He's not annoying, he's my brother.

Living with my brother is somewhat of a challenge. I love the kid, but he is worthless around the house. Some of what has transpired in the past week:

Me: "How about you help me clean the house and then I'll help you rake the leaves in the yard."
Him: "I was kind of planning on doing nothing today."

Me: "This house is a disaster."
Him: "Yeah, we really need a maid."

Him (upon coming in from work and seeing that I had done the dishes): "Thank God you did the dishes. They were annoying me so much last night I almost did them myself."

Me: "What are the chances of me getting you to put up some Christmas lights this year."
Him: "Zero."

The thing is, there is just something about the little shit that is so endearing. I have no idea what it is, but it totally makes you let him get away with all the crap that he pulls. I think it's a magical power or maybe just a defense mechanism he has developed so everyone he meets and or talks to doesn't murder him.

Now broadcasting from the side of a building.

By tomorrow my name will be on the outside of a building prominently featuring the words Law Offices. I definitely don't feel like a person who should have their name backed up by a building. I am still waiting to feel like a lawyer. I'm still waiting to find out exactly when a person makes the transition from feeling like someone trying to do a job to someone actually doing a job.

The thing is, being someone's lawyer entails a lot of responsibility that I take very seriously. You could really, really screw things up for your client if you aren't careful. I'm not especially comfortable with a learning curve that involves other people. All this is not to say that anyone should worry that my inexperience could be detrimental to clients, I would never allow that to happen and I have plenty of help from experienced attorneys to make sure that it doesn't. Basically, what I am getting at with all this is the dichotomy between care and cowardice.

At some point I have to get out there and just do it. There has to be a first everything. A first court appearance, a first deposition, a first jury and at some point I have to be comfortable with someone putting their trust in me as their attorney. They will see my name on a building and expect things from me. Putting yourself out there is hard, putting yourself out there for someone else is even harder.

The Change I Expect

We call the President the leader of our country, but have we really had a leader? A leader is someone who guides a group of like-minded individuals to accomplish some job or goal. I don't think we have had a leader in quite some time. If anything we have had an employee, an independent contractor we hired to do all the dirty work we don't want to deal with. We vote and then we point, "the problem is over there, let me know when you are finished."

The change I expect from President Obama is that I expect to be changed. I expect this president-elect to find a way to be an actual leader who inspires us to do something. The hope and change that we have been promised isn't the hope that Obama will be able to change things better than the last guy. The hope and change we have been promised is a change in the people of this country that they may be filled with the hope for a better tomorrow that they are willing to work toward.

The government of this country was founded to maintain fairness, peace, security and to give us, its people, the stability needed to work toward our own better lives. The government is the vehicle by which we the people establish this union. Just because we elect delegates to lead the union does not mean that we don't each have individual responsibilities to its upkeep.

Maybe the people of this country have been failed by their leaders, but we have also failed. Barak Obama will need our help to be the President he has promised. I hope you don't believe that your vote was a passing of the burdens of anything but leadership onto someone new. The problems of this nation have not been passed to Barak Obama, they continue to reside with us.

I voted. (Or he did.)

I'm not at all disturbed by the fact that the woman beside me voting today was talking to her husband on her cell phone because she couldn't remember how she was "supposed" to vote. She couldn't remember who she was supposed to vote for in this race or how she was supposed to vote on this proposition so clearly she had to clarify her voting instructions with the vote determiner in her household. I'm not at all disturbed by the fact that this woman was apparently given the right to vote so that her husband could vote twice.