The JD/Pizza Boy Diaries: Intro

Twice a year, a great scourge falls upon the would-be lawyers of this land. The letter arrives and the news is bad: you madam or sir, are a failure. It happened to me, and since the post in which I revealed that, I’ve received some comments from other rejected and dejected bar applicants who want to talk about it. They’re embarrassed. They’re stunned. They’re afraid that they may not ever pass. Ah yes, the good old days.

Naturally, all this has got me thinking back to that terrible time and wondering if it might not be a story worth the telling, especially since it seems that some readers are interested in it. I understand. I too love to read about other peoples failures. Still, I don’t want to focus on failure too much. What matters is what we do with the failure. Thus although, for contextual reasons, I think I should talk about the “why” a little bit, I don’t want to dwell on it. I’d rather talk about recovery from the apocalypse, the rising of the sun, the first tentative stretches of the infant phoenix’s ashy wings. So, I’m announcing the “JD/Pizza Boy Diaries,” an occasional series in an as yet undetermined number of parts.

First, the “why.” Why did I fail? Three reasons: laziness, hubris, and Nigella Lawson.

Laziness. I didn’t want to work that hard. I had been through three years of law school and I was done. I didn’t want to study day and night for an exam. I wanted to ride my bicycle. I wanted to sit by the local waterfall. I wanted to watch T.V. I was being a baby. “Work before pleasure,” my mother always says. Screw that. I had worked enough.

Also, I didn’t really set myself up for success. I literally packed up the U-Haul the very same day that I took my ultimate law school exam. When we finally got to Bristol NH at 1 A.M. (after a terrifying night time drive through unpaved Green Mountain roads) we learned that it is possible to have a bad neighborhood in a town of 2,500. We also learned that I had packed the mattress in such a way that every other item in the truck would have to come out before we could retrieve it. We spent the first night sleeping on the wood floor, using our shirts as pillows.

So, in fairness, it was laziness bred by exhaustion, but it was laziness just the same. “Make hay while the sun is shining,” the bar review guy kept saying. The sun shined every day that summer, but I didn’t make enough hay. One night, instead of studying, I watched Enter the Dragon. Twice. That was probably a mistake.

But I could afford to make those kinds of decisions because there was no way that I was going to fail. None. I went to a top 10 law school. I had never failed a test in my life. More than half the people who take the exam pass. If I were to fail, that would mean that I would have to do worse than most of the other people. That’s impossible … etc. etc. blah blah blah.

And then there was Nigella, who I have a crush on and who has always inspired me to be my best self. That was the year of Forever Summer and her recipes were beautiful, and she was beautiful and the summer was beautiful, so why not learn to cook? And, in honor of Lance, who was on his way to his 5th or 6th victory in Le Tour, why not cycle for an hour a day too? Oh, and I should really practice more. Because you deserve your best self. You deserve to be the guitar playing, cycling, defense attorney who can really cook that you’ve always wanted to be. Go for it. You don’t need to study that much. There’s really no way that you’re going to fail that exam.

But, I did fail. And I was fired.

And that’s when the fun began.