happy accidents

By fightinfilipino

i’ve been hearing from an increasing number of law school alums that their own careers weren’t the result of their directed, dogged search for an area of law in which they wanted to practice, but instead was the culmination of a series of coincidences.  i had a hard time swallowing this at first.  i realize that right when you get out of law school, you’re not immediately going to find your dream job, that it might take a few years to be practicing in your favorite area of law.  but until now i very much believed that on the Quest for My Career®, i’d find some amazing subset of law while in school and follow its thread out into the real world.

but with what happened tonight, i’m starting to believe the happy accident stories.  earlier today we’d heard from the school that our grades, long kept in captivity in some secret, dingy vault miles below the school’s foundations, were going to be released.  finally i could learn whether or not i flunked out, or flunked out with style.  turns out i didn’t flunk out after all.  i also had a practice mock interview scheduled tonight with a law school alum who graciously volunteered to help us burgeoning law students practice our interviewing skills.  having happily established that i get to stick around for at least another semester, i went in to the interview expecting to just “shoot the shit” with a random alum.

the alum i interviewed with was a newly-minted associate attorney with one of the larger law firms in town.  he was working in corporate litigation, a field that i have almost no interest in whatsoever.  but figuring i needed to emphasize my “excellent research and writing skills”, i go on to explain a little about my past semester (studiously dodging the grades question) and how that must be very on-point with business litigation memo and brief writing.  i mention the names of the professors we had last semester, and my interviewer’s eyes lit up at the mention of one of the professors.  it turns out that he had had that professor for a corporate law class, and that, like myself and a lot of other people, he too struggled with what turned out to be an economics class in disguise.  we spent the rest of the interview jovially talking about the craziness that is law school.  at the end, i got the requisite business card, and a mention that if i needed some help figuring out the San Diego legal community, he would be more than happy to help.  the professor coincidence made the interview a hell of a lot smoother than it could have been.

we head back to the career services office, me relating an anecdote from when i was still working in Boston and some of the bizarre corporate ethics issues we ran into in some immigration cases.  as we enter the office, one of the career services counselors more or less thrust a box of sandwiches at us and asked us to stay and eat a bit.  being a law student, it is a moral obligation for me to accept free food.  my interviewer grabbed a few sandwiches, chatted a bit more, and then took his leave.  during this last bit, another student in the room, a 2L, overheard that i had been working for an immigration firm.  we started talking a bit about H-1Bs and PERM and how the economic turmoil of late has been upending hiring of foreign nationals.  it turns out that the guy currently works at a local branch of one of the major multistate immigration law firms.  he immediately asks me for a resume copy and says he’ll check if the local office needs 1Ls for the summer.  job opportunities +2!  then, out of the blue, he asks me if i had heard of a company where one of the other alumni interviewers was general counsel.  incredibly enough, the company was one of my old firm’s major clients; we’d done a ton of various immigration cases for them, and the general counsel was someone with whom i’d chatted on a daily basis.  we immediately launch into a long conversation about the company’s immigration work and what the company was like as a whole.  turns out that my new immigration buddy was looking to apply with the company.  i let this insane coincidence stir in my head a bit.

at this point, the career services counselor comes by to chat a bit about our interviewing experience, and then mentions that the alumni interviewer from that company wanted to talk with my immigration buddy about a job offer.  i hung out a bit in the office to see if i could say hi to this alum before i left; a few moments later, he walks into the office and conducts an informal, friendly interview with immigration-buddy.  i step off to the side to avoid being rude, but listen in on the job opportunity, a legal research position over in China.  i can’t help but be amused, since i had done a good deal of work before with the China branch and knew some of the staff there.  after the alum finished the interview, i step up to “introduce” myself, and the alum’s eyes brighten like a flash bulb.  he asks me about how i’m finding law school and a bit of the recent immigration scuttlebutt, and then invites me to visit his office near LA on a free day and have lunch.  he even mentions that his own paralegal, a person whom i also talked with frequently and knew very well, would be glad to see me.  he offers me his card, briskly shakes my hand, and leaves for the evening.

it only hit me then that the entire night was a string of coincidences.  the odds of these discrete events happening all in a row were ridiculously low.  i’m idly considering hitting the local poker club around the corner just to see if this luck holds.

the notion that this all happened in the space of a couple of hours has me bewildered.  but on a detached level, i recognize that i just had three very good ways to find a jobby job for the summer, and perhaps for something more substantial later on, presented to me during an evening i thought would consist of going through the motions of a fake interview.  i’m still going to have to invest a bit of effort to find work, sure.  but the next time i hear an attorney tell me that they found a job or even a calling they liked through a combination of happy accidents, i’ll be more inclined to believe them.

don’t stop me now

By fightinfilipino

i might have a procrastination problem

By fightinfilipino

so instead of reading my law books like a good law student, i’ve spent the last hour playing with this.

and here’s what i came up with:

:3

i get it now

By fightinfilipino

“research” is a euphemism for torture.

did you know that “torts” shares the same etymological root as “torture”?

