June 10, 2004
Legal Papyrus
A few days ago I started my new internship at Legal Aid. My job is essentially odds and ends, putting together layouts for issues and combining brochures. Essentially, all the public relations stuff I can stand without having to actually interact with the public.
I think my official title is "clerk." So yay, I am a law clerk without even being pre-law, let alone going to law school.
For the most part, I love it. Partially due to me being an only child, my interaction with adults has always been a little bit better than my socialization with my own peers. In some ways, the people I am working with there are more similar to me than my peers. One lawyer also loves Sandra Cisneros and loaned me his copy of Loose Woman. He also wants to read my lit paper on The House on Mango Street and we even discussed Ayn Rand some. It was almost eery how he kept on rattling off my obsessions.
We even got to have a discussion about how horrible SUVs are! In his opinion, they should be outlawed altogether. I am not quite that severe, but it is always fun to listen to someone more radical than I am. It makes me feel moderate.
One of the housing attorneys is like a grown-up version of one of my friends from Northwestern. She was immediately extremely nice. "You're giggly, I like you."
I share an office with another clerk, Kara, and we are the only clerks who get our own laptops, which is obviously making one of the other clerks, Gabe, start to chop at the bit. Kara went around introducing me to everyone and quickly convinced me to join the volleyball team that might be started for afterwork activity. Her boss, Kate, asked me if I was good at volleyball over lunch and I shrugged and said, "Good enough."
The only difficult part is adjusting to my new schedule and not feeling completely wiped from it all, as I have for the past three days, especially when I had to go to childcare afterwards. I just want enough energy to do some writing and reading each night. I am going to need energy to get through bigger chunks of Crime and Punishment, though I think the book might be giving me strange dreams.
(I had a dream that I asked to be abused or something.)
Grad parties are not improving my energy levels much, either. And with that, I must write out the extremely cut cards I just purchased. Note to self: don't go to Papyrus again, I dropped nearly $40 on cards and thank you notes. Eeek.
Love,
Mandy