Sua SponteMy law school odyssey: the ongoing narrative.
While I was out doing laundry and getting the car Jiffy Lubed yesterday, my husband was saying his goodbyes to the folks with whom he's worked for the past six years and change. My school adventures may be over, but his are just beginning. When we return to Boston, we will switch hats: I'll be the one earning the wage (albeit not much of one, as a state court clerk) and he'll be the one shouldering the backpack and heading off to the classroom (although he'll be doing research and teaching, rather than struggling through basic intro-level classes, and plus he gets a stipend as a TA. Even with roles reversed, he's still and will always be higher-utility than I am).
Apparently it's become somewhat of a trend among the Silicon Valley software engineering set, of late, to abandon software engineering and Silicon Valley in favor of other stuff you'd been meaning to do. P. and V., our old homebrewer friends, moved to Southern California last year and had a baby; now P. is opening his own microbrewery. Another guy left the company to travel to South America for some sort of grown-up Peace Corps effort. And at least one of my husband's coworkers is even heading to law school (good luck at CLS, A.!).
My husband retains an affection for the Valley that, at least as I perceive it, is stronger than any of his departed peers' connections to the place. I'm okay with the area, basically; and I'll confess that I dashed straight to Burrito Real upon arrival, like an addict in search of a fix, and promptly devoured an entire chico con mole doused liberally with salsa asada. You can't get those anywhere but here, and I miss them terribly. But I don't get homesick for here the way he does. He credits the sushi, the weather, the taste of the ambient energy level in the air. I credit the burritos, but that's about it. Unless the need arises for me to retake the California bar a year from now (my February is already booked in MA), I'm not sure when we'll be back.
So this weekend we're heading up to Mendocino, one last time (for now), to the wonderful Elk Cove Inn. It was the first place to which I ever escaped from law school, and now, appropriately, it will be the last. After we get back to Boston, early next week, blogging will resume apace. Until then, please join me in happily observing the dissipation of bar exam stress. (Imagine the noise a drain makes, when you unstop it at the end of a long hot bubble bath.)
And so it goes.
No bar exam should be three days long, under any circumstances. Sure, there are those brave souls who sit for two different jurisdictions at the same administration; but at the end, if all goes according to plan, they're actually admitted to practice in two different jurisdictions. But three whole days of bar exam -- eighteen hours of brain jam -- just to qualify in a single state? Unconscionable. I know California's big, but hell, after this much protracted agony we should be licensed throughout the entire Western Hemisphere.
So many of our peers across the country had already finished their bar exams. We all knew this, which gave the Oakland Convention Center a much more introspective and thoughtful air today; we were acutely aware that this was a day of particularly Californian hell. Ironically, even though I'd been recognizing dozens of faces from my summer firm and my old law school, it was the third day that made me feel more connected to the place than ever before. Today, we were all Californians. "It's good to see you," a former sectionmate remarked to me as we waited on line, "back where you belong."
It was also a day for a different kind of introspection. This was the last day of the bar exam, the final consummation of eight weeks spent learning and re-learning the bones of law school. Remember law school? That place we went for three straight years, the labor unceasing, the crazy wild ride? This was the final punctuation mark at the end of that experience, the last period at the end of the last sentence. From here on in, we move into a different phase: either limbo, where we loop the loop repeatedly until we finally pass the bar, or lawyerhood, if the results come back positive in November and we can proceed onward with the rest of our lives. But law school, and the experience of studying law as we’ve known it, was coming to a conclusive end right there in that hall as we typed.
As if to mock us, the final California Performance Test (not to be confused with the far more reasonable MPT, administered in many sane jurisdictions) went straight for the solar plexus. Are you ready to be a lawyer? it sneered at us. Then prove it. Write a brief for the government arguing that a poor sweet young couple with a baby and no money should have to forfeit their only car under our new zero-tolerance drunk driving policy. That little twinge you’re feeling where your soul used to be? We’re almost done with it, and soon you won’t feel anything at all.
It is so easy to forget that the goal of all of this effort – the bar exam, the horrible two months of bar review, and all the peaks and valleys of law school – is merely to become a lawyer. At the end of this enormous ungodly race, that’s our only prize. We get to be lawyers. We will not be saving lives, we will not be saving souls, least of all our own. We will be practicing law. That’s it. We have invested untold energy in this effort, for the sole reward of being numbered among the world’s most loathed profession. “There are too damn many lawyers,” my mother tells me whenever I grouse over the harshness of the bar admission process or the low pass rate on the exam. “They should make it even harder to become a lawyer, and then we won’t need a hundred pages in the phone book to list ’em all.”
*shrug*.
Finishing the bar exam turned out to be its own reward, though. On the ferry to San Francisco with wonderful Patrick, I toasted the receding Oakland skyline with my very last bottle of amaro. It tasted as awful as ever, all the more appropriate as we passed under giant mechanical dock arms swinging massive shipping containers over our heads. The bar exam was over. Bar review was over. I didn’t have to think about studying law again for at least four months. Everything is contingent, of course, and nothing can be taken for granted; if I don’t pass this exam, I’m going to have to take it again, and even if I do, there will still be Massachusetts to confront, plus whatever other jurisdictions materialize on our radar screen as we continue to live like gypsies. But those are separate projects. For all intents and purposes, this was truly the bitter end of my law school odyssey.
It quickly got sweeter. We paced the length of the Ferry Building, a wonderful place to which I had not been back since having tea there with JuBu last summer. So much flavored syrup and olive oil and bread to sample. So many glossy counters full of expensive things like caviar and aromatic cheese and chocolate. We even managed, completely at random, to meet Michael Recchiuti himself. “I love your marshmallows,” I gushed to the Picasso Of Chocolates. “Oh, my God, the marshmallows,” he groaned. Apparently the demand for his breakthrough product had broken the fun barrier and now just meant more work. I could see that. Still, we bought marshmallows.
