back to reality, sort of

I have been so lax in my outlining duties. I enjoyed Moot Court so much, and everything else so little, that deciding where to allocate my available work hours was a no-brainer. I'm lucky I've kept up with my class reading and haven't started bagging on Contracts like a good 50% of my section.

Now that Moot Court is over, you'd think that I'd have this lovely expansive ocean of time in which to bring all my outlines up to speed and start in on the battery of practice exams I was supposed to be reviewing with professors by now. In truth, I do plan to outline like spit this week, starting with the entirety of this afternoon to be spent on Civ Pro. But this is an ungodly exciting week in the courts, so staying focused will be a bit of a chore.

My Moot Court case, Intel v. Hamidi, will be argued before the California Supreme Court on Wednesday. It's interesting to scan the list of amici and spy a handful of professors under whom I would absolutely love to study -- nearly all of whom have come out in support of petitioner. I do think that policy is probably on his side, particularly since the actual proceedings will almost certainly reach the First Amendment issue (our in-class proceedings were restricted to single-issue arguments, so it was nothin' but trespass to chattels for us). And yet I find myself rooting for respondent...mostly because that "We hold for respondent" shot me through with such sheer searing joy last week. Intel may be chasing bad policy down a rathole here, but aw shucks, they're the home team.

More excitingly -- and this is a topic I couldn't have done in Moot Court, because my opinions on it are so strongly one-sided -- the Michigan case goes to orals before the Nine on Tuesday. I'm praying that someone (Scalia?) will pipe up with my favorite question: in what sense does a diversity interest that is defined to favor Americans of African, Native, or Latin American origin enrich an educational experience more appreciably than a diversity interest that is defined to favor descendants of other groups historically affected by discrimination, such as Americans of Jewish, Italian, Chinese, or Irish origin? I can't wait to hear how the Michigan folks attempt to justify ethnic origin -- a particular, limited range of ethnic origin at that -- as a principal indicator of one's potential contribution to the marketplace of ideas. I'm looking forward to Dahlia Lithwick's report of the arguments, even though I've never forgiven her for predicting my torts grade.

And then outlining. Yes, outlining.

today's horoscope, and other plans

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

The Stars help you realize your dreams and goals. Today you reap the bounty of a harvest that was planted long ago. Looking back now on all of your hard work and effort, it all seems worth it. A raise or promotion may be in the works. Later in the day, a dividend, inheritance or other windfall comes as a welcome surprise. Tonight, sharing an old gift fills it with new meaning. It just wouldn't be the same without your friends and family members there to help you celebrate, would it?

Creepy ways in which my horoscope is, once again, right on the money:
1. We're getting a sweet tax refund this year.
2. Husband and I are pondering a dinner at Chez TJ to joint-celebrate his upcoming birthday and my Moot Court experience.
3. Ahhh, my Moot Court experience. Suddenly law school no longer feels like a lead weight on my life.
4. As for the old gift, I can only think it refers to my lucky gold bangle, a gift from my late father. Perhaps not coincidentally, he came back from an disappointing albatross first semester of law school by virtue of moot court competitions and a specialization in intellectual property. Was I channeling him yesterday? Could be. Certainly could be.

Trying out for the Moot Court team at my school is a rather involved endeavor. You submit your class brief and your resume, fill out a form that poses questions like "How do you normally handle stress?" and "Are you willing to sacrifice evenings, weekends, and holidays to Moot Court Competition, if necessary? Describe any potential conflicts" [I wonder if marriage counts? --ed.], and then do a five-minute oral argument based on one of last year's competition topics. The available topics do not, alas, include Intel v. Hamidi, but do include some potentially interesting options.

Oddly enough, the one Internet-related topic I unearthed was in the area of international law. Of all things! "The cyber-attack on the [national railroad of fictitious country] and [alleged perpetrator fictitious country]'s failure to exercise due diligence are international wrongs," intones the Pleadings section of the sample brief. Gosh, I guess they could be. Who the hell knows, with international law? I guess I'll be arguing that they are.

P., my good buddy and one of the two other people from my section who wound up in my Moot Court class, doesn't get to argue until Tuesday, but he was more than excited to hear about how things had gone yesterday. I gave him all the heads-up I could remember. He's a hardcore litigation nut, had been planning to try out for competitive Moot Court ever since applying to law school, even intends to fulfill the Civil Litigation concentration (our school's equivalent of a major). He and one other (not unreasonably hyper) guy, as well as the outside threat from another woman on the respondent side, are my main co-contenders for the oral argument prize. Any one of them could handily beat me without either harm or foul.

It will be awfully interesting to see how the prizes pan out. "Don't count your chickens," says my husband, wisely. I'm not. I don't need to. Yesterday was a completely fulfilling experience even absent any resultant resume-padding. But what a thought...to win a prize in orals of all things...

...this must be how people get snookered into competitions that demand the "sacrifice [of] evenings, weekends, and holidays". I can see why they would.

law school suddenly becomes worthwhile

I wound up not going for the manicure this afternoon. It's best not to get one anyway right before you clean house.

"We hold for respondent," said the elder male judge, "based on oral advocacy."

[cue heart soaring]

But I'm getting ahead of my story.

Bill Logan and Patrick Carroll, darlings both, came to watch my oral argument, as did my husband (who had to dodge some traffic around the airport, but made it on time). We hung around in the hallway outside our courtroom with J., my opposing counsel who was scheduled to go twice this evening, all of us fidgeting and waiting for the 6:00 argument to end. T., the moot court program director, patrolled the hallway with an airline-style food cart loaded with bottled water, soda, and candy. "I'm just such a mom," she said. "I want to be sure you have everything you need."

The support was incredible. Even beyond T.'s mothering and a particularly sweet panel of judges, J. and Y., two of the class TA's, had watched a number of the arguments and gave us some excellently-timed coaching. "You need to really customize your argument," Y. told me.

"To the judges' questions?" I asked.

"No," she said, "to your opponent's arguments. A bunch of people who went yesterday didn't do this, so petitioner would get up and argue for fifteen minutes without raising the contact issue, and then respondent would get up and say that the main issue was contact. Just make sure you respond to the points he makes."

I would have. But I never quite got that far.

J. argued well, if his speech was a bit hesitant. I renumbered the points on my outline based on the issues he raised. But when I got up to speak, I never got past issue #1; the judges came at me with a terrific volley of questions. Which was good, since I'm far more comfortable answering questions than I am speaking off an outline. Perhaps they sensed this.

And then things went white-light and transcendental. I said things that I had not prepared, things that wowed the room. I actually used the term "nexus of harm," completely extemporaneously. I stuck to my argument and did not derail once. Not a single umm. One or two hand gestures, merely because my bloodstream seemed to be wholesale replaced with adrenaline. A few "I believe"s which should have been "It is Intel's position that"s. And only one potential instance of condescension to the judge, which fortunately no one seemed to notice.

"But really, that's it," said my husband in the car ride on the way home. "I was looking really closely, but you just nailed it. You were superb."

"I stopped taking notes," my instructor told me while the judges deliberated. "You were just superb."

"You were so into it," said Patrick over a giant blue margarita at the Chevy's on Van Ness. "When you got up, I could just see it by the look in your eyes." He then imitated the look in my eyes. I couldn't help but laugh.

"This," I announced for the benefit of anyone in earshot, "is the first time since coming to school that I have just simply enjoyed myself."

"Imagine," said my husband with a wink, "having fun in law school."

"You should try out for the Moot Court team," said my TA, who was serving as bailiff.

"You should try out for the Moot Court team," said my instructor.

"You should try out for the Moot Court team," said Bill.

"I think," I said, "I'll try out for the Moot Court team."

"It's just too bad the class is pass-fail," said my husband as we drove back down the 101. "You had an A."

"You know what?" I said. "This is such a good thing...so many good things at once, a topic I care about, an excellent instructor, the performing aspect, the lack of pressure...I'm glad it's pass fail. You can't quantify this. You can't fit this experience inside an A."

But hopefully, I can fit it into my schedule next semester.

tick...tick...tick...

In four hours I'll be arguing. The adrenaline rush is already starting to build.

"This feels like opening night," I told my husband.

"See," he said, "I told you that being a lawyer was just like acting."

"I wasn't even thinking of a play," I said. "I was thinking opera."

The last opera I sang in was Turandot, with the New Jersey State Opera, back in...wow, it must have been 1997. All of the chorus folks wore burlappy sackcloth costumes, coolie hats and white masks. But that was fine. You could deal with the itch and the sweaty nose. Turandot has some of the most amazing music for chorus of any opera I know of.

Half our chorus was union, half volunteer. But the volunteers were still bound by some of the union rules somehow; if you showed up even a minute after call, you could be cut. This was the first time I'd been on stage at the then-new NJPAC, which at the time was (and might still be) across the street from one of Newark's best Brazilian rodizio restaurants. I had a caipirinha there on opening night, and then coffee immediately thereafter to sober me up before call. Wound up not sleeping a wink that night.

Nessun dorma...

I could use a caipirinha right now.

Or a manicure.

problem solved

"Hey," said my husband as I tried on the suit to make sure the alterations had nipped and tucked it where they were supposed to. "That suit looks nice."

"I need to get it cleaned," I told him.

"Why?"

"Because it's been in the closet for so long."

"But it's not dirty."

"It's wrinkled. Maybe I just need to get it pressed."

"Where is it wrinkled?"

"Umm..." I looked in the mirror. It really didn't look that bad. The pants draped nicely, the cuffs and pleats were still there, and the jacket lay smooth. "The collar points are uneven."

"Can't you just fix that in five minutes with an iron?"

"I don't know how to iron something with shoulder pads," I confessed.

Still, I decided to wear the suit today. At the very least I could run up to the cleaners on Post and get the collar points fixed this afternoon after Edie. I stuffed my yoga pants into the pullman bag, figuring that if the suit pants got mussed on the train or in class, I could always quickly change and drop them off for pressing at the same time. And I might still have time for the manicure.

But the pearls are still in my makeup bag. They can wait until after class.

problem

People will tell you that San Francisco is a major city, international cultural center, capital-D Destination. They lie. It's a dinky little town that suffers from an embarrassing paucity of one-hour dry cleaners.

I was irked, although not particularly surprised, that none of the cleaners near my South Bay home was willing to take my freshly-altered lucky suit at 4 pm and clean and press it for me before closing time. Fair enough; 4 pm is already pretty late. I'm not sure what dry cleaning a suit actually involves, but I'm prepared to allow that it takes longer than two hours.

But San Francisco, massive mecca of all things urban, should have one-hour cleaners out the wazoo, right?

I didn't even find same day service until my ninth phone call.

Fortunately, I found it at all. So I'll be bringing the lucky suit in a duffel bag on the sunrise train tomorrow and rushing it up to an establishment called "Mack's Valet Cleaners," on Post between Leavenworth and Jones, before my 9:30 class.

For those of you pre-1Ls pondering the life of a commuter student, I submit: you've just spent $90 to get your lucky suit altered, and now all you can do is pray that the folks at Mack's Valet Cleaners don't mistakenly feed it through a shredder and that the folks in the Tenderloin don't mug you between Mack's Valet Cleaners and school. You'll be running for your train in a shell, pearls, jeans, stockings, and short heels, with your makeup in your pullman bag rattling against the power cable to your laptop. You'll be running back up to the cleaners in the afternoon, still praying, wondering whether to bother with the manicure at this point. You'll be changing, coiffing, etc. not in your bedroom, but in a school restroom. And once you're done, you'd better be cool, calm, and collected.

Oh, and don't forget to breathe.

a new way to protest

Forget the walkout...it's a study-out!

Subject: To study or to protest...join us to do both

"We are a group of law students who oppose the war against the people of Iraq"

Law school is a notoriously time-consuming endeavor, yet the Bush administration has compelled us to take time away from our studies to oppose the curtailment of civil liberties at home and the illegal war abroad.

We worked with other law students throughout the state to run a full-page ad in the New York Times expressing our opposition to the Bush administration policies and actions.

Additionally, we have taken to the mailbox to send letters, to the phones to make calls, and to the streets to march.

Now, we need to study.

We will be on the Civic Center lawn facing the UN Plaza on Monday, March 31, from 9:40 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. to let our physical presence speak out against the war while our
minds attempt to do what the Bush administration apparently never did -- learn the law.

Sponsored by the [school] Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

big time

Did you see? Salam Pax made the front page of Yahoo! Apparently Reuters decided that the existence of his blog -- which hasn't been updated in an unsettling day or two -- was in itself newsworthy. He's got to be thrilled to have beaten Instapundit and the Volokhs to this particular flavor of fame...that is, if his Internet service is still live...

expectancies

Claude Steele's research is making the blog rounds. Joanne Jacobs pegs his latest feat of negative-expectancy exacerbation.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's amazing that we're learning this stuff about ourselves, and kudos to Prof. Steele for doing the leg work. But howsabout some research on magic secrets to overcoming negative expectancies, rather than manufacturing pushbutton ones? I know of one person who was working on it a few years back, but I never got to read her dissertation...

gossip?

Overheard in the women's restroom:

"[standard complaining about grades, school culture, etc.]"
"But here we are, and what can you do?" (Note: this phrase has apparently attained mantra status at my school.)
"Man, if I could do it over again..."
"Where would you go?"
"I certainly wouldn't go here."
(At this point I actually start paying attention, since the conversation is verging on genuine gossip.)
"Really?"
"I'd go to New College, they have such a better philosophy..."
"Where's that?" (I hadn't heard of it either.)
"Right here in the city. It's not ABA accredited, but..."
(At this point I stopped listening.)

Something for all the pre-1Ls to consider, as you evaluate your options for next fall...

another one to boycott...

Being TV-less has its benefits. I had no idea that the Academy Awards were scheduled for today until I happened to check in to Yahoo and saw that they had announced the winners.

And, it turns out, I'm offended. Sure, I didn't instantly fall in love with The Two Towers the way I did with Fellowship of the Ring, but that was purely because I had just come away from my Criminal Law exam and was caught in a nasty psychological paroxysm where everything in life seemed to suck. The movie itself, I learned upon second and third viewings, was perfectly fine. So it should have won some actual Oscars, not just the nichey little ones that only film professionals notice.

I have not seen Chicago, and now I won't, in keeping with last year's boycott of A Beautiful Mind. Not that it's such a tremendous hardship missing out on Renee Zellweger doing chorus-girl shtick and Catherine Zeta Jones sporting the same haircut I had in 1989. I simply refuse to support the establishment's continued snubbing of one of the few instantiations of pop-culture celluloid that are actually worth my time (and my $9.00).

Up with Peter Jackson!! And may all of my exam-related trauma be resolved by the time Return of the King opens.

how depraved is depraved?

Hey, criminal lawyers! Contribute to our society's definition of depravity!

I want one

Seen at the gym this morning: a T-shirt reading MAKE LOVE NOT LAW REVIEW.

happy Nowrooz

Among the serving staff at my school's cafeteria is a really sweet, uncle-esque guy named Ali. He's an expert on area Persian restaurants and, every so often when the chef gives him the chance, will sneak a Persian dish in among the day's specials. "This rice has dried fruit in it," he'll say, convincing me to forego my daily turkey wrap, or "Taste the filling for my Persian burritos!" The falafel served by the cafeteria is, by Ali's assertion, his own recipe. (Although I hope the hummus isn't, because it's way too garlicky.)

Ali frequently winds up being the catering guy, whenever some event in the school requires that cafeteria food be delivered and served somewhere other than the cafeteria. He has a sidekick, Abdul, who's a bit younger and not nearly so happy to be there as Ali; so it's usually Ali summoned to pour the wine at alumni receptions.

That's probably where he was on Thursday morning, when I arrived at the cafeteria to collect my chai and my sandwich. Which was too bad, since I wanted to ask him about the spread he'd set up on top of the low refrigerator that houses the yogurt, fresh fruit and sushi (not too exciting sushi, the kind made three days ago with mayonnaise): a series of six or seven different items on display on top of a colorful Middle-Eastern looking cloth, with a sign reading "Happy Iranian New Year!"

There was a dish of what looked like Easter eggs (complete with bunnies and chickies painted on), a martini glass full of some paprika-looking spice, some potted grass, flowers, a few pieces of fruit...but what caught my eye was a small glass carafe of water containing, of all things, a pair of goldfish.

The display was still up yesterday morning, when Ali was back behind the counter. I felt like quite the yokel asking him what each thing was, particularly given his answers: "That's an apple." "Those are eggs." Erm, yeah. But I did, finally, learn the secret of the goldfish: "At a certain time of day -- like five o'clock yesterday evening -- they say the goldfish face towards Mecca."

"No kidding!" For some reason, I'm ready to believe anything about animals. There are so many Incredible-Journey-type stories out there that it's easy to look at a cute little critter and believe them capable of amazing feats of telepathy, not to mention global positioning. If cats and dogs can find their way home over hundreds of miles, why couldn't goldfish bow to Mecca? "Talented fish."

Ali shrugged noncommittally, apparently believing more in the tradition of having goldfish on your Nowrooz spread than in their actual ability to perform salah.

"All my goldfish ever did was die," I remarked, which was true.

Perhaps so as not to ruin the festivity of the occasion, Ali did not conjecture as to the future of these.

protest update 3

Now we're hearing sirens.

A quick window check revealed a series of eight or nine motorcycle cops (possibly more that had passed before I reached the window), passing in series at top speed, going the wrong way up one-way Hyde Street. The marchers are long gone in the other direction. I wonder what's going on up there.

Update on Yahoo. I'll make sure to avoid the vomit.

protest update 2

Chanting noises got louder. I moved to the window nearest to my sixth-floor lawbrary cubicle and -- how the heck did they get here? -- a protest roughly four blocks deep was progressing down Hyde toward McAllister, where they turned right and marched on in the direction of the parking garage (out of which my friends, if they haven't already, most certainly will not be able to exit for the next twenty minutes at least).

I opened the window, which swung outward from a top hinge, and resisted the urge to throw paper airplanes and courtesy-of-Westlaw Skittles at the crowds. All along the side of this building, other disembodied heads stuck out windows just like mine. I saw an unfamiliar flag: black, white, and green stripes, with a red triangle pointing outwards from the left. I figured it must be Iraqi, but a quick googling informs me that it is in fact the Palestinian flag. *sigh*.

Cops stopped traffic headed up McAllister as soon as the crowd made the right turn off of Hyde. Among the sitting ducks was a municipal bus. I'm gladder than ever that MUNI runs underground in these parts.

protest update

Patrick reports from the financial district:

Another protest, this one moving up Market Street from the Ferry Bldg. Large banners the width of the street. at the front. I was crossing Market, so I decided to stand my ground in the middle of the street. March organizers wearing official-looking orange vests told me to move. I told them that they weren't policemen and had no authority to make me. The march stopped! Eventually the protesters got the bright idea of lifting the sign over my head and the march went on, but for a moment they were aghast--a protest tactic being used against a protest. Da noive! If there were 50-100 anti-protesters there I think we could have had some real fun.

Most definitely!

and there was much protesting

A busy day in Fog City.

Every Thursday and Friday, United Nations Plaza features a little flea-market type deal: merchants under white tentlike booths, selling crystals and homemade scarves and fake African masks and drums. The whole establishment, by the time I arrive, smells of cheap incense (also available for, well, cheap). Trust me, it sounds more charming than it actually is. I keep thinking I'll find something to buy whenever I pass through the flea market in search of a gift, but have not yet met with any success.

This morning I expected to see hordes of protesters when I emerged from the Civic Center MUNI station. Instead, I saw the flea market. No activists were bothering the guy with the fake Oriental rugs, or the array of bongo drums, or the sunglasses that fell off the back of a truck. Just the smell of incense. Oh wait, there was one person carrying a photocopied Not In My Name sign.

I was unimpressed. Was this all there was?

And then I noticed the traffic.

The exit into UN Plaza brings you above ground facing away from Market Street, across Hyde toward the gold-domed city hall building. There might have been some people milling around down yonder, but more notable, as I turned up Hyde, was the fact that all three lanes of it were gridlocked. At the McAllister intersection, the gridlock became even more animated as incoming traffic attempted to merge onto Hyde. Red lights turned green, then back to red, and if you inched up a tire length you were lucky. Nobody was going to make it the three blocks to Market within at least a half hour.

I ran into O., who sits to my left in Edie, while making myself a cup of tea in the cafeteria. "Crazy traffic!" she fumed.
"Protesters," I suggested noncommittally.
"Don't these people have jobs??"
I had no answer to that.

Contracts was emptier than it usually is (by virtue of its unfortunate scheduling at 9:30 am). "They've closed off Van Ness," M. told me, "and part of Market."
"Ooh," I said, thinking of K. and C. as they drove in to school. "I bet nobody can get to the Civic Center parking garage."

Anecdotes trickled in all morning, as people made their way to class. L's twenty-five-minute bus ride took her an hour and fifteen minutes. K. fought her way across Market to find the Civic Center garage almost completely empty. C. had unsuccessfully tried to park at a friend's house and take BART.

"I feel guilty," K. said. "I should be out there with them."
"Mmmmm," C. agreed, "yeah."
I had no answer to that.

Patrick, however, did. He sent me a gleeful email describing how he'd gone up to a circle of singing peaceniks at Embarcadero and chanted "Hey hey, ho ho, Saddam Hussein has got to go!" and "Free free free Iraq!" until the nearby cops were almost visibly laughing with him.

After Edie ended at 1:30, I decided to explore a little. Traffic on Hyde was moving again, and I needed to hit the ATM anyway, so I figured I'd walk down to the one at Eighth and Market and maybe do some peoplewatching.

Someone had thrown black paint all over one of the ATMs; I used the other one. Other than that, the area didn't seem any more or less littered or vandalized than usual. "NO WAR FOR OIL" someone had sprayed on one of the F-Market guardrails. "BUSH = TERRORIST" appeared on a garbage can. "HEALTHCARE NOT WAR! FOCK [sic] BUSH!" read a low wall.

I followed the roads closed to traffic and eventually found my protest, marching up Market at about Seventh Street. Free assembly is a First Amendment right that's never been particularly crucial to my personal wellbeing; this was, in fact, the first protest (not counting picket lines) I'd ever actually seen in the flesh. No, they weren't naked. Yes, they were shouting. But the chants were being led by three or four different point people who didn't quite synch up. And the diction would have sent my high-school drama teacher into conniptions. It took me a few rounds to fill in the missing consonants:

"WADAWIWAH!"
"EEEEE!!!"
"WEDAWIWANA!"
"OW!!!"

As though someone had stepped on the protesters' collective toe.

