following the law

Yeah, hi. I've been busy. Living and stuff. Whatever. As I say every time this happens, blogging about blogging is boring.

You know what I do when I start in on a blog post about blogging or the art of blogging or search engine optimization or anything of that sort? One of two things: I pretend to skim and then click away, or my eyes immediately glaze over and I click away.

I currently am having my morning tea in a town that I describe as one of the two armpits of State of Happiness (the other is Universe City's neighboring town). I came up here for a little work thingee, and now I am procrastinating beginning the 1.5 hour drive back. It seems awfully unfair that even one of the armpits has a better downtown than Universe City.

Periodically, about every other day or so, I think that I am in the wrong profession. If I win the lottery ever (difficult, when you buy a ticket almost never), I am going to go back to school in something more helping profession-y and less fighting-y. (Shut up. Those are words. I just made them words, upon my decree.)

This work thingee reminded me of that again. I did a social work type job before I moved to Rwanda, and this morning I felt for a moment that I might be back in that world, just with grown ups instead of kids. I miss it.

Having a law degree is clearly a great privilege. Part of the reason i went to law school, at the final moment, instead of finding a way to do relief work in Darfur, was because I realized that being able to go and not going would be a slap in the face of all the people I knew in Rwanda who so desperately wanted an education but couldn't afford it.

But it is also a burden, sometimes. Once you have taken out well over $100,000 in student loans, you can never just go back to some low-paying job you love. You are stuck in this profession, for money or loan repayment help, and you can't get out. (And it seems to me now that spending that much money on schooling is also a slap in the face of all the people I knew in Rwanda who could not afford even the relatively low school fees there.)

Some of my most panicked moments in the last few years have been when I realized again that I don't have the option of leaving law, not for quite a while.