Working Titles for my Pregnant Autobiography

Please imagine each of these with a colon after it saying “The True Story of the Life of a Pregnant Lawyer”.

Lint-Rolling My Belly

Can Yoga Pants Count as Work Clothes? They Are Black Pants, After All

If Someone Doesn’t Refill the Candy Jar in the Break Room, I Will Scream

Don’t You Dare Tell Me the Bathroom is Out of Order Temporarily

I’m Never Wearing These Heels Again

Ordering Cheezits Delivered to My Desk

Your Brief is So Bad, It Literally Made Me Throw Up, or Maybe It Was Morning Sickness, But Probably Your Brief

You Really Ordered Sushi for Our All-Office Lunch?

If I Can’t Drink Coffee, Don’t Expect This Memo to Be Good

Can’t Quite Reach My Keyboard

Work Clothes

It’s a sad truth that a lot of my decision to become a lawyer was motivated by Legally Blonde.*  Wearing pink, practicing law, and teaching everyone about gender discrimination: that was the dream.

For awhile I was pretty pleased to be at least 1 for 3 on that - practicing law.  And the truth is, I don't have the fashion stamina of our fictional friend Elle.  I didn't go to class in law school in designer dresses; I went in yoga clothes regardless of whether I was going to pretend to do yoga that day.

In sum, I like style but I’m horribly inattentive to it. I generally treat it about the same as my high school boyfriend treated me - sometimes I spend time on it but other times I completely forget about it because I’m off playing laser tag with my friends.  (This is the most accurate metaphor I’ve ever created, and I was a poetry major.)

So I go through these swings, particularly at work. I’ll have times when the only thing I wear to work is the work pants I bought because while being cut like work pants, they are actually pretty much made out of black sweatpants fabric. I have a similar skirt that I bought at Costco for $12 which is, again, made of sweatpants fabric.  Maybe literally, though I'm not sure.  Okay, okay, I actually have two sweatpants-skirts: one in gray and one in black. I wear them a lot. I have five plain white blouses. I have some long-sleeved t-shirts with just enough detail on them for me to I call them "work shirts" and wear them to work, silently daring anyone to call me on it.

At some point in the last year (and after having spent my first year out of school wearing a boring suit every day) I decided to switch it up. So now there are select times when I decide to wear very impractical things that I stubbornly decided are what a lawyer should look like, mixed in with the fact that I actually hate how boring lawyers look.

N.B. Most of my coworkers are dudes and you can’t tell them apart other than by hair color/quantity because they are all wearing the same grey pants and blue or white work shirt. They actually get kind of mad when I point out when two or more of them are wearing the exact same outfit on any given day. "Hey, you guys match!" It’s a fun game for me.  

Question:  If you line up three in a row of them wearing the same outfit, will they explode into points of light, vanish, and award points like in the jewel game on my phone?

Whether I’m dressing stylishly or not is, I think, inversely proportionate to the number of billable hours I worked three days before.

And when I do decide to hang out with style, I go in unique directions. For instance, my new work pants are awesome wide-legged white pants with pockets (a la Veronica Corningstone)...

which I recently wore with a baby-pink ruffled shirt and a beige lace cardigan and a belt with a bow on it. I looked a little like Louis Quatorze via 1973:

 Yesterday I dressed like I was going to a Republican summer picnic campaign fundraiser - ie red sleeveless dress under a white linen blouse with tan sandals. I have a pink, blue, and green flowered blouse with a black sequined collar; several enormous statement necklaces I wear like ties (and occasionally I will just jack Husband’s actual ties and wear those, since they’re very cute and he never wears them); varying dresses in teal, hot pink, and patterns.

This whole situation is aided and abetted by my grandma, who is a very stylish former model who likes to buy clothes that are too big for her and then give them to me. It’s from her I got my leopard-print silk blouse and the red sleeveless dress and the bright yellow blazer.

I think it’s my one rebellion against the severe gray-panted, white-walled, blond-wood office aesthetic I live in where we get e-mails from the office manager instructing us to put plastic lids on our ceramic coffee mugs to keep from spilling coffee on the coffee-colored carpet. If I’m going to wear heels to work, they are going to be my hot-pink patent leather ones.**

...or my beige 4-inch-heeled Mary Janes. Or the gray Cuban heels. I have black pumps (also with four inch heels - heh) but those are only for court, and no one ever takes me to court. So there.

The net result of my swings in style is that I alternate between excessively boring and functional and borderline caricature of a lady lawyer. So I dress, on average, like a usual attorney - the standard deviation’s just higher than you’d expect.

