Running from the Law: Broke, Broken Down, and Out of Shape
By Vado Porro • March 17, 2011 •Writers in Residence
In November, I left my campaign job and started my new life as an Unemployed Soon To Be Lawyer. Then I was an Unemployed Lawyer. Then I was an Unemployed Overweight Lawyer. January hit and I realized I was nowhere in either my job search or with my hoped-for weight loss. I had to quit the gym, since my nonexistent salary could no longer afford the $50 a month for the local YMCA, and challenged myself to figuring out how to stall the unemployment weight I was gaining, and get myself back in shape without a gym membership.I started with…
Running from the Law: Gratitude
By Vado Porro • February 15, 2011 •Writers in Residence
Anyone who has been in the job market these days will tell you: it sucks. If they don’t think it sucks, then they’re lying to you or themselves. With the short days of winter passing, it’s hard not to get downright depressed. In fact, I do. Sometimes I don’t want to get out of bed. I don’t want to write more cover letters, I don’t want to go volunteer because I know it won’t get me a job; I don’t want to go exercise, or even see people who love me and support me (the emotional cheerleading is just too…
Running From the Law: Change How You See, Not How You Look
By Vado Porro • January 17, 2011 •Writers in Residence
Like a lot of women, I was not particularly comfortable with my body as I was going through the last years of elementary school, through middle school, and in high school. Like many girls my age, I sat around with my girlfriends at lunch and maligned parts of my body. I had no concept of healthy foods or eating properly, and as a vegetarian, understanding nutrition was a struggle as a teenager. Ten years later, I managed to get myself to a place where, most of the time, I didn't think much about my weight.Recently, I got married and my…
Rally for Girls’ Sports Day: What I won by playing sports
By Vado Porro • December 08, 2010 •Writers in Residence
Editor's Note: The National Women's Law Center has organized the efforts to Rally for Girls' Sports Day. What did I win by playing sports? I didn’t play sports until I turned eighteen, so I won some different things than people who played sports growing up. When I left for college, I decided to play ice-hockey, and joined the team at the University of Maryland. Maryland is a state that still doesn’t see a ton of women’s ice hockey, so I had a fairly unique opportunity to learn the sport in a supportive environment. This experience was immensely valuable and I…
Running from the Law: Cold Weather Running
By Vado Porro • November 16, 2010 •Writers in Residence
Every year, I look forward to the time of year when the air dries out, the temperature drops, and I get to break out my running pants and long sleeved shirts. After four months of unbearable heat and humidity, it’s finally cold out. Not just cool enough to run without feeling like dying, but cold out. Have to run to warm up cold. Come home with your nose red and runny cold. It’s probably really weird coming from somebody who spends the rest of the winter wearing a fleece bathrobe AND a snuggie, but I love winter running. And I’m…
Running from the Law: I was Wrong.
By Vado Porro • October 08, 2010 •Writers in Residence
I was wrong. I freely admit that at some point, I believed that people who worked from 7am until 11pm could simply get up an hour earlier and squeeze in a work out. I might have thought that getting up at 5am was no big deal and that it was possible to exercise on your lunch break. Then I started a job that worked those crazy hours – I took a position with a campaign for state delegate that required pretty much round-the-clock work – 11pm was the earliest I was out. On good days, I didn’t have to be…
Running from the Law: Sink or Swim
By Vado Porro • September 23, 2010 •Writers in Residence
"I took the bar exam. I can do this." I said to myself quietly as I stared out at the inky black water, with two foot swells crashing into shore. The buoys seemed impossibly far away, and I had to swim around two of them. The sun had just barely come up over the horizon and the water looked cold. I stood with a group of a hundred other women on the beach, waiting for the starting gun to sound. For a lot of us, it was our first triathlon. The swim was a lot like the multi-state section of the…
Running from the Law: Exercise & the Job Search
By Vado Porro • August 17, 2010 •Writers in Residence
A little over three weeks ago, I made it through the bar exam. Once that weight was lifted, it was time for me and many of my classmates to go back to doing what we have been doing for nearly a year now: job hunting. Job hunting is grueling and it is brutal. It is also now a reality of many of our lives that we need to find a job soon. In the coming months, as many of us remain jobless in this terrible market, we will face another issue: too much time. This is where exercise comes in. I read…
Running from the Law: Staying Sane Through Bar Study
By Vado Porro • July 15, 2010 •Writers in Residence
This morning, I woke up in my usual (as of late) fit of bar exam anxiety around 4:30. I tossed, I turned, I whimpered about how much my life sucks right now (my fiance thought the whimpering was “excessive”), and I tried to go back to sleep. Around 5am, I decided that if I wasn’t going to be asleep and I couldn’t bear the thought of another practice question, I would go to the gym to hit the 5:40am spin class that I used to attend with somewhat regularity, before I started a night bar review and not sleeping. As…