Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Note: Dearest friends, the following post comes on the heels of a tremendous amount of deep thought and emotional blood/sweat/tears. Since I announced that this year would be the year for law school, and that I’d have to make some tough decisions about what to do and where to go, I have received a staggering amount of comments, emails and phone calls offering advice. Some of you have known me for a long time; some of you are new friends. To say that I am gratified and moved by your concern and your care is to grossly understate the case. I thank everyone for caring enough to share their experiences and advice with me. Having said that, please know that Lloyd and I came to this decision after hours and days and months of talking and weighing and planning. We’ve made up our minds. We’re happy with, and excited by, our conclusion. It is entirely possible that, were you in our place, you would come to an entirely different conclusion, and think that ours is dangerous and ruinous. By all means, you are certainly entitled, nay, encouraged, to come to your own conclusion. But if I receive any incendiary commentary about how our conclusion is stupid and wrong and marriage-ruining—seriously, I am not exaggerating when I say that I have received email telling me just that—I’m going to cut it off at the knees. We have made our decision. If we change our minds, it will only be due to factors that affect us, and no one else. Thank you all, dear ones, for respecting our decision.
Additional note: This is *not* the official travelogue I keep promising. That one is on the way. Really.
Where does one begin? If that one is me, one begins with fits, starts and hiccups. Three times have I drafted an opening sentence; three times have I deleted it, muttering “no, no, no.” I returned home from California yesterday morning, bringing with me some brilliant things, all of which will be described in the lavish and overwritten style you have come to expect from PTMYB. (I also brought home a little sunburn on my chest and a mild head cold, which are somewhat less brilliant, but I have applied Lush Dream Cream to the former and Theraflu to the latter, and am now just fine for going out and playing in the fresh air with Lloyd, who is off from work this week.) So I’ll start with a teaser and a confession. Here’s the teaser:
This would be my adored and splendid hostess, Grace Davis, sliding down one of the neatest hidden gems of a city ever to be found, the Seward Street slides, a concrete slide situated in a lot between two buildings in the Diamond Heights/Castro area of San Francisco. There is a story to tell about this slide, and about the other wonders my dear friends shared with me so generously, but it will take me some time to tell, particularly since I also came home with 207 photos to sort and catalogue and dream over. So for now I will limit my observation to say that it was a clear joy and an unadulterated hoot to watch and listen to Grace as she rode down the slide on a piece of corrugate. On her first trip down, she cried out “ohmygodohmygodit’sfastIT’SFAST!,” and we’ve found a hundred reasons to say it ever since that moment. 
Did I ride down the slide myself? Nope, I didn’t. Even as I know how berserk this sounds, I’ll confess: I thought the contours of the slide were a bit narrow. I am not narrow. I was afraid that I would get stuck. Grace thinks I need to get over it and just ride the slide already. She’s right, of course. I do need to get over it, and I will.
Now for the confession: Whatever virtues I might have, patience is not one of them. (That clicking sound you might be hearing now is the sound of a thousand foreheads being smote by a thousand friends and readers. “Tonight’s contestant is Bakerina. Her chosen subject: That Which is Manifestly Obvious.") Every time I sit down, take a deep breath and get into the quiet writerly space, a noisy little gremlin pops into my head: “Come on, come on, get to the good stuff! Why are you writing about the taxi ride to the airport? When do we get to the news? You have news! Say it! Say it! Sayitisayitsayitsayit SAY IT.” It’s obnoxious, that gremlin, but it’s right: I do have news, and I don’t want to barrel breathlessly through a narrative that deserves full attention and care in an attempt to get to the good stuff. If I’d wanted to do that, I would be a scriptwriter for the adult film industry. (Cheez Whiz, that sounds like a setup for a joke.)
Dear friends, I am happy to announce that after a lot of discussion, trepidation, tears, laughter, questions, answers, travel and a liberal dose of crossed fingers, the geographic smackdown is over. Bay Area wins. Come August, I will officially matriculate at Santa Clara University School of Law.
Although I am thrilled with the decision, particularly since Lloyd and Momerina are thrilled right along with me, I hasten to add that this was not an easy decision to make. It was not a battle among unequal opponents. Northeastern is a terrific school in a terrific city with a singular law curriculum. If you are contemplating a law education in an East Coast city, I can, and will, recommend Northeastern with enthusiasm. I met some truly smart and funny and impressive people there, and yes, I regret that we will not be playing together in the fall. Likewise, the decision not to attend Pitt Law doesn’t come easily, either. If anything, that was one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make in this whole process. I received my undergraduate degree from Chatham College (now Chatham College for Women, the undergraduate school of Chatham University) in Pittsburgh. I adored the city then, I adore it still, and I know that I will feel more than a little pang when I visit my dear friend Sharon (who was my roommate at Chatham) when I visit Pittsburgh later this spring.
