Frankincense, myrrh and other riches

Okay, so the frankincense (which always sounds like some electricity-woken, bolts-in-head version of incense to me) and myrrh have nothing to do with this entry, but they're baby related, so I stuck them in there. Runaway metaphors! Stop them!

The reason I'm writing tonight, late though it is and tired though I am after the second day of class (and still no finalized schedule!), is that I got an email today from the firm with the news that our first year salaries have been bumped up a wee bit. And by a wee bit, I mean by fifteen thousand U.S. dollars.

Holy moolah! So within the time I've been in law school, the salaries for first year associates have jumped 24 percent: from an already whopping $125K to a truly obscene $160K. The increase alone, as my public interest friends pointed out, is the equivalent of an entire year's salary for many a humble legal services lawyer -- you know, the people actually trying to make the earth a better place 'n stuff.

Ugh. Conventional wisdom has it that virtually all first and second year associates COST their firms money rather than make money (the cost of more senior associates and partners explaining things to them, cost of additional time it takes junior associates to do things, etc.). So yes, the corresponding salaries of those senior associates have gone up too, but really folks -- 160K?

It's ... unspeakable. I made $24K on graduating from college -- five years later, I'd doubled that in my publishing job. That was after five years of experience and honest, earnest work. This 160K is going to lots of 25-year-olds who have never worked a fulltime job and have zero knowledge of how to behave in a professional environment. For serious. The idiots I work with in my student organization? Who don't take responsibility for their jobs and make all kinds of lame-ass excuses when they totally flake on their duties? They're gonna be getting an annual salary of 160K in two years.

God. How do you groom a complete asshole? You take a kid with some brains, pet him all through school and tell him he's brilliant, let him into some fancy schmancy school on the basis of cold, souless grades and test scores, reward him when he cuts others down in class and displays cool calculation in working the system, then give him the equivalent of a small nation's GNP when he finishes school. And then, 7-9 years later, you promote him and call him a partner.

It truly boggles the mind. And you know? As my public interest friends also pointed out, I bet most first year associates would eschew that raise if they could just get their weekends off. Or even just one day a week completely off.

In other rant-worthy news, I have lost sight of my goal of relaxation and easiness this term -- I'm stressing over which class to take. I know negotiation would be good to take -- I'd learn a lot, it'd look good if I ever wanted to go into ADR work -- but my soul quails at the thought of working in groups with eager beaver negotiators. Every encounter I've had with negotiation I've hated. I just don't like the idea of someone being a winner and someone being a loser. You can talk "enlarging the pie" all you want, but that's BS -- you know people are there to win.

Ugh.

To cleanse my mind, I present the picture of the day:
Let's hear it... that's right: "awwwwwwww."