* It came out when I was in 8th grade.  Like that's an excuse.

** Sassy came to visit last week and when she drove up she looked at my outfit (black blouse, black mesh eyelet overskirt over a hot pink underskirt, hot pink heels), she marveled, “Did you wear that to work today? Wearing pink and lawyering? You are living the dream!” Sassy always makes me feel better about my life decisions.

The Narrator

I love generating narratives.

For example, I have always wanted to buy a Roomba and a Scooba, and program the Roomba to vacuum the carpet parts of the floor, and the Scooba to wash the hard parts of the floor, and then name the Roomba Romeo and the Scooba Juliet and they could have this forbidden love, divided by the invisible boundary and their neverending task to clean only their own parts of the floor.

And of course I love scripted TV (other people generate good narratives too!) but I like reality TV for the opportunity it gives me to impose my own narratives on what I’m seeing. Reality TV editors are somewhat constrained - they have to pick and choose from the material they get from the participants. Often, this means more narrative suggestion rather than being INFORMED OF FACTS LOUDLY BY THE SCRIPT. This is a barely-exaggerated example from a TV show I actually quite like:

Bad Agent: Why are you so mad at me?
Good Agent: You are HYDRA! Which, in case you haven’t been watching the show or the tie-in movies or reading the comic book series, is an EVIL organization that was founded by Nazis! Including [insert name of Nazi character here]! So I am mad at you due to that! National Socialism not cool!
Bad Agent: But I want to kiss you. Due to my romantic feelings I have. For you, I should specify.

With reality TV having no explicit script, I have the opportunity to imagine and project onto these hapless figures on my TV screen.

Case in point: I became obsessed with Dancing with the Stars* this season, which I started watching because a) dancing rules and b) they did a Disney episode, so I had to watch it. But I kept watching for the narrative I got to project onto it, which was that a certain supermodel-dating male dance professional had unexpectedly fallen in love with a certain lady Olympian ice dancer and could not figure out to manage his feelings other than to 1) stare at her intensely, 2) give fierce interviews about how she is the best dancer in the competition and everyone must know it, and 3) choreograph insanely torrid dance numbers about problematic love stories.

Liz: “Look at him! Look at how he is staring at her like he is the Phantom of the Opera and he wants to marry her and lock her away forever in his dungeon palace underneath Paris!”
Husband: “mmhmm.” clicks on e-mail
Liz: “Are you even watching this with me right now?”

three minutes later

Liz: “Look at how she is like the only thing that soothes him when he starts raging about their samba scores?”
Husband: “Hrmmm.”
Liz: “Your e-mails canNOT be this interesting.”

Thus when the finale of Dancing aired on Tuesday night, I was definitely interested to see if Said Olympian and Said Danceman won** (because they were unquestionably the best dancers) but I was MORE interested to see if my imposed narrative would prevail: if he would be forced to acknowledge that, even though she wasn’t a leggy blonde, that the tiny fairylike ice princess had completely stolen his evil Russian heart.

Incidentally, there is so little adjustment needed to make this story a feature-length musical.

Perhaps I’m relying on shipping reality TV participants for narrative fix these day because now that I’m older and out of school, I get less of this material from the people in my own life. At school there’s always a good chance that someone has a story going on - when there are enough people thrown together for long enough, someone is going to fall in unrequited love with someone, or develop a deep animosity to someone, or have a secret about someone that they can’t admit. There’s something going on. But my own personal life has become, for the most part, very uninterestingly happy (it’s why the fairy tale doesn’t bother describing in detail the “happily ever after” bit). My conflicts these days are largely internal:

• Liz vs. Liz’s Desire to Eat Cookie Dough For Dinner
• Liz’s Budget vs. Liz’s Preoccupation With “Free” With Purchase Makeup Samples
• Liz’s Job vs. Liz’s Wish She Was a Sitcom Writer, or, While We’re Wishing, Sitcom Star
• Etc.

And my friends are all very mature people with children and careers and other qualities that make me a highly unsuitable companion for them and make it difficult to craft short-term narratives about their lives. (Without them getting mad at me for fabricating things. Heh.)

This is why my favorite time of year at work is the summer when we get a bunch of interns who are still in school. Let me tell you that the narrative potential of all my coworkers is LOW. We are an extremely boring bunch. A good percentage a married; an even higher percentage are married to their work; and if anyone is dating each other, they are keeping it entirely secret, which would make sense in light of the fact that lawyers are very careful about sexual harassment. It’s terrible. No material at all.