By now you’ve probably guessed that I am well-embedded in the concentrated urban milieu, and you would be right. You might also have guessed that the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are a far, far piece, both geographically and emotionally, from everything I have ever known. You’d be right there, too. You might think, further, that for me to pursue a strenuous education in a new place, I’d have to find the school in question to be pretty damn special—and there, dear friends, is your hat trick. I’m not only East-Coast-born-and-bred, I’m citified to the core. My family is from Philadelphia, a place embedded in my blood, bone and marrow. Even when I was growing up in the Poconos, a good three hours’ drive from Philadelphia, I still felt that Philadelphia was my true place, and that all this small-town nonsense was getting in the way of finding my authentic self. Neither Boston nor Pittsburgh are Philadelphia—I will assert until my dying day that East Coast cities are *not* interchangeable, and that they’re not all wishing they were New York City or Washington—but they do share enough of a common taproot that, with a little time and patience, one can find one’s feet and comfort zone pretty easily. Santa Clara (and San Jose and Santa Cruz and Redwood City and the other towns I visited last weekend) are a far, far piece from my own visceral landscape. (San Francisco, by virtue of its citified nature, comes closer, but the geography of the city is so unlike that of any city I have ever lived in or visited that it still counts for me as a completely new milieu.) The quality of light is unlike anything I have ever seen. The geographical markers, the vegetation, the very air itself is different, and I went into instant sensory overload, disoriented and enchanted all at once. It is spectacular, but it is not yet comfortable. It will be, though. I know it will.
Of course, brilliant weather and splendid food and lush vegetation and sunsets that break your heart open, while lovely, are not the stuff for which law firms look when you come to them with your spiffy new J.D. degree and your bar certification in hand. You still need a decent education, and based on what I saw on Law Preview Day, Santa Clara provides much, much more than a decent education: if the 3L students I met on Saturday are any indication, the education it provides is not decent, but magnificent. If my fellow 1Ls are anything like the crowd that was in the moot Ethics Law class in which I participated, I’m going to have to work hard to keep up with my peers. These people are *smart*. Why, no, I’m not intimidated. I’m challenged in a healthy manner. Really. (breathes into paper bag) Seriously, though, I was impressed, deeply, with the moot classes, the faculty lectures, the current students and the incoming students. And yes, I did have a moment of worry ("These people are too smart for me! I don’t belong here!"), but it turned almost instantly into something more exciting and, ultimately, powerful ("That was *cool*. I want to learn how to think like that"). I haven’t had that “I want to do that, too” moment since my restaurant externship after culinary school, when I saw pastry cooks bake cakes, freeze semifreddos and do complex chocolate work simultaneously, exhibiting the coolheaded grace of dancers, or air traffic controllers. As soon as I had that moment, felt that desire, I knew what my answer would be.
This is not to say that I felt any kind of finality, or certainty, at that moment. There was still plenty of wheel-spinning. ("What about not seeing Lloyd every weekend? What about the distance from my family? God, I miss Lloyd so much right now—what will this be like when we can’t see each other for six weeks at a time? What about all the flying? My god, I’m going to have to make peace with flying once and for all! [Those of you who’ve known me for a long time know that I’m not the most phlegmatic of flyers, and that “peace” and “flying” are often mutually exclusive where I’m concerned. That shit stops right now, though.] What if I want to quit? What if Lloyd wants me to quit? What if I end up alienating everybody I know and love? My god, my god. Maybe a beer would help.") Poor Grace was a witness to a lot of this wheel-spinning; for this, if for no other reason, she deserves a Purple Heart for letting me live in her house for four days. She held my hand, literally and metaphorically, she walked me through a lot of this anxiety, she hugged me tightly and put me on the plane and assured me that, whatever I decided, good things will follow. I spent the next six hours reading and dozing and watching tv and turning over my thoughts as the plane zipped over our motley landscape, riding home from JFK in Tuesday morning rush hour traffic, navigating the cabdriver who took a wrong turn on Astoria Boulevard and damn near took us onto the Triborough and into the Bronx, and finally hurtling myself, missile-like, into Lloyd’s waiting embrace. I held on like I would never let go. He held on with me. And then we sat down and made a plan.