Already a tad bit tipsy from the amaro on an empty stomach, I had to fight the urge to rush up to the string quartet (the string quartet!) and interrupt their divertimento with a request for Ravel. “Later,” Patrick told me, knowing full well that I’d be distracted by the jazz quintet and the Spanish guitarist spaced evenly down the rest of the long hallway. It worked. We found the wine bar, munched on a cheese box, and toasted with Riedel glasses of French champagne, in homage to our old stomping grounds on the Tolkien boards: “I’m glad you’re with me here at the end of all things.” Then came the dolcetto, and then came my husband, who had made it up to the city just in time to join us for dinner at the Market Café after the wine bar closed. I had a martini called the “Southsider” (Stoli, lemon juice and wild mint) in honor of my law school, then a glass of chardonnay solely to achieve complete inebriation. The bar exam was over. The bar exam was over. Law school was over. It was all over.
And the more I repeat this, the more likely I am to believe it, eventually.
Two cups of coffee yesterday gave me so much energy. Even that bizarro mutant property/contracts/otherstuffImissed crossover question did not faze me, as I steamed onward like a caffeine engine. But the selfsame two cups of coffee did not wear off until nigh on midnight last night. I woke up six hours later, red-eyed and bleary and unable to recall a single hearsay exception.
So, of course, I had two more cups of coffee. Had to, in order to function at all. Hopefully these will not leave me wired at midnight tonight and hung over tomorrow morning, but one bears what one must. Fortunately, given how beaten-down I'm feeling right now, I'd wager that sleep will likely not be a problem tonight.
Coherence, on the other hand -- there's none to be found in this hotel room. But an exhausted jumble of thoughts is better than no thoughts at all, right?
- Sorry if the Oakland jokes offended. Yes, we were just kidding; no, we're not elitists; and yes, you can get drugs anywhere. Moving right along.
- Memo to the National Conference of Bar Examiners: The Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) covers the subjects of Torts, Real Property, Contracts and Sales, Criminal Law and Procedure, Constitutional Law, and Evidence. Note that Wills is not a subject tested on the MBE. This means that Wills questions do not belong on the MBE, not even if you make up some bizarro anti-lapse statute to prevent hapless bar takers from whining "But in *my* jurisdiction the devise wouldn't lapse!"
- Note also that MBE questions should be written in English. English sentences should contain a subject and a predicate. Independent, dependent, and other clauses should be set off by commas. Commas are, in general, a kindness to the reader. This is a comma: ,
- If I were taking the bar in New York or Massachusetts or Illinois, I'd be done by now.
- It rankles to think that, even in the best of circumstances, I'm going to be doing this whole dance again in February. "Yeah," people tell me by way of consolation, "but at least it's Pass-achusetts you'll be facing, rather than Fail-ifornia." Somehow, this is less than reassuring, as Fail-ifornia has not yet been crossed off my to-do list.
- Whose brilliant idea was it to give 200 multiple choice questions in six hours in one day, anyway?
- Dividing the answer sheet into five columns of twenty questions each was an unnerving design decision, I think. One of my columns had discomfitingly few "D" answers. The more I wondered about this, the more I found myself wanting D to be the answer. And that's bad. Because when you want D to be the answer, it winds up looking like the right choice, and then you don't know whether to believe your own call. What if you only *think* that the answer is D because you're antsy that you haven't seen a D answer in awhile? Yonder madness lies.
- I also had an unusual amount of A answers. Ditto re: madness.
- There were at least two duplicate fact patterns with near-duplicate answer choices, as far as I could tell. Unfortunately, I couldn't recall the rule for either. If you're smart, the exam fairy instructed me as I diddled over the second co-conspirator statement?/statement against penal interest? question, you'll flip a coin, pick one option on one question and the other on the second, and then be assured that you'll get at least one right. Good plan!, I thought. I'll do that on the other pair, too. Except that the other pair was split across the morning and afternoon sessions, and I couldn't remember which option I'd picked four hours earlier.
- I can't remember much of anything. Really. My long term memory is as fogged-over as the San Francisco skyline, and my much-abused short term memory now has all the capacity of Ye Olde Blacke Boxe's primary battery (i.e. little, if any at all). I guess I'm looking at more coffee tomorrow morning.
- Imagine this being over. Imagine how exciting it will be, tomorrow, when the binoculars-bearing announcer dude snaps "Stop! typing." and we are done and we can shove all these horrible outlines and mutant telephone books and flash cards into the back of a closet pending final disposal in November. (I'd throw mine away right now, but I'm too cheap. So I'll be stuck lugging them on another cross-country flight. *headbonk* *headbonk*)
- Will I miss the Faux Pho at Golden Lotus, the Sua Sponte Official Dinner of the California Bar Exam? Aw, heck yeah, that stuff is yummy. But will I miss eating same while the PMBR guy drones on in my ear about strict products liability? Not. In. The. Slightest.
I'm pretty sure it was Oakland that Dorothy Parker Gertrude Stein [1] was talking about when she first quipped that "there's no there, there." There really isn't. The view out my window on the fifteenth floor of the Marriott is spectacular, if you're into massive spreads of stockyards and boxcars and industrial-looking detritus. If you peer really hard through the fog/smog mix, you can see the tips of San Francisco. But it's a world away on the other side of the bay, compared to here, where there is no here.
"What's the point of Oakland?" I asked my husband. "Like, why is there an Oakland when San Francisco is right there?"
"Baseball," he said after a moment's thought. "Baseball and drugs."
"I don't see so much the baseball," I told him as I failed to sight a stadium out my hotel window, "but the drugs, yeah, that I can see."
To its credit, the neighborhood could be a lot worse. No druggies accosted me last night as I scoped out the restaurant scene (conclusion: there's no there there) within a few blocks of the hotel. One homeless guy did shout "You shut up bitch!" after me as I walked past him, but since I hadn't said anything to begin with, I had to wonder if he was talking to me.
I wound up at a vaguely cute-by-dicey-neighborhood-standards restaurant called the Golden Lotus, which claimed to serve vegetarian Vietnamese food. The menu, however, maintained otherwise, offering such unvegetarian items as beef noodle soup and shrimp fried rice.
"How do you serve beef noodle soup in a vegetarian restaurant?" I couldn't resist asking my waiter.
"Ah," said he, "all our meat is fake."
"I'll have the beef noodle soup," I decided.
It was delicious. It was some of the best pho' I've had in recent memory, and didn't even require the liberal lacing of sriracha to which I normally subject my pho. It is now my official dinner for the duration of the bar exam.
