Someone has to pay for the Revolution

Embarcadero an hour before sunrise

The South African time difference meant that we were at work at 6:40 am to interview a client, scurrying around in the darkness because the ACLU building's lights don't work before the ass crack of dawn. If it had been an episode of the X-Files, Eugene Tooms would have waited until I got settled in with my tea and Skype before consuming livers. Yesterday was the four-month mark since starting at ORAM, and I'm still excited to go to work every day, which either means it's a great gig, or I have a dopamine irregularity/mood disorder.

Public interest lawyering really can be all kinds of awesome, and it's funny to think that it could all have been very different if the economy hadn't swirled into the toilet. As in some poor law firm may have been deceived sufficiently or had just enough free associate spaces to say, "Sure, we'll take an extra weirdo."

Fresh out of a Labor Union Summer with the AFL-CIO, I had put myself through at least fifty on-campus screener interviews and a dozen callback ones. At most of these talks, they'd flip through my resume of public interest red flags and ask me to defend why I'd spent my summer with a labor union, why I feel like the firm's pro bono program would be enough to "satiate my public interest spirit" (direct quote). Sometimes, I'd run into someone who would proactively defend why they were now second-year associates. My favorite line was an assertion that "someone has to pay for the Revolution." Not that I have anything against firm life, but somehow it just didn't work out (Firms, it's not you, it's me.). Throughout it, I did my usual Try-Hard Bear thing: I hustled myself through Lavender Law's OCI, followed up on any and all personal connections, etc. In the end, I didn't get a single offer, and I scrambled to chase the public interest jobs that I should have been hunting down in the first place. Stormy times indeed.

This is certainly the gray matter doing its sneaky thing by smoothing out all the inconsistencies along the way, but it seems to have worked out so far. Where I end up next is thankfully a question I can delay for a while, and it's a relief to be off of the usual schedule where as soon as you land a one-year fellowship, you're already casting your resume back into the great dark seas.

YOLO artwork

Lois the Pie Queen

 Finally made it to Lois the Pie Queen for breakfast. I don't know why you would have fried chicken for breakfast, but it happened, and now I wonder why we don't usually have it. We got seated under the YOLO collage, and I again wondered why I haven't already moved to Oakland.

Especially when the BART stations get all glamm'd up:

After I took this shot, other BART denizens also whipped out their phones to take the same. It's disappointing to climb up into Oakland and expect Sapphire City, but I met some fun people to climb with at Great Western Power Station.

And to wrap up, here's a picture of Dinga with no context. 

Whatever you may be thinking about, he disapproves of it.