First, a disclaimer

Most people should not expect to increase 20 points on the LSAT in three months unless they are just beginning their studies. Many people make initial large point increases by improving logic games, and progress slows after that.

If you have self-studied for months to get to a 150, I do not want you to walk away from this post thinking that if you follow my advice that you will get to a 170+ in the same amount of time that I did. My methods are very effective, but I self-studied for three weeks and then did logic games with a tutor for an additional ~3 weeks before getting my first 160.

The people who take my advice and pull this off usually are already very quick readers (often with high scores on other standardized tests) who have had significant exposure to things like the LSAT’s reading comp section. I often work with people who have graduate degrees in other areas who are starting out with pretty high reading comprehension diagnostics. These people usually do not miss more than 10-12 questions on reading comprehension on their first time seeing the test. They are scoring low in logic games, and they can usually get 10-12 questions correct on each logical reasoning section the first time. Their issue is with logic games. (I’m convinced that’s because most logic games books and videos were created by men who are pretty good at math. I started elleSAT to teach games in a more natural and, for lack of a better word, female way.)

Once this type of student figures out the games section, they see big increases because they’re able to pick up a lot of points in logic games. Those students get to 160 very quickly, like I did, and then they get from 160 to 170 by working with me on the finer points of LR and RC (and with Van or Kerry on logic games – I don’t have time to teach them).

So if you are in the high 150s and you are struggling to get through reading comp on time, we can still help you, and I can usually get people comfortably to about 163 on the test, but there are two types of plateaus on this test. There is a reading speed plateau (no score corresponds to this, this is an individual plateau) where you need to increase your speed to progress, and there is a plateau around 165 where you need to truly understand the test to progress. (I hate to generalize about this because for some people, the reading speed plateau happens to be in the 160s. That’s a different situation but often I can still help people squeeze points out of the logical reasoning section.) LSAC puts some incredibly difficult questions to differentiate people along the score distribution. Those questions are what sets the curve. You can see the curve by looking at LSAC’s scaled score charts: it gets closer and closer to a 1:1 raw score:scaled score increase as you increase from 165. That’s why it is so difficult and why there is so much variability in scores at this level.

IF YOU ARE NOT ALREADY A VERY FAST READER, YOU NEED TO READ MORE. A LOT MORE. SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER. I send out articles from law reviews, scientific journals, bascially whatever I read during the week. My lifelong reading habits are the reason I was able to crush the test. I try my best to share those with people, because I was sick of students asking me if they should read The Economist. NO! Read SCOTUS Blog, and if you don’t like it, you should really consider whether you want to endure three years of reading stuff you don’t like to become a lawyer.

I think a good rule of thumb is that it will take the same amount of time (and a little less test material) to get to 160 as it will to get to 170. This is why I think it’s so important not to waste material: I have students who have ripped through practice test after practice test without learning from past work…they stall out…they run out of material…and it’s a problem. This is also, incidentally, why I hate “drilling” so much.

I needed ~20 practice tests worth of material to get from a 160 to a 170. If you need 20+ to get to 160, you have a real chance of running out of tests, and that’s a big problem. Slow down. Book a consult with someone on my site. I have more advice on this…including taking untimed sections, checking your work as you go, etc. Basically, the opposite of what Mike Kim/LSAT Trainer suggests. Lots to say about this. This post is a work in progress. Maybe I’ll write a book after all.

My law school/LSAT application timeline

I decided in December 2019 that I wanted to go to law school. I figured that I would take the summer to put my materials together and apply in fall 2020 when applications opened for the 2021 academic year. I planned to take the LSAT in April 2020 to give myself time to plan my wedding (then scheduled for July 2020, now indefinitely postponed because I refuse to get married on Zoom). I planned to take the test a second time in August if I wasn’t happy with the initial result.

I started studying for the LSAT casually in early February, and got a tutor at the beginning of March.