But the interns! They are still young and in school and there is always the potential that two of them will start dating each other, and even if they try to keep it secret they will fail. Or one of them will develop a crush on another one, and that one will like a different one. Really, that any of them might do anything human at all would be a huge ramp up. Ideally, something like this would happen:

The odds are low based on demographics alone - and even fledgling lawyers have a much higher-than-average ability to rein it in and act professional - but a bored gal can dream. At least until I can afford two expensive cleaning robots and a seamstress to sew tiny Elizabethan outfits for them, I need something to narrate about.

*Huh, isn’t ABC doing very poorly in the network ratings these days? I may be single-handedly keeping them afloat with my viewing habits.

**Of course they won. Because they were the best. And because I voted for them 10 times like a crazed teenybopper watching The Voice. I have no shame.

Functional Listmaking

When we told our realtor we wanted to make an offer on the red house, she was excited for us and supportive. She thought it was a good house for us and that we could get it.

So it just came down to the question that drives all economic decisions: how much? And unlike with buying a granola bar, the answer wasn’t a constant set by Safeway but the result of a multivariate equation. As I explained before, in this Very Special Real Estate Market, you have to pick a number you want to offer. And whereas in Normal Places, if the asking price is $p, you might offer $p - x where x is a function of number of likely other offers, amount of time the house has been on the market, and any repairs or renovations you might need to do.

‘Round these here parts, your offer is more like $p + y, where y is also a functional of likely other offers, plus some other stuff, like the fact that the weather was nice on the day of the open house and what the seller’s realtor’s horoscope will say in three weeks and then a fixed but unknown arbitrary positive number because it sucks to be you.

It feels like witchcraft and I don’t believe in witches. I do believe in negotiation. I hadn’t believed that I was going to need to negotiate with my own realtor.

The negotiation was precipitated by the fact that the $y I wanted to add to $p (we’ll call my number $yLiz, with apologies that I can't figure out how to get Blogger to do superscripts) was far lower than the $y she thought we needed to add to get the place (we’ll call that $yRealtor). In fact, rather alarmingly, her idea of what $y should be was almost twice as big as my idea of what it should be.

The disparity didn't surprise me. There is an inherent difference between her incentives and mine - while she was extremely helpful, it was never going to be coming out of her pocket at the end of the day. And there was the, ahem, additional factor that she knew that I hadn’t exactly been Ms. Cucumber while we were at the open house.

But I think she wasn’t aware of the fact that a lot of my enthusiasm was generated by the fact that unlike most sane human beings (who watch television shows like, I dunno, what are the cool kids watching these days? Mad Men? Man, how I loathe that show), I have inoculated myself against fear of renovation by near-incessant viewings of Property Brothers, Flip or Flop, Love It or List It, and other key HGTV renovation shows. In other words, I’m far less likely than the Average Jen to be scared of a little orange paint and a melange of 1940s tile jobs.

So I sat down to negotiate with my own realtor and redeem myself as a Collected Professional Lady in the eyes of my dear and beleaguered Husband. And there’s one skill I learned in law school (I think by accident - I don’t think anyone taught us this) that comes in handy more often than you think. It works like this:

Take out a yellow pad of paper. Take out a pen. and start making a list of all the problems your opponent has right in front of them. If you’re really good at this, you can make the list while still staring them in the eye. And as it happens, I’m really good. (It helps that when you fold back the pages on a legal pad that the person across the table from you can’t see if your list is cascading down the page sideways because you’re not looking where you’re writing).

After I did that, she caved. She said that when she went to them with the offer, she could point out that we had really done the math and that we knew how much it needed ot be put into it and that our offer was very reasonable. And then she said she’d go draw up the paperwork.

Something that feels like a spa-level luxury to this lawyer: having someone else do the paperwork for you.
As she went to get the paperwork, Husband offered casually, “Oh, by the way, I’m going to be out of the country for the next week.”

She stopped walking and turned around. “You’re leaving the country while you try to put an offer on a house?”

Husband answered, “Yeah, I have work. Why? Liz will be here, she can handle anything you need.”

The realtor looked at him, then at me, then at the list on the table, then back at me with an expression I would describe as “retreating to a mental safe house.”

I tried to give her my best non-diabolical smile, but I think it’s gotten rusty.

----------------

We got the house.  Including an old ladder and some other old stuff that was in the garage, to the great delight of Husband.  It's the most grown-up thing we've ever done.

