Sua SponteMy law school odyssey: the ongoing narrative.
Notice how this year's 1Ls are so much more chill than we were? Law books and caution tossed to the wind, AmbImb is headed to Vegas. Transmogriflaw is going river rafting. Biting Tongue is headed up to the lake. DitzyGenius is just kicking back with the TV. And they're all laughing at the people who seem as stressed out as I recall being at this point.
You guys will do *so* much better than I did on December exams!
Jeremy responds (hi, Jeremy!) to my ramblings of yesterday.
Jeremy, you should know, is a terrifically funny guy, and seems very much like the type of person with whom I would have been great friends, had we ever managed to be in the same place at the same time (not counting the blogosphere). I treasured folks like this in college, people who kept their own time and their own rhythm and were more than happy to make you laugh, kidnap you from your twenty-page paper for an enforced study break, and otherwise obliterate a bad mood or redeem a lousy day.
I know no one like him in law school, and the more of him I read, the more I think I understand why. He says, "I don't think law school is, or at least needs to be, "designed to change you as a person." It's school. It's teaching you stuff. Some knowledge, some skills. It's school. Not POW camp." It must be nice to go to Jeremy's school if this is truly the culture there. I have a strict policy of not talking trash about my school on Sua Sponte, but I can safely say this: no one in my class would describe my school as a place that's simply there to teach you some knowledge, some skills, any more than a lemon reamer is designed to gently massage the fruit.
Lesson to learn from this: never, never underestimate the force of law school culture. Pay attention to culture when you're choosing a law school. It's every bit as important as the professors' pedigrees, if not more so: it will dictate much of how you feel for the next few months, and how you come away from them. If you're fortunate, you'll find yourself in a situation like Jeremy's, where your experience is as simple and enjoyable as just going to school.
I may be so late to this party that everyone else has already left (wouldn't be the first time in my life), but even if that's so, I'm happy to play cleanup crew (ditto).
There has been much giving of law-school-related advice among the blawgs, both recent and older. On one hand, I'm tempted to join in; ever since my grades this semester didn't suck, I get the sense that I should puff up like a bull pigeon and share the magical secrets of my success with the craving eyes of the next generation of 1Ls. But on the other hand, everyone remembers the first rule of LSAT short-answer problems: correlation != causality. The magical secrets of my success, if I could think of any, might be entirely coincidental. I wouldn't know. Don't trust me if I say otherwise.
That said, I can at least provide some service to ye little grasshoppers: having gone through the psychological equivalent of the Ironman Triathlon followed by the 24 Heures du Mans and then the Iditarod for good measure, I can at least compare the advice other people give to the experience I actually had. Much good may it do you.
1. Doing What Other People Tell You
Garrett says: "Really, it's all a load of manure (my advice included)...even if you ask the ten top students in the class, you'll probably get about ten different answers. Reject slavish conformity to other people's lives, whether they are successes or failures."
Waddling Thunder says: "Jeremy has one method. I have a different one. I’m sure we both were equally prepared for exams at the end. And you, prospective 1L, are going to need to develop your own system as well, picking and choosing from what people before you have done."
JCA responds: Quite true. I tried to do the things you're Supposed To Do in order to get Those Grades, and wound up doing miserably. Correlation or causality? I changed this behavior second semester, and things got better. A one-point trend? Maybe. But I'll stick by my second-semester methods. It may feel grossly foreign to you, trying to fly blind when this is so different from what you've done before. But even though it might hurt like hell to break your own mold, doing so might be the only thing that works for you.
2. Talking in Class
Alice says: "Don't be the pompous windbag who speaks just to hear himself talk. Nobody likes that guy. Many law students operate under the conceit that they will be the one the professor bestows the slight nudge for class participation come grade time. Doesn't happen."
Garrett says: "Shut Yo' Trap. [F]or some reason all the people who are huge gunners early all end up doing badly. (You won't hear them talking much second semester)."
JCA responds: If you go to a school like mine, this won't be an issue. We had no gunners -- they were eviscerated within the first week. Professors had no truck with the long-winded; if your point wasn't made after fifteen seconds, you were coldly interrupted midsentence by the prof either cutting you down or calling on someone else. And those were the nice professors. The stricter ones maintained an obedient silence in their classrooms that bordered on monastic. "Browbeaten" is almost too charitable an adjective for my section, round about last October.
There were a few people who routinely said something in discussion, myself included, but none of us was ever permitted to indulge in the diarrhea-of-the-mouth that apparently goes unpunished elsewhere. If you had more than one thing to say, you took your little self to office hours and waited in line for your fifteen minutes' facetime with the professor. This, incidentally, was far more valuable to me than any in-class talking: you avoided all risk of public embarrassment at the hands of a professor who might mock your misunderstanding, and the professor would be approachable, personable, and actually interested in answering your question. Even if you feel you completely understand everything that's going on in the class (warning: when I felt this way, I was only ever mistaken), office hours bonding is essential if you're ever going need a letter of recommendation; it's tasteless to attempt to bond with your professor by talking in class, and ineffective to crowd up around the podium at the end of the hour. Go to office hours, talk there, and all will be well.
3. Balancing School and Life
Dodd says: "Make sure you always have a completely non-law-related book to read. [...] Schedule time to read said books (I read myself to sleep every night, so it was easy to maintain my reading in law school)."
Alice says: "Don't be the recluse. If the only place people ever see you is in the library, you're not doing too well on the social front."
JCA responds: First a bit of background. In the fall and early winter of 1998, I fancied myself a multitasker: I was taking four classes in graduate school, writing a weekly newspaper column, and planning my wedding in New York while working a full-time job that had me spending four days a week in Atlanta and Fridays in Milwaukee.
Turns out, I knew nothing from time management. Nothing. I learned the meaning of time management this year.
I guarantee that you will have an easier time of things if you (a) are single, (b) live within forty miles of your school, or (c) both. But according to the aforecited worthies (who, I assume, are unmarried and live(d) on or near campus), it's a challenge even so to make sure that you're spending enough time on your own needs when school seems to suck up every waking moment of your life. Time management is key. My solution was to reserve a day (and then an afternoon...and then a few hours...but always some time) for Personal Stuff. Force yourself to take time away from schoolwork, even if you feel you can ill afford it. Even if you only use the personal time to vent, eat bonbons, get drunk and feel sorry for yourself, at least that's therapeutic. School is quicksand. If you sink into it completely, you will suffocate. You will.
4. Urban Legends about Law School
Garrett says to read The Bramble Bush.
Dodd says to watch The Paper Chase.
JCA responds: I know nothing of any of this. I never read any books about law school, nor saw any such movies (not even Legally Blonde, unless you count it being the inflight movie once on a flight where I didn't have headphones). I came into law school with no expectations. I imagine it would have hurt even worse if I had.
Don't buy into the urban legends. You will have your own experience in school, and no one else's. See #1 above.
5. Metamorphosis
Alice says: "Don't be "the law student". [...] Don't pick arguments with your friends just because you're in law school or become a law zombie."
Dodd says: "Try and remember that people who aren't law students will find you intensely boring for at least the duration of your first year. Please resist the urge to tell them about all the "terribly interesting cases" you read this week."
JCA responds: And don't be surprised if you find yourself at an utter loss for anything else to talk about. It's hard to invest so much of your time and energy into an experience designed to change you as a person without it having some effect on your identity. There are people, it seems, who can manage this, people who can cleanly maintain their law-school self and their external self in parallel. This skill is as mythical to me as shyness, or mathematical brilliance, or the ability not to take oneself seriously: all features that other people have, or claim to, with which I have no firsthand experience.
If you're lucky, you'll have lots of lawyer friends who find it cute that you're pupating. If you're extremely lucky, you'll have a significant other who's perfectly agreeable about sharing the experience with you, or at least tolerating the fact that you're growing antennae. Even if you're basically going it alone among a crowd of mostly nonlawyers, keep a journal or blog and do all your law-school talking there. You will need to get it out of your system somehow, and there will be things that you will have no desire to share with your schoolmates.
6. How to Study for Exams
Jeremy says not to bother outlining the way you're told to, but rather, collect an array of study materials that roughly maps to your professor's syllabus and make your study aids from those. (He says a lot of things about this, actually; it's a long post.)
Waddling Thunder says to limit yourself to one commercial supplement, do a quickie outline, then blitz on practice exams: first from other schools, then from yours.
Alice says: "Don't join a study group. They are usually time-wasters. There is always at least one person who expects a free ride (i.e., a copy of your outlines)."