LSAC rescheduled the April exam to May. I felt good after taking the LSAT, so I started working on my application a few days later. I got my score on June 5, emailed the law schools I was interested in asking whether I could still apply, and submitted all of my materials by June 15. Things moved very quickly after that. I was admitted to Northwestern on June 30, after I emailed them to tell them that I needed to deposit with another school by July 6 to hold my scholarship. Northwestern started negotiating with me the following week, extended my deposit date an additional week, and made me a compelling scholarship offer within two weeks.

My experience was not normal, but I’ve been teaching the test since June of 2020 and we have now had 2 years worth of students go through the application process, so I have a pretty good sense of how things generally unfold.

My “diagnostic”

I took the free test via Kaplan (I wish I hadn’t, since it was a later prep test – your diagnostic should be in the 60s, not the 70s – 70s and 80s numbered tests should be saved for after you are close to your goal score) and I scored something like a 140, which I thought seemed fine since the questions I missed in those two sections seemed to be rated as “difficult” and I only got like 3 points in the “analytical reasoning” section before giving up. I looked online for information about how to study. I bought three books: a 10 Official LSAT Prep Tests book from LSAC, The LSAT Trainer, and the PowerScore Logic Games Bible. I read this article and thought it sounded like a pretty solid approach, so I decided to start with reading comprehension and logical reasoning to see how far I could make it on my own.

My “process”

At first, I kept things pretty chill. On my lunch break, I walked down the street to my local diner, ordered a cup of coffee, and did one or two reading comprehension passages, or as much logical reasoning as I could fit in. I checked my work after each reading comprehension passage, and after the first half of logical reasoning to try to see where I had gone wrong. I don’t see a benefit to going through material and not checking your work as you progress, since you should be learning from every mistake. I did try to read the LSAT Trainer but it didn’t feel useful to me. So I stopped using it.

Eventually, it was time to buckle down and learn logic games. The PowerScore book didn’t do it for me, so I got a tutor at the recommendation of a friend. The tutor gave me a crash course in formal logic and how to diagram rules in logic games. This was helpful.

Around this time, LSAC released the Prep Plus aka LawHub platform. This was a godsend for me: I had a bunch of practice test books in my Amazon cart, removed them immediately, and saved a lot of money. I started cranking through at least one section a day in LawHub and reviewing my mistakes with my tutor. I didn’t like online explanations and I didn’t like spending my time digging for them when I could just pay the tutor and get through a section within half an hour.

I worked really hard and spent quite a bit of money. I think I could have spent less. I think I could have figured out most of the other two sections on my own over a long enough time horizon. I just really wanted to get this over with.

My tutor

My tutor ended up being someone who I do not share values with, so I no longer recommend them or their company. The direction they chose to take their business was a reason I started my company. I do recommend Kerry Monroe and Van Tran (both listed on my website). They are excellent tutors. There are also a few former students who now tutor for us. Van taught me a lot about the LSAT, and Kerry helps me sometimes with law school. They have many happy repeat customers and rave reviews.

The 165 plateau is, in fact, real

It took me a month after getting to 160 that to get my first score above 170. Then I was stuck at 168-169 for awhile and it took another 2-3 weeks to reliably test above 170. It was excruciating. I learned a lot from going through this and I can get people over this plateau much more quickly than I was able to. I have had students get from the low-mid 160s to 170+ with two sessions. I really think I’ve figured this out. I’ll keep writing more about this as time allowsbut given my schedule constraints unfortunately am only able to transmit some of this information in the initial session.

Is law school hard?

It’s very difficult to get As because of the curve, but difficult to completely fail, which seems like an okay trade to me. Most of the difficulty comes from trying to combine/apply concepts while still learning new ones. If there were a two-week reading period, or one fewer class, I think it would have been quite manageable.

What is Zoom law school like?

In-person law school is better.

Do you like Northwestern?

It’s the best. Great students, great professors, incredible facilities. I really appreciate all the mentorship they build in, whether it’s through an assigned mentor or the APEX program. I’m not sure how it happened when I’ve been to the campus like, five times, but I feel attachment to the school and somehow managed to connect with a few people who I’m pretty sure will be lifelong friends.