In general, things have gone all right up to now. Two days remain during which my entire bar exam experience could get shot to hell, but so far so good: decent vegetarian food near my lodgings, a comfortable hotel room complete with pillow chocolates, prompt wake-up call and decent water pressure and room service that was happy to bring me cornflakes on the second try after I informed the guy that his first delivery (hashbrowns, I think it was, with eggs) was not in fact cornflakes. Not to mention a smashing view of the Oakland docks. And good fluffy down pillows, one of which served as my backrest during Day 1 of the bar exam.
My husband's laptop, which he has named Martingale, appears to like bar exams. It took to the task with far more pleasure than Ye Olde Blacke Boxe ever did. Marty gladly bonded with the USB floppy drive, chatted happily with both Examsoft floppies (damn, but it's been awhile since I touched that benighted software!), and otherwise made no stink about the task appointed to him.
My lefthand neighbor was not so lucky: "My computer died!" she sputtered after the morning essays were over. "In the middle of the essays, it just crashed! I had to restart...I was just praying that I wouldn't have to handwrite...thank goodness it rebooted, but those were a scary few minutes!"
There but for the grace of God go I. Whew.
Barbri, though, they're on my shit list. Property and Corporations unlikely to show up on the exam, eh? Hmph. Maybe we can give them a bit o' credit, since the Property essay was an unholy mess of a crossover. Still, though, I feel like I should consult their predictions once more and double-plus-study up on the other stuff that they wagered would be absent. Because so far, they're 0 for 2 on the unlikelies.
And I'm 1 for 3 on days of the bar exam survived.
[1] Thanks to all who corrected my citation here. I blame the Hon. Garrett Brown.
This is it, kids. 'Tis a finer thing we do than...well, than we've been doing lately.
Does it strike anyone else that actually *taking* this exam, much though it's likely to suck, can't possibly be worse than studying for it?
Best of luck to the legions of folks getting into their starting-lineup positions right now: WT, LawFairy, JM, Eve, Jeremy, JuBu, Gabe, Fayza, Amber, Chai, Chris, GG, Marissa, Yasmin, Andrew, Ross, Carmen, maisnon, quasi, and everyone else I've managed to miss, as well as the nonblogger cohort. (Whee, it's like issue spotting!)
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
The last time I did this, I was afraid.
The last time I parked my car at the far end of the parking lot, unloaded a bag on wheels from the trunk, and walked the four blocks to the train station, it was not unlike this: sunny and clear and smoggy, trees dipping branches in my face, the back of the police station, the back of the microbrewery, the cheap condos facing the train tracks and the cheaper motel across the street from them.
But it wasn't like this. The bells that ring when the candy-striped arms descend to herd traffic off the train tracks -- they used to make me jump, every time I heard them. The separate clanging of the arriving train would pace my pulse. They were alarms, sounding, telling me to worry! be alarmed! be very afraid! things are going to go wrong and there's nothing you can do about it so you better damn well pray that they don't go wrong!
Now, things very much have the potential to go wrong, but apparently not in a way that particularly worries me. The bells were bells. No alarms sounded. It was just an ordinary commuter train to San Francisco, and I was just a woman with a backpack and pullman suitcase who could have been anyone on her way to the airport. "Caution. The doors are closing," the train informed us politely and repeatedly at every station. It was like an old dance step, vaguely recalled but loosened from its original context. I realized with a small thrill that I no longer knew the route by heart.
And then, in a groundswell of warmth, I realized that I was not afraid.
I had arrived. From the day I decided to apply to law school, life morphed into a series of inflection points: everything depended first on this!, then on that!, then on this other thing!, with hardly time to catch one's breath and calm down in between. But now, equipped with my desired degree from my desired school complete with my desired bells and whistles, I was finally rid of the fear that had chased me through the obstacle course. I got what I came for. My one-shot, don't-miss, pressure's-on moments were all past. Now it was back to regular real life: important things remained to accomplish, for sure, but all with the option to do over should the first time not work out. Now there was nothing left to fear.
I didn't go straight to Oakland, where a room awaited me in the hotel attached to the test center. Instead, I got off the train at the end of the line and caught the 45 bus up Stockton Street to Columbus. There, a block away from my favorite pastry shop in North Beach, is the National Shrine of St. Francis. A few candles lit, deep breaths, and minutes spent before the St. Anthony reliquary were my one condition precedent to this bar exam thing that is supposedly going to happen tomorrow. Now, I suppose, it can happen.
Let it. I'm not afraid any more.
I should know this by now, but ah well:
Of the two essay days on the California bar, is one day 100% topical and the other 100% performance, or is each day 50% topical and 50% performance?
And can I reliably predict a morning of essays and an afternoon of performance test?
Today would have been my late father's sixtieth birthday.
I wonder what his bar exam was like. I wonder if he ever imagined eventual children of his, going through the same thing.
I wonder how my own potential eventual children will cope with bar review. Because, of course, they will. There are a number of Things Inevitable in my family, and lawyerhood is apparently one of them. (Or engineerhood. Or both. But definitely one or the other.)
I wonder if I'll be alive to advise them, or if they'll just wear my class ring on a necklace for good luck.
Waking up at 3 AM local time is not the best way to optimize one's in-flight productivity on a 6:45 AM crosscountry flight. I've got something like motion-induced narcolepsy in any event: sit me down in a plane, train, or automobile, and within ten minutes I'm in a delicious doze-trance that carries me all the way to my destination. I had the PMBR Contracts CD going on my headphones, but if anything, that helped me sleep even better. At nine-thirty AM local time, without having done a single PMBR question, I woke up in San Francisco drowsy and bug-eyed and boggling that somehow the day hadn't started yet.
But that meant that there was still time ahead of me.
One day later, I am now more or less on Pacific Time (although someone ought to tell my digestive system, which has been prompting me to visit the loo about three times as frequently as is normal). I am also up by 150 ass-kickin' questions in the PMBR blue book, three Community Property essays, and two Civil Procedure essays, with one more to go before I'm allowed a lunch break. Magically, I think I now grok Community Property. Not a bad thing to pick up just in time for the exam.
Unfortunately, there's still Wills and Trusts and PR and Corporations to stuff into my brain-pan by bedtime tomorrow night. A bit more practice on performance tests -- as in, any at all -- is probably also a wise investment. Plus as many more blue book questions as I can stomach, which, given the current condition of my stomach, may not be very many at all. Uuuurrrk.
