Getting Centered

Somehow, going home (albeit for a brief moment of time) helps me get centered. And, at the same time, it can make me "off-center," in that family issues must be dealt with. My father died a few years ago. His death, and everything that occurred around it, was traumatic. I will be visiting my father's grave, a grave that can be found in a tiny cemetery dating from the 1800's and which is renowned among "ghost watchers." This fact alone is particularly ironic given my father's belief that when one died, one was subsumed solely into the memory of the people one knew; that there was no spirit and soul. But this is not my belief...

I digress...I am going home to visit my family and to tell them that I am beginning another marathon run at the bar examination in July 2010. That I must see all my family and let them know that I love them, for when I return I will be singularly focused at earning an income and using all other available time to study for the bar.

When I go home, I will spend those few waking hours, before family members arise, nursing my coffee and enjoying the quiet to develop my study calendar.

I'm taking my MBE books with me and my flash cards; I will be developing a flash card for each MBE question that I missed and why. I will do a quick review of my flash cards the following morning to "burn" the knowledge into long-term memory so that answering the MBE's becomes familiar territory.

Having met with a bar tutor, a favorite of a friend of mine from law school, I will be probing into the materials he provided, and attempting to drum up sufficient financial resources to retain him. At the same time, I need to squirrel away enough resources to stop working in mid-May so that I can concentrate on one thing only - honing my test-taking technique. I hope that I can do this with a tutor; if not I will need to do it alone.

I've decided NOT to concentrate on reading Convisor or the Bar Bri phone books. I spent too much time re-learning the law during my first marathon exam session. I've decided to focus on 1) studying the bar examiners techniques by analyzing and mapping out each of the exams posted on the California bar examiner's Web site, and 2) to do the same for the MBE's.

I commit to more practice, practice of the bar exam essays and the performance tests; I will need critical feedback to ensure that I meet the examiner's standards. I will need to write each practice essay during the allotted time until the essays and PT's also become familiar territory.

Finally, I hope to retain a hypnotist used by one of the attorneys whom I now support and who passed the California bar exam on her second attempt. Using visualization techniques and hypnotherapy, she chased her self-doubts away and replaced them the belief that she, like the Little Red Engine, could pass the bar exam when she walked into that room for the second time.

I sit here, this morning, in my rented room looking out onto an overgrown garden lush with green and I think that I am very lucky to be sitting here…

At an older age, I am still filled with dreams of a new life and new career…

My ultimate goal is to become a judge in Superior Court. . .

While many younger, soon-to-be attorneys may dream about sitting enrobed on the bench of the Supreme Court, I shall be happy to achieve my modest dreams….

And to build the house that my father designed…and one which I’d like to run my practice out of…

And, perhaps, someday I will see one of my stories published…

A pent-up writer instead writes to you of her dreams of becoming an attorney…

A path that I think that I began moving toward all my life but which I was not ready to assume until now...

All things in good time.

Taking the Well Traveled Road?

Dear Fellow Bar Exam Takers:

I've come to that fork in the road, the one made famous by Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken." Do you know it?

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

As I attended a holiday party for an attorney whom I worked for, and after having won his cases that had been continued for nearly a year for a pure lack of due diligence, I was introduced as a "litigation paralegal" to the guests while his intern was introduced as a "future law school student." The term, "paralegal," had the immediate effect of isolating me from the attorneys in the room, one of whom I had mentored in law school. I watched while the attorneys flocked around the intern, pretty and with her freshly-minted B.A., buzz around her with advice.

I found myself serving appetizers and drinks to these attorneys, a shadowy outsider. But, then the attorney whom I had mentored in law school engaged me in conversation and complimented me for winning my first argument in the California Court of Appeals. He took me aside and said, "Don't be discouraged. I didn't pass the first bar exam, either. I got a great tutor and I learned what I did wrong and what I needed to do right. I passed the bar exam the second time."

And, then another attorney, one who graduated from a Ivy league school and whom I did not know, approached me, quietly, and took me aside and confessed that HE did not pass the bar exam the first time and that I was in good company. He encouraged me to dust off the books, and begin anew.

That moment was my fork in the road…

Last August, I found myself living in a room in a friend's house, my belongings in storage, working two long-term positions, 7-days per week, one where my loyalty was dismissed for lack of a license, and the other where my loyalty was returned with appreciation.

I left my $15.00 per hour job after 5-months, a job where I had spent nights and weekends, burning the midnight oil, with pure passion for the law, applying my business skills and MBA toward building a new practice for the attorney.

Having taken a hiatus from the bar exam, and worked a schedule that would exhaust many, I now must squarely face my own demons and rise to meet the challenge of the exam again, as I have met and succeeded in many challenges before.

I pledge to you that I WILL succeed again. . .on the July 2010 bar exam.

And a confession -- I took the MPRE three times. The 3rd time, I put the rule books away and simply practiced a few hundred MPRE questions, making flash cards for each question that I missed and why. I listened to the free PLI lecture and did the workshops. And, that was all.

I walked in to the exam --with confidence--and passed with a score of 103 when I had failed with previous scores of 79 and 62.

I make one final pledge: I pledge to serve my clients, when I am an attorney, with respect, diligence, and with empathy. I pledge to serve my profession with a passion for the law, for justice, and to treat my employees with respect for their career choices and for their contributions.

I can’t wait to be a licensed attorney, can you?