September 25, 2004

before i get to how rad my new colleagues at the defender association are, let me back up a bit and hit on a few things related to the end of my clerkship, since i found myself reflecting on that a bit today in a fitting room at the gap.

i wrapped up my clerkship on august 27, which, not surprisingly, ended up being a very emotional day. the night before, my judge took me and my co-clerk, whom we'll call "p.v.", out to dinner at morimoto. the three of us ate amazing food, drank some wine, talked, lauged, and generally had a blast together. we became extremely close over the course of our year together, which is especially cool if you understand who my judge was.

on our last day, the judge sat down with each of us alone to talk about our work, give us advice, and so on. when i sat down with her, we mostly just talked about broadway musicals (as we had in my initial interview with her about 2 1/2 years earlier), because every time we talked about me leaving we both started to cry. we had an amazing relationship, to say the least. she was a wonderful mentor and friend, and on top of that she's cool as hell.

after i sat down for cryfest number 1 with her, i went to p.v.'s office and talked to him. that quickly turned into cryfest number 2. we spent a ton of time together during the past year, and he is now one of my closest friends. he has an uncanny ability to know what i'm going to say before i say it. he's also one of the funniest people i've ever met, and he's incredibly smart about almost everything. unfortunately, he's moving to d.c. to work at a law firm there in november. at the moment, he's travelling around the world, courtesy of the enormous clerkship bonus he received from his firm. right now, he should be in india.

but i digress. my point was that my goodbye chat with p.v. on our last day of work was cryfest number 2. number 3 came when i said goodbye to the secretaries. and number 4, which was the last one, came when i called my mom that night to tell her about my day. before i called her, i had enjoyed a few glasses of wine, so that had the effect of amplifying things a bit for cryfest number 4. what a mess.

but the crying was the good kind of crying (and believe me, i'm familiar with the other kind). it would have sucked to leave the office for the last time and feel like i wouldn't miss anyone, or like none of them had had a significant impact on my life. i really couldn't have asked for a better experience. (well, unless maybe they had paid me three times my salary, or if we could have maybe found a reasoned way to legally allow the defendant in the last case that was assigned to me avoid a 2+ year jail sentence).

anyway, this is all on my mind because a song that came on in the gap today reminded me of some time i spent with p.v. and the judge in ocean city, nj, a few months ago, and that made me miss them. just in case you were at a loss as to why i would babble on and on about this now.

moving right along, i went out yesterday after work with my new co-workers and some of the other attorneys from our office. we went to a bar called oscar's, which is a total dive near our office that the defenders apparently frequent due to the extreme cheapness of the beer. at first glance it appears to be shadester 6000, and it is, but good times were had by all (and will be many more times in the future, i'm sure). around 6 pm, an old dude comes in and djs, and he plays pretty much anything you can think of. so we drank, we danced in the one aisle, and it was good times. we boogied to "tipsy," which is a song that i simply cannot get enough of, for some strange reason ("one, here comes the two to the three to the four..."). one guy who has been there for 3 years showed us his "defender" tattoo. another guy bought everyone in our new class tequila shots. someone requested "i want your sex" and dedicated it to me, which was amusing, if not a bit startling. one woman who started last year licked my friend's ear, and another woman who also started last year grabbed my roommate's breast. some sort of hazing, i guess. they're a friendly group.

on an unrelated note in closing, i'm thinking about shutting down this little online diary operation for good, notwithstanding the astounding volume of hits this page gets on a daily basis. one reason is that my roommate and i are getting rid of our dsl sometime in the next month. it's an unnecessary expense that our public defender salaries may not permit us to continue paying. another reason is that i don't think i need it anymore. one of the forces that motivates me to write on here is not necessarily a healthy one, and i might be better off pulling the plug on it for good.

we'll see. i have to contemplate that a bit more before i decide. i don't want to be accused of making a rash decision -- after all, that's what got bradford fired on the apprentice in what was definitely the most dramatic boardroom yet...

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