I wonder if this is as bad as it gets.
Packing. For the last time. For the last flight to California that is currently in our plans.
Of course, plans may change.
For now, though, we fly out of Logan Airport at 6:45 am tomorrow. Somehow, a passel of PMBR questions will get done on the flight to San Francisco. (In my dreams is a good bet.)
And then the final sprint will really start.
Words that I would be happy never to read again:
- Parcel
- Promisee
- Anti-lapse
- Settlor
- Cy Pres
- Quasi-community
- Issue
- Half blood
- Mortgagor
- "Take" as an intransitive verb
- "Notions of fair play and substantial justice"
Today was a day for fixing things. My car, which was pronounced in need of a new timing belt last month, finally got one. This took roughly five hours, during which I entertained myself by outlining three evidence essays and one remedies essay, and then knocking off 50 MBE questions when Ye Olde Blacke Boxe decided it would rather succumb to the vapors than let me finish the remedies assignment.
"You look so busy," one of the car salesmen remarked to me as he watched me busily typing away. "You're working harder than I am!"
That may well have been true, for all the good it did. I'm still hovering way too close to a shameful 60% average on the Barbri MBE questions. I do still have the whole PMBR blue book to entertain me on the flight to California, though; stepping away from Barbri products is probably a good thing right about now. In my own defense, I'd be closer to 80% if I didn't invariably choose the wrong answer on the coin-toss questions. *sigh*. I'm putting a lot of faith in the commonly-repeated assertion that the distinctions between the best and second-best answers on the real test are a lot more clear than on the Barbri practice questions.
Sadly, my nerves are starting to wear. I think I'm about as chill with regard to this bar exam as I could possibly be at this point, but all of this computer agida was just reeeeally poorly timed. I am resisting the urge to drop-kick Ye Olde Blacke Boxe through a closed window, largely because its salvage value is about $200 on eBay and because breaking a closed window right now would dissipate all our costly air conditioning out into the ninety-five-degree fever swamp that is greater Boston in midsummer.
Instead I suppress the urge to cry, make dinner plans I can ill afford (whatever; I won't drink, and this'll just be an extra-late night), and otherwise cope. I'll get to the end of this soon enough. And now that we've acquired the MiracleFloppy and installed Examsoft on my husband's shiny brand new laptop, I have cleared one more major hurdle. One less thing to worry about.
Now if I could just convince myself that the all of these piles and piles of law are actually installed and organized in my head -- I think they are, I know for sure that *some* are, but there's always something to shake one's confidence in this benighted process -- then things would be even better.
Ugh, I groaned inwardly after a pleasant dinner not spent studying. I really need to outline some Property essays tonight.
Yeah, it's time.
Time to do Property.
C'mon. I mean it. Just pick up the book and start outlining.
I did, eventually, pick up the book. But I'd barely typed out subject headers for each of the three calls of the question when my computer went black and sang out a little noise that sounded unmistakably like "Whee!"
"It did it again!" I called out to my husband, who had just gotten off a conference call in the study.
"Did what?" he asked, coming in to the living room.
"Died." I showed him.
He flicked the switch, it began to boot normally...and then, before Windows could even load, it conked out again with another tiny wheezing "Whee!"
"It's overheating," declared my husband, with the certainty that comes from many long years of being annoyed by laptop cooling systems.
"I think," I told him as he examined it more closely, "that I would like to use your laptop for the bar exam. I think I do not want to use this one. In fact I think I probably shouldn't even bring it to California."
"We need to work out the floppy thing," he said, truthfully, as he plugged in a big floor fan and aimed it at the Comfy Chair. "Here. Try it with the fan and see if it does it again."
So far it has not. But I will feel oodles better when we Work Out The Floppy Thing on his machine.
(I'm assuming that we can just re-download the install script for Examsoft off the web, and that the Floppy Thing will merely involve convincing his machine that something in the USB drive is actually A:\ and should therefore be treated as an Examsoft boot disk. But this is now tomorrow's problem.)
Meanwhile, Property remains.
I spent all afternoon yesterday picking away at a big wills flowchart in Visio; no small feat, considering that Ye Olde Blacke Boxe has only the little red button-thing for a pointing device. I saved the document as frequently as I remembered to, but because this is just how my luck runs (and how YOBB tends to bite back at me whenever it feels that I've pushed it too hard), the machine decided at one point to shut off on me at random. Hmm, I thought. Did I bump the power switch? I've certainly done that before, at even less opportune times...although then, at least, Windows told me what I'd done; this time, everything just cut straight to black.
Whatever, I thought, groaning inwardly as I wondered how much work I'd done on that flowchart since the last save. Maybe an hour or two.
YOBB, rebooted and happily exuding "Who, me?" vibes, had another answer for me: it wouldn't let me open the document at all. "This is not a Visio document," said Visio, who would know. I jump-drived the file over to my husband's computer, which was equally disinclined to recognize the file.
My heart sank. There went the fruits of four or five good hours.
But the laptop wasn't finished with me yet: when I attempted to reopen my wills outline, Word suddenly decided it would no longer recognize that file either. I managed to pry open the document in Wordpad, and realized to my horror that the mess before me (parsing out the crazy system characters) hadn't retained any of the changes I'd made since the previous night.
This time my heart plummeted to my ankles. I'd lost a whole day of work. And more than that, my laptop once again appeared to be flirting with the hereafter.
"Why else would it suddenly shut down out of nowhere, and corrupt every file that was open at the time?" I tried not to wail at my husband.
"Maybe you bumped the switch twice in succession," he suggested.
Maybe I had. Maybe there was nothing to be worried about. "After all," my husband said sensibly, "you're not going to be taking the bar exam in an armchair with the machine in your lap."
So this morning I reconstructed the rest of the Wills outline (which went much quicker a second time, and, ironically, made more sense too), backed up the completed document, went to the gym...and came back to find my machine, sitting calmly on the floor, unmistakably powered down.
"It wasn't just put to sleep?" my husband asked.
"Nope," said I, beyond panic at this point. "It was off off."
