My Life, As Told Between (Baby Cakes') Naps

I had a great time in SF this weekend, although I almost didn’t make it.  Plans were up in the air all week (and for someone as generally disorganized as I am, I actually am a huge pre-planner) and there was a crisis involving a lost driver’s license and a waiting shuttle, but I (barely) made it.  I was able to celebrate a good friend’s birthday with a great group of girls (“my girls” as my friend CH affectionately calls them).  For those of you I missed on this trip, apologies all around.  I didn’t have much time up there and things were very last minute.  I’ll catch you the next time I’m up!

So the reason I didn’t have much time was that, as part of the firm’s pro bono option, I spent most of this past weekend in San Francisco, reading scholarship essays for an Asian American Pacific Islander fund that’s distributing money to high school students for college.  It was, perhaps surprisingly, a  really good experience.  I’d mentally composed a terrific post about the experience and what I took away from it while I was driving from San Francisco back to San Jose, but I lost it somewhere after Palo Alto.  (If anyone finds it, please let me know.  It’s probably floating somewhere along the 101.)  What you guys are left with is a much more disjointed mess.  More along the lines of what you should be used to. 

The essays really brought back some childhood experiences and memories I hadn’t thought about in a long time.  Like the original post, I think they must have gotten lost along the way.  My life is nice now.  It’s been nice for a long time, and I forget that wasn’t always the case.  This weekend reminded me that there’s some value to remembering the negatives.  I frequently joke about how self-absorbed I am, but I’ve been wondering how much truth has seeped into that statement over the years.  After all, it’s natural and entirely too easy to become more self-absorbed as we get older and our lives become more complicated.  Time is harder to find, whether it’s time for work, other people in your life, or yourself.  And you (and by “you,” I mean “I”) really do become wrapped up in yourself and your current existence.  Reading those essays put things in a little more perspective.  I think I need to get more involved with something outside myself.  I used to be.  I just need to figure out what…

Anyways, this realization followed the end of the worse week of my professional career (at least so far).  It was a week where I couldn’t do anything right and I made mistake, after mistake, after mistake.  I was thorougly tired of apologizing by the end of the week (although the partner who was the unlucky recipient of all of these errors was more than nice about it all) and was feeling like the worst lawyer in existence.  I’m trying not to dwell on it.  Perspective.  Hopefully this week will be better.  If not, I’m running for cover.  =)