Just wanted to post a quick journal apologizing for my inactivity. I'm really, really not satisfied with my job right now, but unfortunately it's unlikely that I'll be able to find anything better in the same industry. I'm currently at a personal injury law firm, and I could tell from the first week that I was not at all passionate about this kind of work. There's no end to the stress, you have no friends outside of your office (not even your clients), and at any time the work could spill over into your non-professional life. On top of all that, it's virtually impossible to get another job in the legal industry unless you have 2+ years of experience, and right now I'm just hovering around one. I can't take another few years here, so I've decided to work my way out of it.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I really wasn't passionate about any kinds of law. So then I switched it around - what things am I passionate about? Video games, music, tabletop games, and computers all came to mind, so I began to look for opportunities in the legal field that worked with video games. Unfortunately, there's not much, but all of them did have something in common - intellectual property (IP) law. IP law encompasses patents, copyrights, and trademarks, with occasional dips into other fields like contracts. Back in law school, I always dismissed patents as boring, but I never really understood why I thought of them that way. I still don't think I understand them fully, but I know for certain that if I want to do any kind of law that relates to video games, knowing patents is essential.

There's just one major problem: to do patent law, you need to pass the patent bar exam. Okay, I can study for a few months, save my money and get a review course, and give that a shot. Unfortunately, there's another hurdle before that: to take the patent bar, you need to be an engineer. That means you either have a bachelor's degree in engineering, you take enough engineering courses in college, or you pass the Fundamentals of Engineering exam. I don't have the time or money to go back to school, so that means I've gotta take the exam.

The exam covers everything you'd learn in a 6-semester engineering major. That means 6 semesters of calculus and other advanced math, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, and all sorts of other topics that I've never taken. So that's been my life for the past few weeks - working all day, then studying all night to slowly prepare myself for this test. It's been about a month now, and I'm still trying to figure out just the math part, but I'm making progress.

I'll be more active once I'm done there, but for now those occasional breaks to play Pathfinder are about the only meaningful breaks I get. I might play an hour or so of another game some days, but otherwise that's all I've got. So again, sorry for my inactivity, but I really need to get my career on track before I can rest easy again.