I put a great amount of faith in certain chattels: I trust my car not to break down, I trust the oven not to explode and the refrigerator not to flood, and now more than ever, I need to be able to count on my laptop NOT SHUTTING DOWN ON ME AT RANDOM.
According to the nice folks at the State Bar of California, so long as you registered a copy of Examsoft before the deadline, you can take the exam on any laptop with the software properly installed. "I need to install some stuff on your new machine tonight," I told my husband crisply. "I'm not sure I can trust this one any more. I need to be sure I have a backup."
"Don't you need a floppy drive?" he asked.
"I'll get one of those USB ones," I decided. I haven't historically been willing to trust them, but now is not the time to be technophobic. The bar exam is in six days.
It's actually a bit reassuring to think that a week from tomorrow, none of this will matter any more.
After much grunting and straining, and even more random Tourette-style shouting at my husband ("Ademption! Dammit! ADEMPTION!"), I have a completed wills outline.
The problem is this: I still know nothing about wills.
Throughout much of law school, whenever I'd post here asking for advice on course selection, a number of regular readers would insist that I shouldn't take bar classes just because I knew I was going to be tested on them later. "Take what you want," ran the conventional wisdom, "and don't worry, because Barbri will teach you everything you need to know."
Perhaps if you have a cracking short-term memory and a learning style that lends itself well to cramming, this is true. But throughout this ordeal I have not regretted a single bar class I took. (In retrospect, Remedies was probably worth skipping. But, since I did in fact skip it, I have no regrets there either.)
There are people out there trying to learn evidence and crim pro and con law from scratch. God bless them. I have no idea how I would "learn" so much in so little time. There are all sorts of key bits missing from my education -- my Property course didn't cover conveyances or mortgages, my Crim Pro course did not reach the Sixth Amendment -- but those are comparatively small blanks to fill in. If I had to brain-jam any more unprecedented material than I already do, I would surely melt down.
Ademption, dammit! Ademption!
The only subjects I'm learning from scratch right now are wills (aaagh), trusts (not so much aaagh), and community property (which I hope will make sense with a few more repetitions). "I'm doing wills and trusts pretty much de novo," a friend from my 1L school told me, "since it was an 8:30 class, and it's all sort of a fog." Oddly enough, it was an 8:30 class at my school too, perhaps the main reason why I didn't take it. But now I'm wishing I had, even though the negotiation class I took instead was orders of magnitude more fun. I wish I could be comfortable with this material now. I wish it were like evidence or con law, where at least I know I knew the rule once.
I wish this would all just end already.
Doesn't the word "codicil" remind you of a fat fuzzy caterpillar, like a gypsy moth? You can just see its legs moving.
You are a damn smart person who did fine at a great law school and you are so going to pass this exam.
A friend of mine from high school is now a practicing Ayurveda consultant in Manhattan (if you're looking for some kickass holistic healing, contact Sita and she'll set you up right). A few days ago I politely and desperately requested any suggestions she might have for focusing and reducing this mess of bar-related anger/frustration/stress. Here is her response -- much good may it do us all.
Below are a few tips which may help you:1. Basic Meditation
- Choose a comfortable sitting position with back and neck erect. Start by observing the flow of air through your nostrils and the sensations created by each inhalation and exhalation
- Observe any thoughts arise. They will float into your consciousness: just let them float away again. Refrain from getting caught up in judging anything. Should you find yourself following a train of thought, gently and kindly bring yourself back to observing the rhythm of your breath in a detached way
- Gently focus on breathing in and out. Notice how your stomach expands during inhalation and contracts during exhalation.
- Spend 10 –15 minutes doing this twice a day.
- To end the meditation, open your eyes and sit quietly.
2. In addition you can use the following at night to bring calmness and aid sleep, is to apply oil to your head and feet: apply sesame oil (use cold-pressed organic oils) to the crown of your head and massage for a moments with your fingertips. If you do not like getting oil on your hair, apply it to the forehead and temples instead. (A towel over your pillow will help protect it from the oil.)Sitting on the floor, apply oil to the soles of your feet and massage them for a minute or so. The immediately put on cotton socks.
Tips about using oils:
- sesame oil is very penetrating and difficult to remove from fabrics, particularly manmade ones. Do not use your best towels, keep one specifically for use when oiling up. Put on cotton socks after oiling your feet to protect carpets and bedding.
- do not put oil on the soles of your feet if you are going to bathe afterward since they will be slippery. Take care in the shower since any excess oil on your body may leave a film on the bath.
- warm oil is comforting and penetrates the skin better than cold oil. Keep oil in a small bottle with a nozzle to help control the amount used. Warm the oil by putting the bottle in a bowl of warm water.
- Keep paper towels handy for wiping your hands and any spills immediately
3. Chew and eat a couple of holy basil leaves (anti-stress herb) – make sure you do not have it on an empty stomach.
4. Sage tea (at night chop sage and boil with water)
5. Eat pumpkin and sunflower seeds during snacks and also more fruits (such as blueberries, apples, pomegranate, prunes, grapes, figs, pears, oranges, raspberries, plums)
Hope the above helps!
I bet Waddling Thunder has some holy basil in his pantry.
My husband, perhaps sensing that I really didn't need to hear Rod Stewart piping Young hearts be free tonight! Time is on your side! from the study any more, has very kindly beat Grand Theft Auto.
I've been studying fairly assiduously for as long as he's been playing, so you'd think that my skill points would have increased at least a little. And yet today, my first real ten-hour study day, saw me wither and die on the vine roughly halfway through hour eight. Which, unfortunately, was right when I sat down to fifty MDR practice test questions.
Everyone else is apparently reeling from the comedown that is the PMBR practice test, which I have not taken (and now probably won't, since this guy is refusing to use priority or express shipping to get the books here before we leave for California). Meanwhile, here it is ten days before the actual bar exam and I still can't clear a silly Barbri hurdle assigned a month ago. I can only imagine how hard it would have reamed me then. No way could I deal with PMBR knocking my ankles out from under me at this point. I want to crawl under the comfy chair.
"Does it make you miss California?" I asked my husband, as the Grand Theft Auto credits rolled over panoramic computer-generated facsimiles of "San Fierro" and the bright orange "Galvin" bridge.
"Oh, yeah," said he, eyes shining.