There was once a time when we had thought that regardless of where I went to school, we could keep our home base in New York. I would go away, I would come back, we would always have a home here. We’re not blind, though. We can see what’s happening in New York. The economy is in the tank, the job opportunities available for us are largely terrible cubicle-farm jobs where the retention prospects are tenuous at best. You can’t walk two blocks in this city anymore without running smack into construction on new buildings full of apartments we can’t afford. The neighborhood in which we live has officially been discovered by real estate watchers. Our neighborhood message board, and the coffee bar from which much of the discussion generates, is full of commentary from young New Yorkers who have tried for months, years even, to find an affordable apartment in Astoria from a landlord willing to rent to them. All around us, we see signs of tightening, the best of New York being parsed for those who can pay extravagantly for it, the rest of us being squeezed out. Eventually we will be forced to leave. We’d just as soon go of our own free will, thanks.
So this is our immediate future. I will scramble for loans and scholarships and any other means to pay for school. (Thankfully, I will not have to scramble for work. I have a part-time job waiting for me in San Jose. A nifty prize awaits the first reader who can ascertain where I’ll be working.) 
I will cross my fingers and hope that on-campus housing comes through. School starts August 11. To get there, Lloyd and I will go on our long-discussed, long-desired cross-country road trip at last. We will share the driving and eat road food and look for real homemade pie, much as I wanted to do after reading Pascale Le Draoulec’s American Pie four years ago. He’ll get me settled in, he’ll fly back to New York, we’ll talk every day, we’ll fly to each other as often as time and money will allow...and then, once he is fully vested in his pension next spring, we will pursue transfer and/or new job opportunities, anything it takes to bring him to me. It may be later rather than sooner, but Lloyd is coming to California, too. Once I’m finished with school...well, there’s the bright shining question mark. In general, where one goes to school determines where one will stay to practice, so the odds of living permanently in California are good...but they’re not a given. We could end up in Seattle. We could go back to Philadelphia, where Lloyd and I met as bookstore clerks on a day that feels like yesterday. We could see the world. We could go anywhere.
Where does one begin?
Posted by
Bakerina at 10:33 AM in
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Comments •
It sounds like a wonderful adventure. I am really happy for you. I have never been to law school, but I have heard that the first year keeps you really busy, so you might not have been able to spend a lot of time with Lloyd either way. Regardless, you know what your marriage can manage, so good for you for making a leap that with luck will make you much happier!
There is a place in Bicknell Utah (So. Utah) that boast Pickle Pie (and other homemade goodies). If you travel through here (or there) let me know if there is anything I can do to help!
your life adventure is really interesting. Im also a college student that has similar difficuilties that you had, but my best advise would be that with hard work and patience everything will come together.
I’ve been following your struggle and heartache about the box business, baking, and lawschool. I’m so happy for you that you’ve found something that feels *right* for you! Best, best, best of luck!!!
I’ve read your blog for ages now and commented occasionally. I hesitated to comment about your East vs West Coast choice because who am I, a total stranger, to tell you what to do with your life? But now that you have opted for California, I feel free to say that it’s a wonderful place and I am thrilled for you. I speak as one who left Manhattan behind six months ago for a new life in Santa Barbara. I worked in midtown, for a well-known international organization close to First Ave., and commuted every day on the A train from Washington heights. I followed my husband here - he had the great opportunity, and now we have a house with a view of the ocean and an orange and a lemon tree and a hot tub in our yard. We have never looked back, and you won’t, either. People here are NICE. The sun is strong, so be careful. As others have said, law school is hard no matter where you go, but once you are out of the stacks your quality of life will be immeasurably better.
(Is that a Meyer lemon I see before me?)
Oh B, it all sounds splendid.
I am SO HAPPY that you have made a decision and you feel at peace. What a great new adventure . . . and I don’t just mean the upcoming road trip with pie.
Having lived in climates both sunny and damp, I can only give you the truth: Sunny is better. You get sick less often in sunny; you eat more healthily; you feel more cheerful. All these things can only be helpful as you begin the challenges of law school.
BTW, I love the symbolism of the slide . . .
There is a great, very fast slide, at the Bucklebury Farm Park around the corner from me. If you come to England for a visit, you must take this slide all the way down.
How does Lloyd feel about slides?
Congratulations!!!! I’m delighted for you and Lloyd and look forward to total world domination from the two of you.
Congratulations on your decision; I know it was a difficult one. As much as I love NYC, I’m very happy here in Silicon Valley. Santa Clara is a great school and I’m sure you’ll do very well. (your 1L peers will be envious of your baking genius - I work in a law firm here and we are always deliriously happy to see baked goods in the workplace!).
