Mother's Day

For Mother's Day, I got a surprisingly cooperative toddler, an unsolicited "I love you, Mommy" with a big hug from K, and a sleep-in with pumpkin waffles when I woke up from Daddy.

Last night I half-hoped the rainstorm would last until this morning, so we'd have an excuse for skipping the Duckling Day Parade. The trip into Boston, the crowds, and the big event starting at noon, right before K's usual naptime, all sounded daunting. But it was perfect. The day was warm and sunny. K was totally into the duck theme and couldn't wait to put on his costume. We had been reading "Make Way for Ducklings" all week, and we pointed out all the sights as we drove through the city on the way in. He hugged the big duck, made friends with the marching band, and high-fived a police officer. After the parade, he stopped on the bridge in the Public Garden to listen to a guy playing guitar and singing, and he danced and clapped in his duck costume. People stopped to take pictures and I heard somebody say, "That is the cutest thing I've ever seen!"

The camera was out of batteries -- the one thing that went wrong today -- but we managed to take some decent pictures with our iPhones.




Happy Mother's Day!

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Leaving work now

Suddenly I understand the appeal of keeping a cot in your office.

Update: Lessons learned.
1. Going home to put K to bed and then returning to work may sound like a good idea, but it's not.
2. I am too old to go to bed at two in the morning.
3. Not only does Boston's public transportation shut down after 12:30, the highway on-ramps are all blocked. The highway is not closed, you just can't get on it from anywhere in the city. There's a reason that dude never returned.

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Dream of a corporate associate

Last night I dreamed that all the first-years in my department were assigned to slice hard-boiled eggs all afternoon. (I think the dream was inspired by this.) I tried to do something different, or at least take my eggs outside, but was handed an egg-slicing instruction sheet and told sternly, "It's very important that these eggs be sliced correctly and uniformly. We'll need to check in with you from time to time, so stay in this room." So I sliced and sliced.

Not that this has anything to do with my real job.

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Mayhem

Did you know that at common law, mayhem was the crime of dismembering or disabling a body part?

And did I mention I started studying for the bar? I'm not going to have lots of time to devote to studying this summer, since I'll be working, so I'm starting early. My goal is to get through most of the Conviser Mini-Review book by the end of the month, at least a first pass to get all the concepts back in my head. Bar/Bri starts at the beginning of June.

You may have guessed that at the moment, I'm reviewing criminal law. It has so little to do with my current practice that it's kind of fun. It reminds me of 1L year, when you learn all sorts of things that you can't believe you never knew.

Tangent: it blows my mind when people claim they didn't learn anything in law school. Does it become internalized so quickly that you forget it ever took you an hour to read a five-page opinion? Are you forgetting about the time in your life when the only way you knew whether something was legal was to Google "will i get arrested if i dance naked on the roof what if i am drunk then is it ok"? By the end of the first year, when someone asks you a legal question, you probably don't know the answer. But you know where to look, and you can understand what you find. That's totally worth the price of admission.

Anyway, look forward to more exciting law tidbits in the months to come.

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Gardening

While K ran up and down the aisles of the outdoor flower display, I was having visions of the two of us, hands in the earth, bonding over the wonder of helping a living thing set root and grow.

Fast forward a few hours. K keeps trying to lick the spade and yells at me when I try to dig with it. After he finally gives it up, he starts grabbing handfuls of mulch and rubbing them into his hair. Then he takes the spade back and fills in the hole I just dug. JW distracts him while I re-dig. K turns the flat of flowers upside down, then steps on the flowers. He cooperates long enough to pour some water on the flowers, but then tramples the entire flower bed, runs back, and does it two more times before I can pick him up and deposit him elsewhere.

The neighbor girl came over afterwards, when we had put away the gardening tools and he was racing up and down the driveway. "Does he ever stop running?" she asked. Welcome to life with a 2-year old.

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Competence

LL: A feeling of competency is vastly underrated as an indicator of job satisfaction- or at least I underrated it when I first picked my legal specialty.

When I applied to law school, I wondered if I would regret leaving software. I assumed I would, in fact, and steeled myself to get over it. But I loved law school and never looked back...

until I started working. Now I find myself thinking wistfully about coding, and while I do miss it enough to consider doing it for fun in my spare time, I realize that what I really miss is being good at something. Responding to "I don't even know if it's possible, but what I want is..." with, "I can do that, no problem." Handling things on my own instead of running them by someone.

I feel like big firm corporate law instills a feeling of incompetence in new associates. Maybe on purpose. And yes, I get that we have to be really careful, and I know that I have a lot to learn, and I have to learn to do it correctly. But I'm a reasonably intelligent person. Throw caution to the wind and let me fill out a form without anybody looking at it.

Maybe in a year.

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