The pandemic has sentenced everyone to an indefinite term of house arrest.
Lawyers — especially trial lawyers — fit within one lifestyle extreme or another: Team Sloth; e.g., Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny, mixed with the drinking finesse of Denny Crane from Boston Legal versus Team Crazy; as in, Hollywood divorce queen Laura Dern in Marriage Story combined with the intense sprinting skills of Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men.
I graduated law school in 2007. I’d estimate well over half my graduating class gained a significant amount of weight, picked up excessive drinking/extracurricular habits and terrible sleep patterns.
The other end of the spectrum is not much more appealing: OCD fitness routines, poor nutrition, prone to illness, but sharing that trait of terrible sleep. It has become a mandatory term of our house arrest to strike a balance between belonging to Team Sloth or Team Crazy.
The following should speak to both camps, some more than others:
First item on the docket: You do you
Second: Tone down the crazy
Third: Jump on the bandwagon
Fourth: Be a kid again
Fifth: Switch carbs for lunch or dinner
Sixth: Earn that quarantini
Few fall in that happy medium between Team Sloth and Team Crazy. The pandemic has forced us to do something that lawyers hate doing: change.
We’ve given up goals, readjusted schedules, and most disturbing: taken a hard look at our lifestyles. We will (hopefully) never again have this unscheduled free time.
Originally published in The Lawyer’s Daily May 6, 2020: https://www.thelawyersdaily.ca/articles/18935/workin-for-your-quarantini-laurelly-dale