They were a pretty collective bunch. "RAVERS FOR PEACE," read a multicolored sign. "POTHEADS 4 " was scrawled on a piece of cardboard. Someone had even spray-painted "YOUR MOM 4 PEACE" on his sign. (Maybe his is; mine certainly isn't, although I didn't feel the need to tell him that.) I saw a red flag, a blue flag with a picture of Earth on it, and American flags both right-side up and upside down. But I laughed out loud when I saw the man in the hot pink satin body stocking pedaling by on his unicycle, tootling a police-style whistle and making a victory sign with his right hand while pointing to it with his left. Or rather, a peace sign. A "V" with his forefinger and middle finger, at any rate.

An older guy, whom I thought for a few moments might be homeless, was marching alongside the marchers shouting "BUZZWORD PATROL! BUZZWORD PATROL!" No one seemed to notice. His was the only counter-protest I heard, although to be fair, maybe other people were attempting and being drowned out by the howl of vowels from the throng.

Back up by school, a much smaller band of more normal-looking folks marched (er, strolled) along down McAllister. "A JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE" read their banner. They may have been Jewish, but in terms of voices, they seemed to be more interested in chatting with each other than in chanting out loud. They also managed to stay very neatly unaware of, or at least unaffected by, the nasty anti-Israel signage being waved around not three blocks away.

"Just think," M. had said this morning, "all those cops are getting overtime pay just to stand around and make sure these people don't break things. Just think how much this is costing us." [About a half million dollars daily, it's estimated.] "Why not lower our tuition instead?"

(In fact, it's going up 28% as of the fall semester.)

"I mean," B. was ranting to S. a few rows back, "I'm opposed to the war too, but dude, I've got to get to school!"

One might argue that the crowds should, too.

what is it good for?

And we're off.

You know, every time I see the word "war" in print, that old Edwin Starr song gets stuck in my head again...

patriotic butterfat

Mmmmmmmm! *giggle*

Link courtesy of Jane Galt.

exploring my options

This afternoon after Edie, I trundled up to the office of the dean of students, chewing on an idea.

"What can I do for you?" he asked. (I was right -- he doesn't know me from Eve.)

"I'd like some information on joint degree programs," I told him.

My school, it seems, plays fast and loose with them. Basically, the dean told me, you can complete a masters jointly with your J.D. at pretty much any masters-granting institution that'll accept you. One semester of credit transfers in either direction, and after four years, you get not just a J.D. but also a M.B.A. or an M.P.P. alongside. The catch is that they're about as supportive of you doing this as they are of any damn thing you suggest: "Sure, go ahead, good luck." Have fun researching schools, choosing programs, networking with professors, taking whatever standardized tests you need to get in. We'll be happy to calendar you in for fifteen minutes once you've completed the process, to sign your paperwork.

I guess that's better than the administration actively attempting to prevent you from doing something like this.

But then the dean, in what was perhaps a slip of protocol, wound up saying something direct and rather helpful. "You don't want a joint degree," he told me. "These things you're talking about studying --" (digital intellectual property, cybercrime, jurisdictional issues, Internet regulatory policy) "-- are all law classes. They're not what you'd find in a policy school."

"Oh." I guess that made sense. "But they're not offered here."

"No, that's correct."

I waited for him to say the T-word. He didn't.

"We used to offer a few," he said instead, naming an Internet law expert who had been lured away to another school. "But people like that are hard to replace. They're expensive."

And then came the T-word...in a rather different context than I was expecting.

"But you know, you can take classes in this stuff at [several local schools] and just transfer the credit in."

"Really?"

Up to twelve credits, it turns out. Or, another option: go be a visiting student somewhere for a full year, which would allow the importation of a whopping 30 credits. "There's a two-year full-time residency requirement," the dean told me, but I was on track to satisfy that in just two more twelve-credit-minimum semesters. Ad astra per aspera.

This is heartening. This gives me options. If anything, the glorious array of options verges on the intimidating. These eensy little seminar classes...will they even take me?

Too early to worry. The good news is: they just might.

Padraig go bragh

Nobody is Irish in San Francisco, or at least if they are, nobody's admitting it.

It's unusual for ex-of-New-Jersey me to go through a St. Patrick's Day where no one wishes anyone else a happy St. Patrick's Day, one devoid of green-dyed beer and plastic hats and parades. I'm a quarter Irish myself, through my maternal grandfather, and dutifully wore not only a green henley shirt but green socks and a green bra (not that anyone checked, but there it was). And I kept my eyes peeled for any ethnic compatriots doing likewise.

Alas, it seemed that there were more Irish folk (or at least Irish supporters) in my section than anywhere else in town, on Caltrain, on MUNI, or milling about United Nations Plaza for the grand opening of the new Asian Art Museum. (No, the crowds were not disproportionately Asian, which would have explained the lack of Irish spirit but didn't.)

At least I'm reassured that St. Paddy is duly fêted within the confines of my school: Lexis Nexis sponsored another 10,000-loyalty-point contest in his honor. Snakes, beware.

picking nits courses

They've released the course schedule for next semester, so my Mendocino comedown has been spent ciphering out potential course combinations for next semester.

The arc of my plans for the next few years remains indeterminate at best. My mother, last week, sat me down and attempted to map out a number of possibilities; a former district manager, she retains the ability to sit down in the middle of a barn -- a barn! -- and sketch out flowcharts on the back of a Wal-Mart receipt. Unsurprisingly, every branch ended in a question mark. Stay at this school? Transfer? Leave law school altogether? Go back to school for something else? Have a baby? Move back east? Get a job? Retire to Mendocino right now? Who the hell knows.

Still, it's best to prepare for the option which, if not most likely, is at least the most easily predictable.

My requirements are not terribly complicated:

1. No sunrise trains. (Absolutely inflexible on this.)
2. Something that fulfills the Ethics/Professional Responsibility requirement, and will ideally set me up for the MPRE in November.
3. No vertiginously-leftist policy wonk professors (although I'll take one if their class is at the right time).
4. Minimum 14 credits.
5. Brownie points for non-GPA seminars.
6. Guilt points for bar courses.
7. Oh-baby-yes points for courses with anything other than one final exam equaling 100% of the grade.

Which leads me to Evidence at 11:30 am on Mondays and Wednesdays, followed by a seminar in Roles and Ethics that -- gloriously! -- features papers, a midterm, and a take home final worth a third of the grade. I'm then looking at two possible Constitutional Law I sections, one taught by a vertiginously-leftist policy wonk professor (at 1:30 pm) or another taught by my buddy the dean of students (at 10:30 am). He may not yet know that he's my buddy. In fact, he probably doesn't know me from Eve. Which is fine by me.

That's eleven credits. For my remaining three, I've slated either Criminal Procedure -- paired with Professor Policy Wonk's conlaw section -- or, more excitingly, a non-GPA seminar that could well make it worth catching the 8:17 train for the dean of students: "Scientific Method for Lawyers." It's a statistics class, the likes of which I never got around to taking in college. It's taught by the school's champion Evidence professor (whose section, alas, would have necessitated a sunrise train) and doesn't even count towards my GPA, a delicious thing to keep in mind should my math anxiety decide to resurface.

Alas, not a whiff of the Internet. I saw it coming, though, so it doesn't sting so badly. It does suck that the one intellectual property class the school does offer, an intro-level massive lecture, conflicts with almost everything else on my schedule; and the mythical single-credit cyberlaw seminar isn't even being offered this semester. Whatever. If this is the prong of the flowchart along which I wind up traveling, my actual personal interests will likely have little to no influence on my path in life for the next two years. I could let this gall me if I wanted to, could convulse in envy over Paul's amazing note or James' view from the empyrean realms or any of the other wonderful places people get to be while I'm in the land of litigation competitions and social justice clinics. But that would be stupid of me.

If I've learned anything over the past few weeks, and past few days in particular, it's this: In life you may not agree with every decision you make. Once you've realized that you've gone against your own grain, though, you've got two options: abandon and walk away (if even to start over), or stick with it and suck it up. But that's the trick. You've got to pick one.

ahhhgualala

Mendocino was sublime, as anticipated. The Whale Watch Inn is perhaps a misnomer -- three nights there with nary a fluke in sight -- but is just the thing for detaching oneself from the continuum for a bit. Hand-carved furniture, 138 wooden steps down the cliff to the tidepools full of starfish, and fresh-baked banana bread at breakfast. Our room, the Bath Suite (more realistically named than the inn), featured a whirlpool tub in a loft atop a spiral staircase. Mmmm...bubble baths. Repeatedly. All was good.

The laptop was there, but stayed in the pullman bag the whole time. Every so often I did get the urge -- more like a zing of guilt -- to study a bit, which I would indulge...but the experience remained intact.

And for anyone who's ever wondered what I look like -- here's a beauty shot:

trying to vacation

My mother's new horse is named Skip In Earnest, Ernie for short. He is an eight-year-old liver chestnut gelding, sixteen hands, with an astonishingly unflappable personality. You can hot shoe Ernie, go at him with a clipper, turn him out with strange horses in a paddock surrounded by a shock fence, and his only reaction is a few blinks of his giant limpid eyes and a wet snuffle. If he weren't so clearly a horse, you could almost mistake him for a cow. Mom recently retired her first horse after much high-maintenance hassle over his health, and to see her with an undemanding horse who already loves her as much as she loves him...it's blissful.

And yet I failed to bliss out in Florida. I'm doing better now than I was at Christmastime, when I never actually granted myself any down time. Still, I wonder if I'm actually, truly, chemically depressed. Breaks like this are supposed to revive and uplift the downtrodden 1L. To be sure, I had great fun spending so much time with my mother, itemizing her tack room at the barn and sharing Kentucky Fried Chicken and watching (first time I've seen this stuff, me without TV and all) American Idol and Married By America. But as soon as anyone asked me how school was going, everything would hush and go monochrome again.

I didn't get any outlining done in Florida. I did study my Gilberts at night, while repeatedly attempting to fall asleep on something close to Eastern Time. I never quite made it, though, which made last night/this morning all the more fun: to catch a 7:00 flight out of Orlando that got me back home by 11:30 this morning, I have been awake since 1:30 a.m. Pacific time. Whee! My eyes look like pinwheels, sort of.

Tomorrow we head up to Gualala ("wah-LA-la") for the part of my break in which my husband actually intends to join, in the event that he ever gets home from work tonight. I think I will pack my laptop, just to have it, just to see if I'm motivated to do any work while there. It could happen. I'm not trying to escape from school the way I was back in January. I'm trying instead to figure out if ever the twain -- school and my Technicolor life -- shall meet.

must...take...vacation

I need spring break so badly, my entire body itches. I want to tear out of my skin and run, clean and screaming and trailing streamers of blood, run and run and run until I'm surrounded by redwoods and ocean and not another human soul.

Instead I'm going to Florida, to visit my mother, whom I have not seen since last June. She keeps horses. Horses are incredibly comforting, utterly content in their ignorance of restrictive covenants and nonmutual collateral estoppel. I can groom a horse for hours without thinking a single law school thought.

I'll be back on Wednesday, and may or may not blog between now and then. May not blog even then, come to think of it, since husband and I will then head straight out to three nights in Elysium. The hard part will be the comedown next Sunday night, by which point I should certainly be back online to whine and gripe once again.

Happy spring break! And if you don't officially have one, take one anyway, even just psychologically! You can't undervalue such a thing...

hey kids

I should officially extend a hug to all of the pre-1Ls who have been hanging out here recently, paging through my archives and claiming to draw wisdom therefrom. (How they're finding it, I couldn't tell you. I sure didn't put any there. Maybe it just grows, like mold, on words left out in the open for long enough.)

I owe you, by and large, an apology.

Let me first say, a propos of not much, that I take issue with the people picking on Barbara Grutter (a.k.a. one of the plaintiffs in the Michigan admissions-discrimination cases). Apparently Grutter applied to one school only. Some would say that this was a tactically poor move, and that by failing to cover her bases and apply to safety schools, she deserved what she got (in this case, a rejection). Maybe this is true. Maybe it is a tactical error to focus so exclusively on the one place you know you want to be.

I'd argue otherwise. Sure, it's dumb to put all your eggs in one basket and then express surprise when your one possible outcome doesn't materialize. But one doesn't necessarily put oneself at an advantage merely by decentralizing egg storage. One can arguably wind up in an extraordinarily negative situation, even after having covered one's hindquarters in exemplary fashion, by embarking on a Plan B without realistically assessing all possible outcomes.

I owe an apology to the folks searching Sua Sponte for what my criminal law professor would call "an algorithm," the particular magic spell that will resolve the issues they're facing by demonstrating how I successfully did so. I am sorry. I did not successfully do so. I would not recommend my course of action to a pre-law applicant. I'd almost rather recommend Barbara Grutter's. (Except that, once dinged, you should reapply a few times before you sue.)

Here is my advice, which is worth all $0 that you've paid for it. Sit down in front of a mirror, with your resume and application materials spread out in front of you. Know yourself. Cut yourself no slack. Can you accept a particular offer of admission on the understanding that this is the school from which you will graduate? Don't rely on transfer opportunities. Don't assume you'll wind up high in the class. Don't count on your intelligence, your talents as measured against the pool, your historical performance in an academic environment, and particularly not on your luck. If you get screwed, will it derail you?

It is true that there is a direct correlation between good 1L grades and hard work/intelligence. But know now, know in advance, and ahh, you probably won't hear me saying this any more than I heard the people saying it to me a year ago but here goes: the grades-to-work correlation does not work in reverse. Hard work can very easily not pay off. If you've staked any major plans on a certain result of your labors, and that result fails to materialize, where will you be? How will you feel? Will it be worth it? Answer that question now.

And then, when other people ask it of you a year from now, you'll have an answer at the ready.

arrive le printemps

Over the past week or so, I've come to realize something heartening.

When my alarm goes off at 6:15, the room is no longer pitch black. I can get up and walk to the bathroom without having to grope walls and trip over shoes. I can't really call it the sunrise train any more, since the sun is already neatly above the horizon by the time I arrive at the station.

Spring is coming, slowly but surely...

Spring break is coming, this Saturday. Hopefully the professors will come up with some suitable treat for those of us who actually bother to show up to class tomorrow.

procrastinating or multitasking?

Final briefs for Moot Court cannot, alas, be submitted via email. I've grown accustomed to sending off a draft on Monday night and having comments either emailed back to me (by the TA) or aired on the overhead projector (by the instructor). Now, not only must I print eight copies of the item, it's also required that they be vello-bound with card stock covers in a California-Supreme-Court-respondent-specific shade of blue.

I own a printer now, a Christmas gift from my stepmother. Still, I'll probably do all the printing on the giant high-speed laser monsters at my husband's office, both in the interest of time and to save my own ink (the document is well over twenty pages even before the revision I'm about to begin). All of this still means that I need to budget some time for printing and vello-binding into my editing schedule. No waiting until Monday this week for me. Moot Court must get done today.

So of course, I'm playing around with course selections instead.

I'm torn; on one hand, it feels valuable to check out last semester's grade distributions when choosing among professors. Having experienced my school's vicious curve firsthand and without anesthesia, I can't help but want to hedge my bets. A topics in immigration seminar where no one gets below a B? Why the hell not? Immigration law has never seemed particularly uninteresting to me, and safety-in-numbers is just so goddamned important here.

On the other hand, grade spreads tell you nothing about where you'll wind up in the spread when your turn comes. My torts professor was famous among previous classes as the "B+ King," but he sure as hell didn't give me one, and an unsettling number of my classmates are apparently in the same boat. "You are so not alone," P. told me. "I can't imagine that I'm one of the fifteen dumbest people in the class," G. ranted to me. "That just can't be right." Of course it isn't. Yet the numbers say otherwise, and we have no avenue of protest apart from excusemaking come interview season. But would any of us have chosen a different professor, looking at his grade spread? Didn't we all know how smart we were, of what we were capable?

Picking classes is scary, for precisely this reason. I have not yet recovered my faith that exam performance is in any way correlated to either my intelligence or my command of the subject matter. The thought of two more years blindfolded, running an obstacle course laced with barbed wire and broken glass, leaves me chilled. I don't mind the sneering coyness of the Socratic educational model. I can fight my way through the smokescreens to all the actual information I need to feel comfortable that I've learned the law. But I can't support the fact that my trial and error is quantified and centrally featured on my permanent record. If you're going to grade me like this, and my grades are going to matter so much, then just be straight about it and teach toward the test. Or if the method is really that much more important than the numbers, then shift the emphasis there. Pick a story and stick to it.

I think I'll protest by taking as many non-GPA seminars as I'm allowed.

no BB for me

Several fellow student blawgers have talked about the Barrister's Ball at their schools, which leaves me feeling rather antisocial. Ours was last week, and I didn't go.

How lame of me, right? I'm married, so I've got a built-in date (provided I can convince him to haul himself up to the city). But I never did get around to having my black cheongsam dress altered. I couldn't find the occasion to buy tickets. And I basically require a guaranteed lift home to the south bay to convince me to spend a Friday night in town without my car. After 8 pm the trains only run once an hour, at midnight they stop running altogether, and I don't do Cinderella.

The Barrister's Ball was a clubbing-type evening, and I've never been much into clubbing, anyway. Pub crawling, sure -- some of my greatest memories of 1996 trail off into a blissful stumbling-home haze. But I can't dance, as a matter both of fact and of law, and my husband is even less graceful. And what fun is it to dress up and go to a club when all you're going to do is sit at the bar and eat fattening munchies and drink? I could just do that at home in my jammies. In fact, I did.

If they had the BB at a jazz club, on the other hand, that would be something else entirely. Laura once took me to the Village Vanguard, back in my Manhattan days, and the evening still resonates like a Zen chime whenever I think back to it. There must be jazz clubs in San Francisco. (We've been to Slim's, but that hardly counts, if only because we went there to see Jerry Cantrell of all people.)

Maybe it's just me, but when I hear "Barrister's Ball" I think ballroom, chandeliers, parquet floors and an orchestra with a massive brass section on risers playing "Take the A Train" and "Satin Doll." I'd pay ten bucks for that, easily. Twenty even. I'd gladly drag my husband away from work, go out of my way to take my dress to the seamstress in time, maybe even take a dance class or two so I wouldn't step on anyone's feet.

Then again, maybe I'm just old school. Or just old, period.

no name is so glorious...

Stop what you're doing, quickly! You're not worthy! Bow to Mecca!!!

(Link courtesy of Hose Monster. No offense intended to any Muslim readers.)

Wholly brand equity, Batman!

the people you meet

The sunrise train features its own cast of usual suspects. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday morning I come trudging downtown to the station and see much the same people waiting: the same woman who from twenty paces looks exactly like my college roommate Laura; the same group of loud high school kids who make a point of greeting each other volubly as they're dropped off, one after another, in the parking lot on the far side of the tracks ("HI CHRIS!!!"); the same three Mexican sous-chefs who ride bicyles, speak rapid Spanish, and wear some of the most remarkably-patterned cotton pants I've ever seen first thing in the morning.

Sometimes the light rail arrives before the sunrise train, letting off a load of two-segment commuters who can't catch Caltrain in their hometowns. On those days, we all share the trip northward with perhaps the most remarkable passenger: a tall, sandy-haired blind man, accompanied by a yellow Labrador retriever on a leather harness. I always have to restrain my urge to pet Seeing Eye dogs, since they are invariably so calm and sweet-looking and focused on the task at hand. This one in particular has big soulful eyes and seems peacefully resigned to his day job.

I want a dog.

MUNI, on the other hand, is a different story. On Caltrain, I duck upstairs to the single-file seats, huddle in with a casebook in my lap, and am usually asleep by Hillsdale. But MUNI is designed to be a short-haul system, so the seats are plastic, there are hang-on handles suspended from the ceiling for people who don't sit down, and the stops are more frequent and closely-spaced. (I still, on bad mornings, manage to lean forward and rest my forehead on the telescoping handle of my pullman bag as the trolley jolts from one stop to the next...anything to gain another fifteen minutes of dozing time before arriving at school.)

MUNI passengers, too, are a more diverse crew than the Caltrain folks. Last week I was roused from my doze by one of those overpowering odors that make it almost impossible to inhale. I opened my eyes and first saw a pair of muddied shoes standing a few feet away to my right. Sitting up, I beheld one of the most massive homeless men I've ever seen. He risked scraping his frowzy head on the ceiling of the trolley. He left a path through the air. I held my breath until my stop and had difficulty breathing for the rest of the morning; the memory of the scent still feels like choke.

Or, during a busy rush hour, someone will come onto the trolley in a wheelchair. Normally this is hardly an issue, since at the Caltrain station the MUNI usually stops at a platform. Recently, however, construction at that intersection has compelled the trolleys to disgorge their passengers about a block away, which involves lowering the steps and having people exit at ground level. Within a few days of the rank giant, I shared a trolley with a paralytic in a wheelchair whose limbs were contorted in a way that must be awfully frustrating if they're yours: his arms bent at the elbow, forearms stuck straight up, and hands frozen into twists at the top. I looked away so as not to offend, but then I heard the guy cough.

'Hem.
'Hem.
'Hem.

It was a crowded trolley, and the standing commuters hanging on to the ceiling handles were squirming to get out of the way of the incoming coughs. The poor guy couldn't cover his mouth while his hands were stuck in a permanent stick'em-up position, so the rest of us, none of whom wanted to get sick, buried our faces in our sleeves and dodged out the other door as soon as the MUNI stopped. I never did see how they got his chair down the steps.

Still, absent significant worsening of the risk of physical harm, my commute beats the hell out of the available alternative. Few things on earth are worse than Bay Area traffic (maybe Los Angeles traffic is one of those, but I won't go there...literally). At least on the trains, the people you watch while people-watching are utterly devoid of road rage.

property woes

Incredible, how diverse our law school experiences all manage to be even within the 1L formula. The folks at Open and Notorious are going through an El-Dubyar-like experience in what they've dubbed "Brute Court," while my own Moot Court experience has turned out to be a blessed relief from the rest of my semester. I can spend a few hours working on my brief and, implausibly, feel better than when I started.

Meanwhile, the Angry Clam praises Property as the one item on his schedule that doesn't clearly conflict with his politics. Once again, I envy him. Somehow, the chemistry of my section, my casebook and Professor Property taken as a whole manages to infuriate me so much that my scalp actually itches. Case after case, property law seems to deal solely with the transcendent ability of choicely-located individuals to spirit away various rights of the people who actually paid for the property.

