Packed My Suitcase and I Racked My Brain

When I found out last Thursday that I passed the bar exam, I thought of Dr. Richard Kimble.
Well, that's not exactly true.

First, I thought, "Thank you, sweet Lord. Now I will not have to clean out my office with a great deal of shame for being the first person at this firm to fail the bar exam."

After that harrowing thought, though, my mind turned to a bearded Harrison Ford. There's a scene at the beginning of The Fugitive where Ford's character is being transported to the Illinois maximum security prison where he will be executed by lethal injection after being wrongly convicted of his wife's murder.

Some of Ford's fellow passengers decide that spending a few years in the slammer waiting for an injection is not exactly an appealing 5-year plan and attempt to escape. Seeing as though these folks already managed to fall into the clutches of the Illinois criminal justice system, they are not necessarily the sharpest pencils in the box and proceed to knock their bus into the path of an oncoming train. They really do put train tracks in the darndest places, but hey, movies are about the willing suspension of disbelief, right?

(Note: This really should have been a plot twist in Speed. Jan De Bont, if you want to start up production for Speed 3, call me.)

Since The Fugitive doesn't end after a mere 15 minutes, you obviously know that Harrison Ford will somehow escape from the menace of the onrushing train, but when he does escape you don't feel much relief for his character. Sure, he's managed to avoid being turned into a human penny on the railroad tracks, but he also stranded in the middle of the woods on a cold Illinois night, and oh, by the way, he has a first-degree murder conviction next to his name in the state records.

Not to be too much of a downer, but that's what passing the bar exam feels like. I've managed to avoid immediate death by passing the darn thing, but now I'm left out here in the wilderness trying to figure out how this whole "being a lawyer" thing actually works. Tommy Lee Jones hasn't shown up yet, but I'm sure he's off reminscing about his time at Harvard with Al Gore. He'll show up eventually.

Does that mean I'm not excited about the prospect of learning and developing as an attorney?

Certainly not.

If anything, it's a new adventure to start learning to do something that takes years and years to perfect, if perfection ever actually does happen.

I think that's why they call it "practicing" law.