He loves California, to the point where it actually upsets him when I joke casually about the bar exam being the ultimate determinant of whether or not we'll go back.
The MBE is the same everywhere, I know this, but right now it's just another frustrating little thorn sticking out of the fat fruit that is California. This whole bar exam is a taunt: you've never been able to hack it here. you've always found something to screw up. you may have a fancy law degree, but it is a foreign one. be assured that it will lose a large chunk of its meaning once you cross back over this border. this is our own world, here, a world where you and your silly wanderlust will always be alien.
It's not entirely true that you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. I left. One of my husband's best friends from college and graduate school, now working toward an M.D. in Manhattan, likewise managed to disabuse himself of the taste for lotus. But the man I married left his heart somewhere in the vicinity of San Francisco, and if I don't pass this exam, that heart is going to break.
Just what I need to think about, right now, on the heels of a bad rash of multiple choice questions.
As of close of business today (roughly 11 pm EDT), I am now caught up on the Paced Program through...
...*drumroll*...
June 6.
Well, sort of. I'm actually a bit further, in terms of absolute labor: I've done quarter-days and half-days and two-thirds-days' worth of work, as well as several fully completed days, scattered around throughout the calendar. But there's a certain satisfaction to going through the program like a Bingo card and filling all the holes, ruling off entire days full of assignments that I'll never again have to revisit. There's something vaguely like motivation that comes from the combined warm fuzzies of crossing out another day and the vague dread that so many uncrossed ones still remain.
I honestly don't know why I'm bothering with the Paced Program any more. I alternate between pretending to throw it away and looking longingly at it, wondering if I shouldn't just give it one more shot. Either way, I've fully come to terms with the fact that I won't finish it in time under any circumstances. So why not just chuck it altogether? Maybe it's just the overpowering aroma of the conventional wisdom that if you just do everything Barbri tells you, you'll pass.
By that logic, maybe I should go do the PMBR 3-day next week.
I'm not doing enough. This is clear. Back in May, my uncle had this advice to offer on preparing for the bar exam: "Just put in your ten hours a day and you'll do fine." At the time this perplexed me: ten hours a day? Even if I could concentrate on any one thing for that long, what would I *do* for ten hours?
Then I fell behind schedule, and the ten hours thing made more sense: it could easily take ten hours a day if I tried in earnest to catch up with the Paced Program. But I never did. (I keep the thing around to guilt myself, but it doesn't serve much other purpose at this point.) Now, here it is, inside two weeks to the exam itself, and I'm just not doing enough. Six hours a day, or thereabouts, is my average lately. And most of that is spent outlining, reviewing the Barbri lecture handouts, and making the odd flash card as needed.
I need to be writing essays and doing PMBR questions. Instead, I fell asleep in the middle of my Corporations outline not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES this afternoon. I loved Corporations when I took it in law school, and I've been getting plenty of rest, so I had neither explanation nor excuse for the sudden inrush of sleepiness that welled up around me like water and drew me irresistably downward into cozy darkness. Mmmmm. Duty of loy...al...ty.
There is no time for me to be asleep at the wheel, and yet I still haven't found the driving nervous energy that's supposed to be propelling my studies at this point. I need to start caring a lot about this, real damn soon. But the inspiration to do so eludes me still, leaving me to trudge onward through dense boredom when I should be hacking away at it with a machete.
Anyone got a machete I could borrow?
Don't you hate when the underlying infrastructure of your life -- particularly the ties that bind you to the people you care about most -- bows and strains under the weight of stupid ill-timed bullshit like an impending bar exam? Like, but for this profoundly pointless and silly endeavor that sucks your waking hours into its maw, you know you'd be a better wife and friend and daughter and granddaughter and cousin and random stranger on the street?
Yeah. I hate that.
Finishing all the IP and IQ multiple choice questions: nice.
Still having 36 sample essays to outline: ugh.
And 7 simulated (formerly known as "graded") essays to write out completely: ugh.
And all the MDR questions (on whose utility I'm still unclear): ugh. ugh.
And the simulated essay/perftest day to inflict on myself: ugh. ugh.
Not to mention the PMBR blue book: mmmmmfffffff.
And the rest of the Paced Program still ahead of me: um. whatever. whatever. ugh.
My husband and I went out last night for Malaysian food and a terrific movie about penguins. It made me cry. Things tend to, these days, far more easily than usual. But that may actually be a good thing.
Part of my excuse in focusing so exclusively on MBE review this past week has been the fact that I can do multiple choice questions on my laptop. I don't have to touch any of those horrid green phone-bookish monstrosities; Study Smart is my friend and ally, feeding me questions, timing my responses, and immediately telling me what the right answer should have been. Amazing, how much I've learned. Amazing how many rules were missing entirely from my Barbri lecture notes. Now I begin to understand the worth of PMBR.
But now it's time to knuckle down and work on essays, and I fear that means that I'm stuck cracking the Essay Workbook volume (handily referred to on the Paced Program handout as EWB -- does the sad array of Barbri acronyms impress anyone else as cultish?) unless there's a better way. Does Barbri have any other software supplements to the stack o' books? Or are the essays only available on paper? Also, are the MDR questions available on Study Smart, or only the MPQ ones? I've been doing stuff under the "Practice Questions" menu, and it makes sense that the "Self Test" one would offer something different. Then again, it makes equal sense that it wouldn't.
The hardest part is the loneliness.
Bar review is a horribly solitary process. The work itself is lonely, from the video lectures to the practice questions that don't lend themselves well to group review. My own approach didn't help things: I quit the company of my friends prematurely in order to take Barbri at a faraway location full of strangers. While I've learned in the past few weeks to identify a number of people on sight, I still don't know their names. A woman sitting in front of me squeezed my elbow yesterday when the death of my computer prompted me to lapse into uncontrollable hiccup-sobs (right there in public); I didn't know her name either, and still don't, even after she told me that everything would probably be fine.
My friends are still around, little bright spots on my instant-messenger buddy list or cell phone directory. Like me, though, they're generally either offline or permanently hidden "away" behind a message restating some variation of bar review angst. Fellow bar bloggers are largely unhelpful in the lift-the-spirits department, as we're all in the same boat (and bailing frantically). My family is supportive, but neither I nor they profit from phone calls groaning about how little fun I'm having these days. And my husband, preoccupied of late by a half-dozen different issues having nothing to do with me, is a lot better at drilling me on multiple choice and repairing my computer than at the softer-core kind of support that would probably feel pretty good right now. I can't even rely on my pets for unconditional love; they're chinchillas, not puppies, and they intuitively flee from stress.