-----------------

The start of the closing process was pretty straightforward, in fact. It did require signing each of our names to approximately twelve kazillion pieces of paper (each).  But we had a strategy for the rest of it, and by a strategy, I mean a happy accident:

“Oh, hey, realtor/title people/mortage people: we’ll be in Hawaii during most of the closing period.”

The resulting consternation was extreme, despite the fact that our realtor should have known we apparently don’t respect whatever secret rule exists that whilst purchasing a house, you must remain within 50 miles of said house for the entire process. Our realtor, mortagee, and title person all could not believe that we were going AWAY. To a FAR-OFF ISLAND. During the CLOSING PROCESS?!?!?!?!?!!!!!

“Well, what do you need us here for?”

What if you need to sign/see/hear/be talked at about/re-sign something?

“You can call either of us on our cell phone. Or you can e-mail us if we need to sign something. We’ll scan it back. They have Internet there. It’s America.”

...but! but! BUT…

“It’ll be fine.”

I don’t know if we were wildly lucky. I don’t know if normally everything does come crashing to a halt if you vacation during your real estate transaction. I do know that I did have to sign a jillion documents what felt like seven times each, and that I was signing and scanning like I was on a personal quest to endurance-test the scanner. But despite the fact that we left town for half of our two-week closing, everything was fine.

And we came back from our vacation to our very own home.

A Functional Adult's Real Life Is Not the Stuff of TV

When I was fifteen years old, I decided to become a lawyer. Actually, that’s a bit of a stretch---when I was fifteen, my parents informed me that I should become a lawyer because “If you’re going to argue all day, you might as well get paid for it.” To my ears, it was the first reasonable thing they had said in a solid two years. And I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to do anything more than argue. I felt a strong and constant need to vocalize my discontent with approximately everything. 

In college, being a lawyer continued to seem like a good idea. A pretentious boyfriend made it sound very elite, which comported with the certain knowledge I possessed (from television) that all lawyers are intellectual and rich and important. This all sounded fantastic to someone who was not particularly any of the above. Even if I wasn’t intellectual, I was smart and had an only child’s habit of getting what I wanted.

As soon as the law school acceptance letters started rolling in, I had my future life perfectly imagined.

In all vignettes below: hair is twice as long, voluminous, and shiny. Suit made by a designer I haven’t year heard of, but would have by then. No, suit custom made by a secret designer only celebrities have heard of. Very high heels that are somehow comfortable.

Future life scene #1:

A wood-paneled courtroom. Hushed tension. Twelve jurors leaning forward, wide-eyed. I am standing before them all, arm sympathetically stretched toward a handsome brunette man sitting at a table.

Liz: ...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the finally piece of proof that definitively proves what you already know to be true, deep down in your hearts - this man is absolutely innocent.



Handsome Brunette Man: [nods sadly, serious look in his eyes]

Judge: Jurors, you must now deliberate.

The jury looks at each other, each nodding with conviction.

Jury foreman: That’s okay, your honor, we all already agree. Our verdict is: NOT GUILTY.

The courtroom erupts in cheers! A sour-faced prosecutor angrily grabs his ugly briefcase.

HBM: Liz, you’ve saved my life! How can I thank you?

Liz: [With a wink] How about you let me take you to a celebratory dinner?

Future life scene #2:

Liz, standing amidst a bunch of be-suited businessmen.

Liz: And that’s when I said to him, haven’t you ever been to Taipei before?

The entire group laughs raucously.

Businessman 1: [wheezing] That’s the funniest story I’ve ever heard!

Businessman 2: I don’t think we need to hear any more. Liz: we want you to handle ALL of our cases from now on.

Suddenly there is champagne:

Businessman 3: Let’s toast!

Liz: [In Mandarin] To knowing your way around a courtroom: and Asia!

Everyone laughs uproariously again while clinking glasses.

Future Life Scene #3:

Liz: ... and that's the main takeaway your viewers should take away from this piece of legislation.

Anchor: Thanks SO much, Liz. As always, it's been a complete pleasure having you on our show. Ladies and gentlemen, renowned legal scholar and philanthropist, Liz.

--

My real life does not look like that.

Real scene from my actual life #1:

Liz, in a wrinkled dress shirt, pants, and black flats that are showing wear is hunched over in a desk chair, staring at a computer. The desk is covered in piles of paper. There is a dirty plate on top of one pile with the crumbs of a poptart. Fifteen empty cans of Diet Dr. Pepper also festoon the area. A plant is dead.

Liz is slowly clicking a mouse, once every few seconds or so, without changing position.

