My commute is giving me old lady posture.  This is a problem.

Every day, I trek about 4 blocks to the el stop, get on the el (where I invariably have to stand for the entire 40 minute ride), and then walk another two blocks to my office.

Accompanying me on this daily journey is my trusty messenger bag.  Some lawyers might carry fancy leather briefcases, but those are lawyers who have enough discretionary income to spend some of it on something as unfun as a leather briefcase.  I have to save my limited discretionary income for gin, so I carry the same bag that I have carried since 1997:

The problem.

(Those Timbuk2 people do not lie when they say their products last forever.  This thing has lasted for 10+ years of heavy daily use, first carrying huge college textbooks, then heavy teacher’s manuals and student work,  then a laptop and huge law casebooks.  And no, I cannot for the life of me figure out why my 18-year-old self decided to purchase a bag in Packers colors.  The Bears fan in me keeps hoping the thing will wear out so I have an excuse to buy a better color scheme.  It’s not cooperating.)

Now it does not hold textbooks, or teacher’s manuals, or casebooks.  Most days it does not even hold a laptop.  But it is still bothering the heck out of my neck.

A peek inside

So I thought it was time to take a cold, hard look at the ridiculous amount of crap I’m schlepping on a daily basis, to see where I can lighten the load.

The wallet stays.

Wallet.  Can’t get rid of this for obvious reasons.  Plus, contains very little actual money, so is surprisingly light.

Lunchbox

Shut up.  Seriously, stop laughing.  Bento lunchbox is awesome.  It is flat, and fits easily into the bag, and holds lots of food, and saves lots of money that would otherwise be spent on subpar sandwiches at Corner Bakery.  I love lunchbox.  It stays.

File Folder, Notebook, Book

These things are, admittedly, kind of heavy, but I can’t give them up.  The file folder contains work to do at home, which enables me to leave the office at a reasonable hour.  The notebook I try to always have with me to jot down notes, phone numbers, etc.  After years and years of losing the envelopes and scraps of paper I used to write that stuff down on, I’m committed to my notebook system. The book is a fabulous tome containing the history of and recipes for old-timey cocktails, and while I suppose technically I could attempt my commute without a book, I find that it’s important to have something to look at other than your fellow passengers, so as to avoid accidental eye contact which seems always to lead to (ugh) early morning conversation with a stranger.

Rain accouterments

We had a storm.  You may have heard about it.  My hair is very sensitive to rain.

That’s it for the main compartment.  Time to turn to the pockets:

Pocket dwellers

Well…gosh.  I appear to be deeply concerned about lip care.  Let’s take a closer look:

So!  John!  All those times I asked you in accusatory tones why you had stolen my carmex/burt’s bees and hidden it from me?  Um, my bad.  Also, glad to see that I’m keeping the two nicest cosmetic items I own (those two Chanel lip glosses) in the ratty dingy depths of my work bag, considering I don’t wear lipstick to work, like, ever.  This also might explain why I ended up swiping Vaseline on my lips in a fit of desperation before the wedding we went to this weekend when I couldn’t find any lipstick anywhere in the house.

So, what have we learned here today?  Clearly I can remove, oh, a half dozen lip balms/glosses/sticks from my bag.  But I have a hunch that the combined weight of a burt’s bees, a carmex, two lip glosses and a kiehl’s tube is hardly going to make a difference for my poor neck.

I guess the only other option is to invest in one of these:

That, plus a pained expression and a hunch to my shoulders, ought to be enough to buy me a seat on the train so I can set the damned bag down, dontcha think?

I had my first teaching dream in a long time last night.  I was visiting a school to teach a sample lesson because I was applying for a job there, and the classroom teacher told me “you’ll find we keep things a little more casual here than at a lot of other schools,” and then, as if on cue, all of the students slumped way down in their chairs so they were sitting like this (except with less of a 50’s greaser look and more of a 00’s street style look):

And I can’t precisely remember the rest of the dream, except there was a metal detector at the door of the classroom (instead of the door of the school, where they’re more typically located,) and the kids at one point were all ragging on me, saying I couldn’t handle it in their school because I was too dorky, not aware enough of the way things really work (combining teaching anxiety AND regular old garden variety high school “I’m not the cool kid” anxiety into one dream!  Bonus!) And I remember feeling profoundly sad, because for some reason in the dream I knew that one of the kids in the class I was teaching was not going to make it, was going to die tragically in a shooting that afternoon, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

This dream was not totally random.  There’s been a lot of violence involving teenagers in Chicago recently, a sad number of kids dying on the street, and those stories always hit me hard.  My friend MasonNYC (the artist formerly known in this space as Mason’s Sister) has been looking into teaching jobs in the Chicago area, and has been teaching sample lessons, and we’ve talked a couple times about the various schools she’s applying to.  And next week, I’ll be out of the office all week, working in a high school as part of a school site visit, writing a report that we hope will help the school improve the quality of teaching and learning there.  So clearly I have school on the brain. 

I miss working with kids, whether it’s being in schools on a regular basis or representing teenage clients.  I don’t like the part of my job where I feel like I’m looking at these issues from a view 15 stories up- I hated those 15-stories-up-view people when I was teaching, and now I am one of them.  It’s frustrating.  It makes me think hard about what I should look for in a job going forward.  I like the job I’m in now very much, but it has always been a short-term fellowship.  My career so far has been jobs and/or grad programs lasting:  1 year, 2 years, 3 years, and 2 years.  I figure I should eventually get a job that I plan to stay at for longer than a year or two.  My thirties seems like as good a time as any to give that a try. 

Because of the weird way law hiring works, within the next couple of months I’m going to have to start making some decisions about where I want to go next, and if I want to apply for certain categories of jobs when my fellowship is up.  You know, in September 2009.  OVER A YEAR FROM NOW.  Law hiring is so weird.  If I want to pursue a clerkship, for example, I should start looking, oh, yesterday.  If I want to pursue another kind of fellowship, I’ll need to get organized over the summer.  If I want to go into certain kinds of government work, I should probably get my application in about 9 months before I actually want to start, because that’s about how long it takes to go through the entire hiring process in some of these offices.  But if I want to go into a more traditional legal service job with a non-government entity, I shoud wait to apply for those jobs until summer 2009.  In summary:  If I play my cards right, I could be constantly in the process of applying for jobs, with the accompanying updating of resumes, accumulating of letters of recommendation, asking for references, suffering through interviews and rejections, and sitting on pins and needles waiting for answers, for the next year and a half.  Hold me.