This has to be misguided. However much fun it may be for the Property-Teaching Establishment to gloat over nonpurchasers successfully usurping piecemeal ownership rights from the folks actually paying the mortgage, emphasizing the policy advantage of shafting corporate entities in particular, I have to believe that the law in reality will take better care of me when I shell out the big bucks and make my life's investment. I'm OK with spring guns and traps for trespassers being illegal. Really, I am. I can deal with that. But it can't be so easy for people to go traipsing through my yard, camping in my woods, beating paths through the redwood logs strewn on my beach, and wind up having the right to be there merely because I failed to sic a Rottweiler on them. (My husband is allergic to Rottweilers, anyway.)

I went to Professor Property's office hours this afternoon to try and sort this through, which I think now might have been a mistake. I don't think she likes me. To a certain extent it's tough to tell, since she never attempted to end the conversation, nor did she recognize that I was doing so when I stood up, picked up my papers (ten minutes later), or started inching toward the door (after another ten minutes). She also remains one of the most stunningly beautiful women I've ever seen, and it's tough to parse ill will out of her huge dark eyes, perfect skin, and unfurrowed brow.

Still, the entire time I was there I felt under attack. Sparring with Professor Crim was one thing; but he didn't interrupt me, nor I him, to pre-empt an argument or to generalize a premise to an absurd extreme. No, Professor Property, I do not support racially-based standards of exclusion, nor would I kick my parents out onto the street. I'm actually not that evil a person at all, if you can imagine. I simply have difficulty rousing sympathy for people like the plaintiffs in Rase v. Castle Mountain Ranch, folks who built their vacation homes on land that someone else owned in the mistaken belief that he'd never sell it. And so on.

Conclusion, after an hour of this: I need to get over it, find a way to shut down my own worldview, dissemble, misrepresent, come up with phrases like "Trust is a basic human commodity! If we could all trust each other then society would be a better place!" on the exam policy questions under the guise of "arguing both sides," and just tough it out for another six weeks. It's going to get worse before it gets better; we haven't even begun future interests yet. But it will, some day soon, actually end.

Faster, please...

something missing

Preregistration for next semester fast approaches, bringing all sorts of baggage that I have no desire to carry these days. So let's not go there. Anyways, boiled down to its essence, we've basically been given our marching orders: rack up two semesters of Con Law; one each of Evidence, Crim Pro, Wills & Trusts, Corporations, and Remedies; two credits of Professional Responsibility/Ethics (which gets its own quasi-bar-esque exam); and a course in Community Property since this is, after all, California; and *whee*! we're magically ready for the bar exam.

Or something.

I suppose it would bother me more if the available pool of alternatives were brimming with the kinds of courses I feel most interested in, such that I found myself faced with a real choice. Alas, a cursory perusal of the course catalog yields only one offering remotely related to the Internet, a seminar helpfully characterized as a "one credit mini-course." Smurfy, Papa Smurf! Maybe I can take it twice!

Sorry, I thought I was going to manage something more upbeat than this post. I don't want Sua Sponte to turn into my depressive sulking-place, so I'll be back when I've bucked up a bit.

*dissed*

In today's email:

Subject: 2003 Summer Externship

Dear Ms. A...:

Thank you for your interest in an externship with [district judge] for the 2003 summer semester. We regret that we shall not be able to offer you the position, but wish to thank you for taking the time to come in and interview with us.

As I am sure you will understand, the number of qualified applicants far exceed the limited resources of this office, thus forcing us to make difficult choices.

Your resume is very impressive, and we wish you great success in your legal career.

Sincerely yours,

[judge's assistant]

Whoomp! There it is.

and boy was my face red

I am now officially a schlemiel.

This morning, for some reason, I wasn't in the mood for my standard sandwich from the school cafeteria (smoked turkey, havarti, sun dried tomatoes, and shredded lettuce on a tortilla spread with pesto sauce, light on the oil, cut in half and each half wrapped to go, please) and decided to try one of their always yummy-smelling soups. Today's treat was a potage of curried butternut squash with apples, which Ali (who can recommend good Persian restaurants anywhere in the Bay Area) warned me was spicy. It wasn't. I took a cup of it along with my daily cup of green tea and paid $3.25 for the lot.

This left me in the fun position of balancing one boiling-hot cardboard cup on top of another as I dragged my pullman bag behind me with my other hand. I had to pause, every so often, to shift my burning fingers around on the lower cup. Fortunately, I managed to cross the street and even climb up the few concrete stairs in front of the classroom building without incident, cups-holding hand extended out in front of me.

"Wow," said someone I didn't know, admiring my balance as I negotiated the stairs. "That's a talent."

"Actually, it's dumb luck," I smiled back, which was true. I've never been known for the grace of my movements, and can, if I'm not careful, trip over my own feet while standing still.

But my luck seemed to be holding as I opened the door and walked into the classroom building. There, in the lobby, some friends from my section were manning a bake sale table for my journal. I stopped to buy a brownie (our editor-in-chief makes incredible brownies) and was disappointed to find that they were fresh out, but instead picked up two fifty-cent chocolate cookies.

M. checked the clock and remarked that she needed to run back to her apartment and grab her stuff before Property; K. did too. I offered to stay with V. and run the table until they got back, which was fine with everyone. "This isn't bad," I said of the cookie I munched, as I set down my cups and sat in M.'s chair behind the bake sale table. "I paid for two, right? Let me--"

Leaning forward over my cups was a bad idea.

Both lids popped off in perfect synch, splashing curried-butternut-squash soup and green tea all across the bake sale table. I swore floridly and immediately clutched at the roll of paper towels, managing to contain the flood before it hit any of the baked goods on paper plates. V. sprang up and did the same on the other half of the table, half-laughing and half-chanting "It's OK, it's OK, don't worry, we'll just clean it up quickly."

"Oh jeez," said a customer as she cream-cheesed her freshly purchased bagel, "what a mess...you've got some in your hair, too, and on your clothes..."

She was right. My hair and even my eyelashes were sticky with tea and soup, and a big orange splash had landed front-and-center on my black T-shirt. "Good! Good!" I said, working my optimism as hard as I could. "Get all my bad luck out of the way early, then this will be a good day!"

V. and I cleaned up the rest of the table, drawing the attention of a number of passersby who went on to purchase baked goods almost certainly out of sympathy. I buttoned up the cardigan of my twinset, which successfully hid the gunk, but was unable to mop it all out of my hair. Said hair still crunches when I fiddle with it.

So today was Property and no lunch, a combination that left me grossly crabby. I did have a blood orange in my bag, and ran to the cafe a few doors down for a piece of baklava...but still, dinner sounds like an excellent idea.

I'll just have to be extra careful not to spill it.

today's horoscope

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

You wonder about the people who often seem guided by whim and inspiration. You're jealous of how effortless their lives appear, and how unconcerned they seem with little things like perfection. These days you're burning the midnight oil, throwing away ideas and drafts, trying to come up with something that actually works. What seems possible at night may not hold up under a daylight scrutiny. Know your limits when you reach them, preferably before someone else says no. Maybe you should move to a situation that would actually welcome your fertile mind.

hmmm

I'm not usually a blame-shifter, nor do I normally buy in to group-based politics. But this article from a school over on the other coast hooked me with its take on why certain groups of people, including women -- particularly ones with a history of overachievement -- set themselves up to do poorly in law school. Hmmm.

snapshot

Past ten-thirty PM. Husband still not home from work. Dinner tonight was two blood oranges, a few almonds, a piece of toast, some buttermilk, and two (thus far) glasses of wine.

I suppose I should be reading Contracts, but instead I'm going nuts with Limewire downloading old jazz MP3's. They always work. I've got Billie Holliday doing "One For My Baby" and Ella Fitzgerald doing "Black Coffee" and...yeah.

You'd never know it
but buddy, I'm a kind of poet
and I've gotta lot of things to say
And when I'm gloomy
you simply gotta listen to me
until it's talked away...

Blood oranges are delicious.

I could go for a muffin

Earlier this week, folks at UMich held an Affirmative Action Bake Sale -- charging different prices for a bagel depending on the ethnicity of the purchaser. Guess who got the best deal.

Chocolate irony: bake sales are the #1 fundraiser for nearly every student organization at my school, my very-pro-affirmative-action journal being no exception.

(Link courtesy of Kitchen Cabinet.)

check it

Michigan's brief is online. Whee!

(Link courtesy of Rule 11).

Edit: MuteKevin directed me to the petitioner's brief as well -- thanks!

waiting for civ pro

It struck me as odd, back last week, that only one exam awaited me at the official show-your-ID pickup station. I already had both my Torts and Contracts responses in my possession, so the pickup should have completed my collection with both Civ Pro and Crim. Sure enough, there was Crim, and as it turned out I had blown the exact question I'd feared and perfectly nailed everything else. But Civ Pro was notably absent.

"There should be another exam of mine there," I told the flunky behind the desk, and repeated my exam number.

"Nope, that's it," he replied.

I emailed Professor Civ Pro wondering why his exams hadn't made it to the pickup station. He responded, inscrutable as ever, that he reserved the right to reuse the exam questions and thus was refusing to release either the exam itself or any student answers.

"Can he do that?" I ranted to C. I hadn't noticed any of his previous exams missing from the lawbrary archive.

"He's Professor Civ Pro," she responded, which was true.

So I trundled to his office hours, which on Thursdays are late enough that I expected them to be sparsely attended. M. showed up with a question on issue preclusion (kicks self for still not having begun Civ Pro outline), but the only real takers were my Moot Court buddy P. and myself.

Professor Civ Pro equipped us each with our own answer and a handful of A answers to compare, then packed us into the faculty break room across the hall from his office. "You did fine on the first question," he told me before sending me off. "Frankly, if you'd done as well on the second question, you'd have had an A." I guess that's good to know, although learning of a near-miss is never a happy thought.

And it looked like a near-miss to me. Comparing my Erie answer to the benchmark, they looked more or less the same to me. After about fifteen minutes of mutual brow-furrowed silence, P. couldn't stand it any more and mentioned the same thing: "This person got three points for saying [particular phrase]. I said [virtually identical particular phrase] and only got an underline with No! No! No!!! and lots of exclamation points."

Professor Civ Pro's grading voodoo is this: he will underline issues, then add a check mark over his underlining to indicate who-knows-what. If he likes a particular sentence in your answer, he'll scrawl a number next to it in the margin (usually said sentence is also underlined and check-marked, although sometimes it's only underlined, and a check mark without a number still means no points). Sometimes he seasons his underlining -- usually in the absence of a check mark -- with a flurry of question marks, an all caps "NO!!!" or "WHY???", or some other similarly-inflected monosyllable followed by extreme punctuation. In the end, what winds up mattering is your raw score: the simple total of all the numbers in the margins, unaffected by the quantity of underlining, check-marking or !!!!?????.

I'd pulled a respectable raw score on the first essay, the one on personal jurisdiction, the one I knew that I could nail ever since he'd picked over my practice exam and showed me everything I was doing wrong. But somehow the same was not true for Erie: my raw score on the second essay was less than one-third that of my first.

P. went back into the professor's office first, while I in a fit of fussiness cleaned up the faculty break room. I threw away two empty vitamin jars, sorted the salt and pepper packets into separate piles, discarded all of the already-opened packets and the empty vial of contact lens solution. I straightened the magazines on the coffee table -- Science, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and the chick mags (Cosmopolitan & co) -- into their respective piles. Someone had scattered Christian tracts around the room; I arranged them in an empty napkin holder. I caught myself lining up the push pins scattered around the wall before I decided that I should probably just go wait in the hall before I broke something.

I'm not sure how the session went for P., who left the office soon after I took up my vigil outside the door. My own soured almost immediately, not because Professor Civ Pro was anything but congenial and supportive, but because in one fell swoop I realized exactly why I had tanked on the second question.

"Look at your previous paragraph," he said, when prompted to explain why near-identical sentences had earned the A answer three points and mine only one. "The Sibbach test isn't a constitutional test."

"It's...not?"

I blinked. My entire Erie analysis, while all the buzz-phrases were present, had been predicated on a sense that the entire issue was a constitutional one. But Professor Civ Pro sticks to his story; he wouldn't suggest that we frame an issue constitutionally and then change his mind. I haven't taken constitutional law. Where the hell did I come up with this?

And then I realized. I'd learned it from a flowchart, on a chalkboard, during discussion group.

I went to discussion religiously last semester, especially for Civ Pro where the TA seemed so brilliant and authoritative and helpful in cracking the professor's individual code. I'd been a first-semester 1L, addlepated as a matter of course, and latched onto every "Professor Civ Pro loves this, make sure you include it on your exam" pearl tossed before us in the wallow. Tell me more! How can I do well? You did well! I'll believe anything you say, anything!

This was where it had gotten me.

I looked back up at Professor Civ Pro, agog, not realizing there were tears in my eyes until one tickled my cheek. "Did a lot of people make this error?" I asked.

"A number of people did, actually."

"You want to know why?" I forced myself not to snarl; it wasn't his fault, it was mine, for being so gullible and prone to wooden nickels, and my TA's, yemach shemo, for lying to us all. "Discussion group."

Professor Civ Pro rolled his eyes and gave a spectacular groan. "They're not supposed to tell you things like this. You're supposed to go over hypos."

There was the explanation I'd been looking for, something to explain the disparity between my perfectly solid grades in Contracts and Crim and my shameful ones in Torts and Civ Pro. The discussion groups for the former had been unengaging and, in my view, uninformative, while the latter had been excellent, so key to understanding the professors, they'd really helped me make my outlines, prioritize the rules...

What a manifest idiot I was. I deserved those grades just for being so suggestible.

"This is excellent," said my husband. "You had the A, basically, and you know exactly what you need to do now."

"Yeah," I spat angrily, chugging a glass of P. and V.'s homebrewed Scotch ale. "Do my own studying, make my own outlines from scratch, and never go to another discussion group again."

loyalty

Check it -- I won third prize, 2000 loyalty points, in the Valentine's Day Lexis Nexis contest. How's that for luck?

on aging

you know you're a woman hitting That Time In Your Life when...

...the x10 spy-camera window pops up; before closing it, you glance at the animation, panning up and down a provocatively-posed model and back and forth across a stone house.

And you lust after the house.

the legal writing grind

Argh, it's so late and my Moot Court argument redraft has yet to pick up any serious steam.

Half of my section failed to show up to Contracts last week for one reason or another, the one reason being that they were all grinding away at their own Moot Court briefs and the other being that they'd skipped town early to lengthen the long weekend even further. I don't want to fall into either trap. I need to power through this redraft in the next three or four hours and get it emailed out tonight.

My Moot Court instructor, bless his heart, has actually rewritten a page or two of my argument for me. Well, not for me exactly; he intended to put these rewrites up on his overhead projector last week as examples of the right way to structure the section, but the TA responsible for creating the overhead slides had failed to copy these pages. Still, with these in hand I'm more fortunate than most of my classmates, who as of yet have received no feedback (unless the instructor mail-dropped all of our corrected drafts today, which is possible but doubtful). On one hand, it's nice to see a real concrete example of what he's looking for. Unlike my El-Dubyar instructor, however, this guy doesn't seem to be interested in parroting. He hasn't handed me the answer because he wants to hear it repeated; instead, he wants me to reinvent it in my own words.

Ambient music: Rachmaninoff elegiac trios. They're going to have to be the first things to go, I think. Rachmaninoff, even at low volume, simply can't be background noise. (I highly recommend the elegiac trios, though. They're spirited and forceful and dramatic and everything that's wonderful about Rachmaninoff, plus they've got a brilliant cello part.)

remembering snow

It's snowing out on the other coast, a fact which arouses apathetic shrugs, Schadenfreude and/or semi-hysterical television news reports around here where it's sixty-five degrees out and didn't even rain today. Yahoo News says that this is the worst storm in 7 years, which [does some quick math] must mean that the Northeast hasn't gotten this much snow since the week-before-Christmas blizzard in 1995. I was there. I remember it.

[cue Elrond flashback]

I had a psychology final that day, for which I halfheartedly decided to show up. After roughly twenty straight hours (pausing for naps, bathroom breaks, and a bite to eat every so often) of labor, I had just finished my senior essay the night before. My printer promptly ran out of ink. St. Daniel loaned me his. There was no going outside to buy ink, no going outside unless you were stupid. I was stupid, that morning, shuffling up College Street, headed to my Cr/D/F[1] intro psych exam if I didn't freeze or break a limb on the treacherous icy sidewalk first. By the time the exam ended, there was barely sufficient visibility to fight my way back four blocks to my room.

One of my grandfathers died during that blizzard, a suitably dramatic end to a long illness. The roads were shut, the phone lines were out, and I sat in Connecticut and waited for plows and salt and technical support. Eventually, they all arrived as needed.

I wound up doing well enough on my senior essay to win distinction in the major, something I hadn't been expecting. And I passed intro psych.

The world looked like this. And now it does, again. Brava Erin for documenting it with such brilliant visuals; as ever, you spoil us.

[1] Cr/D/F = because pass-fail just oversimplified things. I guess they figured that if you got a D in a pass-fail class, that shouldn't count.

you go guys

High-fives to Waddling Thunder, who is in a positive place after learning of his exam results. (Clifford Chance, here he comes!) Once again, WT, I find myself wishing I were you. At least one of us has it all together!

And a hug to Jeremy, who can't disclose his grades since his blog isn't anonymous. Remember (if this in fact applies to you) that an albatross is supposed to be a bird of good omen.

what's done

Returned home this evening to find a message on the answering machine. A clerk from one of the hitherto-silent district judges was seeking to schedule an interview with me. If, that is, I was still interested.

I swore.

"What?" asked my husband, coming into the kitchen.

"Federal district," I groaned. "That's a job I would have taken."

He blinked at the answering machine a few times, then began to exercise one of his sharpest skills: putting things in their place, including me. "This is an interview, not an offer, right?"

He was right, of course. It would mean an interview that couldn't possibly have been scheduled before the magistrate and the bankruptcy judge anyway, and almost certainly another perusal of my transcript. And it wouldn't be appellate work anyway, even if after a good gawk at the albatross they still decided I was acceptable company.

"True," I said, taking a deep breath. "And I've already had an offer. Already *accepted* an offer. I'm done. They should have called me sooner if they were serious."

"Damn straight."

Earlier this afternoon, I'd tried to explain to C. and K. why appellate work seemed more interesting than trial work. "At the appeal level, you're dealing with questions of law, while at the trial level it's mostly questions of fact," I said. "And I'm going to law school, not fact school."

"Wouldn't that be awesome -- to go to fact school?" C. grinned.

"And every day you could go home and say, I learned fifty new facts today." K. agreed.

"Like all the U.S. presidents!" C. giggled.

I tested myself and realized I still remembered most of the U.S. presidents. Whether or not this is an indicator of how much fun I'll have in an appellate externship is anyone's guess.

laptoppornogirl

It's always embarrassing to find out about an annoying habit of yours when a group of your friends start imitating you and agreeing with each other. "Oh, that's so JCA!" "Omigawd, exactly!"

I have a natural fidget. My hands won't keep still. I come from an ethnic background that predisposes me to wave my hands around when I talk; I thought I managed to tame this tendency early on in school by grabbing hold of my laptop screen when I was called-on. I figured that nothing looked sillier than an older woman in a ninety-person section waving her hands around while she answered a question. Apparently I was wrong: a woman fiddling with her laptop screen looks sillier.

"You rub the corners!"
"You stroke the sides!"
"It's almost obscene the way you touch that thing!"

It seems I can't win. Now, whenever I catch myself reaching for the screen -- wouldn't want to offend anyone with my obscene laptop-fondling! -- I've adopted the anti-habit of joining my hands, either into a folded fist or palms together and fingertips splayed. But even this, it seems, is a practice that's unique enough to me to send folks into peals of laughter when someone else does it. "Hey, you look just like JCA!" "Yeah, that's totally a JCA thing!"

Called-on in Civ Pro this morning, I very deliberately kept one hand on the keyboard and allowed myself to wave the other around in a subdued kind of way, thumb and forefinger together. "Dude," I complained to D. after class, "now I have no idea what to do with my hands, y'all have made me so self-conscious."

"You shouldn't feel self-conscious! It's not annoying, it's endearing!" he replied.

I hope it is. I remember an instance from my childhood, watching through a window as my mother spoke with someone outside. When she came back into the house, I expressed admiration that she spoke sign language. "I don't speak sign language!" she replied. "I just saw you doing it," I insisted. This was, of course, back in the days before laptops.

Maybe it's just cute when other people do it.

oops

D'oh! Now everyone has to buy tomorrow's paper, too.

Subject: law student ad publication delayed by NYT

OK, here's what we know: the NYT says they rescheduled our ad because of increased national news. They make decisions about which ads to prioritize based on the "equity" each advertiser has with the paper. It is now scheduled to run tomorrow. However, they refused to use the word "guarantee." At this point, we're saying
that the ad is "scheduled to run." At 3 pm today, we will know whether it went through the next step in the internal newspaper processs & have a little more information on whether it's actually going to run.

for $25, your name could have been on it

Campus NLG reports, via mass email, that the fundraising campaign for the New York Times ad was a huge success. The ad will run in tomorrow's West Coast edition of the Times, on page 13 [oops --ed.]. Be sure to check out the paper and make sure that they didn't misspell any of my colleagues' names.

I feel a bit guilty; got quite a few Google hits today for "wake up about the war." Everyone looking for further information on the campaign is hereby invited to buy the newspaper tomorrow.

good luck

This is clearly my lucky day: I just found myself an instant winner of 1000 loyalty points on Lexis-Nexis. Now that's nifty.

gradefreaks

When is an A just not enough?

(Of course there's a law firm involved...)

cranking on moot court

Sloooooow going on the Argument. It's not so bad as El-Dubyar, but for some reason, lecturing at length on the subject of trespass to chattels just feels like pulling teeth. One by one. With salad tongs.

I've taken a page from El-Dubyar, though, and am not investing any extraordinary amount of love in this draft. I'm doing my best to stick to form, since there isn't terribly much substance to the tort (intent, check; contact, check; possession, check; lack of consent, check; damages, unnecessary, check), but ultimately I figure that this is going to go through many more drafts than my memo did. No reason to nurse it now if I'm going to shred it next week.

Good news, though: I'm an Instant Winner on Lexis-Nexis. I won -- are you ready for this? -- another sweepstakes entry. No points, no gift certificates, nothing. Just another sweepstakes entry. Still, at least now I have two.

two-headed turtles

Must...break...out of...procrastination mode...

I really ought to have a working draft of the Argument section of my Moot Court brief complete by bedtime tonight, which means that I really ought to be writing it, right now. But there's nothing quite like a paper to write to make me incredibly productive in every area of my life except paper-writing. Thus far today I've gone to the gym, finished my Property reading for Monday, cleaned up the kitchen and run the dishwasher, done three loads of laundry, taken out a shopping-cartload of trash, booked our next North Coast B&B adventure (three nights for the price of two, right at the end of spring break), and, best of all, finally hauled the six massive Hefty bags of old work clothes out of the hall closet and down to to the St. Vincent de Paul donation bay. (Whee!)