I’m biased since I’ve fallen in love (or at least very strong like) with Chicago, but I think it’s the best location in the country. I get that people love the campus at Michigan or Chicago and being in New York and the quad in Cambridge and the weather or the counterculture or tech or whatever in the Bay Area, but it’s Lake Michigan for me.

One of the best moments of my life so far was going into the law school library for the first time. It is on the eastern side of the building and every floor has an unobstructed floor-to-ceiling view of Lake Michigan. When you stand at the windows, even on the lowest floor, you cannot see Lakeshore Drive below you. It’s just you, the glass, and the water. My first day on campus at Northwestern Law was also my first time seeing the lake from that perspective.

Standing in the library that day, the future looked bright for the first time in a very long time. My mind was quiet as I looked at the horizon and all I could think was, “I made it.”

Soon, you’ll have that feeling. I can’t wait to hear about it.

I wanted to expand on my remarks about this since 1) my Twitter account is private and 2) the toxic culture around the CIA petition has reared its head again. (I actually wrote this a few months ago during a different toxic callout culture incident, but it’s once again timely now that the CIA has purchased a booth at ALAAC.)

For your hate-reading pleasure, I’ve grouped my objections to the “No CIA at ALA” movement into a few categories.

Some of the CIA critics are seriously confused, and should not be taken seriously.

The ALA/CIA issue started when the American Library Association featured the CIA library in a regular feature on their Instagram account. It was a super popular post and the comments on Instagram were overwhelmingly positive. (The reception was so warm that the CIA then purchased a booth at ALA’s annual conference. These booths are not cheap. So, ALA’s staff successfully monetized their social media presence, while reacting nimbly to the desires of their online audience for more information about these jobs. Sadly, instead of kudos for a job well done, staff were barraged on Twitter with accusations of “collaborating” with the CIA.)

I should have known that trouble was brewing when Librarian Twitter had a meltdown, accusing ALA of letting the CIA “take over” their Instagram. In fact, it was a post in a series of “instagram takeovers” which featured many government libraries. But I guess Librarians Online thought that the ALA had actually “turned over” their handle and/or information.

To those people, I sincerely ask: what is wrong with you?

There was an entire series featuring different libraries where it was clear that professional photographers had gone onsite and taken pictures ahead of time. It’s terrifying that any of these people teach about “information literacy.” I think these people should get off Twitter and get some common sense. Unfortunately, attacking people who disagree with them online isn’t enough: a handful of these Library Twitterati are now planning to “protest” the CIA at the next ALA conference (and by “protest” I mean “prevent jobseekers from accessing information they are interested in at a vendor’s booth”).

So here I am blogging about them, instead, with the hope that a reasonable blog post will persuade people who are on the fence to mind their own business and let conference attendees look for whatever jobs they want to at an expensive conference that they paid to go to.

Government by protest/Twitter/petition/etc. undermines representative government structures in membership organizations.

After Instagram-gate, Library Twitter got upset about the CIA having a booth at the conference. I believe people protested at the 2018 conference, and then there was a widely publicized open letter. I have an issue with letters like these, which have sadly become more common within our field.

Governance by this kind of petition is not aligned with my personal values of representative government.

My first criticism of this”open letter” was that its authors should have asked a member of Council to introduce a resolution or a proposal at Council, thus triggering the mechanisms that are in place for a more discussion. Plenty of councilmembers signed the petition. Any one of them could have introduced a resolution to either ban the CIA or to form a working group to create a proposed exhibitor code of conduct.

Instead, they signed an open letter that seems to have fizzled out (discussion of the matter seems to have basically faded to people making personal attacks on me for pointing out on Twitter that some people who paid to go to a job fair might actually be interested in highly-compensated federal jobs with excellent benefits).

I don’t like open letters/petitions because they trick people into feeling like they have done something simply by signing. These types of petitions devolve into a form of performative activism that I feel provides short-term social/emotional validation without actually generating strategy or momentum around broader justice and access issues.

