Most memes spread because Blogger A tags Blogger B, thereby making Blogger B feel obligated to answer a series of stupid questions. Patterico has a kinder, gentler approach which I’ll follow here as well: rather than tag five bloggers, let five readers volunteer to answer the questions on their own. The meme has three parts:

1. Take this retarded quiz and tell us how you scored.
2. Tell us five things about you that we don’t already know.
3. Tell us about some things that lawyers appreciate. If you’re not a lawyer and don’t know any of them well enough to answer, feel free to answer about your own profession instead.

Here are my answers:

How I Did on the Retarded Quiz:

That depends. I took the retarded quiz twice. The first time, I refused to answer all questions that either (1) were retarded or (2) offered no possible answers that weren’t retarded. The second time, I answered every question, frequently forcing myself to choose the lesser of two retards. I’m not sure which methodology is worse, but for what it’s worth, I scored a 19 (mildly liberal) on the first go, and 31 (barely to the right of Jack Kemp) on the second.

Five Things About Me You (Probably) Didn’t Already Know:

1. I am one of the few living individuals who know what it is like to drown.
2. I may be a lawyer, but I totally suck at golf, almost as badly as dKos sucks at logic. Always have. I’ve gotten a few hole-in-ones here and there, but not if you count the strokes I took before that one that finally got the damned thing into the hole.
3. I chipped a few pieces of the Berlin Wall three days after it “fell.” Unfortunately, all have been lost in transit since.
4. I’ve visited every state in the union except West Virginia and Ala*a.
5. Marriage Amendment: I actually voted for it, before I voted against it.

Things I Appreciate As a Lawyer:

One of the things I appreciate the most is that most lawyers are very rational people. I have a limited tolerance level for liberal people, but I have zero tolerance for irrational ones. I don’t just don’t run into that many of them in my line of work.

Similarly, lawyers are paid to argue, which has the fringe benefit that few take disagreement personally. Andrew Sullivan could never make it as a lawyer. Somehow, Jeralyn Merritt does, and rumor has it even Glenn Greenwald did for a while, but that’s another story.

As a solicitor rather than a barrister, I appreciate that I am paid to privatley tell my client what is right, not to publicly spin my client’s wrong to make it look right to a judge or jury. Not that I have anything against paid advocates. Some of my best friends are paid advocates, either as lawyers or in other arenas. Getting paid to advocate a particular position favorable to a particular party is a perfectly fine thing to do. It’s just not what I do.

Oh yeah, it also pays well. But you knew that already.