JCA responds: More or less everyone agrees that exam prep is very much a personal thing. I swear by my Gilberts; I had little patience for any other supplements. My grades went up when I joined a study group. I also noticed a strict correlation between my highest grades and the outlines that I'd finished before the semester ended. I make big honking outlines, then cook them down to issue-spotting checklists and recurring-problem-resolution flowcharts. I also had to make sure that every single case mentioned in class, even the note cases, was duly integrated into the master outline; not doing this killed me in Torts, but there's no reason that it should have this effect on you.
I recommend using old outlines and old exams from your particular professor, if you can. I found that much of first year was a people exercise, learning how to track a professor's expectations. It's a game; sometimes it's a game like Mao where you're unearthing the rules as you go, but other times the rules are right there, clear in front of you. For me, this was doubly true in the classes where the professors were heavily policy-oriented. They made no secret of their views, frequently discoursing at length on something with which I couldn't disagree more. This might feel hostile during discussion, but not once you see it for what it is: they're giving you the rules. WRITE THEM DOWN. If you can talk through an exam answer with suitable eloquence, solid logic and sufficient citations, and reach the professor's conclusion of choice, you will make a friend right when you most need one. (It's not intellectually dishonest, it's not selling out, it's lawyering -- making your client's argument rather than your own.)
But that's my experience; your professors will not necessarily be anything like mine. Experiment. Play with outlines, play with supplements, play with study aids. If something is a waste of time (i.e. briefing cases once you've gotten the hang of it), quit doing it. You don't have time to waste, but you do have time enough to get things right.
And you can. You can. The one piece of actual advice that I feel I can give with certainty is this: you will learn to know yourself, learn to know your limits, and, if you can keep from shattering altogether, discover an elasticity of soul that you didn't know you had. And don't worry: the psychological stretch marks will fade. You, however, will endure.
Thanks to Waddling Thunder for discovering this excellent article on surviving a long commute.
My advice is simpler: don't drive, if you can avoid it. On a train you can at least sleep, read, or stare out the window and glaze over.
G R E E T I N G S Capricorn
Creature comforts are particularly satisfying, and you're in just the mood to appreciate them. But in the mood you're in, just about everything pleases you. As an added bonus, it seems as if others are bending over backwards trying to make things even better than they are. Examine your situation carefully. These moments are what life is all about.
"Pinch me," I told my husband over celebratory dinner at Benihana last night. "Sooner or later I'm going to have to wake up."
It is obstinately refusing to sink in, this -- this -- success of mine. I've been resigned for so long to the fact that I probably blew it that I simply can't convince myself that I didn't blow it after all. But no matter how many times I blink at the transcript, it's still there, looking just as I had hoped and dreamed and prayed it would. My incurable Torts grade from last semester, cause of so much angst and lost sleep, now sticks out like ragweed on a neatly manicured lawn. Hopefully I can spin it as an icebreaker, a conversation piece.
I should say this: Nice numbers are nice, but only part of the real victory here. First of all, these grades mean that I can now proceed more or less unhobbled on my major project of this summer (details to follow at some point), something that has been very important to me since before I began this blog. But secondly, and even more importantly, these grades dispel almost all of the wholly destructive depression and self-doubt that resulted from my miserable first semester. I had no idea who this person was, getting on this train and going to this law school and getting these grades. I knew myself, and it wasn't me.
For this reason in large part, I'm almost wishing that I'd adopted a pseudonym to sign my blog posts instead of just a string of initials. It would have been easier to look down from the narrator's foretop into the life of some semi-fictional character as she went about the business of 1L than to go through the whole mess myself. Ah well. Live and learn. My next blog, or at least the next blog I keep during a negativity-ridden time in my life, will be fully anonymous.
But I, now, finally, am regaining confidence in my own character, the nonfiction flesh-and-blood one. I'm still here, it seems. I did not completely shatter, back a few months when it sure as hell felt like I did. I'm not sure who was in my skin for most of this year, but right now, I'm pretty sure that it's me again. I'm glad. I missed her.
Epigraph:
Before my first year of law school began, I had nine Xanax in a bottle in my medicine cabinet.
My first year of law school has now ended, and I still have the same nine Xanax in the same bottle in my medicine cabinet.
Inclinata resurgit.
After a long phone conversation this morning with Adam, I lost my nerve and realized that I was no longer detached and blissful and enjoying life on the outside. I was in denial. My grades were sitting untouched on the web, and it was no longer comfortable not to know what they were. I was getting winded at the gym after five minutes because I just wasn't breathing.
"I think it's time to look," I told my husband, who's back to almost-full health but is still working from home.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm not calm anymore," I said.
I checked the schedule page, which informed me that Property still had not been posted. No matter. I logged in to the private-access system, left my mouse positioned over the Transcript link, went over to my bed and huddled down over my teddy bear as though protecting him from a hurricane.
My husband clicked the link.
Dead silence.
Dead silence.
I tried to inhale and found that I couldn't.
Then, in a neutral-pitched guttural voice, my husband said: "Your Property grade is here."
I managed a choking gasp of air.
"And you kicked ass."
I sat bolt upright; the teddy bear slumped forward in my lap. "In Property???"
"In everything."
In an instant I was clinging to his elbow, on the floor in front of my desk, jabbering breathlessly at the monitor. My Edie grade was exactly what I had prayed for it to be, on my knees by the radiator in the Abigail the night before I took the exam, solid and perfectly respectable, same as last semester's Crim grade. My Contracts grade had slipped ever so slightly from last semester, but if that's the worst effect chronic exhaustion and a panic attack could cause, I'll take it. My Civ Pro grade was the best it possibly could have been given my midterm grade, which meant that I'd aced the final beyond all hope. And Property: it was simply not possible. But there it was.
I cannot believe my luck.
"God did this," I squeaked to my husband.
"God didn't do this, you did this," pronounced my husband, who incidentally deserves mad props for coaching the hell out of me this semester.
But I've got to give credit where it's due. I learned last semester exactly how little it mattered to work one's ass off. There is no luck without work, but there is work without luck, so much work without luck. I did the work, but that in itself is meaningless except as a prerequisite. I have, quite simply, been blessed.
To everyone who supported me, everyone who sent waves my way, everyone who read my blog and posted words of encouragement and thought happy thoughts in my general direction; to every train that wasn't late, every electronic appliance in my possession that didn't break, every homeless person that didn't bother me when I walked to MUNI after dark; to every penny I found on the ground, every thread of good karma that clung to me, and particularly to the Source of all luck: thank you. thank you. thank you.
I felt so big and strong, spiking my casebooks into the bookstore's giant recycling bin last month. But I was a mere flyspeck compared to this, a disposal method that -- admit it! -- we've all dreamed of trying.
Make that six (6) simultaneously pregnant friends. Gaaaaah!
Three out of four of my grades have been posted, according to the master schedule. I still haven't looked at any of them. Think I'll just get pregnant instead. Er, I mean go to the gym.
Tonight at Il Fornaio, hubby and I ran into P. from my moot court class. She's working this summer at a local law firm and staying up the peninsula, having a nice time and settling comfortably into the nonschool lifestyle. She told me that as of this morning, all of her grades had already been posted.
"And how do you feel?" I asked her.
"Good," she said, unemphatically, but with a humble smile and a notable ring of relief in her voice.
"Good for you!" I replied, and meant it. But at the same time I worried: how far back in line am I, really?
"I can look for you to see if your grades are posted yet," my husband told me on the drive home.
"No," I said, emphatically, unrelieved. And then, five minutes later, in a much smaller voice: "I am so tired of being scared. I don't want to be scared any more."
I may just be in denial now, but I refuse to chew on that fear again for as long as I can avoid it.
Bekah nails it, again, as usual. If you don't read her blog regularly yet, I highly recommend starting.
Still no update on the master have-they-posted-those-grades-yet list. Tomorrow morning maybe there will be news.
The website featuring professor/course/date filed listings has not yet been updated with the grades filed today, a.k.a. the deadline for doing so. I could cheat and go straight to my personal report (thankfully, the school has done away with the big honking lists of grades posted publicly; now we can log in as individuals and keep our results, however ignominious, to ourselves); but that would be cheating. I'm happy to wait another day.
Google hit of the day: "options for people who fail law school."
One of my spring-semester grades has been posted, but the other three haven't. I haven't looked at the grade yet. I'm going to continue my protest against misery by postponing mine as long as possible and continuing to be happy and enjoy life until then. Incidentally, I should probably apologize for the sparseness of posting here. So it goes when I'm otherwise occupied enjoying life.