These periodic bursts of outrage and petitions are not just a distraction from the real work of governance. They also obscure the wishes of the majority of the membership. A vocal minority on Twitter is mistaken for the membership itself. Random people, not affiliated with ALA, sign these petitions. Members of Council then chastise other members for asking whether signatories of these petitions are members, occasionally speaking of them perjoratively because of their skin color. This kind of racial commentary is unprofessional, and worse: it’s not collegial. People should be discussing ideas, not attacking each other personally. (For an example of how polite discourse devolves, you can check out all the crap people said about me on Twitter because I pointed out that the American Library Association is not the Antifa Library Association.)

This kind of disiveness leads to low member engagement, and worse: it leads to people leaving our professional associations because they’re sick of the Twitter echo chamber and bullying of anyone who expresses an opinion that isn’t perfectly aligned with whatever today’s social justice groupthink happens to be.

I have more to say about online call-out culture and the people who are cynically leveraging it to build platforms for themselves, but I don’t want to go there in this post. Maybe I will say some of it on Twitter. Follow me for real talk!

This particular protest of the CIA is ad hoc, and does not offer coherent policy recommendations. 

Beyond my issues with performative activism in general, and specifically how it creates a toxic call-out culture at ALA, I simply think it is wrong-headed to propose to ban the CIA without introducing a broader vendor policy. It puzzles me that there was no petition to ban far more dangerous vendors from ALA.

For example, Reed Elsevier, DBA LexisNexis, has been providing database services to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement since at least 2014. These databases are used to track down undocumented people in the United States. Apparently, it took the current administration’s solicitations for librarians to notice that LexisNexis bid on proposals for “extreme vetting” tech.

Amazon Publishing is also exhibiting at ALA. Although the publishing arm of Amazon is probably pretty well separated from the (likely racially biased) facial recognition software it sells to law enforcement, there are still serious privacy concerns with every aspect of Amazon’s business.

If we are trying to ban vendors who make the conference “unsafe,” I think Elsevier is a much bigger risk than the CIA. Conference attendees know to steer clear of the CIA, but are not necessarily aware of Elsevier or Amazon’s activities. Thus, the myopic focus on the CIA was a missed opportunity to have bigger discussions.

Speaking of the bigger picture:

The vitriol against the CIA is bizarrely specific.

I don’t believe that the CIA is uniquely evil or nefarious among government agencies. I do not see a meaningful difference between the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the State Department.

So why are we not writing open letters in support of banning all of them pre-emptively? Why single out the CIA?

Nor do no I think there is a bright line between the work of intelligence agencies and the work of Congress or the higher levels of the Executive Branch. Would the anti-CIA people ban the White House from recruiting librarians? What about the Library of Congress? The Library of Congress provides research assistance to members of Congress, who set imperialist foreign policy and have these other nefarious agencies reporting to them. Most U.S. government agencies are complicit. (I also do not trust the Library of Congress to run a search engine, which is among the most ridiculous suggestions I’ve ever heard on Twitter. The fact that it came from academics is frankly terrifying.)

And for that matter, I don’t think there’s a huge difference between working for the CIA or working for any number of private scetor employers. I certainly don’t think working for the CIA is inherently more unethical than working for Facebook, for example.

Speaking of shady tech companies, I think it’s interesting that people with computer science degrees aren’t bullied online for accepting positions in the private sector. This brings me to my next issue with the people trying to ban the CIA from ALA:

The discourse around this particular job is a manifestation of broader themes of class privilege, classism and ableism in our profession. 

The CIA offers highly-compensated jobs with good benefits in a field where people are hurting for both. People think it’s okay to try to censor information about these jobs because of the pernicious class privilege in our field. I don’t think it’s okay for librarians to censor information from people who have spent their own money to go to ALA because they want to find a better job.

I can’t help but notice how many academic librarians signed that open letter. Your perspective on ALA is different if someone else is paying for you to be there.

So shut the fuck up.