Liz: Huh.




Real scene from my actual life #2:

Liz is sitting at an airport. Behind her, a woman is loudly complaining to a Visa representative on the phone about a problem with her credit card. A toddler runs through the terminal, stops abruptly, and starts screaming as his mother rushes over. Two women sit down next to Liz and one starts loudly teaching the older one how to use an enormous smartphone, or so it seems because they are speaking Chinese. A watch starts beeping and no one turns it off. The mother removes the toddler to be near other toddlers, but his screaming sets them off as well.

Liz: [muttering] Why can’t I get wifi here?

Airline agent : Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you headed to Phoenix, we want to announce that there’s been another delay. We do have a pilot now, but due to weather concerns en route we’ll be delayed another hour. Thank you for your patience!

Real scene from my actual life #3:

Liz is finally on the plane in a tiny seat. She pulls out her laptop to try to work on the small tray table. she then awkwardly reaches below it to try to get a manila file folder with a stack of papers in it.

The guy in front of her leans his seat back so far he hits her in the knees and pushes her laptop half shut.

The flight attendant comes by and dumps a glass of water on her arm.

Flight attendant [trilling]: Oops, sorry!

The same toddler starts screaming.

The differences between my imagined glamorous life as a lawyer and my actual life as a lawyer are, shall we say, rather stark. I’ve only ever met one client in person. Not my client, the client of a partner older than my dad. The client of a partner who then shuttled me away after I just awkwardly said, “Hello.” I haven’t been in a courtroom since I started working.

What I have done is gained several repetitive stress injuries. I have also spent long days reading literally thousand of documents until my brain can’t remember why I’m reading them. The big ol’ salary that looked so enticing to College Liz is consumed by paying for the law degree that earned it, as well as an absurd dry cleaning bill because it is important that all of my work clothes be both crappy and non-machine-washable.

It's enough to make you think that the TV shows about lawyers aren't accurate, somehow.  Dear career-impressionable teenaged readers: consider yourself forewarned.

A Functional Adult: EMPLOYED.

Here’s the thing about pretending to be a functional adult: eventually, it catches up to you.  Like how back in the 9^th grade, I was really good friends with this girl Anaheim, and I used to say “Oh my gosh” pretty frequently, and Anaheim started saying it too to make fun of me, but she said it so many times that she stopped saying it mockingly and was just saying it seriously.  See also everything hipsters have done, ever.  (Low hanging fruit, people: one must grab it before a bird eats it.)

So… that kind of happened to me.  Like one fine day I was just writing a blog about how I was occasionally trying to be a real grownup, not quite sarcastically, but more as a joke, like if you handed your toddler a briefcase and put a fedora on him, how that would be pretty funny?  Especially if you really had a toddler and perhaps would be a little low on regular adult conversation?  That was me, being an adult.  Really just a toddler with a briefcase.

Except somehow… I actually use a briefcase now.  Okay, it’s a big purse that husband gave me for Christmas and it smells AMAZING like the most succulent of cowskins, but I still put a laptop in it and pads of paper with notes on it and business cards and pens that say Marriott on them.

Yeah.  I have a Real Job.  It happened awhile ago.  Maybe you noticed the steady decline of words in this blog.

Here are the gains and losses I have experienced thus far of said Real Job:

Gains:

·         Income

·         An office

·         Business cards with my name on it

·         A big computer monitor, though I had to buy it myself *eye roll*

·         A  coffee habit

·         An online shopping habit

·         A fear of my blog being read by my coworkers

Losses:

·         Time

·         My immune system

·         Invitations to hang out with my name on them

·         Eyesight quality

·         Sleep

·         Time to wear all the shoes I keep ordering

·         Time to write my blog

So on net…. Something?  Something?  Mostly I have lost all conversational topics that are not, Hey, My Work is Boring In This Particular Direction Today, Man Amiright.  Which is okay when talking to my coworkers, who definitely get it,  but less so when talking to civilians who just stare at me and wonder aloud why I am holding my eyes open so wide.

So the new task is to find a way to make it all more interesting.  So far, the only thing I have come up with is extreme gossiping, but it’s working really poorly given that all of my coworkers are just nice normal people who are neither romancing each other nor carrying Deep Terrible Secrets.  They all just go to work, and then afterwards sort of hang out and watch TV in the evenings.  Which gives me nothing, because if I wanted to gossip about THAT I could very well TALK ABOUT MYSELF.

So I’m open to suggestions here.  How do I undo the fact that I may have accidentally become some sort of adult?