I've wasted today almost entirely, sitting in my comfy chair doing multiple choice questions. Thank goodness for the chair. If I curl up just right, it feels like a hug.
The inevitable has come to pass: Ye Olde Blacke Boxe has quit this sphere. Five minutes into the Professional Responsibility lecture, it informed me that both of its batteries were dead and that I should switch to outlet power promptly to avoid losing any data. Problem was, I was already plugged in to the outlet. But the computer failed to recognize this, and soon thereafter, failed to function at all.
I saw it coming, of course; all through law school I saw it coming. This machine is somewhere between five and six years old, and is already an unholy collage of parts scavenged from two different IBM 600x laptops. Neither of these "parent" machines can work on their own, but either one will work with enough parts from the other. The resulting Frankenputer, my husband warned me, could fail at any time. "This is why I hate laptops," he reaffirmed every time a part (usually, the clock battery) needed replacing.
I, on the other hand, do not hate laptops. I love them. I think they're the greatest enabling invention for law students since ruled paper. Even though I always seem to be using one well past its prime and teetering on the brink of meltdown, I couldn't imagine my life without a laptop. (Perhaps then I'd have to get television.) It was certainly a miserable experience to handwrite today's Professional Responsibility notes, particularly since I'd left the Barbri handouts book at home and I couldn't chicken-scrawl fast enough to keep up with the lecturer. I type a hundred words a minute, but the only purpose for which I ever hold a pen any more is to sign checks. My right hand is killing me.
Meanwhile, Ye Olde Blacke Boxe is dead entirely. My husband confirmed it DOA as soon as I got home; sure enough, something in the power mechanism had quit doing its job and could not be convinced to restart.
I did not deal well with this. I'm unclear whether there's enough time to register a new laptop with the California Bar, and even if there is, I don't want a new laptop. I want to take the bar on *my* laptop. I am not yet ready to part with it. Ye Olde Blacke Boxe has a floppy drive, something which few if any new laptops can claim. (And although my husband swears that a USB floppy would not fail me, my faith in technology is not so strong as his. I'm always surprised and delighted when something works the way it's supposed to.)
The other, defunct laptop from which we scavenged so many parts for Ye Olde Blacke Boxe has nothing to remedy this problem. Fortunately, however, eBay seems to have plenty of other Olde Blacke Boxes of similar vintage and component range, with a going rate of roughly $200. I've gotten so much mileage out of loyalty points lately -- a free night at the Oakland Marriott with my husband's hotel points, a free bar-exam plane ticket with my own frequent flyer miles, and of course the whole Lexis/Westlaw haul -- that $200 to keep my #1 sidekick on life support for another month seems reasonable. And with three machines' worth of parts, it might last even longer.
I must not panic. This is fixable. With spare parts off of eBay I'll be right back restored in just a few days. Thank God this didn't happen during the bar exam. Thank God my husband can fix things like this. I am not screwed; I am lucky. I am lucky.
Meanwhile, with my Study Smart decommissioned, I have all the more incentive to get cracking on that PMBR blue book.
Update, two hours later: I misunderestimated both the spare-parts machine and my husband's craft, which, as it turns out, rivals that of MacGyver. Ye Olde Blacke Boxe has been revived using only stuff we had around the apartment. No eBay expenditures required.
*applause for my husband, the highest-utility individual in this apartment right now*
All my Boxe needed was some combination of the other laptop's motherboard, a few other bits, and a smidgen of voodoo. Hubby is currently reassembling the other machine, which will now go back into the closet until its guts are needed again. Until then, he will return to his regular schedule of curing river blindness, solving Fermat's Last Theorem and walking on water.
One of the last motions I filed in the clinic before skipping town involved requesting a continuance of a particular hearing until the end of June. I'd heard secondhand that this motion was granted, but (for obvious reasons) mostly forgot about the case otherwise.
Today, it occurred to me to check and see how the hearing had gone. Recall, my clinic duties involved appealing the sentences of defendants originally sentenced under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines before Booker declared them unconstitutional.
So I peeked at the docket sheet. And there, lit by a spark of delight, was the judge's conclusion (emphasis mine):
I have obtained the views of the government and the defendant, through counsel, with respect to the sentence I imposed in this case. I am unable at this time to say that I would have imposed the same sentence if I had known the Sentencing Guidelines were merely advisory. I therefore desire to resentence the defendant.
So there, blue meanies at Barbri! So there, National Conference of Bar Examiners! I am this much a lawyer. And at times like these, it's good to be reminded of that.
Not having fun, these days.
Bar review doesn't suck the way 1L sucked. 1L was frightening. You got one single blindfolded shot at a moving target, and that was it. I suppose I could work myself into a lather over the bar if I wanted to; I'm still as prone to Anxiety Issues as I've ever been. But the bar, on its face, is not frightening. It's pass fail. It's not just a one shot deal. You get a C on the collective effort, you're fine. Or you miss the target and have to start over. But you can. The only thing at stake in this particular administration of the bar exam is not having to take it again. (And while that's certainly a motivator, it doesn't inspire the abject panic that was the hallmark of my 1L year. YMMV.)
Even absent the ol' fear fairy, though, bar review still manages to suck about as much as any life experience I can recall in recent memory. Where else (with the possible exception of medical school -- imagine, a profession more masochistic than ours!) are we collectively driven to invest so much effort into such dry, miserable, snitpickety memorization of rules and exceptions and sub-exceptions and loopholes and tricks and the Fourteenth Amendment, in preparation for an unequaled test-taking ordeal whose prize is nothing more than the right to do our jobs?
I never did grok the Fourteenth Amendment. Still don't. All the "scrutiny" standards feel ever so fluffy and insubstantial to me. Perhaps because they are.
