Sua SponteMy law school odyssey: the ongoing narrative.
I have a postcard from Germany mounted in an old scrapbook. It features a photograph of a garden sundial with the inscription Es ist immer etwas später als du denkst -- roughly, "It's always a bit later than you think."
Daylight Saving Time kicked in this morning at 2 am, which means it's exactly an hour later than I think right now. It's also the sixth of April, which leaves me precisely 24 days until my Civil Procedure final. I could spend those 24 days preparing and, ideally, find myself in full command of the nuances of offensive nonmutual collateral estoppel by the time the 30th rolls around. But the rest of the problem is this: very soon thereafter, I'll have three other exams to deal with as well, all of which require preparation during the next few weeks.
I've been bringing supplements along with me to the gym, and am considering trading in my Glannon on Civil Procedure for a Gilberts on same. Everyone loves Glannon, it seems, except me. I bought the book on the insistence of my 3L cousin, who swore to me that there was no other way to understand Civil Procedure. The Glannster does give clear explanations, which is helpful if your professor doesn't; mine, however, does, and furthermore insists on exam answers that map precisely not only to his choice of language but to his personal mental flowchart. I can't speak Glannonese to Professor Civ Pro when he wants to hear Professor Civ-Pro-ese.
Plus, Glannon spends far too much time on hypos. I may be unique among law students in this, but hypos do not help me learn rules. They do not even help me learn to spot issues. If I know all the rules already, I'll see them clearly in any fact pattern you set before me. If I don't, then no amount of fact patterns will help until someone just tells me what the damned rules are. The Gilberts supplements don't waste your time on hypos -- they're laid out as one big long outline, peppered with examples and exam hints that I actually do find helpful.
That said, I do need to get started on writing practice exams, particularly for Professor Civ Pro since that's really the only way to figure out precisely what he's looking for. Professor Property's exams are less of a complicated dance step, but apparently require far more brute force; three questions in three and a half hours will touch on every single rule we covered this semester, and then there's a Professor-Crim-style policy question thrown in just to make sure she's made her politics perfectly clear to us. (*sigh*.) Professor Contracts has just handed us our final syllabus of the semester, on which he plans to dedicate the final class meeting to a review of a practice exam answer, which means I'll need to write it before then. And Professor Edie's exam is the scariest of all, since the guy comes across as so kind and happy and goldenhearted in class. Don't be fooled, say the 2Ls who have experienced him. His exams will eviscerate you. And then he'll still be all sweetness and light when you drag your remains up to his office after the fact to figure out why.
No thanks. That's one experience I certainly don't need to repeat.
Still, I'm detached from this whole experience in a way that I wasn't, last semester. In a sense I've already missed my mark; I doubt that, two months from now, I'll be in the position I had hoped to be. This won't prevent me from doing my best to get there anyway, but per my husband's repeated instruction, I'm investing energy not in frothing and berating myself for failure, but in steeling myself for the Most Likely Outcome. It doesn't make the work any less, or any less difficult, but it keeps the panic at bay. No more eyes on the prize. Living in the moment, instead. (Which may prove more profitable anyway.)