very simple

I was reminded this morning that the bar exam starts today. Which got me thinking about milestones, because I took that same bar exam during one of the most hellacious summers of my life.

Ten years and 2 months ago (May 2009), I graduated from law school. Which, I’ll admit, was pretty awesome.

Ten years ago exactly, I sat for the bar. I remember thinking many, many times that, if I didn’t pass on the first go-round, I would have to find another career because there was no way in hell that I was going through that again.

In between those two events, or, more precisely, ten years and 1 month ago, my mother passed away after a long bout (7 years) with cancer. It wasn’t unexpected. She had been actively sick for at least a year, managed to make it to my graduation weighing 90 pounds and needing a wheelchair, and had gone into the hospital for the final time a week later. But the day I found out, it was certainly a shock. I was studying for the bar in Philadelphia, because I actually had a place to live there (my folks had sold the house I grew up in a few years earlier), but was planning on driving up that weekend to NYC to visit. I was sitting in Rittenhouse Square when my dad called me on my cellphone to tell me the news. I don’t remember that much, except that I know I screamed an ungodly scream in the middle of a giant public space, started crying uncontrollably, and ran home to pack. Of course, the reason I wasn’t home in the first place was that my landlords were trying to sell our house for when after our lease was up, so there was an open house going on. Needless to say it ended pretty quickly when I showed up. I’m pretty sure the real estate agent tried to hug me.

My roommates, who were the best, drove me and my car (in a little caravan) up to my parents apartment while I had a minor breakdown. The funeral was the next day, and a significant portion of my law school class, with only a few hours notice, skipped bar review and showed up in westchester. I realized later that my roommates must have called people and it spiraled, because I wasn’t really in a state to do much.

I stayed in rockland for shiva (obviously), and I skipped almost a week of bar review classes. I was theoretically going to borrow the tapes when i got back, but I just never got around to it. People were shocked that I was still going to take the bar, given what happened, but my standard response was that my mother would come back just to kill me if I didn’t. Which I’m pretty sure I believed at the time. Plus, having something (even as miserable as bar exam studying) to focus on did help. But I will say that I’m glad there wasn’t more torts on the exam, because I missed that entire section of bar review.

Oh, and did I mention that in the middle of this, I had to find an apartment in manhattan because my lease was going to be up 3 days after the bar? that was an extra special bonus of suck. I can’t believe I managed to actually find something halfway decent (and I ended up living there for 6 years, until I bought my current place).

My roommates, who took care of me through all of it, are still my friends. I sometimes wish I could thank them every day for having to navigate my craziness during that period. But they saw me through it. My best friend from high school, who I was going to crash with for the bar, packed a bag and went to her parents so that I could sleep in her bed undisturbed instead of on the couch. As weird as it was, it was exactly what I needed and she knew that.

The bar exam itself was its own special circle of hell. Not only is it one of the hardest exams you’ll ever take in your life, in NYC they put you all, all 5000 of you, into a giant cavernous space filled with tables as far as the eye can see at the Jacob Javits Center. It’s like an exercise in pressure-cookerization. Add to that the fact that there was no where to get anything to eat in the surrounding area (at least in 1999), and it’s like they want to see how many people will run screaming or pass out before it’s over.

I survived, and I passed, and I started a career (with a few bumps) that I loved.

That was all ten years ago this summer. Now I’m attempting to navigate through another change in my life, looking for a new job that I might love as much as the last one. I wish my mom was still around to give me the kick in the ass I sometimes need.

It’s almost turkey day, and, more importantly, it’s time for a 4-day weekend, which will be very much appreciated, particularly after this latest cold/flu season. I look forward to passing out on the couch on numerous occasions, to the point where my family thinks I have narcolepsy.

But first, the adventure is all about getting to Thanksgiving. I think I’ve mentioned before that I live 1/2 a block from the Macy’s parade route. Normally, I do everything in my power to get the hell out of NYC before the parade starts. This year, due to some logistical issues, we’re not leaving until mid-day on Thursday. I, my parents, and my parents’ car all live along the parade route. So that should be…interesting. On the flip side, if I leave my apartment at any time tomorrow morning, I will actually get to see the parade for the first time in my life. I give it even odds that I sleep through the entire thing.

The cable guy finally showed up yesterday, after I had been without service for a week and a half (no such luck having my service mysteriously pop back on this time without intervention).  He ran some tests though, and discovered that it wasn’t that I got no signal, but that the signal was coming through at way too high a frequency (one which was OK for the TV/cable service, but not for internet).  So began the process of checking every connection all the way back to the junction box in the stairwell.

