I have only really ever had to find a place to live once before because everything else just kind of worked itself out without any effort on my part. I grew up in my parents’ house, then I went to college and moved into the sorority where I lived for 4 years. After college was over I moved back home for 6 months before law school. That summer was one of my favorites. I worked a lot of food service, and saved so I could get my very own apartment. I also had a lot of fun. I forgot though, how stressful that apartment hunt was. It involved a few very stressful trips to Seattle with B, looking at the most ghetto apartments either of us had ever seen, having a woman in McDonalds tell me I was going to get fat when I was ordering a medium french fries to share. Needless to say there were also a lot of tears involved with those trips.
Eventually though, I found my over-priced, downtown apartment just a short walk away from the law school. I moved in, experienced the whole living alone thing (and being more grown up than ever before, sort of, minus the whole 1L thing) and then at the end of my first year moved back home again for another epic summer in Hood River. At the end of that summer I moved back to Seattle and into the house I’m in now. It is owned by the people I used to nanny for. They were moving, my roommates and I were looking for somewhere to live, they asked us if we wanted to rent their house, it’s beautiful and newly remodeled (heated floors? what?) so obviously we said yes and that was that.
Fast forward two years, in the middle of studying for the bar and I’m looking for somewhere to live again. Alone again. Tears again. I looked at a place yesterday that smelled like urine and had a built in murphy bed in the living room (it was a one bedroom). No thank you?
This new place will be the place where for the first ever time experience a real, grown up life. It is the place where I will experience life without school for the first time, where I will be living when I start my first ever lawyer job (well hopefully anyway, fingers crossed that I pass this bar). It’s exciting. I just hope I can find the perfect place.
In my expert opinion, finding somewhere to live and studying for the bar have to be two of the most stressful thing. Mixing them together is almost unmanageable. So, the moral of my story today, friends, is that you shouldn’t ever think that you can move during (or in my case the week immediately following) the bar. Not. Worth. It.
