Coming Out!

In honor of July 4, our First President

I've been planning this blog post for a long time. This is the blog post where I explain why I quit my job and became a freelance attorney. This is the blog post where I explain what I am going to do with the rest of my life. But I'm 45, gay, and seriously unmotivated. So I don't have well-formed answers to those questions.

So instead, I'm going to make a list of what I'm good at and what I suck at (see the side bottom bar, once I find an extension that will allow it). The worst thing that can do it provide fodder for my updated blog. One of my commitments is to write an entry each week highlighting a topic of interest to me, be it law-related, skeptic-related, or gay-related (cycling related entries will be on Bear's ALC Page). I'll continue to do do this until I've figured out the answers to aforesaid questions. Perhaps that will be in 2013 or perhaps it will be in 2043 or perhaps I'll be dictating it to my descendants from the glass jar where my head is stored.

Along the way, I'll be adding entries on (in no particular order) the importance of digital authorship and social media, dilettantism, how very much more important leisure is than work, the importance of good health, my life-long battle with introversion, the rise and ultimate equality of gay people, the rise and ultimate predominance of liberal thought over conservative, and the nonexistence of God and where morals really come from.

I want to write a good bit on persuasive writing. As a persuasive writer, I know I'm in my infancy. However, that appears to be the general direction of my career. As such, I need to know more about it. So another of my commitments is to learn what others have said about persuasive writing and accept or reject their contentions, postulates, hypotheses, laws and corollaries.

I'll end this post with just a couple short list of facts about my career, to date:

1. I received a Bachelor of Science degree from San Francisco State University in 1998.
2. I worked a desultory 10 years as a software engineer.
3. I wanted an advanced degree, learned that law school was only three years, applied to schools, was accepted, and attended Golden Gate University School of Law from 2003 to 2006.
4. I obtained my J.D. in May 2006.
5. I studied as if I was not a committed dilettante and passed the California Bar Exam on the first try in June 2006 and was admitted to the bar in December 2006.
6. At the time, Davey and I owned a condo in San Francisco, and we were desperate for cash to keep it; I needed to take the first job I could find.
7. I accepted a job as Associate Attorney at Cook Brown, LLP in Sacramento and tried commuting for about a year -- that did not work and we moved to Sacramento a year later and subsequently sold the condo.
8. Selling the condo was a big mistake.
9. I worked at Cook Brown from 2007 to 2012. I learned a lot there. How to take a deposition. How to prepare for trial. How to write and read the law. And, possibly most importantly, conservatives are people too.
10. In 2012, I realized that I was in the wrong place and that as long as I stayed I was going to be miserable.
11. With only a modicum of planning, I left my job in May 2012, just prior to the AIDS Life/Cycle 11, a ride that may well have saved my life.
12. I am now accepting contract work from all comers and will begin to take my own cases as soon as possible.
13. Age, education, and proclivities aside, I still have not found that one thing to which I can commit my working life.

As always, I am open to suggestions.

Your, Bear.