Best wishes!
sounds like a plan! and all so very exciting. if you’re going to make a big change, might as well do it up right, i say! and congratulations on your decision(s). have to admire someone who knows what they want and makes it happen. a very good trait for an attorney, no doubt about it.
I’m dreadfully impatient too, and would certainly have skipped ahead for the news if you hadn’t given it away in your title, sly one
Marriages aren’t that fragile, at least not the ones worth having. You’ll make it through this. When I first went away to school people kept telling me that the time would go quickly. That is neither true nor untrue. Through the low parts I just kept repeating my mantra, this is an investment in our future. . . helped me pass the time faster, if nothing else.
Congratulations and best luck and wishes to both of you!
Too bad that you’ll probably be a bit too far north to go through Pie Town, NM. giggle.
If you feel like swinging up to Portland (yes, I know, quite a bit out of the way, sigh), I’d love to take you both out to dinner. We’ve got 2 weddings to go to this summer but we should be home most of July. If you need more inducements than just scenery: July is raspberries; blackberries & marionberries start in about mid-July and run to September; and blueberries go all summer.
Best wishes as you embark on this WONDERFUL adventure!! You’re going to have a great time, I know it. You’ve thought about this long and hard, weighing all the options, and you’ve reaced an informed decision. All that’s left is the celebrating!!
As for your part-time job, pastry shop? Bakery? Hugs, Cynthia
YAY! I have to say with complete selfishness, I am so happy because you are closer to me! And chances are pretty good I’ll go to the bay area to visit or teach or something in the time you’re there. If not solely to see you
As Margene says, if you’re coming through Utah or want to stop on by, we’d LOVE to see you.
I’ll actually be teaching in Portland sometime during the summer, and in San Diego in September… probably figure out something in the bay area eventually.
Love you, sweetie!
M
Congratulations! I’m an east coast transplant in the west as well, although I married my Oregonian sweetheart instead of bringing an east coaster with me. It’s been a fabulous ride for me, even through the hard bits and the missing of family [which hurts, oh so terribly sometimes]. However, it’s a great place to live, and at the very least you’ll have good access to Stitches West! Hopefully I’ll get to see you there next year.
[my captcha is “growth”. seems fitting!]
Oh, darlin’. I am undiluted in my absolute joy for you, and not feeling a bit of envy, oh no, that you will get to know the Left Coast not as a tourist but as a denizen, and so, well, let me be ummm, I guess, the fourteenth or so to wish you joy. There is that teeny weeny sense of what-will-I-do-without-you, and the wishing that we’d already spent more time together, and the panic that we’d better start to do so, right about now...but please know that my heart is very full of good stuff at the moment, and it’s for you, ma belle, for you.
Home grown lemons is a good place to start. I cross my fingers, I send you hope and luck and a million best wishes. You’re going to have a grand adventure.
Jen, I’m so proud of you for making lemonade when life handed you lemons! I know you’re going to kick-ass in law school, and I know you and Lloyd will get through the time apart just fine. Congratulations to you! I always knew you were meant to do better things than what Luthorcorp could offer.
I’m just very happy for you both and immediately had this great, warm, positive feeling upon reading your news. Don’t know why, just sounds so good.
I wish you and Lloyd the best and am sending lots of good thoughts for you two in this new, grand, and exciting adventure.
I’d like to be the first (okay the 21st) to say Congratulations on this big decision.
I believe I a little get credit as the first to have said, “You ought to get a book and see if you do well on the LSAT,” back in Aug/Sep. 2006 after your grand jury experience reminded you you were once interested in law. Since then I have followed the whole process to this point—from that first star-crossed LSAT to your second, A-game performance to your personal statement (where Bunni truly earned her Putting up with Mewling and Puking and her Draw Out the Great Writer Inside honor badges!) to the point where I was texting every day to check your mailbox for thick envelope with you.
Then all the agonizing over schools, each of which brings such a different set of considerations to the mix.
At the risk of speaking out of turn, I’ve got to share with your friends and readers what you said when I asked you if making the final school decision was scarier than a) going to Russia as a young exchange student back in the 1980’s or b) getting married. Your response: “Going to Russia, getting married and standing on the edge of an overcrowded subway platform during rushhour as the train hurtles into the station all rolled into one.”
That you said, “Yes!” to the scariest, but most life-affirming, change-embracing choice… well, words cannot express how excited I am for you.
That your “yes” is going to bring you (and soon enough your wonderful Lloyd) across the country to my alma mater, less than a mile away, and that we’ll have the opportunity to work together… well, that’s mighty fine too.