Look what Amazon.com recommended for me...
In case anyone is wondering, no, my grades still have not been posted. Monday the ninth is the deadline. I don't really mind waiting, to tell the truth. Right now, things could still go really, really well.
On a slightly tangential note, does anyone know when the Michigan slip opinion is due out? Any day now, right?
Yet another of my pals has just gone pregnant, leaving me with a grand total of 5 women friends simultaneously in the family way. I'd conjecture as to the contents of the water except that these ladies live all over the country. Maybe 'tis just the season.
That was one good thing about law school -- the distraction value. Suddenly I'm seized with a last-minute urge to take that copyright summer class. Yes, the same one I decided not to take last week. It's so frustrating not to be able to stick to a decision! But things just keep rebalancing...
CON: The class isn't cheap.
PRO: We can afford it.
CON: It's law school again, and I could use some time off.
PRO: If I get too far out of the groove I may never go back.
CON: I can just take it at my own law school next year.
PRO: It'll help me for September on-campus interviewing to have some IP coursework under my belt.
CON: But am I even going to bother with September on-campus interviewing, with all my time caught up between Moot Court and whatever journal I'm on?
CON: It's an evening class, but the exam is on a morning when I'm supposed to be working by the judge.
PRO: The grade doesn't have to count toward my GPA if I don't want it to.
CON: Today is the first class meeting and it might be too late for me to hop on the bus anyway.
PRO: There might still be room in the class, and the university is unlikely to say no to my money.
Spinning wheels...got to go round...
Back on duty: this time, rather than grinding away at the same old grind, I'm playing nursemaid to my convalescing husband (he's so cute when he convalesces). Many people say that untimely biological-clock-type urges are best addressed by getting a puppy. I personally prefer mothering someone who's only just dopey enough to still appreciate it.
Besides, our landlady wouldn't allow a dog.
Howling aloud with laughter and clapping my hands: Justice Bedsworth's May column (okay, I'm a bit late on the uptake) includes a discussion of my first El-Dubyar memo topic. Memories!
Life on the outside is beautiful. You can spend all morning writing, in your jammies (note to self: must find summer-weight jammies), finally get to the gym at 3 pm, and then, on the way home, pick up your dry cleaning and get your second manicure in as many weeks. I'm still in search of the ideal manicurist; the one who did my nails in Florida airbrushed the white tips, but failed to properly address the cuticles, while the one here did a terrific job on the cuticles -- as well as patching my thumbnail, cracked at the gym -- but didn't quite understand that the point of a French manicure is to give the illusion of long and elegant nails. She painted half of each nail stark white. "A clown manicure," I remarked to my car.
I feel so spoiled. I can complain about manicures! I can get my clothes dry cleaned! I can return home from a workout and a manicure and indulge myself in a snackfest of edamame, strawberries the size of apples, and three-quarters of a bottle of Sekt, German champagne from Trader Joe's, while listening to Alanis Morrissette MP3s and pretending to write some more. I've decided not to take either of the eligible summer classes at the local law school. Instead, I'm going to have an agent-ready manuscript by the time my judicial externship starts at the end of June. Or maybe not. But I'll be close to one. Enough for a book proposal, anyways. Heck, I've got enough for a book proposal already just in this blog.
...yeah.
There is a page on my school's website that lists the classes for which grades have already been posted, by date. I found this page almost by accident, and now it tickles to think about it.
But I'm not going to check it today. Or tomorrow. Or anytime before Monday at least. The deadline for posting grades is June 9, and I don't need to think about them until then. And won't. Won't.
I refuse to worry. I'm having too much fun not worrying.
I did it! I managed to go a whole week without blogging. When I wasn't out at the barn, I was in here working on that law review competition (about which I have a great many uncomplimentary things to say, none of which should be publicly attributed to me) or out in the great room falling asleep on the couch. In fact, I fell asleep at the barn a few times too. It's tough not to when it's 96 degrees out and 94% humidity. No matter how much water you force yourself to drink, you're basically stuck in heat-exhaustion mode unless you live here. I'm not sure how Floridians do it. My mother is twice my age and flits about the barn with an almost manic energy, hauling manure with the same gusto with which she rides her horse Ernie. And I can barely hold my head up to watch. 'Course, maybe it's also the semester's stress draining out from me and leaving me limp.
"You're decompressing," Mom tells me when I complain that I'm still, for some stupid reason, having nightmares about my Contracts exam. Not the grade, the exam itself. I dreamed once that I showed up to take the exam but had already sold back my casebook and couldn't find my outline. Another time I was running through the classroom building, desperately in search of the exam room, which was on a different floor every time I checked.
The more I think about it, the less likely I am to take a full class this summer. I have two realistic options at our local law school: Copyright, which interests me and may never fit my schedule during the year, and Crim Pro, which is a bar course for which I'd love to get a grade that didn't count towards my GPA. And yet, based on how much fun it was to stick myself to the writing competition, I think I might just be better off not forcing myself to do any more of that kind of work this summer. Of course, this may change a week from now when the registration deadline approaches.
I'm off to Maryland this afternoon, where it is presumably cooler, to attend a Bat Mitzvah. Blogging should resume apace by Tuesday, when I return home to the other coast. Happy Memorial Day!
G R E E T I N G S Capricorn
This is the day you get to take stock of what you've been working toward. When you go over the checklist, you are absolutely delighted to learn that everything you hoped for is starting to come true. If you're in the mood to celebrate, seek out the people who can really understand what all this means to you. The time has come to look back at your hardships and laugh at them. It's only a matter of time before the whole world knows your value.
Just got home from a special Wednesday night premiere of the Matrix. When it's past midnight Eastern time, folks, it's past midnight everywhere as far as movies are concerned. Ahh, California!
Go see it. I recommend two margaritas beforehand.
I am high, drunk, spaced-out on empty expanses of time unburdened by responsibility. "I don't have to do anything," I gushed to my husband this morning. "I can do whatever I want."
"Could you clean the chinchilla cage, then?" he said.
I probably should clean the chinchilla cage. In fact, my to-do list takes up almost a full page in my scratchbook. But none of it's pressing, nothing's a burden, all of it can wait as long as I feel like. (Except the law review writing competition, of course, but that doesn't even start until Friday anyway.) I could clean the chinchilla cage, take down the trash, do the laundry, clean out my inbox and book some more travel plans and organize all the bank statements...or I could put it all off with impunity.
Freedom is juicy like a plum.
I went to the gym this morning, and round about 300 calories when I felt myself getting tired, I realized with a grin that I didn't have to push myself. No more how-much-can-you-stand-it endurance testing; I now know exactly how much I can stand. I stepped off the elliptical trainer and practically skipped back out to my car. Ah, the load off! The load off!
There is nothing I have to do now, but so much I can do. The gym advertised a kickboxing class, and I thought: I can take kickboxing! There is so much I can take! Kickboxing, aikido, tai chi, hatha Yoga. Cello lessons again. Voice lessons again. Latin, Japanese, Arabic. Dressage riding. Poetry seminars. Crim Pro or Copyright summer courses, if I feel like it. Anything, if I feel like it.
When did my life become such a treasure? Suddenly it's summer, and California is beautiful: not just Mendocino, but even the normally-dingy part where I live. The sun is brilliant, the weather is clear and warming up, and I have time, to do errands and drink pearl tea and go shopping. I need something springy and dressy anyway, for the bat mitzvah in DC I'll be attending a week from Saturday. I can drift around our terrific local open-air mall, wander into Bloomingdale's or Ann Taylor or Talbots, and just gaze at what they're offering this season. No pressure, no rush. No commitments. Well, one: I promised my car that I'd get her washed today. She hasn't had a bath since going offroading in Mendocino in March, and she's earned one.
I owe debts of gratitude to so many of my steadfast chattels that could easily have sputtered, died, and screwed me over, but didn't. My car reliably trundled me to the train station such that I never missed my train, and on more than one occasion took me all the way to The City, bless her. The appliances in my apartment kindly remained fully functional throughout the semester. But the MVP has got to be my venerable old Sony laptop, which survived floppy drive issues, a burnt-out pixel that has turned permanently blue, and interminable kicking-about in my pullman bag as my indispensable (yes, 19(b) indispensable) sidekick through two of the nastiest semesters any inanimate object (or person) should ever have to suffer. I used to want to upgrade; now I'm wondering how much longer I can make this baby last.
Speaking of which, why am I still sitting here typing? I have time not to type. It's sunny and breezy and I'm getting a facial this afternoon. Salute!
