Le Troisieme Sexe

Annelien is almost back in town. On Thursday, she will travel all day and on Thursday night, I will rush out of the house to buy her favorite flowers and head to SFO to wait for her at the luggage belt. I am so much looking forward to Thursday! The fridge is already stocked with Annelien’s favorite groceries – I hope she doesn’t read this blog post – and last Friday, I dutifully ordered the turkey that she will prepare with our friends on Thanksgiving. She tasked me to order a special heritage turkey. According to the in-store information, our turkey’s great-great-grandparents came to the US on the Mayflower and the turkey itself was pasture-raised on a lovely farm nearby in Sausolito. It sounds like the most appropriate turkey you can buy.

On Saturday morning, I took the MPRE, an ethics and professional responsibility exam you have to take before you are sworn in as an attorney in California. I went to the big convention center in San Mateo where I had taken – and passed! – the bar exam earlier this year. Six hundred anxious people were waiting for the proctor to give the start sign in a huge hall that is ideal for dog shows. Lawyers typically have a very high anxiety level anyway, but on Saturday, they were bouncing off the walls. I looked at my neighbor who was chewing gum as if her life depended on it. I am not too fond of gum chewing – especially when there is noise involved – but I smiled compassionately, hoping that some good karma would float my way. It was an ethics exam after all.

I realize now that I never updated my blog when I passed the California bar exam (http://sfsnailmail.blogspot.com/2010/05/case-dismissed.html). It was such a big event back in May that I didn’t want to upset the gods by bragging about it on my blog too quickly. On a Friday night – it was May 14, 2010 – the California Bar published the results of the exam on-line and Annelien called me – I was waiting for the results at a dive bar on Valencia – to let me know that my name was on the pass list. I only believed it when I got a letter in the Saturday mail with the same news. And for the next couple of weeks, I was afraid the exam committee would send me a letter telling me that they had confused my results with someone else’s and that the congratulations letter was void. Yes, I just told you, we lawyers generally have a high anxiety level. We are little pussycats.

I needed a little distraction after the test so I went to one of the hippest parties I have ever been to in my life. The place to be was El Rio on Mission. We had to wait in line for more than an hour, but we eventually made it past the velvet rope. Some people were on a mysterious guest list and could get right in. There was a very special great vibe in the air. Beautiful gender-defying people joined the party. It seems to be true that gender is just a cultural construction and right here, people were creating a troisième sexe. And they looked stunning.