It is a month after the bar exam. The day after the test Kristen and I hightailed it to the beach. We spend a couple of days just the two of us in Provincetown and then a week higher on the Cape with her (our) wonderful family. Kristen’s re-acclimation to “normal” life wasn’t without its bumps, but she managed it with her usual grace. When we returned from vacation I had a little more than a week to finish out at my old job. Meanwhile Ryan and Kristen plunged head first into FreedMcKeen, our new law firm. I wrote about leaving over at A Connecticut Law Blog, where we are also documenting the transformation of our office from “There’s Potential” to (we hope, we hope, we…
From Here to Esquire: One Couple's Summer with the Bar Exam.
Posts from the “Relationships” Category
Kristen is virtuosic with beverages. You can keep your Maddow, I have my Marcroft. She will whip egg whites for a pisco sour on any given Tuesday. Her gimlet features pre-prohibition gin, Rose’s, fresh lime juice, and simple syrup. It gets shaken, hard, and she delivers it, icey and beautiful, into my hands. Kristen makes the best coffee I’ve ever had. It is really, really dark. She does not believe in milk. She will settle for half and half only if she has to — if we have heavy cream that goes in. She is right about that. Kristen never hands me a cocktail without a tiny straw in it — even bourbon — even though I know it pains her that I sip…
Categories: bar exam, Relationships
In the summer where Kristen studied for the bar exam, we got a new puppy. Some folks might think that’s crazy. Well, in the middle of the summer where Kristen studied for the bar exam, we were also in the process of opening a law firm. Seriously. That over there is Kristen spending a study break with a sledgehammer in our new office. I have a great job. I work with great people. I collaborate with great lawyers nationally. I have been across the country, and all in between, more times than I can count. There is a list a mile long of folks that want to replace me, and the job isn’t even posted yet. I have been supremely, supremely lucky. But last…
Day Thirty-Eight (and i have walked 500 miles and i will walk 500 more).
Meghan Freed
Posted on July 13, 2012
It’s been a bit chaotic here in our world. The temporary silence on the blog is not indicative of a quiet life — life has been moving hectically along. There were a lot of wonderful things. My Dad had a wonderful retirement party with family, friends, former colleagues, and even a little appearance by Daphne – and we went to a favorite restaurant for my mom’s birthday a few days later. In addition, happenings in my professional life have dominated my brain and schedule. I am engaged in a pretty delicate and stressful juggling act that is challenging, exciting, and stressful. In the middle of all of this, of course, Kristen has been moving along with her bar exam prep. This was her first week of free-range bar…
Categories: bar exam, Relationships
Tagged: bar exam, bar test prep, BarBri, Kaplan, law school, PMBR
It is pretty much inevitable that you will have a wedding at least one weekend during the summer you are studying for the bar exam. Ours was last weekend. Ours was just brilliant.
My childhood best friend, Scottie, married his love, Tim, this past Saturday. That picture up there captures Scott and Tim mid-hora, courtesy of the lovely and way-better-with-a-camera-than-I Jenn. Down to a person, everyone in attendance was over the moon to be at their beautiful, elegant, fun wedding and, more importantly, to see our two get married. They are fabulous, and they are fabulous together. And, frankly, there is something sacred about being at a wedding that is so right, and which was, not too many years ago — and still is, in the vast majority of places – unconstitutional. Scott and Tim’s wedding was as precious as its grooms.
Though today was the Fourth of July, Kristen was back in full-on study mode. While Kristen spent six hours taking a nasty mock MBE, in between walking Daphne and being really quiet, I had time to do a bit of reading. This included thanks to Ryan McKeen, of Kurt Anderson’s New York Time’s article “The Downside of Liberty.” According to Mr. Anderson:
From the beginning, the American idea embodied a tension between radical individualism and the demands of the commonwealth. The document we’re celebrating today says in its second line that axiomatic human rights include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” – individualism in a nutshell. But the Declaration’s author was not a greed-is-good guy: “Self-love,” Jefferson wrote to a friend 38 years after the Declaration, “is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.”
This reminded me of a line I loved from Scott and Tim’s wedding ceremony. Their rabbi explained that the three responsibilities of marriage are to take care of yourself, to take care of your partner, to take care of the world. That line was so striking to me because of the obvious but rarely mentioned truth of the first, and even more obvious and even less often mentioned truth of the third. Jefferson and his comrades, as we are so often reminded in other contexts — for example in furtherance of the argument to deny Tim and Scott’s right to marry — came from a Judeo-Christian tradition. The good parts of that 18th century Judeo-Christian tradition resulted in the Declaration’s being written by folks who did not need the same reminders as we do about the necessity to make taking care of the world an equal priority to taking care of one’s self and one’s spouse. Again, Mr. Anderson:
People on the political right have blamed the late ’60s for what they loathe about contemporary life – anything-goes sexuality, cultural coarseness, multiculturalism. And people on the left buy into that, seeing only the ’60s legacies of freedom that they define as progress. But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967. Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.
It is thanks to the gay rights movement that began in the 1960s that Scott and Tim can be married and pursue their happiness, and for that we are tremendously indebted. In 1814, Jefferson wrote “that our tendencies toward selfishness where liberty and our pursuit of happiness lead us require ‘correctives which are supplied by education’ and by ‘the moralist, the preacher, and legislator.’” Scott and Tim’s rabbi did just that.
The union needs more glorious gay weddings.
Categories: Relationships
Yesterday I wrote about what your partner/ spouse/ roommate/ parent could do for you, the test taker. Now let’s talk about what you might try do for your inexperienced-with-the-bar supporter. As I am mindful of your understandably diminished capacity, I have done as much of the work for you as possible. As far as I can tell, people who haven’t taken the bar exam generally fall into three categories when it comes to their view of a loved one’s taking the bar exam. The first group? We’ll call then “Impressed.” They believe the test to be super hard, and are super impressed with you for taking it. The problem is, they also think you are super smart and don’t totally understand why you need…
Categories: bar exam, Relationships
Tagged: bar test prep, BarBri, gimlets, Ransom Old Tom Gin
I’ve sat on both sides of this bar exam beast — as a former taker myself and now as the partner of a current taker. I have spent more time here writing about the experience of taking the bar than I have about being the bar spouse — mostly because I know I passed the former and no one knows yet how I’ll do on the latter! I turned to some lawyer friends for their imput on what they appreciated and wanted from their spouse/family during the bar exam, and one of the best came from my dear law school chum Clio. When she sat for the bar, Clio was (and is) married to a very lovely, very patient non-lawyer. She wrote: ”When I was studying, I remember hating the ‘what do you…
Categories: bar exam, Relationships
I’ve always been project oriented. I think that’s one reason I enjoyed acting so much from childhood through college. Learn a role (flighty starlet on the verge of being discovered!), perform a play, close a play. Learn a role (clumsy newlywed!), perform a play, close a play. It’s also part of why I loved school so. Classes start, you learn a subject, and then they end and you move onto the next subject. Real life, ahem, isn’t a stage, and it doesn’t happen in semesters. But there are still projects that take more of our time than other things — often because we are more interested in them than in other things. Sometimes something about them attract us, and so we dedicate time and attention to them they…
Categories: bar exam, Relationships
Tagged: bar test prep, priorities