First:
THANK YOU.
Second:
It's done.
It's done.
It's done.
It's over.
"It's over," the proctor told us at noon. "You can cheer now." We all blinked stupidly at her for a few seconds, until B. shouted out: "Way to go, Section 5!" And that did it. We gave ourselves a round of applause.
"I have never felt so bad handing in an exam," R. told me.
"That just sucked," I agreed. I have no idea how it went. Thanks in no small part to the influx of positive energy, at least last night's panic didn't get in my way; still, I haven't a clue how many issues I missed, and have less than no desire to wonder at this point.
"Let's do one last group lunch," suggested J. from my study group.
"Oooh, yeah," I said. "But first let me dump my books."
After each exam, I jettisoned the casebook and supplements from that course in my basement locker. I now went down to reclaim this stack of literature, realizing as I did that I was leaving my locker completely empty. On a whim, I took my lock off and clamped it onto my borrowed-from-husband backpack. If the news comes back bad, I'm prepared...and if it comes back good, I'm prepared. And if it comes back neither, the lock will still be handy come August.
"That book is worth nothing," the bookstore buyback guy told me, looking down his nose at Civil Procedure in California. "I knew it!" I hollered back. He hardly flinched. I was a bit wild-eyed by then, but didn't realize quite *how* wild-eyed until the guy got to my Contracts casebook. "We're not taking this," he told me, handing me back my casebook. "Yes you are," I said, pushing the book back towards him. "No," he insisted, handing it back to me again and nodding towards a large mail cart to our left which contained a goodly number of abandoned casebooks.
"Ah," I said, and took aim. The gusto with which I flung my casebook into the cart prompted S. and I., behind me in line, to giggle. I grinned in some satisfaction, and when the bookstore wouldn't buy my Restatement, I spun around and slam-dunked it into the mail cart. This time S. and I. flinched at the look on my face, which had gone beyond wild-eyed to furious. "Bit of pent-up aggression there?" S. teased me. "You have no idea," I told him.
Everything on my law shelf (minus my Gilberts supplements and Glannon on Civ Pro, which I'm keeping since they could be useful some day), cashed in, amounted to $83. As far as expectation damages go, that's pretty piss-poor. Still, it was money in my pocket as I ventured back out into the astonishing sunlight.
We lunched at Chevy's and toasted with a pitcher of margaritas: "Here's to the best study group in Section 5," I pronounced, "long may we litigate!" We polished off another pitcher before disbanding to go our separate ways, promising to stay in touch over the summer. I still don't think any of them read my blog. That's probably OK.
I meandered down to MUNI, popped in my last token, and got on the N-Judah as usual...except that, instead of heading towards Caltrain, I rode the outbound line. Nearly an hour later, I was crossing a road called La Playa to find myself face to face with the Pacific Ocean.
DANGEROUS WAVES! read a sign.
Don't go in the water, Bill Logan had warned me. It's dangerous at Ocean Beach.
But it wasn't; it was the serenest I'd ever seen the otherwise-misnamed Pacific. Rather than crashing in one after another, the waves faded in and out over each other in no real succession, glassing over large stretches of smooth muddy sand. Ocean-fresh fog veiled the sky and cast a quiet over the scene, much the way falling snow does. The beach was near-deserted, the tide was low. Just me, the birds, the dampered lather of the ocean and a multitude of sand dollars.
Few things are as perfect -- so round, so detailed, so delicate -- as an unbroken sand dollar. I picked up at least a dozen, and there were hundreds more that were broken but still nifty. Several large brown sea gulls watched me flirt with the thin slow-moving waves (the whole sand dollars were more likely to be down by the water than up in the dry sand), standing still and staring at me with mild interest. You look almost like an albatross, I told one of them, but you're not.
I had several miniature bottles of various things alcoholic stowed in the backpack, but wasn't inclined to do shots. Instead, I chose one: a bottle of amaro, Italian for "bitter." Bitter it was, but textured. So was law school. So was this year. I polished off the bottle and tasted the taste in my mouth for another twenty minutes. These things take time to wear off.
On the train home, for closure, I queued up The Swan. I did this for a whole damned year, I thought silently as the sunlit bay flashed by outside the windows (over on the bay side of the peninsula, it was still astonishingly sunny), and now it's over.
It's over.
It's over.
This should sink in soon.
Last night at about ten-thirty, I shut off the light in my room at the Abigail and settled back into bed. And then about the worst possible thing happened.
I had a night terror -- one of those terrifying insomniac panic attacks that I thought had stopped bothering me in college.
For at least three hours I couldn't sleep; my heart thudded in time with the really annoying bass line blasting in from a nearby room. People seemed to be stomping up and down stairs, slamming doors, yelling, coughing, and otherwise making a ruckus all around me. At midnight I had some vodka. At one-thirty I put in my earplugs and managed to release some tension by crying a little. I must have managed to doze off, only because I saw the the binder clip fall off my outline and all the pages go flying around the room (including into the toilet); by the time I pulled it back together it was apparently 9 AM and the exam had already started. This was clearly a dream, therefore I had to have been asleep. Although I couldn't tell you how much rest I actually got.
The terror never quite passed; there's still a hard thrumming nugget of it stuck right between my lungs. I'm doing my best to breathe it out.
In a few minutes I'm going to pop out my Wi-Fi card, pop in my floppy, and kick up my exam software. Contracts starts in about twenty minutes and goes for three and a half hours. It could scare me per se if I let it, even if I weren't recovering from a panic attack. Please send me all the support you can spare, for the next four hours, starting now. Thank you so much. Thank you.
It will be over so soon...
Have I mentioned what a bad idea it is to do Professor Contracts' exams while sleep-deprived? I think I want to cry.
I think it's time to take a break, go next door and check in to the Abigail.
Plugging away at practice exams on four and a half hours of sleep; since I'll be spending tonight at the Abigail and my elderly laptop doesn't run Visio 2000, I had to get all the flowcharts done before I took the train into The City this morning. I've got five, or six, or some large number of pages floating around that are proving to be reasonably helpful. I just need to get back in Professor Contracts exam mode: talk, talk, talk, just go on at length on anything, write entire paragraphs about defenses that don't apply, etc. If I can somehow retain the mojo that mysteriously graced my midterm in December, this will be the highlight of my year. Oh, Contracts, Contracts, speak to me, baby.
[sings]
Call me
Irresponsible
Call me
Unreliable
Call me
Unconscionable too
In other news, one of my friends and longtime studygroupmates seemed to be giving off a strange vibe this morning. She sat down next to me at Professor Contracts' review session, and I had an odd thought: She almost looks pregnant. But being far from trim-waisted myself, and knowing how much fun it is to be reminded of same, I thought better of saying anything.
I didn't need to. "I have some news that's not about Contracts," she told us afterward as we clustered in one of the private weenie-bin study rooms. "I have a bun in the oven."
We were all floored. I hugged her with tears in my eyes; several other studygroupmates did likewise. She's joked about dropping out of school to have a baby before; but then again, most of us (women) have. This, she tells us, was completely coincidental to any such fantasy -- it was an oops. Moreover, the dropping-out part of the plan appears to have been scrapped. "I'm not planning on taking any time off," she said, "but it does help that I don't have any finals next semester." She planned that on purpose, it turns out. Of course we all tried to plan it; but her purpose was a bit more concrete than our general distaste for exams.
Wow.
Must. Focus. Contracts, yes.
The Zone. It's the place where your second wind carries you, where you're running on nothing but momentum and adrenaline. "Why bother stopping now?" you hear yourself say. "Might as well keep going." It's a place where obsessive tendencies can all too easily thrive.
I spent an hour and a half at the gym this morning, burned 500 calories, and realized as I left that I was shivering and my skin was clammy. That's not supposed to happen.
I fear I've lost my sense of my own limitations.
Maybe that's a good thing.
About a week ago, Lexis Nexis stopped incrementing my loyalty points. Does anyone know if they plan to start back up any time before the fall semester begins?
It's finished, it's finished, it's twenty-two pages long and it feels reasonably complete. Remember when anything over twenty pages felt long? Now, with my record at 42 pages, a 22-pager impresses me by its sheer economy. This is the slimmest, most efficient outline I've done this semester. Almost makes me worry that I missed something.
Microsoft Exasperation (tm) of the moment: when, every time you save your Word document, the file size increases by another 300K or so.
Why does it do this? My Contracts outline, midway through expectation damages, is a scant twenty pages and has no excuse whatsoever for being 1.1 MB.