But I haven't started my Argument yet.

I'm not feeling particularly argumentative, I guess. I woke up this morning with a jittery annoyance of a hangover from C.'s housewarming party last night (excellent tequila, two flavors of mole, and a lovely time had by all), and as busy as the day has been, I can't say I've been particularly focused on anything I've done today. Now it's already seven-thirty and I'm still just staring at section headers. At least I have those.

*sigh*

[ambient music: Astor Piazzolla tangos]

mustwork, mustwork, mustwork...

more feelgood LEEWS stuff

Today's mail drop featured a sequel to last semester's panic-inducing LEEWS promotional flyer. "Now you know the accuracy of the BASIC TRUTHS we announced last fall," it announces ominously, then picks over the remains of our collectively shredded hopes with alarming deftness. I particularly liked the punch line:

If you've completed your first term and not gotten A's (even if you did get A's), you face the choice below. Select one.

___ I don't accept that mastery of law school exams is beyond me. Some may have a knack. There is much work to do. But legal problem solving is comprehensible. What professors want is predictable -- perform as a competent lawyer on my exam! Impressing and getting A's is doable. Indeed, law school can be the intellectually challenging and rewarding experience I had hoped for.

In my years as a marketing writer, I (fortunately or unfortunately) never once had to write "hard sell" copy like this. I'm not sure whether I envy the people who do. Is LEEWS itself as powerful as its promotional materials? If so, it could easily be worth the effort...

they're still going

From the same folks who brought you the "Get Your Name on the Michigan Amicus Brief" petition...it's the "Get Your Name in the New York Times for Only $25" ad campaign:

Subject: Friday deadline to contribute to "Wake Up About the War" ad in NYTimes

Last chance to appear in the New York Times!

Many in the legal community oppose the Bush administration's policies in relation to the "War on Terrorism" and the concommitant [sic] erosion of civil liberties.

Law students, law professors, and community members have raised most of the money needed to run the full page ad in the western edition of the New York Times in opposition to administration policies. The cost of the ad is $18,000 and we are almost there. The text of the ad follows. We are targetting a run date of Thursday, February 13, 2003.

Tomorrow, February 7, 2003 is the deadline to contribute and have your name appear in the ad. Student and community member minimum contribution to appear in the ad is $25, professor minimum contribution is $50. Forms can be found at the table or online at wakexupxaboutxthexwar.org. A mockup of the ad is also featured there. Credit cards may be used by completing the form. Checks are also fine.

Names will appear on either side of the ad. Sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild student chapters in California.

[&c.]

Oddly enough, the table in the main lobby recruiting contributions to this campaign has been rather subdued.

Everyone be sure to go buy the Times on Thursday, just so these nice folks get their money's worth -- or at least their fifteen minutes of fame.

Blawg Ring update

Welcome the Blawg Ring's 100th member: Naked Ownership!

a metaphor?

An unusual quantity of roadkill has appeared across my path this week.

I mean that literally. Two spectacularly smushed whatevers en route to the parking lot, a late ground squirrel decorating the lefthand lane on Evelyn Avenue, a severed wing resting flightlessly along the train tracks, and, perhaps most surprisingly, the remains of a pigeon apparently impaled on a steel coat hanger, right in the middle of the intersection bisecting my school. I admired the spread of feathers and entrails, the perfect intactness of the coat hanger, and found myself humming in my contrarian way: I'm still standing, yeah yeah yeah.

A less-exciting near miss: two women were sexually assaulted in the Civic Center BART/MUNI station yesterday morning, right about the time I usually arrive on Mondays and Wednesdays. There but for the grace of it being a Tuesday go I. This was not some midnight drunk going wilding; this was at ten-thirty in the freakin' morning. I need to equip the pullman bag with pepper gas.

loyalty

From the email file, special for Janeway:

Subject: LexisNexis Valentine's Day Contest....One lucky person will win 10,000 Ultimate Rewards Points.........

HERE'S HOW:
1) Go to http://www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool

2) Using either Federal & State Cases (from the Legal Tab) or News Group File, Most Recent 90 days (from the News and Business Tab), run any or all of the following searches:

a. atleast10 (romance)
b. love bird
c. sweetie pie
d. cupid w/5 arrow
e. valentine w/p bitter

3) E-mail the results of each search to me at [address] using the e-mail feature next to your Print options. Please put your name and e-mail address as a note so I can contact you if you win!

4) If you'd like, you can enter up to 10 times by running all five searches in both files!

Contest ends 2/16 and winners will be drawn on 2/17.

GRAND PRIZE: 10,000 points
SECOND PRIZE: 3,000 points
THIRD PRIZE: 2,000 points
100 points just for entering!**

Guess what I just spent the past fifteen minutes doing.

vocabulary

I need to find a way to use the word "gravamen" in conversation more often.

property issues

What the hell is the deal with adverse possession??

In an attempt to take off my rose-colored glasses and be less artificially upbeat this semester, I'm working to assess my classes with a more jaundiced eye. Accordingly, I marched into the study yesterday and announced that I hated Property.

"Why's that?" asked my husband, who was busy killing an army of snow trolls.

The concept didn't bother him so much, perhaps because his ambitions don't quite tend in the same direction as mine. But when you've just spent a few weeks working out all the luscious details of a fantasy purchase of some acreage up on the North Coast, playing around with the dream of building your own B&B, there's nothing so offensive as the thought of some itinerant claiming title to your land because he built an outhouse there and used it daily while you were busy grinding away at your interim life, five hours' drive away in the Bay Area.

Worse yet was Wednesday's reading on the right to exclude (or, more correctly, the lack thereof), which ruled out any potential dreams of live-in nannies or maintenance staff at the fantasy B&B. Such danger you're in, if you operate a business that's open to the public! You have, it seems, little to no right to be selective in your clientele, and if you've got employees who are residing on your property as part of their compensation package, they appear to have the run of the place despite any rules you might wish to make. Unsavory visitors? Too bad, you can't kick 'em out.

Paradoxically, as S. suggested in class today, the best way to pre-empt adverse possession (short of actively policing your land and commencing ejectment lawsuits every time you catch the trespasser relieving himself on your parcel) is to put up a sign expressly granting permission for people to trespass. At that I could only shake my head, which prompted Professor Property to call on me. "I'm sorry," I said, rather unprofessionally, "but I just can't justify the fact that you need to open private property to the public to prevent someone else from claiming title to it. Isn't the point of private property that you're not required to open it to the public? You didn't buy the ranch because you wanted to make it a park."

And then there are prescriptive easements. Don't even get me started.

I bet this is exactly the goal of the casebook author, who admits outright that he's a Critical Legal Studies theorist. "How do you explain this radical Commie doctrine?" Prof. Property gleefully questioned us all, the twinkle in her eyes making it evident that her apparent criticism of the left was intended entirely in jest. I imagine that there's probably some incentive to scare away potential homebuyers who would otherwise be fed up with renting. Debt, not equity drives the consumer economy, does it not? Let's convince as many people as possible not to invest in real estate, first by moaning and groaning about how much effort it takes to maintain a house, and then by threatening the actual property rights that they believe they're purchasing. Brilliant, eh?

Hmph.

schadenfreude

Poor, poor Brobeck.

Not that I would have worked there. Not that they would have wanted me to. Still, that's gotta smart.

today's 'scope

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

It's easy to sink into excess and hard to overcome a bad habit. As the Stars begin to transition into a new pattern, it's time to look around and eliminate what's disagreeable from your lifestyle. Don't become overly dependent on a resource that might soon vanish. Your future lies well beyond the world of instant gratification and short-term gain. Putting your priorities in order is a good place to start. Even if it's as simple as cleaning up the kitchen or straightening up your bedroom, you've got to start somewhere. Start small and work your way up to more important issues.

Google sez:

Best Google hit I've had in weeks: "rent an elephant Michigan."

foil hat, anyone?

[kidding]
Waaah, it's a vast left-wing conspiracy!
[/kidding]

Subject: sign today! [Student council] supports diversity in higher education Last night at the [student council] meeting, the general body passed a resolution in support of diversity in higher education, and encourages all students to sign the petition now in the lobby of [building].

The deadline to sign is 3:30PM. The signed petitions will be express mailed to the sponsors of the Amicus Brief this afternoon.

I guess what bothers me is the purely unilateral viewpoint being aired here, along with the fact that I've painted myself into such an ideological corner that I'm in a poor position to protest it. My politics aren't neatly packaged; there are occasions on which I'm sure an honest airing of my worldview would offend the Federalist Society folks as much as my thoughts on admissions discrimination would bother my journal colleagues. I guess I just see a fundamental incompatibility between dogma and dialogue, which is why it bothers me that the school seems to have wholeheartedly espoused the former on this issue.

they're everywhere

From a mass email to the student body at my school:

Subject: Support diversity nationwide by signing petition here!

Students will be tabling with this petition beginning this Thursday. All students are welcome to sign. Please remember to bring your student ID and be prepared to show it.

The case, Grutter v. Bollinger 288 F.3d 732, will be reviewed by the Supreme Court this term. Join an unprecedented effort to help shape American law on an issue that will directly affect us all--the use of race in the higher education admissions process. The Supreme Court will review the claim of a white woman who was not admitted to the University of Michigan law school who has challenged all race-based admissions criteria. Students at Georgetown University Law School prepared an amicus brief and ask us to sign a petition in support of the brief. Students are circulating this petition at over 80 law schools across the country, and that number is growing. An amicus brief of this nature has never been submitted on behalf of as many law students as we will gather through this effort. With your help, we will make our voices heard and impact this important issue.

Prof. Julie O'Sullivan, of Georgetown Law, serves as Counsel of Record. Prof O'Sullivan clerked for Justice O'Connor at the time the Justice issued her opinion in Wygant (which recognized that diversity has been held to be a compelling governmental interest in the context of higher education). Because O'Connor is likely the decisive vote on this issue, we are very pleased and excited that Prof. O'Sullivan will submit this brief along with Prof. Peter Rubin (a former Souter clerk and constitutional law scholar). In order to insure the integrity of the signature process, only students who have identification at ABA approved law schools will be signing on the amicus brief. The signed petitions must be in the mail on January 31, 2003. Gretchen Rohr, a student at Georgetown University Law School, is centerposting the effort. Her email is: gnr@law.georgetown.edu

From the Brief: INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE A group of 2000+ [final number to be inserted] current law students at ABA-accredited American law schools submits this brief as amici curiae in support of Respondents Lee Bollinger, et al., urging the Court to affirm the Sixth Circuit's judgment that the promotion of diversity in higher education is a compelling governmental interest and that the consideration of race as one factor among many in admissions determinations is a permissible means of furthering diversity. As current law students at accredited law schools across the country, amici are uniquely positioned to comment on the benefits accrued from diversity in legal education and will be uniquely affected by this decision of the Court. Amici believe that a racially diverse student body provides invaluable educational benefits. Amici organized for the sole purpose of expressing to the Court the educational benefits derived from learning among and from students of varied ethnic and racial backgrounds. Listed among the signatories are White, African-American, Latino, Asian-Pacific-Islander, Native American, and Arab-American law students, men and women, from ___ of the 186 ABA accredited law schools in this country.

From another mass email (why stop at one?):

Please stop by the table in the lobby of [building] to sign the petition supporting continued diversity in law school admissions criteria. The Supreme Court, as you may know, will hear the challenge to the remaining vestiges of diversity in the Grutter v. Bollinger case very soon.

The petition supports the respondents, the University of Michigan. Your signature will go to the Supreme Court, attached to the amicus brief being filed by students at Georgetown University. The brief is at the table, and also on an easel in the lobby. Eighty ABA accredited law schools are participating. The petitions must be sent via express mail on Thursday afternoon, so don't miss your chance!

The students running the table are the usual suspects--the same folks who run the campus NLG chapter and the journal on which I work. The lobby in which they've set up camp is one of the most highly-trafficked areas of the campus, not to mention hardest to avoid if you're in a rush (which we commuter students frequently are).

It has not been an easy week to hide from my colleagues, who beyond question expect me -- along with everyone else on the journal, in their social circle, etc. -- to sign the petition. The political bent of the school is such that most of my 1L friends have, most likely, already signed. I know we have a Federalist Society chapter somewhere, but they've been conspicuously silent of late in the face of so much activism.

The tablepeople pegged me this morning, as I arrived at the building en route to Property. "Later," I said over my shoulder with a wave as I bolted down the hall to the elevator, cursing myself for walking right through the front door rather than remembering to go around to the side. I'd really rather not announce myself in such stark ideological opposition to people with whom I work, at least if I can avoid it, for as long as the work is of value to me. I'm not so much a coward as an opportunist; still, there are times galore when I envy the candor of the Angry Clam...

The petition gets mailed out tomorrow, and I'll remember which door to use in the interim. Maybe I'm just passive aggressive at heart.

Prof. Crim dishes

I had a remarkable meeting yesterday with Professor Crim, much of which I'm still trying to parse.

For roughly an hour we talked, concluding early on that he'd be willing to review my exam with me once the Records office finally got around to redistributing the wealth (currently bluebooks are sitting in a box somewhere). He tried first to disabuse me of any belief I might harbor that a review meeting would actually help.

"It's like diagnosing a soft tissue injury," he said. (He is apparently as fond of nasty metaphor as I am.) "I can examine, I can palpate, but at the end of the day I might not be able to tell you anything more valuable than to take two aspirin and give it rest."

I insisted that I would find his feedback useful, even if the only problems were unspotted issues. I needed to improve my consistency on these tests. Every little bit would help.

"You're looking for an algorithm," he nailed me. "There is no algorithm."

And from that point on -- for the next forty-five minutes or so -- we talked a roller coaster. We argued whether practice exams made a difference, whether there were valuable modeling lessons to be learned from sample answers. He told me that mimicry of previous successful responses never worked as well as an "organic" answer "experience"; I disagreed. He told me that grades were contingent in vast part on professorial caprice, insisting that even if he wrote a model answer for one question, it would still provide no indication of what he would value in response to a different question. "Could you tell me why you fell in love with the men you've fallen in love with?" he asked me, and then, perhaps in response to my jaw hitting the floor, revised his question: "Could you tell me why you prefer your favorite foods, or whether you'll like a particular type of food?"

Of course I could. "If something is extraordinarily spicy, I'll probably like it," I responded, "and if it's especially saccharine, I probably won't. Clearly it's not possible to predict with 100% accuracy what someone will like *best*, but it's simply false to say that observable preferences can't be established by trend analysis."

He changed his tack, telling me now that exams tested neither command of the substantive law nor even test-taking skills. "We test judgment," he intoned, going on to tell me how good his was and how little he understood of why it was so. "I'd bottle it and sell it and be rich!" he concluded of his own mojo.

I realized that I would have had no idea what I was getting myself into, had I successfully bid on a day in the wine country with this person.

"And that's why," he continued, shifting back away from self-congratulation, "going over exams can only help up to a certain point. You either have good judgment or you don't. What if I came to you and said, JCA, I have really poor judgment, what should I do? What would you tell me?"

It's tough to tell when Professor Crim is being rhetorical versus when he actually expects a response. "Set priorities," I responded tentatively, "and make all of your decisions with an eye to context."

"I've tried all that, and nothing works! What do you tell me?"

I raised my eyebrows and blinked at him.

"There isn't much you can tell someone," he concluded with a flourish.

More was said that hardly bears recounting; I finally pried myself out of his office by realizing out loud that I was (truthfully) twenty minutes late for Moot Court. We could have gone on.

It feels no less strange in the retelling. I suppose it doesn't help that I'm a compulsive talker; I didn't do poorly enough on his exam to stun myself into silence as with Torts. I wonder what our exam review session will actually be like. On one hand, he's also a compulsive talker, and unlike Professor Contracts has no hangups about seeing his time wasted. On the other hand, he seems convinced in advance that he can offer no substantive advice from which I could profit on future exams.

I still would argue that it's worth a shot -- and probably will wind up arguing exactly that, when the time comes.

the emotional bank account

Professor Contracts was about as helpful as I'd feared he might be.

"I called the dean of students, and asked him if a letter was really necessary," he told me. "And apparently people just pencil in their midterm grades on their transcripts all the time. There's no need for professors to say anything about midterm grades."

I unsuccessfully attempted to keep my eyes from bugging out.

"I don't think there's any reason to be so paranoid," he said, correctly reading my face. "They'll believe you if you tell them that this is really your grade."

"And you don't think it would carry more weight coming from you?" I begged.

"By no means," he said crisply, giving me the evil pixie smile.

I thanked him for his time and left the office chewing on the insides of my cheeks, wondering how in the hell I managed to pull my best grade in a class so utterly bereft of goodwill. And I faxed off the agonizing transcript this afternoon on a wing and a prayer, fronted with a cover letter self-identifying both my utterly modest Civ Pro grade and the fact that I was one of three people in a ninety-person section to top out in Contracts. Should they disbelieve me, they can always call the dean of students.

public disinterest

A fistful of Northern California law schools, every spring, host a daylong interview/schmoozefest for public interest groups to seek out free labor while high-minded students jockey for Work That Really Matters so that they can Make A Difference according to plan. Resume drop for the event is this Tuesday.

I have no guarantee that any judge will engage me this summer, and my chances at a firm job are even slimmer given the near-universal reliance on 1L transcripts as a barometer of individual potential. (Assuming I were interested in a firm job anyway, something that has never really struck my fancy.) So it seemed worth my while to take a shot at contention in the public interest meat market.

There are a few bona fide government jobs on the list, all of which regrettably ask for a transcript (and most of which would require camping in a rented room in DC or Sacramento for more weeks than I'd like to spend apart from my husband). But the vast majority of organizations in search of fresh chuck are the ones who exist to Really Matter and Make A Difference, folks who would turn up their noses and disown any association with me if they ever got wind of my voting record.

I enlisted my husband's aid, figuring that he and I would at least have a good laugh at the activists' expense. Unfortunately, he turned out to be of little help; I'd call out the name of an organization and barely manage to roll my eyes before he'd say "Hmm, that could be interesting."

Way to make me look like the bad-attitude queen.

"Understand," I tried to explain to my husband, who was bewildered at my lack of interest in activism, "I'm looking for something uplifting this summer. Something to remind me why I'm doing this."

"Come on!" he insisted, flipping through several organizations. "How is this not uplifting? You're helping battered women, people with AIDS..."

I opened my mouth to try to explain to him how surrounding myself with other people's misery would only make me unhappier than I already refuse to admit that I am. Whatever came out certainly failed to illustrate this point, if it made any sense at all. "Why are you asking my opinion then?" he sputtered, exasperated, and retreated back to the study.

"I thought you and I could laugh over this," I called after him, but nobody was laughing.

Maybe it's just not funny.

Google sez:

Google hits of the day: "bad 1L grades" and "should I quit law school?"

auction update

I didn't win the wine-tasting with Professor Crim. When bidding reached the price range of a night at a bed and breakfast in Mendocino, I weighed my options and decided that I'd rather save my money and just ask the guy for a recommendation during his office hours. If it should come to that.

Interview this afternoon, 4 pm. I'll be deliberately skipping class (Edie) for the first time since starting law school. Whee!

today's horoscope

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

You can't stop looking around for a way to escape now. Everyone can see that there's only one way out, and that's forward. Time passes more easily if you care about what you're doing. Give yourself an incentive -- that carrot on the end of your stick should be bright and juicy. Whatever happens, don't let the crowd make you question your abilities. Your positive attitude combined with your more-than-adequate skills are all you need to finish the job.

auctiontide

The public interest law club at my school runs an annual benefit auction, proceeds from which provide stipends to students employed in summer public interest positions which would otherwise be unpaid. (As far as I know you can't get one if you work for a judge.) This year's affair starts in about two hours.

I donated a lasagna (actually a future lasagna upon request) to the silent auction, but am a good deal more excited about bidding in the live auction. Professor Crim, in whose class I did solidly enough to be able to request a letter of recommendation without shame, has donated "A Day of Voluntary Intoxication" -- a tour of the Napa Valley in his Boxster with him as the chauffeur/designated driver. "Oh no," groaned my husband upon hearing this. "Don't spend too much money."

Fortunately, I haven't yet had to worry about letters of recommendation. I've gotten two interview requests thus far from the first batch of packets I sent out to judges last week (apparently the binder clips in no way hindered my applications), neither of which was predicated upon a professor expressing support for me. I like it better that way, frankly, and would skip the letters of recommendation altogether if I didn't know how ultimately necessary they were. Alas, they're *that* necessary.

Still, even if nothing comes of it, I'll bid this afternoon just for kicks. Going tasting with Professor Crim has got to be its own experience. But I am glad that it's only Napa, glittery touristy nearby Napa, and not my magical retreat up in Mendocino where no one from my law school world is allowed to tread...

whoohoo: hockey

Devils 5, Sharks 4 in overtime.

I realized midway through the game that it hadn't even occurred to me once to root for the Devils. While I may be an unwilling Californian, I am now officially no longer a New Jerseyan (assuming I still had any claim to the title in the first place).

Stupid way for the Sharkies to lose, too. (Not to mention how disappointed I was that they played whatsisface-Kiprusoff instead of *my* goalie, Nabokov, whose literary surname is only part of the reason for my affections.) At least they scored four goals, though, which meant that our tickets were each good for a personal single-topping Round Table Pizza.

didn't duck quickly enough...

Another for the list of Law School Firsts (which, apparently, do continue into the second semester): I was, for the first time, called on in class without actually volunteering for same.

Professor Property nailed me on Charrier v. Bell, a case where a bumbling amateur archeologist -- although not so bumbling as to have failed to excavate two and a half tons of Native American artifacts from someone else's private property -- was blown off by the Louisiana Court of Appeals when he attempted to claim title to the artifacts. I had read the case last week, back before heading off to heaven for the weekend. This was to be a test of how well my Revised Second Semester Study Habits would endure an actual Socratic fisking.

I've stopped briefing cases, more or less. I still have my cute little briefs database, but instead of wasting potential sleep time attempting to apply my own filters to the cases I read, I populate the database with notes gleaned directly from class discussion. Obviously this approach isn't optimized for when I'm the one being called on, but since my section is still upwards of ninety people, most of the time it should work.

Still, this represented not only the first time I'd been cold-called, but also the first time I'd been cold-called without a case brief in front of me.