In library school, my classmates and I often chatted about new job postings, specializations, etc. I would often make comments to the effect of, “that job doesn’t pay enough for me to apply,” or, “I’m focusing my studies on data analysis because it’s better compensated.” Conversations about money usually result in someone eventually saying, “we didn’t become librarians for the money!”

Actually, I did! I worked 30-60 hours a week during undergrad. I did every kind of job under the sun and I still couldn’t find work after graduating college. I moved back in with my parents in northern Virginia and got a job doing customer service and managing the file room at a car dealership. My parents told me that grad school was the new bachelor’s and that I needed to go back to school.

We landed on library science in part because I had a low undergraduate GPA (thanks to working at jobs that I thought would position me for employment after school – I was wrong) and serious learning disabilities (my undergraduate major choices were limited by those). I also had a neighbor who was a successful law librarian and an adjunct professor at Catholic University, who had planted the seed with my parents long ago that I should be a librarian.

I was skeptical about library school, because I had been following people online for years who seemed to regret their degrees and who posted all the time about how bad the job market was. (Unfortunately, I didn’t realize until after graduating that all of those people have been complaining about their jobs for over a decade yet I’ve never seen them at networking events. I also discovered via conferences that some of them are just borderline unemployable in customer-facing positions.)

But any librarian who can get a job with the CIA can just get a job elsewhere!

Again, why does no one ever say this about software engineers, or any other job? Hmm. Anyway…

Although I’ve read a lot about how this is a “generalist” degree that positions you for lots of different work, unfortunately, I haven’t found that to be the case. Although I have the skills, aptitude and experience to successfully perform in many roles (especially in market research, which is my original and perhaps greatest interest), because I haven’t held full time work or unpaid internships in a handful of the “right” places, I can’t get past an HR screen.

Adding to my challenges finding work, many companies prefer to hire and train 22-year-olds than 30-year-olds with actual work experience, but if you don’t have the right degrees or internships during college (or if you go to the wrong school), you can’t get a job when you’re 22, either.

Of course, plenty of libraries also prefer to hire inexperienced 20-somethings over library professionals…but that’s a post for another day.

Most people complaining about this just don’t understand the D.C. job market.

In DC, if you are a librarian, you only really have two choices. You can either make ~50k at a contractor with marginal health benefits and 2 weeks total PTO (these positions usually top out at around 80k for people with highly specialized skills), or working for the CIA making 75k+ with a much better insurance and PTO package. If you have legal research experience, I assume you can get a job in a law firm – but I don’t, so I assume I wouldn’t be successful seeking these kinds of positions, especially given the sheer volume of unemployed JDs.*

Most federal jobs in the executive branch/competitive civil service go to military veterans. You can get around this by working for the Library of Congress (the legislative branch has way more discretion in hiring), but that’s an employer well-known for nepotism.

The intelligence agencies are some of the very few meritocracies in DC – and they’re known as pretty great places to work as a result. (Other highly technical agencies are also good places to work. But if you had the aptitude to be a specialized and successful research scientist, chances are, you wouldn’t be a librarian.)

Speaking of specialized and successful researchers: I’m constantly shocked at how little academic librarians are paid. I make more in Chicago than my colleagues in academic libraries in the Bay Area, DC area, and Seattle. Some of these people have ten years of experience. I don’t think that’s okay.

If you think it’s okay, you might have class privilege.

Speaking of good places to work:

If your employer claims to have a positive mission, they are probably abusive (and most of the library field is)

Here’s a PSA for anyone still reading this: most passion careers and employers you’d feel good about working for are abusive.

The irony here is that all these would-be censors fawn over April Hathcock when she writes a blog post about how the library is a plantation, but they are actively trying to censor information from people who are so desperate to get off “the plantation” that they paid hundreds of dollars of their own money to go to a job fair.

The bigger irony, of course, is that they want to lecture ME (a first-generation American – my family fled a Latin American dictatorship) about “class solidarity.”

Working in these kinds of organizations is terrible for people’s mental health (and often their physical health, since employees are subjected to guilt-trips about not being committed enough to the mission when they try to set boundaries).

