Sporadic

I see that I've not blogged since March. Part of that must be the summer but part of it must be the fact that I'm busy at work which is nice. Much better than wondering if work will ever arrive. The sporadic nature of this blog reflects in part the sporadic nature of law practice. Cases ebb and flow, and occasionally one's caseload all is quiet at once, much like the western front. There are always calendar dates, however, looming on the horizon.

I'm still early enough in my practice to wonder if I'm in the right place, doing the right kind of work, and all the rest although I also know that with a ticket, I can pull up stakes and reinvent my practice at any time as long as I have the resources and the chutzpah to do it. And right now I don't but maybe as the years roll on into my fourth, fifth, and sixth years of practice I'll feel a yearn to do something that now seems unattainable.

My judge had his tenth anniversary recently on the federal bench and there was a lovely party put together for him by chambers staff and that included all the former students and lawyers who passed through chambers and whose lives were affected, goals changed and ideals re-ignited by their time with the judge. It was nice to see everyone again and reminded me of a simpler time when there was a middle class. When people didn't have to work two jobs just to have a family and afford a mortgage.

And I'm not talking about minimum wage or 15 dollar an hour type jobs. I'm talking about two mid-thirties, urban professionals who have to live in a neighborhood where they hear gunshots and domestic violence (of course maybe that's all neighborhoods these days) and who make well over 150K per year between the two of them. Even with that profile, I don't feel that we qualify as "middle class" because we live paycheck to paycheck, we have minimal savings, we can't afford to contribute to a 401K except for the very minimal matching funds amount, less than 1/15 of the maximum contribution. What happens to all of us like this and especially what happens to those below us on the socio-economic scale?

Politicians talk about class very rarely but as some people say, the fact that social classes exist, doesn't make the person who points that out a marxist. The disparity in wealth between the super-rich and the rest of us is staggering, and I wonder how families whose father works two jobs at $10 and hour and their mother works one manage to stay alive, even in what are called "inexpensive" places to live like the central valley. Families are figuratively drowning from the economic Katrina of the past eight years and I'm not sure there's an end in sight given the money in politics, the economics of the post-modern era, and all the rest. It's enought to give an attorney a headache. And with that, this post on the sporadic nature of modern life will end.