It is a gorgeous clear day out, with a fine fresh breeze wafting through my living room and over the couch where I am still sitting, still working. Apparently annoyed by this, Word seems to be slowing things down, fattening helpless files at random, and otherwise flirting with the idea of crashing my laptop outright -- something which would be kind of inappropriate at the moment.
Maybe it's just feeling as sulky, fed-up and petulant as I am right now.
I'm going stir crazy. Too many consecutive hours on this couch, too much Contracts left between me and the end of the outline. I'm about up to spring break, and have given up all hope of finishing the thing tonight.
The only food in our refrigerator right now is a piece of smoked mahi-mahi and two packets of instant udon. Everything else is either a drink or a condiment. Fortunately, we have no shortage of drinks. Unfortunately, I still need to work tonight.
My Chi candle has burned almost halfway down.
"Ugh - i am SO TIRED of studying," emails J. from my study group.
"I am seriously having a hard time doing anything," replies C.
"I feel I am about to anticipatorily repudiate this class," adds D.
I send out an email in response: "Glad to hear I'm not alone."
Can someone explain to me why "rescission" is spelled with a double-S? Shouldn't it be rescind --> rescision?
I'm starting to resent the fact that the law review writing competition kicks off a week from today. It's going to take every last ounce of juice I can muster to get myself keyed and focused on Contracts. I'll be lucky indeed if there's anything left afterward except brain salad, unlimited exhaustion and a hangover.
At least everyone else is in the same boat.
Ah, remember when that used to be consoling? And didn't imply that you were more screwed than you already feared?
Well, that happened.
I didn't freak out during the exam. I didn't even really freak out after the exam. But it didn't particularly help to hear C., high on a post-exam dim sum binge, remark: "In the middle of the exam I just had a moment where I thought, you know what? I'm perfectly OK with a C+ on this." Because I'm still not, even on a stomach full of dim sum.
I did what I could. I did all I could. I stayed calm, consulted the outline, consulted the checklists, and did all I could. It's out of my hands now. All that's left to do is pray, have a drink, and finally go see X-Men United. And then hunker down to four days of hard-core Contracts.
But that shouldn't be a problem. Contracts, I've done before. Edie, I'll never have to do again. Works for me.
Okay.
I've got three sweet pages of checklist, a solid outline, and plenty of time left to practice this evening. I have no further reason to freak out. Therefore, I will stop freaking out. In fact, I already have. Ipse dixit.
I'm going to go now, go and pick up a burrito and one of those little fourpacks of miniature wine bottles before I catch the northbound train. I'm going to thumb-index my outline on the way up to The City. Maybe I'll do another practice exam. Maybe I'll take a nap, if I can. I am, of course, restricted to one of those little wine bottles on the night before an exam; the remainder will stay in my locker until after Contracts. Or maybe I'll have one after the exam tomorrow, if it winds up kicking my butt. Of course, it may not. No reason to worry about it or anything.
Please think all kinds of good calm thoughts -- tropical island beaches, forests in winter, tea ceremonies and zen gardens -- in my general direction from 8:30 to noon tomorrow. Your support is extraordinarily appreciated.
Must. Fight. The Fear.
We originally had a study group date scheduled for this morning; one by one, in the wee hours of last night, people started to opt out. The sad truth was that none of us felt prepared to answer a question. I've done one since then, and am not disgusted with the result, but I'm still just so damn freaked-out about this whole deal that I'm starting to physicalize it. Neck muscles like coaxial cable, stomach full of lava. Phantom hunger and waves of thirst. Hot chills. The apparent need to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes or so.
Ambient music: "Cello for Relaxation," a CD I bought myself as a prize for making the Moot Court team. (My answer to the "How do you manage stress?" question on the application: "I meditate and listen to cello music." This purchase naturally followed.)
I should do some yoga.
Suddenly Edie has become one of the scariest exam preparation experiences I've had so far in law school.
This is Professor Edie's first time teaching the class; obviously, no old exams of his are available for practice. He thoughtfully recommended a selection of practice exam questions from previous Edie professors, which should at least be useful to bone up on how an Edie question actually gets answered (even if the questions at issue are easier ones than Professor Edie is known to pose). The only problem is that none of these old exams is furnished with an answer.
This was the problem I had with Torts last semester: I did an astonishing number of practice exams, on which I apparently taught myself to make the same mistake consistently. One good A answer would have straightened me out. None were provided, and I wound up paying the price in my grade. And Professor Torts was reputed to be a generous grader. Professor Edie shares no such reputation.
I've also come to rely on student answers as teaching tools -- not so much for the material, although they can be helpful there too, as for test-taking techniques. What do Edie professors want to hear? In what order, and to what extent? What facts flag which particular issues? It gives me the jitters that I still don't know, have no real way of finding out, and the exam is tomorrow.
The good news is that we're all in the same boat. Or maybe that's the bad news.
UPDATE: Turns out we're not utterly without sample answers, for what it's worth; three questions include them. Still, I really need to calm down...this is entirely too unnerving...
Edie outline is done! Not a moment too soon. Two days in between exams is simply not enough time to prepare, particularly when you haven't even finished outlining for the upcoming exam until one of the two days has already elapsed.
The beast is 42 pages long, which I think is a new record for me. Much of it is policy. Most of it is probably useless on the exam. Still, as with all of my big honking huge outlines, I'll be glad I included all the obscure policy butterfat should the need arise to cite to it.
Problem is, I still don't feel as though I actually know the law enough to issue-spot.
No one seems to. Rather, everyone knows the basic black-letter law -- of which there isn't really very much -- just enough to worry about where Professor Edie is going to go with it. He's such a sweet guy, such a clear professor, with no overweening political agenda and an apparently genuine interest in actually teaching us something. He also has managed to earn the sobriquet "The Killer" due both to the reputed difficulty of his exams and the documented harshness of his grading. Between the astronomical number of class-hours we whiled away in rambling policy discussions (and, I'll confess, games of Snood), and the paucity of complex hardcore rules to play with, no one's quite sure how this exam is going to bludgeon us all to pulp. But we're nervous nonetheless.
Tomorrow, which will be spent entirely on study group and practice exams, will hopefully help.
A funny from my Edie casebook:
We find greater merit in the district judge's third ground, that "sick bitch" -- and, we add, the other verbal abuse, and the obscene gesture, that Bullock directed toward Galloway -- was, in context, not a sex- or gender-related term.
[Judge Posner's etymology of the word "bitch" is omitted.]
I think I might just miss this class.
Thought:
One week from today this will all be over.
One week to the minute from right now, I will hopefully be stumbling around Ocean Beach in drunken bliss, searching for sand dollars.
[checks clock]
Actually, by six o'clock, I'll probably have finished my beachcombing jaunt and already be home. The drunken bliss, of course, will be sustained as long as possible without treading into hangover territory.
Seven days was all she wrote.
Decision time: trek up to the City for Professor Edie's review session at noon...or spend the rest of the day finishing my outline and go to his office hours tomorrow? (They start at 9:30, which would mean the sunrise train, after I told myself I'd never take it again.)
OTOH after the outline's done, at least I'll have something to talk about.
Still, it's tough to say no to a review session. There remains a ray of optimism among first-year students at my school: maybe this will be the revelation, the one magic moment where everything comes together and makes perfect sense. And with that feeling comes the companion paranoia: you don't want to miss an opportunity for things to be clearer, every little bit helps, etc. Of course, this being [school name], there's also the danger that the session will be mobbed by other people whose only mission in life is to beat you on the exam.
UPDATE: I wound up going. *sigh*.
No more Property! No More Property! NO!! MORE!! PROPERTY!!!!
I had a brief encounter with the fear this morning (*huge wash of gratitude for all the support!*), and, while it passed, I'm still having difficulty right now internalizing the fact that Property is over. It's over. No more relativity of title. No more takings. No more covenants running with the land (I wound up not using the Gilberts estimation, incidentally). No more frickin' Rule Against Perpetuities. No more watching Professor Property berate those poor souls who still bother to raise their hands, or fawn over the folks who rhapsodized about legal revolution.
I should be riding a wave right now. And yet I'm mostly just tired.
Not crushed, not borderline depressive, not anything nasty like last semester. I feel rather like I'm leaving the gym. Good workout. Now I could use a shower and a nap. The test itself was unpleasant, but not unprecedented given the number of practice exams I did yesterday. No panic. Slight difficulty focusing every so often when things just got too dense, but I stayed in control and managed to finish with enough time left to review my answers. They looked passable. It's anyone's guess whether they actually are. It's not worth wondering, right now.