I know this because I’ve been there: I turned down jobs with a financial regulatory body and the Department of Defense because I wanted to work again in disability advocacy and policy. Talk about an abusive field!

The employers that don’t have a feel-good mission usually pay better and have more interesting work environments. Because these employers make money off of their employees, they are invested in hiring good people and preventing them from burning out. At my job in the private sector, I have great work-life balance and am intellectually stimulated on a daily basis.

So, look. If you want a vacation? If you want to be able to save for retirement? If you want to be able to enjoy a nice meal out or help your family out with money? You’re not a bad person. And having your retirement squared away, and taking vacations, are all incredibly valuable for your mental health. (But I guess encouraging people to tend to their own physical and psychiatric needs isn’t “solidarity” or “intersectionality.” Whatever.)

If you want to make $75,000 as a librarian, and the CIA is your only chance to do that, I don’t see how you’re any more “complicit” than a janitor who works there. Librarians aren’t setting foreign policy.

It’s a decent office job in a high-cost of living area. People will probably be pretty nice to you. You’ll have a high-level security clearance, so you can command a higher salary in other government consulting roles if you want to leave. There is nothing wrong with aspiring to upward class mobility.

Anyone who tells you otherwise has class privilege of their own (or a partner who helps pay the bills).

Because I am not ableist, I don’t judge people who need or want to work in healthy environments.

Speaking of healthy work environments and ableism…

When I started library school, I was waiting tables. This reinforced my conviction that I needed to get a desk job ASAP, because my body is not suited to positions that require a great deal of standing. I had other issues after working as a page for 18 months. Fortunately, with good health insurance, I’ve been able to get my body back into shape.

If you have a chronic health condition (or a family member who needs care), the federal govenment is really your only option in DC. If you don’t believe me, consider that federal employees are about to get maternity leave, despite their already-generous sick and vacation accruals. Contractors aren’t – and their PTO packages are chintzy.

I have friends who have worked for government contractors who were not flexible with flex time or remote work. If you have a chronic condition you are spending all of your PTO going to doctor’s appointments. If you do not have specialized skills outside of library work, a federal job is the absolute best job you can get.

I’m not totally convinced that the people bashing me on Twitter actually know how much it costs to have a chronic health condition. If you have any kind of physical disability or illness, you are spending at least several hundred dollars at the beginning of every year just to hit your deductible, and your spending doesn’t really go down from there. At my last federal job, after I hit my deductible, I was still spending between $200-500 a month just to maintain my health – and that was with solid government health insurance.

One of the people who dragged me online for saying that the CIA was advertising good jobs said that she would prefer to work at WalMart. This is an incredibly ableist comment. There are multiple lawsuits against WalMart because they do not make reasonable accommodations for their employees. WalMart also eliminated greeter positions, which employed many people with disabilities.

This comment is also hypocritical: WalMart causes severe environmental and economic damage on a global scale…just like the CIA!

Effective altruism

The final missing piece of these discussions is the concept of effective altruism. To me, it’s far more unethical for someone who could earn $75,000 to earn $40,000 (the salaries I was being offered in public libraries in Chicagoland).

Even if you can quantify your work as a public or academic librarian and determine that it generates $35,000 in “value” each year, I still think there is serious potential for a bigger social impact if you instead earn that money and direct your resources to social improvements and/or social investing.

(But don’t take my word for it. The most influential moral philosophers and economists of our time have been articulating exactly this position for decades.)

Working for employers like mine gives you a lot of resources. You can use those resources to do great things in your private life. And personally, I’ve accomplished a lot more in my life when I haven’t been worried about my health spiraling out of control and subsequently costing me a job.

My next financial goal (other than having children) is to purchase property suitable for use as a Section 8 rental property. I believe in Section 8 as a program. I think it’s what the government should be doing. I want to provide affordable, high-quality housing for working class people in my community. I think this is how I can have the biggest impact on inequality and everything else the people protesting the CIA claim to care about.

