In Order of Awfulness . . .

Patrick is applying to several other schools now, in light of our recent REJECTION (the word rejection outlined in bright red light bulbs, the bulbs pulsing with a buzzing !You’re a Loser! sound on each pulse).  (REJECTION is easier to take Warner Bros Cartoon style).  I won’t be too specific, and may delete this in the future just to be on the safe side, but we had fun today ranking these places in order of Awfulness.  On a scale from "God, this is a hellhole" to "I would rather die", I present:

5th Place: Medium-Sized Town, Kentucky
I’ve been here, and I don’t like it here much, but I could live with it.  It’s close to Louisville, a town I very much like.  Not close enough to live there or visit frequently, but we could go get some culture once in a while.  The gorgeous horse farms would feed the soul, though otherwise it has little to offer.  I don’t mind.  This is the least awful of our possibilities.  I could finish law school still.

4th Place: Medium-Sized Town, Northern Alabama
The schools would be ok.  Um.  It’s close-ish to family.  Er.  It’s not crushingly heinous.  It could be ok.  It’s within 2.5 hours of a law school, I think, so if we were really dedicated, I could finish law school here, too.

3rd Place: Teeny Weeny Town, West Virginia
Actually, perhaps this should be 4th awful.  I mean, God, it’s West Virginia, and it’s a small town in West Virginia, and kissing-cousin jokes aside – well.  You know.  *I know a delightful person from West Virginia.  One.  So, lovely things can come out of there.  (A) lovely thing.*  However, it does have the amazing mountains going for it, and we do like white water rafting, and maybe this job would pay enough that we could afford to go white water rafting as a special 20th anniversary celebration or something.  You know, I always wanted to be a white water rafting instructor.  Oh yeah, if we go here, there will be neither completion of law school nor any kind of job for me.  Except white water rafting instructor.  Hmmm, this is sounding better and better.  (Compares imaginary weights in each hand) . . . sit at a desk daily and draft boring memos . . . white water raft daily.  Desk and memos.  Raft and tan.  Desk.  Raft.  🙂  (There’s this pesky problem that, you know, I have only been rafting once, but I’m a quick study.)

2nd Place: Totally Non-Descript Kind of Horrible Town With One Really Great Bar, North Carolina
I’ve been here a lot, and I uniformly hate it except for this one bar, which is great.  The big upside here is that we’d be closer to my sister, and our families.  Otherwise, again with the no law school, no job, blech town, blech blech blech.

1st Place: OMIGOD Northern Indiana
I went to school in southern Indiana.  I know a lot of lovely people from Indiana who still live there, and love it.  I think they love it because they’ve always lived there and their families are there, because I can’t really see any other reason.  Indiana is a chilly, flat, and boring state without much in the way of character. Corn grows there.  Snow falls.  It has no cool towns – except maybe Bloomington, which is REALLY far from this school (sorry Indianapolis, but you are strip mall bland bland bland).  Murphy’s law says that if we get a job, it’s here, and after finally escaping my tiny Indiana undergraduate institution and hoping to never look back, I end up chained to the state for life and raising little Hoosiers.

Honorable Mention: Detroit.  It didn’t make #1 on the list because we couldn’t bring ourselves to apply to this one.  I would sooner live with my mother again and eat for dinner each night either boiled sauerkraut or scrambled eggs doused in cold whole milk (2 of my father’s favorites).  I would sooner live in my in-laws’ damp, freezing, humongous-cricket infested unfinished basement.  I would sooner sell my eggs, every last one of ’em, and a kidney, too, and maybe be a surrogate mother, and possibly birth another baby and sell that.  No offense, Detroit.

We hold out hope for a VAP position here in the city where we live.  I could finish law school free (if I get good enough grades – oh!  I haven’t checked my grades in five whole minutes!), we could maybe stay here forever (not what I want at this point, but I could deal), or barring that, at least not starve during my last two years of school.  Since Louisiana has this pesky little quirk in that it is the only state in the union that doesn’t follow the common law system, I must know before my third year whether we’re living here permanently or not, because I would have to take as electives all those special Louisiana quirky courses so I can pass the Louisiana bar.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  Meanwhile, cross your fingers that one of our awful choices comes through, because most awful of all would be to have two children and no way to feed them except by exorbitant student loan borrowing.  God forbid.