Life Lately: Vacation Plans and "Big Cleans"

Photo from a recent visit with a good friend and her cats. Her other cat is much more shy and still spends much of the time hiding whenever I visit. This one is much more outgoing!

Things have been hectic at the office recently, which I think is actually the new normal, given the current status of some of my biggest projects. We may have several months of steady work to look forward to, but that's a good thing. And don't worry, it's not going to be anywhere near as intense as the busy periods I had earlier this year! We likely won't have court filings of quite that size and scale again for a few months, and thank goodness for that.

I have a good number of fun and relaxing things coming up, though: A law school friend is visiting from out of town this weekend, and then I'll be heading off for vacation in early May. For this year's big trip, my sister and I are chipping in together, in shares proportional to our income, to take our mom to Hawaii. (Alas, both my sister and I completed graduate school with student loans a bit in excess of our first year salaries. But we're both working hard on repayment, and still get to splurge once in a while, clearly!) None of us have ever been before, so we're very much looking forward to it. We'll be in Maui for around ten days, and will also get to celebrate Mother's Day there. Any travel recommendations for Maui would be greatly appreciated, of course. 

This past weekend, I spent Saturday cleaning the apartment to get ready for my friend to visit and stay over. K was working all weekend long, so I did 100% of the cleaning this time around. See, even if he's far more likely to initiate and do the lion's share of our occasional "big cleans," including a few weekends ago, I'm capable of doing my part too... when I absolutely have to.

And good golly, if I may fuss for a bit, my back and my joints ached something awful the rest of the day, mainly from scrubbing the bathtub and the tile floor in the bathroom. (For the floor, unlike in the kitchen, the Swiffer has always proven entirely unequal to the task of scrubbing hard enough to get it clean.) This may well be what drives me to the point of finally declaring that we must hire semi-regular cleaning help. Now that K and I are both consistently busier at the office, the decision calculus for that particular question has changed significantly since this time last year. And I absolutely plan for us to pay well and tip generously, given that I've been driven to this choice by a deep appreciation for the difficulty of the labor.

On Sunday, I was shocked to find myself completely without the motivation to write anything for the blog. That almost never happens, I spend some of just about every single weekend writing or revising something that will eventually be posted here. Alas, I think I'm just very ready for that vacation. Given how my schedule looks between now and my departure flight, it's probably safest to assume that I probably won't be able to write here in the meantime. See you again in mid-May!

Oh, and in other recent blog-related news, I only recently realized that Disqus's default settings for website moderators resulted in my not getting email notifications when comments here are automatically blocked as spam. And it's not even particularly easy to figure out where on Disqus's site to view and moderate such comments, it took quite a bit of clicking around. To add insult to injury, the algorithm they use to flag spam is prone to inaccuracy, with maybe only a 55% success rate at best (at least when it comes to comments here). Nearly half of the dozen or so things they flagged as spam since I started using Disqus were real, substantive comments, including from people I frequently have conversations with in the comments here. I've approved all the wrongfully flagged comments now, some of them from more than a year ago. I'm terribly embarrassed that I didn't notice this problem sooner. 

That Five or Ten-Year Plan

Via the New York Times, from a series where they interviewed a group of women junior associates at one biglaw firm in 2001, and then checked in again with some of them in 2013.

I'm a regular reader over at Corporette, a habit that began around 2016 or 2017. It's a bit of an odd internet community, more a message-board for whatever readers want to talk about rather than anything to do with the blog's actual content. Things get weird sometimes, people occasionally say absurd and unkind things (see, e.g., this discussion), and there's the occasional troll about. But many other comments can be insightful or interesting, and so I keep going back. And hey, to the extent that I still feel a powerful nostalgia for an old-fashioned and "retro" style of blogging (circa 2009), Corporette certainly fits that bill! I specifically remember a college friend recommending the site to me in 2009, but I couldn't quite get into it then, maybe because I hadn't yet started working. In any case, the site has changed very little since.

There was a great discussion there recently about people's five or ten-year plans, both on a personal and professional level. A little over five years ago, in November 2013 (so if one is inclined to split hairs, it's turned out to be a discussion about six and eleven-year plans instead), they'd posted something asking about where readers hoped to be in five years, and then in ten. This year, it was time to check in about whether things had gone as planned. The answers were a mixed bag, which isn't exactly surprising, as life is complicated and unpredictable. When it comes to my own life, things also didn't turn out exactly as I hoped. But that's actually a good thing! If things had happened the way I planned, I wouldn't be in this new job that I greatly enjoy.

The original inspiration for this discussion was a set of New York Times features that had done essentially the same exercise in the decade prior, interviewing 21 women junior associates at one top biglaw firm in 2001, and then going back to some of them in 2013. And the pattern of how things changed between 2001 and 2013 is, in my view, substantially similar to the pattern of changes for the 2013 and 2019 group. That's consistent with how diversity and equality-related conditions have not improved substantially in the legal industry between 2001, 2013, and now. (Things are far better than when Justice Ginsburg was starting out, when many firms openly stated they would "engage no women" as a matter of policy. But it's commonly understood that, at some point in the decades since, things began to stall.)

One theme common to many of the Corporette updates was that people (particularly those on the cusp of starting their career, or in the earliest stages of it, in 2013) often found that certain obstacles in their industry or workplace, particularly ones related to discrimination, including harassment and #metoo problems, were far more powerful than expected. Oftentimes, people who, in 2013, were optimistic that discrimination might not directly affect their own career trajectory or workplace had those hopes dashed somewhat, and would now describe themselves as having been too naive about these realities in 2013. Many who encountered those types of challenges made a choice that it wasn't worth it to stay where they were. A lot of those people were attorneys, and I can vouch for how common that experience is in this industry.

