Fifty Days and Counting

Today is my 50th day in Washington, D.C.

In those days, I’ve been able to spend time with a remarkable number of people — so many, in fact, that I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness I’ve been shown and the opportunities I’ve been given.  I’ve spent time with the people leading the fight for marriage equality in the District, the people working to advance LGBT equality and other progressive efforts at the national level both in the federal government and outside it and the people in the media working to cover the many happenings across the government.

I do, however, remain on the job search, having done some freelance contributing to The Atlantic’s Politics page, Advocate.com and D.C.’s Metro Weekly, but continuing in my efforts to find a full-time position.  I remain optimistic that I will soon find a “home” where I can use my skills to advance progressive efforts while receiving a paycheck that will allow me to continue advancing progressive efforts.

As I look at my financial picture — and it’s not pretty — I know that there are times when my stress has gotten the better of me, and for that I apologize to my family and friends, my Twitter and other online acquaintances and my readers.  I want, though, to thank those folks — and two random people — for reminding me what I am doing right now and why I’m doing it.  I’ve been a little down this weekend, stressing about nearing two months in D.C. without having accomplished my “job” goal, when I came across this NYU 1L’s blog post:

In law school, students seem to measure themselves by what they can achieve, irrespective of whether their achievement has any relation to what they want to do in life. Law students try to get As just to have a chance to tell people they clerk for SCOTUS or work at a Top 5 vault firm and . . . don’t care what it is they are actually doing. It’s perplexing.

The reason I found it was a commenter, Lindsey, who noted that she had bookmarked a Law Dork post, “Life Lessons Learned” about the same topic.  The blog’s author replied:

That’s a much more eloquent version of what I was saying I like it. For some reason, things make more sense to me when I’ve actually hit a point where I can relate to it, rather than reading it out of context. I think I read the article before and thought, meh, why would anyone not want to be on the Big Law Train (pre law school).

Now I read it and think, my gosh, such insight!

Thank you.  As I sit in a coffeeshop after 9 p.m. on a Sunday night, that was enough to get me to look back, and see what I wrote.  I am so glad that I did.  In part, I wrote:

There’s a lot more that we can do, a lot of good that can be done, if we’re willing to experiment.  Sometimes, of course, those experiments fail.  They’re supposed to, at times, or else they wouldn’t be experiments.  But, that experimentation — far more often than the path of least resistance — can lead to some remarkable, exciting outcomes that we’d never reach otherwise.

Yes.  I’ve not chosen the easiest path, and some of those decisions — both good and bad — have been of my own making while others, most certainly, have not.  But, regardless of the difficulties, the path I have chosen is the only one that would have given me the amazing experiences that I have been granted thus far in my short career.

So, I am thankful to have done what I have done, and I am excited to think about what is to come.  But, the reality is that right now is not the “best of times,” though I am making every attempt to improve that situation.  I know I am not alone right now in being in such a situation, and I know that, by far, my situation is not in any way the worst or even all that bad compared to some others.  But, I am in a job search, and I do need to move forward with something in the near future to continue in my efforts to advance those issues about which I care most deeply.

So, to come full circle, why this is relevant to you, a reader of this blog?

My situation, of course, makes it difficult to remain wholly objective in my efforts to cover ongoing happenings around the political and legal scene.  It is my hope that my efforts are as transparent as possible and that, to the extent I take a viewpoint in my writing, it is wholly supported by the factual background of the situation.  Unlike my time when I was blogging while working at at the law firm in Columbus, though, it is difficult to completely avoid writing about topics that overlap with the interests of organizations and entities to which I am applying here in D.C.

It is for this reason that my blogging is somewhat minimalist these days and that my posts and other writings are taking a much more fact-based, reporting style.  I am attempting, as best I can, to balance my desire to continue to write on those issues about which I care most dearly with my necessity to find full-time employment.

As I progress, and when I found an employment “home,” I look forward to continuing — in one way or another — to engage with everyone from my blogging in my new efforts.  In the meantime, thank you for your support and keep on reading.

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