end-of-year thoughts

a valediction for 2002, and my first semester

Yeah, it can end now. 'Bout time.

I am six days away from pulling up the lists, checking for my code, and finding out the all-powerful numerical result of my efforts. (Yes, I'm doing my best not to think about this. You'd be surprised how calm I'm managing to stay.)

I can't think of anything I was supposed to do differently this semester. I followed every suggestion, rule, bit of advice that was offered. I sat up and paid attention, took religious notes, did all my reading but never once highlighted any of my casebooks, briefed every case in my little Access database, and never missed a single class. I never once played Solitaire. I made the train every morning and actually studied on most of those rides. I made all my own outlines (wound up not using that one for Contracts except for components), took over thirty practice exams, studied alone and spent exam nights staring at a hotel ceiling, training my eyes onto the prize.

I slept seven or eight hours every night, kept going to the gym, forced myself to down three meals a day, and limited (seriously!) my alcohol consumption back to one shot of grappa or Stoli Vanil at bedtime. I glued a smile onto my face; when my cousin or uncle or Bill Altreuter suggested that this was something I ought to be loving, I nodded vigorously and spoke my agreement. My grinning face was such a fixture that people actually asked me what was wrong if they saw me not smiling.

If I wasn't exactly the Martha Stewart of first-year law students, I must have come about as close as possible.

And now we'll see what that was worth.

I have six days left to imagine that it will all have been necessary, that a glorious hard-earned result will materialize before me like an apparition of St. Yves or St. Catherine of Alexandria, grinning and giggling and tasting like honey.

This might actually happen; but in the meantime, for the next six days, nothing worse has happened. And 2002 is past. Godspeed, and may 2003...well...may it be different.

thus spake /jca @ December 31, 2002 11:56 PM