More happily, there were also many who found that, for serendipitous reasons, life moved in a different direction from what they originally planned. And indeed, even for some who ran face-first into discrimination-related challenges and found that they couldn't stay with their original company, or even in the profession they originally planned on, there was also some of this more positive effect at play. That's another thing I've also found to be true for myself.

With that context in mind, this is how I would answer the questions about where I was in 2013; where I am now in 2019, and whether things had gone according to plan; and where I hope to be in 2024:

Outfit Post: First Signs of Spring

Necklace: Porcelain and Stone Small "Uni" Necklace

Top: Grana Silk Raglan Tee (old)

Skirt: Uniqlo x J.W. Anderson Wrap Skirt, navy blue

Shoes: Sam Edelman Lior Loafer, gold glitter (old, similar design or similar color)

On the morning I was getting dressed in this outfit, I managed to accidentally navigate my phone to the weather for the California Bay Area, where I'm originally from, instead of for NYC, so I thought I was dressing for 55 degrees Farenheit and a clear, sunny day, instead of for something in the mid-40s with a chance of rain. It was only after I'd already put on the entire outfit that I realized I was looking at the weather for the wrong place, but I decided to wear it anyway, though with a wool-blend coat and these shoes (which hold up okay to rain and don't get dirty easily), instead of the pink canvas Soludos llama sneakers (only size 9 left for now) that I was originally planning on. 

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K joked that, if I was willing to speak to the Google Home and ask it what the weather was, I would not have had that mix-up on my phone. But I continue to categorically refuse to talk to my technology, much in the way I refuse to use Siri on my phone. It just feels too awkward to me, the idea of talking to a device! I'm pretty sure I'll never be willing to do it. 

Anyway, with a heavier coat, this outfit was reasonable for the weather we had that day. It was the first day I was able to wear my new Uniqlo x J.W. Anderson wrap skirt outdoors, and I was happy to find that it stayed put fairly well throughout the day, and that it was easy to adjust the way I liked without too much fussing in the morning. The tie did loosen up a little and the waistband did shift slightly by the end of the workday, but not so much as to be annoying, or to need any significant adjusting or re-tying throughout the day. It's a true wrap skirt, but with enough fabric that there's no real risk of a wardrobe malfunction. Although the size S of the skirt would have worked for me as well, and in fact, looked quite similar in the mirror, I picked out the size M so that I could wear the skirt a bit more relaxed at the waist if I wanted to. 

I really enjoyed wearing this outfit, and I loved wearing my new skirt. The look is quite simple, but it was nice to be able to go out with bare legs for the first time this year, even if I had a heavier coat on. 

Money Diary: A Somewhat Typical Week, Part 2

And now for the rest of the Money Diary for my somewhat more typical week (part one here) than in last year's diary (part one, part two)! This week is not fully "typical" in the sense that I don't spend like this every average week of every month. That ~$45 Target order should be our only large purchase of shared household goods or cleaning supplies this April, we typically spend around $50 to $60/month on that, and we split the cost. Sephora orders are a twice per year-ish thing for me, and my next one this year, if needed, probably won't be anywhere near as sizable as this week's ~$109 order because I only wear makeup twice a month or so, and none of my other products are running out. Also, I don't get any skincare products from Sephora anymore, and the only other things I buy there are the Cocofloss and Olaplex No. 3 treatment. Furthermore, I think the additions to my closet captured in this Money Diary should be close to it for the whole month.

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With that additional context, this Money Diary gives a good sense of what my spending looks like most of the time. A few of the biggest things are happening off-screen in other weeks, of course, including my student loan payments and travel spending. (I generally go on one big, long vacation per year, and maybe take one or two additional long weekend trips to visit friends or family.) And I'm often a little coy about the exact amount of my rent, mostly because I'm a bit embarrassed by the fairly high total. Outside of that, though, the diary is accurate in how it depicts my typical approach to spending, including for restaurants, groceries, and coffee shops. My food costs combined are the next biggest spending category for me by far, after student loans and rent.

Another fairly typical day at the office, and I can't help but order the same Sweetgreen salad with kale, spicy chickpeas, spicy broccoli, chopped tomatoes, chopped red onion, and burrata again. I may be ordering it almost every weekday from now until they discontinue the burrata at the end of the season.

With the upcoming trial, K's been having a hard time at the office, so after leaving work a bit past 6:00 PM, I go a bit out of my way to stop at a nearby bakery and coffee shop to get a brownie, cookie, or chocolate croissant for him as a little pick-me-up. I didn't realize that they actually close at 7:00, so they've already sold out of most of their baked goods. Happily, they have a few of their giant chocolate chip cookies left, so I get that and it comes out to $4.87 with tip. Normally, I'd get a second item so we can split both, but they don't have anything else left that I think we'd like, so I just get the one cookie for us to share later.

As for dinner, I get Chipotle. Unlike in last year's diary, this time I add guacamole to my steak salad, as I often do these days (one of the many bits of lifestyle inflation I've indulged in since graduating from law school), bringing the total to $13.50. I eat at home, and after resting and digesting for a while, I use the stationary bike in our apartment to do a workout. Afterwards, I try to do some pilates exercises, but it's been a very long time since I was last doing those regularly, and so my muscles are no longer capable of much. K gets home pretty late, and we share the cookie.

Please follow the link below for the rest of this week's money diary!