I did passably, I suppose, although as soon as I looked down at my casebook in search of an answer Professor Property moved on to C. to my left. The two of us finished off the case and then, either because we'd done so well as Socratic victims or because our performance had been so wanting, we found ourselves the main characters in a string of hypos. "Let's say JCA picks up a property casebook right in the middle of [intersection near our school]. She doesn't know to whom it belongs. Does she own it now? And let's say she gives it to C. to hold for her, and C. chooses not to give it back. Who owns it now? And let's say that it was actually V.'s casebook all along, and he realizes this when he sees C. and JCA arguing over it, but before he can claim it, J. grabs it out of C.'s hands and runs off with it. Now who owns it?"

We all came away from the class having learned two valuable lessons: one, that abandonment of property involves intent for title to transfer to the finder, and two, that indicia of ownership are key if you ever hope to recover anything you've lost.

comparative optimism

Tuesdays this semester are not so bad as Thursdays were last semester. They don't start full throttle and power straight through the next eight hours, for one thing. Even though Tuesdays do begin early (I've taken to calling the 7:38 "the sunrise train," since that's what I'm usually watching on my walk up Evelyn Avenue to the train station), there's a break for lunch, then two usable hours between Edie and Moot Court. There's time enough to get work done, and when I'm getting work done I escape the sense that my time is being wasted, at least by anyone except myself.

Tuesdays this semester are not so bad as Thursdays were last semester, since I now have Moot Court instead of El-Dubyar. Moot Court has everything El-Dubyar lacked: an ostensibly sensible grading rubric (who can argue with pass-fail?), a mellow instructor and five mellow TA's, class time spent thus far on issues of actual procedural import -- *gasp* could I be learning something in a non-GPA seminar? -- and, most importantly, efficient research methods.

Although I must admit that last night, following so close on the heels of my sublime retreat weekend, Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw were not my friends. "Am Jur," I told them gently, "trespass to chattels." They protested. "Am Jur!" I insisted. They nudged each other and winked. "Trespass to chattels!" I begged them, lapsing into cryptic terms like /2 and /s. Lexis finally folded and showed me the damned article, while Westlaw continued to wink at me. Although Westlaw did eventually decide to share a stack of law review articles with me, after Lexis decided she'd had enough of me for the evening. In the end, I emerged with a passable research log, but my Route 128 zen had been mangled beyond recognition.

Near tears, I ranted repeatedly to my husband as we nursed big bowls of ramen. "All of last semester, just wasted," I groaned. "Other students got their passwords last semester. We, on the other hand, got hazed. And now we're paying for it, with just a handful of hours to figure out everything we should have spent last semester perfecting."

He had retained a bit more zen than I had (helped in part by a stopoff at the Japanese Tea Garden), and helpfully attempted to distract me. "Yeah, but this is the skill you'll keep," he said. "Mmmm, tonight we'll sleep on our mattress," he said. "Hey," he said, "Luca is really soft."

But that was Monday night, which dissolved effortlessly into Tuesday, and thankfully Tuesdays this semester are better than Thursdays were last semester. I only wish that they started...just...a little bit...later.

*yawn*

to heaven, and back...

We had the fortune to find ourselves in Elk, California (pop. 250) beneath an expansive full moon. The bustling metropolis of Elk features not a single street light, but we neither needed nor missed them under the incredible moon shadows. Our cottage sat astride a bluff about twenty yards above sea level, with a mildly precipitous path leading downward to a stone-encrusted beach strewn with giant logs. How did logs get on the beach, particularly logs four and five feet in diameter? Coastal redwoods leveled in mudslides? We had no idea. I dreamed of massive bonfires, and so, apparently, did the moon.

Breakfast featured, among other things, a treasure called Morning Pie whose recipe I could not leave without:

Morning Pie

2 cups cottage cheese
3 eggs
2/3 cup sugar
2 Tbs all-purpose flour
1/3 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp grated orange rind
1 Tbs orange juice
1/4 tsp orange extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat cottage cheese with an electric mixer for 1 minute. Add remaining ingredients and blend well. Pour into a 9" pie plate sprayed with Pam. Bake for 50 minutes, or until knife inserted comes out clean. Refrigerate overnight; serve chilled next morning. Freezes great also. Serves 6. (Recipe courtesy of David the Innkeeper, Elk Cove Inn.)

To reach Elk you cross the Golden Gate Bridge and shoot northward on the 101 all the way up through Sonoma County. Past Healdsburg, right when the towns start getting truly quaint (better had pack all the Tylenol et al. that you'll require, since the last chain drugstore you'll see is in Cloverdale), you ease off of 101 onto a road called the 128, which bears absolutely no resemblance to its eponymous Boston analog. This 128 swings around for about six or seven miles in some crazy-ass hairpin turns before depositing you, vaguely queasy at this point, in front of the Entering Mendocino County road sign.

From there the road runs parallel to the Anderson River through what I'm pretty sure is California's northernmost wine-producing region. The cute, if slightly ghosty, towns of Yorkville and Boonville slip past before you look around and realize that you're breathing deeply and everything is...just...perfect. By the town of Philo, as you pass the Roederer champagne cellars, you're grinning. And when you come upon the sign reading "Navarro, pop. 67," hopping out of the car for a quick photograph is an irresistable temptation.

There's a Navarro Vineyards as well, south of Philo, where the tasting room is lazily patrolled by a dachshund named Simon. I adore dachshunds even when sober, and after tasting at Husch and Roederer already, I was ready to hug the dog straight into the A4 and cuddle him all the way back up to the inn. Alas, Miss Kitty, the official guardian of the patio outside our cottage, likely would have objected, so Simon stayed at Navarro (where you can purchase a T-shirt featuring an artist's rendition of Simon standing on his front paws, balancing a bottle of Gewürztraminer on his nose).

Between Navarro and the ocean lies the Navarro Redwoods State Park, inside which it is wholly impossible to harbor any discontent with anything, period. "Camp only in designated areas," mildly threatens a brown sign at the entrance to the park. The trees are slightly scary, much bigger than ordinary trees, silvery-reddish-green with bark and moss and needles and more moss. Perhaps they suspected that I had entertained dreams of bonfires featuring their shipwrecked cousins. Even so, they still welcomed us completely.

And then the ocean. This is my ocean, this is the Pacific I'm supposed to live near. It is not steel-gray and furious like the ocean in Half Moon Bay or Santa Cruz; this ocean is at once joyous and pensive, a toss of jade and eucalyptus and evening sky colors dotted with whipped-cream foam. "Look at the ocean!" was all I could say to my husband. "It's got color!" It had color under the sun, under the fog, and oh, my God, under the moon. The sky and the fog and the ocean swirled together past the cottage picture-window until I could no longer tell which was which.

Amidst the whispering roar of the ocean and the quiet of everything else, my husband and I remembered that we were married and proceeded to act like it.

I turned twenty-eight yesterday at 12:42 pm, right on schedule. Try to keep distractions and other unwanted intrusions out of the way as much as possible, said my horoscope. Now's a good time to pay attention to the inner workings for a while. If you're feeling guilty about something, do whatever is necessary to cleanse yourself of that negative energy. I ate a lot, drank a good deal of wine, and read the inn's copy of Winnie-the-Pooh.

And it was good.

ready to break

Tomorrow my husband and I are headed out of town for a much-needed Actual Break (and this time we mean it), two nights in an oceanfront cottage in Mendocino with no mention of work or exams or law school or any other of the myriad sharp pointy objects suspended tenuously over our heads.

Tonight, I tried to get everything done for Tuesday and Wednesday next week. I came close, at least for Tuesday.

But I'm going to be good to myself this weekend. I'm going to leave my books home, completely wipe my feet and recover all the perspective I failed to recover over Christmas break. We're finally going to observe our anniversary in a suitably festive manner, and we'll toast my birthday in a total contextual vacuum. Just us and the ocean, the A4 and the open road, sand and wineries and a hot tub and a featherbed and port and chocolates delivered to the cottage door at sunset. I get happychills just thinking of how much I need this right now. My husband is already in the best mood he's been in since Thanksgiving.

See y'all on Monday, or thereabouts...

baring witness

I know entirely too many people who are going to be marching in this protest.

"In a lighter but perhaps equally eye-popping tactic, protesters in the organization Baring Witness said they might take their clothes off and march down San Francisco's Market Street."

Hopefully I don't know any of those.

professor daddy

Employment Discrimination (hereinafter "Edie"), my statutory elective, was canceled twice this week. Professor Edie had informed us at the introductory class that he and his wife were anticipating the birth of their second child within roughly two weeks, upon which occasion he intended to cancel "two or three classes." I chuckled at that, figuring that once the baby arrived he'd reassess and take a paternity leave in excess of three days.

Nope. Class reconvened today, and the guy didn't even bring pictures of the kid.

I'm liking Professor Edie, at any rate. He, like Professor Torts, is a graduate of my alma mater (I think they both majored in history, a department I neatly avoided), and has an engaging cuteness that works well for me. D., who for the record is a heterosexual male, described Professor Edie as "uglysexy." I disagree; he's certainly not ugly, and sexy would not be a term I'd choose to describe him. He gives me a different vibe altogether: here's a reasonably young married guy who's actually having children. See, it can be done!

"My part in the effort thus far," he said, upon announcing the pending birth, "was very, very easy." Cue classwide giggle.

J. spotted Professor Edie this afternoon in the cafeteria, grabbing a cup of soup about a half hour before class. "Hey, Professor Edie's back," he remarked. "We should give him a round of applause." C. and I gladly obliged, to which the good professor blushed adorably, paused to thank us, and briefly gave us the lowdown. Boy. Seven pounds, fourteen ounces. Cesarean section, but otherwise without difficulty. Very cute name, Hebrew in origin. Grandparents were in town for the long weekend, wife was about to come home from the hospital.

"Omigawd," I sighed to C. as Professor Edie hurried back to his office to finish his soup, "I want babies."

"Tell me about it!" she groaned back at me.

J. chuckled at me. "See, you're all over this shmoozing with the professors thing," he said. "I need to get a move on."

"I wasn't shmoozing," I protested. "I just want babies. Babies are honestly that interesting to me."

J. rolled his eyes. "Don't get it."

"That's because you're young, male, and not married," I told him.

"I'm your age!" he replied.

"You are not."

"When's your birthday?" he asked.

"Sunday," I said, and then realized that this was true. It's my birthday this weekend. I will be twenty-eight years old on Sunday.

"You're three months older than me," he said.

"And I've been married for four years, and I want babies," I concluded.

"I'm not even married and I want babies," C. chimed in.

At this point, seeing where the conversation was headed, J. prudently changed the subject to Contracts supplements.

*high five*

You tell 'em!

doing things differently, part 1

I have seen my Torts exam.

I had given several thoughts this morning to the nine Xanax pills still in my medicine cabinet, but had finally decided that I would handle the meeting myself, without chemical assistance. I am an adult, he's an adult, and there's no reason left for me to get hysterical over the stupid thing since it's so clearly beyond my control at this point. Just go, I told myself, take the feedback that's valuable, and learn how never to do this again.

I'm not sure whether taking a Xanax would have helped. I kept my cool, which was a good thing, but found myself almost completely unable to speak.

I had, legitimately and in good faith, screwed up. I missed two issues on the first question and one on the second, all of which were major enough to offend Professor Torts. It helped somewhat to hear him say that but for the curve, my grade would have been at least two increments higher; however, he was bound by the rules, and my particular choice of omissions had set me far enough back in the queue to make all the difference.

"What I want to take away from this," I said as clearly as possible, fighting the constriction in my throat, "is a set of marching orders."

"Exactly!" he said. "Here's your marching orders."

Looking at the scattered, well-thumbed pages of the exam in my lap (can't fault the guy for thoroughness; he'd obviously spent a great deal of time determining exactly how much my answers sucked), all I could feel was exhaustion. Two of the issues he claimed I had omitted were news to me; I could have sworn that I addressed them. But looking at my answers -- ohhh, agony of embarrassment, did I write that? -- he was right. No sign of Herskovits, no sign of J'aire, no sign of Firestone. "I even specifically *asked* you to address this in the call of the question," he said, remarking that plenty of other people had done so quite proficiently.

Work with this! I commanded my sulking, choked-up self. I had missed the call-of-the-question issue fair and square; even now, looking at the question again, J'aire would not have occurred to me. Okay. Every case has a rule. Pull a rule out of every case. Leave nothing aside.

But I *had* pulled a rule out of every case; that's how I'd set up my torts outline. General rule, then list of cases, with a bullet point under each case describing the instance of the general rule it addressed.

The other two issues, whose omission had so surprised me, made this a bit clearer. These were rules I knew, rules I'd thought of. How did I skip them in the writing?

I thought of Contracts, the one exam I nailed. I'd done the case-bullet-rule thing in preparation for that exam as well, but I'd kept them separate from the actual outline, which consisted purely of rules. Nearly all of my Contracts studying, in point of fact, had involved grinding and grinding over the rules until I felt somewhat comfortable with them.

I need to get all the rules in one place, I concluded. No matter how confident I feel about my command of the subject. Just make a great big list of all the rules. Every single one.

This left me feeling particularly stupid. No shit, Sherlock! What did you think an outline was supposed to be? Narrative??

That's what I need.

Professor Torts was now saying that Herskovits had shown up regularly on his old exams. "Did you do any practice exams?" he asked me.

"About eight or nine," I responded.

"And who did you review them with?"

I looked him in the eyes and felt my voice break. "Nobody."

He clapped his hands together and shouted that *there* was my problem. If I had just done one or two practice exams, he said, and brought them to his office hours instead of grinding away at so many in isolation, it would have made all the difference in my grade. "Even a study group," he suggested, "might have shown you what you were missing, instead of you just doing the same thing over and over, reinforcing your mistake."

I nodded, wide-eyed. Absolutely. Absolutely. Iteration had saved my grade in El-Dubyar, and my husband had already suggested numerous times that it could do the same for me anywhere else. Keep hacking at it, over and over, until you get it right. That had been my motivation for doing so many practice exams to begin with, and it was my own fault that I'd gotten started on same so late in the semester that office hours were no longer an option. This semester will be different. This semester I will outline sooner, be prepared to take practice exams sooner, do so sooner, and seek real feedback, not just a misleading internal sense that I'm on the right track when I'm not qualified to make the assessment.

Rules. Rules and practice. And next week, a meeting with Professor Civ Pro to conclude, hopefully, the same thing.

today's quote

Today's quote:
A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
--Charles Evans Hughes

bad property omens?

Mondays and Wednesdays provide me with the comparative luxury of sleeping in until 8 am. Property doesn't start until 11:30, and the appropriate train for an 11:30 class leaves my town at 9:19. What a relief. The sun was up before I was. I am going to relish Mondays and Wednesdays.

Today wasn't so tasty, though. I arrived on campus at around eleven, glanced at the bulletin board where initial reading assignments are posted, and realized that my Property class had actually had reading due today. (This assignment had magically materialized on the board over the weekend, unbeknownst to most of the people I asked about it.) Ah well, I thought, I'll just read it right now.

But something was odd about the assignment. I recalled, and quickly confirmed, that the author of the casebook in my pullman bag was a fellow named Dukeminier. The bulletin board, on the other hand, was instructing me to read twenty pages in a casebook by someone called Singer.

Oiy, oiy, oiy.

So much for purchasing a nice used casebook last month. We'd been misled, all of us neurotic earlybird shoppers, into purchasing a book about which Professor Property had apparently changed her mind in the interim. This left the bookstore with *no* used casebooks, so I was stuck plunking down an additional $20 on top of my return to acquire the shiny new Singer. And now there was no time to do the reading. All I could do was shrug.

It didn't matter that I hadn't done the reading, of course. Half the class had failed to discover the assignment in time, which left me a better excuse than most since I actually had the wrong book as well. But it made no difference. My fear of being unprepared has worn through, it seems. Last semester I received my best grade by far in the *only* class for which I failed to read every single case. At the same time, though, I can hardly impute causality between skipping two cases on a bad Thursday and doing well on the exam. I'm going to have to figure out a new approach to workload management this semester, I think.

wise words

Simon and Garfunkel:

Many's the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
But I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones
Still, you don't expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hour
and sing an American tune
But it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all I'm trying, to get some rest.

the bottom of the barrel

Vermouth, straight up, tastes just like Robitussin.

progress by bits

Professor Torts tells me that I almost earned my Civ Pro grade in Torts (which would still have been bothersome, but not unprecedented in my graded life), but then a few key flaws intervened and knocked me over the cusp into no-JCA's-land. I'll be meeting with him on Wednesday morning to discuss exactly what those flaws were. It's funny; I'll be meeting with Professor Civ Pro (whom I still have, this semester) the following week to review his exam, and that's a meeting I'm actually anticipating. I misfired in Civ Pro but can still fix it, am excited to fix it this spring. Torts is dead in the water, and while I'm presumably mature enough to swallow a litany of my own screwups and digest same into a working model for self-improvement, it's less fun when I know there's no chance to undo them.

I got the Moot Court topic I'd bid for last semester, Intel Corp. v. Hamidi. I'll be arguing for the Respondent, which I believe at this stage is Intel. I'll know more after class meets on Tuesday.

It's a tort case. It's either a semesterlong in-your-face reminder of how lacking in this subject I've been judged by this school, or a wide-open opportunity to turn the grade on its ear and demonstrate that the assessment of my capabilities was made in error after all. Sure, yeah, things didn't quite work out for me on the fall exam, but then I cleaned up in Moot Court. Who you kiddin'? I'm all over torts. Pah.

Unlike El-Dubyar, Moot Court is pass fail. Employers don't look at your grade and inhale audibly through their nostrils if it's below an A. You can, however, win awards for best brief or best oral argument. I'm not sure how many of these awards are given, or the extent of the field with whom you're competing to win one (is it just your four-man team, or your whole section, or everyone on the case?), but this should all become clear as time passes.

And I've finally shed the most repulsive shackle of last semester. Yesterday, bathed in a golden aura and accompanied by choirs of angels, I was granted a Westlaw password. No more Federal Reporters. No more photocopies. No more nuclear-winter living room strew of paper. "You can print to this printer here, or to your local printer at home," the instructor told us. "Can you just save it to disk and not print it at all?" I asked. "Um, well, yes," he replied, uncertain why anyone would do such a thing. I, meanwhile, smiled for the first time all day, a great big goofy grin. Starting over, indeed.

or, we could just all die now

This is how it will be. The alarm sounds at six-fifteen. My husband groans. I shut off the noise, roll out of bed, and grope my way through the pitchblack room to the bathroom, where the light burns my eyes and the shower, no matter how hot I run it, gives me a chill. I gulp my vitamins, force down some cereal, and shamble out to the elevator, huddled in my winter coat. The morning is foggy. The sun won't rise.

The train arrives right on schedule. 7:38.

Today is my fourth wedding anniversary.

Today is the first day of the second semester, and it hurts to be here, which it can't, must not, is not permitted to do. The hallways hurt, and the stairs, and the elevators, and the sterile hospital classrooms. The professors ring in my ears; my fingers jitter over the keyboard, misspelling half the things they say. Wrong. I'm all wrong. I have to wipe my feet, get over it, start from scratch, pretend like last semester never happened. Grow new thumbs for a fresh set of thumbscrews.

The migraine is rooted at the base of my neck, where my shoulders have solidified into a mass of knots. It spreads across my scalp like a vise.

The email from my husband arrives in the middle of my third class, Employment Discrimination. Professor Torts called, he writes. He's on the answering machine. He says the grade is correct. There is no air left in the room.

Wrong, wrong, must shelve this, must put it away, move on, get started, there's more work to do, always more to be done.

"How was your break?"

It's my own fault that I had no break, that I stayed on the hook for two and a half weeks and never stopped, never let myself recharge. Now I'm back here, and everything is starting up again, and I can't just curl into a ball and withdraw because there is no time, no time for self-indulgence. Must work. Must work. So much reading, all due tomorrow. And then more. No time. Snap out of it. Get moving. Now.

today's horoscope

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

It might finally be time to let go of something that has been bothering you for a while. Reliving the past could be keeping you from thoroughly enjoying yourself in the present. Try to forget about the things that were never meant to be permanent. Look to the people who care about you for guidance. Family members are especially supportive. It might also be a good idea to get an objective third party's view on the situation.

All true. All true.

I want to hate him, but...

I can't dislike this man. Professor Torts, who is technically already on sabbatical, returned my voicemail this morning. "I'm sorry I had to be the bad guy," he offered, unsolicited. He's checking his math on my exam (the last forlorn hope of any student at my school; no reevaluations here, only recounts), and is happy to meet to discuss what actually went wrong once the exam booklets are handed back to us in a month.

Now would be the appropriate time for a miracle, if I've got one coming.

the skinny

Silver lining to every cloud: there's nothing like a day spent convulsed in misery (coupled with regular gym attendance since returning home, of course, it's not like I'm going completely nuts) to burn off four out of the five pounds I gained over Christmas break.

just part of the continuum

The sad thing is, this is exactly the nightmare I've had for the past two nights. Well, almost exactly. In last night's dream it was Torts that presented the problem; the night before it was Crim. Crim, in real life, turned out to be unremarkable. But Torts --

How embarrassing. Everything I say about it, every thought that crosses my mind is horrendously stereotypical and melodramatic. I am evidently as unoriginal in my anger and panic and grief as dozens of other students in the exact same situation, not to mention dozens of soap-opera actors emoting in response to bad news. Listening to myself I flinch at how clichéd I sound. This can't be true. There must be a mistake. I've got to talk to him! You've got to help me! Don't you understand that this is a mistake?

Authenticity: yet another thing to lose.

My husband (who is showing a great deal more interest in this grades website than I am) made a composite spreadsheet of my section and determined that no one had gotten straight A's. He charted the minimum grade for every student across all four classes and El-Dubyar; the range ran from D to B+. "Still," he said, highlighting a block of about a dozen folks who had bottomed out at B+, "these people did pretty well." I am not among them.

And yet it's not over.

Sua Sponte reader Adam offers excellent advice to any 1L in a similar situation: sit down with all your professors, even the ones on whose exams you did well, and crack the code. Figure out exactly what it is that they were looking for, and what you did that hit or missed it. It's the blitz-on-practice-tests mindset, post hoc, where it's actually valuable as a constructive tool for improvement. Once you've got a clearer picture of what you were missing, engineer your outlines to solve the problem. Keep going to class. Keep doing your work. Tell yourself: now it's serious. Now I'm really going to do it. Quit letting the big picture spook you; screen it out and focus hardily on the near term, on the next five months. "It's a marathon," said Adam. "It's the goddamned Iditarod!" I responded.

Extra-potency rib-crushing hugs to Adam, on his way to sainthood in my book.

oh no, oh no, oh no, no...

This is bad, bad, bad.

My husband came home for lunch, excitedly looked up my grades...and my luck, as it turns out, did not hold.