I'm meeting up with some old friends for dinner and drinks, which should help revivify me nicely. They're running late, which in turn gives me some time to get more work done on my Edie outline. Edie is in two days. I should probably worry or something.
Nah. I just need a glass of wine and a good night's rest; tomorrow, as with any good workout, my energy should come right back.
Churning this morning. I'm afraid I'm going to run out of time on this exam, afraid I'm going to miss things.
Please send waves.
Too many hours spent on Property practice exams can turn an otherwise congenial, upbeat person into a burnt-out bitter zombie with a migraine and persistent nausea. I might be able to do one more question tonight; then again, it's not yet 9 pm and I could just as easily blink once and find myself in REM sleep. I know I complained at Professor Civ Pro's parsimony in sharing old exams; Professor Property is far more generous, which turns out to be less of a virtue than I thought. If I didn't still have two exams waiting to be taken, I wouldn't feel so bad about taking a break.
Of course, if I do take a break, I should spend the time making more progress on my as-yet-incomplete Edie outline.
[considers this]
Nope, can't do that either.
All right. A few glasses of water, maybe a piece of chocolate, and one more practice exam tonight. I can do that.
I've switched from stress relief candles to a different school of thought. The candle now burning on my coffee table is not designed to relax, but to inspire: "Chi -- Vital Energy," its label boasts. "Grapefruit, Ginger & Verbena." Just what I need to power me through the remaining five (aaaaarrrgghhh) practice Property exams between here and the real thing tomorrow at 1:30 pm.
Once again, I'm thankful for afternoon exams, particularly open-book ones. I plan to spend the train ride staying calm and thumb-indexing my documentation: my outline, my policy notes, maybe even a few key pages in my casebook. My husband tells me that my checklists should be sufficiently solid to obviate consultation of anything else. They're nice, to be sure, but you never know when the professor will be in the mood to pull something nasty. I'd rather be glad I covered my backside than overconfident.
(Worst trick seen so far on an exam: giving three principal characters virtually identical names with completely identical initials. Professors: PLEASE don't do this!)
*groaannnnnn*
I am unbelievably ready to be done with Property. The material itself is starting to make me angry, hair-tearing and booze-chugging angry. It is a quarter to midnight and I am working on my gott-damned common ownership flowchart (is there a lease implied in fact? does the lease sever the joint tenancy? does the lease survive death? and what about the statute of frauds?) and I am not allowed to go to sleep until I figure out, and internalize, the difference between an easement by estoppel and a constructive trust.
I am in this to learn the law. The exam can rot in hell.
Seeking advice on keeping one's energy up. These marathon fact patterns are just sapping mine, and I haven't even gotten to the policy questions yet.
Nauseous.
K. decided that we needed to stop on our way up to The City to pick up some munchies from Whole Foods. ("We", lately, consists of a carpool of K., C., me, and K.'s large dog, who comes along for the ride.) We snagged the standard hummus, sesame blue corn chips, rice crackers, Ry Krisp and guacamole, along with a bottle of lemonade for good measure, then ducked into Peet's Coffee for a caffeine spike. C. and I both ordered chai; I probably should have paid better attention when C. took a sip of hers and immediately threw the rest away. "That's awful," she said. "Bitter. The soy milk must be bad or something."
I took a sip of mine, in which I had forgotten to request soy milk, and had the same problem. "It's not the milk, it's the tea," I said. "It's just nasty." But instead of doing the smart thing -- kissing my $3 goodbye and just tossing the drink -- I added some honey and Sugar in the Raw to cut the bitterness, then wound up drinking the entire cup. And now I'm nauseous as heck. Maybe I'll take a study break in an hour or so and toss my cookies. It wouldn't be inappropriate.
The caffeine turned out to be necessary, though: we spent our entire three-hour study group session on the one massive four-part issue spotter from last year's Property exam. These things are not for the faint of heart; Professor Property has all but admitted that they're designed to trigger panic attacks. "I make my exams difficult," she said, "but I grade them generously." Hopefully the latter is as true as the former. We'll have to take her word for it.
Two people did not survive until the end of the study group session. L. succumbed to the panic while we were puzzling through the ambiguous conveyance analysis: "I just need to get back into my own space," she said without confidence as she packed up and left. We could all identify. S. toughed it out through the takings section, but finally hit the wall as D. and I argued over the test for abolition of a core property right. "I'm so sorry I'm so lame today," she stammered. "I'm so sorry." She was not lame today, we told her; she went home anyway. Once the fear infects you, there's nothing you can do but detox.
Fortunately the fear did not infect me. I just need to practice, practice, practice Property exams. These five-page, four-part, nasty rambling fact patterns are fundamentally formulaic once you get used to them. There's always a taking, always an adverse possession issue, always an ambiguous conveyance whose analysis involves both the RAP and a covenant. There are a finite number of rules that we've covered. If I can get them all to fit together, get my time spent issue-spotting down under a half hour, it will help. And Professor Property's policy questions all have a "correct" answer; it's simply a matter of making the law fit it, which should be an entertaining exercise in contrarianism for me -- but eminently doable, with practice.
Practice.
Off to practice.
A quick property question, for those up to the occasion:
My notes, my outline, and a handout from Professor Property all conclude that, for the benefit of a covenant to run with the land at law, one must show ownership of the land, intent of the grantor, and vertical privity of estate. My Gilberts supplement, meanwhile, insists that the three tickoff items are grantor's intent, "some form of privity of estate" and the touch-and-concern requirement as well.
Which is correct?
The more I think about the Civ Pro exam, the more I get scared that I actually did blow it. I've been valiantly trying not to think about it at all, but nasty little flashes of "Hey, you forgot to ______!" have been interrupting my concentration all morning. I need to just dive into my Edie outline, finish it today, and then start to crank on Property. Civ Pro is over. "It's in God's hands now," I said to I. as we packed up our laptops yesterday. "I don't know if I'd go that far," she replied. "Okay," I revised, "it's in Professor Civ Pro's hands now." Anyway, it's out of mine.
I've just done something that might turn out to be rather stupid: I booked a flight to Florida leaving on May 16, a.k.a. the first day of my school's interjournal writing competition. I'll stay by my mother and the horsies for a week, then fly up to Washington D.C. for a bat mitzvah [1], then finally return home to California on May 27, a.k.a. the last day of my school's interjournal writing competition. I signed up to enter the competition, but really have no major stake in getting on a journal:
- my usual luck in legal writing isn't such that I'm likely to make it onto the official law review;
- the five other journals apparently don't get the respect that law review does among employers;
- if merely having a journal on the resume at all is a tickoff item for employers, I've got that already in my unofficial journal -- which comes with its own story;
- Moot Court competition is reputed to take up all the time you have and much that you don't;
- I would much rather spend 150 hours working the kinks out of a sweet oral argument than cite-checking;
- I'm not sure I have 150 hours to spare for a journal anyway, even though maybe half of those hours are allegedly spent partying.
On the other hand, the journals -- with the exception of the main law review, where everyone takes themselves über-seriously -- all seem to be laid-back social organizations, and the note you write for your journal in the spring of your second year satisfies your graduation writing requirement. It would be neat to work on the communications law journal, to befriend like-minded folks I haven't yet met, to write my note on Internet law rather than flailing about the shallow course catalog in search of a writing-requirement seminar I could force myself to care about. There was one woman this year that I know of who did both Moot Court and a journal; she won her Moot Court competition, too, so she must have done something right. Maybe it's workable.
At any rate, I'll probably be bringing my laptop and ALWD handbook along to Florida, which would be supremely ironic on a trip which was supposed to represent the official sloughing-off of my 1L skin. Then again, it would just be typical of law school to permit no such thing.
[1] Waddling Thunder: will you be in town? Drop me an email.
Oh yes, and then there was this:
Subject: Reminder! re: Ear plugs for final exams
Dear Students,
Just a reminder that due to budget cuts free ear plugs are no longer provided by the Records Office during exams. If you need ear plugs, you may purchase them on campus at the Bookstore. Their hours are 9:30 to 5:00 M-TH and 9:30 to 4:00 F.
Fortunately I found out before the exam. Still, I was out fifty cents.
And I'm DONE with Civil Procedure. (At least until the bar exam. But that can wait.)
It's nice having exams in the afternoon. I don't have to spend $59 a night at the Abigail Hotel, don't have to trek up to The City the night before with a clean T-shirt and a change of underwear crammed into my borrowed-from-husband backpack next to my laptop and outline and casebook. And taking the local train, several hours in advance of an exam with no time pressure, can only ever be anticlimactic. I almost managed to fall asleep.
