"Why do you want to be a lawyer?"

Continuing my story of trying to find my place in the world...

After the chili cheese dog incident, I made an effort not to be such an asshole. I was still considering applying to law school, but I had been stymied by the question on the application, “Why do you want to be a lawyer?” I realized, after the chili dog incident, that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. The fact is that most lawyers are assholes. They start out as assholes, and then they spend three years at a special school surrounded by other assholes, being taught how to be bigger assholes by the best and brightest assholes in the country. A really good lawyer would have argued that it was, ipso facto, the chili dog vendor’s responsibility to furnish reasonable evidence of the presence of cheese on the chili dog and to abide by the de facto standards of the chili dog industry by placing the cheese on top of the dog, irrespective of the actual presence of said cheese. I didn’t want to be that guy.

My other option, as I saw it, was to apply to graduate school in philosophy. The end goal here would be to become a college philosophy professor. The problem with this plan was that philosophy graduate programs are insanely competitive. It’s actually harder to get into a decent philosophy graduate program than it is to get into the most prestigious medical or law school. This is because the demand for doctors and lawyers in society outstrips the demand for philosophers by about 100,000 to one. Really the only option for someone with a PhD in philosophy is to wait for a philosophy professor to retire or die – and hope that the university doesn’t take said event as an opportunity to trim their faculty budget. As an illustration, my friend Chris, who graduated with a double major in math and philosophy, and had a 3.8 GPA and test scores at least as good as mine, applied to five philosophy graduate programs and only got into his backup safety school.

I decided to try to demonstrate my aptitude for graduate school by taking several graduate and upper-level philosophy classes at Calvin. This time around, I was going to see what happened if I actually applied myself. I figured that if I could get all A’s, I’d raise my GPA a little and show that I had matured a bit since graduation. I hoped that those factors, along with a killer application essay and strong test scores, would get me into a decent graduate program. So, while working 20 hours a week, I took a full load of advanced philosophy classes, as well as auditing German. The result: Four straight A’s.

I had proven that I could succeed in school if I really tried. But during that semester, I made another realization: I hated being poor. Julia and I had been living on her retail salary and my part-time employment, and we were barely making ends meet. We got by OK, but there was nothing left over for going out to dinner at a nice restaurant, taking a vacation, or going to a concert. If I got into a graduate program, that would mean at least another five years of just barely getting by, knowing that we were always one broken refrigerator or transmission problem away from not making the rent. And when I finished the program, I’d have a PhD in philosophy, which was only marginally more marketable than the BA I already had. And even if I found a job, the pay wouldn’t be great, and I would end up spending most of my time grading bullshit essays on Plato’s Myth of the Cave written by snotty kids coasting through college on their parents’ money.

I did enjoy studying philosophy, but I couldn’t be sure it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And even if it were, there wasn’t anything stopping me from doing that without attending grad school. The lack of a graduate degree in philosophy didn’t slow down St. Thomas Aquinas or Descartes. Studying philosophy isn’t like practicing medicine; you don’t need a license to do it. Nor is it like learning to play the piano, where you need a teacher to help you avoid learning the wrong way of playing. There is no generally accepted “correct” way to philosophize – and if there is, your teachers probably don’t know it. The bulk of any graduate program is going to consist of reading works by other philosophers that blatantly contradict each other and are freely available to anyone. So by paying for a graduate program in philosophy, all you’re really doing is buying a certification that allows you to grade shitty essays at a community college.

An academic program also provides structure, of course. As with any discipline, some days you’re going to get up in the morning and think, “I’m so sick of all this philosophy bullshit. Instead of reading Heidegger today, I’m going to eat Pringles and watch Matlock reruns.” So, to amend my earlier statement, in addition to paying for the right to grade shitty essays, you’re also paying someone to smack you with a ruler when you feel like watching Matlock. In other words, you’re paying someone to compensate for your own lack of discipline. I came to the conclusion that if I was unable to study philosophy on my own, then either (1) I had a deficiency that needed to be corrected before I’d amount to much of a philosopher; or (2) philosophy just wasn’t my thing.

It’s easy to look at a glossy brochure for a prestigious law school or university and be fooled into thinking, “This is my ticket to success! If it were not so, would they be able to print such glossy and convincing brochures, filled with erudite and helpful professors and eager, well-dressed students? Certainly not!” But these brochures are the siren song of academia. The fact is, when the program has had its way with you and dumped you on the side of the turnpike, the odds are pretty good that you’re soon going to be back in line for a job loading trucks at Amway.

I decided to print my own brochure. Rather than try to convince the world to pay for me to do something I loved, I would figure out what the world needed and do that for a while. Then, when I was financially secure, I could go back to doing what I loved. I half-jokingly referred to my future career goal as “philosopher-king.” My plan, such as it was, was to find a decent paying job and save as much money as I could toward buying a fixer-upper-type house. Julia and I would live in the house, renovate it, sell it for a quick profit, and then buy another. After a couple of years, I would quit my job and renovate houses full-time. Eventually I would hire laborers to do the work for me, and I would just manage the operation. At that point I’d be free to write novels or do whatever I felt like doing.

I had a pretty lousy track record of practical employment, but I hoped that this was at least partly due to my lack of any specific skills. I found myself wishing that, along with my major in philosophy, I had picked up a minor in welding. I stopped looking down on the kids who took shop class in high school.

In 1994, it was pretty clear that the skills that were in high demand involved computers. It was also pretty clear that the place to pursue a computer-related job was California. I bought a computer and proceeded to teach myself how to use it. Julia and I made plans to save up some money and move to California, her home state.

In the spring of 1994, we started making plans to move in the fall. I planned to continue working at CompuLit through September. Unfortunately, although I had been able to tame my rebellious instincts in order to prove my scholastic aptitude, I still had some bad habits. One habit in particular, turned out to be my undoing: I worked second shift, starting at 3:30 in the afternoon. I found that if you arrived at 3:35, it was much easier to find a parking spot than if you arrived at 3:30. So that’s what I did, every day. Then one day I got written up for it. I was sternly warned to show up on time from then on. Unfortunately, Chris and I, who generally rode to work together, got caught in construction traffic the next day and were ten minutes late. We both got fired.