The Hater: This week, everyone is a lawyer

By CARIN MOONIN

It’s late Wednesday night, and I have finally been able to poke my head out of my hidey hater hole and see what’s all over the news: apparently rubber band portraits are all the rage. 

What, there’s something else going on?

I’ve been delighted with the Supreme Court’s positive stand toward gay marriage (and here’s an article that explains it better than I ever could); I’m also incredibly pleased that there’ll likely be a run on Mizuno shoes—and that I’m already all stocked up. The positivity stemming from good-willed, hard efforts are all around us. Jesus agrees.

The truth is, I’ve been overwhelmed with things this week that have nothing to do with this tremendous news, and so I am feeling a bit tapped out. I can’t add much to the flood of what’s already been said. Instead, I just scan my Facebook feed, which looks like it’s been hijacked by My Little Pony—all rainbows and pink and exclamation points. 

I get the exhilaration. Really, I do. I support it wholeheartedly: Why shouldn’t anyone get all the rights of marriage to which they are entitled? But with the flood of glee and enthusiasm comes… legal degrees conferred by the Internet. 

Apparently I’m the only one online who doesn’t think she’s a judicial scholar this week. Everyone’s spouting voluminous legal discourse, from my legitimate legal pals to those convinced “Roe v. Wade” is some sort of hipster rubber boot company.

You know what this week makes me glad of? Sure, a rising tide of equality, dignity, choice. But it’s more than that. So much more. 

It has made me really, really glad I’m not a lawyer. God, that shit is boring.

I know many (lawyers) will disagree: The fact that we have decisions like these to write about proves me wrong, and you like to squabble anyway. But trying to wade through the rising tide gobbledygook of legalese flooding my social media makes my eyes roll back in my head, and not in the I-just-ate-something-awesome-that-isn’t-a-Paula-Deen-recipe way. Did anyone else try and read this stuff—before it was chewed and digested for you by the press—and felt like you were hearing Charlie Brown grownups talk—in another language? Like, tagalog? 

Sometimes, you really do need to be told what to think.

I would be the worst lawyer ever. I don’t like deliberating, I like being deliberate. I don’t like arguing, I like being right. (I like it so much that each time I am right, I do a little song and dance routine. My husband sees it a lot.) I like the end of the process, not the process itself. I don’t want to talk about doing things, I just want to do all the things.

And going back to Paula Deen, I’ve never been a fan, but is anyone else surprised her website doesn’t include anything about her current happenings? Not like directly but any words of support or apology? I don’t know if blindly going on like you normally would on your site is the best thing to do. What if I want to read a PR statement instead of going to see the videos? (You know how I feel about videos.) I’m still waiting for her multiple apologies of this week to be autotuned, because that’s how I get my news.

So in the meantime, I’ll watch this one instead.

Carin Moonin is a writer living in Portland, Ore. Sometimes she’ll even tweet about things she hates at @carinwrites.

Image: Peter Breughel the Younger, The Village Lawyer’s Office, via Wikimedia Commons