My husband, the master of all things multiple-choice, naively volunteered to work through some of Monday's MBE debacle with me. We had all sorts of good laughs over the sheer stupidity of some of the law being tested on (which may or may not have included the Fourteenth Amendment), and it was enormously helpful for me to talk through law out loud for the first time in two months. (The fact that he didn't know what I was talking about helped even more, I think.) But even Captain Endurance ran out of steam after a few dozen of these goofballs. "Are we done yet?" he groaned, sprawled face down on the couch, clearly no longer deriving amusement from my scintillating discussion of easements appurtenant.
"Now you see," I shrilled, the nape of my neck prickling with vindication, "why I've been so miserable for all these weeks! Now you see how it sucks!"
I've given up on the Barbri graded essays. Apparently they're now refusing to grade even the ones handed in on time, which is all I need to hear to give up hope that they'll bother looking at ones I failed to hand in two weeks ago. Screw it. I can always worry about essays next week, after I've spackled over the more major cracks in my multiple-choice mojo. I don't need Barbri droids throwing any more deflated grades my way to "motivate" me to study. Just as the devil's greatest trick was convincing people that he doesn't exist, so too is Barbri's greatest trick the extent to which they've thrown us all into actual palpable doubt that we'll pass this thing.
*sigh*. Sucks.
Today is a holiday, which means no Barbri lecture. And empty classrooms on university campuses across the country. And time on my hands, six uninterrupted hours of which I decided to invest (finally) in the simulated MBE, which everyone else took last week.
I should have, too. I shouldn't have waited. It made no difference. I did abysmally. Even after two glasses of wine -- one on an empty stomach, the second tempered by as many Skinny Soy Crisps dipped in chipotle hummus as I could swallow before reason intervened and made me put them away -- my miserable result still smarts. I don't want to do well on the bar exam; I just want to pass. And right now I am nowhere near passing.
Several friends have remarked that they did poorly without studying. Further examination reveals that they didn't do nearly as poorly as I did. Have I "studied" yet? I can't even say. I never feel in control of law-exam material, ever, not even when the exam is open book and I've hammered the material to within an inch of its life. How much less can I claim, at this point, when all I've done are the introductory problems and three of the six MBE-subject essays? Is that called studying? What should I be doing, aside from everything else on the list?
*snorfle*
Tonight I am going to watch the fireworks. Tomorrow I will address this, but, despite my husband's objections that I "shouldn't make this personal" and "need to work on stamina" if I feel fried after a mere seven hours, now is not the time.
The gym in our new building does not have a scale. Right now, that's a good thing. Ignorance is bliss.
I usually suffer from the munchies during exam season. The act of sitting around outlining is so much more pleasant when accompanied by a handful of Pirate's Booty or beef jerky or marshmallows or soy nuts. (These things go surprisingly well together, actually.)
But this time, exam season is two months long. And two straight months of the munchies is not pleasant. I've been going to the gym more or less daily, but this does not seem to be having any effect on either my appetite or my metabolism. My stomach has once again decided to protrude obnoxiously, my hips are thickening, and the small of my back ain't so small any more. Even restricting myself to relatively healthy snacks (no marshmallows this time) doesn't seem to be slowing the snowball effect.
Any suggestions for a bar review diet? Should I just be chewing gum?
Aaack! It's a Miranda violation!
(But remember, confessions obtained in violation of Miranda are still admissible to *impeach*!)
(Doesn't the word "impeach" look like it should mean "to stuff someone inside a peach"?)
Today's mail brought not only the blue PMBR book bequeathed to me out of the goodness of a reader's heart (thank you, HB! and huzzah for blogs enabling this kind of distributive goodwill!), but a particular piece of paper I'd been looking forward to receiving for several weeks now. There, inside the priority mail envelope, tucked into the silk corners of a maroon leather folder bearing a gold crest, was my law school diploma.
I have long had issues with diplomas. For many years I couldn't even bear to look at the one I got upon graduating college. For one thing, it was ugly as sin. Also, I didn't graduate with my class, a decision which greatly disturbed me back in 1996. I was exasperated with the indulgent and meaningless life of the undergraduate, but at the same time, I wasn't quite done living it yet. And then all my friends were still in school and there I was, temping in Manhattan for a starvation wage and wondering what the hell had happened to my life.
Even now, nearly a decade later, I'm still embarrassed by that awful diploma. I thought it might just have looked ugly through the misery-colored glasses I wore for most of 1996, but I gave it a glance last week while we were unpacking and nope, it's objectively ugly. Repulsive. Not a hint of color, not a flake of gold leaf on the embossed university seal. It's laid out in BIG BLOCK LETTERS with huge fanglike serifs and the entire text in Latin, even the frickin name of the university. (Have you ever seen one of these monstrosities? Here's an example. Mine is just as bad.) Framing other diplomalike things to hang alongside it -- my college certificate, my master's degree -- didn't make my B.A. any more presentable. Eventually it went back into the box where it remains to this day.
My law school diploma, on the other hand, is adorable. The name of the university appears in white lettering on a field of maroon, the entire diploma is laid out in (gasp!) more than one font size, and the school seal is embossed in gold rather than by one of those tacky notary-public-style paper crimpers. It's entirely in English, even the perplexing words "Doctor of Law" where one would normally expect to find "Juris Doctor." My one complaint is that the thing is just so small: it's exactly 8.5" x 11", which gives rise to the distressing presumption that it was just fed through an ordinary laser printer. (My father's law degree, by contrast, takes up half a wall and nearly collapses under the weight of the calligraphy and scrollwork adorning its money quotes. It's the kind of diploma that must have been rolled up and tied with a ribbon.)
Still, I'm quite happy with the little redhead. I've got big plans for it, which involve framing it and actually hanging it up somewhere prominent. In the meantime it's sitting on the windowsill, shining its light out into the living room. I had to hurry up and finish my Community Property outline before the thing hypnotized me into complete distraction. You're just too good to be true...can't take my eyes off of you.
It's good to have it here now, to remind me: this was the point. Law school, learning law, picking up everything that we'll take with us on the long haul. Not the bar exam, not the silly essays and crazy multiple-choice questions and faux canned alarmism, but this.
Readerfriend EJM found this artist's interpretation of FRE 803 at Volokh, via OJ, via the Underground, &c., &c.
A truly top-notch oeuvre/study aid. Could only possibly be cooler if they'd used Star Wars action figures instead of Lego people. But the Lego people are damn cute.