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• Wednesday, September 12, 2007 09:23 AM

  LeCastor

  An excellent and fair question. And I am aware of your identity--if I recall, you are a law student. Well, I am a lawyer, and have been practicing litigation for five years in a major northern city.

  I thought, going into law school, that this was what I wanted. My uncle, an assistant DA in a neighboring state, bent over backwards in an attempt to warn me that it was a mistake. I did not heed his pleas. In retrospect, what he attempted to do for me was one of the most compassionate and thoughtful acts I have ever witnessed.

  I am now in hell. Even though I like the firm I've been at for the past 18 mos., and like most of our clients, the work is relentless and tiresome (and increasingly boring), and the personalities I have to deal with every day are, for lack of a better word, assholes. I doubt transactional work would be that different, and so here I am. The lenders gave me a length of rope, and I took it, tied a slipknot, ducked my head in and kicked the chair away. There is no escape, I cannot discharge my student debt in bankruptcy. I am stuck in a profession I really don't enjoy that much. There is some honor to it, but unless you are prepared to live like a pauper, which is impossible for me because of my debt load, you will have a hard time finding a truly rewarding and stable position.

  So my message to you is this: people don't always know what they want. That was fish's original point. I am a living testament to that, believe you me. I was hardly some naive, pampered child when I entered law school--I grew up in a single -parent household on AFDC and have held a steady job ever since I was 14 or 15 years old. I went to a large and prestigious "public ivy" and was exposed to any number of interesting people and concepts. Yet I still blundered into a morass, like a dumb fucking mastodon into a tar pit. It can happen to you. It can happen to anyone. So, yes, fight for the right to work this job, or others like it. I hope to god you enjoy it. The statistical data, however, suggests you won't, and my personal experience, anecdotal though it may be, affirms that in all meaningful ways. I would happily halve my salary (and "status", for all that matters....and before you get too hung up on that, I suggest smoking a giant bowl and reading Hesse's 'Siddhartha', it's only about 125 pg) in exchange for half the weekly hours and an commensurate reduction in my student debt, but I may as well hope to win the lottery, because that isn't happening.

  Best of luck. Remember, the quicksand only draws you in more rapidly if you struggle against it.

  —Anonymous
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