A lazy Prophet's birthday at home

Sleepy puppy unconsciously burrowing closer to my left buttcheek? Check.
A good spy thriller? Check.
Comfy Brooklyn sweatshirt? Check (thanks Uncle Charlie!).
Cappuccino and a piece of chocolate cake DELIVERED TO MY DOOR? Check!

It is pretty much a perfect Friday afternoon. The maid (who lives downstairs) failed to show up for the third time last night (think we’re getting a new maid) so Marisol and I cleaned the apartment. Not really well, since we’ll eventually get a pro in here but well enough that I’m not cringing every time I put my foot down on something dusty or squishy or something that used to be a delivery menu I wanted to use but is now a pile of tiny pieces of paper covered in puppy saliva. Marisol swept (and I’m considering mopping tonight as well, I know, big plans!) while I de-slimed the stovetop and washed every dish and stick of silverware we own. So I can get into the kitchen now, though I haven’t gone grocery shopping this week there is really no need. Nothing to cook.

It might have to stay that way until tomorrow to. Today is the Prophet’s birthday so it is an official government and religious holiday weekend. Not many stores are open. I have errands to run besides the grocery shopping. My brother is coming to visit in a couple weeks and I need to pick up a mattress and a phone for him to use while he’s here. Also, I promised myself a bookshelf after payday as a reward for getting through the month.

There have been big shakeups at my office in the last few weeks so it has been a difficult month. I think I absorb more ambient stress than I realize because even though I don’t really know the people involved it was still really difficult to concentrate on my work. I went from reading an average of 220 letters a day to struggling to make 100. It is better now. One of our senior attorneys left the firm and left the LAW to follow a more spiritual path of studying reiki and teaching yoga. She did this after centering our entire correspondence review procedure around the way her mind needed it to work in order to process the information and draft our Statement of Claim, the central document we will submit explaining our client’s case. I’m glad she’s off to do something that will hopefully be really fulfilling and, after less than two months in a firm I can definitely understand how you could run yourself into the ground doing this for a lifetime, but since the whole system of information gathering was set up under the assumption that she was writing the SOC, she is kind of leaving us in the lurch.

We have rallied surprisingly well. She was only my supervisor for a week so I never experienced this but rumor has it she could be moody and, though a good teacher and friend when in a good mood, she could be unkind and somewhat maniacally ruthless in a bad mood. The tension in the office now that she is gone has palpably decreased. The other senior attorney working on the case has less management experience but he has definitely rallied. There was another scare last week when he had to leave for Canada for the whole week on emergency family leave but he is back and seems to be solidly picking up the slack where the other attorney left off. It is a little terrifying to feel so unprepared for what is coming when we finish the correspondence review in the next couple weeks, but also exciting because we will all get to do the kind of work we normally wouldn’t get to do until after we’d been at the firm for a year or so.

I am learning a lot more about how construction contracts work, which is a good thing, because it helps me do my job better and feel more invested in the work of the firm, but it is also a bad thing, since I honestly don’t really care how construction contracts work beyond the barest veneer of purely academic interest. In my soul, I am not a construction lawyer.

I am starting to wonder if in my soul I am a lawyer at all. I had an annoying conversation last night with a woman I work with that has picked open this old question in my brain that I thought had finally scarred over after I found happy employment and now it is festering again. She is incredibly smart and very intense about her work. Her brightest dream is to become an arbitrator of the highest degree and sit down with a cup of coffee to pour over two brilliantly written claims and determine who is right and what they are entitled to under the law. When she talks about the day she will get to do this, her eyes light up with actual joy at the thought of reading legal arguments. My eyes glaze over.

Anyway, she gave me a ride home last night during the biggest, longest thundering rainstorm I have seen since I’ve been in Cairo. Supposedly it actually HAILED out in Maadi, a neighborhood about 30 minutes away. People actually emailed the listserve about it in wonder. In my neighborhood it was just rain but since Cairo never gets rain there aren’t really any street gutters to speak of so the streets fill with deep puddles that run for ten, even fifteen yards and cover the entire width of the street. Cars that roll in too quickly or too slowly can lose traction and float a few feet before drifting to the other side and since no one knows how to drive in the rain this was happening everywhere last night. Also, it is not typical to drive with your headlights on in Cairo and windshield wipers are decorative only so most cars didn’t have the kind of visibility you want them to have so you can sprint across the street in your flip flops and reach the sidewalk alive. Weaving among the drifting cars and soaked Cairenes, my friend asked me when I knew I wanted to be a lawyer and I said I still don’t know that for sure, which is the wrong answer to give to someone who is so passionate about the law herself and someone, I forgot to mention, who is the WIFE OF MY BOSS, the lawyer who started the firm and hired me back in November.

Oh well, if she ever decides to rat me out for my wavering commitment, I can always spread the word to our coworkers that she called our boss something that sounded like “schnooky mouse” on the phone.