Lawyerish: Just Call Me Charlie Brown

I was emailing with Dianna the other day, regaling her with some of the lowlights of the past few years, and I realized I should share them with y'all. I don't consider myself to be someone who dwells on the negative (yes, I am neurotic, but it's not the same thing as being a pessimist), but when I look back at the last five or six years of my life, it seems there have been some seriously huge disappointments; I'm not sure I've had the greatest luck in the world, let's just say:

After we got engaged, I took a leave of absence from practicing law to give acting and dancing and writing and generally being an artiste a shot. That was a spectacular failure, and not for lack of trying. I got to be an extra -- excuse me, a "background actor" -- on "Whoopi" and in "The Manchurian Candidate", and I did some student films that will never see the light of day and that were presided over by gangly 19-year olds who could barely operate a camera, and then I had the pleasure of getting hit on by a wannabe director who turned out to be a complete lunatic and ended up going on a shooting rampage in the Village some months later.

So that was fun.

Then I decided to apply to grad school to get a PhD in History (well, at first I wanted to get one in psychology since I really should have been a therapist from the get-go, but then I realized I would have to get a post-bac degree since I don't have any psych credentials; so instead I settled on History, which was my undergrad major and I figured academia would be a good fit for me, blah blah).

I did extremely well on the GRE (much to my surprise, since there was, like, trig and junk on there, and it's not like I do any math...EVER), scared up some letters of rec from some prestigious profs, churned out application essays and rounded up writing samples, and then went and visited all these schools and met these great professors and grad students, and everyone seemed to think I would handily gain admission to the top programs and do very well. And then? I didn't get in. ANYWHERE.

Then there was a whole disaster where we decided to rent an apartment that we thought we liked, but when the prior tenant moved out and we were getting ready to move in, we went back to see it again and it turned out to be an UTTER CRAPHOLE. It was the weirdest thing; when we saw it initially, it was all cozy and charming -- exposed brick, fireplace, little office/guest bedroom -- and then when we saw it empty for the first time (after we'd signed the lease, of course), it had been transformed into this cramped, dark, dirty, dingy travesty of an apartment. So we panicked and spent a load of time and money trying to get out of the lease while also rushing about to find somewhere else to live, and GEH, it was a nightmare.

After I went back to the firm (see above re: artistic FAIL), we decided to embrace the American dream and buy our first home. We went into contract on our apartment in the fall of 2005, only to have the real estate market start to sag pretty much immediately thereafter -- I mean literally the WEEK AFTER we signed the contract and locked in our purchase price, the New York Times started screeching about how it was the worst POSSIBLE time to buy and the bubble was about to burst and anyone with any sense at all would rent, not buy.

We do love the apartment -- especially now that we've poured a lot of dough into renovating the kitchen and bathrooms (another series of nightmares) -- but there's still that drifting anxiety about whether we're going to be left holding the bag when/if the economy tanks even more than it already has.

And then there have been all of our hilariously awful travel stories -- the horrific trip to Spain with our lost luggage and 36 hours of travel; the canceled flights for our trip to Mexico; the rainstorms that trapped us in Atlanta last summer; the many, many delays and scheduling errors and the like. We can't even do VACATION right.

Well, and then there's the last two-plus years. That story has a chance to redeem itself. Which I hope it does, SOON.

Of course, amid all of this there have been moments of great joy and plenty of small daily pleasures (ew, I kind of hate the word "pleasures") and I have lots to be thankful for (maybe I'll write about that tomorrow). I just think that we've earned a break -- which doesn't seem to be forthcoming at the moment, but I hope hope hope is right around the corner.

Comments

If you sit down and think of all the negatives, you can always fill up a few pages. You do indeed deserve a break from the b.s. of life. I think your time is CLOSE, my dear.

Posted by: Danielle-lee | November 26, 2008 at 02:34 PM