Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child that you have stolen. For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom is as great, and you have no power over me. —Sarah, Labyrinth (1986)

I met a gal last year at a party. She was a 2L (2nd year law student) at the University of Oregon, and I told her I was considering going to law school. After I told her what my goals were, with regard to practicing law, she admitted my ideas were sound ones and good reasons for proceeding with the process. “But I warn you,” she said. “You’re going to be dealing with egos the size of which you have never seen before.”

That, as it turns out, seems to be the universal reaction. “Don’t do it,” my friend Davis said. “But if you do, keep in mind what you want.” “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” another friend said. “Go to Lewis and Clark,” another attorney friend said. “I loved going to the U of O, but Lewis & Clark prepares its students for the business side of the profession and has a LOT better career counseling.”

There’s a video, made by students and faculty at the University of Calgary faculty of law. “Dear 16 year old me,” it starts. “It’s called law school. It’s where insecure overachievers go to do something with their bachelor of arts.” “Get counseling,” they say. To get over your daddy issues, your insecurity issues, your need to be validated, your need for praise.

And, of course, there are the law school blogs and YouTube videos, all saying how much law school sucks. Like really, really, really sucks. And you know what it reminds me of? Labyrinth, where the professors are Jareth, school is the labyrinth, and we’re the muppets & Sarah.

I’m crossing the bog of eternal stench, threats be damned. It’ll stink and some of my crossing mates will whine about it, but come the fuck on. We chose this journey. If you are so naive as to think it’s going to be easy, that you’re not going to be reduced to tears by some egomanaical dictatorial professor, you are fooling yourself. Turn back now. Go back to whatever job it was you had before you started, making the same amount of money as you will in three years (if you’re lucky enough to land a job at all), and save yourself the trauma.

I went to grad school. I’m no stranger to egos and classmates who need to be right all the time. I’m going to law school for reasons that are, according to people who actually practice law, quite solid. I’m not going to fool myself into thinking the next three years are going to be easy, but I don’t give a shit about what grades other people get, how many hours other people spend in the library. I don’t even know what my GPA from my MA program was. It was good enough to get into (and get a dean’s scholarship from) the only school to which I applied, and that’s all I need to know. Also, I’ve had quite a bit of therapy and I have dealt with my daddy issues & my need for external praise very well, thanks. I’ve lived through way worse than some limp-dicked academic trying to make me look stupid in front of my peers.

Yeah, I’ll probably cry in the washroom. And then I’ll wipe my face, draw my shoulders back, and remind myself that 24.5 hours of pitocin-aided, unmedicated labor is harder than law school. That surviving & extricating myself from an abusive marriage is harder than law school. That being the caretaker for a dementia-addled grandparent who thinks I’m my mother is harder than law school. That doing the latter two things, and raising my two young children, in the wake of my own mother’s death is harder than law school, so chin the fuck up, get back in there, and shine, because failure never is and never was and never will be an option.

I fought my way here. My courage is great, and fear, ego, and uncertainty have no power over me.

Congratulations! You just got accepted to law school at Lewis & Clark and without some guidance you’re going wind up living in a hovel with 18 other people, subsisting on peanut butter and canned cream of mushroom soup, praying you don’t die of scurvy while riding the bus for an hour to get to campus from your shithole apartment because no one told you there was a difference between the east side and Gresham.

First, a bit of education about the area: Gresham, Beaverton, Tigard, Tualatin, Hillsdale, Oregon City, Hillsboro, Wilsonville, St. Helens, and Lake Oswego are not Portland. They are suburbs, they are commuting nightmares if you’re going to law school, and they Are. Not. Portland. You’ll find a lot of housing ads that say something like “gorgeous park-like setting in beautiful Wilsonville, just 20 minutes from downtown Portland!” That is a sack of lies. Run away from that as though your life depends on it.

In Portland, which is divided east/west by the Willamette river and north/south by Burnside street, numbered streets start at the river and go up east on the east side, west on the west side. “Close-in”on the east side is west of 39th, also called Cesar Chavez Boulevard; any housing ad that claims to be “close-in” but has an address like 8888 SE Division is not close-in. That’s 88th & Division (and may not really exist, btw). Neighborhoods, for the most part, and especially on the east side, are named for the major street that runs through it, or the two major arterial streets that intersect somewhere in the middle of it. Hawthorne, Belmont, Alberta, King, Foster-Powell, Irvington, Fremont, Mississippi, Cully, etc.

Now for the hard truths: there are about 50,000 neighborhoods in Portland, and none of them are “affordable” in the way I consider affordable. To me, affordable means it won’t break the bank to have a studio by yourself close to downtown or a safe neighborhood if you work a low-level job or live on student loan overpayments. That really doesn’t exist here. $650-750 for a studio is the low end, and if you want something downtown (SW, bordered by 405 to the south, Burnside to the north, the river to the east & 13th Ave to the west) or in the alphabet district (NW between Burnside & Lovejoy, running east to west between 15th Ave & 23rd Ave), it’s going to be even more. If you want a view, or hardwood floors, or a duplex instead of a complex, or a house instead of an apartment, be prepared for sticker shock.

Full disclosure: I pay just under $800 per month (plus electricity) for the back half of a 2-bedroom duplex with a small backyard. I’m in the Foster-Powell neighborhood, which is SE, and close to the much-revered (and more expensive) Belmont and Woodstock neighborhoods. A place similar to mine in either of those neighborhoods, or the slightly farther but still within spitting distance Hawthorne neighborhood would run $1000-1500. No, that’s not a typo. Even in this neighborhood, I’m paying on the low end of the scale and I have chosen to not ask my landlord why.

Lewis & Clark doesn’t offer student housing for grad students or law students, and rooms in shared houses owned by the university run $520-750, and if you have kids or a spouse that’s really not an option. So what’s a future 1L to do? Cry. I mean it. Let it out. Sob. Worry frantically about the next three years and how little you will be able to buy, how many things you will do without in the name of living in a place not surrounded by speed freaks, not having to wake prostitutes sleeping in your doorway when you get home from a late-night study/wine session. And then take a breath, pour a glass of whiskey, and get down to business.

Once you dry your eyes and sober up from your emotional binge, your first stop should be www.padmapper.com. Forget Craigslist, forget google maps. Padmapper takes both of those (plus apartments.com & rent.com, neither of which is very good, IMO), gives you sliders for options, and bam! You find rentals in your price range & the number of bedrooms you need. You can overlay transit maps, find out the walkscore, and read the ads from the source site.

Make a list of the places you like, and then get there the same way you’d get there once you live here. If you’re going to L&C, law students get a TriMet pass for $43 per month, according to the student life website. That’s WAY less than a month’s worth of gas, you get extra time to study while you commute, you don’t have to worry about parking, parking passes, whatever. Get a daypass for $5 (cash only, exact fare required), use www.trimet.org to figure out which bus or MAX line runs closest to each of your prospective digs, and ride transit from downtown (where L&C has a shuttle that picks up law students from 6th & Salmon) to each of them.

Remember when I said neighborhoods are named for the main streets that run through them? Walk down those streets, where most of the retail & restaurants will be, then down the side streets into the residential portions, where “for rent” signs may be up in windows of places that aren’t advertised on Craigslist. Each neighborhood is going to have a different vibe, and I won’t even try to describe each one in detail, but try to imagine yourself among the locals, because soon you’ll be a local, too.

Flannel, coffee, beards, birds, pirate hordes, and unicycling bagpipers await.