I’m also really looking forward to digging into corporate citizenship initiatives and continuing to leverage my work network for fundraising. Those are resources you’ll never get in the public sector, and this doesn’t even get into the kinds of skills you get in a very short time by working at a high-performing organization. I’ve only been at [REDACTED] for seven months but I am shocked every day by my gains in productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. (More on this in another post, but obviously I hate the article criticizing Pete Buttiegieg for saying that McKinsey was “a place to learn.” It was probably the best objective place for him to build skills. McKinsey would have kept on McKinsey-ing whether or not Pete chose to work there. No company is going to stop being evil because an individual chooses not to work there. On the other hand, an individual can absolutely make a positive structural impact at companies that we think are “evil.”)

I work in a clerical position where I am respected and treated fairly. My MLS is higly relevant to my work, it is respected and valued, and I work with intelligent and driven people who want to make the world better. My employer provides upward paths of mobility to people from diverse backgrounds and is a leader in gender equity and corporate citizenship. My employer gives me the flexibility I need to focus on my health and my family. As a result, I have become more flexible, creative, and a better listener and problem-solver.

Best of all, at the end of the day, I have energy and creativity to give back to my community and care for my family. I think the world is probably a slightly better place because I’m not a librarian living at the poverty line (literally my only other option).

My haters are all keyboard warriors; prove me wrong

Because of my decision to treat my job as a source of income instead of personal meaning, the past year, I’ve:

– gotten multiple trans youth out of abusive living situations and into supportive, stable ones
– exposed an abusive GLBT shelter operator
– provided subsidized housing to first generation librarians of color
– provided employment for multiple disabled people and people of color
– helped women of color receive fair financial settlements when they had been mistreated at work
– connected women of color to employment opportunities
– worked the Hill to reform an arcane and obscure, but incredibly important, disability policy agency (hopefully, more on this to come…)

This does not include my structured volunteer activities (shoutout to the Court Appointed Special Advocates and the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance programs). And I’ve helped a bunch of animals, too. My job’s flexibility allows me to be actively involved in medical care for a chronically ill family member, and will allow me to welcome a child into my family in the near future.

Personally, I think a lot of the people who are so upset about the CIA love to complain on Twitter and flex their social justice bona fides because they have a lot of ennui and suspect, deep down, that their lives are meaningless.

To all my haters, I ask: what have you done lately? With few exceptions (and they must be made for the authors of the open letter, who are undeniably doing good things – I believe their intentions were good and not attention-seeking, but I don’t believe that about most of the other people who are trying to govern by petition), I mostly see my haters:

– complaining on Twitter
– writing open letters and/or blog posts
– acting like victims
– trying to publicly shame people who disagree with them

Am I missing something? Are my haters doing awesome stuff that I should know about?

@ me.

* ETA: Information about law librarianship

A reader was kind enough to share the following:

“While the majority of academic library jobs require both the JD and MLS,  firm jobs don’t, by and large. You posit that you’d still be an unlikely candidate because of the “sheer volume of unemployed JDs,” but some firms even prefer to hire MLS-only candidates because that makes it less likely the librarian will be doing legal work (applying facts to law), which is a big no-no if you’re not licensed to practice in the jurisdiction. For a sample of current law librarian jobs, you can see the SEAALL jobs board, https://seaall.wildapricot.org/employment  , especially the job openings at Miller & Chevalier, Hogan Lovells, and Ogletree Deakins.

[Many jobs] require law firm/legal research experience, so practically speaking one might have to start as a paralegal or at a pretty small firm and work their way up. But no required JD.”

I think I would have been a great paralegal, I’m sad that I graduated from college at a time when those jobs were impossible to get! Do you know anyone with an MLS who has successfully parlayed it into a position as a paralegal? Tell me! I want to interview them for my blog. Even though I make too much money now to change careers, I think this is useful information for other people and I want to share!