X_X

transatlantic foe

By fightinfilipino

i think i’ve turned into a city boy.

don’t get me wrong, i haven’t forgotten my bucolic roots.  i grew up in Simsbury, Connecticut, arguably an epicenter for the agricultural pursuits (read: tobacco) of the original American colonists.  this was a town where cow-tipping was the thing to do on Saturday nights (well, aside from the copious imbibing of fermented liquids and smoking of…substances), and where things like 4H and the Big E were the major annual events.  as a kid i’d run out to the middle of the woods in our backyard and play war games and camp out and go fishing with the local kids and classmates.

but you can’t get the kind of energy that a city provides, or the diversity you can find within just a 5 mile radius.  i spent my winter break in NYC, right smack in midtown, near Rockefeller Center and 5th Avenue.  yes, that particular spot isn’t authentic city.  the midtown area is definitely made for tourist folks.  part of my time there was spent training on the art of dodging others’ photographs.  i’d be walking in front of, oh say, the giant Christmas tree near Rockefeller at nighttime, idly thinking how pleasing it was to see the tree using LED lighting to cut down on energy consumption, when all of a sudden i will see a flash in my blind spot.  i realized quickly that i’d just ruined some tourist family’s carefully planned family photo.  by the end of my first week i’d gotten to the point of looking out for cameras like a gazelle looks out for lions stalking in the grass.  i was doing barrel rolls to escape clans of irate Danish tourists.  forget the seedy gangs of new york, tourists are the real danger!

aside from leaping out of the way every so often though, i was reminded about how much cultural diversity was packed into such a small area.  i walked about three blocks or so uptown and hung out at the MoMA, admiring the always-impressive collections of symbolic and psychedelic pieces.  the museum had a tourist-friendly Van Gogh exhibit up, but they also had a Joan Miró gallery as well.  a brief walk in the other direction took me to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where my favorite Pope, John Paul II, had visited almost two decades ago.  i’m still impressed by the enormity of the building, how small you feel even when the Cathedral is packed to the brim with the faithful and the thronging tourist crowds.

feeling a bit peckish, i made my way over to Dean & DeLuca’s, inside the Rockefeller Plaza complex.  NYC as you might know is world-famous for its huge number of delicious delis.  Dean & DeLuca’s is no exception; their sandwiches are ridiculously delicious, and their desserts, lethal, tasty gastroenterological weapons of mass destruction, should be declared illegal.  i had their roast beef sandwich smeared with horseradish mayonnaise.  the horseradish was fresh, as if it came right from the garden.  it also burned like Beckett burns pitches against A-Rod.  the intense flavor cleared out my sinuses, and possibly a bunch of other cavities inside my cranium.  thankfully i had some delicious carrot cake to munch on, too.

later on i hopped on the B line and went to Chinatown.  aside from the really good food there (which i can’t stress enough, the always-open Chinatown restaurants are the perfect thing after an all-night clubbing spree), Chinatown itself is a revealing glimpse into American history.  here you’ve got a confluence of Chinese (and other Asian) immigrants intersecting with the hustle of New York.  even today, with the incessant march of gentrification erasing much of the original Chinatown, you still can see the unique essence of America’s love, and hate, for immigrants.  even now, you can still witness the attempts to belong to America while at the same time preserving their own traditions, languages, cuisines, and identities.  i can’t say that this phenomenon is uniquely American anymore; many countries in Europe are, somewhat ironically, dealing with the very same conflicts of immigrant waves now.  but the intersection of so many peoples in one place is an integral part of the city, one i love to experience.  you even have Little Italy right around the corner.

i went back uptown again to Broadway and Times Square and caught some shows.  now there’s a storied tradition of American art.  granted, shows like Phantom of the Opera or The Lion King are more akin to pop culture than classical art, but the sheer concentration of acting and musical and illustrative and other talent in one spot is something you could only find in a city.  i met some college students working the TKTS booth and was amazed how eager they were to brave the blustery winter and brightly tell me about their favorite shows, on and off Broadway.  cities provide this kind of environment, where arts aren’t characterized as superfluous; instead they’re lauded as necessary reflections of where we are as human beings (and in some cases, hilarious investigations of things like “why the internet was born?“)  i very much hope these kinds of art survive and prosper.  the monolith of the MTV building always seems a bit like a thieving interloper in Times Square.

now that i’m back in San Diego, i’ve got this itch to explore the downtown area.  law school classes be damned!  i love NYC during tourist season, but i need warm weather and sunlight during my days.  what’s there to do in this fine city?…