Planning: Day 8

Today’s Song: The General by Dispatch

I want to be the best at whatever I do. That’s just a fact of my existence. It probably comes from growing up in a smaller town and being picked for the Most Intelligent senior superlative in high school. I want to be the best because I am accustomed to being the best. College took that out of me, for the most part (there will always be someone smarter and someone better), but I get a flash of annoyance when someone is clearly better than me. It’s not like I’m proud of it. It’s just that I haven’t yet been able to help it. 

I don’t want to take an easy path to success. I want to play to my strengths, sure, but I don’t want to avoid a path just because it would be more difficult. Law school will be more difficult. That’s the nature of the beast. Not everyone should be a lawyer and not everyone should be a doctor and plenty of good people walk into a graduate program wide-eyed and dreamy and walk around in their careers deadened and jaded. I’m not saying that would be me here, but I didn’t read legal thrillers growing up. I haven’t taken a single logic class. This would be an uphill battle for me.

So I think that law school is an option and if I come out of any other educational programs knowing that it’s a need, I could do it, but it’s not a necessary right now. It’s an idea that I could sell myself on. And since I committed to doing this week on that, we’ll continue to explore and see and probably write in big terms about revolutionary ideas and justice and all of that, but I’ll go ahead and say the phrase that those of you who’d rather I do something else besides be a lawyer have been waiting to hear: I don’t think I’ll apply to law school this year.

Plus, I worked super long hours today teaching kids about space and I just don’t have the energy to talk myself into reading another .pdf put together by another school that will just laugh my application away. My options today were (1) get up early to buy dry ice so I can play with it and let the kids build a comet out of it or (2) get up early and continue adding to my spreadsheet of jobs you can do with a law degree. The kids really liked the comet and some of them had never seen dry ice before. 

Can I go now? Am I forgiven?