I watch too much Television

Luck.

noun:good fortune; advantage or success, considered as the result of chance.

You know, luck is a funny thing.  So much of it is about perspective.  I had friends in college, who tended to make mediocre grades, who looked at me and would get so angry at me for doing well in school.  I’m pretty smart, and I’ve got a good head for the way school works and I’m good at the ways schools decide if you are smart or not.  So a lot of my friends have accused me of being lucky…

I was lucky, then.  To graduate from high school, I was lucky.  I was lucky to go to college, and to finish college in 4 years with an excellent GPA.  I was lucky to get into to law school on the basis of those grades, and I was lucky to graduate from law school in 3 years.  Then, I scrounged up some more luck to pass the Bar Exam.  Gosh, I am a really lucky girl, huh?  

Here’s the thing.  I am very lucky.  I believe that.  I have a wonderful family and I was born in a great time for women in a country that gives us a lot of opportunities and freedoms.  I had the monetary means to do a lot of the things listed above.  But here’s what else: it’s easy to say someone is lucky from the outside looking in.  But the same people who I watched stay out till 3 am the night before a test, who complained that I was lucky, liked to have selective amnesia about the hours I spent at home studying when they were out goofing off.  About the entire novel that I read, when they skipped to the end.  And it’s easy to look enviously at someone and say, you’re so lucky you passed the Bar Exam, when you weren’t the one who sat down in front of a blank computer screen, staring at a blinking cursor, facing 21 straight hours of testing, with only your own head to tell you what to write.  I was lucky to get opportunities.  It wasn’t luck that capitalized on them.

The second half of “luck” is called “work.”  That’s the part the people don’t see because it’s not glamorous.  I’m “lucky” I passed the Bar Exam…but I was by myself when I spent 4 months locked in my bedroom, with only an ink-covered stack of index cards up to my knees, and a practice test book thicker than a dictionary beforehand.  The work, sweat, agony and mind-numbing TIME that goes into something is what people like to ignore, and is what they disregard when they have the gall to call something “luck” when what it really is is  ”work and effort that you didn’t see and choose to disregard, followed by a result that you do see and wanted for yourself.”

Unfortunately, I’m actually talking about football.  I’m obviously a huge LSU Tigers fan, and I have listened to the world call my team lucky over and over and over until I just want to show them video of myself spending 16 hours straight writing out index cards until my hand cramped up and I had to start taking sleeping pills just to make myself stop studying.  There’s a point when to call an accomplishment “lucky” is so ludicrous, it is insulting.  When somebody tells me I’m lucky to have a law degree, I’m deeply insulted because they are ignoring my hard work which capitalized on the opportunities I was given.  When somebody tells me LSU was lucky to win Saturday, and lucky to win the game before THAT, and before THAT, and on into perpetuity, I see the same thing.  There are opportunities—that is luck.  Capitalizing on them….that’s something else.  

Tagged: LSUI take football seriously.Geaux Tigers

My God. If ever a game needed to just end in a tie, that was it. But holy hell, Geaux Tigers!

Tagged: LSU footballGeaux Tigers