Things are so different, so amazingly different from last semester. I didn't go into hermetic seclusion before the exam, didn't focus or purify or meditate on The Swan while gazing into the depths of my locker. In fact, I entirely forgot to bring music, which all the same fails to explain why the theme from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon floated through my brain in the middle of my Rule 19(a) analysis.
But I digress. The exam was three and a half hours and wound up featuring a preclusion question, a joinder of parties question, and an out-of-nowhere three-parter with an intervenor and an impleader and the requisite jurisdictional gymnastics under 1367. No discovery, no pleadings, no summary judgment or post-trial motions or any other such areas that I'd been unable to rehearse on old exams. I was, as it turned out, reasonably prepared for this.
And the panic never came, that spike of adrenaline that juiced me through nearly all of my finals last semester. It didn't even occur to me to try to stay calm. I could have been taking an exam in college, in high school even. A hard one, to be sure, a respectable B, but nothing unprecedented.
But the best part came after the exam actually ended, when I dropped off my SofTest floppy disk at the front desk, signed out, and realized that I was done with Civil Procedure. And I was thrilled at the thought. No post-traumatic-exam stress disorder for me this time. I could actually relish the fact that the exam, and the course, were actually over. "No more Civil Procedure," I groaned in joy as I high-fived friends of mine, still queued up to deposit their floppies in the big blue box. "NO MORE CIVIL PROCEDURE!"
While I'm not convinced I flunked, I still am not feeling particularly stoked about my performance on the exam. I haven't a clue whether it will turn out to be adequate, sufficient or sorely lacking. I do know that I had a brief oh shit moment on the train ride home, when I consulted my outline and realized that respondeat superior liability could not in fact preclude a subsequent claim against a primarily liable party. But then I thought: People who walk out of an exam confident that they nailed it to the wall are the ones who get screwed. People who make mistakes and walk away in fear and doubt tend to get lucky.
I would love to get lucky.
Meanwhile, Property is on Monday, followed almost immediately by Edie, for which I still must complete my outline. Now would be a good time to start.
It takes a peculiar strain of misanthropy to come up with law school exam fact patterns. Short hypos are easy; anyone can tell a story. But with the proper ill will towards your fellow man, you can create baroque and nightmarish works of pure malice spun fine as glass. Why pose a simple preclusion question when you can turn out a ninety-minute whopper with three separate suits (two federal and one state, guess which order!), five claims, four parties, two precluded defenses, a missed counterclaim, and three issues up for collateral estoppel, two of which were pure issues of law? Oops, he forgot the partridge in the pear tree.
Times like this make me truly loathe law school. I feel like a ball of yarn being batted around by a psychotic kitten, doing my best not to unwind.
I went into The City this morning to take part in the Easter-egg hunt that is Professor Civ Pro's office hours. I felt reasonably confident about preclusion, and was ready to walk away feeling as confident about joinder.
There was a reason why I refused to go near the campus during exam season last semester. There is not a soul at peace in the entire school this time of year; you need to be either piss-drunk or clad in panic-proof armor (or both) to be able to walk through the place unscathed. I was neither. After a few hours in a room with Prof. Civ Pro and about a dozen of my classmates, I was ready to cry. (This despite Professor Civ Pro's comical refusal to learn to pronounce our names; to this day, he still addresses a student named Nguyen as "Mr. Nugent.")
I passed by T., the Moot Court coach/den mother, outside the classroom building. "It's almost over!" she called out to me by way of encouragement upon seeing the look on my face.
"It hasn't even started yet!" I wailed back.
I have three more practice exams to do tonight; J. from my study group suggests that another old exam question is doable, so maybe I mean four. This is my last chance to crank on Civ Pro, my last chance to seriously pull this off. Much of me is ready to just give up and wash my hands of this and admit that no amount of confidence in my mastery of the material will affect my grade. And then there's the part of me that just wants to reach over and throttle the smarmy kids who ask questions solely to intimidate the other folks present, citing to old overruled cases and third-generation subsections of rules. (We're fortunate that we don't have gunners in my section, but if we did, these would be they.)
It's impossible to keep a clear head there. I'm home now, and glad of it. The exasperated quitter and the furious competitor in me can go get manicures or something; I still have work to do.
Google hit of the day: "Louisiana district attorney neckties." This sounds like one for Ernie...
I think I've come to an important realization about Professor Civ Pro's exams, such that now I understand why he appears to grade so arbitrarily and differently from his peers.
Professor Civ Pro assumes that you will know every applicable rule; spewing them back at him gains you few if any points, although failing to do so in the order and language he likes will clearly hamper your score. (The fairness of this standard on a closed-book exam is open to debate, but anyways.) He cares little about your ability to spot an issue and say "hey, this is an issue." He knows it's an issue, he put it there, and he's unimpressed by your ability to take note of this, no matter how much it enables you to show off all the law you've memorized. This pissed me off to no end last semester: I had been so proud of my find on the Erie question, noting that the federal court was not sitting in diversity and that therefore the state law claim was joined under 1367 as per Gibbs. This earned me a whopping 0 points.
But therein lies the secret. I concluded my paragraph with something to the effect of, "even though there's no diversity jurisdiction, we'll assume the Erie analysis applies." When he later reviewed my exam with me, and I peevishly asked him why this had earned me no points, he replied: "I wanted to hear your argument on why it applied, not just an assumption." A number of people had spotted the issue, he said, but none of us had gotten a single point for it since no one had made it to the A in IRAC.
Professor Civ Pro gives points for lawyering. It's not enough to IRAC, to see all the issues which he assumes you'll see and recite back the rules which he assumes you already know. He will give you points to the extent that you convince him of the validity of either side's position. "P will argue against summary judgment since her employment status represents a genuine issue of material fact" is a yawner for him. The trick is to say something that makes him perk up and start nodding, something he might not necessarily have thought of himself. (True story: I earned five whole points -- nearly a quarter of my entire score -- for a single argument on my personal jurisdiction question, one which still seems rather far-fetched to me.)
The hard part, obviously, is coming up with these arguments on the fly in a time-crunch situation where much of your brainpower is already allocated to spotting issues and fetching back rules from memory. I'm as much a fan of creative lawyering and interesting arguments as anyone; that was the fun of Moot Court. But we had six weeks to develop our arguments in Moot Court. The Civ Pro exam is three and a half hours long. And when I'm breaking a sweat trying to recall from memory which four-prong test applies -- is it Provident Tradesmen or Parklane Hosiery? -- creative approaches only infrequently leap out at me from a freshly-perceived and possibly not entirely understood fact pattern. Maybe this means I'll be a lousy lawyer. Somehow I doubt it.
It does help my confidence, though, to feel as though I finally understand what the guy is looking for.
Courtesy of Professor Achtenberg at the University of Missouri, here are some Civil Procedure PowerPoint animations. I'm especially liking the ones on preclusion.
I realized last night, as I grumpily ran through the four-prong Parklane Hosiery test over and over in my mind, exactly why I was so tired.
No, it's not from excessive studying. I'm moving along at a far more manageable pace than last semester, when I was cramming almost all of my outlining and practice exams into two-day periods. My outlines are already complete for Civ Pro and Property, and Edie and Contracts are well over a week away; time isn't tight yet. I'm so chilled out it almost makes me nervous. There are other things I should almost certainly be doing to prepare for Wednesday's Civ Pro exam, but since I have a grand total of five practice exam questions at my disposal (some of which date back to my grade-school days), I don't feel too guilty making them last.
I'm tired, it turns out, because I ramped back up too quickly on my workouts without paying attention to my diet. It's one thing to survive on beef jerky and marshmallows and Clif Bars; it's another entirely to do so while burning 400 calories a day on the recumbent exercycle and the elliptical trainer.
"You should just work out every other day," my husband concluded.
I should eat better, actually. But during exams that's a problem. Cooking would be so much more fun than studying right now; if I caved even just a little and allowed myself to make something simple like salmon cakes, I would rapidly slip back down the slope and wind up making bean soup or baking gingersnaps or something by the time the exam rolled around. I need to spend my time on preclusion and joinder and discovery and judgments as a matter of law, not in the kitchen.
Still, I didn't go to the gym this morning. My head hurts a good deal less, and I no longer feel as though I'm coming down with something. (Wellwishes to Catherine and the Clam and all the other unlucky folks who didn't dodge the germs.)
I wonder whether I should work out on Wednesday morning before my Civ Pro exam at 1:30.
You know what would really suck?
