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2001-05-06 | 11:06 a.m.

Yesterday Duff went to his LSAT prep course class for the first time. He took the LSAT once before, in 1996, when the girls were still babies. I urged him to take a prep course at that time, but he refused, because he loves taking tests and always scores well. (That reminds me...he still hasn't taken the test over at SexiestGeekAlive.com. I'll have to nag him.) But when he got his results, he wasn't happy. He got 160, which, while nothing to be ashamed of, wasn't good enough to guarantee him a slot at a good law school, especially given his lackluster undergraduate GPA. In other words, all that slacking off finally caught up with him. The slack hit the fan. And he understands and accepts that. But to his credit, he didn't give up the idea. He just waited until the old score rolled off his records and his ESOP is just about fully vested (which is how he can even contemplate paying for law school). Now he's dropped a thousand dollars on this course, hoping to raise his test score by just ten points. Between that and our trip to Florida we are really living in the house that Ramen built. Well, not really. But close enough for comfort.

We did go to a movie last night. Our first two or three choices were sold out, so we ended up seeing Chocolat with all the other geezers. It was nice and I cried all the way through. But it was what I've come to think of as an Oprah movie. One thing I especially liked about it was that the lead character, Vianne, was characterized as an atheist and called an atheist, to no apparent ill effect (I'm not sure whether she was intended to be; she just wasn't a practicing Catholic). That was heartening.

The thing about Duff going to law school that makes me so damn nervous (apart from the whole becoming-a-lawyer aspect) is that I have no idea what he intends to do afterward. He says he wants to do something "with policy." So why not try to get into Berkeley's School of Public Policy? I really don't get it. I think he wants to be involved with politics, and he doesn't want to go into corporate law. I think he wants to be a crusader of some kind, but I'm not really sure. He gets mad if I assume he's going to work for a corporate law firm. I just know that a lot of people who go into law school thinking they're going to do public-interest law don't. On the other hand, he's older and probably more committed to his ideals than other people. (This is a guy who can talk chapter and verse about proportional representation and carries around a copy of the Constitution in his backpack.) I also know that the law school debt load ruins people. The third thing I worry about is--and this does happen all the time--is that I will work full-time to support the family while he goes to law school and then, before he ever buys his first three-piece suit, he'll dump me for some chick he bonded with in the law school library.

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