I pulled a hopefully-sufficient grade for Crim, and tanked in Civ Pro, which fortunately counts for only 25% of my ultimate grade in that class. Somewhat ironically, I tied with two other members of my ninety-odd-person section for the top grade in the class in Contracts of all things. Like Civ Pro, however, it only counts for an eventual 25%; the big guns will still need to be primed for spring exams. My GPA, right now, is merely an average of my grades in Crim and Torts.

I am lost somewhere among hysteria, disbelief, and denial at my Torts grade. This simply can't be correct. I know I did passably, if not better, on that exam, and my best-beloved Professor Torts, the most generous grader in the school, could not possibly have judged my work this way. Maybe the exam didn't print correctly. Maybe there are pages missing or something. Maybe he entered the wrong grade in his ledger. This can't be possible.

I managed to calm down briefly, long enough to call the Records office and find out when they're planning on releasing our marked-up exams. Answer: perhaps by the first week of February. I called the school's guidance counselor, lost my cool, and found myself blubbering on the phone to her (but that's why they pay her the big bucks, so no guilt there). I need to call Professor Torts, track him down, get this fixed.

This has to be something I can fix.

hiding under a rock

They have updated the grades site, but I am being a coward and refusing to look up my grades. I have too much yet to do this afternoon, and don't have time for a crash-and-burn reaction if the news is bad. When my husband gets home tonight, I'll look.

I am one of those people who wade slowly into cold water, who peel off bandaids millimeter by millimeter. But you probably could have guessed that.

today's horoscope

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

The last couple of days have been filled with frustration, but you are finally able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You can breathe a sigh of relief as the cause of your troubles becomes apparent. Instead of laying the blame, you could be fixing things with your new knowledge. Whatever goes down at the office, don't bring your work home with you. You still need a safe refuge, and your house or apartment is one of the best ones you have.

of train wrecks

Scary, scary, scary. I feel vaguely guilty: my first thought, upon reading the headline, was Whew, at least it wasn't a Caltrain.

now this is interesting

I was optimistic, it seems, in my estimation of the efficiency of web-enabled publication of grades.

Turns out today is merely the deadline by which professors must turn in their grades. Presumably this means by the close of business today. I suppose it wouldn't be unprecedented for a few staffers to pull a late evening updating the website, but all the same it looks as though I may still be ungraded as of bedtime tonight, at least in part.

There is one grade that's already posted, though: El-Dubyar. It doesn't figure into my GPA, but it still freaked me out to the point where I couldn't even look. I didn't want my parade rained-on before it even began. "Tell me your number," my husband said, "and I'll look for you." And he did.

I feel odd talking about my grades on a weblog. It feels like discussing one's salary in public, and it's probably too much information anyway. But I will say this: although I was (predictably) not the highest grade in my class, I was very, very lucky. And the 2L was wrong: not everyone gets a B after all.

there is no industry like...

We returned home yesterday to find the kitchen acrawl with ants. Not the dangerous red Florida kind that bite you, or the huge fat shiny Southern Californian kind that scare you. These were just tiny black ants in search of food, wherever they could find it.

Ants are amazing. They'll climb all the way up to the third floor and migrate across an entire living room, all the way around a kitchen, and into the one cabinet where there happens to be one squeeze bottle of honey that's even just a bit sticky. When you crush one with your finger, one of its comrades will pick up its corpse, shoulder it, and march back out, down the wall, along the floor, and even across the living room carpet, which to an ant must seem like miles and miles of exhausting, uneven terrain. All this without blinking. They can do anything. They're ants.

We set out arsenic traps, doused the doorsills with Raid, and scrubbed the kitchen down with white vinegar. And now the indomitable ants are all dead.

My first semester grades should be posted on the internet within twelve hours of this writing.

I'm not too worried, only because it seems that my brain won't let me worry. Every time I think hey, grades tomorrow! it's as though brick walls spring up immediately around the thought, snapping it frozen in place. Don't think about it can't think about it not thinking about it.

Instead, I think of a mantra I chanted to myself every morning last spring, as soon as I woke up: Let this be my lucky day. Let my luck hold out. I will chant it tomorrow, and hope for the best, and remind myself to breathe.

one art

We are headed back to California as of tomorrow morning. I've just spent two weeks at my inlaws' house, gained back several months' worth of lost weight, and accomplished exactly nothing that I intended to do while in New Jersey. Now, tomorrow, if the weather quits mucking with my schedule, we get on a plane to go home and I'm left with four usable days to get everything done before the semester starts on Thursday, at which point I will almost certainly get nothing done for the next four months. I have nothing but ill will towards anyone who has the chutzpah to call this vacation.

I found this, which has been helpful, in a prayerlike kind of way. Elizabeth Bishop wrote it. I agree with her.

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

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.

bonnes fêtes

Oh, so belated. Sua Sponte has missed Yule, Hanukkah, Christmas and Eid altogether. Ah well: Happy Kwanzaa!

Pre-emptive apologies for the sparseness of blogging over the next week and a half. The borrowed 'puter to which I have access tends to spit and hiss when it catches sight of Blogger. It learned this behavior from my mother-in-law's hellion of a cat (my cat-in-law?). "Isn't he the prince of everything!" she squeals in delight as the beast (all nineteen pounds of him) lumbers into the kitchen, licking his chops and hatching plans to steal another steak off her broiler pan.

I realized, after exams had ended, that I'd lost a remarkable amount of weight while studying. I'd been careful to eat well and exercise, but keeping myself that keyed meant burning the calories from somewhere. I saw my face in the Abigail bathroom mirror the morning of my Crim exam and was astonished at how pale I looked. My reflection in windows looked altogether ghostly.

Thankfully, or maybe not so thankfully, my mother-in-law has resolved any problems I might have had with dropping too many pounds over too short a stretch. In the past three days we've had seven or eight full meals, one after another, complete with trimmings. Scampi and filets mignon with three or four vegetables on the side was just the prelude to my mother-in-law's magnificent Christmas lasagna, layered with slabs of mozzarella cheese and flanked with homemade meatballs the size of the clementines I munched on for dessert in an attempt not to stuff myself overmuch with the ensuing cheesecake. Now I'm wondering if I'm not gaining too much weight back. "That's what this time of year is for!" my mother-in-law reassures me, passing around a dish of mixed nuts or torrone or Almond Roca. Her cat certainly seems to agree.

Eat well, folks, and cheers!

(The notable absence of exam stress/post-exams blues in this post was deliberate. I may have more to say about it later, if I feel like thinking about it again.)

[inhales abruptly]

Holding my blogbreath for a few days while I simultaneously travel back to the East Coast and attempt to coax myself out of the post-exams blues. TTYS.

...

Please subdue the anguish of your soul. Nobody is destined only to happiness or to pain. The wheel of life takes one up and down by turn. --Kalidasa, dramatist (c. 4th century)

...

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?

--Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)

and oh, how I miss him

Recently, flipping through my used/new-to-me Property casebook to make sure it didn't have too much highlighting in it, I felt my heart stop for a moment when the book fell open to a case called Jee v. Audley.

Yes, there's a story behind the name. No, I don't feel like telling it now.

pop goes the 1L

*sigh*

The glee kind of never materialized.

I feel hazed, hosed, hung out to dry in the midst of the still-pouring rain (so much for a drought in the Bay Area this year). I went charging through the Crim exam as best I could, spotting all the issues that were to be spotted in a ninety-minute timespan, discoursing on the policy of encouraging the consumption of alcohol vs. severely punishing the harm done by the intoxicated, and coming up with four different arguments as to why acquitting battered women of murder does not constitute issuing victims of abuse "a license to kill." But then I hit the last corollary to the last question: whether it was possible to harmonize favoring a defense for battered women who kill their abusers with a blanket opposition to the death penalty.

As many times as I reread that sentence, I couldn't see the contradiction.

Thought had by me, right at that moment, the only thought of any weight that I managed to think throughout the exam:
I have hit the wall.

I had twenty minutes left in the exam and was not going down without a fight. I finally came up with two plausible arguments for why this might even represent a contradiction (please don't suggest any more; it's already 100% in violation of personal credo that I'm even discussing the exam this much), shot them both down, finished typing within seconds of the proctor calling time, and found that my legs were shaking uncontrollably as I left the room. Joe Cocker jangled in my ears like a knell. I stumbled over to the bookstore, sold back my Torts and Crim casebooks, and bought casebooks for Property and Employment Discrimination next semester. Then I hurried up to the quiet third floor, called my husband, and did my best to talk it out. Plenty of tears in my eyes, very few that actually fell. I needed a good cry, and still do, I think.

I should be thankful that I didn't hit the wall until twenty minutes from the end of my last exam. I should be thankful that I still managed to choke out something resembling a coherent answer. I should be thankful for my husband's coaching, for lunch with wonderful Patrick who hugged me without reserve, for my mother's common sense over the phone on the train home: "You do your best and t' heck wit'em!"

I am thankful for these things. I am thankful for all of the prayers and waves that everyone sent, and I am particularly thankful that the academic dean saw me in a semi-stupor on the third floor and directed me down to the 1L party on the second, where Ali from the cafeteria plied me with a plastic cup of Charles Shaw cabernet. "Guess what!" S. squealed to me as I approached a table populated by friends. "G. bought an engagement ring!!"

Sure enough, he intended to propose to his longtime girlfriend on the day after Christmas, while they vacationed together in Maui. He took my hand to get a better look at my own engagement ring and joked "See, look at this huge motherf*cker." "It's one carat," I responded with a grin. "So's the one I got her," said G., "and if she says no you'll see it on eBay."

Heading back to the bar for a refill on the cabernet, I passed one of the buffet tables and noticed some familiar small red berries garnishing a tray of sandwiches. A student I didn't know was collecting them into a pile on her plate. "I love pomegranate seeds," she told me, unbidden. "They're, like, my favorite things in the whole world." "Mine too!" I squealed back, and suddenly found myself in a giddy conversation with a complete stranger on the Zen of pomegranate study breaks and the best way to protect one's clothing from juicy projectiles. I didn't even actually get any of the pomegranate seeds off the tray. It didn't matter. G. was getting engaged, pomegranates were wonderful, and exams were over.

the end even closer in sight

Nine practice exam questions later, I'm still tired. But I think I'm getting there. At least as far as criminal law is concerned.

I'm going to head out now, pick up a burrito for myself (have been spending too much money at the vegetarian restaurant lately! Time for a cheapie; we'll splurge on the celebration after this is all over) and catch the 5:27 train up to town. This will be my last night at the Abigail for months, the last night I'll spend with an outline occupying the space on the passenger-side pillow that is usually reserved for my husband.

And then, tomorrow morning at 8:30, will be the last exam of my first semester of law school. Send all the waves, prayers, and good vibrations you can spare -- I need them now more than ever. I'll need to issue-spot like wildfire (including exceptions, defenses, causation, complicity, etc.), then shift gears and ponder policy like an actual pundit (into which law school may yet turn me; we shall see). I shall appreciate your support beyond measure.

I'll be such an unbearable bundle of glee after this is all over that I might actually require restraints.

Until then!

the end in sight

I realized, as I flipped through my outline on the elliptical machine this morning at the gym, that this was the last day I'd be studying at the gym for months. (Or at least weeks.) I am so close to freedom. Just one more day of work -- must work! -- and three hours of exam stand between me and the first substantial break in my law-school immersion since before school started.

I'm getting really tired, I'll admit. I can completely understand why people just crumble on the home stretch to the last exam. It's a different kind of exhaustion from the standard version: I can still burn off a couple hundred calories at the gym without dragging, but when faced with another practice exam, I protest despite myself: not...another...one...please...

But slacking is not an option. I've got five years' worth of practice exams to outline this afternoon, to make sure that my short checklist is a fully-functional issue spotting tool and that my obese outline, larded with issues that might potentially figure in policy discussions, is navigable with sufficient ease to be useful.

Tired though I might be feeling, I only need to sprint for twenty-four more hours.

[deep breath]
[keeps going]

outlining blues, take 2

Ugh, eight straight hours is way too long to spend on a sagging couch hunched over one's laptop. I now have 28 pages of outline and 18 pages of policy discussion notes (for Professor Crim's dreaded Policy Questions). If I use a tenth of this on the exam, at least I'll be glad I included that particular tenth.

I would be lunchmeat if this were a closed-book exam.

Fortunately, it isn't. And true to form, I've got my one-page exam checklist (figure a high-level index to the big ol' outline) to guide me through the issue-spotting.

Now it's off to husband's office to actually print this mess. I'm going to be doing a lot of thumb-indexing tonight...

outlining blues

Crim is slow going. Really starting to get tired, and this is a(nother) damn long outline I'm working on here. Death penalty yada yada yada. I needed to take a brain break, and found this:

Which Supreme Court Justice are you?

My results (*giggle*):
#1 Scalia
#2 O'Connor
#3 Thomas
#4 Ginsburg
#5 Kennedy
#6 Rehnquist
#7 Breyer
#8 Souter
#9 Stevens

!!!!

I had a scary moment this morning when I went in to my laptop, attempted to open my still-in-progress Criminal Law outline, and found that the file had been corrupted. (No Word document should ever be larger than 4MB; this should have tipped me off that something was amiss.) Just yesterday, I had backed up every file on my laptop hard drive...except my Crim outline, which I figured I'd just back up later in the evening after I'd clocked out for the night. No dice. Husband put on one of the Lord of the Rings DVDs as a distracting treat for me, and all thought of law school drained out from my mind.

And then, overnight, the file had mysteriously bloated from maybe 300K to over 4MB. It happily proceeded to crash Word whenever I tried to open it.

Oh, shit.

Forcing myself to think optimistically -- it's far too late in exam season to panic, besides which I doubt I can spare the emotional bandwidth to sustain a good hard panic attack these days -- I chanted silently to myself, good thing the outline wasn't finished, you'll better learn the parts you already did by doing them again, remember this is all a continuing process, you want to be refining your outline anyway. And finally, out of desperation, I attempted to open the file in Wordpad.

It worked.

I lost a few fancy schematics and flowcharts done in WordArt, but since they had mostly been created by K. (who is much better at the beautifying-your-outline thing than I am) it was hardly a major setback. My text was all there. Thank goodness. Thank goodness.

And now, back to work.

with wings that blur...

A quick burst of rain just skipped through my town, and now the brilliant sun is back out again, so of course I was inspired to duck my head out onto the balcony and do some rainbow-spotting. There it was, over to the east. All good.

But then I noticed some movement: a tiny, tiny bird was perched on one of the (long-deceased) potted plants on the balcony. It peeped and turned its head, showing off its needlelike beak and astonishingly red neck ruff and breast. Then it took off and hovered directly above the plant, wings blurring into barely-visible smears.

I love hummingbirds; they're one of my favorite things about living in California. This one seemed to be bearing plenty of good cheer as it buzzed around my balcony against the backdrop of the rainbow. I gladly returned the sentiment.

civ pro, check

*rim shot*
So much for the closed-book exam.

As far as I know, I didn't forget any of the things I'd made myself memorize. I hit 1332, 1367, and even -- no kidding! -- 2072 among my statutes, and didn't miss a case. At no point did I blank. I just wrote, wrote, wrote like mad. (Inspired by the Angry Clam, this time I remembered to check my character counts at the end of each question: 14,400 and change for the first, and 10,800 and then some for the second. Not bad for two hours and fifteen minutes.)

The "Actual Thoughts Had By Me During the Exam" feature is temporarily suspended in this post, since I didn't have any actual thoughts during this exam. I was just singlemindedly working, without distraction, the whole time. At one point I found myself running out of steam and had to stop, blink a few times, flex my wrists and check the clock before I could force myself to finish another sentence. But two hours and fifteen minutes is not a lot of time, not when you've got a two-page personal jurisdiction fact pattern and a frickin three page Erie fact pattern. Bleah.

I have a set of lucky charms and totems that I routinely wear into the exam: a crew shirt from my alma mater as a token of my intellectual foundation, a heart-shaped amber charm as a token of my husband's support (he gave it to me last Valentine's Day), my tree of life murrina charm as a token of high energy and focus, and my late father's college ring to invoke his guidance (he was an attorney himself). But for a closed-book exam, I had to supplement this array with a few extra memory-boosting totems, just to make sure I didn't forget any statute numbers.

Fortunately I collect elephants, and had quite a selection to choose from. I picked two that were gifts from good friends: a small jade elephant pendant (which didn't get too tangled with the two other necklaces I was wearing) that had been a birthday gift from my friend M. in Arizona, and a pocket-sized elephant with a Canadian penny sticking up out of its back. "Lucky Canadian Penny Pachyderm," read its packaging. It had been a gift from Layne and Becky, back in June when we'd all met up in Vancouver, and it spent the exam in my pocket just as its jade cousin hung around my neck. A good thing, too. They did their job well.

People are losing their inhibitions and yielding to the temptation to discuss the exam in droves. I overheard R. and J. trading confident assertions that they'd nailed the personal jurisdiction question with time to spare, and had to plug up my ears and leave the room. La la la la. P. in the elevator started talking about Christmas break, which was a much nicer subject to think about without fear of jinxing myself. "We're headed to New Jersey for two weeks to stay with my inlaws," I told him. He was headed home to Los Angeles. I joked that he was in for nicer weather than I was, and he responded, "Anything's better than this place."

San Francisco wasn't terribly inhospitable to me today, though. It stormed all last night, with such a howling wind as I hadn't previously heard in California (with the possible exception of the last time I found myself writing a Civ Pro exam -- maybe there's something about Civ Pro exams that inspires bad weather, or vice versa). I huddled up in my hotel bed, very glad to be indoors and warm and dry, and woke up to find that the clouds seemed to be lifting. By the end of the exam, the sun had come out in full force, almost as bright as it had been in my dream.

Another one down, and now there's only one left! Time for me to set aside my statutory flash cards on the same pile as my torts outline and contracts checklists, and dedicate myself wholeheartedly to the mastery of criminal law for the next three days. Ahhh, the joy of having nothing else left to worry about, such that I can actually concentrate on one thing as well as it deserves! Crim it is, then!

send waves, please

Off to the Abigail for another night of vegetarian cuisine, practice exam questions and continuing memorization.

From 8:30 to 11 am tomorrow, all ye who are so inclined please remember me, pray that I keep my wits and that my memory doesn't leak, and send good civil procedure waves! Yay, personal jurisdiction! International Shoe! Asahi! (Only not with respect to a long arm statute!)

bizarre dream

I went to bed last night with the sixteen-tons-I-mean-pages Civ Pro outline on the nightstand, and proceeded to have the oddest dream.

Salient parts of it involved me walking up to the train station on a gorgeous sunny day, stark naked. Normally in a dream this is cause for intense panic and embarrassment; but in this dream, I realized I was completely unclothed and calmly thought: "Hmm, I look good." And as soon as I began to wonder whether anyone else had noticed I wasn't wearing clothes, by some dream-trick I was wearing them.

But I had missed the train. There it was, cheerfully rolling out of the station in the implausible sunlight. Again, normally this would churn me into a mess of nerves, wondering whether I'd be able to make the next train or potentially have to drive. But in this dream, I merely climbed straight up into the air and started to fly after it. It wasn't the joyous swooping flying that happens in the most amazing flying-dreams, but a calm, assured, breaststroke-through-the-air type flying, something that just came naturally and would simply get me where I needed to go.

I landed at a train station somewhere else (Palo Alto?), but suddenly the train no longer mattered and I was at the bottom of a flight of stairs that substituted for a sidewalk up a very steep street. I started up them without difficulty, but eventually came to a railing that seemed to block me from continuing. My Australian friend Rowen then appeared, breaststroking through the air to my left, and said "Go around it!" Sure enough, to the right there was a tunnellike passage that opened back out onto the stairs above the railing. The sunlight was dazzling.

At the top of the stairs was an ocean, filled with all manner of colorful boats. Some sort of amusement park with roller coasters was also visible nearby, carts full of squealing people hurtling out over the ocean and back on tall white tracks. I walked into a building and found myself in a remarkable candy store, full of all kinds of cookies and sweets painted and monogrammed in incredibly-colored, incredibly-detailed icing. Someone handed me a handful of small dark spheres and said "These are the real thing. Hide them." I looked at them stupidly for awhile before quickly hiding them under various papers and piles of candy, right as someone walked into the store with a detector to find them. And then I woke up.

Dream analysts, knock yourselves out! What could this mean? (And how on earth could it possibly have been inspired by the Erie doctrine?)

on the back of a shovel, with charcoal...

Quite a big wind/rain storm here today. Our power was actually knocked out for several hours, which meant that I was actually -- eat your heart out Abe Lincoln -- studying by candlelight. (I don't recommend it, it's very headachy.)

suggestion box

Seeking advice on the best way to study for a closed-book exam. I haven't taken one since 1996. Scary though Torts and Contracts were in the abstract, at least I had my security blanket (in the form of outline, checklist, and casebook) alongside to keep me from spooking completely. Civ Pro affords me no such luxury, which is unnerving if I think too hard about it.

I'm already in the process of making statutory flash cards, or at least will be after I get back from the gym this morning (need to blow off some steam). Thus far the only statutory section I can manage to remember is 28 USC 1404(a), on transfer of venue. There are a good dozen other numbers that will need to stay mapped to concepts in my mind. How are other folks managing this?

public exposure

A recent email from my school announced that they would be posting exam grades on the web, on or around January 6. Good of them, I thought, but something seemed amiss -- the email provided a username and password to access the site, but was sent to the entire first-year class.

I logged in, wondering how they'd manage to keep our grades private if we all had the same username and password. And then, to my horror, I realized that they had no intention of keeping anything private.

"Dude," I howled, rushing into the study where my husband was busy attacking France. "You won't believe what they're doing with our grades."

"What are they doing?" he asked.

"They're publishing them on a website in one big list!"

"Not with your name, though, right?"

"No, just with your exam number...but they're all going to be posted there, on this huge list, and you can see what everyone got!"

My husband burst out laughing at my consternation. "Haven't you ever watched a movie? Ever? This is totally how it's done in law school."

"That's fiction!" I squealed. "They can put anything in a movie! This shouldn't be happening at a real school."

"Dude," he said, "this is law school. It's the most archaic educational model still in existence."

He's right, as usual, which doesn't make it any easier. The thought of learning my grades by seeking out one four-digit number on a list of several hundred makes me feel, at worst, naked in public, and at best, like one more stamped-out prefab gear on the conveyor belt.