I have gotten my security deposit back after removing the shelves. If you can’t get the anchors out of the wall, you can generally spackle over them and/or they are high enough above eye-level that property management companies maybe don’t care, although if I had a tenant moving into my current room I’d definitely offer to just leave the rail for them.

So, I have wanted to do my laundry room for some time, and had read that ClosetMaid and Elfa are compatible, component-wise. (I need to spec out, still, how much this would have cost with Elfa). This is probably true and ClosetMaid has some neat stuff (like hanging hampers and drawers) that Elfa doesn’t totally have, BUT, oh man, a few painful lessons:

– the Elfa tracks are CLEARLY superior – NOT worth the few dollars as the top track warped a bit with installation meaning that the vertical track on the right POPPED OUT OF THE BRACKETS.

– we resolved this by purchasing screws and anchors at the hardware store and securing the vertical tracks – this was a pain both because Home Depot could have easily sold mounting kits to this end at the point-of-service AND because it was obnoxious to mark the walls through the tracks themselves – pencil did not fit since the holes were small! Ugh!

– the instructions for ClosetMaid are SPOTTY AT BEST

– did I mention we had to drill holes in the wall in addition to the top track – this rather defeats the renter-friendly points I’ve identified with Elfa, above. HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS

– also, the 6-foot shelves, while cheap, are a MAJOR PAIN to install, you have to clip the brackets on them first since it’s tricky to get them onto the brackets after the brackets are on, meaning that any alteration to the configuration is by necessity a 2-person job so like I guess it’s nice to have the option but if I’d known I were going to drill this many holes shit I would have just thrown up some plywood with brackets, fewer holes and less of a pain

– REPEAT: Elfa’s tracks are better designed so the vertical posts DON’T POP OUT OF THE RAIL, I have done three or four installations and NEVER had to drill the vertical tracks in although I might consider it if I were using it to store vinyl or other very heavy objects

I think the best course here would have been to run an Elfa track and then use the ClosetMaid mesh shelves since they are indisputably cheaper and I wouldn’t have resented the shoddy design as much if I hadn’t reached my max for daily irritation installing this janky two-bit industrial design abortion

My laundry room looks tight though

(Thanks to Kevin C for being my rent-a-boyfriend for the afternoon. Also if anyone wants to help me with SEO or analytics I’d appreciate it, I feel like this is the review of Elfa versus ClosetMaid that I was hoping for before I bought this junk, so I want to make sure people can find it, you’re welcome Internet, please do leave a comment if you’re here visiting since I don’t know how to tell how much traffic this post is getting)

Beyond the seeming impossibility of buying a home (well, it’s possible in Mt. Rainier, but I’m rather terrified of renovation and other incidental costs associated with purchasing a 100-year-old single family home, eek) and its impact on my career, there are two things that really affect my life that I don’t see much good writing on: ADHD and bike fit issues specific to women. Had a lovely meal with a writer with ADHD of some renown recently, and can’t stop thinking about how much I want to share the hard-learned gems I’ve picked up over the past several years.

I have 3 pieces of advice for people with ADHD (besides “ignore Mari Kondo,” which a topic for another post: basically, I don’t think “purge by category” is appropriate for ADHD people because it ignores the opportunities to consider matters of flow and layout within a home that are of CRITICAL IMPORT).

I think there are 3 big pieces that MUST be in order for ADHD people to become organized.

#1: Your daily bag (also a subject for a blog post, BIG SURPRISE, I have ideas about how pockets ought to work and dislike interior purse organizers that can be swapped out – TOO FUSSY – do you really need more than one bag other than for special occasions? ). This is the MOST IMPORTANT.

#2: Your day planner. I’m agnostic about keeping an electronic vs digital planner and think both can work (I keep both) but this tool is the second building block.

#3: Your bedroom. Having an organized room improves bedtime routines and rest. Once your bedroom is a source of support and comfort, instead of a place of chaos, you can carry the order of that space into the business of your daily life.

A lot of my thinking lately has been focused on imagining a “hierarchy of needs” diagram specific to ADHD needs. Will write more as I continue to read the literature….