Bar Exam Application

I find it terribly interesting that those people who have gone through the horrors of law school and bar exam in order to thrust themselves daily in situations that would cause violent intestinal convulsions would decide to make life harder for us lowly legal peons by crafting a bar exam application that, frankly, makes me feel uncomfortable about everything I have put onto paper.  I've heard the stories about how people who forget little details or did not disclose every nook and cranny of their past transgressions pass the subject matter examination, but get rejected from admission because of a "character and fitness" issue.  Coupled with the fact that I am an extremely paranoid and unconfident person (thanks to my Asian heritage), this application process has made me worried about every word that I use, every discretionary decision I made to include or exclude something.

I've had to write extensively on one part of the application, and I worry whether my explanation was adequate enough to pass muster.  Furthermore, I am starting to doubt whether my interpretation of even basic things (such as the obligatory "other names you go by" question) will lend to (a) non-admission or (b) being the laughingstock of the examiners in the deep, dark, dank corner of the state bar office where they read these things.

I think about how people characterize lawyers as scum-sucking, morally-bankrupt individuals, and two things come to mind:

First, the lay person has NO idea the hoops we have to jump through in order to represent clients as a legal professional.  We pay ridiculous sums of money, go through a sometimes arbitrary education process that eats away at our creativity and our optimism of humanity, then dig around our brains and, hopefully, our records to find stupid information about what apartment I lived in 5 years ago, so that we can protect people from admitting skeezy lawyers into our state.  Applying to the bar exam is essentially an application to allow you to apply to jobs, but with metaphorical nails being driven into your eyes while you're doing it.  

Second, the paranoia that the "Big Brother" state bar instills, coupled with the ridiculous costs of education and bar preparation (by the way, shouldn't law school be more than adequate preparation to take the bar?), cause lawyers to be those money-grubbing, butt-watching, heartless gremlins.  If you really want to complain about lawyers, complain about all those protections that we're affording you and all the money we pump into the economy in order to get the opportunity to represent you.