But I guess that's part of the point...

premiere excitement

Tickets are booked for the Two Towers on Thursday after my Criminal Law exam. It still itches the heck out of me that I'm going to miss the premiere since I'll be camped out at the Abigail reminding myself of the difference between false pretenses and larceny-by-trick, but at least I'll see it the following day. The fancrowds should still be reasonably amusing at that point; I wager they won't thin out for a week or two. You know the ones I mean -- the ooh-ahh-ers, the laughers and screamers and criers and applauders at battle scenes.

My husband, nervous at the thought of our scheduled Saturday departure for two weeks back east, opined that we should take Thursday and Friday to get our domestic ducks in a row before leaving the state. This would mean waiting until Saturday evening to see the movie, which was simply unacceptable to me. Particularly after two weeks of law school exams. You'd better believe I'm getting my carrot. "We can see it *again* on Saturday," I concluded. And we probably will.

too funny

The always-giggleworthy Jeremy Blachman has come up with a real gem: a Civil Procedure love song. I'm tempted to forward it to Professor Civ Pro.

Friday the thirteenth.

Friday the thirteenth.

Professor Civ Pro usually says things worth hearing, so I figured I'd make the effort to shlep up to The City in spite of the rain today to attend his last review session. I checked in the front pocket of my borrowed backpack (the pullman bag has been retired since its handle broke last week) to make sure I'd remembered my train pass. I took the pass out of the pocket and set it down on the kitchen table, specifically so that I wouldn't forget it. Of course it makes perfect sense to take a train pass out of one's backpack in order to remind oneself to put the train pass in one's backpack. Still with me? The train pass wasn't, when I reached for it at the station.

Friday the thirteenth.

Two women in no apparent hurry stood between me and the little Caltrain ticket-spitting ATM, both of them attempting in series to feed the machine a handful of rumpled dollar bills. The train had already pulled up by the time they finished doing so. I whipped my Visa card through the machine, kicked myself for being so flaky (can you believe this is the first time this semester that I forgot my train pass?) and sprang onto the train with my freshly-printed ticket just as the doors were closing. It was the 8:17 train. The time stamp on my ticket was 8:17.

"Happy Friday the thirteenth!" the conductor said.

While a crowd of us waited in the steady rain for the MUNI trolley to pull up, a gust of wind came whooshing up and inverted my umbrella with a faint pop. I grabbed at the skin of the umbrella, trying to revert its bones back to their proper position, and realized that as it blew back all the water had streamed off it into this one poor guy's face. He glared at me through soaking eyeglasses. I apologized as best I could before I lost sight of him in the press of people funneling through the doors into the trolley.

Friday the thirteenth.

MUNI is usually pretty crowded in the mornings, but it seems particularly so when the passengers have all come in out of the rain and are literally steaming. I stood near a seat which, fortunately, was promptly vacated, so I was seated when the trolley came screeching to an abrupt stop halfway out of Embarcadero station. Other people, who were still standing, went down like dominoes into a surprised, upset, and very wet heap. "The driver didn't do this," said the MUNI policeman who stuck his head in through the door. "This was a computer error. We apologize." The trolley then sat there, half-in half-out of the station, for another five minutes or so before finally moving on.

Happy Friday the thirteenth.

TMI

Ugh, my Civ Pro outline is sixteen pages long. Ten point font. Single spaced. And this is a closed book exam. Seems I've got a lot more digesting to do before I'll be ready for prime time.

*reeling*

Well, that was dizzying.

Prof. Contracts failed to disappoint, peppering both fact patterns with enough details details DETAILS to fray the most solid of nerves (what did I miss? whatdidImiss? Imusthavemissedsomethingwhatthehelltimealready????). I finished -- at least I think I finished -- with three minutes remaining, barely enough time to spell check.

Actual thoughts I had during the test:
How'm I doing on time?
OK, makes sense.
No time to pause for water.
Thank goodness I tabbed my Restatement!
I'm thirsty.
IRAC!
How'm I doing on time?
Shit! Am I done with this one yet?
Gotta be. Moving right along.
After this I think I'll go up to the library and work on civ pro CONCENTRATE, YOU GOOF.
How'm I doing on time?
IRAC!
Need water, have to spare a few seconds for a sip.
Fifteen minutes? That can't be right.
She did NOT just call ten minutes.
Concentrate! Is this complete?
Hurry! Finish!
Is that it?
What did I miss?
What did I miss?

Strictly speaking, I didn't spook. I ran like hell -- God bless the poor folks who had to hand write, I have no idea how they managed in so little time -- but I stayed on point (or at least think I did), stuck to my flow, didn't digress, and hopefully didn't miss much. And now I'm 50% of the way through my law school exams.

It was interesting to note the different tenor of the exam room today as opposed to Monday. Now that we'd all lost our "exam virginity," people were much more relaxed, actually talking to each other and even cracking jokes. I still listened to the Swan before the test started, but didn't need it to put me in the right zone. No static, no freaking out on this one: I've done this before.

I slightly breached my promise not to discuss the exam this time around. P. muttered to me, "Is it just me or were these real softball questions? I kept looking for more things to say." To which I could only shrug -- I'd had no shortage of things to say, my essays straining at the time constraints like overfilled sausages -- and agree as mildly as possible: "Compared to the practice exams, yeah." It was true that these questions seemed more direct than the practice ones, but that could just be due to, well, practice.

Outside, V. approached me in great distress. "I got so messed up on time," he said. "I divided out the number of minutes I was going to spend on each section, but I added wrong! I only had 25 minutes left to answer the second question." Ouch! I thought, but replied: "Time was a real problem. For everyone. You're not alone."

"I mean, I guess I answered the second question, sort of," he agonized.

I started saying all the consoling things I could think of. "This is 25% of your grade, right? And Professor Contracts said himself that there's no fixed percentage credit for the first and second question, so if you did really well on the first one that could help you overall."

V. just looked at me glumly.

"Coraggio," I concluded, which at least put a smile on his face. There's something about Italian -- speaking it or hearing it, either works -- that has a medicinal effect on the downhearted, at least the downhearted who can recognize and understand Italian.

Sure enough, I actually did head up to the library (whence I'm currently typing), which is blessedly free of volubly stressed study groups. I'm not letting myself go home until I finish my Civ Pro outline, since my husband is insisting that I spend more time on Crim before really knuckling down to study for Monday's closed book Civ Pro exam and I'm not comfortable switching gears until I at least reach a place of confidence in Civ Pro. A closed book exam will be a new experience...one for which I'd better get ready.

THANK YOU, supporters, for all your support!

just about ready

After forcing myself through a few practice questions, I feel a bit better. I'm starting to get into the Professor Contracts groove, starting to tease actual issues out of the novellas he presents as fact patterns. Maybe I actually do have a clue about contracts. Maybe I actually can pull this off.

I'm going to take a train up to the city in a little while, check back in to the Abigail, and spend the rest of the night on the rest of these questions. And then, tomorrow morning at 8:30, I'm going to walk into that room again, laptop in hand, Saint-Saëns echoing in my ears, and hopefully, composure firmly intact.

Thanks again to all the Sua Sponte readers who are pulling for me on these exams. Please continue to do so -- it's truly helping me. Tomorrow from 8:30 to 11, if you should think of me cranking away on Contracts, do send along all the waves of support you can spare.

Crepi il lupo!

send waves, please

Ugh.

Petulance has set in around here. I've got my own outline, the one I downloaded, my digest of all the cases we covered this semester, and a process flow/checklist for answering exam questions. It's time for me to start doing practice questions, and I just -- don't -- want -- to. My test-taking faculties are grinding their hoofs into the ground like sulking donkeys, refusing to move for either carrot or stick.

I don't want to take this exam. Professor Contracts writes long, rambling fact patterns, full of red herrings that don't appear relevant to the answer. I've yet to find one shorter than two pages, and who the hell wants to read a novel when they're in the hot seat and have to get cracking on the essay? Unlike Torts, this is only a two-and-a-half hour exam. Reading over both questions enough times to nail all the salient facts and filter out the dross could take twenty minutes by itself. *groan.*

I have roughly twenty hours left (minus the eight or nine I hope to spend asleep tonight, which leaves me with what, twelve?) to crack this professor's code. Must. Motivate. Self.

!?

Brief, intense spike of panic as I woke up this morning:

--What time is it?
--Eight-thirty.
--Ah.
--WAIT, don't I have an exam at eight-thirty??
--[heart pounding]
--[checks wristwatch]
--No, today is Wednesday, tomorrow is the exam.
--Oh.

I have one day left to decipher Contracts. I suppose it could be worse.

scary

Wow. It's astounding how much of Contracts I've gone this entire semester without understanding. I'm currently on a massive sprint to attempt to assimilate (and synthesize) it all by Thursday. Or, barring that, at least to pull it into an outline on which I can look things up during the exam. I'm finding things in my notes that aren't addressed by the perfect outline I found on the Web, which makes for a great deal of forehead-wrinkling as I try to figure out why, what they mean, and whether they matter.

This is the epitome of "learning it for the test." I'll be lucky if I even manage that. How did the UCC ever get so byzantine?

lucky 10k

While I was off taking my Torts exam, someone had the honor of being the 10,000th unique visitor to Sua Sponte. Congratulations, #10K, whoever you might have been!

my first law school exam is over...

One down, three to go. Res ipsa loquitur.

The elevator at the Abigail Hotel is named Elliot. He introduces himself to you via a brass sign above the door, a flexible grating that you close yourself. The sign reads: "Hi, I'm Elliot, one of Abigail's most unique antiques. I'm very sensitive, so if you have anything bad to say about me, please wait until you get out of me to say it."

The Abigail dates from the same time period as the first apartment I lived in after college, back in Hoboken, NJ. I immediately felt at home among the groaning bed, peeling paint, and water stains of a building with character. Someone with time to kill while sitting on the toilet had peeled away the nearby paint through three different-colored layers, all the way down to some truly funky consignment-store-chic wallpaper striped with narrow ribbons of maroon.

My husband didn't want me walking out in the Tenderloin alone after dark, so I had dinner at the hotel restaurant. It's a dimly-lit, rather expensive but exceedingly quirky vegetarian place that features something called "Rawvioli" on the menu, as well as a wine list with specially-shaped asterisks indicating the organic, vegan, and sustainable-grape-culture options. I'm not a vegetarian, practically speaking (although I do love my falafel wraps); but it sure is fun to pretend to be one, particularly when the waitstaff seems particularly preoccupied with high-maintenance sensitivities. "This isn't butter, is it?" I asked the guy who brought me the bread. "Oh, no," he was quick to protest, "it's tofu-based." It was remarkably good, too, and since it wasn't butter I ate it all without guilt.

Dinner was terrific: porcini mushrooms and chestnuts in a tangy wine sauce over blue corn polenta with garlic, flanked by a bittersweet mixture of braised greens (endive and radicchio for the bitter, fennel and onion for the sweet) and a chilled white bean salad with diced root vegetables. I finagled a cappuccino cup of hot water out of the bartender and took it back up to my room to make my valerian tea, with which I washed down a single sleeping pill. I outlined five more old exam questions before lights-out at about nine-thirty.

It was pouring rain this morning when I woke up. Alas, as complete as my packing list had otherwise been (down to a MUNI token and a new set of MP3's for the Lyra), I had neglected to include an umbrella.

So I showed up a bit wet to the classroom building. I stowed my overnight bag and backpack in my locker, pulled out my laptop and cable to take upstairs to the exam room, and then paused before heading up. Time for centering, focusing, closing eyes and breathing deeply and listening to my official pre-exam theme song.

And then I was off.

Various thoughts had during the exam:
My God, I'm taking a law school exam.
Breathe.
*humming the Swan in my head*
I am tired.
Am I really taking a law school exam?
Quit freaking and just do the damn thing!
Breathe.
Focus.
Did my laptop screen just flicker?
Wow, I can actually feel the stress. It prickles.
Should I go pee now or wait until the exam is over?
Oh wait -- government immunity!!

I promised I wouldn't discuss the exam, so I won't. (Although I was quite proud of myself for coming up with the immunity thing, ten minutes from the end of the exam as I was going over everything I'd already finished.) I booked out of the room, realized I was shaking with all the tension fizzling out of me, and dove for the MP3 player as soon as I reached my locker. Time for shifting out of torts mode, looking up from the grindstone, and listening to my official post-exam theme song.

The free chair massage at Student Services was lovely, but what really put me in a sweet mood was lunch with Tolkien buddy and Sua Sponte reader Patrick Carroll, who treated me to a new pleasure: Hot Tuaca. It's the perfect drink for a gray rainy day in San Francisco after one has just emerged from one's first law school exam.

I made the 2:30 train homeward, and realized at about San Mateo that the rain was clearing up. By Belmont the sun was shining almost perplexedly through the westward windows of the train. This was rainbow weather. I craned around in my seat until I was looking southish out of an eastward-facing window, and sure enough, there it was, indicating a pot of gold somewhere in the vicinity of Milpitas.

After I got home, I had one last post-exam resolution to keep: do a good deed, to release today's karma and make room for Thursday's. I took several bags of old clothes, which had been camping in my front hallway for weeks, and loaded them up into the trunk of my car to take over to St. Vincent de Paul. First, though, I ran an errand to the post office. They were selling special stamps with a picture of the three World Trade Center flag-hoisters on them, so I bought a few, donating some money to a 9/11 charity in the process. The machine gave me back fifty cents change, which I handed to a nearby woman bearing a "Sick with Cancer" sign. A good thing, too, since St. Vincent de Paul was closed for donations for the day. S'aright s'aright, at least I've got a good deed left to do on Thursday before I run out of ideas.

Next up: Contracts, a wimpy two-and-a-half hour exam for a piffling 25% of my grade in the two-semester class. And yet the outline calls...

But first, a pomegranate.

send waves, please

Torts exam in eighteen hours.

I'm not yet "all torted out" -- am still having fun telling unwitting victims (like my visiting stepmother) all about the six-step analysis to prove negligence, or who's eligible to recover for negligent infliction of emotional distress in California vs. Massachusetts vs. Hawaii, or about the special California exceptions to intentional interference with a valid economic expectancy (you can't recover in a competitive sports environment even if you were clearly winning, but you CAN recover in an election environment even if you were clearly losing).

But I'm trying to take it easy on torts, plan my packing, make sure everything on my person tomorrow is suitably auspicious. We'll head up to the city in a little while, check me into the hotel, and I'm going to study a bit more before making tonight an early, early night.

My exam starts first thing tomorrow morning. If you should happen to think of me tomorrow between the hours of 8:30 am and 12 pm Pacific Standard Time, please pause and wish me well, or as my husband says, "send waves." Prayers for success in any form from any religious tradition are gladly appreciated.

Until then...

1L ethical issues

Chock full o'torts for the moment after doing a complete essay and outlining another, I'm taking another brain break to work a bit more on my contracts exam-answer flow.

I've got a moral dilemma here. I've rustled up an anonymously-authored outline on Google that is absolutely perfect. It was produced by a student at the university where Professor Contracts taught up until a few years ago. Same professor, same casebook, and a remarkably clear approach. It's basically an exam answer flow just like the one I'm trying to tease out of my scrappy outline and haphazard notes and supplements, with all the rules grouped in logical order by the issues they address, neat, organized, and ostensibly complete.

I feel guilty using it.

On one hand, Prof. Contracts says we can bring any old thing we want into the exam. "But anything beyond your casebook and the supplement, and your outline, will probably prove cumbersome," he advises, which is certainly true if you imagine frantically flipping through Gilberts in search of the UCC statute of frauds while the clock is ticking. Still, he places no restriction, either moral or practical, on using resources outside of those he provides. (Compare Professor Torts, who only permits the casebook and "any outlines you have personally prepared," or Professor Crim, whose exam was voted open-casebook, open-notes, closed-commercial-outline.)

On the other hand, this feels stolen to me. I googled it on a publicly available website fair and square, so it's not as though its author (bless you, who/wherever you are!) didn't wish for it to be used to the benefit of other students of Contracts. But I didn't write it myself, and with my current knowledge couldn't have. Having it at my disposal feels like unjust enrichment. I want to pay someone back for it.

My husband opines that I should use it to study and then make my own flow based on what I learned from it, and if my flow comes out roughly identical then at least it's been parsed through my personal filter. I think I agree with this. The document is probably about 95% on point, and I could probably add a few things. As a study aid, though, it's dead-on, to the extent that if I'd found it sooner I might not have plunked down the $35 on Gilberts. Then again, that's probably not true, since without the help that Gilberts gave me I probably would look at something like this and just go huh?, typical of most of the semester in Contracts.

Ain't exams grand? Imagine ever thinking about this stuff, ever, outside of these few weeks of one's life...

multitasking

I took a bit of a break from Torts this morning to do a practice essay for Crim, since Professor Crim awhile back had expressed a willingness to review sample answers. I hadn't planned on getting to Crim at least until after Contracts, but my husband got very upset at the concept. "You're going to blow it on Crim if you don't do this as soon as possible," he told me, upsetting me enough that I sat down and started pulling together my issue-spotting checklist.

The question I wrote, though, was not an issue-spotter -- I've been doing enough of those for torts -- but one of the policy questions for which Prof. Crim is renowned. "Would you prosecute? Why or why not?" was the call of the question. These feel like fun to me, like the kinds of questions you'd expect to answer on an exam in nonlaw school. I may have completely tanked on it, of course, but that's why I believed my husband's threat and did the thing now: just to get a sense of what Prof. Crim wants.

So much of this exam game is playing into professors' personal tastes. Prof. Torts loves braindumps of black-letter law, arguments on both sides, and then hazarding a guess as to how the jury will lean. Prof. Contracts wants to hear every last tenet of every rule recited and applied to the situation. Prof. Civ Pro is looking for Big Issues, and if you miss the ones he's looking for, he'll remain unimpressed at any other ones you think you might have found. And Prof. Crim wants -- go figure! -- conclusory statements. "I don't want to hear that it's a jury question," he says. "You be the jury. You be the judge. You tell me."

Four different clients, four completely different styles, ten days, intense production pressure. I concluded to my husband: "This is the hardest consulting gig I've ever done."

perfecting my study habits, again

Just finished another torts practice exam, and I've got a headache. I'm not sure if it's the lighting in this room (which I hope it is) or something else going awry with my laptop screen (which it damn well better not be). I'll be sure to pack the Motrin for the exam.

I'm starting to feel a bit odd about law school society, starting to withdraw into my own zone. C. is organizing a number of sessions where people take practice exams in a particular class from a particular year and then get together to discuss them. I can see this being potentially useful for Crim, where there will be policy questions on which we'll actually be able to bounce ideas off each other, and possibly Contracts, where none of us is quite sure what the law actually is. But by and large, I can't really see the value of that kind of group studying. I don't care what issues other people spotted on a torts question; at best, I'd have spotted them all as well and then some, which would make the exercise a waste of my time, and at worst, they'd have spotted many more than I, which would intimidate me into a fearful froth. Again.

Plus, there's the incremental effort of going to school. The time spent commuting to town on the train (where there's no place to plug in my battery-challenged laptop) and discussing the questions could, in my view, be better spent at home just taking more practice tests. And who needs the angst of actually shlepping into the city when there's already sufficient psychological duress to go around without even leaving one's sofa?

Today was a milky gray foggy day which congealed into fat, wet, intermittent but insistent raindrops as I walked out to the 12:30 train. Someone had broken up the tent city through which the train tracks usually passed, a clutter of about three dozen pitched tents that had accumulated all semester beneath the highway overpasses. As if in protest, the occupants of the tents had re-pitched them in series along the Seventh Street sidewalk. (If you go to the Greyhound station you'll see them, but I don't recommend it, at least not without protection.) I looked out the window at the tent people, dispossessed twice over, in their sad state in this sullen gray city with my staticky seething law school at its heart, and I thought, I don't want to be here. I need to go home.

I'm not going in for any of C.'s torts reviews this weekend. Better to study alone, create my own personal mindset outside the noise, come into the exam with earplugs and then head straight over to Health Services for my massage as soon as it ends. My laptop may be giving me headaches, but my colleagues will not, at least for torts.

yet another

Yet another reason to love Professor Torts:

He breaks the curve.

He's the easiest grader in the school, and no one knows quite how he gets away with it since the curve is supposed to be mandatory schoolwide. 2Ls call him the "B-Plus King." Fully fifty percent of his torts class last year got a B+ on the exam, with another 25-30% in the A/A- range. Imagine coming in at the fortieth percentile in your class -- and earning a B+. Imagine what kind of wonderful wonderful person can bestow such a grade as a law professor.

And the #1 reason to adore Professor Torts (last in the series):

At this morning's review session, he gave the best exam advice one could ask for: "This grade has nothing to do with the kind of lawyers you'll all be. That depends on your passion, your interests, your ambition. There are excellent lawyers who got C's in law school, and *neh* ones who made A's. This? This is just a little intramural contest."

I watched him dance around the review session this morning, the last time I'll ever have him as a professor, and couldn't help but tear up at the thought of his class actually ending. I grew up timeshared between divorced parents, and I remember this feeling well from many weekends throughout my youth: No, wait!, don't go, it can't be over yet.

Even his practice tests are encouraging -- inspiring no confidence beyond that which is warranted, giving me a clear sense of what I don't yet know. I should go do more of these now, and quit sniffling.

aspirations and civ pro

"You should have done better on this," Professor Civ Pro told me today as I approached him with my marked-up practice exam. Most of the people in the room had already left, but he still kept his voice low enough that I wasn't embarrassed, but was actually almost reassured, to hear him say it. "I was reading this, like, what happened to her? Did you study?"

This should not have made me feel better, but it did. Maybe it was just the affirmation that my capabilities, such as they are, are apparent to people who interact with me, regardless of how the numbers shake down. At this point it's helpful just to hear someone imply that I have the ability to do well. I came away from the review session with a renewed sense of zeal. I wanted to go home and blitz on Civ Pro until I got it right the way he wanted it. But I've got to manage my time; Civ Pro follows Contracts and Torts, both of which require my attention first.

Poor C. had tears in her eyes for most of the day. I gave her a hug, which didn't seem to help; she's not much of a huggy person, I guess. M., with whom I didn't even get a chance to speak, also looked awfully red and puffy-faced, as did B., whom Professor Civ Pro actually teased about losing her smile. The general campus vibe was almost unbearable. "This place is full of bad juju," I concluded to my elevator companions, and then got the hell out of there.

Memo to anyone studying up on personal jurisdiction, before I move on to Torts: Gray and Feathers are the tests you apply to a long-arm statute, not Asahi. If you go off half-cocked and start applying minimum-contacts tests to statutory provisions on doing business or committing tortious acts in a state, you're, well, wrong. Principal lesson to be learned: just because you've dumped every item on your mental checklist down onto the page doesn't mean that you've actually answered the question.

Speaking of answering questions...it's time to start on the torts hypos.