Which he opened up, took a deep breath, and noted that the connections in there looked like they hadn’t been updated in over 20 years.  I laughed and pointed out that I knew the previous tenant in my apartment (being that she’s my stepmom), and she moved in in 1978.  So she probably had cable installed around the same time that cable was installed in the building.  So he replaced all of the connections, and now I have shiny shiny internet again, and it’s actually much faster than it was before.  Like, near-instantaneous.  So I highly recommend that if you live in a really old building, you find out the last time your trunk line was updated, and if it’s before the internet existed, maybe see about getting that fixed!

Also, I didn’t even realize that there was a problem before, but when we put the TV back on to test it out with some high-def olympic coverage, I could swear that my picture was clearer than it had been in the morning.  I could just be imagining things, but I was actually taken aback (I think the non-word “whoa” might have been uttered).  

The third thing I have, of course, is a neckache, because I had to put all of the furniture back after the cable guy left and something went wonky in the middle of that process.  

Still managed to get a bike ride with my brother in afterwards. Although “with” is somewhat misleading as a significant portion of our ride involved me watching his red backpack get smaller and smaller, and him having to periodically stop and wait for me.  The best part about the ride?  The realization that I’m not actually that slow.  I’m only the slowest cyclist on the road at 6:30 in the morning.  At 5 in the afternoon on a Saturday, there are plenty of people who are more than willing to suck and get in my way while I quietly seethe about how slow they all are.

I promise I’m not going to do this every day. Frankly, no one wants to read repeated blog entries about just how little I can do every day.  But today was exciting – I took my bike out for a “real” ride (i.e., not going in a circle around the park).  The plan was to go down to Madison Square, or Union Square, and maybe get a shake at the shake shack.  Anyway, I got going down the Hudson River Greenway, and before I  even realized it, I was all the way downtown at ground zero.  So I tooled around Battery Park for a little while, took some pictures, drank lots of water (it was really warm out), and then got back on my bike and rode all the way home.  it was a 13-14 mile round trip, and I was gross and sweaty and desperate to get in my shower at the end, but not “tired”.  In fact, my legs didn’t hurt at all. I actually thought at the time that, but for the oppressive heat and humidity, I could have kept going.

This is a really big change from a year ago, when i took my bike to the park and could barely go 3 miles without exhausting myself.  That was the day I decided to join the gym.

Plans for the rest of the week?  More bike rides, although tomorrow is a personal training day, so I probably won’t be biking around the island.  All you can eat sushi tomorrow night with my dad and brother (have I mentioned that it’s kind of weird to have my brother actually living in the city again?  good, but weird.  I was so used to our regularly scheduled Friday afternoon IM sessions with him on the other side of the world).  Tentative dinner plans with a friend from college who I haven’t seen in about 13 years, thanks to Facebook (and yes, I’m totally addicted now).

As far as Friday, I’m currently debating whether to attempt to go get a 3G iphone.  I certainly didn’t plan my vacation around the iphone release, but since I’m definitely planning on getting one, it does seem kind of stupid to NOT get one while I’ve got plenty of time to wait on line.  Although I’m definitely not going to be one of those people who is already waiting on line…

So, I don’t actually have much of an immediate "nuclear" family – there’s my dad and my brother, and that’s about it.  However, when my dad married my awesome stepmom a few years ago, she brought along her also very lovely sisters (and mom), which is how I ended up getting forwarded this e-card today…

 Which pretty much epitomizes this (not particularly significant,  yet close to Christmas so conflated with that giant shopping/consumerist  extravaganza)  jewish holiday.  I’m fairly certain I’ve never spelled it the same way twice.

As I’ve mentioned before, my brother is the world traveler in the family.  Right now, after finishing up with the Peace Corps last month, he’s trekking through the Himalayas for a month, and then heading down to India for a while.

So that’s my brother’s life. 

A few months ago, one of my friends from Italy let me know that she was getting married, in a traditional Hindu wedding, in Singapore, and that I was invited.

So the gears started turning in my head, since Singapore and India are only a few hours apart from each other. 

The plan:

In January, I’m flying to Chennai, India, meeting up with my brother, traveling around the southern half of India (basically looping around the horn and ending up in Mumbai), and then flying to Singapore to go to a three-day-long wedding. 

It took me a few months of coordinating, but now the trip’s all booked, and I just have to get a visa for India and figure out what to wear (and how to, ideally, get my wedding clothes to Singapore without dragging them through seven different cities in India first).

My brother, who has made fun of me for years for having a blog, has now started one of his own over on blogger.  He hasn’t quite gotten the hang of things like resizing photos to actually fit on the page, but the content is significantly more interesting than the drivel that I write over here:

Let’s look, for instance, at the Democratic Republic of Congo (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cg.html).

