Haven't been writing enough

Writing a blog post was a usual occurrence in order to procrastinate studying Con Law or Fed Courts (which is the procedural side of Con Law for the most part), and since I haven't been doing much of either lately, I haven't blogged. It could also be the fact that I've been spending more time on Facebook or Twitter to make some type of social commentary and share it with friends. Though the sites encourage being witty and concise, the possibly unintended consequence is that attention span is now even less than before.

Not knowing how public this whole blog post is, my usual theme of introspection may be curtailed a little until I figure out how to limit the privacy on this site. Most of the previous blog posts were from my MySpace account, which had at least the check of allowing only my friends to read the post and also the anonymity of probably never meeting any digifriends who were on that account.

As to the purpose of this post . . . well, it's mostly out of boredom since I actually feel unemployed for the first time in years. With law school, there was always the reason/rationalization that I always had school work to do, so I was at least keeping busy (or, the fact that I took a trip to Argentina to pass the time). It's been about six months since I've been unemployed, but it's only effectively been about 6 weeks. The first two months don't really count since I was studying for the Bar exam, which took up 12 hours a day 5 days a week (and 6-8 hours the other 2 days). And, understandably right after the ordeal, the last thing I wanted to do was work. Then there was the time in limbo (from end of February until the results came out end of April), since it would be pretty hard to secure an offer without knowing the results of the exam. Then, even after the results came out, there was two weeks before I was sworn in. Even though it would have been more tangible to get an offer once I received the results, I wasn't technically an attorney until I was sworn in. So, there is sort of a schism of what this unemployment is from a temporal sense and a functional sense.

I knew it would be a horrid market, as even when I was still in school and before the global economy tanked, there was example after example of unemployed attorneys. I vividly remember my 1L year, going to a "networking" event at the Chicago Bar Association, where it was a packed house of attorneys either looking for jobs or looking to change jobs. I swore to myself that I'd take the steps not to be in that boat when I graduated . . . no I don't appreciate the irony.

To my credit, however, some of what's going on is totally out of my control. Yeah, there may have been a culmination of decisions that gave rise to the situation, such as going east of the Mississippi instead of west, then deciding to move to a place where the regional pull of my law school didn't really matter. But I think more importantly, there's a historic re-calibration going on because of this economic meltdown. It's crazy to think how unprecedented this is, so it's hard to get too down about the whole unemployment thing (there's more of us than there's been in decades). This is so far reaching, so I'm just going to limit this particular discussion to the legal field.

As bad as this sucks, it's a needed recalibration. One law school dean said that law schools are similar to the American auto industry--producing a product that no one wants. Though there's some merit in the analogy, it goes a bit too far. The effect of this whole situation will weed out those who don't want to be attorneys. I feel the proper analogy (one that I've always made) is more akin to the Wizard of Oz. There's this thought that law school is like some emerald city with some grand wizard. As a result, people who don't know what to do with their lives after undergrad feel that law school is an automatic route to riches. This is compounded by the sense of entitlement of my generation, which was nourished from childhood by giving trophies for "participation." The reality of the matter is that it's only an old man behind the curtains who makes everyone wear techinicolor glasses. But in the end, if it's really what you want, the old man still can get you to your goal.

The recalibration has started, and hopefully people will realize that it is just an old man behind a curtain and the technicolor glasses; that there are ways to get their goals other than parading through Oz. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. But those still standing woudn't have to rely on hindsight, they were looking for the old man the whole time.