Twenty months ago you said “yes” to trying. Three year from now you’ll have a JD in hand. Twenty years from now you’ll be looking back on a career that I’m sure you’ll find/make amazingly fulfilling. Yay for you. Yay for Yes!
Congratulations on this wonderful beginning.
[P.S. Thanks to Shauna at Gluten Free Girl for leading by example on this Yes stuff.]
Let me delurk to wish you all the best. A long time ago, it seems in another world, my beloved got a PhD scholarship on the other side of the world. We made the decision together that he would go and I would finish my degree at home. We saw each other during the summer break for two years and survived on phone calls and many emails. The second summer break he came home, we got married and moved to where he was together. After many years there we’re now back home. The time apart was very difficult but survivable (lots of tears, long-distance misunderstandings, important occasions apart). We’ve been married 14 years now and still like each other!
So what I mean to say is that if you have that commitment to each other and work at what you love and towards what you want, separation isn’t the death knell for a relationship. It can be, but you can make it not so.
All the very best to you and Lloyd. These are exciting times.
Congratulations and the very best of wishes on your new adventure.
My heart’s desire was to go to Santa Clara Law way back in 82. I decided to stay put in Eugene, OR because I had two little boys who did not need any more change in their lives. I have not regretted my decision, but your post brought back that all the old longings.
PS You will want to quit many times during 1L. I think it’s part of the experience.
Congratulations on your decision, Jen. I have some fam in the Bay area (it’s actually where I was born) and you can’t go wrong there.
As the only person I know who actually enjoyed law school (at one of your rejected choices, but still ), I wish you all the best. My experience as an “older student"- I had been out of college 7 years, working as a picture framer, getting married, having a daughter-was a good one. In fact, I found that those of us who were not fresh from 16 years of school had a smoother time of it, especially those of us not still distracted by searching for a mate!
The joys of going to school (vs. work-life) were so apparent to me, and I had an ability to concentrate that wasn’t my forte earlier. So, I liked it, had fun, and did really, really well, and I think you will too. I’m not sure that the law was really an objectively good choice for me in a career sense, but I was lucky there too, and eventually found a lawyer job which is not only not distressing and full of ethical conflict, but is actually interesting and reasonable.I’ve been doing it for 20 + years and ain’t leaving, if I can help it, until I retire.
I wish you the same good fortune.
YAY!!!! I am hoping to stay in SF myself, so we could be neighbors...so glad you’re coming out to the BEST coast. For the lemons and bread alone....
I am unreservedly, joyously happy for you, beautiful Bakerina.
To come out of this journey so at peace with your decision is absolutely astonishing. I know you’ll make it all work for you. For both of you.
Party cakes all ‘round! It’s time to celebrate!
Well, hot damn, you get to have California sunshine and your very own sunshine with you at the same time. Good on you, babe.
I’m so glad I got the chance to meet you and hug you on this coast, though, before you headed wicked far away 
I’m extremely proud of you, and wish you every good thing that can possibly come your way. Also, the strength to say yes to them. You know, if I jumped out of a plane, lady, you sure as hell can SLIIIIIIDE!!!!
You Go GRRRRRRL!
Sounds like you are going to have a grand adventure! With PIE!!!
Best of luck! Just keep blogging…
Conga-rats, globetrotter.
What an exciting time in your life. My wishes for all the best as you take this Big Step.
And, dang! You got to spend time with Grace...and ‘mouse!
It’s a selfish request, but I hope you can keep up with your Online Journaling (at least at a minimal level) despite the huge load of work you’ll be doing as a first-year student. Gotta have me my Bakie-Fix!
Whenever I think of the decision you’ve had before you, my head shakes slowly and my eyes mist up. But I’m also so damn excited for you and this new chapter in your life. Congratulations. (And maybe we will meet now!)
Oh Bakes, I am so thrilled for you. Good luck in the Bay area. I’ll be holding your fortunes in my mind and heart, hoping only for the best for you.
New beginnings are always so thrilling.
Congratulations on making a decision! It sounds like a great plan. Working in a bakery, perhaps?
I’m a Bakerina newbie (as of yesterdray, via Bee Drunken), so I haven’t been following your story as long as others… but as a Bay Area native and current resident, I’d like to extend to you the warmest of pre-emptive welcomes! Congratulations on making the decision, and here’s hoping that Lloyd can join you sooner rather than later. California is wonderful, and even better when shared with a loved one.
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It sounds like a wonderful adventure. I am really happy for you. I have never been to law school, but I have heard that the first year keeps you really busy, so you might not have been able to spend a lot of time with Lloyd either way. Regardless, you know what your marriage can manage, so good for you for making a leap that with luck will make you much happier!