This is a land the size of Western Europe, with only 300 miles of paved roads, no electricity outside of the capital city of Kinshasa, a place where the deadliest war in the world since WW2 has raged for over a decade, with more than 5 million people killed and countless displaced. Most Americans could not locate this country on a world map. Why the indifference? When people begin to care, major things can happen. Where is the DRC’s George Clooney? I did notice press lately (worthy press, I might add) on the conflict that has been renewed in the east of the country, detailing a recent spate of killings. However, those killed were a group of mountain gorillas. Where is the press detailing the human suffering? People need to be informed to begin to care. And people need to care to enact any kind of change. We need to remember that we are all born with the same heart, the same lungs, eyes, ears. Yet some struggle even for the most basic level of survival. A great program that has been getting a lot of press lately, which is a worthy capitalist model, if you have a minute….. (www.joinred.com)

Yeah.  Much better than my obsessing over ipods. 

The compact disc is 25 years old today.  And in the hard-learned lesson of “never let your ten year old brother buy your first CD,” The first CD I ever owned was “Pump”, by Aerosmith.

And yes, I still own it – “Janie’s Got a Gun” is an awesome song.  I don’t care what anyone else says.

(To be fair to myself, I didn’t actually “let” my brother do anything – the CD player was a gift from my parents for my 16th birthday, and so they had my brother give me a CD as a gift so that I’d actually have something to listen to).

Man o man. Things have been a little bit crazy around here. Got home all of two and a half weeks ago, suffered jetlag to the extreme (kept waking up at 4 in the morning), and then got dragged into a crazy urgent work situation that involved staying until 2 or 3 in the morning almost every night last week (from Sunday to Sunday, I billed 101 hours!).

Needless to say, blogging (yet again) has been pretty near the bottom of my list of things to do. I haven’t even gotten around to downloading the last photos I took in Milan (one of my colleagues and I took a long lunch my last day there and climbed (Ok, took the elevator) to the top of the Duomo).

Other annoying things since I got home? I ordered some cabinets from Ikea to fit in a space that was exactly 26 inches wide. The website and my receipt both say that they’re 26 inches wide. Then the boxes came, and the labels said they were 26 and a half inches wide. Argh. Now I’m trying to figure out how to return them, because the only room that they even matched was the bathroom, and the only open space was the one I had ordered them for. So that was annoying. Not just because of the hassle, but because I really wanted some cabinets in that space.

Hmm. what else. Oh, my dad and my stepmom both got some flu/virus bug going around, so I’ve seen them all of once since I’ve been home, and that was the day I got home.

In better news though, I’m going to see Lucinda Williams at Radio City tomorrow night, so that’ll be fun (and convenient, as I work all of a block from RCMH). And I actually have plans on Saturday with friends. And I just got a save the date for a friend who is getting married in the Canary Islands. So that’s a good excuse for a trip (and here I thought the wedding I was going to in Florida next month was going to be the most exotic one this year!).

I know, I know, I’ve been terribly lax about updating. Things have been a little…nuts around these parts. I managed to catch a cold last week, so I was a bit under the weather, and lots of random little stuff has been going on that has distracted me and kept me away from my computer (shocking!).

So, last Friday, I have my regular mid-year evaluation. All was normal, people apparently like me, but the kicker was the end. When the partner giving me my review says, “so, I’ve got this proposition for you.”

The proposition?

That I move to Milan, Italy for six months starting in the fall to “help out” our office there.

How crazy is that?

I told them on Monday that I’d do it. We still need to work out the logistical stuff (and of course, with the holiday, no one’s around to actually deal with any of it), so it’s not 100% definite, but it looks like I may move to Italy for a while starting in September.

It will be different from last fall’s Rome fiasco for a few reasons – first, it’s not a two week trip for a specific client that keeps getting extended, while I’m stuck living out of one suitcase, in a tiny hotel room. I’d have an apartment, and an office, and a variety of work. Plus, my stepmother used to live in Milan, and still knows a bunch of people in the region, so I’d have a bit of a safety net.

Also, it’s Milan. While not the touristy center that Rome is, it’s much more…cosmopolitan. Every description that I’ve read of Milan as compared to the rest of Italy sounds like I’m reading about New York as compared to the rest of the US. Extremely modern, business-oriented, fast-paced, wealthy…you get the idea.

And because of its location it’s really easy to get to a bunch of other places – The train line that runs straight down from Austria goes to Milan, Bologna, Florence, Rome…

It’s easy to get to Switzerland, Venice, and a whole bunch of other places.

I should probably also mention that the complete extent of my prior experience in Milan consists of flying there, taking a bus from Malpensa airport to the train station, and taking a train to Brig, Switzerland. Needless to say, I’m a little freaked out about moving to an entirely new city that I’ve never even (really) been to before. But our office appears to be right in the center of a nice part of town. Near lots of ridiculous shopping.

Ooh boy.