[climbs onto diving board]
[holds nose]
[jumps]

excellent *rubs hands together*

Whoohoo!! They instituted this stupid policy right about the time I graduated, and now they've thankfully regained their senses.

Down with Binding Early Decision!

feedback loop

Lots of good advice incoming about avoiding the campus. Not only do I not need to wallow in the widespread panic, but I lose three hours in transit to-and-fro that would be better spent studying at home, or heck, going to the gym. I still need to do that today. Health is of inestimable importance at this point. I find that I don't have much of an appetite, but too damn bad, depressive streak, you're going to be well-fed and worked-out of my system so that I can troop through these exams unimpeded.

Here's the schedule:
Tomorrow: Review on campus for Civ Pro, going over the practice exam.
Friday: Review on campus for Torts.
Monday, 12/9: Torts exam, 8:30 am - 12:30 pm. Followed by a chair massage at 12:40, thanks be to Student Health Services.
Tuesday: Review on campus for Contracts.
Thursday: Contracts exam, 8:30 am - 11 am.
Friday: Review on campus for Civ Pro.
Monday, 12/16: Civ Pro exam, 8:30 am - 11:30 am.
Wednesday: Professor Crim holds all-day office hours rather than a review session.
Thursday: Crim exam, 8:30 am - 12:30 pm.

As for discussing exams after they're over, this came up last week as C., K. and I took a break from outlining to dine on Thanksgiving leftovers. We all agreed that going over our answers together would do nothing except ruin our Christmas vacations, so we all swore on the cranberry sauce not to discuss a single exam after it had ended. There's too much else to discuss, anyway...like the next exam, or, in the case of Crim, the fact that exams are actually over.

today's horoscope

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

If anyone can meet a goal at this time, it's you. An expert in making plans and following them to the letter, you are ready to go all out this time. You've got your eyes on the finish line already. If you can keep them there, you'll outstrip the competition before you know it. Don't waste any time on self-doubt or second-guessing. You can do this.

down with the sickness

...the end begins...

People have been vanishing from class over the course of the past two abbreviated weeks. I'd like to chalk it up to Thanksgiving-related travel plans, except that the folks whose absence I've noticed are all locals. And then, when they periodically rematerialize to collect class notes, they have stories not of travel but of incredible depression. S., whom I long ago caught in an elevator wearing sunglasses, pondered suicide in between bouts of hysterical sobbing last week. H., to whom I really had no business ranting last month, hasn't been seen much since then. Wow, I think to myself, and then feel guilty when the next thought in the sequence arrives: Thank goodness that's not me. I'm still OK. I'm not there yet.

But I'm getting there, it seems.

Prof. Civ Pro belatedly handed back our practice exams, and while I'm not precisely at the fiftieth percentile, I could spit and hit it without effort. The energetic optimist in me (which I'd like to believe is my actual personality) looks at this and says, good, go to the review session on Thursday where he'll be discussing this question and figure out exactly what's missing, then practice practice practice until you can nail his formula in your sleep. But then the depressive pessimist voices (which I'm really hoping are just a product of school, and not me, not really) start the singsong chant: you'll never make it, you'll never get out, this is where you are, smack in the middle, with no reason to be there and no way of moving up.

Shut up, damn things, shut up shut up shut up!!!

Worse yet, or maybe better yet, it seems as though I'm hardly alone. S. told me that M. and J., two excellently-qualified people in our section, both got reamed on the practice test as well. It's alchemy, voodoo, just a matter of moving on past this test and working harder and pegging exactly what Professor Civ Pro wants in an answer, not what we in our creative capacities might consider to be an elegant approach. We have no business being creative here. We are inside the machine, and we must be well-oiled gears, cookie cutters, taking no liberties and simply stamping out the desired product every time.

"I am going to vomit," said C., and then said it again for good measure. Five minutes later she decided it bore repeating: "I am seriously going to vomit."

"You know," said K., who isn't even in our Civ Pro section, "I think I'm going to take a semester off. Just take some time and have a baby."

"I am so with you," I said. "I need a good cathartic cry right about now."

I haven't had one yet, but am about to head over to K.'s house for an evening of hopefully-cathartic contracts outlining in advance of a practice-exam-taking session that C. is organizing for tomorrow. "I think I need to drink more than I need to outline at this point," I moped.

"We'll drink, don't worry," K. replied.

I'm wrong, of course; I need to outline way more than I need to drink. But one glass of wine has already helped, and if K. opens a bottle right as I'm wrestling with §2-207(2), I won't say no to a second.

Godspeed, fellow 1Ls, and may this be as bad as it ever gets.

torts ends early

To my dismay (and I'm sure I'm not alone in being dismayed), Professor Torts had to cancel our last class today.

The good news is that strict liability won't be on the exam. The bad news is that he's off at a "family medical emergency," the last thing any of us would wish on anyone this time of year. I feel vaguely guilty for not having briefed the strict liability cases, as though I somehow jinxed things. This was the one class that I really didn't want to end.

We shall meet again, I hope. (In the meantime there's always his review session at 9:30 on Friday morning, which hasn't yet been cancelled. Good practice not only for the exam, but for catching the 7:38 train as I'll need to do three days a week next semester.)

In other nice-people news, the Jewish Law Students Association gave me a dreidel and a bag of Hanukkah gelt even though I confessed to not being Jewish. Now that's the holiday spirit!

good profs

If I haven't yet gushed about Professor Civ Pro, now is as good a time as any.

He's a tough cookie, to be sure. You don't show up to his class unprepared unless you're in a mood to have your ass handed to you. No matter how much time you spent on your brief, he's sure to ask you something that you hadn't succeeded in teasing out of the baroque prose of the Supreme Court.

But he gets you there. In his class, more than in any other, I've fallen into Prof. Cooper's feared trap of verbatim stenographer-style notetaking. But in this class, it's a virtue. As I whittle my notes down into a working outline, I am astonished at how amazingly thorough Prof. Civ Pro has been, from the beginning. Take a faithful set of notes from his class, shake them, and a tremendous outline falls neatly and almost effortlessly into place.

(Of course, the thing is long as hell. Thoroughness does take up lots of space.)

It just figures, of course, that Civ Pro is my one closed-book exam, which probably means that the beautiful complete outline will likely undergo a good deal more whittling before it's actually useful as a memorization tool. Still, it helps to have such excellent raw material to work with, particularly after a day spent on Contracts wishing I had anything close...

today's horoscope

The perfect outlining horoscope!

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

Some people take knowledge personally. To you it's a tool or commodity. You have a firm grip on the basics. You surf complexity with ease, shooting the curl of beautifully objective waves. With your navigation, any project will run smoothly. You don't even have to do any of the work unless, of course, you want to. Sometimes it's fun to see what others are thinking and what they intend to do about it. There's no hurry with this. You have plenty of time to see how it all turns out. And if anything needs a little tweaking, you're there to do it.

resolution

Well, after much angst, I have six pages of something that looks -- at least to the untrained eye -- like a workable Contracts outline.

*disbelief*

The thing is cobbled together from Gilberts, two or three different outlines composed by 1Ls from other years and other schools, and, to a minuscule extent, class notes. I'm not sure how much of it I trust; it has a very borrowed, these-are-someone-else's-thoughts feel to it. Then again, I'm not sure how confident I could ever be in an outline based on my actual experience in Contracts class this semester, which has devolved into a twice-weekly experiment in preventing myself from falling into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter. This outline may contain someone else's rules, but at least it contains rules at all.

At least I've theoretically moved past the where-to-begin panic of last week's discussion group. Now I know where to begin, and am left with the much more conventional quandary of where to go from there.

perfecting my study habits

My two outlining buddies, C. and K., are both compulsive formatters. They will spend fifteen minutes playing with tables and bullets and fancy graphs in Microsoft Word and wind up with a gorgeous study aid for mistake of fact or gradation of homicide.

I have the opposite problem: my outlines are ugly ducklings. But the up shot of actually finishing them (which I'm starting to do) is that now I've got the fun part ahead of me. I have a sufficiently-condensed mess of information which I can now pretty up and decorate to my heart's content. And it will actually count as studying.

It's tempting to go back to my Torts outline, which is complete as of yesterday, and start the beautification process. But I can't fall into the trap yet. I still have three more outlines to finish by the end of the week. Professor Crim's advice, if a bit harshly phrased, is starting to feel right to me. Outlining isn't really the point. You'll need one in the exam to make sure you don't miss a rule, but the real skill being tested here is issue spotting.

I've been practicing issue spotting. My husband, who's normally tremendously supportive of my law school efforts, made an atrocious tactical error on Thursday: he bought a DVD player, on which we can now watch the director's cut of the Lord of the Rings. He knows my weaknesses well. I had to flee to K.'s place yesterday to avoid being sucked in entirely by the running commentaries of the writers, the cast, the production staff.

Anyways, in the movie itself (which is now four hours long), I pegged solicitation, conspiracy, trespass to land, larceny, attempted murder, assault, trespass to chattel, implied-in-fact contract, false imprisonment, battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, promissory estoppel, and negligence out the wazoo. If I watch it again (which would be the eighth full viewing for me), I could probably find more.

But not now. Outlines first, issue spotting later this week.

today's quote

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction. --Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

breaktime

Off for a much-needed stay at a cute B&B in Half Moon Bay.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

success?

I'm always afraid of saying things like this, since I'm superstitious about jinxing myself, but it appears that my laptop issues have been resolved.

I found -- miracle! -- an eBay seller who just happened to live in San Jose and who just happened to be selling the exact floppy drive that had broken in my Sony a few weeks ago. No one had bid on it, so the Buy It Now option was still available. Sony's parts hotline had wanted $170 for the item (which is a substantial portion of the resale value of the entire machine at this point); this guy was asking $20. He had himself a deal.

Row and I popped down to SJ this morning to drop off the $20 and pick up the drive. Row's now at an airport hotel watching American daytime television and indulging in a pint of Chunky Monkey (unavailable in Australia) before her flight home tomorrow; meanwhile, with my husband's help, I got the drive working and managed to validate my version of SofTest.

Mild panic attack upon seeing the dialog box at the SofTest launch: "Please wait for proctor to announce that you may begin," complete with little red flashing STOP signs. My God, this is for real. I'm going to be taking exams with this.

The good news is, it now seems that I can.

damn thief

No sign of my lotions at the lost and found. Row says to give them up for gone. I just have difficulty letting go of these things, I guess.

Row came along to Crim today and had a fantastic time (at least I'm pretty sure she wasn't kidding when she said so). She didn't bother with Civ Pro, though, which was probably wise. She's also had a ball discovering all of the things one can eat in California that are unavailable, or at least exceedingly difficult to find, in Australia, including burritos, banh mi, pupusas, and -- [at this point I realize I can't move to Australia until they figure this one out] -- pomegranates. The two of us came home from The City today and tucked into a pair of pomegranates with all the fervor and delight of kids licking the bowl after Mom made cookies.

It is slowly dawning on me: I have five days without classes. All the time I haven't had to outline up until now, I suddenly have. I can do this. I can knuckle down in the next few days, polish off Torts, accomplish something similar in Civ Pro and Crim, and -- thanks be to Gilberts -- actually pull together a sensible enough Contracts outline to be able to move on to the issue spotting phase without the inevitable panic that follows from hitting a clear issue and blanking on the rule.

I love vacation. I wouldn't have thought that I'd look forward to it as an opportunity to work, but ahhh, what a relief to finally have a chance to just get done what I need to do without having to fight through the cluttered mess of my routine school schedule!

the lotion thief strikes

Argh, after such a lovely weekendlong break from studying (badly needed, if ill-affordable at this point) I had to go back to school and have hot coffee spilled on the lap of my faith in humanity.

I am rather more paranoid than the average person about theft. I don't like to wear clothes or jewelry that draw attention to themselves (with the exception of my engagement ring and wedding band, but I wear them all the time on principle). I enjoy the fact that my laptop is so old and obsolete, it would hardly matter if the thing were to be stolen. I try to have as little on me as possible to make taking any of my possessions worth someone's while.

Today I picked up an order of two Body Shop fruit-scented lotion gift sets I'd purchased for two young female cousins who enjoy that sort of thing. Only one of these fit in my pullman bag on top of my Monday books. The other I carried under my arm through most of the day. The problem arose when I set it down near a public computer, then got up and walked away without remembering to pick the thing up.

When I realized this, about fifteen minutes later, I rushed back to the computer...and it was gone.

"Are you looking for a box of lotion?" someone asked me.

"Yeah," I said.

"It was here a minute ago," she told me. "This other woman asked me if it was mine, and I said no, and she took it."

We ran all over the building in search of this woman, tall, orangeish hair, red and gray pullman bag. No sign of her. "She could have gone anywhere," the witness shrugged in resignation.

I scrawled a plea on the back of a mail-drop handout and thumbtacked it above the computer, begging whoever found the lotions to return them to me with no questions asked. Something may still come of this; in the meantime I'm left to stew over the fact that I'm out thirty bucks, still owe one of my cousins a Christmas present, and can't trust my fellow students for fifteen goddamned minutes.

Maybe it's just the pre-exam crescendo, breaking down our senses of propriety and making lawless freaks of us all...

there's an Aussie in the house

Blogging will be sparse for the time being while husband and I entertain a houseguest from Australia.

today's horoscope

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

There are a lot of issues you have been avoiding, but today you finally have the courage to face even your biggest fears. A great change is at work in your life, although the source and direction of which may not be immediately obvious. Break down the barriers that keep you from seeing in all directions. Ask an older friend or relative for support and guidance. Their past experiences light the way for you.

~ extra hugs to Don ~

contracts panic, assuaged

After a phone conversation of nearly two hours with my 3L cousin, and a glass or two of wine inter alia, I'm feeling much better.

Don is one of those incredibly laid-back people to whom nerves are completely alien. He did freak out during his first year -- apparently it's an unavoidable stage in the obstacle course, even for the mellowest among us -- but looks back on it now with some of the best advice I've been hearing lately.

"Everyone will study their asses off," said he. "Everyone will walk into the test knowing everything. And then you will be absolutely amazed at how they'll just panic, they'll freak, they'll lose it. And you won't."

"Sure about that?" I said, thinking of the howling swirl of ghosts chanting that effort doesn't matter and grades are chaotic and luck is fickle at best.

"Listen," he said, "you walk into that room and you damn well better be smiling. Big fat smile on your face. You better go in smiling and come out laughing."

"Mmmmm."

"They should send sociologists in to law school exams," he said. "Because you're going to look back at all these classes and see that they're easy shit. But everyone in the room is going to freak, even though this shit's so goddamned easy, because they're so scared about grades. And they're going to blow it, even though it's easy. But you can do this, it's so easy. If I could bet, I'd put money on you."

I came away feeling much better than I had this morning...and having exacted a promise from my cousin to teach me contracts in the next two weeks.

the worst ends

Despite my nasty experience in discussion group, I couldn't help but notice that I was getting more and more excited all afternoon. By the time Civ Pro ended (ten minutes early, since we wrote our professor evaluations today and Professor Civ Pro was required to leave the room while we did so), I could hardly stand it any more. The buzzer finally sounded, and I squealed out loud:

THIS IS OUR LAST THURSDAY!!!

In a way that's kind of creepy; we have class tomorrow, and then two weeks consisting only of Monday and Tuesday classes, and then exams. Such a short period of time to do so much is unnerving, when you think about it, but I wasn't thinking about it. I was only thinking that I was now free from those awful awful marathon Thursdays, the worst schedule I've ever had, bar none. They're all past now. All done. Over. Gone bye-bye. I was so happy at the thought, I could hardly stop giggling.

I imagine the last half hour of my Crim exam will feel somewhat similar, and by the time it ends, I'll be tripping out of the room in near-hysterical exhausted relief.

At least, that's what I'm hoping will happen. It beats skulking out of the room in defeat as something to look forward to.

contracts panic

Today during discussion group I found myself faced with my very first practice exam for Contracts -- and turned to stone.

I was supposed to be outlining the answer, but nothing was materializing. I flailed around for the basics and scrawled on my page: Offer. Terms? Acceptance? Consideration? Option contract? Promissory estop--

"Would it help more if we just talked through it?" the discussion group leader ventured, as soon as he realized how many of us were just goggling at the page in abject panic.

"You won't believe how screwed we are," I told C. (who had skipped the exercise) afterward. "You just look at the essay and go cold. Don't even know where to begin. We have nothing. We have nothing."

"So we need to take a weekend with Gilbert's," she replied, nodding.

"Yeah," I said, "and just chant rules at each other."

Professor Contracts has distributed a packet of old exam questions with A answers. They'll obviously be useful as a gauge for this particular professor's taste in essays (CRAC or IRAC? Recite the rule or work it into the analysis? etc.), but unfortunately, as I joked to M., "I'm actually learning the law by reading them."

I feel guilty resorting to borrowed outlines at this point, but my instinct for self-preservation tells me that it's wiser than flying blind any longer.

a walking issue spotter

Medical students turn into hypochondriacs; law students alight on something like a sprained ankle like flies to honey. "Causation!" "Breach of standard of conduct!" "Duty to invitees!" etc., when in fact my injury was wholly my own fault for being a klutz and wearing shoes with half-detached heels. Ah well. I got a few stares at the granny boots, but my limp immediately explained them. I think.

I went to Professor Crim's office hours today, which were mildly discouraging. Prof. Crim hadn't previously given me the impression that he was one of those mythical nasty law professors who roll their eyes and sigh through their nostrils at 1L angst; but today, he kept a completely straight face as he told us what a waste of time all of our studying was, how little it would matter.

I still don't think he was being malicious about it -- he did give some pointers on the types of responses he preferred to policy questions -- but it just seemed peculiarly insensitive, to my unjaundiced eye, of a professor with so much experience teaching first-year classes to disparage all the work we're doing to prepare for his exam. I don't know. Maybe I'm just so stuck inside the machine at this point that everything seems oppressive.

Still, it seemed to me that Prof. Crim (who has shown remarkable sensitivity in class discussion) was capable of being much kinder to our efforts. Maybe he was just having a bad day, or was getting fed up with panicky 1Ls haranguing him for magic exam secrets. Or maybe he's a different kind of hardcore, and this is the first we're seeing of it.

As we walked down to MUNI, H. told me even more discouraging stories. "Prof. Crim told me yesterday that you can't really change anything at this point," he said glumly. "You either get it or you don't. It's like it's all preordained."

"Then why the hell are we here?" I groaned. "How can they, on one hand, set up the system so that the assignment of numbers is completely arbitrary and uncorrelated to actual effort, and then on the other hand make those numbers the all-important yardstick against which we're measured in the future?"

"I don't know," H. said, slightly choking up. "I mean, I can't defend the position, it's just what he told me. I don't know. I can't argue this. It makes no sense to me. I'm sorry."

Suddenly I felt awfully guilty for ranting at H. "No, no, I'm not picking on you, it's not your fault, we're all in this pressure cooker...Did I upset you? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to..."

H. just looked at me. I looked back at him. We were in exactly the same place, but somehow that didn't help.

We ran into A. coming toward the escalators at the MUNI station, laden with grocery bags. "Progresso soup on sale for a dollar a can!" she grinned at us. "I bought as much as I could carry."

H. offered to help her carry some of it back up to her apartment. She refused. He then offered again, indicating that he'd be happy to help her eat some. She laughed and responded, "I bought as much as I could carry...no more."

Maybe that's the key to studying wisely at this point. As much as you can carry, but no more.

up with laces

Sleeping helped greatly. (Doesn't it always?)

My bum ankle is still bummed, but nowhere near as awful as yesterday evening. I bound it up this morning in an Ace bandage and tried walking: good progress, but no way was I going to wear those falling-apart old shoes that had been the proximate cause of my fall.

Turns out I didn't have to. Back in the recesses of the closet I really ought to clean out some day, I discovered a terrific boon: an old pair of lace-up granny boots that had been very stylish in 1996 and now just looked old. Fashion plate that I am these days, I could have cared less. They laced up around my Ace bandage and supported my ankle, and if they clash with my jeans and red wool sweater, so be it. At least I can walk again!

owwwww

Phone rang. Got up to answer it, hop-hobbled across living room. It was husband, checking on me. Told him I was OK. Returned to couch and realized that the effort of fetching the phone had left me no longer OK, catching my breath in agony, near tears. Took the damn thing this long to start hurting for real.

Moving around is very unwise right now.

down she goes

I was a remarkably clumsy kid. Even as late as college I retained the ability to spontaneously fall out of an otherwise-motionless chair. It's no accident that the only exercise machines I use at the gym are ones where my limbs are constrained to confined paths of motion. I can, and do, stumble over thin air if given the opportunity.

Today I very stupidly hurt myself, walking to the elevators from Crim. The class topic of discussion had been battered woman syndrome as a potential justification defense in homicide cases, and M., who sits behind me, was ranting on about how unfair it was to assume that a man was automatically more physically powerful than a woman.

"Come on," I told him, "if you and I met up in a dark alley you could easily take me out."

"I'm a bad point of reference." (M. is a rather buff guy with training in karate, it turns out.) "But take H., for example."

H., who is a good deal smaller in build than M., happened to be walking by at the moment. "Take me?"

"I could take you," I grinned threateningly.

"Why would you want to do that?" H. is a hugger, not a fighter.

"She'd hug you to death first," chimed in C.

I reached out toward H., pretending to punch him in the shoulder blades. "Bam. Bam. I'm committing battery on you," I joked.

"More like assault--"

And then, for no reason whatsoever, my childhood clumsiness reasserted itself. I swear I was standing still, and yet I managed to trip myself up and fall forward onto my right knee, bending my left ankle double in the process. My trusty pullman bag tipped over and landed next to me with a clatter of handle.

"Are you all right?" I. and F. were immediately there, helping me up.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I said, brushing off my knee, "the floor must be wet here or something." I stood back up and immediately felt a wash of nausea. Many synapses were telling me not to put any weight on my left ankle. It didn't hurt any worse than a stubbed toe (if you can imagine stubbing your ankle), but the rest of my nervous system seemed to be overreacting. Whenever my body expresses itself like this, usually it doesn't mean good news.

I rode the elevator up to the mezzanine and settled in to read my Civ Pro in the hour before class, propping my left ankle up on a chair. By the time I'd made it through York and Byrd, though, the thing had started to puff up like a pastry.

I tolerated it through Civ Pro, then realized afterward that I was limping for real. Gotta get home, I told myself, gotta get some ice. I hobbled down the nonfunctioning escalator at Civic Center and noticed, as I waited for MUNI, that I could actually feel it swelling more.

Unluckily, the 3:30 Caltrain featured one of those conductors who tsks at you -- "No feet on seats! no feet on seats!"