Getting sick.
Now.
Time to pop a fistful of vitamins and go to bed early. I'll take my flowcharts with me.
Main Entry: tir·a·mi·su
Pronunciation: "tir-&-'mE-(")sü, -'mi-; -mE-'sü
Function: noun
Etymology: Italian tiramisù, from tirami su], literally, pull me up]
Date: 1982
: a dessert made with ladyfingers, mascarpone, chocolate, and espresso
A moment ago I halfheartedly logged in to Lexis, just to feel productive, and instantly won 250 loyalty points. That little thrill might just have been the pick-me-up I needed to really get to work.
So. Tired.
I'm drinking a big honking mug of that jasmine tea that makes me sneeze, in an attempt to revivify myself for another four or five hours of studying tonight. Or two or three. One, at any rate.
I took my outline to the gym with me this morning, something which it feels like I was only just doing scant moments ago. If I'd had more than just weekends at the gym this semester, maybe it would feel as though more time had elapsed since December. Still, I'm not sure I could have stood it had this semester gone on any longer. This has been the longest year of my life. I've aged at least a decade.
Study session in The City was reasonably productive, with a lot of the juice (at least the preclusion and joinder juice) coming from my flowcharts. My husband, whose prodigious sense of efficiency is overshadowed only by the extraordinary limits on his patience, sat down with me last night to help me bash out actual processes. All seven of my study-groupmates made appreciative "ooh" "wow" and "I need that" noises upon beholding the masterpiece he inspired on joinder of parties. They even liked the preclusion flow, although I made that one myself and my husband thinks it needs improvement. Still, if it works for me -- not to mention my fellows -- we're the ones actually taking the test. My outline is frickin' thirty-six pages; I need something I can fit in my brain-pan, and these are doing the job nicely.
If I can force myself to stay awake. I could cave and go get myself a pearl milk tea, which is perhaps the most fattening, sugary, caffeinated pick-me-up imaginable (and is accordingly satisfying). But it would just be so nice to be able to shake off my afternoon doldrums and get back to cranking. The exam is on Wednesday, it's closed-book, and I should really be done memorizing by tomorrow night so I can really haul on the paltry few practice exam questions the professor has made available.
I take solace in the fact that every passing day brings me closer to the END of the exam period...
A few weeks ago, I stopped by my tax accountant's office to pick up this year's returns. She's a remarkable woman, a mother of twins who -- as I found out that day -- has not only her J.D. but her LL.M. as well. "Oooh, studying for exams," she reminisced. "I remember when my roommate and I would sit down, at either end of the dining room table, with this huge pile of books between us...let me tell you, our place was never so clean, nor our dogs so well-trained, as during finals."
I'm lucky I don't have a dog, I guess.
Civ Pro isn't so terribly difficult to concentrate on, or at least it shouldn't be. I'm a bit bothered by the way Professor Civ Pro has handled the buildup this semester, though. Last semester he was so helpful -- he distributed and graded practice exams, walked us through flowcharts for personal jurisdiction and Erie, and generally was a good deal more supportive through our collective angst. Not any more. This semester he's not offering a review session, nor has he discussed process flows at any point during class. He stopped answering email about a month ago. Worst of all, he refuses to share any of his old spring exams except for the ones already up on the library website. There are four of these, but three of them are from 1989, 1990 and 1991, back when the law of supplemental jurisdiction was something else entirely. The cherry on top: this is, as before, a closed-book exam. So not only do I need to decipher the byzantine flows of preclusion, joinder of parties, and that tricky-dicky 1367, I need to memorize them all as well.
Tomorrow I'm getting together in The City with my study groupmates; ideally it will be a productive meeting. I fear that there are just too many flash cards floating around and too little actual under-one's-skin understanding of how this mess actually works.
I have an outline, it's beautiful, it's not really helping me wrap my brain around the multilayered interactions of all of these rules. Can anyone offer any better advice or mnemonics than "Defensive estoppel, D-1, D-2" (which all the same is fun to chant silently to oneself while working out)?
I feel like a complete self-absorbed schmoe for not being aware of this sooner: Heather's pregnant!! (And has been, since February.)
There but for law school and suspended life plans...ah, heck.
Congratulations to mommy and daddy to be!
This is the schedule:
Friday, April 25 (today): Property review session
Wednesday, April 30: Civ Pro exam, 1:30 pm
Monday, May 5: Property exam, 1:30 pm
Wednesday, May 7: Edie review session
Thursday, May 8: Edie exam, 8:30 am
Monday, May 12: Contracts review session
Tuesday, May 13: Contracts exam, 8:30 am
My joy is palpable.
Last sunrise train. Last Friday classes. Last day of my first year of law school.
"I can't believe it's actually over," K. rejoiced after Civ Pro. "Civ Pro is over!"
"I can't believe it either, because it isn't," I grumbled. "I have so much Civ Pro to do between now and Wednesday."
"Yes, but we don't have to go to class any more!" said K. with a huge smile. This was true, at least. And given that K. likes Civ Pro about as much as I like Property, I identified.
Professor Contracts ended his valediction with the word "etcetera." He received a round of polite applause. Professor Civ Pro advised that we should all pursue justice; he was then applauded and presented with a sixpack of Coors beer, inspired by one of his in-class hypos. Professor Edie passed around bags of peppermint patties and Hershey kisses, for which he received an excessive round of applause in return. Or maybe that was just because it was the last class on the last day, and people who didn't intend to go to any of the afternoon discussion groups or review sessions were finally finished and were applauding themselves as much as anyone else.
My section played no further pranks on anyone. The Che flag prank had been quite enough, and was still spiraling out of control: Professor Property reported to our review session this afternoon looking fetching in a black beret with a red star. (Perhaps a prank/class gift from a previous year's section, or maybe she went out and bought this one herself. Either way, you can't make this up.) "You probably had no idea that your class gift would have this effect!" she chortled to us. "But I'm going to hang it up in my office, even though it might just horrify future students!" She followed this with a giggly comment about being a revolutionary. I leave it to your imagination whether it was a boast or a recommendation.
Thus ended my first year of law school.
It doesn't feel over, mostly because 100% of my semester grades remain to be determined. Still, I think I'm in a much better place psychologically than I was this time last semester: two of my outlines are already complete, and the other two are each almost halfway there. I've lost the driving sense of panic that whipped me into a persistent lather for so many months. Now I'm keeping my focus narrow, staying within the day-to-day rather than shredding myself over abstract projections of personal failure. So I have some exams to take. I wish they were already over. Meanwhile, I now at least have time to work without the distractions of additional assigned reading and sunrise trains.
Fall schedules were posted today, and by some beatific stroke of luck, I failed to wind up on a single waitlist. (C. was not so lucky; she's on three, and doesn't really want to talk about it right now.)
Specifics: I'm in to Evidence, Con Law I, Appellate Advocacy (with my moot court instructor) and the ethics seminar, which is now apparently becoming quite sought-after. "How did you know to register for it in the first round?" O. asked me.
"It wasn't a huge lecture with a 100% final exam," I replied, "so it was a no-brainer for me. You mean it's actually a good class?"
"It's supposed to be one of the best in the school," O. rhapsodized. This would be nice indeed, if true.
Evidence, meanwhile, is taught by someone not in our faculty facebook; apparently he's a judge and teaches evidence to other judges as well as to law students. And as it turned out, I lucked my way into the afternoon section of Con Law. Sure, the professor's politics are over on the other side, but then again so are Professor Property's and at least this individual's class is scheduled such that I can go to the gym in the mornings beforehand.
The strangest feeling of all: pausing for a moment, realizing that these are all classes I chose, and briefly tasting what it must be like to have my life back.
This morning I ran into the individual responsible for yesterday's Che flag prank in Property, and immediately asked her the question that had been on my mind since the end of class yesterday:
"So did you ever get your flag back?"
"No!" she squealed, and then told me the story: she and some friends had followed Professor Property out of class, down to the street, and had been about to approach her when she caught up with a fellow faculty member. "Hold my books!" Professor Property reportedly ordered the other professor, then proceeded to unfurl the flag and display it with all due pride. "Look what my students gave me!"
The story got better: Professor Property apparently stopped two more colleagues to show them her new prize, en route back up to her office; once there, she caught sight of the prankster and her cohorts. "Thank you so much for this!" she sang at them.
Again, this would have been the moment for my friend to reveal the joke. ("The person who lent me that flag told me to be careful with it -- it had real sentimental value!") Again she did not. At that point, she concluded, there was no getting the flag back. Professor Property was taking it door